The Last Recovery
On Re-Reading The Lord of the Rings
To call Tolkien the father of fantasy as we know it is to echo what thousands upon thousands of readers and authors already know. He is the originator of a genre that is now one of modern literature's most prolific and profitable. And yet though many fans and haters have opinions about the influence of The Lord of the Rings, fewer and fewer of those opinions seem based on the book itself. The slew of adaptions and inspirations preys on our fear of missing out, to the point where deciding to re-read a text over half a century old feels like a waste of time. Don't we want to enjoy what is popular now? Don't we all know the story of Frodo and the Ring by heart? Why rehash it? If you need a refresher just watch the films. Isn't the book now worthwhile as a piece of literary history or as nostalgia for older readers trying to recapture their childhood sense of wonder, but now made obsolete by authors coming of age in a mature era in which the art form of the fantasy novel has now been iterated and perfected? In short, is The Lord of the Rings really worth reading, and even re-reading, in 2025?
Readers of this blog can guess my answer to these questions, but I'd like to make this essay as complete and unbiased as I can in order to better understand Tolkien's influence on my imagination and the imaginations of millions more readers and potential authors. But first, a disclaimer from the Storyteller himself:
“The Lord of the Rings has been read by many people since it finally appeared in print; and I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meaning of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my feelings for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault. 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. But even from the points of view of many who have enjoyed my story, there is much that fails to please. It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are by all others specially approved. The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.” (Forward to the Second Edition, xxiii)
I. What is worth re-reading?
“For despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.” (Gandalf, the Council of Elrond, 269)
The question of whether something is worth reading or re-reading is very simple on the surface, but very mysterious underneath. Fiction is not like an industry or sport, in which progress and achievement can be measured by numbers, and it is even unlike the more tangible arts, in which a sense of scale or speed can overwhelm an audience into that illusion we call greatness. Who can measure a story? Sales might be a meaningful metric insofar as it shows what sorts of stories in what sorts of media people are willing to buy at a given time, but sales say nothing about the work itself. Who can say whether an author has achieved his goal in a story, because who can say what the goal of a story is? There are tales that uplift, tales that admonish, tales that entertain, tales that seek truth, tales that destroy, tales that despair — and all of these effects based on the reader, for two readers very rarely have the same reaction to the same tale and very often disagree with the authors about the tales. So where does that leave us? Why are you reading this essay, dear reader? What are you looking for? All of us, when sitting in front of a page, are left only with our own minds and hearts to guide us. This is why writing, and fiction especially, defies any attempt at measuring 'progress.' So this essay will try very hard to avoid the meaningless question of whether The Lord of the Rings is better than the tales it inspired. Instead, I will try to record my own reactions and impressions to the work itself, hopefully finding some resonant evidence for why I find Tolkien's work some of the most worthwhile reading I have ever done, and why I think re-reading it is important.
But first I have still not answered the question, and indeed those of us who love fiction will often find ourselves avoiding the question of whether it is worthwhile. Our culture has become so obsessed with utility and efficiency that we find ourselves forced to justify our hobbies, and indeed, reading old fantasy novels would seem to be rather inefficient and anti-useful. To spend time in a completely imaginary world very unlike our own, reading about elves and hobbits, would seem to bear very little on 'real' life. But 'seem' is the operative word, because this fantasy novel was written by a real person who drew from his own mind and his own world, who thought very deeply about myths and what they express about the human soul. These tales do not simply fall from the clouds where fantasy reader's heads are accused of being. They were written by people as real as the authors of the dictionary.[^1] Indeed The Lord of the Rings, despite the setting, is in fact a very grounded tale. The dark lord Sauron is not defeated by a protagonist who typifies the Hero's Journey and overcomes adversity to match the strength of evil. No, if anything, the quest to destroy the ring is marked by failure. The Fellowship is broken and Gandalf is slain before the journey is half over. And when Frodo finally reaches the Cracks of Doom he chooses to keep the ring for himself, finally succumbing to the temptation that has burdened him for so long. It is only through the pure grace of chance, working through Gollum, that the ring falls and is destroyed.
Interpretations and analyses of the story like the one above hint at what makes reading fantasy worthwhile: perspective. By contemplating the fate of Gollum and the ring, we can recognize some of the pure chances of grace in our own lives that we might not have noticed before, and wonder at how the councils of the wise and powerful are often confounded, or whether the wise and powerful are actually wise. By immersing ourselves in a world like but unlike our own we can develop an outside perspective on our world and, comparing it with the goods and bads of the fantasy, we can sometimes achieve a clearer picture of our own situation or a problem we are dealing with. This is the “Recovery” of which Tolkien himself speaks in his essay On Fairy-Stories. It is not so much a recovery of energy but a recovery of perspective that allows us to see what has become familiar in our world as new and interesting again. For Tolkien these were the things that “we say we know,” which have become “like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape... we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.” Reading fantasy helps us recover the power of perception that we locked away when we decided that childhood curiosity was meant only for childhood.
Our problem now is that fantasy itself is in need of recovery. When The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published, there was nothing quite like them. While Tolkien was inspired by many sources, namely Beowulf and The Kalevala and Fairy Tales told to him as a child and many others I am sure, no one had ever put a fantasy tale into the form of a novel and took it seriously. The leap from Beowulf to The Lord of the Rings is much larger than The Lord of the Rings to A Song of Ice and Fire. This does not mean that The Lord of the Rings is better simply because it is original, but it does mean that authors writing fantasy today (and the 90s) write in a much different atmosphere than Tolkien did. Our minds are cluttered with tropes and worlds and prophecies and monsters that are not our own, and the form itself — the form of the fantasy novel — resembles more a baroque painting in that it must bewilder and disorient with surprise and dissonance in order to seem original. We have too many colors to paint with, and yet the paintings all look the same. The great dragon of greed and merchandising and art recycling art has circled around and has been devouring itself for generations. It is time to re-read. It is time for Recovery.
Still, I have not answered the question. I have only avoided it and gotten lost in the weeds. The difficulty is that the answer to the question — What is worth re-reading? And why? — is different for every reader. Recovery is a strong reason for me, but for many others it is not. Yet I must be honest and say that refusing to re-read, or not wanting to, sounds to me like not wanting to eat vegetables or wash your face. Even as an avid reader, I feel my attention span constantly ravaged by screens and the pace of postmodern life. Re-reading is not only a way to rebel against postmodern life, it helps me remember myself by reconnecting me to the art that has shaped me. Saying that one needs only read a book once is a bit like saying that once having married the love of your life, you need not make love to them ever again. Or, perhaps, like saying that having eaten a meal once, one need never eat again.
If you prefer barreling through existence without resisting the violent vicissitudes of time; looking in the mirror to check your appearance in the morning but forgetting what you look like by the end of the day; letting the winds of society and the trend machine stamp and unstamp fads on your mind like a sneetch;[^2] succumbing to the attractive lie that an active life belies an active mind when it often belies the opposite; filling time with movement on a screen, in a car, in a bed, on a sidewalk, in a gym, in a kitchen; any movement but the movement of your eyes over the page of a beloved book — if, in short, you believe that the unexamined life is worth living — then by all means do not re-read, or better yet do not read at all. I do not believe that the unexamined life is worth living, hence these haphazard paragraphs. Hence the next section of this essay.
II. Recovering The Lord of the Rings
No one answered. The noon-bell rang. Still no one spoke. Frodo glanced at all the faces, but they were not turned to him. All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if deep in thought. A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. “I will take the ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.” (The Council of Elrond, 270)
While I am generally cynical about business and the way business profits off of art, this cynicism does not extend to the art itself. Tolkien's legacy is not in danger because his legacy is in his words. The problem is that we don't seem to be reading them. I do not think it is an inaccurate generalization to say that most fans of The Lord of the Rings have watched the movies more times than they have read the books. This is because movies are shorter, more accessible, and demand less of the imagination. In itself, this fact is not bad, but the movies are not an accurate adaption. No adaption is accurate. Even when plot is identical, the difference in medium demands change. What is exciting on the page is often exasperating and tedious on the screen, and vice versa. I am not however concerned with the success, artistic or commercial, of the films. I am concerned with their effect on the imaginations of me and my generation. Entertaining as the movies are, I don't think anyone has truly estimated the blitzing effect they have produced on our minds. One example is the council of Elrond. Be honest with yourself, if you hadn't read the small excerpt quoted above, how would you have remembered Frodo volunteering to take the ring? Was he speaking into silence, or shouting into discord? I am not too proud to admit that before re-reading I would have remembered it as the latter because that is what happened in the movie. I may have questioned whether it really happened that way in the book, but the point is that I would not have been able to tell for certain what was true to the book and what was not.
Mis-remembering the Council is one small example of why Tolkien's words are in need of Recovery. Some of my earliest memories of storytelling are my teachers reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as I ate pretzels and sipped tea during snack time. I can still remember the room with the lacquered floorboards and my teacher sitting like a troll on the rocking chair. Then at recess I, along with my friends, would kill untold numbers of orcs and goblins on the school property, sometimes creeping invisibly as Bilbo, sometimes blazing like the star of Elendil as Aragorn, sometimes as our own characters. Then, when Peter Jackson's trilogy released, it blitzed my imagination and my friends imaginations and probably our parents imaginations and very probably the imaginations of our cats and dogs. My mind's eye accepted the form of the films and never recovered. I abandoned Aragorn and my own creations for Orlando Bloom's impossibly cool Legolas. The shadowy, mysterious Balrog of my imagination now solidified into the fiery creation of the movie. More than twenty years after the release of Peter Jackson's trilogy, it is still difficult for me to imagine the Fellowship without seeing Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood and Sean Astin and Viggo and Orlando and Rhys-Davies and Monaghan and Boyd, or to remember the Council of Elrond without also remembering that one does not simply walk into Mordor. I do not think this is an uncommon experience. Lord of the Rings memes are now common parlance, and all fans (and even non-fans) acknowledge it as the father of the fantasy that is now popular and profitable, which would lead one to think that we all remember it very well. We don't, unless we re-read it.
“Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity,” wrote Dallas Willard, and The Lord of the Rings has proved his words true. I was genuinely worried when I started re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring, whether I would be able to recover a pure experience of the book, and my fears were justified. In beloved movie scenes, such as Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday, my imagination would slip into the images of the film like a wagon wheel on a well-worn track. Only by reading paragraphs repeatedly and straining to focus on the words, was I able to recover a quality of imagination that was truly engaging with the page instead of re-calling the movie. By 'quality,' I do not mean quality as in hierarchy, but quality as in description. Reading induced imagination differs from film induced imagination. The language of the screen, as James Baldwin once wrote, “is the language of our dreams.” The images float in front of us like fairy dust, intoxicating and wonderful in their manifestation, so that even terrible performances can create a mesmerizing spell. Yet when we try to describe them apart from the screen, they feel hollow. We cannot properly convey the experience, though they burn in our imaginations like the sun in our retinas. Reading, on the other hand, is an experience created and maintained entirely by the reader. The words are simply the medium of transmission. While film must rely on illusion and trickery, so that a reveal of its conceit can break the spell, books have the conceit written right on the cover: “by so-and-so.” This analogy cannot carry us any further than this: The quality of imagination created by film is dreamlike, the quality of imagination created by reading is memorylike.
There is a sense, when reading, and especially so when reading The Lord of the Rings, that we have lived the story rather than dreamed it. I was relieved to discover, after getting back into the book, that I was able to recover this sense apart from my retina-burned movie memories. The images from the film became as two dimensional as actual film on a reel, and I could push it out of the way to reveal the actual world (the world of Tolkien's original words), that the film was shot on. This took work, but it became easier as I read. First, because there are a great deal of scenes that are not adapted by the movies; Second, because the human mind is plastic and adaptable. Just as the Hobbits learned to tighten their belts and go without elevenses, so my mind learned to go without the film.
But what, specifically, are we recovering? I have chosen three examples to share. Before I do, I want to clarify that while these recoveries inevitably make comparisons to the films, they do not make value judgements about the films. I like the movies, but at the end of it all, I do not like them as much as I love the books.
The first recovery is the recovery of the Hobbits as mature characters. In the films the Hobbits are played more as naive children, with Merry and Pippin relegated almost exclusively to comic relief. There are moments of maturity, but they are singular. This is most stark in the hobbits' flight from the Shire. While the film captures the terror of the ringwraiths, there is little time left over for the hobbits to be themselves, and the medium's demand for levity and bombast leaves Merry and Pippin stealing carrots and lettuces (an occupation, in the book, for infant hobbits), and all four tumbling down slopes like cartoon characters. Frodo's flight in print, by contrast, is well planned. He disguises it by moving out of Bag End, a plan advised by Gandalf rather than commanded, and a plan in which Merry and Pippin are instrumental (rather than playful tag-alongs). They don't sneak through farmer Maggot's fields, they ask him permission, and he ends up giving them a ride to the ferry. The ringwraiths, or Dark Riders, as they are called, creep more steadily out of shadow to become the terrifying figures they are. Their reveal is less dramatic in print, and would have been lackluster on screen if it was “faithfully” adapted, but on the page it allows them to take shape in the reader's mind as a more mysterious and gradually discovered threat. This not only allows the effect to be more like memory and less like dream, it also allows the hobbits to maintain a level of maturity as they make decisions about where to sleep and how much food to bring. They seem more like adults coming to grips with a rising crisis, and less like children chased by nightmares. This effect holds true throughout the rest of the story. Sam and Frodo never fight or bicker like they do in the third film. Pippin's mistake in Moria is less directly connected with the attraction of the goblins and the Balrog, and Gandalf forgives him after the infamous “fool of a Took!” The main point is not that the hobbits are not mischievous and uneducated about the ways of the world, but that they are not treated like children. The hobbits are small but not young.
The second recovery is the recovery of Tolkien's poetry and whimsy. Indeed, a modern reader gets the impression that The Lord of the Rings, besides being an epic story, is really a trick played by Tolkien to insert a fraction of the thousands of lines of poetry that he wrote about Middle Earth. It is difficult to go more than two chapters without running into a poem or a song. Some find it charming and enriching, others find it tedious and silly. No matter the effect, it is important to understand that Tolkien came from a background that venerated epic poems: Beowulf, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost. For Tolkien and his contemporaries the epic poem was the ultimate art form. Writing a novel was something of a cop out. In this context the vast amount of poetry in The Lord of the Rings makes more sense, as does the great depth of background content that has since been published by Tolkien's son. Middle Earth was not just a convenient place to write a bestselling fantasy novel, it was an escape, a world that Tolkien could inhabit when he was in the trenches or at home or anywhere he longed for self expression beyond the mortal world. It is this longing and love for language that gave us elvish, and lends The Lord of the Rings a solid denseness that subsequent fantasies seem to lack. In another fantasy book, Sam's elvish words outside the lair of Shelob would just be a pretty sounding con language, but in The Two Towers they are words with real meaning and real etymology. Like real words, there is a sense that they have been formed by sweat and blood, so that, though the reader cannot possibly understand them, they shine from the page almost as brightly as Galadriel's vial itself:
A Elbereth Gilthoniel
o menel palan-diriel
le nallon sí di'nguruthos!
A tiro nin, Fanuilos!
(The Choices of Master Samwise, 729)[^4]
Of all the missed opportunities of the films, to me the most glaring is the comparative lack of poetry and song. There are a few renditions, to which we are all in debt to Billy Boyd and Viggo Mortensen and Enya, and Howard Shore's soundtrack is something of a miracle — but there is still so much more that could have been. Admittedly, there are probably many more musical adaptions of which I am unaware, but it would have been beautiful to see the passion and production of the films brought to bear on more of what is in the pages. Thankfully the poetry can be recovered by re-reading the pages, along with the imaginative whimsy that goes hand in hand with it.
By imaginative whimsy I do not simply mean charm, I mean the whimsy of imagination that takes hold of a writer when they are writing fantasy. Little things, such as the water outside Lothlorien that washes the weariness of travel from Frodo's feet as he wades through it; or when Legolas hears the lament of the stones of Hollin; or how the doors to Denethor seem to open by themselves. It is almost as if Tolkien, in trying to paint the tree of The Lord of the Rings, could not help adding more and more leaves.[^3] This is a phenomenon that anyone who sits down to write fiction, especially fantasy fiction, can relate to. No sooner do we finish tying up the loose ends created by a flight of fancy than our imagination wants to invent another. Good fantasy seems to lie in the balance of tension between this force of whimsy, which is really responsible for almost all delightful storytelling, and a stubborn commitment to ground that whimsy to truth (or what is true to human experience). By re-reading, we can recover the tension between these two pillars of storytelling, one of which has been knocked over by the films.
III. The Last Recovery
“Alas! There are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,” said Gandalf.
“I fear it may be so with mine,” said Frodo. “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”
Gandalf did not answer.
(Homeward Bound, 289)
The last recovery that I would like to mention is the recovery of the proper ending of the book. If you have made it this far in the essay (thank you!), you may have been screaming at me about the omitted scenes from the films that we can recover, like Tom Bombadil and Quickbeam et al. I have passed over many of these for the sake of length (and so that other readers may recover them for themselves), and because I wanted to focus, mainly, on the differences that the media effect on our imagination — a comparison that requires us to dwell on scenes that occur in both media — but this omitted chapter (and what it adds to the ending) is so important to me that I have saved it for last. It is the recovery of the Scouring of the Shire.
When the hobbits return to the Shire, after parting with many a dear friend, they are not welcomed. Instead, they find their homes in disarray, and the Shire under terror of Big People. The four hobbits, rather than call their very powerful friends for help, are able to mobilize the Shire and overthrow their oppressors. Whether it was part of Tolkien's originally planned arc, or inspired by his experience as a veteran of a wold war, or both, is besides the point. Tolkien, in spite of his belief in a happy ending (or eucatastrophe, as he calls it in On Fairy-Stories), nevertheless grounds his own happy ending in a realistic and harrowing anti-climax. This makes the happiness more real, and again, less dreamlike. It reflects a worldview that hopes for the eternal and recognizes that no matter what fantasies might be fulfilled in life and story, they will never wholly be fulfilled until the next life. Having reached for the Lord of the Rings out of a longing for more than this life, both Tolkien and the reader are left still longing.
This longing for and recognition of what even the most finely wrought treasures of life and story can never give us is, perhaps, what is most in need of Recovery. For there is an inherent assumption in the label of fantasy that the fantasy is the fulfillment of our most secret and wildest desires. This is corroborated by the way we use the word “fantasy”, sexual or otherwise. If something is a fantasy, there is a sense that we will never be able to fulfill it, yet this is what makes us desire it. The ending of The Lord of the Rings, the originator of the Fantasy genre, in setting our gaze beyond the farthest shore, points the reader towards the fountainhead of longing that created it. It is at that fountainhead where our fantasies will finally be fulfilled, for in re-reading The Lord of the Rings this reader discovered that it was not the story that was in need of recovery, but himself. I needed to recover my memories and the source of the impulse that gave birth to The Lord of the Rings — the impulse for life beyond what we can see. A life beyond Middle Earth. A life that comes after the Last Recovery.
Footnotes
[1] In fact Tolkien himself contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary. Read more here
[2] In Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches, the Sneetches with stars on their bellies exclude the ones who don't. When a sly conman produces a machine to stamp stars on those with plain bellies, the star bellies decide they want plain, and the conman produces a star-off machine. The sneetches go round and round, stamping stars and unstamping them, until the conman has taken all their money.
[3] Like Niggle, in Tolkien's short story, Leaf by Niggle. Niggle is a painter who never finishes the large painting of a tree that he is working on because he is always adding leaves to it.
[4] Translation according to Wikipedia:
“O Elbereth Starkindler
from heaven gazing far
to thee I cry here beneath the shadow of death!
O look towards me, Everwhite!”
Works Cited
J R R Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
J R R Tolkien. The Tolkien Reader. New York, Ballantine Books, 2001. “On Fairy-Stories.” p. 77. “Leaf by Niggle.”
Seuss, Dr. The Sneetches and Other Stories. London, Harpercollins Children’s Books, 2017.
Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy : Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. New York, Harperone, 2018.
Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. Edited by Toni Morrison, New York, Library Of America, 1998, p. 504. The Devil Finds Work Chapter 1.
#essay #Tolkien #fantasy #lotr
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