Prologue
…
My dear Bagginses and Boffins, and my dear Tooks and Brandybucks, and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots…
And I hope I’m not too late, as week dedicated to each part is nearly over…
Nonetheless…
Having in mind lot of what preceeding posts are concerned with, I’d dare your scorn and say that this particluar discussion is mostly engaged in details, and leaves the thing and the whole of the thing aside. And he who breaks the thing to find… well, you know what said 'he' is up to. After all, what is the prologue
about? True, we have author’s statement that it is ‘mostly about hobbits’, but should we take such statements at their face value? I believe not, and I’ll be explaining why in a short while
Any time I reread the prologue (as I’ve done it yesterday, what with it being Sunday and blessed day for one’s freelance activities, reading included), three things inevitably pop up to mind.
1. It includes a mighty load of things
not essential to the plot whatsoever
2. Things it concerns (i.e., hobbits and their habitat) feel essentially English
3. Such a prologue is unprecedented to my reading memory
One at time than.
Entry #1: I can’t help remembering A.P.Chekhov, Russian playwright with his saying: “if there is a rifle on the wall in act 1, it should be firing off at least in act 3”. And all the books I’ve read usually follow this scheme up neatly. I.e., there usually are no unneeded things. Tolkien, even apart from prologue, which is the treasury of such 'things unrequired for the development of the plot', is placing them here an there (wait till wer reach Bombadil, heh!). Tolkien is hinting to older history of the world he brings us into, and does that not only via ancient and neatly worked out names (which feel solid even for the unconscious), old legends and bits of
untranlsated poetry, but by means of those unrequired things, those Hornblowers and Bracegirdles, which are completely unneeded, but form a background, some feeling on the border of one’s consicousness, that there is more to it than the plot we are about to read, that plot is just a tiny friction of the whole world. All of that is forming first in the prologue, where the walls are covered up in rifles and guns of all sorts, which, apart from firing, never make later appearence at all!
Entry #2: I haven’t been to England ever. (To be honest, most westward of my journeys took me as far as Poland). So, the mental image I’ve got of England must be blurred and improper. But what strikes me right away, is how much English Shire feels. Apart from chronology, and Marcho-Blanco/Hengist-Horsa connotations indicated by
Squatter, there is a
feel of England in there (even for a man, (or especially for a man?) who’s mental image is formed by Donald Bisset, Edward Lear, Arthut Conan Doil ,Alan Alexander Miln and their set). And hobbits feel modern, too, quite apart frome the rest of the book, where guys in armour wonder about with great swords and do ‘deeds’. They
are spatially and temporary out of place. Deliberate anachronisms, I daresay, what with all their 'waistkins', pipeweed, five'o'clocks and nearly modern social system. Now that is done on purpose, I believe, and strongly on purpose. Tolkien revealed part of his mind in his “On Fairy Stories” essey:
Quote:
|
Stories that are actually concerned primarily with “fairies,” that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called “elves,” are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good “fairy-stories” are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches.
|
(emphasis Tolkien’s)
Now that is very true. But the truth can be extended to include humans that are alienated from us by depths of time. I believe that ‘modern’ and ‘English’ hobbits are necessary as conductors, as bridge to cover the gap between us with our ‘democracy’ and ethical code down to chaps with swords doing deeds. Those latter would seem strange and alien, if not for hobbits connecting us with them, who, by and by growing (but that happens later on), show that values of ‘deeders’ are not very far from our own, that we, after all, are of the same world, makes us feel for them by comparison.
And now I’m smoothly on my Entry #3. Such a lengthy, maybe even boring (to some) prologue is there for that purpose. It hammers into reader's head the sense of ‘reality’ of the world to be opened up, besides that of ‘modernity’ and Englishness of the heroes to be, sets a stage for us to feel for heroes, not to look at the whole thing as another peculiar and antique thing, to make it
ours.
And that’s about the shape of it.
cheers
