Tolkien, Faery, and Myth

[vison]

I am not fond of being patronized and insulted.

"Patronize: verb. 1 treat with an apparent kindness that betrays a feeling of superiority."

It is Tolkien's own view/thoughts/wishes/opinions/convictions about sex that made me sad for Tolkien.

I think it might be sufficient to say that he was a devout and practicing Roman Catholic.

Compare and contrast.

Um. Are you hinting that I am patronizing of Tolkien? Or insulting? I'm not; my feeling of sadness is sincere. I'm not sure that it's an insult, or patronizing, or condescending to recognize his religion or its importance in his life. Is it?

Do I imagine that I am superior to Tolkien? Not that I know of. He wrote a better book than I am ever likely to write. Otherwise, was he a "better human being"? I don't know. Was he a better parent? I don't know. Was he a better driver? Was he a better cook? These are unknowables. But, more importantly, they are unimportants.

I do intend to respond to Voronwë, when I have the time to do so properly.


If I have misread your intent, I apologize.

[vison]

Since "Vison" appeals to Tolkien's Catholicism vis a vis his views on sex, let me succinctly relate what the Catholic Church teaches about sex:

1) It is a gift from God (and thus by definition good).
2) It is ordered towards two intimately bound and inseparable ends: procreation and spousal unity, both of which are expressions of profound love by the spouses for each other and for God.
3) Sex is the means by which human being become partners with God in His perpetual act of Creation.

Now, obviously, many people will disagree with those teachings (and the corollaries that follow from them). But why the fact that Tolkien (quite apparently) agreed with them should make anyone sad, and least of all sad for Tolkien, is not at all apparent to me.

I guess if you agree with that, you won't agree with me.

And it still makes me sad.

[Pearly Di]

I am a Christian, Vison is not.

I have to say that I find the way she has been spoken to on the last page by a couple of posters to be rather rude.

She has a perfect right to say she doesn't agree with Tolkien on something, without being jumped on, IMO.

The subject of this thread is not sexuality and Tolkien's view of it, or the Catholic Church's view of it.

Vison's view of sexuality is not the subject of this thread either. Nor should her views be put on trial. No doubt she can defend them vigorously elsewhere, should she have a mind to. And I am sure she will.

Yes, I know she raised the subject. What concerns me is the (IMO) unnecessarily aggressive response to her.

To quote the mods on another board where I post: It's not a deathmatch, guys, and we are not trying to kill each other with our brains.

That is all. Thank you.

[Alatar]

to the wisdom of Pearly Di!

[Pearly Di]

Thanks, Al.

Moving into calmer waters (hopefully) ...

I will return to Vison's first post in this thread.

I have always found Tolkien's ideas about Faery to be extremely weird. "Fairy tales" are very, very, very seldom about Fairies at all. Right offhand, I can't think of one so-called Fairy Tale that has even one fairy in it. Except maybe Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, and those Fairies were not quite in the Tolkien Style. Tolkien wanted Faery to be a certain thing, but just wanting it doesn't make it so. In Middle Earth, his ideas shine and are wonderful, but in the real Earth where many generations of children were told "fairy tales", his ideas just don't fit those tales. I wish he hadn't been so intent on creating a mythology - because one man can't create a mythology, a myth is organic and grows out of the real Earth. He didn't create a myth, he wrote a wonderful novel in LOTR.

Tolkien admitted himself (probably laughing at himself a little) that trying to create a 'mythology for England' was somewhat absurd.

I think we are all grateful that he tried, though.

Because in his attempts, he gave us LotR ... which, I agree with Voronwë, is not a novel in any modern sense of the word. He was trying to write a Malory-style epic romance, and IMO he succeeded.

I seldom agree with solictr, but he's spot on in his views on the tone of PJ's movies.

Ah, now, I disagree with both of you on that one.

At least, it's partially true. But not wholly true ... IMO.

[axordil]

The problem is that the term "fairy tale" has come to mean something different, over the course of centuries, than it used to. After Perrault and the Grimms and HC Andersen, it became synonymous with a children's tale dealing with magic. When Tolkien uses it the term, he's thinking of stories not written for children at all, but rather the medieval chivalric romances, the codification of stories drawing from Celtic and Germanic stories of not-quiet-human magical beings with which humans had contact. The stories of Sir Launfal, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Orfeo (with the added twist there of a classical influence), the Wife of Bath's tale, etc (and the many folk tales that are cognates of one or another of these) are the body of work he really had in mind, not Cinderella and its ilk (although there are older versions of the story that point in that direction).

That's probably why his essay is on fairy-stories, not fairy tales. He wants to make a distinction. Whether it's a good distinction is another question.

[Pearly Di]

Why is LotR important? Seriously: why?

My favorite commentator on Tolkien work, Verlyn Flieger, poses a similar question, more broadly about Tolkien's work, in the Preface to her seminal work Splintered Light. She provided an answer in the first edition of the book in 1983, and then when she greatly revised the book for the second edition in 2002 she expanded on that answer.

The Preface to the first edition of Splintered Light defended the importance of Tolkien's fantasy as a vehicle for philosophical and metaphysical speculation. It was correct in this, but too limited, I now believe, in suggesting that its subject matter was more relevant to such speculation than to the concerns of ordinary modern life. The intervening years have shown increasingly that Tolkien's work is highly relevant, that it speaks to and for the anxieties that marked his century (now past) and speaks even more profoundly to the new one he never lived to see. Moreover, it expresses those anxieties more tellingly precisely for being couched as fantasy fiction and has lasted longer than many more realistic works that have come and gone since The Lord of the Rings was first published. The first Preface asked "Why should anyone read Tolkien?" My answer at that time was, "For refreshment and entertainment." I know more about Tolkien and his work now than I did then, and I would amend my original answer to read: "For refreshment and entertainment and, even more important, for a deeper understanding of the ambiguities of good and evil and of ethical and moral dilemmas of a world constantly embroiled in wars with itself."

There is no way that I could provide a better answer than that, nor would I even want to.

As long as I have Splintered Light open to the Preface, let me add this quote, since we have been talking about "On Fairy-stories":

Tolkien's great essay "On Fairy-stories" is the best and deepest consideration I have encountered of the nature, origin and value of myth and fantasy, as well as the most cogent commentary on his own work. here, among the many nuggets of pure gold, is the clearest statement of his working theory of fantasy. "For creative fantasy," he writes, is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it."

Just so. Things in the world are as they are. It is the function of fantasy and its greatest strength to make that hard recognition and enable the audience to make it as well. That audience may come for escape to another world (or think that they do), but they must return to their own with the recognition, hard and uncompromising, that things are so in this world. This is the ultimate importance of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion to Tolkien's own, to this or to any century.

Just so. There is the answer to your question, Di, in a nutshell.

A rather tardy response from me but thank you.

I am not entirely sure I would agree with Verlyn Flieger that LotR is, to quote, ... highly relevant and that it speaks to and for the anxieties that marked his century (now past) and speaks even more profoundly to the new one he never lived to see. Probably because I haven't taken that approach to analysing it.

I don't think I do analyse it, to that extent. I just ... enjoy it.

I would always argue that LotR has its place in literature. But that is a rather different argument. I think.

I think Tolkien's work is highly therapeutic and restorative. If that makes LotR 'highly relevant', then, OK, I'll accept that. And I think we always need fantasy and imaginative literature to enrich our lives and imaginations and inner boundaries, and LotR fulfills that need in spades, so if that is what is meant by 'highly relevant', then I can go along with that.

I would not personally claim that for me personally LotR has helped me 'return to my own world with the recognition, hard and uncompromising, that things are so in this world.' Too often, LotR has for me been a means of escape.

I do, however, think the book is about virtue, real, gritty virtue, and doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not for any reward one might gain from doing so. Which is pretty profound moral stuff, although LotR is never preachy.

[solicitr]

After Perrault and the Grimms and HC Andersen, it became synonymous with a children's tale dealing with magic. When Tolkien uses it the term, he's thinking of stories not written for children at all

Indeed in his essay, he likened fairy-stories to old unfashionable furniture, banished from the parlour to the nursery.

[axordil]

It's been too long since I opened Tree and Leaf. I should do so again (carefully, my father in law gave me a first printing).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I got my copy of the book Tolkien On Fairy-stories today. It is described as being the "Expanded edition, with commentary and notes" and is edited by the same Verlyn Flieger and my friend Doug Anderson, author of The Annotated Hobbit. I was expecting a slim volume, but it is a meaty 320 pages. It is essentially the history of the lecture and essay On Fairy-stories, including extensive manuscript drafts (as well as contemporary media reports on the lecture when it was first delievered). Doug was nice enough to point out to me some of the passages that he found most interesting, and I can definitely say that it provides more answers to some of the questions discussed in this thread, particularly "what is Faerie?" and related questions. I'm excited to get a chance to read it (unfortunately, it was only published by Harper Collins in Britain; Houghton Mifflin declined to pick it up in the States).

Plus, the cover has Tolkien's wonderfully evocative 1915 painting The Shores of Faery, which is almost worth the price of the book by itself.

[WampusCat]

I consider LOTR "relevant" in particular to the 20th century (and beyond) because a major theme is that there can be a weapon so terrible and corrupting that even the wise and the good cannot use it safely without endangering the world and their own souls. Only in the 20th century did mankind develop weapons capable of annihilating humanity and even Earth itself. Destroying something powerful rather than using it for "good" ends is a new twist that made and makes LOTR a very pointed myth for our time.

[halplm]

Coming to the party late, but I wanted to comment on the differences between Lewis's and Tolkien's work (and I also wanted to express my sincere disappointment at not reading the term sub-creation in this entire thread ).

I personally think the fundamental nature of the two "worlds" created by the two authers was very different. (I realize when people were referring to Lewis it wasn't just Narnian books, but that's what people are usually referring to when the topic of Christian allegory comes up.)

In the creation of Middle Earth, Tolkien was excersizing an act of what he considered sub-creation. This is what made the books "fundamentally catholic." He considered the act of creation to be a God-given gift and an exercise in his faith. It was not that there was any Catholic message present. The fact that Gandalf "died" and was ressurected for instance is not a parallel to Jesus, it is more of a coincidence than anything else.

Contrary to this type of "world separate from ours" that is Middle Earth, is Narnia, which was intended not only to be allegorical, but to be a parallel to our own world. By it's very nature of being able to get there from our world it is different than Middle Earth. It was never intended to be its own world, it was rather a reflection of our own. Therefore, to Lewis as a Christian, it only makes sense that there would be a parallel to Jesus in the land of Narnia. This is all spelled out rather clearly in The Last Battle.

So, in general, while I am not the ardent detractor of allegory that Tolkien was... it's frustrating when I see comparisons between LOTR and Narnian books... when they really are apples and oranges .

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Coming to the party late, but I wanted to comment on the differences between Lewis's and Tolkien's work (and I also wanted to express my sincere disappointment at not reading the term sub-creation in this entire thread ).

We were just waiting for you to bring it up. (Edit: of course, the related term "sub-creator" appears in every one of my posts, in my signature.)

Nice post.