The Ring and I

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.  (More on that later.)  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 other books about brave and creative and principled girls I imagined I could be friends with.  Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess was my favorite, but of course there were all of the Louisa May Alcott books, and the Anne of Green Gables series, and a bunch of books that my mother had loved when she was a girl and I loved but that I would not want my kids to read because they are horrifically racist and also – c’mon, 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 for the duration that was full, I mean full to the brim, with Penthouses and Playboys.  Stacks and stacks and stacks of them.  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.  Never let it be said that my generation missed out because internet porn had not been invented yet. 

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.  

As I said, neither of my kids, who are now in their 20's, have made it through The Lord of the Rings.  I blame J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan.  I admire both of them, I do (although obviously Rowling is super problematic and I don’t ignore or excuse that).  I’ve been through the Harry Potter series four times, once when each book first came out (I read the first one in bookstores where I tended to spend a significant part of my lunch hours in the 1990s), once when the last one came out, and then I read them aloud to each of my kids.  Each time I sob at the end of the seventh book, when Harry talks to his dead mother.  This is a series that sticks the landing.  And Rick Riordan is an incredibly thoughtful writer who emphasizes strength in diversity and uses sensitivity readers to make sure he gets his characters right. 

But: their books are not challenging.  They spoon-feed their plots in bite-sized pieces that often involve team sports.  Twelve year old me would not have had to work to get through them.  And, because you can’t get out of something more than you put into it, reading them is not a transformative experience.  But why would you read a book that really is difficult, when you can have the same joy in a story about saving the world with your friends that doesn’t require you to put the work in?

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 – an unexpectedly hard hike with friends,, a difficult 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 in the world, to make it better, no matter what it takes.