Lords of the Ring

Michael Colhaze 

October 31, 2010

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

                               JRR Tolkien

 Many moons ago and for a few years only, I wore my locks long and sported colourful garb and roamed the psychedelic haunts of Paris, London or Amsterdam, usually holding a joint in one hand while employing the other to underline with languid gestures my latest concept of how to bring instant peace and love to the world. As for my fellow freaks and hippies, most subsisted on very little, at least money-wise, but nearly all had pets, the latter named frequently after a brand of heroes much en vogue during those innocent times. For cats, Galadriel stood high on the agenda, also Arwen and Legolas. In Amsterdam my next-door neighbour, a middle-aged lady with henna-dyed hair, flowing dresses and tinkling bells around one fat ankle, owned a huge tomcat called Gollum. When he was one day run over by a lorry, she came and cried bitterly into my lap. I did my best to comfort her, though secretly rejoiced because the cunning bastard, nomen est omen, used to be a veritable bane for the local sparrows and blackbirds, and long since had I weighed means of abandoning him in a far-away place without coming under suspicion. As for dogs, I remember a Frodo, Bilbo and Pippin, also one Boromir, him a mighty Leonberger and the gentlest fellow I’ve ever met.  

Which gives you an idea of how much Tolkien’s arrant epos was on our mind during those happy years. Wherever you came, you found in the bookshelves from cardboard boxes or orange crates at least one copy, usually a weighty paperback falling apart from much use. Walls were hung with coloured maps of Middle Earth, and Gandalf was a household name for anything from an Underground publication to a short-lived artistic society. Depending on fantasy and imagination, and perhaps also on the daily cannabis consume, an inordinate number of people identified with a member of the Fellowship, or wished fervently for the return of the King, or would have retired into the Shire without looking back even once. 

On the other hand there were some, myself included, who had enjoyed the book but found it somewhat lacking in psychological depth. It was, after all, a monumental canvas painted largely in black and white, with protagonists either amazingly valiant, handsome and noble or the absolute opposite, namely unspeakably ugly and wicked. Which made the tale rather predictable and deprived it of the complex emotional touch that otherwise would have found a way into the heart. Still, Tolkien’s power of imagination cannot and will not be denied, and for his excuse it must be said that he relied much on the High Germanic saga like Edda or the Nibelungen, and that those were on the whole magnificent exemplifications of the eternal battle between Good and Evil. A battle where tads of intellectual embroidery might have seemed misplaced.    

Yet under the heroic plainness hid an aspect that intrigued me and many of my  friends considerably, namely the deeper meaning behind the fantasy. Because, as we all agreed, there had to be one since the tale was simply too carefully thought out to be without one. Never mind that the ghastly Sauron, title figure and main protagonist aiming to enslave the world and mankind particularly, didn’t turn up personally during the proceedings. But his presence is overwhelmingly felt, and he had to have an equivalent within the recent history of man, and as such a name that made sense.  

First in line was of course Adolf Hitler, temporal saviour of a betrayed, ruined and starving Germany robbed naked by the Versailles victors, but for the rest and according to the New York Times the biggest blackguard ever to set foot on our sacred earth. Next came good old Joe Stalin, mass murderer par excellence supported by a closely knit clan of henchmen as described and defined by the great  Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag and Two Hundred Years Together. Then the fabulous Chairman Mao, who most likely holds the Guinness record for accumulated corpses worldwide. And finally the inventors of the nuke, embodied by one Robert Oppenheimer who paid, just like that abominable fraud Freud, with lung cancer and a slow and painful death for his sins. 

But try as you might, none of the above really made sense. One reason was of course that Tolkien had begun The Lord of the Rings already in the mid-thirties, long before those villains blossomed medially into full bloom. 

As to the ring itself, what kind of power did it exactly wield? It was, this we know, potent enough to enslave the lesser ones, but not all-powerful. Because long ago Isildur King of Gondor, in a desperate attempt to stem the advance of the Orcs, had offered battle to Sauron their chieftain. And in a one-to-one succeeded with God’s help to cut off the latter’s hand which bore the ring. A feat that routed the Dark One and his hosts, at least for a while and until he tried another grab at the hideous thing.  [more]