Middle-earth Journeys

Ha! I've just taught my logic students another fallacy: hypothesis contrary to fact. That is, if the 'if . . .' part of an if/then statement is untrue, you can't use it to support any conclusion absolutely. I'm afraid I committed this fallacy in my original post! and led you into doing it too! But I think we all know we are speculating.

So if we have rejected Dune as a mythic creation, what after Tolkien counts as one?

Iolanthe wrote: Answering my own question about whether there would have still been a 'Hobbit' if Tolkien hadn't had children, I've just been reading about the creation of The Hobbit and how much Bilbo Baggins is like Tolkien himself - The Shire being Worcestershire where Tolkien felt his real roots lay, the enjoyment of a pipe and plain food, fancy waistcoats, not given much to travel but capable of making a remarkable journey just the same. I get the feeling that even without his children Hobbits would have somehow appeared, just as the word emerged from his subconcious - and then he had to find out what a 'Hobbit' was (I love that...).

Iolanthe I suppose you're right. I think there would have been hobbits (they are the likely unhero type to take the task on with the ring) even with the children's influence but Merry is right...what if's are a tricky thing.

Merry wrote:So if we have rejected Dune as a mythic creation, what after Tolkien counts as one?

I've read many fantacy and sci-fi, I can think of no series of books that comes close the this man's attention to detail not to mention weaving past events and language into the present text.

I read somewhere that one of the driving forces behind the creation of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, aside from Tolkien's desire to provide a body of myth that was uniquely British, was to create the world in which his Elvish (and other) languages would logically have developed. Remember that the languages existed before the stories did.

Part of the reason Tolkien's mythos is so REAL is that it is grounded in these unique but still culturally famliar languages (based on Finnish and Welsh), which provide the roots and contexts for all of the songs, poems, names, places, etc. He didn't just make up names as he went along; they grew out of the languages he developed and loved so very much. That is what makes his work so organic and unique and what gives it the possibility of so many layers of lost "history." It is the element that no other fantasy story writer since Tolkien has been able to satisfactorily capture because they lacked Tolkien's linguistic skills.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, Lindariel, the books are only the tip of the iceberg where Tolkien's work is concerned. It all springs from language.

I wonder: if Tolkien had not had children would he have ended up with a huge disorganised work similar to the Sil - but larger and unedited - which might quite easily have gone unrecognised and unpublished?

That's really possible. He seems to have had trouble finishing anything and I was reading this morning that after the children became too old to want daily after-tea stories, he hurried through the end of The Hobbit without writing it down. He only finished it many years later when a publisher showed interest in the manuscript and asked him to complete it for submission.

So hobbits might have been 'discovered' but never worked up into a publishable book.

I don't think we can attribute all of Tolkien's uniqueness to the languages, although they certainly play an important part. For me, without the moral vision, his work would not be great.

One of our colleagues at Oxford, with a doctorate from the English department there, told me that one of his former profs was a colleague of Tolkien's. Whenever anybody mentioned his name, the old prof just shook his head and said something on the order of, 'What a waste!'

Iolanthe and Merry, I confess to not having researched this properly, but for many readers Tolkien is pure escapism. Was it the same for Tolkien? We all know about his beginning his mythology in the trenches during WWI. I can believe he wanted to escape that, but what about his later years?

He brilliantly created another world that while containing horrors and evil, still espoused the triumph of honor, friendship and nobility. Did Tolkien escape to this world at any given chance? Is that why the composition is so disjointed with volumes and volumes of his writings needing assembly and organization by others...namely CT? Was it the pressure from publishers and the reading public that finally forced the completion of The Lord of the Rings, with so many re-writes and discarded sectons?

Did Tolkien merely want to escape and the real world forced him to organize his stories (as best as he was able) into books? Merry, is this what your colleague meant by "What a waste."?

I think he meant that Tolkien had potential as a purely academic linguist, but didn't take that route. That he chose to write outside of the academic world at all was the waste. (I have to say that I found much of the Oxford attitude to be a bit snobbish!)

As always, any attempt to reduce Tolkien's creation to any one root fails.

Riv Res wrote:Was it the pressure from publishers and the reading public that finally forced the completion of The Lord of the Rings, with so many re-writes and discarded sectons?

I think it helped to keep him at it and might have forced the pace a bit, but I think there was also pressure from his inner imperative to complete a story that, as it progressed, had taken on a life of it's own. Once he knew what the Ring was, once Bingo had become Frodo, and once LOTR began to become the true inheritor of the world he created in the Sil, he HAD to tell the story. It had become 'real'.

I've just been reading how Faramir came from nowhere, suddenly arriving in the story unbidden and almost unwanted (as he had more than enough main characters). Tolkien liked him and had to tell his story too. There must have been elements of escapism for Tolkien in his Middle-earth, but sometimes it seems to have been a hard task-master, demanding that it's story be told at the expense of his philology, research and duties.

You're right Merry, there is always more than one root, but this might be the tap root.

I've nearly finished John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War and I am just so impressed with this book. The research he has done about the TCBS and the Great War is incredible, coupled with great insights into Tolkien's earliest poetry and emerging mythology. I really didn't expect the literary side of it to be so strong. No wonder Garth gathered so many accolades for it.

What a mire of horror these sensitive and idealistic young TCBSites found themselves in. It's so apparent that their friendship - even when argumentative and critical - was a light that they all clung too in the midst of terrifying darkness. Their only hope that at least one of them would make it through the war and fulfil their ideals of changing the world.

I know LotR isn't an allegory, but the friendship of the Fellowship is surely one of the many things that has sprung out of his war experiences (along with Sam and the amazing ability of the common man to rise to great heights). Like the broken Fellowship all the TCBS were scattered, although incredibly three of them were in the first days of the terrible Somme offensive in different regiments and battalions. When I realised Gilson had died on the very first day of the offensive I really felt like crying.

It's not hard to see the Dead Marshes and Mordor in the alien, shell-pocked landscape and mud holes these men endured.

The TCBS wanted to aspire to great things and in Garth's book it becomes clear that the others began to see Tolkien as the one most likely to survive the war and carry their flag. Gilson and Smith became very fatalistic and both sent Tolkien what amounts to farewell letters. The pressure afterwards to live up to their dream must have been huge.

Here is a snippet from the Epilogue of the book:

Wiseman himself had once said that he, Smith and Gilson wrote Tolkien's poems. Smith had put it more tactfully: 'We believe in your work, we others, and recognise with pleasure our own finger in it.' Facing death, he had drawn consolation from the fact that Tolkien would survive, and there would 'still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.' Smith had wanted them to leave the world a better place than when they found it, to 're-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty' through art embodying TCBSian principles. Beyond such broad outlines, what Smith dreamed is unguessable - as Wiseman lamented, he 'never lived to write the "tales" he planned' - but it may be surmised that he envisaged Tolkien, rather than Wiseman or Gilson, voicing the dream.

John Garth' Tolkien and the Great War

I'd like to put a question, did Tolkien fulfil the great dream of those four idealistic young men? Has Tolkien been able to 're-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty'? Has he left the world a better place than those TCBSites found it?

'Cleanliness' seems an odd word in this context, don't you think?

I'm assuming Smith meant moral cleanliness - a kind of purity of thought and motive demonstrated through art. I suppose we would use the word 'purity' nowadays instead.

When the original four TCBSites (Wiseman, Smith, Gilson and Tolkien) divested itself of its later and lesser members after the 'Council of London' and tried to refocus they were really trying to escape the idleness, mockery and negative irony that those other members had brought to the group. Perhaps this purge was in Smith's mind when he spoke of 'cleanliness'. The views the other members had of the world was commonplace.

Iolanthe wrote:I'd like to put a question, did Tolkien fulfil the great dream of those four idealistic young men? Has Tolkien been able to 're-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty'? Has he left the world a better place than those TCBSites found it?

I knew you'd like this book, Iolanthe, when you finally had a chance to get to it. The sanity, cleanliness quote is first mentioned earlier in the book in the context of Smith & Gilson's visit to Wildman in London & is a response to what Garth calls the moral freefall of soldiers

looking for 'a bit of fun' and leaving 'war babies' in their wake.

As to whether Tolkien fulfilled their dream: I would say his writings inspire it in the rest of us. I'm not sure whether he himself felt he had fulfilled it, though.

I see--thanks! It still seems like a strange use of the word, since these guys were lexophiles like Tolkien. But it reminds me of a quote from, I think, C. S. Lewis, something about LOTR being like a clear, sharp Northern gust--or maybe I'm making that up.

I wonder how much the promises of his youth meant to Tolkien after the war. I don't recall reading much about these friends and their dreams in JRRT's letters, except that famous line that by the time he was--what?--twenty or so, most of his friends were dead.

It did occur to me that the use of the word 'clean' in the above context might even have been verbal shorthand, representing the moral outlook that the TCBS quartet admired and aspired to - a sort of 'buzz word', which might also have included its literal sense: war itself being 'dirty' on so many levels, from the filth of the trenches upwards! or am I just being fanciful?

I recall that Tolkien stayed in touch with Wiseman, and although the friendship cooled off somewhat (there was a reason but I can't recall it now), he stayed with Wiseman shortly before he died, I think.

There could be several reasons for the lack of TCBS references in Tolkien's letters - they are edited, after all, and possibly some passages have been omitted. Perhaps Tolkien became disillusioned or preoccupied with domestic and financial concerns; maybe he simply found it all too painful to mention, like many of his generation. Certainly he later pooh-poohed the idea that WW1 had influenced his writing, although as Iolanthe has pointed out, Garth does mention Shippey's view that we can draw a parallel between the Dead Marshes and the trenches. I wonder if his reason for not wishing to draw such parallels was that he didn't want LOTR to be associated with one specific conflict - in the same way that he seems to have removed overt references to Catholicism?