| Product: |
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien |
| Date: |
16/12/01 (136 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Much, much better than David Gemmell
Disadvantages: Probably inspired David Gemmell to write in the first place
The greatest fantasy epic of all time? Oh yes. As someone who has read plenty of fantasy epics, all of which written since Tolkien effectively created the genre, all of which were compared more in hyperbole than truth to the ‘Lord of the Rings’, I feel as qualified as any to judge, and Tolkien’s surpasses by a country mile those of Eddings, Gemmell, Feist, Tad Williams (although he comes closer than most). The best book of the last century? Well… Asinine question really, as neither I nor anyone else has read more than a fraction of them, and even if they had they wouldn’t remember half of them well enough to judge. So, now that’s aside, how good is it, and should those who haven’t so far bother to read it?
Well, the accolade of being the greatest fantasy epic of all time is, without wishing to sound snobbish, no cast iron guarantee of literary merit. The nature of the genre seems to grant the importance of an author's imagination more than a parity with the importance of his or her skill as a writer, which can lead to poor characterisation, awkward description, logical inconsistencies, clumsy allegory, and any number of other literary misdemeanours. Worse, because readers of fantasy books tend to start young, most of them don’t notice until it’s far too late that they’ve been reading terrible books most of their lives (I can think of no other reason for the continuing popularity of David Gemmell’s writing).
Cattiness aside, however, a good fantasy epic is probably about the most completely escapist enjoyment available to most of us in these mundane times. The morality therein tends to be stark, with the main characters firmly on the right side of it. There’s a charmingly naļve conviction that the rule of ‘The One True King’ is unquestionably the best form of government. Wizards are wise, queens and princesses are the kindest and most beautiful women in the land,
animals can generally talk, and there’s no way the bad is ever going to prevail. Oh, and there are all over the place magical swords, enchanted bows, cursed scrolls, and, most famously, rings of power.
And thus we get back to ‘The Lord of the Rings’. I know little about Tolkien (certainly compared to the many who have devoted disturbing portions of their lives to the study of the man and his works), but I believe he was a professor of languages at one of the big two British universities. His studies, and, presumably, having a staggering amount of free time on his hands, inspired him to create what he hoped would be a complete mythology for the British isles. A story featuring fairy creatures from the old tales, goblins and elves straight out of legends, along with wizards, trolls and, of course, The One True King. And so the Middle Earth was born.
I won’t try to go into too much background detail about Tolkien’s world, as I’d only get it wrong, not having memorised (or even read) ‘The Silmarillion’, or all the appendices to ‘The Lord of the Rings’. But the basics are that the Middle Earth is a land much like our own, only peopled by all manner of wierd and wonderful species of humanoid, including the wise and immortal elves, the sturdy and acquisitive dwarves, the numerous but as yet comparatively callow humans, and the hobbits. The hobbits are a charming race of little people who live in the rural paradise of The Shire, minding their own business, wanting to do no more with their time than smoke pipes, tend the garden, drink ale, and ignore their wives (Tolkien certainly does, female hobbits are only to be found in about ten of the thousand pages in the book).
What the hobbits don’t know is that an incredibly malevolent and powerful sorceror is on the verge of completing his grand plan to conquer the entire world and turn it into a deeply unpleasant place for everyone in i
t. All that is required for his plan to take effect is for the sorceror, Sauron, to retrieve the One True Ring of power, the One Ring that would enable him to enslave elves, dwarves, humans, even hobbits under his less than gentle rule for evermore. Sauron already rules Mordor, a land which makes up half of the Middle Earth, and has filled it with armies of corrupted and twisted and brutal creatures, orcs, goblins, and trolls. He also has nine deeply spooky henchmen, enslaved in olden times by the power of some more magic rings, the Black Riders, who lead his armies and hunt for the ring on behalf of their master (Sauron himself never leaves his tower).
The power of the one ring is talked up a lot through the series, but is thankfully of a quite subtle nature, and is never really wholly defined. It prolongs life, makes the wearer invisible, and in the right hands would bring near ultimate power. But It doesn’t shoot fireballs, make the wearer ten times bigger or ten times as strong, doesn’t make one immune to poison or being shot or stabbed. There’s no question, however, that the only way to thwart once and for all the dark designs of Sauron is to get rid of the ring forever, and the only way to do this is to cast it into the Cracks of Doom, which lie within a mountain in the very heartland of Sauron’s territory.
And at the beginning of the book the one ring is, through the auspices of Bilbo Baggins, and his adventures as described in ‘The Hobbit’, to be found in the shire, in the keeping of Frodo, mild mannered hobbit and nephew to Bilbo. The dire straits about to befall the world are revealed to Frodo by Gandalf, wisest of wizards, and thus a quest begins to take the ring halfway across the world, sneak it past the ever watchful eye of the evil Sauron, and drop it into the evocatively named fissure.
In the first novel a fellowship is formed to take the ring into Mordor, and Frodo, three of his doughty
hobbit friends, two human warriors (one of whom is, indeed, The One True King), a token elf and dwarf, and Gandalf, set out, pursued all the while by the Black Riders. In the two novels that follow the fellowship is sundered, and Frodo and only one of his fellow hobbits, Sam Gamgee, the greatest gardener in the Shire, are left to attempt the trickiest part of the venture – penetrating into Mordor and finding the Cracks of Doom without wizard or warrior to help or protect them. Meanwhile, war is joined with the armies of Sauron, and the rest of the fellowship must pursue a seemingly hopeless struggle with the hordes of evil, while betrayal and corruption are discovered even among the free peoples of the Middle Earth.
So, in short, plenty happens. Which makes it rather surprising that the most common complaint about the trilogy is that it drags in places. This must be ascribed in the main to two things. First, there is the very formal language Tolkien employs in telling the story. There is nothing of modernity or slang in his writing, and seldom is even the latter to be found in the speech of his characters. This is probably largely due to the innate bookishness of a respected professor, but in part at least it is surely to preserve the timelessness of the tale. This is supposed, after all, to be a myth from a long gone age, so any contemporary style of speech or description would be a jarring anachronism. However, we are not all venerable academics, and to some such a style may seem impenetrable at first (I recall with some shame that I skipped a chapter or two of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ the first time I read it). But when things get exciting (as they do with highly commendable frequency), it is hard to imagine anyone not being carried along with the pace of the action, and while the language is archaic, it is suitable when the matter is the stuff of legend.
“In rode the Lord of the Nazgūl. A great black shape against th
e fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgūl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.
All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf on Shadowfax…
‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! He had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From the mouth unseen came a deadly laughter.
‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade."
Second, there is the detail. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a complete, living world. Tolkien drew maps, wrote histories, invented languages and genealogies for it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he spent hours contemplating the ecosystem of the Mirkwood or the economy of Mordor as intellectual exercises, just to make sure the logic of it all was correct. To make sure that it was all completely real to him, so he in turn could go on to make it real for the reader. While much of this detail is rightly consigned to the appendices where it can be safely ignored, much is left in. In most cases it supports the plot, adding depth and history to the places visited by the travellers, but sometimes it doesn’t, in which case whether it is welcome or otherwise will depend entirely on one’s taste.
In the main, I love it. However, the text is stuffed with old songs, rhymes and stories lifted from the legends and history of Middle Earth. Some of these are actually written in elvish, but mercifully not
many. A lot of background comes from these, as they are recited by the characters at opportune moments to describe places or characters that have come into the story. The most important, and the best, is the introduction to the One Ring itself:
“Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.”
Those lines are evocative, powerful, inspiring, and perfect. Revisiting those lines after reading the saga, it is impossible not to feel them. Sadly, none of the other songs and sagas live up to them, and often they feel like excess baggage.
Happily, there is an abundant supply of helpful detail to offer in contrast. For example, in the opening chapter, necessary background is delivered by some beautifully rustic conversation in a pub of the shire, which is crammed with titbits of information about family trees and local legends, none of which have any real bearing on the events that are about to unfold, but all of which Tolkien had probably written out at length on scraps of notepaper well in advance of starting to write his opus.
What one has to remember is, that for a fantasy story to succeed, the author has got to make the reader forget that what they are reading is, essentially, ridiculous. How can you make a conversation between a group of three foot tall men with hairy feet, smoking pipes in a pub in a village where most people live in burrows with round doors seem anything other than silly? Tolkien’s answer: give them a context and a history that’s as real as you can imagine it, and then let them get on with it. And it works. Now if the upshot of this is that a
little bit of extraneous data which doesn’t progress the story is also included then that’s a price well worth paying, for this is otherwise the most rewarding of books.
As for the people of all shapes and sizes who inhabit the Middle Earth, there is nothing to complain about. Tolkien’s characters are well rounded (literally in the case of the plump hobbits) and wholly convincing. Part of the reason for this is that wise wizards and heroic kings in waiting are something that we are familiar with from the fairy tales and legends that we all enjoy in our youth (whether by old storybooks or Disney adaptations). We feel we know Gandalf and Aragorn before they even speak, and they live up to their archetypes. Indeed, it seems possible that Gandalf and Aragorn will come with time to be more famous still than Merlin and Arthur.
The hobbits are more unexpected, however, but despite this in Tolkien’s hands they are brought warmly and vibrantly to life, Frodo and Sam in particular. Sam, the optimistic, loyal gardener who is revealed as a true stoic and hero, is my favourite. With his continuing wonder at the sights he witnesses (particularly elves and ‘oliphaunts’), and simple gardeners common sense, he’s a lovely creation, and a welcome relief to Frodo’s increasingly bleak state as the novel goes on.
Gollum also demands a mention. Too good to be left in the gloom at the end of ‘The Hobbit’, he is a picture of perfidy and putrescence. I also have a soft spot for Treebeard, the slow talking Ent, whose hmms and hooms and long pauses are almost exactly what you’d expect from a walking, talking tree.
We never really get a look at the main adversary, however. Sauron is no seductive, charismatic villain, that role is left to the considerably less successful Saruman the White. Sauron seems more to be the eternal embodiment of malice and hate. His symbol is a red eye, and the idea o
f his seeking gaze, glaring out from his fortress searching for the ring and the defenceless hobbit carrying it, does convey a real feeling of menace, particularly when we come to see more of Mordor, his lands, and of his soldiers and slaves. His henchmen, the Black Riders, are similarly lacking in character. The bulk of their power does not lie in wielding swords and casting lighting bolts from their fingertips. They are instead, utterly terrifying to all who behold them. Again, referring back to the first time I read the book, I seem to recall wondering why everyone in it was so scared of Sauron and the Nazgūl, since they didn’t seem to kill anyone, nor really seemed that handy in a fight. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, it seems clear to me now that they are intended to represent the rule over man of hatred by way of terror, in which respect they are a horror reminiscent of Orwell’s Big Brother. This speaks of much deeper thinking than pitting heroes against the fantasy staples of power crazed wizards, false kings, rogue demons, or dragons, and is the reason that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is so much a weightier, darker effort than ‘The Hobbit’ and most of the imitations that followed it.
So, to return at last to the original questions; how good is it? It’s very, very good. The accolade of being the greatest fantasy novel of all time may be no guarantee of literary merit, but it is a guarantee that the words within are the product of an exceptional imagination. And in this case, the words are written by a master of the craft, well able to stock over a thousand pages of story with drama and excitement, and also provide us with a cast of characters who seem real, even while they are talking to trees or fighting giant spiders. Should those that haven’t already get on and read it? Definitely. And that have already could do far worse than to read it again.
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dididave - 06/06/06 No doubt this is the seminal fantasy work although George Martin comes close with Song of Fire and Ice. |
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