In a now famous letter to Milton Waldman in 1951, Tolkien wrote that “hardly a word in its 600,000 has been unconsidered, and the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all the features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered.”¹ It is not possible to honestly proclaim that any word placed in The Lord of the Rings is in some way arbitrary. As a rule of thumb, a statement of author’s intention—conscious or otherwise—should be square one of any form of literary criticism.

It’s true that some writers spend significantly less time on their drafts than did Tolkien. And it’s also true that some artists are less careful in their craft, either out of the conscious decision to keep their creative impulses unimpeded, or as an unconscious expression of a carefree attitude. No matter the reason, however, the artist’s work is the final word, indeed the only finally relevant word on the subject. Any consultation of sources outside of the work in question should be done under the auspices of learning about the creator’s motivation.

This is not to say that an artist’s statements on his work are unimportant. One hopes to find his own interpretation of a work aided in unearthed private correspondence, interviews, or author’s commentary, and generally speaking, a close and attentive reader of literary fiction should. The narrative is the expression of the author’s intent, after all, and one always hopes that the authors are intelligent and competent enough to know how to express that intent best. While true that this isn’t always the case, we are fortunate enough to be focused here on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien—an artist for whom this certainly holds true.

The intention of this section is not to give a complete or exhaustive critical “deep reading” interpretation of The Lord of the Rings, as such an effort would come about being approximately the length of a book by itself. Rather, it is to briefly approach the core elements around which his novel was written, and to contrast those with how it has come to be represented in common culture. How he intended his novel to be depicted, too, alongside his intentions for particular aspects of it are also of note, and for that reason, segments of his letters are considered often in unison with various parts of the novel’s text.

In order to give fair interpretation to any given work art, the interpreter must first presume that the work forms the completeness of what the artist found necessary to express. In narrative fiction, this may not apply per se to elements like setting or character, wherein a particular work—such as The Lord of the Rings—makes reference to fictional histories or lands which never appear past a line or two of dialogue, or bring up characters with obvious and important backstories that are only present for a handful of scenes. There might be more to these things that are contained in the work, but both of these elements, setting and character, are only being used as means toward a particular end. In fiction, that end is of course the narrative. Storytelling is not just a matter of inventing characters or drawing maps, but, as Tolkien understood it, the full act of sub-creation: the replication of the world into a model over which the artist has direct control.

This will be contrasted, both explicitly and implicitly, with the film adaptations made by Peter Jackson. While it is true that films operate according to a different writing method than novels, the ethos behind blockbuster film writing and the inclinations behind the majority of genre fiction is close enough to warrant the comparison. Both feature the flattening of narrative into a package better suited for raw consumption rather than comprehensive interpretation. And this is not to say that film is itself a medium unsuited to the creation of art; many directors have proven this false over the short time that film has existed. Rather, it’s to note that the manner in which the medium is most often used falls overwhelmingly along the lines of consumer media instead of meaningful acts of sub-creation. The case relevant to this piece is, of course Jackson’s attempt at bringing Tolkien’s legacy to the big screen.

Setting

It is remembered by all, and unhappily by some, that The Fellowship of the Ring spends a great deal of time concerning hobbits. So much, in fact, that the hobbits of the Fellowship don’t even leave the rough boundaries of hobbit lands until more than halfway through the first part, having spent approximately two hundred pages in the Shire, Buckland, the Old Forest, the Barrow Downs, and Bree. For the sake of reference, the entirety of The Hobbit is only about half again as long as this (roughly three hundred and twenty pages).

Most of these chapters are totally absent in Jackson’s rewritten version, and the segments that remain are unrecognizable. Normally, a brief aside here regarding Jackson’s motivations, both stated and surmised, would be included before criticizing his treatment of the narrative. This, however, deserves more space than is appropriate for this section and will be included instead in section three of this piece. Our focus here will solely be on how Jackson’s alterations changed (for the worse) how audiences engaged with the story.

Tolkien begins The Lord of the Rings with hobbits. He doesn’t begin with background about Sauron or Rings of Power or the beginning of the world. Nor does he begin with a summary of The Hobbit, which, although somewhat clumsily orchestrated, The Lord of the Rings was something of a sequel to. He begins instead laying out what hobbits look like, what they act like, what they enjoy doing, where they live, and a general anthropological (hobbropological?) study of their traits and habits. This grounds the story he tells in a sense of reality, as even though he is talking about fantastic creatures, these creatures are impossible not to recognize as, effectively, rural Englishmen of the kind that Tolkien himself owed a great deal of creative nostalgia to.

The relation between ‘hobbit’ and ‘Englishman’ isn’t simply an aesthetic choice. Tolkien expresses that the Shire is not exactly England in a letter to reviewer Michael Strait, but nonetheless draws obvious comparison to it:

There is no special reference to England in the ‘Shire’–except of course that as an Englishman brought up in an ‘almost rural’ village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham. I take my models like anyone else—from such ‘life’ as I know.²

The last line is especially relevant. Art, according even to Tolkien, remains an act of sub-creation; it cannot escape the real as it is a model of it. Tolkien’s use of ‘fantasy’, as well as his writing of it, works only because it is in some sense real, that is, drawn from the real world by the creative exercise of his will and the expression of his memory. This is how the Shire begins in a dream of Tolkien’s contemporary England; idealized and romanticized in some sense, but still very close to home in organization, operation, and appearance—the shortness of the inhabitants notwithstanding.

His depictions of Shirefolk and of the hobbits generally reveals these close ties to England, despite there being no landmarks or explicit points of reference to tie the two together. Consider the naming patterns of the people of Bree, and how the Shire hobbits contrast them with the ones they’re more familiar with:

The Men of Bree seemed all to have rather botanical (and to the Shire-folk rather odd) names, like Rushlight, Goatleaf, Heathertoes, Appledore, Thistlewool and Ferny (not to mention Butterbur). Some of the hobbits had similar names. The Mugworts, for instance, seemed numerous. But most of them had natural names, such as Banks, Brockhouse, Longholes, Sandheaver, and Tunnelly, many of which were used in the Shire.³

Bree, according to Tolkien’s own maps, sits roughly a hundred miles east of Hobbiton, past the Old Forest and the Downs—both very English in their naming conventions as well. It is clear that when Tolkien mentions “no special reference to England,” he is referring not to the texture of the Shire, nor its substance, but rather that there is no “Cambridge” to be found on a map of Arnor, nor “Oxford College” neighboring the Grey Havens, and no “Scotland Yard” situated off the main road.

While on the topic, in a letter to his son, Tolkien remarked that he “should have given all the hobbits very English names to match the shire.”⁴ Note “to match the shire,” itself so-named in English tradition for county nomenclature. ‘Shire’ itself, according to Oxford, refers to strongholds of traditional rural culture, particularly in the Midlands.

The four hobbits, however, leave the Shire, and this too is important despite being truncated to the point of absurdity in the films. Frodo’s move is premeditated; he sells his house at Bag End under the ostensible purpose of purchasing a spacious home in Buckland. The reader is taken from the largely familiar region of the Shire to the slightly less familiar region of Buckland, and then almost immediately to the Old Forest, again, depicting a diminishing sense of familiarity without quite crossing over into the realm of the alien or the faerie. The first shock to the system comes with the Barrow Downs, the episode of which, paired with Bombadil, comes across almost as an incomprehensible bad dream after the fact. Even after this, familiarity clings to their surroundings through Bree, through the marshes, all the way to Weathertop.

Tolkien was not trying to recreate England in fiction by creating the Shire. That would have been, as he’s often cited as saying, a sort of conscious, intentional, heavy-handed allegorical writing that he disdained. The England recreated in The Lord of the Rings is instead a permeation from the wellspring of his soul; each eddy in each pool he envisioned on the continent, every current of every river, each twig underfoot or leaf overhead: all of these he drew from memory and transformed in his personal subcreative act. England is in The Lord of the Rings because its author is English. One cannot simply dispense with the author. He is on every page.

Violence

Tolkien’s is found too just as obviously in his depiction of human action, particularly in violence. The differences between Tolkien’s work and Jackson’s adaptation of it could not be more obvious than in the depiction of violence and action with regard to audience attention. Jackson’s films heavily rely on violence due to their nature as action blockbusters; audiences fill seats when they’re promised fantasized carnage and destruction. Defenders of the films may argue that padding out these scenes does no harm to Tolkien’s work at all, even if they are allegedly necessary to keep an audience’s attention. While the latter may be true, the former is certainly not.

We consider first the skirmish at Amon Hen. It is recounted in retrospect, with the chief narrator of the action discovering its aftermath too late to have intervened in it. This is a far cry from the ten to fifteen minute action sequence depicted in the films, where Aragorn fights his share of the horde and the Boromir’s last stand is captured on celluloid. Instead, the skirmish comes quickly and without buildup. As the fellowship made its way downstream toward the falls, they had become aware of a company of orcs following their passage but, eventually, losing them.

The Fellowship of the Ring, although not considered its own novel, ends not with the climax of the skirmish, but of the division of the Fellowship itself. As Boromir turns toward Gondor, the Falls of Rauros marked the intended division of the Fellowship between those who would turn toward their homelands, such as Boromir to the south, and both Legolas and Gimli to the north, and those who would continue on to Mordor in the East. It was Boromir’s last chance to entreat Frodo to bring the Ring to his city.

This plea quickly turned to madness, however. It was a madness glimpsed at over the previous chapters, which gnawed away at him the way any petulant and untamed temptation does, until finally it bubbled up to the surface on the slopes of Amon Hen. Notice that unlike the film, the book does not end with the skirmish. It ends with Boromir transgressing the trust of the Fellowship and spurring its sudden fracture, and it ends with Frodo, fleeing to the power of the Ring out of fear. The violence comes immediately afterward.

The skirmish, instead, is saved for the opening pages of The Two Towers. Aragorn, aware that the party is scattered, searches for Frodo in order to ensure the safety of both he and the Ring. Instead, the entire situation disintegrates into chaos in a matter of minutes:

Even as he gazed his quick ears caught the sounds in the woodlands below, on the west side of the River. He stiffened. There cries, and among them, to his horror, he could distinguish the harsh voices of Orcs. Then suddenly with a deep-throated call a great horn blew, and the blasts of it smote the hills and echoed in the hollows, rising in a mighty shout above the roaring of the falls.

‘The horn of Boromir!’ he cried. ‘He is in need!’ He sprang down the steps and away, leaping down the path. ‘Alas! An ill fate is on me this day, and all that I do goes amiss. Where is Sam?’

As he ran the cries became louder, but fainter now and desperately the horn was blowing. Fierce and shrill rose the yell of the Orcs, and suddenly the horn calls ceased. Aragorn raced down the last slope but before he could reach the hill’s foot, the sounds died away; and as he turned to the left and ran towards them they retreated, until at last he could hear them no more.⁵

It reads as if Tolkien were transcribing the words of—perhaps expectedly—a veteran. Violence comes practically unannounced, out of sight, and quickly: a successful ambush carried out against an unprepared company, and it occurs within the space of roughly half a page. It is not an exciting and swashbuckling parade of extras getting brutally dispatched by a photogenic cast of main characters. Far from it, in fact, as it depicts instead the panicked desperation of a scattered company whose leader was caught out of position.

The tension comes from a total lack of information, not from the menacing image of a band of orcs attacking a group of main characters. The orcs aren’t even seen.

It’s important to note here that no argument is being made, at the moment, regarding whether gratuitous action is itself works to the detriment of any given narrative. The point to this is that gratuitous action is an element that can only exist in fantasy, and that The Lord of the Rings lacks much of this save for very specific scenes, contra the impression of the story given off by the films. But the films, as has been argued and tangentially argued here, tell a very different story from the books, to such an extent that one could consider them a gross and unfair misrepresentation of what The Lord of the Rings is.

Tolkien himself would agree with this sentiment. In 1958, Forrest Ackerman approached Morton Grady Zimmerman to write a lengthy treatment for a proposed cinematic adaptation. It was sent to Tolkien for his thoughts and approval, which, despite being impressed with the promising concept art, Tolkien soundly rejected.

The letter covers similar topics so far discussed above, but one scene in particular highlights Tolkien’s understanding of violence in The Lord of the Rings above others: the incident at Weathertop from Fellowship’s chapter, “A Knife in the Dark.”

Strider does not ‘Whip out a sword’ in the book. Naturally not: his sword was broken. […] Why then make him do so here, in a contest that was explicitly not fought with weapons?

The Black Riders do not scream, but keep a more terrifying silence. Aragorn does not blanch. The riders draw slowly in on foot in darkness, and do not ‘spur’. There is no fight.

Why has my account been entirely rewritten here, with disregard for the rest of the tale? I can see that there are certain difficulties in representing a dark scene; but they are not insuperable. A scene of gloom lit by a small red fire, with the Wraiths slowly approaching as darker shadows – until the moment when Frodo puts on the Ring, and the King steps forward revealed – would seem to me far more impressive than yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings.⁶

Akerman and Zimmerman both clearly had similar beliefs about that scene as Peter Jackson would have some three decades later. Tolkien’s attention remained fixed on a realistic portrayal of being ambushed by wraiths, which in his mind, were creatures of shadow or malignant ghosts that had no obvious or discernible form. The depiction of the wraiths is just as important, however, as the depiction of the ambush; much like the later attack at Amon Hen, it is over almost as soon as it begins. More time is spent after the fact in determining exactly what has happened than is spent depicting and reveling in the violent confusion:

At length he gathered from Sam that they had sen nothing but the vague shadowy shapes coming towards them. Suddenly to his horror Sam found that his master had vanished; and at that moment a black shadow rushed past him, and he fell.⁷

Aragorn similarly states, upon his return, that he had “been trying to discover something of their movements” but he found nothing, nor did he understand “why they have gone and do not attack again.”⁸ Again, the emphasis is on determining the event that had just transpired, as the event itself was too brief and indistinct for any of the characters to do a proper survey. At both Amon Hen and here at Weathertop (fittingly, Amon Sul), Tolkien does not stop the story in order to revel in depictions of combat, but neither does he shy away from them; rather, it seems clear that his experience in war taught him what combat is—or, more appropriately perhaps, what it isn’t: describable.⁹

Not unlike how he crafts settings, his depiction of violence too springs out from the collected memories of his experiences. Who better to understand the disorder of armed combat than an English Army officer who survived the Somme?

One can see this repeated in the large battles the characters take part in over the coming chapters. The battle at Helm’s Deep is given similar treatment, as is the siege of Minas Tirith and the subsequent battle before its walls. In both cases, Jackson’s films place great emphasis on the violence and action, delivering the audience into the fray itself, highlighting the coolness of the actors, the physical dexterity of their performances, all propelled into heightened emotive spheres by Howard Shore’s score. Tolkien, however, seems to go out of his way to avoid anything like this. Far from glamorizing how cool melee combat seems to be, or combat at all, for that matter, the actual description of battle is slimmed down to a handful of pages. Hardly can it be called sterile or grotesque, either, as Tolkien, despite his war experience, does not seek to reduce violence to a mire of unfortunate and evil gore. Where heroes triumph, they are lauded, and where defeat looms, there is tension. But these are far briefer in text—and, one might argue, in real life—than they are on film.

Instead, Tolkien goes to great lengths detailing the key strategic and tactical elements of the battles before they start, and then, after the violence is over, the ramifications of the battle’s outcome—usually in the form of logistics of tending to the wounded and the command of leadership after either victory or defeat. This, as well as his grasp over the importance of geography, make his war experience so obvious in the text.

These are not the elements of narrative that tend to accompany a consumptive, fantasy-based interest in fiction. The fantasist is more interested in heroic deeds carried out with wanton glory. Strategy and tactics may play roles in the fantasy, but only insofar as they amplify the fantasist in the comfort of his own world. What the fantasist wants are highs of emotional resonance that drag him out of his life and into the alternate reality of the fantasy. Films with particularly strong geek followings show these tendencies off very well, and Jackson’s film trilogy does succumb to this. But notice what he had to change.

The action-blockbuster needs glamorized violence in order to be exciting. If violence is shown with too much realism, it’s no longer fantastical, as moving images aren’t the same as the written word. But if it’s too cartoonish, it falls into the territory of low-grade comedy. Jackson’s background was in exactly the latter, and while it shows in his film treatment of The Lord of the Rings, he offers enough restraint to ensure that most of the action scenes maintain some element of narrative tension. Still, this focus on the spectacle dilutes if not outright obscures Tolkien’s story.

It turns the audience’s attention to fantastical feats of bravado, leaves nothing to viewer imagination, and moreover, isolates and removes the action set pieces from the narrative. This makes for convenient one-liners and memorable quips, but only by cutting the film up, so to speak, into chunks where story exists and where action exists. It doesn’t bring the two together. One may criticize the lengths to which the latter Hobbit films by the same director embellished nonsensical, gravity-defying, computer generated action, but the exact same approach to storytelling and violence was used in those as in this earlier film trilogy.

Politics

Tolkien is popularly considered to have abstained from political intrigue his most famous novel, and to some extent, this is true. There is little to be found in the way of royal court drama or noble scheming, as these settings simply don’t appear in the book at enough length to make a difference. But politics are not absent from The Lord of the Rings; much of the last part, and a substantial segment of the second part, are at heart some sort of political drama.

We can consider politics as the organization and definition of groups of people with regard to their movements, whether that entails capital (economics) or violent animosity (warfare). Of special importance is how this concerns the use of power with regard to authority, and how these are both used to command, as well as how they reflect back on their commander. In other words, politics here will be about how peoples are commanded, who commands them, and why. As such, we shall contrast Saruman’s behavior in the Shire, itself an image of Sauron’s across Middle-Earth¹⁰, against Aragorn’s behavior across Gondor throughout The Return of the King. Toward the end, Jackson’s films shall be assessed briefly, but only briefly, as the films lack all elements of these themes in both their theatrical and extended cuts. There’s little to say except that the films seem to totally miss the point.

Saruman, famously, was one of Tolkien’s wizards. A full analysis of their power is a topic broader and deeper than the space available in this piece, as it touches on the ‘Art’ of the Elves and how Tolkien conceived of magic within The Lord of the Rings. In short, however, Tolkien considered there to be two different magics: one was that of the Elves and the Valar, as well as the lesser-spirits of the Maiar, and the other was that of the Enemy. The former he referred to as an art and tended, in both the narrative and in letters, to address the later as magic, though both ultimately seemed to fall under the term—particularly when one considers that both wielded some version the same sort of power, the latter having altered its use for nefarious means after their Fall. It was not ever considered as some systematized, hermetic machine code but rather as a simple resonance between wills; the Art flourished when the will actively aligned itself with the Divine spirit, while its antithesis ran rampant in pursuit of total domination. It’s a classic Christian view of good and evil: the Good serves God where Evil seeks (unsuccessfully) to supplant Him.¹¹

In the case of Saruman, his power is explicitly revealed to be in his use of voice. In his letter to Forrest Akerman, Tolkien makes clear how this power affects the listener’s reason rather than being some sort of subliminal device. It was rhetorical:

Saruman’s voice was not hypnotic but persuasive. Those who listened to him were not in danger of falling into a trance, but of agreeing with his arguments, while fully awake. It was always open to one to reject, by free will and reason, both his voice while speaking and its after-impressions. Saruman corrupted the reasoning powers.¹²

In film and common imagination, it may be difficult to imagine this use of voice and word alone to corrupt reason without the use of some special magic spell or hypnosis. One need only to consider propaganda, however, or perhaps the news cycle, mass media, and the unsaid social norms that lay hidden beneath common conversation to witness active attacks on reason in real time. For the most part, these do not rely on scientific, esoteric, or hypnotic means to alter a man’s perception of the world and thus undermine his reason. It’s just a matter of sophistic argumentation, as the likes of Plato or Socrates combated a two and a half millennium ago. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, Saruman’s ability to wield this was itself some manifestation of an art turned to a domineering magic, and it was wielded by a rational being with thousands of years to perfect it.

The importance of this power could not be understated in terms of Saruman’s political ambitions. It was words, rhetoric and subterfuge that allowed him access not just to Rohan, which he intended to deliver to Sauron, as well as, in its later years, the White Council, which he deceived in order to further his own research into the Ring. After the sack of Isengard, his plans apparently laid waste, he remained imprisoned at Orthanc until he again used his power to weasel out of captivity, journeying North with his lackey Wormtongue in tow.

As if to signify his diminished power by association with his political stature and ambition, he last appears as ‘Sharkey,’ the ‘Old Man’ and Boss of a greatly transformed Shire. The wizard who had been among those first spirits who sang the world into being, according to the Ainulindalë, who some three thousand years before the events of The Lord of the Rings had been sent to the continent to raise local resistance to the shadow of the Enemy, who bred new races orcs and recovered ancient knowledge apparently not known even to Sauron¹³, waged intra-continental war, manipulated the aspirations of nations, ended his life and career as a petty neighborhood commissar to a population of largely agreeable creatures that were less than half his own height.

Saruman’s gradual but total corruption resulted also in the total destitution of his power. As his intellect corroded due to the influences of evil, so too did his will. In the end, he was capable only of envisioning himself a lord of a collection of halflings, and even then, only out of spite for the four of the Fellowship.

In contrast to Saruman, for our purposes, we come to Aragorn. With respect to the narrative, Aragorn is better understood as an earthly foil to Sauron himself, where Gandalf was considered, even by Tolkien, as something of an otherworldly foil.¹⁴ Sauron’s political machinations, however, remained hidden behind a (somewhat literal) fog of war in The Lord of the Rings; his alliances with Southrons and Easterlings, as well as his various bodies of orcs and efforts to bring the tribes in the Misty Mountains into the fold, are all alluded to in very short passages and without exposition. It is depicted as information of the enemy relayed to an entrenched army; the reader becomes aware of the facts but none of the intrigue, nor is it really necessary.

Saruman’s machinations, on the other hand, are depicted more clearly, and, due to his sharing that domineering impulse, the reader can understand Saruman imaging the greater evil in his plots. Even the power of his voice, which “corrupts the reasoning powers,” can be understood as imaging Sauron’s corrosive force upon the psyches he turns it to. By understanding Saruman and his actions (though not necessarily his intentions), the reader can come to see Sauron’s methods as well.

Aragorn, however, does not seek domination nor does he demand respect. Nor does he necessarily earn it from kindred as one might among peers. Aragorn’s authority is derived from several sources which all act in union with one another: principally his birthright, his actions, and his manner. The most succinct example of this is found when he departs the Rohirrim to walk the Paths of the Dead.

Accompanied by Legolas, Gimli, and the sons of Elrond, Aragorn is not explicitly seeking an alliance of dead men who have no bodies left to give aid, so much as a route through the south of Gondor in order to combat the many enemies there. Aid to Minas Tirith was sparse due to the plight south of the city, but between these two regions was a mountain range, and in it, the Dunharrow. In those hills resided the spirits of cowards who, when once called by the king to defend the realm, hid in shame. Only by the invocation of the king’s authority could the curse upon them can be lifted, and likewise it is by his authority that they answer his call in the first place:

‘Oathbreakers, why have ye come?’

And a voice was heard out of the night that answered him, as if from far away:

‘To fulfill our oath and have peace.’

Then Aragorn said: ‘The hour is come at last. Now I go to Pelargir upon Anduin and ye shall come after me. And when all this land is clean of the servants of Sauron, I will hold the oath fulfilled, and ye shall have peace and depart for ever. For I am Elessar, Isildur’s heir of Gondor.’¹⁵

It need not be dwelt on how differently Jackson chose to depict this sequence in his films. Far from being an unseen and threatening menace of shades, the dead are depicted as glowing ghosts. And moreover, rather than Aragorn’s detour through the south of Gondor done with the express purpose of rendering aid and gathering troops, it’s reduced to as an exercise in supernatural necromancy.

This latter point is most important; Tolkien’s consideration of shades were such creatures with only limited ability to physically attack mortal objects.¹⁶ These shades followed him for some twofold personal gain: first to reclaim the honor that they had lost in failing their oath, and second to fulfill their oath now that they were granted the opportunity, and in so doing, pass on from a curse that held them in their lands long past the days of their lives. But there is no obvious material benefit for Aragorn to offer them such clemency; Jackson’s version of the Dunharrow men are effectively superpowered phantoms. Tolkien’s are but barely-visible shades. The only benefit offered to Aragorn is the further exercise of his authority as King and the removal, or perhaps rectifying, of a curse upon the land he was to be lord over.

This difference typifies the difference in authority between that defined purely by domination, as explored with Saruman above, and that defined as in accordance with the superior ‘nature of things’ or providential order. One reason the films are unable to fully capture this difference is because, ultimately, the films fail to depict Middle Earth as a world in which the latter is sensible. There are a couple of vague references to a higher order, supreme beings, ‘fate’ so-called, and the like, but the motivations of the characters and their actions within the plot, where they diverge from Tolkien’s real story, can be reduced to some materialist sense of self-interest.

Kingship in The Lord of the Rings extends deeper than a simple aesthetic of black banners, speeches and coronations ceremonies. The last part of the book is titled The Return of the King not simply because one main character comes to the throne his thousand-year line is heir to. Return concerns itself with the overthrowing of a world order defined by domination and its replacement with one in which authority is, as stated, in line with the providential order of creation: a status correction back to what was intended. One might even appeal to the Natural Law, here.

As a last note, in the time that The Lord of the Rings has gained more wide-spread cultural appeal in the wake of Jackson’s films, and as a genre of dark pop-fantasy has grown with it, such as George Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice, one criticism of Tolkien’s depiction of politics is an apparent naivete toward how complex social-political systems actually function. His now famous quote hopefully reveals his lack of attention to what Tolkien’s view of authority actually was:

Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. 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?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences.

His argument has largely been addressed. Aragorn was not an effective ruler because he was just a ‘good guy.’ He cooperated with providence and met his fate head-on, biding his time when appropriate and acting swiftly where necessary. And most importantly, unlike the films, he never ran or hid his identity when the times were appropriate to announce it. The reforging his sword, itself a narrative device that marks the emblem of the king, took place before the Fellowship even left Rivendell; it was not something sprung upon him by Elrond at the eleventh hour, as the films depict.

As far as dealing with real-world decisions, Martin again fails to read The Lord of the Rings in any sense of context. Tolkien considered Aragorn’s first orders of business as king to be bringing order to a demographically altered Gondor in the wake of the war.¹⁷ Aragorn himself only spends two chapters as king in the story, anyway; hard decisions made from a throne are better seen in the depictions of Theoden and Denethor, both depicting, in different ways, a darkly realistic pessimism in the face of their current events.

Recapitulation

As far as putting together a comprehensive interpretation of what Tolkien was ‘trying to say’ in The Lord of the Rings, this section only scratches a surface, but with the hope that the reader recognizes this surface to be much thicker than an applied veneer. For our purposes, this section serves to emphasize three elements of of his novel in which Tolkien himself is inextricable from the content.

In terms of setting, Tolkien drew from what he had either great personal love for or at least intimate experience with such as the Dead Marshes and the “approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after The Battle of the Somme.”¹⁸ A narrative’s setting is not just a matter of positioning scenery or providing a stage. Where characters are formed from the writer’s personality, and plot from the imaginings of unlived events, setting draws from the autobiographical memory of places traveled to and seen firsthand. This is particularly true of the more fantastical settings, such as Rivendell or Lorien—or the house of Tom Bombadil—in The Lord of the Rings. The commonness of the Shire holds the alien world of the faerie, or Elf, in its proper dream.

In terms of violence, Tolkien again drew greatly from personal experience. His depiction of violence throughout the book consistently reflects an experiential knowledge of battle and violence the likes of which few works of fantasy adequately reflect. The specific focus on violence as an end in itself, insofar as Jackson’s film trilogy embellishes and amplifies battles and physical conflict for the purpose of blockbuster cinematic excitement, does more than take liberties with the ‘source material’. By altering the expression of the narrative in order to emphasize action, it shifts the focus from the implications of the characters’ actions to the actions themselves.

In terms of politics and authority, Tolkien emphasized the differences in both purpose and consequence of how to wield power. As evidenced by Sauron, but more especially by Saruman, power by means of social, self-indulgent domination was a form of rule over and against true kingship, which he depicted most clearly in Aragorn. A king does not need to inflict his will over his people where such conflict arises that it needs dominion and slavery to drag it into submission; a king rules rather by a sort of union between land, people, and authority. This authority, in the case of The Lord of the Rings, arises out of both right ownership and the right duties associated with ownership.

The differences between The Lord of the Rings and Jackson’s attempts at adaptations now should be obvious. There are significantly more than these, but we have left aside criticism regarding choices of aesthetics and abbreviations in the interest of filmmaking convention. These differences illustrate the manner in which the films deviate from the substance of Lord of the Rings, not just its presentation.

By condensing the time spent in and around the Shire, and by embellishing aspects of the hobbits’ characters, the films fail to cement the story in a sense of lived, real-world experience that hark back to rural England. In doing so, this prevents the story from taking on the quality of a fairy story, wherein the reader—or viewer—is taken from the known and plunged into the unknown. The Shire is idealized from the beginning. It isn’t entered into like a neighborhood.

Likewise, by emphasizing action set pieces and spending long scenes focused on blockbuster styled violence, the films again place a wall of glamour between the audience and the narrative. Battles don’t look like they do in Jackson’s films, and intuitively, every viewer knows this. But for the sake of simple entertainment, the viewer suspends his disbelief. But notice the complete difference in approach compared to Tolkien’s text; battle and skirmish are depicted with a largely silent ferocity. Buildup to battle and its aftermath are more than matters of narrative pacing, they are greater parts that make the short scenes of battle more vivid to the reader. When one is engaged in a charge of cavalry, one hasn’t the time or interest to think or dwell on the moment, and Tolkien’s style captures this feeling; slow-motion shots of screaming actors affect the audience in an opposite fashion.

Finally, alterations to the characters of Saruman and Aragorn, too, alter the story being told. Themes of domination by force rather than command by natural authority are set aside or offered as window dressing to subplots about an evil caricatured wizard and a brooding, reluctant king-to-be. Saruman’s pettiness, which is the crowning jewel of his character’s descending arc, is largely absent; in its place, Christopher Lee carries the performance of a static character who scowls over a defeat and dies. There is no depiction of his decrepit decline, which again, undermines the theme presented by Tolkien. As for Aragorn, the decision to invent a character arc focused on personal growth does similar damage, in the opposite direction, to the themes.

The last, and perhaps most important element that alters the film’s story, regards the titular Ring itself, what it stands for, how it affects the characters, and its position in the narrative with respect to other events in the story. This, however, is a topic too large for this piece, and as it stands, a lot of what would be included here can be inferred by the rest of this section. Whether we will address this in future pieces remains undecided.

Section three will be the last of this piece. Section one addressed the notions of art, fantasy, and narrative literature, particularly with how Tolkien considered them. This section addressed his magnum opus and contrasted it with the films, highlighting where fundamental elements of the narrative were suspended or simply removed in favor of telling an easier story. Section three will bring these two aspects together in order to present not just how The Lord of the Rings should best be interpreted, but how art can be defined; in doing so, the damage caused to Tolkien’s work in popular culture should be made apparent. Far from elevating it to broader audiences and so allowing them to share Tolkien’s vision, what has occurred instead is the elevation of something wearing Tolkien’s vision as a hollowed out skin.

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1John Tolkien to Milton Waldman, unknown date, Letter 131 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, eds. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (New York: Harper Collins, 1981, 2023), 222.

2John Tolkien to Michael Straight, likely January 1956, Letter 181 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 337.

3Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, (Harper Collins: London) , 156.

4John Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, 28 July 1944, Letter 76 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 126.

5Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, (Harper Collins: London) 413-414

6John Tolkien to Forrest Ackerman, June 1958, Letter 210 from The Letters, 392.

7Tolkien, Fellowship, 198.

8Ibid.

9One finds similar depictions of combat in the letters or memoirs of soldiers who saw front line duty in the First World War. See Ernst Junger, The Storm of Steel, Copse 125, Fire and Blood, as well as the letters sent home from the Western Front compiled in Tom Donavan, The Hazy Red Hell.

10Christopher Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring (Harper Collins, New York: 1993, 2000), 396: “Sauron had, in fact, been very like Saruman, and so still understood him quickly and could guess what he would be likely to think and do, even withou the aid of palantiri or of spies.”

11For more specific, detailed explanation of this, see John Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison (draft), 25 September 1954, Letter 155 from The Letters, 296. Especially:

I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the ‘deceits of the Enemy’. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, god or bad (per se), but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other ‘free’ wills. The Enemy’s operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but ‘magic’ that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. There magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. There goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to use between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and ‘life’.

12Tolkien to Akerman, 210 from The Letters, 396.

13Consider Christopher Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 418-19: “There is no doubt that long afterwards, in the Third Age, Saruman rediscovered this, or learned of it in lore, and in his lust for mastery committed this, his wickedest deed: the interbreeding of Orcs and Men, producing both Men-orcs large and cunning, and Orc-men, treacherous and vile.” Implication here being that Sauron either did not know of this method or simply did not use it, while Saruman’s competency drove him toward uncovering forgotten ways.

14See John Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April 1954, Letter 144 in The Letters, 270: “Gandalf’s opposite was, strictly, Sauron, in one part of Sauron’s operations; as Aragorn was in another.”

15Tolkien, The Return of the King, 789.

16See again, Tolkien to Akerman, Letter 210.

17See John Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, 29 November 1944, Letter 91 from The Letters, 147: “Aragorn far away on the throne of Gondor labours to bring some order and to preserve some memory of old among the welter of men that Sauron has poured into the West.”

18John Tolkien to L.W. Forster, 31 December 1960, 226 in The Letters, 432.

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