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Someone's really good explanation of why LOTR has bored me and so many others.

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on December 21, 2003 at 13:50:15

And why the books too were so unsatisfactory. None of them bear comparison the to the One True Ring, viz., Wagner's. Here's a brilliant dissertation, only excerpted here. Well worth reading for the Oscar Wilde remark alone!

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THE RING AND THE RINGS

by ALEX ROSS (The New Yorker)

Wagner vs. Tolkien

...Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner’s. “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,” he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of “Die Walküre” not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas. True, the Volsunga Saga features a ring from a cursed hoard, but it possesses no executive powers. In the “Nibelungenlied” saga, there is a magic rod that could be used to rule all, but it just sits around. Wagner combined these two objects into the awful amulet that is forged by Alberich from the gold of the Rhine. When Wotan steals the ring for his own godly purposes, Alberich places a curse upon it, and in so doing he speaks of “the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring.” Such details make it hard to believe Tolkien’s disavowals. Admit it, J.R.R., you used to run around brandishing a walking stick and singing “Nothung! Nothung!” like every other besotted Oxford lad.

It is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things. Power, for them, was not a baton that could be passed from one person to another; those with power were born with power, and those without, without. By Wagner’s time, it was clear that a marginal individual would soon be able to unleash terror with the flick of a wrist. Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Nor did the ring have to be understood only in terms of military science. Mass media now allowed for the worldwide destruction of an idea, a reputation, a belief system, a culture. In a hundred ways, men were forging things over which they had no control, and which ended up controlling them...

I hope that at least a small fraction of the huge worldwide audiences for these films will one day be tempted into Wagner’s world, which offers something else again. For Tolkien, myth is a window on an ideal world, both brighter and blacker than our own. For Wagner, it is a magnifying mirror for the average, desperate modern soul...

When Tolkien stole Wagner’s ring, he discarded its most significant property—that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it’s hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.)... The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction...

The apparatus of myth itself—the belief in higher and lower powers, hierarchies, orders—crumbles with the walls of Valhalla. Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.

• http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?031222crat_atlarge   (Open in New Window)

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