No, I haven’t seen the movie yet. At some point I will. I might even like it, but I have my doubts.

The new “Lord of the Rings” flick is, after all, a blockbuster, a movie that everybody sees. I hate fads, especially ones that end up on Burger King cups.

But I didn’t keep the cups. Instead, after much pestering of Burger King employees, I have already collected all four of the Fellowship of the Rings goblets and all 19 of the toy figures. I try to explain to my 6-year-old son what each character means, and he seems interested. He might see the movie, he might not.

I hope that one day he will read the books.

Maybe he won’t wait as long as I have. I didn’t read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit until this past summer. Common sense and my recurring work ethic told me to go no further after I finished it. That was to have been my summer to get things done.

Instead I immediately began the sequel, Fellowship of the Ring, which also begins the trilogy of Frodo the hobbit. I finished the Fellowship and sneaked a peak at the second work, The Two Towers, to see if I could glimpse the fate of Boromir. I didn’t have to read far. Poor Boromir.

I didn’t pick these books to read for escapism, light reading or the mounting hype about the movie. I simply gave in to pressure from those closest to me.

My father, a GMAC finance supervisor, worked too hard to have much time for pleasure reading, but he recommended two books to me when I was a teenager. One was Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and the other was The Hobbit. I would roll my eyes and feign interest, but these books weren’t tops on my teen reading list. I don’t think I had a list.

But I couldn’t help but wonder about my father’s favorite books. They seemed like heady, artsy reading for a man who made his living from balance sheets and credit reports. My father often dispensed sage advice, so I could understand the attraction to philosophy. But what about that hobbit stuff?

For many years I had associated Tolkien with the high school losers who played Dungeons and Dragons, couldn’t get a date, didn’t bathe regularly, and turned to fairies and feudal fantasies to escape reality. I always thought Tolkien fans dueled with cardboard swords and spent too much time hunched over a ouija board. My high school idol wasn’t Tolkien, it was Lynyrd Skynyrd.

But several years ago, when I found out that one of my musical heroes, guitarist Duane Allman, had named his daughter Galadriel after the queen of the elves, I thought, man, if it was cool enough for Duane ...

It wasn’t until I married a Tolkien fan (now I know why she often called me, “Precious,” all you insiders) that the author became more interesting to me. My wife, Elaine, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of history and an interest in British history in particular, explained the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic mythological themes that ran through his work, and besides the historical significance, it was just great stuff. Give it a shot, she said.

So I did. I devoured The Hobbit, laughing out loud at the dry humor and relishing each catastrophe along Bilbo’s epic journey. I knew those mountains and forests, could feel the ridgetop snows and razor-sharp frigid winds, and I constantly wished I could find a hobbit host eager to share lots of food and drink. I understood hobbits.

The Fellowship signalled a darker turn. At the heart of the book is an unseen menace that the reader and the characters cannot fully explain. But in the middle of the Fellowship, I think I figured it out. This was a world in transition, changing way too fast and possibly not for the better. Cultural traditions were fading and power was shifting into invisible hands. Everyone seemed on the move or preparing to leave the familar. Nothing seemed for certain anymore.

And it was getting harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Tolkien didn’t portray life as that simple, no matter how much hobbits wanted it to stay that way. Power, evil and greed could corrupt anyone, making Tolkien’s work more complex and realistic than a basic morality play.

I admit that my fascination for Tolkien deepened because of another book I read at the same time. The recent translation of Beowulf by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney gave new life and haunting beauty to the Old English epic, and I couldn’t help but notice the similar themes of intense loyalty, friendship, duty, honor and oral tradition that ran through Tolkien and the poem. Not to mention nature, always ready to invigorate or destroy, a force out of the hands of earthly creatures to control.

The similarities shouldn’t be surprising. Tolkien was one of the foremost Beowulf scholars, and it was in academia that he began attracting attention. He was born in South Africa and grew up in the Birmingham area of England. After serving as an infantryman in World War I, he received a Readership and then a Chair at Leeds University before election to Oxford University’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon in 1925 when he was only 33. His central field of study was Old and Middle English, roughly 700 to 1500 A.D. His linguistic studies enabled him to craft the fictional languages of his famous books.

What about Tolkien himself? He once wrote, “I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

Few people in Tolkien’s position would have dared to imagine what he was crafting in his head. The pent-up creatvity finally gushed in a moment of sanity preservation. I know the feeling. While grading an apparently not-so-stellar exam that had one page mercifully blank, Tolkien let his mind drift to the project that had been haunting him. On the blank page he wrote the sentence that started it all: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

Despite worldwide acclaim and millions of fans, Tolkien had his critics. But when one reads the slams on Tolkien, the weaknesses of the reviewers stand out, not the weaknesses of Tolkien. In the introduction to the Fellowship, Tolkien responded to his critics: “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

Our politically correct critics of today are fond of branding Tolkien as a racist for having fair-skinned protagonists, a sexist for having no dominant female characters and sexually repressed for depicting too close a bond between Frodo and his servant, Sam. One can easily pick apart each criticism by simply going back to the mythology on which Tolkien based his work, and Tolkien himself, a devout Catholic and devoted hisband and father, would have scoffed today at the accusations.

The movie will mold viewers, who will never read the books, opinions’ of characters but advance reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Director Peter Jackson admits to being a loyal Tolkien disciple, and some reviewers who have read Tolkien swear that Jackson has somehow recreated Middle Earth in New Zealand. Tolkien mania among European fans has far exceeded reaction in the United States so far (a sure sign that it could be a great movie) and the British newspaper The Sun has hailed it as one of the 10 greatest movies ever made.

No matter how the movie turns out, we can thank Jackson for bringing Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Aragorn, Galadriel and other heroic characters back into our lives. We are a better world when they are in it. People of all ages will be discovering them for the first time. Many will wonder why they waited so long to meet them.

And like me, they will finish their first Tolkien book and sit there in awe of how deep the human imagination can go.

I’ll say it again Mr. Tolkien on behalf of your newest fans: Thank you very much.

(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at rohr@wcu.edu)

 

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