The Fellowship of the Ring

• 1. Introduction

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  The Fellowship of the Ring arrived in British bookshops on the 29th of July 1954, the first of three volumes that together would become one of the most discussed works of the twentieth century. Its author, J. R. R. Tolkien, had conceived it as a single book of six parts, bound together with extensive appendices. His publisher had other plans. The split into three volumes gave the first part its own identity, its own opening and ending, and a structural personality unlike anything that followed it in the trilogy.

  What makes this opening volume different from the two that follow it? The answer lies not just in its story, but in how that story is told. Scholars have noticed that The Fellowship of the Ring obeys a set of rhythms and patterns the rest of the novel does not share. There are five safe houses. There are cycles of feast and danger. There are two enormous chapters that stop the action entirely and reach back into history. Those patterns raise a question that critics have spent decades debating: were they the product of deliberate artistry, or of a writer feeling his way through a story he had not yet fully imagined?

• 2. The Shape of the Book

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  Before Tolkien's publisher stepped in, the volume that became The Fellowship of the Ring did not have that name. Tolkien had proposed his own titles for its two internal books: the first was to be called The First Journey or The Ring Sets Out, and the second The Journey of the Nine Companions or The Ring Goes South. Both The Ring Sets Out and The Ring Goes South were eventually used in the Millennium edition of the work, preserving something of his original vision.

  The volume opens not with a chapter of story but with a prologue explaining that the work is "largely concerned with hobbits". It tells of their origins in a migration from the east, their fondness for smoking "pipe-weed", and how their homeland the Shire is organized. The prologue also stitches this new story to the earlier novel The Hobbit, in which the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins first encounters the One Ring after it had long been held by the creature Gollum.

  Book One then begins with Bilbo celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, a word Tolkien coined to mean one hundred and eleven. Bilbo leaves the Shire suddenly, passing the Ring to his cousin and heir, Frodo Baggins. Seventeen years pass in a single chapter break before Gandalf returns to confirm what the Ring truly is: the Ruling Ring, lost by the Dark Lord Sauron long ago, powerfully seductive and dangerous. What follows is a journey through the English-feeling Shire, through the peculiar wilderness of the Old Forest, and eventually out into a wider world where ancient and dangerous things are stirring.

• 3. Five Safe Houses

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  In 1982, the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey observed something that had gone unremarked for decades: the opening movement of the book follows a very particular pattern. The Hobbit protagonists, having set out on their adventures, repeatedly return to what Shippey called "Homely Houses", comfortable and safe places where they recuperate before the next danger begins.

  Shippey counted five such houses. The chase through the Shire ends with dinner at Farmer Maggot's farm. Trouble with Old Man Willow in the Old Forest ends with hot baths and comfort at Tom Bombadil's house. Adventures in the village of Bree give way to safety in the Elven sanctuary of Rivendell. And finally, the Fellowship finds refuge in the timeless Elven forest of Lothlórien.

  In 2001, writing in the London Review of Books, Jenny Turner argued this rhythm was a deliberate storytelling choice, designed for "vulnerable people". She quoted Shippey's observation that "the hobbits have to be dug out of no fewer than five 'Homely Houses'", and described the experience of reading the book as being "gently rocked between bleakness and luxury, the sublime and the cosy. Scary, safe again. Scary, safe again. Scary, safe again."

  Shippey himself offered a second explanation: that the pattern might not have been planned at all, but might instead reflect Tolkien's working method. He described the early writing as giving the impression not of a sudden inspiration followed by careful invention, but of a long period of laborious searching for a story. Tolkien would invent characters, places, and events; run into the complications that arise when story-elements collide; and only then find his inspiration. The safe houses, on this reading, were rest stops for the author as much as for the characters.

• 4. Self-Plagiarism and Philology

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  Shippey pointed to another technique Tolkien used when the story stalled: raiding his own earlier work. He called this "a sort of self-plagiarism". The character of Tom Bombadil, for instance, and Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight all originated in a poem Tolkien had written in 1934, titled "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil". When Tolkien needed to populate the Old Forest, he reached back two decades and expanded what was already there.

  His professional training as a philologist also shaped the book's geography. Shippey noted Tolkien's careful concern for places and place-names, beginning in the rather English-feeling Shire and then moving outward. Hobbit villages with names like Bree carry a linguistic texture meant to feel rooted and old.

  Both Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis and his publisher Rayner Unwin had to tell him to cut back the Hobbit-talk. Shippey's verdict was that "Tolkien found it too easy, and too amusing, just to let the Hobbits chatter on." The whimsical fun that resulted, with its detailed descriptions of meals, cheerful songs embedded in the text as poems, and elaborate comic dialogue, was in Shippey's reading a coping mechanism for a writer who was not yet sure where his story was going.

  The scholar of literature David M. Miller, writing in A Tolkien Compass, described the result as nine distinct cycles in The Fellowship of the Ring alone, each involving a feast or a moment of food, followed by a total danger, followed by an unexpected helper who becomes the advisor for the next cycle. Miller noted that the cycles involving Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight stand apart from the rest: those ancient presences are not at all concerned with the Ring, and seem to exist outside the main story entirely, standing "left over from the First Age".

• 5. Two Crucial Chapters

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  Tolkien himself identified "The Shadow of the Past", the second chapter of Book One, as "the crucial chapter" of the entire novel. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey called it "the vital chapter". Its importance is twofold: it is both the moment in the writing process where Tolkien devised the central plot of the book, and the moment in the narrative where Frodo and the reader first understand there will be a quest to destroy the Ring.

  A sketch of the chapter was among the first parts of the book to be written, early in 1938. Later that same year, it was one of only three chapters Tolkien had drafted. He returned to it in 1944 to add descriptions of Gollum, the Ring itself, and the hunt for Gollum. The chapter changes the book's tone entirely, moving away from the light-hearted partying of Bilbo's birthday and introducing the book's major themes: a sense of deep time behind unfolding events, the seductive power of the Ring, and the interlocking questions of providence, free will, and predestination.

  "The Council of Elrond", the corresponding chapter in Book Two, is the longest chapter in that book, running to some 15,000 words. Like its counterpart, it replaces action with narration: people sit and talk, and Gandalf recapitulates the history of the Ring in flashback. Shippey calls it "a largely unappreciated tour de force". The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge writes that the chapter brings the hidden narrative of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings close to the surface.

  Both chapters share a structural peculiarity: they are the only places in the entire volume where the single narrative thread following Frodo is interrupted by something other than forward-moving action. The rest of The Fellowship of the Ring is told without the elaborately interlaced structure that characterizes The Two Towers and The Return of the King. These two chapters are the exception, and critics have argued they are the load-bearing joints on which the whole story turns.

• 6. How Critics Received It

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  The poet W. H. Auden wrote a positive review of The Fellowship of the Ring in The New York Times on publication. He praised the excitement of the book and compared it favorably to John Buchan's thriller, writing that "Tolkien's invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps." He did add that the light humour at the beginning was "not Tolkien's forte".

  The scholar Loren Eiseley, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called it "a major creative act", describing Tolkien's work as a "great tapestry... rich with all manner of invention and of symbols, of the peculiar ethnology of a created world". C. S. Lewis, writing in Time and Tide, celebrated the book's creation of a new world of romance and "myth without allegorical pointing", with a powerful sense of history behind it.

  Not every critic agreed. The literary critic Edmund Wilson attacked the book in a 1956 review with the mocking title "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!". He called Tolkien's work "juvenile trash" and declared that "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form." The Scottish poet Edwin Muir, writing in The Observer, took a more measured position: he acknowledged the book as extraordinary but criticized Tolkien's moral simplicity, noting that his good characters were "consistently good" and his evil ones "immovably evil". Muir speculated that if Tolkien had had the sensibility of Spenser, Ariosto, or Malory, "this book might have been a masterpiece".

  The novelist Naomi Mitchison praised it in The New Statesman and Nation, writing that "above all it is a story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and greatness." The science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp, writing in Science Fiction Quarterly, offered one of the more vivid characterizations, calling a Hobbit "a cross between an English white-collar worker and a rabbit."