Red Books, Black Books, Yellow Books

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Narrative Methods

Tags

Bilbo, Black Book of Carmarthen, Book of Ballymote, Book of Leinster, Book of Lismore, Book of Taliesin, Book of the Dun Cow, Dwarves, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gollum, Mabinogion, Manuscript, Medieval books, Red Book of Hergest, Red Book of Westmarch, Scriptorium, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, White Book of Rhydderch, Yellow Book of Lecan

Dear Readers,

Welcome back! This posting is devoted to a look at what lies behind that famous imaginary document The Red Book of Westmarch.

As Tolkien says of The Lord of the Rings in the section of the prologue entitled “Note on the Shire Records”:

“This account of the end of the Third Age is drawn mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch. That most important source for the history of the War of the Ring was so called because it was long preserved at Undertowers, the home of the Fairbairns, Wardens of the Westmarch. It was in origin Bilbo’s private diary, which he took with him to Rivendell. Frodo brought it back to the Shire, together with many loose leaves of notes, and during S.R. 1420-1 he nearly filled its pages with his account of the War. But annexed to it and preserved with it, probably in a single red case, were the three large volumes, bound in red leather, that Bilbo gave to him as a parting gift. To these four volumes there was added in Westmarch a fifth containing commentaries, genealogies, and various other matter concerning the hobbit members of the Fellowship.” 14

This is not the end of the material on the Red Book, of course,—that takes up another paragraph and then is continued in several more paragraphs about copies and about other pertinent written sources. This is JRRT having fun, of course: after all, for him, what is more satisfying after creating languages than building contexts for them?

This particular context is based upon material from his own specialty, medieval literature, and it’s always been said that The Red Book of Westmarch was inspired by the late 14^th-century Welsh Red Book of Hergest. This famous manuscript contains one of the major texts of the cycle of legendary material called the Mabinogion, but for Tolkien its importance may have been simply that

it’s a medieval manuscript familiar to him and a model-ready-to-hand for what he created in what he thought of as his own medieval world
as the Wiki entry says, “The manuscript derives its name from the colour of its leather binding and from its association with Hergest Court between the late 15^th and early 17^th century.”

This manuscript and others like it, both Welsh (Black Book of Carmarthen,White Book of Rhydderch, Book of Taliesin) and Irish (Book of the Dun Cow, Yellow Book of Lecan, Book of Leinster, Book of Ballymote, Book of Lismore)

were created in the scriptoriums (Latin plural: scriptoria), the medieval equivalent of a copy center, in various monasteries. The following images will give you an idea of how they worked.

In the world before Gutenberg

everything was written—and then copied—by hand, a fact which Tolkien faithfully reproduces in his world when he writes that:

“The most important copy, however, has a different history. It was kept at Great Smials, but it was written in Gondor, probably at the request of the great-grandson of Peregrin, and completed in S.R. 1592 (F.A. 172). Its southern scribe appended this note: Findegil, King’s Writer, finished this work in IV 172.” 14

There are, of course, no monasteries in Middle Earth, but, in our world, there were clerks, educated in monasteries, who worked as secretaries and copyists for kings and their nobility, so it’s quite logical that a copy of the Red Book in Middle Earth was the work of a so-called “King’s Writer”.

Comparing an actual manuscript with the Red Book of Westmarch, we find several other differences. For one, the RBW’s four main volumes appear to contain nothing but material relating to the events surrounding Bilbo, Frodo, and the Ring. In contrast, the actual medieval manuscripts are more like compilations. The Red Book of Hergest, for example, has not only the Mabinogion, but also unrelated poetry, and a Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, among other works. The Irish Book of the Dun Cow has religious texts and secular, all mixed together, and this appears to be common. The closest the RBW comes to this is volume 5, with its “commentaries, genealogies, and various other matter concerning the hobbit members of the Fellowship” and this is still material pertaining to the main subject, not something as removed as the method for determining the correct date for Easter to be found in the Book of Leinster.

Another difference brings us to a puzzle and the conclusion of this posting. Tolkien has told us that the core of the RBW is Bilbo’s diary. The Welsh and Irish manuscripts discussed above are collections of literary and religious texts, with nothing personal in them at all, as he would have been well aware. As well, we might wonder when and where and how Bilbo kept that diary. There’s no mention of it in The Hobbit—after all, Bilbo ran out of his house to join the dwarves without even a pocket handkerchief. And, even if the dwarves had provided one (along with the handkerchief–although that does not seem terrifically likely–the dwarves who visit Bilbo seem more attuned to orality than literacy), surely it would have been lost with all of the other baggage when the company fell into the goblin world and Bilbo met Gollum.

Other than assuming that Bilbo, although he had forgotten his handkerchief, had remembered his Blackberry and was constantly dictating to the Cloud for later transcription, what do we have here? (And, while we’re wondering, if The Hobbit was based upon that mysterious diary, what do we know of the adapter/narrator who turned it from a diary into a continuous narrative–another “King’s Writer”?)

Obviously, MTCIDC!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Where Did It Go– And Why?

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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Tags

Arbeia, Boromir, Cavalry, Denethor, England, Faramir, Film, Gondor, Hadrian's Wall, Helm's Deep, Iliad, Minas Tirith, Offa's Dyke, Osgiliath, Pelennor, Peter Jackson, Rammas Echor, Script, The Great Wall, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Wansdyke

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

In this post, we want to consider the Rammas Echor, which, in the original, had holes blown in it by the invading army of Sauron, but was demolished completely by the script writers for Peter Jackson’s LOTR.

We first meet it when Gandalf and Pippin, in their rapid journey to Minas Tirith, are briefly stopped at what appears to be a sally port in it (rather than a major gate, as Shadowfax is said to have “passed through a narrow gate in the wall” 749). Gandalf briefly trades remarks with an officer named Ingold (who appears briefly later in the story to report that the northern section has fallen, 821) before he and Pippin continue their journey.

It is described thus:

“Gandalf passed now into the wide land beyond the Rammas Echor. So the men of Gondor called the out-wall that they had built with great labour, after Ithilien fell under the shadow of their Enemy. For ten leagues [about 30 miles in the English system—about 48 km in the metric] or more it ran from the mountains’ feet and so back again, enclosing in its fence the fields of the Pelennor: fair and fertile townlands on the long slopes and terraces falling to the deep levels of the Anduin. At its furthest point from the Great Gate of the City, north-eastward, the wall was four leagues [12 miles—about 19 km] distant, and there from a frowning bank it overlooked the long flats beside the river, and men had made it high and strong; for at that point, upon a walled causeway, the road came in from the fords and bridges of Osgiliath and passed through a guarded gate between embattled towers… “ 750.

With so much of Tolkien, one can find illustrations from the usual artists—the Hildebrandts, Howe, Nasmith, and Lee—but for this particular—and important—architectural feature, we haven’t discovered—so far—a single illustration.

It’s made of stone and has evidently not been well-maintained: “Many tall men heavily cloaked stood beside him [Shadowfax], and behind them in the mist loomed a wall of stone. Partly ruinous it seemed, but already before the night was passed the sound of hurried labour clould be heard: beat of hammers, clink of trowels, and the creak of wheels.” 748 And, as mentioned above, it has gates, but, beyond that, what does it look like?

England has a long history of long walls. There are the surviving earthen walls and ditches of the Dark Ages or early medieval Offa’s Dyke

and Wansdyke

and, of course, the well-known 2^nd –century AD work, Hadrian’s Wall, with its surviving stone work and its elaborate series of mile castles, gates, and supporting forts and camps.

We might also cast further afield and in time. In Book 7 of the Iliad, the Greeks dig a ditch, fill it with sharpened stakes, and build a stone wall behind it to protect their ships from Trojan attack.

[We can’t find an image of that, but here’s a picture of one of our favorite features of today’s Truva/Hisalik, just to remind you of a later feature of the Trojan War—along with a still from the 2004 Brad Pitt film, known to those of us who love Homer for its rather casual attitude towards the traditional story.]

And how can we fail to mention the Great Wall of China?

For us, Hadrian’s Wall might do, with its stretch of stonework across the entire width of England (73 miles, 117.5 kilometres).

It even has the requisite main gate, which will be defended by Faramir.

This is actually from the Roman fort of Arbeia, South Shields—a great site—but it gives you an idea of what something a little grander—after all, it connected the Pelennor with Osgiliath—might look like.

That event, however, is in The Lord of the Rings, where Faramir maintains his reputation as a brave and far-sighted commander, as Beregond says to Pippin:

“But things may change when Faramir returns. He is bold, more bold than many deem; for in these days men are slow to believe that a captain can be wise and learned in the scrolls of lore and song, as he is, and yet a man of hardihood and swift judgement in the field.” 766

In the film, it is quite a different matter. There is no Rammas Echor and Faramir, in contrast, is badly wounded in a cavalry charge against the walls of Osgiliath while his father, Denethor, has a rather messy and all-too-symbolic lunch.

What has happened here? First, no intelligent—maybe even foolish—commander would attack a stone wall with cavalry, and we know that Faramir is, indeed, intelligent. Second, what has happened to the Rammas, where Faramir actually had been just before he fell, commanding the rearguard?

First, we would suggest that the script writers took their cue from the final scene between father and son, in which Faramir, already told by his father that his father had preferred his elder son, Boromir, volunteers to direct the defense of Osgiliath:

“But at length Faramir said: ‘I do not oppose your wil, sire. Since you are robbed of Boromir, I will go and do what I can in his stead—if you command it.’

‘I do so,’ said Denethor.

“Then farewell!’ said Faramir. ‘But if I should return, think better of me!’

‘That depends upon the manner of your return,’ said Denethor.

Gandalf it was that last spoke to Faramir ere he rode east. ‘Do not throw your life away rashly or in bitterness,’ he said. ‘You will be needed here, for other things than war. Your father loves you, Faramir, and will remember it ere the end. Farewell!’” 816-817

To them, this might have indicated that Faramir—who had clearly been Gandalf’s pupil, as his father has said:

“See, you have spoken skillfully, as ever; but I, have I not seen your eyes fixed on Mithrandir, seeking whether you said well or too much? He has long had your heart in his keeping.” 812

does not listen to his tutor and deliberately sets out to get himself killed. In the text, however, Faramir is actually acting responsibly, fighting in the rearguard of the retreating detachment driven from the Rammas:

“Even as the Nazgul had swerved aside from the onset of the White Rider, there came flying a deadly dart, and Faramir, as he held at bay a mounted champion of Harad, had fallen to the earth.” 821

(And we might add that Prince Imrahil, who brings the wounded Faramir back, says, “Your son has returned, lord, after great deeds…” 821, which, of course, could easily be understood to be ironic and is perhaps meant to be so on the part of Imrahil, considering Fararmir’s last words to his father and Denethor’s reply.)

Thus, we see Faramir’s wounding completely changed, but what about the wall he had been defending?

When one reads through the various chat sights, there was once a considerable amount of discussion about the Rammas Echor, but all was speculation, it seems, as we were unable to find anything said by the writers themselves. In the text, instead of concentrating on the main gate, Sauron’s engineers detonate explosions to each side and the troops then pour through the breaches to take the defenders in flank. This could be seen as a repetition of a similar earlier event at Helm’s Deep, in which Saruman’s forces blew a hole in the defenses.

As well, we think that, for the director, the big visual attraction was the attack on Minas Tirith. This means that it could simply have been a matter of where to spend time—and/or possibly money—and so the Rammas was sacrificed. If the decision had already been made to change—we will say misinterpret– the story of Faramir, simplifying it drastically and shifting the focus (just think of that dripping mouth!), then the choice to discard this defense would have been an easy one.

So, suppose you were script writer or director, what would you have done, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading (and, we hope, speculating).

MTCIDC

Powerplay

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Villains

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Tags

Barad-Dur, Beer Hall Putsch, Black Country, Charlie Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Edwin Butler Bayliss, Ents, Fangorn, Franco, Frodo, Gandalf, Grima, Hitler, Isengard, Maiar, Merry, Middle-earth, Mordor, Mosley, Mussolini, O'Duffy, Orcs, Orthanc, Pippin, Rohan, Saruman, Sauron, Spode, The Great Dictator, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Theoden, Tolkien, Treebeard, Valar

Welcome, as always, dear readers!

We’ve discussed the nearly-invisible Sauron in an earlier posting, but now we’d like to think out loud about the all-too-visible Saruman. And, as we’ve just heard that we’ve lost our own Saruman, Christopher Lee, we would like to dedicate it to his memory.

Pippin and Merry have been filling Fangorn in about all of their adventures up to the moment when he found them in his forest.

Saruman, in particular, has caught his attention, being his neighbor and, it seems, an increasingly distant one—

“There was a time when he was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything. And he got more and more like that; his face, as I remember it—became like windows in a stone wall: windows with shutters inside.” 473

At that moment, everything comes together for the Ent.

“I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power.” 473

And not a friendly power, as Gandalf, during his last visit to Isengard, has learned to his dismay, having heard Saruman alternately wheedle and threaten him. Saruman’s initial words, however, were not about himself, but about someone else, to the east:

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power.” 259

So far, this must sound like the Sauron party line—and Saruman is actually described “as if he were making a speech long rehearsed”, (259), the tone of which Gandalf recognized immediately, replying:

“I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Morder to deceive the ignorant.” 259

If we pause for a moment and consider the era in which this was written, we might catch a glimpse of something from the history of our world in this, something from the period beginning in 1922 and extending at least through 1945, when Tolkien was beginning to write The Lord of the Rings.

JRRT always denied that his work was allegorical, although, sophisticated man that he was, he was well aware that the world around him would impinge upon his consciousness. Thus, when we see numerous sinister figures rising in power in our world, it would be difficult to imagine that they might not, even if only very distantly, exert some small influence on his work.

The lesser figures include Franco, in Spain,

Eoin O’Duffy in Ireland,

Sir Oswald Mosley in England, (mocked as “the amateur dictator “ by P.G.Wodehouse in the persona of Sir Roderick Spode—brilliantly played by John Turner in the 1990s Wodehouse “Jeeves and Wooster” television series)

and the most menacing of all, Mussolini and Hitler.

Mussolini had begun his rise to power just after World War One, achieving his position of Il Duce in 1922,

while Hitler, after a false start in 1923, in emulation of Mussolini,

finally reached the ultimate position of authority in 1933.

Although Hitler was a relative late-comer in comparison with Mussolini, it seems that Mussolini looked up to Hitler, even taking German lessons (although there is no mention of Hitler reciprocating) so that they could talk more easily (and, doubtless, securely).

Thus, it might be possible to see Saruman, in his position as lesser of two evils, looking up to and wanting to imitate Sauron, the greater of two evils, as Mussolini attempting to emulate Hitler. (And this odd partnership is sharply satirized in Charley Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, 1940.)

So, as Sauron has the Barad-dur,

so Saruman has Orthanc.

As Sauron has Orcs

so Saruman has Orcs.

Worst of all, just as Sauron has the vast wasteland of Mordor

Saruman takes the once-green and beautiful Isengard

and turns it into a mini-Mordor.

All of this is swept away by Fangorn and his fellow Ents, of course,

and it appears that Saruman will remain within the tower, but we know that he slips away, taking the former counselor of Theoden, Grima, with him.

Or, at least, that’s what Tolkien intended. Unfortunately, the makers of The Lord of the Rings films simply dropped this theme here, with the deaths both of Saruman and Grima on Orthanc. We say unfortunately because, although we have portrayed Saruman as a wanna-be Sauron (even to the point of thinking that he might gain control of the Ring), which is certainly one of his roles, his is a greater role as he was once a greater figure. He is the eldest of the Maiar in Middle Earth, those spirits whom Tolkien once described as “near equivalent in the mode of these tales of Angels, guardian Angels”, LTR 159. That he can be corrupted by Sauron (as Sauron himself had been corrupted by Morgoth), shows just how great Sauron’s power (and the lure of the Ring) really is. As well, in his fall, we see that that corruption, like Sauron’s, is complete. Offered the chance to return to the good, he spurns it and slips away—but not out of the story, and it’s here that we feel that the writers of the films missed a great opportunity.

In what might, at first, seem like an act of petty revenge, Saruman goes to the Shire, that green and so-far-safe land far west of all of evil of Middle Earth,.

and industrializes it. After all, Fangorn has said of Saruman that “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” 473

So, just as at Isengard, trees must go, if only to feed his industrial plans. When we think of Saruman’s ultimate vision for the Shire, we imagine that it would look like the work of Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) who painted the industrial landscapes of England’s West Midlands, the “Black Country”, an area Tolkien himself thought of as his home region.

The end comes quickly, however, when the Hobbits return and we see, in “The Scouring of the Shire”, on the one hand, the new maturity of Merry and Pippin, and, on the other, the deep humanity of Frodo.

And Saruman would have been allowed to go free again—but there is an irony here in what happens. He had sought to overturn Theoden and Rohan through having subverted Grima and, instead, he himself is killed by that very agent—

and we have wondered about that. If Saruman is of the same substance as the Valar, merely inhabiting a human body, can he, in fact, be killed, any more than Sauron? We assume that Sauron, who had poured so much of his spiritual power into the Ring, would be seriously weakened by its loss, enough so that his empire collapses on him. In Saruman’s case, the end is less dramatic, but at the same time, poignant:

“To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.” 1020

Although the withered remains are then described, they seem unnecessary. That was only the borrowed flesh. The tragedy lies in that wavering look, the bending away, the sigh. In the final chapter, “The Grey Havens”, we see Gandalf departing towards that very West which was denied to Saruman and here we see, as well, what it was that the spirit of Saruman had lost: the reward of being allowed, at last, to return home, to go back towards Valinor. Instead, the Valar have rejected one of their own and, though his spirit may not have been destroyed, something seems to have left him forever.

By leaving the final chapters out of the film, then, the script writers lost the chance not only to show us Merry and Pippin, at the end of their long adventure, grown into figures to rival the Old Took, both in deeds and in stature. As well, they denied us the potential contrast with the end of such figures as Hitler—a suicide—and Mussolini—executed by his own people, and that of Saruman the White, murdered by his own follower and, at the end, nothing but sadness and grey smoke.

Thanks, as always, for reading. And thank you, Christopher Lee, for acting.

MTCIDC

Where From the Rohirrim?

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim

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Tags

Amazons, Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Burial mounds, Cavalry, Charge of the Light Brigade, descendants, Edoras, Eotheod, Horse people, Indo-European, Kurgan, language, Middle-earth, Normans, Rohan, Rohirric, Rohirrim, Scythians, The Lord of the Rings, The Mark, Tolkien, Tom Shippey

Dear Readers, welcome!

In this post, we want to think out loud a bit about the Rohirrim.

Everyone knows where their language is from, as Tolkien says in a letter to “one Mr. Rang”:

“…’Anglo-Saxon’…is the sole field in which to look for the origins and meaning of words and names belonging to the speech of the Mark.” LT 381

And yet they are horse people (their own name for themselves, in fact, is Eotheod, “horse people”), which the Angles and Saxons who went to make up the Anglo-Saxons, were not. Tolkien was well aware of this difference, saying in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings:

“…this linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances…” L1136

Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, suggests that

“The Rohirrim are nothing if not cavalry. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons’ reluctance to have anything militarily to do with horses is notorious…How then can Anglo-Saxons and Rohirrim ever, culturally, be equated? A part of the answer is that the Rohirrim are not to be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend.” (112)

Or, could there have been other models?

Tolkien may have been suggesting one when, in a letter to Rhona Beare of 14 October, 1958:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’ in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Taptestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” Ltr 280-281.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts both Normans and their allies, on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons, on the other, but Tolkien doesn’t appear to distinguish between them. The Normans themselves are mounted, the Anglo-Saxons on foot, as was their custom (they did use horses to move rapidly from place to place, as in the race north to Stamford Bridge and then back south to face the Normans).

Here, to the left, we see those mounted Normans and, to the right, the Anglo-Saxons behind their shield wall. The “tennis-nets” are clearly visible and would actually have looked like this:

In this further illustration, by the way, it’s easy to see the consequences of having the shield wall crumble: men on horseback can have a significant advantage when their opponents lose cohesion.

This, however, is only their look . What about those horses and an entire culture based around them?

For a clue, we look to another element in the culture of the Rohirrim, the use of burial mounds. Here they are at Edoras.

(We can’t resist, by the way, saying that our absolute favorite part of the Jackson movies is anything to do with the Rohirrim—to us, absolutely inspired and we see the depiction of the charge of the Rohirrim against the army besieging Minas Tirith as being right up there with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 and the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917–

One might say, in reply, that there are Anglo-Saxon mounds—like the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial.

But that leaves us where we started, in the land of foot soldiers.

So, let’s go farther afield, to the north of the Black Sea.

Here, we see the so-called “Kurgan Culture”, with its burial mounds

[This, by the way, is not to be confused with The Kurgan from the first Highlander movie

The Kurgan]

These were a people who:

are believed by many linguists (and some archeologists) to be the direct ancestors of the Indo-Europeans who gradually invaded Asia Minor and western Europe (including, eventually, the Anglo-Saxons) as well as moving east, to India and beyond
buried their dead (at least what appear to be the high status ones) in mounds
were a horse culture

And, in fact, were seemingly the forerunners of the Scythians, a later well-known Indo-European horse people

And the Scythians, in turn, may have been the model for those mythical horse folk, the Amazons.

In the 19^th century, when the idea of Indo-Europeans began to circulate, there was a preference for a northern European origin (a theory no longer held), but the idea of an eastern home was also circulating and we would suggest that Tolkien would have known about this, as well as, from his early classical training, Scythians and Amazons, their actual and mythical descendants.

Imagine, then, that what we see in the Rohirrim is, in fact, an interesting mixture of people sprung from an earlier people (as Tolkien tells us, the Rohirrim were descended from the Edain of the First Age—see LOTR, Appendix F 1129), both in our world and in Middle Earth, who based their culture upon horses, and bury their dead in mounds, combined with people who may also bury their dead in mounds, who speak a version of Anglo-Saxon and who dress like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons of the 11^thcentury AD.

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks for reading, as always.

MTCIDC

Subsubcreations

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Chicken Run, Corsairs, Easterlings, Gorbag and Shagrat, Haradrim, Melkor, Minions, Morgoth, Nazgul, Nick and Fetcher, Orc, Robin Hood, Sauron, Star Wars, Storm Troopers, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Zorro

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

Two posts ago, we talked about how it might be possible to make Sauron –the- nearly-invisible slightly more visible by means of his minions.

[oh yes—minions—from Middle French, “mignon”, meaning “little/darling” and coming to have a negative meaning in English, “lackey”]

These included the Nazgul

various humans—corsairs, Haradrim, Easterlings—

And, the real stars (as Nick and Fetcher, the two rats from Chicken Run, refer to themselves)

the Orcs.

Tolkien appears always to have had trouble placing them. We would suppose that this problem arose because Orcs were not the usual run-of-the-mill lackeys one usually sees in adventure, like the sheriff of Nottingham’s men

the soldiers of the evil commandante in the Zorro adventures

or the hordes of faceless stormtroopers in Star Wars

His first question—where do they come from? was immediately followed by a second—if they are created, do they have free will? That first question, any author might ask himself. The second, however, was pure Tolkien, fitting into the pattern which those who’ve only read The Lord of the Rings and not JRRT’s letters on the subject or the volumes produced by the admirable (a pale adjective!) Christopher Tolkien, would never see: the complex spiritual history which lies behind the creation of Middle Earth.

Not that the first question was simple. In The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn says of the Orcs:

“But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” L486

The author, however, had a very different opinion:

“Their nature and origin require more thought. They are not easy to work into the theory and system.”

(Morgoth’s Ring 409)

Not easy because of that second question. As he wrote in an unpublished essay entitled (not surprisingly) Orcs (Morgoth’s Ring 409-413),

“…only Eru [the central creative deity] could make creatures with independent wills, and with reasoning powers. But the Orcs seem to have both: they can try to cheat Morgoth/ Sauron, rebel against him, or criticize him.”

Morgoth (Sauron’s former master) made the Orcs in some way, but, because only the central deity, Eru, can give independent wills and reasoning powers—which Orcs display by cheating, rebelling, and criticizing– to created beings, what is to be made of Orcs? Bound by those seemingly contrary facts, the conclusion was obvious to him that “therefore they must be corruptions of something pre-existing.” (409)

But of what?

“But Men had not yet appeared, when the Orcs already existed. Aule constructed the Dwarves out of his memory of the Music; but Eru would not sanction the work of Melkor [i.e. Morgoth] so as to allow the independence of the Orcs.

It also seems clear…that though Melkor could utterly corrupt and ruin individuals, it is not possible to contemplate his absolute perversion of a whole people, or group of peoples, and his making that state heritable.

In that case Elves, as a source, are very unlikely.” (409)

Thus, logically, if the Orcs are created, not corrupted, and created by a power which hasn’t the ability to give his creations independence, then–

“The Orcs were beasts of humanized shape (to mock Men and Elves) deliberately perverted/converted into a more close resemblance to Men. Their ‘talking’ was really reeling off ‘records’ set in them by Melkor. Even their rebellious critical words—he knew about them. Melkor taught them speech and as they bred they inherited this; and they had just as much independence as have, say, dogs or horses of their human masters. This talking was largely echoic (cf. parrots). ..Also (n.b.) Morgoth not Sauron is the source of Orc-wills. Sauron is just another (if greater) agent. Orcs can rebel against him without losing their own irremediable allegiance to evil (Morgoth).” (410-411)

We don’t know about you, dear Readers, but we confess to a certain disappointment at the idea that the Orcs are only more complex puppets. Consider this piece of villainous dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat:

“I’d like to try somewhere where there’s none of ‘em. But the war’s on now, and when that’s over things may be easier.”

“It’s going well, they say.”

“They would,” grunted Gorbag. “We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d’you say?—if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.”

“Ah!” said Shagrat. “Like old times.” (LOTR 738)

The plans and reminiscences of demons—how wonderful! And what an interesting sidelight into their world and even their past: they used to be masterless marauders, in the “old times”—could this suggest that perhaps they weren’t such puppets after all? We would like to imagine so!

And what is your opinion, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

The Sadness of a Second Reading

27 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Aragorn, Arwen, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Ents, Fangorn, Frodo, Gandalf, Herblore, Hildebrandt, Hobbits, Isengard, Meduseld, Merry and Pippin, Ring, Saruman, Sauron, Smaug, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, Villains

Welcome again, dear readers!

We’re sure to return to villains—Orcs first, we think—but, as we reread material for the last posting, we came across a passage which so struck us that we had to sit down and write a posting about it…

Isengard is ruined. So much of what Tolkien described in such vivid detail in “The Road to Isengard”, both before Saruman decided to be a rival to Sauron and after, has been destroyed—here is the Hildebrandts’ version of it in Saruman’s early days

And here it is when Saruman’s ambition overcame his sense of mission as one of the Istari and he could tell Gandalf that their job was to strive for “Knowledge, Rule, Order”—

But Fangorn and his Ents have changed all of that—

So that, when Gandalf and his company appear, they see

“…And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled in ruinous heaps.”

On top of one of those heaps

“…two small figures…at their ease. One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long wisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.”

Not tiny Smaugs sunning, it is, of course Merry and Pippin making themselves comfortable in the wreckage of Saruman’s palace/fortress/factory. That comfort is an affront to Gimli—or, at least, he pretends that it is—but it is a source of amusement to the rest of the company and the Hobbits themselves are a source of amazement to Theoden:

“The days are fated to be filled with marvels. Already I have seen many since I left my house; and now here before my eyes stand yet another of the folk of legend. Are these not the Halflings, that some among us call the Holbytlan?”

But Theoden’s wonder is greater: not only are these figures from distant legend, but, “I had not heard that they spouted smoke from their mouths.”

This sets Merry off on a lecture, which prefigures, of course, his later treatise, Herblore of the Shire, but which Gandalf stops in its tracks, saying,

“You do not know your danger, Theoden…These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin [ironic here, as they are, in fact, doing so—it’s Saruman’s ruin] and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.”

Theoden, however, shows that, in the future, at least, he will encourage them with that patience—

“Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them; and we will speak also of Tobold the Old and his herb-lore. Farewell!”

Merry and Pippin, usually less-than-respectful, are quite charmed by this and behave better than usual:

“The Hobbits bowed low. ‘So that is the King of Rohan!’ said Pippin in an undertone. ‘A fine old fellow. Very polite.’”

If this is your first reading, there is something to look forward to—or, if you are Gandalf, to dread. For the more experienced, we already see the splitting up of Merry and Pippin, Pippin’s whirlwind ride with Gandalf to Minas Tirith, and Merry’s equally grueling ride to the Pelennor and his part in the last heroic moments of Theoden’s life and his final words on the subject of that earlier promise:

“Live now in blessedness; and when you sit in peace with your pipe, think of me! For never now shall I sit with you in Meduseld, as I promised, or listen to your herb-lore.”

And this brings us to the point: if you know what’s going to happen—in detail—why read this again?

The answers are many and here are only a few from an entire spectrum: it’s such a rich story that you can easily read it again and find something new every time; you’d like to escape to Middle Earth because, even troubled as it is with Sauron, it makes more sense than Here and Now; you don’t read it all, but there are scenes and/or characters you like to revisit; it has become a kind of happy yearly ritual, as Chaucer fans reread The Canterbury Tales every spring. For us, among all of the other reasons (and we would say that probably every one makes sense, in its way) there is another reason and it has to do with that knowing.

Wherever the sun shines directly on an object, a person, there is a shadow. Shadows can be knife-edge precise or vague, still or moving, smaller than that which casts them or greater. Knowing what’s to come in Tolkien is like seeing each event with its outcome, its shadow, all at the same moment and, as so often in The Lord of the Rings, what’s to come is compromised—if there’s happiness, it’s happiness of the moment: Sauron is defeated, but the Elves fade; Arwen marries Aragorn at last, but, he being mortal, even if a long-lived one, she is left a widow for many years; Frodo survives the Ring quest, but somehow is never healed. Events cast shadows in our current life, but we only see the shadows in retrospect in this world. In Middle Earth, on second and subsequent readings, events cast their shadows before as well as after themselves. And there is a pleasure in this. One might say, “Hmph. Adolescent thinking. Really self-pity in literary disguise.” We would disagree.

One of the most powerful enhancers of emotion is contrast, beginning with the very idea of human mortality. As so many religions and philosophical systems advise: live now, in the moment, because there are just so many moments and then…?

Thus, to read Theoden’s affectionate promise to the hobbits and to know, at that same moment, that it will be broken, and very dramatically, with Theoden’s death, is, potentially, to see that shadow, which is the contrast between what is said now and what will happen then.

So, dear readers, what do you think? We imagine that you’re like us, with favorite books about which it doesn’t matter in the least that you know them practically by heart—surprise is only the first sensation—like opening a wonderful present which, once opened, you’ll use and love again and again, always grateful to the giver.

MTCIDC

Food for Thought

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Eating, Gollum, Isengard, Lembas, Longbottom Leaf, Lorien, Man-Meat, Mordor, Orc, Rivendell, Rohan, Saruman, Sauron, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In this posting, we’re continuing our discussion of villains, specifically in Tolkien, but, for a change, we mention the good guys, as well.

We begin with a wail by Gollum, when assured by Frodo that, if there’s no other way to go, he will enter Mordor by the Morannon, the Black Gate.

“No use that way! No use! Don’t take the Precious to Him! He’ll eat us all, if he gets it, eat all the world!” L637

It’s not surprising that Gollum would express his fear in such terms—after all, in his first appearance in The Hobbit, his first words were

“Bless us and splash us, my precioussss! I guess it’s a choice feast, at least a tasty morsel it’d make us, gollum!”

And this from a creature who appears ready to consume anything living, as the narrator says of him:

“He was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking. He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it…”

What were goblins in The Hobbit have become the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings and Gollum would still be interested in them, but now we’re told what they eat—and drink.

“Ugluk thrust a flask between his teeth and poured some burning liquid down his throat: he felt a hot fierce glow flow through him. The pain in his legs and ankles vanished. He could stand.”

“An Orc stooped over him, and flung him some bread and a strip of raw dried flesh. He ate the stale grey bread hungrily, but not the meat. He was famished, but not yet so famished as to eat flesh flung to him by an Orc, the flesh of he dared not guess what creature.”

“”We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand which gives us man’s –flesh to eat.”

To judge by what Merry and Pippin find when they come to Isengard, Saruman certainly didn’t stint himself, including casks of Longbottom Leaf from the Shire.

And here is a glaring contrast between the two sides in The Lord of the Rings, and it has to do with plenty and enjoyment. Saruman seems to have all the wealth in the world, but always wants more, and what he has does not appear to be shared out equally. Sauron, Gollum says, wants to eat the world, but would he ever be full?

Contrast the traveling supplies of the orcs as you see them above in our text with lembas

As the elves describe it, “…it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.” To which Gimli agrees enthusiastically, “Why, it is better than the honey-cakes of the Beornings, and that is great praise, for the Beornings are the best bakers that I know of…”

Only contrast the look of West and East to see the difference. Here is what the plains of Rohan must look like:

And here is an artist’s rendering of Mordor:

It’s a striking difference topographically, but the difference is even greater in terms of behavior. Isengard is a fortress and a factory, a little Mordor set against the greater Mordor to the east. It can also be a prison, as Gandalf finds out. In contrast, think of the welcome in Rivendell

and Lorien

The West doesn’t plan to eat the world, instead, it lives in a fruitful land, which it makes more fruitful, and it offers this in hospitality to those who come in peace.

This is what is really at stake in The Lord of the Rings, that sense of bounty, generosity, and pleasure, which it must defend from what would eat all the world.

And, as always, we ask what you think, dear readers?

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Don’t

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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1984, Antagonists, Big Brother, Hobbits, Invisible, Palantir, Paradise Lost, Prince Valiant, Ramayana, Ravana, Saruman, Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains, Visible

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

Imagine this—and we’re sure it’s happened to you. You’re working, somewhere by yourself, maybe downstairs. It’s late. Very. Everyone else is long asleep. And you suddenly, for no easy reason, look up. It’s nothing. Nothing…visible. Is it something you heard, then? But what? Is it even a sound—and certainly not something distinctive, like things in old horror movies—chains, groans, thumping footsteps from overhead—but maybe something very quiet—almost nothing more than the disturbance of familiar patterns like appliance hums. In fact, maybe it’s the silence under the familiar patterns which magnifies it. No matter what it is, it’s there. And, at the moment you actively take notice, the creepy feeling catches hold, and you sit, listening ever more intently. (Holding your breath is optional, but a popular choice for times like this.)

Recently, we wrote about two kinds of villains, those we called “open-ended” and those we called “terminal”. Another classification which might spring from that eerie feeling described above: villains visible and villains invisible.

Let’s return for a moment to that not-so-quiet place where your work was disturbed by…what? If you were a small child, perhaps it would be easy to give it shape from a fairy tale book you’d read, or a movie you’d seen. One of us, for example, was haunted in far childhood by a Hal Foster Prince Valiant illustration in which Prince Valiant has been drugged by Morgan le Fay. Every night, creatures like those in the picture would creep out of the eaves doors at the far end of the room and clutch at the bottom of the bed…

As we’re adults (sort of), however, do we necessarily embody whatever it is at such moments? And there’s that second question: do we want to? For all that we may be creeped out, is there some odd, perverse pleasure in being creeped out? Certainly those who make horror movies think so! But is there a difference between seeing what scares you and only feeling it?

With that in mind, suppose that you’re not you, spooking yourself (yes, pun intended) late at night in your living room, but Tolkien constructing a long and complex combination of myth and adventure. You’ve got a wide assortment of protagonists, beginning with some of those beings you created in an earlier story, Hobbits.

What about villains, antagonists? As we’ve discussed in a previous posting, they are necessary to provide friction, that resistance which pushes against the heroes and creates the motion which is a plot.

Commonly, such a figure is visible, like Lucifer, in Paradise Lost.

Or he’s very visible, like Ravana in the Ramayana, with his ten heads.

For us, however, this is to risk circumscribing the villain, his visible body suggesting his visible limits. After all, it was a Sauron with hands who lost the Ring to a sword blade. To have a body, then, is to be vulnerable (literally, in the case above) and, more perhaps more important, in terms of story, more predictable, more bound by conventions.

You (as JRRT) create Sauron, then, who once had a body, but now you make him nearly disembodied, being represented physically as a single, fiery eye.

This gives the effect of a brooding, ever-watchful presence, a bit like all of those posters in 1984’s London of Big Brother.

This presence can be captured in the text in all sorts of ways, both direct and indirect. You have only to look up “Sauron” in the index to The Lord of the Rings to understand this: “Dark Lord, Enemy, Black One, Black Hand, Black Master, Base Master of Treachery, Dark Power, dark hands of the East, Nameless One, etc.”

A brooding presence, however, is a real challenge for anyone trying to transfer The Lord of the Rings to the screen, which is why, after the previous defeat of Sauron, in which he appears as a huge being in black armor, he is reduced to that eye, sometimes captured in a palantir

Or Galadriel’s mirror, though, more often, as Sam and Frodo come closer to their goal, as the equivalent of a tower-mounted searchlight.

Film and fiction are different media, with different needs and tools to satisfy those needs, as the script writers never tire of explaining to us. In our opinion, however, this extremely literal depiction so strongly smacks of old black-and-white prison escape films,

that we wish that those script writers could have left the Dark Lord offstage entirely, if this is the best they could do.

With our feeling that an bodyless villain might be more powerful here than an incarnated one—remember feeling spooked at night by a subtle change in the ambience?—we would wish that the writers had been a bit more imaginative—and had read their author a little more closely. After all, he had plenty of good ideas about how to depict villains. And it is perhaps a sad commentary on their work that, increasingly, in their years of using JRRT, they abandoned him, choosing, instead, to bloat his story and turn it in directions he clearly never intended. Why not, for example, do as Tolkien did and mirror the villain not only in that long list of titles, but also in the actions and words both of his subordinates and his opponents? Would this have worked? Perhaps a reference to the amount of time “You Know Who” appears on-screen in the first Harry Potter movie in contrast to how often he is mentioned would suggest how this might have worked.

As for villainous subordinates and their actions, we’ll have more to say about them in our next.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Remember: we want to encourage discussion and debate. If you agree with us, say so. If you don’t, say so and we can have fun working through our views.

MTCIDC

JRRT: Editorial Comment

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Andrew Lang, de Montesquieu, Hawthorne, Hobbit, Persian Letters, The Lord of the Rings, The Scarlet Letter, Tolkien, William Morris

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. We had intended to go on with our discussion of villains, which looks like it will form a series, but we were distracted for a moment by the following– so more on villains to come.

“This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages, a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history. Further information will also be found in the selection from The Red Book of Westmarch, that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.”

So begins The Lord of the Rings, a novel. But a novel which pretends not to be a novel at all, but, rather, an edited version of a true history of someplace and sometime else: Middle-earth, the Third Age.

It’s hardly a new ploy, to pretend to be only presenting something already written by others. Often, it’s done to deflect attention from the sensitive matter within the novel: de Montesquieu’s criticism of France in Persian Letters or Hawthorne’s use of the theme of adultery in The Scarlet Letter.

The adventures in The Lord of the Rings, or, for that matter, The Hobbit, are hardly controversial, however, so why go through this pretense, we wondered?

As we thought about and discussed this, we came up with a whole series of possible reasons– and none of them necessarily excludes any of the others.

First, and perhaps most obvious, was that being an editor and translator formed a major part of what JRRT did in his academic life. What would seem more natural?

Second, he lived in the academic world of Oxford, among academic friends, who formed a large part of his initial readership, and who themselves could be editors and translators.

Third, based in part on one and two above, it fits into Tolkien’s and the Inklings’ desire to produce more of what they liked to read: an adventure, but in the guise of a “scholarly” work, yet one wholly invented.

Fourth, unlike real scholarly work, this one was not bound– and never would be– by the limits of available knowledge. There is only one Beowulf manuscript, after all. Because the only bounds placed upon the “research” for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were the limits of the author’s imagination, this material was, potentially, endless, and every point within could be infinitely expanded, as we see in the twelve volume edited by Christopher Tolkien. One might imagine that JRRT, frustrated at how little Old English verse there was, felt enormously freed– and, should there be criticism, well, at one level at least, he had no need to respond, not being the author.

This leads, in turn, to a less comfortable idea: suppose JRRT wasn’t completely at ease with his own creation. After all, he was a professor who was spending a great deal of his time and energy fabricating a fictional world rather than doing research and writing about literary/linguistic activities in the actual world of academia. Could this have been a kind of subconscious defense– I am doing scholarship– see?

And then there’s reason five, which one might see as informing, at some level, all of the others. JRRT had been drawn, from childhood, towards stories from Lang’s Fairy Books through the prose and poetry of William Morris. He was also an active literary scholar. By playing editor and creating a second scholarly shell around the primary adventure, he could neatly combine the two halves of his life into one and, in the process, produce works which please reader and scholar alike– and combined.

As always, we ask for your opinion.

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC,

Where is Adventure?

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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Adventure, Landscape, Sam and Frodo, Story, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

In this post, we want to consider the idea of adventure. Usually, we think of this as an event or series of events, things which happen. This is certainly the way Bilbo sees it in the first chapter of The Hobbit, when Gandalf appears and all Bilbo thinks he wants to do is to sit, smoke, and read his mail, saying to the wizard: “nasty, disturbing uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them!”

But what does Bilbo really know of adventure?

Imagine (and what a wonderful word that is), that you live down the hill from Bilbo, in the Shire in the quiet time, long after the wolves had come over the frozen Brandywine and some time before the Black Riders appear. This is a contented backwater of Middle-Earth and Bilbo mirrors this in his strong anti-adventure reactions.

With the world seemingly so safe and day-to-day (not that there aren’t the usual human–or hobbit–tussles—think of the Sackville-Baggins and their plans and jealousies) is there anything to suggest—beyond the idea that they are “nasty, disturbing uncomfortable things”–what real knowledge of adventure might exist in the Shire?

Sam suggests, in the second chapter of The Lord of the Rings, that at least he has some understanding beyond a vague sense that adventure is nasty when he says, “I heard a deal that I didn’t rightly understand, about an enemy, and rings, and Mr. Bilbo, sir, and dragons and a fiery mountain, and—and Elves, sir. I listened because I couldn’t help myself, if you know what I mean. Lor bless me, sir, but I do love tales of that sort. And I believe them too…”

Adventure, to Sam, then, isn’t a thing, but a story, and a believable one, too. It’s a story which he and Frodo talk about much later in the narrative, when they are about to encounter the treachery of Smeagol, Shelob, and the terrible march into Mordor and Sam has now realized that he and his master are in a story, too.

“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo” Sam says, in one of the most profound moments for us in all of Tolkien, “adventures I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say.”

So now we see a kind of equation, which (beginning with Bilbo) might read:

(Nasty, disturbing) thing = adventure = story (Sam’s addition)

But Sam, the second half of his first name now being truer than he knows, continues his definition:

“But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.”

And here, with words and expressions like “paths” and “turning back” we can add another step to our equation:

(Nasty, disturbing) thing = adventure = story = going somewhere

There are, of course, folk and fairy tales where adventure comes to the protagonist, but it seems to us that when we began to run through the big stories, stories like the Odyssey, the Ramayana, and Beowulf, the narrative is mostly laid outside the world of home—Odysseus is coming home, but the bulk of the story takes place otherwhere, Rama and his wife and brother are in the forest, far from the palace when their adventure begins, and Beowulf has come from southern Sweden to Denmark to help King Hrothgar with a pest-control problem. And there are, of course, Frodo and Sam, who have traveled, mostly on foot, all the way from home in that safe-seeming Shire.

So, imagine that adventure can mean Somewhere Else, and that that place needs to be traveled through (or at least traveled to) for it to be an adventure, and for it to make the transition from adventure to story. For Sam, the choice to travel to and through adventure seems all-important. As he says of those who turn back:

“And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least, not to folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things alright, though not quite the same—like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in.”

These, then, are the possible consequences of going to (and through) Somewhere Else: on the one hand, you may come back and, if you do, you may find things have changed, but are survivable, as Bilbo does when he returns to find himself considered dead and his house and goods up for auction. On the other hand, you may not come back—and yet may still be part of “the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

There is, of course, a paradox here: by Sam’s definition, it’s only by not turning back that one is in an adventure and a successful story, but a successful story (meaning, to Sam, a memorable one) may not ultimately be a successful adventure: what’s good for the listener/reader may not be good for those traveling to or in Somewhere Else.

Somewhere Else, itself, can be like any place in fiction: seas, mountains, forests, Middle Earth has them all and much of the story is about the simple act of marching along those many long miles, where the only quality necessary for heroic behavior seems to be persistence and, for Sam, and for us as readers, this becomes an heroic quality in itself—the ability to keep going, no matter what, a quality which is tested to the extreme degree in that last trek through the worst landscape of all, Mordor, half volcanic wilderness, half industrial wasteland. The landscape almost becomes another character here, a geographic Sauron who opposes those who would destroy his ring and through it, him. This, in turn, presents us with the idea that, just as characters good and bad give a story life, so do surroundings and the more complex the surroundings, might we see the greater the power of that life to make the story one that “stays in the mind”?

We’ll end this here, but, at the same time, we’ll add a “teaser” for our next. Sam and Frodo talk about adventures from the viewpoint of people who have read or heard them, all the while being inside an adventure themselves, as they—Sam in particular—acknowledge:

“Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards.”

And yet there is an authorial fiction here: when they talk about being in a story, they mean that, through all the consequences of the Ring, their lives have been significantly altered and they have been “landed” in the current narrative. We know that they are, in fact, completely fictitious characters literally put into the story and that it only exists because the author has chosen to locate them there. All around them is a narrative which they cannot hear, as well as a listener whom they cannot see but who sees them and records every word and act, and this is just as true for Homer as it is for Tolkien. If Sam and Frodo went to Mount Doom without that listener, but didn’t return to set down what happened, as we’re told they did, what story would there be, even though they didn’t turn back and therefore should have been part of a story that “stays in the mind”?

More on that next time.

Thanks as ever for reading!

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: The Lord of the Rings

Red Books, Black Books, Yellow Books

Where Did It Go– And Why?

Powerplay

Where From the Rohirrim?

Subsubcreations

The Sadness of a Second Reading

Food for Thought

Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Don’t

JRRT: Editorial Comment

Where is Adventure?