“A Look at the Gaze in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”

ABSTRACT

The gaze plays a pivotal role in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, steadily generating tension, affecting the characters’ physical and psychical values, and even governing the very way the narrative unfolds itself. This essay’s intervention lies in framing its examination of vision, visuality, and the gaze in Tolkien’s novel through contemporaneous theoretical and philosophical approaches, specifically gaze theory. In addition to highlighting the ontological, phenomenological, and structural dimensions of Tolkien’s gaze, this essay also interprets the novel as a robust and complex theoretical work that enhances our understanding of the meaning and substance of the gaze as a totalizing component of ontological experience.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The author would like to thank William Solomon, Steven Miller, David Bratman, and Chris Hall for their insightful feedback and suggestions.

2. Briefly, Tolkien incorporated in his work the Empedoclean and Platonic emission theory of optics (Wodzak and Wodzak; Hood). This theory suggests eyes project a beam of light to not only illuminate but trap its object. Edward Lense identified Celtic and Nordic mythological figures as the source for the Eye of Sauron and the “other burning and baleful eyes” (Lense, 3) in Tolkien’s work. Although Beowulf was one of Tolkien’s “most valued sources” (Tolkien, 31), with the monster Grendel’s burning and fiery eyes directly inspiring Tolkien’s Gollum and his memorably gaudy and gleaming globes, Josh Woods presents a convincing argument for Stoker’s Count Dracula as yet another literary ancestor of some of Tolkien’s most malevolent characters known for their powerful vision. Woods, for example, notes a similarity in “Count Dracula’s glaring red eyes and the Witch-king’s ‘deadly gleam of eyes’” (Woods, 198).

3. In his “Note on the Text,” Michael A. Anderson writes that “The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes” (Tolkien, ix). Allen & Unwin’s decision to divide and publish the novel in three volumes—The Fellowship of the Ring; The Two Towers; The Return of the King—over the course of 1954–55 was simply an economic one.

4. As the text demonstrates, these vignettes enable Tolkien to introduce, speak about, and critically interpret the gaze. This is not a practice specific to Tolkien. Peter Wollen reminds us how Sartre’s “grippingly novelistic narrative passage[s]” (Wollen, 96) assisted the philosopher in presenting and articulating his ideas on vision and visuality. Similarly, in Lacan, there are anecdotes and semi-autobiographical stories that help break down the complexities of his theories. The “cinematic quality” (Wollen, 99) of gaze theory, Wollen insists, was intentional because it allowed philosophers to better convey and contextualize the concept and the experience of it. The “alternating points of view, the creation of suspense, [and] the temporalization of the look” (Wollen, 99) present in Sartre’s mini-narratives demonstrably suggest that the gaze is never simply the object of a theory but is instead that which is always embedded within a specific story replete with characters, settings, and uses of time and space. (Special thanks to Steven Miller for sharing this insight via personal correspondence.).

5. Amy M. Amendt-Raduege argues that “Tolkien incorporated many of the medieval themes and ideas that occupied his professional life” in his literature. Above all, the “one medieval preoccupation that found expression” in The Lord of the Rings is that of the medieval dream vision (Amendt-Raduege, 45). One of most important motifs of medieval literature, dreams function as an instance in which “the dreamer attains knowledge which he or she would otherwise lack” (Amendt-Raduege, 45). We see this throughout Tolkien’s text, primarily in Frodo, who often has clairvoyant episodes about “wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen” (Tolkien, 42). Moreover, Amendt-Raduege explains that in The Lord of the Rings, “all the hallmarks of the medieval genre are there: the intense visual quality of the vision, the ideal or symbolic landscape, the authority figure at the center, and even the five aspects of dreaming that informed medieval psychology” (Amendt-Raduege, 46).

6. Gollum’s eyes are also described as being colored with either a pale or green flame. Throughout the work, there are “over a dozen references to the light in his eyes[;] the two colors even seem to correspond to his moods: a pale light indicates that he is relatively happy, a green light that he is upset” (Lense, 5). When Frodo approaches Gollum in the Forbidden Pool, for example, the narrative records Gollum’s eyes alternating between two lights to indicate a shift from placidity to intense anger (Tolkien, 672–73). “The strange lights in Gollum’s eyes are not merely decoration,” writes Edward Lense; they elaborate in exemplary fashion the gaze of the Other. Ocular (dis)coloration helps achieve further foreignness, or “remoteness” in the looker’s gaze (Murphy, 115). According to Sartre, “the Other’s look is the disappearance of the Other’s eyes as objects which manifest the look” (Sartre, 359) and that “The Other’s look hides his eyes” (Sartre, 346). The light in Gollum’s eyes neutralizes them; characters no longer remark on the “sheer gaudiness” of his globes (Lense, 5) but rather on their unnatural coloration.

7. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze defines the haptic experience as “a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own” (Deleuze, 125). Deleuze argues that the haptic exposes “the most rigid link between the eye and the hand,” allowing “the eye to function like the sense of touch” (Deleuze, 99). This “joining together of the two senses of touch and sight” (Deleuze, 99) is readily locatable in Tolkien’s fiction.

8. Gergely Nagy correctly claims that Sauron’s conception of power is “essentially corporeal, bodily,” his gaze transforms them, in effect, “into his own Other” (Nagy, 64). The central representation of this “bodily obedience” (Nagy, 64) that Sauron demands from his subjects is presently found in Gollum, who knows not what he once was nor what – or who—he currently is. Additionally, and most extremely, “the Nazgûl, subjects to the Nine Rings of Men, are totally under Sauron’s control but have no physical bodies any more (whereby the last trait of their former subjectivity is erased)” (Nagy, 65).

9. We can compare Frodo’s encounter with Sauron’s gaze at Amon Hen with a thematically similar story Sartre narrativized in Being and Nothingness, about a watcher in the park (Sartre, 340–46). Told in two parts, Sartre’s story involves a character entering a park; he “discovers that he is alone: everything in the park is there for him to regard from an unchallenged center of the visual field” (Bryson, 88). However, when an intruder enters the park, the initial watcher’s “reign of plenitude and luminous peace is brought abruptly to an end” (Bryson, 88). Here, “the intrusion of the other makes of the self a spectacle or object in relation to that other: the self is threatened with annihilation by that eruption of alterity on the subject’s horizon” (Bryson, 95). In other words, “the ultimate abasement of the subject occurs at the moment when the other interrupts the subject in the middle of its fantasizing and thereby exposes the private fantasy to the public” (McGowan, 196). Just like what happens to Sartre’s watcher, Frodo is objectified, and his fantasy is disrupted when he suddenly feels Sauron’s intrusive eye in his presence.

10. Shame is a key component of the ontology of the gaze not only for Sartre but for Tolkien, as well. “A sense of shame arises when we catch ourselves being-seen-by-the-Other, but that is also the moment when we become somehow visible to ourselves” (Montebruno, 52). Frodo becomes suddenly aware of his actions. Like the jealous lover in Sartre’s keyhole vignette (Sartre, 347–50), who is suddenly caught in another’s gaze, Frodo is caught in Sauron’s gaze, rendering him conscious of the fact that he is spying and being a sneak. Frodo covering himself with his hood is not entirely to afford him some protection, I claim, but to simply hide himself out of shame.

11. In Tom Shippey’s reading of the Ring’s evil, he focuses on its malevolent effects, stating that “the Ring is deadly dangerous to all its possessors: it will take them over, ‘devour’ them, ‘possess’ them” (Shippey, 114). According to Shippey, the Ring works on one’s mind, growing more and more precious to them, until it destroys them both physically and mentally (Shippey, 114). “The Ring is ‘addictive,’” writes Shippey; “All readers probably assimilate Gollum early on to the now-familiar image of a ‘drug addict,’ craving desperately for a ‘fix’ even though he knows it will kill him” (Shippey, 139). Of course, Frodo was affected this way, as was Boromir who in The Fellowship of the Ring expressed strong desire for the Ring. With Gollum, however, it is especially clear just how aggressive an addiction to the Ring can be. Let us not forget how the famous lines inscribed on the Ring itself—One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them./One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them (Tolkien, 49) – reveal the object “as a tool to control” those who wear it and “enslave” them “via sympathetic magic” (Rosegrant, 168).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Kielich

Steven Kielich is pursuing a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. His work has been published in Games & Culture and he is the co-editor of The Metal Gear Solid Series: Critical Essays and New Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2025).