Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Prologue, 4 Of the Finding of the Ring
Continuing my essay series on The Lord of the Rings, I will discuss the fourth section of the Prologue appearing in Part One The Fellowship of the Ring: “4 Of the Finding of the Ring”. This section reviewed events from The Hobbit, especially “Chapter V Riddles in the Dark”. For the first time, the narrator provided a year for the event: Shire-Reckoning (S.R.) 1341, which is Third Age (T.A.) 2941. The home of the dwarves, called Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit, now has an elvish or Sindarin name, Erebor. The narrator recalled Thorin’s death after the Battle of the Five Arms, and the description of Gollum was somewhat clearer than in The Hobbit: he is “little”, has “large flat feet”, “pale luminous eyes” (13) that turn green when searching for the ring, and ate both raw fish and orcs, originally called goblins, which he killed by strangulation. The narrator reviewed the ring itself: “a ring of gold that made its wearer invisible” (13) and the only thing loved by Gollum, which he called his “precious”.
Magic rings had a longstanding history in Western literature, but the One Ring of The Lord of the Rings is so distinctive and pervasive that nearly every article I encountered purporting to cover the general topic of magic rings inevitably became an essay about that ring. Since this is the road more traveled by, I will briefly review the history of rings before moving on to a pair of less explored topics: the folklore studies and the history of unreliable narrators in Western literature.
Magic Rings
Among the earliest surviving accounts of a magic ring turning its wearer invisible came from the second book of The Republic written by Plato around 375 BC. Plato’s brother, Glaucon, himself a philosopher concerned with justice, wrote this particular passage. Glaucon described a shepherd from the country of Lydia, now modern day Turkey, who discovered a gold ring on the finger of a corpse in a chasm, used the ring to turn himself invisible, seduced the queen of the country, killed the king, and made himself king. Glaucon insisted “no one, of his own free will, is just, but only when he is compelled to be so…”, and the ability to commit crimes with no repercussion would cause many people to commit crimes. He followed up the story with a lengthy argument that just people are tortured despite their innocence while unjust people reap reward, a message found in The Lord of the Rings.
Another magic ring was the Seal or Ring of Solomon, used by the king of Israel to command genies or jinn. He set four jewels in the ring to control the four classical elements of water, air, earth, and fire. According to Antiquitates Judaicae by Josephus, a Jewish historian in the Roman Empire, a man named Eleazer had a ring with the seal of Solomon, which he used to draw out demons. This controlling of spiritual entities was similar to the connection between the One Ring and Ringwraiths, nine former kings of Men whose cursed rings turned them into ghosts enslaved by Sauron. In contrast, the elemental aspect of the Ring of Solomon paralleled the three elemental rings belonging to the elves that control either water, air, or fire, but not earth.
Most influential on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien were the rings of Germanic and Scandinavian mythology. Andvaranaut, or Advari’s Ring, appeared in the Poetic Edda written in Norse, the Völsunga saga written in Icelandic, and the Nibelungenlied written in Middle High German. This magic ring allowed its wearer to shapeshift but also came with a curse. Nearly every character in these mythologies wanted the ring except for Sigfried or Sigurd, who happened to be the ring’s owner. German composer Richard Wagner, whose work was last mentioned in my essay on the Foreword, created an artistically beautiful opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, that turned the mythology into White supremacist propaganda. Tolkien’s own interpretation, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, attempted to combat this prejudice while collecting material for his legendarium.
Meanwhile, Tolkien’s best friend and literary colleague, C.S. Lewis, took magic rings in a completely different direction. Lewis melded fantasy and science fiction in The Magician’s Nephew, a prequel to his more widely read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. In this book, a pair of rings forged by a magician from magical dust brought from the lost city of Atlantis allowed people to transport between parallel universes. While Tolkien did include a time travel element in some of his less widely read fiction, a ring was not involved there.
Folklore & Motifs
With so many variations on a similar theme, scholars needed a way to catalogue and analyze the stories. Folklore studies evolved into its own field, a cross between literary analysis and cultural anthropology. I first learned about this field and its tools from the podcast Digital Folklore, which focuses on stories from the Internet Era. However, folklore studies has existed since the early 20th century. Among the earliest scholars was Atti Aarne, a Finnish professor who compiled a Folklore Index but died at age fifty-seven before completing his work. The mantle was taken up by Stith Thompson, who continued working on the Folklore Index and translated the work into German, along writing the Motif-Index of Folk Literature and founding the first folklore academic program in the United States at Indian University Bloomington. Thompson defined a folklore motif as “the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition… something unusual and striking…” Most recently, Hans-Jörg Uther added to the folklore index, giving it the current name of Aarne-Thompson-Uther Folklore Index (ATU). He also worked on the fifteen volume Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales).
In these indexes, folklore motifs receive a letter code denoting the index and a number code denoting the type of motif; the longer the number, the more specific the motif. For Aarne-Thompson-Uther Folklore Index, a magic ring is ATU 560, while for Motif-Index of Folk Literature, a magic ring is D1076. The One Ring falls under several other categories within the Motif-Index, including D810 Magic object a gift, D840 Magic object found, the more specific D845 Magic object found in underground room, D860 Loss of magic object, and D861 Magic object stolen. By assigning codes to story elements, folklore researchers can quantitatively compare where folktales align or differ. I will use these codes in future posts to compare motifs in The Lord of the Rings to those found elsewhere in Western literature.
Unreliable Narrators
A variant of the story about Bilbo’s finding of the ring appeared throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In Fellowship alone were four recollections of the event: the note by the 1950s anthropologist narrator in the prologue (12-15), a brief conversation between Gandalf and Frodo near the end of “The Long-Expected Party” (43), a long conversation between Gandalf and Frodo in “The Shadow of the Past” (50-67), and the retelling by Bilbo alluded to in “The Council of Elrond” (279-280). Each variant approached the story at a slightly different angle, but in each case, characters insisted that Bilbo usually told the truth, and this lie was an exception to his honest nature. I question the accuracy of this statement, as he was best known for stealing the Arkenstone and using the jewel to broker an alliance between the free people in East, and he never willing told the full truth of his adventures to anyone except for Frodo. Characters who wanted to believe that Bilbo was usually truthful — Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, and Elrond — loved him as a close friend or family member, and their views were likewise skewed.
Original editions of The Hobbit included the “false” story, as Tolkien wrote the book long before he had The Lord of the Rings in mind, and the revised edition now in print was rewritten to better match the sequel trilogy. The in-universe explanation for these two version of the book were explained as “Frodo or Samwise… seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself” (15), a task that would fall to later editors. This deletion process will act as a framing device in my hypothetical animated musical, and the in-universe editing of the book will receive extensive explanation in later posts.
American literary critic Wayne C. Booth invented the term “unreliable narrator” in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction published in 1961, seven years after Fellowship came out. He classified unreliable narrators into four categories: the sinful pícaro, the foolish clown, the mentally ill madman, and the ignorant naïf. More recently, the clown has been renamed to the liar, which better fit Bilbo’s two tales of the finding the ring. Ansgar Nünning, a scholar of English language literature who teaches in Germany, described unreliable narration as “a projection by the reader who tries to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies by attributing them to the narrator’s unreliability”. This description fits Tolkien’s ambiguity found throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, a style of writing with plenty of information but not enough concrete description for the reader to know exactly what is happening, similar to many work emails I receive.
Unreliable narrators have existed in English language literature for as long as the modern English language novel, a medium which first appeared in the 18th century. Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth satirically depicted a family of Anglo-Irish landed gentry not so unlike the upper class hobbits discussed last week with narration by the family steward, Thady Quick. This chatty working class man reminded me of Hamfast “Gaffer” Gamgee, the father of Sam. Both were all too eager to share news about their wealthy, eccentric employers even if what they say was factually inaccurate or insulting. By the 19th century, gothic stories like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and the works of Edgar Allen Poe used unreliable narration to create an ambiance of horror. This technique appeared in “Chapter IIX: Fog on the Barrow-Downs” in Fellowship as Frodo rescued his friends from the barrow-wight, an undead creature intent on performing human sacrifices. Postmodernist text from the 20th century and later used ambivalent narrators or no narrative voice, as every fact presented in the narrative was treated with the same level of validity. Similarly, Frodo constructed the narrative of The Lord of the Rings using notes from all surviving members of the Fellowship after the War of the Ring, presenting each voice with equal authority even if they contained inconsistencies or conflicting information.
The story of Bilbo’s finding of the ring does not fit neatly into these historical categories, but it does mesh with another phenomenon of modern storytelling. Tolkien’s rewrite of The Hobbit before the release of Fellowship was part of an increasingly common practice called retconning, short for “retroactive continuity”. The phrase has been used since 1973, incidentally the year of Tolkien’s death, and the abbreviation appeared in the late 1980s on the young internet. Among the earliest characters to receive this treatment was Sherlock Holmes, killed off by Arthur Conan Doyle and later brought back by popular demand. For modern franchises like Marvel, this allows creators to alter the backstories of characters with a high intellectual property (IP) value.
However, retconned characters are rarely given the power to rewrite their own story, as was the case for Bilbo. This process can be analyzed through a post-colonial lens while considering the adage “history is written by the victors”. Bilbo’s conscious decision to alter history and portray his finding of the ring in a more positive light was a power he received as a victor in the riddle contest and ultimately the war. Similarly, the surviving members of the Fellowship attempted to tell their story in a straightforward and honest manner, but their views are biased towards their own cultures, experiences, and storytelling frameworks, making their narrative unreliable, just like any real-world historical narrative.
Conclusion
More on the in-universe making of the Red Book of Westmarch, first mentioned in “1 Concerning Hobbits” as the literary work containing the Westron language original version of The Lord of the Rings, will come next week when sorting through “Notes on the Shire Record”, the final section of the Prologue. Unlike the popularity of the One Ring as the greatest source of evil able fit in the palm of one’s hand, multi-layered historical editing systems as the origin of a fictional work have not caught on, although the latter is much more likely in the real world. The One Ring has become so large in the minds of literary critics that it overshadows the rings on which it was partially based. While folklore scholars might attempt to reduce this ring to a motif index code, the ambiguity surrounding the object makes it impossible to quantify through a simple strings of letters and numbers. Only through unreliable narrators, with their minds altered by the ring, can the reader glimpse of its poorly understood power.
Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical