J.R.R. Tolkien did not write The Lord of the Rings or any of the related Middle Earth materials. Honestly.

No, the good Oxford don was merely a translator and annotator of an ancient work of literature known as the Red Book of Westmarch. In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are presumed to have been written by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the Red Book also contained a large collection of ancient folklore known as Translations from the Elvish. It’s from this section of the Red Book that The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and Unfinished Tales are presumed to have originated.

To me, this is one of the truly fascinating things about Tolkien’s world that sets it on a higher pedestal than just about any other work of fantasy. Middle Earth extends beyond the printed page. Like the actor who stays in character between performances, Tolkien pretended in his letters and private writings that he really was just a quaint British scholar dusting off old books of lore.

Tolkien was an early example of the kind of complete, obsessive immersion you find today in devotees of Second Life or World of Warcraft. I can only imagine what the stuffier dons at Oxford must have thought of this elderly chap whiling away the hours alone pretending to be a scholar of an invented world, writing philosophical treatises about it, mapping it out, trying to smooth out its inconsistencies. Certainly Tolkien’s pal C.S. Lewis never went to such extremes with his Narnia fantasies. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about someone creating such a detailed, fantastic world — called “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — but even that was speculative fiction.

And so there’s something both satisfying and frustrating about this posthumous collection of stories. Unfinished Tales is really just a big hunk of Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father’s stories in lots of dry footnotes.

All this for what? Well, for stories. Fiction. And fiction about Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, no less. Sometimes I would finish some of the drier chapters of Unfinished Tales — say, the listings of the kings and queens of Númenor, or an account of the battles fought in the margins of LOTR by the Rohirrim — and really have to struggle to remember that this was all just part of a made-up story.

Because in the final analysis, what Tolkien’s doing with these stories isn’t scholarship or historical research. It’s pure fiction, just the same as the Flight to the Ford or the Council of Elrond or the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It might feel like scholarship, but it isn’t really. Tolkien’s a storyteller at heart; he just tells them in a different way than anyone before him.

That leads me to the frustrating aspect of Unfinished Tales. There are lots of these seemingly endless endnotes where Christopher Tolkien talks about the different versions of the story at hand. Did his father really intend for Ar-Adûnakhôr to be the nineteenth or twentieth king of Númenor? In the appendices of Return of the King he says one thing, in draft A he says another, in draft B he says a third thing, in a letter to a fan he wrote a fourth thing, and furthermore if you compare the dates of the drafts you find that… zzzzzz.

I mean, really, who cares? We don’t give an urn of warm troll spit about Ar-Adûnakhôr. He’s just one of the thousands of names in the margins. I felt like smacking Christopher across the face and saying, “You’re the frickin’ editor now, dude. None of this is really germane to the story your Dad was trying to tell. Nineteenth or twentieth, doesn’t matter — just pick one.”

For another example, take “The Quest of Erebor,” a behind-the-scenes look at how Gandalf came about getting involved with Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien presents multiple drafts and fragments that his father wrote on the subject, with plenty of editorial commentary and endnotes in between. The drafts really don’t differ all that much. Any half-decent editor could have stitched together a 90% complete and cohesive narrative of “The Quest of Erebor” without adding a single word of their own.

As for the last 10% — why didn’t Christopher just take a co-author credit and flesh it out? We already know that Christopher found enough in the Túrin saga to put together a relatively complete Children of Húrin. Guy Gavriel Kay helped him finish The Silmarillion. Most of the tales in Unfinished Tales end with a long summary by Christopher Tolkien of how the rest of the story was supposed to go. It’s not like he was transcribing the words of Moses here — why couldn’t he just finish the ones that were close to being finished?

On further reflection, though, I can think of two words that summarize why you shouldn’t flesh out your father’s notes and outlines, and those words are “Brian Herbert.” (Read my take on the first three Dune prequels.) Besides which, Christopher had a very good justification for treating the material with the reverence of a historian: his Dad wanted it that way.

Tolkien wanted his mythology to be fragmentary and occasionally contradictory; he wanted these histories to read like summarizations of retellings of half-remembered legends. As if JRRT himself was only the latest in a long line of scholars attempting to construct a complete history of Middle Earth without access to the original source materials. I think he would be tickled to discover that his writings were being treated with the same scholarly fussiness that he himself employed.

Tolkien himself recognized the absurdity of all this, as son Christopher quotes him in the introduction to Unfinished Tales:

I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good — certainly not for me who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings, of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer “information,” or “lore.”

If you want to see how far Tolkien’s self-awareness goes, look at the story of “Aldarion and Erendis,” which I couldn’t help reading as autobiographical. The tale concerns a prince of Númenor who strives to reconcile his love for a woman with his obsessive love of the sea. He spends years denying one or the other — either staying home and tending to his marriage, or voyaging afar on the sea and neglecting his wife. The resulting bitterness makes a sham of his marriage and sows evil in the Númenoreans that will eventually lead to their downfall hundreds of years later. It’s one of the best chapters in the book.

Now I don’t know much about J.R.R.’s wife Edith and what their marriage was like. But I’m sure there must have been many a tense night when J.R.R. secluded himself in his study with his funny little maps and philological note cards, leaving Edith to wonder if she should have married William the tax attorney instead. I’m sure a lot of women reading this story nod their heads, thinking about their husbands who like to seclude themselves in the attic and obsess over their online gaming/model trains/fantasy baseball/Civil War recreationism/whatever. (I don’t want to be sexist or exclusionary — but isn’t this kind of fetishism generally a male thing?)

“Aldarion and Erendis” stops somewhere in the middle, and J.R.R. left only scattered notes about where he intended to take the story, but it’s clear that things were headed for a bad turn. Aldarion’s desire for the sea and Erendis’ stubborn resentment cannot be reconciled. Tolkien always works in dichotomies — good vs. evil, Frodo vs. Gollum, fealty vs. treachery, etc. — and one could argue that the main “theme” of his work is how we make our way through the world by steering between these moral pylons. I wonder if Tolkien found this particular story too painful to finish.

Aside from “Aldarion and Erendis,” the Túrin fragments, and “The Quest for Erebor,” the other major treats of Unfinished Tales include:

• “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin,” which contains a breathtaking scene of Ulmo, the lord of waters, appearing before a mortal Man (see the third book cover on this page), as well as a fantastic description of the hidden city of Gondolin
• “The Drúedain,” an essay about those jungle pygmy dudes that help Théoden’s army get to Minas Tirith in Return of the King, and including a short story, “The Faithful Stone”
• “The Istari,” an essay on the Order of Wizards that included Gandalf and Saruman, including some tantalizing information about Alatar and Pallando, the two “Blue Wizards”
• “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” which offers many of Tolkien’s musings on the First Couple of Lórien, including much speculation about Galadriel’s ban from returning into the West

If you haven’t gone much beyond Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films — if you couldn’t get through The Silmarillion — if you didn’t look longingly at the maps of Middle Earth in those volumes and hunger to know what was in those blank spaces — then don’t bother with Unfinished Tales. You’re the kind of person who’s probably never bought the Special Extended Limited Edition DVD version of a film specifically so you can listen to the Visual Effects Supervisor’s commentary, which wasn’t on the original DVD, which you also own. And this is okay. You’re what we call “normal.”

But if you think you just might have a touch of the obsessive fanboy in you, give Unfinished Tales a whirl. I think Unfinished Tales is about as geeky-obsessive as I get. I have no desire to slog through all twelve volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s “History of Middle Earth” series. Though I might just breeze through The Tolkien Reader if I feel up to it. And maybe Roverandom. And maybe Smith of Wooton Major…

Many people who read The Lord of the Rings falter somewhere in The Two Towers, and that’s perfectly understandable. According to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Foreword to the Second Edition of LOTR, he actually faltered in the writing of it, putting the book down for two years before picking up again in book 4. (”Foresight had failed and I had no time for thought,” says J.R.R.)

It’s a difficult book. Frodo and Sam, the characters we’re most invested in, disappear for a couple hundred pages; Gandalf is presumably dead in the book’s opening chapters; Boromir’s definitely dead; and Aragorn is still something of a distant figure. Gimli is interesting enough but hardly crucial to the plot, and it’s difficult to give two figs about Legolas.

Then we have the problem of the Rohirrim. As far as I’m concerned, Tolkien doesn’t do a very good job getting the audience to buy in to the kingdom of Rohan. I was shocked to discover that Éowyn is given less than a page in Two Towers, barely enough time for her to show up and cast eyes lovingly at Aragorn. Erkenbrand, Háma, and Gamling are just tertiary characters, nobody we particularly care about. The only person who really grabs your attention in these opening chapters about the Riddermark is Éomer. Before we’ve formed any emotional attachment to Rohan, Théoden’s off to Helm’s Deep.

As for Théoden? Théoden becomes more likable as the book goes on, and he really comes into his own when he rejects Saruman’s offer of peace at Orthanc. But when we first see him, the king of Rohan is just a cranky old man under the sway of bad counsel. Then Gandalf shows up, speaks a few strong words, casts Wormtongue down on his belly — and Théoden has a baffling change of heart. In my LOTR omnibus edition, we first meet Théoden on page 501; Gandalf casts Wormtongue down on page 503; on page 507, the king’s already mustering the troops. Too quick.

Now Gandalf is supposed to be a Maiar of old, and it’s said somewhere that his “magic” is to inspire the people of Middle Earth. To restore them to their youth and vigor, to rekindle the divine spark within. So that could certainly explain Théoden’s sudden shift. But then why didn’t Gandalf accomplish the same thing the last time he saw the king? Okay, there’s a convenient excuse — Gandalf was in a big hurry. But Gandalf’s obviously been in and out of this place many times, and Saruman’s poisoning took years.

So Théoden’s conversion is somewhat puzzling and the Rohirrim are still strangers. Therefore I wasn’t particularly invested in the battle of Helm’s Deep. The battle itself is the first extended battle sequence Tolkien had written since the Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit, and it’s considerably better done than that. But Peter Jackson’s instincts were correct in trying to build up this battle with every scrap of back story he could find. I struggled hard to care about anyone here but Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli.

But I want to come back to Théoden’s choice to cast aside Gríma Wormtongue and follow the advice of Gandalf, because such choices are what this book is made of. Everyone gets their moment of choice in Two Towers.

Sam and Frodo stand on the brink of Mordor and decide to press on, even if nobody is left alive to know about it. Saruman is given a clear choice by Gandalf to come down from Orthanc and walk the long, hard road towards forgiveness, or to rot in his tower. Treebeard and the ents must decide whether to confront Saruman or to sit back and await “the withering of all woods.” Even Gollum has a moment standing over the sleeping bodies of Sam and Frodo on the stairs of Cirith Ungol where he briefly reconsiders his evil plot to lead the hobbits to Shelob.

So what are our characters choosing between? For Tolkien, the choice is not complex: there’s light, and then there’s darkness.

White light is the purest representation of the holiness of the Valar –the White Tree of Gondor, the white light of the Silmarils, the white light of Galadriel’s phial, Gandalf’s reincarnation as the White Wizard. Meanwhile, black is the symbolic color of Sauron and evil. Black is darkness, black is the skin color of the “cruel Haradrim,” black is the color of the Nazgûl, the Black Riders. (About the racial aspect of Tolkien’s writing, see my post on The Silmarillion.)

And in Tolkien’s world, the bad guys are always trying to muddy the distinction between black and white, thereby muddying the distinction between the moral decisions the characters must make. Remember how Saruman rejects the designation of white, as Gandalf recounts during the Council of Elrond in Fellowship of the Ring:

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘ “I liked white better,” I said.

‘ “White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

‘ “In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

So The Two Towers is a book where all of the players must figure out what’s the right path and what’s the wrong path and what’s simply the convenient path. For Frodo and Sam, choosing the right path is a very literal thing. They spend most of the book teetering on the brink between Mordor and Gondor, and until the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, the path westward to Gondor is always the closer and easier route. Likewise, Rohan could have accepted Saruman’s offers of alliance; the ents could have sat the war out and left it to the Elves and Men; Frodo could have had Faramir’s men kill Gollum at the Forbidden Pool.

(In light of these tough moral choices that fill The Two Towers, the character of Faramir is quite frustrating, and I can completely understand why Peter Jackson decided to give him a makeover in the films. Faramir manages to completely resist the lure of the Ring where even Galadriel could not. “Not even if I found it on the highway would I take it,” he says, bizarrely.)

(As a result, without any real choice to confront, Faramir’s really not much of a character. His purpose in The Two Towers is really to act as a moral foil for Frodo, giving him the opportunity to do away with Gollum, and get an armed escort back to Minas Tirith, if he wants. Faramir also provides a convenient bit of foreshadowing for the confrontation with Shelob. But beyond that, he’s just another one of Tolkien’s pleasant, wise, faceless heroes that just seem to be wandering around Middle Earth, like Gildor, like Glorfindel, like Haldir.)

So every character is confronted with their moral choice. How to choose among them? For Tolkien, it’s really not a complicated issue. Chase down those moral grays for long enough, and they all eventually resolve into black or white. As Éomer asks Aragorn at one point, “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” Tolkien’s mouthpiece Aragorn replies:

‘As he ever has judged… Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’

Many have criticized Tolkien over the years for this simplistic black-and-white approach. They call his villains one-dimensional, they decry his treatment of the orcs as an evil race beyond any possibility of redemption. Sauron is just a faceless cipher.

But such critics are missing the point, I think. The real villains in The Lord of the Rings aren’t the orcs, or the Nazûl, or even Sauron. The real villains are the temptations within. Despair, greed, pride, anger, fear. Sauron and his minions are just the external manifestation of these things.

And this is part of the genius of Tolkien, and one of the things that makes these books so much more interesting than the simplistic good-vs-evil battle they’re often made out to be. There really are no evil characters in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron? The Witch-King of Angmar? The Balrog? These aren’t characters, per se. We learn very little about their motivations, and they only appear at a remote distance. There’s no reason Sauron wants to conquer Middle Earth; he just does. Sauron is the magnetic pole that pulls our characters towards the Dark Side, while Gandalf (representing the Valar over the sea) is the magnetic pole for the Light.

So the orcs and the trolls and the Nazgûl get short shrift by Tolkien, because they’re not really who he cares about. He cares about all of us down here in the middle, wavering between good and evil, trying to make the difficult choices between them. His “villains” are Boromir, a brave soldier who gives in to temptation; Gollum, a hobbit-like creature who’s in over his head; Wormtongue, a man who’s chosen the most expedient side in a brewing war; and so on. People caught in between the two distant poles of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, struggling to find a way between them and choose a side.

It’s a very Christian concept. Discern the moral choice; make the right choice, even if it’s the least expedient or most fraught with danger; and have faith that the right will prevail in the end.

*****

An interesting side note:

You may laugh, but I find some very solid gay overtones in the relationship between Sam and Frodo, especially in The Two Towers. Yes, I understand that Tolkien didn’t mean for them to actually be gay, and that the main thing he was exploring here was the master/servant relationship.

But what to make of Sam attacking Shelob like a “small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate”? What to make of Gollum finding Sam and Frodo dozing with their arms around one another and Sam’s head in his lap? What are we to make of Sam, in the midst of preparing rabbit stew for Frodo, studying the lines on his sleeping face and then saying, “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no”?

There are plenty more examples. So scoff if you want, and tell yourself that J.R.R. Tolkien lived in a more innocent time where these things could be written without having any homosexual overtones. But I’m sure that even in Tolkien’s time there were old English bachelors who lived together and puttered in the garden together and finished one another’s sentences, and even J.R.R. wasn’t completely naïve about what was going on.

I’m convinced the overtones are there. Why exactly Tolkien put them there, I’m not sure. Any ideas?

*****

Another side note:

Peter Jackson got a lot of heat from fanboys who felt that Treebeard’s decision to march to war in the film was completely out of character. After a two-day colloquium with all of the ents, he suddenly reverses himself at the sight of a few burnt trees? But on re-reading The Two Towers, I was shocked to discover that Treebeard’s decision to go to war is just as hasty in the book as it is in the film. In a single conversation with Merry and Pippin, Treebeard goes from “I have not troubled about the Great Wars… they mostly concern Elves and Men” (middle of p. 461) to “I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!… I will stop it! And you shall come with me” (top of p. 463).

While I admit that the films are flawed, more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that Peter Jackson and his co-screenwriters read these books very, very carefully and came to many of the right conclusions.