The Lord of the Rings again

I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings again—this is probably the fourth time through. (Thanks to Paul Harris for introducing me to the book when I was in high school.) It’s lost none of its narrative power and excitement; in fact, I sometimes have to make myself slow down to savor Tolkien’s detailed descriptions of the landscapes and the poems and bits of historical lore that he adds in. Over the years, I’ve occasionally read other fantasy fiction—very occasionally. Lynn Draper recommended Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara and I remember liking it; Vanessa Davis keeps recommending something with a Greek-like name . . . Acropolis? Hellespont? I don’t know if I’ll get to it.

I also don’t think I’d like Brooks if I had the chance to re-read it; his world didn’t stay with me. But Tolkien excels precisely because of the detail of his world, its history, its languages—even if he hadn’t filled out the rest of this history in The Silmarillion and all the other manuscripts that Christopher Tolkien has published as The History of Middle-earth, the tantalizing glimpses of the past that he gives us in The Lord of the Rings is enough to make Tolkien’s world apparent in all its breadth.

And I love the tone of the prose in The Lord of the Rings. In The Hobbit, Tolkien told a tale for children; the narrator’s voice betrays an awkward self-consciousness:

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained – well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

Compare that to this passage, from The Two Towers—Gollum returns to Frodo and Sam and sees them sleeping peacefully together:

Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.

What an amazing passage! Even as Gollum covets the ring, he also loves Frodo and longs for the closeness that Sam and Frodo share. Tragically, the corruption of the Ring has foreclosed the possibility of love to Gollum forever. Still, he’s not simply an evil character; he carries with him the remnants of the being he once was—Smeágol—and the tortured recollections of love and kindness which he cannot experience again. Could a child really sense the full import of such loneliness? I’m very glad that Tolkien seemed not to bother worrying about that.

There are few books I have time to read more than once, but I enjoy making time to re-read The Lord of the Rings. And while I’m glad that I was able to see Peter Jackson’s magnificent filmed adaptation of Tolkien’s novel, I know it can’t begin to compare with the depth, pacing, and profound drama of the original. One day, I’ll detail all of the film’s shortcomings as a way to goad people into reading (or re-reading) the novel for themselves.