[ Daily Tolkien / Lord Of The Rings ] Why Lord of the Rings Is Not Even One Novel, Much Less Three

Romance novels are not novels. Mystery novels are not novels. Dime novels (mostly, probably, a mixture of the previous two kinds) are probably mostly not novels either. And no, dear readers, Lord of the Rings is not a novel. It’s certainly not three novels, as I am very tired of reading in the popular press or even in book reviews that should know better. It’s not three anything–it is one book, one long story.

Because that’s what Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, Harlequin Romances, and Indiana Jones all are–stories. "But Anwyn, what in the world is the difference? Most fiction stories are called novels." Well, maybe so. But it’s likely most fiction stories, in that case, are sadly misnamed. You know how a square and a rectangle are both rectangles, but a rectangle is not a square? Yes, novels and stories are both stories, in a certain sense, but a story is not a novel. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to explain what I (and I do not believe I am alone) see as the difference between them.

Novels are stories of human nature. Real, as it is. They are, usually, stories of the reactions of one human or set of humans to a particular set of fictional circumstances. What ties them all in common is that the heroes and villains have the same emotional triggers, the same failings, the same ability to be killed and stay dead, the same distance between them and God or the gods, the same spiteful behaviors, the same remorseful moments, and the same frustrations at dealing with other humans as we have ourselves. Jane Austen wrote wonderful novels, I have learned to my delight during the last year. So, I’m told, did Charles Dickens. (Yes, I know. A writer who hasn’t read Dickens. Crucify me later, I have a column to write.) Larry McMurtry wrote novels, although perhaps very story-ish novels due to our preconceptions about the "wild west" many of them are set in. The people remain the same–low-minded, foul-behaved, duty-minded, hard-working; as many different types as in your very own neighborhood–and just as complex. These people are not always evil, they are not always good, they are certainly not always perfect. They deal with their nature as it is, they way all of us do every day. That horrible book I alluded to last month, as an Oprah-blessed scrap of modern literature, stomach-turning as it is, is a novel–it is about real people dealing with real situations, however ugly.

A pure story is something very different. A story is told for the sake of putting events and characters in a certain light. A story is told for the sake of making up fabulous places, wonderful happenings, and beautiful and horrifying creatures that could never exist in our world. A story is told for the sake of explaining metaphysics, or sometimes even physics, that we cannot understand. A story is told for the excitement of unfolding a mystery the author has fathomed and hopes is original, to the wondering reader. And a story is at the whimsical command of the author, to absorb and utilize whatever fantastic invention the author writes about next. The characters are not human in the sense that we are. They are cast in a certain mold, and for the most part they stay that way. They do not deal with real situations, and they mostly react to all situations in quite the same way.

Let me put it to you this way. Would you call The Odyssey a novel? How about Sagas of the Icelanders? Here’s a doozy–King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Whoa. Talk about your saga, mystery, and romance all in one, there–but it’s not a novel.

"Aw, Anwyn, what does it matter if people call it a novel? It’s just a word that means ‘fiction book.’ It doesn’t really mean anything, certainly not to the depth you’re taking it." No? Why do you think the self-important literary critics of the century have gone so far out of their way to bash our Professor? They were living in the blossom age of the novel–these things go in cycles, don’t you know. From Jane Austen, a hundred years or so till Dickens, then crowding fast and thick, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, Tom Wolfe. A return of the mere story was anathema to the way these people thought–sagas belong in the past, to mythology. No place in the twentieth century, and God forbid that some small-minded little people should think of Tolkien in the same way as Hemingway!! So bash it, it’s horrible, it’s not literature… ah, but as I observed last month, merely being a novel does not make a book into literature. I repeat myself now–The Odyssey, not literature? Puh-leeze. One of our latest geek-bashers condemned Lord of the Rings as having no psychologically complex characters. If you want psychological depth, don’t look to the mythology of Greece and Rome, but isn’t every schoolchild and college freshman taught about them as some of the oldest surviving examples of literature? Good heavens, in a story told for the emotional effect of it, who would want that kind of depth? I want to love Frodo and hate Sauron. I want to pity Gollum and cheer for Gandalf. I want to fear Galadriel just a little and watch Éowyn turn from sounding like a spoiled brat to her revelation as one of the greatest heroes in the bunch. I don’t want Sam to struggle with whether or not to keep on with Frodo, to toy with the idea of betraying him–that, I suppose, is psychological depth. No thanks. Give me pure, sweet, unadulterated Sam Gamgee, "like Thingummy’s soap–pure soap to the last bubble!" (That’s my other idol Lewis again, for the uninitiated.) Zeus always reacts with a thunderbolt and Odysseus is so single-minded because that’s the mold in which they were cast. They were not meant to be representative–they were meant for a particular purpose. So also with the "mythology of England," as Tolkien intended it to be–story, explanatory, narrative, amusing, wonderful, moving–but not psychologically complex. Give me that kind of literature any day.

Larry McMurtry, in his quasi-autobiography Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, quotes a German writer I’d never heard of, the aforementioned Benjamin, as saying of the novel: "What distinguishes the novel from all other forms of prose literature is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his more important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others." What were the Greek myths or the Icelandic sagas but oral tradition? And what was King Arthur but oral tradition? And what is Tolkien but the desire to imitate that style–to bring a sense of oral tradition to the imagined history of another reality?

Dryden defines a novel thus: "A fictitious tale or narrative, professing to be conformed to real life; esp., one intended to exhibit the operation of the passions, and particularly of love." Professing to be conformed to real life. Tolkien never pretended such. He created another life, a simpler life, where concepts and characters were, pardon the expression, more black-and-white. Novels revel in their shades of grey; Tolkien decidedly shied away from them.

"Hmrf, Anwyn, if the main criteria of the novel is dealing with love, then what you said about Harlequins is wrong… they must be novels…" Well, here’s a tip for all those not already in the know. Harlequins aren’t about love. They are about sex, duh. And no, they are definitely not about real people having sex. (That doesn’t bear on the definition of the novel. I just wanted to say it.)

It is not accident or imagination that Tolkien is called the father of the modern fantasy story. Pick up any Dragonlance and it’s all there–the Quest, the Heroes, the Slightly Shady Ambiguous Character, the Evil Henchmen, the Evil Overlords, the Pitiable but Twisted Necessary Adjunct. Naturally not in the quality we get from our Professor, but certainly in scads more quantity. Yes, Tolkien was influenced by an older time, but until him, that older time had all but died out in the twentieth century. (Does it boggle anybody else that when we say "in the twentieth century, we are no longer speaking of our own? It’s the same sense of the past I used to get when my teachers said "the eighteen-hundreds"… but worse, because I was just there…wasn’t I?) The novelists were running full steam–with the boom of the industrial revolution and all it meant for various aspects of our cultures, novel material was everywhere and rampant. Pure story was a dying art form. No wonder that Tolkien, disgusted with said revolution and all it brought about, would turn for help to the stories and sagas that reflected a more pastoral time, the idealized countryism and self-sufficiency of his childhood, and no wonder that his own writing would take that same path. Frustrated with what he saw as his own inadequacy, no wonder he would turn from sordid human nature to nature that was both more and less than human–more of the qualities he admired: adherence to duty, faith in the Good, expending great effort to strive up the mountain, and less of the muddled and muddiness of human behavior.

So take that, all you critics who bash Tolkien because he lacks the human complexity of the novel. He didn’t want it. He didn’t need it. We don’t want or need it. Tolkien wrote sagas. Stories. Myths. He couldn’t have cared too much less about the realities and weakness of human nature–flaws were either the makings of evil or the stuff of high tragedy, never just a daily fault of a tired human. Goodness was either the pinnacle of heroism or the simplicity of a plowed and planted field, never just the everyday luck of having gone a day without sinning. I’ve enjoyed my share of novels (and by the bye, did you know there are novels for children? I don’t mean adolescent muddles like Judy Blume and her set write–I’m talking children. Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books are the epitome of what it is to be a real human child) and hope I will come to enjoy more. But in school this semester (oi vey, yes, I’m back in grad school) I’m taking a course on Dante and one called "Viking Sagas In Translation." Give me stories, ones that take the germ of humanity and lift it to something more fun, more exalted, more otherworldly than a novel could ever hope to be. Give me Tolkien.Author: Anwyn
Published on: September 01, 2001

Dear Readers, what a tempest I have evidently stirred up in a teapot! J I got many letters on the subject of last month’s Counterpoint, in which I took the stance that Lord of the Rings is not a novel, at least not by what I believe to be the definition of a novel. There are many letters on the subject that I have not yet answered, and so I’m going to take this space to answer you publicly–forgive me if I have used your email without asking your permission.

"In my dictionary, the definition of ‘novel’ says nothing about having to display the complex nature of characters. And the second definition of ‘novel’ — ‘new, original, and different, and often particularly interesting and unusual as well’ - displays more of Tolkien's work than most ‘novels’ of today - Oprah's book club, per se. If we want to speak in semantics, you can't ignore the roots of the word "novel" when discussing what you, or a critic's opinion, of the word ‘novel’ is. We are all critics, in the technical sense." --Shawn Hudson.

Shawn, dear, the rest of your letter on the nature of Middle-earth itself was interesting, and please expect a response from me in the (I hope!) not-too-distant future. But here I will focus on an answer to your semantic point. You are, of course, completely correct about the definition of ‘novel’ that deals with something ‘new.’ But my dictionary also goes on to state: "A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters. The literary genre represented by novels." So many of our words these days have come into "standard usage" through being constantly applied in a way that may have been slightly different from the original usage. "Novel" is no exception–it has come to represent a genre of literature that is certainly not new, but each author is trying to do something new with the form of the novel, else why bother to write it? However, I still do not agree that the definition has nothing to do with psychological complexity. I quoted the definition I’m working from last month–Dryden’s, which says "A fictitious tale or narrative, professing to be conformed to real life; esp., one intended to exhibit the operation of the passions, and particularly of love." So I’m making two points by saying this: firstly, that any narrative which tells the story through the "actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters," and which deals primarily with "the passions," will be uninteresting without psychological complexity; therefore we may say that a novel should purport to carry some, and secondly, that Tolkien was not doing anything new. He was recasting the ancient mythological and heroic saga form into the minds of a more modern audience.

William Roper writes quite complimentarily: "It's sad that we live in a world where the novel acts as an oppressive mode. Critics don't condemn Tolkien in comparison with the novel; they do it through it. If you will, we're all reading through novel-colored glasses. It's a shame that we can't go ahead a few centuries to see what literary works survive time's unbiased critique. If I were a betting man, I'd expect to see Tolkien still on a kempt shelf marked "Literature" and our modern novels on a shelf marked "History."

I couldn’t agree more, Will. Heroic sagas, when well done, have been proven, time and time again, to survive much longer, no matter in what mutated form through oral tradition, than anything fictional about "real people." And thank you for making my point again that this dangerous confusion of saga and novel has resulted in the critics feeling free to bash Tolkien because he is not a novel-writer. Evidently they don’t know what to make of a good heroic saga that has been carefully thought out and written by a modern writer, not passed down garbled through the centuries.

Now the point where I have been most disagreed with. I’m not complaining; without different points of view, nothing I have to say would be very meaningful, so by all means, keep sending me your arguments, dear readers. But in this particular case, and I felt it would probably be so, many of you have been upset by my intimating that Tolkien’s characters lack psychological depth. Voronwë writes: "Just read your article about LotR not being a novel, and I understand what you're trying to say. I do agree that, taking a certain definition of the novel, LotR is something else; however, it certainly does not lack psychological complexity. The 'good' characters all have their flaws and weaknesses, and the 'evil' ones are shown to have fallen because of these (even Sauron, if you read the background in other works). Tolkien does not explicitly point out the motivations and emotional states of his characters, or at least not often - it is his genius that portrays these almost entirely through their words and actions. But he saw human nature very clearly, and the psychology of his characters is flawless. It's forty years since I first read LotR, and every time I return to it I am struck by a further example of its truth. There are not many modern novels that get it so right."

Yes, the ‘good’ characters have their struggles, and the ‘evil’ ones may have a few redeeming qualities lurking about. But any psychological depth is created only by the struggle between these forces, not by the turmoil within one character. Remember that it was said of the family of Baggins that there was no need of asking what a Baggins would say on any question; you could know what he’d say without the trouble of asking him? The characters in Lord of the Rings, like it or not, do fit some archetypal patterns reaching back into the ancient tradition of the heroic saga. And most certainly, Tolkien "saw human nature very clearly," but from where I sit he sought to illustrate it by showing something so much better and stronger, not how weak and silly we really are.

Charles Hahr writes (quoting me, to begin with): "’Novels are stories of human nature. Real, as it is. They are, usually, stories of the reactions of one human or set of humans to a particular set of fictional circumstances. What ties them all in common is that the heroes and villains have the same emotional triggers, the same failings, the same ability to be killed and stay dead, the same distance between them and God or the gods, the same spiteful behaviors, the same remorseful moments, and the same frustrations at dealing with other humans as we have ourselves.’ Funny, someone asked me to describe Lord of the Rings to them recently and this paragraph you wrote is exactly as I described it to them. If you consider characters as abstractions of human nature (and don't tell me this isn't done by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens), then isn't Lord of the Rings just a story of the reactions of a set of humans to a
particular circumstances, just done so in a more pure form than Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Tolkien went to great length to draw the parallels between heroes and villains to point out to us that they reacted with the same emotional triggers, the same failings, and the same spiteful behaviors. The (dare I say it) novels contain more examples of this than I can count. As to whether or not the character can be killed and stay dead, this is as true in Lord of the Rings as it is in any other book I've ever read. The remorseful moments and frustrations at dealing with other humans are present as well. And personally, I never encountered any God or gods while reading Lord of the Rings, so I can't comment on that."

Well. Lord of the Rings is indeed the story of the reaction of characters to their given circumstances, but I cannot say I agree that many of them react the way we might do. Were you ever told that a family heirloom held great power for evil and must be destroyed? Were you ever tempted to look into a crystal ball of great farseeing power? Have you ever disguised yourself as the opposite sex and rode away looking for adventure? "But Anwyn … quit being ridiculous." J I suppose I am, and many will say it is an over-simplification, but one of the cruxes of my definition of a ‘novel’ is that the circumstances described in it could reasonably be expected to be encountered by us, in our world. Gandalf is killed but does not stay dead, the gods are reasonably close by in the form of Maiar and Valar, and a little person, instead of saying "Why me?" or "No way, I can’t do this," sets out on a long road into the Fire. I just don’t see it as human–and don’t get me wrong, dear readers, this is what I love most about it.

Finally, I must quote Merwyn, who said in four beautiful sentences what it took me my entire last column to say. "I have learned something new and wonderful today. Novels (like Jane Austen's) are personal insights into mundane human nature. Stories, sagas, myth are about what human beings could be--gods & monsters. Give me Tolkien, too."

And that is my belief, too, Merwyn, in a nice little nutshell. Stories, sagas, myth–Tolkien–are what give me something (forgive the word) neat to look up to and outside myself, to hold up as an example of purity of spirit (even the evil spirits) and nobility of mind. These characters aren’t worried about where their next meal is coming from, the fact that they have to go to the bathroom, wondering if they will marry a rich person, standing around being bored by their Uncle Fred at a party, wondering whether to go to class or sleep in. The issues of saga and myth are always grand in scope and sweeping in consequence. All those other things make up, as Merwyn succinctly put it, "mundane human nature." The gift of the novel writer is to make that mundane human nature interesting, just as I think Jane Austen did. But Tolkien went outside that, to transcend human nature altogether and give us, in Merwyn’s excellent words, ‘gods and monsters’ to look upon with wonder.

That horrible book I alluded to last month, as an Oprah-blessed scrap of modern literature, stomach-turning as it is, is a novel–it is about real people dealing with real situations, however ugly.

F.Y.I. here is what Anwyn had to say about the book in the earlier article:

''Did you ever try reading any of the modern stuff people are considering "literature?" Self-proclaimed literary judge Oprah Winfrey has put her stamp on a lot of books–I’ve read exactly one of them. It was newly out, it was newly endorsed by the big O, and the librarian of the high school where I was working bought it, read it, and put it in the library for our teenagers to read. I was on a quest for something new and the librarian wanted my opinion, so I picked it up and went through it. Never have I wished more that a batch of words had not entered my brain. I suppose it was all very realistic and well-written and thought-provoking and gripping, but the plain truth of the matter was, it was disgusting. Full of graphic depictions of abuse, physical, verbal, and sexual; full of the trashy thoughts and lewd behavior of what I suppose was meant to be an "underdog heroine;" concluding with a seeming sort of redemption that felt hollow and in no way made up for all the torture of the previous ninety percent of the book. I was literally sickened at times–and this, people are calling literature, while Tolkien-lovers are freely bashed?''

The Daily Tolkien articles:

ARTICLES 1-10

11) He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water by Michael Martinez

12) All About Sam by Quickbeam

13) Count, count, weigh, divide by Michael Martinez

14) Real orcs don't do windows by Michael Martinez

15) Olog-hai Fidelity by Mister Underhill

16) Middle-earth Connections: Lore of the Rings by Michael Martinez

17) Pasta la feasta, baby by Michael Martinez

18) Why Lord of the Rings Is Not Even One Novel, Much Less Three by Anwyn

Self-proclaimed literary judge Oprah Winfrey has put her stamp on a lot of books–-I’ve read exactly one of them. . . . . Never have I wished more that a batch of words had not entered my brain. . . . Full of graphic depictions of abuse, physical, verbal, and sexual; full of the trashy thoughts and lewd behavior of what I suppose was meant to be an "underdog heroine;" concluding with a seeming sort of redemption that felt hollow and in no way made up for all the torture of the previous ninety percent of the book.

Bet it was White Oleanders. I hated that freakin book.

I suppose it was all very realistic and well-written and thought-provoking and gripping, but the plain truth of the matter was, it was disgusting.

Very true. People often forget that something inherently repulsive does not become less so if it is done well. It becomes more so.

That is my basic reaction to a lot of recent movies, among them American Beauty, Pleasantville and 8 Mile. All are well made, but that only points up the inherent shallowness and depravity of what they are saying.

Poor kid. You're in for it...

Your job is to convince people that your definition of "novel" is the prevailing one. Just as the term "liberal" shifts, so would "novel." And I don't think I'd enjoy your idea of novels--I hated "Catcher in the Rye" with great energy, and won't even look at anything that says, "coming of age."

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