That’s quite apt. I haven’t read the “Letters” for years, having loaned my copy.
It was a failure as a modern novel, your quote says as much. I agree that Tolkien accomplished much of what he set out to do, however it still wasn’t an unqualified success.
Just because the style was out-of-date, doesn’t mean that Tolkien didn’t have hopes that there would be a receptive audience. His readings aloud for the Inklings are partial evidence. The notion that he could “turn back the clock” and get audiences to appreciate a form of narration which he personally was entranced with proved a failure. There was no resurgnce of epic literature, and “The Lord of the Rings” was successful in spite of that style, not because of it.
Had he tried to match the style of Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” novel, I’d guess he’d have had less luck. I tried to read that a few times, and couldn’t get anything from it whatever.
“The Lord of the Rings” could have been written in a less archaic style. It certainly could have been better organized. It’s hard to assemble comprehensive support for this, but things that stick out are lapses in narration in the first book…the omitted text is evident in the notes collected by Christopher Tolkien.
The flaw in the OP’s reasoning is the assumption that Frodo is “the main character”. That’s like trying to decide who the main character is in Friends.
Frodo is not the main character… he is only one of many who are directly connected to the main focus of the story (the Ring, and its fate). Others include Aragorn, Gandalf, Merry, Pippin, Sam, Legolas, and Gimli. Among others. Ironically, all these characters are seen throughout the book… it’s funny how that works out, isn’t it?
Was it The Hobbit or LotR that Tolkein wrote in installments for his son, who was in North Africa with the RAF? I can’t find a cite, but LotR seems more likely, since The Hobbit was published before WWII.
Or meybe my memory is playing tricks on me (damn '60s mushrooms!).
In any case, if it was written in installments, intercutting would make perfect sense–especially as we’re dealing with two distinct plots (Frodo and Sam out to destroy the Ring, and everyone else trying to keep civilization afloat while they’re off doing it).
Maybe I’m a geek (okay, so there’s no “maybe” about it) but the appendices are my favorite part! How else can you translate the elvish script and the runes on the title page? And know how to pronounce “Celeborn”?
Partly Warmer, I assume you have no use for the Iliad or the Odyssey, since they begin in mid-story and use an immense amount of stock epithets. And clearly this “Homer” dude had no conception of how to write a novel.
Tolkien, as Katisha pointed out in response to your first post, was not trying to “write a novel” but to do a sequel to his nsely popular 1930’s children’s story The Hobbit. Because he had set The Hobbit in the same universe as his early efforts to make up a mythology, he was constrained to set the sequel in the same universe, and as a quest story, it grew with the telling (something Tolkien acknowledges as a failing of his).
Because he was writing a heroic fantasy, he did not feel constrained to use the techniques and styles of the modern novel (which he was quite familiar with, as a member of the Oxford college community; he had regular correspondence with, for example, Iris Murdoch and W.H. Auden. The “archaic” language is that suitable for characters in this sort of story – he explains this in another letter by trying to show what King Theoden of Rohan might have said in more modern language in place of what he did say in the story as written when he decided to lead his troops to the aid of Gondor. And, bluntly, it sounds dopey – instead of something like “if I die in battle for good, I will rest content in my grave” (which, if a bit hokey, is a fine idealistic metaphor), he ends up sounding like a guy talking to his psychiatrist and then suddenly doing the dialogue for a Sominex commercial – an extremely poorly written one.
Sarcasm Mode ON
Oh my heavens! Why, I wonder why I didn’t see all those characters before? Well, of course NOW it all makes sense! Thank you for pointing out this little gem of information. Sarcasm Mode OFF
I submit to you that in “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum, there at least 10 different characters encountered during the course of the book. I also submit that Dorothy Gale is the main character of said book. One could make a strong case that the land of OZ itself is the focus of the book and Dorothy only one of many characters encountered.
Wrong.
An inanimate object(such as a ring) or a magical land(such as OZ) may be a strong presence, but characters have dialogue, feelings, actions, etc.
I still maintain that Frodo is the protagonist of this book. Maybe if I finish it one day, I will sing a different tune. I will concede that it is possible that Tolkein was deliberately writing in a different format, presumably to make his work “stand apart”, as it were. If this is the case, then I’ll give applaud him for bucking convention.
My main problem though, is that this device simply doesn’t work for me. By the time the action gets back to Frodo and Sam, I have completely lost the thread of what was going on with them. And, with all due respect to MsWhatsIt,I much prefer reading their storyline/adventures than that of Strider/Aragorn/whatever he calls himself.
Chris W
PS I was going to argue against the “Friends” analogy, but thought better of it. After all, the similarity of Legolas, Gimli, aragorn and Company to the Friends cast is notable. But the question you should ask yourself in both cases is not who the main character is, but, more importantly, “Who cares?”
The technique you call “intercutting” was something Tolkien adapted from medieval French and Breton Arthurian romances, where it was known as entrelacement.
Instead of being poorly designed, you would be astounded if you knew the painstaking amount of careful planning and plotting he put into it to craft a tightly synchronized narrative in which every character’s movements, day by day over several months, were fitted into the master sequence of events that coordinated several different plot threads all going at once. When different characters were traveling in different directions over the map during the same time, he had to consider precisely their respective velocities along the way to make sure they arrive in the right places on the right days.
The way he wove all this spatiotemporal complexity into the narrative is unequaled in literature. He had both a comprehensive master plan taking up most of a continent, coordinated with hundreds of tiny details to all of which he gave minute attention. No wonder it took him 17 years to complete it all!
P.S. We all think of Frodo as the protagonist, but after rereading it for the umpteenth time, I subjectively concluded that Gandalf was the real protagonist all along. In fact, though, the thing is just too huge and sprawling to have one single protagonist. Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn collectively form a sort of triumvirate of protagonism.
Just to put my pain-in-the-ass two cents in once again, the OP makes the common mistake of spelling the author’s name TolkEIn, when it is, in fact, spelled TolkIEn. Elvish vs. Elfish is one thing, but we might want to at least get the gentleman’s name correct, after all. Sorry, but I am a nit-picking geek at the core (at the risk of being redundant). Thank you for your support…TRM
I concur with the Frodo-as-protagonist point of view; the other characters are supporting characters. They range from minor to crucial, but no one–not even Gandalf–is as important to the tale as Frodo.
So why push Frodo’s story all the way back to the beginning of “Book Four”? I think that was the only reasonable way for Tolkien to approach the tale. To intercut the two narrative threads would have done a disservice to both of them. The way the text is currently arranged, each of the “books” forms its own cohesive narrative. Without such an organizing structure, the text would have been a jumbled mess. As someone who has done a little writing myself, I can say that it is much better for both author and reader to take care of one story at a time. If you want quick jumps/edits, spend some time letting MTV rot your brain (the point raised above about modern attention spans is very appropriate to this discussion); but if you’d like to do some actual reading, you can hardly do better than TLOTR.
And I must say, if you can’t get any pleasure from reading about the chase across Rohan and the battle of Helm’s Deep (which will probably be awesome on the big screen later this year…), then you may just be hopeless as a reader. Sorry, but that’s the fact, Jack.
I concur with the Frodo-as-protagonist point of view; the other characters are supporting characters. They range from minor to crucial, but no one–not even Gandalf–is as important to the tale as Frodo.
So why push Frodo’s story all the way back to the beginning of “Book Four”? I think that was the only reasonable way for Tolkien to approach the tale. To intercut the two narrative threads would have done a disservice to both of them. The way the text is currently arranged, each of the “books” forms its own cohesive narrative. Without such an organizing structure, the text would have been a jumbled mess. As someone who has done a little writing myself, I can say that it is much better for both author and reader to take care of one story at a time. If you want quick jumps/edits, spend some time letting MTV rot your brain (the point raised above about modern attention spans is very appropriate to this discussion); but if you’d like to do some actual reading, you can hardly do better than TLOTR.
And I must say, if you can’t dig reading about the chase across Rohan and the battle of Helm’s Deep (which will probably be awesome on the big screen later this year…), then you may just be hopeless as a reader. Sorry, but that’s the fact, Jack.
Well, once the author has your attention, to some extent the more abstruse he makes his plot, the more one is likely to read things into his intentions that weren’t there.
Reading the first couple volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s notes, it’s pretty clear that J.R.R. Tolkien was fixated on a few dozen scenes in the first 150 pages, and was having trouble deciding what to say about them! It’s evident from the vast plot changes his process was more like digging himself out of a hole than painstaking plotting. Having spent years on a long novel that was never finished, the signs are familiar. Far from “keeping threads together” I rarely have felt such jolt as he moved from Frodo and Sam to Strider, Gimli, and Legolas.
Polycarp: Tolkien’s lack of restraint concerning conforming to a contemporary novel standard was inevitable: he was floundering around with story-telling, history, linguistics, genealogy, and (shudder) poetry. He had the good sense to stick with his vision, and forge something palatable out of it. He succeeded in a number of ways, but making a less-than-difficult novel wasn’t one of them.
Tim: You pegged me, there. My pronunciation of foreign words is highly suspect. I surely didn’t read the appendicies to decode the names (not until many years had passed). I think the appendicies were a worthwhile notion, but they aren’t the thing I’d point out to a detractor as a point of easy access and special interest. More amusing to an academician, than reader looking for a good time, surely.
partly_warmer, you tried to refute my point by citing Tolkien’s floundering with the story line of Book 1 back in the 1930s, in the early stages of trying to figure out where he was going with it.
The stage of carefully working out the interlaced chronologies of the various plot threads in Books 3, 4, and 5 came much later, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after he had already completed the story. The effort in this late stage of the work was to clean up inconsistencies. See Humphrey Carpenter’s J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, T. A. Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, and especially Christopher Tolkien’s many annotations in the History of Middle-Earth series.
“Tried to refute?” Hmm. You didn’t hear the call of the hounds?
Tolkien didn’t work anything out carefully. It doesn’t matter. Murder mystery, by-the-second plotting was irrelevant to what he was doing.
He worked himself into the worst hole an academician can: having scribbled lots of odd socks ideas in an hour between classes, he discovered that there was no easy way to put together all his bright ideas.
Putting to paper a rough idea of where each of two dozen characters was in any month is hardly careful plotting.
That was my point actually;Dorothy is the obvious main character/protagonist so it wouldn’t come across very well to bypass her character for that amount of time. Why does Tolkien do this(Note to Tim R. Mortiss: Mea Culpa on the spelling, it was late when I first posted this)?
I was trying to make the point that the characters on Friends, while somewhat entertaining, are hardly worth the energy of debating who the “Main” friend would be. I feel, IMHO, that Aragorn, Legolas, etc., are the same way; they simply don’t interest me as much as Frodo and Sam. Ergo, it’s not worth debating which is the main character.
I presume that you mean “This story is about Frodo, and no one else”, which I agree, is NOT true. However, Frodo IS the main character. Not the Ring. Not Sauron. Not Gandalf.
Hell, not even Tom Bombadil.
Nope, it’s Frodo. I don’t care what Tolkien’s intentions were, the way he wrote the darn thing(at least in Fellowship) Mr Baggins the younger is our hero/antihero/whatever. But suddenly at the beginning of The Two Towers, I feel like I’m being told “Oh, you know what? Remember how I spent all that time on Frodo? Never mind, we’re actually going to make the other characters carry on without him.”
Then a few hundred pages later,
“Sorry, wrong again, he IS in the book. Just a bit of fun at your expense. Creative License and all that. Made you look!”
Granting that there is even a main protagonist, I would say that it’s Sam, rather than Frodo. Frodo is just sort of driven by fate, whereas Sam actually has motivations and decisions.
Of course, this doesn’t do anything to resolve the question in the OP, since Sam is just as missing as Frodo. But then, I happened to like the way Tolkien did it.
This thread has been interesting. I saw it a week ago but didn’t want to read it because I didn’t want spoilers. Tonight I finished The Two Towers for the first time. It was…interesting.
The main thing that I kept thinking throughout the whole book is “they’re going to make a movie out of this?” How? Nothing happens!
Frodo and Sam: walk walk walk There’s Gollum, let’s get him! walk walk walk swampwalk swampwalk swampwalk walk walk walk hey you stay out of our super secret fort! walk walk walk. Ah! Spider!"
There’s your 200 pages right there. Where’s the story arc? Where’s the excitement?
Now maybe, MAYBE, the excitement comes from the travelling. Learning about the land, learning about the rich history that surrounds and envelops the characters. But that’s not a story.
Truly, it was ironic to me that the longer the characters moved, the more the story stood still.
Just finished the Carter biography. I’m not enough of a Tolkien nerd (it’s a compliment, from me at least) to give any kind of definitive answer, but from both the biography and the book itself, it seemed to me that Tolkien organized obsessively. This wasn’t something he threw together- it grew out of his love for languages, and he spent immense amounts of time and energy making sure it all fit together. I understood that he deliberately changes tone throughout the series, and (shrug) I never had any problem going back and forth from one set of characters to another. It’s too bad if you do.
Also, I just read Beowulf, and Tolkien’s essay on it. I loved both.