Return to Return to The Lord of the Rings

Thoughts after almost half a century...

I first tried to read The Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen, wading my way through the Unwin three volume paperback set. Too young to appreciate it, I inevitably skipped through the passages of lore and backstory to focus on the adventure itself. I came back to it three years later, and was totally enraptured by it, legends and poems included. I lingered over every scene and sentence and didn’t want it to end. At this point in time the only books available were this and The Hobbit. The Silmarillion came out at the end of 1977 to almost universal disappointment among those expecting a more exciting narrative. There was nothing like the vast array of peripheral material edited and released posthumously from Tolkien’s notebooks.

Eowyn confronts the Witch King by ‘Ingahild Grathmer’ (Queen Margrethe II of Denmark), The Folio Society, 1977

After that I didn’t look at the books again until last year. Having loved the films, and re-watched them many times, I fancied tackling the novel itself, interested to see how much I remembered and whether it would still deliver the open-mouthed gosh-wow wonder of all those decades ago.

It didn’t. A few things struck me - firstly I’d forgotten how sad it was. The overall theme of melancholy and decline struck me far more than when I’d read it as a teenager. Maybe that was the effect of age. The other thing I found hard to take was Tolkien’s social conservatism and donnish snobbery. Having characters who talk like pantomime cockneys (e.g ‘Lawks!’ and ‘if I may make so bold’), struck me as lazy and, on occasion, quite bizarre. Having gone to so much trouble weaving an astonishing world far richer in lore than any other fantasy writer it seemed a strange lapse.

The Hobbits themselves, and Sam in particular, I found intensely irritating when they spoke and behaved like country bumpkins whose primary virtue often seemed to be knowing their place in the face of their social betters. Their adventures often felt like episodes from an Enid Blyton story - peril interspersed with slap up feasts by way of compensation (not quite ham sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer but not far off). By the time Aragorn started going around healing people by laying on hands in true kingly fashion my patience was shot. The films had removed so much of this archaic paternalism and snobbery, and in doing so improved the original to my mind. It was a bit of a wrench to encounter it in the books.

But after finishing the reread and coming out of it so dissatisfied I decided to have another crack to see if it was the book or me. This time I set out to listen to Rob Inglis’s audio version as it would force me to slow down and actually think more carefully about the novel sentence by sentence. I wanted to identify what was winding me up, and why, and think it through in greater detail. On the one hand the audiobook compounded much of what had irritated me. Rob Inglis’s narration is as posh as they come - and the nobles all sound pompous and declamatory (even Aragorn - a far cry from Viggo Mortensen’s wonderfully taciturn delivery) and the little folk are still country bumpkins - Sam is all ‘Oo, aar, beggin’ your pardon Mr Frodo’.

Edward Burne-Jones. The last sleep of Arthur, 1898

Having said that, not giving into impatience allowed me to appreciate what a stunning, and at the same time very peculiar, achievement The Lord of the Rings actually is. It seems to me, in hindsight, that the novel is almost the last of the great Pre-Raphaelite/Arts and Crafts Movement works of art and it bears all the hallmarks of that genre’s attempts to return to a combination of medievalism and rustic simplicity while realising, at the same time, that the ideal world of the chivalric romance will never be recaptured.

Peter Jackson’s film pays tribute to the Pre-Raphaelite artists

Denys Guerolt alluded to it in his 1964 interview with Tolkien, claiming that the book echoed the theme of Tennyson’s Idyll’s of the King - “The old order changeth, yielding place to new”. Six years studying, and fifteen years lecturing in, English Literature also helped me understand the context of the books. On the surface The Lord of the Rings stands out like a sore thumb - a retrogressive nostalgic fantasy in a sea of Modernism. It was published in 1954 the same time as Lucky Jim, Lord of the Flies, The Quiet American and The Talented Mr Ripley - all cynical and amoral tales of damaged individuals in damaged worlds and in that sense it’s almost half a century after the Pre-Raphaelite movement faded away. But it’s also part of a singularly strange sub-group of English novels born out of the Arts and Crafts valorisation of Arthurian Romance, mixed up with the dark dream-imagery of the Symbolist Movement.

The Demon Lords of E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros

I think The Lord of the Rings belongs to a tradition that includes George MacDonald’s Victorian fantasies Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895), Tennyson’s poetry, the paintings of Dante Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, fellow Inkling E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). The last two books, in particular, embrace an amoral Nietzchean philosophy where nobility, violence and the will to power trump any Christian ethics. Tolkien didn’t like the morality (or lack of it) in Eddison’s book, Eddison thought Tolkien was ‘soft’. Perhaps the epics of Middle Earth were an attempt to reclaim imaginative fantasy in service of the original egalitarian medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites. Yes, they too equated goodness with melancholy nobility and courtly ceremony, but they also saw virtue in rustic simplicity and honest toil (they were predominantly Socialists). Tolkien never went that far - his Catholicism and Tory home-counties paternalism got in the way.

Free League’s One Ring Roleplaying Game

So for me, the idea that The Lord of the Rings is the last great Pre-Raphaelite work of art makes sense. It also explains many of the odd and apparently out of date tropes that Tolkien used in what, for all its faults true and imaginary, is a magnificent and yet-to-be-beaten evocation of a lost world of romance, honour and beauty. It’s confusing, stylistically all over the place, and struggles to decide what it’s ultimately about (which is also the impression I get from Tolkien’s maddeningly opaque interviews). It’s nowhere near as bad as Michael Moorcock’s 1978 essay Epic Pooh makes out, but then he was writing on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s triumphal first election and saw all her small-minded reactionary Toryism reflected in all the classic High Fantasy novels.

Ultimately I think that The Lord of the Rings is now greater than the sum of its parts. Middle Earth and all its inhabitants exist across a vast media landscape of books, artwork, games, films etc. Not only have the original novels been mightily expanded in the tales and chronicles published posthumously from Tolkien’s notes, but the realm has been enhanced through the illustrations of Alan Lee, the films of Peter Jackson etc. In that respect they’re similar to Shakespeare’s plays. Yes the original text is the all-important genesis point of a whole field of creative endeavour, but no longer the ultimate arbiter of how we experience Middle Earth in our imaginations.

Now on to Titus Groan…