Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:What does that have to do with whether they have "soul"? As I said, those are two completely different things.
"Soul" is a weird word, admittedly. But, you know, as has been said many times, these are archetypes, and archetypes don't have "souls". Archetypes are molds, projections, symbols, and those things, while they may be beautiful and powerful and important, aren't alive. Perhaps it is in that sense that I'm using the always-difficult word "soul".....
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
That simply isn't true. Particularly of the characters in the Silmarillion. Which characters in that work would you say are archetypes? And why do you say that. Feel free to be as verbose as you need to be.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
Even with the Ainur, I'm not sure that I would agree that they are archetypes, precisely. Feel free to explain why you disagree. Be as verbose as you need to be.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Unless, of course, you have something to say about whether Tolkien characters are archetypes. Or about any other relevant subject. Or about anything else.
Last edited by Voronwë the Faithful on Sat Jun 13, 2009 2:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
They fulfill archetypal functions. Their motivations are archetypal when they are not inscrutable. Their personalities are functions of their positions within their pantheon and have obvious cognates throughout Indo-European myth.
That's not very verbose. And I think that the Ainur deviate from traditional mythic pantheons as much as they parallel them.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
As much as the Greek pantheons do from the Hindu or the Norse, certainly. Apart from the existence of a supervisor and an unambiguous diabolus, it's just another pantheon: half divine, half anthopomorphized. They have the same kinds of arguments in terms of what to do about mortals, the same little "humanizing" quirks gods are depicted with in myth, the same sine qua non: without their function, they wouldn't exist.
But their 'function' is distinctly different than any other "pantheon" because of Eru.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
Structurally speaking, not really. Gods in pantheons have spheres of influence and attributes and avatars--that's the Ainur. The only difference is that the function of supreme god has been kicked up a level, as it were. Just because they're working for someone and attempting to follow a plan doesn't change their status as characters: they are their functions (and a few distracting quirks), nothing more, nothing less.
That's true on a certain level, but I think it is too superficial. There is no real parallel in any mythological tradition that I can think of to Yavanna complaining to Manwë about her spouse Aulë's children -- and those of Eru Himself -- having dominion over her realm, and then Manwë turning to Eru to do something about it. Moreover, the interaction between the Ainur and the Children of Eru is markedly different that the interaction between the Gods of most any other "pantheon" in mythological traditions. How many maidens does Manwë rape in the form of a bull?
I probably will split this discussion off into a Shibboleth thread if it continues (as I hope it does).
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
"What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter."
Actually, there are quite a few "gods at home" types of stories in most pantheons. The Norse in particular were fond of depicting gods at an almost ironic level (Thor, Loki and Odin walk into a mead hall...), and more than one pantheon had turf battles, which is what Aulë/Yavanna boils down to.
The desexualization of Tolkien's pantheon is one spot where I think it rings false, to be honest. That has more to do with the culture it arose from--Victorian England--than anything else, though.
BTW--I wouldn't say "mere" archetypes. Archetypes can be very, very powerful characters, since their roots go deep. What they aren't is mimetic: they do not seek to represent in any way real psychological processes, since they are defined solely by their function.
Last edited by axordil on Sat Jun 13, 2009 4:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
axordil wrote:The desexualization of Tolkien's pantheon is one spot where I think it rings false, to be honest. That has more to do with the culture it arose from--Victorian England--than anything else, though.
I don't think so. If that were true, then they would have started out that way, since Tolkien's earlier writings were closer to the Victorian era. Yet the early Valar were more sexualized than the later Valar, albeit mostly with each other, not with the Children. I agree with Elizabeth Whittingham's thesis in her book The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology that the "desexualization" of the Valar is related to the Christianization of his mythology, as Valar moved more towards the position of the Christian angels and away from the traditional role of small g gods of most mythological pantheons.
BTW--I wouldn't say "mere" archetypes. Archetypes can be very, very powerful characters, since their roots go deep. What they aren't is mimetic: they do not seek to represent in any way real psychological processes, since they are defined solely by their function.
And this is another way in which Tolkien's Valar differ from the gods of many pantheons. Because they do represent real psychological processes. An example is Manwë being fooled by Melkor into believing that he was truly cured of his evil (although that is reflected much better in the later version that Tolkien wrote which was left out by Christopher in favor of the much more psychologically simplistic statement that Manwë was free of evil and therefore did not understand evil (I would argue that there a number of places where Christopher's editorial decisions make the characters of The Silmarillion seem less psychologically complex than they otherwise would have seemed).
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
Manwë getting fooled is not a real psychological process. It's part of Manwë's function to get fooled by Melkor, as it's part of Thor's function to be made the butt of jokes by Loki, or part of Hephestus's function to be cheated on by Aphrodite. Just because the gods occasionally act like people doesn't mean you can think of them like people, or that they think as people do.
And I would say that as Tolkien aged, he reacted to the onslaught of modernity with reactionary fervor: his work got MORE Victorian (which in his case means necessarily more Christian).
I've always thought of the Ainur as Eru's staff. And while there are many things unique about Tolkien's pantheon when compared to others, I am very hesitant to call it something totally different. The Ainur are not the badly behaved gods one finds in so many flavors of ancient myth - rather than being humans elevated to deity status, they are angels elevated to deity status. But at the same time, enough of the standard elements of gods in the ancient mythologies are given to Tolkien's beings that people very quickly recognize them as a pantheon. They each represent something. If they were born (as is the case in many RL myths), they were born into their role; they did not attain it and they will never die. They do not live in the sense that mortals do. They only exist and serve the purpose for which they exist. They can do nothing else. They have no choice. They never had a choice. Like the archetypes they personify, they just are. If anything, Tolkien's mythology makes that cleaner than most - there are actually a few Greek myths in which a very accomplished human was deified. In Tolkien's universe, you're Ainur or you're not.
It is not so with the Elves or Men. Elves and Men grow, learn, aspire and attain. They also screw-up and fail. Epically. They live. Even when they're fulfilling an archetypal type of role (Beren sticking his hand in a wolf's mouth, anyone?). So, to hearken back to what set this whole thing off, I'd say Aragorn's got soul. We, as readers, don't get to know him as well as, say, Merry or Pippin, but he's more than an idea with a cloak and sword pinned on.
I've honestly never thought about whether or not gods have souls. To my mind, a soul is what differentiates the living from the not living and now that I have thought about it, I'd say that gods don't have souls. They can't. Souls are for the living and gods don't live. Thing is though, when you look at a pantheon and what each member represents, you quickly realize that there isn't really a "God of human beings" anywhere. Instead, the gods represent aspects of the world around us. Each piece of you, your capacity to love, the work done with your hands, the food you eat, and so on, belongs to a different god. The gods drive life. So, in essence, what I'm getting at is gods don't have souls. They transcend them. They create them.
Ax, I would strongly recommend Whittingham's book to you. She does an excellent job of comparing and contrasting Tolkien's mythology (and particularly his "pantheon") to classical mythology, Norse mythlology, the Kalevala, and of course Judeo-Christian tradition. You might not agree with everything that she says (although she is quite knowlegdable), but I think you would find her thoughts interesting.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
River wrote:Thing is though, when you look at a pantheon and what each member represents, you quickly realize that there isn't really a "God of human beings" anywhere
That's a really interesting thought, River.
* goes off to ponder *
"What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter."
I will grant this much: it's not a black or white proposition, but a spectrum, with purely archetypal characters at one end and purely mimetic characters at the other. The Ainur are not all clumped together. Some are less creatures of function than others: the Istari are certainly examples of the most nearly mimetic, whether they go bad, go native, or (in Gandalf's case) eventually go home.
That's true of other pantheons too, though. It is actually possible to have a worthwhile debate about the motivation of Loki, for example, in his betrayal of the Aesir.
Ultimately, though, I submit that the underlying dynamic is the act of creating anthropomorphic godlike characters in the first place. It requires pushing them up and away from us, but they can never quite escape the mold of their makers, us. All we can do is make them more powerful and occasionally more principled.
As River notes, there's a gap of kind, not merely degree, between us and them: they know what they're here for and always have. The Children have to discover it.
It's worth mentioning that, as you allude to in your posts, JRRT's intent in this matter seems to have changed over time: witness the old texts in which Túrin and Nienor are purified and achieve apotheosis. That's more in line with the sort of thing River points at in Greek myth: the gap may not have been always so absolute in his mind.
But, you know, as has been said many times, these are archetypes, and archetypes don't have "souls". Archetypes are molds, projections, symbols, and those things, while they may be beautiful and powerful and important, aren't alive. Perhaps it is in that sense that I'm using the always-difficult word "soul".....
