“The Lord of the Rings”, by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

440 pages, Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN-13: 978-0395193952

Ummmmm…sooooo…it’s okay if I criticize J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s a perfect story or a faultless book without stain or errors, right? RIGHT?! Like, it’s not every day that one can say that the movies were better than the book, but…um…okay, here it goes: “The Lord of the Rings” movies were better than the books. Now, now, now cosplayers, put down your rubber swords and take off your elven ears and listen for a minute, okay? There can be no doubt that Tolkien’s magnum opus established a whole genre of fantasy storytelling and launched a new industry in fantasy gaming, and his epic Epic of Good versus Evil and the bonds of friendship and how the most inconsequential-seeming person can have an importance beyond the obvious and that one must never give up and fight the good fight though the heavens fall…and so on and so forth, is a wonderful message and one that shouldn’t ever be forgotten.

But, damn, brah, who new an epic Epic could drag on and on and on and make one wish for a Nazgûl dagger right between the eyes? Why none of his editors was on the case is beyond me; I mean, do we have to stick with Frodo and Sam for page after page after page?! Can’t we have a break and see what’s happening elsewhere in Middle Earth? Endless descriptions of walking and where the hills over there were in comparison to their location here became tiresome, at best. I get it: Tolkien was an old-school English Country Gentleman Wannabe who saw the glory of creation in England’s Mountains Green and saw evil in all of those dark Satanic Mills, but I could have done with fewer descriptions of scenery and after a while began to just skim over those parts and hope for some action to come – and when the action did come…well, it wasn’t very actionful, was it?

And I’m not alone in this, either: Judith Shulevitz of The New York Times said that Tolkien “formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself”, while Richard Jenkyns of The New Republic thought that Tolkien’s characters were “anemic...lacking in fiber” and overall the book lacked psychological depth. Michael Moorcock, the British-though-transplanted-Texan science fiction and fantasy author in his essay Epic Pooh equated J.R.R.’s work to Winnie-the-Pooh and criticized it for his “Merrie Olde Englande” viewpoint. Even Hugo Dyson, a member in good standing of The Inklings (Tolkien’s literary and debating group at The Eagle and Child in Oxford) had not-good things to say about it, lolling on the couch and shouting “Oh God, no more Elves!” every so often (I feel ya, Hugo).

Okay, okay, okay, it’s not all bad. The sheer creativity in calling forth a world and populating it with peoples and places and history and languages (even if most of the Quenya was cribbed from Old Finnish) is not to be lightly laughed at. I mean, the man wrote out thousands of years of backstory for his world; tales and myths and legends that are mentioned or hinted at in The Lord of the Rings weren’t just throw-away lines, he actually wrote the damn stories down, just to flesh everything out. The problem is, if you don’t read all of those tales and myths and legends, a lot of this detail is lost – but damn, did Christopher Tolkien try to get it all out, what by publishing The Silmarillion in 1977, Unfinished Tales in 1980 and The History of Middle-earth in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. But am I really going to read these 14 books just so I can understand Aragorn’s tossed off comment to Arwen Undómiel? Ahhhhh…nope.

And while all of those descriptions of mountains high and valleys low and forests deep and hillocks round can grate after a bit, they do form a kind of poetry for which Tolkien gets almost zero credit for. There were times – and I mean it now – when I could almost see the landscape as he described it, independent of any Rankin-Bass drawing or Jacksonian cinematography. And the messages of hope over despair and friendship against impossible odds are grand and universal and must never leave us. It’s just those instances are strung together in long-winded and overly-important passages that seem never to end. Seriously, Dear Reader, editors are supposed to edit, and if only someone over at Allen & Unwin had taken a red pen to at least some of these wordy passages, then a more tightly constructed and eagerly paced book would have been the result.

Despite all of this, go out and read The Lord of the Rings, anyway; you’ll find plenty of cheap copies that were brought to used bookstores and put up on Amazon after scads of the damn things were printed and sold and went unread after millions of people discovered what a slog it was compared to the movies. I mean, you almost have to read it now, seeing as it’s a cultural milestone and whatnot. If nothing else, you’ll have one over on all those cosplayers who, despite what they say, haven’t read it either and wouldn’t know the difference between Gondor and Gondolin.