The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [228]
After many adventures which show Robin and his men gradually building up their power and determination in the shadow realm, the outlaw kingdom finally breaks out into the upper world and overthrows the Sheriff's tyranny; at just the moment when the true king, Richard the Lionheart, returns from abroad to seize back his throne from his usurping brother. Robin and his men throw off their disguises, emerge into the light and are greeted with honour by their King. Robin himself can at last assume his true upper-world identity as Earl of Huntingdon and can be properly married at last to his Marian. Everything in the kingdom is back where it should be. Merrie England has been restored to itself.
The Lord of the Rings
In the early years of the twenty-first century, Peter Jackson's imaginative three-part screen version of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings established itself as one of the most popular films ever made. One reason why we have not looked in detail before at this huge novel, originally conceived by Tolkien for his young son in the years around the Second World War, is that it is another instance of a story which is not shaped by a single basic plot but which contains elements of all seven woven together.
Tolkien's story begins in the cosy, safe world of `the Shire' - in many ways like an idealised rural England of the pre-machine age, with the innocence of childhood - where there live some little near-human creatures called hobbits. But the Shire is only, as it were, the brightly-lit foreground. Beyond it, chiefly to the east and south, stretches a vast, mysterious world from where a great shadow has lately been emerging.2 The `Dark Lord, Sauron the Great, has taken up his abode again in the `Dark Tower', in the far-off land of Mordor (with its echoes of mort, death). The shadow eventually lengthens as far as the Shire and the little hobbithero of the story, Frodo, receives the Call to a great Quest. There is a ring, of enormous magical power, but of ambivalent value: its power can be used both for good and ill, but mostly for ill. There is nothing in the world Sauron wishes to lay his hands on more, because it will make his power complete:
Frodo's task, laid on him by the old wizard Gandalf, who comes from the mysterious world beyond the Shire, is to make a long and perilous journey to the heart of distant Mordor, where he must throw the ring into a bottomless cleft in a great volcano, Mount Doom.
Such is the goal of Frodo's quest, and the greater part of the story is taken up with his journey across the hazardous terrain to Mordor. This follows the usual Quest pattern. Frodo sets out with three hobbit companions, Merry, Pippin and his gardener, the faithful Sam Gamgee; and even before they have left the Shire, shadowed by the menacing `Black Riders, they have already entered on that familiar Quest sequence of terrifying ordeals alternating with periods of respite and succour. They find allies to accompany them on the journey, until the `Company is nine strong, including representatives of all the races which inhabit the world of `Middle Earth, an elf, a dwarf and two men, one of them the tall, mysterious `Strider'. They have to confront an amazing array of enemies and deadly monsters. They have many `thrilling escapes from death'. They meet with `helpers, like the `Good King' Elrond and Galadriel, the `Lady of Lorien', `tall and white and fair, `above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth. They are also guided at crucial points by Gandalf, who even, for one stretch of the journey, becomes part of the Company, although he then plunges over an underground precipice to seeming destruction, locked in a death-grip with a particularly terrible monster, the Balrog (like Sherlock Holmes plunging with Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls). Eventually, like Holmes, Gandalf returns, in ghostly elusive form as the