Tolkien has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, but it’d been probably a decade or more since I last read the books, so I figured I’d give it a go.
First, I started with the appendices, and I recommend this approach for anyone re-reading the books (or if you’re reading them for the first time but have seen the movies). It gives you a good historical grounding (especially the Gondorian dynamic, which is barely explained at all in the main text), and since it is a little dry (though still interesting for anyone into worldbuilding) it would feel anticlimactic to end your reading experience with it after the high drama and emotional ending(s, and I’ll get to that) of the main text.
So, the main event. I’d internalized the sense from other people that Tolkien’s prose was stuffy or boring or overly florid, so I was a little wary going into this. But you know what? I think he’s a pretty good writer. A bit old-fashioned, maybe, but it works, and his long descriptive passages really help to ground the story in a physical place. And though the story structure takes a bit to come together (though it is heresy to say so, I don’t think the Bombadil section belongs in this story; it’s a remnant of The Hobbit‘s more fairytale style, and it doesn’t fit with what comes after) it’s just as compelling now as it’s ever been. I was engrossed from start to finish, and even felt tense at peak dramatic moments despite knowing the story so well.
My main disappointment with the books didn’t come from the writing but rather from my own mental framework. As I said, it’d been a while since I read the books, but it’s not as if I spent that time consuming no Tolkien-related works whatsoever. I’ve rewatched the movies (SE editions, obviously) several times, and spent at least as long playing the video games. Unfortunately, this means that those works are much more ingrained in my head than the text, and it’s hard to see past the images I’m familiar with to what Tolkien is actually describing. One upside, though, is that playing through the first 10 or so chapters of Lord of the Rings Online multiple times has given me a pretty good understanding of the geography of the Shire, Breeland, and the North Realm, which was very helpful when reading Fellowship, and the appendices. And it’s not like the images in the movies are bad ones to have: the Balrog, Minas Morgul and Minas Tirith, Gollum—all these and more are, I think, worthy representations of Tolkien’s world.
Speaking of the movies, one surprising result of rereading the books is that I got a newfound appreciation for the movies. Obviously I always knew they were good, but over and over as I was reading the books I found myself realizing how impressive an achievement they were. First of all, the writers had an incredible knack not just for placing dialogue in exactly the right context and with the right characters but for plucking individual lines out of disparate sections of the text and weaving them together to create some of the best dialogue in the script (an example of both of these techniques in action is Gandalf’s speech to Pippin about the afterlife during the siege of Minas Tirith).
Then there are the incredibly smart changes they made. The narrative consolidation in Fellowship alone is a masterclass in adapting page to screen. Aragorn, rather than being a haughty, almost supernatural being predestined to rule, is a real human character with flaws and doubts, so that when he takes up the crown it actually feels like the conclusion to an arc and not just an unquestioned inevitability (it turns out Aragorn is actually one of my least favorite characters in the books). Merry & Pippin meet Gandalf in Fangorn, so that when Gandalf says to the three pursuers, “They met someone they did not expect; does that comfort you?” it makes slightly more sense. Eomer saves the day at Helms Deep instead of some other rando we’ve never met who will never be mentioned again. The siege of Minas Tirith is actually, like, a thing, and not just a few burning buildings on the lowest level. The Dead actually come to Pelennor instead having one measly fight with some sailors before Aragorn lets them off the hook. Drop-kicking elves.
None of this is to say the movies are better than the books; only that the movies necessarily had to be different from the books, and Jackson and co. showed extraordinary thoughtfulness and skill in choosing where and how to make those changes (for example, having Sam fight his way through Cirith Ungol is a choice that works great for the movie and absolutely would not have worked for the books). And while some of these are, I think, improvements (especially Aragorn’s characterization), there are plenty of things the books do better, like Gandalf’s characterization (while I like Aragorn being more human, I think Gandalf should be a little supernatural, since he is), Denethor’s characterization (more dignified, less mad), and “The Scouring of the Shire” (for all the jokes about LoTR having too many endings, “The Scouring of the Shire” is thematically important). Also, the movies are arguably more racist.
Oh, what, you thought we weren’t gonna talk about it? We’re talking about it. So, the racism. It’s a thing. It’s not great. It’s not just the predominance of light-skinned characters (Tolkien wrote from the POV of light-skinned people because he was writing a mythology for pre-colonial Britain, so that makes sense), it’s that all of the dark-skinned people are evil. Individual light-skinned humans might be corrupted by Sauron or dominated through fear or trickery, but entire nations of dark-skinned and/or “slant-eyed” peoples worship him and do his bidding. Arguably this is more a product of geography and history than anything inherent to their race, but Tolkien is also very into a biological essentialist view of nobility (all the best Men are the ones who have “pure Numenorean blood”), so it’s plausible that he would see evil through the same lens.
There is one explicit nod towards a more empathetic view of the evil humans: the same hobbit naiveté that sees them as exotic and somewhat frightening also gives us this moment of insight (when Sam observes one of the dead Haradrim in Ithilian): “He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.” Setting aside the idea that the Haradrim must be evil for making war against an imperial oppressor, it does place these things in the context of warring nations more than the context of racial divides, which is likely more what Tolkien intended (it’s this little bit of empathy that we don’t get in the movies, and lacking that and any historical context (in-world history, I mean) their depiction of the Haradrim and Easterlings is pretty one-dimensional.)
Honestly, with a few tweaks, and especially if he’d ever gotten around to expanding the purview of his work to include some stories from the perspective of the Haradrim or the Easterlings (or the Dunlandings, for that matter), it really wouldn’t be that bad. A little tone-deaf for modern sensibilities, maybe, but I think a generous reader would give it a pass. What really makes it uncomfortable is that Tolkien is the father of modern fantasy, and the racial dynamics in his works have been copied over and over, becoming codified and systematized within fantasy in a way that I don’t think he ever would have intended. It was only this year, 2020, that Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, announced they would be making changes to the game to address the biological essentialism hardcoded in its system (though apparently someone else already fixed it.)
(I couldn’t figure out where to fit this in the preceding discussion, but it should also be noted that Tolkien’s take on appearance equating with morality is slightly more nuanced than it first appears. While it’s true that everyone’s “true form” maps to fairly recognizable Good/Evil visual tropes, many of the good characters often appear plain, unappealing, or even sinister, while the evil characters often adopt fair guises. As Frodo says when meeting Strider, “I think one of [Sauron’s] spies would – well, seem fairer and feel fouler.” The whole Saruman the White becoming Saruman of Many Colors thing is kind of weird though, and I don’t really know what to do with it.)
To grow is to constantly have to reckon with the past, and there are undeniably some problematic aspects of Tolkien’s work (I didn’t even talk about the female characters, two of whom just stand around looking pretty and being wise and mysterious, and are literally the subjects of an informal beauty contest). But Tolkien has always been an integral part of who I am. It meant a lot to me that these books could still work their magic, and I love them, flaws and all.
Certain of Eventual Failure 