A curiously very great book

But there is no mercy for the Orcs, a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and/or Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death. They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil. In short, they are by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about, far away to the east and south. In a letter to a potential film producer, Tolkien explains them as "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." As a representation of the Other, to use contemporary critical terms, they could hardly be more revealing.

And yet, and yet. If Tolkien's racial typing is dismaying, it is also the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices. At the level of conscious intention, he was not a racist or an anti-Semite. In his letters, he decries the racial situation in his birthplace of South Africa, and he knew and liked several Jewish academics; when someone wrote to ask whether his last name was of Jewish origin, he replied that he "should consider it an honor if it were."

Furthermore, like "The Lord of the Rings" itself, Tolkien's political and social views were so peculiar that he can genuinely be claimed by renegades and revolutionaries almost as easily as by Jesuits and aristocrats. In 1943 he wrote to his son Christopher, "My political beliefs lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) -- or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy ... Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers."

It was the entire terrain in between anarchy and monarchy -- the so-called rational forms of government, from socialism to liberal democracy to fascism -- that he disliked. (The Shire had virtually no government or police force before the arrival of Saruman.) He loved England but not Great Britain and still less its empire; he had little preference between the American and Soviet behemoths, but once said he suspected the Russians were "not quite so dismal." He was a hardcore Luddite who would no doubt have been horrified by the Internet; he gave up driving in 1939 after seeing what cars and road building had done to his beloved English countryside, and even in later years when he had become rich he never owned a television set or a washing machine.

"The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets," he wrote to Christopher in another wartime letter. "It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be."

This I think is the Tolkien who survives, the cantankerous, politically unclassifiable, anti-globalization Tolkien who is clearly our contemporary -- jibes against feminism included. In trying to return a lost sense of myth and mystery to his little corner of the world, he also sought to make the globe as a whole less small, dull and flat. He lived in a provincial suburb for virtually his entire adult life -- he was a Christian after all, and accepted that this is a fallen world -- but fought against the spreading ideology of suburbanism more fiercely than any black-clad rioter smashing a Starbucks window. "There is only one bright spot," he added in the "Anarchy and Monarchy" letter, "and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations ... But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."

Although the subject of sex in Tolkien deserves its own article -- he is writhing in his grave, a tormented wraith, as I write this -- it is one of the key contradictory elements in his work and requires a brief visit. Despite what some critics have suggested, I see no homosexual element in "The Lord of the Rings"; rather, it is a "homosocial" realm of intimate, affectionate relationships among men, of a kind that has virtually vanished from modern life. From his school days in Birmingham onward, Tolkien spent his intellectual life in just such a realm, sharing his innermost thoughts and visions with Lewis and other friends around firesides and in Oxford pubs. Frodo and his courageous servant Sam -- who indeed saves the entire quest from disaster -- undoubtedly love each other, and their love is both physical and emotional, in fact platonic in the truest sense. Tolkien intended to reflect the complex cross-class relationships between man and officer, servant and master, that he had encountered as a World War I lieutenant.

That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that "The Lord of the Rings" is ever fully comfortable with heterosexuality. Its female characters are little more than idealized figures of inspiration or decoration; Eowyn, the warrior-princess of Rohan, is the only real exception. (Was her original a female graduate student who braved the pipe smoke and postprandial glasses of port?) Her courtship by Faramir of Gondor is stylized and awkward but at least has the flavor of real emotion. If you still believe that the book has no more explicit depiction of heterosexual activity than that, however, I suggest you take another look at the disturbing encounter between Sam and Shelob, the huge and evil female spider, at the end of Book Four.

But I am mainly here to praise Tolkien, not to bury him, and one bizarrely sexualized scene between hobbit and arachnid does not spoil my enjoyment of "The Lord of the Rings." It is a book too long for some of its purposes and too short for others; its highfalutin language gets more archaic as it goes along, and it never quite lives up to the menace and tension of the journey from the Shire to Rivendell in Book One (a judgment with which Tolkien apparently agreed). I don't believe for a moment that it is the best book of the 20th century, or even that such comparisons are meaningful. But it is a distinctive, even definitive, modern work of rebellion against modernity and, in the words of Tolkien's publisher and friend, Rayner Unwin, "a very great book in its own curious way."

Next Page: A heroic quest notable for its human frailty

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