It’s Time to Dethrone Tolkien as the King of Fantasy

Content Warning: This post does mention some racially loaded language that J.R.R. Tolkien used to describe the orcs in his works. I don’t like that language, but we do need to acknowledge his flaws.

Hey, everybody! It’s been a minute! We are now in the wonderful season of Hobbit Girl Autumn, and that means I’ve started a Lord of the Rings rewatch. Yes, I’ve been watching the extended editions, although particularly when I watch the extended Fellowship of the Ring, I realize I have the theatrical version’s story beats memorized. I read the books years ago, but I much prefer the Peter Jackson films.

There, I said it. After nearly 20 years of pretending I understood and preferred the books, I can finally admit it.

Now I have to just sit and wait.

Wait for what, you ask? Oh, I’m waiting for the diehard book fans to show up and talk about how I’m a stupid, ignorant person who can’t finish Go, Dog, Go. That I’m nothing but a dum-dum stupid-head who will never, ever understand true art or the meaning of Tolkien’s works, and that I’m probably one of those awful, hideous, moronic people who have been enjoying Rings of Power.

And that just isn’t true. I’ve read and finished Go, Dog, Go many times.

You see, I’ve been on the LOTR meme algorithm for a couple of years, and I never looked at the comments on those memes until now. Once I did, I remembered just how awful the Tolkien book fans can be. Like, on one meme about how little female characters talk to each other, people said things like, “That’s why I love these stories,” and “Art is not a kindergarten: everyone does not need to be included.” And on another meme about how in the film version of Fellowship, Elrond recalls how he brought Isildur to the fires of Mount Doom, and now he’s like, “Okay, you all have to solve this” (the meme was comparing Elrond to Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec), and book fans started saying “that scene never happened,” and the person who shared the meme (@saruman_the_silly) had to explain to multiple people that they had read the books and understand that mythos, but it’s much easier to meme a film than pages from a book. And someone else said that everyone should just be happy that they watched the movies and that they (that particular user) would rather watch a three-hour film than “spend 72 hours reading eight pages about tree bark.” Of course, this person was being a bit silly, but naturally, a book fan replied, saying, “You just reworded ignorance is bliss.” Geez.

There are worse comments, of course, but I won’t put them here.

At some point, all of these comments pile up, and it just seems like the book fans exist to scream at people that they’re missing the point. A few people are willing to explain the differences between the books and the movies nicely, but it seems like those people are outnumbered by the screamers who want the film fans to know that they are dum-dum stupid-heads. On top of that, this article* lets us know that an alarming number of very right-wing (and rather fascist) people are trying to coopt J.R.R. Tolkien’s work to bolster their very creepy, right-wing ideas. And these neofascists include Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance, who has lots of interesting (read: terrible) ideas about reproductive rights and immigration.

Well, because of all the book fans screaming at people who aren’t obsessed with the books and the rise of the alt-right (and similar neofascist movements with different names in places outside of the U.S.), I think it’s time that we remove J.R.R. Tolkien from his throne as the King of Fantasy.

No one ever calls him that, but that’s what he is. He is worshipped like he’s a monarch or a god, and you can never question any of his storytelling choices or defend any changes made in the adaptations. At least, that’s the case in certain parts of the internet. There are several reasons for this, I think:

• Good ol’ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien has been dead for 51 years now (at the time of this writing). Since he’s dead, he can be idealized in a way that living authors cannot. No matter where they fall on the political spectrum or any other spectrum, readers can take what they read in his work and in quotes from him and other things and cherry-pick those things to say that his worldview reflected theirs. (In fact, that’s what right-wing people like J.D. Vance are doing, but left-of-center people do it, too.)
  • This idealization and self-identification aspect is not unique to Tolkien, and does happen to other dead creators. For example, a few years ago, I was watching a video of a woman singing an operatic cover of Bohemian Rhapsody, and I found that people in the comments were saying, “She’s singing it like a Disney Princess! Freddie Mercury would hate that!” That’s when I realized that a) these commenters had little exposure to classical styles of singing (opera, musical theatre, religious music) beyond the Disney animated canon, and b) they had no idea that Freddie Mercury was a fan of opera and even became friends and collaborated with renowned operatic soprano, Montserrat Caballe. By the way, I let those people be, knowing it would take way more energy to explain all that to them than I was willing to expend.
• Because John Ronald is dead, people can make intense claims that he would or would not have like a particular adaptation. They can also say whether or not he would have agreed with their own opinions on his work, and he isn’t here to agree or disagree anymore. Isn’t that convenient?
• Outside of any political or philosophical worldviews, readers can used John Ronald’s status as a dead man who was born in the 1890s to excuse anything that people may criticize. Not enough women characters? Well, he was born in the 19th century, which means the fact that Eowyn was included at all was revolutionary. He uses racially loaded language (like “swarthy,” “broad-nosed,” and “slant-eyed”) to describe the orcs? Again, he was born in 1892, so it was completely acceptable then. (I don’t believe that, but people will and do make those kinds of excuses.)
• His work romanticizes the life of the hobbits, just hanging out in their agrarian society and enjoying things like food, gardening, and other cottagecore pursuits. It’s a type of life that can seem very quaint and fun to people who have to endure the 21st century corporate grind, but that lifestyle had its challenges and struggles, too. It’s not as romantic as John Ronald would have you think. (Maybe I’ve just seen one too many episodes of the most recent adaptation of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, where some adorable farmer or farm family starts losing their livestock to illness and having their livelihood threatened every other episode.) I think a lot of book readers fall in love with that sort of thing (along with other world-building elements, like the songs and poems as well as the Elves being Elven), and they decide that his books are the best books ever and beyond all criticism.
• Because Tolkien is dead, people can declare that his works are apolitical, or claim that if any adaptation makes political commentary on anything, that is bad and inaccurate. Where Rings of Power is concerned, that has happened in Reddit threads and this Forbes article by Eric Kain. In reality, his work wasn’t completely free of political commentary, since the Ents’ lament about Saruman destroying the trees and Tolkien’s tendency to call anything to do with technology “orcish” are both commentaries on how awful industrialization has. That was actually a reactionary viewpoint in Tolkien’s day, since the industrial revolution started around 1760, about 132 years before dear John Ronald was even born. And by the way, I’m not saying that industrialization was inherently good (it isn’t) or doesn’t have environmental fallout (it does). It’s just that John Ronald’s laments for the trees aren’t as purely spiritual and apolitical as some people think.
• His writing can be hard to work through for some people (including me). It’s not for everyone, but that seems to make his most zealous fans believe that because his writing can be difficult to read, they are smarter than everyone on Earth. Out of all of the issues of dealing with a dead writer that I’ve listed here, this is the one that bothers me the most. Mostly because as soon as I got involved in the LOTR fandom back in the 2000s, I definitely encountered the vibe that if you hadn’t read the books, or if you had and preferred the films, you weren’t very smart. And any additions to the films (like the Elves showing up at Helm’s Deep and Haldir dying) are inherently wrong, and if you like them, you are bad. So I had to pretend to like the books more than I actually did. Because while I think many of his world-building ideas are interesting, his writing style just isn’t for me. And please don’t tell me to read The Silmarillion. I did that when I was 16, and I eventually gave my copy away because I realized the book had no scenes and was just walls of text. I forgot the majority of that book except for the following things: In the beginning, there was Eru Iluvatar (that’s ripped straight from the freaking Bible); Melkor becomes Morgoth (also from the Bible); and someone accidentally married his sister (and that was just a retelling of a Finnish myth). I’m sorry I don’t like it. Wait, no, I’m not sorry for that. I’m sorry that I ever pretended to like that stuff. Maybe I’m a dum-dum stupid-head, but at least I’m an honest one now.
• Overall, Tolkien’s works give off a strong air of exclusivity. If you can get past all the overly stylized prose, you get access to a special club where you get to understand all the nuance in his works and feel more enlightened than other people. But the thing is, the Tolkien fanbase often meets people who have questions or just want to make a silly, funny comment on something that happened in the films with cruelty, derision, and verbal abuse. It’s like the awkward nerds are finally the popular kids, and they get to be as viciously mean as people were to them in their school days because they finally have the social exclusivity they’ve always craved.

All of this social posturing, exclusivity, and meanness has left Tolkien rather untouchable. No one can criticize him without gets horribly bashed themselves. He lives on a pedestal as the greatest fantasy writer of them all, and we have to spend so much time on him that I think a lot of other fantasy writers never get spoken about, at least, not with the level of reverence that our dear John Ronald is spoken about. I think it’s time to bring him back to Earth and acknowledge that just like every other writer in human history, Tolkien has strengths and weakness, and from the perspective of a modern reader and writer (hi, that’s me), he can be hard to read.

Bringing him back down to Earth is the very reason that I often call Tolkien “John Ronald” instead of “Professor Tolkien” or “the Professor himself,” like I’ve seen other people do online. Since I’m a writer and aspiring novelist, he’s my colleague, not some kind of deity. I’m Mary Grace and he’s John Ronald. And guess what, I get to critique him. And so does the rest of the world. We can admit that he helped lay the foundations of modern fantasy while still acknowledging his shortcomings (like his inability to turn The Silmarillion into something that most humans can read). At some point, he was just as limited and human as the rest of us. 51 years after his death, it’s time that we take the crown off his head, let him diminish, and go join all the other writers in the canon of English literature. And then we can talk about modern authors who are doing similar things (like N.K. Jemisin, for example), but widening the circle of who gets included in big fantasy stories (the world is not Europe, my dudes). Taking away Tolkien’s crown of invincibility will actually help us a lot in the long run because we can compare him to other authors and include him in a group, rather than talking about him in isolation.

Since we can criticize Tolkien now, here’s a critique: Tom Bombadil’s presence in FOTR breaks your storytelling rules, man. If the Ring tempts everyone to use it, including very powerful people like Gandalf and Galadriel, then he’s got to be tempted, too. And introducing him and never using him again in the rest of the trilogy isn’t a very good idea, either. He needs to play some kind of role in fighting Sauron, not just some random side quest where the Hobbits get cornered by something called Barrow-wights. I guess the point is that this guy is a little weirdo who doesn’t crave material power and just wants to hang out with his wife (so maybe he’s a stand-in for John Ronald himself?), but he throws off the story’s pacing in a weird little side story that doesn’t serve the larger story. I was just telling my sister about this point, and she said, “You can break your own rules to serve the story, but he doesn’t serve the story at all.” That’s why I think the films made the right decision to cut Tom Bombadil and instead have the Hobbits run away from a Nazgul/Ringwraith** because those are a much larger threat in the story and their introduction shows us what the forces of Mordor are like.

And to make Tolkien just a normal human writer again, his fanbase needs to come out of the rafters and join the rest of us. Now, granted, we have to remember that we’re dealing with Tolkien diehards that seem to have a case of arrested development. A lot of the people screaming at film fans and just people casually existing on line seem to be stuck in a very tween/teenage mindsets where they need to actively control who has access to what and enjoy a type of exclusivity that they don’t enjoy in other parts of their lives. They long to be the cool kids, long after the rest of us have stopped caring about that stuff.

Here’s some advice for those fans, based on advice my mother gave me when I was a teenager: When it comes to Tolkien, your minds move at the speed of light, and everyone else moves at the speed of sound. You need to have patience and compassion for the people who are moving at the speed of sound. It may be hard, but you can do it. You may be mad that the LOTR films have eclipsed the books in terms of pop cultural awareness, but that’s because they told those stories in a more accessible way. And the books still exist and have sold many copies over the years. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon. And you don’t need to harass people anytime an adaptation diverges from Tolkien’s lore. Again, the lore still exists both in the books and in various wikis all across the internet. At some point, all the kicking and screaming over every little thing (usually with the Peter Jackson film trilogy or Amazon’s Rings of Power, but never any of the animated adaptations or the weird live-action Soviet adaptations from 1985 and 1991) doesn’t really solve anything and only serves to alienate anyone who might be interested in the books’ lore and continuity.

I think the real lesson to take away here for the more intense chunks of the Tolkien fandom is that a little bit of kindness goes a long way. Being rude, cruel, and/or verbally abusive towards people who don’t understand everything you do about Tolkien doesn’t help them and it helps build your fandom’s reputation for being one of the most toxic ones around. Additionally, does being so cruel about something you claim to love make you happy? I can’t imagine it does. The next time someone asks a question about something they don’t understand about Tolkien’s mythos (sorry, Legendarium), just try answering it in a straightforward way. I do that all the time for George R.R. Martin’s Westeros lore, and it really isn’t hard to do. Understanding is much more important than exclusivity or arrogant posturing. Why? Well, it brings people together, and isn’t that what fandom is supposed to be about?

Now, I know that all of the issues with the Tolkien fandom that I mentioned above do exist in other fandoms (Hi, Star Wars!), but I singled this fandom out because its toxicity personally bothers me the most, and it’s always been the hardest for me to tune out. Additionally, this fandom has the strange “our creator is dead and didn’t live into our lifetimes, so everything he did was perfect art and beyond criticism, and you can never change anything ever” angle that fandoms like Star Wars don’t have. Even fandoms like Star Trek and Doctor Who don’t have that problem, despite outliving their original creators. It’s just a strange phenomenon that I think needs to be called out because there are kinder, gentler alternatives to the Tolkien fandom’s snobbish and mean behavior. Twenty years after the LOTR film trilogy’s release, it was time someone said something.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go enjoy the rest of my Hobbit Girl Autumn!

*The article I linked to is in a journal for Marxist literary criticism. Yes, I was a bit freaked out by the word “Marxist”, but then my former English major brain remembered that Marxist literary criticism is a legitimate school of criticism using Karl Marx’s theories about class. While the author, Robert J. Tally, seems to be left-of-center politically, he’s not calling for converting governments to communism or anything. Rather, that article is about critiquing Tolkien’s work and how class appears in it. And also, his views on the Orcs.

**Hot Take: At least in the films, the Nazgul/Ringwraiths are more terrifying when they’re riding horses than when they’re riding their Fell Beasts (dragons who got their Masters). When they’re on horses, they seem like something that could grab you and take you Eru knows where, but when they’re on their Fell Beasts (again, these are dragons with advanced degrees), they feel too distant to be truly scary. Yes, this aside has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but I think it’s necessary, even if you don’t understand it. Just like Tom Bombadil!