[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I went back and re-read the first post in this...um...thread, just to see how and where it all began (more than a year ago!). One interesting thing that I found in that post, which I think we have lost sight of, is the importance that I placed on the "open-endedness" or even unfinished nature of Tolkien's works and world. The fact that there are so many inconsistencies in the fabric of this world was, I argued, an opportunity for (even a demand upon) the reader to approach the corpus of M-E as history and not literary (which is how the Professor preferred it to be taken).

One point I would immediately make in light of this is that it is impossible to sustain any allegorical reading of the stories, not because Tolkien won't "allow" us, and not simply because the stories are complicated, but because at some level, like history, they don't make perfect sense. Until we can nail down with absolute certainty the full blood lines of Aragorn and Arwen we can never really know what their union means in an allegorical way (is it the marriage of Reason and Love, or whatever...we can't know because there will always be some shadowy aspects to the past and natures of Ar and Ar due to the less than entirely clear lineages Tolkien gave them in various sources).

The other point I would re-iterate here is that no matter how badly one may desire the authortative/authorial voice to guide us, that isn't going to happen -- at least, not in any reliable way insofar as that voice (like the voices of all individuals) is fragmented and multifarious. To turn over the interpretive act to the reader in the case of Middle-Earth is not to be as Saruman and break the white light into many hues, but to acknowledge that the rainbow exists already -- to seek to ignore that is folly, to seek to resolve it is, I would suggest, limiting and hubristic.

Again, referring back to my original post, I used the examples there of Balrogian wings and the origin of orcs (to that I would now add the shape of Elven ears and the identity of Gothmog: not to mention far more perplexing riddles such as the precise function and nature of the Ring, the ability of Saruman to fool Sauron, the relation between magic/art/technology, and the list goes on...). These examples were chosen to demonstrate that in most cases, if we go looking for the authoritative/authorial version or meaning, we will find only that it's just not there. The fact that we can continue the discussions about these things, all of us with careful reference to the works, proves that! I would venture to go so far as to say that if the author is dead, then it is the reading COMMUNITY which has killed him, insofar as the voice of one person (the reader) cannot overwhelm the voice of one other person (the writer) so effectively as can the overwhelming voice of a large and excited group of people!

I would go even further than this: to interpret the text at all, that is, to make a choice of any sort about what it means, is to insert yourself not just into the process of the text, but to put yourself before the text. "Before" in both senses -- both before it as we stand before the altar, in reverence, awaiting some kind of outside beneficence, but also before meaning in greater priority and placing the text behind and into the background. Let's face it, the reading act is about as solipsistic and isolated an event as there is: the presence of another person in the room can be enough to ruin the reading act. Conversation with someone else is impossible. To those who would say that the act of reading is itself a conversation with the author I would merely say that it's unlike any I've ever had -- I've never been able to stop the other person from talking merely by looking away from them, and I'm usually able to effect what they say by saying something myself!