The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien - 2/5

I have tried, and failed, to get through The Lord of the Rings once before. I read The Hobbit as a child, and was not terribly taken by its muddled prose and weak characterization! But I figured this time, if I am ever going to survive Tolkien’s entire trilogy, it’s going to have to be via audiobooks, which still took me three months to get through! I’m sorry but I just really do not get the appeal of LotR, and I think I only finished the trilogy (skipped the appendices because I was so close to giving up!) out of stubbornness, so I could tell the fans exactly why I dislike this series so much. Which I plan to do right here!

I think I just don’t understand the fanaticism over these books (and the movies, which is an entirely different conversation… they’re not good! With the instagram filter color grading and editing moments that look like a Slipknot music video!). I want to like fantasy but I feel like most fantasy ignores the actual interesting parts and instead focuses on boring worldbuilding... I feel like the literary landscape is this way solely because of Tolkien’s influence. I read this for a bookclub, and I made the point that the racial absolutism of Orcs being completely evil isn’t believable nor does it make for interesting character drama, and someone replied “I don't feel like a guy who invented like 4 languages while writing a story should be called ‘lazy’,” (if you read this blog sorry!! I mean no shade!). Which is true, but I feel like Tolkien’s interests were more in inventing languages and worldbuilding, not telling a compelling story. Most of it was fanservice, and I suppose people do eat that up, but it wasn’t a universe I felt was worth the cost of entry, unlike something like Dune which has similar levels of acclimation.

Why is it different? Dune tells the story of a local political conflict of limited consequence. Lord of the Rings attempts to tell every story in its universe, and it’s exhausting! What’s more, the whole time I could not tell what the actual consequences of Sauron getting the ring would be. I find these sorts of undefined, metaphysical high stakes completely unrelatable and therefore uninteresting (when contrasted with something like Star Wars, where the worst case scenario is a shitty president, something we can all relate to.)

What’s more, I found the pacing completely bizarre. My favorite volume was probably The Fellowship of the Ring, because the culture of the Shire was charming and interesting. The Two Towers was my least favorite, and I was baffled by the decision not to intercut the two volumes (which the film adaptation at least remedied). I completely zoned out during the entirety of the Rohan drama, with my attention regained a little when Gollum finally showed up. (Sidenote: the audiobook narration by Andy Serkis was absolutely incredible, and at times was the only thing holding my attention. He does every character’s voice different in a manner recalling Jim Dale’s Harry Potter, and at times it could be described more as “acting” than “narrating”!) The third book was somewhat baffling to me. I enjoyed Sam and Frodo’s bickering gay married couple dynamic (with Gollum giving adopted dog vibes) but the climax of the story appeared weirdly early, and the resolution was overlong. My conclusion is that Tolkien had no idea how to pace a story and was in dire need of an editor (which is how I felt about The Hobbit as well!) “The Scouring of the Shire” was probably the most interesting part of The Return of the King because the consequences were so much less cosmic.

In the end, having spent so much time with this book, it feels weird to leave it behind, but also a huge relief because the bad waayyy outweighed the good. It could have been amazing! I think I would have loved this series if they had somehow made it gayer and also shorter.