Randall on Tolkien – Lure of the Ring

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© 2002 Neil Randall

 

 

The Lure of the Ring

 

Neil Randall

 

(Published in edited form in the K-W Record, December, 2001)

 

 

When first published back in the mid-1950s, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings drew raves from many, including people as noteworthy as British poet W. H. Auden. But its reviews were in fact quite mixed. For every reviewer who found the books enticing, another found them ludicrous. “A children’s book which has somehow gotten out of hand,” chimed in prestigious critic Edmund Wilson, displaying “a poverty of invention which is almost pathetic.”

 

Back then, Tolkien’s trilogy was a book you argued about passionately. Auden himself noted that nobody seemed to have a moderate opinion about it. “Either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre,” he said, “or they cannot abide it.” But now, forty-five years later, the arguments have disappeared, even from the dislikers. Very clearly, The Lord of the Rings is here to stay.

 

But why? What is it that brings readers back to this tale of hobbits and wizards and magical rings, of bad guys that are one hundred percent evil and really incredibly ugly, and good guys so good they make even Mother Teresa seem downright amoral? Oh yeah, and trees that talk, and elves who live forever? Obviously, nobody actually knows the answer to this question, because if they did they’d simply re-create the phenomenon in order to cash in. But let’s look at some possibilities.

 

The book industry could point to LOTR’s popularity as part of the strength of the fantasy genre as a whole, but that argument really doesn’t fly. First, LOTR began the genre as we know it today. Second, the book appeals to many who wouldn’t be caught dead reading other fantasy novels or going to other fantasy movies. There’s no question that setting swords and magic against terrible baddies appeals to a significant portion of the fantasy market, especially the young male hack-‘n’-slash crowd, but LOTR doesn’t have bloodbaths around every corner or treasure to be plundered. That isn’t it at all.

 

So let’s look elsewhere for our answers.

 

Part of LOTR’s appeal is about the desire for heroism. And not heroism as we hear it referred to so often today, either. Professional athletes aren’t heroes, for instance, because be a hero you have to do something important, and winning a championship or a medal just isn’t, no matter how much we might enjoy watching it happen. Heroism is about saving others at the cost of one’s self. It’s about the willingness to sacrifice, without the expectation or even the thought of glory. At its best, it’s even accomplished modestly.

 

The Lord of the Rings oozes with heroism. In fact, sacrifice is everything in this story. To rid the world of evil, Frodo the hobbit must destroy the controlling Ring, and he spends the entirety of the story in an attempt to do so. He loves his life and his home, but he willingly sacrifices both for the greater cause, and he does so, throughout the book, with a disarming modesty that demonstrates his essential humanity. The Elves, the eldest and most powerful race in Tolkien’s world, know that the destruction of the Ring will also result as well in the destruction of all they have lived for, but they, too, are willing to sacrifice for the sake of good.

 

And that brings up another appeal. LOTR is about good. It assumes that we all know what “good” means, and in doing so it draws us in and refuses to insult us. This is save-the-world good, treat-with-kindness good, the kind of good we wish we could simply expect of the world but can’t. Furthermore, this good is set against an evil that still speaks to us, but is no longer (and probably never was) possible to know.

 

In LOTR, Frodo fulfills one of the deepest fantasies possible: small and weak, he sets off on a quest to destroy evil, an evil that everyone acknowledges as evil. In fact, this is beyond our deepest fantasies, because this is a simplified evil, of the kind we can’t ever know. How would you set out against a universally acknowledged evil today? How would you become the hero that eliminated it? LOTR lets us experience that battle, but it shows us as well the consequences of doing so.

 

Good, evil, heroism, immortal beings with great power - this is the stuff of mythology, of course. And that, ultimately, is at the heart of Tolkien’s continuing appeal. We live in an age where the concept of mythology has become so debased that we know longer understand how much we need it. Myths are the stories that define our societies, our purposes, our lives. We can no more do without them than we can without language itself.

 

Tolkien knew that, and over the course of his lifetime he constructed a mythology that answered his own needs in this matter. And make no mistake, they were definitely his own. Except for The Hobbit, the children’s story that started his career as a novelist, and LOTR itself, Tolkien wrote hundreds of pages of stories of the ancient times of his invented world, yet had no illusions about anyone other than himself being even remotely interested in them. He gave his world, which he called Middle-Earth, a rich, complex mythology, and in the main text and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings he let us into that world.

 

The sophistication and scope of Middle-Earth and its mythology lie at the core of LOTR’s appeal. It’s easy to believe in his world because of these characteristics, and because of its sheer sincerity. Which is not to suggest in any way that Tolkien readers believe in elves or hobbits or orcs or wizards or anything else that appears in the stories. The tales let us believe, however, that it’s not just acceptable, but also vital, to seek, understand, and celebrate a mythology of ourselves.