I really appreciate these posts, which are deepening my understanding of Tolkien. I wasn’t aware of academia embracing “object oriented ontology,” and, as a former nature writer, I think it’s a good thing.
On the realism vs escapism debate: I’m tired of it. Why can’t we have both? It’s a false dichotomy anyway. The minute we pick up any novel, we’re escaping our actual surroundings and situations and entering the lives of others, set in other places, whether near, far, or made up.
I agree; it's a completely false dichotomy. All literature is constructed; no literature is reality. Our picking up of a book involves the giving over of ourselves to another consciousness for a while.
John, another great article. I really value the way in which you explore topics that may not be apparent to the casual reader but are relevant upon a deeper reading.
One of my personal frustrations with critics is that they sometimes insist on a work of art being all things for all people. I don't really understand this. Artists create at a specific point in time while accessing their own experiences and knowledge. The fact that Tolkien doesn't address every social issue isn't a detractor in my opinion. I think he does a rather good job addressing the issues he has prioritized.
Ecology and world-think are critical here. Having a perspective beyond that of human motivations is front and center. While humans have a role in the tale, they are not the focus, and their lives and desires are shown to be fleeting. The elves play a crucial role in tying the deep vision of worlds to a sentient being. I think that Tolkien does this in part to make it more relatable. In his time, proposing that trees or the world itself are sentient may have been a step too far for many readers (although he does play with this with the Ents). I see the elves as a bridge between the lesser races (those with short lives) and the long life/concerns of the created world itself. Because of this I see them as central to the story.
I agree with your assessment of the negative criticism. JRRT makes the point in the Foreword to the Second Edition: they apparently don't like the book, but he has no reason to complain, because he doesn't like the kinds of books that they apparently prefer.
I also agree with your take on much of the past criticism of LOTR, and I don't believe Tolkien could address every social issue (or was required to do so to make this more "realistic"). I've long been irritated with such elitism in the literary world, and I don't want to drag out the hoary "he was a man of his time," either. With this challenge, I'm fangirling. That gets me in touch with the deeper artistic aspects of a work that's had a big influence on me.
That said, the orcs have not improved with each reading I've done, especially their dialogue and the racial undertones. I'd be interested to see how others read this when we get into the "Uruk-Hai" and beyond.
Yes, the orcs are a real problem for the modern reader, which we should not avoid. I have some theories about how to think of them in the context of book, which I will elaborate in a piece on Tolkien and race. I’m thinking about how to approach this in the classroom, given the legislation that just passed in my state. (The short answer is that I’m not going to change a damn thing about what I do in the classroom, but the legislation has made every discussion of race fraught with even more tension than usual.)
John, I look forward to your piece on Tolkien and race, and I sympathize with how fraught such discussions can be in a contemporary college classroom. But they are necessary. No, don't change a thing, because avoiding the topic feels deceptive in other bad ways. I have been wrestling with this whole free speech thing and new constraints on campus, especially because U.S. Republicans have turned "free speech" into a partisan rallying cry. I'll say no more, not wanting to drag this away from LOTR, but I'd be interested in hearing more about it from you offline.
It's a hard problem. An artist has to speak to an audience, and leverage that audience's expectations to create an effect. What dialogue tags would one use to create "dirty, violent, evil," without pointing towards some human (or nonhuman) example?
It is a hard problem, Randall. I think what I always liked about the personification of evil in LOTR is that it comes from a lust for absolute power. Instead of Sauron showing up as a comic-book evil villain, we see his influence in the corruption of characters like Saruman, Boromir, and Gollum — even Frodo and Bilbo, when the Ring gets some hold over them. In those cases, the changes undergone appear both physical (especially with Golllum) and emotional, and they make sense.
The trouble comes with those interchangeable orcs. I can go along with them as an army of evil minions. There needs to be an enemy army to make the battle scenes work or to build a real sense of menace. But in the scenes where they do too much talking, I get dragged out of my suspension of disbelief.
I especially disliked Peter Jackson's choice to make orc blood black, which I thought was a further step toward dehumanizing the enemy. Sort-of like the white-plastic storm troopers of Star Wars.
There are occasional moments, when a little thought can be given to what could have motivated some of the (problematically racialized) Southrons or Easterlings to side with Sauron and what threat or lie brought them when they would presumably be happier at home with their families (I think this a movie-Frodo line, but it seems to echo a sentiment in the book).
Generally, though, this idea of evil as an absolute seems modern or even pre-modern to me. John's photo of the Silmarillion cover caused me to dip into that a bit. I'm appalled at the evil (and even venality) of the elves in many cases.
Orcs were magically corrupted from Elves, by the first dark lord Morgoth, right? Though in Tolkien's Christian-esque framing, that couldn't have happened if they hadn't chosen evil at some level (to preserve their own lives?). I've often wondered if an Orc could be "saved," though Middle-Earth has no equivalent of baptism.
Boromir sinned against Frodo, but he was sorry, and paid for his crime with his life, protecting Merry and Pippin, instead of being fully corrupted.
Corruption by the Shadow features prominently in several of the game adaptations, like the collectible card game Middle-Earth: the Wizards and Crucible 7's role-playing setting.
Interesting, Dan, especially that reference to why various groups from the racialized south would be Sauron’s allies. I thought about that again, too, when reading about the Helm’s Deep battle - in the aftermath, I found a reference I hadn’t remembered to why the “wild men” of the Westfold had allied themselves with Saruman, fighting alongside orcs - as Tolkien framed it, they had an axe to grind with Rohan because their lands had been taken (that is, stolen) by the horse lords. Some current resonances, for sure. Almost makes me want to read an alternate history of Middle Earth told from the perspective of the other side 😉
Indigenous Australians have an oral knowledge culture that stretches back into deep time (in human terms at least). For example they have songlines that bear witness to volcanism that happened thousands of years ago, and can describe cave systems that are now deep underwater, drowned long ago by seawater after the last glacial maximum. Perhaps they are our Elves, and that we should be paying more attention to indigenous cultures worldwide.
I want to echo what others have said about the value of these posts, which are certainly taking me new places with *The Fellowship of the Ring*. Old places, too, as I consider time moving forward and backward in my own life, trying to recall my first response to reading about Lothlorien when I was young. I recall that I loved that part of the book. I don't think I could have articulated it as the notion of deep time or make the connection to an ontology of place (or of nature/ecology; "object" seems to dry too me), but I certainly felt that this perspective was different from a human one. I was drawn to the elves, and I still like the idea of there being different conscious beings roaming the fictional realm of Middle Earth, not just humans.
This post also resonated as I dove into the "Treebeard" chapter in Book III this morning (yes, I'm ahead of schedule). We learn from Treebeard that the elves taught trees to speak, bringing in the idea that language or storytelling can be transformative for all beings. Through song and story, history is set down, even if imperfectly. I was amused to come upon Treebeard's "lore of Living Creatures," to which he recalled no reference to hobbits from the "old lists." I don't want to reduce something like deep time to a metaphor, but I do think the experience of it — the sense of always moving forward yet repeating, with some details lost as the river flows on — works something like memory.
I was only fifteen or sixteen the first time I read LoTR, and compared to The Hobbit, I was disappointed. It was too slow, too stilted for my comic-book mind at the time. It wasn't until I had read a lot of his more contemporary imitators, and realized that they were just copying him, that I went back -- with more grounding, more context, and more maturity -- and realized how deep it was.
I always have to stop myself from rolling my eyes whenever I remember that George R.R. Martin claimed that Tolkien's great flaw was that we don't know what King Elessar's tax policies were like, as though realism is achieved solely through knowing the exact yield of grain harvests and developing census records for your imagined world. I would argue that Tolkien made a far more realistic world in Middle-earth thanks to his deep knowledge of medieval literature and his love of language and nature. We don't read LotR for tax records, we read it to find adventure or solace or beauty or whatever you find in the books. The realism comes from the sense of place Tolkien built thanks to the details of time, place, and culture he wove into the narrative.
As for the modernists and their pooh-poohing of Tolkien for not talking about sexuality or what have you, I've always wondered at their obsessions with their libidos (or lack thereof). I don't want to read about the sex lives of aging men, thank you very much. I'll stick with my elves and hobbits.
Martin is sometimes very good at what he does, which is a different slice of reality than what Tolkien is interested in. Tolkien experienced the horrors of war, but he refused to show them in the gory graphic way that Martin does, perhaps *because* he experienced them personally. Or perhaps because, as mentioned above, he knew his audience, who had so recently experienced them, too.
Peter Jackson likewise wanted a dirtier, more "realistic" Middle-Earth. He was responding to an artistic context, in film as well as in print. Previous versions, the Rankin-Bass especially, leaned into the fairy-tale feel.
Thanks, guys. I’m going to edit my caption to that picture to indicate that the tree is *one of* the oldest living things on the planet. It really is mind-blowing.
I was really struck by Tolkien's description in the 1951 "Letter to Milton Waldman" that appears at the start of the Silmarillion: "a sort of second fall or at least ‘error’ of the Elves. There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel ... But they wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. They thus became obsessed with ‘fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming – even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts."
Tolkien goes on to describe some Magic (and all Machines) as being an attempt to use "Power" to "make the will more quickly effective". This sense of "clinging" strikes me a bit like the "attachment" that Buddhists try to avoid. But in this sense of the Buddhist point, I think I agree with the elves. As Gandalf says at the end of LOTR, tears are sometimes appropriate. I do think, however, that there's something to the idea that trying to resist the flow of time is problematic. But what are you to do if you're more-or-less immortal (as immortal as the earth) and you see beauty slipping away.
I also like how the best "Men" are the ones closest to (and most respectful of) the elves. I think the blending of the lineages and characteristics of elves and men is a great metaphor.
That letter to Waldman is a treasure trove--and an excellent guide to the Legendarium. The more I read JRRT, the more I come to appreciate this "long view" of the elves. You are right that it can be problematic to be too attached to the past, but we can also see it as an increased awareness and understanding of change.
I've been watching a lot of deep time biological documentaries lately, Spielberg's being only one of them. The idea that camels might have such huge eyes because they evolved in Arctic forests, dark for half the year . . .
Science fiction has a great project to make "the strange familiar and the familiar strange," which echoes Buddhist practices that try to wake people up to the wonder of the seemingly mundane, which it seems Tolkien also wanted to do.
I really appreciate these posts, which are deepening my understanding of Tolkien. I wasn’t aware of academia embracing “object oriented ontology,” and, as a former nature writer, I think it’s a good thing.
On the realism vs escapism debate: I’m tired of it. Why can’t we have both? It’s a false dichotomy anyway. The minute we pick up any novel, we’re escaping our actual surroundings and situations and entering the lives of others, set in other places, whether near, far, or made up.
I agree; it's a completely false dichotomy. All literature is constructed; no literature is reality. Our picking up of a book involves the giving over of ourselves to another consciousness for a while.
Science fiction has a term for it, "suspension of disbelief," that I always liked.
👏🏻
I was having trouble upgrading to a paid subscription, but now I've managed it and am looking forward to catching up on the bonus posts.
Thanks for upgrading!
John, another great article. I really value the way in which you explore topics that may not be apparent to the casual reader but are relevant upon a deeper reading.
One of my personal frustrations with critics is that they sometimes insist on a work of art being all things for all people. I don't really understand this. Artists create at a specific point in time while accessing their own experiences and knowledge. The fact that Tolkien doesn't address every social issue isn't a detractor in my opinion. I think he does a rather good job addressing the issues he has prioritized.
Ecology and world-think are critical here. Having a perspective beyond that of human motivations is front and center. While humans have a role in the tale, they are not the focus, and their lives and desires are shown to be fleeting. The elves play a crucial role in tying the deep vision of worlds to a sentient being. I think that Tolkien does this in part to make it more relatable. In his time, proposing that trees or the world itself are sentient may have been a step too far for many readers (although he does play with this with the Ents). I see the elves as a bridge between the lesser races (those with short lives) and the long life/concerns of the created world itself. Because of this I see them as central to the story.
I agree with your assessment of the negative criticism. JRRT makes the point in the Foreword to the Second Edition: they apparently don't like the book, but he has no reason to complain, because he doesn't like the kinds of books that they apparently prefer.
I also agree with your take on much of the past criticism of LOTR, and I don't believe Tolkien could address every social issue (or was required to do so to make this more "realistic"). I've long been irritated with such elitism in the literary world, and I don't want to drag out the hoary "he was a man of his time," either. With this challenge, I'm fangirling. That gets me in touch with the deeper artistic aspects of a work that's had a big influence on me.
That said, the orcs have not improved with each reading I've done, especially their dialogue and the racial undertones. I'd be interested to see how others read this when we get into the "Uruk-Hai" and beyond.
Yes, the orcs are a real problem for the modern reader, which we should not avoid. I have some theories about how to think of them in the context of book, which I will elaborate in a piece on Tolkien and race. I’m thinking about how to approach this in the classroom, given the legislation that just passed in my state. (The short answer is that I’m not going to change a damn thing about what I do in the classroom, but the legislation has made every discussion of race fraught with even more tension than usual.)
John, I look forward to your piece on Tolkien and race, and I sympathize with how fraught such discussions can be in a contemporary college classroom. But they are necessary. No, don't change a thing, because avoiding the topic feels deceptive in other bad ways. I have been wrestling with this whole free speech thing and new constraints on campus, especially because U.S. Republicans have turned "free speech" into a partisan rallying cry. I'll say no more, not wanting to drag this away from LOTR, but I'd be interested in hearing more about it from you offline.
It's a hard problem. An artist has to speak to an audience, and leverage that audience's expectations to create an effect. What dialogue tags would one use to create "dirty, violent, evil," without pointing towards some human (or nonhuman) example?
It is a hard problem, Randall. I think what I always liked about the personification of evil in LOTR is that it comes from a lust for absolute power. Instead of Sauron showing up as a comic-book evil villain, we see his influence in the corruption of characters like Saruman, Boromir, and Gollum — even Frodo and Bilbo, when the Ring gets some hold over them. In those cases, the changes undergone appear both physical (especially with Golllum) and emotional, and they make sense.
The trouble comes with those interchangeable orcs. I can go along with them as an army of evil minions. There needs to be an enemy army to make the battle scenes work or to build a real sense of menace. But in the scenes where they do too much talking, I get dragged out of my suspension of disbelief.
I especially disliked Peter Jackson's choice to make orc blood black, which I thought was a further step toward dehumanizing the enemy. Sort-of like the white-plastic storm troopers of Star Wars.
There are occasional moments, when a little thought can be given to what could have motivated some of the (problematically racialized) Southrons or Easterlings to side with Sauron and what threat or lie brought them when they would presumably be happier at home with their families (I think this a movie-Frodo line, but it seems to echo a sentiment in the book).
Generally, though, this idea of evil as an absolute seems modern or even pre-modern to me. John's photo of the Silmarillion cover caused me to dip into that a bit. I'm appalled at the evil (and even venality) of the elves in many cases.
Orcs were magically corrupted from Elves, by the first dark lord Morgoth, right? Though in Tolkien's Christian-esque framing, that couldn't have happened if they hadn't chosen evil at some level (to preserve their own lives?). I've often wondered if an Orc could be "saved," though Middle-Earth has no equivalent of baptism.
Boromir sinned against Frodo, but he was sorry, and paid for his crime with his life, protecting Merry and Pippin, instead of being fully corrupted.
Corruption by the Shadow features prominently in several of the game adaptations, like the collectible card game Middle-Earth: the Wizards and Crucible 7's role-playing setting.
Tolkien thought about this problem himself, as we see from his letters. I'll be writing about this on Friday :)
Interesting, Dan, especially that reference to why various groups from the racialized south would be Sauron’s allies. I thought about that again, too, when reading about the Helm’s Deep battle - in the aftermath, I found a reference I hadn’t remembered to why the “wild men” of the Westfold had allied themselves with Saruman, fighting alongside orcs - as Tolkien framed it, they had an axe to grind with Rohan because their lands had been taken (that is, stolen) by the horse lords. Some current resonances, for sure. Almost makes me want to read an alternate history of Middle Earth told from the perspective of the other side 😉
In the games at least, the Dunlendings went over to Sauron but the Hillmen of Rhudaur did not, though they were no friends of the Free Peoples either.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Hillmen_of_the_Trollshaws
This is fabulous 👏🏻 I like very much your metaphor for the bridge
Indigenous Australians have an oral knowledge culture that stretches back into deep time (in human terms at least). For example they have songlines that bear witness to volcanism that happened thousands of years ago, and can describe cave systems that are now deep underwater, drowned long ago by seawater after the last glacial maximum. Perhaps they are our Elves, and that we should be paying more attention to indigenous cultures worldwide.
I love this. I may quote you in a future piece if you don’t mind.
Absolutely…
I want to echo what others have said about the value of these posts, which are certainly taking me new places with *The Fellowship of the Ring*. Old places, too, as I consider time moving forward and backward in my own life, trying to recall my first response to reading about Lothlorien when I was young. I recall that I loved that part of the book. I don't think I could have articulated it as the notion of deep time or make the connection to an ontology of place (or of nature/ecology; "object" seems to dry too me), but I certainly felt that this perspective was different from a human one. I was drawn to the elves, and I still like the idea of there being different conscious beings roaming the fictional realm of Middle Earth, not just humans.
This post also resonated as I dove into the "Treebeard" chapter in Book III this morning (yes, I'm ahead of schedule). We learn from Treebeard that the elves taught trees to speak, bringing in the idea that language or storytelling can be transformative for all beings. Through song and story, history is set down, even if imperfectly. I was amused to come upon Treebeard's "lore of Living Creatures," to which he recalled no reference to hobbits from the "old lists." I don't want to reduce something like deep time to a metaphor, but I do think the experience of it — the sense of always moving forward yet repeating, with some details lost as the river flows on — works something like memory.
Thanks, Martha. I have a lot to say about Treebeard, but I’ll hold off until next week ;)
I was only fifteen or sixteen the first time I read LoTR, and compared to The Hobbit, I was disappointed. It was too slow, too stilted for my comic-book mind at the time. It wasn't until I had read a lot of his more contemporary imitators, and realized that they were just copying him, that I went back -- with more grounding, more context, and more maturity -- and realized how deep it was.
I always have to stop myself from rolling my eyes whenever I remember that George R.R. Martin claimed that Tolkien's great flaw was that we don't know what King Elessar's tax policies were like, as though realism is achieved solely through knowing the exact yield of grain harvests and developing census records for your imagined world. I would argue that Tolkien made a far more realistic world in Middle-earth thanks to his deep knowledge of medieval literature and his love of language and nature. We don't read LotR for tax records, we read it to find adventure or solace or beauty or whatever you find in the books. The realism comes from the sense of place Tolkien built thanks to the details of time, place, and culture he wove into the narrative.
As for the modernists and their pooh-poohing of Tolkien for not talking about sexuality or what have you, I've always wondered at their obsessions with their libidos (or lack thereof). I don't want to read about the sex lives of aging men, thank you very much. I'll stick with my elves and hobbits.
Martin is sometimes very good at what he does, which is a different slice of reality than what Tolkien is interested in. Tolkien experienced the horrors of war, but he refused to show them in the gory graphic way that Martin does, perhaps *because* he experienced them personally. Or perhaps because, as mentioned above, he knew his audience, who had so recently experienced them, too.
Peter Jackson likewise wanted a dirtier, more "realistic" Middle-Earth. He was responding to an artistic context, in film as well as in print. Previous versions, the Rankin-Bass especially, leaned into the fairy-tale feel.
👏🏻 bravo
Also, BTW, I believe the oldest living thing in the world IS TREES. Specifically Pando, the Aspen grove in Utah: https://www.treehugger.com/nature-blows-my-mind-year-old-aspen-grove-clones-itself-4859208.
There are also very old mesquite rings and that huge fungus in Oregon.
Yes, I think the mycelial mat is about 8,500 years old and pretty huge.
Thanks, guys. I’m going to edit my caption to that picture to indicate that the tree is *one of* the oldest living things on the planet. It really is mind-blowing.
I was really struck by Tolkien's description in the 1951 "Letter to Milton Waldman" that appears at the start of the Silmarillion: "a sort of second fall or at least ‘error’ of the Elves. There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel ... But they wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. They thus became obsessed with ‘fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming – even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts."
Tolkien goes on to describe some Magic (and all Machines) as being an attempt to use "Power" to "make the will more quickly effective". This sense of "clinging" strikes me a bit like the "attachment" that Buddhists try to avoid. But in this sense of the Buddhist point, I think I agree with the elves. As Gandalf says at the end of LOTR, tears are sometimes appropriate. I do think, however, that there's something to the idea that trying to resist the flow of time is problematic. But what are you to do if you're more-or-less immortal (as immortal as the earth) and you see beauty slipping away.
I also like how the best "Men" are the ones closest to (and most respectful of) the elves. I think the blending of the lineages and characteristics of elves and men is a great metaphor.
That letter to Waldman is a treasure trove--and an excellent guide to the Legendarium. The more I read JRRT, the more I come to appreciate this "long view" of the elves. You are right that it can be problematic to be too attached to the past, but we can also see it as an increased awareness and understanding of change.
I've been watching a lot of deep time biological documentaries lately, Spielberg's being only one of them. The idea that camels might have such huge eyes because they evolved in Arctic forests, dark for half the year . . .
Science fiction has a great project to make "the strange familiar and the familiar strange," which echoes Buddhist practices that try to wake people up to the wonder of the seemingly mundane, which it seems Tolkien also wanted to do.
Bombadil and the Ents are as old as anybody, but Bombadil seems to live mostly in the present.
Preach!