Big Books I Have Read: The Lord of the Rings, Part II

My history with Tolkien:

I think I’ve read The Lord of the Rings to completion about five times.  By the standards of die-hard Tolkien fans, that’s not a lot, but I’ve always found reasons to go back.

Where it started:  in 1978 my sister read LOTR on the recommendation of friends or possibly my father.  She may have been trying to get ahead of the release of the Ralph Bakshi animated film, the one that ended with Helm’s Deep and was completed later by other people as a TV movie in a totally different style.  I don’t believe I’d started reading the books before we went to see the movie, but I was thoroughly hooked just a few minutes in.  I dived into The Fellowship of the Ring as soon as we got home.  I was in fourth grade.

This, BTW, actually puts me in the same position as people who saw Peter Jackson before they read JRRT.  I may be snobbish about a lot of things, but I can’t be snobbish about that.  Really there’s nothing to be snobbish about here anyway, since Aragorn was voiced by John Hurt and the Bakshi-matic battle scenes were fully as creepy and ominous as anything that can be imagined with CGI today.

So how did Tolkien matter to me at that age?

Let's get the criticism out of the way.  JRRT is a wonderful prose writer, but his storytelling sometimes sags.  There are pacing issues.  Now and then there's a certain amount of (dare I say it?) preciousness in his narrative voice.   

What saves it from any tedium, however, is the world-making.  That’s the strength of it.  It's all there:  cosmology and linguistics and political history and material culture.  It has been said (by JRRT himself, in fact, IIRC) that Tolkien wrote LOTR so that there would be people to speak the languages and live in the lands that he had already invented for himself.  It's all so totally realized that it's just breathtaking. It's hard to call Middle-earth just a "setting."

Tolkien also came along for me when I was already deep into Star Wars.  We all know that George Lucas suffers from severe storytelling disabilities, but these won’t concern us here.  It can’t be denied that the first movie, back before it was the fourth movie, was perfection in itself.  It, too, had a world of its own, and I’d been happily living there for more than a year and a half when I encountered LOTR.  The Star Wars galaxy was nowhere near as well-developed as Middle-earth, and most of it is all surface polish, but it worked well for me at that age (just as H. Potter probably works well enough for kids today).  It felt like a universe.

What Tolkien offered right away was something much, much deeper and more total.  I’m sure I didn’t compare it much to Star Wars at the time, since I loved both and didn’t need to exclude one for the sake of the other, but it’s easy to see the relative strengths in hindsight.  SW had events and characters, and these were terrific, but LOTR had something more:  it had history and geography and always the sense that you were arriving where much of great importance had already happened, much of it long ago.  It wasn't generic, and I still believe it's more than just Europe with orcs.  There was mystery and a strong sense of firm order on the other side of text.  It was enticingly Biblical that way.

In short, what LOTR had was a vivid and inviting sense of place.  Even then, I think, I was dissatisfied with stories that had shallow roots.  LOTR, meanwhile, felt grounded in a reality that I knew I didn’t know enough about.  I think I always had the sense that I could really get there if I just kept reading.