The number of entries was pretty pathetic, which makes me feel rather pathetic. I’ve been neglecting this blog terribly over the past few months, and Google Analytics reflects it.

But that doesn’t make me any less enthusiastic about awarding the final prize to loyal reader Josh Vogt. Josh writes:

I’m assuming we’re talking about the “old” Obi-wan, since it’d be great to see two hoary-haired mentor figures going head to head. Now, after they both got all frowny and had a bushy-browed staring contest, Gandalf would win the ultimate showdown (bridge locale optional). Why? Because Obi-wan has a suicidal death wish. Just stick any young Jedi-wannabe within ten feet of the old guy, and the moment anyone takes a swing at his head, whether with a staff or light saber, the dude’s going to get a mystical smile on his face, cue a little emotional background music, and let himself get decapitated into a pile of dirty laundry. Because he’s just that enigmatic. He wouldn’t dare sacrifice all that mystique for the sake of winning any kind of fight. Gandalf is much more pragmatic and at least provides substantial opposition, making sure his enemy is down for the count (preferably cast down upon the mountainside) before even letting himself take a breather.

Congratulations, Josh, you’ve won the David Louis Edelman prize pack, which includes:

• One signed copy of the Solaris mass market of Infoquake
• One signed copy of the Pyr trade paperback of MultiReal
• One signed copy of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two (containing my story “Mathralon”)
• One signed copy of the new Overlook Press edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone (containing my introduction)

The only other entry of note came from Derek Johnson, who writes:

This is easy: Gandalf wins hands down.  He defeated the Balrog, and traversed the belly of Middle Earth in the process.  All Obi-Wan ever did was turn into a ghost.  Obi-Wan couldn’t even stop the chosen one from turning to the dark side of the Force.

The “how” is even easier.  Because magic in Tolkien is something of a technology, he could sap Obi-Wan of his midichlorians, which are the key elements in accessing the Force.

The topic also came up in the comments for the last contest of what would happen if you added Morpheus, Albus Dumbledore, and Duncan Idaho to the mix. Personally, I think Morpheus would kick all of their asses — because you know that the powers of all the others are simply delusions forcefed down their neural cortexes by the Matrix.

There were parts of this book that had me excited and intrigued, but then things would wander off into emotional dead ends. The tech and some of the social ideas were cool and nifty, but the business model stuff just never made it for me. And a glossary in the back? That’s just never a good sign. There are plenty of interesting bits in there and lots of promise, but the book as a whole just never gelled for me.

Most of the review I can just kind of shrug and say, “Well, if it ain’t your cup of tea, it ain’t your cup of tea.” But I’m a little puzzled by the comment about the glossary. Glossary = bad?

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment. A few other reviewers of Infoquake have stated that the book had a strike against it from the outset just by including a glossary and appendices. For another example, here’s what Paul Kincaid had to say in his (generally quite positive) review of Infoquake for The New York Review of Science Fiction last year:

Occasionally we have become used to extraneous material being introduced, a list of characters in a sprawling Russian novel or a map in a second-rate fantasy, but generally the more an author feels the need for this material the more justified we are in feeling that the author has failed in the primary task of telling it all in the story. David Louis Edelman has devoted the last 40 pages of his novel to no fewer than six addenda, including a glossary, a timeline, a history of the Surina family, a (cod) explanation of the (cod) science in the book and so on. There is nothing in any of these addenda that should not have been crystal clear through the story alone.

I don’t understand this sentiment, and I’m wondering how widespread it is. I mean, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant all have glossaries, to name a few off the top of my head. Do they have strikes against them too?

I can’t speak for why Mssrs. Tolkien, Herbert, Burgess, Blair, and Donaldson included appendix material in their books. For Tolkien, the humbug-scholarship aspect of Middle Earth was clearly central to his work. (See my post about Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales for more on this.) Herbert’s seem like something of an afterthought.

For me, the appendices were a way of compromising with the reader. Personally, I tend to enjoy the long-winded infodumps in stories. My favorite chapter in The Lord of the Rings? “The Council of Elrond.” My favorite part of The Matrix? Morpheus’ explanation to Neo about the world of the machines (followed by that near-incomprehensible speech by The Architect in The Matrix: Reloaded).

If I had written Infoquake solely for my own benefit, I would have filled it with chapter after chapter of people lounging around talking about the ethical implications of multi technology over dinner. But given that I’m writing stories for other people to enjoy, I realized that it would help move the story along if I excised some of these narratives from the story proper. Moving them into appendices seemed like a nice way to keep the rising tension while still satisfying the irrepressibly curious.

(As for the glossary? The world of Jump 225 is quite complex and filled with invented buzzwords, I’ll admit. That part of the story is entirely intentional, and meant to both reflect on and satirize our own society. Imagine how many footnotes you’d need to explain to a resident of 1965 how you used your Blackberry’s GPS to track down the closest Mickey D’s from an address you got on Google.)

It might sound like I’m starting to get defensive here, but I’m really not. I don’t get mad at people who have problems with my books, I get curious. So. The sentiment that glossaries and appendices are to be avoided. What to make of it?

My initial temptation was to write it off as the opinion of someone who doesn’t want to read anything they have to think about too hard. (Honestly, the reader who picks up Infoquake at the airport just because they want to stay awake on the plane isn’t a reader I care too much about.) But that’s clearly unfair to the two reviewers cited above. The NY Review reviewer clearly engaged with the material, even if he had some problems with it. And from what I can tell by browsing through his blog, the Whatta Fiasco guy seems to be well-read, engages with the material, and has generally good taste.

But after giving it some more careful thought, here are what seem to me to be plausible reasons an intelligent and engaged reader would object to seeing lengthy glossaries and appendices in the back of a book:

1. It’s a sign that the author is taking him- or herself too seriously.

2. It’s a sign that the author is really in dire need of a good editor.

3. It’s a sign that the author is falling prey to the (perceived) genre shortcoming of unnecessary complexity.

4. It’s a sign that the author is too lazy to introduce these terms organically into the body of the story.

5. It’s a sign that either the author, the editor, or the publisher don’t trust the reader’s intelligence enough to remember the important terms in the story.

Any that I’m missing? Any thoughts from glossary-lovers or -haters out there?

Perhaps I should have called this post “Dungeons & Dragons: An Appreciation,” since I really didn’t know Gary Gygax from Elric of Melniboné. I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak or saw his picture until this afternoon. I may have read an interview or two with him over the years, but they certainly didn’t make any lasting impression.

But to me, Gary Gygax was not primarily the inventor of a popular role-playing game; he was an unparalleled author of fantasy. Gary Gygax wrote three volumes that were highly influential to me as a kid. I speak of the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. I present them below in the editions that will forever be branded in my memory:

My experiences as a player of Dungeons & Dragons have generally been pretty miserable. I played my first game at perhaps the age of eight, with my brother as dungeon master and my older sister serving as co-adventurer. I’m guessing this was 1979, because the module we were playing, In Search of the Unknown, was published that year. I believe we were playing the Basic rules, using the set pictured below. (Gawd, do these pictures bring back memories…)

We made an awful team. My sister and I spent a couple of hours building our characters — I was a dwarf, if I remember correctly — and got into a horrific argument about how we should order our party for the inevitable foray into the dungeon. Tears and screaming ensued. (Hey, I was eight.) Finally, we decided to just put aside our differences in the interest of pursuing adventure, but the adventure proved to be short-lived. We found ourselves shooting arrows at a band of ravenous giant centipedes, which we pictured as these enormous Dune-sized worms with enormous jaws and enormous sharp teeth. Then my brother cheerfully informed us that these giant centipedes were only about a foot long, at which point the game dissolved into a fit of giggles and never resumed.

Over the next half-dozen years, I was determined to find a good game of Dungeons & Dragons and become one of those legendary dungeon masters you read about in Dungeon Masters Guide. But despite fervent evangelism to my elementary school friends, the most that ever materialized was a rather pathetic playthrough of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. I served as dungeon master to my then-friends, who wandered disinterestedly through a haunted house killing everything that moved, without ever realizing that the place was just a ruse set up by pirates to scare the locals away from their smuggling operation.

When I finally found a group of guys who were serious AD&D players, we were all heading into the dungeon of puberty. We had weekly sleepovers where eight or nine of us would earnestly head off for adventure, and then quickly drift off into Giggling & Gossip after an hour or two. This continued for a couple of years until my friend Geoff and I brought the entire role-playing phase of the group to a close by creating a game called Chutes & Dungeons & Ladders & Dragons. The raucous game, played only once, went something like this:

ME: You turn the corner and you see a giant ladder.

PLAYER: I’ll climb the ladder.

ME: You get to the top of the ladder, and you see Matt’s dad yelling at you to take out the trash. He summons Cthulu, who zaps you with a lightning bolt that costs you four million hit points.

PLAYER: I’m rolling a saving throw… it’s a 3! That means the lightning bolt bounces off me and kills Matt’s dad instead. [throws Cheetos]

And that, in a nutshell, is my history with fantasy role-playing.

Despite the fact that I never had a satisfactory Dungeons & Dragons gaming experience, I spent years poring over those books you see above. I read them cover to cover multiple times. I studied the artwork. I sketched out a million dungeons and was never far from a pad of graph paper and a felt bag full of 20-sided dice. I would daydream about the world of Greyhawk and psionic powers and what would happen if I gathered a group of a hundred adventures and we all screamed “Hastur!” at the top of our lungs. (Readers of Deities & Demigods get the joke.)

Through those books you see above (along with others like The Fiend Folio, Deities & Demigods, The Monster Manual II, and Oriental Adventures), Gary Gygax opened my eyes. He introduced me to Norse mythology, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. He gave me a hard-on for imagination that’s been with me ever since. (And if you’ve ever spent any time poring through those books, you can imagine that they produced hard-ons of a more literal variety too. Let’s just say that in the ’70s, topless large-breasted she-demons were about as hard core as it got for a preadolescent kid in Orange County, California.)

What was so fabulous about Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks?

I think it was a combination of Gygax’s boundless enthusiasm, his slightly cornball sense of humor, and his ability to gleefully cannibalize any piece of film or literature in the service of adventure. It wasn’t armor classes and spell requirements that I was learning by reading those books. I was learning how to turn life into an adventure that would never end no matter how good you got at it. I was learning how to size up the world around me with a rigid set of rules and statistics and dice rolls. I was learning a handy set of moral rules in the alignment chart, which taught me more about human nature than eight years of Hebrew school ever did.

Detractors of D&D often stereotype RPG fans (as well as SF fans) as people with poor social skills. (And I suppose one must admit that there does seem to be some kind of correlation.) But to me, the hallmark of the D&D player is the tendency, on unfolding a map of Greyhawk, to look at those peculiar countries on the edge, the ones with the strange names about which the accompanying booklet simply says “not much is known about this land,” and instantly want to be there, to yearn beyond all else to jump into that map and be the first one to trek through it and map it out and provide a complete description of its history, customs, and politics for the world’s edification.

E. Gary Gygax unlocked that tendency in me in the late ’70s. And the fact that he’s gone now makes the world that much poorer. Damn it, how come there’s never a 25th-level Cleric with a Wish spell around when you need one?

Late last year, I was asked to write the introduction to Overlook Press’ new edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, last novel of the so-called Gormenghast Trilogy. Considering that the first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, had introductions written by Anthony Burgess and Tad Williams, respectively, I felt pretty honored to get the invitation.

Today I’ve received word that the books have actually come off the press and should appear in bookstores all across the U.S. soon. So, with the permission of Overlook Press, I’ve posted the introduction in its entirety below. After you’re done, go visit the Overlook Press web page for the book, and pick up a copy from Amazon. (Update 5/29/08: And also visit the Mervyn Peake blog, run by his son Sebastian. Sebastian was nice enough to write about this introduction there.)

Now here’s the introduction. You may notice that I’ve borrowed liberally from my blog entry about Titus Alone posted over a year ago. Page numbers refer to my Vintage Press UK edition of Titus Alone (because I don’t actually have the Overlook Press edition in my hands yet).

*

Did Mervyn Peake go mad writing Titus Alone, or does Titus Alone merely predict his madness? Is it a work of dystopian science fiction, or a work of psychological symbolism? Is the book a terse masterpiece, or is it just the half-formed ravings of a crumbling mind?

What the heck is this book you’re holding?

Let’s start with the facts. Mervyn Peake was a noted artist and illustrator of children’s books who spent his formative years in China. He published the novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) to excellent reviews, though not resounding commercial success. After the failure of his play The Wit to Woo (1957), Peake suffered a nervous breakdown. Parkinson’s disease, electroshock therapy, and brain surgery would follow over the next decade. Peake spent his last years in institutions, finally passing away in November of 1968. His works would dip briefly into obscurity and academic disfavor — Kingsley Amis once famously dismissed him as “a bad fantasy writer of maverick status” — before enjoying a critical and commercial renaissance that continues to this day.

Eyre & Spottiswoode originally published Titus Alone in 1959, and the book has been the target of critical dissatisfaction ever since. It’s barely half the size of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, leading some to conclude that Peake was only half-done with it. Given Peake’s mental state at the time of publication, others have assumed that the author was in no condition to write a novel. Regardless of the reason, Titus Alone is generally considered the least of the three Gormenghast books.

Why the fuss? Well, there’s no delicate way to put it: this book is bizarre. Even by the standards of the previous Gormenghast novels (which aren’t exactly models of straightforward narrative), Titus Alone stands — well, it stands alone. Titus spends the entire book wandering through a sparsely described dream world pursued by two silent, faceless policemen. He journeys through an underground realm filled with derelicts and runaways. There’s a beggar who eats money, and a remote-controlled glass spy globe. One of the main characters spends a good deal of the book with an ape on his shoulder.

In the last words of Gormenghast, Peake writes that “Titus rode out of his world.” Who would have imagined that Peake meant it literally? Titus Groan and Gormenghast take place in some undefined location in what seems to be a pre-Industrial setting. But in Titus Alone, there are flying mechanical needles, death rays, and a factory filled with mysterious bad smells. Muzzlehatch drives a car, Cheeta rides in a helicopter, and Cheeta’s scientist father talks to his subordinates through a videoconferencing system. Crabcalf informs us that someone or something named “Molusk” has recently circled the moon. (A successor to Sputnik?) All this technology implies that the novel takes place in the near future, yet nobody Titus encounters has heard of Gormenghast. Gormenghast, a castle so enormous that you can wander its rooftops for days without seeing the end of it.

But the setting isn’t the only incongruity between Titus Alone and its predecessors. The books have vast differences in style and tone as well. Peake ambles through Titus Groan and Gormenghast with page after page of (glorious, lyrical) exposition; but in Titus Alone, he takes the linguistic express route, zipping through descriptions of even central characters like Cheeta and Muzzlehatch in a mere sentence or two. The first two books make only the vaguest mentions of a higher power; this book brims over with Biblical allusions. Titus Groan is entirely sexless, and Gormenghast approaches the subject with the utmost discretion; Titus Alone is bursting with sexuality, both expressed and repressed. (Can you imagine anyone in those first two novels saying, as Titus says to Cheeta, “let me suck your breasts, like little apples, and play upon your nipples with my tongue”?) (p. 166)

So the first question to ask is this: how much of Titus Alone is Mervyn Peake switching gears, and how much is Mervyn Peake losing his marbles?

It’s a fair question, given that so much of the novel is devoted to the question of insanity. Clearly the subject was on Peake’s mind. Titus begins to doubt the existence of Gormenghast almost as soon as he steps foot off the grounds, and his doubt is only magnified after he loses his flint. “I have nothing else to prove where I come from, or that I ever had a native land,” Titus laments. “…I have nothing to hold in my hand. Nothing to convince myself that it is not a dream. Nothing to prove my actuality.” (p. 105)

Take the hallucinatory strangeness of the novel, add Titus’s doubts about his sanity, mix in Peake’s eventual descent into dementia, and you’ve got all the ingredients for the proverbial novel of madness. Let’s not forget the fact that some of the known symptoms of Parkinson’s disease include language problems, memory loss, hallucinations, and depression. Maybe the author of the fantastic we should be comparing Peake to is not J.R.R. Tolkien but Philip K. Dick, the poet of paranoia, who believed that God sent him messages through a pink laser. It’s difficult to read Titus Alone and not think of Dick’s Time Out of Joint — also published in 1959 — which features a similarly anguished protagonist living in a dream world stitched together with carefully labeled pieces of paper.

So… case closed? Mervyn Peake went mad, and Titus Alone is just a half-finished, semi-coherent product of his deteriorating mental state, right?

Wrong. Outlandish as the novel may be, it’s also tightly plotted, thematically cohesive, vividly written, and slyly self-aware. In fact, in many ways the book not only extends the themes of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, but it challenges them and turns them on their head.

We can blame two things for the popular misconceptions about Mervyn Peake’s last book. The first is the poor editing job of Peake’s original editor. The original edition of Titus Alone omitted entire chapters and contained many dubious “corrections” that weren’t fixed until years after Peake’s death. But the second and more important reason for this misunderstanding is that the book is, by nature, incomplete. Titus Alone is a bridging novel. It’s what stands between the story of Titus’s childhood and the stories of his adulthood — stories that Peake never got the chance to write.

Titus Alone can be roughly divided into three parts: Titus’s explorations of the nameless city and his first encounters with Muzzlehatch and Juno; Titus’s sojourn through the Under-River; and his strange “courtship” of Cheeta, leading up to the final pantomime in the Black House.

Peake sets up the key metaphor of the novel early on, in Chapter 13, during the fight between Muzzlehatch’s camel and his mule. The two animals break free of their cages and set on each other with a frenzy, until they’re stopped by a naked Muzzlehatch wielding a hose and wearing a fireman’s helmet. (I did mention that the novel was bizarre, right?) Look at how Peake describes the animals’ walk back to their cages:

But the camel and the mule were anything but embarrassed. They had tasted freedom and they had tasted blood, and it was with a quite indescribable arrogance that they swaggered towards the cages, their thick, blue lips curled back over their disgusting teeth; their nostrils dilated and their eyes yellow with pride. (p. 25)

Clearly Peake’s not just talking about animals here; he’s deliberately drawing a parallel between the animals escaping from their cages and Titus Groan escaping from Gormenghast. Titus says so himself. (“Gormenghast was a kind of jail,” he tells the Magistrate. “A place of ritual. But suddenly and under my breath I had to say good-bye.”) (p. 86) And in case you missed that reference, there are several more: Titus locked in prison like “some kind of caged animal,” (p. 63) Titus asking Cheeta “Why can’t you set me free?” (p. 223), Titus “like a dancing bear on the end of a rope.” (p.171) As for the tasting of blood — wasn’t one of Titus’s last acts in Gormenghast to kill the traitorous Steerpike?

But it’s not just Titus that Peake wants to compare to an animal in a cage; these animal metaphors extend throughout the book. We’ve got characters named Cheeta, Muzzlehatch, Cusp-Canine, and Crabcalf. We’ve got characters compared to condors, crocodiles, foxes, snakes, birds, jackals, squirrels, tigers, tortoises, dogs, cats — the list goes on. At one point, while Titus is on the glass roof looking down on Lady Cusp-Canine’s party, he imagines the whole crowd as some kind of menagerie:

They were all there. The giraffe-men and the hippopotamus-men. The serpent-ladies and the heron-ladies. The aspens and the oaks; the thistles and the ferns — the beetles and the moths — the crocodiles and the parrots: the tigers and the lambs: vultures with pearls around their necks and bison in tails. (p. 38)

I tried to keep a running list of all the animal metaphors in Titus Alone, but finally I gave up and stopped counting at forty.

So in the first third of Titus Alone, our hero endlessly rehashes his escape from the prison of Gormenghast, the prison of being the 77th Earl of Groan. He soon finds himself in the dark and mysterious world of the Under-River, the symbolism of which should be obvious to anyone who’s ever taken a class in English literature. Dark passages, birth canals, furtive adolescent scrambling — you know the drill.

After his dark underground journey, in the last third of Titus Alone, Titus finally finds what he’s looking for — or at least what he thinks he’s looking for. He’s lived his entire life in the confines of Gormenghast, a place of stultifying ritual, where tradition rules for tradition’s sake and any breach of protocol is a mortal sin. What he finds in Cheeta, her scientist father, and his factory is the opposite extreme. What could be more unlike Gormenghast than a place of invention and experimentation? Peake hammers the point home by continually referring to Cheeta and the scientists in terms of newness and invention. Cheeta is a “modern” with “a new kind of beauty” (p. 160); she takes Titus to the Black House to see “a hundred bright inventions.” (p. 213) She implores him to spend one last night with her, “not in some dusky arbour where all the ritual of love drags out for hours, and there is nothing new; but in the bright invention of the night, our egos naked and our wits on fire.” (p. 194)

Yet for all their differences from the ancient, moldering castle, Cheeta and her father clearly represent a kind of evil, like the relentlessly ambitious Steerpike in the first two books. Notice that despite all the air of newness about the factory, it never seems to actually make anything; all the scientists accomplish is the destruction of Muzzlehatch’s zoo with their death ray. (You’ll remember that the forward-thinking Steerpike never accomplished much in Gormenghast either, except to burn down the library.)

It’s hard to see anything noble about Gormenghast in the first two novels. The castle never felt particularly malignant in itself, but all those centuries of relentless tradition did seem to have a malignant effect on its inhabitants. The only proper reaction to such immenseness is to close oneself off, like Sourdust and Barquentine and — well, just about every other character in Titus Groan and Gormenghast. But in the last third of Titus Alone, Peake shows us that there’s an entirely different side to the castle. As Cheeta discovers, living in the shadow of all that monumental history has given Titus a strength of character that she lacks:

From the cold centre of elegance and a life of scheduled pleasure she was now being shown the gulches of a barbarous region. A world of capture and escape. Of violence and fear. Of love and hate. Yet above all, of an underlying calm. A calm built upon a rock-like certainty and belief in some immemorial tradition.

Here, tossing and sweating on the bed below her, lay a fragment, so it seemed, of a great tradition: for all the outward movement utterly still in the confidence of its own hereditary truth. Cheeta, for the first time in her life, felt in the presence of blood so much bluer than her own. (p. 162)

Gormenghast, a place that ennobles the soul? A place that provides Titus with the foundations to survive and thrive in the world? It’s enough to make you reevaluate all of the truths you thought you knew from reading Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

By the conclusion of Titus Alone, the 77th Earl of Groan has come to a kind of acceptance with his past. He’s escaped from the prison of stifling tradition, he’s rejected the false promise of the new, and he’s confronted the demons of his upbringing and overcome them. Why, then, does Titus reject Gormenghast in the book’s final pages? Why does he turn away from the castle with a fairy-tale finality, to be “never seen by him ever again”?

Clearly Mervyn Peake was not finished with Titus Groan. We know that Peake planned to write further episodes in the saga, with tentative titles that include Titus Awakes and Gormenghast Revisited. Unfortunately all the author ever put to paper were scattered notes and fragments. I’d like to think that Titus goes on to achieve great deeds, now that he’s armed with the mighty tradition of Gormenghast but not controlled by it. What final destiny Peake had in store for him, we’ll never know.

The more I study Titus Alone, the more I realize that Peake knew precisely what he was doing with this book. Perhaps the author didn’t have the opportunity to polish his last Titus story to the same bright sheen as Titus Groan and Gormenghast. There are some individual passages that have a sketched-out or unfinished quality to them. (Who exactly is this village girl that Titus is frolicking with shortly before the book’s climax? What exactly does it mean that Juno’s hallway was “daringly yet carefully… furnished”?) (p. 66)

Still, I can’t imagine that a Mervyn Peake at the height of his intellectual powers would have produced a book much different than the one you’re holding right now. Titus Alone may stand alone, but it stands on its own two feet.

***

So the Harry Potter series is over, and I was pretty much right. (Read my entry What Will Happen in the Final Harry Potter?)

I predicted that Harry, Ron, and Hermione would all live to the end of the series, though J.K. would keep us in suspense until the last minute. Bing! I predicted that Snape would reveal that he had killed Dumbledore and turned Death Eater on Dumbledore’s orders. Bing! I predicted that Harry would triumph over Voldemort at the expense of lots of secondary characters. Bing! I predicted that Harry would find some way to contact Sirius Black again from beyond the grave. Well, no bing! there, but I’d suggest that I deserve a partial bing! since Harry does manage to contact another dead mentor (Dumbledore) from beyond the grave.

Of course, you can chalk this up less to my amazing powers of prognostication than to the fact that J.K. Rowling made a lot of this fairly obvious. I think many of us knew that Dumbledore was going to die from the second or third book in. I mean, didn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi die on Luke Skywalker? Didn’t Gandalf die on Frodo? That’s simply the way these stories go: Our Hero receives instruction from a Wise Mentor, who later dies and leaves the hero to confront the Big Bad Villain alone.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the Harry Potter novels are “too derivative.” To which I say, Yes! J.K. Rowling is derivative! And that’s the entire point. One of the things that makes these books so terrific is the fact that the author is very consciously following traditional patterns. She’s taken something old and familiar, dusted it off, and made it seem fresh and new again. It’s harder to do than you think.

So how does Deathly Hallows rank? How good was the book? I’d say Deathly Hallows is the third best in the series, behind Order of the Phoenix and Prisoner of Azkaban.

I admit I was very worried about this book. L. Frank Baum got lazy a few books in to his Oz series and wrote a real stinker called The Road to Oz, which basically consists of Dorothy meeting up with all her pals and going to the Emerald City for a big party. (Baum even pulls in characters from his other books in a crass effort to draw attention to them and boost lagging sales.) Then in the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to wrap the whole thing up by making Oz invisible. C.S. Lewis had similar issues drawing Narnia to a close in The Last Battle. I dreaded the prospect of Deathly Hallows becoming a Road to Oz-type wrap-up with endless cameos by secondary characters.

So imagine my surprise that Rowling didn’t fall into this trap at all. There’s very little of that last-time-around nostalgia kick going on in Deathly Hallows. No last ride on the Hogwarts Express, no last trip to Hagrid’s shack, no last game of Quidditch. Hell, they don’t even make it to Hogwarts until the last hundred pages or so. About three-quarters of the book is focused exclusively on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and there are quite a number of new characters here to sink your teeth into. Characters like Dobby, Neville, and Hagrid (the last of whom seemed in danger of staging a Fonzie-like takeover of the series two or three books in) only show up for short bits here and there.

That’s not to say that the book is perfect. Rowling does still indulge a number of her less-than-admirable habits in this book too. She makes too much of the plot revolve around obscure details and marginalia from several books back that we can’t be expected to keep track of. Remember how frustrating it was when Sherlock Holmes would bend to the ground at the scene of a crime, take notice of something that our narrator Watson couldn’t see, and then produce this insignificant thing at the conclusion as the final damning piece of evidence against the villain? Rowling’s got that affliction too.

Why didn’t Harry die when Voldemort cast the Avada Kedavra curse on him at the end? Why did the spell rebound on the Evil Dude? There were a couple of long convoluted explanations about switched wands that I couldn’t really follow, nor did I think it really mattered that much. Ditto with the overly complicated back story for Albus Dumbledore. What mattered was that Voldy’s selfishness, arrogance, and shortsightedness did him in in the end, and Alby’s faith, patience, and trust in Harry won the day.

(And has anybody else noticed Rowling’s little joke here, that “Avada Kedavra” sounds a heck of a lot like “abracadabra”? Well, maybe it’s not so much of a joke, as Wikipedia explains.)

The other questionable tactic Rowling uses is her excessive killing off of characters. About a dozen characters bite it in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but it almost seems like the author chose them at random by writing their names on note cards and tossing them up in the air. I mean, really, Tonks? Crabbe? Anybody wonder what logic there was in some of these choices? (And anybody else find it peculiar that Mad-Eye Moody’s body was never found?)

So now that we’ve seen the whole Harry Potter saga from start to (presumed) finish, what can we say about it? Will the Harry Potter novels endure?

I say yes, but not necessarily because of the clever plotting and suspense. The primary virtue of these books is that they provide such an incredibly convincing portrait of a boy’s coming of age. So many other authors who write about children either gloss over the turmoiled adolescence or yank their characters from childhood to adulthood in one fell swoop. Harry starts the series as a cute kid who discovers a magical world, and undergoes a very gradual transformation through the seven books to a responsible adult. It’s an impressive achievement, made all the more impressive by the fact that Rowling is a woman. (Although once future generations finally shake off this irritating Puritanical streak that runs through our culture, people will start to wonder why Harry is the only teenaged boy in history to grow up without a sex drive.)

So if you’re one of those people feeling incredibly sad that Harry’s adventures are over, don’t worry — I’m sure J.K. Rowling will return to Hogwarts at some point. Even though we know what happens to Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny nineteen years down the line, there’s still plenty left to show. I’m betting that the lure of the four hundred zillion dollars the publishers throw at her will prove irresistible.

I’m betting on a collection of Potter-related short stories sometime in the middle of the next decade, and/or one or two novelties like Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them done for charitable purposes.

***

A side note: Perhaps I missed this in earlier books — but did anyone else notice that the death date on James and Lily Potter’s graves was 1981? Which would make the present day of Deathly Hallows 1997-98, not 2007-08. Rowling eschews the use of topical references and specific dates through most of the series, and this is the first time I noticed when the series was supposed to take place. It’s an insignificant thing, really, but I’m curious if there’s any reasoning behind it. Remember how in Superman Returns, if you looked at the dates closely, the Man of Steel turned out to have gone off on his little five-year hiatus right before 9/11?

Man in Black: Really! In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.

Vizzini: I accept!

Man in Black: All right. Will Harry Potter die or will Voldemort die? The battle of wits has begun! It ends when J.K. Rowling decides, and we all read, and find out who is right — and who is dead.

Vizzini: But it’s so simple! All we need to do is divine from what we know of J.K. Rowling: is she the sort of woman who would kill off her protagonist, or her villain? Now, a clever author would kill off her protagonist, because she would know that only a great fool would assume that the beloved protagonist of a popular series of novels is safe. We are not great fools, so we can clearly not bet on Harry Potter to die. But J.K. Rowling must have known we were not great fools; she would have counted on it! So we can clearly not bet on Voldemort to die.

Man in Black: You’ve made your decision then?

Vizzini: Not remotely! Because while J.K. Rowling pretends to be a novelist with a dark and sinister side, she’s really a sentimental crowd pleaser at heart. And she knows that killing off her protagonist would be very distressing to much of her young audience. So clearly, though she’s going to string us along, she won’t do something so dark as to have Harry Potter die in the end. She’ll go for the cheery, crowd-pleasing ending of having Voldemort die and Harry Potter triumph.

Man in Black: But she’s already killed off beloved characters before, like Sirius Black and Dumbledore.

Vizzini: And I think there’s a good chance she’s going to bring Sirius back before the end of Deathly Hallows too. Either that or she’s going to hint somehow that he’s still alive, or Harry can still communicate with him through the grave, or something like that.

Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Vizzini: Wait ’til I get going! Where was I?

Man in Black: Dumbledore.

Vizzini: Yes! Dumbledore! As for Dumbledore — you realize that he expected to die, and even planned for it? In fact, if you carefully re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you realize that all the time Dumbledore is begging Snape to keep his vow and do what he promised, he’s actually begging Snape to kill him when the time comes. Snape has been acting so mopey throughout the series because he doesn’t want to go through with it and pretend to join Voldemort’s side, even though he promised Dumbledore he would.

Man in Black: So who will die then? Rowling’s already claimed several characters will die.

Vizzini: Not Ron or Hermione, that’s for sure. They’re going to get together by the end of the book, Rowling’s been hinting at that for ages. I doubt Ginny Weasley will die either, because Rowling’s set Ginny up to be Harry’s love interest — though I wouldn’t rule out Ginny being another tragic loss Harry has to endure before the end. I’m guessing that Snape will die in the act of saving Harry and thus become your classic tragically misunderstood martyr character. I would have bet on Neville too if I hadn’t heard that they cut out the parts about Neville and the prophecy from the Order of the Phoenix movie. Now I’m convinced that all along he was just a red herring. Draco Malfoy might bite it too, although Malfoy strikes me as a likely candidate for either sudden repentance at a last, crucial moment, or as the bad guy who’s going to stick around and endure the punishment at the end of the book.

Man in Black: What makes you so sure that Harry won’t be the one to die?

Vizzini: Because the whole series is set up as a coming of age story for Harry. With a few exceptions, just about every chapter in all six books has been set from Harry’s point of view. The series begins when he’s eleven — just entering his teenage years — and ends when he’s eighteen — a symbolic age for the passage to adulthood. Rowling’s not writing a martyrdom story here or a parable about Jesus; she’s writing the classic passage-to-adulthood story. And we all know how this story goes: the protagonist begins young and naive, he faces great challenges, and eventually he vanquishes his enemy, but not without great sacrifice along the way. He emerges from the story older and wiser, triumphant but having learned that life requires hard work and sacrifice. Harry can’t very well learn that lesson if he’s dead, can he?

Man in Black: But Rowling has hinted several times that Harry might not be safe.

Vizzini: Marketing hokum! J.K. Rowling is terrific at it. Plus she loves red herrings. Remember that scene in Order of the Phoenix where she made us believe, for just a moment, that Mr. Weasley had died? Why put that in the book? Because she got a nice little thrill from telling everyone that a major character was going to die in that book, and it’s just so much fun to play around with readers’ expectations.

Man in Black: You’re really so sure that Harry’s not going to die then.

Vizzini: Well, I’m sure that having Harry live is what she should do. But keep in mind that making predictions about the outcome of the series is nothing more than a guessing game. Like any good novelist, Rowling’s stuck omens and portents in the books that could lead to any number of possible outcomes. There’s evidence to support just about any conclusion you might draw. It’s all a question of what kind of person Rowling is, and what kind of endcap she feels like putting on her series. I suspect she’ll leave Harry alive, but she’ll kill one or two tertiary characters simply because she has to to keep up the suspense. But she’ll also leave enough openings and a few juicy unresolved mysteries just in case she decides to write sequels.

Man in Black: What else is going to happen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?

Vizzini: I don’t have high hopes for the book, because I suspect that every character from the past six books is going to pop in for a farewell cameo. It could prove to be very messy. That’s what happens when you get such phenomenal success so early — it affects what you write. J.K. Rowling’s probably gotten a thousand letters from children all over the world begging to hear what happens to every minor, insignificant character in the series, and I’m afraid she’s going to try to oblige them all.

Man in Black: So will Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sell less than 20 million copies?

Vizzini: That would be totally, and in all other ways, inconceivable.

No, the good Oxford don was merely a translator and annotator of an ancient work of literature known as the Red Book of Westmarch. In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are presumed to have been written by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the Red Book also contained a large collection of ancient folklore known as Translations from the Elvish. It’s from this section of the Red Book that The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and Unfinished Tales are presumed to have originated.

To me, this is one of the truly fascinating things about Tolkien’s world that sets it on a higher pedestal than just about any other work of fantasy. Middle Earth extends beyond the printed page. Like the actor who stays in character between performances, Tolkien pretended in his letters and private writings that he really was just a quaint British scholar dusting off old books of lore.

Tolkien was an early example of the kind of complete, obsessive immersion you find today in devotees of Second Life or World of Warcraft. I can only imagine what the stuffier dons at Oxford must have thought of this elderly chap whiling away the hours alone pretending to be a scholar of an invented world, writing philosophical treatises about it, mapping it out, trying to smooth out its inconsistencies. Certainly Tolkien’s pal C.S. Lewis never went to such extremes with his Narnia fantasies. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about someone creating such a detailed, fantastic world — called “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — but even that was speculative fiction.

And so there’s something both satisfying and frustrating about this posthumous collection of stories. Unfinished Tales is really just a big hunk of Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father’s stories in lots of dry footnotes.

All this for what? Well, for stories. Fiction. And fiction about Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, no less. Sometimes I would finish some of the drier chapters of Unfinished Tales — say, the listings of the kings and queens of Númenor, or an account of the battles fought in the margins of LOTR by the Rohirrim — and really have to struggle to remember that this was all just part of a made-up story.

Because in the final analysis, what Tolkien’s doing with these stories isn’t scholarship or historical research. It’s pure fiction, just the same as the Flight to the Ford or the Council of Elrond or the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It might feel like scholarship, but it isn’t really. Tolkien’s a storyteller at heart; he just tells them in a different way than anyone before him.

That leads me to the frustrating aspect of Unfinished Tales. There are lots of these seemingly endless endnotes where Christopher Tolkien talks about the different versions of the story at hand. Did his father really intend for Ar-Adûnakhôr to be the nineteenth or twentieth king of Númenor? In the appendices of Return of the King he says one thing, in draft A he says another, in draft B he says a third thing, in a letter to a fan he wrote a fourth thing, and furthermore if you compare the dates of the drafts you find that… zzzzzz.

I mean, really, who cares? We don’t give an urn of warm troll spit about Ar-Adûnakhôr. He’s just one of the thousands of names in the margins. I felt like smacking Christopher across the face and saying, “You’re the frickin’ editor now, dude. None of this is really germane to the story your Dad was trying to tell. Nineteenth or twentieth, doesn’t matter — just pick one.”

For another example, take “The Quest of Erebor,” a behind-the-scenes look at how Gandalf came about getting involved with Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien presents multiple drafts and fragments that his father wrote on the subject, with plenty of editorial commentary and endnotes in between. The drafts really don’t differ all that much. Any half-decent editor could have stitched together a 90% complete and cohesive narrative of “The Quest of Erebor” without adding a single word of their own.

As for the last 10% — why didn’t Christopher just take a co-author credit and flesh it out? We already know that Christopher found enough in the Túrin saga to put together a relatively complete Children of Húrin. Guy Gavriel Kay helped him finish The Silmarillion. Most of the tales in Unfinished Tales end with a long summary by Christopher Tolkien of how the rest of the story was supposed to go. It’s not like he was transcribing the words of Moses here — why couldn’t he just finish the ones that were close to being finished?

On further reflection, though, I can think of two words that summarize why you shouldn’t flesh out your father’s notes and outlines, and those words are “Brian Herbert.” (Read my take on the first three Dune prequels.) Besides which, Christopher had a very good justification for treating the material with the reverence of a historian: his Dad wanted it that way.

Tolkien wanted his mythology to be fragmentary and occasionally contradictory; he wanted these histories to read like summarizations of retellings of half-remembered legends. As if JRRT himself was only the latest in a long line of scholars attempting to construct a complete history of Middle Earth without access to the original source materials. I think he would be tickled to discover that his writings were being treated with the same scholarly fussiness that he himself employed.

Tolkien himself recognized the absurdity of all this, as son Christopher quotes him in the introduction to Unfinished Tales:

I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good — certainly not for me who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings, of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer “information,” or “lore.”

If you want to see how far Tolkien’s self-awareness goes, look at the story of “Aldarion and Erendis,” which I couldn’t help reading as autobiographical. The tale concerns a prince of Númenor who strives to reconcile his love for a woman with his obsessive love of the sea. He spends years denying one or the other — either staying home and tending to his marriage, or voyaging afar on the sea and neglecting his wife. The resulting bitterness makes a sham of his marriage and sows evil in the Númenoreans that will eventually lead to their downfall hundreds of years later. It’s one of the best chapters in the book.

Now I don’t know much about J.R.R.’s wife Edith and what their marriage was like. But I’m sure there must have been many a tense night when J.R.R. secluded himself in his study with his funny little maps and philological note cards, leaving Edith to wonder if she should have married William the tax attorney instead. I’m sure a lot of women reading this story nod their heads, thinking about their husbands who like to seclude themselves in the attic and obsess over their online gaming/model trains/fantasy baseball/Civil War recreationism/whatever. (I don’t want to be sexist or exclusionary — but isn’t this kind of fetishism generally a male thing?)

“Aldarion and Erendis” stops somewhere in the middle, and J.R.R. left only scattered notes about where he intended to take the story, but it’s clear that things were headed for a bad turn. Aldarion’s desire for the sea and Erendis’ stubborn resentment cannot be reconciled. Tolkien always works in dichotomies — good vs. evil, Frodo vs. Gollum, fealty vs. treachery, etc. — and one could argue that the main “theme” of his work is how we make our way through the world by steering between these moral pylons. I wonder if Tolkien found this particular story too painful to finish.

Aside from “Aldarion and Erendis,” the Túrin fragments, and “The Quest for Erebor,” the other major treats of Unfinished Tales include:

• “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin,” which contains a breathtaking scene of Ulmo, the lord of waters, appearing before a mortal Man (see the third book cover on this page), as well as a fantastic description of the hidden city of Gondolin
• “The Drúedain,” an essay about those jungle pygmy dudes that help Théoden’s army get to Minas Tirith in Return of the King, and including a short story, “The Faithful Stone”
• “The Istari,” an essay on the Order of Wizards that included Gandalf and Saruman, including some tantalizing information about Alatar and Pallando, the two “Blue Wizards”
• “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” which offers many of Tolkien’s musings on the First Couple of Lórien, including much speculation about Galadriel’s ban from returning into the West

If you haven’t gone much beyond Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films — if you couldn’t get through The Silmarillion — if you didn’t look longingly at the maps of Middle Earth in those volumes and hunger to know what was in those blank spaces — then don’t bother with Unfinished Tales. You’re the kind of person who’s probably never bought the Special Extended Limited Edition DVD version of a film specifically so you can listen to the Visual Effects Supervisor’s commentary, which wasn’t on the original DVD, which you also own. And this is okay. You’re what we call “normal.”

But if you think you just might have a touch of the obsessive fanboy in you, give Unfinished Tales a whirl. I think Unfinished Tales is about as geeky-obsessive as I get. I have no desire to slog through all twelve volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s “History of Middle Earth” series. Though I might just breeze through The Tolkien Reader if I feel up to it. And maybe Roverandom. And maybe Smith of Wooton Major…

Sador is speaking here about the race of Men, and his statement may sum up Tolkien’s recently published novel as good as any. Children of Húrin is a tale about fear and Man’s futile attempts to wrest honor and courage from the jaws of certain doom. It’s a major new work, though incomplete, and one of the clearest distillations of Tolkien’s thought since the publication of The Silmarillion in the late ’70s.

Those who have already read The Silmarillion will find a lot that’s familiar here. (For those who haven’t, be warned that there will be spoilers here.) The Children of Húrin is just an expanded version of the tale of Túrin Turambar, the longest (and best) chapter from that book. Having just recently read The Silmarillion myself, honestly this tale doesn’t seem all that different from the previously published version; fragments of the story also appeared in Unfinished Tales.

Technically, The Children of Húrin can be read as a stand-alone tale. It has a beginning and an ending, for the most part. But I imagine that readers who had trouble getting through The Silmarillion will have a difficult time understanding the context of what’s happening here. Who is this Morgoth, exactly? What’s all this about Fëanor and his sons? Christopher Tolkien does a rather poor job in the Introduction at summarizing the larger context of the story. We’re left with passages like this:

The second son of Finwë was Fingolfin (the half brother of Fëanor), who was held the overlord of all the Noldor; and he with his son Fingon ruled Hithlum, which lay to the north and west of the great chain of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. Fingolfin dwelt in Mithrim, by the great lake of that name, while Fingon held Dor-lómin in the south of Hithlum. Their chief fortress was Barad Eithel (the Tower of the Well)….

Or, more concisely stated, Yawwwwwwwwwwn.

So here’s basically what you need to know. Once upon a time the Valar (the gods) invited the immortal Elves to the land of Valinor in the West. There Fëanor, the smartest Elf in the pack, made three one-of-a-kind jewels called the Silmarils. But the evil god Morgoth stole them and took off to the land of Beleriand. Fëanor and many of his people went after him, rebelling against the Valar and taking an oath never to rest until the Silmarils had been recovered. The Elves established a bunch of kingdoms in Beleriand and have been fighting Morgoth for a few hundred years now (with the help of the Edain, the good Men).

But the tale of the Elves is really not as crucial in The Children of Húrin as that of Men. The main character of the book, Túrin son of Húrin, is a Man, after all. And the book revolves around this character’s noble, yet futile, attempts to rise to greatness.

It’s said in The Silmarillion that Elves are bound to the Earth. The Elves are immortal, and even when they die their souls sit in the halls of Mandos (a Hades of sorts) until they’re eventually resurrected. But Men have been granted the gift of death by Eru the One, their Creator. This means that Men’s souls leave the circles of the world when they die and go someplace that nobody, not even the Valar, know where.

Fine. Except when Men first wake up after their creation, it’s Morgoth they stumble into first. Without the Valar around, Morgoth pretends to befriend the first Men and turns death — originally intended as a gift from Eru — into something to dread and fear.

Fear, as I mentioned before, is the predominant theme of Children of Húrin. And it seems to be the primary Achilles’ heel of Men in Tolkien’s world, one we see arise again and again throughout the book. Dorlas shrinks from facing the dragon Glaurung from fear; Brodda the Easterling conquers Dor-lómin but is afraid to harm Húrin’s wife Morwen; Mîm the Dwarf ultimately betrays Túrin’s hideout from fear of the Orcs who have kidnapped his son; and so on.

But the house of Húrin is a race apart. “This land might pass into [Morgoth's] dominion,” Húrin tells his wife. “But if things do go ill, I will not say to you: Do not be afraid! For you fear what should be feared, and that only; and fear does not dismay you.”

The faithful household retainer Sador tells Túrin that “a man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.” And so Túrin takes up arms against his foes even though others counsel him to hide and preserve his strength. Niënor stands in front of the dragon Glaurung and tells him to his face “The children of Húrin at least are not craven. We fear you not.” Húrin defies the will of Morgoth himself under torture in Angband, and brings down the curse of Morgoth upon him:

But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.

Húrin, undaunted, replies:

Such things you spoke long ago to our fathers; but we escaped from your shadow. And now we have knowledge of you, for we have looked on the faces that have seen the Light, and heard the voices that have spoken with [king of the Valar] Manwë. Before Arda you were, but others also; and you did not make it.

If this confrontation sounds familiar, it should. It’s essentially a reworking of the Book of Job in the Old Testament. God allows the Devil to throw calamity after calamity on the hapless Job in an effort to test his faith; here Morgoth puts Húrin on a chair and bids him to watch how his children Túrin and Niënor fare against his onslaught of evil.

But here’s the interesting thing: Tolkien’s sympathies are with Túrin Turambar, much as they were with Fëanor in The Silmarillion. There’s a nobility in the character that overarches everything he does, even though it leads to ruin in the end.

It’s very interesting that throughout the history of Middle Earth — in all of Tolkien’s major works — the constant reaction of the Elves and the Valar, the “good guys,” is to run and hide. Confronted with Morgoth’s betrayal and Fëanor’s rebellion, the Valar wall off their sacred realm of Valinor and stay there. Thingol and Melian retreat behind the enchanted Girdle around the forest of Doriath. Turgon and Finrod make themselves scarce inside their secret realms of Gondolin and Nargothrond. And in The Lord of the Rings, three of the remaining Elvish lords — Elrond, Galadriel, and Thranduil — stay entrenched in their protected havens, while the fourth, Círdan, is basically just hanging out in Middle Earth to help hustle anyone who will go back to Valinor.

And the race of Men? Well, we’re the weak ones, the fickle ones, the Lesser Children of Eru. But while the sons of Fëanor bitch and moan about their stolen Silmarils for hundreds of years, it’s the Man Beren who actually dares to go to Angband and do something about it. When Sauron grows strong in Middle Earth during the Second Age, the Elves sit back and let it happen while the men of Númenor go forth and kick some ass. Even in the Third Age, the Men of Rohan and Gondor are the ones who are putting their butts on the line to challenge Sauron. Remember that in Tolkien’s Two Towers, there was no brave cadre of Elvish archers coming to the rescue at Helm’s Deep like in Peter Jackson’s film.

Nobody embodies this boldness and nobility so much as Túrin. Círdan sends a message to Nargothrond telling them, “Shut the doors of the fortress, and go not abroad. Cast the stones of your pride into the loud river, that the creeping evil may not find the gate.” But Túrin refuses to be a hostage to his fate and to huddle in a cave. He calls Círdan’s messenger “a runagate from war,” and says “it will still seem better in our case to muster our strength, and go boldly to meet our foes, ere they come too nigh.” The Elves run from the dragon Glaurung; Túrin insists on going forth to challenge him.

Unfortunately, the greatest attribute of Men is also what leads to their downfall. Remember Gimli saying in The Return of the King that “With its own weapons was [Mordor] worsted”? So it is with Men. If the impulse to rebel against fear and darkness is what inspires us to great deeds, it also leads to the pride that’s our undoing in the end.

Notice all the examples of handicap, decay, and degeneration in The Children of Húrin. There’s Sador Labadal, who accidentally sliced off part of his foot due to his carelessness with an ax (very symbolic, that). There’s Brandir, the clubfooted leader of the men of Brethil. There’s Gwindor, the Elf of Nargothrond who only escapes the dungeons of Angband after losing a hand. And then there’s Mîm, last of a dying breed of Petty-Dwarves devolved from greatness due to their pettiness and greed.

What happens to Túrin in the end? Túrin can’t rise above his circumstances. He seeks to ennoble the race of Men and restore his house to greatness; instead, time and again his pride blinds him to the better advice of those around him. Pitting himself against Glaurung the dragon is one thing; but to defy Morgoth? Remember that this is the dude that literally invented evil. He was the one who sought to mar Eru’s divine plan during the very act of creation itself.

So Túrin is doomed to slay his friends through many a case of mistaken identity. He leads the great Elvish fortress of Nargothrond to ruin, he unknowingly marries and impregnates his own sister, and he in general hastens the collapse of all Beleriand under the armies of Morgoth.

In the end (as Tolkien tells in The Silmarillion), it’s not force of arms that conquers Morgoth. It’s the selfless mission of mercy to Valinor undertaken by Eärendil that causes the Valar to finally step out from their refuge and call on the help of Eru. Just the same, it’s not Aragorn’s army that ultimately wins the victory over Sauron in The Lord of the Rings; it’s Frodo’s pity in not slaying Gollum (and Bilbo’s, and Sam’s, and everyone else’s).

So are we to admire Túrin or pity him? Is he a character to look up to or a character to revile?

Perhaps, as I noted in my discussion of The Return of the King, one side of Túrin Turambar can’t exist without the other. In The Children of Húrin, it seems to me, Tolkien’s moral determinism strikes again. Túrin’s story isn’t so much a cautionary tale as it is an observation. Tolkien is saying: This is how Men are. This is how Eru created the world. This is the symphony the great Composer in the Sky has composed for us.

***

(One small side note: The book is filled with glossy full-color paintings from Alan Lee, which was an unexpected treat. Most of these paintings are quite phenomenal. But am I wrong to feel gypped that, in a book that spends so much time dealing with a dragon, there isn’t a single clear illustration of a dragon here? I admit dragons are a somewhat predictable topic for cover art on a fantasy novel. But I’m surprised that Houghton Mifflin would publish such a major commercial book with such a subdued and unassuming cover. You think the Tolkien estate twisted HM’s arms?)

***

(Another note: Why would Christopher Tolkien choose to omit the further material about Húrin’s death, which appeared both in The Silmarillion and The War of the Jewels? The fragment that appears in the book’s last pages feels jarringly incomplete. At the very least, I would have liked to see the scene where that little fucker Mîm the Petty-Dwarf gets what’s coming to him. Oh well.)

It’s also the book that differs the most from Peter Jackson’s film treatment. But Return of the King has always been my least favorite of the three movies, and many of the wonderful moments in that film — the lighting of the beacons, Faramir’s charge on Osgiliath, the catapult battle, Pippin and Gandalf’s discussion about the afterlife — are scenes that Jackson either invented or wildly embellished. (Unfortunately, PJ also invented Sam and Frodo’s falling out over some missing lembas wafers. Ugh.)

So there were all kinds of gems awaiting me on my re-reading of ROTK. I had completely forgotten about Beregond, Guard of the Citadel, and the heroic role he plays in saving Faramir from death at the hands of Denethor. I had only a faint recollection of Ghân-buri-Ghân and the Wild Men. I didn’t recall that our heroes have a run-in with Saruman before the Hobbits return to the Shire. I had forgotten that the only reason Merry was able to wound the Lord of the Nazgûl was because of his sword, picked up at the Barrow-downs in the early chapters of Fellowship.

The first half of the book (book 5 of the Lord of the Rings proper) has simply masterful pacing. The way the tension builds throughout the siege of Gondor… and then Gandalf confronts the Lord of the Nazgûl… and then suddenly the horns of the Rohirrim blow… and then we backtrack to see the ride of the Rohirrim… oh man, is that good. It’s the big build-up that was sorely lacking before the battle of Helm’s Deep in Two Towers.

A single theme kept running through my head as I read Return of the King. It’s the way evil acts continually redound to the greater good in the end. Think of how Merry found his sword. The Hobbits’ capture by the wights in the Barrow-downs certainly seemed like a bad turn when it happened; but this serendipitous encounter enables Merry to critically wound the Nazgûl at just the right time, thus possibly saving the entire battle from going sour and changing the fate of all Middle Earth.

But nothing’s that cut and dried in Return of the King. There’s an unsettling kind of moral determinism lurking behind the scenes here, and indeed throughout the entire trilogy. Perhaps “moral determinism” is the wrong thing to call it, but I can’t think of a better phrase to use. It’s this pervasive sense that not only does the darkness exist, but it’s actually necessary and an integral component to the light.

Why do I think that? Because it seems like Tolkien is constantly giving us matched pairs of characters, one of whom turns to the path of light and one of whom follows the path of darkness.

Take for example the characters of Denethor and Théoden, the Steward of Gondor and the King of Rohan. Clearly Tolkien means to draw very strong parallels between the two. Notice the similarities:

• Both are rulers of their respective lands (Gondor and Rohan)
• Both have recently lost firstborn sons in battle (Boromir and Théodred)
• Both have ambivalent feelings about their remaining heirs (Faramir and Éomer)
• Both are confronted with a devastating siege (Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep)
• Both have been striving against an insidious higher power (Sauron and Saruman)
• Both take on a Hobbit squire (Pippin and Merry)
• Both men had fathers for whom Aragorn fought in his youth (Ecthelion and Thengel)
• Both are initially mistrustful of Gandalf
• Both eventually grant Gandalf favors early in the saga (access to the Gondorian archives and the loan of Shadowfax)
• Both die in The Return of the King

But obviously there’s a crucial difference between the two; one selflessly redeems himself and dies in battle, while the other stews in his bitterness until he finally commits suicide.

Denethor is constantly boasting about his uncanny foresight into the events that are shaping the War of the Ring. But Théoden clearly has a touch of it too; he knows that he won’t be returning from Minas Tirith, and tells Éomer as much. “If the war is lost, what good will be my hiding in the hills?” he responds to Éomer’s suggestion that he sit out the battle at Minas Tirith. “And if it is won, what grief will it be, even if I fall, spending my last strength?” Contrast this with how Denethor reacts to Gandalf’s suggestion that he ride out to battle: “Battle is vain. Why should we wish to live longer? Why should we not go to death side by side?”

The symbolism in the manner of their deaths is telling. Théoden is crushed under the weight of his slain horse Snowmane, rallying his troops to battle to save someone else’s country; with his dying eyes, he sees “[a] grim morn, and a glad day, and a golden sunset.” Denethor, meanwhile, perishes in a bier of fire, which is about as close as Tolkien ever comes to suggesting the existence of a Hell.

It’s not just Denethor and Théoden that get the duality treatment. There are other similarly matched pairs in The Lord of the Rings: Frodo and Gollum. Gandalf and Saruman. Faramir and Boromir. Aragorn raises an entire company of shadow warriors whose ancient faithlessness and treachery stand in stark contrast to his company of long-suffering and loyal Dúnedain.

But the two characters whose duality I find the most interesting are Sauron and Galadriel.

Galadriel has held the realm of Lothlórien in a state of suspended animation for hundreds or thousands of years, clinging to the golden age of the Elves as long as possible. She rebelled against the Valar and left the Blessed Realm to follow Fëanor, as The Silmarillion tells — but despite her best efforts, the day of reckoning must come. Time moves on, and Galadriel will have to return to Valinor and face her judgment.

But isn’t Sauron really just the mirror image of Galadriel? (Frodo even sees his Eye in Galadriel’s mirror.) Sauron too is a rebel against the Valar, trying to forestall judgment and recapture a long-lost golden age. But for Sauron it’s not Valinor he seeks to emulate but Thangorodrim, the fortress of his master Morgoth in the First Age. And what would Sauron do if he got a hold of the Ring? He’d bring the world into subservience, he’d eradicate the line of Númenor and chase the last remaining Elves away, he’d set up an eternal and changeless kingdom of darkness that would last “unto the ending of the world.”

Interesting that neither Sauron nor Galadriel are capable of making anything new. Sauron’s orcs and trolls are but crass imitations of Elves and ents, and his Mordor is just a recreation of Morgoth’s Thangorodrim. Likewise Galadriel’s Lothlórien is little more than a pale imitation of the glory of Valinor beyond the sea. (“[T]hey attempted nothing new, living in memory of the past,” says Tolkien in the appendices, writing about the keepers of the Three Elven Rings.)

It’s no accident that the destruction of the One Ring also leads to the destruction of Galadriel’s Ring too, and the end to her idyllic land of Lórien. Sauron’s puppet Saruman even gloats about it when Galadriel and company encounter him in Dunland:

‘I did not spend long study on these matters for naught. You have doomed yourselves, and you know it. And it will afford me some comfort as I wander to think that you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine. And now, what ship will bear you back across so wide a sea?… It will be a grey ship, and full of ghosts.’

The crucial difference between Sauron and Galadriel is that Galadriel has the chance to take control of the One Ring. Frodo offers it to her, in Fellowship, giving her a possibility of extending her exile from Valinor indefinitely. But she turns him down, thus earning the likely forgiveness of the Valar. Sauron and Saruman aren’t so lucky; on their deaths, their spirits are both blown away. Saruman’s shade specifically yearns for Valinor and forgiveness: “For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.”

So we have several pairs of characters, one of whom takes the light path and one of whom takes the dark path. Sometimes it feels like everyone in Middle Earth has an ideological counterpart floating around, and that every good deed is being canceled out by an evil deed somewhere else.

In the end, of course, good and evil don’t entirely cancel each other out in Tolkien’s universe. The pity of Bilbo and Frodo saves Middle Earth and has long-lasting consequences. If either had given in to their impulses and slain Gollum when they had the chance, Frodo would have never made it to Mount Doom — and he would have never tossed the Ring in the fire if he did.

But what I find interesting is that the evil acts were necessary to the success of the quest as well. Frodo’s pity would have come to nothing in the end if not for Gollum’s savage greed and the seductive evil of the One Ring. It’s that very power that drew Gollum out of the Misty Mountains to search for Bilbo in the first place. And it’s only because of that unceasing lust that Gollum is hanging around Mount Doom waiting to seize the Ring in the end.

Similarly, Merry wouldn’t have gotten a hold of a magic sword of Westernesse if he hadn’t been captured by the wights of the Barrow-downs. Aragorn wouldn’t have had an army from the Paths of the Dead to command if the Shadow Host hadn’t broken their oaths to Isildur long ago. Treebeard wouldn’t have roused the ents to war if Merry and Pippin hadn’t been hauled to Fangorn by the orcs.

“Strange and wonderful I thought it that the designs of Mordor should be overthrown by such wraiths of fear and darkness,” says Gimli, referring to the Shadow Host. “With its own weapons was it worsted!”

So good and evil are striving in Middle Earth, testing each other, canceling each other out, and all getting tied up in a neat little package at the end of The Return of the King. It all hearkens back to the Music of the Ainur in the opening chapter of The Silmarillion, the Genesis of Tolkien’s cosmology. You’ll remember that during that act of creation, Melkor attempts to overwhelm the theme of Eru (God) with ideas of his own. As Tolkien writes, Melkor’s competitive theme is loud and repetitive, almost a mockery of the original music.

But Melkor, too, is a creation of the mind of Eru. In other words: evil was clearly a part of Eru’s design from the beginning. And so there’s nothing Melkor can do that doesn’t ultimately reflect on the glory of the whole symphony. Because in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, darkness is the opposite of light, but also its enabler.

All the works of the enemy — and the Valar — ultimately reflect the glory of Eru the One. As Frodo says when he sees Arwen arriving at Minas Tirith like a star shining in the evening: “Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away!”

The grand symphony in Tolkien’s universe is Eru’s, and both the day and the night are His design. But why He chose to write it this way is unknown, and maybe unknowable.

It’s a difficult book. Frodo and Sam, the characters we’re most invested in, disappear for a couple hundred pages; Gandalf is presumably dead in the book’s opening chapters; Boromir’s definitely dead; and Aragorn is still something of a distant figure. Gimli is interesting enough but hardly crucial to the plot, and it’s difficult to give two figs about Legolas.

Then we have the problem of the Rohirrim. As far as I’m concerned, Tolkien doesn’t do a very good job getting the audience to buy in to the kingdom of Rohan. I was shocked to discover that Éowyn is given less than a page in Two Towers, barely enough time for her to show up and cast eyes lovingly at Aragorn. Erkenbrand, Háma, and Gamling are just tertiary characters, nobody we particularly care about. The only person who really grabs your attention in these opening chapters about the Riddermark is Éomer. Before we’ve formed any emotional attachment to Rohan, Théoden’s off to Helm’s Deep.

As for Théoden? Théoden becomes more likable as the book goes on, and he really comes into his own when he rejects Saruman’s offer of peace at Orthanc. But when we first see him, the king of Rohan is just a cranky old man under the sway of bad counsel. Then Gandalf shows up, speaks a few strong words, casts Wormtongue down on his belly — and Théoden has a baffling change of heart. In my LOTR omnibus edition, we first meet Théoden on page 501; Gandalf casts Wormtongue down on page 503; on page 507, the king’s already mustering the troops. Too quick.

Now Gandalf is supposed to be a Maiar of old, and it’s said somewhere that his “magic” is to inspire the people of Middle Earth. To restore them to their youth and vigor, to rekindle the divine spark within. So that could certainly explain Théoden’s sudden shift. But then why didn’t Gandalf accomplish the same thing the last time he saw the king? Okay, there’s a convenient excuse — Gandalf was in a big hurry. But Gandalf’s obviously been in and out of this place many times, and Saruman’s poisoning took years.

So Théoden’s conversion is somewhat puzzling and the Rohirrim are still strangers. Therefore I wasn’t particularly invested in the battle of Helm’s Deep. The battle itself is the first extended battle sequence Tolkien had written since the Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit, and it’s considerably better done than that. But Peter Jackson’s instincts were correct in trying to build up this battle with every scrap of back story he could find. I struggled hard to care about anyone here but Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli.

But I want to come back to Théoden’s choice to cast aside Gríma Wormtongue and follow the advice of Gandalf, because such choices are what this book is made of. Everyone gets their moment of choice in Two Towers.

Sam and Frodo stand on the brink of Mordor and decide to press on, even if nobody is left alive to know about it. Saruman is given a clear choice by Gandalf to come down from Orthanc and walk the long, hard road towards forgiveness, or to rot in his tower. Treebeard and the ents must decide whether to confront Saruman or to sit back and await “the withering of all woods.” Even Gollum has a moment standing over the sleeping bodies of Sam and Frodo on the stairs of Cirith Ungol where he briefly reconsiders his evil plot to lead the hobbits to Shelob.

So what are our characters choosing between? For Tolkien, the choice is not complex: there’s light, and then there’s darkness.

White light is the purest representation of the holiness of the Valar –the White Tree of Gondor, the white light of the Silmarils, the white light of Galadriel’s phial, Gandalf’s reincarnation as the White Wizard. Meanwhile, black is the symbolic color of Sauron and evil. Black is darkness, black is the skin color of the “cruel Haradrim,” black is the color of the Nazgûl, the Black Riders. (About the racial aspect of Tolkien’s writing, see my post on The Silmarillion.)

And in Tolkien’s world, the bad guys are always trying to muddy the distinction between black and white, thereby muddying the distinction between the moral decisions the characters must make. Remember how Saruman rejects the designation of white, as Gandalf recounts during the Council of Elrond in Fellowship of the Ring:

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘ “I liked white better,” I said.

‘ “White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

‘ “In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

So The Two Towers is a book where all of the players must figure out what’s the right path and what’s the wrong path and what’s simply the convenient path. For Frodo and Sam, choosing the right path is a very literal thing. They spend most of the book teetering on the brink between Mordor and Gondor, and until the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, the path westward to Gondor is always the closer and easier route. Likewise, Rohan could have accepted Saruman’s offers of alliance; the ents could have sat the war out and left it to the Elves and Men; Frodo could have had Faramir’s men kill Gollum at the Forbidden Pool.

(In light of these tough moral choices that fill The Two Towers, the character of Faramir is quite frustrating, and I can completely understand why Peter Jackson decided to give him a makeover in the films. Faramir manages to completely resist the lure of the Ring where even Galadriel could not. “Not even if I found it on the highway would I take it,” he says, bizarrely.)

(As a result, without any real choice to confront, Faramir’s really not much of a character. His purpose in The Two Towers is really to act as a moral foil for Frodo, giving him the opportunity to do away with Gollum, and get an armed escort back to Minas Tirith, if he wants. Faramir also provides a convenient bit of foreshadowing for the confrontation with Shelob. But beyond that, he’s just another one of Tolkien’s pleasant, wise, faceless heroes that just seem to be wandering around Middle Earth, like Gildor, like Glorfindel, like Haldir.)

So every character is confronted with their moral choice. How to choose among them? For Tolkien, it’s really not a complicated issue. Chase down those moral grays for long enough, and they all eventually resolve into black or white. As Éomer asks Aragorn at one point, “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” Tolkien’s mouthpiece Aragorn replies:

‘As he ever has judged… Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’

Many have criticized Tolkien over the years for this simplistic black-and-white approach. They call his villains one-dimensional, they decry his treatment of the orcs as an evil race beyond any possibility of redemption. Sauron is just a faceless cipher.

But such critics are missing the point, I think. The real villains in The Lord of the Rings aren’t the orcs, or the Nazgûl, or even Sauron. The real villains are the temptations within. Despair, greed, pride, anger, fear. Sauron and his minions are just the external manifestation of these things.

And this is part of the genius of Tolkien, and one of the things that makes these books so much more interesting than the simplistic good-vs-evil battle they’re often made out to be. There really are no evil characters in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron? The Witch-King of Angmar? The Balrog? These aren’t characters, per se. We learn very little about their motivations, and they only appear at a remote distance. There’s no reason Sauron wants to conquer Middle Earth; he just does. Sauron is the magnetic pole that pulls our characters towards the Dark Side, while Gandalf (representing the Valar over the sea) is the magnetic pole for the Light.

So the orcs and the trolls and the Nazgûl get short shrift by Tolkien, because they’re not really who he cares about. He cares about all of us down here in the middle, wavering between good and evil, trying to make the difficult choices between them. His “villains” are Boromir, a brave soldier who gives in to temptation; Gollum, a hobbit-like creature who’s in over his head; Wormtongue, a man who’s chosen the most expedient side in a brewing war; and so on. People caught in between the two distant poles of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, struggling to find a way between them and choose a side.

It’s a very Christian concept. Discern the moral choice; make the right choice, even if it’s the least expedient or most fraught with danger; and have faith that the right will prevail in the end.

*****

An interesting side note:

You may laugh, but I find some very solid gay overtones in the relationship between Sam and Frodo, especially in The Two Towers. Yes, I understand that Tolkien didn’t mean for them to actually be gay, and that the main thing he was exploring here was the master/servant relationship.

But what to make of Sam attacking Shelob like a “small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate”? What to make of Gollum finding Sam and Frodo dozing with their arms around one another and Sam’s head in his lap? What are we to make of Sam, in the midst of preparing rabbit stew for Frodo, studying the lines on his sleeping face and then saying, “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no”?

There are plenty more examples. So scoff if you want, and tell yourself that J.R.R. Tolkien lived in a more innocent time where these things could be written without having any homosexual overtones. But I’m sure that even in Tolkien’s time there were old English bachelors who lived together and puttered in the garden together and finished one another’s sentences, and even J.R.R. wasn’t completely naïve about what was going on.

I’m convinced the overtones are there. Why exactly Tolkien put them there, I’m not sure. Any ideas?

*****

Another side note:

Peter Jackson got a lot of heat from fanboys who felt that Treebeard’s decision to march to war in the film was completely out of character. After a two-day colloquium with all of the ents, he suddenly reverses himself at the sight of a few burnt trees? But on re-reading The Two Towers, I was shocked to discover that Treebeard’s decision to go to war is just as hasty in the book as it is in the film. In a single conversation with Merry and Pippin, Treebeard goes from “I have not troubled about the Great Wars… they mostly concern Elves and Men” (middle of p. 461) to “I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!… I will stop it! And you shall come with me” (top of p. 463).

While I admit that the films are flawed, more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that Peter Jackson and his co-screenwriters read these books very, very carefully and came to many of the right conclusions.