I’ll agree with this – I remember picking up FOTR, years since I last read it, and being slightly startled by the short passage when Frodo is recovering in Rivendell. Gandalf thinks (or speaks to himself) “He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.” This is, I think, the only time in all three books where we ‘hear’ what Gandalf is thinking. And this is mostly true for other characters as well; you get 3rd person descriptions like “Hope left him” but little or no getting inside anyone’s skull.
Well could the Iliad have been better written if we had explicit descriptions of pychological tension between individual identity vs. public honour while relentless raping of captured women was going on?
Yeah, not really.
The books are written the way they are to be what they are. The Hobbit is a fairy tale in the Tolkien mode. A self consistent world to be enjoyed. Why would introspective modern concerns ever be useful in that?
The LotR is different. You can see the fairy tale wrapper in the beginning and ending chapters but the bulk of the narrative is arch type struggles over free will, the possibility of grace and duty. Again bringing in modern introspection and “realism” would shrink the tale.
LotR isn’t a child tale because it has elves in it any more than Harry Potter is adult due to people being tortured.
Good - I like the way you think, Grey
Hey Gollum, wanna guess wots in me pocket?
bow-chicka-bow-wow…
Well, you’d be wrong then wouldn’t you. But thanks for dropping in to patronise.
I don’t think “patronise” is a fair rebuke. You say that as if YA is not a valuable genre. And I don’t think Reno Nevada is way off base here. Much of what happens in LotR is quite appealing to the YA target audience: power fantasies, leaving home, the coming-of-age growth that happens to Merry and Pippin, plus all of the “adventure.” But it wouldn’t jibe with a modern definition of YA, since Frodo is 50 when he leaves the Shire, not a teenager.
(Plus, FWIW, I had a hell of a time getting through FotR as a teen. I was reading all sorts of Science Fiction and Fantasy when I was in high school, but I just could not force myself through the hobbits struggles in the Old Forest/with Bombadil/on the Barrow-Downs. It was reading SO slow… I didn’t pick it up again and successfully make my way past those chapters until I was in college—and then I finished all the books within a week, naturally, to the detriment of my classes.)
Is he though? It’s easy to love the book as an adult if you read it as a teenager (as I did), but would most older adults really go for LOTR once they are in their 30’s and beyond? If I came on it cold in my 30’s or older I’d be an entirely different place than if I were in my teens and I doubt it would have the same resonance for me.
It’s very good fiction, but it’s not really (IMO) written for adults. It’s a young(er) person’s book.
I wasn’t trying to patronize. I read LOTR when I was 15, and I would guess that the majority of people who do read it, read it before they are 21. There is nothing wrong with a book being accessible to teenagers.
The Hobbit is definitely a children’s book, but more adult than most are nowadays. LOTR is definitely more adult than the hobbit, but is epic in a way completely different than serious fiction tends to be nowadays. I think people would disagree whether LOTR’s echos of traditional myths with good kings and wise wizards is literary or juvenile (and I think there are aspects of both – I find LOTR absolutely amazingly good, yet also containing many features which I would normally otherwise describe as “bad”).
It would be possible to rewrite LOTR to be more like a modern adult literary book, but it would be difficult, because LOTR is build around many assumptions that work in middle earth, and work in beowulf, but don’t work in the real world, not just obvious things like “magic” but implicit things like “kings are just better than everyone else” and “we are controlled by fate”. It would be possible to change things such that Aragorn’s paragoninity is based on himself, rather than being the last descendant of a line of men who were just better, but it would change all sorts of things.
And I think it would almost certainly destroy the things that are good about the book. Not necessarily, but I think it would be as hard as writing it in the first place.
I think a lot of things people are suggesting here have already happened: in Peter Jackson’s movies.
Aragorn was given a character arc and conflict that he never had in the book. He never had to be spurred on to accept his destiny—he knew it was his to claim, and he spent his youth gathering all the experience he would need to do so. By the time FotR comes along, he’s like an athlete stepping out for the Super Bowl. Sure, the outcome of the game might be in doubt, but there’s no question that he’s going to play.
Likewise Faramir’s and Frodo’s turn-abouts: In the book, we never saw Faramir experience the character struggle he went through re: turning Frodo over to his father. And we never saw Frodo kick Sam out of the expedition in favor of Smeagol. These were all things added to make Tolkien’s story have more modern flavor, where every character must have a story arc and conflict (even within each volume of the grand story).
Excellent synopsis.
There are many very good responses in this thread, and this is one of them. Whether toadspittle agrees with me or not, I would like to add: And it didn’t make the story better.
As I see it, The Lord of the Ring is the story of the great war, wherein the Ring was destroy by hobbits, and as such it is very well told by Tolkien. It is not about the father complex of the king’s sons, for instance, not the sexual desires of a ranger, the frustrations of the gardeners, or whatever.
On the other hand, you may see it as a fairy tale in the traditions of the Grimm brothers’, where all kinds of psychological interpretations are welcome. How the hobbits leaves home, is separated from their childhood, goes through death and transformation, come back as adults, and so forth.
But as in the tales recorded by Grimm, the “adult” way of describing the psychological conflicts and so on, would take away the symbolism of the tale, strip it of its presumed archetypal meaning.
So no, it wouldn’t make the story better; it would make it another kind of novel altogether, which I guess would not steal the hearts of millions of teenagers who subconsciously, if you will, connect to the characters and their adventures, making it one of the most important readings in their lifes.