The Ring and the Rings

In The Ring and the Rings, Alex Ross examines Howard Shore's score to Peter Jackson's film version of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Having no musical education, I skimmed most of it and gleaned little. It certainly seemed insightful though. Then I came to the parts I could grasp:

Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner's. "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased," he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of "Die Walküre" not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas. True, the Volsunga Saga features a ring from a cursed hoard, but it possesses no executive powers. In the "Nibelungenlied" saga, there is a magic rod that could be used to rule all, but it just sits around. Wagner combined these two objects into the awful amulet that is forged by Alberich from the gold of the Rhine. When Wotan steals the ring for his own godly purposes, Alberich places a curse upon it, and in so doing he speaks of "the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring." Such details make it hard to believe Tolkien's disavowals.

Both Wagner and Tolkien were writing in times of great technological progress — "progress" that would be turned toward war:

It is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things. Power, for them, was not a baton that could be passed from one person to another; those with power were born with power, and those without, without. By Wagner's time, it was clear that a marginal individual would soon be able to unleash terror with the flick of a wrist. Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: "A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle." Nor did the ring have to be understood only in terms of military science. Mass media now allowed for the worldwide destruction of an idea, a reputation, a belief system, a culture. In a hundred ways, men were forging things over which they had no control, and which ended up controlling them.

(I love that Oscar Wilde scenario, by the way.)

The Götterdämmerung of Tolkien's elves is peaceful:

Tolkien began "The Lord of the Rings" in the wake of the First World War, whose carnage he experienced firsthand, and he finished it in the wake of the Second. In both wars, he witnessed the wedding of Teutonic mythology to German military might. He bemoaned how the Nazis had corrupted "that noble northern spirit." You could see "The Lord of the Rings" as a kind of rescue operation, saving the Nordic myths from misuse — perhaps even saving Wagner from himself. Tolkien tried, it seems, to create a kinder, gentler "Ring," a mythology without malice. The "world-redeeming deed," in Wagner's phrase, is done by the little hobbits, who have no territorial demands to make in Middle-earth and wish simply to resume their gardening. In the end, the elves give up their dominion, just as, in Wagner, the gods surrender theirs. Yet it is a peaceful transfer of power, not an apocalyptic one. The story ends not with the collapse of Valhalla but with the restoration of a wasted world.

I love the way Ross handles this "heretical" notion (bound to attract geek wrath):

It is probably heretical to suggest that the "Lord of the Rings" films surpass the books on which they are based. (Correspondence on this subject may be addressed to Alex Ross, The North Pole.)