The Great Tolkien Reread: Introduction

"The Doors of Durin" by J.R.R. Tolkien

This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues.

It's Hannukah, and for me this has always been a time to revisit The Lord of the Rings. I don't reread it every year, but always when the candles are lit and the days grow darker, I find myself feeling the urge to return to this story. It was on a Hannukah in my early teens that I first received a copy of The Lord of the Rings (my American-born mother practiced the protective coloration habit of American Jews of exchanging small gifts on each night of the holiday). Having listened to her read The Hobbit many times as a younger child, the gift represented both the next chapter in a story I had adored, and a show of faith in my ability to tackle such a gargantuan work of fiction. It remains, among several others, a gift that has shaped me as a reader and a fan.

I've reread The Lord of the Rings many times since that first winter, each time finding more in it, and also finding the wherewithal to go deeper into it. It wasn't until my second or third reread, for example, that I bothered with the appendices. And it's only in the last half-decade that I've paid more attention to The Silmarillion and other works of Tolkien marginalia, all of which change the character of the book in ways both subtle and substantial. On my last few rereads, I've found myself thinking that I'd like to write something about the book, and increasingly, that there was too much to say, and of too diffuse a nature, to sum up in an essay. What about a chapter-by-chapter reread, I thought?

But for someone who has been maintaining a blog for twenty years, I can be pretty slow when it comes to bringing reading projects into fruition, and in the time that I was dithering over this idea, two different groups of my acquaintance decided to do exactly the same thing. On the blog A Reader of Else, Roseanna Pendlebury has been reporting on her and her partner, Ed Morland's, deliberate progress through the book, from the perspective of readers who know Middle Earth primarily through Peter Jackson's movies. The podcast Shelved by Genre, which featured excellent seasons on William Gibson and Alan Moore this year, has announced that it will dedicate all of 2026 to Tolkien, beginning with The Hobbit. And these are, of course, only two examples in the robust, growing field of Tolkien-focused conversation.

It's worth considering why Tolkien, a century-old author whose work is more than a little old-fashioned, is experiencing this sort of resurgence of critical attention. One of the reasons, in fact, that I held off on my idea of a Lord of the Rings essay series for so long was the belief that Tolkien was fully processed—his place in the canon assured, his shortcomings thoroughly acknowledged. But looking back at the changes that fandom's reaction to the man and his work have undergone, even since I started reading it, I'm no longer sure that's true.

When I first read Tolkien in the mid-90s, it was decades after The Lord of the Rings's emergence as a darling of the counterculture, and its inevitable cooptation and processing into a commercial product—into the bedrock of role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and the quarry from which imitators like Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan withdrew their building materials. A backlash—exemplified by Michael Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh" (1978), and later expanded upon by China Miéville in several essays and interviews—helped to articulate some of the key problems in the text, primarily its unexamined racism. Authors like George R.R. Martin set themselves up as Tolkien's successors by calling out specific blinds spots and lacunae in his writing, promising to address them in their own work.

None of which is to say that Tolkien was in bad odor when I started reading him. He was, and for some time continued to be, a colossus of the fantasy genre, a fixed point against which any author seeking to write epic fantasy had to measure themselves (this, I think, is no longer quite the case). At the same time, there was also a thread of fond contempt running through the fandom's attitude towards him. The movies, if anything, froze this reaction in amber. They are a rare case of an adaptation that is both very good and almost entirely faithful (there are slim but significant points where they miss the book's intent, but these are often extremely subtle). Which means that, twenty years after their debut, there is an entire generation of Tolkien fans who understand The Lord of the Rings quite well without ever having read it.

As a result, I think that a popular perception has solidified around Tolkien. He is a savant—these days we might say neurodivergent—who just wanted to document his made-up philology and somehow backed into writing one of the most exciting adventure stories of the twentieth century. He writes great battle scenes but can't hack people. His morality is simplistic, his worldbuilding ungrounded (what was Aragorn's tax policy?). And for every Helm's Deep, there are endless passages of poetry or landscape description which all but the most masochistic reader can skip.

There are any number of reasons, I think, why a critical mass of people have started reading Tolkien and pushing against this received wisdom. Hollywood's increasingly desperate attempts to wring more cash out of this franchise; the collapse of Martin's counter-narrative following the disappointing ending of Game of Thrones and his own failure to complete A Song of Ice and Fire; the seemingly endless stream of politicians and executives who appear determined to demonstrate that you can read a book without understanding it. Perhaps most importantly, the diminution of Tolkien's influence over the genre has paradoxically made him more interesting. Now that there are more works of epic fantasy starring people other than straight white men, set in worlds not necessarily derived from medieval Europe, focusing more on issues of geopolitics and the social sciences, and less in thrall to the concept of inborn nobility, it is perhaps easier to take Tolkien as a single data point rather than Miéville's "wen on the arse of fantasy literature." A lot of people, I think, are going back to the source material and discovering that it is richer, stranger, and more complex than its reputation. And then they're writing about it.

All of which might mean that I could just leave them to it. But I've found that the more people talk about The Lord of the Rings, the more I want to do the same. The more I want to put into words what has become increasingly clear to me every time I return to this novel: that this is an intentional work. That one does not accidentally write a novel this complex and satisfying. That just because a story's morality is simple does not make the story itself simple. That Tolkien was an author of profound, often stunning craftsmanship, for which he is rarely given credit. (And also, yes, that there are deep flaws in this novel that strike me more powerfully every time I read it; we will get to that too.)

My current plan is to proceed leisurely through The Lord of the Rings, but to segue occasionally to other works in what I will try not to call the Legendarium. These will include The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and, if I feel like it, some deeper cuts such as Unfinished Tales and The Children of Húrin. I might even get really wild and crack open the copy of The Monsters and the Critics that has been sitting on my shelf for twenty years. My goal isn't to write chapter-by-chapter summaries so much as a series of short essays on topics that each chapter evokes. I will aim for a new installment every two weeks, usually discussing a single chapter, though I can already tell that some chapters will require more than one post, while others will end up in larger groupings.

In fact, since we're already here, let's take a moment to talk about the prefatory material to The Lord of the Rings—to the second edition, that is, the only one that you are likely to find unless you happen to track down a rare used copy. For the most part, this is an engaging but hardly essential discussion of the book's genesis and composition process, as well as the reactions that Tolkien has received from readers and reviewers. It features some of the wit that he is rarely given credit for—"Some who have read the book, or at any rate 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". There is what is called a prologue but is actually a potted history of hobbits, including an explanation of how they happened to cultivate pipe weed (to be clear, the perception of Tolkien as a man who cared about things that very few other people cared about is not without foundation). It also includes the by-now famous refutation of the theory that the book may be read as an allegory for WWII, featuring this passage, which never fails to stop me in my tracks.

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of his time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle Earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

Well, don't hold back, John Ronald Reuel. This is, to blunt, an absolutely mind-boggling paragraph. Even if we read the Ring into it as the atom bomb, it is hard to map its events onto those of the war. Which is perhaps Tolkien's point—perhaps he is simply paying those who insist on reading the novel as an allegory back in their own coin. But there is a sudden outburst of bitterness and cynicism in this passage that seems to me to run deeper than mere needling. I can't untangle it, but it feels like a reminder that an author is not their work. Tolkien wrote the great heroic work that is The Lord of the Rings—and as he goes on to say, his experiences in both world wars inevitably affected that writing—but that doesn't mean that he is summed up by it, as a writer, or a thinker. As we will see later in this series, bitterness and cynicism have their place in Middle Earth, even as its creator tries to fight against them.

Next time: The story begins with "A Long-Expected Party" 

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