Inziladun and I cross-posted in the
Learning about this Website thread and we happened to respond to
Pitchwife with two very similar thoughts:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
As I get older, I find myself treasuring Tolkien's works all the more, and becoming rather protective. I am fearful of not heeding Gandalf's advice to Saruman, about not breaking something to discover its workings. I really have no interest now in how the books were constructed. I don't care about real or imagined symbolism. I know what I feel when I read of Tuor seeing the Great Sea for the first time, and spreading his arms as if to embrace it; or picturing Galadriel standing with Frodo in front of her Mirror, struggling with her own longing and temptation to use the Ring.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Formendacil
This is a good distinction and thinking about it, I think I'm almost the complete opposite: I love to talk lore--the worldbuilding and the factoids and the gap-filling, but I have always been protective of things around literary worth and meaning where Middle-earth is concerned, but this topic has been on my mind since I re-encountered the What Breaks the Enchantment thread while looking for a link to the great Canonicity thread, and setting aside the self-analysis of why I resist talking about the MEANING of Tolkien's literature (to me or anyone else), I think it is very much accurate to distinguish between the two. |
So, here's a thread about that.
Now, threads evolve, so I can't say where this is going to go, but after reading through a couple pages of the
What Breaks the Enchantment thread, I know sort of what I'm not exactly looking to talk about
: this isn't thread isn't aiming to be about OUGHT; it's about IS.
In other words, I think the big back-and-forth about that thread ended up boiling down to how a reader responded to Tolkien and, since it was about where the enchantment (the willing suspension of disbelief) failed, it devolved into a question of whether it was the author or the reader's fault it had failed. And, don't get me wrong--it's a good thread and I kind of want to revisit some aspects of it, once I get through to the end of rereading it, but spurred on by the "protective coincidence," I want to look at something similar, it a bit reversed.
While the specifics may and probably do differ,
Inziladun and I each seem to mean by "protective" that Tolkien's works have become dear to us: it is something we seek to protect; something--at least I would say--that is a part of who we are. (A parallel could no doubt be made to how the Ringbearers feel about the Ring, but hopefully this lacks the downsides.)
In my own case, I remember that a visceral part of my dislike for the movies and part of my hesitancy at joining any sort of fan community in the days before I opened up to the Barrow-downs, was that it impinged on and seemed to threaten what Middle-earth meant to me. It is at once home and family and part of the furniture of my mind. Thinking of the "what breaks the enchantment?" question is hard because, well, I can't see anything in Middle-earth objectively.
Obviously, I overcame the hesitancy about joining the 'Downs and I'll even say that the PJ movies didn't end up ruining anything and might even not be bad movies, but that core impulse beneath of fearing to expose Middle-earth to too much scrutiny because it would be exposing
me to scrutiny hasn't necessarily gone away. Arguably, I've just become better at deflecting it.
An example of this in the wild--as opposed to in my head--would be about a year ago, when there were several memes taking Gandalf's words "...so do all who live to see such times, yet it is not for them to decide... etc." popping up across Facebook and it was not just a case of applicability, of "these words in this book seem to apply to this situation," but a case of "these words are familiar from these books and because they are a strength for those characters, they are a strength for [INSERT READER HERE]."
This isn't a unique issue to Tolkien. There's a lot be said, for example, about the Star Wars fans who were so torn over
The Last Jedi being torn because the new interpretation of the movies clashed in some way with the internalised vision of the Star Wars timeline that had become a part of their selves in years before. But I do think Tolkien has inspired a greater amount of this sort of protectionism because his work is as good as it is: there are fewer reasons NOT to imbibe it into one's self if it is the sort of thing you like.
I don't know if all that counts as a topic-starter or if it's more of a single-post statement, but where better to talk about the conflation myself and Middle-earth than on the 'Downs?