Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Jeff, Journal, Middle Earth, Novel, Offringa, Personal, The Hobbit, Tolkien, writing
“In a hole in the ground their lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole. filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
So begins the book that for many of us was our introduction into fantastic literature. Many of us have heard or read those words so often that we have them memorized – or just simply put them to memory, period. Tolkien has deservedly earned his lofty status as the grand master of fantasy, creator of the greatest world within our own, a world more dear to many of us than the real world we live in.
Except for one little problem: Tolkien isn’t a fantasy writer.
OK, before you get out the pitchforks and prepare to skewer me alive, please consider my words. To start, I’ll say that this post comes out of conversations I had with a couple of my oldest friends over the holidays, and both of the gentleman in question have forgotten more about Tolkien than I’ll ever know.
The conversation began when one of my friends made the comment that Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit movie could have been forty-five minutes shorter. My other friend, being the biggest Tolkien purist that I know, after he picked his jaw up off the floor, had to rebut.
This is the point at which I jumped in. I made a point that I have made before, that the Rings trilogy – and the new Hobbit movie – have many parts in it that add nothing to the story. I know of people who had epileptic fits that Tom Bombadil was left out of the first Rings movie, and that the “Scouring of the Shire” was left out of the third. Or, another example: My same friend threatened to pull his hair out over the changes made to Faramir.
My response to all that was the same now as it was when the movies first came out a decade ago: “Meh.”
My own feelings on Tolkien are mixed, as you might guess from my previous statements. He did create the modern genre of fantasy fiction. Everyone – myself included – borrows from him (or more accurately the common core of myth that he taps) whether they know it or not. His cultures, depth of history and language, and scope are unparalleled. And honestly, if it wasn’t for him, orcs, elves and hobbits wouldn’t be the household terms that they are today. He was the original – and still is – Grand Master. Oft imitated, never bettered.
Yet…. Large portions of the Rings books actually bored me – the endless “Marching through Mordor,” as I call it, as well as the aforementioned scouring of the shire. Ï mean, come on! The climax of the book is when Frodo destroys the ring, but for some reason Tolkien has all this pointless stuff after the climax about Hobbit Paladins! Really?
As such, I’ve never been the slightest bit upset that Tom Bombadil wasn’t in the movie. When I read the book, I was pretty much skimmed that section. “Who is this guy, and why do we care about him?!? Let’s get to the part where Aragorn runs some orcs through! Bombadil adds nothing to the story, and seems to be…. what? This crazy old tree hugger that saves Frodo? Meh. What’s the point?
Sacrilege to some of you, I know, but bare with me.
I made this point about Tom Bombadil to the friend I mentioned above, and it started a discussion that changed my view of Tolkien. I’d always assumed that Tolkien had set out to create an action adventure epic, along the lines that most more modern fantasists seek to write. In that mindset, Bombadil and Hobbit Paladins DON’T fit. They add nothing to the action of a story about epic battles between elf, man, and orc, or about the courage of a lowly common man – or hobbit – as he seeks to prove that one man DOES matter.
Yet this misses the point, as my good friend Rev. Pete pointed out. Were Tolkien simply seeking to write an action story, Bombadil would be out of place. But that isn’t Bombadil’s purpose in the story at all.
Tolkien, he pointed out, set out to create not simple a story, but an entire mythology. Bombadil is there to show us what someone who is truly incorruptable can do in the face of temptation. The ring has no power over him, appearing to be nothing more than shiny trinket. He doesn’t take the ring from Frodo because he is complete in his own person. He doesn’t need or want it.
And that gets me to the point that my friend (reluctantly) agreed to after much discussion: Tolkien is a better world builder than a story teller.
Think about it! What do we love about Middle Earth? It’s length and width and breadth and depth… How is seems to go on forever, with endless detail. It has history going back for millennia, complete with all the parts that and “good” mythos has: The origin of evil great heroes doing great deeds, the fall of mortals into evil… and on and on and on. Yet as a story, the rings novels are pretty… average.
Feel free to disagree with me, but I maintain that Tolkien, like George Lucas, is an idea man, and while Toliken is a far better writer than ol’ George, they have many of the same strengths and flaws. The mythos of the Star Wars universe is just that – a modern American mythos. But as for his writing? Yeah. Prequels. ‘Nuff said.
Tolkien is similar, as I said. Brilliant idea set in a brilliant world. Yet the story isn’t so much to show us a great tale of heroic action, but to show us the world he built – and the mythology behind it. Once I understood that, both worlds make more sense.
And Hobbit paladins no longer irritate me.
Oh, the movie itself? Yeah, it could have been a little shorter. As my friend Ed said, “In this scene we knock goblins off a bridge with a pole. Next, we do it with a ladder!” Yet, in the end….
It’s Tolkien. 🙂
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
Jeff Offringa's Journal 
Tokien’s trilogy is really a combination (“mash-up”, we might say today) of three different genres:
1) The post-WW1 war novel, represented by All Quiet on the Western Front.
2) The coming-of-age children’s adventure novel, represented by Huckleberry Finn.
3) The mythopoetic epic, represented by Beowulf (or the Illiad, the Prose Edda, etc).
None of these things are exactly what we regard as a “fantasy novel”, and none of them care all that much about the kind of “plot” concerns that motivate a fantasy novel. The first category uses war as a backdrop for elegiac reminiscence on the loss of beauty and tranquility even in a victorious war, which is a fundamentally unheroic theme. The second category is introspective and heavily grounded in real-world culture and tradition, not really recipes for fantastical themes either. The third category is deeply related to fantasy, of course, but creates something that’s totally unlike the modern novel: Most epic poetry “ends in the wrong place” (the Odyssey’s Telemachus-centric postscript is the Scouring of Ithaca, sort-of) and contains substantial digressions that “don’t forward the plot” (an entire chapter of funeral games, for example).
Each of these three novels needs a different ending, which accounts for the strange structure of the Return of the King. The mythopoetic story ends first, with the destruction of the Ring. The coming of age novel ends second, with the four hobbits becoming fully-realized heroes who can set their own small world to rights, after being tutored by their experiences in the wider world. And the war novel ends last, with the two wounded ringbearers being forced to leave Middle-Earth along with the elves in a poignant expression of loss.
I can think of a few other genre novels that attempt to do two of those things at once (Ender’s Game, for example, is both #1 and #2), but Tolkien is really the only one I know to attempt all three. I’d say his success as a mythopoet is almost incomparable. I can’t think of anyone capable of doing half as well at writing a book that can sit comfortably on the shelf beside authentic ancient poetry as the Silmarillion, and that gives his books a depth that’s missing from most other high fantasy novels. That’s not just world-building in a descriptive sense, it’s also creating the literature, language, and verse that inhabits that fictional world.
In the other two categories, he’s competent but not exceptional. But many people who would never read a serious war novel have been indirectly introduced to some of the same themes with a dose of fantasy to make it more palatable, so in effect he’s become the way that we can relate to the emotions of the WW1 generation, which would otherwise be mostly forgotten to us. That’s a valuable service for someone to perform.
I’d also contend that Tolkien (like most British authors) is a master prose stylist, in a way that few American authors can match. Most modern fantasy writers have a bare descriptive style that feels flatter by comparison. That differentiates Tolkien from someone like Lucas, who is only an idea factory and has no aptitude for polished literary style at all.
Comment by ELH January 7, 2013 @ 6:05 pm