Dissents of an Ending

A still from the Soviet television version of Lord of the Rings, featuring what I can only assume to be Gollum?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book by J.R.R. Tolkien must be in want of a shorter ending. Maybe we can blame Peter Jackson here, whose interminable film of The Return of the King, with its solid 5 or 6 endings, was merely a warm up for the utter desolation wrought on us all by his three part version of The Hobbit (or, there and back again, and again, and again). I daresay I’ve been guilty of harboring this thought myself, both at the beginning AND end of Lord of the Rings. Couldn’t Tolkien just hurry things along a bit? Do we really need a whole chapter on the hobbit proclivity for mushrooms? Or a chapter just detailing the celebration after the final battle?

To my surprise, I found myself feeling quite differently on my most recent read through. Just yesterday I finished reading the trilogy to my three oldest children (10, 8, and almost 6; the three year old would occasionally wander in and scream at me not to read that boring stuff, though I did catch him chanting “One Ring to rule them all” to himself one day, so it can’t have been entirely wasted on him). The experience of reading a great story out loud to your children is everything they say it is, even if you have to stop every two minutes because your almost six year old wants to know the definition of a word, or is asking who just said something.

Anyway, this time around I found myself savoring every little bit of Tolkien’s ending, and not just because I didn’t want the experience to be over. Tolkien is not a great prose stylist, as many have noted before me, but he is a great craftsman, and the level of detail he pours into the ending of Lord of the Rings serves an important purpose: it brings home that this story is not merely about cosmic battles between good and evil, but about the ways in which lives and societies feel the reverberations of decisions they (often) had no hand in. In fact, I’m not sure how the pernicious untruth got started that Tolkien has a simplistic, almost Manichean view of the world. His deep attachment to myth? (But the old myths themselves are far from simplistic, especially those of the North that Tolkien knew best). His legion of subsequent acolytes, who took the forms he used and hammered them to a fine point? (But that’s hardly his fault).

Reading through this time, after a career in graduate school where my advisor was an expert in literature of World War I, I couldn’t help but be struck by the deep resonance of the end of Tolkien’s book with the aftershocks caused by the war he served in. Obviously Tolkien despised allegory and repeatedly denounced any attempts to make his books read as such, but I’m not talking about anything so strong as allegory: I’m talking about a deep sense of loss, felt in the bones, a scarring of both individuals and the lands they inhabit. Frodo returns from the war carrying some internal burden; perhaps not quite what Tolkien would have known as shell shock and what we would call PTSD, but a deep malign impression made on him by the long carrying of the ring. Even Sam, ever cheerful, feels a profound lack. Near the end, he finally has the two parts of his life he feels complete him: a marriage and family with Rosie Cotton, and the presence of Frodo. But then Frodo must leave, for the sake of his own peace, and Sam is left a half-person, something even Frodo acknowledges.

The land itself is no less ravaged, which is why Tolkien gives us not one but two chapters about attempts to restore it: first in Isengard, where the Ents labor to undo all the industrial evils of Saruman’s regime, then again in the Shire, where Saruman has attempted to repeat, in a faint echo, his ravaging of the land. In both cases, but especially in the Shire, Tolkien carefully shows the gradation of evil at play: an instigator in Saruman, but also enablers carried along by vanity (Lotho) or simply fearful inertia (the Shirriffs of the Shire). He also emphasizes that the harm done to the land cannot be instantly reversed — that destruction takes far less time than restoration. In this Tolkien shows his deeply “conservative” nature, in the original sense of that word: the facile progress of Saruman, ill conceived and ill carried out, has swept away both the natural beauty of the Shire and the long forged solidarity between its inhobbitants.

I think this desire to show the aftermath explains why Tolkien takes so long to wrap up. In his hands, it’s wrong to think of the quest of the ring as a journey there, to some discreet point where some final heavy action takes place to end the struggle forever. Instead, it is always a journey there and back again, so he follows the Hobbits as they reverse their trip, step by step, all the way back to the Shire. Along the way they must honor the dead (most notably Théoden, king of the Mark); take note of the deep bonds that have been broken; and try to envision a future where those bonds might be repaired.

That’s why the charge of moral simplicity has never made sense applied to Tolkien, however well it might describe those writing in his wake. With perhaps a few exceptions, no one is beyond either temptation or redemption. Frodo, for all his courage, would not have thrown the ring into the fires willingly; in the end the ring mastered him, and only Gollum’s unlikely intervention saved the day. Likewise, till the very end Gandalf and Frodo hold out hope that Saruman, once wise but twisted by years of power, might be brought back into the fold, be taught how to use his insight and influence once more for the cause of justice. Even the “simple” people of the Shire, remote from the main theater of battle, feel that dividing line of good and evil run shuddering through their own hearts. Those who choose evil, like Ted Sandyman, of course fall prey to Saruman’s empty promises, but, viewed from another angle, he merely works upon the envy and pride already present within them.

Lord of the Rings is far from a perfect work. But neither is it a thing disconnected from real life, or tangled up too much in its author’s arcane musings (okay, maybe once in a while). Sometimes Tolkien is accused by his critics (or praised by his fanboys) for writing stories that lift us up out of real life, that bear little relation to our world of pragmatic concerns, moral compromises, and so forth. I think a careful, close attention to his actual words, especially his endings, shows that this is simply not true. He might write about elves and dwarves, but his central concerns are decidedly human.