[Bêthberry]

Bethberry comes in, brushing toast crumbs off her shirt, and licking a stray bit of honey from her fingers, having had a hard time sleeping for the playing in her head those whispers of davem...

davem, did Tolkien know the author's intention when he wrote about The Battle of Maldon or Beowulf? Lost to the dim echoes of time are the Anglo Saxon bards who gave him and us the poems. Yet that did not stop Tolkien from engaging with the works and giving us fruitful things to consider about them. Are we to have two different kinds of reading, one for ancient texts about which we cannot ascribe any authorial authorising, and one for modern texts about which we must say is insufficient since we must go to other things outside it to understand what it means?

On the other hand, if we consider the text as an self-contained object which holds its meaning, which the reader digs out, then we assume a certain condition on the part of the reader: a kind of blank entity which the text fills up, a bucket, waiting impassively to be filled up. I don't think this model really describes the kind of reader Tolkien was--it cannot account for how he saw newly.

But if we become more self-reflexive as readers, asking ourselves why we respond to certain things and not others, asking ourselves what other stories we are reminded of, what other experiences--in short, if we consider the value of our different interpretations--then I think we get closer to where the value of literature lies--creating experiences which allow us to be more fully human, more fully aware, more fully responsive. We will always endlessly be caught in the pursuit of meaning because that is important, but if we become too set and hardfast in saying that our end goal is simply to determine meaning, then we overlook the glorious aspect of faerie (which I might be tempted to say is the experience of all art and not just fantasy, but I grant this could be reductive), which is this seeing newly for the first time.

*wanders off thinking she really needs a second cup of coffee*

Edit: cross posting with Aiwendil, whose post I must now go read.