It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.
And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.
And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”
So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.
+1
You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest – the job of bearing witness to what happened – and the duty to finish and protect his writings?
Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school – the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916.
My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.
And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.
Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.
Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever – a particularly nasty disease carried by lice – and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor – as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.
TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.
I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.
I got quite a few questions and responses about why the online brand / website / Facebook page “The Dodo” shouldn’t be supported. Here’s a quick rundown:
Misguided Anti-Captivity. They are often blatantly anti-captivity, or use anti-captivity language and/or promote anti-captivity views. They use language such as an animal is “trapped” in a zoo or an animal was “saved” from a zoo. They actively support and often get quotes from representatives from ZooCheck, an anti-zoo and anti-captivity organization, and support HSUS (Humane Society of the United States). Their reports on tragedies of animals being injured or dying at zoos are overwhelmingly full of blame, toxicity, and disrespect. Their ideas of anti-captivity are incredibly limited and misguided – they are often pro “sanctuary” with the idea that all sanctuaries are better and they rarely discuss any kind of conservation.
Anthropomorphism over Accuracy. They are wildly, ridiculously, inaccurately anthropomorphic. For example, a picture of a bear leaned against a wall is captioned as: “He looks desperate, depressed, despondent. He stares up, seeming to search for a way out.” They described an owl resting on someone’s shoulder as “missing the man who saved her so much she couldn’t stop hugging him.” A kitten “looks at his rescuers face to be reassured everything is okay. One of their most recent articles is about a cow “shedding tears” and crying because it is sad. Overall, they are much more concerned with ‘tugging on heartstrings’ of animal lovers than with being accurate about animal behavior.
Unsafe Animal Interactions and Inappropriate Pets. Despite being anti-captivity when it comes to zoos specifically, they have often published videos of exotic pets and/or inappropriate free contact with wild/dangerous animals.
Lack of Primary Sources and Information. They often lack any resources to accurate information about their “news”. Recently they made a 45-second video which claimed that basically any elephant on display (from a Ringling Circus to a rural south Asian performance) was automatically and certainly being abused and tortured. There were no sources or proof to back this up, no resources to explore, nothing. They rarely have any kind of scientist or animal care worker as a source for any video or article, just activists.
Stealing and Editing Videos. You’ll notice almost every video on their site is made by them and hosted there, not shared from somewhere else. They take videos from other sources, add music and text, and call it their own. They almost never link to the original source.
Overall, “The Dodo” is not a news site. It’s a brand. It’s a website designed to get views and make money – it will do anything just to get those clicks. But it tries to sell itself as news, and therein lies the issue. They use strong language, buzzwords, and clickbait titles in order to push a vague, biased agenda that hurts those of us who work in zoos and other animal facilities.
konekorambles 