RUNNING RINGS AROUND TOLKIEN:

THE RING AND THE RINGS: Wagner vs. Tolkien (ALEX ROSS, 2003-12-15, The New Yorker)

It is probably heretical to suggest that the “Lord of the Rings” films surpass the books on which they are based. (Correspondence on this subject may be addressed to Alex Ross, The North Pole.) The books tell a fantastic story in a familiar style, but the movies transcend the apparent limitations of their medium in the same way that Wagner transcended the limitations of opera. They revive the art of Romantic wonder; they manufacture the sublime. I hope that at least a small fraction of the huge worldwide audiences for these films will one day be tempted into Wagner’s world, which offers something else again. For Tolkien, myth is a window on an ideal world, both brighter and blacker than our own. For Wagner, it is a magnifying mirror for the average, desperate modern soul.

There is a widespread conception of Wagner’s cycle as a bombastic nationalistic saga in which blond-haired heroes triumph over dwarfish, vaguely Jewish enemies. Wagner unquestionably left himself open to this interpretation, but the “Ring” is not at all what it seems. It is in fact a prolonged assault on the very idea of worldly power, the cult of the monumental—everything that we think of as “Wagnerian.” At the beginning, the god Wotan is looking to expand his realm. But every step he takes to assert himself over the affairs of others, to make his will reality, leads inexorably to his downfall. He is marked from the outset, and the ring becomes a symbol of the corruption of his authority. Tolkien believes in the forces of good, in might for right. Wagner dismisses all that—he had an anarchist streak early on—and sees redemption only in love.

When Tolkien stole Wagner’s ring, he discarded its most significant property—that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it’s hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.) The sexual opacity of Tolkien’s saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron’s bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-dûr? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction.

Wagner, by contrast, uses the ring to shine a light on various intense, confused, all-too-human relationships. Alberich forges the ring only after the Rhine maidens turn away his advances. Wotan becomes obsessed with it as a consequence of his loveless marriage; he buries himself in his work. Even after he sees through his delusions, and achieves a quasi-Buddhist acceptance of his powerlessness, he has nothing else to lean on, not even his Gandalfian staff, and wanders off into the night. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, lost in their love for each other, succeed in remaking the ring as an ordinary trinket, a symbol of their devotion. They assert their earthbound passion against Wotan’s godly world, and thus bring it down. The apparatus of myth itself—the belief in higher and lower powers, hierarchies, orders—crumbles with the walls of Valhalla. Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.

Admittedly, the notion of the “Ring” cycle as some sort of sexual hothouse can seem far-fetched when the operas are seen in performance. People like to think of Wagner as a lot of large people standing around and singing loudly, and they are not mistaken. The Met lacks a Heldentenor who looks even a little bit like Viggo Mortensen. But if in the opera house you sometimes notice a discrepancy between what you hear in the libretto and music and what you see onstage it is no less distracting than what moviegoers are asked to believe on a routine basis. You don’t ask whether an elf could kill an oliphaunt, or even what an oliphaunt is; you go along with the premise. It is the same in opera. The premise is that performers trained as opera singers are going to assume action-hero roles. Squint a little and it’s all fine.

Having been introduced to the story, improbably enough, by an adaptation in the Thor comic book, I saw the Seattle Opera do the Ring Cycle in Summer 1981. At the intermissions, little old ladies would elbow their ways past you to get to the bar and then bitterly complain about how much better it was in Bayreuth in '38, when the Fuhrer attended. Meanwhile, the Seventh Day Adventists were in town for some kind of convocation, but the church had declared the imminent end of days and folks were selling their homes and giving the proceeds to the church, so protestors, afraid of recriminations, were marching with black hoods over their heads, that they might not be recognized by other church members. All in all it was like being trapped in a scene from Cabaret.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 30, 2003 11:57 AM