Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > The Lord of the Rings

One of the greatest trilogies of all time and certainly the measuring stick to which all subsequent fantasy-style writing is compared, The Lord of the Rings trilogy still stands at the top of the stack. Its realism, the characters and monsters, the storyline, the epic battles, and the quest motif are all drawn with incredible care by Tolkien in his chef-d'oeuvre. My favorite was The The Two Towers but all three are stunning. This edition, despite the awful cover art, contains all three books and the original appendices from The Return of the King. The one issue I have with this one is that the map of Middle Earth that should open The Two Towers is back in the appendices and relatively hard to find. It is also a rather large book and thus unwieldy for public transport commuting.

I wanted to use this review to address a few overall themes of LOTR: symbolism, ecology, sexuality.

Symbolism
As for symbolism, as described in Tolkien, Tolkien's politics are not mapped onto the characters of Middle Earth in any obvious way. The symbols he uses go back before the Germanic invasions of Britain around 1000 because his goal is precisely to recreate the mythology that existed in England, Scotland and Wales before this period of instability and wanton destruction. His theory was that there were shards of that previous system of beliefs, fears, mythologies that survived in story form in the Arthurian tales, in Beowolf, in Gawain, and other Old English remnants. Most of the transmission was done orally, so when that generation disappeared after Norman invasions of the 11c (1066 - Battle of Hastings) for the most part, collective memory subsumed some of these images. Tolkien's idea was to extract these and try to revive the uber-myths that they derived from. He was a philologue, meaning that he studies in-depth the origins of the English language and chaired the Philology Department at Oxford for decades. Old English and its offspring Middle English owed their origins to various Nordic tongues (Old Norse, Old Icelandic) and eventually, the invading Norsemen brought their culture and religion and especially their languate ultimately fusing all of these into what became the Modern English that I am writing in now. In fact, Tolkien's translation of Beowolf is still a reference for scholars of Old English even today. All that to say that in reading the oldest extant myths in the "Old" languages, Tolkien got a sense that there was something important that was hidden just beneath the surface, and he spent nearly his entire life as a linguistic speleologue trying to find it - sort of a human Dorin mining Moria to find the original stories. The Elves represent the very first humanoids to arrive in England whereas the Dwarves represent the various invasions from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland before 1000. Men are those who populated the Middle Ages and Hobbits are sort of the archetype of the middle-class, landed but non-aristocratic gentry in the villages of England.

Perhaps the one place where political events in Tolkien's own life affect the narrative is in the episode at the very end of The Scouring of the Shire. Here we see History catch up with the Idyllic and somewhat isolated Shire where violence (the sad, pathetic revenge of Saruman on Bilbo and Frodo for having thwarted his plans) rages across the land, nature is destroyed, and industrialization arises. This represents the Industrial Revolution but also the coming of age for Tolkien himself in WWI and, I would argue, the bombing of Oxford during the Battle of Britain during WWII that he experienced first-hand as well. It is interesting that this is included as a coda after the main action of the epic is already concluded, as if he had this one other thing to say before sending Gandalf, Frodo and Bilbo off to Grey Haven with the Elves, thus definitively ending the pre-Modern Middle Earth (and by extension Medieval and Revolutionary Europe) and entering into the Modern/Industrial Age.

Ecology
I wrote quite a lot about Tolkien's sensibility to nature in my previous LOTR reviews (see below), but I wanted to reiterate that in these books, nature itself is a character in the saga. When Tolkien talks about flowers or herbs, his descriptions are lush in detail and even anthropomorphic as it comes to trees (Ents for example). Indeed, recalling what I said above about his pining for an England before the agricultural and industrial revolutions when the great primitive forests still covered England and all of Europe, he bemoans the loss of this environment time and time again. Most poignantly, I think, with Treebeard's sad resignation at the definitive disappearance of Entmaidens which spells certain death for his species. Sam is able to bear the destruction of Hobbiton to a degree, but when he sees the Party Tree under which Bilbo gave his Farewell Speech destroyed and lying dead on the ground, something breaks inside of him.

Nature in LOTR is a living, breathing thing and critical to the success of the mission: without the Ents, the Battle of Isengard would certainly have not been such a definitive defeat for Sarumon (another reason why he attacked not only Hobbits but trees as well in his Scouring of the Shire). The loss of communication between Man and Forest is one of the reasons for the breakdown in relationships between Rohan and Gondor as well as that between Elves and Men, thus the marriages of Faramir and Eowyn and Aragorn and Arwen are so important for reforging those bonds and replanting the forests that were impacted by the war. Once communication has been reestablished and the forests resume their role in connecting communities, peace can once again attempt to thrive.

Lastly, I would point out that this sense of the importance of ecology has completely disappeared from fantasy (and its modern derivation of dystopias) literature (at least as far as I have read). The stories of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, the Grishaverse, and so on have pushed trees and nature into a Hollywood backdrop for the most part. This is rather unfortunate because that means that the generations after LOTR did not really have a solid basis of awareness about man's intimate connection to nature making it easier to deny the grim reality of climate change and ecological destruction since it is seen as superficially unrelated to their daily lives. Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning as evidenced by the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction given to Richard Ford's excellent The Overstory.

Sexuality
The last theme I wanted to touch on briefly was sexuality. For the most part, the world of Middle Earth is asexual. The relationships between the paired characters, say, Sam and Frodo and Legolas and Gimli, are those of deep, intimate but strictly non-sexual friendships. In the case of Sam and Frodo, I suppose that it could be argued that Sam sometimes has a man-crush on Frodo, but it is not truly reciprocated nor acted on other than their relationship involving more hugs and handholding than other friendships in the book.

As for the Elves, we have several gorgeous women Elves: Arwen and Galadriel, but both are asexual (at least until Arwen weds Aragorn) despite provoking deep reverence in Merry, it remains platonic and more of a one-sided infatuation. There is little mention of rape in LOTR even during the war, this book having originally being intended as a sequel to the child-focused The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, perhaps that plus the natural British tendency to whitewash unsightly behavior was at play.

For the most part, women play a secondary or tertiary role in LOTR. At one point, Galadriel could become a supremely powerful figure, but she renounces it in The Two Towers after looking into her Mirror and seeing the consequences. The notable exception to this is, of course, Eowyn who revendicates her status of independence from her 'cage' and who slays the King of the Nazgûl in revenge of the death of her father and both protecting Merry and saving the outcome of the battle for the good guys with her immortal: "For no man am I!" speech. That being said, she is obliged to give up her love for Aragorn and settle for Faramir, who fortunately has a good heart and seems to truly love her at first sight. What I am getting at is that Eowyn escapes her fate as a non-actor in history with her act in the battlefield, but does not escape her destiny becoming a wife to a man at the end. Perhaps in that sense, Galadriel does remain a heroic figure, if more passive than Eowyn, she retains her total independence and a modicum of power, being one of the last two Ring holders with Gandalf.

Gandalf's lack of sexuality is interesting. Perhaps folks were put off by the adage that one must never delve into the affairs of wizards because they are of short and violent humor. In any case, he is clearly not homosexual (unlike his distant cousin Dumbledore according to Rowling (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion...)). He is more an archetype of the Catholic God the Father than the sex-hound Jove.

Suite et fin
Well, I hope you appreciated these thoughts about LOTR and that it will encourage you to reread this classic and be more environmentally-aware going forward. Long live Middle Earth!

Fino's Tolkien Reviews:
The Hobbit
The Fellowship of the Ring (LOTR 1)
The Two Towers (LOTR 2)
The Return of the King (LOTR 3)
Lord of the Rings 1-3 - General Comments and Observations
Raymond Edward's Tolkien biography