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

by J.R.R. Tolkien

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?