Janet Brennan Croft

This book misses the point almost as much as Peter Jackson did.

That statement needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We cannot be absolutely certain why J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. (Note that his reasons were not the same as the motivations for The Silmarillion, which was intended to be the backdrop for his invented languages and is an anthology of tales. The Lord of the Rings is a single romance, and romances have, or should have, something to teach us.) We think the story was partly a commentary on power corrupting. On the hopelessness of a world without a divine redeemer -- the history of Middle-earth is a "long defeat." We know that Tolkien wanted to create a "mythology for England." So any of those might be "the explanation" for The Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien's most important point, I think (following Tom Shippey and other scholars greater than I) is to stress the "Theory of Courage" -- the need to do the right thing even when there is no hope, no clear way forward, and no sign of a reward. Frodo Baggins goes on an dangerous, brutal quest -- and fails, and is rescued by providence (a providence that only acts because of his earlier good deeds). He tries to go home again, and he can't. He no longer belongs at home, or anywhere in the world. But the world was saved because of him. His hope to escape his burden has echoes elsewhere: "Let this cup pass from me. But not as I will, but as you will."

So any adaption of The Lord of the Rings, to be true to the point, must show the Theory of Courage. Peter Jackson was true to the Theory of Appealing to Whoever Buys the Most Movie Tickets. The result does not impress me. But I was never the movie's target market anyway. (I probably am Tolkien's personal target: a student of medieval romance, like Tolkien himself; a folklorist; deeply interested in language.) This book, in a way, is an attempt to start a conversation between the two sides -- to let the book-readers understand the movie-goers, and vice versa.

Editor Croft was perhaps not the best to take on this task -- like me, she doesn't think much of the movies. There are essays that approve of the movie adaption, but more that don't. The most typical complaints are (1) That, in the movie, the role of Arwen has been completely rewritten, (2) that Aragorn's personality is different, (3) that the hobbits are infantile, (4) that Gimli isn't taken seriously, and (5) that most of the changes are not needed. (The absence of the Tom Bombadil sequence, while repeatedly mentioned, isn't as roundly condemned, probably because it isn't really integral to the plot. If something had to go, that was a logical thing.) (1) through (3) are patently true, and I'd say the others are, too. But you can't just say, "Bad, bad, bad!" and ask someone to believe you. You need to say what would be better. And we know that what Tolkien was trying to offer was the Theory of Courage. But that nowhere comes up in this book. Instead, we get constant shrieks of irritation. A typical example is David Bratman's "Summa Jacksonica: A Reply to Defenses of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films, after St. Thomas Aquinas." This is three dozen pages that really boils down to little more than an endless refrain of "I don't like it." I don't like it, either. I don't think the Tolkien estate should have licensed the story to Jackson -- not without a veto on the script, anyway. It's not as if the family were short of money! But this book, although it tries to discuss both what Jackson did right and what he did wrong, really doesn't have much to offer. If you want to change something, you need to offer something to change it to!

[Update 5/27/2018: This review was one of those affected by the Great 2018 Data Glitch. All the paragraph returns were lost. I've put some back in, but this may not be quite the same as it was before. The text is unchanged.]… (més)

It's quality, not quantity, that counts.

One of the strongest criticisms of the books of J. R. R. Tolkien -- apart from the fact that critics fail to realize that they are romances, not novels, and should be judged by the standards of medieval romance, not modern novels -- is that they don't contain many women. The purpose of this book is to argue that, although women are rare, they are vital to the work of Tolkien.

I can't say that this point is indisputable, since it's disputed, but I think the evidence for this view is strong. It's not unusual to see women be rare in romance -- taking a not-so-random example, the greatest English-language romance of all, Chaucer's Franklin's Tale (which gave Tolkien one of his personal mottos) has four major characters. Only one of them, Dorigen, is female. But without Dorigen, there would have been no Tale.

Of course, Dorigen is rather a weak reed of a character. But is anyone going to claim that Lúthien, or Galadriel, or Éowyn, is a weak reed? Beautiful, yes, and judged by beauty-contest standards -- but that's the stuff of romance. As one author pointed out, of Tolkien's guardian powers, several (notably Varda) are "female." And, as John Rateliffe notes, in real life a disproportionate share of Tolkien's advanced students were women -- at a time when sexism was still so strong that one of them, Simone d'Ardenne, felt the need to publish as S. R. O. d'Ardenne to hide her sex. Furthermore, this was at a time when Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis was still giving his female characters orders to submit to their husband's orders in marriage! Tolkien was not a feminist, but this book makes clear that he respected women and considered them fully intellectually equal to men. (And, for someone like Tolkien, that's the attribute that counts!) Were they part of his armies? No. But neither were they part of the armies that fought the World Wars; he followed the convention of the time.

Not every essay in this book is good. Melissa A. Smith's article on War Brides would have benefitted from having a lot less on one particular war bride (Ruth Fuller) and a lot more on the whole folklore phenomenon of wives who fought alongside their husbands. ("The Soldier Maid." "Jackie Monroe." "The Female Rambling Sailor." "William Taylor." Some of these have the women end up high officers, and on merit!) And as for Leslie A. Donovan's piece on valkyries -- well, if anything you don't find in your back yard is a valkyrie, which seems to be her definition, then yes, Tolkien is full of valkyries. But to look to valkyries as a characterization of a woman giving gifts (Galadriel, or Éowyn again) is just perverse. This is Tolkien we're talking about; think Wealhþeow in Beowulf, Dr. Donovan! I eventually stopped reading that particular essay, which surely managed to get in only because it's by the book's editor (and a high power in the publishing house, too).

But these are exceptions. Most of the essays are scholarly, and highly relevant, and prove their point: Tolkien wasn't neglecting women. He honored women. They simply were part of another realm.… (més)