The Tower and the Ruin by Michael D.C. Drout, a review

“Tolkien’s vision is deeply and essentially true, and it gives shape and meaning to the grief and loss that is our common and inescapable inheritance as humans incarnate in time.”

--Michael D.C. Drout, The Tower and the Ruin

As a 52-year-old with more of my life in the rear-view mirror than the road ahead, I find myself looking back on fond memories as much as forward. I think of growing up in the 1980s, which for me meant marathon sessions of Dungeons and Dragons at the kitchen table with friends, afternoon-consuming sessions of Atari 2600 with my brother and cousin, and of course, getting lost in the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Those days are gone, irretrievably, save only in the wells of memory. When I recall them now they are accompanied with intense pangs of nostalgia. They are broken remnants of past glories, even if the artifacts remain.

Towers, and ruins.

A tower and a ruin makes for a powerful symbolic contrast and one author Michael D.C. Drout puts to full effect in this new work of Tolkien scholarship. The Tower and the Ruin (2025, Norton) is a striking blend of deeply personal memory and reflection, sharp intellectual rigor, and voluminous engagement with what is now a great breadth of published Tolkien scholarship. 

Drout tells us how Tolkien forever changed the course of his life, then sets out to show us how Tolkien’s works (principally The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and LOTR) achieve their potent spell through literary effect. In somewhat of a surprise Drout dispels the myth that Tolkien set out to create a mythology for England, arguing this common refrain is a misread by Tolkien’s principal biographer Humphrey Carpenter. Instead, Drout writes that Tolkien sought to create works of literary art … “that would produce in their readers some of the same effects that the works of medieval literature produced in him.”

The Lord of the Rings is great for many reasons, but among them for evoking the feeling that you are in a world of tremendous depth and history. It feels real, and lived in, like inhabiting a “coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world … glimpses of a large history in the background.” We can feel this when we read him. Tolkien achieves this effect by layering in references to older ages of Middle-earth, evocative names, and even inconsistencies, all of which combine to produce the effect of displacement and historicity that we get from reading something like Beowulf. Drout explains how this is done with Tolkien’s use of intertextuality; for example writing the chapter “The Council of Elrond” through the telling of a number of implied histories shared by the tellers, all of whom have their own unique voice and viewpoints informed by their unique cultures and races. Tolkien drew on old medieval sources but also sophisticated literary techniques like patterning, interlace, and “heterotextuality,” or the illusion of a story told by multiple authors (Bilbo and Frodo and the fictitious “Red Book of Westmarch”). These create the effects of “textual ruins.” Literal ruins like the tumbled Tower of Amon-Sul, but also the feeling that this is a Third Age which of course means two prior Ages, greater Ages, preserved in song and tales of Beren and Luthien and Turin. It all creates per Drout “the convincing illusion that the work has a long and complex composition and transmission history rather than merely being the creation of a single Oxford professor in the twentieth century.”

Some of this I knew through the likes of the scholarship of Tom Shippey, but some was new to me including Drout’s examination of Tolkien’s deliberate use of racism among the Elves as a motivating force in the narrative of The Silmarillion and to a lesser degree, LOTR and The Hobbit. Drout makes a convincing case that the Elves’ rigid racial hierarchies led to internecine conflicts and great tragedies and helped speed their downfall. See the Kinslaying at Alqualondë and its conflict of Noldorin Elves, led by the prideful Fëanor, vs. the Telerin Elves. This also serves as an interesting counterpoint to modern critiques of Tolkien’s perceived racism; per Drout Tolkien was not only very aware of the pernicious effects of racism but actively grappled with it in his works. 

I found myself nodding along to Drout’s summary that the problems of death and immortality, and the critical importance of individual freedom, are all front and center themes of Tolkien’s works. Even as I learned and/or reinforced what I knew, I found myself not always seeing eye-to-eye with Drout  … but I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed the act of mental dialogue and sparring.

For example, I really wish Drout—a professor of English at Wheaton College, who not only specializes in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature but also science fiction and modern fantasy--would read more sword-and-sorcery. He lists early examples of fantasy that add reality and verisimilitude to their works through replicating the feel of old medieval texts, and to his credit gives props to the likes of H. Rider Haggard, William Morris and Walter Scott … but somehow ignores Robert E. Howard, who employed the same “pseudo references” for which he gives so much to credit to Tolkien. Howard not only incorporated his own pseudo references like the Books of Skelos but also incorporated Lovecraft’s pseudo references … which I suppose makes him a pseudo-pseudo referencee/referencer. Like Tolkien Howard also used our real world to frame his fictitious Hyborian Age. Steve Tompkins considers Howard and Tolkien the Two Towers of fantasy with only a short distance between. I agree; the towers and ruins they’ve left behind leave us in awe.

Speaking of Tompkins, one of the things that drew me to Drout was his essay in The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On. Steve’s mention of that essay on The Cimmerian website led me to track it down. You can read my review/experience of that here. Drout’s essay is intensely personal, a recollection of his first encounter with The Silmarillion which he received as a Christmas present in December of 1977. He had just moved from New York to a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts (my neck of the woods, incidentally). That winter the region was hit with the Blizzard of 1978. In addition to the suffocating snows the nine year-old Drout was coping with his parents’ impending divorce and separation from his friends, family, and childhood home. 

Yet paradoxically the bleakness of The Silmarillion and its terrible scenes of carnage and defeat (The Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the Fall of Gondolin) served as a salve for Drout, who learned in its pages the value of courage and resilience and of exhibiting tenacity in defeat. Drout also learned that nostalgia is a genuine emotion worthy of exploration, not of shame, as it is a part of the spectrum of the human condition. 

As Steve wrote, with his typical poetic sensibility:

We humans aren’t as lucky (or is it unlucky?) as Tolkien’s Elves, but Valinors of sorts are available to us, be they the green-gold stun grenade of a spring day, the Polaroid poignance of that one page it might be easier to skip in the photo album, or a chance hearing of a long-ago hit single that ruled the airwaves all during one of those cusp-between-adolescence-and-adulthood summers when possibility and probability were still in equipoise.

In The Tower and the Ruin Drout expands on that essay, but abandons “nostalgia” for the term Heimweh, a German word meaning “home pain” and originally a medical diagnosis. I won’t quibble overmuch with Heimweh… except to say I think nostalgia is a fine word, it signifies something you long for but can never reach. I believe it still fits for how I feel when reading Tolkien, even if it’s been corrupted. We can’t let word corrupters take our language and adapt with constant new (or old) terminology. That’s like playing whack-a-mole.

Anyone who has followed me for any length of time knows how much I detest “Epic Pooh,” which is more or less uniformed teen angst (in fact, Moorcock only read LOTR once, as a teenager, by his own admission). Why anyone gives it any weight beyond the author’s name and some misguided appeal to “authority” eludes me. Drout doesn’t address that essay precisely but he does craft a perfect takedown of its overwrought claims. Here I slightly paraphrase:

“It must be, instead, that there is something about Tolkien’s work that triggers a critical blindness or a perverse reflex to claim the opposite of the truth. I think I can identify one of the major factors. The standard, cliched twentieth-century rejection of any works of literature that depict humanity and its works as being substantially good and beautiful and thus worthy of preservation is to call them “fairy-tales,” with the implication that such are just simple, happy stories that only children would believe.”

There is also a particularly choice and delicious shot at postmodernism and the misguided belief that there is no such thing as good and evil, only power, among some of the intellectual elite… but I won’t spoil it ere.

The Tower and the Ruin is Drout’s first book on Tolkien and ultimately it is mostly for the Tolkien nerd, perhaps more than I was anticipating, mainly because it is in conversation with and builds upon the work of other Tolkien scholars, in particular Tom Shippey. Drout owes a sizable debt to Shippey; you could say this book is built on the textual ruins of Shippey’s groundbreaking scholarship. There is some direct recapitulation of Shippey’s work including his theory of how bourgeois Bilbo vs. the older epic world he encounters gives The Hobbit its unique power. But this is not a critique of Drout; every Tolkien scholar since The Road to Middle-earth is in Shippey’s debt. Drout also references and interprets the likes of Verlyn Fleiger, John Garth, Gergely Nagy, and Thomas Hillman. He’s responding to critics, not just the source texts, which is why any good critic should do. In fact, if you’re looking to get into Tolkien scholarship The Tower and the Ruin is a good place to begin that epic quest; Drout references a number of essays and critical works to take you ever deeper into the whys and hows of JRRT. 

But, this makes The Tower and the Ruin predominately a work for hardcore Tolkien-heads/scholar-types, and less so a broadly popular/mainstream accessible work. I thought it would be more of the latter; I’m not disappointed because I am a Tolkien nerd but I wanted even more of Drout’s experiences as a child escaping from the arguments of his near-divorced parents to his snow and ice castle of Nargothrond. And a pair of terribly sad personal losses, which I won’t spoil here but Drout describes with some haunting, beautiful writing. 

That we do get these personal experiences in The Tower and the Ruin is quite unique. Scholars don’t do this; academic writing is a unique beast, with its own norms and codes. Drout bravely puts his own ruins on display alongside the tower of Tolkien’s art, which makes me grateful we have The Tower and the Ruin. 

Read it.

Here’s an interview with Drout focused on The Tower and the Ruin you might want to check out.

Weird Studies podcast tackles The Fellowship of the Ring

Ever have a podcast hit your feed that you can’t click on fast enough?

A handful of podcasts have stayed in my rotation from the moment I first heard them. One of those is Weird Studies with hosts Phil Martel and J.F. Ford.

I don’t listen to every show; in fact I estimate I might skip half or more. I’m not interested in the Tarot, or the X-Files, or analyses of films I haven’t seen. But when it’s a topic that interests me, even obliquely, I’m in. Martel and Ford are college professors and possess not only a very high level of erudition and insight, but also a fine dialogue with one another. They have a level of glib I admire and a playfulness and earnestness I enjoy. I’ve listened to some dynamite shows on George Miller’s Mad Max movies, Algernon Blackwood, Blade Runner, and more.

So you can imagine my level of excitement when they dropped an episode on The Fellowship of the Ring.

This did not disappoint. Tolkien does not leap to mind when you hear the term “weird” … until you think of things like Old Man Willow, and trees full of anger, which is very much out of Blackwood’s “The Willows.” Or the Elves themselves, whose lives as immortals unbounded by time as we know it are utterly alien to men, or hobbits.

Here’s three cool things the hosts discussed I wanted to point out.

The Lord of the Rings is a postapocalyptic story. Of course it is! It’s so obvious I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Probably because I tend to associate postapocalyptic with Thundarr the Barbarian, Mad Max or World War Z. But how else would you describe a fallen world that is Arda marred, damaged irrevocably by Morgoth, and suffered the drowning of Numenor by a vengeful Iluvatar? And whose characters stride through ruins of greater civilizations, and great Elven kingdoms that have been destroyed in war and whose remnants are steadily leaving for Valinor via the Gray Havens? One word might be, postapocalyptic.

It is deeply anti-modern and modern at the same time. By modern I mean of the literary movement. LOTR is a post WWI novel and of a time when old certitudes were stripped away by the devastation of the Great War. Its author was aware of everything that had come before him, and his choice to write with deliberate archaisms is a form of irony, a modernist technique. Tolkien was not some atavistic throwback but in tune with the times and a reader of the news and of “modern” fantasy of his era. Yet it’s also deeply unironic, intensely engaged with the world, and moral to its core. And anti-postmodern. 

The Lord of the Rings is applicable to every reader, and challenges you. Reading it is perilous, because it offers moral clarity and forces you to consider tough choices. Can you exhibit pity, and mercy, on your enemies, because you cannot see all ends? Would you have the will to cast a (metaphorical) One Ring into the fire? For example on the use of AI, which grants greater power but requires environmental degradation, and has well documented deleterious impacts on learning and human flourishing?

What is your ring?

***

I disagreed with a couple of the hosts’ points. I’ve read enough Tolkien, and enough about Tolkien, to have my own views. Which is what anyone should strive for who truly loves a subject enough to return to it again and again. They assert for example that the work is not nostalgic, I argue that it very much is, though I think we are operating off two different definitions of nostalgia. They also assert that Aragorn is not rooted, unlike Bilbo or Boromir, but I note he is descended from Elendil and the Kings of Numenor and of the Faithful, and therefore rooted (at least in bloodline) very deeply.

Regardless this is the type of dialogue I yearn from when I’m reading something like LOTR. There is a dynamite soliloquy with about seven minutes to go prompted by a reading of Galadriel’s gift to Gimli that left one of the hosts choked up; the book does the same to me.

Listen to the episode here. I can’t wait for forthcoming parts on The Two Towers and The Return of the King.

I’m also in the midst of reading The Tower and the Ruin by Michael D.C. Drout which has also been great. More on that later.

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I played Gorgar

I marveled at its glory... and writhed at my suck.

… and I sucked at it. 

This past weekend I took a short dude’s weekend trip to Southington. None of us knew anything about this rather nondescript town in central Connecticut, save that it was a convenient halfway point between my buddy Scott, who lives in New Jersey, and the other three of us dudes from MA/NH.

Scott did some online scouting. Southington had a venue where we could throw axes, an arcade, and ample beer. The decision was made.

As it turns out GameCraft Arcade is not just any arcade. It’s a two-story homage to old-school gaming. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Double Dragon, Wizard of Wor, Asteroids, Tron, 1941, Castlevania, Joust, Frogger, dozens more of that ilk. So many that I decided to give the place a thorough scouting-out before plunking down my hard-earned coin.

And there it was. On the second floor, tucked way in the back corner, a holy grail for S&S enthusiasts. 

Scantily-clad chicks. Skulls. Muscular warriors with swords and horned helmets. The snake pit. And the leering red demon himself.

Gorgar, in all its glory. The 1979 machine made famous by being the first-ever talking pinball machine. One I've written about before, here.

I stood back, admired the beautiful artwork. It begged to be played. And of course, I did.

Unfortunately not much to report there. I batted the ball around a few times. Tried my best to land it in The Snake Pit. Failed, and watched helplessly as it guttered over and over before I got much done on the scoreboard.

Despite my enthusiasm for these games as artifacts I suck at pinball. I now realize I like the idea of pinball much more than the game play itself. I adore the aesthetic—the tactile steel ball and the bright lights and clack of the flippers—but in truth I’d rather play Double Dragon or Galaga. Which I did, and got a lot more mileage out of my coin.

GameCraft also had other related pinball games, including Seawitch, Paragon, and Black Knight. Someone there appreciates the sacred genre it seems. Paragon and Seawitch are, like Gorgar, heavily inspired by the Frank Frazetta aesthetic.

Axe throwing was fun, and the venue supervisor who made sure we didn’t plant a heavy hatchet into our foot or our buddies’ back was a huge Lord of the Rings fan, with a sleeve of tattoos on one arm including a JRRT rune on her shoulder and the “One Ring to Rule Them All” inscription wrapped around her bicep. Much Tolkien nerdity ensued. I did not come home with a tattoo of my own though the thought crossed my mind and was liberally encouraged by the dudes. The Groggy Frog was a worthy (2? 3?) beer stop and we got a kick out of the waitress with the Poison half shirt who evaded my question about her favorite Poison song. 

Anyway, should you ever be driving down I-84 and see signs for Southington it’s a worth a visit. Tell the Girl with the Gandalf Tattoo I said hi.

Heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, the Outsider ... and Iron Maiden's “Drifter”

Anecdotally, readers of S&S listen to heavy metal in higher proportion than country or rap music. There are reasons for this.

The sound of S&S is heavy, and of battle. James Taylor cannot be the soundtrack of “Black Colossus.” 

Another is the appropriation of sword-and-sorcery imagery by metal bands. Dangle Kings of Metal in front of a Robert E. Howard reader and you’ll get a grunt of recognition, if not appreciation, even though they might have never heard of Manowar. Some will go on to sample the music, discover that “Heart of Steel” is really fucking awesome song, and become a metalhead.

Ken Kelly and Manowar can be none more metal.

That’s partially what happened to me. Fantasy imagery—along with the influence of high school friends and what was going on in the broader popular culture circa 1987--led me to sample metal bands. The sound and fury hooked me. And the rest is history.

Metal and sword-and-sorcery also share some deeper DNA …. a thematic attraction to the Outsider. Some examples fired off over a beer:

Judas Priest with “The Sentinel”

Whitesnake and “Here I Go Again.” Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.

Helloween: I Want Out

Metallica: Escape (Life’s for my own, to live my own way)

Etc.

Metal does not have a patent on the outsider concept; rock has always contained its seeds. See Dion’s “Runaway” and Rolling Stones “Tumbling Dice.” But the combination of imagery+heaviness+outsider makes metal music a substantial overlap in the venn diagram of S&S.

Iron Maiden’s “Drifter” is another fine example. As Paul DiAnno sings:

Gotta keep on roaming, gotta sing my song… ‘cause I’m a drifter, drifting on.

I hope you drift into a fine weekend on this Metal Friday.

Taking a stand against LLMs in the arts (it’s what Conan would do)

“In a system where men are protected by hired forces, and waited on by machines, how can any real self-confidence and self-reliance be induced, or long-sustained?”

--Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard, a champion of hard labor and an admirer of the physical, hated machine-work. He believed the fate of the men who worked on machinery was to become machines themselves: 

“Standardization is crushing the heart and soul, the blood and the guts, out of humanity and the eventual result will be either complete and unrelieved slavery or the destruction of civilization and return to barbarism. Once men sang the praises of ephemeral gods carved out of ivory and wood. Now they sing equally senseless praises to equally ephemeral and vain gods of Science and Commerce and Progress. Hell.”

--Letter from Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, Oct. 1931

Howard was right; vain gods are here, and vain men and women are using them to create the soulless simulacra of art. “Creators” (I will not use the term authors or artists) surrender their craft, and their soul, to the machine. They prompt large language models to produce aggregated content and then put their name on it. 

I’ve decided I really do hate this shit. And to take a stand against it. 

Author Paul Kingsnorth recently declared a Writers Against AI Campaign. Consider this my digital signature on the manifesto.

AI in the arts* is an outrage because it diminishes that which makes us human through the insidious forces of aggregation, standardization, and the elimination of ingenuity and effort.

Art is the result of effort and skill, talent, and commitment to craft. It isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be. Hard work is the point. Learning a craft is the point. These make you a better person. Which is what art does: It elevates the artist, and we participate in it, as people. We want to see people succeed, and enjoy the output of people, not machine simulacra. 

A sincere question for the AI enthusiasts.

Do you enjoy football, or boxing? The Olympic games? Do you admire people who transform their bodies on the bodybuilding stage, or who go to boot camp to pass through the fire and become better versions of themselves?

If so, why not surrender all of this to machines, too? After all, robots are faster, and stronger. Not subject to injuries, gridlocked contract negotiations, illness, aging.

When you celebrate AI art, you are celebrating a machine, not a person.

Most of us want to see people on the stage. We admire the human spirit, in all its frailty and limitation. We cheer when it rises above, agonize when it fails. And cheer again when we see someone pick themselves up from the dirt, out of the ashes of defeat, and try again. There is nobility in this.

Art is no different. 

Bringing true art into the world must remain hard work, because that is the point. You’re working for yourself, not letting the machine do it for you. Start using LLMs and you become dependent on them, and ultimately a slave.

Howard read everything he could. He experienced rejection. He rewrote drafts. He experimented in different genres and created new ones. He created fabulous worlds and titanically heroic characters while working in the most banal and arid landscape imaginable.

His poetry and fire came from within, his great passions and outrages and loves, hammered out on a steel typewriter.* And despite occasional bouts of self-loathing, he was damned proud of it. 

Howard would be outraged by our willing surrender to the machine. We know this because he said so, again and again.

“I look back with envy at the greater freedom known by my ancestors on the frontier. Hard work? Certainly they worked hard. But they were building something; making the most of opportunities; working for themselves, not merely cogs grinding in a soulless machine, as is the modern working man, whose life is a constant round of barren toil infinitely more monotonous and crushing than the toil on the frontier.”

--Letter from Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, Jan. 1934

Art is uniquely human and must be kept that way. We go to Robert E. Howard Days, and visit his home, and attend panels, to honor the man. Are going to go to OpenAI Days, or Anthropic Days? To honor CEOs who fully admit that these machines have a nonzero chance of destroying humanity? Whose companies deliberately stole authors’ copyrighted works, ingested them illegally and without permission, and now sells them back to customers for monthly subscription fees? And whose products now choke the internet with artificial slop?

I reject this future. 

What would Conan do? He’d smash the metal motherfuckers to junk.

Choose your side.

I know where I stand. I am a Writer Against AI.

*I believe LLMs have valid applications, just not in the arts. Shove your “luddite” claims up your ass.

**Yes, a machine, but one that sits dumb and inert. Each letter must be pressed into paper by force of will, generated by a human brain.

Desert Plains, Judas Priest

It's July, 7 o'clock in the evening. The New England night is warm. I'm sitting in my car, windows rolled down. The moon and stars are glittering above … and I’ve got an evening ahead of Judas Priest style heavy metal.

The Priest* is playing Uncle Eddie's Oceanside Tavern in Salisbury. A dive bar teetering on shithole, but one I happen to love.

I drive out of the garage, press play on my curated Judas Priest playlist, and hear this:

This song takes me to some desert plain, the stars wheeling overhead on a trip to nowhere and everywhere all at once. Nowhere to go and no responsibilities ...  and everything ahead. I've got a life to live.

But tonight is the next best thing. Route 110, a straight line to the New England coast, toward the salt tang and deep roar of the Atlantic ocean. Sour black leather and cold beer and dude companionship, with good-looking chicks and a dumpy bar as the backdrop. 

Heavy metal until midnight. 

I've done this. Have you? I hope so. There's still time.

"Desert Plains" is the ultimate driving song. You heard this guitar tone in the mid-80s but you don't hear it anymore. This is it in its full glory. "Heading Out to the Highway" is comparable but it lacks the slow, stoned, ethereal vibe of "Desert Plains." Listening to it puts me on an Arizona highway, one of those flat, level, straight to the horizon stretches where you press down on the gas pedal and roar past 80 ... 90 ... and just keep going.

With Judas Priest as the soundtrack.

* The Priest is a New England based tribute band to Judas Priest.