Back
in 2003 The Lord of the Rings was
voted as Britain’s favourite novel on a live television series called ‘The Big
Read’. 21 books had a chance of winning, including several that I’ve already
reviewed in this blog, and each one had a short video presented by some
celebrity who championed their chosen book and gave reasons as to why it should
win. Ray Mears did a piece on The Lord of
the Rings, and obviously made a suitably compelling argument considering
that that was the book which ended up winning first place; however, as I
witnessed its inevitable success, my thirteen year old self could not help but
think that the vote may have been skewed, just a little bit, by the recent Peter
Jackson film adaptations. Was this book really as popular ‘The Big Read’
evidenced it to be, and was it even that good a book if so? These past couple
of months I’ve been investigating these very claims, spurred on by my memories
of 2003 and by my general slight disappointment with all things related to The Hobbit.
The first thing to note about Tolkein’s masterpiece is its
sheer size. The whole story is estimated to be around 500,000 words long, and
it is easy to see why it had to be split into a trilogy. I fortunately possess
the whole story in one complete volume, the 1991 edition illustrated by Alan
Lee, and it certainly deserves the description ‘a mighty tome of a book’. It
runs to over a thousand pages, complete with the various appendices, maps and
illustrations that flesh out the fantasy world of Middle-Earth, as well as a
long red silk ribbon that serves as a bookmark. When the dust-cover is removed
I am presented with what looks like a normal brown-coloured hardback book,
albeit one that’s several sizes larger than the average novel, with gold-leaf
lettering on its great thick spine declaring, simple yet elegantly, that this
is JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Illustrated by Alan Lee, and published by
Harper Collins, whilst the only thing on the front cover is an neat rune-like
symbol made obviously from the combination of the letters J, R, R, and T, a logo
for Tolkein.
This book is quite probably one of the most beautiful
things in my possession.
As we know though it’s not the presentation of a novel that
wins it the marks, no matter how good the Alan Lee illustrations may be (and
believe me, they’re good! You might be interested to know that the artist Alan
Lee was one of the chief people working on Peter Jackson’s film adaptations –
one of the many excellent decisions he made), it’s all about whether the
writing inside is any good. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? The Lord of the Rings is a novel, not a picture book. It comes as
no surprise then that this is a particularly long book; Tolkein is able to
dispense with the forced-childish tone he adopted in his earlier fantasy book
and could devote himself to the great long wordy rambling narrative style that
beefs his masterpiece up to its current immense word-count. He skimps on
nothing; description, dialogue, action, side-points, segue-ways, all have the
very best the English language has to offer piled into them, each paragraph a
story all in itself. This is at once its greatest strength, and potentially its
greatest weakness where the reader is concerned. Modern novels always opt for a
broadly minimal approach and fast-paced plots, and because Tolkein seems to
openly scoff in the face of this approach it is little wonder that many people
would be put off this immense, wordy thing which takes a lot of time to develop
as a story. Yet it was still voted the favourite book of 2003, and I still
enjoyed reading it, despite my self-confessed hatred of long, over-worded
archaic literature from Victorians and Victorian wannabes. Tolkein is not one
of them. Tolkein is something else entirely.
The key to enjoying The
Lord of the Rings comes in its pacing; namely that it has a certain pace,
and once you adjust to it, then it becomes a deeply, richly rewarding book to
read. To use a cliché, ‘It’s a walk, not a run,’ and when you work out that
each paragraph, each sentence even, is something to be enjoyed in itself and
not hurried over just for the sake of finding out what happens next in the
plot, then you realise just how remarkable a story it really is. Most of the
500,000+ words of this book are devoted to the simple sights and sounds of
characters who are journeying across a largely uninhabited, unspoilt fantasy
landscape. Casual readers may dislike this, as it seems needless to hold up the
story for long sections in which quite literally nothing happens, but if this
is the case then they’re missing the whole point. This is a complete world that
Tolkein is presenting, one with more history and land than any other fantasy
author has come close to equalling; and he does not shy away from showing it to
us in the most gorgeous detail during his journey; because it’s the journey
that matters, not just the ending or the events that take place during. Someone
once said that you should be careful when writing about a journey, because it
could quite quickly just devolve into a story about the stops and breaks along
the way; well I’m pleased to say that Tolkein is the one writer I’ve read who
has not let this happen at any point in his work. Frodo and Sam walk from the
Shire to Mordor, and by God we follow them every step of the way. At no point
is the journey neglected over the action, we see every sight the world has to
offer on the way, and the battles that take place are all the more poignant
because of the distance we’ve travelled to get there. When one adjusts to this
slow but careful pace, the book really opens up; and when you try the same
approach on other, lesser books, you begin to realise just how hollow they
really are. Maybe I should try this on one of those ghastly pieces of Victorian
misery I deplore so much, and see if that makes them less mind-numbingly boring
– although I tried it on Dracula, and
that still didn’t help.
Now then for some criticism – while The Lord of the Rings can be forgiven for taking a while to get
going, it cannot be forgiven for making some narrative hiccups in its first
section, the Fellowship of the Ring.
Particularly in chapter 2, and in the ‘Council of Elrond’ segment later on, the
reader is swamped with huge, insurmountable chunks of mind-numbing exposition
as characters just ramble on to each other about the future plot of the story
and the other divergent plot-threads that Tolkein wishes to bring in. If the
joy of this book is in the journey they take, then these are especially tedious
because the characters spend their time stock-still, going nowhere, just trying
to work out why they’re there and where they need to go and why they need to go
there. I can’t tell you what a relief it is when they get moving again; because
it’s a long way to Mordor, and the sooner they start, the sooner they can
finish. Also the characters themselves aren’t especially interesting; instead
of a bunch of non-entity Dwarves as in The
Hobbit, are alternatively a couple of indiscernible Men, a handful of
Hobbits, a grumpy wizard and a dull Elf and Dwarf. While the taller characters don’t
undergo much in the way of noticeable character development for a long time,
the book can be forgiven when Frodo and Sam ditch the rest of the Fellowship
and team up with Gollum/Sméagol, for these sections show excellent
characterisation and vivid interactions between the three of them. I would say
that books four and six, the ones starring Frodo and Sam, are the very best of
all of them, portraying sympathetic and believable characters undergoing real
hardship, especially in the character of Samwise Gamgee, the real working-class
hero of the story who turns out to be heaps better than either Frodo or
Aragorn. Tolkein’s decision to make the Hobbits the protagonists of his story
was a good one, for the cold and under-developed Aragorn and the other
characters of the race of ‘Men’ always seem a little wooden and aloof, while
the sympathetic and introspective Hobbits, innocent and good-natured, help make
the story that bit more authentic.
Once the rambling exposition disappears the journey can
begin, and you can pretty accurately trace the route they take on a map. The
journey through the abandoned mines of Moria is a bit of a hard slog, and I
couldn’t help but greet Gandalf’s departure from the story with indifference,
but it gets a whole lot better the moment that this is over. The three chapters
that take place in the forest of Lothlórien are amongst my
favourite of the entre novel, as the characters come to terms with Gandalf’s
passing amidst the idyllic woodland of the Elves; it’s a welcome respite after
Moria, for the reader as well as the characters. The setting of this enchanted
Elven forest also helps to tell the story far better than any of the rambling
exposition that came before, painting a beautiful though mournful setting of a
people whose time in the world is almost over, and no matter the outcome of the
quest the Elves will have to leave Middle-Earth, their magic disappearing from
the world forever.
In this way may I just point out that this book is possibly
mislabelled when they declare it as a fantasy. Fantasy suggests a flight of
fancy, or the work of some kind of feverish imagination, but Tolkein’s world
seems to transcend that somewhat contemptuous stereotype; I would say it’s a
work of nostalgia more than imagination, as though he’s harking back to every
fairy-tale ever written and amassing it in one single prose epic. Think about
the plot elements and characters; we’ve got a messiah-like king in exile come
to reclaim his rightful throne and thus end all ills in the world, the Dark
Lord, knightly figures on horseback, the evil advisor whose name is nothing
less than ‘Wormtongue’, a Fairy-Queen, enchanted forests, a wise old wizard, an
unhappy princess, a giant spider, a haunted swamp, and a cataclysmic last stand
against the Very Forces of Darkness. It’s a story about a world where battles
are fought with swords and on horseback, where a fortress is as strong as its
walls, where the enemy really are vicious beastly savages, ruled by a villain
who is genuinely evil, and where kings really are great divinely-appointed men
of nobility – in short, it’s a complete rejection of the modern world. The
Hobbits also are a throw-back to some idealised past, of a happy and amiable
society unconcerned with the troubles of the outside world, content to live in
their comfortable little houses, gardening, slaking their thirst down the local
tavern, and smoking pipe-weed, where the only disturbance to the peace is the
occasional family-feud. Much of Tolkein’s story is about the threat to these
things presented by Mordor and the One Ring, and this is all brought home at
the very end during ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, where the Hobbits see the
damage that has been caused to their tranquil home by petty-minded revenge and
greed. Tolkein isn’t merely presenting the results of a enthusiastically
overactive imagination, but instead is recalling an idealised lost past where
there really was magic and a force for good. Then again, it’s not just mere
nostalgia, for this world is so well developed, so detailed, that it rises
above most other literary creations, and has resulted in a lasting legacy.
And one of the best parts of that legacy is the Peter
Jackson films. I know that this is overstepping the whole book-review aspect of
what I do, but I have to give praise where praise is due, and the films did a
great deal of good in bringing Middle-Earth to life. The characters were
brilliantly fleshed-out, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli given actual personalities,
and Gollum was presented in a suitable pitiable light. I can’t think of many
films in which every decision made by the makers ended up being the right one,
and part of the success was due to their faithfulness to the source-material. I
am one of those people who adores the Extended Edition more than the original
Theatre version, for you end up with, in essence, six films instead of three,
and they do a far more adequate job of bringing The Lord of the Rings to the screen – complete with tying up
character arcs, as in the case of Faramir and Eowyn, and in revealing some of
the weirder aspects to Tolkein’s world, such as the life of the Ents. In many
cases a film adaptation of a novel falls well below the mark, while sometimes
if a novel isn’t particularly good a film adaptation can be a whole lot better
– Peter Jackson’s adaptations have, in my opinion at least, hit the same
very-high standard as the book without eclipsing it, a rare and wondrous thing.
One or two minor changes that they did make to the overall story I can
understand and appreciate, such as the skipping over the Tom Bombadil section
entirely (seriously though, that bit was a little too weird, even for the
films).
Wrapping up now, I’m happy to conclude that The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkein
is worthy of its apparent popularity. Though I still believe that the results
of the 2003 ‘Big Read’ were skewed by the success of the film adaptations,
there were no other books I would be happier to see in that pride of place. While
I can hardly say that it’s my favourite book of all time, favourites being
rather fickle and abstract things and hard for me to choose considering the
large amount of choice there is in the world, I will admit that this novel is a
monumental thing that is worthy of reverence from all and sundry, and I am
happy to have read it. Middle-Earth is one of the most richly-detailed
creations in all of literature, putting the stock-creations of its lesser
imitators to shame time and again. The reader can’t get away from the notion
that the story they are reading takes place in a setting richer and deeper than
mere words and paper can convey, and Tolkein’s writing helps to cement this
even further – the opening chapters in the Shire refer to towns, villages,
people and places that have never purported to exist in the real world, yet
never in those opening chapters did I once doubt that any of them real.
Particularly the place of Crickhollow, a name which when said out-loud at the
right speed sounds infinitely delicious – go ahead, try it. The world itself,
though only a fantasy, carries genuine weight, of history and language and
culture and geography, and all throughout we have tantalizing glimpses of the
places and peoples who don’t play a direct part in the main narrative, but have
themselves yet more stories to tell. I hope then that you can find it in your
heart to appreciate this fine work of literature, for I certainly did.
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