Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
I do think its possible to view CoH as a counterbalance to LotR/The Sil as a whole. Tolkien wrote it as it is - & unless we want to accuse him of 'lying', or at least of attempting to mislead, it is equally as 'true' in & of itself, as the more 'hopeful' works. LotR & CoH are both tales set in an invented world, but that's no reason to reduce one of them to being merely a 'part' of the other. They are both equal, but in a moral sense, opposites.
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In a moral sense, opposites. This is the crucial distinction between the two works, I think. As Andrew O'Hehir wrote in his review on Salon.com, "
I came away from "The Children of Húrin" with a renewed appreciation for the fact that Tolkien's overarching narrative is much more ambiguous in tone than is generally noticed" However, O'Hehir grants that this change in tone is a result of Tolkien's "imperfect success" trying to "harmonize the swirling pagan cosmology behind his imaginative universe with a belief in Christian salvation". This begs the question, is Tolkien trying, in CoH, to "harmonize" these two worldviews, which are morally and eschatalogically at variance?
O'Hehir continues: "Salvation feels a long way off in "The Children of Húrin." What sits in the foreground is that persistent Tolkienian sense that good and evil are locked in an unresolved Manichaean struggle with amorphous boundaries, and that the world is a place of sadness and loss, whose human inhabitants are most often the agents of their own destruction." We've certainly identified here that "salvation feels a long way off". Yet it's interesting here that O'Hehir assigns the epithet 'persistent' to the idea that good and evil are "locked in an unresolvable...struggle" This seems to be quite at odds with the usual critical stance, which (half rightly) suggests that good will triumph over evil eventually. Usually, this is a kind of boxing bag for some critics, who perceive this as a kind of existential flaw in Tolkien's mythos. All the same, does CoH afford a sense of "unresolvability"? As I wrote in my last post, I'm drawn to the idea that CoH is in some ways not merely a backdown from but a moral repudiation of the doctrine of "eucatastrophe". When the story ends, Hurin knows that his wife "had died" in his arms. No more is said, and no more need be said.