It’s pretty obvious that Dune is a fantasy novel written with specific reference to The Lord of the Rings.
That’s a really fascinating take, Frank! What makes you say that?
So to get to the point: LOTR is a sprawling, expansive (it’s over 5,000 pages!), often plot-heavy, epic, and detailed retelling of a fairly specific myth.
The main character is Frodo Baggins; the story centers around him, his quest (in the “Tolkein-era” version of the myth) to destroy the ancient, malevolent artifact called the One Ring while simultaneously fighting a war, both of which he can only do thanks to his powerful Fellowship of Noble (and sometimes villainous) friends who have decided to aid him with their strength and valor. They travel around the world, eventually battling (and defeating) a dragon that was the physical manifestation of Evil, and this leads to (in the “Tolkein-era” version of the myth) the defeat of the Evil One, the Witch-King of Angmar.
There are lots of other important characters, of course, but they have little to no relevance to the main plot, which centers on Frodo and Sam (his loyal companion) and their quest to destroy the Ring; for example, Sam can’t even read.
The story goes something like “The Fellowship fights its way through hostile territory filled with orcs, goblins, and other types of evil. After the defeat of the Orc-King at Helm’s Deep, Sam is sent to Mount Doom, where he fights Sauron and the Ring (who is the physical manifestation of Evil) with the aid of the fire-breathing, three-eyed, dragon-killing, eye-wielding Elf known as Aragorn. Aragorn also fights Sauron while Frodo and the other Fellowship members, who are mostly elves, try to destroy the Ring and find the One Ring in the Shire, which is in the middle of the forest.”
And so forth.
There is one detail you really need to keep in mind in order to understand what makes LOTR special – it was written in a specific time period. Before I go on, I need to explain what that is, so here goes.
Throughout his career, Tolkien used the term Middle Earth to refer not only to the fictional world that appeared in his novels, but to a specific time period, which was basically the British Empire’s “Middle Ages.” In the Lord of the Rings, “Middle Earth” isn’t an abstract notion – it is the Earth as seen from its Middle Ages, and the people living in “Middle Earth” refer to themselves as “Middle-Earthlings.”
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were written as early-to-mid 20th-century fantasy novels, and so their references to the era of the late Middle Ages are not as “strictly accurate” as those in LOTR (especially as The Hobbit gets rather a bit into the early Middle Ages and LOTR very much stays in the late Middle Ages). There is a lot of modern-style political stuff (e.g. you have a ruler whose name is something like “Barfbag” [a corruption of “barbarian”], and who is “the man to whom I owe allegiance”), which isn’t present in LOTR. Even the technology is not quite the same – some elements in LOTR make sense when you know about cars and aeroplanes, and are not present in The Hobbit.
Anyway. Now to The Lord of the Rings. It’s basically a story set in the late 19th/early 20th century. In it, there is magic and science, and there is an evil entity who is not merely evil but literally evil, which is a particular “inversion” of the common (Tolkien-era) notion of Evil. The “evil” one isn’t some sort of demonic mastermind or ancient sorcerer in a tower. No, this evil one is a sort of natural force that has arisen in our world from the corruption and decay of the natural order, a force (known as “Sauron” – “the evil one” – and “Melkor”) which can’t be combated directly, but which can be suppressed by (in Tolkien’s view) using a certain sort of magical/technological/social organization. In The Hobbit, the evil force isn’t there. In The Lord of the Rings, because the evil force arose from our own world, its very creation can be seen as an act of divine violence, even though its power comes from the decay of nature. It’s the decay of nature that has caused the world to become un-natural, leading to the rise of the evil one and its followers. That’s really important.
I don’t want to quote the actual passages because it would take an entire book to explain all of that, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of LOTR’s plot by getting into it.
That said, I will just tell you one important plot point: the One Ring is a “masterpiece” which must be destroyed. The Ring is powerful and malevolent in a way that other artifacts that have been associated with evil in the past aren’t.
(The Lord of the Rings is more mythic and less plot-focused than The Hobbit, not least because it is set in a very specific time period. The books are a great (and I mean great, not “good”) retelling of a myth written in a certain time and place – hence the reference to “Tolkein-era” things – which is, for many, the only way they get to encounter Middle-Earth in this context.)
Frank, I want this post to live on my blog forever.
This is because I am awesome!
A few more important things I don’t think I explained, though, which would give you a better sense of the plot:
The ring is extremely dangerous. To destroy it and the tower where it is kept (I’m not going to say this is an important plot point, but I want to emphasize that it’s bad, in case you’re not aware), Frodo, Sam, and the Fellowship have to travel all the way up and down the continent of Middle-Earth and through nine great armies of enemies of the ring, all in service of a single mission. You may recall that the whole “this is an epic quest” thing was pretty cool, but you might not be aware that not only are these people the only ones left on Earth (because there were so many others before), but that in order to find a ring that had been stolen from the one who had owned it the whole time, they had to do this in a world where a ring of that size could exist (in The Hobbit, where a ring of that size can’t exist, it’s said to exist “somewhere in Mordor,” i.e., in a fictional place)
The “good guys” are mostly fighting against Sauron, but a lot of the actual fighting isn’t with the big-name characters, it’s with a lot of lesser-known people who are on the side of Evil for complex reasons and who do not know it. When the battle with Saruman at the Black Gates happens (in LOTR), he’s in a position of power and wealth and status, and he’s a skilled fighter, and he really looks the part, but he’s also fighting a group of lesser-known guys who are mostly not very good at fighting.
There are a lot of ways in which the world of LOTR is better-realized than those of The Hobbit and the other earlier novels, because the earlier novels are less mythic, less specific about the time and place they’re set. It’s not that they’re “bad,” necessarily (I still like The Hobbit even though I’m not as much of a Tolkien fan as I used to be); but LOTR really feels like a retelling of some of these myths, in a mythic time and place where those myths were true. When you read Tolkien, you feel as if you’re reading the mythic chronicle of those mythic days.
Which is what it is: a retelling of myths written in a certain time. In my opinion, LOTR’s time and place are more mythic (or myth-like) than the time and place in other previous novels. Of course, LOTR is the one that gets published, and as a consequence the mythologization becomes “strictly true,” but this only gets you so far away from Tolkien’s own mythologization.
These are all really excellent points!









