Matt Gray of The Oxford Student compares the works of Tolkien and Pullman… Read more.
From the archive: 3 February 2003
“One story to rule ’em all?”
Matt Grey tries to work out what the hell J. R. R. was playing at
Amidst the current throng of Elvin pencil-cases and Hobbit McNugget meal deals, thinking of Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of mid twentieth century books is no longer truly accurate. All works of art must experience augmentation and expansion as they find a place in our culture; but living in Britain right now it seems as though LOTR has suffered this to an unprecedented degree. The books have accumulated so much baggage that the literature is lost somewhere between the movies and the merchandising executives currently printing money with the torrent of overpriced crap.
Tolkien’s fiction has become caught up in a recent bracket of accessible and massively popular fantasy books, including J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. However, although they are enjoyed by adults, the new guard are marketed as modern children’s fantasy. LOTR, since its publication in 1955, has been defended as serious literature, voted the Best Book of the Century by Times readers.
This is an easy mistake to make. Middle Earth can become the ultimate escapist universe, a hermetically sealed literary environment, ripe for mad fans to start communicating in Elvish with the rest of their ‘exclusive’ community. But the books, examined in the pariah-filled waters of Literary Criticism, are actually not that great. Only ‘Gandalf_231’ on fan site Let me be Lord of Your Ring.com could hope to argue that the stodgy prose, stilted dialogue and dirth of poorly rounded peripheral characters is ‘better’ than the charged and intellectually challenging writing in the His Dark Materials Trilogy.
Philip Pullman (another Exeter dude) is not an easy read. His themes and narrative can sometimes jar against our expectations of Western storytelling; the empowered female hero, the underlying atheism and the burgeoning (and under-age) sexuality of the writing.
Tolkein has mass-appeal because he conforms to and epitomises the most basic requisites of an English story-telling tradition. Battles between good/evil, a male-dominated society, a heroic code, bucolic idyll ranged against darkness and despair, monsters, princesses, a lot of violence, and…wayhey! the good guys win in the end.
We need to start changing the cultural and story-telling clichés of The Lord of the Rings. It is time to finally face that, by taking the road to Mordor, we are really taking the path of least intellectual and moral resistance.
