Tag Archives: The Lord of the Rings

Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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I picked up the first version of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, getting it a bargain rate that day. You, if you want the book, will probably prefer to get the Revised and expanded edition, which has the further advantage of being cheaper (in the Kindle edition) than the one I’m reading (which, aside from containing fewer letters, features an unfortunate number of typos – “orcs” often comes out as “ores,” for instance.

It is, for me, a somewhat emotional read. Though I am not such a coxcomb as to compare my own work to The Professor’s, I can certainly identify – within my limits – with the agonies he went through getting the whole thing written down and published – a process that took something in the neighborhood of two decades. (He openly admits that he probably wouldn’t have finished it without the encouragement, or even the nagging, of C. S. Lewis.)

His publishing history, at least, is almost as complicated as mine. George Allen & Unwin published The Hobbit. They very much wanted a sequel, but when Tolkien went to work, his story expanded in an alarming way. His correspondence with them, over many years, focused on his frequent excuses why he hadn’t been able to do much work, because of obligations at Oxford. Which was no doubt true, especially during the war years. He was also working on the Silmarillion, and he seems to have come to consider that work the real center of the project, with the Lord of the Rings a more peripheral matter. Allen & Unwin were interested in the “Hobbit sequel,” and happy enough to discuss that, whenever it would be finished at last. When they decided against publishing the Silmarillion, Tolkien clearly took offense. When another publisher (Collins) made noises of interest, Tolkien actually tried to push Allen & Unwin away. He says in one letter to them:

My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion.

But Allen & Unwin didn’t want the Silmarillion (at that point). Then the Collins editor changed his mind, and Tolkien seems to have despaired, having gone from a strong to a weak negotiating position. Eventually Rayner Unwin, his former student, reopened communications, and Tolkien – visibly humbled – agreed at last to let Allen & Unwin publish it without the Silmarillion, and (against his preferences) in three volumes.

The rest is history.

I too know the experience of wrong-footing it with a publisher – without quite so happy an outcome. But I could identify, certainly. One feels so attached to one’s own books that it’s hard to distinguish literary criticism from personal slight. No matter how you try to be objective, it’s hard to keep feelings leashed. The situation is too subjective; there are no landmarks to go by. Especially if you’re slightly unstable – and what author was ever very stable? Publishers must lead frustrating lives and require thick skin, dealing with us. Some of them are rumored to drink, and it’s hard to blame them.

As for my own delayed work The Baldur Game, I’ve got all the notes from my readers now, and am doing (what I hope is) the final read-through. Still waiting for my cover art, which I’m confident will be a masterpiece, and well worth the wait.

Publishing

Mind-boggling Lawsuit from Fan-Fic Author Fails

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A few years ago, a guy writes a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, which he hopes will be a collaboration with The Tolkien Estate. He solicits their support, gets nothing, so publishes his novel independently. He conceives it as the first of six books in The War of the Rings series.

Then, Amazon releases its Rings of Power series, and this guy, this fan-fiction author, sees it as a copyright violation of his work. He sues Amazon and The Tolkien Estate, claiming his work is “wholly original book and concept.” This is a work that begins with Sam and Rosie’s daugther, “Elanor Gamgee Gardner.”

That lawsuit is dismissed with a judgment that the fan-fic infringes on Amazon’s copyright. At this point, The Tolkien Estate sues the author, and this week, the judge on that case rules the original “lawsuit as ‘frivolous and unreasonably filed,’ and award[s] legal fees to the Tolkien Estate and Amazon in the sum of $134,000.” The fan-fic is to be totally and completely destroyed in print and in digital.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Snow and hope

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Photo by hideobara. Unsplash license.

Disclaimer: You did not mistake the date on your calendar. This is a rare Saturday post by Lars Walker. Due to a certain weirdness in my life right now, I’m posting book reviews every day (two yesterday). What you’re reading now is a personal post, so I’m squeezing it in on the weekend.

March did not go out like a lamb in Minnesota last night. It went out like Mike Tyson, or Chronos the Titan, or a Frost Giant, or any kind of large, brutal mythological creature you might want to imagine. Yesterday the spring melt was well underway. Today it’s underway too, but with a difference. Nearly ten inches of snow fell overnight, even though the temperatures only slipped below freezing for a few hours. We woke to piles – sometimes towers – of thick, heavy white precipitate, already congealing into a dense, waterlogged mass. My neighbor with the snow blower cleared the driveway. But I had to clear the steps, front and back. And that meant hacking through knee-high piles of white stuff that looked like Styrofoam but weighed like sandbags.

But I cleared it out, and didn’t have a heart attack. I went to a restaurant for lunch (went to the farther Applebee’s rather than the closer Applebee’s, because they just closed the closer Applebee’s forever. More fruits of scientific, infallible Progressive governance). It was a strange environment in the parking lot. The sky is clear and the sun shines with full force, producing that wonderful effect (it’s called “apricity”) in which one feels warmer than the actual temperature, due to the intensity of the light. Yet all around us were mountains of snow. Kind of an alien, fantasy world for a day, where the physical laws are different.

Anyway, that’s not what I came to post about. Just thought I’d mention it.

Thursday night I attended a lecture in St. Paul. I don’t generally go out at night anymore; I have gained that wisdom of age that tells me very little good is likely to happen to me after dark in the urban area. But a friend invited me and urged me to come, so I acquiesced. In the end I was glad I did.

The lecture was held at the Cities Church on Summit Avenue, which is the Beacon Hill of St. Paul. It’s where James J. Hill and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived. Where the governor has his mansion. (The roads, by the way, are full of potholes. Even plutocrats can’t get basic services in that city.) The lecture was part of a series sponsored by Bethlehem College and Seminary, a small Baptist school.

The lecturer was one of their professors, Professor Matt Crutchmer, who looked impossibly young to me. He spoke on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The core of his theme – as I understood it – was the nature of Christian hope, as portrayed by Tolkien. Hope for the Christian, he said, is not attached to any particular thing in this world (I wish I could recall the word he used for this idea, but it’s slipped my mind). Our hope isn’t for a good election result, or a military victory, or for rain or a successful business deal or a stroke of luck. Our hope is a more basic one – like the star Earendil that Sam spied through the clouds on the way to Mordor. Our hope is just there. It’s part of God’s creation and immovable. We may be defeated; we may suffer; we will surely die. That affects our hope not at all. “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.” We believe that God shapes all ends, regardless of what we do or what happens to us now. In that lies our peace.

I needed that message just now, for reasons I won’t detail. I was just glad I heard it.

Fiction, Reviews

Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power

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Last month, one of the showrunners for Amazon’s The Rings of Power enthused about the series, saying it wasn’t their story but Tolkien’s. I think that’s how deeply deceived fan-fiction writers feel about their stories. This isn’t Tolkien’s story by a far cry.

I watched the remaining episodes of The Rings of Power yesterday, and all the wind has been taken out of my sails. Reading a bit from the showrunners has depressed me. Hearing from a few critics has soured me. Spoilers ahead.

I wasn’t hoping or expecting the show to become awesome in the last three episodes, but some errors hit you differently than others. You can roll with some lines of dialogue, some character motivations, and with others you can’t. Others just rattle the wheels right off your wagon and leave you on the hillside, wishing Santa would make things that last for a change.

They make up an origin story for Mithril to compel Elrond to push Duran IV to mine for it, because King Duran III believes it’s too dangerous to continue digging for it. They say a tree with the light of a silmaril is fought over by an elf and a balrog, is struck by lightning, and creates mithril by sending all the light into the rocky mountain earth. The elf king pulls out this story in episode 5 to say another tree that’s tied to the life of all elves is dying all of a sudden and if they don’t get that mithril stuff, all elves will be forced to flee to Valinor. It was a point in which the king seemed deceptive and manipulative. And the whole thing was dumb.

At the end of episode 8, they handle the creation of the elfin rings like any other TV drama. A main character, regardless of supposed skill, has to suggest the solution to the master craftsman. They hint that this craftsman is being manipulated, but please. There’s no strategy working here. It’s a line, a plot point, a touch of authenticity to say they know Tolkien’s history and are telling his story. The rings themselves look like trinkets (image via LOTR Fandom).

In episode 7, there’s a battle, and the “good” villagers give up their most defensible position for one that trained solders would have difficulty defending. And in doing so, they give the enemy the freedom to unlock an old plan that would nonsensically ignite Mt. Doom. Which is a big problem, but it doesn’t come before they mop the floor with their enemies because the elves and Númenórean men, whom Galadriel has been attempting to rally for half of the series, finally show up on the horses they brought overseas. How this cavalry knew the Southland village would be under siege at that moment is not important. What is important is that had the villagers stayed in the defensible outpost they fled to days ago, the cavalry would not have been able to charge in like they did.

A Kodak moment, I tell you.

Continue reading Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power →
Authors, Fiction, Religion

‘Rings of Love’

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The other day somebody on F*cebook shared a fine article on J. R. R. Tolkien from the archives (2002) of Touchstone Magazine. It’s about love and happens to have been written by Dale Nelson, a Tolkien scholar and a close personal friend of mine:

Tolkien told one of his sons about his young love for Edith in a letter, written after her death. “I met the Lúthien Tinúviel of my own personal ‘romance’ with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes, and beautiful voice” in 1908, when he was 16 and she was 19. Very soon after they married, he was captivated by his wife’s dancing, for him alone, when he was an army officer on leave from the Great War, in 1917, and they slipped away to “a woodland glade filled with hemlocks” in Yorkshire. And that moment was the origin of the myth of Beren and Lúthien, Tolkien wrote to another of their sons.

Read the whole thing here.

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.

Fiction, Reading, Religion

Reader’s report: ‘the Return of the King’: Happy endings

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And he sang to them, now in the elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.

Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings, now reading The Return of the King.

I’ve gotten through the hardest part. The ring is destroyed, Sauron is fallen; his followers are scattered and defeated. The great evil has passed, and the world begins to heal under the wise power of the King and the White Wizard.

Tolkien’s essay on Fairy Stories emphasizes the importance of the Eucatastrophe – the surprising happy ending. The eucatastrophe doesn’t work unless the dramatic tension is intense. All must seem lost. Any hope that remains must be no hope at all. “We must do without hope,” as one of the characters says. Only after the good side has lost hope and continues fighting merely out of a stubborn determination to die on the right side, if the right must fall – only then can you have a real eucatastrophe.

It seems to me that most writers – and I am certainly one of them – are a little shy about happy endings. We know how to pile up the obstacles; we know how to frustrate our heroes and test them past the point of despair. But when – beyond all expectation – they triumph in the end, we’re not sure what to do with the victory. Mustn’t do an end zone dance, after all.

Tolkien does an end zone dance. He knows that the drama doesn’t exist for its own sake. It exists for the sake of the happy ending, just as the saga of humanity itself exists only for the sake of Christ’s Kingdom. The Return of the King should be read side by side with the Book of Revelation.

He describes in loving detail how friends are reunited, the wounded are healed, the land is cleansed, the pollution is washed away, and justice is restored. He understands that after the sufferings his characters (and the reader, vicariously) have endured, they well deserve a reward.

I need to bear this in mind as I work on my latest Erling book. My current story actually involves a happy ending with historical warrant. I need to be less shy about rejoicing and vindication.

Like most modern people, I know more about depression than rejoicing. More about ambivalence than victory. I need to look to the Word of God to guide me in subcreation.

Fiction, Reading

Reader’s report: ‘The Return of the King’: Concerning tombs

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Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings. I’m on The Return of the King now.

Reading impressions: I was struck, as most readers will forever be now, I suppose, by the differences between the movies and the books. I know this, and yet it always sort of surprises me. The impression I always get from the movies (and of course it’s much easier to watch the movies than read the trilogy) is that the movies are pretty faithful, except for a few obvious changes. The role of Arwen is the most famous. The omission of Tom Bombadil is another. And we could go on and on, in orders of relative importance.

But in fact, the movies are very different from the books. The general plot lines are largely the same, though the order of presentation has often been shuffled. But there are actually few scenes in the films that are presented substantially as Tolkien described them. Compression and economy have had their effects everywhere. Most of the dialogue is new, too. We notice the direct quotations when they come, and quote them in Facebook memes. But they’re actually relatively rare. Most of the dialogue is new – streamlined paraphrases of Tolkien’s general sense.

Every fan of the movies should read the books at least once.

Of course, they won’t.

Looking at the story through the eyes of a Viking buff, one thing struck me in my recent reading. When Denethor commands that Faramir be carried into the kings’ tombs, the entrance is described like this:

Turning westward they came at length to a door in the rearward wall of the sixth circle. Fen Hollen it was called, for it was kept ever shut save at times of funeral, and only the Lord of the City might use that way, or those who bore the token of the tombs and tended the houses of the dead.

In other words, bodies were not carried in through the main entrance, but through a separate, smaller, door. I’m probably reaching, but this reminded me of a Norse custom known from the sagas. We’re told that when someone died in a house, the corpse was not carried out through the main door. Instead a hole was broken into a side wall, and the corpse carried out that way. Then the hole would be repaired. The idea was that if the dead person were to “walk again,” they would try to get back in the way they left, and be unable to find that door. This would protect the residents.

The two things are different, in that one involves carrying corpses in, and the other involved carrying them out. Still, I thought it might have been in the back of the Professor’s mind.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Lord of the Rings’: Incompatibility

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Blogging my way through The Two Towers:

To some extent Ronald and Edith [Tolkien] lived separate lives at Northmoor Road [Oxford], sleeping in separate bedrooms and keeping different hours…. She and Ronald did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his and her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild’s measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with. (J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter.)

‘But our hearts did not go on growing in the same way: the Ents gave their love to things that they met in the world, and the Entwives gave their thought to other things, for the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills…. But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees, and to the meads in the sunshine beyond the feet of the forests…. ‘ (Treebeard, in The Two Towers)

Just a parallel that struck me, from Tolkien’s life and his books. It’s not for me to say much about the Professor’s domestic life (which was full of love by all accounts, though a little eccentric). Just to point out a similarity.

Fiction

Amazon TV is working on prequel series of LOTR

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What would you say is the prequel to the Lord of the Rings? Yeah, that’s not this. With an estimated cost of over $1B, the new Amazon series will look into all of those details we get in the appendices about Aragorn’s life as the ranger and heir to the Gondorian throne. When Gandalf took Bilbo and the dwarves to Rivendell, the young heir was there, though perhaps not around them. A few years later, he was told who he was, that the sword of kings of Arnor was his, and that he needed to watch his back. That’s when he began to roam Middle Earth and later served under two kings for many years.

Lots of good material for them to, you know, ruin. I know they want a new Game of Thrones, which would be bad, but I hope they don’t give us a medieval Gotham, which would be like saying, “You know all of the hope and purity of Middle Earth that you’ve loved all your life? This ain’t that.”

https://nerdist.com/lord-of-the-rings-prequel-tv-series-amazon-everything-we-know/