The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Some mildly worded, not too strongly felt, and quite trivial views on the books (click on a topic):
- Colored lights
- Elf sex
- The Star Wars connection
- Race in Middle-Earth
- Towns that break into song
- "It's a Balrog!"
- An Awfully Big Anticlimax (plot spoiler warning)
- That whole language question
- Colo(u)red lights seem terribly important to LOTR. White, golden, red all provide signals to the reader about who's in charge. You get red from Him Whom We Do Not Name, white from Galadriel's jewel, golden under the trees in Lorien. Perceived colors don't change under these lights: The light itself occupies space, and it is the emitted light, not what's reflected from some illuminated object, that conveys information. Nifty, I guess, but it isn't how light works, is it? Except brake lights. Which, hmm, are always red.
(Terry Pratchett, who knows how to steal a good thing when he sees one, not only uses a similar convention in the Discworld books but actually invents an eighth color.) - Where do little Elves come from? These folk claim ancestors, but to all appearances the only time sex enters their lives is when humans, excuse me, Men are around. The boy Elves are sylphlike and the girl Elves—am I wrong to think you wouldn't need both hands to count them?—are admirable but have no attributes whatever. Maybe all the action is over in the Isles of the Blest or wherever they go to get away from Middle-Earth. Yeah, probably America is teeming with little Elf toddlers. Strider must have an urge or two, though he holds it in check till Evil has been vanquished. You can picture the Rohirrim kind of getting it on, and definitely Faramir has more than just a spiritual attachment to Eowyn. Hobbits, now . . . yes. But the Elves, they love the woodlands and the flowers and seem to leave one another decorously alone.
(Another Pratchett connection: Tolkien Dwarves come in both flavors, but nobody except Dwarves can tell them apart.) - Speaking of connections, has anyone made one of those comparison tables between LOTR and Star Wars? Inaccessible Galadriel and inaccessible Princess Leia wear white, Strider and Han Solo first turn up in rough-trade bars, Frodo and Luke lose appendages, Sam and Chewbacca have good hearts but can't express themselves plainly. I could go on.
- And of course the bad guys wear suggestive colors in both. Gollum is as dark as the Emperor's habit, and both Orcs and Vader are always camping in black cloaks. Tolkien's race-consciousness extends beyond color, though: A renowned linguist, he writes of Orcs as speaking a foul, degraded language, and he comments in an appendix that human beings who curse are "Orc-minded." The Haradrim and Easterlings are disposed to embrace evil, possibly, it's suggested, for the sake of booty. Probably that means things they can steal.
You really can't invest much effort in geographic, political and anthropological speculation about The Lord of the Rings. While Tolkien was a broad reader and a deep thinker and no doubt had plenty of firm opinions about people not so fortunate as to be English, he spent a good deal of care not to give the reader keys ("Look, Honey, Orcs are Germans!"). You could, if you wanted to, set Great Britain down in the Shire; Bree would be Calais or Ostend, and you could go on from there. But eventually you'd be tempted to identify Dunedain with Danes or, heaven forfend, Americans, and Tolkien's ghost would spit in your eye. Draw a broad line from the Shire to Minas Tirith, and the people who live near the line are all right while others get more and more evil the farther away from it. (Except Elves.) Beyond such a scheme, nothing quite works. - Just to check myself: Does anyone else draw a parallel between entire towns bursting into song (like Minas Tirith when the King comes back) and the finale of Porgy and Bess?
- Movies made recently for children follow a convention that I was disappointed to observe in the first LOTR picture. Something awful pops up out of the ground, and the endangered people address the problem by crying in unison, "It's —!" (fill in blank as appropriate). Usually they run in circles too. Here the book uses probably 60 pages preparing us for the creature in Moria, and when it appears it's all the more terrible for the slow buildup. The movie goes from no-monster to monster in a few seconds, and sure enough, when the travelers see it their only response is "It's a Balrog!" I feel sure they would run in circles if they weren't all lined up on a ledge.
Besides, the monster was a copout, a computer-generated menace. It coulda been a contender insteada bum. - So (I'm back in the book, not the movie) we have a book, something like 1500 pages long, and after months of toil and sorrow, the plot resolves like this: In a page and a half, Gollum bites off Frodo's finger and plummets into the volcano. Whooops!
- LOTR is, in a sense, a book about made-up languages with imaginary people put in just to speak them. Several appendices describe both languages and the scripts used to record them. I've even read a suggestion that the book started out as simply a vehicle for the Elvish speech that Tolkien invented. Click here for some trivial notes on the LOTR languages.
Here is the introduction to my notes on the book. You can skip that.
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Lord of Rings