LOTRO Legendarium: The virtuous world of Middle-earth

There are plenty of fantasy brands out there to suit any preference. If you arranged them on a spectrum, you might start at cozy fantasy at one end and go all the way to severe grimdark at the other, passing through many other varieties along the way. Every created fantasy IP has to take a stance at how accessible, moral, and realistic its proceedings are going to be.

The exact flavor of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth is not wholly unique — plenty of brands draw strong inspiration from it, after all — but it does seem to set itself apart from the gritty and often graphic Game of Thrones-style fantasy that’s been ascendant for a decade or so. So what makes this game world feel different from other titles on the market, and why is that an attractive force in its favor?

In many fantasy worlds, there is a great amount of attention given to various visual elements: the races, the otherworldly locales, the magic systems, the languages, and so on. But what I’ve come to learn about Lord of the Rings from the books, movies, and especially the MMO is that Tolkien placed a special emphasis on virtue as a force that pervades his characters and story.

Every upstanding character in these books can be defined by their virtues as much as their history and skillset. Samwise is loyal, Frodo is humble, Gandalf is wise, Aragorn is noble, Bilbo is kind, Éowyn is courageous, and so on. These tales aren’t only about people taking up a quest to achieve, they’re also about virtues clashing with corrupting evil to see which will rise to the top.

Tolkien didn’t infuse his works with overt religious allegory as did his good friend CS Lewis, but there’s no doubt that his Catholicism influenced how he saw and wrote the characters of Middle-earth. Good versus evil to him wasn’t cause for eye-rolling and a graduation to muddy morality; it very much meant something to him and his world.

To Tolkien, a war-weary veteran, this was a fight worth fighting, with what was beautiful and honorable on one side and what was destructive and corrupting on the other. The tug-o-war between these polar extremes catch some of the characters up along the way, from Gollum to Boromir to Faramir to Saruman. Some fall to the seductive temptation of selfish ambition and abusive power, while others pass the trial and stand firm.

So why wax on about this in a column about a video game? This is all to say that the developers from the very start truly understood this about Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, and the world setting and did a terrific job incorporating it into the Lord of the Rings Online MMO.

It’s no coincidence that the character growth system that the game employs uses “virtues” as an overlay, with insightful descriptions of each one. Most players won’t really pay attention to the names or what they mean, but I think that some do. Maybe it even gets one started down the road of inner roleplay, asking questions like, “Is my character actually merciful? Patient? Loyal?”

But the game goes far beyond paying mere lip service to the idea of virtue as a central force in the world. There’s a strong emphasis in much of the quest writing that appeals to the player’s sense of morality and virtue. NPCs call out to us as heroes who have compassion and care upon a hurting world. And the NPCs themselves are often marked by a particular virtue — or lack of it.

Going through this game for almost two decades now has made me quite familiar with the exploration of this virtual Middle-earth. And almost always, there are two themes coming at the player at the same time: Here’s something good worth protecting, upholding, and restoring; and here’s something deeply wrong that must be confronted in order to uphold that good.

Encountering Lord of the Rings often brings to mind one of my favorite Bible verses, Philippians 4:8, which says, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Middle-earth, especially in LOTRO, does a wonderful job of giving us a more nuanced fantasy that places a premium on such high virtues. It’s not a game that I walk away from feeling as if my character did a bunch of scummy things or that I’m forced to run missions for morally compromised bosses. Instead, I enjoy the wholesome pursuit of what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent… even in a completely pretend world.