LOTR is really cool. For example, Aragorn is a supersoldier and long lost true heir who's engaged to an immortal princess, but the world ends up being saved by Sam who doesn't have any of those gifts. Sadly, most later genre fiction succumbed to nostalgia for aristocracy, with heroes like Luke Skywalker or Paul Atreides relying on inherited special powers.
I think claiming that any single member of the troop saves the world misses the point. All of them had a part to play. At best you could argue Gandalf was the one who moved the pieces into place and made it happen.
I accept the premise that the gambit was won not through great warriors, but by folk of spirit, loyalty and fortitude disproportionate to their stature.
One thing that really struck home as a youngster reading was of course Eowyn and the witch king.
Of course, Sam and Frodo fail in the end... at the last moment, Frodo succumbs to the ring, claims it for his own, and turns away from the quest.
The only thing which actually saves them and destroys the ring is blind chance. Or, maybe, providence? "Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker," says Gandalf. Once you start looking, that theme permeates the entire book.
But then, so does free will: providence, if it exists in Tolkien's universe, cannot act except through people. Frodo's choice to let Gollum live allows Gollum to unwittingly destroy the ring later. And that theme permeates the book too.
It's painfully dated in a lot of ways, but still fascinating, and a lot more complex than the simple adventure story it first appears to be.
- we wouldn't pace it like that these days. When the story splits, Tolkien tells an entire story from the point of view of some of the characters, and then rewinds time by quite a long way to tell an entire story from some of the other characters. We'd tend to use more changes of PoV, so that all the events progress at the same time. This has the advantages that the climaxes all happen simultaneously, and also allows compare-and-contrast between different plot threads.
- the writing style itself is pretty uneven; there are sections at the beginning which have the same forced-joviality-talking-down-to-children feel that the Hobbit had, but which is quite out of place in the much darker book. It gets better later on, though. (IIRC he only redrafted it once, due to not having a word processor.)
From the worldbuilding point of view:
- despite all the care behind Gollum's characterisation, the bulk of the antagonists get no characterisation whatsoever. Orcs are simple ciphers, portrayed as irredeemably evil; which doesn't fit in Tolkien's cosmology (only Illúvatar, God, can give or take free will). Tolkien was aware this was a problem later on and tried to address it in the Silmarillion, but apparently he was never happy with the solution there. Sauron, of course, famously never appears on stage at all.
- there's a lot of 1950s attitudes, both subtle racism --- he's got a regrettable tendency to use dark skin or deformity as a marker of being evil --- and subtle classism --- and I'm not talking about Sam vs. Frodo here; what I mean is that outside the Shire, the only people we ever meet who matter are aristocracy. Ordinary people exist, because at one point our characters stand on Edoras and look out at the burning farmsteads, but only as comic relief or bit parts. And, of course, there's the famous lack of female characters.
- Sam and Frodo's relationship is very alien to modern eyes: we just don't seem to do that master/servant relationship any more, or if we do, we interpret it as a sexual relationship (hence all the 'Sam will kill him if he tries anything' jokes). Tolkien uses this elsewhere; Saruman/Wormtongue is a perverted example. (There is, BTW, another excellent example of this done right in Kipling's Kim, which you should totally read.)
None of this, BTW, is any reason why it's bad, because not, it's a great book; and the fact that a 60-year old book holds up so well today is a tribute to just how good it is; but it is still very much an artifact of its time, and needs to be remembered as such.
A lot of the points you raise aren't much to do with it being dated IMO, merely the style in which its written. You say "we'd do this, we wouldn't do that" (where "we" is presumably modern day fantasy writers), but he made those artistic choices. It sounds like you consider writing fiction to be a technological domain, where advances are made that make old forms obsolete. Maybe fantasy writing is -- I don't read it, although I have read LOTR -- but that makes fantasy sound like an even more limited genre than I thought it was. I'm an avid reader BTW, but of literary fiction, for want of a better term.
I absolutely agree that no one can write sincerely in the style of a bygone age. But having been written in the past doesn't in itself make, say, Anthony Powell's books (to pick someone writing in a different style at a similar time) dated. It's not like we learned more about how to write novels since then, or novelists of today would be easily able to do better than Powell, which I don't think they are.
Your points about racism etc do make sense though, things like that can be jarring, and it's always a bit disappointing to me to remember that our favourite writers were subject to the reality tunnels of their time.
> but it is still very much an artifact of its time, and needs to be remembered as such.
I think that is a good attitude.
Although I do want to add about the aristocracy/common people issue: the fact that we almost only meet nobles outside of the Shire is consistent with his medieval-style world. At the level of planning and command that the Fellowship moves in, only kings and the like would have any say. (Imagine the battle of Minas Tirith and the march on Mordor being written from the POV of a normal soldier - almost nothing of what's going on would make sense.) Also, one of the big themes of the book is how the Hobbits themselves change from being young, simple, rural people to being warriors and true leaders. This change is made possible in large parts by their dealings with the nobility of other countries.
Sam is based on the ordinary British soldiers that Tokien served alongside as an officer while enduring the horrors of the Western Front in WW1
"“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” "
>Sadly, most later genre fiction succumbed to nostalgia for aristocracy, with heroes like Luke Skywalker or Paul Atreides relying on inherited special powers.
Which by the way I prefer. The cliche of the powerless humble guy who in the end saves the world has become boring and predictable.
It's not exactly any less boring and predictable than the poor stupid proles needing the brave, noble righteous heir to come and dig them out of the mire
Paul Atreides was also a mistake in the sisterhood's breeding plan, since Jessica broke with their Illuminati-esque plan out of love for her Duke and to give him an heir, and thus jumped the gun a generation too early.
Paul was supposed to be Paulina and marry Feyd-Rautha, rather than gut him in front of the Emperor.
I wouldn't say there are "nods to aristocracy". The whole Faufreluches class system was quite deliberately designed for the Dune world. Herbert has his characters criticize it subtly at various points of the first three books and then has Leto II outright declare it as one of the biggest problems with the human society in "The God Emperor of Dune".
