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Originally Posted by Anguirel
At last it struck home. All these assorted bards and scribblers seem to me to be one, huge, fascinating authorial metaphor. From here stems the apparently omniscient perspective. All characters in the Legendarium are, of course, extensions of Tolkien; but these sub-authors occupy a middle ground, a twilight world. They have to depart to obscurity to represent the distance the author must, in the end, maintain between himself and his creation. Even Tolkien has never walked the streets of Minas Tirith, or wondered at the glades of Doriath. Regretful he might be, but Maglor cannot come back among the people of the Elves-he has his story to tell, to lament in song, and must remain detached. Likewise the others.
Even the varying styles Tolkien indulged in are reflected in these "mediums", these guides, these historians, these lost wanderers. Salgant and Bilbo, I am sure, would happily cooperate on many a comic scene; Maglor and Frodo would be "high, purged of the gross"; while love scenes and tender romance falls to Daeron's flute...
So listen to the note of the harp or the squeaking of a quill. Their importance is paramount. Eru has bestowed the power of creation upon them; they preserve with more eficacy than any Elven ring; but in the end, they must always elude both author and subject.
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I'm not sure I would take these characters, this fate, as a metaphor for the author. There is, first of all, the question of each character's omniscience: do they sing us the full story? And, secondly, it is always tempting to contemplate characters as a reflection of the author--even, as you say,
Anguirel, extensions--but much more contemplation would be needed, I think, to justify this. Some writers sometimes throw off distance, some write only with extreme distance, and these conditions vary with character, scene, event. Were they explorations of Tolkien's sense of the writer's and singer's role? Well, we'd need to see more 'in the text' I'd think, to see the subject of the writer and his work, brought out as a topic more prominently.
On the other hand, I think there is something here about the siren call of the road. The road, the song, the quest, requires only one thing of the singer, the teller, of Frodo. And that is the one thing which the singer desires above all else and longs to give: a perfect economy of action and focus. All heart, all mind, all focus, all emotion are devoted solely to that one purpose, the road, the song, the Quest. There is no distraction exception those which challenge the focus, no residue of other commitments, nothing messay with cross purpose. It is perfect in its simplicity.
This perfection of economy does not pertain to others--certainly not to Sam as Mayor of the Shire and definitely not to Frodo upon his return to the Shire. The focus is no longer pure, but splintered through all the colours of messy world. This, too, pertains to readers, for at the close the single-minded focus, the pure pursuit of story, must also be scattered for our thoughts about the story must now find a new discipline in our own scattered thoughts about the road, the Quest, the story. And this is a far harder thing to accomplish.
The loss is of this perfection of action and focus, I think, rather than a necessary detachment or a not knowing. Nothing now is simple.