But more importantly, in an ideal world one would be able to discuss The Fellowship of the Ring without being overshadowed by Peter Jackson’s film of the same name. Unfortunately, for me that’s impossible. I’ve seen the films probably a dozen times each since their release, enough that I can recite most of the dialogue word for word. The Extended Edition of Fellowship is one of my favorite films ever, ever, ever.

But this is the first time I’ve re-read Tolkien since the film’s release, so I was constantly reacting to things that were different from what I’m used to — as if the books were the adaptation of the films and not the other way around. And in case that’s not irritating enough, I couldn’t picture anyone but Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood as Aragorn and Frodo, while Ian McKellen’s voice kept ringing out whenever Gandalf opened his mouth. It’s kind of like reading those annoying New Testament Bibles where Jesus’s words are printed in red; every snippet of dialogue that was used in the films stands out.

It’s especially a nuisance when you consider that J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson had vastly different agendas. Jackson made wonderful films in their own right. But they’re distinctly different in tone from the books, and I’m convinced now that Tolkien himself would have hated them.

What’s the difference? Take just one example, the battle with the orcs and the cave troll in the mines of Moria. Jackson lavishes plenty of attention on the battle, with multiple decapitations, thrown swords, close escapes, and a (somewhat clunky) CGI troll that vexes the Fellowship for a good ten minutes. But in the book, here’s how Tolkien describes that battle:

The affray was sharp, but the orcs were dismayed by the fierceness of the defence. Legolas shot two through the throat. Gimli hewed the legs from under another that had sprung up on Balin’s tomb. Boromir and Aragorn slew many. When thirteen had fallen the rest fled shrieking, leaving the defenders unharmed, except for Sam who had a scratch along the scalp.

There are a few more paragraphs describing the setup and denouement, but you can tell that Tolkien’s heart isn’t in it. The entirety of the scene that Jackson spends fifteen minutes on is a single page of Tolkien’s manuscript.

In fact, I was stunned to discover that all of the action sequences that thrilled me as a kid are really much, much shorter than I had remembered. The flight to the Ford? A measly 2 1/2 pages. Gandalf’s confrontation with the Balrog? 2 1/2 pages. Frodo’s fight with the Nazgûl near Weathertop? One page. And just think of all the dramatic sequences that Tolkien either doesn’t describe at all or relegates to a character’s secondhand report:

• Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman and escape from Orthanc
• Gandalf’s battle with the Black Riders on Weathertop
• Gollum’s escape from Mirkwood
• The Black Riders’ incursion into Bree
• The elves’ battle with the orcs inside Lothlórien
• Boromir’s last battle with the orcs
• Glorfindel’s attack on the Nazgûl at the Ford

And that’s all just in Fellowship. The issue will become even more pronounced in The Two Towers, when Tolkien chooses to sit out the ents’ attack on Isengard.

The fact of the matter is that J.R.R. Tolkien has no taste for blood. He goes out of his way to avoid describing action sequences by keeping the action offstage. As soon as the swords are drawn, the authorial voice recedes and becomes distant summarization. And the summarization itself? Well, it’s not clear to me from the text that Tolkien knows anything at all about sword fighting or horse riding or archery; his descriptions don’t contain any specialized knowledge outside the imagination of your average 14-year-old. Certainly Tolkien doesn’t know swords the way George R.R. Martin knows armor, for instance, or the way Stephen Hunter knows guns.

So if Tolkien doesn’t care about the action sequences, what does he care about?

Consider this: in my edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Council of Elrond is 33 pages long. Gandalf’s infodump to Frodo in “The Shadow of the Past” stretches for about 17 pages. There must be at least 20 solid pages of verse interlaced throughout the book.

It’s clear that what Tolkien adores is the act of storytelling. The book is full of it. Every five pages, it seems, the characters are sitting down around a fire to recount old history or sing a narrative song. Sometimes it seems like the entire Lord of the Rings is just a framework for Tolkien to hang the folk tales, myths, and poems on.

But not only are the characters always telling stories; they’ve got this strange postmodern awareness about their own story in progress. Sam says to Haldir in Lothlórien: “I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.” Aragorn is often compared to the verses Bilbo has composed about him (“All that is gold does not glitter / Not all those who wander are lost”). Bilbo is constantly talking about how he’s going to write everything down in his book, causing Frodo and Sam to wonder several times what their story’s going to sound like when it’s set down on paper.

It might sound like I’m complaining about The Fellowship of the Ring — but I’m not. The most astonishing thing I discovered on re-reading the book is how incredibly good Tolkien is at the fundamentals of storytelling. His pacing is absolutely perfect, which as a published author I can tell you is very difficult to accomplish. He’s always very careful to properly foreshadow things that need foreshadowing. Alfred Hitchcock knew that the scariest things are the ones you don’t see onscreen, and Tolkien follows this rule to the letter (see above). He builds up a slow but persistent tension and menace of the unseen.

And his prose is better than I had remembered in most places, though surprisingly it’s not nearly as divergent in tone from The Hobbit as I had thought. The poetry, however, doesn’t stand up so well. Even Tolkien’s verses about the most sublime subjects are too heavy handed on the meter and rhyme. They all sound like limericks about a man from Nantucket.

(Tolkien also has the irritating habit of switching point of view whenever it suits him. Out of the blue, the omniscient narrator will jump into Gandalf’s or Aragorn’s head for a moment to show the reader their thoughts. Then in the next moment, their actions and motivations are shrouded in secrecy, leaving the reader to wonder what’s going on. Not a hanging offense, but sloppy writing nonetheless.)

But the place where Tolkien really falls down on the job is in characterization. Most of the time, he’s far more interested in lingering on the details of the terrain and the architecture. (J.R.R. might not have known sword fighting, but man, did he know his trees. Ever notice that there are only four forests on the map of Middle Earth, and through the course of LOTR and The Hobbit, we spend time in them all?)

Frodo, Sam, and Gandalf are wonderfully realized characters, but Merry and Pippin are scarcely distinguishable at all in Fellowship. Legolas and Glorfindel might well have been named Anonymous Elves #23 and #24. When he does indulge in character description, Tolkien mostly doles out rather useless flowery aphorisms. Take his description of Elrond:

The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful… Venerable he seemed as a king crowned with many winters, and yet hale as a tried warrior in the fulness of his strength.

Then there’s the Balrog, which he describes thusly:

[I]t was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it… Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it. In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left it held a whip of many thongs.

Er, thanks. That helps a lot. Try putting those descriptions in your next short story, and watch everyone in the workshop roll their eyes.

Characterization is actually one thing that Peter Jackson’s films did better than the books — and I think that’s the real reason behind the films’ success. Aragorn, in particular, gets some much-needed humanization. I’m not sure why the author chose to relegate the love story with Arwen to the marginalia in the back of The Return of the King, but without it we’re frequently robbed of much-needed context for Aragorn’s decisions. Boromir too is given short shrift by Tolkien, but the combination of the script and Sean Bean’s superb acting truly make him come alive. And Saruman, of course, is given an actual role in the films, while in the books he just makes a few choice cameo appearances.

So one-third of the way through, I can definitely say that re-reading The Lord of the Rings has been an eye-opening experience. I can’t wait to dig in to The Two Towers.

This will probably be my fourth round trip through the whole cycle, the first being sometime around 1978 and the last coming somewhere around 1996. So as I go back and revisit Middle Earth, I’m going to blog about my impressions here. I assume just about everybody in creation has either read the series or seen the Peter Jackson films by now, so I won’t worry about spoilers.

*****

I’m always struck by people who claim to love The Lord of the Rings but find The Silmarillion impossible to read. In the same vein, I wonder exactly why LOTR readers from the ’60s and ’70s went so gaga over it.

To me, The Silmarillion is what the whole thing is about. The Silmarillion is the cake of Tolkien’s work, while The Lord of the Rings is largely the frosting. (Which might leave The Hobbit as that gooey ribbon of fudge that runs through the middle.) Now there’s nothing wrong with indulging in a nice big dollop of frosting — I’m a sucker for that salty-sweet stuff they put on cheap grocery store cakes — but it’s more satisfying when you’ve got something to anchor it.

So if you’ve read The Lord of the Rings and you haven’t read The Silmarillion — or at least spent long hours studying the appendices in Return of the King — then you’re missing the Big Picture. You don’t really know what Tolkien was up to. You’ve got a great adventure story with some fabulous characters and a peerless amount of detail around the edges, but that’s about it. For many people, that’s enough.

So what was Tolkien up to? Once you see the entire tapestry laid out, you realize that J.R.R. Tolkien was writing one of the world’s great parables about mankind’s Fall from Grace.

The main thread of The Silmarillion chronicles the rebellion of the Elf Fëanor against the Valar, the gods who are his shepherds, teachers, and protectors. Both are faced with the treachery of the evil Morgoth, who mars the world the Valar built and steals the Silmaril jewels Fëanor created. The Valar choose to fence themselves inside their land of Valinor and leave Morgoth to his own devices; Fëanor, on the other hand, refuses to accept compromise. He announces he’s going to leave Valinor and do whatever it takes to recover the Silmarils. And in doing so, of course, he overreaches and drags his whole people down with him over the next thousand years.

Call it blasphemy, but to me, Tolkien distilled the essence of the Fall from Grace much better than the actual Bible does. I find the Old Testament frequently hokey and morally confused, while Tolkien’s achievement in metaphor is a beautiful, transcendent, and clear as a bell. (Keep in mind, of course, that I’m an atheist.) The story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden strikes me as ludicrous and almost laughable; but when I read about Fëanor’s exile from Valinor in The Silmarillion, I get it.

The Bible uses all kinds of metaphors for Heaven. It’s a pasture, it’s a garden, it’s a place in the clouds, it’s a kingdom full of light. All metaphors that must have been really impressive to the nomadic desert-bound Jews who first heard them. But for us, these images don’t have so much potency. Paradise is a garden? Dude, if I want to see a transcendently beautiful garden, I can drive to Delaware and see Longwood Gardens.

But Tolkien? Tolkien writes about the great lamps of Illuin and Ormal that the Valar built to light the world, which Morgoth overthrew — and then about the trees Telperion and Laurelin grown by the Valar to replace those lamps, and how Morgoth poisoned those — and about the second-rate tree Galathilion the Vala Yavanna made to remind the Elves of those original trees — and the seedling of that tree named Celeborn, which was planted on the Elvish island of Tol Eressëa — and then the seedling of that tree, Nimloth, that the Elves gave to the Men of Númenor — and then the fruit of that tree that Isildur managed to smuggle out of Númenor before its destruction — and then the sapling of that tree Isildur smuggled out of Minas Ithil when Sauron destroyed it — and then the sapling of that tree planted by the twenty-seventh king of Gondor, until it died — and finally the sapling of that tree which Aragorn finds in The Return of the King.

Now that’s a Fall from Grace. That’s a metaphor for the spark of God’s majesty continuing on despite adversity and debasement which I can understand.

But similarly, Tolkien puts this divine spark inside of us, too, the readers. We’re (theoretically) remote descendants of the people of Gondor, who were descended from the people of Númenor, who were descended from the Edain that helped out the Elves in their battles against Morgoth. And we’ve also got in our blood strains of the Elves (through the marriage of Beren and Lúthien) and strains of the gods (through the marriage of Thingol and Melian the Maia). It’s remote, it’s diluted, but it’s there in all of us.

This presumes, of course, that you are of white European descent. Which leads to one of the most controversial — and least understood — elements of Tolkien’s world. If you’re not a white European, according to Tolkien’s mythology, you’re descended from one of the wicked tribes of men who fell under the sway of the evil god Morgoth.

Racist? Sure. But it’s only right that Tolkien should put things that way, and I’m glad Peter Jackson didn’t try to appease these cries of racial insensitivity in his films by casting a bunch of polychromatic hobbits. Why? Not because I believe in that kind of white-is-right bullshit — but simply because Tolkien’s other major purpose in writing these stories was to create an alternate Anglo Saxon mythology.

These are the tales that the Anglo Saxon warriors told around the fire after everyone got sick of hearing Beowulf for the five hundredth time. And when you’re tired from a day in the field hacking away at people that don’t look like you, the last thing you want to hear is how these enemies are just misunderstood souls with their own culture, history, and moral compass. You want to be reminded that you’re a true defender of the faith, the one doing God’s duty, and they’re the heathen scum not fit to scrape the mud off your boots. Otherwise, why go back out there to fight the next day?

Tolkien wasn’t attempting to create a complete and self-contained universe. He was engaging in an exercise of nationalistic mythology. It’s an attempt to construct an entire folklore, history, and set of morals for a people from the ground up. And in that sense, it has to rank among the most ambitious undertakings in modern literature. Tolkien might not have been one of the world’s great prose stylists — boy, there are some clunky passages here — but as a worldbuilder he’s unparalleled.

And make no mistake about it, the world Tolkien is building here is ours. It’s no accident that the map of Middle Earth looks a heck of a lot like Europe, and it’s no accident that the polite, happy, good-natured, British-seeming hobbits live not too far away from where Tolkien’s own England would fall on the map. (View a larger version of the map to the right on Wikipedia.) The dark-skinned Haradrim live where Africa would be, and the noble, civilized Gondorians are in a great position to found Greece and Rome in a few thousand years.

So The Silmarillion is full of tales of purposely one-sided nationalistic folklore. It’s got plenty of heroism and adventure and derring-do. It’s got love, rebellion, betrayal, comedy, tragedy, romance, redemption, and sacrifice.

But The Silmarillion also provides a crucial framework for The Lord of the Rings that’s somewhat elusive if you read the latter without reading the former. Without The Silmarillion, Galadriel’s just a queen afraid of losing her realm; with it, she’s the last remaining Noldor and participant in Fëanor’s rebellion, hesitant to give up all she’s built in Middle Earth and beg forgiveness from the Valar. Without The Silmarillion, Aragorn’s just the heir to an old kingdom who comes into his own and regains the crown; with it, he’s the last descendant of the Edain, the elf-friends who fought against Morgoth, and the Númenoreans, the once proud people who rebelled against the Valar and fell into ruin.

The thing that struck me the most reading The Silmarillion this time was how short the book was. Excluding the index, it’s only 300 pages. So what are you waiting for? Pull that sucker off the shelf and tell me your thoughts about the book.

A Storm of Swords, the third novel in George R. R. Martin’s projected seven-book “Song of Ice and Fire” series, had me believing that the author was just shy of walking on water.

He spent the first two and a half books building up a panoply of fascinating and believable characters who ranged the spectrum of moral grays. Then in A Storm of Swords, Martin proceeded to yank the rug out from under our feet by killing off two of the series’ principle heroes and one of its principle villains. And these weren’t noble deaths in battle we’re talking about — these were nasty fates. Robb and Catelyn Stark betrayed and murdered at a wedding feast, Tywin Lannister shot through the belly by his son Tyrion while on the privy.

Now, after a five-year wait, Martin has given us… a retreat?

It’s hard to think of A Feast for Crows as anything but a retreat, after the grand flourish of the series’ first three novels. We’re brought closer to a wealth of new point-of-view characters who seem to have only a peripheral relation to the main thrust of the story — the ailing Doran Martell and his three rebellious nieces, the various aspirants to the throne of the Iron Isles, Brienne of Tarth — while some of the series’ main characters are nowhere to be seen. Sorely missed are Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Daenarys Targaryon, Brandon Stark and Davos Seaworth. And certain other characters who do put in an appearance, such as Sansa Stark and Arya Stark, seem to be stuck in a holding pattern.

One can’t help but think of another epic fantasy author whose series began to wander astray four or five books in. (Hint: his initials are RJ.)

The fault clearly lies with Martin’s decision (explained on his website) to lop this volume in two. The subplots revolving around the southern half of Westeros are recounted here in A Feast for Crows, while those in the northern half and overseas will have to wait for next year’s A Dance with Dragons. The decision seems arbitrary and hastily derived, more the product of a publisher looking for a Christmas blockbuster than a novelist trying to solve an artistic dilemma. We’re left with a book that sorely misses its vanished characters, a book seemingly without a center.

Even some of those subplots left in A Feast for Crows are meandering and without resolution. Brienne’s quest to find Sansa Stark, for instance, takes a lot of exposition to go nowhere. We leave Brienne hanging from a noose fighting for life. Do we need to wait another three or four years for Martin to reveal her fate? In King’s Landing, Cersei Lannister schemes endlessly against the titular queen of the realm, Margaery Tyrell, but it’s only in the book’s final fifty pages that the plotting bears any fruit. And once again, Martin leaves us here with a cliffhanger ending.

Martin still remains the reigning champion of epic fantasy in my book, but much will hang on his next novel. A Dance with Dragons could reinforce the strengths of “A Song and Ice and Fire” and propel the series towards a rousing climax, or it could further wander into the Jordanian wilderness. Time will tell.