Thought I'd copy/paste the three reviews I wrote back in February/March 2009 to see what the reactions would be. I posted this on OF as well back then.

The Fellowship of the Ring

When I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in 1987, I had just turned 13 years old. An eighth grader at the time, I was already then planning on majoring in history when I would be able to attend college. Anything and everything that had a "history" feel appealed to me. Most of my readings then were library copies of narrative histories written in the 1950s. I found myself spending hours at a time examining historical maps of ancient empires and medieval fiefdoms, always wanting to go further, to learn more, to immerse myself in the experience. Discovering Tolkien after watching the cartoon version of The Hobbit on TV, I was drawn to the sense of a sad history behind that tale.

Between 13-17, I must have read the LotR books over a dozen times. It was the sense of history, the way that prior events influenced the storyline "present." There was this sense of loss and grandeur intermingling that appealed greatly to me. But even then, I wanted to know more about Lúthien, to know where Númenor had lain, why the Elves and Dwarves were estranged. LotR as a story was more valuable to me as an imagined history than as a fictional tale.

After I began majoring in history at the University of Tennessee in 1992, my free-time reading shifted from histories and biographies towards 18th and 19th century British and French literature. My history classes, most of them taught by social and cultural historians, introduced new ways of reading texts. Much of what I enjoyed about Tolkien went against what I was learning. My views on how histories develop, about the need to examine events not just from the perspective of the "winners" but also from the more oppressed groups (working class, women, non-Caucasians, etc.), all that began to change. I found myself not as eager to read about "long ago," about Elbereth. Instead, I began reading D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love and I began to question why Arwen got so little ink and why Éowyn had to be so "exceptional" in order to garner speaking lines.

Before this past week, the last night I had read LotR was in 1996, just after I turned 22. I recall thinking that Tolkien's prose was a bit trite, that the action, especially in The Fellowship of the Ring, was a bit too understated for an epic. I had recently discovered Ludovico Ariosto's magnificent Orlando Furioso and the action there seemed to be more centered in the present than in the narrative past. It took me far longer than normal, about a couple of weeks, to finish a re-read of LotR. Something was eating at me, but I couldn't quite put it into words. I could recite key scenes from the story, but it just felt stale and overused.

I have debated every now and then whether or not I needed to re-read LotR again, lest I risk it fading into memory as a hate/love work. I did read The Children of Húrin when it was released in 2007, and while I thought the tragic elements were done well, it did nothing to rekindle a desire to read LotR or Tolkien's other works. It wasn't until I read the little teapot tempests that revolved around Richard Morgan's recent broadside blasting Tolkien's works for its apparent conservative attitudes that I decided to re-read the series.

I read most of The Fellowship of the Ring on Sunday, mixing it in with stories from Best American Fantasy 2. It was a rather odd experience, as I kept slowing down in my reading, taking breaks to read online posts, pondering the stories in the above-named collection, and trying to puzzle out why things had become such a drag. Perhaps my lingering bronchitis and the medication I was taking for it slowed things down as well, but I believe it was the text itself that was the culprit.

The 13 year-old me loved the introductory section on Hobbits. The 22 year-old found that section to be skip-worthy. The 34 year-old writing this read it, but struggled to keep interest in the story. Ironically, it was the "history" elements that I loved as a kid (the stories, the songs, the Wights' origins) that proved to be most tedious. I tried to let my imagination stray, but I felt roped in, as if I couldn't just invent a reason for something, because the author had developed such an intricate substratum that I couldn't go two imaginary paces without stubbing my metaphorical reader's toe against Snippet A or B of a prior story that was influencing the present one.

The entire Book I felt too long. As interesting as the hobbit interactions with each other could be when the damnable "history" wasn't introduced to make them go "Oh, gee-wilikers, Gandalf/Strider! Tell us more about that!", I kept feeling that the literary "present" was swamped over by the backstory that Tolkien kept developing behind the scenes. As a result, the characters felt a bit diminished, being more than passive recipients of the fictional past than as active, dynamic characters.

Book II was a little bit better (fewer lays, more "present" action), but I noticed that my sense of wonder had faded over the years. Boromir's "fall" felt a bit flat, since there wasn't enough foreshadowing for my liking. Tolkien's usage of saga storytelling elements made for a duller read, as I just didn't feel that emotionally connected with each of the characters. The end result was a trilogy opener that felt lifeless, with the past events receiving more attention than the literary present characters/events.

It'll be interesting to see how I react to The Two Towers when I read it this weekend. I wonder if my experience with that novel, containing more action than The Fellowship of the Ring, will leave me with more fond memories than The Fellowship of the Ring managed to do.


The Two Towers

Close to two weeks ago, I wrote a short reflective essay on my first re-read of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring since 1996, when I was 22 years old. In that essay, I discussed how many of the events in my life from my first reading of the trilogy at 13 to the then-final re-reading nine years later had shaped my views of the story and how I was curious to see how much subsequent personal developments would have altered my opinion of the tale now that I am approaching 35 years old. Frankly, I was a bit underwhelmed when I read The Fellowship of the Ring last month, finding the story to be a bit lacking for most of the volume, overwhelmed too much by Tolkien's attempts to tie it into his broader imagined mythology for Engl...err, Middle-Earth. Nevertheless, I decided to soldier on, hoping to see if my remembered love for The Two Towers, which I recall being my favorite of the three volumes when I was 13, would remain strong, or if it too would be diminished by my own changing literary tastes.

One of the first things I noticed was a perceived shift in character development in The Two Towers. While Tolkien never really developed the hobbit characters much beyond the rustic rubes of the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring for most of that first volume, the characters of Merry, Pippin, and especially Sam and Frodo come into their own in this volume. While at times I felt frustrated because Tolkien's chosen echoing of saga storytelling motifs seemed to get in the way of showing the very real concerns, worries, and problems that the characters faced (more a problem for the characters of Book III than the Frodo/Sam/Gollum triad of Book IV), there were times when their character growth would shine through the archaic narrative style, giving me something to consider besides wondering just how closely Tolkien would ape the various Eddas and the style of Edwardians such as Eddison.

In particular, the different ways that Merry/Pippin and Frodo/Sam (and no, I'm not going to suggest that the Secret Histories are that true!) demonstrate their friendships with each other was a highlight of this tale. From the languid, affected teasing that Merry and Pippin use when greeting Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas at the ruins of Isengard to the more somber and yet devout loyalty that both Frodo and Sam show for each other as they transverse the Emyn Muil, the dialogue is excellent. In fact, it is this excellent use of the more rustic, but still more "modern" language that makes the archaic greetings of the Rohirrim and the battle cries of various forces all the more jarring and irritating to me. I now can't help but to wonder if the trilogy would have read better if more of the dialogue had been in a more "modern" voice.

The events were more immediate and felt much more "important" than they did in the first volume. While there are still references to the Elder Days and the subsequent estrangement of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, these have been dialed back and are blended much better into the storyline "present." Although Tolkien perhaps felt it necessary to have a fragment of The Lay of Lúthien to be told in the wilds near Weathertop in the first volume, in retrospect it feels even more of a shoehorned, extraneous element included there only so he could make a reference to it when Frodo and Sam were crossing Cirith Ungol. But outside of this niggling criticism, the created "past" was integrated much more smoothly into the narrative in this volume.

The action scenes (Helm's Deep, Isengard, the skirmish in Ithilien) were done fairly well, and for once, the saga-influenced narrative voice that Tolkien used to describe these events made for a quick but purpose-filled read. While I personally didn't care much for the Gimli/Legolas tallying of enemies killed, the way in which the defense of the Hornburg was narrated highlighted the bloody action without detracting from the overall focus of the novel.

One thing that I noticed in this re-read that I wouldn't have caught in my earlier re-reads (in large part due to my conversion to Catholicism in 2003) is the metaphysical aspects of Tolkien's story. While I knew that the One Ring was meant to represent the temptations of Sin in large part, I never really thought much about the fate of the Three Rings and of those who try to preserve in whole-cloth form anything of value. Several times in the narrative, and especially in Book IV, there are brief digressions on the nature of suffering (usually illustrated by the blasted nature of the lands Frodo and Sam had crossed), of the falsity of human abilities to "master" anything long-term, and briefly, hints of redemptive possibilities (Sméagol-Gollum peering at the sleeping Frodo). Before this re-read, I usually hurried through the Frodo/Sam chapters, finding them a bit dour and lacking action; this time, they had become the thematic highlight of the trilogy to date.

However, there were times when it seemed Tolkien could have gone further. While I do not agree with much of what he said in his essay on Tolkien's LotR last month, Richard Morgan does raise an interesting point about how Tolkien's orcs come so close in places (or at least in each scene where at least one hobbit is near them) to being rounded, dynamic characters who are more than cannon fodder foot-soldiers of pure, malignant evil. I can agree with Morgan that Tolkien does back away from a precipice there, but I don't believe it was "panic"-stricken flight. Instead, if I had to guess at a reason why the orcs were relatively underdeveloped in these tales, it was because Tolkien was conflicted over whether or not these creatures possessed "souls" and thus Free Will, or if they were so filled with the malice of the Dark Lord(s) that they truly were beyond redemption. For a devout Catholic as Tolkien seemed to be, that likely was too thorny of a situation to work out in full at this time.

Regardless of the missed opportunities such as the one noted above, on the whole The Two Towers was a much smoother, interesting read for me than was The Fellowship of the Ring. While the archaic speech patterns still grated on occasion, this was more than counterbalanced by the hobbits' character developments and by the more visible presence of religious thematic elements in the narrative that helped add layers of depth to a text that earlier seemed to be a weaker carbon copy of older Scandanavian sagas and late medieval romance epics. In the next few days or so, I hope to have a reflective essay up for the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King. While I doubt my love for Tolkien's storytelling will return to what it had once been 22 years ago, I do have hopes that I will regain at least some appreciation for what he has accomplished. But that's a tale for another time, no?


The Return of the King

In this third and final reflective essay dealing with my first re-reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings since 1996 (click on the links for my thoughts regarding The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers), I want to spend more time addressing some of the larger issues surrounding the story, since there is little that I would change about my statements regarding the narrative flow in RotK or its prose that I did not already say in the first two essays. In particular, I want to explore a bit further a comment made by another in a forum thread regarding the "sense that the characters were moving through two landscapes: the real, tangible, beautifully described landscape of Middle Earth itself; and a larger, mythic landscape of past deeds, stories and memories." That statement I think lies near the heart, if not at it, of the divide between those who absolutely adore The Lord of the Rings and those who find much of it to be baffling. Furthermore, I have held back addressing until now the issues of gender roles and "blood" until now, in part because I wanted to finish reading RotK and the almost-interminable appendices before commenting further. But since these essays are meant to be relatively brief (under 2000 words), doubtless this reflection will be but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussing thematic possibilities and problems.

In tone and pacing, Book V of The Return of the King strongly resembles that of Book III from The Two Towers. It is a more martial book, however, since the march to the greater War of the Ring has begun and the pace is near break-neck speed. However, Tolkien still continues to intersperse bits and pieces of a larger imagined narrative within this tale (the Púkelmen, the Paths of the Dead, the twin hills outside the Black Teeth), creating a sense of mystery and wonder...that he later dashes in the appendices and other writings of his. For the most part, these elements work, as long as the reader doesn't bother reading the appendices before finishing the main storyline, because not only is the importance of the events hinted at in these revelations, but the reader is left wondering "How will the Dead play a role in the fight at Minas Tirith?" or "Will the Púkelmen be able to help the Rohirrim arrive in time?" Tolkien does an excellent job in switching back and forth between the Minas Tirith, Rohirrim army, and Grey Company scenes to create narrative tension that makes one want to read faster, while still wanting to have time to ponder what is truly going on around and behind the narrative.

The Battle of Pelannor Field, with its use of a short, direct narrative that echoes that of older sagas and the epic poems of the Matter of Britain, was well-done. The heroism was displayed in full, but without too much space devoted to it, which would have risked distorting the true heroic act that was taking place far from the battlefield. I usually do not care much for action/adventure scenes (not because blood/killing terrifies me, but because I value little such violent acts, even when presented as being "necessary"), but Tolkien appears to have taken great pains to balance this out with the more real, "spiritual" struggle that was taking place near Mount Doom.

Frodo and Sam's plight in Book VI used to be a "hurry up and read it to get to the good stuff" for me when I was younger. Now that I'm nearing middle age and have felt great weariness from my personal burdens (which I will not share here), I have come to have a much greater appreciation for what Tolkien accomplished here. People want to cheer for the hero to succeed; they want him/her to push on through the daunting challenges toward triumph and glory. It is difficult to read of the battered, bruised, and almost-broken Frodo and the steadfast, suffering Sam struggling every step of the way towards Orodruin, while the Ring begins its inexorable takeover of Frodo's will. While some might try to argue that Tolkien never wrote an allegorical tale, I would counter by noting that while the story never is meant to represent a specific action, Tolkien certainly saw parallels between the subject matter of his tale and his own personal beliefs. The temptations emanating from the Ring may not represent Satan's will, but the reader's understanding of what temptation is might be seen readily in how Frodo and Sam have to struggle to maintain their will in the face of the increasing burden of the Ring's temptatous power.

In most heroic tales, the hero triumphs or dies while staving off evil. Frodo however fails. He is no Christ, no matter how much he has grown throughout his wandering and his suffering. He is mortal, and the Ring claims him at the end. Regardless of what one might think of Gollum's intervention (I think it worked well, to highlight another concern of Tolkien's, that of mercy and the possibility of repentance), Frodo's succumbing to the Ring's lure was a stark reminder that humans cannot conquer all obstacles. Perhaps others may wish to debate this point, but I suspect it is central to much of Tolkien's underlying narrative themes.

The Scouring of the Shire works well as a complement to the other events of RotK, showing how pervasive Evil can be and how sorrow has been woven into the world's fabric. While the end of Saruman was sad, I wonder if Tolkien could have expanded the dialogue between him and Frodo a little bit longer to increase the effectiveness of that passage. However, some of the events here and earlier in the trilogy still trouble me.

Much has been made elsewhere over the years about Tolkien's apparent backwards-looking, with his numerous reference to dark machines and foul air that conjures up images of smokestacks and Victorian factories. Some have taken him to task for this, arguing that the world-view Tolkien presents here is reactionary, condemning the good of the Industrial Age by lumping it with the bad. For the most part, I sympathize with his detractors here. At times, there seems to be too much wistfulness, too much bemoaning of what is lost, too little focus on creating an optimistic future. For as devout of a Catholic as Tolkien was, there was not as much hope for righteousness as perhaps there could have been. At times, the story was a bit too bleak, even after Sauron's downfall. While this would jibe well with the notion of Arda marred, or with St. Augustine's idea of Original Sin spoiling God's creation, Tolkien fails to balance this with the eschatological promise of the Millenium and the Second Coming. While doubtless part of this was because he was not creating a 1-to-1 parallel with Catholic Christianity, the distinct, near-total absence of a final hope for Arda was quite noticable. Sometimes, one would love to have just a wee bit more hope in a work.

The gender issue is a very tricky one, one that will reflect much more upon the age/generation of those making the case and not as much on the author's generation. Yes, women played relatively limited roles in the trilogy compared to the men. Yes, Arwen spoke but maybe a couple of times the entire main story. Yes, Eowyn and Galadriel got "screen time" because they were "exceptional" and not because they were representative of women in Tolkien's world. But one could make the argument that Tolkien's faults there (presuming that one accepts that this is a flaw, which is a debatable matter. I think he could have done more) lie more with his conscious copying of older narrative styles that emphasized the trials and tribulations of males, while leading the more wholesome cooking and childrearing duties to the silent, nurturing females. Back in the 1950s, raising the gender issue would have been quaint. Now, it seems odd at times and perhaps at best a "missed opportunity" for Tolkien. More proof that as the times change, so do reader interpretations of fiction.

The race issue is much more troubling to me. The black, "half-troll" men of the Far Harad, the horde-like qualities of the Easterlings - these bring to mind all sorts of prejudical comments on East Asians and Africans that appeared frequently in action/adventure tales of the times. While Tolkien certainly wasn't sympathetic to the racial nonsense of the Nazis and their ilk (he did note in his published letters that there were intentional parallels between the Dwarves and the Jews and their loss of homeland and subsequent wandering), at times there just seemed to be a bit too much there. Perhaps it is the intervening years (the American Civil Rights Movement, the 1968 protests in several countries, Title IX, etc.) that have colored impressions of the years before, but there were several times towards the end of the series that I rolled my eyes at the descriptions of the opposing forces. Yes, Tolkien was careful not to label the Easterlings and Southrons as sub-humans, but it was a near thing in several places.

But what about my overall reaction to the trilogy? I have discussed in these essays how the writing is moving at times, especially toward the end, while the dialogue was more of a hit-or-miss mixture of the rustic, almost "modern" speech and the more elevated, high-born talk that led to several scenes containing stilted language. The characterizations were good for most of the Nine Walkers characters and a few of the more prominent Gondorian and Rohirrim soldiers, but outside of a few fleeting times where the orcs were allowed to be seen as victims of their slave masters as well as being seen as evil, cruel beings, there just was a bit too much one-sidedness to the story's presentation of the sides. However, it is hard to think of how Tolkien could have portrayed a more multi-faceted approach to the good/evil equation without radically altering the story he had set out to tell.

As a narrative, The Lord of the Rings contains many layers, sometimes too many. I still believe that Tolkien's invented "history" intruded too much into the War of the Rings in places, leaving me to wonder if some readers would find the backstory to be more intriguing than the "present" tale. Too bright of a light through a window can deaden the sparkling wonders inside a room, or at least that's how I felt about how the tales told on the travel to Rivendell lessened the narrative impact of the actual, dangerous travel. This perhaps is but a symptom of a greater problem that I had with Tolkien's writing.

Sometimes, authors provide too much information, leave too few mysteries behind. By explicating almost everything, too little is left to the imagination. Instead of having the travelers come upon mysterious, unknown objects from a distant past, there is always some sage (Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir, etc.) to explain just what this object is/was, why it was built, with the implication that the author's created "past" will lie at the root of everything taking place. While doubtless such "infodumps" can create a sense of curiosity about what else the author might have in store, the sense of wonder is lessened. Sometimes, I just don't want to know the how's and why's of something I read. Give me a mysterious, vaguely threatening monolith and let me create my own imagined past for it.

So in a large sense, my reluctance to re-read Tolkien these past 13 years and my ambivalence now can be chalked up to my irritation that the author has abrogated to a good extent the reader's ability to create alternative understandings or explanations for events. I don't care about "world" creation; I want to read a narrative that remains true to itself and doesn't depend much upon the wires of the underlying setting to draw the reader's attention. Tolkien excels at creating a mythic feel, but often he turns around and ruins much of that by failing to make his backstory remote enough to the unfolding narrative. This was just a case of too much explication, in my opinion. In the end, this re-reading of The Lord of the Rings left me with an appreciation for Tolkien's talents for mimicking the style, tone, and subtlety of older storytelling forms, but it also served to remind me why I rarely read stories in which authors try to create "fully-realized worlds" - authors should be more dead within their texts than any wight from the Barrows crawling about at night.