“One September day in 1914, a young J.R.R. Tolkien, in his final undergraduate year at Oxford, came across an Old English advent poem called “Christ A.” Part of it reads, “Éalá Éarendel engla beorhtast/ofer middangeard monnum sended,” which he later rendered: “Hail Éarendel, brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men!””
“Safe in his aunt’s house in Nottinghamshire while battles raged on the continent, Tolkien took inspiration from this ode to the morning and evening star and wrote his own poem in modern English, “Éarendel the Mariner.””
“That poem was not published in his lifetime, but after it came the stories that would become The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, which in turn inspired, to varying degrees, Earthsea, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, The Wheel of Time, The Witcher, Game of Thrones, and so on, an apostolic succession of fantasy.”
“The latest in the line is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”
“the showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, have crafted a prequel, set thousands of years before the events of the three-volume novel and drawn from bits of lore in its prologue, “Concerning Hobbits,” and extensive appendices on Middle-earth history and culture. It’s an undertaking not dissimilar from Tolkien’s own reworking of “Christ A,” spinning out a narrative from a few textual scraps—the kind of academic exercise an Oxford professor of Old English could appreciate”
“It’s a pity the show doesn’t extend the same scholarly pleasures to its viewers. Its narrative conceits are those of big-budget TV: the so-called mystery boxes popularized by shows like Lost”
“Beyond a few delightful glimpses of ancient hobbit culture, there is little sense of a deep past that can be excavated through careful reading”
“This is partly a problem of translation. Contemporary television drives its narratives with its characters, by their arcs and inner conflicts. Tolkien’s characters remain largely static; it’s the world around them that changes”
“The concerns of the novel are civilizational rather than individual”
“The reader encounters this history in ruins and snippets of legendary songs”
“The songs, in particular, may seem like digressions or page-fillers, especially those sung in fictional languages, but they also provide a sense of Middle-earth’s cultures and history, stretching back into “the deeps of time.””
“The effect is like Tolkien’s description of the mines of Moria, where, “in the pale ray” of Gandalf’s illuminated staff, Frodo sees “glimpses of stairs and arches, and of other passages and tunnels, sloping up, or running steeply down, or opening blankly dark on either side. It was bewildering beyond hope of remembering.””
“The novel evokes a wanderlust to go back and take those untrodden paths, but since its world exists only on paper all further discovery must be textual. In other words, it requires research”
“But there will be no flipping through card catalogs or paging through dusty tomes for our heroine—she has orcs to eviscerate. Galadriel has librarians pull the scrolls for her. Like the show itself, she’s afraid to sit still”
“Tolkien’s books feature plenty of battles, but they also reflect the joys and pains of academic work. The Lord of the Rings is a novel “in which the scholarly rituals [are] observed; in which you flipped from index to text to appendix, cross-referring to maps,” as Jenny Turner wrote in 2001 in the London Review of Books”
“The book becomes, in her words, “a machine for the evocation of scholarly frisson. The thrills are the thrills of knowledge hidden, knowledge uncovered, knowledge that slips away.””
“Tolkien’s wizards are scholars first and sorcerers second. They each have areas of expertise and are renowned for their wisdom. And unlike Amazon’s Galadriel, they do their own research”
“Gandalf seeks out the history of the One Ring in the “hoards” of Gondor’s archives (a scene Jackson wisely kept in The Fellowship of the Ring, having Ian McKellen smoking a pipe and shuffling through piles of musty pages), while the arrogant Saruman turns traitor to the forces of good after delving too deep into the archives in an attempt to learn “the arts of the Enemy.” Tolkien’s greatest paean to academic pleasure is in the sprawling elf haven Rivendell, run by the “lore-master” Elrond and hidden in an alpine valley, which in The Silmarillion is described as “a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore.””
“In Tolkien, refuge and research are bound together.”
“After the war Tolkien returned to academic work, first at the Oxford English Dictionary as a researcher and then as a professor at Leeds and Oxford. Besides enthralling some students, like W.H. Auden, and boring others, like Kingsley Amis, with his lectures on Old English, he translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other Middle English texts”
“His greatest contribution to scholarship remains his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which recast the Old English saga as a work of art rather than a historical document that served only as “a quarry of fact and fancy.””
“To ennoble history and legend was also part of Tolkien’s fictional project: his books are stuffed with allusions to Old English texts”
““By the time the reader has finished the trilogy, including the appendices,” Auden wrote, “he knows as much about Tolkien’s Middle-earth, its landscape, its fauna and flora, its peoples, their languages, their history, their cultural habits, as, outside his special field, he knows about the actual world.””
“This lore is essential to the structure and ultimate pleasure of the novel. Tolkien’s great theme is loss, the “inevitable overthrow in Time,” as he put it in his Beowulf lecture, fated for all cultures and civilizations”
“The appendices are only the first step out the door. In the years after Tolkien’s death, in 1973, his son Christopher compiled, edited, and published a huge quantity of his father’s writing, starting with The Silmarillion in 1977 and later the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth. These books are labors of love.”
“Much of what Tolkien left behind was disorganized and incongruent”
“Out of the drafts and notes, Christopher could have created any number of Silmarillions”
“Tolkien’s is the England of the anonymous poets who wrote Beowulf and Pearl, largely bygone even by the time the English language settled into a familiar form, swamped by the Norman Conquests, great vowel shifts, gunpowder, and paper”
“There was no returning to that England, Tolkien knew, just as his characters could never return to the drowned lands of Beleriand and Númenor. “As the poet looks back into the past,” he wrote of Beowulf, “surveying the history of kings and warriors in the old traditions, he sees that all glory (or as we might say ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’) ends in night.””
“In the course of a few decades Tolkien achieved, quite by accident, what the Old English scribes, singers, and poets had taken centuries to create: a large, confused, and contradictory body of myths and legends”
“Amazon wants its own mythology, but for the same reason that Disney purchased Marvel and revived Star Wars and HBO spun off Game of Thrones into House of the Dragon: there’s money to be made”
“Tolkien’s “machine for the evocation of scholarly frisson” has been turned into an assembly line. The goal is to keep the machine running for as long as it is profitable, with no natural end in sight.”
“This is an imperative of the contemporary franchise: everything must be connected somehow in an endless feedback loop (or ring). This is usually achieved through “fan service,” knowing winks and nods to characters and events the audience already knows, but an overreliance on such references seals the worlds off, and the air in them soon turns stale. There is no room for the organic happenstance of real life, for the inexplicable and strange”