Leaving the Gray Havens
Middle-Earth on the Skids
Dearest readers, sometimes it just doesn’t come together. I’ve been plugging away at a lofty piece about hurricanes and political instability and technological alienation, but when I looked at it this morning I discovered someone had removed all my brilliant ideas and replaced them with shredded corndogs and SpaghettiOs®. It happens.
My archives seemed particularly bare given how mercilessly I plundered them last summer—mostly the cupboards are filled with small fragments of pieces, some of which I have to admit are kinda funny (“Apropos of nothing, would any of you be the least bit surprised if Georgia Governor Brian Kemp spit tobacco juice into a Dixie cup during a presser?”) but most show strong evidence of intoxication and don’t really amount to much more than the literary equivalent of a pan of bacon fat.
But lo, there in the back, sandwiched between a long rambling description of sundry types of lutes and an unfunny attempt to create a set of aphorisms like those of Nietzche had Nietzche been trying to write an aphorism-a-day desk calendar, I found a jewel whose time has come, given the imminent reduction of the great John Ronald Reuel Tolkien to the cinnamon bun papasan of media genres: the television series. This from the company that wired the world supply chain directly to our brains so that we can get that new dildo within twenty-four hours of twitching a finger in response to some fleeting desire. I speak, of course, of Amazon.1 God speed you! Black Emperor2
My love affair with Tolkien is over. Dead. As dead as Tolkien himself. It’s all over—to mangle a phrase—but the screening. Which I will probably dutifully watch as one might a burial. Whatever. In any event, I don’t think I could have written this piece this week. Or last month. Or last year. I wrote it during my last days with Tolkien and then tucked it away presumably for this moment. Enjoy.
Oh, and I won’t be doing a Star Trek review this week. Do you really have to ask why?
I’ve read The Lord of the Rings more times than I care to admit. Although I may occasionally be spotted indulging in odd corners of what some folks term geek- or nerd-culture, I rue the words. Once used to inflict harm on bespectacled and sports-averse mid- and post-adolescent victims, the monikers enjoyed a brief ascendancy when my D&D-playing, TRS-80-programming, Doctor Who-watching ilk found their way into a world that turned out to have a gaping hole exactly in the shape of their ideas. But then, if I may risk sounding bitter, they went mainstream. By the time my own kids began to develop opinions on the culture that had been handed to them, geek and nerd had become an umbrella over virtually every corner of human life, including sports (e.g. fantasy; baseball, football, NASCAR, cheese rolling, etc.). It’s as the though the word “passion” had been abducted by aliens and needed replacing.
Passion is, of course, what I’m talking about, and passion stands in stark contradistinction to the aspect that galls me most about the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of English; the facet that causes me to admit my love for Tolkien even in this late era with a red face. I’m talking of their cloying egalitarianism.
I’m not knocking equality broadly, but in matters of culture I’m a die-hard meritocracist. Say what you will about the virtues of crowd-sourcing; crowds are what gave us everything from the Nuremberg rallies to Ten-Cent Beer Night. Carrying an uneven picture of the world around, then, makes for some awkwardness standing in the crowd at the DragonCon parade each year watching legions of also-ran comic book characters and steampunk-themed Si-Fy channel mish-mash marching alongside phalanxes of portly Gandalfs. Hell, even a single Gandalf or hobbit or elf with their heavy metal hair and prosthetic pointy ears seems to me as out of place as would a battalion of Huck Finns and Jims with bare feet and straw hats or a mob of Hamlets all darting around poking swords at the crowd or peering into the hollow depths of plastic skulls.
There’s an unspoken line drawn around certain cultural products; a mass illusion that they are all of a kind with Battlestar Galactica and Xena: Warrior Princess, ostensibly because of the supposed commonality of subject matter—entirely because of that commonality in fact, though 2001 and Beowulf are inexplicably absent. It’s a lot like war reenactments: the American Civil War is a hoedown in blue and gray. Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking, not so much. And who draws the line? Presumably Justice Potter Stewart, who knows it when he sees it.
In the past several years a fair bit of this sort of anodyne nerd culture has begun to inhabit my mind, crowding out some worthwhile stuff like expanding foam insulation. I won’t lie: I saw Peter Jackson’s movies, and for the most part I liked them (though his adaptation of The Hobbit is reprehensible garbage, and any self-respecting lover not just of Tolkien but of movies in general should admit this and campaign viscerally agin it). As time went by, the much more easily digested visions of Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen began to spring more readily to mind than the linguistic constructs that had occupied their places previously. What could be wrong with that? Fine actors, the both of them.
I didn’t give it much thought until a few weeks ago, when I decided my son was old enough to appreciate the novel, and I began to read it to him. Like I said, I’ve read it myself an embarrassing number of times. Mostly in my youth, when I was wont to read a book several times in a row, as rapidly as possible. Since then, I’ve mainly revisited it in the interest of sharing it with others. I am a proponent of reading aloud; a dying art whose only remaining place in our world seems to be church and poetry slams. And this book I’ve read aloud to more than a couple girlfriends, including the woman who became my wife. I should note that all of them seemed to enjoy it. One Christmas about ten years ago, in fact, my wife bought me a new edition of The Lord of the Rings, bound and boxed in a deep claret and combining all three volumes into a single tome with a wonderful heft and feel. (My joke is that it has the words of Frodo in red.) So I read it again. Then, when my daughter was old enough, I read it to her. And now, finally, my son.
It’s worth noting that when Tolkien was writing this book, there was no fantasy section in bookstores. He didn’t have movie rights in mind; he wasn’t writing to a marketer’s genre. His models were the ancient English and Scandinavian epics that were the meat of his day job as a professor at Oxford and later Merton College. Was he hoping to produce one of the best-selling novels of all time? Well, he may have had ambitions for its popularity, but he clearly wasn’t in any hurry—the book took him 12 years to write, and was simply one movement in a drama he spent some 55 years on. It was basically a linguist’s version of a model railroad layout. The output of all those years was two books, plus one published posthumously. Middle-earth, I think was not so much about action figures and a never-ending fount of sequels—rather it was an imaginary playground for a curious man with a lot of very odd obsessions. How we got from that to films costing hundreds of billions of dollars is a real grade-A stumper.
Anyway, to me Tolkien’s work and my long association with it carries a lot of emotional weight, and I find myself growing more sensitive to it as time goes by. We reached Moria a few days ago, and it was with no small difficulty that I read of Gandalf’s struggle against the Balrog [spoiler warning]. I had to swallow the hitch in my throat as Gandalf plunged into the chasm.
What is that? I know perfectly well that Gandalf is coming back in The Two Towers. I can go there any time I like. I can go back to The Hobbit. Gandalf’s existence is fixed on the page, and all of his moments are equally accessible, in a way in which the moments of my grandmother’s life, say, no longer are. In truth, Gandalf is just a bunch of words, as still and lifeless as a bug in amber. What do I care about those words in particular? I knew they were coming and I know they are sitting there on the shelf behind me even now.
Of course, it’s the act of reading that gives life to words, and reading is a temporal thing. You read, and then you’re done reading. Gandalf may die every time I read that passage, but for a while he lives in my imagination, as familiar as any friend I’ve known—perhaps moreso, since he lives only in my imagination. And that explains why his death is so freighted: there’s a good chance that this will be the last time I read this book. I’ve run out of people to share it with, and there are too many other books waiting unread for me to spend any more of my own limited time with it. Shit people, this may be the last time I see Gandalf alive.
Therein lies some of the greatness of The Lord of the Rings—it is a book suffused with melancholy acceptance of its own borders. The struggle between Good and Evil is the easy theme of the book, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Tolkien, a devout Christian, clearly recognized, as I maybe his friend C.S. Lewis did not, that this struggle, even while it precipitates suffering and unhappiness, animates our very purpose. Life is that struggle, and when the struggle ends, so does life.
This must have been an interesting contradiction for a man who believed in an eternal life after death, but he surely viewed it with a measure of sadness. His beloved elves, whose languages form the backbone of the entire legendarium, are wistful about their long, slow decline and incipient departure from Middle-earth. The sense of loss even in the face of victory is stark in The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn expresses it best, standing on the crest of the great hill of Cerin Amroth in Lothlorien, speaking to Frodo shortly before their departure from the last remaining fragment of the Elvish Eden, “... here my heart dwells forever.”
And Tolkien continues, “And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as a living man.”
