15

The moral thematic of the novel goes around the war between Light and Shadows,
Good and Evil, but not only about that. We can consider this book as a product of a skilled
mind that could filter the happenings of the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, and was acquainted
with the literature, folklore and narrative structure of its time. The book is also the product of
a mind still bound to late Victorian culture, defending beauty and nature against the war and a
post-industrial world that is not concerned with the environment, allowing its machinery to
destroy forests and pollute rivers.

The utility of The Lord of the Rings relates also to resuming the joy of reading it. It has
always been a pleasure for me to talk and to write about Tolkien. I hope I can share this
pleasure with my fellows. I believe that, ultimately, The Lord of the Rings is a book about our
current days. The mythological appeal of Tolkien’s fantasy seems to respond to the reader’s
necessity of symbolical and religious thought, giving to the present generation, even if
through Peter Jackson’s adaptation to the cinema5, a felling of belonging. In a society so
confused, where the sense of identity is broken, the reader is thankful to find a place like
Middle-Earth. I know I am. I hope this work can be useful to my fellow students of literature,
as a way to approach Tolkien’s imagery and his magical world.

5
LORD of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Directed by Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema. 2001. 1 DVD
(178min.), dolby digital EX, color.
 16

1 HISTORY BECOMES LEGEND, LEGEND BECOMES MYTH

In this chapter I provide a contextualization to The Lord of the Rings as related to the
emergence of Fantasy Fiction through the influence of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and other
members of the English Literary group called The Inklings. The history of those times
permeates Tolkien’s fiction, changed into beautiful tales permeated by mythological qualities.
This chapter also introduces the idea of mythological appeal, arguing about the ways in which
it applies to Tolkien’s novel.

1.1 The Rising of Fantasy Novel

In this work I deal with a literary genre which has not been much favoured by a
number of theoreticians, who prefer to concentrate on the standard canon – that great creator
of the paradigms and dogmas that rules the literary object. The genre I refer to is Fantasy,
whose origins can be traced back to mythological narratives, expanding through fairy-tales –
first at an oral stage and then in written registers such as those made by the Grimm Brothers
and by Charles Perrault – to reach the current Fantasy Novel, represented by names as Lewis
Carroll, James M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, Michael Ende, J. R. R. Tolkien or Katherine Paterson
among many others.

In its roots, the word fantasy comes from the Latin word phantasia meaning the part
of our imagination that is capable of creation. It also means, in its origin, fantastic image,
 17

dream, daydream, utopia or fiction (BUNEL: 2005). The word ‘fiction’ here reminds us of its
root – fingere – that is, the act of pretending, deluding, misleading somebody deliberately. Is
not that idea appropriate to the notion of literature? Does not literature delude, mesmerize the
reader, suspending him in a parallel world which has its own rules, and its own logic of world
building? Is not literature an act of fingere? I think it is. However, this conception of fantasy
differs from the one we find in myth.

Mythology was born in a time ordered by orality, where the main word was the magic-
religious word. The tradition those oral stories dealt with relied on religion, ritual and magic
and could not be set apart from ordinary life. Joseph Campbell compares these stories to parts
of a broken ceramic vase, which is widespread around the world (CAPMBELL: 2003)
According to him, these pieces of ceramic could preserve the main content of the stories – that
are the symbols and archetypes – because as a part of the vase they contain it inside them.
Campbell believes that the underlying structure of any myth is always the myth of the hero.
And his purpose is to show that this myth is about every human being: each of us is the hero,
struggling to accomplish his own adventure. As human beings, we join in our own journey to
develop ourselves as individuals and to find our place in society. According to Campbell, by
understanding the myths we get to understand our own lives,

the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural

history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the
fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected
hero have a worldwide distribution—appearing everywhere in
new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a
kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore,
whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes
are taken lightly— in a spirit, obviously, of play—they appear
also in religious contexts, where they are accepted not only as
factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the
whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both
its spiritual authority and its temporal power. (Campbell: 2003
p.9)

The great advancement of Fantasy narrative in comparison to mythological narrative is

that it presents itself in the written form from the start. Of course, thinking like that, we do not
ignore the epic narratives from Greece as The Odyssey and The Iliad, written by Homer, or
even the applicability of the cycles of Greek myths in the tragedies created by Sophocles,
Aeschylus and Euripides, that are filled with mythical content. Still, they differ from Fantasy
Novel because they are – as the fairy and folk-tales are – recollections of traditional and oral
narratives shared by different communities from a determinate local and culture. They
 18

represent the birth of Literature, and register the passage from the magic-religious word to the
laic one.

The laicisation of the word provoked a great change: through it man could retain what
used to be lost with the end of oral tradition. Common knowledge was not passed from father
to son any more. With the spreading of the written form, the concepts of art and religion were
separated. The recollecting of old stories dealing with ogres, fairies, elves and all sorts of
enchanted creatures that live in the bestiary complex conceived by European Imagery, found
out a place in the world through the works of Charles Perrault, Andersen, and the Grimm
Brothers among many other folklorists. Thankfully, their huge efforts and researches provided
us with a gigantic quantity of narratives known as the fairy-tales or folk-tales that were
analyzed by the Russian Formalists to exhaustion. Vladimir Propp was the main researcher to
look for a kind of typology to the fairy-tale and to the folk-tale, revealing the underlying
structures of this kind of narrative (PROPP: 1984).

Fantasy, as one can notice, has always found out a place in the world. In all literary
genres we can find allusions to wonder creatures and their enchanted worlds. Be it in William
Blake’s poetry, in Shakespearian plays, in Greek epics, in medieval romance, and even in the
most representative literary genre of the current days – the novel.

Fantasy novels are written by a range of authors who draw their magic lands from a
wide range of historical, religious and mythical sources. To the aim and scope of this
research, however, we will concentrate on the foundation of a literary group called The
Inklings, conceived by two British authors, Irish-born C. S. Lewis and one of his best friends,
the South-African born Englishman J. R. R. Tolkien. The idea of this group, which got its
meetings in a pub near Oxford University, in England, was to form a party of literati to talk
about literature, philology, mythology and creative writing, since most of the members were
also writers. Among the members who joined The Inklings during the years we have: Lord
David Cecil, lecturer in English at New College; Neville Coghill, English tutor at Exeter
College; James Dundas-Grant, Commander of the Oxford University Naval Division; Adam
Fox, Dean of Divinity at Magdalen; Colin Hardie, Classical Tutor at Magdalen; R. E.
'Humphrey' Havard, Lewis's doctor; R. B. McCallum of Pembroke College; Father Gervase
Mathew, OP of Blackfriars, C. E. Stevens, historian at Magdalen; Charles Wrenn, Lecturer in
English Language; Christopher Tolkien (son of J. R. R. Tolkien) and John Wain, both
students at the time.
 19

The conversations held in this group gave birth, among several other things, to two of
the most celebrated Fantasy Novels from the Modern Period of English Literature – The Lord
of the Rings, written by Tolkien, and The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis. These two
pieces of literature were created in the period between the two Great Wars, and both are
marked by the wartime context that surrounded the authors. However, we must not think of
The Inklings as anything like a mutual admiration society or men hungry for professional
advancement – as Walter Hooper reminds us,

They were, first and foremost, Christians, who had in common

something that was far more important than their jobs or their
other interests. Nowhere it is better put than in the definition
Lewis gave of Friendship in The Four Loves: 'In this kind of
love,' he said, 'do you love me? Means do you see the same
truth? Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth? (Hooper:
1999, p.5)

The Fantasy Fiction written in this warlike period created a kind of counter-culture
literature. If we consider the aesthetic and thematic aspects privileged in European
modernism, the dark existential perception that seems to lead the intellectual positions of the
first half of the twentieth century is disrupted in Fantasy Fiction. The mythic approach to
literature offers some rest from the predominant atheistic, even nihilistic perception of things
predominating in the intellectual circles of that period. As to the relation between internal and
external verisimilitude, it seems that Fantasy Fiction is more committed to the rules of
medieval Romance than to the fictional structure found in texts written by great modern
novelists such as Virginia Woolf or Joseph Conrad.

Because it was widely bought and in a sense worked as a balm against anxiety,
Fantasy Novels were underestimated as mere escapist fiction. The huge influence they began
to have on their readers, especially the young ones, was often attributed to the fact that readers
found in those stories a way to flee from reality. Narnia and Middle-Earth were seen as safe
places to go when the ‘real’ world was in trouble. It was only in the second half of the 20th
Century that the metaphors involving aesthetics and religiosity became more flexible and
allowed a loosening of the restrictions imposed upon imagination. It was at that period that
Fantasy Fiction started to be seen through a more favourable angle. In the United States, for
instance, among the hippies, many fellowships were created, which called themselves “people
from Middle-Earth”, living together in communities in the countryside. Those people argued
 20

they were living under the laws of Tolkien’s Mythology, following his precepts as caring
about nature and living without machines and pollution. We can clearly see how far The Lord
of the Rings could reach people’s mind through the glimmering of Tolkien’s writing.

The year of 2001 witnessed a return of the same themes through the appropriation of
the novels by the cinema. Tolkien, Lewis, Barrie or even contemporary authors as J. K.
Rowling with her Harry Potter saga had their stories adapted to the screen around the globe,
fomenting a new movement towards to the mythical narratives, and as a consequence waking
up the interest of legions of new readers. That was also the opening to a completely new
generation of writers who joined the enterprise of narrating their own stories and creating
their own magic lands. This phenomenon also triggered a new sort of critical approach to this
kind of stories, which were no longer seen as escapist books, but as aesthetic constructions
that should be understood as another kind of literary object, with aesthetic rules of their own.

Readers’ yearning for fantasy founded a new mainstream of popular culture.

Contemporary critics now regard this phenomenon as a resuming of folk motives of
mythological thought. There are a new generation of critics who deal with Fantasy Fiction,
represented by names such as David Leeming, Tom Shippey, Richard Purtill and Jane
Chance. The facts that Fantasy novels are popular, and that they allow for magic and
imagination, are no longer considered detrimental to the genre. Fantasy novels are as popular
as mythical narratives and fairy-tales, and this is merely a peculiarity not a hindrance. These
stories allow us to take a journey into an exciting and mysterious world – the world of
fantasy. Inside them you can expect to encounter gods, heroes, monsters, exotic countries, and
amazing adventures. In other words, Fantasy Novels take full advantage of the fact that they
belong in the world of fiction. Fingere, Phantasia: this is the stuff Literature is still made of.
And this is the business of my monograph, to ascertain that in our contemporary times – call
them post-modern, hypermodern, liquid, or as you like it – fantastical and mythological
themes are still incorporated into our present-day literary aesthetics.
 21

1.2 Fairy-Tale, Epic Novel or Literary Myth

As piece of literature Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has been defined in different
ways, because of the different possibilities this book presents. Some critics, as David
COLBERT (2002), have read the novel as a modern myth full of metaphors that are
connected both with ancient and contemporary times. This view of the book is shared by
many – scholars or common readers – who seem to experience, through the reading of this
novel, the same kind of force the old myths would provoke. Others, as TOLKIEN (1983)
himself, prefer to consider the novel as a fairy tale with its own particularities, that makes it
possible to compare the characters and situations with old folkloric stories and legends. There
are also some critics, as Tom SHIPPEY (2001), who see The Lord of the Rings as an Epic
Novel filled with religious meanings.

In his essay On Fairy-Tales, Tolkien talks about his own studies and beliefs about
these stories. He says that fantasy has played a vital role since ancient times and that fairy
stories are related to “fantastic elements”. According to him,

(…) fairy stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly with the
simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these
simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the
story-maker who allows himself to be “free with” Nature can be her
lover and not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the
potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and
wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.
(Tolkien, 1983, p. 147)

Joseph Campbell reaffirms such concepts when he says that Myth and Fairy- Tale,
although sharing the same roots, present precise differences that can be clearly noticed. While
 22

the hero from the fairy-tale triumphs in a microcosm bound to domestic and ordinary life, the
mythic hero triumphs in a macrocosm bound to the destiny of all his/her people, or all
humankind. Therefore,

It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal

the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from
tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal":
they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. Even when the
legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are
rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; for the point is
not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that, before
such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important,
primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we
all know and visit in our dreams. (Campbell, 2003, p. 27)

In this context, it is impossible to think about Frodo, Aragorn or even Gandalf as

heroes who triumph only in a microcosm. They are engaged in a dangerous quest that keeps
the destiny of all peoples and races of Middle-Earth. Consequently, for the purpose of this
work, The Lord of the Rings will not be considered as a fairy-tale, at least not when the matter
is the quest of its characters.

There are also some similarities between the Epic Novel and The Lord of the Rings,
especially in the matters of extension, subjects and typical passages. If we think about the
Council of Elrond, in The Fellowship of the Ring, which decides their destinies, we can find
analogous epic passages, such as for instance Satan’s council, in Paradise Lost, or
Agamemnon’s council, in The Odyssey. We can even trace parallels between the dreams of
Frodo and the dreams of Odysseus, revealing the usual epic mechanisms which prepare the
hero to meet dangerous situations.

Nonetheless, in spite of the mythical and archetypal constructions in Tolkien’s novels,

we also have the boundaries related to the treatment of myth in contemporary times. Although
I believe these boundaries are flexible nowadays, we cannot broaden them inconsequently if
we want to keep some of the original concept. In this sense, calling a literary work as The
Lord of the Rings a myth is, at least, a mistake.

Even if Myth is a lithe construct in the present days, it is important to ascertain some
aspects that are relevant when we are dealing with such a volatile concept. Firstly, a myth is a
narrative, a discourse or a talk, a way the ancient societies found to mirror their contradictions
or to express their paradoxes and doubts while trying to explain nature and its entire
 23

workings. It could also be seen as a way these same societies could think about life and
cosmos, trying to grasp the meaning of their existences in a chaotic world. These narratives
are conceived in an allegorical form, never opening to people their entire meaning. There is
always something left hidden in mythological narratives, something imprecise and fading that
does not reveal the entire truth. This is the most common definition of myth, which has been
improved a lot by many researchers from different areas of knowledge throughout the last
decades. Psychologists, anthropologists, historians and literature scholars are responsible for
broadening the understanding of myth by creating many approaches to the study of it. So,
when someone decides to research on mythology, it is necessary to delimitate what
conceptual line is going to be used to accomplish the task. There are many ways to approach a
myth: Freudian psychology, the French school of Myth and Ritual, the Structuralism of Levi-
Strauss, Foucault’s connections between Myth and Discourse and Truth, among several
others. The line to be pursued in this monograph relates to Comparative Universalistic
Mythology as presented and defended by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, both followers
of Jung’s views on mythology and the unconscious.

Briefly, Comparative and Universalistic mythology preaches that there is one

underlying structure in all the myths that is shared by all peoples around the globe. On a
deeper level, the myths can be seen as narratives with diverse colours, but with the same
structure always related to man’s rites of passage. According to Joseph Campbell,

The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to

view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such
themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and
resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution—appearing
everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the
entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly— in a spirit,
obviously, of play—they appear also in religious contexts, where they
are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the
verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which
it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power elements
of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. (Campbell, 2003,
p. 3)

Although Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings shares many of the particularities and the
same underlying structure, and corroborates the line defended by Colbert, it cannot be
considered a myth for some reasons. First, a myth is a narrative bound to a magical religious
time, when people had their knowledge passed through stories, orally. Second, a myth is a
fading and intangible construction never written and totally out of our concept of time. Any
ordinary reader of Tolkien knows the importance this author gives to dates, years and
 24

calendars in his stories, always setting up events in specific periods of time. So, Tolkien’s
novels could be better defined, according to Pierre BRUNEL (2005), as literary myths.

Myths do not have authors because they only exist when connected to certain rituals,
tradition or culture. In this sense, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Homer do not write
myths, but literary myths. They are myths retold or recollected by an artist at a determinate
point in time, embedded with the artist’s impression of the myth and of the society of their
time. So, it is very difficult to define what the myth of King Arthur really represents, because
we can count on many versions, by singular authors who have offered their own impressions
about what the original myth might have been.

Tolkien does not retell any specific myth in The Lord of the Rings, although many
English, German and Finish myths have inspired him. Tolkien is the author of his story, from
the creation of Middle-Earth and their races, the languages spoken in it, to the events narrated
as if being told by a historian who writes about the history of his own homeland.
Nevertheless, it is clear – especially in the parts concerning the Hobbits and the Shire – that
the author is aware of the kind of literature he is producing. As Tom Shippey affirms, Tolkien
has no need to reinvent himself, or reinvent the Englishman:

Hobbits, then, like the English middle class to which they clearly
belong, may aspire to be bourgeois and boring, but it is natural to
them. Tolkien indeed had nothing against middle-class Englishmen,
for he was one himself: and, unlike so many of the English-speaking
writers of his time, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, he did not feel in
any way alienated, nor have any urge to reinvent himself as working-
class, non-English, in internal exile, or any other glamorous pose. It is
one reason why he has never found any favour with the determinedly
cosmopolitan British intelligentsia. (Shippey, 2001, p.11)

Therefore, before calling The Lord of the Rings a literary myth, I would rather see it as a
novel with mythological patterns, full of mythological appeal, that gives the readers an
impression of getting in contact with genuine Myth.
 25

1.3 The Novel’s Building – Parallels and Contrasts

One of the most instigating characteristics of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the
way he chooses to tell his story and the mechanisms he uses to accomplish such an amazing
task. The role of the narrator here is the role of the historian. From the start we can taste a
mock sensation, as if we were reading a history treaty. In fact, Tolkien decides to assume the
posture of a modern scholar who has found out an old book (The Red Book of the Westmarch)
written in an ancient and forgotten language of which he is the only possible translator.
Tolkien, as the artist responsible for the writing of the novel, is the translator of a book that is
pretended to exist since gone ages. He is the researcher who is dictating, compiling, and
translating all these copies of ancient documents about a land called Middle - earth.

The first part of its job – The Hobbit – is written by Bilbo Baggins, while The Lord of
the Rings is written by Frodo Baggins – both of them Hobbits of the Shire. This enchanting
idea gives to the story a quality of an antiquity, as if we had in our hands a piece of a very old
story that registers all the happenings of a magic land lost in the past that really existed in our
world. This is one of the most representative characteristics of the fantasy fiction – to create
an internal and external sense of verisimilitude to convince the reader that there is a link
between our factual world and the fictional one. As a consequence of this technique, this
magical land is built with such precision and detail, that the events described in the novel are
perceived by the reader as feasible and real. Each part of Middle Land is described – almost to
the exhaustion of the reader – in a powerful and intricate manner, tessellating the language
fabric of that unusual map. The geography of the place is totally associated with the morality
of its peoples. Through the analysis of the appendix to the work, we confirm the impression
raised during the reading that the description of the places we can follow the movements
related to abstract or moral values. For instance, Good and Beauty flow from the West and, to
it, they come back at the end. While the attacks of Evil generally are hidden or come from the
East – where lies its foremost force.
 26

Nevertheless what is really remarkable is the precision in the construction of the story.
Each chapter, each book, is meticulously wrought, presenting the reader with an elaborate
web where we can see many parallels and contrasts. It is clear that this is a sort of narrative
which has laws of its own, and they serve to harmonize Middle - earth as well. Even the
languages spoken by the inhabitants are deeply connected to some morality issue. If we
compare language of the Elves to that of the Orcs’, we can notice that the Elves have gone
through many sufferings in their long existence through the ages of Middle - earth, acquiring
wisdom, nobility and a poetic language, making of the sounds they utter as beautiful as they
are. On the other hand the Orcs are deformed creatures born in darkness, with no intelligence,
atrocious and cruel. Such characteristics are well portrayed in the unpleasant language they
speak in the novel.

The Lord of the Rings is divided in six books, organized in three tomes: The
Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King.6 Throughout its 1202
pages we follow the story of Frodo Baggins and his friends in a reversed quest, which does
not intend to find any treasure but to destroy one they already have. Tagging along Tolkien’s
plot, the reader is conducted to a path of constant alternation between the sensations of danger
and relief, which is one of the predominant traits of this fantasy novel. The books are
organized in a way they present one chapter of danger and fear an then a next chapter of
protection and consolation. We can consider this pattern if we examine a sequence of chapters
such as “The Old Forest – In the House of Tom Bombadil” or “The Bridge of Khazad-dym –
Lothlorien”, when the reader is first thrown to evil and risk, after to be given some time to rest
and recuperate. The alternations of tone are also remarkable, from the daylight colours and
joy from the perspective of the people who inhabit the Shire, moving then to a progressive
darkening and then plunging into the gloom and misery of a heavy telling, to return again to a
lighter narrative at the end of the journey.

Another attention-grabbing technique is the foreshadowing effect. With this recourse

the reader is made aware of what is to come, as in the dreams of Frodo, the speeches of
Gandalf, or Galadriel’s mirror in Lothlorien. Flashbacks are also used to narrate a separated

6
For the purposes of this work, The Lord of the Rings will be referred to as one single novel, divided into three
volumes. As for the structural differences between the novel and the fantasy novel, I will only refer to them
briefly, when necessary. Fascinating as this discussion may be, I would lose track of my established goal if I
developed it too far.
 27

fact during the novel – when Gandalf tells Frodo that he was arrested by Saruman in Isengard,
when the wizard was being awaited by Frodo and his fellows in the Shire.

One of the most striking features of The Lord of the Rings is its parallelism, which
reveals to what extent the characters and situations are related to one another. From the simple
details to the most sophisticated ones, parallel scenes appear from the start. Book I tells the
story of a group of four friends (hobbits from the Shire) who travel to take the ring to a land
far from their homes. In Book II we have the same situation after the Council of Elrond, when
after some discussion a group of fellows leave from a secure and pleasant land to face a
dangerous path to take the ring to a land far from Elrond’s home. In both parts Frodo accepts
that a man associated to Gondor follows him in his journey to destroy the ring – in Book I the
man is Aragorn and in Book II Boromir. Both chapters start with a celebration – Bilbo’s
birthday party in Book I and an elegant dinner in Rivendel in book II. In both books the ring
is revealed and Frodo spontaneously decides to carry it. Shippey also identifies some parallels
in The Lord of the Rings, as the first meeting between Frodo and Faramir and Aragorn and
Éomer,

In both cases an armed company comes upon strangers in disputed

borderland. In both cases the leader of the company is under orders to
arrest strangers and take them back, but decides not to obey the order,
at the risk of his own life. Both scenes begin with a hostile
demonstration, indeed a surrounding, and in both a subordinate
member of the weaker party (Gimli, Sam) comes close to lose his
temper in support of his own leader. In both scenes, finally, there is an
initial sequence which is public, heard by all the Riders or the
Rangers, and then a second one in which the leader of the group
speaks more privately and in more conciliatory fashion. (Shippey,
2001, p. 100)

Nonetheless it is in the characters and their roles in the story that the parallel
technique is more explicit. Denethor and Théoden, for example, both kings, are old men who
have lost their beloved sons (Boromir and Théodred), and both men see the young
descendents Faramir and Éomer as weak and unreliable substitutes for their antecessors.
Another peculiarity about Boromir and Théodred is that both princes die almost at the same
time, when the Battle of Pelenor Fields is taking place. Such effects of parallelism reveal
Tolkien’s precise symmetry that addresses The Lord of the Rings as “the complex neatness of
its overall design.” (SHIPPEY, 2001, p.50)
 28

Cultural aspects of ancient culture are used to establish another kind of parallelism
with mythology and history, especially in the poems and songs recited and sung by the
characters along the narrative,

From the Gate of the Kings the North Wind rides, and past the roaring
falls;
And clear and cold about the tower its loud horn calls.
“What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me
today?
What news from Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.”
“Beneath Amor Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought.
His cloven shield, his broken sword, they do the water brought.
His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they lay to rest;
And Rouros, golden Rauros-falls, bore him upon its breast.”
O Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gaze”
To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of the days.
(Tolkien, 2003 p. 436)

This elegiac tune sounds as echoes of the rhetoric Old English poems. The poetry in
the book follows a pattern related to the old Anglo-Saxon elegies that used to be sung by the
bards during battles or funerals. Shippey observes in Tolkien’s poetry a relation to the acts of
the knights who lose their lives in the battlefield,

Nearly all the poetry that is quoted is strongly elegiac, one might note
in a culture with no written records that is a major function of poetry,
at once to express and to resist the sadness of oblivion. It has the same
function as the spears that the Riders plant in memory of the fallen, as
the mounds that they raise over them, as the flowers that grow on the
mounds. Éomer says as he passes one burial- place, “when their
spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mounds stand and
guard the Fords of Isen!”As they ride up to Meduseld between the
royal barrows (paralleled in reality by the burial-sites of Sutton Hoo in
England and Glamle Lejre in Denmark), Gandalf looks at the white
flowers that cover them and says, “Evermind they are called,
simbelmynë in this land of men, for they blossom in all the seasons of
the year, and grow where dead men rest.” Tolkien makes a point here
uncommon in the many attempts to present the barbarian past: that the
very fragility of record in such societies makes memory all the more
precious, its expression both sadder and more triumphant. As often,
his imaginative re-creation of the past adds to it an unusual emotional
depth. (Shippey, 2000, p. 97)

The timeline of the novel is also a significant part of the narrative, and it is worked out
in a way that gives us a sensation of increase in the speed. The action in Book I lasts
seventeen years, from Bilbo’s party to Frodo’s arrival in Rivendel. The whole of Book II
lasts three months, and Books III and IV respectively ten days and fifteen days. This
acceleration generates a sense of hurry, as we run faster and faster to reach the climax that
comes with the destruction of the ring.