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In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael Drout has set out on a very ambitious goal of describing the methods J.R.R. Tolkien used to create stories that feel qualitatively different than most 20th century literature. I am very happy to report that he has achieved that goal.
This may be the most significant book-length piece of Tolkien criticism in the last decade, if not longer. In fact, it likely deserves a spot among the quintessential tomes of Tolkien scholarship such as Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth and Author of the Century, Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light, and John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War.
This post is part review and part reflection.
Rating: 10/10 (5 stars on Goodreads)
Reminders of a Bygone Home
Drout’s specific aim, as he describes in the introduction, is “to explain…how Tolkien’s stories work, both in their internal functioning and in the ways they affect their readers” (13). To do this, he relies on the titular metaphor of towers and ruins.
“Towers are achievements, visible expressions of design and knowledge, technology and labor” (16), while ruins preserve “the memory of what has been at the cost of making it impossible not to recognize what has been lost” (17). To encapsulate the idea of such memory, Drout turns to the German word Heimweh (“pain for the lost home”), an emotion which “is never absent from The Lord of the Rings, but…[is] transmuted into a sadness that we can accept because we understand the shape and texture of that sorrow” (15).
The reason that heimweh is never absent from The Lord of the Rings is that Tolkien has strewn ruins—that is, the physical reminders of a deeper past—throughout the entire story. Some of them are explicit, such as the ruins on Weathertop or at Amon Hen. Others are subtler, such as Aragorn’s compressed rendition of the tale of Beren and Lúthien or Sam’s surreal observation about being part of the ongoing Great Tales. Still others are textual, such as the framing of The Lord of the Rings as a work of many minds and hands. And some of those ruins are even mistakes that Tolkien left in the story—inadvertently or otherwise—artifacts from his various drafts and revisions that lead to confusions, misinterpretations (or at least differing interpretations), and contradictions in the story.
This insight, that the flaws of The Lord of the Rings (as well as Tolkien’s other stories) contribute to its distinctiveness among 20th century literature, becomes the basis for the core chapters of Drout’s book. He demonstrates the idea across seven dimensions, one per chapter:
- Origins
- Frames
- Texts
- Patterns
- Emotions
- Threads
- Tapestry
In each case, Drout makes a strong argument for showing not only that Tolkien was intentionally trying to capture heimweh, but that even the author’s errors contributed to the overall effect in a way almost reminiscent of Eru Ilúvatar’s reshaping of Melkor’s attempts to introduce dissonance into the Music of the Ainur.
One heuristic on effective scholarship that I’ve developed over the years is when a scholar is able to lead the reader down a path such that it continually clears just a few steps ahead of you. Drout’s arguments in this book are so well done, that I found myself repeatedly forming conclusions a page or two before he led me to them.
One such example—the only one for which I have any evidence—is when I texted a friend who was part of Drout’s “Author’s Circle” to ask if he knew whether any lexomics analysis had been done to determine the different fictional authors of various parts of The Lord of the Rings. I was on the last couple pages left of Chapter 2, “Frames,” when I sent it, and I got the reply:
“Yes, keep reading.”
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to predict what occurs in Chapter 3, “Texts.”
Good Will Heimweh
I read The Tower and the Ruin from December 6, 2025, through January 6, 2026. On Christmas Eve during that stretch, my (adult) children came to my house to eat and watch movies and open gifts. One of the movies we watched was Good Will Hunting.
The film originally came out in December 1997, less than a year before my dad died. It was a favorite of mine from the start, but after my dad’s passing, it became a consolatory watch for reasons I never quite put my finger on until reading Drout’s book and re-watching the film with my own kids.
There’s a scene where Will (Matt Damon) explains to his therapist Sean (Robin Williams) why he has not scheduled a second date with Skylar (Minnie Driver). Sean calls out Will for cowardice, suggesting that he doesn’t want to break the illusion of perfection he cultivated on their first date.
Sean then goes on to laughingly describe one of the things he remembers about his late wife:
My wife used to fart when she was nervous. She had all sorts of little idiosyncrasies. You know, she used to fart in her sleep…One night, it was so loud, she woke the dog up.… Oh Christ, but Will, she’s been dead for two years and that’s the shit I remember. It’s wonderful stuff, you know? Little things like that. Yeah, but those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about. That’s what made her my wife.… People call these things “imperfections,” but they’re not. Ah, that’s the good stuff. And then we get to choose who we let in to our weird little worlds.
In my understanding of Drout’s argument, this is a form of heimweh, a longing not only for a lost place, but also for a lost sense of belonging, a lost sense of affection, a lost sense of fellowship. Ruins might trigger memories of a specific place, but the real desire is to be with the people who were there and who helped make it home.
That The Lord of the Rings triggers this feeling in readers is a testament to the empathy that such stories can engender within us. Readers don’t have any direct ties to Middle-earth, but experiencing the characters’ heimweh vicariously throughout the story, they become attached to the memory of a place that never actually existed, but which nevertheless feels exceedingly real.
And that’s the thing I’ve struggled to put my finger on when it comes to The Lord of the Rings, Good Will Hunting, or pretty much any other story I’ve been most closely drawn to over the years. They’re the stories that help us remember what it means to remember, which is not to yearn for the past but to keep the memory of that past in sight while still moving forward, regardless of whether that forward movement translates to “Well, I’m back” or “I had to go see about a girl.”
For me, at least, I think part of this is because truly happy endings don’t feel real. But hopeful endings are real, because hopeful endings are those that see the ruins, remind you of the tower they represent, and suggest that it’s possible to build another one that becomes a new home. A new tower doesn’t obviate either the ruins or the lost tower, but it does give you a way to remember them without remaining focused only on loss and decay.
Neither The Lord of the Rings nor Good Will Hunting have happy endings, but they’re certainly both hopeful.
