The Self and the World in The Lord of the Rings

The success of The Lord of the Rings, written by J.R.R. Tolkien, shows that epic conventions used unabashedly, without irony or contradictions, can still be relevant to this day. Tolkien’s contemporaries, mostly modernists, preferred to render “the old heroism derisive in the face of a very much unheroic present,” but Tolkien rejected this and embraced instead the weaving together of different traditions (Simonson 77). Tolkien achieves this by addressing modern concerns, like the alienation of the subject from the world, within the mythology of his fictional world, and thus creates a balanced compromise between the relevance of the novel form and the grandeur of the epic. The combination of the novel form and the epic is significant because they depict contradictory representations of the relation between the self and the world, as argued by Georg Lukàcs in The Theory of the Novel.

Georg Lukàcs argues that literary forms “differ from one another not by their authors’ fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted” (Lukàcs 56). Literary forms like the epic, the tragedy, and the novel are not only differences in styles, but represent different metaphysical realities that each align with the historical situation in which the work was created. The novel, which is the main literary form of modernity, arises from a historico-philosophical reality where the self cannot recognize itself in the world anymore, and thus grows its own interior reality where it can seek a new meaning to life. The novel then often represents a problematic individual and their search for meaning in a meaningless world (Lukàcs 80).

In the epic, however, which was the primary literary form of the ancient Greeks and many other ancient civilizations, the divide between the self and the world does not yet exist: the self is not yet inherently different from the world, and instead is part of the same homogeneous whole as the world. The totality of the world, which includes the self and its fate, can be explained through gods, myths, rituals, and cultural and social norms. The Greeks of Homer’s time “knew only answers but no questions, only solutions (even if enigmatic ones) but no riddles, only forms but no chaos” (Lukács 33). The epic world is one which is entirely explainable, and where everything is “new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars” (Lukács 29). There is no place for alienation because the meaning of life is immanent to the world. One cannot be placed outside the world because the world is all there is. It is a closed totality and nothing escapes or exists beyond it.

The closed totality is broken with the advent of philosophy which puts into question its homogeneous nature and attempts to find truths beyond self-evidence. The metaphysical reality of the ancient Greeks was “smaller than ours ... We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approximation that is never fully accomplished” (Lukács 33-34). Our ever-increasing knowledge of the invisible mechanisms of the world has removed our ability to come to the “passively visionary acceptance of ready-made, ever-present meaning” which used to be found out in the world (Lukács 32). The world is no longer a valid source of meaning, which signifies that meaning must now be produced instead of given to us by the world. Produced meaning, however, is never definitive, but always subject to change and disagreement. It is an approximation of the truth, which leaves room for doubt.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien recreates a closed totality through the creation of a fictional world, which allows for the reemergence of self-evident, mythical truths into the world. In a real world setting, readers would be skeptical of concepts like the wisdom of kings, the benevolence of the world, extraordinary beings, absolute evil, and heroes, which have all lost their self-evidence, but can retain it in the fictional world, and allow for the rekindling of the epic sense of adventure, wonder, and belonging to a world wider than oneself. Tolkien’s fictional world then acts as a blank slate upon which a new closed totality can be written. An alternative world means that the knowledge readers’ gain about this place does not conflict with their knowledge of the real world: it and the fictional world can be conceptualized as two different things. The prologue of The Lord of the Rings, “Concerning Hobbits,” serves as a foundation for this new closed totality by providing various facts on the history of the world, its inner workings, and, of course, on Hobbits. These are the boundaries by which the closed totality of Middle-Earth is created. They serve to convince the readers of the existence of this alternative world and explain its oddness and magical elements by the verisimilitude of its details to the real world.

Tolkien’s fictional closed totality allows him to create a metaphysical reality that aligns with the themes of his novel, and thus reinforces them by making them universal self-evident truths in the fictional world. Hope is not just a feeling, but how one fights evil. The world is not just sometimes beautiful; it is inherently good, and its beauty, like in ancient epics, is “the meaning of the world made visible” (Lukács 34). Even in Mordor when the two Hobbits are surrounded by hostile lands, Sam sees a white star piercing through the dark clouds and “[t]he beauty of it [smites] his heart, as he look[s] up out of the forsaken land, and hope return[s] to him.” (Tolkien, Return 1206). Sam is never alone in his struggle because the world is helping him along the way, and therefore, he is not alienated from it. 

There is no fundamental divide between the self and the world in Middle-Earth, which is made apparent in the Shire where Hobbits live content and rejoice with simple things like food, drinks, pipe-weed, gifts, and books “filled with things that they already knew” (Tolkien, Fellowship 2; 10). They are described as loving “peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt” (Tolkien, Fellowship 1). The hobbit songs are concerned with natural things as in “A Walking Song,” “A Drinking Song,” and “The Bathing Song” (Tolkien, Fellowship 101-102; 118; 132). Hobbits find their meaning in the world around them and live lives unperturbed with interior doubt.

In a homogeneous world, “even the separation between man and world, between ‘I’ and ‘you’, cannot disturb its homogeneity” (Lukács 32). Everyone is linked by their attachment to the same world. Epic characters exist in immanence with the world. However, modern characters who exist in a fragmented world, live mostly within their own sense of interiority “which is full of content and more or less complete in itself” (Lukács 112). This interior reality “enters into competition with the reality of the outside world, leads a rich and animated life of its own and [...] regards itself as the only true reality (Lukács 112). Characters in modern novels are dissociated from the world. They exist as individuals whose interior selves have grown to be complex in their search for meaning as opposed to epic characters who have meaning bestowed upon them. The epic hero is then “strictly speaking, never an individual,” but instead represents many as “[i]t is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community” (Lukács 66). In the modern novel, the self belongs only to the self, whose interiority has grown to become as large as the world, while in the epic, the self belongs to a larger structure, like the world, a region, or a city, that gives it its life-meaning.

Most characters in The Lord of the Rings are not isolated individuals struggling with personal issues or traumas. The closed totality of their world allows them to take meaning from their communities and environments, and thus represent them in the larger world because they share the same essence as the other members of their communities. Aragorn does not represent any psychological or inner struggle of the self, but the destiny of his community. If Aragorn succeeds, then his community succeeds. This is why he is king. The epic hero is often the ruler or the future ruler of their community because their quest will determine the future of their community. In the appendix B to The Lord of the Rings which goes over some events happening after the end of the book, Merry becomes the Master of Buckland, Pippin becomes the thirty-second Thain of the Shire, Sam is elected Mayor of the Shire, Gimli is given the title of Lord of the Glittering Caves, Faramir becomes the Prince of Ithilien and Éowyn the Lady of Ithilien. (Tolkien, Return 1441;1269).

However, The Lord of the Rings is not an epic. It is a novel, and therefore is concerned with inner struggle and alienation. The One Ring is the source of alienation in The Lord of the Rings. As an element that exists within the fictional world and can only be experienced by a few, the One Ring brings interiority and alienation into this world without shattering its closed totality. It accounts for alienation where it simply did not exist in an epic like The Iliad. After finding the One Ring and murdering his friend to keep it, Gollum “wandered in loneliness, weeping a little for the hardness of the world” until finally, after years of loneliness, “he hated the dark, and he hated the light more: he hated everything, and the Ring most of all” (Fellowship 72). The Ring cuts Gollum off from the world and his community by making him obsessed with itself, which is a purely interior struggle.

Bilbo gives a similar account of the presence of the Ring on his mind as he realizes that 

“It has been so growing on my mind lately. Sometimes I have felt it was like an eye looking at me. And I am always wanting to put it on and disappear, don’t you know; or wondering if it is safe, and pulling it out to make sure. I tried locking it up, but I found I couldn’t rest without it in my pocket. I don’t know why. And I don’t seem able to make up my mind.” (Tolkien, Fellowship 45)

The Ring slowly takes over his mind, and the struggle between it and himself gives rise to a sense of interiority. An interiority that separates him from all other Hobbits, and thus causes the permanent separation of his self with the world. The Shire loses its meaning to Bilbo because of the presence of the Ring on his mind. Bilbo has grown to want peace and quiet, and to write an  autobiographical book which is an intellectual task of reflection on the self and creation. Bilbo is not writing an epic, but a memoir; which is not concerned with the world or his community, but with relaying his inner experiences, most likely as a way to relieve him.

Frodo completes Bilbo’s book with his own adventures. Frodo’s experience with the Ring also leaves him unable to enjoy the Shire and his body is often in pain which alienates him further from the outside world. Sam catches him “looking very pale” with “eyes [that] seemed to see things far away” (Tolkien, Return 1342). Frodo has retreated back into his own interior world while his community still exists in harmony with the world. He says to Sam “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me” (Tolkien, Return 1346). He has transcended the closed totality of Middle-Earth which now brings no meaning to his life. Frodo possesses characteristics of both the epic and the novelistic hero, and thus synthesizes “the archaic and the modern” as he “conforms to mythic patterns and [...] also provides the kind of identification and empathy which the twentieth-century reader has come to expect from fiction” (Flieger 69). He is brave, selfless, and determines the destiny of his community, but by doing so, he becomes alienated from the world he helped to save.

The Lord of the Rings structure is made out of two narratives, Frodo’s and Aragorn’s, which run in parallel to one another after “The Breaking of the Fellowship” where Frodo has to distance himself from his friends in order to succeed in his quest. Frodo’s narrative is a small-scale battle of interiority while Aragorn’s is an epic struggle of cosmic proportions that includes every community in Middle-Earth. The two narratives work together to reveal the interconnectivity between the destinies of extraordinary people, like Aragorn, Boromir, and Gandalf, and of ordinary people, like Frodo, Sam, and Bilbo, who also have decisive roles to play in the destiny of the world. The Ring would not have been destroyed without Bilbo sparing Gollum’s life below the Misty Mountains, and Frodo would not have made it to Mount Doom without Aragorn threatening Sauron at the Black Gate.

The novelistic narrative of Frodo is enclosed within an epic structure that returns the self-evidence of the epic age to the novel form. A self-evidence that allows the self to find itself in the world once again, but still accounts for alienation through Frodo’s narrative, and thus manages a compromise between the universality of the epic and the modern sensibilities of the novel. Its depiction of an alienated individual existing within a closed totality makes alienation itself appear universal and a necessary part of the world. The Lord of the Rings rekindles the epic sense that adventures are necessarily meaningful, but adds to that the inner struggles of the self.

Works Cited

Flieger, Verlyn Brown. Medieval Epic and Romance Motifs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. 1977. The Catholic University of America, PhD dissertation.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock, Merlin Press, 1971.

Simonson, Martin. "Epic and Romance in The Lord of the Rings" El Futuro del Pasado, vol. 7, 2016, pp. 65-84. doi.org/10.14516/fdp.2016.007.001.002.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. 50th anniversary ed., HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. 50th anniversary ed., HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004.