THE RING AND I
This
essay is the Tolkien-fan equivalent of mommy blogging. As with so many
emotionally fraught topics that can make its devotees laugh and cry and spend
hours and hours analyzing nuances like the exact name for the color of their
baby’s poop, you either already get it, you’ll never get it, or you don’t get
it yet. If you already get it, this essay will be trite.
(And, let’s be clear, there are millions and millions of you. When
computer passwords first became a thing and I used FrodoLives as mine, my
then-husband rolled his eyes and explained to me that every computer geek in
the world uses that same password and I might as well stick with 1234.
Today I counted approximately 60 currently active easily findable podcasts
devoted to Tolkien.) If you will never get it, this essay will be dull,
if you’ve even read this far. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Christine from my
networking group who told me she could never get into The Lord of the
Rings because there’s so much walking. Which is like saying you’re
not into Russian history because there’s so much snow.) So in some ways,
this is for the people who don’t get it yet. Like my young adult kids,
who I have been telling since they first cut their teeth on the Color Fairies
books that The Lord of the Rings is the best book ever – and they still
haven’t read it. But, beware, you yet people! So many
spoilers here! Mostly, though, this essay is for myself, because like any
good mommy blogger/Tolkien fan, my heart is so full of love for my subject that
if I don’t share it I might explode.
I
was always going to be a girl who was into fantasy novels. When I was
seven I discovered L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz book series, and I read
them over and over continuously for a couple of years. One day at the
dinner table it came out that if you asked me what happened on p. 57 of, say, The
Emerald City of Oz, I could tell you. Alas for little girls showing
off, because the books belonged to my older brother, and in the first
heartbreak of my life he decided that I could not borrow them any more because
they were obviously doing something weird to my brain.
Here’s
a tip: the Wizard of Oz book series is no fun to read as an adult.
They are travelogues with little plot or conflict. But to a lonely
seven year old, they are a glimpse into a life where there are lots of other
girls (and the occasional boy, and one notable transgender character) to play
with who are nice to each other and if you could only find the magical means to
get yourself there they would be nice to you too. Almost every book
introduces a new little girl who makes her way to Oz, goes on a long walking
tour, and then is integrated into the happy society in the palace in the
Emerald City under transgender queen Ozma, long may she reign.
There
were a handful of years for me between the Oz books and my introduction to
Tolkien, and they were filled with books my mother had loved as a girl and that
I loved about brave and creative and principled girls -- Anne Shirley and Jo
March and the like. Of course, there were also some left turns in that genre.
Ahem, Elsie Dinsmore– aside from being about slave owners on a
plantation in the antebellum south, it’s about a girl who is like one spanking
away from having a full on BDSM relationship with her handsome young father. (I
never read the rest of the books in the series but I believe she grows up and
marries her father’s best friend.)
When
I was in seventh grade I heard a couple of kids talking about The Hobbit,
by JRR Tolkien. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember having
the sense that this was a book I had to read. So I wandered away from the
bookshelf where my mother kept the Girl Books, and into my father’s study where
I found a paperback of The Hobbit. I took it on a family
Thanksgiving trip to visit relatives a few states away. I remember two things
about that trip: walking into a living room while my mother was proclaiming to
my relatives the story about me asking for a bra even though I had nothing to
hold up; and reading The Hobbit. Okay, that may have also been the
trip where my weird older cousin described his fantasy of cutting up one of his
professors and baking him into a pie. Family, what can I say . . .
I
didn’t love The Hobbit, and I still don’t. Too many dwarves and
too many songs. Its main importance is that you can’t read The Lord of the
Rings without reading The Hobbit first.
That
winter, like so many Michigan families, we drove down to Florida for Christmas
vacation. I brought my father’s paperback copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy
with me. My family had rented a timeshare condo that for whatever reason
(other than it being the 1970's) was filled with stacks and stacks and stacks
of Penthouses and Playboys. My brothers and my cousins and
the older relatives – all the way up to my grandmother, who was almost 90, and
I spent much of our vacation voraciously reading, er, “reading” these
magazines.
But in stolen moments alone – when the
rest of my family went back to the beach and I couldn’t because my sunburn was
blistering – it wasn’t the weird diary of the virgin whose “daddy” checked
every night to make sure she was still a virgin that occupied me. It was The
Lord of the Rings.
I read books from cover to
cover. Dedications, introductions, prologues, afterwords,
appendices. That’s a matter of taste, but if you’re going to read The
Lord of the Rings you must start with Tolkien’s Foreword to the
Second Edition (which, yes, deserves to be capitalized), which he wrote in
1965. It’s a beautiful understated essay about the process of writing and what
it means to be a writer. “The delay [in finishing the books] was, of
course, also increased by the outbreak of war in 1939 . . . . In spite of the
darkness of the next five years I found that the story could not now be wholly
abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by night.”
And of course, he was funny. “Some
who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring,
absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar
opinions of their works.”
Tolkien goes on with his famous
explanation that the story is not an allegory. While largely written
during World War II, it was conceived well before. If World War II “had
inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring
would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been
annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but
occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the
confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in
his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great
Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of
Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred
and contempt; they would not long have survived even as slaves.”
Wow. Mic drop.
Then comes what may be the most beautiful
passage in the entire three books, and certainly one that colors my
understanding of the books each time I read them: “One has indeed
personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as
the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth in 1914
was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following
years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
As for the novel itself – by this age I
already enjoyed writing and took it seriously, and read with half an eye on
technique. I remember admiring Tolkien’s characterizations in the opening
chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring. I have a distinct memory
of thinking as the four hobbits left the Shire that I felt like I knew each of
them. While Peter Jackson’s movies (more on them later) made Merry and
Pippin more or less indistinguishable, in the books Merry was a level-headed
organizer, while Pippin was impetuous and funny. Frodo was the wise
reluctant hero, and Sam was stolid and loyal. While I reduce them each to
a couple of adjectives, they were fully fleshed out.
I’ll be honest, though, the books were
hard going. I still say that the opening chapter of Fellowship, “A
Long-Expected Party,” is a terrible way to start a book because it is so
boring. And then the whole Tom Bombadil chapter – again with the endless
songs, can we just not.
There’s a lot that I missed the first time
through The Lord of the Rings. I remember the smell of the books –
just a little musty, like my father’s study where they came from. (You
can never convince me that eBooks are worthwhile as long as physical books are
around because reading should involve as many senses as possible.)
(I hardly ever taste books –although I once lived with a parakeet who
thought my books were delicious.) But because the books were long and
complicated, my second reading of them held many revelations of plot points I
had completely missed the first time through.
My second reading was when I was in ninth
grade. I was an awkward, lonely, mostly friendless teenager. I was
reading Fellowship in the library before school, sitting on a couch made
of hard orange plastic, when I arrived with the hobbits in Bree. And
there was Strider in a shadowed corner of the bar, and all I can tell you is
that at that moment I felt joy, because I had just bumped into an old friend
who I had not seen for a long time and who I loved. Joy is not an
exaggeration. It was pure delight.
And it changed me. Because I sat on
that ugly, uncomfortable couch feeling unadulterated happiness, and I thought
to myself, “This is what I want to do. I want to write stories that make
other people feel like this.” Sure, this would have more of an impact if
I had grown up to be, you know, a writer, instead of an insurance lawyer who
once published a novel under a pen name – a novel that took me longer to write
than it took Tolkien to write The Lord of the Rings because even
though I wasn’t dealing with World War II I had kids and a job and a bad
marriage and was mostly exhausted for decades and the time I had to write was
the 40 minute increments while my kids were doing their swimming or ice skating
lessons and neither of them was sick or tantrumy and I didn’t bump into another
mom who wanted to make conversation. If you don’t already know my pen
name or my novel or my genre, don’t ask because I won’t tell you, but I will
tell you that when I’m writing I am my truest self, and that truest self is a
person who wants to write characters who feel like beloved friends to my
readers, and who bring them joy.
The reason that encountering Strider in
Bree while I was sitting on an orange couch in the library felt like bumping
into my best friend is because although The Lord of the Rings is
high fantasy, with magic swords and wizards, and deeds of derring do, it is
also a beautiful book about friendship. So many friendships. While the
relationship between Frodo and Sam gets all the attention, it’s not my
favorite. Gimli and Legolas develop a friendship that is so deep that the
laws of nature are bent so that Gimli can go with Legolas to the Undying Lands
where mortals are not allowed, but that’s not my favorite friendship
either. Aragorn develops an instant soldier-jock friendship with Eomer,
which is cemented by killing a bunch of orcs together. Also not my
favorite. My favorite is Merry and Pippin, two young adult men who
unabashedly refer to each other as their best friend, and when they are
separated they miss each other and they tell people that they miss their best
friend. And I just want to hug them and be friends with them too,
although I know I would be a distant third.
There’s something else about the books –
something that the movies don’t capture at all. Let me be clear, I love
the movies. While the friendship theme is mostly left by the wayside in the
plot itself, it comes through because of the friendships on the set. Yes,
I spend way too much time watching behind the scenes videos of the movies, and
although many of them are silly what seems to be true (and never meet your
heroes, the actors are real people, who knows what actually went on) is that the
cast, and the stand-ins, and the extras, and the crew, valued and loved each
other. And so if movie Pippin doesn’t sadly tell other characters how
much he misses his best friend Merry, the actor who played Pippin and the actor
who played Merry make podcasts together and they seem to have a lifelong
friendship and this shines through in the movies.
The movies are about the power of the
ring. The books are about the power of doing your best to do what you
know in your heart is right, every day, all the time, no matter how hard it is
and no matter what you have to sacrifice, and no matter that you think it all
might be in vain. When the movies flattens characters, turns Gimli and
Merry and Pippin mostly into comic relief, makes Frodo a person with little
agency or wisdom, it takes away from Tolkien’s central theme – that although
fate (or God) may play a role in saving the world, it is the collective action
of scared and overwhelmed regular people making a conscious choice every day to
put one foot in front of the other in the fight against evil that ultimately is
required.
There is plenty of self-insert fan-fiction
written about The Lord of the Rings, but I’ve never been particularly
drawn in that direction. I can just imagine myself leaving Rivendell with
the Fellowship, and after about two miles being like, “Uh, can we take a
rest? My foot has cramped up.” When Frodo, Sam, and Pippin set out
from Hobbiton for Buckland, they jog. While wearing backpacks.
For fun. There is no place for me there. ChatGPT tells me that if I
were a character in the books I would most likely be doing research in the
musty libraries in Minas Tirith. I mean, fuck you, ChatGPT, but it’s not
wrong.
Although I would never be able to keep up
with the Fellowship, their journey has been a central metaphor for me that has
gotten me through many hard times. Specifically, Frodo and Sam in Mordor,
out of food and low on water, dragged down by their burdens. When I face
difficult challenges I think of them, and I remind myself that if I stand still
I’ll never get there, but that if I put one foot in front of another, and
trudge along, no matter how slowly, I’ll get there eventually – just like Frodo
and Sam. Most of the time that comes up in the drudgery of my life – a
tedious insurance coverage court brief, a difficult year, a difficult end to a
difficult marriage. But in my better moments, my best moments, I am not
just bumping into Strider in the library; I am joining him, in fellowship with
all the good people, trudging along as best we can, to make the world better.
