Tolkien's Legend Told as History
12-14-03
by Edward Cone
News & Record
The first thing to know about The Lord of the Rings is that the story rocks. Bad guys chase good guys toward even worse guys, armies roll across plains, heroes duel demons and giant spiders. The fate of the world is at stake.
After reading the trilogy a dozen times or more, I still pick up the books and flip to my personal highlight reel of action scenes: the flight to the ford at Rivendell, Gandalf holding the bridge against the Balrog, Eowyn laughing as she faces death on the battlefield.
But that’s not why I return to the books, or at least not the only reason, and it doesn’t account for the success of the trilogy in reaching new readers, year after year, while drawing back old ones for repeated visits. Swords and sorcery are entertaining, but the enduring popularity of The Lord of the Rings derives as much from Tolkien’s realism as his fantasy. This is legend told as history, an immersive experience in an alternate reality.
The ability to create a believable world is a key to Tolkien’s genius. He works at an epic scale as deftly as Tolstoy in War and Peace, and like Tolstoy he makes you care about the individuals who find themselves swept up in historic events. Readers bond with characters, and Tolkien’s world is populated with people worth knowing. Many of them are not human, but still possessed of humanity, and many are archetypes endowed with personalities instead of just characteristics.
These folks have issues. They have histories, secrets, and flaws. They change as the story goes on. Before the hobbits can save the world, they have to overcome a strain of genteel provincialism as strong as anything to be found in Irving Park. Aragorn has to face down his doubts and assume the burdens of the family business. And not all the changes are for the better. Boromir and Saruman lose their battles with the corrupting the power of the Ring. Their nobility and knowledge cannot save them.
As in real life, one of the most interesting things about individuals is the way they interact with each other. The books are full of complex relationships: the deepening bond of loyalty and trust between Frodo and Sam, the buddy capers of Pippen and Merry, the rivalry between Legolas and Gimli, and, as the movies show so well, the split personalities of Smeagol and Gollum.
Each character has a different relationship with Gandalf, the real hero of the tale, and one of the great characters in all of literature. The wizard even goes by different names from one place to another. Gandalf can be cantankerous and mysterious, and even as you keep finding out more about him there is much you never learn.
Gandalf is revealed to be much more powerful than one first suspects, and this is a constant theme in the books: the hidden strength of good people (and hobbits). It is something I notice all around me, in real life, the wisdom and character of people who do not call attention to themselves, glinting occasionally into view like a jewel or a dagger catching the light.
Very few of us are called upon to save the world, real or imaginary, but all of us face crises, or at least the moral choices of everyday existence. We have to take responsibility and be stronger than we know we are, or care to be. Tolkien brings home this truth by bringing the war home to hobbits’ own turf, recapitulating the whole long story in the great scouring of the Shire chapter at the end of the trilogy (an episode that is not included in the third move, The Return of the King, which opens this week).
The Lord of the Rings is full of people making hard choices, choices that may serve a greater good but cost them everything. The elves are ready to sacrifice their home in Middle Earth to save it. Gandalf, Frodo, and humble Sam are prepared to pay the ultimate price for freedom and friendship. It’s drama played out amid siege engines and cavalry charges, but it feels like it could happen to you.
So you’ve got characters you care about, and they are off on a series of vividly imagined adventures as Armageddon approaches. The final element is the world around them, the realistic fantasy realm that Tolkien has mapped, complete with historical documents and pronunciation guides for its made-up languages. It’s not a fairyland but a place of mud and blood and snow, and of families and songs and beer and bowls of pipeweed, a wild natural landscape dotted with tenuous patches of civilized life.
Tolkien built this world from pieces of many others, including ours. The Lord of the Rings mines other myths and the actual past, and synthesizes them into something original. These are elements from the collective unconscious, a reforged sword from German legend here, a bit of the Crusades there, some fallen Rome and enduring Constantinople, combined to give Middle Earth a depth and breadth that makes it worth revisiting.
The movies made from the books succeed because director Peter Jackson recognized that he was making something much more than a series of action flicks, that the computer magic at his disposal could take him only part of the way to his destination. Jackson’s films are true to Tolkien’s vision, and to his characters, although Elijah Wood is a too-callow Frodo who so far has done little so far beyond rolling his eyes back in his head and looking like he needs to vomit. Jackson even improves some of the books weaker characters, especially the female ones, without disfiguring his source material.
I’ll be in line for the movie, and unless something has gone terribly wrong with the finale, I’ll see it more then once. Then I’ll buy the DVD. And then I’ll reread the books, flipping ahead to my favorite scenes, but coming back again to the familiar story between them.
Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
Tell someone about this page
Contact Us | Web Design & Advertising | Print Advertising | News & Record Corporate | News & Record Jobs
|
© News & Record 2003 |
Last update: 10/1/2004; 6:41:28 PM .
