What I sometimes found jarring was the use of heroic tropes - for example, where King Theodin blows on a horn a blast so powerful the horn quite literally “bursts asunder”. That sort of think sounds fine in anglo-saxon heroic poetry, but is slightly absurd when in an actual narrative fiction. Ditto the characters breaking out in poetry.
That said, I’m a fan of his work, no question.
Yes. Tolkien is, consciously, much more akin to heroic poetry–to mythology–than conventionally narrative fiction. This is clearly not for everyone. I like him very much, but have long felt that he was much more popular than he ‘should’ be.
Knorf - Thank you for writing so eloquently what I was thinking as I read through this thread. Agree, agree, agree.
Only adding one bit - I don’t think of LOTR as YA, for many reasons. At any rate that is not a common consensus. Just because a book does not have rape or incest, etc. etc. , does not mean it is not an adult book. Many YA books have more sex & violence than LOTR does, by the way. LOTR has adult heroes, which is not true of most YA lit.
I sort of agree with this. It also helps explain the backlash, to some extent.
In all fairness, I should mention there is one element of the The Lord of the Rings I won’t attempt to defend: the poetry. It’s not particularly good, for the most part. I understand what he was going for, his being a scholar of things like Icelandic sagas and such. But his poetry mostly doesn’t come across all that well in comparison.
Geez, Malthus, if you keep this up people are going to think I’m paying you to pretend to goad me so I can riposte with my prodigious knowledge of the field. I mean, you don’t have to tell me the history of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I wrote it. And the meaning of the title is, as with all things in this thread, the opposite of what you say. They intended for “fantasy” to be the word that encompassed their style of literate otherness but the audience saw that term as “science fiction.”
Nor do you have to look far to see those examples of of science fiction including fantasy, since I already gave three examples in post #60. And I mentioned the Science Fiction Research Association, which certainly includes fantasy writers among its purview. It’s not my decision or some weird notion of mine. It’s simply the way the English language has evolved.
Knorf, Auden’s review - inherently much fairer than the ones from 1954 reviewing the first third of the work - is a classic because it touched on so many of the themes that would permeate the work of academics such as the SFRA crowd. The tensions between genre, especially genres of the fantastic, and the mimetic tradition, alluded to by Auden in his quote of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, has generated more words than other topic. Many of them quite unreadable. (There’s been a long-standing tension between the writers interested in criticism and the academics, since the academics have to - and some want to - write in academese and the writers can reach a much larger audience with recognizable English. That’s the reason I quickly left that world.)
Tolkien and Nabokov are of course placed together on many readers’ lists of the greatest novels and the aforementioned Adams Roberts, a working academic and writer of science fiction opined “If I’m asked now I would say: the two 20th-century authors that have influenced me the most are probably Tolkien and Nabokov.” But mostly I wanted to mention Nabokov for quotes like this one:
Oh, Vladdy. Had you lived to be on the Dope, what a great target you would have made.
LOTR is definitely for adults, but I think that children might enjoy it too. As for the moronic post trashes Beowulf, the post is moronic by someone who has not enjoyed a translation.
I am jumping to the end of the thread to post this, but I thought as a fairly snobbish literary type who adored Tolkien as a kid, didn’t touch the books for twenty years and then somewhat-recently revisited them, I may have something to add.
I think the closest thing one can make to an “objective” appraisal of a work is to ask, “Does this work achieve what it appears to set out to achieve?” Not a perfect yardstick, but at least it sidesteps the danger of attacking LotR because it’s not A Portrait of a Lady. By that measure, Tolkien succeeds far more often than he falls short. He creates a world of believable scale and breadth, with a coherent history that serves an important purpose in the story. The vision undergirding Lord of the Rings is clear and consistent: pastoral simplicity trumps technological expansion; courage and valor can be shown by anyone, not just the so-called mighty; and evil is a corruption of good that cannot create but only parody and distort.
As a story, LotR is often quite thrilling. Revisiting the books, I was surprised at how positively frightening the scene at the barrow-downs was, and the claustrophobic dread of Frodo’s passage through Cirith Ungol is almost suffocating. The flaws of the storytelling in this context are relatively minor: stiff, wan dialogue; excessive details (we don’t need to see every twist and turn of Frodo and Sam’s journey); and a fondness for archaism that gets pretty heavy-handed by the end.
But there’s a deeper problem with Lord of the Rings, and that’s why I think many refuse to rank it as truly great literature. That problem, in a word, is Frodo.
As a hero, Frodo embodies Tolkien’s ideal of pastoral innocence. Like all Shire-folk, he is neither acquisitive nor particularly ambitious, and inhabits a world that provides him with everything he needs and wants. One of the simplest ways to arrive at an understanding of a literary character is to ask, “What does this character want?” Frodo doesn’t want anything, except to live in the Shire, where nothing ever changes and nobody wants anything beyond a nice dinner.
What this means in terms of the story is that Frodo has no inherent flaws or desires for the Ring to exploit — it ends up making him paranoid and deranged, but these are not qualities inherent in his character, and it means that there is something missing at the heart of Lord of the Rings: a sense that its main character must overcome his own weaknesses and grow from a simple rustic into a hero. For all his adventures, Frodo doesn’t evolve; he returns to the Shire traumatized and discontented, but he is essentially the same person he was when he left.
And as Tolkien apologists will point out, that is the whole point. The Shire represents humans living in pre-modern accord with nature, and that is the virtue that allows Frodo to remain uncorrupted by the Ring, in contrast to “heroic” Boromir. But incorruptible innocence, when you get right down to it, isn’t all that interesting. It means that for all its thrilling epic sweep, Lord of the Rings is psychologically a vacuum; the characters are missing an important part of their inner lives.
(The movies, for all their missteps, attempted to address this by giving Aragorn an internal struggle: he worries that he will falter and give into weakness as his Numenorean ancestors did. Some might argue this made him seem weaker; I thought it made him more heroic, as well as someone I could empathize with a bit more.)
So yes, Lord of the Rings achieves what it appears to set out to. But what it sets out to achieve is in some ways anti-modern, and out of step with what many have expected from literary writing in the last century or so.
Interesting. From your own article:
Apparently, your “prodigious knowledge of the field” at one point included using the terms “science fiction and fantasy and horror”. Nowhere, may I add, does the article claim that there was a “term of art” that included all of these genres - and, in plain English, the fact that the title of the mag was “Fantasy & Science Fiction” sorta puts the lie to that.
No, it is not. The fact that the Science Fiction Research Association includes fantasy writers does not mean that the term “science fiction” is the general term.
In fact, as I proved, a quite different term is used when that meaning is requiredfor academic reasons (namely, “speculative fiction”). That’s how “English has evolved”.
Science Fiction is a term notoriously difficult to define - but not one major author I have ever heard of has claimed it includes “fantasy”.
Here’s a list of dozens of such definitions:
The only use of “fantasy” is by way of contrast.
No dictionary definitions I have seen claim that fantasy is a sub-meaning of science fiction.
You mentioned the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction in your post 60, as an example of how Tolkien is limped in with Science Fiction (and so, how fantasy is, in general perview, part of science fiction). Perhaps you were unaware of this, as it was published in 2012:
[emphasis]
Once again, one of your own cites demonstrates you are wrong. Evidently, the good folks who published the cite you relied on do not, in fact, consider “fantasy” as a subgenre to “science fiction”.
I am simply not seeing literally anything that supports the notion that, in the English language generally, “fantasy” is considered a sub-genre of “science fiction”.
Not sure why this is the hill you want to die on.
He is so damaged that he cannot find happiness in those simple pleasures, or indeed even live in the Shire. Of the four hobbits, the others have grown greatly, but Frodo has been changed most.
Still, the kind of character-arc you’re looking for here is, indeed, not really important to what the work was meant to be about and do.
Thanks, Nonsuch, for an excellent example of what criticism can be at its best. I don’t substantially disagree with any of your points, except in so far as to say, for my taste, I find Frodo’s character more interesting than you do.
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t see this as a bad thing, speaking as someone who genuinely does love a lot of modern literature.
This is a very good analysis - though I would argue that Frodo very much has to overcome his very ordinariness to achieve the quest (and that he was not the same person as when he set off - he wanted to be that person, but no longer was).
I don’t think that Frodo was in fact “incorruptible”. In the book, he was corrupted - he claimed the Ring, and presumably, had he not been stopped by force, would have proclaimed himself a new dark lord eventually. His achievement was to battle against that corruption for so very long and to make some very hard choices–such as abandoning all of his friends (save Sam) simply to save them from its effects.
In fact, the tragedy of Frodo is that he wanted very ordinary things (basically, to live out his life in peace), but more or less willingly threw what he wanted away, in order to achieve his quest - which therefore ended up benefitted others but not himself.
He succumbed, but he wasn’t corrupted — once the Ring was gone, he reverted to the same decent person he always was, albeit a decent person with what we would recognize as a serious case of PTSD. What Frodo goes through is akin to a kind of torture, with the scene at the Cracks of Doom as his breaking point, and we don’t think of people broken by torture as being corrupted. They are pushed past their limit and suffer for it, but they do not betray who they are.
The point is that while Frodo bore the Ring, he was never seriously tempted by it — he was spiritually drained and eventually overwhelmed by its malevolence, but fundamentally it appealed to nothing in his nature: no envy, no desire, not even (a la Galadriel) a temptation to wield its power in the name of right. (Oddly, we do catch a glimpse of this when Sam wears it.) Having no internal struggle to overcome deprives Frodo of the opportunity to grow before the reader, to actually be a better person (or a worse one, depending on his choices) than he was at the tale’s beginning. My argument in my previous post was that this was deliberate, and dovetails precisely with Professor T’s ideas of innocence as embodied by the harmonious, nature-loving, pre-modern hobbits.
As a corollary to my post, there’s another thing that contributes to what might be deemed a lack of psychological depth in LotR. The cosmos of Middle Earth is very much driven by what we might call fate or destiny — the idea that the characters’ choices are in some sense pre-ordained and occur in order to fulfill a larger plan of which the characters themselves are mostly ignorant. This theme is propounded quite explicitly, for instance when Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring (“and not by its maker”), and that therefore Frodo himself was meant to have it. This culminates quite neatly in Gollum’s betrayal of his oath to Frodo at the end, wherein he ends up saving Frodo and the quest in spite of his own efforts. But it comes at the cost of further depriving the characters of agency, and therefore interest as well-rounded, psychologically rich creations.
Thanks to you and Knorf for the kind words.
I think the reason for this is that, while we tend to identify Frodo as the hero (he’s the ring-bearer after all), we actually see most of the action of the pair of them from Sam’s point of view. He sees Frodo struggling with thye temptations of the ring, but from the outside; we aren’t privy to what is happening in Frodo’s head.
An example of this sort of thing is the scene where Frodo forces Gollum to swear his oath. To Sam (looking from the outside), he sees Frodo almost physically take on a grim and awesome persona - like a lord wielding terrible power - and Gollum diminish to an insignificant wretch. But the author doesn’t put us into Frodo’s head at that point, so we aren’t expressly told what this feels like to Frodo. We can well imagine that this sense of mastery and lordship is tempting.
We are only let in on “what it feels like” when Sam himself takes up the ring - and it immediately sets to work corrupting him, attempting to use his good intentions, his love of gardening, his desire to “set things to rights”, as lures. He resists - and gains insight as to what Frodo was going through.
To my mind, this isn’t necessarily a weakness - there is no particular need for the authour to tell us explicitly what Frodo is going through; it is explained through the experiences of other characters.
Well, this is admittedly an issue; this is a universe packing literal gods (heck, Gandalf himself is a type of supernatural being), so having gods interfering with destiny is part and parcel. Though I dispute that this removes all agency - clearly, in the LoTR universe, character counts for a lot.
Also, simply having gods messing with destiny isn’t necessarily incompatible with having well-rounded and rich creations. Otherwise, most of human mythology would be impoverished - what is Oedipus, but a story of gods messing with a man’s destiny? I’m not saying that Gollum is like unto Oedipus, but they have this in common - they both commit an act they have no interest in committing, because (basically) of destiny. This is a very ancient theme and not, of necessity, unworthy of interest.
Excellent summary; very well put and very true.
The contrast with the other Hobbits, in the Scouring of the Shire, is stark: they have grown, and are now among the mighty. (Well, okay, third-tier “mighty.”) But Frodo is the Shire: somewhat damaged, but with soul untainted.
The mirror-image with Gollum is also very sharp. Almost to the very end, Gollum’s natural goodness could still be perceived. He, too, had no weakness – no lust for power, no desire to command – other than the ring itself. It’s like a miser who could be satisfied by collecting pictures of gold and jewelry. Even with Gollum, the Ring didn’t have much to work with.
Tolkien produced a fascinating thought-experiment in the philosophy of power and corruption. We all like to think we’re immune – but the horrible truth is that most of us aren’t.
“The Scouring of the Shire” is one of my favorite parts of the whole book. It’s fun watching the hobbits react with undisguised amusement as these bumpkins try to push them around. And there’s a great moment when either Merry or Pippin tells Frodo (paraphrased), “You can’t fix this by sitting there looking sad.” Shows that these characters are paying attention to each other, and I wouldn’t have minded a little more to-and-fro in that vein.
But the Shire can be put right.
This possibility and necessity is pretty key to the thematic impact to me, and thus the omission of the “Scouring” the single biggest failing of the movie.
Then again, an important component of the dramatic interest is that he, like Bilbo before him, is pressured into risking life and limb to accomplish a task he would very much rather have someone else do. The simple yet abundant comforts of life in the Shire-gentry take on added importance when the protagonists are forced to leave them behind.
I, too, love the “The Scouring of the Shire,” and in fact always look forward to it when I reread the series. All this interesting talk about Frodo put me in mind of a couple discussions I’ve had before about the LOTR:
That Sam is the real hero of the story. This is actually in alignment with Nonsuch’s comment about anti-modern sentiment in the story: Sam achieves so much through humility and simply looking after his master. He lacks ambition beyond this, but in the end, he’s probably the wisest of all the hobbits by a fair margin and, as related via the appendices, proves to be exactly the leader (Mayor) the Shire needed.
That Legolas achieved or grew the least of all the Company. Even Boromir dies with his eyes opened and his character redeemed. Come to think of it, I think Tolkien said as much.
I disagree with this. Frodo is broken, there’s little in the Shire that can salve his soul or heal his body. He took on the greatest burden and he only failed at the last, beyond endurance. Those who matter know this, that’s why he’s on the boat out with Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond (and Bilbo). Sam is the Shire.
See, this is an example of how some people here are taking too personally the honest opinions of others, or accurate memories of the utter dismissal of science fiction and fantasy by many literary authorities and English professors before the 1970s. I do not attack you for your opinion, and I wish you would not attack me for mine.