How Is Star Wars Like The Lord of the Rings?

Q: How Is Star Wars Like The Lord of the Rings?

ANSWER: It is virtually impossible to discuss Star Wars without wandering into the realm of “sources for George Lucas’ vision”. But now that George Lucas is no longer the guiding light of Star Wars canon it remains to be seen just how much future SW stories will resemble any of the classic 20th century science fiction and fantasy literature. We will probably have to differentiate between Classic Star Wars and Disney Star Wars, or something like that. We have already heard bits and pieces about “the new Star Wars canon” and old school Star Wars fans may not like just how much of their beloved Extended Universe may be about to vanish into the folds of Rebooted Franchisedom. It is probably no mistake that J.J. Abrams was brought in to manage the first post-Lucasian Star Wars film, “The Force Awakens”.

But we began with a simple question: “How is Star Wars Like The Lord of the Rings?” You will find a thousand different answers on the Internet and I debated long and hard before deciding to tackle this. But let’s see if I can find something sort of new to say.

Both Stories are About A Family George Lucas has been quoted in the media as saying that Classic Star Wars was a soap opera. It is about the adventures and turmoils of the Skywalker family. He does not think The Disney Company will stay true to that vision. They may make Star Wars more like a comic book franchise such as the Marvel superhero universe. That is now what Disney knows best.

But how is The Lord of the Rings a family drama? You’re thinking about Bilbo leaving the One Ring to Frodo, but I have a different family in mind. The family J.R.R. Tolkien was most concerned with was a blended family of Noldor and Sindar. Really it was two families: the descendants of Finwë and Elwë. More specifically he was most concerned with the descendants of Lúthien Tinúviel, Elwë’s daughter. Lúthien, like Anakin Skywalker, had only one “normal” parent. But whereas Anakin is a child of The Force (and is often compared with Jesus’ virginal conception), Lúthien is merely the child of an elf (Elwë) and an angel (Melian).

Both Lúthien and Anakin possess incredible power compared to other people like them. But this comparison is, I think, more coincidental than intentional. After all George Lucas had written the script for “Star Wars” before 1977 and that was the year in which The Silmarillion was first published. In fact, “Star Wars” was released into theaters in May 1977 and The Silmarillion was published in October 1977.

Of course people should quickly realize that we don’t really know much about Anakin Skywalker until after “Star Wars” comes out. There was some information in the novelization that accompanied the movie but certain details were kept from the public for years. Furthermore, Lúthien never converted to the Dark Side of anything. She always remained good, and she never brought any sort of balance to Middle-earth.

So when we say that The Lord of the Rings is a family drama (or saga) we have to really look at it in the context of the larger drama that J.R.R. Tolkien was concerned with: the struggles of the Noldor with their innate curiosity and arrogance. This was not something that came from Lúthien; she was more like Shmi Skywalker in temperament.

Both “Star Wars” and The Lord of the Rings are but Chapters This is an important point in any comparison between the two sagas. Just as The Silmarillion came out after The Lord of the Rings, thus explaining all the back history that was only alluded to, so Lucas’ Prequel Trilogy only came out after the Original Trilogy. And despite what self-appointed guardians of Star Wars fandom want people to believe, “The Phantom Menace” remains the most popular of all six George Lucas Star Wars films. Now that Lucas has left the Star Wars stage there is no hope of another Lucas film unseating “The Phantom Menace” as the best of the six movies.

The Silmarillion, on the other hand, does not compare as favorably with The Lord of the Rings as the Prequel Trilogy does with the Original Trilogy. The Silmarillion is hard to understand and is written in a very different style from The Lord of the Rings. Far fewer copies of The Silmarillion have been sold than copies of The Lord of the Rings. Although Tolkien himself might have thought of The Silmarillion as his literary masterpiece that honor is bestowed by critics and readers upon The Lord of the Rings.

And yet both the Prequel Trilogy and The Silmarillion surpass their predecessors in several ways. With the Prequel Trilogy George Lucas was finally able to tell the story of Anakin Skywalker the way he wanted to. We did not all necessarily approve of his choices but this was his story to tell and it is good that he did tell it. In the same way, The Silmarillion is the story that J.R.R. Tolkien wanted to tell. The Lord of the Rings was a distraction to him, written for the masses simply because his publisher advised him in 1937 that his readers wanted to know more about Hobbits.

Well, we learned about Hobbits soon enough but that digression post-poned (while making possible) the publication of The Silmarillion by several decades.

Both “Star Wars” and The Lord of the Rings had to be told first It is no mere coincidence that both tales end their sagas, although Lucas was not necessarily following the same path as Tolkien. It is true that when George Lucas showed his agent the original story that became Star Wars his agent advised him to tone it down because it was “too confusing”. When J.R.R. Tolkien presented an early draft of The Silmarillion to his publisher (George Allen & Unwin), who had happily sought him out so they could publish The Hobbit (which originally was only intended for family and friends to enjoy), he was told it was “too Celtic”.

Tolkien was stung by the application of the “Celtic” label to his work since he deemed it to be written in an experimental Anglo-Saxonist tradition. But no one really understood what The Silmarillion was supposed to be. It was something like Spencer’s “Faerie Queen” (and not — as many today wrongly say — “a mythology for England”), a fantasy meant for high-minded souls who wanted to think about their literature. The Silmarillion may also have been a cathartic experience for Tolkien who, having witnessed the horrors of the First World War up close (and having lost many friends to the war), chastised his rebellious Noldor with slaughter and widespread devastation.

The sinking of Beleriand is very much like the destruction of northern France, which was churned into a muddy, lifeless no-man’s land. In “Star Wars” we see something similar with the destruction of Alderaan. The Death Star is the culmination of the Emperor’s quest for complete control over the galaxy. His ultimate weapon threatens to turn the galaxy into a lifeless sea of stars.

But Lucas was no war veteran. He began his film-making career in the era of Vietnam War protests, to be sure, but he was not trying to cope with the horrors of seeing almost an entire generation wiped out on the battlefields. Lucas had his own demons but they were somehow smaller.

And yet J.R.R. Tolkien had to publish The Lord of the Rings first because his readers wanted to know more about Hobbits; Lucas had to tell just a small part of his story because his audience would not understand the damn thing unless they saw a good guy defeating a bad guy. Whereas Tolkien had to tie off the end of the story Lucas had to reassure everyone that there was a good resolution.

The Bad Guys Win in Both Prequels Yes, the bad guys win in The Silmarillion. I’m not talking about Morgoth, although Sauron slips away in a Darth Vaderish fashion. I’m talking about the Noldor. They are the bad guys of The Silmarillion. If it were not for their arrogance and conceit none of Tolkien’s dramatic stories would have happened. So Morgoth (hardly an innocent) is done away with and the Orcs are swept away like fields of wheat before the fire, and most of the Noldor are slain. But a few of them survive and thrive and seize control over Middle-earth.

In the same way the Sith seize control over the galaxy at the end of the Prequel Trilogy. We knew that was coming because “Star Wars” (aka “A New Hope”) opened up with a struggling rebellion against the evil Empire. And just as the Sith go on to make their Death Star so the Noldor go on to make their Rings of Power.

Now this is the interesting thing for me because the One Ring is sometimes compared with the Death Star by fans who want to talk about similarities between the two stories. And there are similarities in purpose. But whereas the Death Star is used to control the galaxy through fear, the One Ring is used to control others through direct mind control. The One Ring is more like a Jedi’s mind trick magnified to galactic scale. Imagine what Darth Sidious could have accomplished if he had trapped the Fellowship of the Ring in some bizarre crossover tale (okay, I am sure someone has written that story somewhere).

Either way, you cannot have the defining the struggle in The Lord of the Rings without some bad guys (High Elves of the West) doing something evil (creating Rings of Power) prior to the story. The situation has to be such that great evil already exists in Middle-earth. Why? Because Tolkien did not have the luxury of showing how evil would gain control over Middle-earth in his sequel to The Hobbit.

It would be generations before a reading public would have the patience to tolerate a “rise and fall and redemption” saga cover 12-20 books. In fact, when I attended World Fantasy Con in 1992 I asked a panel of world-famous fantasy authors, who were deploring the endless production of LoTR-like trilogies, if it were conceivable that someone could plan a 20-book saga (I already had an outline for one written at home). The entire audience, a few hundred people, groaned so loudly that the panelists felt no need to answer my question, although Roger Zelazny gamely pointed out that it was already sort of happening just because publishers kept asking for more sequels. Zelazny died before he was able to finish a second series of novels about his fantasy world Amber, but other authors who went on to write huge cycles included Christopher Stasheff and Robert Jordan.

Today you almost cannot sell a major fantasy series if you don’t have 20 books in mind. The readers expect to learn more about your fantasy world than a single book can possibly reveal. These mega stories did not begin with Tolkien (Mark Twain, for example, wrote four Tom Sawyer novels if you include Hucklebery Finn). But mega stories are now what everyone wants, from five-year television show arcs to multi-decade comic book sequences (not allowing for endless reboots).

When Tolkien was writing fiction and Lucas was creating the Star Wars universe all that megastory stuff still lay in the future. They had to show their audiences that there was indeed “an end” to the story (even if it was not “THE end”). And in both endings good guys had to win, some guys had to die, and everyone had to rejoice that a great evil had passed.

Only by revealing how their stories ended were both Tolkien and Lucas free to go back to tell how their stories began.

There are Some Wise Old Guys in Both Star Wars and Middle-earth You cannot escape the endless comparisons between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gandalf, but I’m going to compare Yoda to Treebeard and Tom Bombadil. You cannot tell “Star Wars” without Yoda and you cannot tell The Lord of the Rings without Bombadil and Treebeard. All three characters serve an important purpose in both sagas: they bear witness to a yet more ancient past than the official “beginning” of the sagas. Technically The Silmarillion begins with Iluvatar in the Timeless Halls but “Quenta Silmarillion” quickly gets to the part where there are Elves in Middle-earth and from those Elves come the Finwëans and Elwëans.

Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga is rightly the story of the descendants of Finwë and Elwë. Lucas’ Star Wars saga is rightly the story of the Skywalker family. But in both sagas there exist older, wiser beings who step up to fill in some gaps in knowledge. And when our end-of-story heroes need some special help the Old Wise Guys come in to offer final bits of sage advice before wandering off into the past to be forgotten.

Bombadil and Treebeard may go on living in Middle-earth but they are never heard from again. Yoda fades into the Force (although he becomes a “Force ghost”). Part of the mystique of the long-winded fantasy saga is the imparting of wisdom from an ancient elder to a young disciple. Belgarath teaches young Garion in The Belgariad, Zeddicus teaches Richard Rahl in The Sword of Truth, and so on. The trope is repeated in endless stories. If the elder is not physically present to lecture the headstrong young future savior then there is almost inevitably an ancient archive where the needed wisdom resides.

So maybe it is not fair to compare Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings this way, but the Old Wise Guys are integral to both stories. And both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gandalf die, only to come back stronger than before. You really cannot tell this kind of family saga without a few Old Wise Guys hanging around to dispense wisdom and explain things for the audience (which is their main function in the story).

The Old Wise Guy is not always a mentor. He appears in many forms. He is a tree stump of a thousand hack jobs. He might be a redeemed Theoden leading Aragorn to the Paths of the Dead, or he may be a Mace Windu trying to steer Anakin Skywalker away from the clutches of Darth Sidious. There are always Old Wise Guys in these stories. The only interesting story I can think of where there were no Old Wise Guys was a short story by Isaac Asimov (or maybe Lester del Rey) in which five robots “woke up” with no memory of how they came to be. But even then the author wrote a prequel story explaining where the robots came from and, yup, there were Old Wise Guys in it. See the animated movie “Nine” for a similar tale that also features an Old Wise Guy.

Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings both Feature Racist Stereotypes I am not talking about Jar Jar Binks and the Neimoidians, neither of whose alleged ethnic influences have ever been successfully pinned down by irate fans. They are curious, innovative blends of many cultural influences and George Lucas should be commended for stirring so much debate among his audience with those “cardboard” (but impossible-to-explain) caricatures.

No, the racism I speak of in “Star Wars” is the clear bias against Droids and the oh-so-subtle “we-humans-rule-this-galaxy” attitude of the Empire. You do see alien creatures serving the Empire’s interests but their motivation seem to be economic in nature: they are cheap assassins and spies. It’s the human race that rules the galaxy.

In The Lord of the Rings almost every chapter drips with racism. Tolkien hated racism and he all but lectured us on the evils of racist stereotypes with every encounter between any two foreign groups. All the readers seem to take away from that is “Elves and Dwarves hate each other” (which is not true but people have been telling each other that fib for 60 years so you won’t get them to stop any time soon).

I think Lucas uses racism in the same way Tolkien does: he wants his good guys to be flawed in a socially significant way. Not all humans are bad in the Star Wars universe but they have a problem with Droids. Why is that? We finally learn why in the Prequel Trilogy. Meanwhile, in the Original Trilogy, the anti-Droid bias is an interesting and inexplicable characteristic of a foreign culture. We honestly don’t get the joke, and that is part of what makes the story feel so real. The audience cannot fill in all the facts.

In The Lord of the Rings there are good reasons why the various “Free Peoples” have trouble trusting each other, and it’s not because of mutual natural enmity. It’s because Sauron drove them apart over centuries through a long, meticulous plan. But you have to read the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings to catch that. Or if you miss it there then you have to read “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” in The Silmarillion. Even so many readers today still don’t understand why no one trusts anyone else in Tolkien’s late Third Age Middle-earth.

Small Things Have Great Consequences in Both Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings I speak of the plans for the Death Star and of the One Ring. No one really understands the significance of what he is carrying at first. Luke is handed two Droids by his uncle and told to clean them up and put them into service. Frodo is left the One Ring by his cousin/uncle/adoptive father Bilbo and told not to lose it. In neither case does either young adventurer understand that he has just been handed the keys to the kingdom.

The Death Star plans eventually end up in the right hands so that they can be analyzed. But when it comes down to destroying the Death Star only Luke Skywalker can do the deed with an impossible shot fired from a speeding X-Wing fighter that is under fire from Darth Vader.

The One Ring eventually crushes Frodo’s will and forces him to “rat out”, give in, and claim it for himself. Fortunately for all of Middle-earth Gollum has been hanging around hoping for a last chance to seize the Ring and he does just that, impossibly falling into the fire with it.

Small things have great consequences in both sagas, and neither is an accident. Just as Frodo was meant to inherit the Ring from Bilbo, so Anakin was meant to help others with his special gift. They were both born for a purpose, a greater purpose than either could fully appreciate.

We can argue all year long about how much Lucas was directly influenced by Tolkien but I don’t think that matters. Tolkien was borrowing tropes from older sources and Lucas borrowed his inspirations from many sources, too. Great story-telling all looks similar sooner or later.

We had a pretty good run with both Lucas and Tolkien. I can’t say I was entirely happy with everything Tolkien wrote or failed to explain; nor can I say I was entirely happy with everything Lucas put into his movies.

But I loved both stories and will always love them. Maybe it’s because they are so much alike in so many ways. Maybe it’s because they are just darned good stories.

See also:

• Xenite.Org’s Star Wars Movies Portal
• Is It True There Is Racism in The Lord of the Rings?
• Shhh! It’s a Secret Ring!
• It’s All in the Family: The Finwëans
• It’s All in the Family: The Elwëans and Ingwëans

# # #

Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?

15

Click to Like