I’ve booked my ticket for The Two Towers, and I’ve seen its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring, three times. Nothing unusual in that, you say. Except, I’m the type who prefers books to movies—hands down. I’m unconvinced that the visual medium can capture the imagination or comprehend the subtleties of the written word. So I feel the need to justify my enthusiasm (especially given the inexplicable omission, in Peter Jackson’s direction of The Fellowship of the Ring, of Tom Bombadil, and the pointless replacing of Glorfindel by Arwen—not to mention a certain loss of gravitas in the plot and characterisation).
The justification: ever since reading Classics at university, I’ve been a sucker for epic stories—for high tales of gods and mortals, with all their strength and frailty, heroism and fear, love and hate. And The Lord of the Rings, even on the big screen, is a modern epic in the style of the ancient myths. Of course, it isn’t written in poetry like Homer and Virgil. But Tolkien’s epic tries to make up for not being in poetic metre by including poems and songs all the way through—as Tolkien also does, though more humorously, in The Hobbit. Needless to say, the poetry (along with Tolkien’s graceful prose) is lost in the movie.
J.R.R. Tolkien was part of a literary circle called the Inklings, which included such luminaries as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. They used to meet during the 1930s and ’40s in the small back room of an Oxford pub called The Eagle and Child. There, in an atmosphere that must have been loud and stuffy, they smoked pipes, drank beer, and read their stories aloud. Most of the gathered writers shared a love of myth, and were steeped in the Classics and other mythologies, including the old Norse legends. They were also, in their different ways, committed Christians—although in those pre-ecumenical days, the Catholic–Protestant divide between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis became increasingly difficult for them both.
One common characteristic of the Inklings was that they took myth seriously, and for them ‘myth’ didn’t mean untruth but a story of gods and heroes that expressed the deepest truths. In an increasingly secularised and pragmatic age, the Inklings believed that mythology should be allowed its own integrity and not be relegated to the nursery. That meant resisting what they saw as the dangers of allegorising. Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis refused to