Interlacing in The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lord of the Rings rests on a medieval narrative device called interlacing. In 1959, the reviewer William Blissett called it 'perhaps the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages,' sensing the technique without naming it. The Tolkien scholar Richard C. West found Blissett's remark witty but not quite right. What is accurate is that J. R. R. Tolkien borrowed the device from medieval literature and rebuilt it as something new. This technique, known in French as entrelacement, disorients the reader deliberately. Rather than following a single clear plot, the interlaced novel jumps between storylines and drops characters for chapters at a time. Readers cannot know what is happening to other characters elsewhere in the story world. More subtly, the leapfrogging of storylines plants hidden connections that readers can only grasp by looking back. Why did Tolkien reach for a device rooted in French medieval tradition? What exactly does interlacing do to a reader? And when Peter Jackson adapted the novel for film, what became of the architecture at the book's core?

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• 2. A Medieval Inheritance

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  The 13th-century Queste del Saint Graal shows what medieval interlacing looked like in practice. The holy grail is only one goal; the knights Bors, Galahad, Gawain, and Lancelot each pursue their own separate adventures. Readers follow each knight in turn, comparing and contrasting their paths. Richard C. West describes this as the defining purpose of entrelacement. Rather than making a story as clear as possible, the interlaced tale aimed to reflect how events actually flow in the world. The form also appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses from ancient Rome, in the Old English epic Beowulf, and in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene.

  Tom Shippey calls Tolkien's use of this French technique 'a minor mystery.' Tolkien favored Old English above all other literatures, and Old Norse otherwise. He hated Spenser's writing. Tolkien said of Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso inspired Spenser's Faerie Queene, that he hadn't read him 'and wouldn't have liked him if I had.' The mystery lies in how he came to deploy a form he had such strong reasons to distrust.

  The answer lies in Tolkien's scholarly work on his edition of Sir Gawain. Working on that text, he encountered the French interlaced romances that informed it. When Tolkien used the technique himself, Shippey notes, his version was far more tightly structured than any medieval practitioner's. John R. Holmes called Tolkien's method decidedly modern, sitting closer to Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner than to Thomas Mallory or Chrétien de Troyes.

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• 3. Six Books, Three Threads

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  Tolkien structured The Lord of the Rings as six 'books' that the publisher chose to print as three volumes. The first two books are nearly single-threaded, following Frodo from the Shire through Rivendell. From there, the nine companions of the Fellowship journey south through Moria and Lothlorien to the River Anduin. From book 3, the Fellowship breaks apart, and interlacing begins in earnest. Book 3 advances Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli while the main quest stands still. Book 4 focuses entirely on Frodo and Sam approaching Mordor, leaving the others behind. Book 5 sets Frodo and Sam aside once more and weaves together the stories of Merry, Pippin, and Aragorn. Book 6 brings the quest to its close and reunites all the companions; the Hobbits return home and scour the Shire of enemies. West and Shippey note these are only the major interlacings. Many smaller ones occur as characters travel through Middle-earth. The timeline carries a further complexity: the books do not leave all characters synchronized to the same moment in time. The narrative leapfrogs so that sometimes one group is ahead, sometimes another. Gollum, glimpsed only briefly in pursuit early on, will by book 6 have destroyed both the Ring and himself. The timeline keeps that outcome hidden until the very moment it arrives.

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• 4. Suspense and Natural Order

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  At the end of book 5, Pippin falls under the body of a Troll he has killed. Whether he survived is not answered until the story cuts away and returns with elements the reader did not yet possess. This is interlacing used as pure suspense.

  Tolkien presents the story through the eyes of the Hobbit protagonists. The reader knows no more than what a single Hobbit can see as he struggles forward. That Hobbit does not know what lies ahead, where his friends are, or whether the quest has already failed. To prevent total disorientation, Tolkien plants what scholars call 'narrative landmarks.' A brooch dropped by Pippin is later discovered by Aragorn, linking two storylines across the narrative gap. Different characters observe the same full moon at different points in the narrative, placing them in shared time without any announcement.

  West calls naturalness the subtler effect. Even a reader unconcerned with literary form notices, at least unconsciously, that things happen the way 'things seem to happen in our own lives.' West traces one chain of causes: Merry and Pippin meet the Ents, who destroy Saruman's base. This frees Rohan to go to the aid of Gondor. The Hobbits would never have met the Ents unless Saruman's Orcs had captured them first. The Orcs would not have been hunted down unless Eomer's band of Riders of Rohan, disobeying orders, had pursued the intruders. Each party acts on its own motivation, but 'everything is interconnected,' West concludes. The same network of causes operates at a deeper level, in ways visible only when all the storylines have been laid side by side.

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• 5. Providence and Wyrd

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  Shippey describes the moment at Amon Hen, the Seat of Seeing, as an example of what interlacing can reveal beneath the surface. Frodo puts on the One Ring and immediately feels the Eye of Sauron pressing toward him. At the same time, a voice urges him to take the Ring off. He complies, just in time. The source of the voice is left unexplained within the scene. But the leapfrogging timeline means that readers, looking back, can work out what was happening elsewhere at that exact moment and what forces were in play.

  West notes that interlace can 'show purpose or pattern behind change.' Shippey connects this to wyrd, the Old English word that in Beowulf names the line between ordinary luck and something supernatural. Tolkien knew Beowulf with scholarly depth. His lecture 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics' is still cited as a landmark work of Old English criticism. The same ambiguity runs through The Lord of the Rings, where lucky chance and hidden design are difficult to separate.

  West argues that these retrospective discoveries imply something larger than coincidence. A contest of good and evil powers, he writes, works through events that appear merely contingent on the surface. The sense of purpose this reveals, West concludes, is part of what the novel's 'pervasive sense of history' rests on. The story did not begin with the Fellowship of the Ring and does not end with it.

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• 6. The Open Edge

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  The appendices that close The Lord of the Rings catalogue Kings and Rulers, Chronology, Family Trees, Calendars, Writing and Spelling, and the Languages of Middle-earth. West argues their existence does something unusual. Rather than tidying up the story's world, they extend it past the final page. They supply events that occurred before the War of the Ring. They reveal what happened simultaneously elsewhere in Middle-earth. They describe what became of the main characters after the text ends. West calls this openendedness: the reader's impression that the story exists beyond the confines of the book. Tolkien, West argues, could have begun the tale earlier or ended it later if he had chosen to.

  West describes the wealth of detail in the novel, and the way its events mutually interact, as creating 'solidity.' The imaginary world comes to seem real because it follows the logic of actual events. Causes and effects tangle across time and space, just as they do in life.

  On the stairs of Cirith Ungol, the dangerous pass into Mordor, Tolkien placed the clearest statement of this openendedness. Sam asks: 'Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! Don't the great tales never end?' Frodo answers: 'No, they never end as tales. But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later, or sooner.' George H. Thomson, writing in 1967, described the novel's structure as 'a complex and highly sophisticated type of narrative.' He noted it 'has been out of fashion for a long time.' West concluded that Tolkien's instinct was right: medieval interlacing would work for what he called a 'modern masterpiece.' Whether that masterpiece could be translated to film was the next question. It would take Peter Jackson an entire trilogy to answer it.

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• 7. Jackson's Adaptation

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  Peter Jackson and his scriptwriters chose to flatten the book's complex interlacing into a more direct narrative for the screen. The scholars E. L. Risden and Yvette Kisor studied how that translation was achieved. Risden found that Jackson made the Ring itself central, building a storytelling approach to provide 'compelling progress with as few asides as possible.' Kisor examined three techniques Jackson used in place of the page's narrative leaps: intercutting, visual doubling, and voice-over. Her conclusion, unlike that of some Tolkien scholars, was that Jackson succeeded. The films achieve comparable effects in 'emotional and thematic content,' remaining true to the book.

  Emily Auger came to a stronger conclusion. She argued that the films, especially in their extended DVD versions, do not simply approximate interlacing. They use what she calls 'specifically filmic variations of Tolkien's interlace,' particularly intercutting, to amplify the narrative and dramatise its status as myth. Auger listed more than 50 scenes in the films where various forms of interlacing occur. She also detected all three types of Tolkien's narrative interlace in Alan Lee's illustrations for the book. The first is structural interlace, which uses achronological order. The second is stylistic interlace, which restates themes across images. The third is pictorial interlace, where characters and their environments are depicted as if the outer world is a projection of the inner life.

  Kisor also identified where the limits of the translation show most clearly. When the Mouth of Sauron displays Frodo's mithril mail-shirt before the Battle of the Morannon, film viewers already know Frodo is alive. Readers of the book did not. The interlacing structure had withheld that knowledge; the loss of that gap is the one effect the screen cannot recover.

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