|
The Lure of the Ring
Neil Randall
(Published in edited
form in the K-W Record, December,
2001)
When first published back in the mid-1950s, J. R. R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings drew raves from many, including people as
noteworthy as British poet W. H. Auden.
But its reviews were in fact quite mixed. For every reviewer who found the books
enticing, another found them ludicrous. “A children’s book which has
somehow gotten out of hand,” chimed in prestigious critic Edmund Wilson,
displaying “a poverty of invention which is almost pathetic.”
Back then, Tolkien’s trilogy was a book you argued
about passionately. Auden himself noted that nobody seemed to have a moderate
opinion about it. “Either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its
genre,” he said, “or they cannot abide it.” But now, forty-five years later,
the arguments have disappeared, even from the dislikers. Very clearly, The
Lord of the Rings is here to stay.
But why? What is it that brings readers back to this tale
of hobbits and wizards and magical rings, of bad guys that are one hundred
percent evil
and really incredibly ugly, and good guys so good they make even Mother
Teresa seem downright amoral? Oh yeah, and trees that talk, and elves who
live forever? Obviously, nobody actually knows the answer to this question,
because if they did they’d simply re-create the phenomenon in order to cash
in. But let’s look at some possibilities.
The book
industry could point to LOTR’s popularity as part of the strength of the
fantasy genre as a whole, but that argument really doesn’t fly. First, LOTR
began the genre as we know it today. Second, the book appeals to many
who wouldn’t be caught dead reading other fantasy novels
or going to other fantasy movies. There’s no question that setting
swords and magic against terrible baddies appeals to a significant portion of
the fantasy market, especially the young male hack-‘n’-slash crowd, but LOTR
doesn’t have bloodbaths around every corner or treasure to be plundered. That
isn’t it at all.
So let’s look elsewhere for our answers.
Part of LOTR’s appeal is about the desire for heroism. And
not heroism as we hear it referred to so often today, either. Professional
athletes aren’t heroes, for instance, because be a hero you have to do
something important, and winning a championship or a medal just isn’t, no
matter how much we might enjoy watching it happen. Heroism is about saving
others at the cost of one’s self. It’s about the willingness to sacrifice,
without the expectation or even the thought of glory. At its best, it’s even
accomplished modestly.
The Lord of the Rings oozes with heroism. In fact,
sacrifice is everything in this story. To rid the world of evil,
Frodo the hobbit must destroy the controlling Ring, and he spends the
entirety of the story in an attempt to do so. He loves his life and his home,
but he willingly sacrifices both for the greater cause, and he does so,
throughout the book,
with a disarming modesty that demonstrates his essential humanity. The Elves,
the eldest and most powerful race in Tolkien’s world, know that the destruction
of the Ring will also result as well in the destruction of all they have
lived for, but they, too, are willing to sacrifice for the sake of good.
And that brings up another appeal. LOTR is about good. It
assumes that we all know what “good” means, and in doing so it draws us in
and refuses to insult us. This is save-the-world good, treat-with-kindness
good, the kind of good we wish we could simply expect of the world but can’t.
Furthermore, this good is set against an evil
that still speaks to us, but is no longer (and probably never was) possible
to know.
In LOTR, Frodo fulfills one of the deepest fantasies
possible: small and weak, he sets off on a quest to destroy evil,
an evil
that everyone acknowledges as evil.
In fact, this is beyond our deepest fantasies, because this is a simplified evil,
of the kind we can’t ever know. How would you set out against a universally
acknowledged evil
today? How would you become the hero that eliminated it? LOTR lets us
experience that battle, but it shows us as well the consequences of doing so.
Good, evil,
heroism, immortal beings with great power - this is the stuff of mythology,
of course. And that, ultimately, is at the heart of Tolkien’s continuing
appeal. We live in an age where the concept of mythology has become so
debased that we know longer understand how much we need it. Myths are the
stories that define our societies, our purposes, our lives. We can no more do
without them than we can without language itself.
Tolkien knew that, and over the course of his lifetime
he constructed a mythology that answered his own needs in this matter. And
make no mistake, they were definitely his own. Except for The Hobbit, the
children’s story that started his career as a novelist, and LOTR itself,
Tolkien wrote hundreds of pages of stories of the ancient times of his
invented world, yet had no illusions about anyone other than himself being
even remotely interested in them. He gave his world, which he called
Middle-Earth, a rich, complex mythology, and in the main text and the
appendices of The Lord of the Rings he let us into that world.
The sophistication and scope of Middle-Earth and its
mythology lie at the core of LOTR’s appeal. It’s easy to believe in his world
because of these characteristics, and because of its sheer sincerity. Which
is not to suggest in any way that Tolkien readers believe in
elves or hobbits or orcs or wizards or anything else that appears in the
stories. The tales let us believe, however, that it’s not just acceptable,
but also vital, to seek, understand, and celebrate a mythology of ourselves.
|