The Story Was Already Written: Narrative Theory in The Lord of the Rings

Popularity, for a writer of fiction, can be a double-edged sword: Surely writers want their work to be read and appreciated, and royalty checks are always welcome; but some forms of enthusiastic reception may give other potential readers a misleading impression of what a work is like. Such may be the case with The Lord of the Rings. Its popularity with the opt-out culture in the '60s, the prevalence of buttons reading "Frodo Lives" in the '70s, and people in elf costume lining up for movies in this decade have, perhaps, led some to suppose that the work can appeal only to relatively naive readers, that it would not reward the kind of critical analysis that more sophisticated fiction receives. Or perhaps it is simply that many of us read the work as teenagers and have never returned to it. Whatever the reason, there has been a general neglect of The Lord of the Rings among scholars of fiction. Certainly, no articles on Tolkien have appeared in Narrative before, or in other journals with broad audiences such as ELH or PMLA. (Specialized scholarship on Tolkien, on the other hand, has proceeded quietly for many years and includes some work of very high quality; for an overview, see Drout and Wynne.) But this is beginning to change: Modern Fiction Studies, for example, recently ran a special issue on Tolkien (Hughes). With this article, I hope to contribute to that change by demonstrating some of the richness of Tolkien's fiction for inquiries into the structure and function of narrative. Specifically, I will explore the metanarrative aspects of The Lord of the Rings: These include characters' conversations about narrative (which are sometimes self-referential) and features of the novel's structure and narrative technique that illustrate some of the points made in the characters' conversations—and in ours.

One such conversation occurs between Frodo and Sam, the characters whose task it is to travel (alone but for the company of Gollum, their untrustworthy guide) into the stronghold of the Dark Lord Sauron to destroy the Ring that contains much of his power. On their last evening outside the borders of Mordor, they have what can only be described as a theoretical discussion of narrative and reader response. Sam muses on (among other things) what kinds of tales "stay in the mind," what kinds of adventures make for a good tale and which are "forgotten," and even what their own experiences will be like when made into a story, "put into words . . . told by the fireside, or read out of a big book" (IV.8, 696-7)¹ . More surprisingly, perhaps, this conversation serves to lighten the mood of the two hobbits, in spite of the cheerless place in which they find themselves and the dangers that lie ahead of them. Though he observes that they are "still stuck in the worst places of the story," Frodo actually laughs—in a place where laughter is seldom heard—and tells Sam, "to hear you makes me as merry as if the story was already written" (IV.8, 697).

It is perhaps not surprising to find such a conversation, with its mood-altering impact, in a work written by a man who spent his professional career, as well as a good deal of his leisure time from boyhood, reading, teaching, editing, and writing about narratives of various sorts (not to mention creating them). Yet this attention to story as a topic of discussion is an aspect of The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien criticism has not yet fully explored. In addition to the characters' discussions—which run throughout the work, only becoming more extended and explicit in this example—there are a number of structural features of the work that give it a meta-fictional dimension. "This tale grew in the telling," as Tolkien famously begins his Foreword to the second edition (xiii), and...