(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of reviews of my favorite novels, structured by covering five facets of my reading experiences, each in five sentences. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all books covered therein).
What’s it about? The Lord of the Rings is arguably the most influential epic fantasy novel of the past century, if not longer, an immensely popular text that has inspired countless other fantasy and adventure books, most inferior to their inspiration. The Lord of the Rings has also birthed a multi-billion dollar merchandising industry, primarily fueled by Peter Jackson’s increasingly-bloated and self-indulgent interpretations of LotR and its precursor novel, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (1937), and by the ongoing pillaging of the myriad ancillary collections edited and published by J.R.R. Tolkien’s heirs since his death in 1973, most notably Amazon Prime’s ongoing The Rings of Power series. The Hobbit was originally marketed to, and intended for, children, but in crafting that work, Tolkien deployed his immense literary and philological skills to build a world (Middle Earth) over the ensuing two decades that was rich and vast enough to contain a truly phenomenal quest narrative. Tolkien originally intended The Lord of the Rings to be a single volume broken into six segments, to be followed by a separate tome called The Silmarillion, but Allen & Unwin (publishers) balked at the heft of the work, publishing it over a two year period as the trilogy now familiar to generations of readers: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955); The Silmarillion did not see publication until 1977, four years after Tolkien died. The simplest plot summary (“A modest hobbit named Frodo Baggins is entrusted with the task of destroying the terrible and terrifying One Ring, crafted by the malign spirit, Sauron; Frodo’s journey changes the world, forever”) can’t capture the true essence of the book, the reading of which is an extraordinarily immersive experience, filled with nuances and details that spring organically from Tolkien’s nigh-unto-obsessive ability to build a robust literary world, within which his army of characters could romp and stomp with aplomb.
Who wrote it? John Ronald Ruell Tolkien (1892-1973) was an philologist and long-time university professor, born in South Africa to English parents. He lost his father when he was three years old (the family returned to England around that time) and his mother when he was 12; she had known that she was ill, and had made arrangements to have Father Francis Xavier Morgan appointed as his guardian before her death. Tolkien served in the British Army during World War I, experiencing the horrors of trench warfare in The Somme, before beginning his academic career in the 1920s; his scholarship associated with such ancient British texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf was highly respected and influential. In the 1920s and 1930s, Tolkien was regularly engaged with an Oxford University literary group called The Inklings, which also counted fellow fantasy authors C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams among its members; both Lewis and Tolkien used The Inklings in framing, vetting, discussing, and exploring their greatest literary creations. Tolkien retired from academia in 1959, and enjoyed the experience of watching The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings emerging first as counter-cultural favorites, then as pop culture icons, until his death from a bleeding ulcer in 1973; the grave he shares with wife, Edith, bears the names “Beren” and “Luthien,” after two characters whose stories are told in The Silmarillion.
When and where did I read it? When I was in fifth grade in Lake Ridge, Virginia, a teacher read to my class an entry from one of those omnibus children’s magazines that were popular at the time; it was called “Riddles in the Dark,” and it was the fifth chapter of The Hobbit. I was entranced, and rushed to the library to get the book, but I didn’t go back to read chapters one to four, just plowing forward to see what happened to Bilbo Baggins and Gollum, back story be damned; I didn’t actually read the early bits of The Hobbit until many years later. We moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, for my sixth grade year, and I read The Lord of the Rings in its entirety in some split fashion between Virginia and Kansas, some of it while in the car with my entire family, our pets, and our houseplants while moving westward. My next door neighbor in Kansas was Rob Heinsoo, also a LotR reader, who had recently gotten this weird new game called “Dungeons and Dragons,” which felt like a perfectly solid ancillary to Tolkien’s Middle Earth; Rob grew up to be a master fantasy/role-play game designer in his own right. Then, off to Long Island for seventh grade, where my best friend was Jim Pitt, yet another LotR (and Dungeons and Dragons) fan; it remains a great memory for me to have had people to discuss these books with in my earliest encounters with them, and I have plowed through them multiple times in the years since, including reading them aloud to Marcia at bedtime when she was pregnant, and through the first several months after our daughter Katelin was born.
Why do I like it? A recurring theme for me in these essays about my favorite novels is the importance of world-building to me, and I would be hard-pressed to come up with any literary world as rich and dense as the one J.R.R. Tolkien built for his Middle Earth stories. A lot of people tend to be tepid-to-dismissive of the final segments of The Return of the King (the last book of LotR), after the big “quest complete” sequence, but I have always loved and savored those closing chapters, as the last lingering moments of “living” in Middle Earth, knowing that leaving it will be bittersweet, just as it was for Tolkien’s characters themselves. The main dramatic action (a classic journey narrative, with many side quests) was inspired by and built upon Tolkien’s in-depth knowledge of the great British and Scandinavian epics of yore, and it has all of the iconic characters, swaggering derring-do, vile skullduggery, dreadful monsters, and sweeping grandeur that such tales require at their very best. In my most recent re-readings of LotR, I’ve found myself most awed by a somewhat under-discussed element of the book, namely the relentlessly brutal depiction, over hundreds of pages, of the suffering that hobbits Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee face while crossing the blasted hellscapes of Sauron’s stronghold, in the Land of Mordor. There’s no doubt in my mind that these passages were illuminated by Tolkien’s experiences in the trenches of The Somme, and it is a shockingly visceral body of text, exceedingly dark in a tale generally and ultimately regarded as a light one.
A five sentence sample text: “And here things still grew, harsh, twisted, bitter, struggling for life. In the glens of the Morgai on the other side of the valley low scrubby trees lurked and clung, coarse grey grass-tussocks fought with the stones, and withered mosses crawled on them; and everywhere great writhing, tangled brambles sprawled. Some had long stabbing thorns, some hooked barbs that rent like knives. The sullen shriveled leaves of a past year hung on them, grating and rattling in the sad airs, but their maggot-ridden buds were only just opening. Flies, dun or grey, or black, marked like orcs with a red eye-shaped blotch, buzzed and stung, and above the briar-thickets clouds of hungry midges danced and reeled.”
This is the Ballantine Books edition of “The Lord of the Rings” that I first read, circa 1975-76.
