I begin with
a confession: this is the first time I
have ever read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
I know. It’s crazy that a 40-year-old self-professed
nerd has never read the granddaddy of all fantasy fiction. I’m not proud.
While we’re
being honest here, I have to admit that I was a little afraid to read it
now. I grew up hearing all the stories
from the novel thanks to my older brother and my various geek friends. I played D&D when the game was first
published in the 70s, and my first wizard was named Gandalf. I have read and loved The Hobbit. I have seen the movies many times and loved
them. What if, given all this indirect
exposure, I read the thing itself, the center of so much nerdy fun, and found
that I didn’t like it? What if I
stumbled over literary faults or found the plot dragging and leaving me wishing
for the films? What if Tolkien’s voice,
so easy and charming in The Hobbit, became overworked and pretentious with the
epic nature of The Lord of the Rings? It
would be devastating.
My worries
were of course entirely unnecessary. I
loved the novel. It read with all the
easy and joy of The Hobbit, and I never felt the story sag, in spite of its
tremendous length. Tolkien is a master
of his craft, and his place in the literary canon (of both fantasy and literary
fiction) is well founded. It is, of
course, a wonderful story, wonderfully told.
And those appendices! Oh my goodness!
I never understood why some people insisted on rereading then novel
every year, but now I get it. I embarked
on the appendices solely because I promised myself I would read the whole book,
but I was shocked to learn how engrossing the appendices were. The scope of Tolkien’s universe is
staggering. The energy he put into
creating the world lying under his tale—incredible! With every page, I wanted to reread the novel
and see how much more I understood. One
could spend 20 years studying, reading, making connections, and making sense,
all to understand a mythical world. What
an accomplishment!
Early in the
novel I found myself disappointed with the dialogue because so much of it is
all surface. The characters say exactly
what they mean with no subtext. And all
the characters recognized each other’s greatness, so friendships could form in
ridiculously short times. But in the end, these disappointments were minor and had no lasting
impression; the story and scope of the world are so grand that the lack of subtleties
in character can be painlessly overlooked.
I don’t have
much to say about the novel analytically, but I will leave off with some thoughts about the lack of women in the novel. Frodo and Bilbo have no woman in the house,
Sam’s mother has apparently passed on, both the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor
are without a queen, as is Rivendell, and of course the Ents have lost the
Entwives entirely. There is a serious
dearth of mothers and wives at the end of the Third Age of middle earth. Obviously, this is no accident on Tolkien’s
part. Moreover, Eowyn’s roll and
speeches make it clear that Tolkien didn’t remove all the women because he felt
that war was no place for such gentle creatures. Nonetheless, women do act as a kind of symbol
in the novel, a symbol of growth and stability and healthy times. The three main female presences in the novel
are Lady Galadriel, Arwen, and Eowyn.
The last two becomes wives and a promise of generational growth and
prosperity in the Fourth Age, the Age of Men.
Eowyn is tamed by Faramir, giving up her desire to fight in order to be
with him. Arwen sacrifices eternal life to rule with Aragorn. Meanwhile, the other creatures will dwindle,
like the wifeless Ents, the dwarves with their low population of women, the
orcs, who seem to be entirely without females.
Lady Galadriel has been doing all the work of womankind for the last
half of the Third Age, and she is ready to retire her position and sail from
Grey Haven with a boat full of broken and used-up men.
When this reading adventure is complete, I expect I'll be coming back to Lord of the Rings and travel through Middle-Earth once more.
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