A Long-Expected Essay...
First, some context and background for this post:
sixteenbynine recently wrote a post about why he self-publishes, and included the statement “What they really wanted was the same old Tolkien-clone crap in a different wrapper. (Not to say that Tolkien's work is bad, just that so many fantasy writers have been living in the man's shadow for so long that they've forgotten so many other possible modalities for fantasy exist. E.g.: Mervyn Peake, Peter S. Beagle, China Mieville, etc.)”.
I replied with:
“One of these days, I'm going to have to write up the essay version of the start-and-stop conversations you and I have had on exactly this topic, and why, out of all of the 'Tolkien-clones' that the publishers crank out, very very few of them even begin to approximate the original.”
Because it is something we have discussed a few times, both in text and in his kitchen. He beat me to the punch with his own thoughts on the matter, but this thing got written anyway, and to a large degree, I think there’s a lot of ‘why the imitations fail to approach the original’ ground left to cover.
And let’s face it, I like the look of my own text. (Can’t really say I like the sound of my own voice when it’s written, now can I?) So, without further ado…
Why most modern fantasy wants to be The Lord of the Rings, and why it isn’t.
I can see you rolling your eyes. You know where this is going now. None of these modern writers can hold a candle to the Divine Pillar of Awesome that was Professor Tolkien. All of their efforts are pale imitations and utter shite after the wonder and glory of Middle-Earth. Everything written is crap that doesn’t deserve to be printed in the same medium as the stories of Arda.
Yeah, bullshit. Tolkien was a dry, wordy son-of-a-bitch who never once described a character in any real detail. Aragorn have any moles? Any notable scars? What about Boromir? Guy fought in a low-intensity hot war for his entire adult life, and he has no scars? Doubt it. Eomer? What did Halbarad look like? Or Grimbold? Gamling the Old… what color were his eyes? See where I’m going? Tolkien wrote awesome place descriptions. He sucked at describing his characters. Look at the illustrations he did and you’ll see the same thing: he did maps, he did landscapes, he did places, not people.
His work comes across as very patriarchal and sexist - there’s all of 1 strong female character in The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn, and she’s a fairly minor character we don’t see at all in 3 of the 6 ‘books’ of the novel, and really exists as a carefully-threaded build-up for one scene that can be viewed as ‘I need to give Merry something meaty to do.’ Of course, Tolkien had a very good reason for not writing strong female characters - by his own words, “I just don’t understand them”, speaking of women. And he didn’t put any in, so he wouldn’t write them badly.
The point I’m making with the previous paragraphs? No writer is perfect. Nobody does everything brilliantly. J.R.R. Tolkien had a gift for languages. His Sindarin and Quenya constructed languages are solid enough to stand up on their own and have prompted serious scholarly work by generations of linguists for at least the last 40 years. They are, in fact, the measure against which all invented languages for fictional settings are measured these days. That’s where he truly shined: his languages, and his use of language.
Which is hardly surprising: that’s what the larger framework was constructed to do - provide a context for his invented languages. Philology was his first and best love. Literature his second. In short, J.R.R. Tolkien was a lover of words, and the things words and language can do when used well.
That’s what setting descriptions are, after all, good use of language to paint a picture. When it comes to actual events, though, Tolkien doesn’t spend as much time as some might like. He recounts events, rather than describing them, for the most part. An example of this is Helm’s Deep. We don’t see every sword-stroke Aragorn makes. We don’t see the clever cuts and parries of Legolas once he’s reduced to ‘knife-work’ as he puts it. Rather, we see the battle unfold in broad strokes, we get the sense of the event, not necessarily the specific actions of each principle actor at each moment.
For some readers, that’s a weakness. For some, it’s a strength. In both cases, however, it’s part and parcel of the style of writing Tolkien employed in The Lord of the Rings, and it’s a very different style than that he employed over much of The Hobbit. (At the end of Hobbit, for the Battle of Five Armies, we get the first strokes of this style of event-coverage, but it should be remembered that the descriptive narrative is following Bilbo, and Bilbo - not being a warrior, and not being a fool - is way the hell up the mountain, out of the real fighting.)
That it is part and parcel of his writing style is why he was brilliant, and the modern imitators aren’t. But it’s not because of his writing style, either.
It’s because people, publishers, writers, readers, in general - with very few exceptions - don’t get it. Sometimes they stumble onto it, but even then, they don’t realize the lesson’s been out there all along.
The Lord of the Rings was ridiculously, amazingly, stupidly successful over time. By the late 70s, and certainly the mid-80s, the hunt for the next one was on. Authors were inspired by the book. Readers were devoted to it. Publishers were willing to have sex with barnyard animals to secure the rights to the next one that hit the same way that one did. And they looked at it, and they took away all of the wrong things. But they can be forgiven, because even the author didn’t always realize what he’d done.
Confused yet? Here’s the deal - it’s in two parts:
Part I: Are You Writing A Fantasy Story?
Part of this element is the tropes of modern fantasy. You need heroes. You need someone, at some point, casting spells and tossing around magic. Call it a wizard, sorceror, witch, whatever, it’ll be there. You need an enemy of incredible power - preferably direct and indirect power. An evil sorceror is good. An evil sorceror holding an oppressed nation in thrall by means of his undead army is better. And you need the bad guy’s weakness, which will come into the heroes’ possession through a combination of luck/divine providence/fate and sheer doggedness on their part. Maybe it’s a magical ring that contains the greater part of the evil enemy’s magical potency that Frodo has to carry down to Mount Doom and toss into a volcano. Maybe it’s a special knife that Eddie Murphy has to go and get from a temple in Tibet because he’s the only one who can.
Most fantasy books these days understand the tropes. They know the necessary ingredients that need to be mixed, shaken, and baked. The authors stick to these tropes, and get confined by them. They have a hard time breaking free. And so a humble knight in an oppressed province of a decadent empire proves himself to be virtuous, and so receives a magical weapon with which he is able to defeat the unstoppable Dark Goddess and drive her back to the abyss. That one’s The Legend of Huma, one of the later Dragonlance books.
And in a lot of cases, since we’re talking about people attempting to duplicate Tolkien’s success, they’re poisoned by the movies.
Yeah, I said it: poisoned by the movies. Not the Jackson movies, though those count, but all fantasy/action/adventure movies. It’s a different medium, and it tells stories differently… and authors need to understand that.
Fantasy’s a very active genre. There’s all this stuff, see, and it’s happening. It’s a genre that lends itself immediately to the screen. It’s why you can take The Three Musketeers as a pseudo-historical swashbuckling movie and Excalibur as a fantasy movie and visually, they’re not that far apart.
There’s stuff, and it happens.
But the problem comes in when the author tries to write for a visual medium. You get flashy blow-by-blow of every fight and in-depth details about every little thing that’s happening. The story itself bogs down in the details, and something that takes ten seconds to occur takes ten minutes to read. It doesn’t feel as fast-paced as it’s meant to feel, and skews the pacing of the rest of the tale. This is largely an issue of writing style, I know. But it’s also why the publishers keep getting it wrong.
They’re looking for cinema-level excitement in text. They think they’re looking for something as captivating as Middle-Earth, but they’re forgetting something very important.
Tolkien didn’t write The Lord of the Rings as his first story of Middle-Earth. It’s not even his second. The Lord of the Rings was begun in 1937. It would take twelve years to be completed, and published five years after that. Seventeen years is a long time for one book to be in development, but it’s not the whole story at all. In actuality, Tolkien began writing the material from which Rings would spring twenty years earlier, quite literally in the trenches of World War I. So in effect, the author had been inhabiting the setting, though not this specific story, for twenty years before the first stroke of the pen fell. And that familiarity, that depth of connection, is responsible for much of how Rings is written and unfolds.
Tolkien denied inventing Middle-Earth. It was his artifice that he wasn’t making stuff up, he was relating it, like a newpaper reporter or a dime-story pulp novelist might go out and see what’s happening, and write about it.
That’s one of the big things that publishers seem to not get: Tolkien, from his own approach, wasn’t writing fantasy, he was reporting history, just… very, very old history. He had very rough ideas of the Quest, but usually only a half-dozen or so chapters ahead. And often, the story unfolded in ways he did not expect at all, completely skewing or forcing him to abandon his earlier concepts. Characters evolved, and often completely rebelled and reinvented themselves, during the writing process. Pippin’s character is the development of 3 different hobbits who all eventually become part of Pippin. Frodo is originally Bingo. Aragorn begins his existence as Trotter, a hobbit with the unusual habit of wearing wooden shoes, who at some point was likely captured and tormented by the Nazgul. Tolkien wrote in a 1955 letter, “Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22nd.”
By Chapter 3, the story is already running away with the author. And more remarkably… he doesn’t try to stop it. How many authors, when faced with a similar situation, are willing to let the story follow its own track, and don't go back and rewrite to get to where they thought they wanted to go? The answer is simple: All the good ones, and precious few of the rest.
Another outgrowth of the book developing from Tolkien’s earlier, unpublished writings is the world itself. He didn’t set out to create a fantasy world. He was writing a fantastic history of our world. So the incredible things that can’t happen… don’t happen. Someone falling off a cliff doesn’t just happen to hit the water just right to survive it. Nobody climbs up onto the harness of a six-story tall elephant, cut the leather bindings, and then surf to safety down the trunk. The incredibly skilled, handsome, famous, rich warrior hero, facing off against an army… dies. (Ok, he died in the movie version, too, but only because it’s a major plot point. I’m convinced that if someone can figure out how to let Boromir live w/out screwing up the rest of the story, they’ll do it.)
The world works the way we expect it to work. The biggest overt magic use we see is Gandalf shattering a slender stone bridge - and that only happens out of sight of most of the world, facing a demon. Otherwise, the ‘fantasy’ element… is all in our heads. Middle-Earth is a fantastic setting because the story that unfolds is a fantastic one… of all of the ‘fantasy’ worlds we’re shown with wizards and dragons and demons, Middle-Earth shows us the least ‘magic’, and the most reality.*
And that’s an important, perhaps even the most important, factor in understanding the mistakes of setting if someone’s out to try to find the ‘next Tolkien’ - the setting engages and envelops us… because it’s so familiar. Because it’s already home. The more they try to write stories in fantasy worlds, the less chance they have of writing Tolkien’s type of fantasy - because he wasn’t writing a story in a fantasy world. He was writing a fantastical story, in the everyday world.
Part II: So What’s This Thing About, Anyway?
The Lord of the Rings is commonly thought to be a book about an adventure, wherein humble folk of the simple agrarian Shire, small in stature and might, take on a dangerous quest that the great and powerful cannot embark upon, and save the world by defeating evil.
As Col. Sherman Potter used to say… Horse-hockey.
The Lord of the Rings is a book about growing up. It’s a book about people having to make hard choices about who they are, and what they’re willing to do and suffer in order to do what they know is right. It’s a book about a Quest. And therein lies the problem.
The genre that Rings helped to spawn, which dominates modern fantasy (and much of sci-fi is fantasy, so don’t think this doesn’t apply there) is really the Fantasy Quest genre. A danger is identified. Heroes assemble to face it. The heroes overcome long odds in order to reach the point of confrontation with the threat. The threat is met in a titanic clash of good v evil, and good wins. Evil is vanquished, and there is much rejoicing. Yay.
The Quest is understood to be the big huge plot to save the world or whatever. But that’s really not what real quest fiction is about. Good, solid Quest Fiction is about the main characters’ growth-arcs. That’s what makes the successful resolution of the overt goal possible. In Frodo and Sam accepting at the end that it’s a suicide mission, but it has to be done, and so they’re going to do it. In the end, Frodo falls to the temptation of the Ring, but he and Sam have learned the lesson, they’ve dedicated themselves to the success of the mission regardless of their own survival, and so Providence intervenes (via Gollum) to reward their self-sacrifice.
And in the final chapters, that same thing continues: The elves withdraw, leaving the world to Men. Gandalf leaves the four hobbits to settle affairs in the Shire on their own, without his help - because they don’t need it anymore. They have, as he himself says, grown up. The tale was never truly about the Ring. It was about a people who’d been carefully guarded and kept safe by forces they had no inkling of accepting responsibility for their own community - about the journey to adulthood by the three individuals who would emerge as leaders among the people.
That growth, that depth of character, is what makes the Quest work - not within the fictional world, but as a narrative structure. The audience has to care about the Questor. The audience has to experience, however fleetingly, however tangentially, their efforts.
It’s why Superman has a weakness. It’s not just because without it, he’s unstoppable, and that makes for a lousy tale (which it does), it’s because his weaknesses make him relatable. And yes, that’s plural. I’m not just talking about kryptonite here. Kal-El is, as we know, The Last Son of Krypton. He’s a stranger in a strange land, the ultimate immigrant, and he’s alone. He’s got his surrogate parents, but in a lot of very important ways, he’s alone. That isolation is something we can all relate to. When he gets hit w/kryptonite, that, too, is something we can relate to: the moment when we’re feeling that we’ve got things under control… and then everything falls apart and we’re suddenly, inexplicably, helpless to stop it.
It’s also why the later seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation started to lose us - all the problems became technobabble. It’s why Voyager, despite two seasons of incredibly bad plots, was able to win a loyal following - the writers focused on the characters’ stories - while Enterprise, which moved away from that into a convoluted time travel war… thing… never really did.
That’s the real trick of the Quest - it’s a journey of self-discovery, and nothing more. The external focus is really a McGuffin, there to get the main character into difficult situations that will force him to grow.
Most publishers, though, don’t care about that. They’re churning out swords-and-sorcery or alien-war or time/space/dimension-displaced-hero or post-apocalypse settings that give us these hugely important quests to Set Things Right… and the characters don’t need to develop, don’t need to become the guys who can set things right. They just need to whack on things until the bad guys are all dead.
They write characters well enough to come up with protagonists that people like, and are interested in seeing succeed, and that’s important. It’s necessary - you want to be able to make the emotional connections, after all. That goes right back to Superman, above. But once you do that, you also need to let your characters grow - to be shaped by events, even as their actions help to shape events as well. People don’t stay the same, not from one event to the next, not form one moment to the next. Characters need to be real enough to change, to be who they are, not who they were. That gets missed a lot in the churn of witty heroes chopping their way through evil hordes, and it’s a lot more important than really stellar writing or an original plot. There are no original plots, only very creative set dressing on the plots we’ve been retelling since we first mastered enough language to tell one another stories.
I think my favorite modern work of fantasy has to be the second trilogy from the Dragonlance series, Legends - Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, and Test of the Twins. And the writing isn’t great. It’s not terrible, mind you, not horridly florid purple prose like you’d find in a Harlequin romance or a Mack Bolan: The Executioner book, but it’s not great. It’s decent, solid, work-a-day writing. But that’s not what sticks with me about these books. What sticks is the story.
The story is ostensibly about saving the world. And the world gets saved along the way. But in reality, the story is about one man coming to the realization that he can’t derive his sense of self-worth from someone else’s infirmary. Weis and Hickman manage, in that series, to explore a little bit of co-dependency, and its after-effects. What’s even more interesting is that the two real protagonists, the ones whose story we’re really reading - even if we think it’s a story about Caramon and his brother, it’s really about Caramon and Tasslehoff and the way both of them grow up as a result of intertwined events - at one point have to make the decision of ‘save the world, or save the people we care about’, and they make different decisions. Caramon’s decision is to focus on the big picture, the big goal. Tasslehoff refuses to let their friend die as part of the background noise of the End of the World. Caramon’s decision is the wrong one, and it almost kills him - and it would have killed him, and doomed the world, if not for Tasslehoff saving Tanis, who then saves Caramon.
For all that it’s a fairly basic D&D novel, the story under the story is solid, and it’s about the characters’ growth as people. It doesn’t achieve the depth of LotR, and doesn’t achieve the heights of the earlier work, either, but it also didn’t take forty years to get to print.
Tolkien had a gift for informed verisimilitude. Because of this, he was able to bring together very important elements:
The world was real. It didn’t need explanation, because it was our world, and so when events happened, we understood them. And the author recognized that. He never stopped to explain the things that never needed explanation. Tolkien would never have told us that Jedi can test people for Force-sensitivity by counting the midi-chlorians in their blood. He would have understood the ages-old principle of ‘like calls to like’ or, as we often say these days, ‘takes one to know one’. Qui-gon and Obi-wan would’ve simply understood Anakin to possess incredible potential for using the Force, because they would’ve recognized themselves in him.
The languages spoken hang together well. There’s a good match of feeling between the sound of the languages and the people speaking them. The Rohirrim, though completely different than the Anglo-Saxons, are written using Anglo-Saxon linguistic modes, because they fit. The strong, rolling sounds mesh well with the landscape and the image of rough-hewn, tall, proud and powerful warriors.
The people themselves were real. Characters grow over the course of the book. They come to decision points and are forced to face truths about themselves and either embrace those truths or work to change them. And rather than just striding through events like colossoi, they react to the world around them. Things held to be important change in the wink of an eye when something new comes about. Eomer is a warrior. He understands war, and understands that warriors die. He’s resigned himself to that eventuality, for himself and those who fight with him, including his aged uncle, King Theoden. When Theoden falls in battle, he’s already achieved significant personal victories in the fray, and finally is thrown down by a foe so terrible, his own forces go mad with fear around him. When Theoden dies, Eomer accepts this and tells his men ‘Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen, meet was his ending. When his mound is raised, women then shall weep. War now calls us!’
Yet he himself wept as he spoke. ‘Let his knights remain here,’ he said, ‘and bear his body in honour from the field, lest the battle ride over it! Yea, and all these other of the king’s men that lie here.’ And he looked at the slain, recalling their names.
He gives the order for the King’s knights, his personal guard, to bear Theoden’s body from the field, and those of the guard who’d died with him. And he spares a moment to look from one man to the next, recalling the names of the slain. In the middle of the battle, knowing he has to return to the fighting, he still takes a moment to reflect on the men lying dead in front of him. A very real, very human reaction. But not the most human moment he’ll have in this scene:
Then suddenly he beheld his sister Eowyn as she lay, and he knew her. He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.
‘Eowyn, Eowyn,’ he cried at last, ‘Eowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!’
Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: ‘Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!’
And with that the host began to move. But the Rohirrim sang no more. Death they cried with one voice loud and terrible, and gathering speed like a great tide their battle swept about their fallen king and passed, roaring away southwards.
That right there? That’s the most human reaction in the world. He’s accepted the likelihood of his own death. He’s come to terms with the idea that his uncle and king may well die in this battle. When Theoden falls, he can handle that. But his sister? She’s supposed to be home, safe. Securing the safety of his people and his family is one of the big motivations a man has for going to war - and now she’s here, apparently dead. He’s shattered in that moment, and he can’t handle it. But he’s also a man trained for battle, and raised to his duty. His reactions cycle through shock and disbelief to anger, and rage; anger at his own inability to protect those he loves, anger at her for coming to this place where (he feels) she had no business being, and utter rage at the world and the war and the enemy that has killed his sister.
The Rohirrim, too, react as people. The Riders of Rohan are professional soldiers. They are not levies, they are not conscripts. They are an elite, professional military caste of their people, who train from a young age to fight in wars and battles in order to ensure that the vast majority of their folk do not need to worry about their own defense. Rohan has levies, and freeholders are expected to be able to be summoned to defend their land, but Rohan has a culture that is very much rooted in the idea of a separate warrior caste whose duty and purpose is to excel in battle. They take joy in fulfilling their purpose, much as modern professional soldiers and pilots do - they do not love the idea of warfare, they do not seek reasons to kill other people, but they find fulfillment and satisfaction in doing what they have trained to do, in being what they have devoted their lives - been willing to surrender their lives - to being. They are craftsmen in the art of war, and they entered this battle, a battle where they began the day outnumbered 15:1 or more, counting their entire army against the forces the Enemy had on the field - with more troops pouring in against them by the hour - singing. They come in singing songs of glory and battle, to settle their nerves and express their deep and profound happiness at doing that to which they have bent all of their efforts.
Then their King dies, and they can handle it. He’s a warrior born, he knew the risks. It is, in many ways, the fulfillment of his life, and a far better ending than they feared he would have a month earlier, when he seemed shrunken and helpless on his throne. His heir is a good man, a man many of them have known and fought for in the past, a man both honorable and true. And their homes are in good hands - the royal line is safe at Dunharrow, the bloodline that has led their people for 500 years and more will continue, even should Eomer fall.
Except it’s not. And Eowyn seems dead. The man they look to for their leadership is mad with grief and rage, and that’s infectious. Death. Death to their enemies, to themselves, to all who fight upon the accursed battlefield. And suddenly, they’re not singing anymore. They’re grim and furious and burning hot with the need to avenge themselves upon the foe. The battle, at this moment, isn’t just about fulfilling oaths of friendship to foreign lands. It’s not about fulfilling their purpose as the warrior elite of Rohan. At this moment, each and every man of the host would nod their heads in response to the words of Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China: “Son of a bitch must pay.”
And that’s a very real, very human reaction. And its one that happens in a very small spot on a very large battlefield. From the Rammas Echor, the wall surrounding the Pelennor, to the gates of Minas Tirith is 10 miles at its furthest point. There is fighting all through the field. The gates themselves have been breached, and the Guard of the City hold back the press of foes even as the Rohirrim turn the armies of the enemy around. And yet, all of that is simply the backdrop for this one very real, very human moment… that then ripples outward from one man’s shock and loss to an entire army’s rage and fury.
I was, to say the least, extremely disappointed that that moment wasn’t in the films. Because it’s moments like that, it’s that human connection and reaction, that in many ways shows what the imitators don’t get, but what Weis and Hickman, at least in one instance, did: It’s not the big things. It’s not saving the world. It’s the characters, and their reality, and their growth, that makes The Lord of the Rings stand up over time.
People don’t read history textbooks for fun. People want stories about people. I said earlier that Tolkien wasn’t ‘writing fantasy, he was reporting history’, and that’s true. But think about the most compelling journalism you encounter: it’s about people, against the backdrop of historic events. The small stories within events help us to maintain a connection, an investment, in the bigger stories. We seek to understand the larger scope of events because it helps us to put the smaller, more personal stories into context.
To me, that’s the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings. It’s a novel of small stories, intertwining together, in some cases completely tangentially**, that together bring us through the entire timeline as the larger events unfold behind them. No one personal story tells the tale, and it doesn’t try to. Too many modern fantasy authors try to. Or they focus on the big events. They see The Lord of the Rings as a story about an epic struggle between good and evil, and not simply a story about people rising to meet the challenges of their lives. And that, to paraphrase Yoda, is why they fail.
* - Consider this: In Tolkien's writing, we know of the deaths of 4 dragons. We don't know the exact details of the deaths of Scatha and Ancalagon, but Ancalagon was defeated in combat by Earendil, who possessed no magical power of his own, and Scatha was killed by Fram of the Eotheod - the people who would become the Rohirrim - mighty warriors, but no spellslingers, they. Glaurung, the first and mightiest of the dragons, is killed by a sword-thrust from a hidden attacker striking at his soft underbelly, and Smaug the Golden is killed by an arrow, fired by a normal mortal man (though a skilled archer), piercing the one soft spot in his gem-augmented armor. Every dragon-slaying we know about it an act of martial valor, not magic. The biggest and baddest magical monsters in pretty much every fantasy setting under the sun, and magic doesn't play a role in their deaths. Good old-fashioned bravery, skill, and strength does them in - elements present to some degree in every man, woman, and child. Elements we see in ourselves, and in everyone around us. Dragons are a fantastic element, yes... but the world they inhabit is still ours.
** - This is important. Like, big time important. It’s so important, it’s not even completed in the book, but continues beyond the scope of the main narrative, extending back twenty-eight years before the main series of events (and just over a decade before the first chapter), and out ove a century after the Frodo sails from the Havens. The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen is one of those small stories - it’s an important part of the story, but it doesn’t fit within the narrative, and so it’s excluded. Tolkien gives us the story in the appendices, and once you read it, once you see where it touches the narrative, it becomes part and parcel of what’s going on in The Lord of the Rings, so much so that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens felt it needed to be included in the films in some form, and I think they were right.
At the same time, another piece they added to the movies feels right, even though it might not be - the flashback to Boromir’s retaking of Osgiliath, and the aftermath, in the extended version of The Two Towers feels right - the conflict between Faramir and Denethor, the relationship between the brothers. It might be wrong - in the novel it’s said that Boromir claimed the dangerous journey in search of the answer to the riddle for himself, and Denethor approved it, but it feels right. Boromir’s claim in the books could just as easily be that he’s trying to protect his brother and do what the people of Gondor need him to do - or simply that he presented it in a way as to not speak ill of his father - as it could be that he sees a dangerous mission and insists only he can succeed (and get the glory). Denethor, after all, does tell Faramir ‘stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself’. Denethor, in the end, was the one who made the decision, and we do not know for certain whether Boromir put himself forward, as is suggested, or if Denethor simply would not send Faramir, as in the movies. Faramir’s words in this scene suggest the latter, but Gandalf's words to Denethor upon his arrival imply the former, though they may have been simply kind words meant to assuage a father's grief. On the whole, I think I would prefer to believe Faramir, though I suspect Gandalf likely has it right. ;)
In fact, Boromir in the movies is a stronger character than he is in the books, in part because of this scene. Boromir as we know him in the novel isn't the Boromir of the movies - but he could be, if he spoke to us more. He doesn't, though, because it's not his story, just as it's not Aragorn or Legolas or Gimli's story, and so the growth and development of those characters is minor. It's a story about four hobbits. The movies, however, are more Aragorn's story than Merry or Pippin's (though both Merry and Pippin do have their high-points touched on, they don't really come into their own until The Scouring of the Shire, which Jackson left off), which is why many of the revisions are made to show Aragorn progressing from 'I don't want to be King' to, well, King.
The nice thing about Boromir's arc, though, is that Jackson manages to give Boromir more by understanding the limitations of his medium - something far too few filmmakers seem to get when adapting the written word. All of Boromir's lines on Caradhras originally come during the discussion w/Frodo at Amon Hen. And yet, Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens know that even a few more lines during that scene reduces the intensity of it. Frodo loses some lines there, Boromir loses some lines, and what could be a lengthy discussion achieves the same level of building tension that the longer discussion can do in text (because we are more able to be given the participants' emotional states). But the lines removed are good lines, insightful lines... so they're moved to an earlier scene that would otherwise be 'and they climbed the mountain until THIS happened!' By moving those lines, and creating a moment of doubt and danger, we see the building tension w/in Boromir - tension that in the book, is expressed by a line indicating that while they're going down the river, Boromir keeps hurrying his boat closer to Frodo's before catching himself and settling back down. By understanding the limits of the medium, the director and screenwriters are able to draw more out of a character who isn't truly given a lot to work with in the book. (The entire discussion between Boromir and Aragorn in Lothlorien, for example, doesn't happen in the novel.)
And with the flashback, Jackson uses Faramir's entry to further explore the tragedy-and-redemption of Boromir's arc. Boromir doesn't want to go. He's forced into a situation that pits him against temptation that is too great for him to resist, and he very nearly falls prey to the Ring. Were Frodo not as resourceful as he was, Boromir would have fallen. But as soon as the immediate presence of the Ring is removed, Boromir comes to his senses, and abhors what he tried to do. Unfortunately, he has given in to temptation, and so must atone for his sin - Tolkien-as-Catholic comes into play throughout the book - but in the end, redeems himself by living up to what Tolkien would have considered among the most axiomatic statements of redemption, Luke 17:33: 'For he who seeks to save his life shall lose it, but he who loses his life shall preserve it.' In sacrificing himself to try to save Merry and Pippin, Boromir goes out as the hero he was. It's not his fault the hobbits were fated to come to Fangorn, after all, and remember, Boromir takes out a large number of those orcs. If he doesn't do that, more Rohirrim die during the fight at the eaves of Fangorn, possibly including Eomer. Every little piece fits together in the greater skein of fate. ;)
sixteenbynine recently wrote a post about why he self-publishes, and included the statement “What they really wanted was the same old Tolkien-clone crap in a different wrapper. (Not to say that Tolkien's work is bad, just that so many fantasy writers have been living in the man's shadow for so long that they've forgotten so many other possible modalities for fantasy exist. E.g.: Mervyn Peake, Peter S. Beagle, China Mieville, etc.)”.
I replied with:
“One of these days, I'm going to have to write up the essay version of the start-and-stop conversations you and I have had on exactly this topic, and why, out of all of the 'Tolkien-clones' that the publishers crank out, very very few of them even begin to approximate the original.”
Because it is something we have discussed a few times, both in text and in his kitchen. He beat me to the punch with his own thoughts on the matter, but this thing got written anyway, and to a large degree, I think there’s a lot of ‘why the imitations fail to approach the original’ ground left to cover.
And let’s face it, I like the look of my own text. (Can’t really say I like the sound of my own voice when it’s written, now can I?) So, without further ado…
Why most modern fantasy wants to be The Lord of the Rings, and why it isn’t.
I can see you rolling your eyes. You know where this is going now. None of these modern writers can hold a candle to the Divine Pillar of Awesome that was Professor Tolkien. All of their efforts are pale imitations and utter shite after the wonder and glory of Middle-Earth. Everything written is crap that doesn’t deserve to be printed in the same medium as the stories of Arda.
Yeah, bullshit. Tolkien was a dry, wordy son-of-a-bitch who never once described a character in any real detail. Aragorn have any moles? Any notable scars? What about Boromir? Guy fought in a low-intensity hot war for his entire adult life, and he has no scars? Doubt it. Eomer? What did Halbarad look like? Or Grimbold? Gamling the Old… what color were his eyes? See where I’m going? Tolkien wrote awesome place descriptions. He sucked at describing his characters. Look at the illustrations he did and you’ll see the same thing: he did maps, he did landscapes, he did places, not people.
His work comes across as very patriarchal and sexist - there’s all of 1 strong female character in The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn, and she’s a fairly minor character we don’t see at all in 3 of the 6 ‘books’ of the novel, and really exists as a carefully-threaded build-up for one scene that can be viewed as ‘I need to give Merry something meaty to do.’ Of course, Tolkien had a very good reason for not writing strong female characters - by his own words, “I just don’t understand them”, speaking of women. And he didn’t put any in, so he wouldn’t write them badly.
The point I’m making with the previous paragraphs? No writer is perfect. Nobody does everything brilliantly. J.R.R. Tolkien had a gift for languages. His Sindarin and Quenya constructed languages are solid enough to stand up on their own and have prompted serious scholarly work by generations of linguists for at least the last 40 years. They are, in fact, the measure against which all invented languages for fictional settings are measured these days. That’s where he truly shined: his languages, and his use of language.
Which is hardly surprising: that’s what the larger framework was constructed to do - provide a context for his invented languages. Philology was his first and best love. Literature his second. In short, J.R.R. Tolkien was a lover of words, and the things words and language can do when used well.
That’s what setting descriptions are, after all, good use of language to paint a picture. When it comes to actual events, though, Tolkien doesn’t spend as much time as some might like. He recounts events, rather than describing them, for the most part. An example of this is Helm’s Deep. We don’t see every sword-stroke Aragorn makes. We don’t see the clever cuts and parries of Legolas once he’s reduced to ‘knife-work’ as he puts it. Rather, we see the battle unfold in broad strokes, we get the sense of the event, not necessarily the specific actions of each principle actor at each moment.
For some readers, that’s a weakness. For some, it’s a strength. In both cases, however, it’s part and parcel of the style of writing Tolkien employed in The Lord of the Rings, and it’s a very different style than that he employed over much of The Hobbit. (At the end of Hobbit, for the Battle of Five Armies, we get the first strokes of this style of event-coverage, but it should be remembered that the descriptive narrative is following Bilbo, and Bilbo - not being a warrior, and not being a fool - is way the hell up the mountain, out of the real fighting.)
That it is part and parcel of his writing style is why he was brilliant, and the modern imitators aren’t. But it’s not because of his writing style, either.
It’s because people, publishers, writers, readers, in general - with very few exceptions - don’t get it. Sometimes they stumble onto it, but even then, they don’t realize the lesson’s been out there all along.
The Lord of the Rings was ridiculously, amazingly, stupidly successful over time. By the late 70s, and certainly the mid-80s, the hunt for the next one was on. Authors were inspired by the book. Readers were devoted to it. Publishers were willing to have sex with barnyard animals to secure the rights to the next one that hit the same way that one did. And they looked at it, and they took away all of the wrong things. But they can be forgiven, because even the author didn’t always realize what he’d done.
Confused yet? Here’s the deal - it’s in two parts:
Part I: Are You Writing A Fantasy Story?
Part of this element is the tropes of modern fantasy. You need heroes. You need someone, at some point, casting spells and tossing around magic. Call it a wizard, sorceror, witch, whatever, it’ll be there. You need an enemy of incredible power - preferably direct and indirect power. An evil sorceror is good. An evil sorceror holding an oppressed nation in thrall by means of his undead army is better. And you need the bad guy’s weakness, which will come into the heroes’ possession through a combination of luck/divine providence/fate and sheer doggedness on their part. Maybe it’s a magical ring that contains the greater part of the evil enemy’s magical potency that Frodo has to carry down to Mount Doom and toss into a volcano. Maybe it’s a special knife that Eddie Murphy has to go and get from a temple in Tibet because he’s the only one who can.
Most fantasy books these days understand the tropes. They know the necessary ingredients that need to be mixed, shaken, and baked. The authors stick to these tropes, and get confined by them. They have a hard time breaking free. And so a humble knight in an oppressed province of a decadent empire proves himself to be virtuous, and so receives a magical weapon with which he is able to defeat the unstoppable Dark Goddess and drive her back to the abyss. That one’s The Legend of Huma, one of the later Dragonlance books.
And in a lot of cases, since we’re talking about people attempting to duplicate Tolkien’s success, they’re poisoned by the movies.
Yeah, I said it: poisoned by the movies. Not the Jackson movies, though those count, but all fantasy/action/adventure movies. It’s a different medium, and it tells stories differently… and authors need to understand that.
Fantasy’s a very active genre. There’s all this stuff, see, and it’s happening. It’s a genre that lends itself immediately to the screen. It’s why you can take The Three Musketeers as a pseudo-historical swashbuckling movie and Excalibur as a fantasy movie and visually, they’re not that far apart.
There’s stuff, and it happens.
But the problem comes in when the author tries to write for a visual medium. You get flashy blow-by-blow of every fight and in-depth details about every little thing that’s happening. The story itself bogs down in the details, and something that takes ten seconds to occur takes ten minutes to read. It doesn’t feel as fast-paced as it’s meant to feel, and skews the pacing of the rest of the tale. This is largely an issue of writing style, I know. But it’s also why the publishers keep getting it wrong.
They’re looking for cinema-level excitement in text. They think they’re looking for something as captivating as Middle-Earth, but they’re forgetting something very important.
Tolkien didn’t write The Lord of the Rings as his first story of Middle-Earth. It’s not even his second. The Lord of the Rings was begun in 1937. It would take twelve years to be completed, and published five years after that. Seventeen years is a long time for one book to be in development, but it’s not the whole story at all. In actuality, Tolkien began writing the material from which Rings would spring twenty years earlier, quite literally in the trenches of World War I. So in effect, the author had been inhabiting the setting, though not this specific story, for twenty years before the first stroke of the pen fell. And that familiarity, that depth of connection, is responsible for much of how Rings is written and unfolds.
Tolkien denied inventing Middle-Earth. It was his artifice that he wasn’t making stuff up, he was relating it, like a newpaper reporter or a dime-story pulp novelist might go out and see what’s happening, and write about it.
That’s one of the big things that publishers seem to not get: Tolkien, from his own approach, wasn’t writing fantasy, he was reporting history, just… very, very old history. He had very rough ideas of the Quest, but usually only a half-dozen or so chapters ahead. And often, the story unfolded in ways he did not expect at all, completely skewing or forcing him to abandon his earlier concepts. Characters evolved, and often completely rebelled and reinvented themselves, during the writing process. Pippin’s character is the development of 3 different hobbits who all eventually become part of Pippin. Frodo is originally Bingo. Aragorn begins his existence as Trotter, a hobbit with the unusual habit of wearing wooden shoes, who at some point was likely captured and tormented by the Nazgul. Tolkien wrote in a 1955 letter, “Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22nd.”
By Chapter 3, the story is already running away with the author. And more remarkably… he doesn’t try to stop it. How many authors, when faced with a similar situation, are willing to let the story follow its own track, and don't go back and rewrite to get to where they thought they wanted to go? The answer is simple: All the good ones, and precious few of the rest.
Another outgrowth of the book developing from Tolkien’s earlier, unpublished writings is the world itself. He didn’t set out to create a fantasy world. He was writing a fantastic history of our world. So the incredible things that can’t happen… don’t happen. Someone falling off a cliff doesn’t just happen to hit the water just right to survive it. Nobody climbs up onto the harness of a six-story tall elephant, cut the leather bindings, and then surf to safety down the trunk. The incredibly skilled, handsome, famous, rich warrior hero, facing off against an army… dies. (Ok, he died in the movie version, too, but only because it’s a major plot point. I’m convinced that if someone can figure out how to let Boromir live w/out screwing up the rest of the story, they’ll do it.)
The world works the way we expect it to work. The biggest overt magic use we see is Gandalf shattering a slender stone bridge - and that only happens out of sight of most of the world, facing a demon. Otherwise, the ‘fantasy’ element… is all in our heads. Middle-Earth is a fantastic setting because the story that unfolds is a fantastic one… of all of the ‘fantasy’ worlds we’re shown with wizards and dragons and demons, Middle-Earth shows us the least ‘magic’, and the most reality.*
And that’s an important, perhaps even the most important, factor in understanding the mistakes of setting if someone’s out to try to find the ‘next Tolkien’ - the setting engages and envelops us… because it’s so familiar. Because it’s already home. The more they try to write stories in fantasy worlds, the less chance they have of writing Tolkien’s type of fantasy - because he wasn’t writing a story in a fantasy world. He was writing a fantastical story, in the everyday world.
Part II: So What’s This Thing About, Anyway?
The Lord of the Rings is commonly thought to be a book about an adventure, wherein humble folk of the simple agrarian Shire, small in stature and might, take on a dangerous quest that the great and powerful cannot embark upon, and save the world by defeating evil.
As Col. Sherman Potter used to say… Horse-hockey.
The Lord of the Rings is a book about growing up. It’s a book about people having to make hard choices about who they are, and what they’re willing to do and suffer in order to do what they know is right. It’s a book about a Quest. And therein lies the problem.
The genre that Rings helped to spawn, which dominates modern fantasy (and much of sci-fi is fantasy, so don’t think this doesn’t apply there) is really the Fantasy Quest genre. A danger is identified. Heroes assemble to face it. The heroes overcome long odds in order to reach the point of confrontation with the threat. The threat is met in a titanic clash of good v evil, and good wins. Evil is vanquished, and there is much rejoicing. Yay.
The Quest is understood to be the big huge plot to save the world or whatever. But that’s really not what real quest fiction is about. Good, solid Quest Fiction is about the main characters’ growth-arcs. That’s what makes the successful resolution of the overt goal possible. In Frodo and Sam accepting at the end that it’s a suicide mission, but it has to be done, and so they’re going to do it. In the end, Frodo falls to the temptation of the Ring, but he and Sam have learned the lesson, they’ve dedicated themselves to the success of the mission regardless of their own survival, and so Providence intervenes (via Gollum) to reward their self-sacrifice.
And in the final chapters, that same thing continues: The elves withdraw, leaving the world to Men. Gandalf leaves the four hobbits to settle affairs in the Shire on their own, without his help - because they don’t need it anymore. They have, as he himself says, grown up. The tale was never truly about the Ring. It was about a people who’d been carefully guarded and kept safe by forces they had no inkling of accepting responsibility for their own community - about the journey to adulthood by the three individuals who would emerge as leaders among the people.
That growth, that depth of character, is what makes the Quest work - not within the fictional world, but as a narrative structure. The audience has to care about the Questor. The audience has to experience, however fleetingly, however tangentially, their efforts.
It’s why Superman has a weakness. It’s not just because without it, he’s unstoppable, and that makes for a lousy tale (which it does), it’s because his weaknesses make him relatable. And yes, that’s plural. I’m not just talking about kryptonite here. Kal-El is, as we know, The Last Son of Krypton. He’s a stranger in a strange land, the ultimate immigrant, and he’s alone. He’s got his surrogate parents, but in a lot of very important ways, he’s alone. That isolation is something we can all relate to. When he gets hit w/kryptonite, that, too, is something we can relate to: the moment when we’re feeling that we’ve got things under control… and then everything falls apart and we’re suddenly, inexplicably, helpless to stop it.
It’s also why the later seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation started to lose us - all the problems became technobabble. It’s why Voyager, despite two seasons of incredibly bad plots, was able to win a loyal following - the writers focused on the characters’ stories - while Enterprise, which moved away from that into a convoluted time travel war… thing… never really did.
That’s the real trick of the Quest - it’s a journey of self-discovery, and nothing more. The external focus is really a McGuffin, there to get the main character into difficult situations that will force him to grow.
Most publishers, though, don’t care about that. They’re churning out swords-and-sorcery or alien-war or time/space/dimension-displaced-hero or post-apocalypse settings that give us these hugely important quests to Set Things Right… and the characters don’t need to develop, don’t need to become the guys who can set things right. They just need to whack on things until the bad guys are all dead.
They write characters well enough to come up with protagonists that people like, and are interested in seeing succeed, and that’s important. It’s necessary - you want to be able to make the emotional connections, after all. That goes right back to Superman, above. But once you do that, you also need to let your characters grow - to be shaped by events, even as their actions help to shape events as well. People don’t stay the same, not from one event to the next, not form one moment to the next. Characters need to be real enough to change, to be who they are, not who they were. That gets missed a lot in the churn of witty heroes chopping their way through evil hordes, and it’s a lot more important than really stellar writing or an original plot. There are no original plots, only very creative set dressing on the plots we’ve been retelling since we first mastered enough language to tell one another stories.
I think my favorite modern work of fantasy has to be the second trilogy from the Dragonlance series, Legends - Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, and Test of the Twins. And the writing isn’t great. It’s not terrible, mind you, not horridly florid purple prose like you’d find in a Harlequin romance or a Mack Bolan: The Executioner book, but it’s not great. It’s decent, solid, work-a-day writing. But that’s not what sticks with me about these books. What sticks is the story.
The story is ostensibly about saving the world. And the world gets saved along the way. But in reality, the story is about one man coming to the realization that he can’t derive his sense of self-worth from someone else’s infirmary. Weis and Hickman manage, in that series, to explore a little bit of co-dependency, and its after-effects. What’s even more interesting is that the two real protagonists, the ones whose story we’re really reading - even if we think it’s a story about Caramon and his brother, it’s really about Caramon and Tasslehoff and the way both of them grow up as a result of intertwined events - at one point have to make the decision of ‘save the world, or save the people we care about’, and they make different decisions. Caramon’s decision is to focus on the big picture, the big goal. Tasslehoff refuses to let their friend die as part of the background noise of the End of the World. Caramon’s decision is the wrong one, and it almost kills him - and it would have killed him, and doomed the world, if not for Tasslehoff saving Tanis, who then saves Caramon.
For all that it’s a fairly basic D&D novel, the story under the story is solid, and it’s about the characters’ growth as people. It doesn’t achieve the depth of LotR, and doesn’t achieve the heights of the earlier work, either, but it also didn’t take forty years to get to print.
Tolkien had a gift for informed verisimilitude. Because of this, he was able to bring together very important elements:
The world was real. It didn’t need explanation, because it was our world, and so when events happened, we understood them. And the author recognized that. He never stopped to explain the things that never needed explanation. Tolkien would never have told us that Jedi can test people for Force-sensitivity by counting the midi-chlorians in their blood. He would have understood the ages-old principle of ‘like calls to like’ or, as we often say these days, ‘takes one to know one’. Qui-gon and Obi-wan would’ve simply understood Anakin to possess incredible potential for using the Force, because they would’ve recognized themselves in him.
The languages spoken hang together well. There’s a good match of feeling between the sound of the languages and the people speaking them. The Rohirrim, though completely different than the Anglo-Saxons, are written using Anglo-Saxon linguistic modes, because they fit. The strong, rolling sounds mesh well with the landscape and the image of rough-hewn, tall, proud and powerful warriors.
The people themselves were real. Characters grow over the course of the book. They come to decision points and are forced to face truths about themselves and either embrace those truths or work to change them. And rather than just striding through events like colossoi, they react to the world around them. Things held to be important change in the wink of an eye when something new comes about. Eomer is a warrior. He understands war, and understands that warriors die. He’s resigned himself to that eventuality, for himself and those who fight with him, including his aged uncle, King Theoden. When Theoden falls in battle, he’s already achieved significant personal victories in the fray, and finally is thrown down by a foe so terrible, his own forces go mad with fear around him. When Theoden dies, Eomer accepts this and tells his men ‘Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen, meet was his ending. When his mound is raised, women then shall weep. War now calls us!’
Yet he himself wept as he spoke. ‘Let his knights remain here,’ he said, ‘and bear his body in honour from the field, lest the battle ride over it! Yea, and all these other of the king’s men that lie here.’ And he looked at the slain, recalling their names.
He gives the order for the King’s knights, his personal guard, to bear Theoden’s body from the field, and those of the guard who’d died with him. And he spares a moment to look from one man to the next, recalling the names of the slain. In the middle of the battle, knowing he has to return to the fighting, he still takes a moment to reflect on the men lying dead in front of him. A very real, very human reaction. But not the most human moment he’ll have in this scene:
Then suddenly he beheld his sister Eowyn as she lay, and he knew her. He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.
‘Eowyn, Eowyn,’ he cried at last, ‘Eowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!’
Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: ‘Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!’
And with that the host began to move. But the Rohirrim sang no more. Death they cried with one voice loud and terrible, and gathering speed like a great tide their battle swept about their fallen king and passed, roaring away southwards.
That right there? That’s the most human reaction in the world. He’s accepted the likelihood of his own death. He’s come to terms with the idea that his uncle and king may well die in this battle. When Theoden falls, he can handle that. But his sister? She’s supposed to be home, safe. Securing the safety of his people and his family is one of the big motivations a man has for going to war - and now she’s here, apparently dead. He’s shattered in that moment, and he can’t handle it. But he’s also a man trained for battle, and raised to his duty. His reactions cycle through shock and disbelief to anger, and rage; anger at his own inability to protect those he loves, anger at her for coming to this place where (he feels) she had no business being, and utter rage at the world and the war and the enemy that has killed his sister.
The Rohirrim, too, react as people. The Riders of Rohan are professional soldiers. They are not levies, they are not conscripts. They are an elite, professional military caste of their people, who train from a young age to fight in wars and battles in order to ensure that the vast majority of their folk do not need to worry about their own defense. Rohan has levies, and freeholders are expected to be able to be summoned to defend their land, but Rohan has a culture that is very much rooted in the idea of a separate warrior caste whose duty and purpose is to excel in battle. They take joy in fulfilling their purpose, much as modern professional soldiers and pilots do - they do not love the idea of warfare, they do not seek reasons to kill other people, but they find fulfillment and satisfaction in doing what they have trained to do, in being what they have devoted their lives - been willing to surrender their lives - to being. They are craftsmen in the art of war, and they entered this battle, a battle where they began the day outnumbered 15:1 or more, counting their entire army against the forces the Enemy had on the field - with more troops pouring in against them by the hour - singing. They come in singing songs of glory and battle, to settle their nerves and express their deep and profound happiness at doing that to which they have bent all of their efforts.
Then their King dies, and they can handle it. He’s a warrior born, he knew the risks. It is, in many ways, the fulfillment of his life, and a far better ending than they feared he would have a month earlier, when he seemed shrunken and helpless on his throne. His heir is a good man, a man many of them have known and fought for in the past, a man both honorable and true. And their homes are in good hands - the royal line is safe at Dunharrow, the bloodline that has led their people for 500 years and more will continue, even should Eomer fall.
Except it’s not. And Eowyn seems dead. The man they look to for their leadership is mad with grief and rage, and that’s infectious. Death. Death to their enemies, to themselves, to all who fight upon the accursed battlefield. And suddenly, they’re not singing anymore. They’re grim and furious and burning hot with the need to avenge themselves upon the foe. The battle, at this moment, isn’t just about fulfilling oaths of friendship to foreign lands. It’s not about fulfilling their purpose as the warrior elite of Rohan. At this moment, each and every man of the host would nod their heads in response to the words of Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China: “Son of a bitch must pay.”
And that’s a very real, very human reaction. And its one that happens in a very small spot on a very large battlefield. From the Rammas Echor, the wall surrounding the Pelennor, to the gates of Minas Tirith is 10 miles at its furthest point. There is fighting all through the field. The gates themselves have been breached, and the Guard of the City hold back the press of foes even as the Rohirrim turn the armies of the enemy around. And yet, all of that is simply the backdrop for this one very real, very human moment… that then ripples outward from one man’s shock and loss to an entire army’s rage and fury.
I was, to say the least, extremely disappointed that that moment wasn’t in the films. Because it’s moments like that, it’s that human connection and reaction, that in many ways shows what the imitators don’t get, but what Weis and Hickman, at least in one instance, did: It’s not the big things. It’s not saving the world. It’s the characters, and their reality, and their growth, that makes The Lord of the Rings stand up over time.
People don’t read history textbooks for fun. People want stories about people. I said earlier that Tolkien wasn’t ‘writing fantasy, he was reporting history’, and that’s true. But think about the most compelling journalism you encounter: it’s about people, against the backdrop of historic events. The small stories within events help us to maintain a connection, an investment, in the bigger stories. We seek to understand the larger scope of events because it helps us to put the smaller, more personal stories into context.
To me, that’s the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings. It’s a novel of small stories, intertwining together, in some cases completely tangentially**, that together bring us through the entire timeline as the larger events unfold behind them. No one personal story tells the tale, and it doesn’t try to. Too many modern fantasy authors try to. Or they focus on the big events. They see The Lord of the Rings as a story about an epic struggle between good and evil, and not simply a story about people rising to meet the challenges of their lives. And that, to paraphrase Yoda, is why they fail.
* - Consider this: In Tolkien's writing, we know of the deaths of 4 dragons. We don't know the exact details of the deaths of Scatha and Ancalagon, but Ancalagon was defeated in combat by Earendil, who possessed no magical power of his own, and Scatha was killed by Fram of the Eotheod - the people who would become the Rohirrim - mighty warriors, but no spellslingers, they. Glaurung, the first and mightiest of the dragons, is killed by a sword-thrust from a hidden attacker striking at his soft underbelly, and Smaug the Golden is killed by an arrow, fired by a normal mortal man (though a skilled archer), piercing the one soft spot in his gem-augmented armor. Every dragon-slaying we know about it an act of martial valor, not magic. The biggest and baddest magical monsters in pretty much every fantasy setting under the sun, and magic doesn't play a role in their deaths. Good old-fashioned bravery, skill, and strength does them in - elements present to some degree in every man, woman, and child. Elements we see in ourselves, and in everyone around us. Dragons are a fantastic element, yes... but the world they inhabit is still ours.
** - This is important. Like, big time important. It’s so important, it’s not even completed in the book, but continues beyond the scope of the main narrative, extending back twenty-eight years before the main series of events (and just over a decade before the first chapter), and out ove a century after the Frodo sails from the Havens. The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen is one of those small stories - it’s an important part of the story, but it doesn’t fit within the narrative, and so it’s excluded. Tolkien gives us the story in the appendices, and once you read it, once you see where it touches the narrative, it becomes part and parcel of what’s going on in The Lord of the Rings, so much so that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens felt it needed to be included in the films in some form, and I think they were right.
At the same time, another piece they added to the movies feels right, even though it might not be - the flashback to Boromir’s retaking of Osgiliath, and the aftermath, in the extended version of The Two Towers feels right - the conflict between Faramir and Denethor, the relationship between the brothers. It might be wrong - in the novel it’s said that Boromir claimed the dangerous journey in search of the answer to the riddle for himself, and Denethor approved it, but it feels right. Boromir’s claim in the books could just as easily be that he’s trying to protect his brother and do what the people of Gondor need him to do - or simply that he presented it in a way as to not speak ill of his father - as it could be that he sees a dangerous mission and insists only he can succeed (and get the glory). Denethor, after all, does tell Faramir ‘stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself’. Denethor, in the end, was the one who made the decision, and we do not know for certain whether Boromir put himself forward, as is suggested, or if Denethor simply would not send Faramir, as in the movies. Faramir’s words in this scene suggest the latter, but Gandalf's words to Denethor upon his arrival imply the former, though they may have been simply kind words meant to assuage a father's grief. On the whole, I think I would prefer to believe Faramir, though I suspect Gandalf likely has it right. ;)
In fact, Boromir in the movies is a stronger character than he is in the books, in part because of this scene. Boromir as we know him in the novel isn't the Boromir of the movies - but he could be, if he spoke to us more. He doesn't, though, because it's not his story, just as it's not Aragorn or Legolas or Gimli's story, and so the growth and development of those characters is minor. It's a story about four hobbits. The movies, however, are more Aragorn's story than Merry or Pippin's (though both Merry and Pippin do have their high-points touched on, they don't really come into their own until The Scouring of the Shire, which Jackson left off), which is why many of the revisions are made to show Aragorn progressing from 'I don't want to be King' to, well, King.
The nice thing about Boromir's arc, though, is that Jackson manages to give Boromir more by understanding the limitations of his medium - something far too few filmmakers seem to get when adapting the written word. All of Boromir's lines on Caradhras originally come during the discussion w/Frodo at Amon Hen. And yet, Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens know that even a few more lines during that scene reduces the intensity of it. Frodo loses some lines there, Boromir loses some lines, and what could be a lengthy discussion achieves the same level of building tension that the longer discussion can do in text (because we are more able to be given the participants' emotional states). But the lines removed are good lines, insightful lines... so they're moved to an earlier scene that would otherwise be 'and they climbed the mountain until THIS happened!' By moving those lines, and creating a moment of doubt and danger, we see the building tension w/in Boromir - tension that in the book, is expressed by a line indicating that while they're going down the river, Boromir keeps hurrying his boat closer to Frodo's before catching himself and settling back down. By understanding the limits of the medium, the director and screenwriters are able to draw more out of a character who isn't truly given a lot to work with in the book. (The entire discussion between Boromir and Aragorn in Lothlorien, for example, doesn't happen in the novel.)
And with the flashback, Jackson uses Faramir's entry to further explore the tragedy-and-redemption of Boromir's arc. Boromir doesn't want to go. He's forced into a situation that pits him against temptation that is too great for him to resist, and he very nearly falls prey to the Ring. Were Frodo not as resourceful as he was, Boromir would have fallen. But as soon as the immediate presence of the Ring is removed, Boromir comes to his senses, and abhors what he tried to do. Unfortunately, he has given in to temptation, and so must atone for his sin - Tolkien-as-Catholic comes into play throughout the book - but in the end, redeems himself by living up to what Tolkien would have considered among the most axiomatic statements of redemption, Luke 17:33: 'For he who seeks to save his life shall lose it, but he who loses his life shall preserve it.' In sacrificing himself to try to save Merry and Pippin, Boromir goes out as the hero he was. It's not his fault the hobbits were fated to come to Fangorn, after all, and remember, Boromir takes out a large number of those orcs. If he doesn't do that, more Rohirrim die during the fight at the eaves of Fangorn, possibly including Eomer. Every little piece fits together in the greater skein of fate. ;)