Tolkien Teaches Us to Take Courage

J.R.R. Tolkien was not a professional author nor, for much of his life, even a much-published one. He had a certain success with The Hobbit in 1937, when he was 45 -- enough for his publisher, Stanley Unwin, to ask for a sequel. But though Tolkien dutifully began to write one almost immediately, it was 17 years before the first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published, by which time Tolkien had almost reached retirement.

For much of his life he was haunted by the fear of never finishing anything -- the theme of one of his few short stories, Leaf by Niggle. In The Notion Club Papers, not published until 20 years after his death, he imagines his own work as a manuscript discovered on a dusty shelf sometime far in the future, incomprehensible and anonymous.

Tolkien's fears have been proved false, but they were not unfounded. His work is now known to hundreds of millions of readers and viewers, but the non-professional nature of his writing still shows through.

An experienced professional author, writing to make a living and with a good sense of potential markets, would not have produced a 1,000-page romance with only vestigial love interests. Nor would he have added 100 pages of appendices about dates and scripts and languages. And he would have known not to stop the action dead with a 15,000-word account of a confused committee meeting, which is "The Council of Elrond."

Peter Jackson's first film had to take stern action to deal with that problem, and his second one has to deal equally sternly with Tolkien's decision -- how Jackson must have torn his hair! -- not to bother with the Ents' attack on Isengard, the stronghold of the corrupt wizard Saruman, but to have the junior hobbits Merry and Pippin report it in flashback.

At the end of one chapter, they are gazing down from the Ent Treebeard's shoulders on Saruman's valley, and then they disappear from the action until, 70 pages later, they turn up picnicking in the ruins. It was a dead certainty that Jackson could not allow his version of the story to go like that. It breaks a basic rule: "Show, don't tell."

But basic rules are made to be broken, at least by authors who are not writing for the market but for themselves. And if there is one thing that publishing history shows, it is that the market does not know what it wants -- except novelty, which is by nature unpredictable. Again and again, great writers of fantasy have been loners, starting off without agents and against sensible advice. Tolkien was not a professional author. He was a driven one, and one ought to ask what drove him because, whatever it was, it draws other people too.

Things like missing out the sack of Isengard perhaps provide a clue. Tolkien dropped a big action scene, yes. What he got in exchange, and what he clearly wanted to get, was a major surprise, as one plot strand --Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, now mixed up with the Riders of Rohan -- quite unexpectedly runs across the results of another -- Merry and Pippin and Saruman and the Ents -- although the day has already been saved for the first group by the marching wood at Helm's Deep in Rohan. None of the characters, as Tolkien wrote the story, really understands the whole of what is going on.

Not even Gandalf. In fact, the only thing they do know is that their fate will not, in the end, be determined by visible events but by a mostly invisible one: the stealthy crawl of three insignificant-looking characters into the lion's mouth of Mordor. The great ones and the heroes are continually trying to see what is happening elsewhere, through the palantirs and the Mirror of Galadriel and the Eye of Sauron. The attempt is repeatedly disastrous. Denethor commits suicide because of what he sees in his palantir, but he has read it wrong. As Gandalf says, "Even the wise cannot see all ends," and the really wise remember that.

The moral is, to quote Gandalf again -- and Jackson picked out just these words to repeat in the first movie, varying the pronouns cunningly -- "That [the future] is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Tolkien surely did not mean these words just for Frodo. They were a major part of his own conviction and a part of his own cure for the defeatism, the appeasement, the lack of will and the weary calculation of odds that he saw dogging the Western democracies as he was writing The Lord of the Rings and still after he had finished it. Tolkien's achievement, it may be, was to reintroduce a heroic world view, drawn from the ancient texts he taught as a professor, to a world gone ironic.

And this world view was put across not only by the obviously heroic figures such as Aragorn and Faramir and King Theoden, but by the hobbits -- and, most of all, by the very structure of the story. In this story, all the characters find themselves, literally as well as figuratively, bewildered: their bearings lost, not sure what's for the best, but slogging on regardless. The most important ones, moreover, the hobbits Frodo and Sam, think they're on their own. All the time, their friends are risking everything to distract the Eye of Sauron from them, but they don't know that. They go on anyway.

The film version, adapted to the limited attention span of the modern viewer, can't handle all of this, but it handles a surprising amount. Tolkien himself, commenting on the first of several attempted film scripts back in 1957, remarked that he had no objection to people cutting things out, but he disliked compression, trying to jam everything into three hours. It loses the uncertainty, the false trails and the fog of war that link The Lord of the Rings and the battle of the Somme, where Tolkien fought with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Peter Jackson has inevitably built up the action scenes and straightened the tangled threads, but the message survives the change of medium. Courage is what you need after you've lost hope: Things may not be as bad as they seem. Tolkien learned that nearly 90 years ago, but it isn't obsolete yet.

And I have nothing against Daniel Day Lewis. He is a fine actor. I wouldn't necessarily cast Roger Howarth... he was just a starting point.

Because of the lack of preparation... soap operas reveal your acting skill quickly. The good ones are very good... the bad ones awful.

On the soap that Roger plays in I don't watch anymore because it is boring... but the character (Todd Manning) he plays started out rapist... then transcended into some sort of hero. (He actually quit the show because he felt a rapist was being turned into a romantic hero, and felt that was beyond the pale). He's back now... still flawed... yet Roger has the ability to move you by revealing Todd's inability to rise above his faults and the pain that weakness causes Todd. It's very subtle, and powerful to behold.

I wouldn't recommend that you watch the Soap now... because its very stupid. I don't like what they have done with the Todd character... and it would take weeks before you saw the contest between doing the right and wrong thing.

and it would take weeks before you saw the contest between doing the right and wrong thing.

ROFL! So true! I remember some storylines taking MONTHS to develop...

BTW, DDL is also in his 40's, just like SC...

Cool! Where and with whom do you teach? I was very involved in theatre in high school, and have for the last few years been involved (off and on) in community theatre. As a matter of fact, a friend called last December to ask me to audition for the upcoming production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' I got the part! (Maudie Atkinson - in this script is the 'narrator' character)

Anyway, I go mostly for their ability to act as well, but looks help, especially if it is going to be a heroic character. In Sydney's case it would be that much more heartbreaking...but you are right about Wood. I just can't help thinking that playing it a bit younger than 'for real' would appeal to the younger audience (just as it did for LOTR)...

I was thrilled that they 'downsized' the ages a bit for those characters...every other depiction I had seen of Frodo was of a corpulent grubby old man. That would work for an elderly Bilbo, yes, but hardly pull the heartstrings for a hero. And its probably a bit more reflective of what actually happens in a war....so many beautiful young men go off and come back forever changed. I remember working for a museum company and helping them put together pictures for an exhibit on Viet Nam. O the beautiful faces! And what were we left with? Filth and idiocy!

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