Tolkien’s lasting legacy

This year is the 50th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, and Nick Groom, a professor of literature at the University of Macau, whose previous works examined vampires, monsters, and Gothic fiction, marks the occasion with a fresh appraisal of Tolkien’s legacy in Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century (Pegasus Books).

In the first half of the book, Groom recounts Tolkien’s arduous process of bringing forth The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As a teenager, Tolkien experimented with invented languages, a lifelong passion, and eventually began inventing myths and histories—what’s called the “legendarium”—to provide a framework for his new languages. Throughout his life, Tolkien worked and reworked these stories, and Groom connects the developing legendarium with Tolkien’s academic studies in northern European literature, as well as his changing circumstances.

Tolkien’s literary trajectory shifted in 1926 when he jotted down the first lines of The Hobbit in an examination booklet. He didn’t know what hobbits were, so he wrote a children’s story to figure it out. The popularity of The Hobbit prompted Tolkien to delve further into the story of these little people, and he discovered that Bilbo’s magic ring had a greater and more sinister significance than he had thought.

Once Tolkien settled on the story of the ring, he revised subsequent editions of The Hobbit and rewrote vast portions of the legendarium. Groom shows how Tolkien’s story took on a life of its own as the ring bent the ­legendarium to its will. Tolkien never plotted his novels. He merely kept reworking them until he felt he had uncovered the truth of what happened. Groom delights in the uncertainty of this method, likening it to the com­peting narratives of contemporary discourse.

The second half of the book recounts the various attempts to adapt Tolkien’s epic. The first people to embrace this faerie story written by a stuffy Oxford don were ironically the denizens of America’s counterculture and Britain’s underground music scene. The script of one early adaptation of The Lord of the Rings featured mushroom-fueled drug trips and sex scenes. We can be thankful that script never made it to film. Groom also introduces the ­cartoon movies of the 1970s and the various BBC radio dramas before tackling Peter Jackson’s six Tolkien movies and Amazon’s recent TV series.

Groom writes with a breathless quality, piling example upon example, as if a multitude of sources will argue his thesis for him, and he writes about all the adaptations with universal approval. I would expect an English professor to offer critical analysis, but he implies that any reinterpretation of a great text is an unalloyed good. I ­suppose there’s no room for criticism in the 21st century. In an era in which we celebrate the messy uncertainty of personalized truth and shifting identity, anything goes.

Sometimes Groom works too hard at trying to make Tolkien fit contemporary social trends. He says moral ambiguity pervades Tolkien’s novels because heroes don’t always suffer ­consequences when they do wrong. For example, Bilbo lies about the ring and steals the Arkenstone. Tolkien, however, created a world informed by Judeo-Christian morality. Individuals might not suffer the direct consequences of their sin, but the whole of Middle-earth falls into disorder because of pride.

Groom briefly mentions Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism, but his exploration of religious themes in The Lord of the Rings remains feeble. He describes Tolkien’s idea of “eucatastrophe”—the unforeseen turn of events that delivers the hero from impending doom—but he never explains that Tolkien explicitly tied the concept of eucatastrophe to Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. Groom’s vision of a 21st century in which truth is uncertain can’t be reconciled with Tolkien’s faith in a certain first-century Savior.