The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
J. R. R. Tolkien · a heroic romance in six books and three volumes, with a prologue and six appendices · George Allen & Unwin, 1954 to 1955 · scored on Tolkien’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Heroic romance as invented history; quest, epic of war, elegy and comedy of manners in one book
Mythos
The quest turned inside out: a treasure to be unmade, not won; the ring of power as a burden; the wizard’s descent and return; the hidden king known by his healing; the wounded bearer who must leave the world he saved
Phase
From a birthday party in the Shire to a departure from the Grey Havens at the end of the Third Age; from the third book, the war and the quest told apart over the same weeks
Presentation
Fiction; a prologue, six books of sixty-two chapters in three volumes, and six appendices of annals, chronology, family trees, calendars, scripts and languages; songs and verse throughout
Register
From the Gaffer’s talk and Sam’s speech to Gandalf’s dry authority, the archaic syntax of Théoden, the alliterative verse of Rohan and the Elvish lyric
Scale
Four hobbits, a company of the free peoples, and the passing of an age of the world
Governing Proposition
A hobbit of the Shire inherits a ring that would give its bearer dominion over every will, and with a gardener beside him carries it across a world at war to the one fire that can unmake it, while the war in the west is fought over the same weeks; at the fire his will fails, and the ring is destroyed by the creature an old pity spared. The wager of the book is that power to dominate cannot be used for good, that no will holds under its full weight, and that the world turns on small faithful acts chosen without knowledge of their end; and that an invented world, given its history, its tongues and its annals, can carry that knowledge as fully as the one we know.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins as a record. A prologue sets out what is known of hobbits, their pipe-weed, the ordering of their Shire and the finding of a ring, and closes on a note about the Shire’s own records, from which the story is presented as drawn. Then a party, a departure, and an old gardener, the Gaffer, giving the inn his opinions on Bag End and the folk who live there. Nothing in the first chapter is high. The world that will be fought over is first shown as a place of gossip, farms and gardens, and the book never forgets that it is for these that the rest is done.
In the second chapter Gandalf tells Frodo what he has inherited. The ring is the ring of the enemy, made to rule the wills of others, and it works on whoever holds it. Bilbo, who found it, spared the creature he found it from, and Gandalf will not call the mercy wasted: “the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.” Offered the Ring, he refuses it, because it would come to him through pity, and the strength to do good would become the power to dominate. Gandalf gives the book’s ethic in a sentence: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Around that choice stands a large and exact architecture: a prologue, six books of sixty-two chapters, twelve, ten, eleven, ten, ten and nine, issued in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, and six appendices of annals, chronology, family trees, calendars, scripts and languages. The first book walks out of the Shire slowly, with the Black Riders on the road behind it: through the Old Forest to the house of Tom Bombadil, into the barrows, where Merry takes up a blade whose use is far ahead, to Bree, to Weathertop and to the Ford. Its voice is still the Shire’s. The book will climb, register by register, toward the speech of kings, and it will be seen all the way by those who do not belong there.
Movement II
At the Council of Elrond the Ring’s history is laid out and every use of it refused, since to wield it against its maker would make the wielder what its maker is. Tom Bombadil is explained and set aside. What remains is to unmake it in the one fire that can, and a company drawn from the free peoples sets out to carry a hobbit there. The old shape of the quest is turned inside out: the treasure is to be destroyed, not won, and the one who carries it will not come home whole.
Under the mountains, in Moria, the company is pursued to a bridge, and the Balrog comes after it. Gandalf turns on the bridge alone: “You cannot pass.” The bridge breaks, and as he falls he gives his last order: “Fly, you fools!” The guide of the company is gone, and from that loss the book’s parts become required. Without Gandalf the company must break; its breaking will send each part where it is needed. The wizard’s descent is not the end of him, but the book lets the company and the reader grieve before it says so.
In Lothlórien Galadriel is offered the Ring and refuses it, knowing the cost: “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” It is the first statement of the book’s elegy, that the victory, if it comes, will end the age of those who win it. On the river the company goes south, and at Parth Galen, under the ruins of Amon Hen, Boromir falls to the Ring’s pull, and the company breaks. Two hobbits are carried off toward Fangorn. Frodo and Sam go east alone.
Movement III
From the third book the story divides, and the form becomes the argument. The third and fifth books follow the war in the west; the fourth and sixth follow Frodo and Sam toward Mordor; and the two strands run over the same weeks out of step. The reader goes through the great battles knowing that none of it matters unless two hobbits beyond the mountains go on walking. Two hobbits come to Fangorn, and the Ents march on Isengard, whose master, Treebeard says, has “a mind of metal and wheels”. Gandalf comes back from beneath the mountain. Rohan has a failing king, and its song asks where its past has gone: “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?”
Gondor is held by a steward, Denethor, who despairs. Aragorn takes the paths of the dead. Minas Tirith is besieged, its gate broken, and the Witch-king comes to the broken gate. Then a cock crows in the city behind, as if nothing were happening, and far off the horns answer: “Rohan had come at last.” On the field Éowyn stands before the Witch-king and unhelms: “You look upon a woman.” Merry’s blade from the barrows wounds him, and he is brought down by a woman and a hobbit.
After the battle the king who has not yet claimed his name goes into the Houses of Healing and heals the wounded, and by that he is known. The captains of the west then march to the Black Gate of Mordor. They do not know how near the end is. The reader does, because the reader has been with Frodo and Sam. The interlace has made the greatest battles of the book a diversion, and made the reader know it as no one in them can.
Movement IV
The other strand is narrow and slow. Frodo and Sam take Gollum as their guide, the creature Bilbo spared, starved and arguing with himself in two voices, Sméagol and Gollum in one body. They cross the Dead Marshes. Faramir, Boromir’s brother, has the Ring-bearer in his hands and lets him go: the test Boromir failed is passed. Sam is a gardener, and he carries his pans into Mordor. The myth is carried by people who keep the habits of the Shire.
Shelob is the gate into Mordor. For a time Sam carries the Ring, and at the Tower he refuses it, as Galadriel did, in a gardener’s terms. Inside Mordor, in a waste under smoke, he looks up and sees a star through the cloud, and knows, for a moment, that “the Shadow was only a small and passing thing”. Frodo meanwhile is being invaded. The burden is a slow occupation of the mind, and it is nearly complete.
At the Crack of Doom, the one place where the Ring can be unmade, Frodo stands at the edge and does not throw it: “I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” The hero fails at the decisive moment. Gollum, alive only because of the pity Gandalf defended, takes the Ring, and it goes into the fire with him. The quest is finished by the will that was spared, not by the will that was sent. Then the Eagles come.
Movement V
The book does not end at victory. From the field of Cormallen it goes on for chapter after chapter: the partings and the long road home. The strands are closed and the company parted, each to his own country, and the knowledge of the long aftermath is that victory does not restore. The Elves are passing, as Galadriel said they would, and the age ends with them.
The four hobbits come home and find the war already there. Saruman, as Sharkey, rules the Shire through gatherers and sharers, and his mills have come there as the Ring once came to Frodo: the will to dominate, in small. The hobbits who went out to the war must fight it at home. Without this homecoming the meaning of the book about power would end in pageantry. With it the last battle is fought in the lanes of the first chapter, and the evil is seen at the scale of a village.
Frodo cannot stay. He is wounded past what the Shire can heal, and he says so: “it has been saved, but not for me.” He leaves from the Grey Havens, into the West. Sam walks home, “and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected.” The last words are his, as plain as the first chapter: “Well, I’m back,” he says. Beyond them the appendices go on: the annals of the kings, the tale of Aragorn and Arwen, where she chooses a mortal life, the years, the calendars, the tongues. The story becomes a fragment of a history, and the history goes on after it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites in the first book and almost nowhere after. From the Council of Elrond the parts are required: Moria loses Gandalf, so the company must break; the breaking sends two hobbits to Fangorn and the Ents to Isengard; Faramir is the test Boromir failed; Shelob is the gate; the Scouring brings the war home. Even the Barrow-downs pays its debt, in the blade with which Merry wounds the Witch-king. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what could go: the slow prelude from the party to Crickhollow, the house of Tom Bombadil, explained at the Council and set aside, and verse that ornaments rather than carries; perhaps a twentieth to a fifteenth of the whole.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: power to dominate cannot be used for good, because it works by corrupting the will that would use it well, and no will holds under its full weight. It is tested on the good. Gandalf refuses the Ring because it would come to him through pity; Galadriel passes her test; Boromir falls; Denethor despairs; Saruman was the wisest of them. At the fire the hero fails: “I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” (Book VI, “Mount Doom”). Held near the bar: the disclosure comes through myth rather than observation, the enemy is never seen from within, the orcs are beyond redemption, and part of the force is elegy, a mood rather than a meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height is reached often, in every book after the first, cold and warm. The terror: the Black Riders on the road, the Balrog on the bridge and “Fly, you fools!”, the Dead Marshes, Shelob, the Nazgûl over the Pelennor. The grandeur: a cock crowing at the broken gate of Minas Tirith, and the horns behind it, “Rohan had come at last” (Book V); Éowyn unhelmed before the Witch-king; the elegy of Rohan. The quiet heights: Lothlórien; Sam in Mordor seeing a star; the last walk to the Havens and a homecoming whose plainness is the height. Held below the top because the first book rises seldom, and the high style of Gondor sometimes reaches for an elevation the scene has not earned.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built as the book’s frame. The quest is turned inside out: the treasure is to be unmade, not won, and the finder is unmade with it. The archetypes carry the plot: the ring of power, as old as Plato’s Gyges and made new by being a burden; the descent and return of Gandalf; the paths of the dead; the hidden king known by his healing; the wounded bearer who must leave the world he saved. The particular holds beside the archetype: Sam is a gardener who carries pans into Mordor, and the Ring’s last enemy is a starved creature arguing with himself in two voices. Held a step below the top because Aragorn and the Elves stay nearer type than person.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is twofold, and the book departs from both. From the romance tradition (Malory, the sagas, Beowulf, William Morris, Dunsany, Eddison) it departs by putting a hobbit drawn as a novel draws its people at the eye of the story, so that the cost is felt in a small life; by treating an invented world as history, with chronology, languages and appendices; and by ending the quest in failure redeemed. From the novel of its decade it departs utterly: a long heroic romance without irony, in an archaic high style where it chose, published in the years of late modernism and postwar realism. The stake was real, and paid in a critical contempt that lasted decades. Held below the top because the parts are medieval and the swerve is in their fusion.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The interlace is the argument: from the third book the war and the Ring are told apart, so that the reader follows Helm’s Deep and the Pelennor knowing that none of it matters unless two hobbits beyond the mountains go on walking, and knows, as the captains at the Black Gate do not, how near the end is. The point of view climbs register by register from the Shire’s voice to Gondor’s, so the high world is seen by those who do not belong to it. The long aftermath knows that victory does not restore. Held off the top because the first book’s form is long a container, and the interlace of the last two books doubles back awkwardly in time.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over seventy years. The book has drawn a literature of its own: Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light, Christopher Tolkien’s volumes on its writing within The History of Middle-earth, and the journal Tolkien Studies. Its questions stay open: whether evil in it is absence or power; what Frodo’s failure, and the grace that answers it, mean in a book its author called religious but which names no god; what Bombadil is; whether the elegy for the Elves is consolation or grief; how far its “applicability”, the word of the second edition’s foreword, reaches. Held below the top because much of the return is lore and philology, depth of fabric before depth of meaning.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the novel of its decade. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the book showed that an invented world, with its history, languages and geography, could be the full object of serious fiction, and that the heroic could be written at length, without irony, in the twentieth century. Much of what followed copied the surface (the map, the dark lord, the company of races) rather than the vision, and the literary novel itself went on largely unmoved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the campus paperbacks of 1965, the unauthorised Ace edition and the authorised Ballantine, made it a mass book; the commercial genre of secondary-world fantasy was formed in its image, from Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977) onward, and its shape still governs that genre; and it reached music, games and film.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival weighed on the text, then on presence. The text survives whole, as Tolkien finished it, in his own revised second edition, with later corrections that restore rather than change. It has been in print without a break for seventy-one years and translated into dozens of languages, and it was read across the world for nearly half a century before the films. It is taught, though more in the study of fantasy and of medieval reception than at the centre of the literature curriculum. Its surface has not dated, because it was archaic by choice in 1955. Its presence is among the widest of any modern book, but much of it is popularity and much now passes through the films; and seventy years do not stand level with millennia.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Tolkien’s English. The command of structure is of the first order: two strands timed against each other day by day across four books, and a geography that holds over a thousand miles of walking. The command of register is wide: the Gaffer’s talk, Sam’s speech, Gandalf’s dry authority, the archaic syntax of Théoden, the alliterative verse of Rohan, the Elvish lyric. The landscape is exact and the weather felt, and the last chapter finds a sentence of perfect plainness, “and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected” (Book VI, “The Grey Havens”). Charged: the high style can stiffen into pastiche, the speech of kings and Elves is often declamatory, adjectives and formulas recur, and the first book’s prose is slack, still half in the register of The Hobbit.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Gaffer’s opinions on Bag End in the first chapter, and the Witch-king at the broken gate of Minas Tirith. One law governs both: the will to dominate corrupts and devours, and the small faithful act, chosen without knowledge of its consequence, is what the world turns on. Saruman’s mills come to the Shire as the Ring came to Frodo; Sam’s refusal of the Ring at the Tower is Galadriel’s refusal in a gardener’s terms; Gollum is spared at the start and finishes the quest at the end. The range is wide and kept, comedy to apocalypse, and the made world of tongues, chronology and ruins is consistent beyond any novel’s need. Charged: Bombadil stands outside the law by design, the early chapters keep traces of the lighter physics of The Hobbit, and the Eagles, though prepared, arrive with the convenience of grace.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Many orders, held by one question, power and its refusal. Consciousness: Frodo’s burden as a slow invasion of the mind; Gollum and Sméagol debating in one body. History as an agent: the Ring’s past drives the plot, and three ages stand behind the war. The state: Gondor under a steward, Rohan under a failing king, the Shire’s near-absence of government, and Sharkey’s rule of gatherers and sharers. Labour and the natural order: the Shire’s farms and gardens, the Ents and the forests, Isengard’s furnaces, Saruman’s “mind of metal and wheels” (Book III). War and death, and the difference between mortal and immortal, carried to Arwen’s choice in the appendix. The sacred, unnamed, in the invocation of Elbereth. Held below the top because the family is mostly fathers and sons, marriage and the body are thin, women are few, and the economy of the world is sketched.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, then Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 9.1. A myth built as the book’s frame, a quest turned inside out whose treasure must be unmade; a reorganisation that made an invented world the full object of serious fiction and formed a literary kind still written seventy years on; a text whole and in print without a break since 1955; and one law, of domination refused and the small faithful act, from the Gaffer’s talk to the broken gate.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0, held by what the first book could lose: the slow prelude from the party to Crickhollow, the house of Tom Bombadil, set aside at the Council, and verse that ornaments rather than carries, perhaps a twentieth to a fifteenth of the whole. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 8.6: a disclosure that holds and is tested on the good, but comes through myth, never sees the enemy from within, and is partly elegy.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, published by George Allen & Unwin, London, in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring (Books I and II, 29 July 1954), The Two Towers (Books III and IV, 11 November 1954) and The Return of the King (Books V and VI, with Appendices A to F, 20 October 1955); Houghton Mifflin published it in the United States. It is scored as one work: the prologue, the six books in their three volumes, and the six appendices. The second edition (1965 to 1966), revised by Tolkien with a new foreword and an index, is the text in common use, and its revisions, being his own, are part of the one work. The Hobbit and The Silmarillion are not part of it and are neither credited nor charged. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Tolkien’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain; “applicability” is the word of the second edition’s foreword. The finer detail of the appendices, the annals of the kings and the scripts, is beyond this reading, and no axis rests on it. The studies named under The Bottomless Well are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the word count, the number of songs and poems, the history of the book’s writing and of its division into three volumes, the publisher’s expectations, the dates of the studies, the reader polls and the lunar chronology, are not given. Citations are by book, with the chapter named where it is certain.