[Fordim Hedgethistle]

In folk tale and oral literature, the story-teller has a wide variety of tricks-of-the-trade that she or he uses both to remember the story without benefit of literacy and to tell it in an engaging way. These tricks include things like repeated actions and motifs, things happening in threes, the inclusion of songs and rhymes, doubling of parts and characters and – almost universally – structuring the tale around a story of the hero’s journey through a series of challenges, riddles, tests or dangers toward a new sense of him or herself, and then back home to a transformed state of existence.

Sound familiar? It should, since all of these things happen in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Now, I am far from the first person in this forum to make this point, but thinking about it the other day got me to thinking about the role and status of literacy and orality in the tales. And it occurred to me that, interestingly, Elves don’t seem to use books. This was at first surprising to me, as I rather immediately associate an advanced state of culture with literacy, but I don’t recall mention of an Elvish library or a book really anywhere in the legendarium (although I am sure that such references exist…don’t they?). Whether or not Elves read books is not really the point though. What’s intriguing to me is that they don’t seem to place as much stock or importance in books as do other races (Hobbits especially). But then it occurred to me that they don’t really need to. The point of literacy is that it allows people to put down information in a more or less permanent form that will not alter through the years. But Elves, being immortal, don’t need to worry about that so much: if the teller of a tale three thousand years later is going to be someone who was actually there, there’s not much to be gained by committing it to print!

But it’s not that Elves are anti-book. It’s more that they are themselves so bookish that they don’t need books. That is, they don’t need to write things down because they can remember them for hundreds and thousands of years, and they hate change and want always to preserve the past unaltered, so (presumably) the stories as they tell them will not vary or alter – they do orally what mortals can do only in print.

The other ‘type’ for this is the Ents. They don’t need books because they live for so long and have such long memories that they can record their knowledge within an oral tradition that traces its way back through the history of the Three Ages. It’s interesting, too, that they are themselves trees, from which paper is made – it’s like they’re living books already!

So all this leads me to wonder about the status and view of books and reading, literacy and orality in Middle-Earth. We seem, on the one hand, to have a world in which the book – or the idea of the Book – is the highest ideal there is, with the Elves and the Ents being living, breathing books: books as they should be. In this view, peoples like the Hobbits and Men (and Dwarves who provided the only book I can remember from the story proper: The Book of Mazarbul which is only a record of woe) are using books as a kind of poor substitute for memory and orality.

On the other hand, LotR goes to great lengths to present itself as a book: the translator conceit, the appendices, the prologue, the extended history of the Book of Westmarch, etc. So perhaps the book – or the idea of the Book – is being celebrated insofar as after the Elves are gone, and the Ents have departed, it’s up to the mortal beings and their books to record the tales of the oral culture that’s gone.

I’m just intrigued by a book that is written like an oral tale, in which people who have no use for books are celebrated as the highest beings by people who depend upon books for the transmission of knowledge.