General Criticism: The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Work as a Whole

Christopher Scarf searches out The Ideal of Kingship in the Writings of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Divine Kingship Is Reflected in Middle-earth (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2013), of which part 3, chapters 9–11, deals specifically with Tolkien. While Scarf points out many common views on ideal kingship among the three Inklings (e.g., that ideal kings are representatives of the divine), he notes that “although Tolkien, as a Christian, believed in Christus Rex, he did not present his ideal king, Aragorn, as having been actually ‘modelled’ on Him.” Rather, “Tolkien ‘absorbed’ Christ into his story, making Aragorn a type of Christ, while avoiding any kind of allegory or parody of Christianity” (164), this avoidance of course in striking contrast to Lewis. The three chapters on Tolkien deal respectively with the historical bases for kingship in his works, the biblical foundation for king-ship and the ordering of a parallel divine court in Tolkien’s fiction, and the kingly ideal in Anglo-Saxon England and in Middle-earth.

Maria Błaszkiewicz is likewise concerned with the concept of regency in “Tolkien’s Queen Women in The Lord of the Rings” (Kowalik 69–91). As many critics have pointed out, women are all but absent in The Lord of the Rings. While this is often seen as a defect, Błaszkiewicz argues just the opposite, that the absence of women is deliberate. Rather than a “sign of the author’s prejudice or his failure as a writer, [it is] a conscious design which aims not to diminish the importance of the female element but, on the contrary, to glorify it” (70). Błaszkiewicz then proceeds to analyze the roles and environments of the women in the novel with fruitful results, as when she notes that the safest refuges during Frodo’s exile are those with a strong, even queenly feminine presence.

One of Tolkien’s female characters, Éowyn, comes again to the fore in Justyna Brzezińska’s “Rohan and the Social Codes of Heroic Epic and Chivalric Romance” (Kowalik 47–68). Brzezińska argues, with numerous examples, that the Rohirrim represent a culture in transition, “evoking on the one hand the Anglo-Saxon warriors of old epic poetry and on the other the later medieval knighthood governed by the chivalric code as presented in the romance genre” (47–48). But added to this, Éowyn’s aspiration to become a knight herself “transgresses the conventions” of any genuine historical model; therefore, in spite of the putative sources of Tolkien’s Rohirrim, they are equally “a genuine product of the author’s imagination” (66).

Continuing on the subject of heroism, Barbara A. Heavilin’s “ ‘The Best of Us’: Saints and Heroes in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (in her own book, From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism: The Search for Meaning and Presence of God in Modern Literature [Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013], 106–21) is a rather obvious study of the heroic and saintly behavior of certain characters in The Lord of the Rings. The author uses Viktor Frankl’s memories of the “saints” and “swine” of World War II concentration camps to reflect Tolkien’s characters, although the comparison adds little to either. The arguments are facile, and the essay suffers a significant blemish when Heavilin combines passages from Tolkien’s letters to Father Robert Murray and W. H. Auden into a single quotation. Along similar lines, Constance G. J. Wagner, in her essay “Frodo & Faramir: Mirrors of Chivalry” (Silver Leaves 5: 52–55), finds in Frodo and Faramir common traits of the preudomme, the ideal chivalric knight, as described by the 14th-century knight Geoffroi de Charny. Wagner’s argument is sound enough, but she needlessly appeals to Peter Jackson’s film adaptations as often as to Tolkien’s novel for evidence.

More than usual was said in 2013 about trees and forests, particularly in how they contrast with urbanized culture. Thomas Honegger examines episodes in The Lord of the Rings surrounding food, cooking, and eating...