JRR TOLKIEN IS BEST KNOWN for his The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, published over 1954-55. But before that, he had written a novel for children — The Hobbit — published in 1937. After the success of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) films, it was deemed likely that The Hobbit too would succeed as cinema since interest in Tolkien had been revived. Peter Jackson made three films, over 2012-2014, based on the novel, although The Hobbit is a much smaller work. All the films are now on Amazon Prime Video, alongside the prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power that had its finale this Friday.
LOTR and The Hobbit, set in an imagined space called Middle-Earth, are considered fantasy novels. But going by Bulgarian literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov’s definition, they are ‘marvelous’ rather than ‘fantastic’ since they create alternate worlds and are not about supernatural occurrences in the actual world — as in a ghost story or a work like The Exorcist. Tolkien explained that he was trying to write a mythology for England through LOTR, but there are clues that suggest allegory (although he denied this was his intention). The bit of history generally regarded as the candidate for LOTR’s allegorical aspect is World War II, but there are elements that suggest it was at least unconsciously inspired by the Cold War.
The Cold War began in 1947, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Tolkien, based on his letters, is supposed to have completed LOTR in 1949. The USSR also detonated its first nuclear bomb in 1949. My own (perhaps unpopular) view is that the idea of the One Ring that helped its owner “rule them all” derives from the nuclear weapons that were then thought to give any world power a decisive edge.
In LOTR, Sauron rules in Mordor over an industrial power in which orcs work underground. There are several ways in which they might be perceived as zombies. The zombie as a category was a transformation of a legend originally from Haiti. Later zombies are not individual dead people brought to life by voodoo but masses with lost souls. The idea of people under Communism with their souls given up to an all-powerful ruler seemed to correspond to people under Stalin, especially because Communism was officially atheistic and discouraged religion. Tolkien, we may note, was an ardent Christian and that too would have influenced his view of Communism.
The zombie featured in Cold War science fiction films like Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or horror films like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). They do not announce themselves as ‘allegory’ but it is most tempting to interpret the lifeless humans in these films as subjects under Communism. The same kind of representation of ‘lifeless citizens’ in the USSR is found in David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (1965), which is different from the way Boris Pasternak’s novel deals with the Soviet people. Apart from these aspects of Mordor and the Orcs, Sauron is represented as a gigantic eye, which corresponds to how George Orwell represented ‘Big Brother’ in 1984, a satire on the USSR under Stalin published in 1949. My argument here is, regardless of when LOTR claims to have been written, its publication was in 1955 — which was well into the Cold War, and it reflects that political mythology.
When we examine Tolkien’s The Hobbit where Bilbo Baggins finds a ring, we never get the sense that its possession is going to be so momentous. The likelihood is that when he wrote the novel Tolkien had not imagined that it would become the center of his magnum opus, the LOTR trilogy that he would publish only 18 years later. But when we compare the two sets of films by Peter Jackson, we are struck by how The Hobbit is trying to make itself a ‘prequel’ to LOTR. A prequel is something made later but trying to situate itself chronologically earlier and that is what The Hobbit is doing in cinema. In Tolkien’s The Hobbit there is the brief mention of someone called the ‘Necromancer’ (someone who can bring the dead to life) but he is explicitly given the same ‘Sauron’ in Jackson’s The Hobbit.
There are various kinds of creatures in Tolkien’s two literary works: hobbits, elves, men, dwarves, trolls, orcs and goblins, and one could use different adjectives to describe them. The hobbits playing key roles are only Bilbo (in The Hobbit) and Frodo-Sam in LOTR (with a supporting act by Merry and Pippin) while there are armies of the others. But the important thing is that the hobbits, elves, men and dwarves are essentially on the side of the good. Dwarves are head-strong and elves are proud while men refuse to have any truck with either of them; they are all bickering but at moments of crisis, they come together.
Trolls are essentially diversions and although troublesome and stupid (they are large and eat smaller creatures) they do not contribute much to the action. The goblins and orcs are both essentially evil. I am not sure how the two are different but neither does Peter Jackson, apparently. In The Hobbit they are both shown in the same way: as unspeakably ugly, with scars on their faces, and bad teeth. Scarred people as ‘evil’ is problematic because one associates scars with the violence that someone has met, and not to what they can cause.
It is perhaps because they are fanciful creatures and not humans of some specific ethnicity that the portrayal of orcs has not met with opposition from those alert to racial prejudice and discrimination. LOTR has been described as the portrayal of a struggle between good and evil but I wonder if there is any other serious literary work from the West in which an entire tribe is vilified as ‘evil’, since the essentialsation of the enemy in such terms, even in war, is morally frowned upon. In The Iliad, for instance, there is nothing to say that the Trojans or Greeks are evil as people. ‘Evil’ is supposed to reside in individuals and it was always for the individual to decide on his or her moral choices.
LOTR’s portrayal of orcs is reminiscent of jingoistic World War II comics in which beefy Germans are shouting guttural expletives at Allied soldiers and the Japanese are grinning gleefully at the pain they are causing their prisoners. LOTR and The Hobbit are covertly racist exercises because they support the notion of tribes of creatures being inherently evil or good as connoted by their physical ugliness or otherwise. In the fights between the orcs and anyone else, the most fearsome orc is destroyed easily by the frailest of adversaries and this happens so frequently that we soon lose the sense that even armies of orcs can be threatening. That too is notionally jingoism where the blameless protagonists are never seriously threatened. The reason that people do not see it as such is because they see LOTR as fantasy, and not as allegory.
I tried to make a connection between Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the mythology around the Cold War, but what is the attraction of the same story in the present day? LOTR as a tale had lost its appeal by the 1970s. Ralph Bakshi — who departed from Walt Disney by making cartoon films like Fritz the Cat (1972) for adults — made an animated version of the first two parts of LOTR in 1978, which flopped badly. My interpretation of why LOTR captured the public imagination in the new millennium can be associated with the new eagerness to demonise a political enemy, as Tolkien had (arguably) done with Soviets.
In the new millennium it was possible, because of technology becoming opaque to the general public, to awaken such political fears. The WMD hoax — that led to Iraq’s destruction — was a product of the public’s gullibility with regard to both technology and the geopolitical scenario. This grey political-technological area is fertile ground for fantasy to sprout in entertainment and Hollywood routinely mixes real political elements with fantasy in films — like ‘military assets’ in The Shape of Water (2017) and Iron Man’s ‘arc reactor’ in the context of Afghanistan. I propose that Putin’s Russia has once again provided an eminently vilifiable object. The notion of the ‘good people’ eventually triumphing over such an evil, and irredeemably ugly enemy reassures a simple-minded public politically, and both LOTR and The Hobbit draw upon that. They help construct a subliminal narrative in the minds of the public that can sell a political decision to them.
MK Raghavendra is a well-known film critic who has authored eight books on cinema.
