Tag Archives: The Fellowship of the Ring

Fiction, Reading

Reader’s report: ‘The Return of the King’: The Scouring of the Shire

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‘We’re not allowed to,’ said Robin.

‘If I hear not allowed much oftener,’ said Sam, ‘I’m going to get angry.’

Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings, final installment from The Return of the King.

I have come to the end of the story. For each reader of The Lord of the Rings hereafter, I expect, one of the final impressions of reading the saga must be the Scouring of the Shire, made conspicuous by its absence from the Peter Jackson movies.

I’m not going to look back and check, but I’ll bet the last time I did this pilgrimage on this blog, I remarked on this very subject. I can see why, for dramatic reasons, a filmmaker might leave the Scouring out the story. It makes for a substantial anticlimax, which might detract from the eucatastrophe of the defeat of Sauron.

But I have an idea there might be other reasons.

Moviemakers today, it would be redundant to say, are generally leftists. The Scouring is highly problematic for leftists, particularly in these times. The same people who read the books as Hippies in the ‘60s, and cheered when Merry, Pippin, and Sam tear down all the signs posted by the Chief’s men, are now Woke leftists. There’s nothing Woke leftists today love more than lots of cautionary signs – No Smoking, No Firearms, No Automobiles (Tolkien wouldn’t have minded that one), No Pets, Please Recycle, Masks Must Be Worn.

There’s a quotation making the rounds in which Tolkien says that his political views tend toward Anarchism. He didn’t mean 19th Century, bomb-throwing Anarchism, of course. Those guys assassinated kings, and Tolkien loved kings. He meant something more like what we call Libertarianism today (I’m not a Libertarian myself, so I have my own issues here). The fans of the movies, who often believe (I suspect) that it’s all about environmentalism, probably don’t enjoy reading about the hobbits tearing signs down and smoking all over the place (in the movie they suggest that pipeweed is really marijuana, but they’re wrong). But Tolkien’s environmentalism is different from that of today’s left. The professor loved trees, but he didn’t love wilderness as such. In the time of the King, he writes:

…the evil things will be driven out of the waste-lands. Indeed the waste in time will be waste no longer, and there will be people and fields where once there was wilderness.

Tolkien’s ideal world is a world of villages, solidly middle-class and bourgeois.

One other point is even more delicate. The Shire needs scouring because Saruman has filled it with foreigners. Men of low character who bully the hobbits and have no respect for their property or traditions.

For today’s England, and for most of the West, that’s a subject best left alone.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Religion

‘Reading report: The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien: The Rainbow Wizard

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I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring over the weekend. One can’t really review a work of this eminence. I can only write appreciations. One thing I noted was a detail I’d forgotten, one that was left out of the movies, and it’s  no mystery why. It’s when Gandalf meets with Saruman at Orthanc, and learns his former master’s perfidy:

‘”For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!”

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘”I liked white better,” I said.

‘”White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

‘”In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”’

This is an amazing passage. Saruman the White, whose white color had symbolized his supreme wisdom, has broken the white color down into its constituent prismatic hues.

He’s made it into a rainbow.

We see rainbows all the time today, in churches that believe they’ve “deconstructed” traditional morality and theology.

Was Tolkien an actual prophet? Did he foretell the future of the church?

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report: ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien: A veteran’s story

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‘Yes sir!’ said Sam. ‘Begging your pardon, sir! But I meant no wrong to you, Mr. Frodo, nor to Mr. Gandalf for that matter. He has some sense, mind you; and when you said go alone, he said no! take someone as you can trust.’

‘But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,’ said Frodo.

Sam looked at him unhappily. ‘It all depends on what you want’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway: there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid – but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.’

No major revelations from my reading of The Fellowship of the Ring tonight. Just a thought on a subject I’ve touched on before – The Lord of the Rings as veteran’s literature.

What struck me in the scene above – which takes place at Frodo’s new house in Crickhollow, before the adventure even properly begins – is how different the tone is from what we see of the hobbits in the films. Merry and Pippin are pure comic relief in the movies – up till the moments when they’re forced to grow up.

And there’s certainly an element of that in the books too. But in this scene we see them in a different light. Here they are Frodo’s comrades – his buddies in the military sense. They’re freemen and equals, under no illusions, and loyal to their officer. There’s a time for games and laughter, but when it comes to the point, we all know what we’re here for, and we’re in to the end. Whatever the cost.

If we were privileged to have access to Tolkien’s memories, I think we’d find that this scene echoes some moment (or moments) in his wartime career. He’s memorializing men he served with – most of whom would probably have never come home. Jack Lewis would have recognized it right off.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report: ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien: Bombadil and Goldberry

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There on the hill-brow she stood beckoning to them: her hair was flying loose, and as it caught the sun it shone and shimmered. A light like the glint of water on dewy grass flashed from under her feet as she danced.

Blogging through the Lord of the Rings, still on The Fellowship of the Ring:

What are we to make of Tom Bombadil? He’s a riddle inside an enigma inside a mathom, which is probably just what the author intended. The narrative of the epic can endure without him, as the movies demonstrated. But every reader knows he belongs, somehow, in Tolkien’s world. Every reader will think of Tom in his own way. I’ve stated my view before on this blog, but I’ll repeat it here:

Tom seems to me to be a representation of Adam, or at least of unfallen Man. Adam tended the Garden, and he named the animals; whatever he called the beasts, that was their name. Tom Bombadil controls all nature within his domains, and when he names the hobbits’ ponies, those are the names they answer to ever after. Tom says of himself:

“Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.”

Remember how important “subcreation” was in Tolkien’s artistic/religious vision. Man in fellowship with God becomes a kind of little god – he can’t create ex nihilo as God does, but he creates in a smaller way that brings glory to his Master. In the same way, I think, unfallen Tom Bombadil glorifies his Creator by ruling the Garden that’s been set under his stewardship.

Tom Bombadil, incidentally, began as a toy, a Dutch doll owned by Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla. She lost it down a sewer, and was distraught. Her father comforted her with tales of how Tom floated along the river and had numerous adventures, overcoming all kinds of dangers through his magical powers. Eventually he even overcomes the powerful River-woman, and marries her daughter, Goldberry (herself a rather sinister figure until Tom tames her).

Which brings us to Goldberry. Goldberry has a very special place in this reader’s heart.

The year must have been 1973; I was in college, and my roommate was an even bigger Tolkien geek than I was. We agreed that I would read the Hobbit and the Trilogy to him, one chapter a night (I love to read aloud). And we did that – straight through. It took a while.

During that same period I went out on my first date, with a girl who was very Goldberry-esque. I fell hard for that girl, and have never quite gotten over her. She’s a grandmother today, and lives far away, but to me she’ll be forever young and slender and graceful.

Whenever Tolkien tells us of a woman dancing, and how her feet tinkle on the grass (as in the case of Luthien), I’m pretty sure he’s harkening back to Edith Bratt and how she danced for him in the woods the day he fell in love with her. For my own part, I always look forward to seeing Goldberry again.

Fiction, Reading

Reading Report: ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien

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He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.

This quotation, concerning Frodo Baggins in the Barrow Downs, from The Fellowship of the Ring, seems to me a good epitome of what I’ve found in my current reading of the Lord of the Rings

Actually, the thought was mainly inspired (to my shame, I suppose) by watching the movies twice through recently. I’ve found them inspirational as I wrestle with my Work in Progress. It’s a remarkable thing, as I see it, that in spite of the movie industry’s well-earned notoriety for messing with original sources, the Peter Jackson movies managed – overall – to preserve the heart of the story. Even though most of the people involved must surely have been a thousand miles away from Tolkien’s beliefs.

Anyway, what struck me as I watched and read was this. It hardly needs saying that we’re in perilous times. I never thought I’d live to see a day when I worried about the breakdown of civil society and the loss of our republic, but such things don’t seem unthinkable now.

I’m not a man known for confidence and courage. I reserve heroism for my books. I know heroism when I see it, and I salute it from a safe distance. I’m pretty sure that if the day comes when I must raise my sword in defense of my rights, I’ll probably trip over the scabbard.

But it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t the end. That’s the thing about stories.

In every good story, there comes a moment when the main character thinks the tale is told – and that he’s lost. A moment when his strongest instinct is to lay his weapon down and surrender.

But that’s not really the end, in a good story. It’s only the Final Crisis. It’s the hero’s test. The climax is yet to come – and at the climax, the hero either triumphs or fails in a way that means something.

So this is my message. Not the message of a prophet, or the son of a prophet, but of a storyteller.

This isn’t the end. It’s the crisis. Hold on. Carry on doing your service, at the station where God has set you. As Sam Gamgee said:

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Fiction, Reading

Blogging through LOTR: Eucatastrophe

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The Fellowship of the Ring

I’m nearing the end of The Return of the King, and I’m kind of overwhelmed. I’m not sure how many times I’ve read the trilogy – no less than six, I’m sure. But I’d forgotten how good it is, especially as the threads come together toward the climax.

I’d remembered Frodo’s and Sam’s trek from Cirith Ungol to the Crack of Doom as taking up more pages than it does. In memory it’s a long narrative, but in the book it actually constitutes a fairly short section. I mean that as praise to Tolkien’s skill – he leaves a strong impression of weary and hopeless trudging that looms large in memory.

As I read the climactic passages describing the defeat of Sauron, sobs shook my diaphragm and tears welled up in my eyes (which was a little embarrassing because I was on a reclining table giving blood at the time). Lewis called LOTR “Good beyond hope,” and I wonder if anything as good of its kind has ever been written before – or ever will be again. Can I myself ever hope to come close?

I thought of the many children of this world who love these books. How can they bear it? How can they experience that joy – Tolkien’s eucatastrophe – and then return to the mundane world, believing that the promise of Middle Earth is just a cheat? That there will never be a true happy ending like that for them? That real life is only a descent through pain and disappointment to death, with a few bright moments which are in themselves just false promises of a happiness that can never be?

Ah well. I suppose they deal with it as best they can. The Lord of the Rings is really about not cutting down trees, after all, they believe.

Fiction, Reading, Writing

Blogging through LOTR: “Write what you know”

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The Fellowship of the Ring

Frodo felt that he was in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into forgetfulness. When he had gone and passed again into the outer world, still Frodo the wanderer from the Shire would walk there, upon the grass among the Elanor and niphredil in fair Lothlórien.

I have finished my latest re-reading of The Fellowship of the Ring (don’t ask me how many times I’ve read it; I haven’t kept count. I know many a geek has surpassed me in that department).

The last time I read the Trilogy was in the wake of the releases of the Peter Jackson movies. I remember that I had to struggle a bit to override the film images in my imagination (as I’ve mentioned before). This time through, although the “struggle” remained, it bothered me less. I found that I relished the depth and scope of the book, compared to film with its many limitations (even in wide-screen with special effects).

Continuing my theme from last night’s post, I was most struck by the sense of time in the book – an impression of a comprehensive history, often only hinted at but lurking behind every corner. You can learn much of that greater history in the works that Christopher Tolkien has given us, but frankly I’ve never had the patience for all that. I don’t need to know the details. I just need to know it’s there, adding a deeper perspective to the epic narrative.

This is a lesson to writers.

Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” And that’s good advice, but it doesn’t necessarily mean “Write only about your own life and experiences.” You can know many things outside your experience. Tolkien writes with such authority about the Third Age of Middle Earth (which, if you didn’t know, corresponds to the Norse term for our planet in mythological terms – Midgard) because he had put in a lot of hard work creating a coherent world with a coherent history, including languages. All those things were imaginary, but he “knew” them because he’d spent so much time with it all. That’s what we really mean when we say, “Write what you know.” We mean know your basic material, even if you’re making it up. Do your spade work before you plant. We live in the golden age of research – the internet gives you access to resources the greatest scholars of the past could only dream of. Take advantage of them.

Fiction, Reading

Blogging through LOTR: A matter of time

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Beside the standing stone Gimli halted and looked up. It was cracked and weather-worn, and the faint runes upon its side could not be read. ‘This pillar marks the spot where Durin first looked in the Mirrormere,’ said the dwarf. ‘Let us look ourselves once, ere we go!’

Happy New Year to you. In this season we think about time, which “like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” That makes this a good day, I aver, to discuss the question of time in The Lord of the Rings. At least some aspects I’ve noticed.

I’ve been looking for hints of Norse influences in The Fellowship of the Ring, which I’m still reading (almost done now). One such element seems to be the runestone that Gimli visits, shortly after the escape from Moria (excerpt above).

But the stone is illegible, thanks to time and weather. And that got me thinking about time and the concept of ancient things in the Trilogy. Continue reading Blogging through LOTR: A matter of time →

Fiction, Reading

Blogging through LOTR: The pictures in our heads

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The Fellowship of the Ring

In recording my Lord of the Rings reading impressions, I keep reminding myself that I’ve got to let the movies go. The web is full of criticism of the films. I can add nothing useful.

But let me say this. I read visually. I stage the scenes in my head, and watch them (more or less) like movies.

The real world movies are hard to get free of. Humans are visual creatures. Things we see inevitably supersede things we imagine, however vividly. As I read (I’m on The Fellowship of the Ring now), I consciously attempt to recall to myself the actual book descriptions, but the actors and sets of the films keep washing over them. (For instance, Frodo is described in the books as “fair,” meaning blond. Doesn’t look much like Elijah Wood at all). For that reason I appreciate the undramatized sections of the novels even more. They are unadulterated, so to speak.

Not that I’m complaining. The movies have many excellencies which I enjoyed. But when I’m reading I want to engage with Professor Tolkien himself. Since the movies came out, they are my main deceivers. But I had deceivers before then – mainly my own misunderstandings.

For instance, on my first reading I got the elves completely wrong. I was in high school at the time, and I still thought of elves as “little” people. I don’t know how I missed the description at the banquet in Rivendell, where both Glorfindel and Elrond are described as being taller than Gandalf. But I did. I imagined elves as basically like dwarves (even to having beards), but better looking. When at last I was disabused of that fallacy (I think my college roommate might have done it), I abandoned it with pleasure.

That was around the time I met a girl who was very like Goldberry. I see her still, in my imagination, every time I read the books. I’m glad no movie actress has superseded that image.