Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

Frodo's quest to destroy the Ring ends in victory, and the members of the Fellowship disband forever and return to their separate lands. However, a cloud of foreboding passes over the hobbits' contented and triumphant march home when they overtake Saruman, now "a beggar in the wilderness" (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 982) after his ousting from Isengard. Saruman exchanges bitter and unrepentant words with Gandalf and the hobbits before departing, warning as he does that the ill-treatment he alleges against them "will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like" (962). Saruman's troubling portent initiates a shift in the tone of narration, marking a turning point in the narrative as well. His words are the first shadow of doubt cast upon the characters and the reader to trouble the exuberance of victory over Sauron. His words indicate that, although the quest is over, returning home may be more challenging than the hobbits expected throughout their adventures.

This exploration of the quest's aftermath causes these curious final chapters of The Lord of the Rings to stand noticeably apart from the rest of the text. To account for them, one must either suppose that Tolkien prolonged his heroic romance almost two hundred pages too far, or one must concede that they bear narrative significance. I wholeheartedly support the latter assertion: Saruman's comments suggest that The Lord of the Rings is more than a work of adventurous mind-candy that irresponsibly allows its protagonists to live happily ever after once the action reaches its climax. Rather, these final chapters allow the narrative to explore the impact of evil on the individual, as well as the impact of place, and the memories thereof, on identity.

By neglecting the final chapters in which this inquiry unfolds, however, critics overlook the very segment of text in which this exploration of the quest's ramifications unfolds. Instead, they tend to approach The Lord of the Rings from one of four perspectives. The first is to explain the narrative by enumerating European mythological texts that influenced Tolkien's creativity, explaining the similarities and drawing parallels between these works and The Lord of the Rings. Helms demonstrates this approach, considering the work in light of Tolkien's familiarity with such texts as the Bible, The Kalevala, The Völsunga Saga, and the Atlantis legend. [2] Burns likewise adopts this critical perspective in her essay "Gandalf and Odin." [3] It is possible to use this technique to discover the narrative significance of the final chapters, considering them in light of Raglan's assertions that heroic romances across cultures and throughout history often include an episode recounting the heroes' activities after they attain their goal. [4] Critics, however, have yet to apply this perspective in consideration of these final chapters.

Another favorite technique is to examine Tolkien's own life for insight into The Lord of the Rings. Encouraged perhaps by the sole biography authorized by the Tolkien estate, [5] or the exhaustive survey of Tolkien's personal life contained in his published collection of correspondence, [6] many Tolkien scholars assert the relevance of the particulars of Tolkien's life, and the necessity of integrating them into the study of his works. Some look to Tolkien's experience with trench warfare in the Battle of the Somme, for example, to gain insight into the epic conflicts that drive his stories. [7] Critical analyses like these are numerous, and consequently Tolkien criticism as a whole demonstrates an excessive awareness of the author's life. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find a work of Tolkien criticism that fails to assert the relevance of some biographical tidbit. This popular analysis, however, has seldom touched the final chapters, despite the obvious connection to Tolkien's own experience returning home and coping with the trauma of the Great War.

A third critical position regards The Lord of the Rings merely as a byproduct of Tolkien's preferred creative endeavor—his exploration of the history, geography, and cultures that animate Middle-earth (Tolkien, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 113). These elements comprise a vast yet unfinished corpus that was edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien in 1977 as The Silmarillion. Critics who favor this perspective received newfound textual evidence-and not a little encouragement-in 1996 with the publication of the final volume of The History Middle-earth, a twelve-volume series containing a half century's worth of Tolkien's drafts. This meticulous survey of the creative evolution of Middle-earth ignited a new wave of Tolkien scholarship by affording a more detailed understanding of the genesis of The Lord of the Rings. Although the series does explicitly itemize and compare every successive draft of these final chapters, [8] analysis only focuses on their progression towards the final draft. Consequently, the textual significance of these chapters remains untouched.

The fourth critical perspective considers Tolkien's works from a linguistic perspective. Shippey produces one of the finest examples of this approach, [9] informing his analysis with Tolkien's avowed passion for languages that fueled the development of his Middle-earth fiction. The contribution of language was no small one: "at best Middle-earth was only vaguely in the author's mind as he wrote… [T]he stories he wrote began with the languages [that Tolkien invented for his mythology], and then a place and story grew out of that" (Lewis 81). The present project considers Tolkien's use of the language of narration to emphasize the primacy of the final chapters, but no other noteworthy critiques have relied on this element to inform exploration of the text's conclusion.

Isaacs expresses his frustration with the inadequacy of these four perspectives, insisting that the "function of Tolkien criticism should be to shift the emphasis from extraliterary aspects of the trilogy…to a consideration of the work itself" (Shippey, "Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings" 298-299). The scholarly neglect he indicates has created noteworthy gaps in the body of Tolkien scholarship pertaining to The Lord of the Rings. The most glaring omission is the paucity of analysis of the text's final six chapters. In these chapters, the narrative continues after the exhilaration of victory fades, following the hobbit protagonists on their journey home, readjusting with them to their diminished place in the world, and exploring the impact that participation in the quest has on their identities.

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[ Contents | Abstract | I | II | III | IV | V | Notes | Works Cited ]

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