Revisiting Tolkien

This holiday season, I rediscovered the meaning and beauty of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Over the holidays, I nostalgically rewatched and reread many of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, works that played a huge role in my childhood. Tolkien never really truly disappeared from my life, given how much his ideas permeate modern culture, especially modern fantasy literature, and I’ve kept up with the latest publications and shows, such as the Amazon Prime show, The Rings of Power.

One of the delights of going back to Tolkien’s work as an adult, twenty years after I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was that I was able to approach it as an adult, as a work of literature and philosophy, rather than just as a good novel with an interesting plot. (Some other Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels rise to this level, such as Dune.) I’ve come to appreciate how much better of a writer and thinker Tolkien was compared to quite a few modern fantasy authors. Tolkien was able to truly capture and recreate the vibe of medieval epic storytelling, such as Beowulf, in his work. My favorite Tolkien work has always been the Silmarillion, which I loved because of its epic nature, tragedy, and beauty.

I admittedly fell away from Tolkien’s works for a while, primarily because I began to feel that a better model of fantasy fiction was to be found in A Song of Ice and Fire (and its derivative, the TV show, Game of Thrones). A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) embodied a realism toward politics and characters that I felt was lacking in Tolkien. But when you realize that Tolkien and Martin were trying to tell different types of tales and that Tolkien wasn’t attempting to write an entertaining novel, with adventure and romance, for the masses, then it no longer makes sense to compare Tolkien against modern fantasy novels. The Lord of the Rings and even more so, The Silmarillion, were vehicles for Tolkien’s worldbuilding, languages, and mythology.

But Tolkien’s writing skills are really good too. Having compared Tolkien’s prose in the LOTR side by side with a popular modern author such as Brandon Sanderson, one can tell the difference immediately between a well-read master of the English language and a person who uses words in a functional manner. And lest one says that Tolkien was a monochromatic writer, his stories all tales of good versus evil with stagnant, unchanging characters, one only has to read his other works to be disabused of this thought. Take for example, Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife, a story about marital strife between a Numenorean king and his wife. Of course, one cannot forget Tolkien’s darkest tale—filled with incest and murder, where it is unclear if the protagonist actually might not be the antagonist—The Children of Húrin, which takes an episode from the Silmarillion, and expands it into a novel.

Tolkien and Martin are more similar than they appear at first glance, and they are the masters of their genre in their own ways. In Tolkien’s world, every mountain, every river, every town, maybe every tree or stone has a reason to be there, a purpose, a history, a story. It is a deep, deep world. This concept, the impression of depth, is one of the strengths of Tolkien’s work, and perhaps one of his greatest contributions to the literary genre of fantasy. It is closely related to another of Tolkien’s populaizations, the secondary world, an internally consistent constructed world that stands on its own, without having to take place in a dream or in the imagination of a figure in our, primary world. When the principle of the impression of depth is applied to a secondary world, the aesthetic outcome is that the secondary world feels real and authentic because it is deeply rooted. There are maps, there are genealogies, there are stories and songs about the past, there is culture and history. The alternative is just dropping a story into a shallowly constructed world. The reader can tell the difference at once.

Tolkien and Martin have approached this concept of depth differently, nonetheless. Martin’s genius is that he took Tolkien’s methods and applied them to the sociopolitical and historical dimensions. A forgotten third-cousin can suddenly became the heir to a lordship because Martin has an excellent grasp of the dynamics of medieval European hereditary laws and customs and applied them to his world. Tolkien’s work dealt in epic and myth, whereas Martin’s is rooted in medieval history and chivalric court culture. Martin couldn’t care less about languages, whereas Tolkien was immersed in languages. So they each had their own directions when it came to depth. Martin’s work is in fact an answer to his constructive criticisms of Tolkien:

“But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?”

I also used to see Martin’s treatment of the character of Ned Stark—upright and honorable, to the point where it got him killed—as a criticism of Tolkien’s characters and their values. In Tolkien’s work, noble and honorable people like Aragon always win because of their nobility, which, frankly, is not realistic in a cutthroat political world. But again, Tolkien is not truly to tell a realistic story, but is using his work to model his values. Looking back, I’ve come to appreciate that; after all, even if not perfect or fully feasible, the values in Tolkien’s works—honor, nobility, courage, sacrifice, loyalty, freedom—are among the best, and should be what people ought to aim for. After all, does a person want to aim toward virtue or not? And I think Martin agrees with that. Ned Stark’s problem wasn’t his honor, but his inability to combine that honor with pragmatism and realism. Characters such as Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen do more good by combining honor with common sense pragmatism. This is very different from the cynicism and amorality that Martin is sometimes seen to promote in his works.

To take another author: Brandon Sanderson’s worldbuilding is excellent when it comes to magic systems and some times such as the climate and geology of his creations. This is presumably, because his of background in chemistry and the mechanics of video games. On the other hand, entire chapters of his novel can take place in a country that the reader may never learn the history or political climate of. A civil war occurs in an important country in The Stormlight Archive series, but we learn nothing of the machinations and campaigns related to this war. It is conveniently glossed over, so that the story may continue. In another instance, we never even learn the name and nature of rule of the father of a main character (Dalinar Kholin’s father). But Sanderson is trying to tell a different type of tale than Martin. The magic feels deep but the world itself, its history and cultures, feels lacking in that impression of depth previously discussed. None of this, by the way, stops Sanderson from being one of my

There are some very valid criticisms of Tolkien. In the LOTR, the characters do often tend to be black or white, and while good characters grow and acquire wisdom, like Merry and Pippin, for the most part, characters, and entire races seem to have a fixed, essentialist nature. There are exceptions of course, like Boromir. The counterargument to this is that the will of the individual to freely make choices and and impact outcomes is one of the most essential components of the tale. This characterizes the arcs of Frodo, Sam, Gollum, Aragon, Théoden, and even Gandalf and Saruman. Tolkien’s works are inundated with the concept of freedom, to freely live, to freely create, without coercion or domination. Those who seek to dominate the wills of other, such as Melkor ‘Morgoth’ and Sauron put so much of their being into controlling and dominating the world that they literally lose themselves and the essence of their power in the futile attempt to dominate.

This is the sort of argument that I would not have necessarily picked up on when I first read Tolkien in my early teens, but now, having reread the works, as well as many of Tolkien’s letters, I have come to appreciate. This is what I meant that Tolkien’s works are works of philosophy, literature, and even theology, because of the issues and assumptions underlying the themes therein. From the History of Middle Earth 10: Morgoth’s Ring:

“Sauron was ‘greater’, effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First. Why? Because, though he was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low. Eventually he also squandered his power (of being) in the endeavour to gain control of others. But he was not obliged to expend so much of himself. To gain domination over Arda, Morgoth had let most of his being pass into the physical constituents of the Earth – hence all things that were born on Earth and lived on and by it, beasts or plants or incarnate spirits, were liable to be ‘stained’”.

Another criticism of Tolkien, one that I feel a bit more acutely, it its Eurocentric and Western focus. After all, the men of the West—stand-ins for the people of medieval Europe—are literally fighting the hordes of the east, the people of Rhûn and Harad, the minions of Sauron. My only answer to that criticism is that works of literature, despite being rooted in the particular time or place or ethos of a certain culture, can nonetheless rise above that ethos and provide universal entertainment and elucidation for all humans. Such works look at the universal in the human disposition from the lens of the particular. This is no different than a person in modern China finding inspiration from the Bible, a text far removed from them in space and time and culture. I would be more than happy if a work of my ancestors, The Mahabharata or The Ramayana or The Bhagavad Gita serves as moral inspiration to someone from a very different culture. So it is important not to look at Tolkien’s work in modern geographical and cultural terms, but as a work of philosophy and morality inspired by and rooted in Tolkien’s interests in medieval Europe.

People have spent their lives writing essays on Tolkien. His works are amongst the world’s most widely known and commented upon. An immersion into his works, the Histories of Middle Earth published by his son, his letters, and more will give a reader a good sense of his worldview and philosophy and their depth, whether or not one agrees with all that they might find. When I revisited the LOTR a few weeks ago, one of the most interesting chapters was one that I had not read or considered in a long time, especially as it had been cut from the Peter Jackson movies: The Scouring of the Shire. The chapter is almost a mini-novella and can be read as environmentalist, libertarian, anti-technocratic, anti-bureaucratic, anti-autocratic, anti-industrial, pro-localism, pro-common sense, and pro-freedom. This, presumably, like the Shire in general, was Tolkien’s representation of a good life.

All in all, I got a lot out of reconnecting with Tolkien and revisiting his works. I’ve gone on to watch some YouTube videos about themes in his essays, as well as read works I’ve never read before, such as those dealing with the nature of souls in his world, Elvish agriculture, the Valar, and so on. The lore is so deep and comprehensive that there is always going to be a lot more to learn and come back to, whenever I am in a Tolkienesque phase again. And that I appreciate.