The Fellowship Of The Ring – J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954 ★★★★

One Ring to Rule Them All

The first book in J. R. R. Tolkien's epic trilogy makes for a fine scene-setter and a bit of a puzzler. 

Enormously different in tone and content from his earlier novel set in Middle Earth, The Hobbit, The Fellowship Of The Ring challenges you to read closely and pay attention. It often rewards you for the effort, but make no mistake, this ain't no pleasant Misty Mountain hop.

In a world called Middle Earth where demi-humans and magic are ever-present and the power of evil waxes wroth, a hobbit named Frodo Baggins is charged by his human wizard friend Gandalf with a mission of cosmic importance: Transport a ring that has the potential to become the final nail on goodness's earthly coffin to a place where it can do no harm. Can Frodo and his brave escorts accomplish this mission?

The answer is no. At least, not here. Fellowship Of The Ring is a singular reading experience worth recommending to anyone, but hardly complete on its own. You need to know the backstory of Frodo's ring as provided in The Hobbit (published 17 years before Fellowship) and really need the next two books in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, The Two Towers and Return Of The King, as Fellowship takes you a good distance on Frodo's journey but not nearly all the way.

Fellowship is different from Hobbit in other ways; less juvenile, less playful, more lyrical, more freighted with significance. Tolkien's descriptive powers seem much stronger here, like he knew more what his Middle Earth was about and wanted to share as much of it as possible through the eyes of Frodo and his companions. Even without the terrific maps Tolkien prepared (my 1987 Houghton Mifflin edition comes with only two, alas), Frodo's journey seems to traverse real geography the way Tolkien writes it.

Tolkien's tale is rather dark otherwise. A sense of desperate hopelessness seems to pull at the characters. The ring in Frodo's possession, bestowed upon him by his older, beloved cousin Bilbo, turns out to be no mere bauble of conveniently-bestowed invisibility, as it was depicted in The Hobbit, but a gateway to the perils of darkness, much coveted by the all-powerful, all-seeing master of darkness Sauron. Frodo can't even use the thing himself unless he wants to give the whole game away.

"We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one," Gandalf announces.

Later on, after the expedition takes one of several turns for the worse, another party member, the ranger Aragorn, declares: "We must do without hope. At least we may yet be avenged."

Not that everything goes wrong for the good guys in Fellowship. There is plenty of rousing action and even a goodly amount of humor. Just be warned: You want happy endings, don't expect them here.

Challenges pile up quickly. No sooner has Gandalf sent Frodo on his quest than he is waylaid by a powerful character he mistook for a friend. Frodo and his hobbit companions are on their own for a good stretch of their trek, and even the helpers they eventually find seem unable to parry the forces of evil nipping at their heels. At one hilltop battle, Frodo is grievously wounded by the blade of an evil wraith. One of Frodo's human companions proves unreliable when he gets understandable-if-misplaced ideas about using the Ring for his own ends.

"One Ring to rule them all/One Ring to bind them/One Ring to bring them all/and in the darkness bind them." Image from http://slamiticon.deviantart.com/

Not all the plot elements of The Fellowship Of The Ring ring true. One goodly character is a mystic woodland inhabitant named Tom Bombadil who seems Tolkien's effort at restoring some of Hobbit's lost pastoral spirit and merriment. He and his female companion Goldberry present Frodo and his companions with needed shelter from the growing storm around them, but seem too removed with their singsongs and gentle tidings from the larger cosmic crisis of Middle Earth. They are an unnecessary distraction; even Peter Jackson left them off his otherwise exhaustive film trilogy.

For me, the main drawbacks of Fellowship are twofold: Poetry and elves. Tolkien includes a lot of the former, which however beautifully, even immersively written slows things down a lot and gets kind of twee in places. The elves appear a few times in the book; one, Legolas, even joins the party, but too often come across as too precious to be true, more like earth angels than realistic denizens of the Middle Earth setting.

But the overall seriousness of the story, and of Tolkien's epic narrative treatment, grows as the novel progresses, quite wonderfully, to a council where important decisions are made amid much backbiting. Tolkien is careful to delineate his alliance of goodness, being as it is a marriage of convenience more than of common spirit. The political challenges of this Fellowship, as it becomes known, adds a welcome layer of complexity that grows with the next two books, and adds to the suspensefulness of this involving chapter in a larger tale.

Fellowship’s great weakness is that it sets up a terrific story you have to read two more books to get to the end of. Its great strength is it makes you want to read them immediately, if not sooner.