The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

by J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes.

As part of the release of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, celebrated authors (and huge fans) of the books are sharing their exclusive annotations with readers. We hope you enjoy these notes from Ken Liu, a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy recipient. Thanks for stopping by my notes on The Fellowship of the Ring. It's a real joy and honor for me to make these notes, for Tolkien has been a great inspiration for my own epic fantasy novels. Like The Lord of the Rings, the Dandelion Dynasty was also heavily inspired by Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon literature in general (I absolutely love kennings). Also like The Lord of the Rings, at least parts of the Dandelion Dynasty were written as a single novel, and only forced to become multiple volumes due to the limitations of the technology of bookmaking. There's a lot more in this introductory note where I feel sympathy for Tolkien, but these hints will suffice. Countless writers have been drawn into epic fantasy by Tolkien, who virtually single-handedly created the modern genre with this magnum opus. Everyone who writes in epic fantasy, myself included, has had to write in Tolkien's shadow, to struggle with and against him. Love him or hate him, he is the one author we cannot bypass. Even if you haven't read him, you know what he is about. How many writers can claim that? All great epics are written for their time as well as for eternity. Over time, as Tolkien's language grows archaic and recedes from the ever-renewed tides of the evolving vernacular, what was timely about The Lord of the Rings also fades, leaving behind only the lasting, the ruined meditation on the nature of humanity. The Lord of the Rings will then share the fate of Beowulf, the epic that inspired it, and become itself an original that can only be understood through imitations and translations. May we all who write be so lucky.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Long after the details of the Council of Elrond had faded, long after the journey through the Mines of Moria had become hazy, long after I had stopped yearning for a taste of Lembas, this line stuck with me. I expect it will be there with me until the day I die. Lord of the Rings is about grand adventues and righteous wars, about the fate of empires and national myths. But it's also a book about the most intimate epic journey of them all: the passage of a single soul through this Middle-earth, through our mortal coil. We are born into this world naked and ignorant, as unformed as a lump of clay. Into this void appear our parents and teachers, who become our first angels and demons. They teach us the names of things and tell us our first stories—the personal mythology that will form the core of our being. The way they love us shapes the way we understand love and joy; the way they hurt us leaves us with scars that will inform how we endure and lash out. Later, as we gain companions and friends, we weave our stories together into a collective spell-tale of strength. Each of us is the hero of our own story, and each of us is also the loyal companion, the carefree forest spirit, the wise wizard, the insounciant rival, and even the despised villain, in someone else's story. Somewhere along the way, as we journey through life's dark wood, we find ourselves now the angels and demons in the stories of those who come after us, and the way we love them and hurt them will shape who they are as much as our predecessors shaped us. This is how we go on, generation after generation, our one and only life the grandest epic in the history of the universe. The most important part of this journey is the story we live through, construct, tell -- with the help of our friends, foes, and lovers. Do we know them half as well as we should like? Do we like them half as well as they deserve? These are questions worth asking ourselves, for in the end, it is fellowship that defines us, the web of many loves that sustains us on our journey into the eternal west.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Perhaps the most famous quote from the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. I've seen it and variations of it in tattoos, graffiti, source code comments, mottos, epigraphs, birthday cakes ... The quote here is in English, but everyone reading this knows that the original quote is in Elvish, "of an ancient mode." Gandalf tells Frodo that he's giving a translation into the Common Tongue, and like all translations, it's only "close enough." In fact, the English version that we quote is doubly mediated, being Tolkien's translation of Gandalf's Common Tongue translation. In a sense, none of us knows what the incription on the ring "really" says. We know it only through an interpretation of an interpretation, a description of a sketch. Can that really be right? Tolkien, in his capacity as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, was intimately familiar with the problems and possibilities inherent in translation across time as well as space. (As was his friend and rival, C.S. Lewis, who likewise explored the lacunae between languages and their overlapping penumbras and emanations in his fiction and nonfiction.) In the modern world, none of us knows the Bible, the Koran, the Homeric epics, the Dao De Jing, Beowulf ... except through translations. Even if you speak a modern descendant of one of the original languages these books were written in, even if you studied the languages and cultures that birthed these classics your entire lives, you would still at best be only be a visitor. The past is dead. We, as creatures of our own time, are divided from that past by the mythology of our own experience. We'll never understand the wrath of Achilles exactly the way Homer's audience understood it, and we'll never feel exactly what the Anglo-Saxon thanes felt when they heard "ond on sped wrecan spel gerade, wordum wrixlan." We can only understand the classics through the Common Tongue translation of modernity, hoping that it's "close enough." It's often said that Tolkien shows his readers the true depth of the Medieval mindset; I disagree. I think Tolkien's grand achievement is to make the reader confront their own modernity. In telling a story infused with originals "in ancient mode" that cannot be understood except through modern translations, Tolkien brings to the foreground our collective experience of modernity, our sense of "translatedness." Modern culture is founded on mythologies that we cannot read in the original, on constitutions written hundreds of years ago (that is why we still argue over the dictionaries and diaries of people who died hundreds of years ago as we struggle to make sense of our Bill of Rights), on words and phrases and roots and lexemes that have become unmoored from their own origins and migrated to new lands, new tongues, new purposes. In this translation, it is not what is lost that matters, but what is gained. This is why Chancellor Gorkon could say to James T. Kirk, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." We, none of us, know anything about the rings except what is revealed to us in the Common Tongue, in translation. Only by accepting the translatedness of modernity and ceasing to yearn for an impossible, uncorrupted "original understanding" will we be freed from the shadow of the past. What do you think is gained in Gandalf's "close enough" translation of the inscription? How do you think this Common Tongue rendering, the version translated by modernty, serves as a spell (a word whose original Anglo-Saxon meaning was "tale") to bring about the grand adventure to come?

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

A lovely gloss on the definition of heroism. Heroes don't seek out confrontations; they choose to do the right thing -- which is always very, very hard -- when it becomes a duty in a dark time. Many have interpreted The Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for the Second World War (or any other conflict in which ideological confrontation between good and evil is at the heart). I think it's worth meditating on the portrayal of ideological good and evil in Tolkien. Good is mostly represnted as the local, the concrete, the commonplace. The hobbits want good food and good company, to make and arrange their own hobbit holes as they like, to be left alone, to be surrounded by greenery. Community, control over one's immediate environment, leisure to converse with friends, nature, playful idleness—these are the pillars not only of what is good in the Shire, but also the desired life in countless children's books. The core value of this vision of the good is not overweening individualism, but communitarian-individualism: there's a good reason that "fellowship" plays such an important role in these books. Evil, on the other hand, is associated with distant authorities obsessed with abstractions, with uniformity, with grandiosity. Obedience takes the place of community; all-consuming conquest takes the place of local control; self-definition is erased by authority; nature is despoiled by industrial exploitation. What have we done, as individuals, to push back against ideological evil? What have we done, as individuals, to push for the local, the diverse, the human-scaled, the playful, the heart-to-heart? We don't get to choose the age we live in; we can only choose which path we'll walk through the time we're born into.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Versions of this sentiment can be found in the lessons of the world's greatest teachers, Laozi and Jesus and Buddha among them. To me, the key to Gandalf's lesson is the importance of empathy, even for those who have been corrupted by evil. Empathy isn't the same as justification or forgiveness, but a recognition that all of us are corruptible beings, and the distinction between the fate of Gollum and the fate of Bilbo may be found in a single choice. There but for Grace go I. It's not always easy to hew to Gandalf's admonishment. But I think in that empthy there is also a seed of hope. Because the line that divides Bilbo from Gollum is so thin, there is always hope that we can resist temptation and make the right choice. We can ask for Grace and receive it.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’

All too true, and all too often forgotten. It's generally a good idea in life not to go look for trouble, to cherish your friends and family, to focus on the here-and-now, to dine well and to play heartily. But when trouble comes to look for you, be prepared to punch back as hard as you can. Getting that balance right, however, is hard. Sometimes we become so used to the very act of swinging our fist that we keep on punching long after we've won, turning into a kind of trouble ourselves without realizing it. Or else we are so focused on avoiding trouble that we turn into cowards who thinking cowering is the same as standing. Getting that balance right, I repeat, is much harder than we think. All oppressive empires begin (certainly in their own stories, but often in truth) as freedom-loving individuals pushed to rebel.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

This was my second favorite quote from The Lord of the Rings when I first read it (my favorite quote at that time was Saruman screaming "For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!" -- I would quote it and then fall to the ground convulsing with laughter every time). But why should wizards be quick to anger? Shouldn't "subtle" individuals be subtle in their emotional responses as well? I would have thought that subtle wizards would be slow to anger (or at least slow to show anger), for true subtlety in scheming requires a nuanced theory of mind and great emotional intelligence. Convince me otherwise. Come, argue with me. Let's have a debate, for I am Ken the Subtle-Minded!

‘Courage is found in unlikely places,’ said Gildor. ‘Be of good hope!

This is, of course, the central conceit of The Lord of the Rings. It is the unlikely courage of the hobbits that saves Middle-earth, and the unlikely courage of the lowly, the overlooked, the enslaved and oppressed, that have always brought down mighty empires. The power of such courage is multiplied and transformed through fellowship, through collective action by individual acting in free choice, to bind themsleves to reciprocal obligations of loyalty. It is also, in that respect, an evolution of the ethos of the Anglo-Saxon warrior, of the heart of Beowulf. May we all live up to that ideal.

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost;

Bilbo's poem has the rhythm and pattern of Daoist and Buddhist aphorisms, where apparent paradoxes are used to show that the truth is more dynamic than static, and categories are not as interesting as the seams between them. The imagery of "wanderer" is important in The Lord of the Rings (not least from the influence of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Wanderer"). The wanderer is not lost, but merely temporarily blocked from his true identity. The exiled warrior, deprived of his web of reciprocal obligaions of community, of purpose, of identity, strives across the land to recover the mead-hall, the ring-giver, the lord-thane relationship that gives his courage meaning. It is in that bearing up against the slings and arrows of inconstant fate that the wanderer proves his worth as a warrior, to return to his reightful place. The ideal of the wanderer in Daoism is different. A wanderer is a playful figure, a fool who has no specific place where they must be. Aimless, directionless, like a meandering turtle dragging its tail through the mud, the wanderer lives the utlimate life of freedom, of limitless possibilities. It is only be eschewing the obligations imposed on one by conventional society, honors as well as dishonors, that one can achieve xiaoyao, the ultimate freedom of the wanderer. I'm not sure which version of the wanderer is more compelling to me, or if maybe they are even, two sides of the same coin, a paradox to be resolved. I've been speaking a lot about Tolkien's inspirations, but as I draft this meandering note, it occurs to me that I ought to speak a little on how he transcends his insipirations as well. All great writers must invent their own language, their own inimitable combination of idiosyncratic usage, preferred grammatical constructions, unique images infused by their personal myths, rhetorical tropes honed by their particular experience ... all fused into an idiolect that they, and only they, feel perfectly at home in. This is because ordinary language (or "the Common Tongue"), like ready-made clothing or mass-manufactured tools, is inadequate to express or realize the sui generis nature of each singular existence. To tell the stories that only they can tell, writers must invent their own language. (Writers who don't strive to invent their own language end up writing in clichés; they're easy to understand because they have nothing interesting to say). Idiolects, of course, die with their one and only speaker. And so all great books are written in dead languages. The passage of time erodes them, tests them, filters them until what limited them to their times have been striped away, leaving behind only what is eternal, universal, lasting: Humanity expressed in a single voice, Life embodied in a single soul. That core is self-translating, self-generating, self-renewing. This is, ulitmately, why I think The Lord of the Rings continues to draw the love of readers everywhere -- those who love Anglo-Saxon poetry as well as those who don't, those who enjoy finding parallels to Daoism as well as those who don't, those who want to live like Hobbits as well as those who want to live like elves -- a story told in "ancient mode" with an eternally youthful soul. It is a story that only Tokien could tell, and he invented a language to tell it -- a language that we gladly study and immerse ourselves in, in order to discover our own soul-path, to enrich our own breóst-hord. In that act of reading and actively imagining into being the world created by the author, our minds touch across time and space, and the dead language is alive again. All that's dead isn't gone; not every universal is also common. A paradox. Thank you for accompanying me on the latest iteration of my journey through Middle-earth. You've been such plasant company that I wish I knew half of you as well as I should like and you deserve. Wander on.