Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aiwendil
Davem wrote:
Are you really claiming that :
1. LotR has a simple "everyone lives happily ever after" ending
2. The Silmarillion has a simple "everyone lives happily ever after" ending
3. Once there exists one story with a happy ending, it's pointless for there to be any more
4. Tolkien, contrary to all evidence, would have published the 'Narn' on its own, deliberately suppressing the tale of Earendil
5. The eucatastrophe of the War of Wrath erases all the suffering of Turin and his family; tragedy is so weak a thing that subsequent joy robs it of its potency?
I think that each one of those points is clearly false.
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Well, I think my posts on the LotR read through more or less confirm that as my position, yes.
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Well you've signed off on some rather strange claims.
Numbers 1 and 2 are the sort of literary snobbery I'd expect from Edmund Wilson. Number 3 implies that there should be no such thing as literature. Number 4 is demonstrably false. There seems little point, then, in arguing against them.
But number 5 sounds reasonable enough that someone might fall for it. Yet it's also false, and I think that is nowhere clearer than in Tolkien's writings. To paraphrase Turin, tragedy is tragedy, however small, nor is its worth only in what follows from it. But the tragedy of the 'Narn' is not small; it is deep and potent. The ultimate defeat of Morgoth no more wipes away the suffering of the 'Narn' than the defeat of the Nazis wipes away the holocaust.
In my opinion (as I think I've harped on elsewhere) the synthesis of antitheses is one of Tolkien's chief strengths. In LotR two very different concepts of evil are synthesized (as Shippey discusses in
Author of the Century). In the tale of Turin, fate and free will are synthesized. And in the Silmarillion as a whole, Norse hopelessness and Christian hope are synthesized. Now it is the special power of Tolkien's synthesis that neither of the apparently contradictory elements is mitigated. Contradictory though it may seem, in the Silmarillion as in life, the deepest sorrow and the highest joy co-exist, and neither invalidates the other.