Word: sauron
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When The Fellowship of the Ring was first released, literary critic Edmund Wilson assailed Tolkien for creating polarized characters—characters that were either good or evil, and nothing in between. Sauron and his servants are the utter embodiment of evil, with no goal other than to dominate the world under a pall of darkness. Frodo, Gandalf and Aragorn, the protagonists of the novel, have no wish other than to see Middle Earth live in peace and are willing to sacrifice themselves to attain that goal...
...literature. Frodo is a Hobbit, three feet or so tall. The ring is magic and dangerous. It renders the good and weak who wear it invisible, but it provides both the power and the itch to dominate the world to any bad and overweening personage who may possess it. Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, for instance, who has already sent his dread black Ring-wraiths coursing through Middle-earth to seize it. The only hope for peace lies with poor Frodo. He must journey to the very heart of darkness, to Mount Doom in Mordor, and drop the ring...
Middle-earth is very nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi. Frodo and some true-hearted companions endure Ringwraiths and Barrow-wights, hordes of Ores, who are Sauron's shock troops, and much cloak-and-daggering. When Frodo triumphs, finally, and destroys the ring, it is only with the perverse collaboration of Gollum, a pitiably evil creature with froglike feet who sounds a bit like Oliver Twist's Fagin and is one of the memorable minor characters in English literature...
...praise of friendship) to Beowulf. Then, with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred, Sauron was really Joseph Stalin and fumbling, heroic Frodo was the West...
...Villain. Tolkien himself denies that there is any "inner meaning or message" in the Ring cycle, and many students take on a muzzy, Middle-earth look when they try to explain its appeal. To some, it is a poetic portrayal of the times, with Sauron and his destructive threat seen as an analogy to atomic war. For others, the Frodo saga represents a way to escape the mundane realities of life. "I'd like to live in the hobbit world because this world is so foul," says Marilyn Nulman, who works at the Harvard bookstore. Another enthusiast likes...