time-traveling with Tolkien
Jun. 13th, 2005 07:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacYesterday we celebrated our wedding anniversary by having the Mythopoeic Society discussion group over to talk about The Lord of the Rings on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of volume 3. We had a good discussion. I mentioned the curious fact that most attacks on the book miss the point and sometimes - as with complaints that Sauron should have been brought on-stage - actually criticize Tolkien for his wisest decisions. Curiously, hardly any anti-Tolkien writers have ever caught what I consider to be the book's genuine flaws. (No, I'm not going to tell you what they are.)
I've been reading a lot of the earliest reviews, which seem to divide into two classes: those both favorable and unfavorable which seem to be bewildered by the book and uncertain how to describe it, and favorable ones which tend to burble in a way that would be incomprehensible to someone who hadn't read the book. The latter category includes some of Tolkien's best-known advocates, including W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Naomi Mitchison.
I kept thinking that I could have done better than that. So I set myself a challenge, a mental exercise. You might try the same.
Here's the setup. You are a person who has read The Hobbit (at whatever age you actually read it at). You are now an adult (if you weren't one already), it's 1954, and you are writing book reviews for a newspaper. Completely to your surprise - for you hadn't heard that such a book was coming out - you are handed The Fellowship of the Ring. The two announced successor volumes haven't been published yet. Your job is to read and review it.
Stepping outside the frame, then: try to cast out of your mind everything you've read and thought in retrospect about the work, and everything that's happened in the fantasy genre since then, and look at the book afresh with memories of your initial unfiltered reaction. And then, as best as you are able, write the review you would have written, for a completely fresh and unknowing audience, in 1954.
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin hardcover, 1954, reviewed by DB.
Many children, some of them now grown to adulthood, have over the years enjoyed reading a children’s fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien titled The Hobbit, first published in 1937. This tale takes an imaginary creature of a kind physically resembling a leprechaun but in personality and habits more like an English country squire, and sends him off on a dramatic Nordic quest among dwarfs, elves, wizards, trolls, and dragons. By turns both humorous and serious, The Hobbit is a richly imaginative story of tremendous breadth.
But nobody could have guessed just how much imagination Mr. Tolkien had up his sleeve until now, all these years later, with his publication of a sequel to The Hobbit titled The Fellowship of the Ring. If The Hobbit has breadth, the world lacks a word to describe what the sequel has. One may say that Mark Twain’s Huck Finn is a deeper, richer book than his Tom Sawyer, but that difference is as nothing to what we find here. The Hobbit is a children’s book, but The Fellowship of the Ring is a fully adult book of a scale and kind rarely seen: it’s like an Arthurian romance set in an imaginary country and told in modern language. And – most amazing of all – it is not a complete story but merely the first of a projected three volumes collectively titled The Lord of the Rings.
In the earlier book, the hobbit adventurer had acquired a magic ring of invisibility. In the present volume, he resigns his estates to his adopted son, who soon learns that the ring is actually a tool for control and destruction of tremendous power and danger, too powerful indeed for a creature as insignificant as a hobbit to wield for any purpose beyond pure invisibility, but too dangerous for any being to hold who is powerful enough to wield it. At all costs it must be kept out of the hands of the being who made it, the earlier book’s offstage Necromancer, now revealed as a great Enemy of evil intent.
From this outline, it would be a dull or unworldly mind that does not immediately think of the atomic bomb. But if you try to cast the hobbit as an innocent scientist or the Enemy as Stalin, the jigsaw pieces cease to fit. This story has far too much of a wealth of imagination to be a simple allegory like Animal Farm waiting to be decoded. It follows its own logic, not an externally imposed one.
Even the opening scenes showing the hobbit at home have greater scope than the equivalent in the earlier book, but the story begins, at its broader pace, as something of a copy of its predecessor’s episodic quest, only with a different purpose: instead of setting off on an adventure almost on a lark, this hobbit is fleeing from danger as the Enemy’s truly frightening agents pursue him. Eventually, after greater discomfort than his predecessor, and with the companionship of three other hobbits and a mysterious human tracker, our hero reaches the elf haven which was a key resting point in the earlier story. Here, halfway through the book, a great council is held, much background material is revealed, and a larger group, the Fellowship of the title, must set off in a new geographic direction in hopes of destroying the ring in the only place this may be done: the fires where it was forged in the middle of the Enemy’s lands.
By the end of the volume they’re about halfway there. I know this because there is an excellent detailed folding map. In the process they’ve experienced dark journeys (through a huge deserted mine in the equivalent of The Hobbit’s journey through a murky forest), battles, death, treachery, and another elvish haven more beautiful than the first one. For all its fantastic invention, this is as big and somber an adult book as any topical novel of World War II.
The prose is sometimes plain, and sometimes rises through stiffness to grandeur. The characterization and dialogue are deft. The moral underpinnings are firm. The landscape and journeying are vast and awesome. This is a slow story but a gripping one, ending at a point of dramatic crisis. It had me captivated all the way through, and left me with a burning impatience for the rest of the story. I am looking forward to the remaining volumes with my heart in my throat and my breath bated.
I've been reading a lot of the earliest reviews, which seem to divide into two classes: those both favorable and unfavorable which seem to be bewildered by the book and uncertain how to describe it, and favorable ones which tend to burble in a way that would be incomprehensible to someone who hadn't read the book. The latter category includes some of Tolkien's best-known advocates, including W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Naomi Mitchison.
I kept thinking that I could have done better than that. So I set myself a challenge, a mental exercise. You might try the same.
Here's the setup. You are a person who has read The Hobbit (at whatever age you actually read it at). You are now an adult (if you weren't one already), it's 1954, and you are writing book reviews for a newspaper. Completely to your surprise - for you hadn't heard that such a book was coming out - you are handed The Fellowship of the Ring. The two announced successor volumes haven't been published yet. Your job is to read and review it.
Stepping outside the frame, then: try to cast out of your mind everything you've read and thought in retrospect about the work, and everything that's happened in the fantasy genre since then, and look at the book afresh with memories of your initial unfiltered reaction. And then, as best as you are able, write the review you would have written, for a completely fresh and unknowing audience, in 1954.
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin hardcover, 1954, reviewed by DB.
Many children, some of them now grown to adulthood, have over the years enjoyed reading a children’s fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien titled The Hobbit, first published in 1937. This tale takes an imaginary creature of a kind physically resembling a leprechaun but in personality and habits more like an English country squire, and sends him off on a dramatic Nordic quest among dwarfs, elves, wizards, trolls, and dragons. By turns both humorous and serious, The Hobbit is a richly imaginative story of tremendous breadth.
But nobody could have guessed just how much imagination Mr. Tolkien had up his sleeve until now, all these years later, with his publication of a sequel to The Hobbit titled The Fellowship of the Ring. If The Hobbit has breadth, the world lacks a word to describe what the sequel has. One may say that Mark Twain’s Huck Finn is a deeper, richer book than his Tom Sawyer, but that difference is as nothing to what we find here. The Hobbit is a children’s book, but The Fellowship of the Ring is a fully adult book of a scale and kind rarely seen: it’s like an Arthurian romance set in an imaginary country and told in modern language. And – most amazing of all – it is not a complete story but merely the first of a projected three volumes collectively titled The Lord of the Rings.
In the earlier book, the hobbit adventurer had acquired a magic ring of invisibility. In the present volume, he resigns his estates to his adopted son, who soon learns that the ring is actually a tool for control and destruction of tremendous power and danger, too powerful indeed for a creature as insignificant as a hobbit to wield for any purpose beyond pure invisibility, but too dangerous for any being to hold who is powerful enough to wield it. At all costs it must be kept out of the hands of the being who made it, the earlier book’s offstage Necromancer, now revealed as a great Enemy of evil intent.
From this outline, it would be a dull or unworldly mind that does not immediately think of the atomic bomb. But if you try to cast the hobbit as an innocent scientist or the Enemy as Stalin, the jigsaw pieces cease to fit. This story has far too much of a wealth of imagination to be a simple allegory like Animal Farm waiting to be decoded. It follows its own logic, not an externally imposed one.
Even the opening scenes showing the hobbit at home have greater scope than the equivalent in the earlier book, but the story begins, at its broader pace, as something of a copy of its predecessor’s episodic quest, only with a different purpose: instead of setting off on an adventure almost on a lark, this hobbit is fleeing from danger as the Enemy’s truly frightening agents pursue him. Eventually, after greater discomfort than his predecessor, and with the companionship of three other hobbits and a mysterious human tracker, our hero reaches the elf haven which was a key resting point in the earlier story. Here, halfway through the book, a great council is held, much background material is revealed, and a larger group, the Fellowship of the title, must set off in a new geographic direction in hopes of destroying the ring in the only place this may be done: the fires where it was forged in the middle of the Enemy’s lands.
By the end of the volume they’re about halfway there. I know this because there is an excellent detailed folding map. In the process they’ve experienced dark journeys (through a huge deserted mine in the equivalent of The Hobbit’s journey through a murky forest), battles, death, treachery, and another elvish haven more beautiful than the first one. For all its fantastic invention, this is as big and somber an adult book as any topical novel of World War II.
The prose is sometimes plain, and sometimes rises through stiffness to grandeur. The characterization and dialogue are deft. The moral underpinnings are firm. The landscape and journeying are vast and awesome. This is a slow story but a gripping one, ending at a point of dramatic crisis. It had me captivated all the way through, and left me with a burning impatience for the rest of the story. I am looking forward to the remaining volumes with my heart in my throat and my breath bated.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-13 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-13 05:50 pm (UTC)It did make me want to read the books again, though, so that's to your credit.
And Happy Anniversary!
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Date: 2008-06-06 12:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 02:20 pm (UTC)It's possible, though I hope not, that my comparison was influenced by my knowledge (which the reviewer would not have) that Tolkien struggled over the question of what to make The Lord of the Rings about, having agreed to write a sequel without any inner need of his own to do so, and of how to differentiate it from The Hobbit, not being able (at first) to think of anything to say about hobbits that he hadn't already said.
But I do believe the idea of the book as an expanded and deeper replay was evident to me from my own first reading.
As for whether it was marketed as a sequel, marketing of that kind as we know it today was unknown then. But the relationship between the books was made clear. Here's a quote from the publisher's catalog, announcing the forthcoming book: "Mr. Tolkien's long and enthralling tale is cast in the same imaginary period of history as was The Hobbit, and some of the chief characters, notably Gandalf and the sinister Gollum, appear again. ... It is not a children's book, neither is it necessary to have read The Hobbit first. But readers of The Hobbit of all ages will be amongst the most insistent in demanding The Lord of the Rings.
(By the way, do you see what I meant in the post about framing discussion of the book? If this blurb is not purely addressed to readers of The Hobbit, then the references to Gollum and to Gandalf, who doesn't even get an adjective describing him, are merely pointless and frustrating.)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 03:54 pm (UTC)