J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

217 Pages·2008·0.93 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations
The Adventures of The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint
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The Age of Innocence The Great Gatsby Artist as a Young
Alice’s Adventures in Gulliver’s Travels Man
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Lord of the Rings—New Edition
Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The lord of the rings / edited and with an introduction by Harold
Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-145-1 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John
Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973. Lord of the rings. 2. Fantasy fiction, English—History and
criticism. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Lord of the rings. III. Series.
PR6039.O32L63457 2008
823’.912—dc22
2008007062
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Contributing Editor: Pamela Loos
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Epic Pooh 3
Michael Moorcock
“Queer” Hobbits: The Problem
of Difference in the Shire 19
Jane Chance
Mind, Spirit, and Dream
in The Lord of the Rings 27
Michael N. Stanton
Frodo’s Batman 37
Mark T. Hooker
In the Far Northwest of the Old World 49
Jared Lobdell
Spiders and Evil Red Eyes:
The Shadow Sides of Gandalf and Galadriel 69
Marjorie Burns
Archaism, Nostalgia, and
Tennysonian War in The Lord of the Rings 101
Andrew Lynch
vi Contents
Gothic Echoes 117
Sue Zlosnik
Tolkien and the Idea of the Book 129
Verlyn Flieger
The Story Was Already Written:
Narrative Theory in The Lord of the Rings 145
Mary R. Bowman
Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power 171
Nancy Enright
Chronology 187
Contributors 189
Bibliography 191
Acknowledgments 195
Index 197
Editor’s Note
My introduction, much at variance with most of the essayists who follow,
sadly asks whether Tolkien’s trilogy is not a large period piece? Its style is
quaint, pseudobiblical, overly melodramatic, and its personages are so much
cardboard. But then, I am aware that my standards are literary-critical, and
many now find them archaic in our age of pop culture.
Michael Moorcock sensibly indicts The Lord of the Rings for infantilism,
after which Jane Chance seriously meditates upon “difference” in Tolkien.
Utterly under Tolkien’s sway, Michael N. Stanton finds the Lord trilogy
to be replete with Christian emotion, while Mark T. Hooker examines Sam
in his role of “batman” or soldier-servant to Frodo.
Jared Lobdell praises the Englishness of Tolkien’s Lord series, after which
Marjorie Burns broods on the darker aspects of Gandalf and Galadriel.
Victorian medievalism is invoked as the proper context for Tolkien by
Andrew Lynch, while Sue Zlosnick studies gothic motifs in the Lord trilogy.
Verlyn Flieger discusses Tolkien’s unfinished “Book,” after which Mary
R. Bowman employs narrative theory better to understand the Lord series.
In this book’s final essay, Nancy Enright defends Tolkien from those
feminist critics who fail to apprehend the Christlike renunciations of his
most virtuous female characters.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
I will attempt, rather briefly, to define my aesthetic doubts about Tolkien’s
trilogy by contrasting them to the shrewd defence by Roger Sale, Tolkien’s
best critic, of what he regards as Tolkien’s and the protagonist Frodo Baggins’s
heroism.
Tolkien, at twenty-three, went off to the Western Front, was wounded,
and lost to the war nearly all his friends in his own generation. For Sale,
the trilogy is Tolkien’s delayed, ultimate reaction to the Great War, which
decimated Great Britain’s young men. Tolkien dated his lifelong love of fairy
stories to his turning away from the war, and The Lord of the Rings is a vast
fairy story.
Sale accurately observes that the trilogy purports to be a quest but actually
is a descent into hell. Whether a visionary descent into hell can be rendered
persuasively in language that is acutely self-conscious, even arch, seems to me
the hard question. I am fond of The Hobbit, which is rarely pretentious, but The
Lord of the Rings seems to be inflated, overwritten, tendentious, and moralistic
in the extreme. Is it not a giant Period Piece?
Sale nevertheless makes quite a strong case for the trilogy, and a vast
readership implicitly agrees with him. I don’t know whether Frodo Baggins
breaks free and away from Tolkien’s moralism to anything like the extent Sale
suggests. Frodo, and Tolkien’s deep creation of fairy lore, are the strengths of
the trilogy, in Sale’s account.
1