The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Durin woke and walked alone.
The Song of Durin, JRR Tolkien

In Innovation, the final installment of Peter Ackroyd’s entertaining and informative History of England, he writes:

“The post-war years had brought fables of splrltual or material collapse, from That Hideous Strength to Brave New World to Ninteen Eighty-Four. During the Fifties, the novel seemed to be settling back to its journalistic roots – quotidian in subject, unpretentious in style – but the zeitgeist is a wayward wind. Among writers of fiction, another response was offered to the bewilderments of the post-war world, which was to fly above it. In 1955, Return of the King, the last installment of R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was published. It was the resurrection of heroic romance, tempered by its author’s memories of war. It tells of a small, unregarded race of Middle-earth, the ‘hobbits’,who ‘arise to shake the counsels of great’. The freedom of the world hinges upon the destruction of something tiny, beautiful and evil, evil, a ring forged by a fallen angel. While elves, men and dwarves fight, two hobbits are tasked with the destruction of the great destroyer. A whole world, formed of its author’s experiments in language came into being to the extent that if anyone were to point out that Middle-earth’ is only a translation of the Norse ‘Mittlegard’, the hearer would respond with a shrug. It was there, whatever its origins. For the English journalist Bernard Levin, it offered a beautiful and salutary reminder that the ‘meek will inherit the earth’; for the American critic Edward Wilson, it was “juvenile trash”, a story of good boys being rewarded. In spite of the naysayers, the popularity and influence of The Lord of the Rings grew to unprecedented heights. Tolkien himself, a scholar and devout Catholic, was later to find his work taken up as a banner by most unlikely allies, a group that came to be known as ‘hippies’”.

Whenever a survey or poll crowns JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as the public’s favourite novel – and there have been many during the past seventy years – and lauds the author as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, the reaction has always been the same from critics who have been sneering at his books since their publication. The Lord of the Rings has been dismissed as trivial, juvenile even, and not worth arguing about. It has been called archaic, backward looking, nostalgist and sentimentalist, and has been gaslit for misogyny and homo-eroticism, violence and even racism (with its ethnocentric and androgynous elves and it’s Graeco-Roman Gondorians besieged by darker races from the south and east). Yet, most critics have probably never read it.

On the side of the angels (or is it the elves?) are the millions who came of age with and fell in love with the books and adopted a Tolkienesque taxonomy for viewing the world as a perpetual dialectic between the forces of light and of darkness. Some have even studied the lineages and languages. The actress Liv Tyler, who plays a luminous Arwen Evenstar in Peter Jackson’s award-winning film trilogy is said to have learned elven, and I sometimes see people on the street with elven rune tattoos. Liv probably has one too. I once spied a young lady walking down King Street in Newtown, the boulevard of Sydney’s myriad young tribes, sporting eleven runes on the backs of her suntanned calves. I was cheekily tempted to tell her that they were upside down, but let the moment go. I recall that as we queued at the cinema to see The Fellowship of the Ring, young folk rhapsodized among themselves on the delights about to unfold before their very eyes.

The Elves leave Middle Earth

The Hobbiton film-set on New Zealand’s North Island is one of that country’s premier tourist destinations – indeed, during the three years of the films’ successive release, a big sign at Auckland International Airport declared “Welcome to Orc Land!” The trilogy’s diverse film locations revealed to the world the exquisitely beautiful landscapes of Aotearoa.

The films’ casting prompted criticism in some quarters insofar as the elves, men and dwarves were played by predominantly white Anglo Celtic actors the dubious Hobbit films (included spook Richard Armitage, Poldark heart-throb Aiden Turner,” everyman” Benedict Cumberbatch, and angsty Scottish actor Ian Nesbitt, all shrunk-down) whilst New Zealand’s indigenous Māori portrayed the evil orcs and Uruk Hai. Nevertheless, hundreds of kiwis, Pakeha and Māori alike, were employed as extras, the scenery dazzled the world and the economy of Aotearoa, The Land of the Long White Cloud, enjoyed a Middle Earth boom.

The recent streaming in 2022 of the extravagantly expensive prequel series The Rings of Power has stirred controversies of an altogether different variety insofar as many Tolkien die-hards and purists protested the acting of actors of colour as hobbits, dwarves and, heavens for it, elves! A most peculiar paradox, you might think, given those aforementioned condemnations of JRR’s ostensible racism. It just goes to show that you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But more on Amazon’s epic later with an excellent article from the New York Review of Books.

Arwen Evenstar

In an opinion piece in the Unheard e-zine, republished below, British historian and author Dominic Sandbrook asks whether Tolkien’s works are indeed trivial. “Surely not”, he retorts. “Even if you can’t stand them, only a fool would deny that The Lord of the Rings occupies an extraordinary place in the modern imagination … he wasn’t just a man of his time; he remains a guide for our own … And his themes might have deliberately been chosen to appeal to modern readers, anxious about the consequences of science, the environmental costs of industry, the dangers of war and the fate of the individual in the face of the vast forces reshaping Western societies in the early 21st century.

I am reminded of a piece I read recently by writer, artist and Druid Cerri Lee:

” I suddenly realized it is a profound and overwhelming sense of loss for their world and mine that I feel as the Elves sail away from the Grey Havens.  When the Elves leave they take with them the enchantment from the land, something dies in it and I am left on the shores of Middle Earth amidst a fading beauty, as they sail on into the distance. The realization that now humans will have no restraints in their actions and will push forward the rise of mechanism, commerce on a global scale, and a discarding of anything that even looks like ‘fluffy’ thinking. My Middle Earth will never be the same again and I am constantly mourning its passing through this story. It leads me to wonder if some part of that feeling is what drove Tolkien to write his story”.

To put it simply, then, Tolkien matters. How many writers can you say that about, these days?”

Tolkien and me

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Walking Song, JRR Tolkien

My own life has intersected with JRR Tolkien on many serendipitous levels.

I first encountered The Lord of the Rings in my late teens when curiosity, imagination, and various substances bought me admission to his fantasy world, along with that of his fellow Inkling CS Lewis, creator of The Chronicles of Narnia. I read all three books in the trilogy over a weekend in the autumn of 1968, and when I’d finished, I felt bereft and out of sorts. I reread it soon after, and again, and again – but didn’t we all in the days when Tolkien was king, and elves and ents walked among us. I set many of the songs to music – now long forgotten – and an apposite quotation was always on hand. I recall reciting the opening lines of The Song of Durin, which prefaces this piece, as I was walking home from a concert under a full moon on the eve of the landing of Apollo 11 upon the moon in July 1969. And many times as I headed eastwards on what we now call the hippie trail, I would recall Bilbo Baggin’s Walking Song.

In subsequent years as I evolved from naïf to cynical, and thence to other passions, the rereads slowed and then stopped, although I read and enjoyed The Silmarillion, and still treasure the opening chapter describing in a manner reminiscent of the St. James Bible of how the world was created by music. I began to pick holes in The Lord of the Rings’ story line, with its derivative ‘hero’s quest’, a monomyth popularised by Joseph Campbell in his celebrated book The Hero with a Thousand Faces; what I now viewed as stereotypical characters; the outdated and anachronistic perspectives of earlier generations; and what I perceived as old-school English prejudices. But, as Sandbrook points out, Tolkien was of his times, and those times were not kind to diversity and dissent.

And yet, The Lord of the Rings is ever present in my cultural and literary consciousness, and is often referred to and quoted. Here us one of my favourites:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” The Return of the King

I have never lost my love for the poetry and the songs that complement the narrative  – the archaic syntax, rhyme, rhythm and balladry that I’ve incorporated into my own writing. There was a wonderful lyricism and, indeed, musicality to them that I still love. It’s as if they are just waiting for a tune to accompany them. Compare Tolkien’s Song of Ëarendil with own

– the style, that is, not the subject matter:

JRR:

In panoply of ancient kings,
in chainéd rings he armoured him;
his shining shield was scored with runes
to ward all wounds and harm from him;
his bow was made of dragon-horn,
his arrows shorn of ebony;
of silver was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony;
his sword of steel was valiant,
of adamant his helmet tall,
an eagle-plume upon his crest,
upon his breast an emerald.

Me:

With massive head,
And shoulders broad,
As lean and mean as Rambeau
(That’s Sly, and not that fey French bard
This bruiser was no bimbeau!).
His hide as dark as ebony,
As tough as old mahogany,
His horns shone like chalcedony,
This massif of solidity
Was built like a Pajero.

Years passed without a revisitation, but working for a publishing company that ‘owned’ the rights to his work, I collected the latest editions and often gave them away to young people who had yet to enter the magical world of Middle Earth. For all my later cynicism, I still regarded it as a book all young people ought to read. I read the whole thing once more prior to the release of Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy. The films were excellent, although I found the hobbits increasingly irritating, wishing that they’d all jump into the fires of Mount Doom, and the ents were a disappointment, a mob of corny and badly conceived muppets (they were indeed conceived by Jim Henson, the ‘father’ of Kermit and Miss Piggy). I am looking forward to the upcoming, uber-expensive television series – but I don’t reckon I’ll reread in preparation this time around. As for Jackson’s three part Hobbit extravaganza, in my opinion, it was a travesty.

Learning more about the author, I was to discover that he’d grown up in Birmingham, my hometown, first in leafy Edgbaston (the home of Cadbury and the Warwickshire County Cricket Club), where he’d attended the prestigious King Edward’s Grammar School – my own school, Moseley Grammar, was not in its league. He lived near Sarehole Mill, in present day Hall Green, around the turn of century, between the ages four and eight, and would have seen it from his house. The locale at that time was rural Worcestershire farmland and countryside and not in the Birmingham ‘burbs. He has said that he used the mill as a location in The Lord of the Rings for the Mill at Hobbiton: “It was a kind of lost paradise … There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill … “

Sarehole Mill was just down the road from my school, and our sports field and cross-country tracks were adjacent to it. On many a wintry, cold, wet and windy Wednesday afternoon, I’d stagger past it on a muddy track. How I hated wet Wednesdays; dry ones were for rugby, and I hated them too!

Tolkien died aged 81 on September 2nd, 1973, in Bournemouth, Dorset, a town that I’ve visited infrequently. But I was actually in Bournemouth on that day to meet an old friend. Perchance his spirit swept passed me. On 2nd September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien’s Roman Catholic parish church during his time in Oxford, offered its first Mass to advocate for his beatification, the first station on the road to canonisation, as an evangelist for nature, beauty and love.  A prayer was written for his cause:

“O Blessed Trinity, we thank You for having graced the Church with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and for allowing the poetry of Your Creation, the mystery of the Passion of Your Son, and the symphony of the Holy Spirit, to shine through him and his sub-creative imagination. Trusting fully in Your infinite mercy and in the maternal intercession of Mary, he has given us a living image of Jesus the Wisdom of God Incarnate and has shown us that holiness is the necessary measure of ordinary Christian life and is the way of achieving eternal communion with You. Grant us, by his intercession, and according to Your will, the graces we implore [….], hoping that he will soon be numbered among Your saints. Amen.”

Just imagine, Saint John Ronald Reuel of Middle Earth!

© Paul Hemphill 2022.  All rights reserved

Read also in In That Howling Infinite, Tolkien’s Tarkeeth – in the darkest depths of Mordor and Better Read than Dead – books and reading

Gandalf the White

This is Tolkien’s World

The Lord of the Rings is more than nostalgic medievalism

Dominic Sandbrook, Unheard December 10th 2021

It’s exactly 20 years since I stood in line to see a film I had dreamed about since I was a little boy. Ever since I had first turned the pages of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I had wondered what it would be like to see it on the big screen: the hobbits, the battles, the sweeping landscapes, the blood and thunder. When I read that the director Peter Jackson was filming a trilogy of Tolkien’s masterpiece in New Zealand, I felt almost sick with anxiety. Would it be terrible? Would they sound like the All Blacks? What were they going to do about Tom Bombadil?

I need not have worried, of course. From the moment the lights dimmed in the Odeon, Leicester Square on 10 December 2001, the Lord of the Rings films were a phenomenal success. And although poor Tom B. never made it onto the screen, Jackson’s trilogy carried all before it, grossing a staggering $3 billion and winning a record-equalling 11 Oscars for the final instalment alone.

Two decades on, the films stand up remarkably well. As for the wider Tolkien industry, the bestselling books just keep on coming: The Fall of Arthur in 2013, Beren and Luthien in 2017, The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. And next autumn sees the release of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel series – at a cool $1 billion over five seasons, the most expensive television project in history. Not bad for a writer who’s been dead since 1973.

To some people, all this could hardly be more infuriating. For as we all know, Tolkien is still associated in the public mind with a sweaty, furtive gang of misfits and weirdos — by which I mean those critics who, for more than half a century, have been sneering at his books and their readers.

As far back as the mid-Fifties, the American modernist Edmund Wilson published a comically wrong-headed review dismissing Tolkien’s work as “juvenile trash”, marked by — of all things! — an “impotence of imagination”. Decades later, Philip Pullman, never happier than when sneering at his Oxford forebears, called Tolkien’s efforts “trivial”, and “not worth arguing with”. And whenever some new survey crowns The Lord of the Rings as the public’s favourite novel, the reaction is always the same.

So are Tolkien’s works “trivial”, as Pullman claims? Surely not. Even if you can’t stand them, only a fool would deny that The Lord of the Rings occupies an extraordinary place in the modern imagination. Indeed, in his trenchant defence of Tolkien’s reputation, the literary scholar Tom Shippey suggests that much of the criticism is rooted in pure social and intellectual condescension, not unlike the rank snobbery that Virginia Woolf directed at Tolkien’s fellow Midlander Arnold Bennett. Shippey even argues that in the future, literary historians will rank The Lord of the Rings alongside post-war classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies and Slaughterhouse-Five. Who’s to say he’s wrong?

One reason highbrow people dislike The Lord of the Rings is that it is so backward-looking. But it could never have been otherwise. For good personal reasons, Tolkien was a fundamentally backward-looking person. He was born to English parents in the Orange Free State in 1892, but was taken back to the village of Sarehole, north Worcestershire, by his mother when he was three. His father was meant to join them later, but was killed by rheumatic fever before he boarded ship.

For a time, the fatherless Tolkien enjoyed a happy childhood, devouring children’s classics and exploring the local countryside. But in 1904 his mother died of diabetes, leaving the 12-year-old an orphan. Now he and his brother went to live with an aunt in Edgbaston, near what is now Birmingham’s Five Ways roundabout. In effect, he had moved from the city’s rural fringes to its industrial heart: when he looked out of the window, he saw not trees and hills, but “almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond”. No wonder that from the moment he put pen to paper, his fiction was dominated by a heartfelt nostalgia.

Nostalgia was in the air anyway in the 1890s and 1900s, part of a wider reaction against industrial, urban, capitalist modernity. As a boy, Tolkien was addicted to the imperial adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, and it’s easy to see The Lord of the Rings as a belated Boy’s Own adventure. An even bigger influence, though, was that Victorian one-man industry, William Morris, inspiration for generations of wallpaper salesmen. Tolkien first read him at King Edward’s, the Birmingham boys’ school that had previously educated Morris’s friend Edward Burne-Jones. And what Tolkien and his friends adored in Morris was the same thing you see in Burne-Jones’s paintings: a fantasy of a lost medieval paradise, a world of chivalry and romance that threw the harsh realities of industrial Britain into stark relief.

It was through Morris that Tolkien first encountered the Icelandic sagas, which the Victorian textile-fancier had adapted into an epic poem in 1876. And while other boys grew out of their obsession with the legends of the North, Tolkien’s fascination only deepened. After going up to Oxford in 1911, he began writing his own version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. When his college, Exeter, awarded him a prize, he spent the money on a pile of Morris books, such as the proto-fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga. And for the rest of his life, Tolkien wrote in a style heavily influenced by Morris, deliberately imitating the vocabulary and rhythms of the medieval epic.

Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and experienced the agony of the Somme at first hand. In just three and a half months, his battalion lost 600 men. Yet it was now, amid the horror of the trenches, that he began work on his great cycle of Middle-earth stories. As he later told his son Christopher, his first stories were written “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire”.

But he never saw his work as pure escapism. Quite the opposite. He had begun writing, he explained, “to express [my] feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it, and prevent it just festering”. More than ever, he believed that myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this broken, bleeding world, he must look back to the great legends of the North.

Yet The Lord of the Rings is not just a war book. There’s yet another layer, because it’s also very clearly an anti-modern, anti-industrial book, shaped by Tolkien’s memories of Edwardian Birmingham, with its forges, factories and chimneys. As a disciple of the Victorian medievalists, he was always bound to loathe modern industry, since opposition to the machine age came as part of the package. But his antipathy to all things mechanical was all the more intense because he identified them — understandably enough — with killing.

And although Tolkien objected when reviewers drew parallels between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the course of the Second World War, he often did the same himself. Again and again he told his son Christopher that by embracing industrialised warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil. “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” he wrote in May 1944. “But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Even as the end of the war approached, Tolkien’s mood remained bleak. This, he wrote sadly, had been, “the first War of the Machines … leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines”.

Dominic Sandbrookis an author, historian and UnHerd columnist. His latest book is: Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982

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. Amazon Studios does not have the rights to The Silmarillion, the posthumous collection of Tolkien’s mythology that serves as a sort of bible for Middle-earth, nor is it adapting The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s 1954 novel about the hobbit Frodo’s quest to save Middle-earth by destroying the One Ring, which holds the power of the Dark Lord Sauron. Peter Jackson’s film trilogy still looms too large. Instead, 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. What is the sigil that the elf warrior Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) finds carved in her dead brother’s flesh? Who is the stranger (Daniel Weyman) who falls from the sky and ends up living among a nomadic clan of proto-hobbits? Which character is really Sauron? Will the mortal Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) and the elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) kiss? The show hurries along toward the inevitable revelations: the sigil turns out to be a map of Sauron’s realm of Mordor; the magical stranger is almost certainly the wizard Gandalf; Sauron himself is the roguish drifter Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), who has a Forrest Gump–like ability to accidentally be in the right place at the right time. 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. What Aragorn thinks or wants in his personal life matters far less than the fact that he is descended from kings of Arnor, and before it Númenor and Beleriand. His fitness for the throne of Gondor is never in doubt, neither to himself nor to the reader. He’s simply the last pebble in a royal landslide that has been slowly rolling over Middle-earth for millennia.

The reader encounters this history in ruins and snippets of legendary songs. Galadriel speaks of her wanderings before the fall of the kingdoms of Nargothrond and Gondolin. Treebeard, an ancient tree-like creature, reminisces about long-lost forests and departed Entwives. Merry, whose hobbit-memory is not as long, wonders at the strange, weather-worn statues that line the path to Dunharrow in Rohan. Even the earthy Samwise sings about the death of the elf-king Gil-galad (played by Benjamin Walker in The Rings of Power). 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. Payne and McKay understand the academic aspect of Tolkien’s work. Twice during the season, Galadriel goes to archives (one in the mortal kingdom of Númenor, another in the Elven Eregion) in search of the truth about Sauron. 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.

Tolkien’s brief respite at his aunt’s house, where he wrote “Éarendel the Mariner,” could not last. He belonged to what Angela Carter later described as “that generation for whom history [had] already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France,” and soon he was on his way to the front. He fought at the Somme, a battle in which nearly 20,000 British soldiers, including one of his closest friends, were killed on the first day. He got lucky: he soon contracted trench fever in the lice-infested dugouts and was sent home to recuperate.

The Somme haunts Middle-earth, which is pocked with broken and drowned lands. “This is Mordor,” Frodo remarks on the ruins of his beloved home Bag-End when he returns to a scarred, occupied Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings. After the war, Tolkien transformed Éarendel the Mariner from a celestial sailor into a warden on eternal watch, sailing over the Walls of Night to guard against the return of Morgoth, the Great Enemy, from out of the Void. The Rings of Power alludes to these wartime experiences. Early in the first episode, Galadriel wanders a devastated battlefield reminiscent of the Western Front. “We learned many words for death,” she says, and the show takes pains to demonstrate some of them in detail: stabbings, hackings, slashings, burnings, and decapitations. This is the visual language of contemporary prestige fantasy shows like Game of Thrones. Galadriel dispatches a snow-troll with John Wick–like elan—a far cry from the more measured violence of the novel, in which the soldier Faramir tells Frodo, after a battle against Sauron’s forces in his homeland of Gondor, “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

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. Bilbo’s burglary of Smaug’s hoard in The Hobbit mirrors a scene in Beowulf. Aragorn quotes a poem from Rohan that echoes the elegy “The Wanderer.” Elrond’s father is none other than Eärendil the Mariner. They also provide their own store of fictional lore. You can stop reading The Lord of the Rings when Samwise says, “Well, I’m back” by his hearth, or you can keep going, depending on how much you want to know about various elvish scripts and runes, or the differences between the calendars used in the Shire and the ones used in Númenor, or the fact that Merry Brandybuck’s actual name, in one of Tolkien’s invented languages, is “Kalimac Brandagamba.” “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 reader can hardly be expected to feel that loss without some sense of its width and depth. Even the most casual reader can feel, as Frodo does in Galadriel’s forest of Lothlórien, that she has “stepped over a bridge of time…and was now walking in a world that was no more.”

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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. He frequently switched characters’ names, rewrote and then left unfinished parts of stories and poems that contradicted what he’d written before, and changed his mind about such fundamental concepts as the origin of orcs, the nature of the sun and moon, and even the shape of the earth. Out of the drafts and notes, Christopher could have created any number of Silmarillions.

Tolkien’s original aim in his fiction was to craft a “a body of more or less connected legend…which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country,” which he felt lacked one beyond, as he wrote in a 1951 letter, “impoverished chap-book stuff.” This mythology would not be a political project like Virgil’s Aeneid, which tied Rome’s foundation to ancient Greek civilization, but an artistic attempt to capture “the tone and quality I desired, somewhat cool and clear…redolent of our ‘air.’” It was a particular and old air. The Englands of Dickens, Austen, Fielding, Milton, or even Chaucer are nowhere to be found. Instead, 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.” His project was to delay that night while he could—to preserve, not restore, what he felt was that older country’s “elusive beauty.”

Amazon wants its own mythology, but for the same reason that Disney purchased Marvel and revived Star Wars and HBO spun off Game of Thronesinto House of the Dragon: there’s money to be made. However good their intentions, the showrunners’ ultimate task is to mine Tolkien’s works in order to create and expand the franchise. 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.

The Rings of Power does add its own bit of lore. In the fifth episode, Elrond (Robert Aramayo) recounts the legend of “The Roots of Hithaeglir,” according to which a lightning-struck tree creates the ore mithril, a powerful metal used in weapons and armor like the mail-shirt Frodo wears. Elrond calls the story “apocryphal,” a nod to the fact that it was invented whole-cloth for the show. It’s one of the writers’ attempts to tie various parts of Tolkien’s unwieldy legendarium together, in the same way that the show has Galadriel share a sea-tossed raft with Sauron and witness the creation of Mordor. Mithril, it is explained, is suffused with the light of a Silmaril, a holy jewel that can prevent the downfall of the Elves, who are otherwise due to suddenly “fade” in a matter of months (the show never tells us why or how).

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, like Tolkien’s immortal weirdos Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, who were jettisoned from Jackson’s adaptation.

The show’s conceit about mithril also misunderstands the elegiac character of Tolkien’s novel. In the final episode, the elves create three rings—“Three Rings for the Elven kings under the sky,” in Tolkien’s lore—from mithril to stop the cataclysmic fading of their race (a fate clumsily literalized by diseased leaves falling from a magic tree). The Rings provide a convenient cure to the season’s contrived crisis, whereas in the book they were created, in Elrond’s words, for “understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained.” The tragedy is that the destruction of the One Ring, the only act that can save Middle-earth, will also mean the destruction of the Three, and “many fair things will fade and be forgotten.” The elves, like their creator did, understand that dwindling is inevitable. They just want to slow it and enjoy their works while they can, before they become, as Frodo thinks of Galadriel, “present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.”