![]() ![]() ![]() And though he discouraged readers from reading any "'allegory,' moral, political or contemporary," into the work, it's clearly the product of war years and dire times, no less so than Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, with which it shares the fantasy of total victory, the quest of the doughty individual hero against an unredeemable enemy and an obsession with magical technology, if not sexual conquest. Tolkien began the work in 1938 and wrote it throughout World War II. The first of the three volumes of "The Lord of the Rings" appeared in 1954. The dark days of 2001 are more like the days in which Tolkien wrote the book than any since. This work of hobbits and elves and wizards, innocence and far-sightedness and magic, is all about terror, it turns out, and about the difficulty of countering evil deeds. For Tolkien's book is a story of war, and its theme is one we've heard a lot about recently: the nature and power of evil. What surprised me about the novel is how current it seemed. The book is still scary, in some ways scarier than when I last read it. In a letter advising his son he wrote, "The hard spirit of concupiscence has walked down every street and sat leering in every house since Adam fell."īut never mind that. Tolkien was a devout Catholic born in the 19th century and was Victorian about matters sexual. Hobbits seem to procreate through poetry. There is, it hardly needs to be said, no sex on any of the thousand pages of the work. Tolkien the philologist wrote that the book was "fundamentally linguistic in inspiration," a story written to provide a world for his invented languages. As amazing as ever is the minutely detailed geography of Middle-earth, as well as the fully foliated language system for each of the various races in it. Tolkien was a serious and learned scholar of Anglo-Saxon myth and language, and an Oxford Don, and this, his life's work, remains monumental and beautifully written, if seriously eccentric. Evil flying things cast shadows of despair across the land, and these things, the Nazgul, still had a potency that got me through dozens of pages of elves and dwarfs. But what I recalled about the book and what I found still true was that it was scary. My friend Harry simply said he would never read a book that long that had elves in it, and I had to agree. I ended up reading the entire work, all 1,000 pages. I'd loved it when I had read it before, in the flower power era. I found one of the three volumes on a shelf and wondered what I'd think of it now. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" recently, for the moment forgetting about the three-movie hobbit extravaganza about to be visited upon us. In one of those odd zeitgeisty moments, when one finds oneself a creature of the culture without even trying, I picked up J.R.R. ![]()
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