by Doodle Dee. Snickers » Mon Mar 26, 2018 10:09 pm
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R.Tolkien
I usually do non-spoiler reviews, but most everyone alive has seen the LOTR movies, so there's little point. Speaking of which, the movies will probably come up a couple of times, as I find them useful comparisons since they're the point of reference most people have. The last time I read these books was when the movies were coming out, which would've made me around 13. Back then, I didn't really have the same reading comprehension I do now, so I understood much more of this book than back when I first read it.
First, the writing style. This is written very much in the form of something like Beowulf or a Shakespearean play, but without the poetry. It's all very melodramatic, humorous, and heartwarming, but sometimes feel a little too melodramatic when I'm not in the mood for it. Also, like that style of writing, I've never really cared for the sudden changes of heart or decisions that are endemic to the narratives. That said otherwise, it's written in a way that I would personally strive to emulate were I writing a work of fiction set before the Industrial Age.
And you know, I often think of Tolkien as overwriting in the vein of GRRM, but now that I read it I realized that was really only the songs and the bit with the Shire at the end. For the most part, though it absolutely could've been tighter, the exposition never really got to me and a lot of time was spent describing people and locales in a way that never felt wasteful. That said, I did skip over every song that was sung without exemption.
LOTR often gets guff for not having particularly complex characters, but while it's true that the characters mostly either go through dubiously sudden changes (Aragorn is a good example) or don't change at all, they're characters that are more meant to represent something than to undergo a real complex growth. Frodo goes on a big adventure where he sees a lot of torment and horror and comes home to find that nothing's the same and he no longer feels the same about it (almost like...say...a soldier coming back from WW1). Aragorn represents the idea of majesty even inside the roughest characters, as he goes from a particularly unsavory-seeming guy to king (although his transition from "I don't want to be king" to "I will uphold my line with pride and ensure our existence forever" happens in an instant). Sam represents an enviable simplicity, a person believing in home and love who's so pure that taking the ring fails to even make a dent on his psyche, even when it outright tempts him.
It also tends to receive some disdain for everyone having a happy ending, but that's not entirely true. Frodo is the obvious point here, someone who goes home a broken person who can't really fit in anymore. The Elves and Gandalf are also about the same, people whose time has come to depart forever. Theoden dies at peak badassery but before he can see the war through. Boromir dies just as he realizes how wrong he'd done by everyone (by the way, still the most complex character in the books). Arwen has to leave her family. Eowyn and Eomer lose their father figure. So there is some misery here, even if it's not completely ASOIAF-level misery.
However, it also did a phenomenal job in making the presence of unseen characters felt. I realized as I read through it that Bilbo was the unsung hero of this story, and Boromir always felt like a presence hanging around until the end. Denethor, obviously, makes a lot more sense here than in the movie, though his character still feels a little...too overdramatic, even in books that read like Beowulf. Theoden and Sam remain my favorite characters, because they kinda represent the same thing: the true heroes of the story standing in the shadows of much more prestigious people. Rohan were a bunch of hillbillies compared to the wondrous Gondor, but damned if they weren't the only reason Middle-Earth wasn't under Sauron's control. Frodo was the one who threw the ring into the fire, but damned if he wouldn't have been murdered by Gollum long before without Sam. That bit where Sam is sneaking around after he beats away Shelob remains my favorite stretch of the book.
If I remember correctly, the 'heroes in the shadows of greater heroes' was intentional; Tolkien fashioned Sam, at least, after servants that some officers would have back then, and had said he considered him to be the real hero. I can imagine he meant the same for Rohan on a wider scale, especially given how he held in equal stature the kingly and wondrous with the simple and rustic.
What I do happen to find a problem with is that everything conspires in a way that nobody needs to get their hands dirty. And maybe it can be said that it's a point in the book, and I suppose in some ways it is, but it always feels like everyone but Boromir takes the morally just path every time and it always works out for them. Even Saruman doesn't need to be killed, Frodo and Gandalf spare him so that Grima can kill him later. Aragorn lets Boromir slide when he realizes what he did and it wasn't a problem that didn't have to be confronted because he died. The only real error made here is when Theoden spares Grima, who then helps Saruman attack the Hornburg.
Then there's the ending. Or rather: all the endings. I actually look upon the endings in ROTK (the movie) with more favor now, because this book did take quite a while to end. Even before the non-sequitur in the Shire (for those who've never read the books, the hobbits return home to find that Saruman has taken up residence there, and they have to fight a battle to get him out. It's supposed to drive home a thus-far unspoken point about industrialism and felt a little unnecessary to most people), there's a whole huge bit where the Fellowship slowly breaks apart in Gondor while they wait for Aragorn's wedding, all the elves meet up with everyone, they go in a huge group back through the path to check in with Rohan, then the Ents, then Isengard, then Bree, and THEN comes the part with the Shire, then there's more about settling down in the Shire, then Frodo finally sails off to the Grey Havens. The part with the Shire, I happen to agree it could've been taken wholesale from the book, and it would've felt more satisfying. Even then, I didn't necessarily mind all the endings. That much closure feels needed in a story so large.
Also weird: I forgot how much events in the book are told in the past. You never actually see the Ents crush Isengard, the Ents just march off and then a hundred pages later, they're just sitting on rubble and telling the story to their companions instead of it actually happening. The Battle of the Hornburg was also...a lot less tense than I remember. In fact, if anything, I'd call it anticlimactic. There's a big buildup, but then it's over pretty quickly. Aragorn straight up walks out onto the walls and has a bit of a chat with the Orcs and Uruk-Hai just before the cavalry shows up.
Because of the way these books are constructed in big blocks of perspective (there are 'books' within the books, and each 'book' concerns one part of the story before it moves on to the next perspective), it also jumped back and forth between time periods once the Fellowship separates. The Army of the West show up in front of the Black Gates, the Eagles come to help, then you move onto the next book, which is a week or so before that, where Sam's just about to sneak into the prison Frodo's holed up in. It becomes a little jarring though doesn't necessarily detract from the story.
So: Race. Yep, we're doing this. I often see Tolkien spoken about as possibly prejudiced, and indeed, I can see how these books would give that impression. Non-white foreigners are seen as unsavory or outright enemies, while there's all this talk about pure bloodlines and people are seen as being good the more 'fair' they are, etc. Perhaps I'm simply making excuses for it, but since I know Tolkien had nothing but disdain for antisemitism (Not the same thing, obviously, but one tends to accompany the other) and despised the racism of the Nazis even before they bombed Britain in a time where there were plenty of intellectual apologists for them, I happen to think it's simply an oversight born of the times. I often found myself wondering if Mordor was supposed to be a stand-in for the Ottoman Empire, given the geographical location of it and Tolkien's time in the trenches of the Somme. So I would say it's both simply a product of the time as well as the intention to write a very Nordic/Scandinavian tale. I do think it'd raise quite a few eyebrows in today's times, but within the context of its time, I hardly think it's bad. Especially considering other famous authors who'd written during the WW1/WW2 era and had an outright hostile view of race.
It's difficult to separate these books from the movies, quite frankly, which I tend to find as a positive. I still hold the New Line Trilogy as the gold standard of adaptations, as it achieved the balance of complementing rather than abandoning the books (a la the Shining) with the deliverance of expectations to the audience in a way that made it accessible to newcomers. It's kind of like...well...ASOIAF, where it's easier to read this weighty book with weighty themes because there's a more visual source to help keep names with faces and thus engage with the story on a deeper level since you don't have to expend so much effort keeping track.
All in all, now that I'm reading this at an age enough to have full context of and understanding of these books, I appreciated them a lot more than I did the first time around. Perhaps some of this has to do with the starry-eyed idealism of these books (to say little of an author who encountered more grim evil in the world than most of us will ever know) within our current age of complete cynicism. It was incredible to realize exactly how much these books (I'm sure I probably referred to it as "this book" in here a couple times, it's hard to remember it's three books) formed everything that would happen with fantasy from that point forward, and I do mean everything. So in the end, this book would remain among my top five, if I had such a list, to give you an idea of how high I hold it in regard.
I'll give it Eighty-Three Lazy Tom Bombadils out of Eighty-Five Lazy Tom Bombadils.
Next up: White Fang/Call of the Wild, Candide (I haven't read it yet because it seems like the kind of thing I need to ingest in one sitting)