--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.
