Tag Archives: The Lord of the Rings

Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Don’t

07 Thursday May 2015

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

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Invisible-Man

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…

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 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.

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     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.

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

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     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.

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

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     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

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

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     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,

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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.

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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

CD

JRRT: Editorial Comment

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

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

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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,

CD

Where is Adventure?

20 Friday Mar 2015

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

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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

CD