Frank N. Magill in 1969, on The Lord of the Rings

Here is a possibly overlooked critical and positive appreciation of The Lord of the Rings, found buried in Frank N. Magill’s Masterpieces Of World Literature In Digest Form; Vol. 4 (1969). At that time the weighty volume(s) would likely only have been available in larger or university libraries. Though it is said to be a reprint under a new title, and snippets from Google Books suggest that the LoTR items originally appeared in Magill’s Masterplots: The four series in eight volumes (1958), and probably earlier than that in his Annual. Which if correct would make it a very early piece of criticism, and perhaps more widely distributed than in 1969 (among the many authors who would have subscribed to the Masterplots series in the 1950s, and associated Annuals). It may have been overlooked because Tolkien researchers assumed the Magill books contained only bald plot summaries?

The item does not occur in A Chronological Bibliography of Books about Tolkien under “1969”, a list in which Magill only enters in 1983 with his Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature. The same is true of the items referred to in Tom Shippey’s “Tolkien as a Post-War Writer”.

The three books are treated in different parts of the volume, and are here run together.

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Samuel Johnson is credited with saying that “A book should teach us to enjoy life or to endure it.” J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings teaches both. It also fits the dictum of another writer, Robert Louis Stevenson: “And this is the particular triumph of the artist —not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.” Tolkien has been compared with Lodovico Ariosto and with Edmund Spenser. Indeed, he is in the mainstream of the writers of epic and romance from the days of Homer. His work is deeply rooted in the great literature of the past and seems likely itself to be a hardy survivor resistant to time. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, Celeborn the Elf King (no doubt speaking for his author) warns against despising the lore that has survived from distant years; for old wives’ tales may be the repositories of needful wisdom. Although The Lord of the Rings is advertised as a trilogy, with each volume bearing a different title, it is really a single, continuous romance. The author is in complete control of his copious material. He has created a consistent world with a sharply realized geography, even furnishing maps; he has worked out a many-centuried time scheme, summarizing the chronology in an appendix to the third volume, The Return of the King. With fertile inventiveness Tolkien has poured out an amazing number of well-drawn characters and adventures; and his memory of the persons, places, and events of his creation is almost incredible. If there are any loose ends in the three volumes, they are so minor as to be negligible. The book has been pronounced an allegory; with equal positiveness it has been pronounced not an allegory. At any rate, it is a gigantic myth of the struggle between good and evil.

The author also presented his invented creatures, the hobbits or halflings, in an early book, The Hobbit, to which The Lord of the Rings is a sequel, but a sequel with significant differences. Hobbits are small, furry-footed humanoids with a delight in simple pleasures and a dislike of the uncomfortable responsibilities of heroism. They share the world with men, wizards, elves, dwarfs, trolls, orcs, and other creatures. Although many of these creatures are not the usual figures of the contemporary novel, the thoughtful reader can find applications to inhabitants and events of the current world, which has its share of traitors, time-servers, and malice-driven demi-devils, and is not completely destitute of men of good will and heroes. Of the three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring has the widest variation in tone: it begins with comedy and domestic comfort, then moves into high adventure, peril, and sorrow. Occasional verses appear in the pages, but the quality of Tolkien’s poetry is in both his prose and his verse.

The Two Towers is the second volume of The Lord of the Rings. Like its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring, and its successor, The Return of the King, the volume has its roots in faérie, which is not quite the same thing as our conventional fairyland. The setting is a country inhabited by creatures of miraculous goodness or horrifying evil just beyond the borders of our so-called “real” world, and its time is not our time. In his essay “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien defines a fairy story as an account of the adventures or experiences of men in faérie or on its shadowy borders. He defends the idea that fairy-stories should be written for adults and read by them, and not, as an American scholar said of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, unjustly “banished to the nursery.” In The Two Towers, Tolkien’s fertile imagination continues to pour out fascinating beings and exciting adventures; and his poetic spirit continues to cast a light of heartrending beauty and a shadow of sadness on his story. In the men of Rohan he recaptures the heroic spirit of Beowulf; in his creation of Ents, gigantic herdsmen of trees who resemble their own flocks, he goes far beyond his predecessors who have furnished their pages with animated tree-beings; and in the spidery Shelob, he creates a malevolent, blood-chilling monster worthy to join his favorites, the great dragons of Germanic story. Aragorn, who grows in stature as the book moves on, speaks for the author and helps to furnish a critique of the book and its philosophy. He points out that the earth itself is a principal matter of legend and that the events of the present provide the legends of the future. He also declares that good and evil are the same in all generations. It is Aragorn also who pronounces most clearly “the doom of choice.” For The Lord of the Rings is a story about choice, or free will. Character after character is brought to a choice, and the sum of the choices makes the fate of the character. In this volume as in the others there are lyrical passages which are small prose poems. Such a passage is the description of Gandalf, returned from the depths and transfigured. The author paints a picture of the wonderful old man holding sunlight in his hands as if they were a cup. The power of the image is increased when the old man looks straight into the sun.

The concluding volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, brings to fruition the choices and labors of the opposing forces of good and evil, whose struggle is narrated in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and the present work. Like a symphony the book reaches its climax and subsides into a quiet coda, mingling profound joy and sadness. After depicting many adventures, it returns to the Shire, where the first volume began; but the Shire and its inhabitants are much changed from what they were at the beginning. As in the other volumes, the author shows his mastery of narrative and his poetic power. No brief summary can cover all the incidents or name all the memorable characters in the book; nor can a mere retelling of the story do more than hint at its depths. When Tolkien speaks of the song of the minstrel after the overthrow of Sauron, he, perhaps unwittingly, characterizes his own work, for the singer led his hearers into the regions where joy and sorrow coalesce. The book looms like a survivor from some ancient age but speaks wisely and pertinently to the present.

The appendices to The Return of the King include chronologies of the First, Second, and Third Ages, family trees, legendary histories of the peoples appearing in The Lord of the Rings, and keys to pronunciation of names and to the languages, including the elven tongue. Although not necessary to the understanding of the book, the appendices are a playground for the linguist and teller of tales, and they furnish delight to readers with similar tastes.