One Ring to Rule them All

Elves and trolls. Wizards and Dark Riders. A magical ring. And, of course, those little people with furry feet.

If you don’t know what a hobbit is, very likely you’ve been in isolation for a very long time. In the nearly half a century since its publication, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has sold more then 100 million copies. It has been translated into just about every major language, including Chinese, and Tolkien societies can be found worldwide. The new movie version, part one of which was released this holiday season, was perhaps the most anticipated movie in history—when the movie trailer was first posted on the official website, three and a half million fans trying to get a look almost immediately crashed the server.

If it seems amazing that a fantasy set in an imaginary realm called Middle-earth and featuring such unlikely heroes as hobbits could generate such powerful interest, even more curious is that this popular epic recently has been hailed as one of the greatest books of the 20th century. That idea is no surprise to Rice English professor Jane Chance, however. Chance has been teaching The Lord of the Rings (LotR) since 1976, and she has authored several books and collections of essays on Tolkien and his work. Revised editions of two of those books—Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (first published in 1979) and Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (first published in 1992)—were rereleased this past year by the University Press of Kentucky.

Chance’s expertise is medieval mythography, Anglo–Saxon and Middle English literature, and Chaucer, and most of her 15 books, including her award-winning two-volume magnum opus, Medieval Mythography, are on those topics. She also serves as general editor of the Library of Medieval Women and series co-editor of the new Greenwood Guide to Historical Events in the Ancient and Medieval World. But what she is known for these days is her understanding of Tolkien and his works. “I guess this is my 15 minutes of fame,” she laughs. So far, she’s been interviewed by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Fox TV, among others, and the requests continue to come in. “I am a bit leery of it,” she admits. “I’ve spent a lifetime studying mythography, and Tolkien had been an ancillary, fun interest. It’s ironic to me that I’m important now as an authority on Tolkien, because that has nothing to do with what I normally consider important in my work.”

Chance may minimize her Tolkien scholarship, but his work has sufficiently intrigued her that, in addition to publishing books on the subject, she organized two sessions on Tolkien at last year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies—the first time that Tolkien has been formally discussed at the ICMS in its more than 30 years. The sessions have lead to yet another book, Tolkien the Medievalist, which is a collection of theoretically driven essays by Tolkien scholars that will be published soon in the Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture series by Routledge LTD.

Besides, there’s no mistaking the glow in her eyes as she discusses Tolkien’s epic, its cultural context, and its internal meanings.

Chance was in her first teaching job, at the University of Saskatchewan, when a medievalist colleague recommended LotR. “I took a weekend out and started reading very skeptically,” Chance says. “I got immersed in the magic of it and just devoured all three volumes. I don’t know if I became a convert—that almost sounds like something religious. I certainly became convinced that it was a text you could teach and that it was worthy of scholarly study.”

Tolkien, a professor of Old and Middle English literature at Leeds and Oxford, was unhappy, Chance explains, with the lack of an English mythology. “He wanted to create a mythic world that could do justice to the richness of English culture,” she says. “Other cultures—Mediterranean, Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, and even Irish and Welsh—have native mythologies, but England has no mythic gods, no identifiable corpus of heroes like the ones in Ovid’s Metamorphosis or Homer. You could point to King Arthur, but those legends are affected by French Norman influence, which Tolkien didn’t like. What he did have was a corpus of work in Old and Middle English, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Scandinavian sagas, such as the Norse Eddas. But most of those, even Beowulf, are about Scandinavian, not English, heroes.”

Even so, Tolkien’s knowledge of northern European myth and languages profoundly influenced his work, particularly with regard to the themes, images, and structures he uses and the names he gives to people and places. Frodo, for example, is from the Old English word fr?d, which means wise, and mordor is the Anglo–Saxon word for death.

Certainly, though, the reality of two world wars affected Tolkien as profoundly as any myth. “Many of his good friends whom he had gone to school with died in World War I,” Chance says. “He never got over that. He had a terrible reaction to the war and had to be sent home early. He was really shell-shocked.”

Much of LotR was written during World War II, and many readers have drawn parallels between Sauron and Hitler, between the blasted landscape of Mordor and the destruction of the European countryside. While Tolkien denied that LotR was a veiled reference to the war, Chance says that there is a growing body of work by scholars who are interested in LotR as a reaction to World War II. “Tolkien makes that statement of denial in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings,” Chance says, “and there’s also a letter in which he denies any parallelism. But if you read carefully, what he’s saying is that he doesn’t want his work to be taken as an allegory of the war. He always talks about applicability, that the war might be applicable to the situation.”

When Tolkien first created hobbits in The Hobbit, they were childlike creatures about whom he could create stories for his children. But in LotR, with the backdrop of World War II, they took on another nuance. “I think he was saying that they are ordinary, everyday people who may be called on to perform in extraordinary circumstances and find heroism in themselves,” Chance explains. “He was responding to the need for everyone to help their country during the war.”

Chance believes that today’s readers and viewers of the movie will similarly link LotR’s battle between good and evil with current world events. “It’s very much comparable to what’s going on right now in America following September 11. How do you deal with that kind of enormous threat to peace and harmony and civilization? The Lord of the Rings provides the solution in the title of the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring. The solution is fellowship—the idea that people have to band together. We have to learn to be part of a community and accept and tolerate that which makes us different, as do the members of the fellowship. Only in that way can we help each other work together as a community. Actually, that’s a powerful Christian message. Tolkien was a staunch Roman Catholic, and he drew on that other chief influence in his work.”

LotR is the story of an epic heroic quest, yet Tolkien frequently inverts the established heroic formula. “A hero goes on a quest to achieve something,” Chance says. “It may be to kill the dragon and win the lady. It’s this Horatio Alger idea of achievement and attainment, which is basically a self-aggrandizing tendency.” The quest usually culminates in a battle in which the hero triumphs against the villain and is then held up as a model. Often after that, there is a happy ending.

In LotR, there is a climactic battle, but it is a distraction, not the key. While the battle of the armies is taking place, the real hero, Frodo, is sneaking into Mordor through the back door. For Tolkien, Chance says, humility and self-control are the true virtues of the hero, and the important battle for those take place within Frodo himself.

“What Tolkien has done with Frodo is so brilliant. Frodo could have used the ring to become a Dark Lord and take what he wanted. Instead, he carries it through Mordor to destroy it. So the ultimate heroism is an act of renunciation, not of boast, which is very hard. That’s one element of the book that is so appealing, because we’re all anxious to leave something of our lives for posterity. Tolkien, through Frodo, is saying that it’s okay to be the way we are and do something in our lives that maybe nobody will ever know about. And who knows that Frodo has accomplished something so amazing and saved Middle-earth except Gandalf and the fellowship?”

The epic irony is that, in the end, Frodo ultimately falls prey to the enervating power of the ring, and he fails. He doesn’t throw the ring into the fire but decides to retain possession of it—or let it possess him. And his final struggle with Gollum on the brink of the pit is as much to keep the ring from Gollum as it is to prevent it from falling into the Dark Lord’s hands. But in that struggle, Frodo has donned the ring, and only Gollum—a degenerated hobbit—is visible. “The part students most love to talk about is that ending,” Chance says. “The doubles there are multiple and therefore rather exciting in an analogical way.”

Tolkien even turns the traditional happy ending on its head. “I’m not so sure it is a happy ending,” Chance says. “The destruction of the ring and the fall of the Dark Lord crystallize things, but it’s interesting that Tolkien didn’t stop there. Things have changed in the Shire towards industrialization, and they’ll never return to the idyllic days that existed before. Frodo and the elves go away to the Grey Havens, leaving a world without wisdom and magic, as history moves into the age of Man, which is a lesser age.”

The epic does not end on a note of doom, though, for Sam rebuilds the Shire. He plants the seeds that Galadriel gave him, and there is a great crop. Many children are born, and there is fertility and happiness for a period of time. “What he has to help him is his memory of the visit to Galadriel in Lothlórien,” Chance says. “Remember, Sam has had that glimpse of paradise—he knows there is a paradise, and that’s so reassuring. Tolkien talks in some of his fairy stories about why fantasy is so reassuring, and he says that the ultimate fantasy—in a literary sense—is the resurrection of Christ because it means there’s going to be a happy ending for us all somewhere and there is some plan and order to the world.

“I think that’s the reason many modern readers are drawn to The Lord of the Rings. So I no longer think of it as escapist literature. I think you can see it as escape and read it as fantasy, but what it provides is reassurance and consolation that the world is not a bad place but ultimately a place of good.”