Tolkien's Hobbling HabitA warning for those about to read The Lord of the Rings.
By Chris MooneyPosted Wednesday, July 25, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
As the December release of the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring approaches, a full-fledged J.R.R. Tolkien literary revival is in the works. Numerous British polls have crowned Tolkien "Author of the Century." In the United States, sales of Tolkien's always popular 1953-54 novel The Lord of the Rings (of which Fellowship is the first volume) are four times what they were in 1999, partly thanks to a new movie tie-in edition released by Houghton Mifflin in June. The Tolkien phenomenon appears to be cross-generational: While professors who wore "Gandalf for President" buttons in the 1960s scribble literary defenses of Tolkien, Harry Potter readers are discovering the novel that created modern fantasy.
The Lord of the Rings has its virtues, of course: a compelling plot, a vast imaginative scope. But it's also full of poetry that is—and there's no nice way to say this—simply awful. A typical example comes from the hobbit Pippin, as he's taking a bath (seriously) in The Fellowship of the Ring:
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Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!
Tolkien is a master of generic imagery. Grass is always green in The Lord of the Rings; raiments always glimmer, and stars always shimmer. If there's a breeze, it's bound to be a "cool" or "crisp" one. His verse also suffers from an almost comedic lack of restraint. Take the character Tom Bombadil, who for almost two chapters does virtually nothing but burst into song. Bombadil is introduced by his "deep glad voice":
Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!
At the risk of fan backlash, director Peter Jackson has reportedly cut Tom Bombadil entirely from the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring—a hopeful sign that he may get tough on the rest of Tolkien's verse, too.
There's a pretty innocent explanation for all this criminally bad verse. Tolkien, a scholar of Beowulf, a translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was striving to re-create ancient, folkloric literary modes. Take this war chant from the Ents (Tolkien's walking trees) in The Two Towers:
To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;
Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars—we go to war!
As you can see, the results have none of the genuine article's grandeur. And the collateral damage of the faux-epic verse is high: The poems often put the novel's plot on hold, as characters pause to blow smoke rings and sing songs of yore.
So before the Tolkien revival leads to any children being named "Frodo," Tolkien idolaters should slow down and maybe re-watch the "Stonehenge" scene from Spinal Tap.
Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: The Fray team is still looking for the posts that say "well whoever thought it was good anyway?" Tony Adragna does a fine defense job, but one that includes sentences such as "It might be possible to distinguish good Hobbit verse from bad, but only after studying Hobbit culture and folklore. Every piece of Elven verse that I have ever read is considered by me to be high art, but I've no doubt that Elves would be more critical." And this theory--which at first we thought to be, well, not entirely serious--was shared by so many readers that it obviously constitutes a Tolkien theory of lit crit: Hobbit poetry bad, Elvish poetry good. Thrasymachus has a lovely post on Tom Bombadil ("His poetry and, indeed, his character seem, at first glance, to be truly awful, a sucking chest wound in the fabric of the book") here.
Meanwhile Jill Buckland makes the astounding claim that "the like of [the Hobbit songs] can still be heard in the shires [of England] with which Tolkien was familiar." Perhaps she means the rap version proposed by Claude Scales, below. And, still with music, Ananda Gupta has a valuable tip: he says "Celine Dion is the wrong approach" when singing Goblin songs.]
Grandmaster JRR? Some of Tolkien's verse would, I think, do quite well as rap. I'm thinking in particular of Bilbo's chant, from The Hobbit, when he puts on the ring and creates havoc among the spiders in Mirkwood; e.g.: "Old Tomnoddy, all big body, old Tomnoddy can't find me!/ Attercop! Attercop! Down you drop! [etc.]" One can easily imagine this blasting from the 300 Watt-driven speakers on an SUV cruising the local strip on a Friday night.
--Claude Scales
(To reply, click here.)
Chris, I was so with you. Your commentary on the poetry of Tolkien seemed spot on, until you took into your sights the Ents marching cadence. I'm guessing you've never called cadence to soldiers marching, and as such you can't be expected to know a good cadence even if it stomped up to you and kicked your teeth out. From the perspective of one, who has actually marched troops armed for war, this is a fine march indeed. If you can appreciate Tolkein's prose and suspend your disbelief enough to accept giant trees stomping off to war, certainly this heroic march would make your hot blood race through your veins just to hear it!
--Kelley
(To reply, click here.)
These books were children's stories, which were recast in the type of epic poetry when written down. Ever since Eleanor of Aquitaine got bored and started commissioning bad poetry we have had stories with people randomly bursting into song. And she was following in the large footsteps of Homer, Sappho, and Virgil. And anyone who has been forced to sit through an episode of Sesame Street knows the value of songs, poetry, and lyrics when telling stories…
Our society is full of references to literature and movies. These stories are the common language of our society--sort of our version of Shakespearean idiom. Countless books and movies refer to each other as a sort of storytelling short hand. If people don't have the referent to go with the references made, they miss out. Anyone who doubts this should try to show a Monty Python movie to a British humor newbie, or take a five year old to see The Emperor's New Groove.
I am appalled by the numbers of people who through lacking this knowledge "don't get it". I watched Atlantis this summer with my children and some of my eldest son's friends and their parents. The difference between my children's impression of the movie and their friends was very telling to me. My children have heard me read Around the World in 80 Days, and the John Carter books, and other examples of that "Adventurer's Club" genre that was so popular in the late 1800's/early 1900's. They loved the movie. Their friends (and all but one of the parents) who have no experience with the genre, though it was flat and incomprehensible. Or to put the shoe on the other foot, until I showed them My Fair Lady, my children didn't get half the jokes in Miss Congeniality.
For better or for worse, epic style is part of our cultural landscape. Anyone got a copy of The Green Knight Mr. Mooney can borrow?
--MsZilla
(To reply, click here.)
(7/25)
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: The Fray team is still looking for the posts that say "well whoever thought it was good anyway?" Tony Adragna does a fine defense job, but one that includes sentences such as "It might be possible to distinguish good Hobbit verse from bad, but only after studying Hobbit culture and folklore. Every piece of Elven verse that I have ever read is considered by me to be high art, but I've no doubt that Elves would be more critical." And this theory--which at first we thought to be, well, not entirely serious--was shared by so many readers that it obviously constitutes a Tolkien theory of lit crit: Hobbit poetry bad, Elvish poetry good. Thrasymachus has a lovely post on Tom Bombadil ("His poetry and, indeed, his character seem, at first glance, to be truly awful, a sucking chest wound in the fabric of the book") here.
Meanwhile Jill Buckland makes the astounding claim that "the like of [the Hobbit songs] can still be heard in the shires [of England] with which Tolkien was familiar." Perhaps she means the rap version proposed by Claude Scales, below. And, still with music, Ananda Gupta has a valuable tip: he says "Celine Dion is the wrong approach" when singing Goblin songs.]
Grandmaster JRR? Some of Tolkien's verse would, I think, do quite well as rap. I'm thinking in particular of Bilbo's chant, from The Hobbit, when he puts on the ring and creates havoc among the spiders in Mirkwood; e.g.: "Old Tomnoddy, all big body, old Tomnoddy can't find me!/ Attercop! Attercop! Down you drop! [etc.]" One can easily imagine this blasting from the 300 Watt-driven speakers on an SUV cruising the local strip on a Friday night.
--Claude Scales
(To reply, click here.)
Chris, I was so with you. Your commentary on the poetry of Tolkien seemed spot on, until you took into your sights the Ents marching cadence. I'm guessing you've never called cadence to soldiers marching, and as such you can't be expected to know a good cadence even if it stomped up to you and kicked your teeth out. From the perspective of one, who has actually marched troops armed for war, this is a fine march indeed. If you can appreciate Tolkein's prose and suspend your disbelief enough to accept giant trees stomping off to war, certainly this heroic march would make your hot blood race through your veins just to hear it!
--Kelley
(To reply, click here.)
These books were children's stories, which were recast in the type of epic poetry when written down. Ever since Eleanor of Aquitaine got bored and started commissioning bad poetry we have had stories with people randomly bursting into song. And she was following in the large footsteps of Homer, Sappho, and Virgil. And anyone who has been forced to sit through an episode of Sesame Street knows the value of songs, poetry, and lyrics when telling stories…
Our society is full of references to literature and movies. These stories are the common language of our society--sort of our version of Shakespearean idiom. Countless books and movies refer to each other as a sort of storytelling short hand. If people don't have the referent to go with the references made, they miss out. Anyone who doubts this should try to show a Monty Python movie to a British humor newbie, or take a five year old to see The Emperor's New Groove.
I am appalled by the numbers of people who through lacking this knowledge "don't get it". I watched Atlantis this summer with my children and some of my eldest son's friends and their parents. The difference between my children's impression of the movie and their friends was very telling to me. My children have heard me read Around the World in 80 Days, and the John Carter books, and other examples of that "Adventurer's Club" genre that was so popular in the late 1800's/early 1900's. They loved the movie. Their friends (and all but one of the parents) who have no experience with the genre, though it was flat and incomprehensible. Or to put the shoe on the other foot, until I showed them My Fair Lady, my children didn't get half the jokes in Miss Congeniality.
For better or for worse, epic style is part of our cultural landscape. Anyone got a copy of The Green Knight Mr. Mooney can borrow?
--MsZilla
(To reply, click here.)
(7/25)