A Long Grey Road: Notes on The Fellowship of the Ring

I started to read The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was twelve. In retrospect, I was a bit too young: my memories of the year it took me to trudge wide-eyed through the trilogy mostly consist of spellbound confusion. But the story has never really left my mind since — I adore the films, and I have little mementos of Tolkien’s world strewn around my room: a Middle-Earth map on my wall, a Lorien Leaf brooch, a Sting letter-opener. It’s also inspired a (probably, hopefully) lifelong love of fantastical worlds and the heroes they forge.

I’ve dipped back into The Lord of the Rings a few times since then, especially during my degree: I took a half-year module on ‘Tolkien’s Roots’ in Old English literature, and the essay tied to my final year fiction project was about the songs and poems in The Fellowship of the Ring. It was always on my list of favourite novels, but I hadn’t really read the whole thing, cover to cover, since I was a preteen. So recently, finally, annotating pencil at the ready, I dived into the first volume in my red paperback, single-volume copy of Tolkien’s masterpiece.

It took me a month to get through, but I’ve never been more in love with Middle-Earth. I underlined my favourite bits of dialogue and description, bracketed paragraphs full of beautiful prose, and circled the names I knew from the extended mythos. I’ve always loved Tolkien’s writing style, the contrast of the grand cosmology and deep history of his world alongside the restrained descriptions of its valleys and ruins. But after finding the same adjective three times in the space of one spread, I realised there’s one word that appears constantly in Fellowship: grey.

Artwork of Rivendell by Alan Lee

Middle-Earth is completely saturated in grey. It can be found in the names of some of its most important places and people: the Grey Havens is the ancient port city that leads passengers to the Undying Lands across the sea, and almost all the names of Gandalf the Grey — Mithrandir, Greyhame, Tharkun, Stormcrow — hold the colour somewhere in their meaning.

But Tolkien’s use of grey goes beyond the usual candidates of stone, clouds, cliffs, fortress walls, and distant mountains. Descriptions that might otherwise be lush, earthy, and vivid — dew on grass, morning light, starless night skies, falling leaves, foaming rivers, distant hillsides, deep shadows, the knarled trunks of ancient trees, the dawn itself — are instead described as grey. Old, gentle, faded. Many characters are also painted in this murky monotone: grey is woven into their robes and shoes, their chainmail, flecked in their hair, shining in the eyes of its wisest wizards, its oldest stewards, its lost kings. And even past setting and character, the path of the fellowship is described in the same way: the hours themselves are dim and grey as they trudge on an uncertain road in a dying world.

Once I noticed it, I couldn’t help but see greyness everywhere in the book, a heavy mist over every landscape, beneath every weary hero’s gaze. But I don’t think this is just a quirk of the narrator, or the unhealthy habit of an author obsessed with the many connotations of his favourite catch-all adjective. I think grey is a symbol for the world as a whole, and is used as a motif throughout its volumes.

A crucial underlying theme in Tolkien’s works is the idea of ‘the long defeat’. Middle-Earth is an ancient, wilting place, and the powers of its greatest rulers will end with either outcome of the oncoming war. The Fellowship’s primary goal to destroy the Ruling Ring is a bittersweet quest, because the Ring is deeply tied to the prosperity of its most wonderous and magical places and peoples. Mutually assured destruction, carefully crafted by a wicked, fallen god. But despite the helplessness that often tints stories with these kinds of prospects, Tolkien emphasises the importance of hope, strength, and courage. To keep fighting until the very end.

The Lord of the Rings is a story about loss, reluctance, friendship, and fate. It’s an elegy for a world of fog and fading magic. Grey is the colour of age, of melancholy, of cold skies and pale stone, but also of purity and balance, wisdom and promise. To me, grey seems to be the emblem used throughout the narrative as a reminder of this theme, a veil that covers the story, that cloaks the world and weighs on its characters.

I’ve learned a lot from re-reading Fellowship. For one thing, the simplicity of Tolkien’s language goes against every instinct I have as a writer to use every obscure synonym I can get my hands on. But more than that, I’m so glad I still love the written world of Middle-Earth as much as I did when I was younger. The magic that I found there still lives on in the things I make, and I can’t wait to find more glimpses of grey in the rest of the trilogy. The end of their age — an age of long-preserved beauty and untamed wonder — is fast approaching, and I will journey with Tolkien’s heroes through a continent on the brink of tragic, irreversible change. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll probably cry at the end, just like I did the first time.

Until then, fare well, wherever you fare,

— H