The Lord of the Rings has grown in popularity the last few years largely because of the Peter Jackson films. Though I’m pleased to see a renewed interest in this great story, I fear many who share this interest have never actually read the books. That, to me, is very unfortunate. There is so much treasure to be found in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I discover more each time I read them. So, in an effort to increase interest in Tolkien’s masterpiece I asked Dr. Michael Stanton, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Vermont, to field questions related to Tolkien’s Middle-earth world. He graciously agreed to the interview. Even if you’re not an LOTR fan (yet), I think you will find his answers very insightful and informative. He’s agreed to respond to any questions you might have regarding his answers in the comment section below. So, please feel free to post questions. Dr. Stanton has been very kind to answer these LOTR questions. (Here’s part one of the interview)

1. What was Tolkien’s understanding of evil and in what ways is it reflected in The Lord of the Rings?

This is both one of the simplest and most complex of questions. Simply, evil manifests itself as hatred of life; but that hatred works its way through LOTR in a great variety of ways. Sauron hates life, and he shows it by destroying natural life (plants, animals) in every region he dominates. He especially hates free life, as Gandalf warns Frodo: “Hobbits as miserable slaves would please him [Sauron]far more than hobbits happy and free.” (FR, 1, II) So that hatred unfolds in many ways and at many levels: Sauron’s follower and rival Saruman cuts down trees in Fangorn Forest and converts Isengard from a garden into a place of iron and crude robotics. And Saruman’s own followers once established in the Shire ruin its landscape and pollute its waters.

Evil hates life because life is by nature profoundly creative, while evil is profoundly uncreative, even more, anti-creative. It is thoroughly traditional theology to view evil as a negation, as nothing in itself, hence the association with blackness, the absence of light. Sauron can create nothing: even his orcs were once elves, but he has deformed and twisted them, as he deformed ents into trolls, Treebeard says. Sauron can pervert and subvert life, but he cannot create it. He is therefore both hateful and jealous of life-affirming forces like free people.

All this may be Tolkien’s way of showing us that the idea that good cannot exist or at least be understood without the existence of evil is silly. They are not equal and opposite forces; that would partake of the Manichean heresy.

Evil is a negative, a falling away from good. Elrond says at his Council that nothing is evil in the beginning; even Sauron was not so. When Frodo looks in the Mirror of Galadriel he sees Sauron’s eye: “a window into nothing.”

Tolkien’s is a traditional viewpoint, having much in common with both the dogma of the Church Fathers and with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In that poem, as Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis observed, Satan no sooner begins speaking than within ten lines he is talking about himself. It’s all ego, and pride, and envy. Such is evil in The Lord of the Rings. And it lacks imagination: that may be the least human aspect of it, for we humans do have great gifts of imagination: our imagination is a gift to us from God, says Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories.” So Sauron, being entirely wrapped up in himself, cannot imagine what course any other being could follow. As Gandalf says a couple of times, he cannot imagine that, having the Ring, the Free Peoples would not use it. That’s what he would do. And worse, as Gandalf says, “that we [the West] should try to destroy the Ring itself has not entered into his darkest dream.” Evil’s lack of imagination is Good’s greatest hope.

2. What happened to Gandalf between his fall on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm and his return as Gandalf the White?

I delivered a paper on this topic at a conference a couple of years ago in which I argued that less happened to Gandalf in that interval than people want to believe. My opinion was not very warmly received. Tolkien said different things about this subject at different times.

My own belief has always been that just as the Valar originally sent Gandalf (and the other wizards) to Middle-earth, so they took him back to the West after he defeated the Balrog, reconstituted him and instructed him, and returned him to Middle-earth as the White, as the figure of power and wisdom which Saruman should have been, as Gandalf himself says. “Naked I was sent back,” he also says, and the passive verb is important.

This is, in its own way, common sense. Unfortunately, Tolkien said in a letter to a Jesuit priest, Father Robert Murray, that Gandalf did indeed go back to the West, but his reconstitution was taken from the hands of the Valar, and that Eru himself, the One, saw to Gandalf’s return, enhanced and empowered. Gandalf himself does not say anything beyond the cryptic “I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell,” which can mean any number of things.

In that same letter to Fr. Murray, Tolkien says he would have to make certain changes in the language of the LOTR text to show that Gandalf’s return had been implemented at a higher level of Authority. But even though the letter was written before LOTR ever saw print, and even though a major revision of the whole text took place in 1965, Tolkien never did change the language, so you have to wonder just what he did intend. Anyway, Gandalf was at least as strong before his fall as after. The Balrog was the most powerful enemy he ever directly faced.

I won’t rewrite my whole paper here but I remain pretty certain that the Valar, and no one else, took Gandalf from the mountain-top, healed him in the West, and returned him to Middle-earth.

3. Is there any way in which we can say that there are Christ figure-like characters in LOTR or at least characters that in some small way point to Christ?

I suppose any story that involves a character’s self-sacrifice for others can be said to have Christ-like attributes. I fail to see why it is so important to find such figures; it in no way makes the story more valid or more interesting.

Before I get into too much hot water, let me just point our that Tolkien himself denied any intention to create such figures (it would be blasphemous to make such a parallel, he said) and that Tolkien strongly objected to, even ridiculed, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles for their open religiosity and Christian symbolism.

4. What did you like and not like about how Peter Jackson turned the book into a movie?

First of all, I believe that the book is primary and that any adaptation of it into another medium should be as faithful as possible. In the late 17th century Nahum Tate thought he was improving Shakespeare’s King Lear by giving it a happy ending, but most people since would not agree. What he did was re-write in order to cater to prevailing audience taste. To an extent Peter Jackson did likewise, by emphasizing female roles, particularly Arwen’s, by making Gimli a figure of fun, and so on.

What I disliked:

-some of the casting: I thought Ian McKellan was perfect as Gandalf, Elijah Woods was OK as Frodo, Sean Astin was better than OK as Sam, but Hugo Weaving was totally unsuitable as Elrond. He did not look or sound like Elrond. Christopher Lee was a fine Saruman but Jackson and his cohorts apparently did not notice that in the book we never see him wearing white. White is what he used to wear before he went wrong; the change in costume color has significance, or at least it was meant to.

-changes in characterization: Faramir is made into a junior Boromir in the film, whereas Tolkien emphasized the contrast between the two brothers. Similarly, Frodo is made to seem weak-minded by listening to Gollum and thereby rejecting Sam and sending him away in “The Return.” This is a betrayal and a misreading of Frodo’s moral character as Tolkien s it to us.

-omissions: I think cutting Tom Bombadil’s chapters was regrettable but probably necessary, whereas the Scouring of the Shire should have been included. As developed in the book it was both predictable and inevitable, and was a useful reminder that evil does not exist merely in rings but more centrally in people’s hearts. The Edmund Burke quotation I mentioned is still apt: “All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” and that’s just what happened in the Shire.

What I liked:

-the settings: New Zealand is a beautiful country with a variety of microclimates: everything needed for Middle-earth is there, although not always to scale (the River Anduin, for instance, changes character as the Company goes southward; Jackson needed several different New Zealand rivers to show the changes)

to some extent, the technology: I thought the city of Minas Tirith and the fortress of Helm’s Deep were beautifully realized, although they were mostly studio work.. Similarly, Gollum was well done by motion capture, although necessarily cartoonish. Andy Serkis was very good at the gestures and the voice. Tbe irony here, of course, is that Tolkien hated most manifestations of modern technology, and yet the film of his book could not have been effectively realized without it.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of likes and dislikes, rather just a sample of the things uppermost in my mind.

5. Can you tell us a little about your LOTR trip to New Zealand? What did you do and what was it like? Do you have any plans to go again?

The trip was organized by a woman who does these things for a living (she does nature tours, and garden tours, and so on.) She is a Kiwi but lives in California; I had met her before and when she learned that I was interested in Tolkien and had written about LOTR, she decided to organize a tour of the filming sites (the first two movies had already come out when we left in January, 2004). We visited Hobbiton, which was one of only two places exempt from the New Zealand government’s requirement that the film-makers remove all traces of their work. We rafted down one of the rivers which constituted the Anduin and visited both the place where Sam and Frodo crossed into the Emyn Muil on their way to Mordor, and the place where Theoden’s castle and city had been erected, among many other places. We even got to meet some of the artisans and craftsmen from the Weeta studios where the swords and other weapons and armaments were fabricated.

We covered many spots in both the North and South Islands on an 18-day itinerary. We traveled mostly by bus, but also by helicopter (to visit the place where the Company emerged from the Mines of Moria), by boat as noted, and by foot. There were 18 or 20 of us, of all ages and kinds of interests, female students who loved Orlando Bloom, elderly folk who were interested in Tolkien’s religious beliefs, teachers, librarians, and literary types like myself, and so on. We had guides at most points, many of whom had worked with Jackson and his crew as local guides and advisers and who were therefore knowledgeable about the film-making process. We were fortunate enough to be accompanied for several days by Ian Brodie, who had written a book about the correlation between New Zealand sites and film scenes.
We also had DVDs of the first two segments of the movie, and at night in our various hotels we would watch the movie scenes of the spots we had visited that day, and discuss what we had seen.

The weather was for the most part excellent: it was January, which is mid-summer in New Zealand. We stayed in good hotels, ate good food (hard to avoid in that country if you like plain hearty cooking with lots of beef and lamb), and were treated with great courtesy everywhere we went. It was altogether a rewarding experience.

I would like to return to New Zealand, not for the film associations, but for the country itself. But the trip is expensive, the plane ride is long and tiring, and a lot of advance planning is almost a necessity.

I am almost sure that this does not answer your or your readers’ questions adequately, but I have very much enjoyed participating in the blog experience. Thanks for asking me along.