Christopher Rush

Content Summary and Author’s Perspective

Isaacs and Zimbardo’s collection of Tolkien criticism, their second compilation since the completion of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, offers a variety of essays about diverse issues and themes of Tolkien’s trilogy.  Because of the variety and wealth of critical possibility in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, I will concentrate here on three of the more important and useful essays.  Since the essays were brief, I will summarize their content and discuss the author’s perspective together.  All three of these essays were recollected in the editors’ more recent Tolkien collection Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism from 2004, but the page references are to the 1981 collection.

Lionel Basney’s “Myth, History and Time in The Lord of the Rings” presents in twelve brief pages a look at three crucial though often neglected aspects to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.  Basney is quite literate concerning mythological structure, teleology, and social progression, which becomes clear quickly in his brief essay; however, Basney subsumes his knowledge for the less-educated reader well, allowing the lay reader (who, though, should be more than a passing Tolkien fan) to get a sort of beginning look at applying teleological analysis to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.  Basney is also conscious throughout that a design in the Middle-earth universe, with a consistent and coherent cosmogony, might lead certain readers to posit a Christian/Biblical worldview or design upon Middle-earth, but Basney cautions against such a reading.  To Basney, Tolkien has explicit, coherent design and natural progression from age to age and people to people but also a “causal vagueness” (16) that should warn readers away from reading too much into it as a work of God or divine providence.  (Certainly The Silmarillion is more explicit about the supernatural powers at work in and around Middle-earth, but that is beyond Basney’s focus; The Lord of the Rings is much less explicit or dependent on Tolkien’s “God” Eru/Ilúvatar or “angels” the Valar.)

Verlyn Flieger’s essay “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero” does what its title implies, in that it examines the two major (obvious) heroes of The Lord of the Rings, from both their characters and actions.  Flieger draws on medieval and fairy-tale criticism to distinguish these two heroes, implying more than declaring that Tolkien did the same when he created them.  Aragorn is the typical medieval and mythical hero, the lost/forgotten king on his quest to restore his throne and marry his princess.  Frodo is the typical fairy-tale hero, an unusual creature who becomes embroiled in gargantuan tasks but survives and succeeds through cunning, luck, and magic.  Flieger’s key insight, though, is noticing that Tolkien inverts the culmination of both of these heroes’ quests: Frodo, the fairy-tale hero, suffers the loss of his finger and estrangement from the world he once loved; Aragorn, the medieval/mythic warrior who travels through the underworld and reunites the nations against the evil one gains the more typical fairy-tale ending of the restored kingdom and happily-ever-after marriage to the princess.

Third is Patrick Grant’s essay “Tolkien: Archetype and Word.”  Obviously Grant uses archetypal criticism: “Frodo moves through a process equivalent to Jung’s individuation, which is charted by the main action of the book” (93).  Grant also looks to Jung when analyzing Gollum’s role as Frodo’s shadow.  Throughout Grant’s analysis, he finds Tolkien’s counterpoint of light and darkness symbolic of identity: “Saruman’s multicolor, like the facelessness of the riders, indicates a dissolution of identity.  White is whole; fragmented, it is also dissipated” (98-9).  Grant’s conclusion relates somewhat to the “Word” component of the title, finding, like Basney, design in the archetypes of the story: “Tolkien plainly indicates throughout The Lord of the Rings that on some profound level a traditional Providence is at work in the unfolding of events.  And in a world where men must die, where there are no havens, where the tragedy of exile is an enduring truth, the sense, never full, always intermittent, of a providential design, is also a glimpse of joy” (103); the archetypes and design lead through the darkness into a saving light.

Critical Response and Evaluation

It is not surprising that these three essays were reprinted in the editors’ “best of” collection, since they were the cream of the crop from 1981’s collection.  Basney’s essay has great potential, given his obvious understanding of the interpretive framework by which he analyzed The Lord of the Rings.  I would have appreciated a longer, more advanced analysis from him; as it was, the essay provides only a few useful ideas — very useful, definitely, but not as many as the title suggested before I read it.  I appreciate Basney’s underlying perspective that, despite the pervasive teleology of Tolkien’s world, Tolkien was not creating an allegory of the Biblical story of creation nor was the “God” of Tolkien’s sub-creation, Eru/Ilúvatar, causing everything to happen, but instead was allowing growth and choices.  Basney’s insights, few though they were, are helpful: “One of Middle-earth’s governing cosmic conditions is the growth of legend into history” (16).  Structural repetition is essential in demonstrating how heroes in The Lord of the Rings, especially Aragorn, are types of the heroes that came before them discussed in The Silmarillion.  Another of his good quotations, “It is through the transformation of certain myths into experience that the free peoples recognize each other, and their common destiny and enemy” (13), helps us understand the mythical foundation of The Lord of the Rings.

From what we know of Tolkien’s reading habits, Verlyn Flieger is almost undoubtedly correct, at least in her analysis, if not the implications that Tolkien consciously created two discrete heroes both necessary to the completion of his tale.  Perhaps he was not consciously utilizing a medieval and fairy-tale hero, but Flieger’s analysis fits well.  She is, after all, probably the leading voice in Tolkien criticism, especially concerning the History of Middle-Earth series.  One somewhat lengthy quotation from her is worth the entire essay, and worth more than most of the essays in the collection:

Aragorn’s is a true quest to win a kingdom and a princess.  Frodo’s is rather an anti-quest.  He goes not to win something but to throw something away.…  Aragorn’s is a journey from darkness into light, while Frodo’s is a journey from light into darkness — and out again.…  To Frodo come defeat and disillusionment — the stark, bitter ending typical of the Iliad, Beowulf, and Morte d’Arthur (42).

She develops those ideas very well.  Like Patrick Grant, she highlights the importance of Gollum, with his role in the story more psychological than physical even though he leads Frodo and Sam through Mordor.  He is what Frodo could become, and Frodo must fight the psychological battle against the call of the Ring as well as fending off his own devolution into another Gollum.

Grant seems to discuss his archetypal approach to the trilogy more than the “Word” component, but at other times “Word … is a primary archetype” (88) throughout Tolkien’s work, so it gets a bit confusing.  Other than that, Grant’s Jungian archetypal analysis is quite interesting — were one to focus more on the archetypes of Tolkien, one would definitely need to read more Jung, but Grant’s introduction here is helpful — elaborating more than Flieger on Gollum’s role in the book.  Frodo and Gollum are opposites, but Sam is the stalwart center.  Another opposite crucial to Grant’s Jungian approach is Galadriel and Shelob, a connection I had never thought of before.  In addition to the generalized opposites, Grant emphasizes that characters aren’t really either good or evil but have components of both, and, as Galadriel’s scene by the mirror and Frodo’s entire journey illustrate, must choose to be either good or evil.  His comments and viewpoint are different from how I’ve read the books before and are quite useful even to Tolkien fans who are not interested in psychological or archetypal criticism.