THE REFUSALS OF GALADRIEL: TOLKIEN AND FEMINIST CRITICISM

"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.”

-Neil Gaiman 

The Tolkien Misreader

Watching Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy, TIME magazine's Ruth Davis Konigsberg wanted to know "Why Are There No Women In Tolkien's World?"  She's not alone in her inquiry; for decades people have been taking about the "anti-feminist" streak in his works.  The arguments usually come down to there being a lack of women, to his habit of putting women on pedestals, and to the "fact" that there are no female role-models in his Middle-earth.  All sorts of explanations are offered for this, ranging from his devout Catholicism to the death of his mother when he was twelve.  None of them are satisfactory, however, for one important reason: the fault lies in an assumption made the audience, not in the author's work.

I had a great-grandmother who walked into Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds once thinking it was going to be a documentary about our feathered friends.  Needless to say, she had a rude surprise coming to her.  If you pick up The Lord of the Rings, and expect it to be a modern novel, or mistakenly assume Tolkien was a "novelist," you are in for the same kind of shock.  Tolkien was exactly the opposite of a novelist.  Intentionally.

We need to think about the word a minute here, because as a professional philologist, that is exactly what Tolkien would do.  The word "novel," from the Latin for "new," means something that is "...new and different from what has been known before."  The word becomes associated with "narrative literature" only around 1640, because at the time, the novel was something novel.  

For, centuries, the role of the storyteller had been that of custodian.  The storyteller preserved the language, culture, and ethics of the past by passing them down, generation after generation, in the form of tales and fables.  Traditional literature, whether the Iliad or Odyssey, the Ramayana or Mahabharata, the Kalevala or Mabinogion, was simply oral tradition finally making its way into writing.  Sir Thomas Malory didn't invent Arthurian Romance any more than Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm invented their fairy tales.  They were part of the older tradition, of preserving the past in writing.  In the late Renaissance, by sharp contrast, we see the emergence of modern novel--a new story invented by an author, and frequently as a social criticism meant to initiate change.  This was a complete reversal of previous written literature, and it is not until the 19th century that it rises to dominance.

J.R.R. Tolkien was an academic and a writer, but certainly not a novelist.  His career as a philologist, his groundbreaking work with traditional pieces like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his academic writings, all make it clear he was dedicated to preserving the kind of literature that the modern novel was trying to supplant.  To read him as you might read Martin or Jordan is to completely miss the point.

Now you might be thinking at this point "but Middle-earth is just fantasy, it's something Tolkien 'made-up.'"  Yes and no.  It is true that Tolkien invented the Elvish tongues, with a smattering of Black Speech and Dwarvish for spice, but otherwise his "invention" was in fact a kind of "imaginative reconstruction."  Looking at the scattered fragments of fairy tales and legends of Northern Europe, especially the old Anglo-Saxon and Germanic bits, Tolkien played a game of trying to imagine where it all might have come from.  Who are the dwarves in Snow White?  Are they the same as the dwarves scattered throughout Arthurian romance?  What about elves? Goblins?  Trolls?  Tolkien sifted through all the pieces and tried to imagine a primordial myth cycle that might have originated them.  

The clearest example of this lies inside The Hobbit.  The dwarves in The Hobbit are all drawn from a section of the Norse Eddas call the "Völuspá," specifically a chapter entitled Dvergatal or "catalogue of the Dwarves." This ancient poetry fragment lists Durin, Kili and Fili, Bifur and Bombur, Thorin, et al.  Nestled among these names was one that to Tolkien would have stood out like a sore thumb...Gandalf.  Not only did it sound different than the others, it meant literally wand elf.  What was an elf doing in a list of dwarves, and what on earth was a wand elf?  Eventually he would conclude a wand elf was a wizard, not really an elf at all but a staff-bearing immortal from the Undying West where the elves lived.  Is he making this up?  Of course he is, but hardly from scratch.  He was trying to imagine what these things might have meant.

And this brings us back to the charges of anti-feminism.  Neil Gaiman is right; you could take a machine gun to The Lord of the Rings and not hit any women.  But the same could be said for Beowulf, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  It would have been impossible for Tolkien, who so clearly and painstakingly tried to emulate traditional literature, to include Peter Jackson's version of Arwen, or the elf maiden Tauriel, in his works.  They would have stood out as obvious anachronisms.

Tolkien himself was aware of this.  Take for example his understanding of fine amor, the medieval tradition of "courtly love."  The idea, essentially, is of a pure and chaste woman who inspires a man to preform great deeds.  Loving her from afar, the hero elevates himself out of a desire to be worthy of her.  This is exactly the kind of relationship Arwen and Aragorn have, because if you are writing an authentic piece of medievalism like The Lord of the Rings then fine amor can't be ignored.  All the same, Tolkien, both as a modern man and especially as a Catholic, rejected the concept;

"Its (fine amor) center was not God but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady.  It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity - of the old-fashioned 'his divinity' = the woman he loves - the object or reason of noble conduct.  This is, of course, false and at best make-believe....The woman is (just) another fallen human-being with a soul in peril..."

- Letter to Michael Tolkien, 6-8 March 1941

Tolkien then is not the one elevating women to such a status, the genre is.  He recognizes the idea of a perfect, ideal woman as "false" and "make-believe," and that women are human beings just as flawed as men, but there is simply no way he could authentically preserve medieval literary tradition by omitting fine amor, taking Arwen down off her pedestal so she could go out adventuring with Aragorn as a modern writer (or filmmaker) might have preferred him to do.  

The Refusals of Galadriel

While we can agree that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, like the literature they are meant to emulate, have few women characters, and that Tolkien includes the medieval trope of elevating women to paragon status in The Lord of the Rings, the claim he presents us with no feminist role models is simply wrong.  Again, I tend to think this oversight arises from a fundamental misapprehension of his work.  If you read The Lord of the Rings as a self-contained novel, which is in fact to misread it, then you are missing a full understanding of the character of Galadriel.  Only reading the book in the context of Tolkien's greater myth cycle, published in The Silmarilion, does it become possible to see Galadriel as exactly what she is; a role model.  Indeed, in Tolkien's mind she might have been the role model, for reasons we will soon discuss.  As this status does not depend on her gender, and if we accept feminism as being "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes," this makes her a powerful feminist role model by default.

But before we get there, we need to cover a few concepts first.  Most importantly, we are not talking about Galadriel solely as a character in The Lord of the Rings, but as a key figure in a larger myth cycle.  This is crucial to fully understanding her significance. 

Keep in mind that in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien is writing a history, not a novel.  Consider his famous quote from the front matter of The Fellowship of the Ring;

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Tolkien refers to The Lord of the Rings as a history time and time again, and for him, it was just the tail end of an immense saga stretching back eons, the final chapter of the great history of Middle-earth.  Because he is writing a history, he does things no sane novelist would ever do.  When Galadriel appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, there is no real explanation of who she is or why she matters.  A novelist would never have done this, but a historian would.  Consider, when Sir Gawain's shield is described to us in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a work I reference again because Tolkien knew it so well and translated it into modern English), we are told the inside of it bears the face of the Virgin Mary.  The anonymous author doesn't stop to tell us who Mary is...he simply expects us to know.  The same is true of Galadriel, who anyone in Middle-earth would presumably know of.  Telling us about her breaks the illusion of Middle-earth being a real world, and Tolkien likely hoped we would go and reference other documents (The Silmarilion) to get those answers.  If we did, our understanding of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring would completely change.

Galadriel--based solely on her scenes in The Fellowship of the Ring--has been compared to Glinda the Good Witch by some critics, who see her as almost one dimensional in her cartoon goodness.  She is so virtuous and pure that when Frodo offers her the Ring she refuses it.  Then she gives the Fellowship some nifty parting gifts and sends them on their way.  And oh, how cute that she gives the dwarf Gimli three strands of her pretty hair.  It is easy to see her as little more than the goody two-shoes fairy queen, or--as others have more flatteringly hypothesized based on Tolkien's devout Catholic faith--some sort of reflection of the Virgin Mary. 

But if you read The Silmarillion, or Tolkien's notes and other writings about her, these scenes look completely different.  Galadriel is anything but sweetness and light, and she is certainly not the Virgin Mary.  In some ways she has more in common with Lucifer than the Mother of God.  She is an exceedingly complex character and central to one of the author's themes.

Let's get the Marian comparisons out of the way first.  Mary, in Catholic doctrine, is revered because of her submission to the Divine Will;

By her complete adherence to the Father's will, to his Son's redemptive work, and to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary is the Church's model of faith and charity.

- The Catechism of the Catholic Church

But "complete adherence to the Father's will" is hardly how you would describe Galadriel, who is defined primarily by her refusals, rather than obedience.  Galadriel is half Noldor, a race of elves that once dwelled in timeless Paradise by the grace of the Creator and his emissaries, the archangelic Valar.  Rebelling against the Divine Will, Galadriel and her brethren became exiles from Paradise, driven by pride and anger.  They were banned from these lands of bliss.  Later, given a second chance to return to grace, Galadriel was among those who refused again, too proud to surrender the queenly status she had attained in the fallen world of Middle-earth for the role of servant in the Undying Lands.  As Tolkien summed up the Marian comparisons;

I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching about Mary, but actually Galadriel was a penitent; in her youth a leader in the rebellion against the Valar (the angelic guardians). At the end of the First Age she proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return...

Letters, p. 407

Tolkien reiterated her position more strongly elsewhere;

(Galadriel) joined the rebellion against the Valar who commanded them to stay; and once she had set foot upon that road of exile, she would not relent . . . Her pride was unwilling to return, a defeated suppliant for pardon...Pride still moved her when, at the end of the Elder Days after the final overthrow of Morgoth, she refused the pardon of the Valar for all who had fought against him, and remained in Middle-earth...

-The People's of Middle-earth, p. 338

Again, this idea of "Fallen elves" is not something Tolkien was just "making up."  Elves, in pre-Christian mythologies, were a class of intermediary spirits between gods and men.  In medieval tradition they were reinterpreted in light of the new religion.  Folklore had it that after Lucifer's rebellion in Heaven, the third of the Angels who sided with him fell and became demons, the third that fought with Michael stayed in Heaven, and the third that remained neutral were cast down to Earth to become elves.  Tolkien's Noldor reflect that tradition; they are not strictly evil, but they are angelic immortals banished from Paradise.

But what does this have to do with Galadriel being a role model, let alone a feminist one? 

For starters, Galadriel is significant in her total equality.  When we meet her in The Fellowship of the Ring, she is the co-ruler of Lothlórien, described as equal in everything (including physical stature) to her husband, Lord Celeborn.  Tolkien calls her not only the "greatest of elven women," but also the "mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth." She is second to no one, male or female.  Indeed, even her name implies a kind of transcendence of gender stereotypes; not "Galadriel," the name she has come to be called in Middle-earth, but "Nerwen," a name she bore in the Undying Lands that means "man maiden," given to her by her mother because she was as tall and strong as any male elf.  

This must not be taken as meaning her "mannishness" is what defines her.  Galadriel's feminine attributes are key as well;

...and she grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor; she was strong of body, mind, and will [...] Even among the Eldar she was accounted beautiful, and her hair was held a marvel unmatched. It was golden like the hair of her father and of her foremother Indis, but richer and more radiant, for its gold was touched by some memory of the starlike silver of her mother; and the Eldar said that the light of the Two Trees, Laurelin and Telperion, had been snared in her tresses...

—Unfinished Tales, The History of Galadriel and Celeborn

The significance of her femininity is also reflected in the importance of being a mother, and in fact a grandmother to Arwen, the elf maid Aragorn loves.  

Thus, just as her beautiful hair combines the golden and silver light of the two divine trees, Galadriel combines qualities we might see as both masculine and feminine, but what really distinguishes Galadriel is her complexity.  In a cycle of tales often criticized for their "black and white morality," Galadriel stands out as very grey.  She is not, like Morgoth or Sauron, evil, but neither is she as loyal and obedient as Gandalf.  Galadriel knows her own mind.  And again, we come back to her refusals.  Not only did she refuse the command of the Valar to remain in the Blessed Lands, not only did she refuse to return, it was her refusal that started--indirectly--the fall of her entire race.  It was Fëanor, her kinsman, who fashioned the three Silmarils, enchanted jewels that captured the golden and silver light of the two trees that lit the Undying Lands.  The fallen angel Morgoth poisoned the trees and stole these gems, taking them to Middle-earth, and this is why the Noldor went into exile; against the wishes of the Valar they decided to go after Morgoth and the stones.  But Fëanor forged those jewels because of Galadriel's refusals.  For it is said her beautiful hair also captured the light of those trees, and Fëanor asked her three times for a strand of it.  Three times she refused, and so he made the jewels instead.

And here, her gift to the dwarf Gimli takes on special significance.  Reading only The Lord of the Rings we may think nothing of it, but it was a monumental act;

Her parting gift to Gimli is highly significant. He asks for a single hair from her head, which he intends to enshrine within imperishable crystal. In the elder days Fëanor had asked the same, and been refused three times, for her tresses were famed for seeming to contain the light of the Two Trees. . . . Now she gives Gimli three hairs, one for each of the ancient refusals, which were bound up with so much grief for the Elves. Galadriel's gift heals the long rift between her people and the Dwarves. It implies that she now repents of any part her pride may have played in the long tragedy. 

The Power of the Ring, p. 54

Here again is Tolkien's excellence as a mythographer and historian and "failure" as a novelist.  We cannot grasp the immense significance of Galadriel's gift by reading The Fellowship of the Ring alone.

Which brings us at last to the act that makes Galadriel heroic, and absolutely central to Tolkien's work as a role model to us all.  

Tolkien succinctly summed up his themes in a letter later published in The Silmarillion. "Anway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine" (The Silmarillion, p. xvii).  The Fall in particular haunts his tales, from the Fall of the Dark Lord and the Fall of the Elves to the Fall of the proud Men of the West.  As we have seen, Galadriel is bound tightly to the theme, and the Fall of the Elves.  But she does something amazing in The Fellowship of the Ring.  When Frodo Baggins offers her the One Ring, she refuses it;

"And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!" . . . She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illumined her alone and left all else dark. . . . Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a simple elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

"I pass the test," she said. "I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel." 

Fellowship, p. 381.

This is not, as critics would have it, because she is one dimensional and too good to take it.  As we have seen, Galadriel has twice refused the Divine Will already, and chosen to "rule in Middle-earth rather than serve in Paradise," to paraphrase Milton. The One Ring signifies rulership of the world, and Galadriel is a fallen immortal who refused forgiveness because she desired to rule in Middle-earth.  Offering her the Ring is to tempt her with everything she ever wanted.  But unlike Lucifer, or Sauron or Morgoth for that matter, Galadriel refuses this.  It is this last of Galadriel's refusals that changes her destiny.  

It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth of which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth forever. 

The Peoples of Middle-Earth, p. 338

Here at last we come to Galadriel the role model.  Tolkien famously said, "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," and we have seen some of this in the many "Falls" that happen in the  mythology.  Morgoth falls.  Sauron falls.  Saruman falls.  The Men of the West fall.  And most of the Noldor elves fall.  Likewise, there are many who resist temptation and do not fall; Tom Bombadil, Gandalf, Samwise, Faramir, etc.  But Galadriel is very nearly unique in that she falls and is then redeemed, in a sense representing the whole of the human condition as Tolkien understood it.  There may be a shortage of women in Tolkien's quasi-medieval fiction, but we cannot simply dismiss the fact that the character that best embodies Tolkien's faith--that it is possible to sin and be forgiven--is a woman.  And a proud, self-possessed, regal woman at that.  

You don't have to be a Catholic or a a Christian to appreciate this; I am certainly neither.  But you are on very shaky ground when you accuse Tolkien of anti-feminist tendencies when one of the most important figures in his work is a woman.  Galadriel doesn't swing a sword or wear armor, but the strength she demonstrates in resisting temptation far exceeds any action-heroine antics.  The author clearly meant her to be a role model for us all, male or female.  Galadriel is neither Eve nor Mary, but an "every person" meant to represent us all.  If we are looking for feminist role models, and quality is to outweigh quantity, then Tolkien was perhaps a feminist after all.

ROLEPLAYING TOLKIEN: RPGs IN MIDDLE-EARTH

In honour of his birthday, 3 January 1892

Despite the nearly ubiquitous presence of orcs, elves, dwarves, and halflings in fantasy gaming, there have been only three official, licensed Middle-earth RPGs; Iron Crown's Middle-earth Role Playing or "MERPS" (1984), Decipher's The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game (2002), and Cubicle 7's The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild (2012).  Each has it's merits and adherents.  But "Tolkienesque" gaming is a bit like chasing the unicorn.  It isn't so much about mechanics, statistics, or spell lists as a certain spirit, or tone.  The reality is, with the wealth of Tolkien reference manuals out there (such as here), any popular game system could be adapted to Middle-earth with very little effort.  

In his letter to Milton Walman (1951), Tolkien provides a brief sketch of his Middle-earth works.  In it, he includes one of the most succinct descriptions of his themes; "...Anway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine" (p. xvii The Silmarillion, Harper Collins 1998). Using these three concerns, the following is a very brief summary of the steps a GM might take to make his or her favourite game system a Middle-earth game system.

FALL

Middle-earth is a lot more "Cthulhu" than you think.  Well no, not really, but the central mechanic of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, Sanity, is ideal for the first of Middle-earth's great themes, the "Fall."

The Fall essentially begins with Melkor, and through him, is a Shadow that infects all of Middle-earth.  The world is essentially a Fallen world; too much contact with it tempts and erodes the spirit.  This is why the Elves are so reluctant to intervene in it, this is why "death" is considered the Gift of Men (freeing them from it).  Constant exposure to loss, pain, hardship, and the forces of the Shadow (be it Morgoth or Sauron) leads to oppression and despair.  

What a good Middle-earth system needs then is a version of Cthulhu's Sanity mechanic, or the World of Darkness's Humanity.  Let's view it as a spectrum with "Hope" at the high end and "The Shadow" at the low end.  Using Cthulhu's Basic Roleplaying mechanics, Hope begins as the POW stat x 5.  Immoral acts, such as robbery or murder, trigger Hope Rolls--a percentage roll using your current Hope score as the base.  Failure results in a random loss of Hope points (a d6, d8, or d10 depending on the severity of the act).  Likewise, pain and suffering require Hope rolls, such as enduring a serious wounds, going without food or water for extensive periods of time, suffering torture, etc.  And, of course, encountering servants of the Shadow require rolls as well, with minor loses for things like Orcs (a d6 perhaps) and massive loses for something like the Nazgul (d12, d20, etc).  

Falling towards Shadow (0 Hope points) is a terrifying thing.  Quite simply, it removes you from the game.  At zero, humans, halflings, and possibly dwarves become servants of the Shadow.  Essentially, they lose all hope and surrender to the Enemy.  Elves surrender instead to the call of the Sea and must depart Middle-earth.  But the process of getting to 0 is painful too; any time a Hope roll is failed, in addition to the loss of Hope points the character temporarily enters a state of Despair.  During this time he or she suffers a penalty to all non-defensive skill rolls and activities.  In a Basic Roleplaying game, the Hope score temporarily becomes a skill roll cap; for example, if a warrior has 75% in his sword skill and enters Despair with a Hope score of 40%, his new sword skill percentage is 40%.  This state may last minutes, hours, or days depending on the situation.

Of course, there should be ways to recover Hope--resting at Imladris, stopping to eat lembas, drinking miruvor, defeating the agents of the Shadow, and so on.  But in keeping with the theme of the Fall these gains should be minor, perhaps a d4, d6, or d8 at most.  This keeps Middle-earth campaigns from being your typical fantasy RPG, where constant adventure makes you stronger and stronger.  Tackling the Shadow should be a terrible thing which demands sacrifice.

Fortunately, there are a number of variations of the Sanity system out there, from the d20 version in Monte Cook's Call of Cthulhu conversion to the Savage Worlds version in Realms of Cthulhu.  Likewise, the Humanity track from World of Darkness games can be converted over as well.  The main idea should be though one of nearly inevitable decline from adventuring.  Bilbo retired.  Frodo sailed into the West.     

MORTALITY

This one is related to the concept of the Fall.  A Middle-earth game needs to be about death.  Nothing is permanent.  Everything fades. The immortality of the Elves is not the gift it seems to be...it chains them to a world that constantly crumbles around them despite their best efforts.  Men are fortunate that they die.  

Now, there are a few simple ways to incorporate this.  Most game systems have some sort of rules for ageing.  Use them.  Second, take a page from King Arthur Pendragon or The One Ring and space out your adventures; put a year or two (or even a decade) between them.  Obviously, this doesn't happen between chapters in a single quest, but when one concludes leave some time before the next begins.  Have the players talk about what they did between adventures.  Did they marry?  Have children?  How did they spend their loot?  This is Middle-earth so you don't need to obsess too much about gaining experience between tales.  It isn't about that.  Tolkien is the "slow food" of fantasy gaming.  Leave "fast food" to other worlds.

Please note, it isn't necessarily important that your Middle-earth game be lethal.  It doesn't have to be "gritty."  If you focus on the passage of time and the inevitability of death, you are closer to Tolkien than a game system that chews up character after character.  If your game likes the fast-paced cinematic action of something like Savage Worlds, that's just fine.  Just make sure that after twenty or so adventures the characters are all ageing.  Encourage the idea of having children, watching them grow, and then taking them over perhaps as fresh characters.  There are some advantages to this.  True, long-lived dwarves and elves will be more powerful, but they will also have more fragile Hope scores than the younger, fresher heroes who replace their forebears.

THE MACHINE

Here is the Big One, the Sticky One.  In a word, "magic."

"...I have not used 'magic' consistently, and indeed the Elven-queen Galadriel is obliged to remonstrate the Hobbits on their confused use of the word both for the devices and operations of the Enemy, and for those of the Elves...(b)ut the Elves are there (in my tales) to demonstrate the difference.  Their 'magic' is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations: more effortless, more quick, more complete...(a)nd its object is Art not Power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation...The Enemy in successive forms is always 'naturally' concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines..." (ibid, p. xviii)

Middle-earth is of course a highly magical place, but it is not magical in the way that most D&D settings are.  Both of the first two licensed Middle-earth RPGs were a bit too magic-heavy; The One Ring neatly avoids the problem by not including any magic-using character types.  How much magic you include in your Middle-earth campaign is a matter of taste, but to keep it Tolkienesque you should bear the distinction between Elven magic and the devices of the Enemy in mind.

At the heart of Middle-earth is this notion of the world as Creation; it is the work of Eru, the One (God).  Elven magic is sub-creation, it works inside the boundaries established by Eru and it does not seek to change the essential nature of thing.  Usually it just enhances.  The nature of a sword is to defend against an enemy, so naturally an Elvish sword is sharper, stronger, and possibly even glows blue when the enemy is near.  The nature of a cloak is to protect against the elements and to conceal, so naturally an Elven cloak keeps you warmer and makes it easier for you to hide.  It is not the nature of a sword to shoot lightning bolts or of a cloak to give you the power to fly.  These things go against the nature of the object, and thus are devices of the Enemy.

A very simple way to handle Elvish magic is that it grants bonuses.  A cloak gives bonuses to stealth rolls, a sword gives  bonuses to hit and to damage, lembas bread gives bonuses to rest and recovery, etc. If you stick to this, you are safely within the bounds of sub-creation.  Additionally, Elvish magic is primary passive; Rivendell, for example, is hidden from intruders...it doesn't have a force field around it that blasts intruders to bits.  Further, Rivendell is not hidden in plain sight, it's not invisible.  Again, in keeping with sub-creation, hidden Elven communities simply enhance the power of nature to conceal them; they are usually in hidden valleys or woods and the Elvish magic simply gives bonuses to that concealment.  Actual invisibility, as we all well know, is a device of the Enemy.

As a final note, Elvish magic originates from within.  The Elves are, after all, inherently magical.  Elvish wine and bread is not necessarily enchanted by spells...it is simply magical because the Elves who made it are magical.  Why are the Elves magical?  Because they are meant to be magical.  This is also the case of Maiar spirits like Tom Bombadil or the Istari (Gandalf and his fellow Wizards).  They don't command an external power, their magic comes from their natures.   

The Enemy, however, is "the Lord of magic and machines."  Note that Tolkien does not see a distinction between the two.  This is because the Enemy's magic does not originate inside its user but is always an external device, a "machine."  The power of the Nazgul comes from their rings, not their inherent natures.  The Enemy's magic is not about enhancing the natural properties of an object, but artificially conferring powers it is not supposed to have.  The most common example is granting immortality, or at least longevity, to those not meant to possess it.

Please note when we use the term "devices of the Enemy" here we do not necessarily mean they come from Sauron or Morgoth directly.  Rather, they ultimately derive from the corruption Melkor wove into Creation, a lust for power that is not rightfully yours. Whether or not they come from the Enemy directly, they always fall under his dominion.  

Feanor's Silmarils are a good example, because they possessed a light that properly belonged only to the Two Trees.  It is the nature of jewels to sparkle and be beautiful, but their light was a stolen one that properly belonged to something else.  Not surprisingly, then, the Silmarils led directly to the Fall and Exile of the Noldor and the destruction of much of the West.  Likewise, the palantiri are a sticky case; it is not the proper nature of stones to convey messages or grant clairvoyance...so again they eventually fall under the power of the Shadow.

The magic of the Enemy is always meant to dominate or change the essential nature of a being or object.  It is an external power the user is not meant to have.  Because of this, using a device of the Enemy always requires a Hope roll with the threat of losing points and sliding closer to the Shadow.

Now, there are of course blurry cases.  The Mirror of Galadriel seems dangerously close to a device of the Enemy, but Galadriel is, after all, a High Elf from the West.  We are told that she possesses the inherent gift of seeing into the hearts and minds of others, and her mirror really just seems to be an outward extension of her power.  Likewise, Gandalf often stretches the case; pine-cones are meant to burn, but turning them into flaming missiles is a bit extreme.  Again, he is a Maiar, and he is rightly imbued with power to challenge the Shadow.   

In summary, here is a checklist of Tolkienesque magic;

Elvish Magic

- Enhances natural properties

- Grants bonuses

- Is passive rather than aggressive

- Inspires hope and wonder

- Doesn't require a Hope roll

The Devices of the Enemy

- Comes from an external source (a device or spell)

- Grants powers the user would not normally have

- Is meant to dominate or transform

- Inspires despair and terror 

- Requires a Hope roll

So long as you stay within these bounds, you are free to make your Middle-earth campaign as magical as you like, or to use whatever system for it you desire, and it will feel more or less Tolkeinesque.

AND A FINAL WORD ON ELVES

With these three things you are well on your way to making your favourite game system suitable for Middle-earth.  But there is an issue we probably should touch on; what to do with the Elves.

There is a tendency to think of the Elves as super-human, and why not?  They are immune to disease and ageing, they are able so see partially into the spirit world, they seem highly resistant to extremes of weather, they don't require sleep but rather spend an hour or so meditating, and everything they make is magical.  And this is just the Elves who stayed in Middle-earth; the High Elves that returned from the West are even greater.  When you add to this the fact that they also tend to be more beautiful, more graceful, taller, more resilient, etc, you end up with a play balance nightmare.

Make it work for you.

If you are using a game in which stats are rolled, require would-be Elf players to roll just like everyone else, but in order to actually be one you need to roll high.  For example, in a 3d6 stat system, require Elves to have 12 or higher across the board.  With High Elves, go ahead and demand 14 or higher.  The trick is to remember that there are humans who are more beautiful than some Elves, or taller than some Elves, or more graceful.  The Quendi simply tend to be better.

In point buy systems, require the player to purchase high minimum stats, leaving less for skills.  A beginner character Elf need not be a supremely skilled member of his race; it is very likely he isn't.

Also, remember to use Hope against them.  Instead of ageing rolls, Elves must make annual Hope rolls.  They are a fading race.  Their time is nearly done.  They are meant to go into the West.  Making them more susceptible to the weariness the world inspires than other races is not only very Tolkien, it helps to balance the scales a little.

Beyond that, don't worry so much about it.  The Lord of the Rings has a party composed of a Maiar Wizard, a King, a Dwarf warrior, a Human warrior, an Elf prince...and four inexperienced Hobbits.  Play balance is not that much of an issue.

  

     

  

  

     

THE HOBBIT: A BRIEF REVIEW

As a bit of a Tolkien nut, there was never any question whether or not I was going to go see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  I've read the book at least a dozen times and have been eagerly waiting for the film adaptation. But despite looking forward to it, I went into the theater with a mild case of trepidation.  You see, some other Tolkien nerds, I thought Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy was genius, Tom Bombadil or no.  The bottom line is that I recognize books cannot be filmed directly as written, that the two mediums are very different animals, and that particularly in the case of a wordsmith like Tolkien the transition from print to cinema necessitated change.  So it wasn't any Peter Jackson hate that made me uneasy going into The Hobbit.  My jitters were caused by two big questions hanging over the project.  First, did a children's novel that weighs in at less than 300 pages really require a nine hour long film trilogy?  Second, I knew Jackson wanted to tie the Hobbit films into The Lord of the Rings as a sort of prequel, which the book sort of is.  Sort of.  The problem is that The Hobbit is a light-hearted children's fantasy, while The Lord of the Rings is, well, Wagnerian.  Joining the two would be like making Snow White the lead-in for Les Miserable.  Could Jackson pull it off?

Well actually, yes.

The Tone

In general I try to be patient with people who tell me Tolkien is a "bad" writer, that he "had a great imagination" or was a "fantastic world-builder" but that the writing itself was weak.  To each his own, of course, but what I am really hearing is something like "I have never read a piece of pre-industrial fiction, don't have the first clue about it, and expected Tolkien to read like a modern novelist."  They go into Tolkien thinking he is R. A. Salvatore or Robert Jordan and are dumbfounded by what they find.  On the other hand, if you have read medieval or ancient literature, it becomes crystal clear that Tolkien was an extraordinary writer, but that he chose to work in a genre that was no longer around.  He reads like Geoffrey of Monmouth or Thomas Malory, and had more in common with Beowulf, the Kalevala, and the King James Bible than George RR Martin or Michael Moorcock.

The Hobbit, however, is the one exception.  In writing for children, Tolkien consciously tries to bridge the gap between the medieval and the modern by speaking directly to the reader in a conversational tone and in the personage of Bilbo Baggins.  His hobbits are anachronisms; in a world of warriors, dragons, and wizards, they have pocket watches and handkerchiefs, a postal service and afternoon tea.  Bilbo was a literary device to ease children from the world of 1930s Britain into the ancient past.  As Bilbo is dragged into a strange new world, so were they.

It's all in the names.  Tolkien lifted the names of Gandalf and the 13 dwarves from the old Norse Voluspa saga.  They are quite literally relics of a bygone age.  But Bilbo is a "Baggins of Bag End," whose very name elicits a smile from those who catch the joke ("Bag End" is the English translation of cul de sac, the very symbol of modern suburbia).  Tolkien is having a bit of fun with us, and making it very plain that Bilbo is the modern reader's surrogate.  As he slowly releases his modern comforts and picks up a sword, so do we.  There is no such anachronism in The Silmarillion or the recent Children of Hurin; the reader is thrust right into the ancient world without decompression.  And Frodo Baggins of the Rings saga is no Bilbo, he's a soldier called upon to risk his life for his country rather than a well-to-do bourgeois  who decides an adventure might be fun.  Thus The Hobbit stands apart from the bulk of Tolkien's work not only in being kid-friendly, but in being more "modern reader" friendly as well.

What Jackson had to do, then, was wed an epic story about war, resilience, and death (The Lord of the Rings) to what was effectively a children's adventure meant to awake something "Tookish" in kids and make them dream of Beowulf (Tolkien, was, of course, one of the greatest Beowulf scholars of his day and as a good Catholic has his characters re-enact Beowulf like the stations of the cross; we have Gollum in his cave for Grendel in his, we have Beorn the "bear man" for Beowulf the "bee-wolf" or bear, and it all leads of course to a dragon).  Jackson is put in the position to do what Tolkien wrestled with...making The Hobbit a real prequel.  Because it wasn't, not really.  There are no "orcs" in The Hobbit but "goblins," the trolls are comical and speak cockney, Gandalf is just a wizard and the ring is not yet The Ring.  All the mythology Tolkien would later weave is not really there in The Hobbit, and Tolkien was himself hard pressed at times to link them.

Jackson does a fair job by literally blending The Hobbit with The Lord of the Rings.  He keeps the comedy and the songs, but shows us the meeting of the White Council that Gandalf only alluded to in the book  His trolls are comedic, but he introduces Radaghast the Brown and shows us the darkening of Mirkwood and Dol Guldur. Gandalf is given motives for the quest that Tolkien only attached to him much later (the Dragon could be a potential ally for Sauron of Mordor down the road).  In short, Jackson takes The Hobbit and seasons it with the Rings appendices.

Which leads me to the problem...

The Trilogy

Unlike the purists whose heads explode with ever little deviation Jackson makes from the Holy Writ, it is clear to me that Jackson and his team love Tolkien.  They are fanboys (and girls) like me.  While I am hardly naive enough to discount the fact that the studio can make a lot more money from three films rather than one, I remain convinced that Jackson likes the idea of three Hobbit movies because he can cram every last nerdish detail in.

Bringing The Lord of the Rings to the screen in just nine hours required a Herculean effort of concision and editing.  We are talking about 1500 pages of text.  Bringing The Hobbit to the screen in nine hours is the total opposite.  The story is less than 300 pages.  So again we go back to "blending," not just to bring the tone of The Hobbit closer to Rings but to make sure we can pack in as much minutia as possible.  Anything and everything that didn't make the Rings films is popping up here.

This isn't a bad thing--in fact for fans it is a great thing--but I can easily see where casual viewers will be left wondering where on Middle-earth Jackson banished his editors to.  I had a laugh out loud moment when Gandalf explains that there are four other Wizards like him; Sauruman the White, Radaghast the Brown, and the two Blue Wizards whose names, Gandalf admits, he "forgot."  I laughed because I know Tolkien never really bothered to name them, but no one else in the cinema got the joke.  Like seeing the White Council meet on screen, it is the kind of thing that extended cut DVD watchers like myself eat up but may leave others yawning.

So...?

So is the first installment any good?  Absolutely.  If you judge it by other fantasy films it is brilliant.  If you judge it by the Rings movies it is merely "good."  If you liked the Jackson Middle-earth films you will like this Hobbit.  There is even a good chance it will bring in new fans as well, given that this is a MUCH more "family friendly" film than any of the others.  Jackson does a superb job of finding a middle of the road tone between the lighter Hobbit and the apocalyptic Rings, and by including so many members of the Rings cast he clearly sets this all up as part of the same epic story...just a lighter chapter.  But in the negative column, unless you are a die-hard Middle-earther these films are bound to be a bit of a slog.  Two Hobbit films I could believe, but three?  I am hoping the next two films pick up the pace a bit.

Now, before I go something has to be said about Martin Freeman, on whose Bilboish shoulders much of this hangs.  He is, in a word, splendid.  In the book, Bilbo is more a device than a character, and Freeman has the challenge of making him real, which he does wonderfully.  He is a much more attractive figure than Frodo was.  And the script manages to do something truly wonderful, taking Bilbo's love of his little hobbit hole and using it for a climactic display of empathy that is quite moving.  Richard Armitage is equally good as Thorin Oakenshield, who again feels more flesh and blood on the screen than he did in the book.  This may be one thing Jackson has going for him in these films; in the Rings, he had to capture the depth of the characters, while in The Hobbit he is more free to give depth to them.  So far, so good.

I give The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 6 Ringwraiths out of 9.

TOLKIEN

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work...unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism"

- Tolkien, from a personal letter

I am probably the last person on Earth who should be a Tolkien admirer. As a skeptical materialist, and what the late Christopher Hitchens called an "anti-theist," Tolkien's Catholic-derived world view is diametrically opposed to mine. It isn't simply that, as a rational person, I find no evidence at all for the claims of the Catholic (or any other religion). It isn't that as someone who spent seven years at university studying various religions I find it remarkable for one person to wholeheartedly embrace the one he was raised in and dismiss the claims of others. Rather, like Hitchens I find the idea of supreme, unquestionable "leader" who makes all the rules and must be followed absolutely repugnant in the extreme. It is an insult to the things that I really do hold dear, such as intellectual freedom, self-determination, and personal liberty. Thus, were I trapped in Tolkien's Middle-earth, I would probably end up in league with Melkor and Sauron. Yet despite all of this, J.R.R. Tolkien is one of my favorite writers, and in part due to his religious vision.

The Philologist

The most obvious level where my interests intersect with Tolkien's is in his fascination with words, where they come from, and how their meanings evolve over time. Tolkien was a philologist, which means he was something of a literary archaeologist, digging through layers of language and text to uncover the past. Though this was never quite my area of interest, in my own university work linguistics played a very important part, as a key tool in studying the origins of mythologies and religions and how they develop from earlier ones. But Tolkien was one of the foremost philologists of his day, and even if he had never written The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings his studies of Beowulf or fairy stories would have been achievement enough. And in many ways philology is the engine that drove his literary work.

In some ways, Tolkien didn't see himself as "inventing" Middle-earth so much as "unearthing" it. Most modern fantasists are essentially people who "make shit up." They pull names, places, characters, and races out of thin air. There's nothing wrong with this, and some--like Howard, Moorcock, or these days Martin--do it very, very well. But it is categorically wrong to put Tolkien in the same lot. True, he did "make shit up." He invented two Elven languages and a bit of Dwarvish. But even these were linguistically inspired by Welsh, Finnish, and Hebrew. And in the case of the Elvish tongues, they were wholly consistent. Hell, I've met people who have learned to speak them. But aside from this act of invention, Tolkien was doing something very different. He was trying to answer questions.

For example, it bothered him that fairy tales had things like dwarves running around in them. There are dwarves in the Norse sagas. There are dwarves in King Arthur. There are dwarves in Snow White. But none of these bother to explain to us what the hell a dwarf is. The reader is just assumed to know all about dwarves, which indicated to Tolkien that at the time these stories first appeared, people did know about them. And so he set out to try an make an educated guess what those original dwarves might have been. The same goes for his elves and his dragons, and most of Middle-earth.

One of my favorite examples of his thought processes is the character of Gandalf. As is now well known, Tolkien took the names of his dwarves and the wizard accompanying them in The Hobbit from a fragment of the Old Norse Völuspá called "The Catalogue of the Dwarves." Basically, this is just a list of dwarf names without any context. But what bothered Tolkien, as a philologist, was the one name blatantly standing out in the list. With names like Nori and Bifurr and Bomburr and Fili and Kili, there was a "Gandalf." Gand-alf. "Wand-elf." Now, an elf was certainly not the same thing as a dwarf in Old Norse mythology, so what the hell was an elf doing in a catalogue of dwarves? And what, pray tell, was a "wand elf?" Norse had its Light Elves and Dark Elves and Wood Elves, but "wand elves?" Or was a wand elf something like an elf, immortal and magical, but carrying a wand or a staff? Was it a "wizard?" And if it was a wizard, did these wizards come from the same place the Elves did? Across the Sea? All of this is just one example of how Tolkien's work was to create a mythical origin for the fragments of legend and folklore we have left to us today. (As a side note, there is a great deal of another fragment, "Beowulf," in The Hobbit. The character of Gollum in his cave strongly recalls 'Grendel,' and the man-bear Beorn resembles Beowulf (whose name mean 'bee-wolf,' or 'bear'). And just like the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Hobbit ends with a dragon as well.)

The Believer

As I mentioned though, in part my admiration for Tolkien is because of his faith.

The hallmark of all great fantasy is a strong, overriding world view. All the truly enduring fantasy worlds have a paradigm which informs them, a lens through which the setting understands itself. Perhaps it is because of our sympathy for certain paradigms over others that different people find themselves attracted to different settings; they show us the world the way we choose to believe it really is. In this way, fantastic fiction is a bit like philosophy or religion.

Consider Howard. Howard's Hyborian Age has no absolutes, no good, no truth, and no real evil (its demons may be alien and inhuman, but don't qualify as evil the way Melkor does, because there is no absolute good to be the opposite of). The Hyborian Age is an almost Nietzschean paradigm where strength is the only real virtue. The central tension in the Conan stories is between barbarism and civilization. Michael Moorcock (author of the influential "Elric," "Hawkmoon," and "Corum" sagas, offers a very different paradigm. His work seems to say that any absolute—in his case absolute Law or absolute Chaos—is intrinsically unbearable and that the only wholesome route lies through balance.

But in Tolkien's Middle-earth we have a world which does has an absolute truth. Eru created the world, and those who live in accordance with the “mind of Eru” are good while those who go against it are bad. Goodness, truth, and righteousness are the rewards of those who side with Eru and the Valar. Those who defy Eru, from Melkor and Sauron right down to the Easterlings, fall into error and ultimately suffer. This is the kind of absolutism offered by Tolkien's own devout Catholicism.

I world argue that it is this quality which makes Tolkien's work powerful, largely because it is coherent and flows through all his work (the same could be said for Lovecraft, but from a very different perspective). But in addition to this, it is the striking absence of the trappings of Catholicism which makes Tolkien extraordinary. "God" does not appear in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. There is no "Jesus," no "Church," no depictions of worship of any kind. Instead, Tolkien uses what he believes to be Catholic themes--of hope and compassion and redemption--to express his religious views, and these things are universal enough to touch anyone. He does not, as his friend C.S. Lewis did, simply regurgitate the Gospels under a thin mask of fairy tale. Instead, he took what he felt to be the true core of his beliefs and used it to lead him through his tale.

I could go on. I haven't yet mentioned the man's staggering diversity of styles (The Hobbit reading as a fairy tale, The Lord of the Rings reading as a history, The Silmarillion reading as mythology, The Children of Hurin reading as classical tragedy, etc) nor the brilliant ways he bridges the gap between Semitic religious tradition (Christianity) with Indo-European. For brevity I will omit this. Rather, I will close by saying Tolkien is one of those writers I come back to time and time again, and would place easily in my pantheon of the top ten. And this despite our agreeing to disagree. For while I would describe the telling of tales as a Promethean thing, stealing fire from heaven so to speak and becoming as gods ourselves, Tolkien would say;

"We have come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall."

And that's really just two ways of saying the same thing.