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.

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.