As I said above, I came reluctantly and very late to the Harry Potter saga, as a Tolkien fan prepared to be dismissive. And I was thoroughly won over. Rowling’s work may fall short of Tolkien’s in sheer mythological scope, grandeur and sublimity; yet it also exceeds its predecessor in other areas –Rowling, for instance, is far better at building, and managing, suspense.
Here are some of the many parallels and echoes — and some central differences — between the two works that I noticed as I raced through the Potter books these past weeks. These notes are offered as a comparison between two masterworks, with no particular agenda and no desire to rank them. (Spoiler alert: if you’re in the dwindling portion of the populace that has not yet read the Potter cycle, you’ll probably want to skip the rest.)
In Tolkien’s work, as in its mythic models, good and evil are pre-existing poles to which characters, and whole races, simply align. There are complex characters in Lord of the Rings whose nature is ambiguous — Boromir, in his way, or Gollum, in his — but they are rarities. We do not particularly know or care how or why Sauron became the Dark Lord; that is simply what he is. Rowling’s Dark Lord has a personal history that explains, though hardly excuses, his evildoing: indeed, Harry’s gradual discovery of that history — and how it in part parallels his own — forms one of the central arcs of Rowling’s books.
Frodo and Harry are both “little” people who have greatness thrust upon them, but Frodo is more truly a nobody; Harry, though Rowling makes a little fun of his status as “the Chosen One,” is born to specialness — it’s just that he’s still a kid when we meet him, and he needs to grow into his power.
Both Frodo and Harry are orphans raised by uncles — but for Harry, this fact is formative, where for Frodo it seems almost incidental. The Potter books are all about families and Family: the bad guys believe in an aristocracy based on bloodline; the good folks understand family as a bond of love. The evil regimes of both worlds bear resemblance to the Third Reich, but in Rowling’s books the racial-purity parallel is explicit. The Potter series makes a case for tolerance, diversity, and the cherishing of misfits that is more thoroughly modern than Tolkien’s. The redemption of house elves like Dobby and Kreacher recalls the partial redemption of Gollum, but Tolkien would never frame this as a matter of “liberation.” (Of course, when Rowling does so, it’s with a healthy dose of humorous irony.)
The tale of The Lord of the Rings unfolds across the long majestic arc of a single quest, where the Potter books are more episodic: each new book brings a whole new set of Maguffin-like objects and new information. On the other hand, Rowling’s work proceeds across its own grand trajectory — that of Harry’s bildungsroman, his coming of age, worked out year by Hogwarts year, mystery by solved mystery.
The similarity of the Ring and the Horcruxes is obvious — objects that each Dark Lord has endowed with a portion of his power and that must be destroyed. As Frodo’s quest nears its conclusion, the Ring grows heavy and painful and begins to have a mind of its own; the Horcrux that Harry and his companions haul around through much of their final book is particularly Ring-like in this way. Frodo gradually spends more and more time in the darkness of Sauron’s dimension; Harry, similarly, finds his scar aching and his mind tracking Voldemort’s. The long passages in The Deathly Hallows in which Harry, Ron and Hermione hole up in a tent on the run from Voldemort’s Ministry share the narrative shape and emotional desolation of the chapters in The Two Towers and The Return of the King that follow Frodo and Sam on their lonely journey into Mordor.
There’s probably a zillion other interesting points of overlap or contrast. That Potter provides fodder for this sort of comparison is, I think, a tribute to Rowling’s achievement. Now I’d better go back and re-read His Dark Materials — I’m afraid that I read Pullman’s books on such thin sleep (we had babies then) that I remember little of them, other than my delight.
[tags]Harry Potter, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, J.K. Rowling[/tags]
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