Tolkien Critical Reviews

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Tolkien's works were praised not only by readers, but also by literary scholars. This document is a compilation of academic reviews on Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring".

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On the Possibility of Writing Tolkien Criticism

By Neil D. Issacs

". . . the Tolkien mass popularity was not fostered by the mass media; it grew from the excellencies and appeals of the work itself and was simply reported in the media" (Isaacs 1)

The Dethronement of Power

By C. S. Lewis

"I think some readers, seeing (and disliking) this rigid demarcation of black and white, imagine that they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people. Looking at the squares, they assume (in defiance of the facts) that all the pieces must be making bishops' moves which confine them to one color. But even such readers will hardly brazen it out through the two last volumes. Motives, even on the right side, are mixed. Those who are now traitors usually began with comparatively innocent intentions. Heroic Rohan and imperial Gondor are partly diseased. Even the wretched Sméagol, till quite late in the story, has good impulses; and, by a tragic paradox, what finally pushes him over the brink is an unpremeditated speech by the most selfless character of all." (Lewis 13)

"There are two Books in each volume and now that all six are before us the very high architectural quality of the romance is revealed. Book I builds up the main theme. In Book II that theme, enriched with much retrospective material, continues. Then comes the change. In III and V the fate of the company, now divided, becomes entangled with a huge complex of forces which are grouping and regrouping themselves in relation to Mordor. The main theme, isolated from this, occupies IV and the early part of VI (the latter part of course giving all the resolutions). But we are never allowed to forget the intimate connection between it and the rest. On the one hand, the whole world is going to the war; the story rings with galloping hoofs, trumpets, steel on steel. On the other, very far away, two tiny, miserable figures creep (like mice on a slag heap) through the twilight of Mordor. And all the time we know that the fate of the world depends far more on the small movement than on the great. This is a structural invention of the highest order: it adds immensely to the pathos, irony and grandeur of the tale." (Lewis 13)

"The . . . excellence is that no individual, and no species, seems to exist only for the sake of the plot. All exist in their own right and would have been worth creating for their mere flavor even if they had been irrelevant." (Lewis 14)

". . . the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal; the war of the ring is only one of a thousand wars against him. Every time we shall be wise to fear his ultimate victory, after which there will be "no more songs." Again and again we shall have good evidence that "the wind is setting East, and the withering of all woods may be drawing near" (II,76). Every time we win we shall know that our victory is impermanent. If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man's unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest: hammerstrokes, but with compassion" (Lewis 15)

The Lord of the Hobbits: J.R.R. Tolkien

By Edmund Fuller

"For this world [Middle-Earth] he has created a self-contained geography, with maps, a mythology and balladry, a history in great depth and completeness of organization, stretching back far behind the time-span of his story. He has created several languages and runic alphabets, and within them traced elaborate linguistic interrelationships. The historic frame of his world is filled out with genealogies and what might be called ethnic treatises on his other-than-human species. There are extensive flora and fauna in addition to those already known to us. All these elements are woven through the tale, but so deep is Tolkien's immersion in this world that at the end of the trilogy there are six appendices, totaling 103 pages, elaborately footnoted, dealing with the subjects remarked above. Though the appendices contribute to the persuasive verisimilitude of the tale, they are not necessary for such a purpose. They reflect Tolkien's own intensity of inner experience and total absorption in his act of subcreation. It is this that makes his spell so great and in turn draws readers with him into these further compilations of data about an imaginary world they are loath to leave." (Fuller 18)

"A runic rhyme tills of: 'Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, / Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, / Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, / One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne / In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. / One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, / One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them / In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.' " (Fuller 20)

"He [Tolkien] creates runic rhymes and bardic songs in a wide range of moods and meters, from comic to heroic to elegiac, in the modes of those that characterize Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature" (Fuller 21)

"[Sauruman] seeks to persuade Gandalf: 'A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. . . . This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. . . . Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it . . . the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time . . . deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order . . . . There need not be . . . any real change in our designs, only our means.' (I, 272-3)" (Fuller 25)

" 'We cannot use the Ruling Ring . . . . Its strength . . . is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. . . . If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it I will not take the Ring to wield it.' (I, 281) Here we are brought to the classic corrupting quality of power in direct proportion to its approach to the absolute. Yet, of course, it is not the power, in itself, that corrupts, but the pride which power may engender, which in turn produces the swift corruption of the power. The primal nature of the sin of Pride, bringing the fall of angels before the seduction and fall of Man, is the wish to usurp the Primal and One source of Power, incorruptible in His nature because He is Power and Source and has nothing to usurp, in being All." (Fuller 26)

" [The Ring] is a demonstration of the fact that creaturely life does not always offer us clear choices of good or evil. Often we must choose between degrees of evil, and we are fortunate when we know that is what we are doing. Frodo, at times, is compelled to use the Ring for its power of invisibility as the immediate alternative to losing all. Yet every time he does so, two bad results are involved: the always baleful influence of the Ring gains perceptibly over Frodo, and Sauron is instantly aware of its use and his mind is able to grope, in a general way, towards its location, like a radio direction-fix." (Fuller 28)

" [Remark on Fate: Gandalf] 'Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it.' (I, 65) " (Fuller 30)

" [Remark on Fate: Gandalf] '. . . he [Gollum] is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least.' (I, 69) " (Fuller 30) " [Remark on LOTR: ?] 'This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.' (I, 283) " (Fuller 31)

" [Remark on Evil in LOTR: ?] 'Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again . . . . The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been . . . . Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant of the emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.' (I,60; II, 154; III, 155)" (Fuller 33)

" There is never a hiding place, or a time when the perennial but Protean moral dilemma has been solved forever. Though we feel with Frodo, 'I wish it need not have happened in my time (I,60), we must accept the fact that 'The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out' (I,92). We are faced with what Aragorn, foremost of the men in the story, sternly calls 'The doom of choice . . . . There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark' (II, 36,43)" (Fuller 33)

" [Remark on evil] 'How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' 'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.' (II, 40-41)" (Fuller 33)

"It is clear from the nature and powers of Sauron - not always evil, but become so, and not himself the greatest of his kind - that he is a type of the fallen Angels. In the era of the making of the twenty Rings of the runic rhyme, even certain of the sub-angelic High Elves were for a time deceived by him and, with biblical and Faustian parallels, ensnared by 'their eagerness for knowledge' (I, 255). We learn that 'It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill' (I, 276)." (Fuller 35)

The Quest Hero

By W.H. Auden

"To look for a lost collar button is not a true quest: to go in quest means to look for something of which one has, as yet, no experience; one can imagine what it will be like but whether one's picture is true or false will be known only when one has found it" (Fuller 40)

"The Quest is one of the oldest, hardiest, and most popular of all literary genres. In some instances it may be founded on historical fact - the Quest of the Golden Fleece may have its origin in the search of seafaring traders for amber - and certain themes, like the theme of the enchanted cruel Princess whose heart can be melted only by the predestined lover, may be distorted recollections of religious rites, but the persistent appeal of the Quest as a literary form is due, I believe, to its validity as a symbolic description of our subjective personal experience of existence as historical" (Auden 42) "The essential elements in this typical Quest story are six. (1) A precious Object and/or Person to be found and possessed or married. (2) A long journey to find it, for its whereabouts are not originally known to the seekers. (3) A hero. The precious Object cannot be found by anybody, but only be the one person who possesses the right qualities of breeding or character. (4) A Test or a series of Tests by which the unworthy are screened out, and the hero revealed. (5) the Guardians of the Object who must be overcome before it can be won. They may be simply a further test of the hero's arete, or they may be malignant in themselves. (6) The Helpers who with their knowledge and magical powers assist the hero and but for whom he would never succeed. They may appear in human or animal form." (Auden 44)

"A dream world may be full of inexplicable gaps and logical inconsistencies; an imaginary world may not, for it is a world of law, not of wish. Its laws may be different from those which govern our own, but they must be as intelligible and inviolable. Its history may be unusual but it must not contradict our notion of what history is, an interplay of Fate, Choice, and Chance. Lastly, it must not violate our moral experience. If, as the Quest generally requires, Good and Evil are to be incarnated in individuals and societies, we must be convinced that the Evil side is what every sane man, irrespective of his nationality or culture, would acknowledge as evil. The triumph of Good over Evil which the successful achievement of the Quest implies must appear historically possible, not a daydream. Physical and, to a considerable extent, intellectual power must be shown as what we know them to be, morally neutral and effectively real: battles are won by the stronger side, be it good or evil" (Auden 51)

"The extremes of good and evil in the story are represented by the Elves and Sauron, respectively. Here is a verse from a poem in Elvish: 'A Elbereth Gilthoniel, / silivren penna míriel / o menel alglar elenath! / Na-chaered palan díriel. / o galadhremmin ennorath, / Fanuilos, le linnathon / nef aer, sí nef aearon'. And here is an evil spell in the Black Speech invented by Sauron: 'Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatalûk, agh burzum-ishi-krimpatul.'" (Auden 52)

"An imaginary world must be as real to the senses of the reader as the actual world. For him to find an imaginary convincing, he must feel that he is seeing the landscape through which it passes as, given his mode of locomotion and the circumstances of his errand, the fictional traveler himself saw it. Fortunately, Mr. Tolkien's gift for topographical description is equal to his gift for naming and his fertility in inventing incidents. His hero, Frodo Baggins, is on the road, excluding rests, for eighty days and covers over 1800 miles, much of it on foot, and with his senses kept perpetually sharp by fear, watching every inch of the way for signs of his pursuers, yet Tolkien succeeds in convincing us that there is nothing Frodo noticed which he has forgotten to describe." (Tolkien 53)

"Some of the characters in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf and Aragorn, for instance, are expressions of the natural vocation of talent. It is for Gandalf to plan the strategy of the War against Sauron because he is a very wise man; it is for Aragorn to lead the armies of Gondor because he is a great warrior and the rightful heir to the throne. Whatever they may have to risk and suffer, they are, in a sense, doing what they want to do. But the situation of the real hero, Frodo Baggins, is quite different. When the decision has been taken to send the Ring to the Fire, his feelings are those of Papengo 'such dangerous exploits are not for a little hobbit like me. I would much rather stay at home than risk my life on the very slight chance of winning glory.' But his conscience tells him: 'You may be nobody in particular in your self, yet, for some inexplicable reasons, through no choice of your own, the Ring has come into your keeping, so that it is on you and not on Gandalf or Aragorn that the task falls of destroying it'." (Auden 55)

" [Remark on conflict between Good and Evil] 'Victory cannot be achieved by arms. . . . I still hope for victory but not by arms. For into the midst of all these policies comes the Ring of Power, the foundation of Barad-dûr and the hope of Sauron. . . . If he regains it, your valour is vain, and his victory will be swift and complete; so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts. If it is destroyed, then he will fall; and his fall will be so low that none can foresee his arising ever again. . . . This, then, is my counsel. We have not the Ring. In wisdom or great folly, it has been sent away to be destroyed lest it destroy us. Without it we cannot by force defeat his force. But we must at all costs keep his Eye from his true peril. We cannot achieve victory by arms, but by arms we can give the Ring-bearer his only chance, frail though it be.' (III, 154-156)." (Auden 57)

" [Remark on the Quest's end] 'Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footsteps of Doom? For if fail, we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.' (I, 380)" (Auden 61)

" [Remark on the Quest's end] 'But,' said Sam, and tears started from his eyes, 'I though you were going to enjoy the Shire . . . for years and years, after all you have done.' 'SO I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.' (III, 309)" (Auden 61)

The Appeal of LOTR: A Struggle for Life

By Hugh T. Keenan

"The abstracts of Death and Life are personified by the Nazgûl and the tree-like Ents" (Keenan 63)

"The Rangers, as Miss Spacks points out, 'understand the language of beasts and birds,' whereas Tom Bombadil 'is in the most intimate communion with natural forces; he has the power of 'the earth itself''" (Keenan 63)

"In Beowulf, Grendel and his mother can be seen as the objectification (in part) of the flaws of the king Hrothgar and of the faults of his court. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron can be similarly viewed as the objectification of the fears and self-destruction (death instinct) of the inhabitants of Middle-earth" (Keenan 66)

"What justifies Frodo's being the hero? Her one comes to a paradox. Frodo has the usual rabbit-like and child-like nature of a country hobbit. He enjoys smoking, birthday parties, presents, good food, and good company. But as he journeys toward Mordor, he loses some of this vitality. He becomes isolated, less humorous, more rational, and even mystical, in contrast to his old emotional, animal self. In other words Frodo grows up; he becomes adult in a human sense. He becomes conscious of his sacrificial duty. He becomes humble as he learns more about the world outside the Shire and as he perceives the pathos of mortality through the passing of the fair and beautiful." (Keenan 67)

". . . there is a strong suggestion that Frodo and his kind represent psychologically the eternal child who must be sacrificed so that the man may life." (Keenan 67)

Two people are not affected by the ring: Sam + Tom Bombadil

"In addition to symbols [forests & trees], we find patterns of contrast in character, incident, and place which define the theme of life against death. At the beginning of the journey, Frodo and the three hobbits meet Tom Bombadil and his consort Goldberry. At the end of the journey, Frodo and Sam encounter Gollum and his mistress-ruler Shelob. Besides the parallels and contrasts of character - Tom Bombadil (life) and Gollum (death), Goldberry (preserver) and Shelob (destroyer) - there are parallel actions. At the beginning of the story, Tom rescues the lost Frodo and company from the Old Forest and then saves them from the Barrow-wights. Later Gollum rescues the lost Frodo and his companion Sam in the wilderness of Emyn Muil and guides them through the treacherous Valley of the Dead. As one guide leads them to safety and life, the other one leads them to treachery and death. While Tom Bombadil cannot be moved by the Ring, Gollum can never be free of it." (Keenan 75)

Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings

By Patricia Spacks

Hobbit analogous to Icelandic quasi-hero (83)

". . . the simplicity of [LOTR's] ethical system is redeemed by the philosophic complexity of its context: simplicity does not equal shallowness. The Pagan ethos which that of The Lord of the Rings most closely resembles is redeemed from superficiality by the magnitude of the opposition it faces. The Anglo-Saxon epic hero operates under the shadow of fate; his struggle is doomed to final failure - the dragon at last, in some encounter, will win. His courage and will alone oppose the dark forces of the universe; they represent his triumphant assertation of himself as man, his insistance on human importance despite human weakness." (Spacks 85- 86) Two main themes - "freedom of will and order in the universe, in the operations of fate" (Spacks 87) Corruption of Power (Saruman)

"'All the 'great secrets' under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering. He [Gollum] was altogether wretched. He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he hated everything, and the Ring most of all. . . . He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter" (I, 64)" (Spacks 94)

"In the presentation of 'Gollum's destruction of the Ring', the idea of free will intimately involved with fate receives its most forceful statement. The same idea has been suggested before; now it becomes inescapable. Free choice of good by the individual involves his participation in a broad pattern of Good; individual acts become a part of Fate. Frodo has repeatedly chosen to behave mercifully toward Gollum, even in the face of treachery on the other's part. His merciful acts determine his fate and, because he has by his acceptance of his mission come to hold a symbolic position, they determine also the fate of the world he inhabits. Gollum, on the other hand, though he is comparatively weak in evil, has become the symbolic representative of evil. His original acceptance of evil has made him will-less; it is appropriate that at the last he should be merely an instrument of that essentially benevolent fate through which, as Sam realizes, 'his master had been save; he was himself again, he was free' (III, 225) - free at the cost of physical maiming, the emblem of his human (or hobbit) weakness - like Lewis' hero, Ransom, who is in Perelandra successful in physical struggle with the Devil, but emerges from it with an unhealable wound in the heel" (Spacks 95) "Like the richly-imagined unreal world, the language appeals to the child-side of its readers; it evokes memories of fairy tales and of legends of chivalry. 'The grey figure of the Man, Aragorn sun of Arathorn, was tall, and stern as stone, his hand upon the hilt of his sword; he looked as if some king out of the mists of the sea had stepped upon the shores of lesser men. Before him stooped the old figure [Gandalf], white, shining now as if with some light kindled within, bent, laden with years, but holding a power beyond the strength of kings" (II, 104)" (Spacks 98)

(Alliteration + primitive Northern Epic) used in story

Men, Halflings, and Hero Worship

By Marion Bradley

"Frodo shares for a time in the rewards of their labors, but he bears forever the three wounds: knife-wound of Weathertop, for folly; the sting of Shelob, for over-confidence; and the finger torn away with the Ring, for pride." (Bradley 124)

"Merry, too, has achieved high adult stature; for him, the return to the Shire is like 'a dream that has slowly faded' but for Frodo it is like 'falling asleep again.'." (Bradley 125)

Sam is the representative of the Heroic Age, not Frodo.

Tolkien and the Fairy Story

By R.J. Reilly

". . . Richard Hughes, who mentioned The Faerie Queene in connection with it; Naomi Michinson, who took it as seriously as she does Mallory; C.S. Lewis, who compared Tolkien's inventiveness to Ariosto and found Tolkien's the better; and Louis Halle, who thought it has the same meaning as the Odyssey, Genesis, and Faust." (Reilly 133)

"Douglass Parker [See "Hwaet We Holbylta . . . ," Hudson Review, IX (Winter, 1956-57), 598-609] reminds the reader of Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulfand holds that what Tolkien has done in the trilogy is to re-create the world, and world view, of the poem. The words that Tolkien took from Widsith to apply to Beowulf can as well be applied to the trilogy: 'Lif is laene: eal sceacep, leoht ond lif samod, Life is fleeting: everything passes away, light and life together." There hangs over the tale, he thinks, the same cloud of determinism that hangs over Beowulf. The end of an age is coming, and nothing that men or hobbits or elves can do will forestall that end. In the face of inexorable extinction the only answer that man or hobbit can make is to be heroic. Tolkien has gone to fantastic lengths to make is world 'a prodigious and . . . unshakable construct of the imagination' in imitation of the world of the Beowulf poem because Tolkien feels 'that only in this way can he attain what the author of Beowulf (also an antiquary) attained: a sense of man's Verganglichkeit, his impermanence, his perishability.' And this imaginary world has relevance to the real one. His borrowings from, or reworking of, myths from the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Norse provide a bridge from his world to ours; they make 'the implicit statement that our world, in the Age of Men, the Fourth Age, is a continuation of his, and will recapitulate its happenings in new terms, as the Third Age recapitulated the Second, and the Second the First.'" (Reilly 135)

"Faërie may be roughly translated as Magic but not the vulgar magic of the magician; it is rather magic 'of a particular mood and power,' and it does not have its end in itself but in its operations. Among these operations are 'the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires' such as the desire 'to survey the depths of space and time' and the desire 'to hold communion with other living things'." (Reilly 138)

"The [Lord of the Rings] itself is of the Third Age, but the story is full of echoes out of the dim past; in fact, the trilogy is in great part an attempt to suggest the depts of time, 'which antiquates antiquity, and hath an art to make dust of all things.' The Third Age is, for the reader, old beyond measure, but the beings of this age tell stories out of ages yet deeper 'in the dark backward and abysm of time,' and in fact often suggest that these stories recount only the events of relatively recent times - Browne's 'setting part of time' - and that the oldest things are lost beyond memory." (Reilly 139) "The Ents, for example, the great trees of the Third Age, are among the oldest living things. They speak to the hobbits in a language as old, as slowly and carefully articulated, as the earth itself. And when Tom Bombadil speaks, it is as if Nature itself - non-rational, interested only in life and in growing things - were speaking. The elves, the dwarfs, even Gollum and the orcs, are gradations - either up or down - from the human level; they are 'other living things' with whom the reader holds communion in the trilogy world of imagined wonder." (Reilly 139) " (Tolkien's 'On Fairy Stories') 'The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things . . . but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power - upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to the minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well on any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may make woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But such 'fantasy,' as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. (pp. 50-51)" (Reilly 141) "He [Tolkien] is aware of the implications of the word 'fantastic,' that it implies that the things with which it deals are not to be found in the 'Primary Worlds.' In fact he welcomes such implications, for that is exactly what he means by the term, that the images which it describes are not extant in the 'real' world. That they are not 'is a virtue [,] not a vice.'. We recall Shelley's lines: 'Forms more real than living man, / Nurslings of immortality.' Just because Fantasy deals with things which do not exist in the Primary World, Tolkien holds, it is 'not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent' " (Reilly 143)

". . . we rediscover the meaning of heroism and friendship as we see the two hobbits clawing their way up Mount Doom; we see again the endless evil of greed and egotism in Gollum, stunted and ingrown out of moral shape by years of lust for the Ring; we recognize again the essential anguish of seeing beautiful and frail things - innocence, early love, children - passing away as we read of the Lady Galadriel and the elves making the inevitable journey to the West and extinction, and see them as Frodo does, 'a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.' We see morality as morality by prescinding from this or that human act and watching the 'inherent morality' to which all the beings of the Third Age - the evil as well as the good - bear witness." (Reilly 145)

Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critters

By Thomas Gasque

"'It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that . . . put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage. . . . So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times.' (J.R.R. Tolkien, 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,' p.77)" (Gasque 151)

"Tom [Bombadil] shares at least one characteristic with the two monsters: his indifference to the ring. For him, as for the Balrog and Shelob, it has no power to do either good or evil. He is interested only in sustaining life and fostering the enjoyment of it; they care only for destruction or, in Shelob's case, for satisfying the appetite. And none of the three willingly acknowledges any other creature as his master. All three possess an independence that places them outside the central moral concern of the story - the destruction of the Ring. Their amorality, like their nonhumanity, reveals them as allegorical principles: Tom of life or nature, Shelob of death or blind appetite, and the Balrog of a central disorder that no creature can withstand." (Gasque 157)

Old English in Rohan

By John Tinkler

"When Éowyn passes the cup, offering it first to the king, as is proper, she says 'Ferthu Théoden hál!" This is Old English for, "Go though Théoden healthy'. The language of Rohan not only 'resembles' Old English, it is Old English" (Tinkler 169)

FOOTNOTE FOR ABOVE PASSAGE: "See Beowulf, 11. 615 ff. for a similar feast. The whole of 'The King of the Golden Hall' seems dependent for much of its action and a good bit of its language upon the Heorot passages in Beowulf.

The Poetry of Fantasy: Verse in LOTR

By Mary Kelly

Hobbit Poetry

"'O! Water Cold we may pour at need / down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed; / but better is Beer, if drink we lack, / and Water Hot poured down the back' (I, 111)" (Kelly 175)

Uncomplicated rhyme; children's rhyme; warmth, enjoyment

Tom Bombadil's Poetry

"'Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you. / Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you!' (I, 130)" (Kelly 180)

Uncomplicated rhyme

"Tom promises to renew life - symbolized by water, wood and hill - and to provide warmth and light - symbolized by fire, sun, and moon - when is aid is needed." (Kelly 182)

Wight Poetry

"'Cold be hand and heart of bon, / and cold be sleep under stone: / never more to wake on stony bed, / never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead' (I, 152)" (Kelly 182)

Uncomplicated but irregular rhyme

Repeated on the "cold, dark, foggy Barrow-Downs" (Kelly 182)

"grim, hard cold words, heartless and miserable" (Kelly 182)

Elvish Poetry

"The song [The Lay of Tinúviel] is indeed one of the fairest in the entire work. The nine stanzas of eight iambic-tetrameter lines each have the complicated rhyme scheme of abacbabc" (Kelly 185)

"[Tolkien's poems] abounds in musical effects. There are twenty instances of alliteration in the short lines, two of them triple alliteration. Tolkien has frequently used consonant sounds especially suitable to the context. The sounds of the many aspirates (h and wh), voiceless dentals (f and th), and voiceless sibilants (s and sh and ch) help to create images of the breathlessness of the lovers' chase. Even more prominent are the sonorant sounds of the hums (n and m and ng) and the liquids (l and r), all of which contribute to the resonance of many of the lines and make the poem the more suitable for chanting." (Kelly 187)

" 'He heard there oft the flying sound / Of feat as light as linden-leaves, / Or music welling underground, / In hidden hollows quavering, / Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves, / And one by one with sighing sound / Whispering fell the beechen leaves / In the wintry woodland wavering.' (I, 197-198)" (Kelly 188)

Rohan Poems

dactylic hexameter; ubi sunt rhythm

refers to the Anglo-Saxon-type duguth society (Kelly 195)

The Lord of the Rings as Literature

By Burton Raffel

"[Quote by Tolkien] 'I do not think that the reader or the maker of fairy-stories need even be ashamed of the 'escape' of archaism: of preferring not dragons, but horses, castles, sailing-ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and priests. For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation . . . of progressive things like factories, or the machineguns and bombs that appear toe their most natural and inevitable, dare we say 'inexorable' products. . . . The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only very much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) 'in a very real sense' a great deal more real. . . . It is indeed an age of 'improved means to deteriorated ends " (Raffel 236)

"We are made suspicious of Aragorn, at first meeting. He is 'a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall . . . listening intently to the hobbit-talk. . . . The gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits' (I, 168). But as Frodo and the others quickly discover, Aragorn is all gold and a yard wide. He is brave, loyal, honest, faithful - everything in Faërie one would expect of a king (which is what he becomes in the end). Gandalf too is everything one might expect of a wizard, and for much of the way he is rather more than that. Gandalf is mercurial, in the sense that he adjusts to his setting, to his environment, human, hobbit, elf or wizard, not becoming all things to all persons, but not presuming, either, on the knowledge or capacities of anyone. He is flexible, and he is also limited: this is not a wizard who can do anything he likes, but a 'real' wizard who, as far as we know, dies in the tunnels of Moria, pulled to his death by a Balrog, 'a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it' (I, 344). At the end of the first volume of the trilogy, Gandalf is a heroic memory, a beloved memory. Less than two hundred pages later, in the second volume, he has returned, 'passed through fire and deep water,' (II, 98) resurrected after his - one is tempted to say, after His Passion, though 'Sacrifice' will do. And Aragorn says to him 'You are our captain and our banner. The Dark Lord has Nine: But we have One, mightier than they: the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads' (II, 104)" (Raffel 238) 

"Taking allegory in its very loosest sense, I think The Lord of the Rings is indisputably allegorical. I do not mean that Frodo, or even Gandalf (as we first meet him), is a symbolic representation of Good - though surely the Nazgûl, not to mention the Lord of Mordor, are symbols of Evil. Nor do I mean that Frodo's journey is a neat representation of, say the kind of journey undertaken by Niggle. Rather, so much Faith underlies the trilogy, so much strong feeling about the world (the so-called real world, as Tolkien might say), that representational elements are unavoidable: this is, again, a 'good and evil story.' When Frodo has reached Rivendell, for example, and Gandalf is telling him about 'the Dark Lord in Mordor,' Gandalf exclaims: 'Not all his servants and chattels are wraiths! There are orcs and trolls, there are wargs and werewolves; and there have been and still are many Men, warriors, and kings, that walk alive under the Sun, and yet are under his sway. And their number is growing daily' (I, 234). It can be argued that the reference to men is essential, since they too are part of Middle-earth. It must however be clear that Men are singled out by Gandalf-Tolkien, receiving very special and detailed attention beyond the needs of the story proper. One does not need to claim any precise allegory, or even any particular topical reference, to see what C. S. Lewis has called the trilogy's relevance 'to the actual human situation.' In loose terms this is allegorical enough" (Raffel 244)

Bibliographic References

Isaacs, Neil D., Zimbardo, Rose A. Tolkien and the Critics. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame 1968

This book was taken from the Elmhurst Public Library.