Quenuvalye i lamber Eldareva? A boring question, I know, and I’m sure that people ask you the same thing all the time. What it means, of course, is “Thou canst speak the language of the Elves?,” and, if for some unpardonable reason your Elvish is on the rusty side, you have until December 19th to make it shine anew, even as the tumbling waters of Nimrodel refresh the weary traveller who ventures unto Lothlórien, below the eaves of the Golden Wood. For, on that day, men in the bright havens of the West, and along the storm-tongued seaboard of the East, and at your nearest multiplex pretty well everywhere in between, will release the first installment of “The Lord of the Rings,” rated PG-13. Ele! Eglerio! Laite! And a box of Raisinets!
The film has been a long time coming. An animated, severely truncated version arrived on our screens in 1978, but this fortress of a story has a habit of repelling invaders. “The Lord of the Rings” is about hobbits—small, peaceable souls, the tops of whose heads lie level with the average human crotch. The plot tells of a journey taken by Frodo Baggins and his hobbit companions from the Shire, where they have long conducted blameless lives, to the land of Mordor, far away to the east, where Frodo must hurl a ring of inexpressible power into the crater of Mount Doom. Everything about the book seems so earthy and rooted, so densely planted with discernible characters and landscapes, that you would expect movie directors to leap upon it with glee, and yet something—some mysterious element of wit or magic—has been missing. Now we know what the element is: three hundred million dollars. That, give or take a few million, was what the director Peter Jackson was given to play with: a gratifying deal, considering that, unlike Bilbo Baggins—uncle of Frodo and hero of “The Hobbit,” the predecessor to “The Lord of the Rings”—he didn’t have to sneak past a dragon in order to lay his hands on the loot. The bulk of it seems to have been spent on re-creating Middle-earth, the place where the story unfurls. People who complain that for three hundred million you could purchase a small nation are absolutely right, but that only proves what a bargain this movie may turn out to be. Jackson isn’t buying himself a country; he’s building us a world.
The film, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s original novel, will appear in three parts. After “The Fellowship of the Ring,” we will be forced to wait twelve months for “The Two Towers”—a period of reflection that, given the title, is probably a good thing. Finally, at the end of 2003, we will don our chain mail and stand to greet “The Return of the King.” No one can say whether audiences will stick with the story, or whether, in two years’ time, they will have dwindled to a small band of hobbit wanna-bes, lining up glumly in the rain. All that Jackson can do is look back at the example of Tolkien himself. When “The Fellowship of the Ring” came out, in 1954, Tolkien’s publisher, Allen & Unwin, gambled on selling as many as thirty-five hundred copies, falling to thirty-two hundred and fifty for “The Two Towers,” and so down to three thousand for “The Return of the King,” the following year. In the event, this estimate proved a little cautious. By the end of 1968, total readership of the trilogy was thought to stand at around fifty million.
And so, once again, we will enter the outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth. For the next two years, we will be assailed by unorthodox creatures, the like of which many of us will have read about but few will have witnessed in the flesh. Towering or stumpy, brazen or subtle, smooth or hirsute, gabbling or speechless, yellow-bellied or stout of heart, reassuringly human or halfway to the swamp: there’s no two ways about it, Tolkien fans are a funny bunch.
Ishould know, for I was one of them. Been there, done that, read the book, gone mad. I first took on “The Lord of the Rings” at the age of eleven or twelve; to be precise, I began it at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. It was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.
The size of the beast is important in this respect. Tolkien sales remained earthbound until 1965, at which point the three parts of the novel were clamped together and published in America as an unauthorized one-volume paperback; five months later, an official equivalent hit the bookshops, whereupon sales went through the roof and never came back down. That one-volume slab was a challenge in itself. The thrill of it was pricking you before the story even began; you turned over the title page, and the next page was bare, except for an eight-line chant. One couplet went straight to your bones:
Even at the time, something cinematic stirred in those words; they reminded me of the drumbeats that herald the flame-lit appearance of King Kong, and it came as no surprise to hear the lines intoned again, when the trailers for “The Lord of the Rings” started playing in theatres this year. Six lines into the book, and the author had us exactly where he wanted us; even the foreword, two pages later, continued the doomy thrill. “This tale grew in the telling,” Tolkien wrote, introducing the second edition, and that blend of modesty and grandeur hinted at a process of growth beyond his reckoning, as if the story we were about to read possessed a life of its own.
Before embarking, I had one more detail to attend to. I flipped to the back, not to sneak a glance at how happily the narrative would end—a matter on which I am more undecided than ever—but to frighten myself with a simple count. A thousand and seventy-seven pages: the number itself was like a spell. (Tolkien had typed the whole thing out with two fingers.) My idea of a big book, until then, had been “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and even there I had become bogged down in the Oompa-Loompas. So how on earth would I grind my way through this great brick? One answer was “The Hobbit,” which my friends and I read by way of a training program; if we could follow Bilbo to the dragon’s lair and evade the inquiries of the slimy Gollum (“What has it got in its pocketses?”), we would be primed for the longer haul, like mountaineers who haunt their local hills before setting off for Nepal. What the explorer of “The Lord of the Rings” soon comes to understand as he launches himself into the text, and what puffs him with pride as, weeks or months later, he reviews his completed task, is the fact that this book about a quest is itself a quest. You battle through it, against the odds; you fend off the blizzards of bewildering mythology; you stand firm as the reams of dodgy dialogue try to suck you into the mire; and you come through. If you encounter it as a child, it will be the longest book that you have ever mastered, and, for many adults, it will retain that talismanic status. The tale grew in the telling, but, more significantly, the reader grows in the reading; such is the source of Tolkien’s power, and it is weirder and more far-reaching than even he could have foretold. I wonder what he had in his pocketses.
Certainly, by the time I reached page 1,077, I was more hobbit than schoolboy. Without further ado, I cast myself in the part of Frodo and wasted no time in appointing various acquaintances to the secondary roles: Gandalf (good wizard), Saruman (good wizard gone bad), Sam (sidekick), Gimli (dwarf), Legolas (elf), and Aragorn (quiet fellow who sits at the back of a pub and turns out to be descended from fifty-one generations of known royalty). Then there was Frodo’s mission: to destroy forever the One Ring, and so to prevent it from falling into the hands, or slipping onto the finger, of the dark lord named Sauron. This is at once virtuous, foolhardy, guaranteed to save civilization, and extremely difficult to enact within the confines of a school playground. Nevertheless, we persevered, and many were the ring-pulls plucked bravely from cans of Coke and cast into the uttermost depths of the trash.
In later life, I discovered that, in comparison with other Tolkien-watchers, I was a pitiful novice. True, when the fine Swedish movie “Together” was released, earlier this year, I was one of the few sad headcases in the audience who realized that the squeaky electronic tunes on the soundtrack came from “The Lord of the Rings”—an instrumental album by the Swedish mood musician Bo Hansson. That, however, is small fry. One friend recently confessed that he had learned to speak Elvish, and true believers have any number of Tolkien societies and fanzines to choose from; I own a slim publication entitled “The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth,” by Ruth S. Noel, who seems perfectly unbothered at having compiled a phrase book for a country that does not exist. Maybe that is why “The Lord of the Rings” became a bible of the counterculture, whose proponents were eager to find an alternative—any alternative—to the countries that did exist. In the late sixties, American students liked to sport badges that read “Gandalf for President,” and one can picture them musing long and hard on Bilbo Baggins, discovered by Frodo in the chill-out sanctuary of Rivendell: “Time doesn’t seem to pass here,” Bilbo says. “It just is.”
A couple of years ago, there was a TV documentary on Tolkien, and what stood out was the clip of a song, “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” Not a folksy, lute-backed number but a mid-sixties funkfest, complete with dancers in abbreviated skirts. Center stage was a familiar figure making a forlorn attempt at early rap; that figure, I regret to say, was Leonard Nimoy. I can see the connection—Mr. Spock’s ears were definitely a subspecies of the Elvish ear—but the idea that “The Lord of the Rings” belongs in any sense to the province of science fiction strikes me as a gross misreading of the map. The trek that interested Tolkien was not from one star to the next. His kind of trek was hard on the feet, short on humor, and knee-deep in mud; it may have been imaginary, but, within the boundaries of his busy imagination, it was all true.
Tolkien himself hardly went anywhere. He was an expert in Old Norse, but not once did he visit Scandinavia. He hated France, and not only because he hated French food; in the words of his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, the Norman invasion of England, in 1066, “pained him almost as much as if it had happened in his own lifetime.” Perhaps the most significant journey was one that he failed to make. He was born in South Africa in 1892, the son of an Englishman who had taken up a position with the Bank of Africa in Bloemfontein. When John Ronald Reuel was three, his mother took him and his brother back to England for a while; during their absence, their father grew ill, and they made hasty plans to return. The young Ronald—as he was known—dictated a letter to his nurse. “My dear Daddy, I am so glad I am coming back to see you it is such a long time since we came away from you I hope the ship will bring us all back to you Mamie and Baby and me.” Word came that his father had died, the letter was never sent, and one turns with new eyes to “The Return of the King”—to its closing pages, in which Frodo, his duty done, sets sail toward “a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
Tolkien stayed with his mother in England; the family moved near a mill in a small village outside Birmingham. Most writers seem to own, or to have mislaid, a touchstone—something that gathers into itself all their memories of love or dread—and, in Tolkien’s case, Sarehole Mill came to stand as his sacred place, and as a pastoral bulwark against the encroachments of industrial sprawl. The Tolkiens left it in 1900, for the sake of the boys’ education, and from here on his life, though crowned with fame, bears the marks not of success but of intolerable loss. His mother died in 1904, bequeathing him her Roman Catholic faith; Tolkien remained a devout Catholic until his death, in 1973. A sudden sense of the mortal world as treacherous, shadowy, and undeserving of one’s trust is not uncommon among bereaved children, and, in Tolkien’s case, the leap forward to the next catastrophe, on the Western front in 1916, feels wretchedly short. In between, it is true, he flourished at school, won a place at Oxford, and married a fellow-orphan named Edith Bratt. But two of his dearest friends from school were lost in the Battle of the Somme, the first day of which claimed twenty thousand lives. Tolkien himself, who fought on the Somme with the Lancashire Fusiliers, would undoubtedly have died in action, were it not for a case of trench fever that saw him invalided back to England. He was a tweedy, clubbable soul, relying as heavily on male friendship as on married bliss or the love of his four children, and he came to idolize the company that he had kept in his youth. Why else would Pippin, Merry, and Sam, Frodo’s fellow-hobbits from the Shire, refuse to let him seek Mount Doom alone?
Tolkien was a scholar by profession. At school in Birmingham, he not only debated in Latin and Greek but, according to Humphrey Carpenter, “broke into fluent Gothic.” At Oxford, he read first classics and then English. (His view of English literature, incidentally, ended more or less where the current view begins; he rarely ventured later than Chaucer, and thought Shakespeare to be pernicious nonsense.) After the war, he was just the man to take a job with the Oxford English Dictionary, working mostly on the letter “W”; Carpenter consulted Tolkien’s entry for the word “wasp” and found cross-references to Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Old High German, Middle Low German, Middle High German, Modern German, Old Teutonic, primitive pre-Teutonic, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Russian, and Latin. In short, Tolkien was a bit of a linguist. Back at Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925 and Professor of English in 1945, a post that he retained until 1959. Philologists have had a field day with his borrowings, beginning with the roster of dwarfs that accompany Bilbo Baggins, which Tolkien lifted directly from a tenth-century poem in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Icelandic verse. And could there be a better name for a land of ill repute than Mordor? In Elvish, it means Dark Land or Black Country; in Old English, it meant “mortal crime” or “murder,” and you sense the full, historical heaviness of threat in Tolkien’s coinage. All in all, it is strange to think of him as an unwitting sponsor of the counterculture; here was a man with culture coming out of his ears and, if you were lucky enough to attend his lectures, out of his mouth. The young W. H. Auden sat and listened to Tolkien reciting “Beowulf,” the greatest and bloodiest of Old English poems. According to Auden, “The voice was the voice of Gandalf.”
So what happened? How were hobbits made? We know, at least, how the first one came about. Tolkien himself described the day in the early nineteen-thirties when, in the midst of marking examination papers, he came to a blank page and scribbled on it, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” The breeding of further hobbits is harder to pin down. The work of Tolkien is infamously, almost scandalously, bereft of sex; nevertheless, at some point hobbit must have humped hobbit, presumably in a discreet hayrick, and, given the degree of superfluous hair that a hobbit displays on the parts of the body that you can see, such as his feet, one shudders to think of the forestation that occurs elsewhere.
”The Lord of the Rings” is lit with a reverence for nature in the raw, which makes it all the more surprising that Tolkien should have flinched away from natural functions. When Frodo and his band are given refuge by Tom Bombadil, a roving spirit of the woods, we are introduced to Goldberry, the woman with whom he lives: “Her gown was green, green as young reeds, shot with silver like beads of dew; and her belt was of gold, shaped like a chain of flag-lilies set with the pale-blue eyes of forget-me-nots.” A little of this goes an awfully long way, although not far enough to explain the nature of the relationship between Goldberry and Tom. Indeed, given that he wears a blue jacket and yellow boots, and that he chooses to sing “Ring a ding dillo del!” without provocation, I suspect that he is, in the profoundest sense, one of nature’s bachelors. The film has dropped him altogether: a wise move, for Tom is more of a fairy tale than any other character in the book, and he was, in fact, devised by Tolkien in a bedtime story for his children.
It is at times like this, when the diction droops into the antique, that one struggles to defend the novel against its ranks of accusers. These are legion, beginning with an intemperate Edmund Wilson in 1956, and “The Lord of the Rings” has remained comically divisive; it is either adored, with varying degrees of guilt, or robustly despised, often by those who have yet to open it, or who never made it past the first sentence, with its daunting mention of Bilbo’s “eleventy-first birthday.” To read it again now, after a gap of decades, is both a rousing and a withering experience; nobody can deny the tweeness trap into which it repeatedly tumbles, or the way in which it tends, at moments of great import, to back off and scurry into the creaking comforts of outdated syntax. The hobbits, on their journey home from Mordor, arrive in the region of Eregion and stay for a week: or, rather, as Tolkien puts it, “Here now for seven days they tarried, for the time was at hand for another parting which they were loth to make.” This is the high style, but it is height without self-consciousness; Joyce climbed up there, too, but his was a parodic quest, and he stripped bare the language of nobility as if removing a suit of armor. Hardly anyone had used it unironically since Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” and to revert to it with a straight face in the nineteen-fifties was to mount a head-on challenge to modernity; those forget-me-nots on Goldberry’s belt were a real problem for anyone with a smuggled copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” in which Connie and Mellors employ the same flowers for some highly interior decoration.
I have never quite forgiven Tolkien for leading me on with Goldberry and the even more unearthly Galadriel, and thus leaving me with the distinct impression that all women were milkpale maidens with waterfalls of yellow hair—a delusion that landed me in no end of trouble, and one that, even now, pains me like a war wound. But I was ripe for the gulling, because I read the book at the right age. To call “The Lord of the Rings” superior children’s literature is not meant as denigration, because it seems ideally suited to superior children—not clever ones, that is, but those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back. Tolkien’s characters, like teen-agers, feel at once lonely and sociable; Frodo is aided by a merry band of friends, each of whom is prey to private fears, and the book itself, though dazzled by innocence, is also hungry to know the worst—to confront all varieties of darkness and dereliction. And, to be fair, there are still plenty of passages that infest your mind like lice. How tempting it is to follow Blake’s reading of Milton, or, more recently, John Carey’s black-edged take on Dickens, and to contend that Tolkien was, contrary to his own wishes, a pallid advocate of goodness but an inspired and intricate summoner of evil:
That is an orc-chieftain in the mines of Moria; notice how Tolkien shrugs off the fancy phrasing and whacks us hard with Germanic monosyllables. All the years of studying “Beowulf” have paid off. And there is worse on the way:
This, needless to say, is a Balrog, a subterranean nightmare who comes equipped with batwings and a multi-thonged whip as standard. The cast list of the new “Lord of the Rings” movie does not include Samuel L. Jackson; it seems a curious omission, since he is the man we need to stand on the bridge beside Gandalf, take one look at the Balrog, and declare, “That is one mean motherfucker.”
There is a nasty moment, shortly afterward, when the Balrog cracks his whip and yanks Gandalf down with him into the abyss. The company must continue wizardless. What ensues is a prolonged dramatization of courage, interrupted by lyrical digression. We must think of the years—a dozen in all, from 1937 to 1949—in which the novel was composed. Think, for instance, of a young man from a village in middle England, or, for that matter, from a small town in the Midwest. He is summoned from a place that he knows like his own hand; he is packed off to a country of whose existence he was unaware and with which he had no quarrel; he is asked to fight, and possibly to die, in the defeat of an enemy whom he is barely expected to comprehend; and then, if he survives, he is sent back home, to resume his familiar ways. The cause in which he fought was plainly just, and thus worthy of sacrifice, but that was as much as he knew; its magnitude was beyond him. In other words, the Second World War was largely fought by hobbits. A senior elf called Elrond explains that Frodo’s companions are drawn “from the Free Peoples of the World,” and those capital letters could have been written only by someone who had listened to the speeches of Churchill and de Gaulle. Tolkien did not plan his book with the conflict in mind, and he fiercely denied all charges of allegory (“I dislike allegory whenever I smell it”); but he told his son Christopher, who was on active duty, that “we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” and it is safe to say that, if he had seen a G.I. resting up in a foxhole, sharing a quick smoke, he would have recognized a kindred spirit. The peaceniks who swarmed around “The Lord of the Rings,” twenty years after the war, got the wrong end of the sword; peace is not something into which you endlessly drift but a tenuous blessing that you snap out of when the time demands.
And that may be why “The Lord of the Rings” refuses to relinquish its grip. There is so much that is wrong and flabby with the book, but there is one big thing that Tolkien got right: he got rhythm. His instinct for the procedures of Dark Age saga was as reliable as his indifference to the mores of the machine age, and he soon established a beat—a basic pulse, throbbing below the surface of the book and forcing you, day after day, to turn the page. We can no more leave Frodo stranded on his mission than his friends can. Not all works of literature share that pulse: the Odyssey has it, “Ulysses” doesn’t. This is a way of suggesting that “The Lord of the Rings” may be the final stab at epic, and there is invariably something risky, if not downright risible, in a last gasp. Tolkien believed that he could reproduce the epic form under modern conditions, and that there was no call to update the epic vocabulary; hence both the mockery that met his enterprise and the more charitable amazement that anyone could strive for such a thing. (Read the commentaries of Tolkien scholars and you find them plaintively torn between crying up his serious literary credentials and claiming him for a man of the people, an Aragorn-like leader who will outwit the snares of the élite.) It is a book that bristles with bravado, and yet to give in to it—to cave in to it, as most of us did on a first reading—betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly. That is why boys have traditionally been fonder of it than girls, who are less fazed and flummoxed at the prospect of growing up; women leave their girlhood behind with a glance, whereas men keep looking over their shoulders at the vanishing Shire and asking themselves if it might still be possible, or proper, to head back to their hole in the ground. And so, against our better judgment, we will troop into the movie and start to replace the world outside with the more vibrant and momentous one within, the one that Tolkien taught us to prefer. Elbereth Gilthoniel! Cuio i Pherian annan! Elvish Lives! ♦
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