mens rea

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.

What’s happened is that they’ve mistaken a specific brand of subversive storytelling for the only way to tell a morally complex story. The fact that subversion is relative to what you’re talking about has gotten muddied, because people have gone and labelled a certain plot type (which is actually a new fantasy staple in and of itself) as the ‘grey’ or ‘morally complex’ storyline.

This type of storyline is, of course, the one where the distinctions between heroes and villains are deliberately blurred. While there is definitely room to do things like ‘question the accuracy of the heroes’ perception of orcs’ in LotR, it’s also very clear that the canon narrative isn’t aiming for that. We know who the heroes are and we know who the villains are, and apart from some stray moments of self-reflection or betrayal, this is never really brought into question.

The Moon in paintings by Mariusz Lewandowski