Tolkien Time

It's been a while, so I figure It's time to reread the Lord of the Rings again.

Please note that this is not a confession of weakness. I say this in all seriousness that THe lord of the Rings is one of the great fictional works of the 20th century. (and I say this as someone who's read and enjoyed Ulysses twice, and am a big Thomas Mann fan, and loves me some Henry James.) The Lord of the Rings is a big, serious, masterfully written book. It tried for different effects than what critics were used to, and was shaped differently from their criteria, and so  a lot of them missed the boat. In the mean time it simply bowled over millions, myself included.

Just to hopelessly typecast me, I went to Woodstock with friends, and we parked my 1965 Rambler American by the side of the road because traffic was bunching up and we figured the site was just a little bit ahead. As it turned out it was over 5 miles, and we ended up riding on the hoods, roofs and trunks of cars as we approached that unbelievable bowl of people with Richie Havens' voice echoing out of the distance. As we rode, a hippie pair climbed over the previous car and onto ours. "Hi. We're Lúthien and Beren," she said, and I said, "From out of the Mountains of Terror to Doriath?" We knew each other.

The bond of that book was as strong as Woodstock. J.R.R. Tolkien was as thick a thread in that skein of the 60's counterculture as Timothy Leary, and nearly as powerful as the Beatles. This of course appalled Tolkien at first, but eventually he accepted it with grace. You do not revivify myth in the Western World and think it won't grow beyond you.

I was completely overwhelmed by the book. I started writing my own fantasy novel, but after maps  and histories and thousands of words, I began to realize that all I was doing was rewriting the Lord of the Rings. And I stopped. It had filled up my imagination to such an extent that I couldn't get beyond it. (Of course, I was 16.)

But as I learned how to read a book,  I went back to the trilogy and discovered that it wasn't just that he wrote about elves and magical rings and made up maps that made LOTR compelling. By then thousands of writers were doing the same thing, and nearly none of them were doing it well. Looking at it carefully, I discovered a number of things: that there was actually very little magic in the book (a tree gets set on fire, a door opens, things are seen in a dish of water, a rope unties itself, and you disappear when you put on the Ring. Not a power bolt or a morphing in evidence.) unlike everybody else, who would put in a marvel at every opportunity. He was always careful about point of view--always from the most humble character--hobbits, or when he couldn't get hobbit, the dwarf. And when Frodo began to get too changed by the Ring, the viewpoint shifted to Sam. (We get in side Gandalf's head exactly once and Aragorn's never. Tolkien had at least three prose styles and switched them with care. And the Professor would echo a mythic model--but only up to a point.

This was especially amusing among the critics: although Tolkien said flat out at the very beginning that it was not a goddam allegory, critics immediately started treating it as such. And every path they turned down, before very long there was the Oxford don standing across the path waving his finger at them. The WWII analogy he handles in the preface; the Christian one? Frodo's Jesus fails in his quest, which is completed by Gollum. THis is moreover a world without a Fall--and when the great Redemption is done, the angels leave. And the one character that may be God does nothing in the story. No, no, no. What did I tell you?

And he uses a Ring, forged under tragic circumstances, picked out of a Great River, but that's as far as the Wagner goes. And Gandalf is Merlin and Aragorn Arthur (not the Tennyson Arthur, but the Wace and Layamon Arthur, who is marching on Rome to become emperor when Modred raises rebellion)--but Gandalf is also Odin. The Ring is actually the Holy Grail inside out: you've got it, and you can only get rid of it at a certain place and if you are virtuous--or bite it off with your teeth and trip. And Gollum is Caliban without a Prospero.

There's no one novelty in LOTR that you can point to--and that's also deliberate and important. All the cleverness has been planed down, added to the cauldron, and left to simmer for half a lifetime. It is a work of imagination--but it's very much a medievalist's book. Wonders and delights--but every point is anchored to our (half-remembered) traditions. It is new and astonishing--but we're already at home, just as he intended.

And it keeps throwing up little rewards: it wasn't that long ago that a friend (and you know who you are) pointed out that the two orcs Shagrat and Gorbag translate out of Middle English as Ratfucker and Bag of Shit. (We probably don't know their real names then.)

So it's time to jump in once more. I'm going to warm up with the Hobbit, and who knows? Maybe all the way through the twelve volumes of Christopher Tolkien's heroic History of his father's work. Yes, I read them all.

(And that, I guess, does qualify as an admission of weakness.)