We do not often think of J.R.R. Tolkien as a writer relevant to modern issues. After all, he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon; his world of Middle-earth was the creation of fantasy influenced by old Norse sagas, the Greek and Latin classics, and a medieval imagination rooted in Roman Catholicism. This is the real Tolkien, right? Not so fast, says Nick Groom. Tolkien is very relevant to our modern age and all the concerns of modernity.
Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century is the latest book in the never-ending panorama of the Tolkien-verse, a world of media, publishing, and speaking dealing with Tolkien’s life and work. Nick Groom embarks on a heroic effort to bring Tolkien into the contemporary age, exploring his works (primarily The Lord of the Rings) and their contemporary relevance in a world beset by uncertainties, hesitancy, environmental degradation, and war. Groom insists that Tolkien’s writing is deeply relevant to many contemporary issues.
However, I would argue for a more guarded and cautious approach, especially in light of Groom’s implications that Tolkien should be read with a postmodern eye. He argues that Tolkien’s characters “do not assert an individual identity, but are pluralistic, persistently fashioning and refashioning themselves, or being reinvented by other forces.” Likewise, Groom emphasizes the theme of “uncertainty” and the “ambiguity of evil” and “hesitancy of good” to fit our own cultural currents that prefer narratives emphasizing uncertainty and confusion over good and evil.
When discussing characters and their identities, Groom asserts that confronting “fluctuating identities” and the “changing status of characters” is central to understanding the heroes who populate Middle-earth. One is tempted, here, to read Groom’s chapter on the multiplicity of identities as an implicit commentary on contemporary identity-politics, but this is a mistake. We do, in fact, have multiple identities, and this has always have been the case. As an example, I have my primary identity through who I am as an individual person, and I have other secondary and tertiary identities stemming from my birthplace, my family, my heritage, my accomplishments, my travels, my work, and so on. The myriad identities and stories that populate Middle-earth do not exist because Tolkien foresaw the contemporary fad of postmodern identity construction. They exist because human persons live and are inherently rooted in the identities we construct for the stories we tell in relationship to others—those we meet for a day, those we get to know for a year or two, and those with whom we will spend most of our lives.
The magic of identity is in the power of the words and stories we tell in the construction of our own identities; we are the stories we tell others and the stories others tell about us. Groom gets this entirely correct when he writes, “Words held a magic for [Tolkien]—they were the rich remains of previous epochs, carrying the history of the region, imbued with the cultures and values of the past, and at the same time the most sophisticatedly modern medium of thought and communication.” How true! I carry in my identity the same richness of my family history, the history of my hometown, the traditions and stories of my newly adopted hometown. We bond over these shared stories and intermingling identities. This is why the words uttered, the stories told, and the identities revealed in The Lord of the Rings are so powerful: in them, we find ourselves and discover the mysteries that intrigue us about the world and characters we meet.
Let us return to classical source material just to prove this has always been the case and isn’t a recent discovery. Aeneas is a Trojan warrior and prince. Aeneas is the (mythic) founder of Rome and therefore the father of the Roman people. Aeneas is the lover of Dido fated to break her heart and to cause her demise. Aeneas is the son of Anchises and the father of Ascanius. Aeneas is a warrior and a lover. Aeneas has many identities to many different people, and he himself is filled with a multiplicity of identities over the course of his life. Thus, it is unsurprising that this is true for the heroes of Middle-earth: Frodo (Mr. Underhill, Bearer of the One Ring, Elf Friend), Aragon (Strider, Wingfoot, the Dúnadan), and Gandalf (the Grey, the White, Old Greybeard, the Wandering Wizard).
The multiplicity of identities often explored in modern literature calls us back to reality. It is not a wholly new discovery and invention of the modern age and certainly not, as implied by Groom, the self-construction of identity that we find in the contemporary fad of identity-politics.
Groom proceeds to explore other modern concerns, as already mentioned, like “uncertainty” and the “hesitancy of good” and the “ambiguity of evil.” This, too, smacks of an invitation into postmodernism. We live in a world of hazy, gray, murky choices burdened by the uncertainty over right and wrong; the world of black and white morality, certainty and certitude, absolute goodness and absolute evil is but a figment of social creation. Groom notes that in any initial reading of the tales of Middle-earth, “It does appear to be an insistently secular world, in which morality is vague and, at best, contingent: characters repeatedly mislead, deceive, lie, cheat, and steal.” Let us unpack all this.
Nothing that Groom says is necessarily wrong. And it is important for those who fetishize Tolkien as a demigod of absolute goodness fighting absolute evil to be reminded of these ambiguities. But again, Groom’s implication that Tolkien can be a resource and friend of relativism is misleading. A reader who is only steeped in the writings and ideas of the past century has forgotten that this reality of uncertainty and ambiguity is also old. There is nothing new under the sun after all.
Let us look at the biblical and classical heroes of many millennia ago. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They murder. Yet they are still heroes. Why? Not because they lie, they cheat, they steal, or they murder. But because they overcome these uncertainties, hesitancies, and ambiguities by the end of their heroic journeys. Achilles is no longer the vengeful killer he was by the conclusion of the Iliad; he is now a lover and friend to Priam, and he bestows peace to the war-torn world of Troy (even if only temporarily). David repents of all his crimes and sins, and, though he has lost friends and sons in the process, is a transformed man after all the suffering and realization of his own evil and return to the goodness of God who cleanses him of his many iniquities. So Boromir redeems himself after having tried to steal the Ring from Frodo in defending Merry and Pippin from the Uruk-hai; so Gimli and Legolas let go of their hatred for each other and become friends; so Frodo, despite all his doubts and confusions, carries onward with the help of Samwise who undoes the repeated failures of Frodo to ensure the Ring continues on its path to Mount Doom.
It is precisely this world of moral uncertainty and ambiguity that calls out the best in us and demands we eventually pursue good, and not evil. We do not remain sunk in the muck and mud of perpetual chaos and confusion. We emerge out of it with an act of will, a free choice to embrace the good that does, in fact, exist, even if it is sometimes hard to see. Failure is not the end. We can persevere through failure to that “eucatastrophe,” for which Tolkien is now famous. In the chaos and confusion that abounds around us, our heroic moment is choosing to reject that chaos and confusion and to embrace the call of the good—however dim—to its just end. It might just surprise us.
The true highlight of the book comes in the second half when Groom analyzes the films spawned from Tolkien’s complex stories and source material. There are generally two camps in relation to the adaptations of Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasia: those who love the adaptations, and those who hate them. Groom offers a convincing defense that Peter Jackson and his team of writers and producers were right to expand upon Tolkien’s world and cut out other elements of it for the sake of the story they were telling within the story Tolkien was telling.
For those who love Tolkien, it is worth remembering that the creator of Middle-earth was often revising his own creation and characters. The many appendices and short side stories that populate The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were given pride of place in Jackson’s adaptations. As such, we get to learn more about the backstory, the foggy history recounted only in a few lines of poetry or song in the books through the films. Groom explains his love for Jackson’s adaptations—The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit—in terms with which I wholeheartedly agree:
There was, then, no reason not to include additional material from The Lord of the Rings in fleshing out characters and plot: details were taken from ‘Durin’s Folk’ (Appendix A) and the chronology ‘The Tale of Years’ (Appendix B), allowing three linked subplots to be developed: the rise of Sauron as the Necromancer; the blood-feud between the Dwarves and the Orcs of Moria, led by Azog (the Defiler, the ‘Pale Orc’); and the intervention of Gandalf in Thorin’s quest to reclaim Erebor.
Any lover of the 21st century cinema of Middle-earth, especially Peter Jackson’s films, will gain insight into that world through Groom’s reflections. Furthermore, the first film adaptations I saw were Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings and the Rankin/Bass productions of The Hobbit and The Return of the King. Thus, it was with much delight to discover Groom also treated these adaptations with his wit, insight, and criticism. Groom is an obvious lover of the films alongside the Amazon series The Rings of Power, and any cinephile will benefit from his guiding analysis of the good, the bad, and the unforgettable in these adaptations of Tolkien’s majestic words.
Although one might be tempted to read Groom’s book as endorsing a postmodern Tolkien, he circles back to the obvious in Tolkien: love and friendship in a world of chaos, confusion, and death:
So against the disasters of war, Tolkien offers friendship and fellowship—one of his abiding themes and the principal concerns of his greatest writing, clubs and collaborations being central to Tolkien throughout his life. Friendship and loyalty also have wider associations of hospitality and familiarity that are of course expressed throughout Tolkien’s works, as well as in later reworkings: they remain powerfully domestic bulwarks to the threats of apocalyptic evil.
Here is Tolkien’s most enduring legacy: finding friendship in a seemingly friendless world.
Apart from the hobbits, the initial fellowship is a group of lifelong best friends. The fellowship become friends through their trials, tribulations, doubts, uncertainties, and eventual embrace of heroic deeds—even in death. Friendship breaks down prejudice (Gimli and Legolas); friendship unites races (hobbit, dwarf, elf, human); friendship motivates courage and sacrifice (Sam); friendship erases prior scorn (Gandalf and Pippin); friendship offers redemption (Boromir). To return to my principal critique, which is one in how the reader will interpret what Groom is saying, the uncertainties, the ambiguities, and the hesitancies that abound in Tolkien’s works are not—and should not—be read as endorsements of contemporary relativism but as the real world’s temptations and confusions that we can overcome to forge love and friendship with others. That is the everyday heroism found in Middle-earth. That’s exactly what happens with our heroes as they journey to save Middle-earth from the destructive appetite of Sauron despite all the bickering, confusion, and uncertainty that looms over them. This is also our reality in the 21st century.
In the end, friendship is the most precious gift we have with each other. In the face of tyranny, darkness, evil, death, destruction, and crisis, friendship gives us the strength to face these threats and to overcome the uncertainties and hesitancies we may otherwise have.
Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today is an ambitious and heroic work written by a lover of Tolkien trying to bring him and his world into relevance with a new century and a new audience. For this, Groom should be commended. However, one should be careful not to fall for the trap of reading Tolkien as an implicit friend of relativism and postmodernism. Tolkien’s fantasy is not amenable to contemporary fads. It is a call to return to reality. At its heart, fantasy—of which Tolkien was the master artist—is the embrace of reality forgotten by the confusions of modernity—not an endorsement of them.
