Visionary fantasy but with no link with our world

Rating: 9/10 (11 January 2007)

This first episode of this cult saga has an essential function. It is supposed to set the community from which everything is going to start after the quick summary of what this ring is all about, power. We thus have to learn first hand about the hobbits, the dwarfs, the elves, the kobolds, and of course enough to know they exist about the dark forces. It is also supposed to set the decor for magic. A good wizard and a bad wizard. This is slightly innovative on the great model as for wizards, Merlin. The bad one was a woman. Here the bad one is an friend of the good one, another male. No sexual innuendo. We are writing a saga for modern teenagers and kids, so sex is out. This first episode is also there to select the final heroes. We start from an accidental designation or appointment of one young hobbit. Then we move to a wider circle in some human town. It becomes the Fellowship of the Ring. They are nine, an ominous number but not necessarily bad. And the rest of this first part is the elimination of four of them. First the wizard because we are going to deal with power, force, courage, and no magic. Anyway the wizard was apparently very powerless and not very swift. Magic first and thinking second, like some kind of cowboy turned magician : shoot first and ask questions second. He got what he deserved, death in the grip of some underground devilish  horns, fire and all  monster. Then two hobbits are captured and taken away by the monster-warriors sent by the dark forces. And finally one of the two humans who was attracted by the ring and wanted to assume its power thinking that its power was neither good nor bad but that it depended upon the person who wore it. He is deadly wounded in the last battle. Then finally this first part enables us to separate the five survivors into two groups. In one boat the hobbit who is the ring-carrier and his friend the hobbit Sam who is looking after him. On the other hand, and on foot, one human, one dwarf and one elf. All that is supposed to entangle us into some unconsciously significant structures or patterns. A pair of identical beings who carry the ring and a trio of three different beings meaning the alliance of all against the dark forces without whom the mission cannot be carried out, but that are only supporting warriors, not the main ones since they do not have the ring itself. This general design unluckily carries too much the seal of Christian imagery. The dark forces are seen necessarily as devilish, satanic, with hooves, horns and spitting fire, and then their warriors are ugly, gross, disgusting in all possible ways. They are of course not courageous, for on their side it can only be bestiality. On the other side you have courage, handsomeness, beauty, femininity though at a fair and cautious distance, friendship, faithfulness, the sense of an ethical if not even moral mission set to you not by greed or envy or some other of these deadly sins, but by a vast sense of destiny, progress, salvation, redemption, etc. That is very common today and « The Lord of The Rings » is the model of all the tales of the type. It associates fantasy, medievalism, the basic war dynamic of good versus evil. But it does not reach the level of real fantasticity, at the most some religious marvelous or bizarre wizardry, at the utter most gothicness. It does not reach science-fiction because there is no possible link between this ancient world and ours. Humans are secondary and by definition stated from the very start as unreliable because they can change allegiances in no time : they are dominated by their passions, particularly envy, greed, jealousy or even love. That makes them unreliable. But this modern saga is heavily inspired from Nordic sagas and of course the fundamental one in an Anglo-Saxon world, to know « Beowulf ». Many differences exist but the link or links are numerous. But yet this total severance from our modern world makes it a story with no direct impact on us, no gate from there and then to here and now. We are not directly concerned in our very being, only in our sentimentality, or fear, in one word pathos. For real fantastic science-fiction fantasy we will have to wait for Stephen King and his Dark Tower.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne