'The Fellowship of the Ring': A Review

In Which Lots of (Unbiased) Gushing is Followed by Some (Tasteful) Fanboying, and a Bit of Analysis

The Lord of the Rings is my all-time favorite book, if we take it as one book. If we take it as three, I think The Fellowship of the Ring stands on top. It’s held that place since I first finished it, at 11 years old or thereabouts. Starting in the spring of 2018, I reread all three books slowly, finishing Fellowship in the summer. I relished every word. It was my first time through the series in at least five years, possibly seven or eight.

The descriptions of topography and flora and climate, on this time through, were much more picturable to my mind’s eye. Past readings saw me struggle to get much out of Tolkien’s descriptions (and there are a lot of them) of these things. I’d even skip over them, a phrase or two at a time; not whole paragraphs. Part of what helps me now is my delight in the Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon that he uses to describe things. To read of a ‘fir-wood’ is far nicer, somehow, at least in the Shire, than of a forest, with its Latin roots. ‘Sedge’ is a pleasure by itself, as is ‘gorse’ and ‘loam’ and ‘thicket’.

I was really pleased to find that my imaginations of many characters and scenes came right back to me from early readings, undisturbed by the films or illustrations. If anything, they were sharper and more attuned to the text. Lothlorien in particular stood out as something that I could see much better this time around. I finally had a decent picture of Caras Galadhon and the Company’s approach to it, on that white-stone road skirting the green city on the right.

This book rises above its successors for me chiefly because of the slow unveiling of the evil. The true nature and history of the Ring we learn gradually, as of its lord, Sauron, and Nine pursuers. The Black Riders in the Shire are such a vivid, terrifying image that nothing else in the series really approaches the suspense of chapters 3, 4, and 5. These three chapters form a small arc and episode of their own which might be my favorite part of the book. The coziness and distant threat of the first two chapters have given enough to launch us into the first real excitement, and yet enough is still unknown to make the threat really intimate and obscure. I don’t think anything in all the fiction I’ve read gives me the combination of thrill and comfort as does the image of a hooded rider in black on a black horse, on the top of a green ridge, espied from a dense hammock of trees below by three hobbits. (The only other thing that comes close is the simple name of ‘The Admiral Benbow Inn’, and the warning “Aye! Beware the one-legged man!”) The comforts of home cut off behind them, the unforeseen comforts of Farmer Maggot’s house and Crickhollow ahead, the adventure newly embarked upon: it almost asks for a big literary German term of its own, like bildungsroman or Luther’s Anfectungen—some word meaning a cozy terror, or a terror experienced in a safe place, like hearing a scary story indoors by the fire. This is my experience reading that scene. The hobbits, of course, would have been just plain terrified and probably full of sick dread, beginning to know that the Black Riders were really hunting them. Maybe the word exists already.

Neither The Lord of the Rings nor the Fellowship are perfect. Some of the dialogue is a bit flat and generic, capable of coming from one character’s mouth as another’s. But examples of that only come to mind from The Two Towers and Return of the King, with Gollum or some of the minor Men. In this first part, the biggest place where the gears show is in “The Shadow of the Past” where Gandalf reconstructs Smeagol’s discovery of the Ring and his falling out with Deagol. Tolkien clearly wanted to put us there just as much as in any scene we are omnisciently told of. To do this, he sacrificed the fact that Gandalf could not have known all of what was said between those two quasi-hobbits. The need for exposition overpowers the realism here. But the problem is not exposition. As I said, Tolkien wanted a real scene of Smeagol and Deagol, not just Gandalf telling us about them, and that would be totally fine. The problem is, he constructs the scene as if it’s coming through Gandalf, so we are left with an impossibly detailed recounting. It’s not much of a problem, but it does pull (and always has pulled) me out of the world a bit.

One thing that doesn't quite come through to me is the similarity between Aragorn and Gandalf, which we are told about in “Many Meetings”, by Frodo, and other places throughout the trilogy. The only real similarities I see are the fact that both characters are powerful and a bit close or mysterious toward the hobbits, and grim. But others, such as Elrond, Celeborn, even Legolas, are powerful and mysterious and come off no less grim than these two. Gandalf is tart-tongued and bristly in a way that no other character, including Aragorn, is. Aragorn comes off as grave and slow to speak, slow to any emotion, by no means the fiery curmudgeon that Gandalf is. In other words, we are told that they are similar, but I don’t really feel it. Of course, they both conceal their power under a more unassuming, derelict exterior than the others I mentioned. Maybe that’s what Tolkien had in mind.

A theme in all three books is the fading of a glorious past and the dawn of an inferior age. I don’t know what place this sentiment has in Anglo-Saxon or British antiquity, but it does seem to be part of Greek antiquity. Hesiod’s Works and Days famously describes five ages, beginning with Gold and ending in Iron. Men were said to have lessened with each age and their deeds with them. I get the feeling that an Iron Age is beginning in Middle Earth in these books, as the Elder Peoples leave and the more prosaic, humdrum races of Men and Hobbits live on. But eventually, of course, only Men will survive, and their basest works thrive. I can’t help but think of Tolkien’s time in the First World War and the British 18-pounder, made of steel (iron), by mass production for mass death. This was the future of Middle Earth. Or at least, a future like this is hinted in Tolkien’s mythopoeia. Tolkien’s feelings about this are bared in the fact that Mordor is the place with the mighty works of iron and melting heat, and that Saruman has a “mind of metal and wheels.” 

The scene I think of in this connection from the Fellowship is Frodo and Gloin’s conversation at Elrond’s table. Gloin tells the hobbit that “we cannot again make mail or blade to match those that were made before the dragon came. Only in mining and building have we surpassed the old days.”

I’ve never been able to get as excited as I felt Tolkien wanted me to be about the Elves. They are too high and remote and ethereal. Too removed. And I suppose they have to be. But I never as a kid wanted to be one of them, and I still don’t. Hobbits, yes. I would be a hobbit in an instant. Maybe if I could hear their music. We get bits of Elvish poetry in their own tongue and in English, but none of the music, which is said to be so hauntingly beautiful (as in Sam’s saying “it was the singing that went to my heart, if you know what I mean” in Chapter 3; or the enchanting effects of the music in the Hall of Fire at Rivendell in Chapter 1 of Book Two). This is one area where the film adaptations were able to complement the books and round out the world that Tolkien made. This is no slight on Tolkien. Films, by being what they are, can have sound and music, where books cannot. And some of the lovely parts of the score that Howard Shore composed do help me feel the pull of the Elvish.

A delightful and pleasing thing about the Elves is their close connection to and mysterious influence over nature. Gildor and his companions in Chapter 3 are able, in some fashion, to help a fire spring to light by singing, faces uplifted to see a great constellation rise in the night sky. Elrond has power over his valley and is able to cause the river to rise and sweep away the Black Riders in Chapter 12. And other examples abound. The Elves seem to belong to the world in a special way that no other race on Middle-Earth does. They are the firstborn on Arda, something like a middle step between angels and humans.

Much has been said about the Christian significance of The Lord of the Rings.¹ It’s certainly there. Tolkien was a Christian and that seeps out through his imagination. His creation story, the Ainulindalë, is beautiful and very close to the Biblical story.² But The Lord of the Rings should not be read as an allegory—that word that so often gets thrown around when discussing these books. Allegory, for Tolkien, was a specific genre of Medieval and Renaissance literature that has passed away, and not one that he liked. Even if it’s the case that Gandalf or Aragorn are deliberate stand-ins for Christ (and the parallels are persistent), this wouldn’t make the books an allegory. Allegory, even in our more modern and loose sense of the word, requires some special meaning behind and outside of the story itself, which the story is depicting. There is no such special meaning above and apart from the story here, on Tolkien’s own testimony.³ He wasn’t trying to condemn Nazism or pat Western civilization on the back or deride the internal combustion engine. The story is the main point. It is not a vehicle for some other real-world point, except insofar as every story is making any number of points about the real world simply by being true to it in some way.

The Fellowship of the Ring is a hard book for many modern people to get through. Many who start it, in my experience, don’t finish it. Whether this is Tom Bombadil’s fault or Peter Jackson’s is hard to say. It does take quite a while to get going, if judged by the standard of… I guess most other books. I just love it though. Unabashedly. If anything, it’s too short and hasty for me. I wish it went at a more Entish pace, so I could have more to savor. Why can’t there be an Extended Edition to the books too?

1. Tom Shippey, in his book The Road to Middle-Earth, has pointed out that Tolkien had March 25 as the date the Ring was destroyed, the traditional Anglo-Saxon date for the Crucifixion.

2. In this story, Iluvatar (God) possesses “the Flame Imperishable” or the Secret Fire, which is in some way responsible for the creation of all things. It is said to be “with Eru” (the One). Thus it can be likened to the Word of John 1:1. However, Clyde Kilby has said, in his Tolkien and the Silmarillion, that the Professor once told him the Secret Fire was the Holy Spirit. For more on all this, I recommend Jonathan McIntosh’s book The Flame Imperishable.

3. In his 1954 Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings