The Bright Sword and its Sharpness: Swords, Symbolism, and Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings

Authors

Gavin S. Davis, Penn State UniversityFollow

Abstract

Swords are paradoxical objects that hold in tension both aesthetic beauty and repulsion, and how one goes about resolving this paradox has much to say about one’s personal ideology. This paper investigates Tolkien’s representation of swords in The Lord of the Rings as ideologically loaded objects with shifting symbolic significance between the cultures of Rohan, Gondor, and Hobbits. These changes in significance produce three kinds of medievalism, shaped by differences in their interaction the cultural imagination of the medieval sword. Through the Rohirrim, Tolkien provides a medievalism of spectacle—an idealized world of valor to be marveled at from the safe distance that separates the Secondary World of fantasy from our own. With Gondor, Tolkien offers a medievalism that critiques the shortsightedness of a culture that prioritizes the weaponness of a sword over the values that would characterize its symbolism and govern its justified use. Finally, Hobbits offer a third kind of interaction with medievalism, since their characteristic unfamiliarity with swords connects their experience with that of the reader who also comes from a largely swordless society. By filtering the warrior-cultures of Middle-earth through the experiences of Hobbits, The Lord of the Rings closes the space between the Secondary World of fantasy and the Primary World of reality, turning the reader’s attention to their own experience of the medieval imaginary. Throughout, Tolkien’s treatment of swords as complex signifiers creates an ideologically robust medievalism that offers profoundly sophisticated structures for appreciating the dangerous beauty of an enduring symbol of the medieval past.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

ORCID ID

0009-0009-1045-9062