J.R.R. Tolkien: The Two Towers (1954)

Edition: Unwin, 1978
Review number: 1057

The second volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy contains two of the most imaginative ideas that Tolkien ever had, one in each of its two very different parts. The reason for the two parts is to narrate the stories of the various members of the fellowship of the Ring, once that split up at the end of the first novel.

The first section features the main body of the fellowship, and it concerns the siege of Saruman's tower Orthanc at Isengard. Here, Tolkien introduces the ents, the creatures which make this section a favourite for many of his fans. They are the herders of the forests of trees which once covered much of Middle Earth, and Tolkien conveys a sense of gentle and yet elemental power in his descriptions of the ents, together with the pathos the sorrow of their laments for the lost entwives.

Fans often annoyed Tolkien by reading hidden meanings into his writing that he hadn't intended. (Judging from some of the people interviewed in documentaries produced to coincide with the launch of the film of Fellowship of the Ring, many fans have only a tenuous connection to reality, and some of them seen to have hardly understood a word of the books.) One aspect which is clearly there and which was acknowledged by the author, was the celebration of the rural life of England, and disapproval of the suburbanisation and industrialisation of Britain. The way that Saruman has transformed Isengard, with its pits of fire, is clearly a reference to the development of some sort of industrial process, and its destruction at the hands of the ents is at least in part an indication of how Tolkien wanted to see the countryside overcome the towns that had spread so rapidly since the Industrial Revolution. Saruman's fall can be seen as Tolkien's view of the technologist: not starting actively evil, but seduced by technology, and eventually becoming subject to the enemy.

To return to the novel, the second part tells the story of the journey of Frodo and Sam (and the ring) to the gates of Mordor, land of the evil Sauron, where the ring needs to be destroyed to cripple his power. In this section, Tolkien's interesting idea is the use he makes of Gollum/Sméagol, the creature from whom Bilbo took the ring, who had been corrupted by its power over many centuries. Gollum helps the hobbits unwillingly, guiding them to Mordor by a way which will keep them from the eyes of the forces of Sauron. He evokes, from them and from the reader, a mixture of revulsion and pity, and introduces a note of moral ambiguity which brings into question the real motives of the others. This is something which is often rather lacking in the fantasy genre, though it has become more of a feature with more recent writers. (A criticism often levelled at Tolkien is that his characters are stereotypes from the boys' stories of the early part of the twentieth century. Gollum here is a rare exception - in The Hobbit he is more like a minor villain from this genre.)

The Two Towers contains some interesting ideas, but it has severe failings as well. Tolkien starts to fall into an "epic" style which is more difficult to read and alienating - dialogue in particular is poorer. (Convoluted sentences and archaisms are the main symptoms.) It would still be possible for fantasy authors to learn from Tolkien; he is still better than his most slavish imitators.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

Edition: Unwin, 1978
Review number: 1040

Barring the lyrics of pop songs, the "one ring to rule them all" poem from this novel, the first part (as everyone surely knows) of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, could well claim to be the best known piece of verse written in the twentieth century. Its atmosphere is more dark and brooding than this particular novel, though it fits the trilogy as a whole very well.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins, the hero of The Hobbit, retires and leaves the Shire, passing on his home there and his possessions including the magic ring to his nephew Frodo. The wizard Gandalf re-appears some years later, his research having made him realise that this is in fact the "one ring", made by the evil Sauron to bring him dominion over Middle Earth and particularly the elves who had made the original rings of power. As Sauron has sent his sinister servants, the nine Nazgul or Ring-wraiths, into the world to seek his lost ring, Frodo is in grave danger; and so he embarks on the quest to throw the ring into the volcanic fires of Mount Doom where it was forged, the only place hot enough to destroy it and deny its power to Sauron forever.

As this trilogy has become one of the most popular series of all time, and is regarded by many as the origin of the modern fantasy genre (much of which consists, even now, of imitations), there are some obvious questions to be asked. What makes The Lord of the Rings different from its predecessors and successors? Why was this the fantasy work which caught the world's imagination?

Part of Tolkien's originality is shown by the fact that it is hard to decide just who his predecessors are. Novels which would today be considered to lie in the fantasy genre had been produced for several decades at least on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them also by strangely obsessive authors like William Morris and E.R. Eddison. American fantasy tended to be more straightforward action (like Edgar Rice Burroughs), its more whimsical side really having yet to develop; English fantasy, on the other hand, was either very obscure (Eddison) or closely imitative of late medieval romance (Morris). Tolkien wanted to produce a national mythology for the English, and his basic story elements come from more primitive sagas than Morris' sources and from fragments of existing English folklore. He also wrote in much more modern English than either Morris or Eddison, both of whom used a pseudo-medieval style. (This is probably because Tolkien's previous Middle Earth novel had been written for children, and his style is thus rather more like George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin.) Tolkien is not seeking to imitate his sources, but to derive his material from them, and this makes his work (The Silmarillion excepted) a great deal more accessible. His sense of the epic does overcome him some of the time, but this isn't particularly apparent in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Tolkien also brought in a major innovation in the genre with the unexpected hero. Instead of the central character being someone to aspire to be like, his hobbits are to be identified with. Even if not a terribly earth-shattering development, this is one of Tolkien's major legacies to the genre, and can be seen in novels as otherwise diverse as Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger, David Eddings' Belgariad and Piers Anthony's Xanth series. (In fact, this, the medieval background and the use of magic are about the only elements that the so-called imitators of Tolkien generally have in common.)

Those who are really imitators of Tolkien rather than writers interested in the creation of an alien culture tend to miss some of the virtues of his storytelling. For example, Tolkien was well aware just how difficult and dangerous long distance travel could be in the medieval period. While in many fantasy works small groups like the fellowship of the Ring set off halfway across the world with hardly a second thought, in this novel, the journey itself is one of the off-putting elements of the quest, and on the way they meet hazards which are not in fact relevant to their quest but which are just part of travelling - the episode of the Old Forest, for example, where a short cut nearly proves fatal. (This and the episode of Tom Bombadil which follows it are among the best moments in the novel.) This kind of detail can be easily written by Tolkien because he is placing his story in a world which was created independently of his story, a process which involves far more thought than imitation.

Because it doesn't fall into the portentousness of the later novels in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring is the best part of The Lord of the Rings. It now seems old fashioned in places (there are one or two phrases which are on the edge of racist when you consider that Middle Earth is supposed to be a portrayal of a real prehistoric Europe) and suffers from the limitations of the author's imagination (in particular, his complete inability to envisage women as playing any real part in world affairs; only Galadriel has any substance, and she is beautiful and elegant but sexless). It is still better than most of the imitators.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)

Subtitle: There and Back Again
Edition: Unwin, 1966
Review number: 1032

From the years of obsessive work defining the geography, peoples and history of Middle Earth, Tolkien created a story for his children. It has become one of the most popular and best loved novels of the twentieth century, alongside the sequel, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Far more accessible than the trilogy (and massively more than The Silmarillion, his other major completed Middle Earth novel), The Hobbit is an excellent introduction to Tolkien even for an adult, and is the one book of his where those things which irritate his detractors are almost entirely absent.

The story is quite well described by Tolkien's rather dismissive subtitle. A hobbit is a creature invented by Tolkien (almost everything else in Middle Earth is derived from sources in folklore), who is basically a type of Englishman the author particularly admired. (I say "man" advisedly; women play small part in Tolkien's writing, and The Hobbit does not have a single female character, except possibly some of the spiders.) While revelling in the comforts of his home, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins proves brave and resourceful when chosen by the wizard Gandalf to accompany thirteen dwarves on a quest to recover the treasure hoarded by the dragon Smaug in the caves under the Lonely Mountain far to the east, a one-time dwarvish stronghold.

Without The Hobbit, it would be easy to accuse Tolkien of lacking a sense of humour. While I do feel that he took his creation of Middle Earth too seriously, this novel is amusing. Even the interpolated poetry, usually rather poor and one of Tolkien's direst legacies to the genre, is not just humourous but self-deprecating - Tolkien was far better at writing verse which seems to be doggerel made up on the spot than at imitating oral tradition epics.

The enormous, obsessively documented background of Middle Earth makes the The Hobbit read like an episode in a larger history. Of course, with the discovery of the ring it is this, and much of the history is made explicit in The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit gains atmosphere from having it, but also by leaving it unexplained. Although a children's book at heart, it is to me Tolkien's most successful novel.