Summary: A study of the enduring power of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, tracing it to both its counter to modernity and its genius as modern myth.

Many in the critical community have puzzled over the public acceptance and staying power of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Patrick Curry notes that Tolkien has been described as “paternalistic, reactionary, anti-intellectual, racist, fascistic and…irrelevant.” Curry believes the nature of the books account for their success. It is a myth about an earlier age of the earth drawn from both Norse and Anglo-Saxon material, fashioned into a truly unique place, not to be read allegorically, yet one that speaks into late modernity, a project more or less exhausted.

He describes the work as centered around three domains. The first is the social, centered around the Shire, where community, local government, and love of place dominate. There are many such places throughout Middle-Earth from Lothlorien to Fangorn forest to Gondor, all standing in contrast to the soulless industrial wasteland of Mordor. The social domain is nested within a second domain, an ecological or natural one of Middle-Earth. Everything, from the mountains and rivers to Tolkien’s beloved trees, pulses with life and the peoples of Middle-Earth live harmoniously within these domains–Elves in the forests, dwarves in the mountains and hobbits in the Shire, and the Ents shepherding their trees. Surrounding Middle-Earth is the Sea representing the spiritual–the ethical, the questions of death and life, the ultimate.

Curry’s exploration of the latter notes how Tolkien did not impose Christian theology by another name on his story, unlike the Narnia Chronicles of C. S. Lewis. Oddly enough, Curry notes that Tolkien combines a polytheistic pantheon at war with evil with a kind of animism, that resacralizes nature. All this combines with Christian virtues of humility, courage, hospitality, and compassion drawing together a fellowship of the “differents.”

Curry proposes that a Middle-Earth with this character, these domains, speaks powerfully to modernity-weary readers, tired of big and bureaucratic states, alarmed by the exploitation of the planet, and groping for a spirituality that embraces all of life. But he believes it is also powerful, certainly in the English speaking world because Tolkien succeeded in his project of fashioning a contemporary myth, a story neither true nor false, but one that explains something of the origins and place and future of not only those in the story but that of the reader as well.

Curry’s discussion rings true for me in many ways. The Shire of the hobbits is the local membership of Wendell Berry’s Port William, calling us away from identity-less exurbia. The love of all nature, and especially the forests speaks into a land stripped of trees, seemingly destined for a Mordor-like wasteland. Then there is the surrounding sea, the reminder of lives answerable to something greater, destined for something beyond, longing for God knows what.

Finally the mythopoeic elements helps explain the power of this story for me, that only grows as I age–not merely the adventure but the hope and loss of which life consists. And there is the power of traveling with the Fellowship, the Nine who faced wonder and danger and sorry and strove to overcome. Having traveled so far, and through so many readings, we each face the question of what then shall we be and “what to do with the time that is given us.” ( )

No amount of earnestness can make up for missing the point.

There have been, over the decades, quite a few defenses of the meaningfulness, the relevance, the suitability for modern times of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I cannot claim to have read them all, but of those I have read, this one is certainly the most full-throated. Tolkien, to Curry, is not just significant, he is a guidepost -- a star leading us to the sacred place of a sustainable, honest, fair, complete world.

Since most of the virtues Curry sees in Tolkien are very liberal virtues, some may be offended just by that. Indeed, Tolkien himself would surely be offended by some of them. But this is not the basis for my objection -- Curry's claims became monotonous after a time, but they did not bother me.

But Curry just doesn't understand what Tolkien was writing. The proper defense of Tolkien is not that it is some sort of ecological version of More's Utopia; it is that The Lord of the Rings is a pure and brilliant Romance based on Christian and Northern European myth. Curry neither understands the Romance nor, frankly, the Fairy Tale, on which he bases much of his argument.

By Romance I don't mean the modern love story. I mean a tale which, through the wonders that let us see thing clearly, teaches a true lesson about how the world should be. Examples include many tales that Tolkien's critics would approve of -- Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Franklin's Tale, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the many French ("Roman") tales that gave the genre its name.

Curry addresses much of his work to those who condemn Tolkien. And in this he is right. We need the Romances to know how to be better people -- at least, most of us do, and the people who don't need them are not the people who condemn Tolkien. But Curry is defending Tolkien on grounds that Tolkien himself did not care to take.

Again, Curry is right that The Lord of the Rings has much in common with fairy and folk tales. But Curry does not know fairy tales, except through mediation such as Tolkien and even Walt Disney (a source he faults without realizing what the alternative is). Tolkien's folk sources taught him much that gives The Lord of the Rings its feeling of deep reality, but it is the Romances that give the lessons. No author who misses that point will ever be able to defend Tolkien fully.

And Curry sometimes even misses points Tolkien himself made. On page 148, for instance, Curry claims that when the One Ring was destroyed, the Three Rings faded slowly. On the contrary; their power was destroyed at once. What faded slowly was what was built with it. The analogy might be to electrical power: Anything which runs on electricity, such as your computer, will fail the moment the power goes out. But anything merely made with that power, such as a print-out from the computer, merely begins to age and decay. Evil desires power, and as long as we fight power with power, the victory will be impermanent. Only something greater can win the true victory. In Tolkien's personal view, that Something Greater was the Incarnation of Jesus, but he carefully kept that out of the book -- so much so that Curry does not seem to realize how much the Romance of Jesus (and, yes, it fits much of the definition of a Romance) stands behind Tolkien's work.

Tolkien's chief point is that, in an unredeemed world, all battles against evil are delaying actions, temporary gains, pyrrhic victories. In this sense, Tolkien almost stands closer to his critics than Curry, who thinks the great battles can be won.

Tolkien deserves his defenders. But he should be defended for his actual virtues, not for what reviewers fail to see in his books. ( )