The Boomer Logic of ‘Lord of the Rings'
That haunting feeling that everything literally used to be better.
I have an acquaintance who is pretty salty about any piece of pop culture that came out after 1995 or so. He’s one of those folks who pretty much thinks civilization in general has been in decline since forever, with a real Tony Soprano-ish sense that he missed all the best stuff1. Bring up any current work of literature or visual media and he’ll dismiss it as a copy of a copy or representative of the slow decline of our culture2. In other words, he has some serious Lord of The Rings energy. Because if there’s one phrase that sums up that LOTR energy, it’s “things used to be better.”
Let me explain. No, wait, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Everyone who has even a scintilla of love for epic fantasy loves The Lord of The Rings and its bastard younger brother The Hobbit and its weird cousin The Silmarillion and its extended, largely estranged family comprising the approximately 1,000 books Christopher Tolkien has shepherded onto bookshelves in the last few decades3. Of course they do, it’s awesome! And also foundational in the genre and all that. Personally, I encountered LOTR as a too-young kid. I’d read The Chronicles of Narnia and The Wizard of Oz books and then moved immediately to LOTR. It was the third series of fantasy books I’d ever read, I was probably 10 years old, and there simply wasn’t enough room in my head for all of it4.
But even as a child I was aware of something almost subliminal in LOTR: Sadness. There’s a sense of loss shot through the entire story. Some of this is text, of course—characters lose things along the way, as all good characters should5. But much of it is subtext. The entire story is suffused with the sense that things used to be better. And, frankly, in Middle Earth things did used to be better. Because that’s essentially the whole point of LOTR: Everything used to be better, and our best case scenario is that things are going to keep getting worse6.
Númenor? I Hardly Knew Her!
Consider: There isn’t an aspect of life in the Third Age that isn’t debased from a superior prior example. Sauron is just a cut-rate Morgoth (and Saruman is just a cut-rate Sauron). Gondor is the frail shadow of Númenor. The elves are weakened, fading echoes of past glory, and men, who once lived for centuries, have degenerated into creatures that barely make it past 200—with clear implications that they will soon be lucky to live past 1007. The wizards are of the same class of godlike beings as Sauron, but are generally weaker than him, the Dwarves no longer rule their own mines, and the glorious Two Trees of Valinor have been replaced by the imperfect Sun and Moon. Even Shelob, the awesome huge spider we all love, is just the slightly less horrifying offspring of Ungoliant. That’s right: Even the fucking monstrously huge spiders in the Third Age are not as monstrous as they once were.
In other words, Middle Earth’s Third Age is just one stop along an ongoing decline.
Some of this stems from Tolkien’s conception that power has a cost, and that cost is often physical. Melkor, the original gangster of LOTR villains, starts off as a godlike being who assists with the literal creation of the universe, but in his quest to ascend to the status of Eru Ilúvatar (basically God) he expends much of his power into creating off-brand things like orcs8. This diminishes him. Sure, to the creatures of Middle Earth Melkor (renamed Morgoth) is terrifying, but he’s a shadow of what he once was. The same process occurs with Sauron, a lesser godlike being and originally one of Morgoth’s lieutenants. He loses his ability to take physical form and pours so much of his essence into making the Rings of Power that destroying the One Ring also destroys him.
Everything, from good to evil to horses to elves, used to be better, stronger, more beautiful in Middle Earth. Heck, you could once literally sail to heaven in Middle Earth before Sauron ruined everything for everyone. And Tolkien makes it pretty clear that after his trilogy concludes the world will continue to slowly lose its magic, probably until it resembles the sad, dull world we all now inhabit. For Tolkien, The Lord of The Rings is really about the inevitable decline of Western Civilization, the endumbening of its population, and the fact that none of us will ever see true magic again9.
You Are the Only Exception
There are two notable exceptions to this meta-theme of decline and diminishing returns. One is Gandalf, who abruptly upgrades from Gandalf 1.0 (The Grey) to Gandalf 2.0 (The White) after being unceremoniously murdered by a Balrog, an ancient and therefore more formidable evil10. Gandalf The White is allowed by Eru Ilúvatar to show his true, godlike nature a bit more, which makes Gandalf pretty badass against anyone aside from perhaps Sauron, especially if Sauron regains possession of the One Ring that contains much of his essence. It’s a rare example of something getting better over the course of the story, and illustrates Gandalf’s purity. He’s the only one of the five wizards sent by Eru to resist Sauron who stays on mission, the only one to resist the temptations of power and knowledge11.
The other exception is, of course, Tom Bombadil—but Bombadil is pretty much a force outside the mechanics of the universe12. Tolkien never makes it clear what Bombadil is, but he’s clearly incredibly powerful—the One Ring has no effect on him at all, and within the boundaries of his forest realm he appears to be all-powerful. But his disinterest in the affairs of the world makes his immortality and ageless power useless—it’s superficial, because in Tolkien’s world power is meant to be used. Bombadil never declines because Bombadil never changes. He simply exists, outside time and space, affecting nothing and being affected by nothing. It’s easy to imagine that if Bombadil had strapped on some leafy armor and marched on Sauron, he either would have snuffed out the Dark Lord with an irritated gesture or died on the battlefield like so many legends before him, leaving behind a world slightly less magical. His lack of importance and effect is why he doesn’t go into decline13.
It’s easy to view the past as a golden age because we tend to forget details, and because time gets compressed. If you look back over several thousand years of history and find a half dozen true heroes, then look at the last century and see exactly zero such heroes, it’s very easy to make a false comparison because those two time periods look similar to our brains despite their vast differences. This tricks a lot of people into assuming everything used to be better. Add in a bunch of music and other cultural changes you haven’t been paying attention to and it can seem like the past was way better. In LOTR that’s subtext: The Third Age is kind of crappy, because everything (except Gandalf and Tom Bombadil) is worse than it used to be.
This is why I only play “We Built This City” by Starship when I want to hear music, because everything’s been on a downhill since 1985, really.
Next week: The sound of two people who desperately want to f*ck each other.
These people are crazy. I was there in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s and they sucked.
One of his go-to arguments revolves around reality television, which he believes to be a clear sign of the looming Idiocracy. As if fucking Fantasy Island and The Dukes of Hazzard didn’t exist.
I read The Simarillion and was so exhausted by the end of it I had to take a 3-year nap.
I’ve told this story many times, but the first story I ever wrote featured a wizard named Cobolt who recruits a bunch of short folk called Twabbots to help him in a war against a dark lord. So, yeah … you could say these books had an effect on me.
Sam, for example, loses his dignity.
"Worse",” in case you’re not paying attention to what Tolkien is laying down, is us, the modern world, which is implied to be the end result of this devolution.
Or, if you’re a Somers Man, clear implications that you should greet every day after the age of 35 with unsullied gratitude and amazement, because we Somers’ die easy.
Similar to the way I have put much of my power and essence into newsletters.
Except at /r/blackmagicfuckery, where it’s all magic, all the time.
I’m just gonna say it: If the promotion requires being murdered by a Balrog, I do not want the promotion.
Here’s something many writers don’t understand: In LOTR, there are these two Blue wizards who entered Middle Earth alongside Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast and immediately vanish into the south and are pretty much never heard from again. And this is a marvelous piece of world building, that these two incredibly powerful beings would simply vanish, and we might never know what happened to them. That’s what I love about them: That I will never know. And there’s probably someone working on a pitch for a Two Blue Wizards TV show spinoff to explain everything about them, and that is a terrible thing. Some mysteries should remain unsolved.
The greatest interpretation of this character comes from the incredible parody Bored of the Rings: Tim Benzedrine, a far-out hippie more interested in getting high than anything else. Bored also contains the greatest piece of writing I or anyone has ever seen:
“He would have finished Goddam off then and there, but pity stayed his hand.
'It's a pity I've run out of bullets,' he thought.”
If you haven’t read this amazing piece of trash, buy a copy today and commit it to memory. You will not be sorry.
This is also pretty much my life plan.
I love LOTR, have read it too many times to count. But the poetry? Boring. I struggled to get through it without drifting off. But after a single reading of BOTR and I was walking around chanting, “I sit on the floor and pick my nose and dream of dirty things…” What I’m saying is the poetry definitely got better.