Luke Skywalker Can't Read (11 page)

Our 2015 is scarily real, while the 2015 of
Back to the Future
was never intended to be any more real than its “past” or “present.” Instead, everything that works (and doesn't work) about this pop stalwart does so thanks to fake nostalgia, which really is no different from Doc sticking garbage into the DeLorean to make it fly.

W
hen I was three or so, my parents used to drop me off with a nice Mormon couple who named their daughter “Galadriel,” in honor of the beautiful Elf person from
The Lord of the Rings
who we now know looks exactly like Cate Blanchett. In the early '80s, I didn't know what a Mormon was, or who Cate Blanchett was, but I'd like to think that I just inherently understood Elves. Beyond her name, there's not much today that my mother can recall about my Galadriel or her family. They lived close enough to us in Mesa, Arizona, to function as a great place to plop me when my parents both needed to go to the grocery store, mind the fish store they owned together, or, possibly, get high and have sex. Beyond that, nothing has been retained of this friendship other than one Polaroid of the two of us; and I'm clutching the hand of the three-year-old version of the Lady of Lothlorien.

Pronouncing the names of all the characters in
The Lord of the Rings
is tricky enough, but if you're a three-year-old, it's
totally impossible. The only thing my mom does remember about little Galadriel turns out to be the best thing: I could not pronounce her name at all. Instead of saying “Galadriel,” tiny-me apparently shortened it into a portmanteau word: “Deedle,” which rhymes with “needle.” This means that I'm the only Tolkien fan to invent my own canonical nickname for one of the major characters, though there are exactly zero references to a “Deedle” in any of the appendices in
The Return of the King
. Can you imagine Ian McKellan's Gandalf saying the word “Deedle”? Do it now, please.

Despite how uncommon this name is, I've been unable to track down my old playmate. Dreamingly, I believe there's an alternate universe where Deedle and I grew up and became great friends and I learned from her—a real-life Galadriel—how to pronounce “Galadriel.” As it stands, in this reality, our families drifted apart and Deedle is out there somewhere, a riddle in the dark of my childhood, which is only mildly interesting because I didn't have any other childhood friends with names like Spock or Gizmo. So, I had to learn how to pronounce this name like the rest of you who have read
The Hobbit
or
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy: I invented a pronunciation in my head and then was shocked how wrong I was when the Peter Jackson movies came out in 2001.

In all seriousness, though, I think my toddler-self's apprehension over learning the real pronunciation of “Galadriel” was a prescient metaphor for how afraid I am of real Tolkien fans. They're not a vicious bunch at all, but hard-core Tolkien scholars are patient with information in ways that I am not. They
can accept the fact that a whole relationship/marriage can exist as a footnote. They can believe that Tolkien merely “translated” these works from other languages. They can endlessly ponder if the Hobbits are very gay or actually metaphors for Christian values or, possibly, both. Going down the hobbit-hole of Tolkien scholarship is really, really difficult because J. R. R. Tolkien himself was like a built-in scholar/fan of his own work. If Neil deGrasse Tyson were to write science fiction novels, and those novels became immensely popular, I feel like he would become the Tolkien of sci-fi, the inventor of a new genre who is nearly beyond reproach in terms of the logistics of how his fictional world actually functions. In stark opposition to George Lucas—who is clearly unaware of how his fictional world functions—Tolkien is such an expert on his own material that jumping from the frying pan of casual fan to the fire of serious discussion of his work is scary for any serious writer or critic.

Luckily, I'm more of a Bilbo and I'm not serious. I'm a fool. So here we go.

There are numerous ways of thinking about Tolkien's intentions, and a lot of facts and interviews to sort through, but I think even the most hard-core Tolkien scholars will agree with me when I say that
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy only exists because Tolkien's original publisher asked him to write a sequel to
The Hobbit.
In
The
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
, there's tons of evidence to indicate the author originally had no intention of writing a sequel to
The Hobbit
at all. Specifically, in a 1937 letter to his publisher Stanley Unwin (of Allen & Unwin) Tolkien says, “I am a little perturbed. I cannot think of
anything more to say about
hobbits.
” This is funny because Tolkien obviously believes it at the time, but the ten-year process of coming around to think the exact opposite is one of the most important retcons in geek history. If Tolkien had continued to respond to letters from fans and his publisher with a similar “no thanks” sentiment, I can't imagine the “fantasy” half of science fiction and fantasy existing in a way that is recognizable at all. The eventual decision Tolkien made to seriously write a “sequel” to
The Hobbit
is the big bang of fantasy, a revolutionary turning point that makes an alternate reality without
The Lord of the Rings
almost impossible to fathom in retrospect, even though it's fascinatingly bizarre that in our universe, any of this happened at all.

John Lennon famously thought “Help!” should be a slow song, which puts him in the genius company of J. R. R. Tolkien, who also didn't initially understand the commercial value of his own work. What I mean is, Tolkien wanted the super-boring tome called
The Silmarillion
to come out before
The Hobbit
, and later, as part of
The Lord of the Rings
, though his publisher wouldn't allow it.
The Silmarillion
is also symptomatic of something I like to call the Magician's Nephew Bullshit, insofar as the effect it has on
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
is similar to what C. S. Lewis did with the Narnia books.
The Silmarillion
“explains” why the fantasy world of Middle-Earth exists the same way Lewis's
The Magician's Nephew
explains how Narnia became Narnia. Magician's Nephew Bullshit values accuracy over narrative fun. As Laura Miller explains in
The Magician's Book
, “Some lines in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
don't make much sense if you presume that its
readers are already familiar with
The Magician's Nephew
.” This is why there's literally no good reason to read
The Chronicles of Narnia
in anything other than the publication order, and possibly (and controversially) why you never need to read
The Silmarillion
. Magician's Nephew Bullshit totally applies to
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
, but you already knew that.

Like George Lucas, Tolkien is an insane historical revisionist of his own work, though—totally unlike Lucas—a wildly successful one. He revised his original 1937 novel
The Hobbit or There and Back Again
, and this revision appeared in 1951.
*
It differs radically enough from the original to allow
The Lord of the Rings
to exist at all. Specifically, Gollum goes from being a curious creature with funny opinions about things to a straight-up murderous psychopath. Furthermore, the original version of
The Hobbit
doesn't indicate at all that the Ring was bad news. However, try getting your hands on an original 1937 version of
The Hobbit
these days. It's not a conspiracy exactly, but a totally successful retcon. Because Tolkien
revised
that version of
The Hobbit
to make it compatible with
The Lord of the Rings
after the fact, he's totally guilty of Magician's Nephew Bullshit, even though he's one of the only people who ever made it work insofar as it is completely accepted by the fans.

But we need to back up. If
The Hobbit
is the on-accident prequel to
The Lord of the Rings
, what's the big deal? He wrote
The Hobbit
, people liked it, so he wrote a cool series of novels as
a follow-up. Why would anyone care or think that's profound? Well, if Tolkien hadn't come around to turning his
Hobbit
sequel into
The Lord of the Rings
, fantasy as we know it wouldn't exist because
LOTR
is to fantasy what the Beatles are to rock and roll.

Try to imagine a world without the Beatles. Really, really try. I think there's a very real chance that such a world is a ravaged, burned-out cinder that has a culture not dissimilar to the creepy-melting-faces people who live underneath the Earth in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
. I can't prove this of course, because there's not a direct correlation between nuclear war being averted and the Beatles releasing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but still. It's nearly incomprehensible to imagine a contemporary world of pop/rock music without the Beatles, which is partly attributed to Ringo Starr joining the group in 1962. Their original drummer—Pete Best—was infamously unceremoniously fired from the group just prior to the Fabs signing with Brian Epstein and truly becoming a universal phenomenon. If the Beatles didn't chuck Pete Best, they might not have been managed by Brian Epstein, and suddenly, your parents didn't have the right music to listen to and you're not born at all or able to read this book. So, follow this closely: Bilbo is Pete Best and Frodo is Ringo Starr.

Because Bilbo's journey totally concludes arguably even before the end of
The Hobbit
, you couldn't possibly make him the star of
The Hobbit Part 2
, and that's because Bilbo isn't a character who is “part 2” material. You might think Ringo is the everyman of the Beatles, but that's because he's the everyman who went on the adventure and
stayed
on the adventure.
Bilbo's the guy who went on the journey and came back again and stayed home, like Pete Best. Bilbo is an intentionally and aggressively unremarkable everyman whose hero's journey is so anticonformist punk rock that he actually doesn't do much traditional heroic stuff in the last section of
The Hobbit
. In a 1975 essay called “The Psychological Journey of Bilbo Baggins,” Dorothy Matthews asserts: “It stands to reason that Tolkien does not have Bilbo kill the dragon because that would be more the deed of a savior or culture hero, such as St. George, or the Red Cross Knight, or Beowulf. The significance of this tale lies in the very obvious anti-heroic manner in which Tolkien chooses to bring Bilbo's adventures to a conclusion.”

Sitting out the big battles and not taking a lot of credit make Bilbo the star of an epic adventure who doesn't act like the star. So, when
The Hobbit
demanded a sequel, Tolkien needed something old (a Hobbit) and something new, and what we got out of that equation was Frodo Baggins, Bilbo's plucky nephew, a deeper kind of Magician's Nephew Bullshit that is actually not bullshit.

If viewed through the lens of heroic archetypes, in every way, Bilbo is a more iconoclastic character than Frodo, because he actively protests being part of the story that he's in. Frodo isn't nearly as iconoclastic, and structurally, the narrative style of
The
Lord of the Rings
is a little more efficient than that of
The Hobbit
. I know, I sound like a crazy person: a three-novel trilogy is somehow more efficient in its language than a tiny little three-hundred-page deal called
The Hobbit
. I'm totally nuts. But I'm not.
The Lord of the Rings
books are way more plot oriented than the meandering child's journey of
The Hobbit
. In
“Narrative Pattern in
The Fellowship of the Ring
,” David M. Miller talks about picturesque writing versus writing that focuses on the movement of the ring. He argues that with a few exceptions (like Tom Bombadil) everything that happens in
The Lord of the Rings
is answering the main plot question of WHERE IS THE RING NOW?

Meanwhile, there's a lot of random shit in
The Hobbit
—goblin attack, giant spiders, lots of eating and singing—not all of which really adds up to an exciting plot, which is exactly why turning this book into a series of three films was a great idea for making money for New Line Cinema, but a terrible idea in terms of making watchable movies. The characters in
The Hobbit
are forced in their film adaptations to sustain themselves over narrative distances they were not designed to cross. Peter Jackson tried to turn
The Hobbit
into
The Lord of the Rings
when he made his film adaptations of the novel, and if J. R. R. Tolkien had attempted the inverse—to make
The Lord of the Rings
a true sequel to
The Hobbit
—nobody would have liked
The Lord of the Rings
.