A curiously very great book

It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance, or by divine grace, which in Tolkien's world comes to the same thing. He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes the accidental agent of Frodo's and the world's salvation. But Frodo, the book's ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left, like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed).

Even the victory wrought by the Ring's destruction is a sad affair, in many respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of Middle-earth after Sauron's fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkien's most beloved characters -- Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the Ring -- depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that none of us on this shore will ever see.

Tolkien liked to present himself to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco, simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters, he replied that they were "the fauna of Mordor.") But in reality he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book, whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.

I think the best answer to the dear-oh-dear, flight-from-reality crowd is to point out that Tolkien's Middle-earth is not an imaginary world but an imaginary history of our own world. For all its fantastic and immortal creatures it is after all a vale of tears, and "The Lord of the Rings" is not a triumphalist fantasy but a lamentation and farewell for all that is past or passing. Tolkien should of course have the last word on this. Less than a third of the way through his epic he sounds a melancholic note that reverberates throughout his story and prefigures its ending. It is perhaps the loveliest piece of prose in all his work, and it reminds us that he understood myth not only in terms of philology or sacred truth but also as writing of tremendous clarity and affective power.

Frodo and his companions depart by boat from Lórien, the enchanted forest of Galadriel -- a sort of earthly paradise, which Shippey thinks Tolkien may have borrowed from the medieval poem "Pearl" -- near the end of Book Two. But it seems to be Lórien that is slipping away from them,

like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world.

---

The Atlas of Middle-Earth: Revised Edition

By Karen Wynn Fonstad
Houghton Mifflin
210 pages

Buy this book

Even as they gazed, the Silverlode passed out into the currents of the Great River, and their boats turned and began to speed southward. Soon the white form of the Lady was small and distant. She shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land. Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him.

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