What first struck me about Tolkien’s school is that the boys, craving beauty, admired Morris, Burne Jones and medievalism, and I immediately thought of contemporary boys listening to hip hop (an ugly, primitive genre if ever there was one) and watching porn. In a sea of urban ugliness Tolkien’s friends still clung to one of the three pillars of civilisation, beauty, which as an aspiration is now all but gone. Even our artists are contemptuous of the ideal, as the elites are also contemptuous of the other two pillars, truth and goodness (what is truth? what is the good?). We may have technology but our ‘civilisation’ is rotten to the core.
I wouldn’t say the ordinary people have lost their taste for beauty, only the elites, but that’s who politicians and decision-makers listen to. An example from just a couple years back: Trump was quite dismissive of modern, brutalist design in buildings. He signed an executive order that federal buildings should be based on classical designs. This was widely dismissed by architects, Democrats (kinda mandatory for them, I guess), and the media (Democrats who haven’t been elected, in some cases). Surveys actually showed that across the political divide, however, most Americans strongly favored the classical designs for public buildings. Biden rescinded that order very early on. But it isn’t what the people want, it’s just all they can get if they want to allow those who care nothing for their opinions into positions of responsibility.
Christopher Chantrill
2 years ago
I think that fantasy, sci-fi, and myth get a lot less respect than they deserve. And modernist snobs get a lot more respect than they deserve.
True, tho as a long term SF reader I have to say there’s more embarrassing tripe in SF & fantasy than in most genres. As to the modernists, I was gratified to discover the other day in the vast correspondence between those two titans of modernism, Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, that they were both huge Tolkien fans, and as dismissive of the snobs as Sandbrook. Comforting.
J Bryant
2 years ago
A fine essay. Thank you. And to heck with the literary snobs.
Literary snobs should know their history a bit better. Tolkien, essentially, builds on Old Norse sagas, Chivalric romances, Wagnerian epics and English letters. There’s so much rich history in Tolkien.
…bearing in mind his academic credentials, and fluency in various ancient languages…this is a rather curious view of Professor Tolkien. Although Mr Scarrow is no doubt a well-educated fellow…I rather think the Professor has the edge…
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
A fine essay.
The similarities of CS Lewis’s life and Tolkien’s is very strong, the childhood (although Lewis had a life of hell at school) University, and WWI Trenches, and what magnificent books they produced. I would add Alan Garner with them, in evoking that feel of nobility and baseness, good and evil, and ultimately, one’s duty is always primary rather than self – in the similar Scandinavian Folk setting.
When Harry Potter came out I was curious to read it, but it lacked soul to me, and most of all lacking Nobility and Honour and ethics, it made me feel modern children have grown up in a shallower world than us older ones did – and more shallow every year.
– children’s books were one of the greatest influences on my life, I think the reason I hit the road to become some useless drifter for decades was the romance of the remote lands and the societies outside of the mainstream, from those stories. Snufkin from Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll was sort of what I became – the character I felt a very great bond with as a child, I always wanted to see what was beyond the ranges he would cross. I think from his character I learned to deal with great periods of solitude, years, out on my own as a young man, to actually seek out great hardship and remote places and solitude and be able to take it, and even learn to respect tedium as what drives one to think and feel – as activity replaces thought and feel of a place – learning to just be somewhere with nothing but looking out, and thought.
To have grown up without my books, and the great deal of isolation I had as a child where one only had imagination to create an escape from tedium was how I became who I did. As a child we had no TVs, radios, neighborhoods, but lived behind walls with gardens – books, imagination, simple toys, creatures… It was the opposite of childhood today, – – of endless stimulation, phones, people, action, games, Screens, and never The solitude and complete self dependence which were much of my life, and the books having given you this world inside.. Really – it was like these books were my best friends, like another world I lived in.
Have you tried Disenchantment by CF Montague? A wonderful exposé of many modern trends, already visible to a veteran in the years immediately after WW1
Agreed – i go away on my boat for a week at a time with a big pile of books and virtually no one gets it – ‘dont you get lonely ?”, dont you get bored, you are a bit strange , but your boat is so small , I would feel unsafe, there is no proper bathroom,why do that to your wife, etc etc. It seems that people can now only cope with careful pseudo lives reliant on hourly ? electronic connectedness – as I listen to the 2 pigeons outside -‘ its ok i am other here, its ok i am over here, its ok i am over here, its ok i am over here’ ad nausiem – most of the silly stuff seems to happen on land – thank the god thing that most of the planet is covered in water !!!!!!!
Anna Meanock
2 years ago
How can the story of how Power corrupts people, absolute power absolutely, ever be out dated? When greed chases away loving kindness and people act in a base manner, their is always a story to be told. It is an ageless Tale.
Andrew Masterman
2 years ago
Bravo Dominic and thank you. I’ve also thought woven in was a deeply profound (and Christian) observation about society in that only the Hobbits could bear the ring and so defeat Sauron and of the Hobbits, it is Sam who is the true hero rather than Frodo. I wonder how much of this too comes from his experiences in the trenches.
Hi Jon, I’m not sure whether you’ve read the books but this is fairly key to the trilogy. The point is that the Hobbits (based on an admittedly romanticised trench socialist view of the English working man/private soldier) were the ones who defeated evil as personified Sauron because of their courage and loyalty to each other. All of the other members of the Fellowship, as exemplified by Boromir and Galadriel’s vision would be corrupted by the ring. I have read (can’t give a reference, sorry)that Tolkien based Samon his batman and so is making the point about the officer class being dependent on the resilience of their men. Underlying this is a Christian ethic about the meek inheriting the earth. If this makes you queasy, then sorry, but we are talking fantasy here albeit underpinned by myth, faith, neo-romanticism/environmentalism and a degree of sentimentality. If that’s not for you, you might want to give the books a miss. They do feature trolls though…
Excellent response! I first came across Tolkien through reading The Hobbit in late 60’s and was hooked. I remember my then ten year old reading LOTR by wood firelight in our rented shepherds cottage in the Scottish hills. Magical stuff!
An excellent essay and I’ll join my voice in the chorus of those booing the modernist snobs. While Dominic’s essay peeled back several layers of Tolkien’s work, sadly he did not penetrate deeply enough. At the heart of LOTR is Tolkien’s Catholic faith and worldview. He wrote in a letter “TheLord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” This article by Joseph Pearce unlocks the Catholic elements brilliantly:https://denvercatholic.org/the-catholic-origins-of-the-lord-of-the-rings-and-other-truths-about-j-r-r-tolkien/
Spot on. Thank you. I’d only add that Tolkien is a writer for the future too because, shaped by his friendship with Owen Barfield, he realised that portraying an awareness of life and nature that has past is also seeding the yearning for and inception of a conscious for the future – when we might know “the inside of the whole world” once more, renewed, extended.
And in down moments, I am consoled, enjoying contemplation of the Revenge of the Ents.
JR Stoker
2 years ago
Great article, thank you. But whilst I admire the books tremendously and that world that Tolkien created, I am not nearly so keen on the films; far too much fighting in those huge set pieces. That Tom Bombadil was left out and too much time given to orcs shows how Jackson got it a bit wrong.
Though it can be argued that Jackson was excavating in the deeper underpinnings of the books and making the threat explicit, it might have been better to leave the threat where Tolkien put it. Especially in The Hobbit film, which tends to loose the sense of the journey and the wonder of the outside world, and take up too much time, again, with fighting. It certainly did not need a trilogy of films
Agree about the Hobbit. I sat through the first instalment of overblown fight/chase sequences but that was enough. It’s a very different, gentler and more childish story than LOTR. Jackson seems to have either not got this, or ignored it.
The three Hobbit films desperately need condensing into one longish one and some severe cutting of endless silly CGI slapstick, chases and fights, the queasy elf dwarf lurve interest etc. Indeed, the strangeness of the outside world and the sense of journey are absent. Good points.
Tolkien’s story is heroic and at the same time very human – yes even with elves, dwarves and orcs! The critics are post modernists who despise morals, heroes and beauty. All desperately needed in this world.
You’ve said it beautifully. I’m an American, not just Christian, but conservative Presbyterian. I don’t know anyone in my church who doesn’t love Tolkien. Recently, in his weekly notes, our pastor referred to himself as a hobbit. All of the young teens in our church’s school throw LOR references about casually. Morals ( and its better, spirituality ), heroes, beauty. Indeed. ( Note in passing: Rod Dreher, who is probably familiar to many readers here, referred to himself as a hobbit the other day. )
Madeleine Jones
2 years ago
There’s some great scholarship done by John Garth (mentioned in the article) about Tolkien. I own a beautiful book from Garth about how the ‘real world’ inspired Middle-Earth.
Ian McKinney
2 years ago
This is a lovely, well written piece.
David Batlle
2 years ago
I merely chuckle and shake my head at the critics. Tolkien requires no defense.
Last edited 2 years ago by David Batlle
Steve Byrd
2 years ago
Thanks, Dominic for that. Synchronicity, too: earlier this morning I was doing an English lesson with an Italian student and he said his favourite book was . . . Lord of the Rings. He seems to have read all Tolkein’s work; I’ve never been able to get through them. But, in my defence, I have read Beowulf ( ‘A Far Light’ by Robert DiNapoli is a great guide) and as a teenager, the Icelandic sagas; Njal’s Saga in particular is a great story of the struggle to do the right thing in violent circumstances. Your analysis is spot on. The ‘sneering classes’ have surrendered to the Machine.
Michelle Johnston
2 years ago
A beautiful piece. Tolkien articulated beauty, in the world in men in women, as well as how it is lost.
Last year I lived on the South Island of New Zealand and apart from a brief period in May, I tramped the deserted coasts of the North of the Island as well as many of the muti day hikes where life is a mixture of hiking, stopping to make camp and conversation into the night under the stars or around a warm fire in the doc huts.
Very few of the absent tourists really get in that deep and the young have their Instagram checklist but out there with strangers who become friends on a multi-day hike there was/is a glimpse of what Tolkien was on about refracting a way of doing things which is fast disappearing.
Just as armageddon was about to break an English Girl died hiking, drowned in a river after becoming disorientated. Tolkiens created world, as it was for him reminds me that death is ever-present and just round the corner and that we should live life in the knowledge there are risks and sometimes that risk increases but we should not stop living.
One could go on about the Mighty Warrior King who went before he died witless, in glory undimmed.
There is much that we have forgotten.
Am rather planning the same after watching me dad decline with alzeimers
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
I agree that fantasy draws a lot of undeserved condescension from the literati, especially considering the lousy quality of many writers they lionize. Personally, however, the genre never did a thing for me. Nothing snotty here. It’s a bit like Elizabeth Taylor. I acknowledge her beauty, it’s just that she never ignited anything in me. There’s no particular reason that should be, it just happened that it was the case. Same with fantasy.
Anna Bramwell
2 years ago
I write at length in my book Ecology, in the 20th Century, A History ()Yale,UP London,1989) about Tolkien and his views and the roots of the Hobbits. Good to see those issue taken up again, and by a distinguished historian.
Nicholas Rowe
2 years ago
Germaine Greer may not be the only person to not have read Tolkien’s work but nevertheless has an opinion about it. Some considerable number of those who rate the book so highly may have only done so on the strength of seeing the films rather than from a reading of it.
New Line Cinema’s scriptwriters pointed out that they corrected a major error in the original. This is where Faramir refuses to take the ring, even though he has Frodo captive.
The films do the job that an editor should have done on the book. The scriptwriters unsentimentally distil the essence of the story while trimming out the parts that don’t fit, such as Tom Bombadil. They also add the love story between Aragorn and Arwen that Tolkien only put into a short appendix. They also add doses of humour which are absent, rather like they are from Pullman’s turgid epic. Even Lewis managed to put humour into his Narnia stories.
The films have some magnificent monologues, such as Elrond’s eulogy about Aragorn’s passing as a mortal, which, if not exactly as Tolkien wrote them, elevate the story such as to negative the various criticisms of triviality.
Faramir holds Frodo captive because he doesn’t know who he is. He thinks Frodo is an orc spy. Once he realizes who Frodo is and what he’s doing, Faramir releases him.
We’re probably going to get a lot of criticism, but I’m with you on Tom Bombadil. For the longest I refused to read LOTR because I figured it was for nerds (I was around 20 before I realized I was one). A friend finally talked me into it, after years of effort, and I loved them. The only major exception was Tom B. That part just made me cringe. Whenever I was trying to talk someone else into reading it, I would throw in “There’s one weird part in the first book, but just get past that and it’s all great.”
I loved the films. There are things I wish they had done differently. Some changes I could understand–you could never make the films exactly as the books. Others–like green demon Galadrial or the ghost army intervening at Pelennor Fields–I think were avoidable. But the absolute best change was leaving out Tom B. Especially in a film setting, that would have been the kind of thing to drive away the non-hardcore Tolkien fans. Jackson and New Line weren’t just making these movies to appease hardcore fans, they had to make money too, and throwing in something that would have seemed too embarrassing to watch for people who weren’t already LOTR fans would probably have really hurt the bottom line. And even at least some hardcore fans (like me and everyone I knew back then–only more than a decade later did I learn some people actually wanted him in the movies) were probably grateful. I think some people forget these movies were about the riskiest venture yet in the film making world back then–fronting $300 million to film three movies at once without even one of them having gone to theater, much less made a profit.
I understand keeping Tom Bombadil out of the films, and Old Man Willow would have caused confusion with the Ents. However, it’s a shame we also lost the Barrow-wight and the significance of the Numenorean blade specifically enchanted to undo the Witch-King’s magical protection, used to such great effect on Pelennor field.
Lewis would have been hard to put to keep humor (however subtle and ironical) out of anything. It was peculiar to his genius.
Patrick Heren
2 years ago
Very well expressed. Tolkien was also a devout Catholic, an aspect of his life ignored by most critics, but which informed all of his writing.
LCarey Rowland
2 years ago
Thank you, Dominic.
I have never read any of Tolkien’s books, but my three children read them while they were growing up here in the US, and I saw the movies.
Your literary portrait here was absolutely fascinating to me, because I have done extensive historical reading about the the two World Wars. This research was undertaken mostly for the sake of exploring backstory for my third novel, Smoke, which is about what was happening in Europe in 1937; the story begins in London on the coronation day of King George VI, May 12.
What was especially fascinating about your Tolkien report was your explanation that related his imaginative Tolkien inkings in the infernal trenches of France. The winsome imaginings of a British solder while confined to a 1916 hellhole at the Somme. . . gave birth to JRR’s multi-storied tale of the Shire, Gondor, Mordor and beyond.
Amazing! What a way to retrieve Wonder from the Mordorous hellholes of World War!–writing a series of “children’s books” that go viral in the later 20th-century!
Sir, your pun, “mordorous,” sickens me with envy. Why didn’t I think of it?!?! I’m going to tell all of my hobbity pals about it.
Margaret Boult
2 years ago
Good – I no longer have to feel embarrassed about having returned to LOTR with Andy Serkis’ new spoken word rendering. I will admit however that I still don’t like the songs and poems that I skipped over when I was 16.
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
Question from the anty-podes: what’s with “going up to Oxford” and being “sent down”? Is it on a hill? Do Cambridge students face similar topographic challenges?
I am not sure how relevant London is.People “go up” to Oxford and get “sent down” regardless of where they come from. Similarly, people traditionally “go up” to London (or “town”) and “down” to the country. I am also not sure most attendees came from London. I am sure a lot did but not necessarily most.
I think this is correct for “up to..” In terms of being “sent down”: my experience may not be typical but I’ve heard this used for any university/ educational institution (not just Oxford) – as a euphemism for “expelled”.
Professor Spooner, for those not aware of what this is referring to; the man who gave his name to “spoonerisms”.
Johanna Edmond
2 years ago
I like to think what (fictional) Dorothea Brooke would have made of LOTR. I think she would have been impressed, and she had high standards. As someone from outside the UK, there is something very English about the books despite the Norse undertones. This is no relation of Kristin Lavransdatter. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a characteristic, but it does matter to the interpretation.
I wonder how Dominic would feel if more characters in LOTR had spoken with the accent of Faramir?
Terence Fitch
2 years ago
Morris! Read ‘News from Nowhere’- it’s the most stupid stuff and proto fascist.
Jon Redman
2 years ago
the village of Sarehole
You would have special sympathy for anyone dyslexic growing up somewhere with a name like that.
The critique of Tolkien with which I’m most familiar and sympathetic is that it’s all rather nursery childish.
the tortured relationship between Gollum and Frodo
I mean, really.
anxious about the consequences of science, the environmental costs of industry
The issue is scientism, not science, and the real worry is the cost to industry of environmentalism. He saw none of this coming AFAIK. To mention him in the same breath as Orwell – who foresaw a great deal and with not a Tharg or whatever in sight – is just fanboi laughable.
As per formula. With every criticism of Tolkien always comes this very revealing sense of self-superiority. It’s a tell. We aren’t dealing with literary critics, we are dealing with snobs.
Nope, you’re in fact dealing with people who rightly consider adults who still read children’s books about trolls and fairies to be very, very similar to adults who still build Lego. Both are activities you should really have got past when you were 12 or at a push 14. Kids’ pastimes are for kids.
Have to agree – tried to watch the first lotr movie and pretty much fell asleep – same with the book, could not finish. Found C S Lewis very engaging though and way more relevant. Lotr popularity is a complete mystery to me. I have a vague theory that fantasy fans struggle to deal with the real world – pretty dangerous saying that here tho – tho i do look forwards to other comments…..Twould be really weird if most Unherd readers were lolr fans !!!!!
What first struck me about Tolkien’s school is that the boys, craving beauty, admired Morris, Burne Jones and medievalism, and I immediately thought of contemporary boys listening to hip hop (an ugly, primitive genre if ever there was one) and watching porn. In a sea of urban ugliness Tolkien’s friends still clung to one of the three pillars of civilisation, beauty, which as an aspiration is now all but gone. Even our artists are contemptuous of the ideal, as the elites are also contemptuous of the other two pillars, truth and goodness (what is truth? what is the good?). We may have technology but our ‘civilisation’ is rotten to the core.
Wonderfully expressed
I wouldn’t say the ordinary people have lost their taste for beauty, only the elites, but that’s who politicians and decision-makers listen to. An example from just a couple years back: Trump was quite dismissive of modern, brutalist design in buildings. He signed an executive order that federal buildings should be based on classical designs. This was widely dismissed by architects, Democrats (kinda mandatory for them, I guess), and the media (Democrats who haven’t been elected, in some cases). Surveys actually showed that across the political divide, however, most Americans strongly favored the classical designs for public buildings. Biden rescinded that order very early on. But it isn’t what the people want, it’s just all they can get if they want to allow those who care nothing for their opinions into positions of responsibility.
I think that fantasy, sci-fi, and myth get a lot less respect than they deserve. And modernist snobs get a lot more respect than they deserve.
True, tho as a long term SF reader I have to say there’s more embarrassing tripe in SF & fantasy than in most genres. As to the modernists, I was gratified to discover the other day in the vast correspondence between those two titans of modernism, Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, that they were both huge Tolkien fans, and as dismissive of the snobs as Sandbrook. Comforting.
A fine essay. Thank you. And to heck with the literary snobs.
Literary snobs should know their history a bit better. Tolkien, essentially, builds on Old Norse sagas, Chivalric romances, Wagnerian epics and English letters. There’s so much rich history in Tolkien.
Tolkien is to Norse sagas roughly what Simon Scarrow is to Virgil.
…bearing in mind his academic credentials, and fluency in various ancient languages…this is a rather curious view of Professor Tolkien. Although Mr Scarrow is no doubt a well-educated fellow…I rather think the Professor has the edge…
A fine essay.
The similarities of CS Lewis’s life and Tolkien’s is very strong, the childhood (although Lewis had a life of hell at school) University, and WWI Trenches, and what magnificent books they produced. I would add Alan Garner with them, in evoking that feel of nobility and baseness, good and evil, and ultimately, one’s duty is always primary rather than self – in the similar Scandinavian Folk setting.
When Harry Potter came out I was curious to read it, but it lacked soul to me, and most of all lacking Nobility and Honour and ethics, it made me feel modern children have grown up in a shallower world than us older ones did – and more shallow every year.
– children’s books were one of the greatest influences on my life, I think the reason I hit the road to become some useless drifter for decades was the romance of the remote lands and the societies outside of the mainstream, from those stories. Snufkin from Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll was sort of what I became – the character I felt a very great bond with as a child, I always wanted to see what was beyond the ranges he would cross. I think from his character I learned to deal with great periods of solitude, years, out on my own as a young man, to actually seek out great hardship and remote places and solitude and be able to take it, and even learn to respect tedium as what drives one to think and feel – as activity replaces thought and feel of a place – learning to just be somewhere with nothing but looking out, and thought.
To have grown up without my books, and the great deal of isolation I had as a child where one only had imagination to create an escape from tedium was how I became who I did. As a child we had no TVs, radios, neighborhoods, but lived behind walls with gardens – books, imagination, simple toys, creatures… It was the opposite of childhood today, – – of endless stimulation, phones, people, action, games, Screens, and never The solitude and complete self dependence which were much of my life, and the books having given you this world inside.. Really – it was like these books were my best friends, like another world I lived in.
Have you tried Disenchantment by CF Montague? A wonderful exposé of many modern trends, already visible to a veteran in the years immediately after WW1
Agreed – i go away on my boat for a week at a time with a big pile of books and virtually no one gets it – ‘dont you get lonely ?”, dont you get bored, you are a bit strange , but your boat is so small , I would feel unsafe, there is no proper bathroom,why do that to your wife, etc etc. It seems that people can now only cope with careful pseudo lives reliant on hourly ? electronic connectedness – as I listen to the 2 pigeons outside -‘ its ok i am other here, its ok i am over here, its ok i am over here, its ok i am over here’ ad nausiem – most of the silly stuff seems to happen on land – thank the god thing that most of the planet is covered in water !!!!!!!
How can the story of how Power corrupts people, absolute power absolutely, ever be out dated? When greed chases away loving kindness and people act in a base manner, their is always a story to be told. It is an ageless Tale.
Bravo Dominic and thank you. I’ve also thought woven in was a deeply profound (and Christian) observation about society in that only the Hobbits could bear the ring and so defeat Sauron and of the Hobbits, it is Sam who is the true hero rather than Frodo. I wonder how much of this too comes from his experiences in the trenches.
Hi Jon, I’m not sure whether you’ve read the books but this is fairly key to the trilogy. The point is that the Hobbits (based on an admittedly romanticised trench socialist view of the English working man/private soldier) were the ones who defeated evil as personified Sauron because of their courage and loyalty to each other. All of the other members of the Fellowship, as exemplified by Boromir and Galadriel’s vision would be corrupted by the ring. I have read (can’t give a reference, sorry)that Tolkien based Samon his batman and so is making the point about the officer class being dependent on the resilience of their men. Underlying this is a Christian ethic about the meek inheriting the earth. If this makes you queasy, then sorry, but we are talking fantasy here albeit underpinned by myth, faith, neo-romanticism/environmentalism and a degree of sentimentality. If that’s not for you, you might want to give the books a miss. They do feature trolls though…
Excellent response! I first came across Tolkien through reading The Hobbit in late 60’s and was hooked. I remember my then ten year old reading LOTR by wood firelight in our rented shepherds cottage in the Scottish hills. Magical stuff!
Enjoyed your Parthian shot.
An excellent essay and I’ll join my voice in the chorus of those booing the modernist snobs. While Dominic’s essay peeled back several layers of Tolkien’s work, sadly he did not penetrate deeply enough. At the heart of LOTR is Tolkien’s Catholic faith and worldview. He wrote in a letter “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” This article by Joseph Pearce unlocks the Catholic elements brilliantly:https://denvercatholic.org/the-catholic-origins-of-the-lord-of-the-rings-and-other-truths-about-j-r-r-tolkien/
Exactly. We must not forget this aspect.
Spot on. Thank you. I’d only add that Tolkien is a writer for the future too because, shaped by his friendship with Owen Barfield, he realised that portraying an awareness of life and nature that has past is also seeding the yearning for and inception of a conscious for the future – when we might know “the inside of the whole world” once more, renewed, extended.
And in down moments, I am consoled, enjoying contemplation of the Revenge of the Ents.
Great article, thank you. But whilst I admire the books tremendously and that world that Tolkien created, I am not nearly so keen on the films; far too much fighting in those huge set pieces. That Tom Bombadil was left out and too much time given to orcs shows how Jackson got it a bit wrong.
Though it can be argued that Jackson was excavating in the deeper underpinnings of the books and making the threat explicit, it might have been better to leave the threat where Tolkien put it. Especially in The Hobbit film, which tends to loose the sense of the journey and the wonder of the outside world, and take up too much time, again, with fighting. It certainly did not need a trilogy of films
Agree about the Hobbit. I sat through the first instalment of overblown fight/chase sequences but that was enough. It’s a very different, gentler and more childish story than LOTR. Jackson seems to have either not got this, or ignored it.
The three Hobbit films desperately need condensing into one longish one and some severe cutting of endless silly CGI slapstick, chases and fights, the queasy elf dwarf lurve interest etc. Indeed, the strangeness of the outside world and the sense of journey are absent. Good points.
Jackson butchered it. Horrible.
It’s rather odd that this piece does not mention that Tolkein was a Christian (a friend of C.S. Lewis)
Actually I much prefer C S LEWIS..
Tolkien’s story is heroic and at the same time very human – yes even with elves, dwarves and orcs! The critics are post modernists who despise morals, heroes and beauty. All desperately needed in this world.
You’ve said it beautifully. I’m an American, not just Christian, but conservative Presbyterian. I don’t know anyone in my church who doesn’t love Tolkien. Recently, in his weekly notes, our pastor referred to himself as a hobbit. All of the young teens in our church’s school throw LOR references about casually. Morals ( and its better, spirituality ), heroes, beauty. Indeed. ( Note in passing: Rod Dreher, who is probably familiar to many readers here, referred to himself as a hobbit the other day. )
There’s some great scholarship done by John Garth (mentioned in the article) about Tolkien. I own a beautiful book from Garth about how the ‘real world’ inspired Middle-Earth.
This is a lovely, well written piece.
I merely chuckle and shake my head at the critics. Tolkien requires no defense.
Thanks, Dominic for that. Synchronicity, too: earlier this morning I was doing an English lesson with an Italian student and he said his favourite book was . . . Lord of the Rings. He seems to have read all Tolkein’s work; I’ve never been able to get through them. But, in my defence, I have read Beowulf ( ‘A Far Light’ by Robert DiNapoli is a great guide) and as a teenager, the Icelandic sagas; Njal’s Saga in particular is a great story of the struggle to do the right thing in violent circumstances. Your analysis is spot on. The ‘sneering classes’ have surrendered to the Machine.
A beautiful piece. Tolkien articulated beauty, in the world in men in women, as well as how it is lost.
Last year I lived on the South Island of New Zealand and apart from a brief period in May, I tramped the deserted coasts of the North of the Island as well as many of the muti day hikes where life is a mixture of hiking, stopping to make camp and conversation into the night under the stars or around a warm fire in the doc huts.
Very few of the absent tourists really get in that deep and the young have their Instagram checklist but out there with strangers who become friends on a multi-day hike there was/is a glimpse of what Tolkien was on about refracting a way of doing things which is fast disappearing.
Just as armageddon was about to break an English Girl died hiking, drowned in a river after becoming disorientated. Tolkiens created world, as it was for him reminds me that death is ever-present and just round the corner and that we should live life in the knowledge there are risks and sometimes that risk increases but we should not stop living.
One could go on about the Mighty Warrior King who went before he died witless, in glory undimmed.
There is much that we have forgotten.
Am rather planning the same after watching me dad decline with alzeimers
I agree that fantasy draws a lot of undeserved condescension from the literati, especially considering the lousy quality of many writers they lionize. Personally, however, the genre never did a thing for me. Nothing snotty here. It’s a bit like Elizabeth Taylor. I acknowledge her beauty, it’s just that she never ignited anything in me. There’s no particular reason that should be, it just happened that it was the case. Same with fantasy.
I write at length in my book Ecology, in the 20th Century, A History ()Yale,UP London,1989) about Tolkien and his views and the roots of the Hobbits. Good to see those issue taken up again, and by a distinguished historian.
Germaine Greer may not be the only person to not have read Tolkien’s work but nevertheless has an opinion about it. Some considerable number of those who rate the book so highly may have only done so on the strength of seeing the films rather than from a reading of it.
New Line Cinema’s scriptwriters pointed out that they corrected a major error in the original. This is where Faramir refuses to take the ring, even though he has Frodo captive.
The films do the job that an editor should have done on the book. The scriptwriters unsentimentally distil the essence of the story while trimming out the parts that don’t fit, such as Tom Bombadil. They also add the love story between Aragorn and Arwen that Tolkien only put into a short appendix. They also add doses of humour which are absent, rather like they are from Pullman’s turgid epic. Even Lewis managed to put humour into his Narnia stories.
The films have some magnificent monologues, such as Elrond’s eulogy about Aragorn’s passing as a mortal, which, if not exactly as Tolkien wrote them, elevate the story such as to negative the various criticisms of triviality.
Faramir holds Frodo captive because he doesn’t know who he is. He thinks Frodo is an orc spy. Once he realizes who Frodo is and what he’s doing, Faramir releases him.
We’re probably going to get a lot of criticism, but I’m with you on Tom Bombadil. For the longest I refused to read LOTR because I figured it was for nerds (I was around 20 before I realized I was one). A friend finally talked me into it, after years of effort, and I loved them. The only major exception was Tom B. That part just made me cringe. Whenever I was trying to talk someone else into reading it, I would throw in “There’s one weird part in the first book, but just get past that and it’s all great.”
I loved the films. There are things I wish they had done differently. Some changes I could understand–you could never make the films exactly as the books. Others–like green demon Galadrial or the ghost army intervening at Pelennor Fields–I think were avoidable. But the absolute best change was leaving out Tom B. Especially in a film setting, that would have been the kind of thing to drive away the non-hardcore Tolkien fans. Jackson and New Line weren’t just making these movies to appease hardcore fans, they had to make money too, and throwing in something that would have seemed too embarrassing to watch for people who weren’t already LOTR fans would probably have really hurt the bottom line. And even at least some hardcore fans (like me and everyone I knew back then–only more than a decade later did I learn some people actually wanted him in the movies) were probably grateful. I think some people forget these movies were about the riskiest venture yet in the film making world back then–fronting $300 million to film three movies at once without even one of them having gone to theater, much less made a profit.
I understand keeping Tom Bombadil out of the films, and Old Man Willow would have caused confusion with the Ents. However, it’s a shame we also lost the Barrow-wight and the significance of the Numenorean blade specifically enchanted to undo the Witch-King’s magical protection, used to such great effect on Pelennor field.
Yes, back in the day the barrow-wight in particular was one of those things I really missed when the first movie came out.
Lewis would have been hard to put to keep humor (however subtle and ironical) out of anything. It was peculiar to his genius.
Very well expressed. Tolkien was also a devout Catholic, an aspect of his life ignored by most critics, but which informed all of his writing.
Thank you, Dominic.
I have never read any of Tolkien’s books, but my three children read them while they were growing up here in the US, and I saw the movies.
Your literary portrait here was absolutely fascinating to me, because I have done extensive historical reading about the the two World Wars. This research was undertaken mostly for the sake of exploring backstory for my third novel, Smoke, which is about what was happening in Europe in 1937; the story begins in London on the coronation day of King George VI, May 12.
What was especially fascinating about your Tolkien report was your explanation that related his imaginative Tolkien inkings in the infernal trenches of France. The winsome imaginings of a British solder while confined to a 1916 hellhole at the Somme. . . gave birth to JRR’s multi-storied tale of the Shire, Gondor, Mordor and beyond.
Amazing! What a way to retrieve Wonder from the Mordorous hellholes of World War!–writing a series of “children’s books” that go viral in the later 20th-century!
Sir, your pun, “mordorous,” sickens me with envy. Why didn’t I think of it?!?! I’m going to tell all of my hobbity pals about it.
Good – I no longer have to feel embarrassed about having returned to LOTR with Andy Serkis’ new spoken word rendering. I will admit however that I still don’t like the songs and poems that I skipped over when I was 16.
Question from the anty-podes: what’s with “going up to Oxford” and being “sent down”? Is it on a hill? Do Cambridge students face similar topographic challenges?
It’s because Oxford is ‘up’ from London. And most attendees at one time were from there.
I am not sure how relevant London is.People “go up” to Oxford and get “sent down” regardless of where they come from. Similarly, people traditionally “go up” to London (or “town”) and “down” to the country. I am also not sure most attendees came from London. I am sure a lot did but not necessarily most.
I think this is correct for “up to..” In terms of being “sent down”: my experience may not be typical but I’ve heard this used for any university/ educational institution (not just Oxford) – as a euphemism for “expelled”.
No, but the venerable Oxonian professor did plan to leave “by the town drain”…
Professor Spooner, for those not aware of what this is referring to; the man who gave his name to “spoonerisms”.
I like to think what (fictional) Dorothea Brooke would have made of LOTR. I think she would have been impressed, and she had high standards. As someone from outside the UK, there is something very English about the books despite the Norse undertones. This is no relation of Kristin Lavransdatter. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a characteristic, but it does matter to the interpretation.
I wonder how Dominic would feel if more characters in LOTR had spoken with the accent of Faramir?
Morris! Read ‘News from Nowhere’- it’s the most stupid stuff and proto fascist.
You would have special sympathy for anyone dyslexic growing up somewhere with a name like that.
The critique of Tolkien with which I’m most familiar and sympathetic is that it’s all rather nursery childish.
I mean, really.
The issue is scientism, not science, and the real worry is the cost to industry of environmentalism. He saw none of this coming AFAIK. To mention him in the same breath as Orwell – who foresaw a great deal and with not a Tharg or whatever in sight – is just fanboi laughable.
“I mean, really.”
As per formula. With every criticism of Tolkien always comes this very revealing sense of self-superiority. It’s a tell. We aren’t dealing with literary critics, we are dealing with snobs.
Nope, you’re in fact dealing with people who rightly consider adults who still read children’s books about trolls and fairies to be very, very similar to adults who still build Lego. Both are activities you should really have got past when you were 12 or at a push 14. Kids’ pastimes are for kids.
You bring to mind C.S. Lewis’ conviction that those who desire joy will certainly find it.
Have to agree – tried to watch the first lotr movie and pretty much fell asleep – same with the book, could not finish. Found C S Lewis very engaging though and way more relevant. Lotr popularity is a complete mystery to me. I have a vague theory that fantasy fans struggle to deal with the real world – pretty dangerous saying that here tho – tho i do look forwards to other comments…..Twould be really weird if most Unherd readers were lolr fans !!!!!
Come on- who else out there does not like lotr – lets have some balance here !!
Thank you for providing a perfect illustration of Dominic Sandbrook’s thesis.
The only thing I like about your comment is your pointing out the making of an anagram.