Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Thought About It: Part I
I have seen endless repetitions of the same glosses on Tolkien – once before I tried my hand at all those glosses left out. This time, I thought it would be fun to go through the books piece by piece, as no one (afaik) has ever done. Moreover, I bet that when I have finished, you will say about at least 3 things I note: Gee, I never thought of that before.
The Intro
No one ever talks about the introduction. I think it goes on too long; every time I read it, I fight the urge to fall asleep somewhere past the halfway point. He should have left out the part about the Fallohides and Stoors, and put it in the Appendix. But it’s far more important than it seems.
To understand why, think back to The Hobbit. If you think of the style of The Hobbit, it starts out firmly in the tradition of folk tales. It is like Grimm, or even Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. There is a series of “talelets”, each involving a hero, a challenge, and “magical thinking” that solves the puzzle. Talking to others, I sense that those who first read the Hobbit went quite far through the book before they suddenly realized that this wasn’t one of those – and that gave them very mixed feelings.
The changeover comes somewhere in the path through Mirkwood, just before the spiders. Gradually, the emphasis shifts over into actual killing, and multiple alien magical creatures at once, and more complex magical “people”, and politics, and strategy … in fact, to classical fantasy. And then, at the end of The Hobbit, Tolkien gives a nod back to the folk tale, as if Bilbo will live happily ever after.
Superficially, the introduction looks almost like a history professor’s essay on a particularly obscure period. In fact, it is accustoming the reader to the fact that there is no going back: this is going to be fantasy, a world as complex as our own, not a series of folk tales. Moreover, Tolkien is trying something new: by sheer force of beautiful detail, he is trying to make this fantasy world seem relevant to, similar to, our own. And so, he starts out with the full background detail of just one people in that world: the hobbits. The dwarves and the Elves are never fully revealed as equivalent to us humans in their long history (at least until the Appendix); but the hobbits are. When humans don’t have the main point of view – and that’s for most of the story – the hobbit point of view is our best way to connect with what’s going on. You could never do that if Tolkien hadn’t given them a full back history up front.
The most important other thing Tolkien does in the introduction is that he leaves a clue as to why, ultimately, hobbits bear the Ring to Mordor. And so, that’s the way I’m going to leave it.
Chapter I: A Long Expected Party
Aside from the very first couple of paragraphs, in The Hobbit Tolkien plunges us right into the action. In this Chapter, Tolkien doesn’t. I am going to tell you this up front: it works – I don’t care if you didn’t get it.
Let’s begin by understanding that Tolkien had a great love for and appreciation for English-related language before about 1600. He saw very clearly that their language led them to think of things in different ways, and that these ways of thinking were valuable. So the entire first two books are a transition into the old language and the old ways of thinking, and it begins right here. It begins with a birthday party that is full of harmless jokes, and just occasionally, like a jab, references to the world outside Hobbiton, then more and more, and then they become visual: dwarves show up, and Gandalf shows up; and then Gandalf starts talking, not in the style of Bilbo nor Sam nor Lobelia either, but rather in a surprisingly serious tone, and then Bilbo starts talking like that, and then there’s the party that gets more and more unusual, and then we know – that this world is not stable. Something has been papered over for so long that everyone except a few has forgotten; and it’s going to come out.
And that something is a very different world outside, where people think differently. That’s what Gandalf’s and Bilbo’s language is telling us. And that’s why, of all the words in the first Chapter, the ones we tend to remember are the “formal” pre-1600 ones. But Tolkien, remember, is just getting started.
Two other things to note:
Lobelia is the first female to feature in the story, right here. That’s only important because of the next female to feature in the story (Goldberry).
Much of the action takes place indoors. There’s not much talking about nature. That’s only important because that’s going to change.
And one final thought: whenever people try to film LOTR, they think the best way is to give a long back history, possibly followed by some of Chapter I before the party. Exactly the wrong approach. What you want is a camera that starts in beautiful nature as you know it, then steadily moves toward and bursts on the Party just as Bilbo begins his speech, looking at all these strange characters one by one and then moving towards the most important – forcing us to cling to the familiar in the midst of the strange. And then at the very end of all the movies, you return to nature, incredibly sad that it has now faded into the past – as in the movie Tom Jones. To do otherwise is to turn Tolkien into a war movie – something he definitely did not like and did not intend, and an approach that makes the movie much less lasting.
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