What’s it all about, Alfie

#34, January 8, 2004

Reelin’ in the Years (2)

What’s it all About?...Alfie

Owing to director Peter Jackson’s attempts to remain faithful to the original texts, the movie trilogy, “Lord of the Rings,” retains its author’s English perspective of the modern world. Given when they were written (published first in 1955) these works take on a view of the world largely derived from the experiences of the British during World War II, and their vision of the emerging post-war world has a very distinct English flavor.

J. R. R. Tolkein was a scholar of early Anglo-Saxon literature like Beowulf. His first story about Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit, is very much shaped by his reading of this literature, and the work almost represents a pre-history that situates Britain and its peculiar history for the reader. The shire is very much rural Britain, a pastiche of Hardy’s “Wessex,” a world that was being “lost” in the twentieth century, and which could be harked back to with nostalgia. This was Britain as it should be, and the hobbits were the English idealized, a seemingly small and provincial people of limited understanding, who nonetheless had big hearts and who were ready to undertake important work that few others would be able to manage.

And if The Hobbit is the pre-history, setting the stage, The Lord of the Rings is the modern history, a struggle of good against evil of the sort that had only just recently been faced in the war to halt Hitler’s madness in Europe. Here again, we see that while the world is now witness to many more powerful peoples and forces – Americans (like Strider – who could be Frederick Jackson Turner’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s frontiersman, a rough rider with noble blood) and other full men struggling to establish the “age of men”, as well as nuclear weapons (dead men who can move in a wave like a storm destroying all in its path) – it is once again the little Englishmen-hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, stepping outside their shire, but very much empowered by it, who are able to save the world.

While the Soviets with their manpower and the Americans with their machines (Rohan and Gondor, not respectively) can win the battles, it is the ability of the little Englishman to resist evil, to keep the fires of hope burning, Spitfires holding off the mighty Luftwaffe that really turns the tide and secures victory. But for the work of Frodo and Sam (with the unwitting help of Gollum and good fortune), the eye of fascism and totalitarianism, Orwell’s Big Brother, would remain open and able to subjugate everything within its view.

Perhaps the clearest indication that the director has retained his commitment to render the text accurately with all its English flavor is the way in which “The Return of the King” ends (or never seems to). Many in the audience will have thought that it dragged by the end and that it could have ended half an hour earlier. Indeed, had the movie been made by George Lucas, then it would have ended with the crowning of Aragorn/Strider and the general celebration that followed. The Hollywood assumption would have been that Good had triumphed and that the rule of this king, with his frontier sentiments and democratic inclinations, would have naturally been beneficent. But an Englishman like Tolkein would have required a resolution to a number of themes in the story. He would have wanted to know that merry England was still alive, back in the Shires, and would also have wanted the History of the battle with evil to have been recorded properly. For, if not told properly, empirically, rationally (via the Anglican profession) then the power of the eye and totalitarianism would still have been alive and ready to return. And since, almost by definition, only Hobbits and Englishmen make good historians, it was left for Frodo to finish the work of Bilbo, before they could both leave with the Elves for the enchanted land. Once Frodo hands on “The Lord of the Rings” to his trusty friend, Sam, we are sure that the Order has been restored. All is right with the world – there will forever be an England.