Revisiting the Lord of the Rings

On a whim last month I decided it was time to reread my old copy of the Lord of the Rings. It's one of the earliest editions that collects all three major parts together - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King - and floating on its cover painting by Alan Lee of Minas Tirith is a shield reminding us that this was an upcoming major motion picture from New Line Cinema.

To give an idea, I bought it in college, and it traveled to Germany with me for my exchange year, where it subsequently went on a series of travels without me, as I lent it to a couple of friends who took it separately to Barcelona and Poland with them. It's probably the best traveled of my books, and it's certainly visited a number of places I've never been to.

It's also fairly dogeared at this point, both because of those travels and the fact that I reread it three times before and during the release of the above-mentioned movies, once for each film. When I started that project, back in late 2001, it was to look for the bits that I expected Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens to change when they translated it to film. The easiest to deduce was Fellowship, since it has that long section early on where Frodo and co escape the Black Riders across the Old Forest and then meet Tom Bombadil - a section that while charming enough in spots, even then didn't feel essential.

The point of all this is to say that I know the book fairly well, so like all books that one rereads multiple times, it was comforting and reassuring to slip back into its pages and paragraphs, like putting on an old sweater that you weren't expecting to fit.

I've talked elsewhere about the oddness of rereading books with a few years' distance, how I'm a different person now than when I first read the book, but because I've read Lord of the Rings so many times that doesn't really apply here. Though it was interesting where I found myself most interested in the narrative and prose, and where I found myself switching off a bit.

As I recalled, my favorite bits have always been the ones most concerned with the Hobbits and the Shire (although Part 2 of Towers, which follows Frodo, Sam and Gollum sneaking into Mordor, is one of the bits that drags for me). The Scouring of the Shire, for instance, is one of my very favorite parts and I always thought it too bad that the movies couldn't include it, though Return's ending is long enough in movie form without adding a further hour of the Hobbits' return to find their homeland changed for the worse.

The other parts that I thought dragged a bit were the battles in Return, on the Pelennor and the Ride of the Rohirrim. Tolkien's register changes from the simple, charming and almost folksy language of the sections focused on the Hobbits into what generations of less talented fantasy writers have tried to recapture - though it's worth noting that as a professor of Old English at least Tolkien, unlike David Eddings, gets his "thees" and "thous" right.

But the parts with the Rohirrim riding to war feel overwrought now, as if he's trying to recapture some of the flavor of the Old Testament, which would be okay except it gets tiring after a while.

More interesting though is the question of what place LoTR has, or should have, in the fantasy "canon". I'm putting that in quotation marks because I've been seeing some debates on Twitter about how important the canon is to new fans and writers of science fiction. For some the question of canon raises the uncomfortable specter of gatekeeping, where not having read a certain "foundational" text means you can't be a "true" fan; for others the canon as constituted contains too many authors of one type (white, male, heterosexual, etc) and not enough other demographics.

For myself I lean toward not really caring if something is a foundational text of the genre or not - I've read Dune and a fair amount of Asimov and Philip K Dick, but very little Heinlein or Clarke (other than the 2001 books and Childhood's End), but no Moorcock - so does that mean my education is lacking? I have read a couple of Octavia Butler's novels, though, so maybe it isn't? I find this discussion boring and would rather share the good stuff about it rather than engaging in ever more bad-tempered culture wars over it.

So if you ask me whether LoTR should be part of the fantasy "canon", I'd tell you to un-ask the question. Reading the story itself, and especially the 100+ pages of linguistics, legends and so forth that comprise its appendices, it becomes clear that Lord of the Rings only spawned the epic fantasy genre by accident, and that you could just as profitably shelve it alongside mythology-derived books like Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (in the case of the latter English rather than epic fantasy).

Of course I'm guilty of perpetuating the second-artist syndrome with my own fantasy stories, which clearly owe a lot to Tolkien. Like Terry Brooks or Tad Williams or Guy Gavriel Kay, I'm engaging in a conversation with the earlier work and seeing for myself what makes it tick, but it's so easy for that engagement to fall into mimicry. That, of course, is the fatal flaw of the whole genre - and if you don't believe me, just read Joe Abercrombie's Third Law trilogy, which can't get away from LoTR even as it skewers and questions everything about it.

I also can't help thinking of China Miéville's dueling viewpoints on the book. On the one hand he calls it a wen on the arse of fantasy literature, needing to be lanced; on the other he grudgingly admires how it brings to life the Nordic mythology that inspired Tolkien, contrasting it with the Victorianized Greco-Roman pantheon that he calls sterile. Both can be true, and when you read some of the worst excesses of the genre (not naming names) it's hard not to agree with Miéville.

Taken on its own, of course it's old-fashioned (though not always cliche, in contrast with certain of the choices that the movies make). And not only old-fashioned, but quite uncomfortably racist, when he talks about the "evil" Southrons and Easterlings, the mingling of the Dúnedain with "lesser" men and the "foul" Orcs. There's loads more, and it's always made me uncomfortable, though I also appreciate that there was a different cultural context for talking about "evil" races that way.

At the same time, Tolkien still manages to partly humanize even a couple of Orcs, when they're talking about how the ongoing war affects them personally. It doesn't make up for the weird racism or the outright erasure almost all women from any pivotal role in the story (yes, spare me your Eowyns), but it's clear there's more to it than the detractors would like you to think.

So I'd argue that any newcomers to the book approach it from the viewpoint of English fantasy - go read some Norse mythology (or even Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology), Susanna Clarke and a translation of the Edda or the Kalevala, rather than lumping it with the Sword of Shannara, the Wheel of Time or Prince of Thorns or something. All of those newer books have their good points, but Tolkien's most famous work probably deserves to be read in a different, more scholarly context.