Disclaimer: I’ll just get this out of the way first. I’m not meaning to insult JRR Tolkien as an author, or say that The Lord Of the Rings is bad, or that LOTR fans are idiots, or anything like that. I definitely don’t want to get into that argument. I just think it’s sometimes interesting to pick a book apart and wonder how else it could have been written. And by Tolkien’s own admission, LOTR wasn’t the book he set out to write – it was supposed to be a simple sequel to The Hobbit.
Another thing I read somewhere is that Tolkien was not a fan of revising his work, and that once he’d written something down, that’s the way it had to be. (I’m citing that from memory, so don’t hold me to it). Rather than going back and changing something already set down, he would try and reconcile any problems that cropped up. I’m rather relying on this here.
So I was following the LOTR reread over at the Tor website (http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/02/lord-of-the-rings-re-read-index) and reading about all the continuity and other weaknesses I hadn’t picked up on before, when this occurred to me. At the outset, Tolkien intended to write the whole of the Lord Of the Rings from the viewpoint of the hobbits. And all of the obvious weaknesses in the work arise because he was obliged to abandon that scheme (but did not wish to rewrite LOTR from scratch). That’s my theory.
No doubt Tolkien was aware of the fantasy convention that if you are going to write about fantastical places and events, your protagonist should be a plain, ordinary sort of person. In a story full of unconventional things, the reader needs a point of view they can relate to. Tolkien did this successfully in The Hobbit, when he made Bilbo Baggins its hero. Bilbo was a small, unambitious person in a big wide world, who was as clueless about that world as the reader. There was even tension in that, because Bilbo often didn’t know what he was doing and sometimes didn’t think he had it in him.
In planning a bigger book, Tolkien introduced not one, but a whole bunch of hobbits to be his viewpoint characters. There was Frodo, who would be the ring-bearer. But since Frodo was under the influence of the ring, he would eventually become corrupted and Gollum-like. So he needed Sam to tag along, to become the viewpoint character after Frodo grows too alien for the reader to sympathize with. But this was not just a story about an evil ring but also about an epic war, where a long-lost king returns to lead his people against a terrible foe. So Tolkien also included Merry to be a point of view character in Gondor, and Pippin to be a point of view character in Rohan. Then, for good measure, he included Fatty Bolger for a point of view character on the home-front.
This, I speculate, is how LOTR was originally supposed to run. The hobbits would leave the shire. Frodo and Sam would do their bit with the ring, and Merry and Pippin would tag along and witness all the great people and deeds. Then, having learned and grown, they would all return to for the climactic scene where they fight their own battle and kick the agents of evil out of the Shire. It sounds simple enough.
But I think it started to go wrong for Tolkien almost immediately. In the first half of Fellowship Of the Ring, he was determined to follow his hobbits on every step of the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendel. So he leads us on a pointless diversion through the dark forest. From there they go onto Bree where they meet Strider, which is about the only important thing that happens on the journey. They also meet Bill Ferny, in a scene I believe was meant to introduce a sub-plot about what happens in the Shire, but which Tolkien never returned to because he got so caught up in other parts of the story. Tolkien manages to turn the journey into something dramatic – a race to the ford of Bruinen, with the dark riders on their tail.
The trouble is, getting the ring to Rivendel is the only important plot-point resolved by first book of The Fellowship Of the Ring. Everything else important is happening off-camera. Aragorn captures and interrogates Gollum, and learns that Sauron now knows the name Baggins. Gandalf goes to Isengard, but Saruman betrays and imprisons him. We don’t see any of this happen. We have to be told about it after the fact in a long and tedious chapter of exposition.
I suspect, at this point, Tolkien knew he was in trouble. Until then he had been following the hobbits, but the hobbits were not well-positioned to witness the actual story that was playing out. Following a hobbit every step along the road had been a good choice for The Hobbit, but it wasn’t working for LOTR. Still, after Rivendel, he had all his important characters together, so he pressed on, through the mines of Moria and Lothlorien.
After they leave Lothlorien and get onto the river, a curious thing starts to happen. The hobbits start complaining that they feel like useless baggage. And it’s true, they are. I think it’s quite possible that this is the author’s opinion too, which is intruding into the story. Bilbo had plenty to do on his journey. He had to convince a bunch of dwarves he was good thief, he had to rescue them all from Mirkwood, and then had to negotiate with a dragon. But in LOTR, the hobbits apart from Frodo have nothing to do, and even Frodo is little more than a porter at this point. The real actors in the story are the big folk – Gandalf leads the way through Moria and defeats the Balrog, Boromir is tempted by the ring, Aragorn comes to terms with his fate… The hobbits? They’ve got nothing.
The most significant chapter for my theory is the first chapter of The Two Towers. This, I believe is where Tolkien finally threw up his hands and said, “Sod it! This is not a story about hobbits, it’s a story about all these other characters.” It’s the first chapter in LOTR where there are no hobbits present, and the first viewpoint presented is that of Aragorn. Under the circumstances, it was probably the best decision to make, because now Tolkien is free to write the actual story that’s emerging, instead of just following hobbits around. But this decision has a couple of fatal flaws.
The first problem is that all these people weren’t actually designed to be fully-rounded viewpoint characters. Tolkien conceived them as heroic archetypes, and that’s the way they were written from the beginning. The biggest complaint the critics of LOTR have is about the flat and lifeless characters in it. Aragorn doesn’t particularly come across as a sympathetic or psychologically convincing character, even though he is the big hero of the story. I think it’s because we were only ever meant to see him at a distance, through the eyes of hobbits – some glorious shiny vagabond-turned-king that inspires hobbits to greatness.
It’s not that Tolkien is incapable of creating fully-formed characters. Gollum is a great character. Treebeard is a great character. The hobbits themselves are all fairly well-drawn. And yet, look at poor old Celeborn, who utterly fails to have any sort of personality whatsoever. Even someone like Galadriel, who has plenty of personality in Tolkien’s other writings, is reduced to a magical gift-giver in LOTR. Out of Tolkien’s cast, the ones that were always meant to be well-rounded, sympathetic viewpoint characters work perfectly well as such, but the ones who were meant to be the heroic archetypes all fall flat. And I believe it’s because the story was originally meant to be about the hobbits, not about all the humans and elves who get pushed to centre stage almost by accident.
The second problem with abandoning the hobbits as the central focus of the story is that the ending now misfires. The bit where the hobbits were meant to bring home all the lessons they learned abroad and defeat evil in the shire becomes a silly anticlimax. The whole “war on the homefront” subplot with Bill Ferny and Fatty Bulger gets dropped altogether. And by the time the hobbits finally do get home, there’s no credible evil left in the world that could realistically challenge them. After defeating the witch king of Angmar, Shelob, and Sauron himself, Bill Ferny is hardly going to give them any trouble. And nor is Saruman, who they’ve already seen defeated once. The whole sequence is now completely unnecessary.
So anyway, that’s what I think. Of course, I have no way of backing up my little theory, so you can take it or leave it as you please. But I do wonder what LOTR would look like if it had panned out the way I believe it was conceived.
