[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem

This will be hurried as I am due at work, but I think you are selling yourself short.

In the first place, would it be such a terrible thing if we politely agreed that there were some points we could agree on, and others that we could not? This thread has reached a total of eight pages. With all those reflections and differing opinions, it's scarcely surprising that it would be difficult to reach a consensus.

Secondly, if we look at the thread as a whole, I think that there is more middle ground here than you are seeing right now. This began as a discussion of the right of the reader to grapple with the text on his own and to come up with interpretations that Tolkien had not personally discussed. It was a celebration of the individual and his or her right to bring his own personal background and experience into the literary mix. In essence, we were doing exactly what Tolkien recommends in his preface: not being locked into an allegorical meaning etched in stone, but having the freedom of applicability, looking at the story through the prism of our unique backgrounds and experiences and applying those ideas. We had individual quibbles about the place of the Letters in this process, or how to respond when confronted with interpretations that seemed contrary to what Tolkien himself said (a lá Stormfront) but for the most part we could at least define a middle ground.

Now we come to the difficult part. The thread drastically switched gears. Instead of celebrating the individual, we began searching instead for those common things that readers see in LotR and Tolkien's writings. In a sense it was like grafting a rose onto a pear tree. This had not been Fordim's initial question or intent.

Still, for the most part, we could agree that there was an element of enchantment or faerie that Tolkien drew upon, and that the majority of readers could sense that in their reading. The problem came when we tried to pin that down and put a name on it.

My personal objection to "Truth" (with a capital T) is not that it doesn't exist in the world as a whole. And I would certainly agree that Tolkien was attempting to reflect truth in LotR, and that it stands at the core of much of what he wrote. Even Aiwendil said he could accept that statement if truth was defined in its broadest sense. My objection to using "Truth" was a practical one. The minute you begin to define that term closely, you leave some people in the room and some people outside of it. This is particular true if you define truth in such a manner to touch upon the existence of God. One person's particular definition of Truth may not be the same as another's.

Tolkien was exceedingly careful not to define things in an explicit manner in LotR. He did not do what Lewis did. He uses the pregnant passive in LotR to give us vague hints of a greater force at work, but he does not spell out any of this in detail, at least not in this particular piece of writing. He tells us in the Letters that he did this intentionally. I also think it was intentional that he did not refer to "Truth" openly in the story itself.

Why did he do this? Helen has already pointed out that he did use the term "Truth" in Mythopoiea and On Faerie Stories. Perhaps because in this particular tale he didn't want to lock himself into the same problem we are having here? The minute you start defining Truth in a precise way, people's defensive walls go up as they begin to consider what side of the fence they are on, whether they fit into that particular defintion of truth or not. Tolkien did want to point out the shortcomings in our dreary old world, and to suggest that there could and should be more to life than that. The last thing he wanted to do was to get people's hackles up, so that they would build a wall and lose sight of what the author was saying.

And I am afraid that's what may be happening here. I sense an underlying exasperation in some of these posts that goes beyond a mere intellectual exchange. So my objection to 'Truth' as a term is merely a practical one. Helen may be right that I am throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But I see people becoming defensive about their particular definition of Truth and how that fits into their personal life and beliefs. I don't think that's what we're aiming for. It would be preferable to find terminology that doesn't raise this problem.

Whether we like it or not, Truth does imply a set standard. That is why I feel more comfortable with the terms "Joy" or "Light" which don't seem to carry quite the same meaning.

Fordim does have a point. If you look at "Truth" from a totally different vantage, you could argue that LotR is about rejecting anyone who comes telling you the "Truth", who claims to know the certainties of life better than you do, who in effect supplants Eru's music with his own ideas and schemes.

And I would say that Sauron does do this. Aiwendil , it's interesting that you mentioned Myths Transformed, because my own view of Sauron and Truth stem directly from that. Unlike Morgoth who was merely a nihilist (or at least had become one by the end of the First Age), Sauron did have a clear vision of "order and planning and organization". It has become the great Truth in his life, supplanting the music and plan that Eru put forward. Saruman had a similar vision. That vision of "order as Truth" is also one that we see in a certain modern political ideologies.

Can we not at least agree on a broad statement like this? That most readers see a core of 'enchantment' or 'faerie' which Tolkien depicts or draws upon in his writing. That this may go by different names -- truth, Truth, Joy, or Light-- and that we each differ somewhat in how we define or regard this concept, since we bring our own experiences and backgrounds into the process of definition. But can we not also agree that this core reflects the crucial values and themes that Tolkien delineates in his story: concepts of goodness, self sacrifice, love, and hope?

Would that ledge be broad enough to hold most of the readers here, but defined enough to have a least some meaning? If something like that still doesn't work, we may have to politely agree to disagree, which has certainly happened many times before.

Sorry if this is incoherent. I am racing off to work.

Sharon