Why the Lord of the Rings is a Bad Story
If the reader has familiarized themselves with the various plot problems I have mentioned in other sections of this website then he or she is now prepared to understand why the Lord of the Rings (LotR) is not a good story. It has three forbidden motifs, one LSOC, four separate unexplained prophecies one major internal inconsistency and one minor internal inconsistency. For some inexplicable reason people just ignore all this and insist that this story is one of the great tales of the modern age. That is the power of hype. Let me be more specific.
Forbidden motifs: Frodo's adventure to Mt. Doom is the archetypical example of sneaking behind enemy lines and dealing a serious blow, in this case a mortal blow. One could argue, I suppose that when this was written this theme was NOT overused, and I would not argue to hard against that. However all that matters is that the story be good by today's standards, as is the claim in this case. Tolkien is perhaps prompting us to wonder how a humble Hobbit of a gentle and simple race can carry the weight of the world on his shoulder and defeat evil head on. Is he suggesting that humility and simplicity can triumph against significant evil? I think not, else Tolkien would not have included all the help of Gondor, the army of dead soldiers, Gandalf etc. The forbidden motif is simply an irony: a little detail that escapes Sauron's eye leads to his downfall even as he is on the verge of conquering Middle Earth.
The second forbidden motif is Aragron's compulsion to succeed where his direct male ancestor, Isildur, failed. Aragron is carrying the burden of the weakness of mortal men in his heart and must sacrifice all pleasure in life until he has a chance to bring the royal family of Gondor redemption.
The third forbidden motif is that Gandalf, and indeed all Middle Earth, is betrayed by his boss, Saruman. Who would have thought that the man Gandalf respects and trusts the most is the very one that would betray him and take him prisoner, almost ending the whole story right there? Oh,... *I* would have guessed, that's who.
LSOC and Prophecy: Ask yourself this simple question: How is it that a group of incompetent dwarves and one bumbling Hobbit could possibly succeed in traveling across middle earth and winning back the treasure stolen by a ferocious dragon? Answer: they can't unless the Hobbit happens to find a powerful magic trinket along the way and that Hobbit exploits its power of invisibility in the most obvious ways to save the hapless troupe from certain doom time after time. So the independent confluences are: 1) Bilbo knows Gandalf personally and Gandlaf is eccentric enough to send Bilbo on a hopeless mission and 2) instead of immediately dying on this hopeless mission the moment that Gandalf leaves the party, Bilbo is positioned to pick up the Ring which seems to be looking for a way out of the Misty Mountains. Each of these confluences have a different purpose in the story and that is the defining charachteristic of LSOC. All the textual information available in the story points to the fact that these two events are entirely independent. Now it is true that Gandalf believes that there is "something" special about Hobbits, but he never indicates why he believes this or what that special thing is. Can it be that the special thing is that they are DESTINED to find the Ring of Power and that they are DESTINED to successfully led it to Mt. Doom and destroy it? I can suppose that he knows of some prophetic information that indicates that Hobbits have a critical role to play regarding the coming of the Third Age of Middle Earth, but that would be pure speculation. However if that speculation were true that would destroy the independence of Bilbo's quest as assigned by Gandalf and the discovery of the Ring of Power: some prophetic force LEAD Bilbo into the Misty Mountains. One can not claim that the Ring lead him there because the Ring only wanted to get out and would have preferred a more corruptible creature but took the first thing that came along which wasn't Gollum. This same prophetic force seems to want to mollify the power of Sauron's ring and exploited Gandalf's experiment of sending Bilbo on a dangerous journey. Either that or Bilbo's discovery of the Ring was pure co-incidence. However this other force is never discussed at all in the Hobbit although it is alluded to occasionally in various parts of the LotR trilogy. (For example the fact that representatives from all over Middle Earth came to Elrond's house at the same time is described as a remarkable indication that forces more complex than anyone understands are at work.) However the movie version of Fellowship of the Ring unambiguously claims that it is pure co-incidence that Bilbo found the Ring and drives us to accept the LSOC.
Regardless even if we accept prophetic power without reliable textual evidence we are still left with a story that requires substantial metaphysical groundwork, and this groundwork is never laid.
Other prophecies: There are several instances of prophecy in LotR. The first is the marginal case mentioned above. The second is the dream of Boromir that brings him to the Council of Elrond in the Fellowship of the Rings. This prophecy seems fully informed about the Ring and the Ring's predicament. The third are the visions that Frodo sees in Galladrial's mirror. The fourth is the fact that "the hands of the King are the hands of a healer" and this is one of the ways Aragron's claim to the throne is provided credibility. Lastly there is an implied prophecy regarding the army of dead soldiers that Aragron calls to arms in the defense of Gondor. They were essentially waiting there for his timely return.
Remember: prophecy itself is not the problem. The problem is the missing metaphysical background. As it is LotR is a story that could NOT have turned out any other way. Failure was impossible because if they failed, who would taken the dead army out of bondage, who would have demonstrated the healing hands?
Major Inconsistency. Tolkien's handling of the Ring of Power and its metaphysical nature is problematic. He explains early on in the Fellowship of the Rings that Sauron assumed that the Ring was destroyed. However we eventually learn that the destruction of the Ring is essentially the destruction of Sauron himself. Honestly we were surprised by this. When reading the Return of the King we did NOT expect Sauron to evaporate when the Ring was unmade. So Sauron must have been aware that his own existence implied the Ring was still intact somewhere in Middle earth. We suppose that Gandalf may have been wrong about what Sauron knew and when he knew it, but such an error has real implications. You see, it was made clear at the Council of Elrond that the Ring would assure Sauron's triumph. The implication was never that without the Ring Sauron would be rendered powerless, just potentially less powerful. In the end when the Ring is destroyed all of Sauron's army falls to pieces as though the spell they had been under was broken. Gandlaf seemed to know that this would happen as he lead the army of Gondor just north of Mordor but that knowledge is inconsistent with his non-understanding of the nature of the Ring earlier. This just shows how Tolkien confused himself, his editor wasn't paying attention and the error slipped by. Hype has kept the error hidden from view for years.
In addition there is also the unresolved issue regarding "claiming" the Ring. Sauron instantly knew where Frodo was and what Frodo was up to when he "claimed" the Ring as his own during those final moments in Mt. Doom. However just wearing the Ring wasn't good enough although there is some indication that simply wearing the Ring alerts Sauron and his agents in some way. However Gollum certainly claimed the Ring as his own while in the Misty Mountains and wore it frequently. Why didn't Sauron know about it then? This inconsistency is slightly less severe because one can claim that Sauron, who was dwelling in Southern Mirkwood at the time, was not as powerful as he was by the time the Trilogy started and thus less sensitive. However it is more likely that Tolkien agreed with Gandlaf: Sauron in Mirkwood had no reason to suspect the Ring existed because at that stage of authorship Tolkien did not intend the destruction of the Ring to be the destruction of Sauron, just the reduction of Sauron's peak power. Later Tolkien's conception of what the Ring actually was shifted to the Ring being the embodiment of Sauron's very life force, but Tolkein never went back to revise the earlier material. We presume such an error can occur if you write a long book.
All in all the LotR has obvious problems. It is saved perhaps by the fact that people enjoy getting so lost in it unreality that they detach themselves from logic, but now it is time to wake up and deliver the proper dose of criticism. LotR is three clichés piled on an implausible co-incidence of co-incidences and brought to a conclusion via an ad-hoc inconsistency.
Roahn Wynar