The Lord of the Rings is a foundation stone of modern fantasy. It’s such a landmark in fantasy books, it’s difficult to do it justice. Every time I try to sum up why this three-volume epic dominates a genre six decades on, the task defeats me. Let’s give it another try.
Name a fantasy trope
The Lord of the Rings presents us with so many fantasy tropes it’s hard to know where to begin.
Tolkien created his secondary world of Middle Earth with thousands of years of history and lore. It sets the standard of world building many writers still aim to match.
It is a genre-defining blend of humans and supernatural creatures. The early fellowship of the ring treks across a dangerous world of orcs, trolls, goblins, a fire-demon, undead Ring-wraiths and whatever the tentacled thing is in the lake of Moria.
The mines of Moria present the dungeon hack that spawned a thousand role-play games.
Archetypes galore
The Lord of the Rings is a grand quest to save the world from the un-killable Dark Lord Sauron, resurrected as a giant eye of fire.
The tale of the plucky underdog on a quest to retrieve or destroy a Mcguffin wasn’t invented by Tolkien. But ring-bearer Frodo Baggins, an archetypal middle-class English gent, wouldn’t have completed the quest without his faithful retainer Sam, arguably the true hero of the story.
While the ranger, the elf, the dwarf and the wizard hold back vast armies of darkness in titanic battles, it’s Frodo and Sam who have to complete the mission while Middle Earth burns around them.
A kinder morality in a difficult age
Superficially, The Lord of the Rings follows the classic hero’s journey fantasy, in which everyone grows and changes under adversity and good wins out over evil.
But war veteran Tolkien knew the horrors of World War One. For all their derring-do, his characters do not go lightly into battle. These are reluctant heroes, who go to war of necessity and for a higher purpose. For all that, Gandalf, Frodo, Sam and Aragorn look to a better future where everyone can find some kind of peace.
The Lord of the Rings isn’t really about swords and battles, these are just the trappings of epic adventures. It’s really about the struggle, surviving the battles and returning home changed for the better, kinder and wiser.
A lasting legacy
If you can get past Tolkien’s staid Edwardian prose, his world of boundless imagination opens up. It’s almost impossible to write anything in this genre without some direct comparison back to the very source of modern fantasy.
Tolkien, a professor of ancient and Anglo-Saxon literature, knew his sources from Gilgamesh to Beowulf. He re-interpreted and borrowed plot, characters and themes from many of them. His influence is such, you might believe Tolkien is the progenitor of the whole fantasy genre.
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