Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Michael D.C. Drout gives a talk titled "Lord of the Rings: How to Read J.R.R. Tolkien" which you can find on YouTube here

I would encourage anyone to watch it but since I found it interesting I'll summarize at least what I got out of the lecture.


A topic which is common across a lot of Tolkien discussions is how the book creates a sense of consistent reality that occurs within the universe. As if The Lord of the Rings was a real history, written, re-written, and amended through time. This sense of true history and the manner in which the story is told creates a sensation of learning and generates nostalgia for the past but of course the past is lost. How does Tolkien achieve this? Well by being a philologist.

Creating a sensation of history

Tolkien was building a textual ruin, practicing the art of "literary tribology" as Drout puts it. Culturally in many cases we are fascinated by aging of things, we find ruins beautiful, we distress jeans, people even pay to have their guitars "relic"d.

But how does one create a textual ruin? By copying the features of real textual ruins, like Beowulf. Real textual ruins have a sense that though incomplete the texts were once coherent, even 'when written by multiple hands over time. They contain cultural references which are consistent and which persist over time.

Drout distinguishes between a "Broken Refernce" and a "Pseudo Reference" the latter being a reference essentially made up which has no other source (like the cats of Queen Berúthiel at the time it was written) while the former is a reference with some external story which is told elsewhere (such as the references to Húrin and Túrin). All of the references in the Lord of the Rings (save the cats at the time of writing) are "broken references". These broken references are mostly recognizable to the reader as different, but especially so when they are used in a consistent fashion. At no point in Beowulf, Drout explains, do the broken references conflict internally or externally with other texts, despite being a story with trolls and dragons.

This use of broken references also creates a sense of "reverse dramatic irony" when the characters know more than the readers (that is, they understand the reference, no one goes "the cat's of Queen who?"). Many of these broken references also appear to be "poetic devices" being often verse or at least containing alliteration, meter, or rhyme. This is common in real "textual ruins" because alliteration, meter, and rhyme, etc., are of stable references because the structure makes them easy to remember they tend to persist when stories are re-told or re-written.

The re-telling and re-writing which occurs in textual relics is another device which Tolkien deploys. The Lord of the Rings has a frame narrative and is in fact a revised version of the Red Book, already containing several layers of textual history in itself -- let alone the references to other stories outside of the text. Tolkien employs different narrative forms, there's spontaneous verse and translation, high brow prose, but also hobbit jokes and songs. It's a book that seems to have many authors. In fact, there are even some textual inconsistences which are evidence of multiple hands. For example, who is oldest, Bombadil or Treebeard?

Gandalf, The Council of Elrond, FotR wrote: But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless

but also

Gandalf, The White Rider, TTT wrote: Treebeard is Fangorn, the guardian of the forest; he is the oldest of the Ents, the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth

The Least Knowledgeable Character POV

Drout points out that Tolkien achieves this sensation of textual history without completely losing the reader and also without having the dreaded "Chapter two: on the people, history, culture of my fantasy world". He uses a technique which Drout calls the "Least Knowledgeable Character Point of View". Tolkien rarely uses an omniscient third person narrator and instead in almost all of the chapters chooses the Least Knowledgeable Character (LKC) as the reader's point of view.

By doing this, as the LKC goes through the scene anything which is important for them they must learn and consequently we learn as the reader. In that way what is happening to the character who's perspective we're reading, learning, is also happening to us, the reader. So in addition to this sense of learning it also gives Tolkien an opportunity to do exposition about the world in a manner befit of a textual ruin which surely would not contain such a "chapter two".


I found Drout's lecture to be very interesting (obviously I made a post and summary about it). When asked about what I enjoyed about Tolkien I've always pointed to the sense that it's "history" which is often not present in other fantasy, at least in the same way. The consistency of the references (e.g. that you don't explicitly contradict yourself) was easy enough for a non-philologist like me to pick up on. But it didn't seem a sufficient response for why The Lord of the Rings had this compelling truth feeling to it. I've read a handful of Tolkien analysis books (mostly Shippey, Flieger, Scull & Hammond) and it's quite possible that this material is present in those works but this was the first time I've seen such a excellent summary of how he creates a "textual ruin" and consequently why it's such a popular book among so many people. If you enjoyed any of my summary (even if you didn't) I highly recommend watching the lecture he does a much much better job than me.

It's quite interesting, as you point out, that Tolkien also follows this "epistemic regime" where the characters know more than the reader as a mechanism by which to create a strong sense of in-universe lore (secondary creation) but then complements that by using the LKC instead of using the most knowledgeable character and having them explain either through internal monolog (which Tolkien doesn't use that often) or through external dialog with another character. I think Drout's point is that Tolkien chooses the PoV of the LKC because if you're going to have the dialog explaining some unknown concept to the reader (Tolkien seems to prefer expository dialog over expository internal monologue) that if the perspective you're taking on is the LKC (rather than the one with the knowledge) then you experience learning simultaneously as the character whose perspective you're reading from gains the knowledge. I don't think he necessarily does this as a way to avoid telling intricate experiences, he just has them be explained by characters like Gandalf or Legolas to the reader via the LKC rather than the other way around.

Aikári Salmarinian wrote: ↑Sat Mar 05, 2022 9:44 am Romeran: Thanks for posting and linking this subject!
My way of writing leans more in the epistemic regime, the characters know more than the writer.

Taking it a step even further I see!

A most excellent summary. And i do most humbly thank you, Romeran, for bringing 'Tolkien scholarship' to this table. I comment after reading your post but not viewing the lecture; but i have seen another lecture by Michael Drout, and I do really rate him - he is Shippey's heir, but with neither Shippey's silver-tongue nor agenda. He is, first and foremost, a Beowulf scholar, and i have a deep sense that all who follow Tolkien long and deep enough come to the conclusion that most of what is going on in LOTR is found in his ruminations on Beowulf. The philological points you reiterate are cases in point, Drout sees Tolkien reading Beowulf as he himself reads Lord of the Rings - and can tell us what he sees.

The point where I raise an eyebrow is once this lecture passes beyond itself and into the wider stream of 'Tolkien scholarship', which has an unerring tendency to seize upon an insight and make of it a blindfold. Drout is a professional scholar, an Anglo-Saxonist, and thus brings to his talk not only his professional skills and knowledge but also a border, a place where his reading of LOTR stops. What can go wrong (and I am thinking about something I read recently) is that Drout's points about the creation of the sense of historical depth can appear the last word on the 'historicity' of Middle-earth in the late Third Age - as we who read what is drawn out of the Red Book discover it.

What I mean is that the old and ancient stories and allusions and references are sprinkled into a story in which some of the old and ancient people in these stories step into this story: think Elrond explaining to Frodo that he witnessed the Last Alliance, or Bombadil's obscure reference to the ancient history of the Barrow-downs and the line of lost kings, which introduces Aragorn, or at the heart of the journey we enter the Golden Wood, a land of myth out of its own time that must vanish from the face of historical Middle-earth if the quest succeeds, and so these broken references are more than merely creating 'a feel of historical depth', they are fitting the story of the end of the Third Age, the story preserved first at Undertowers in the early fourth age, with the 'origins' of that story in the 'mythical War of the Rings' of the Second Age.

I mean its not only about philological technique. The feel of a true history that you allude to in your last paragraph is bound up in a clear vision of the relationship of different ages of the world, specifically of the relationship of myth (origin) and legend (history). This framework I think Tolkien drew out of his story of 'The Fall of Númenor', and is intimately bound up in his Beowulf studies but in a kind of 'far out' or speculative or conceptually too ambitious manner for Drout to feel comfortable investigating - but it seems to me that it is the other side of what he recounts.

Just adding the context of my post above, and also some of my posts concerning the 2nd Age. A while back a friend sent me a manuscript he had just composed on the One Ring. It is really very good! But in passing he brought in just this kind of Drout-take on Tolkien establishing historical depth, but in the specific context of a discussion of Celebrimbor and his doings. This really set me thinking because, while I agree that the hints and allusions to the mythical 2nd Age War of the Rings do indeed give historical depth to the story of the legendary War of the Ring that ended the Third Age, I feel in my bones that the two wars, as also the story of Celebrimbor and the characters of LOTR, are connected in a deeper way. I'm not quite sure, but I have a sense that the 2nd Age stories give a kind of mythic form of the themes around which the legendary 3rd Age narrative is woven.

@Chrysophylax Dives Am I understanding your point as it’s more than just a set of “true” broken references. A true story at a point in time cannot exist without the history that defined it. In some mechanical senses like the language in which it is written or the words that are chosen. But also the themes and the culture of the people in the stories are fundamentally products of their history. In this sense the story that is told in The Lord of the Rings has this sense of history not just because the references are broken and that it’s is written in a way that mimics a historical test like Beowulf. But also because the story of the lord of the rings, the creation of the ring, the wizards, Aragorn and the Rangers, Boromir and Gondor, the hobbits and the eventual destruction of the ring, the very themes of rings and jewels of power, are also products of the “historical” first and second age. And thus they feel “real” because they have a “real history” which generated them.

Or are you more referring to parallel themes across the two ages?