I’m
really going to stick me neck out here and say that I disagree with the two premises that underlie so much of this thread…
1) I don’t agree that Tolkien has created a myth (but then, I don’t think that any
one person can)
2) I don’t agree that this attitude or ‘feeling’ which we
attribute to a tale and call ‘mythic’ must forever and anon reside only in the original work (that is, a ‘mythic’ book cannot become film or vice versa).
To tackle my first point: with all due respect to Lewis, I think he missed a major component of myth – that it is
not something that can belong to any one person, but is instead a communal/societal experience. Works of art can be ‘mythic’ (like classical Greek drama) only insofar as they rewrite or represent a body of myth that the society is already organised around or in response to in some way. But no-one can just sit down and write a myth; when we come to read such a work, we are not finding an expression of something that we share, but something alien. (Unlike the citizens of Thebes hearing about Theseus, the ‘founder’ of
their city, we read of Aragorn and the refounding of some place called ‘Gondor’ that is meaningless outside the book.) Myth is not just a story that one person tells and that we like, it is a living body of tradition that finds expression in and through a wide range of social and communal experience. Yes, LotR has become widespread and lots of people find meaning in it, but it is not the expression of our own societal belief system – it is the expression of a belief system, but we do not look to Aragorn and Frodo, Boromir and Éowyn as part of the ‘us’ the way that the ancient Greeks looked at Odysseus, or Native Americans regard Old Woman or Coyote.
What LotR is, is ‘mythic’ which is an entirely subjective attribution that some people are willing to give it and others are not. By ‘mythic’ I mean, does it ‘feel’
like a myth? As I said, this is entirely subjective and personal, so I will not attempt to argue anyone into or out of their position toward the mythic in LotR, since if you think it is, it is. But where I will take issue is with anyone who would want to move from their own subjective response to the text (“This feels mythic to me”) to a normative stance that they wish to impose on others (“therefore, it really is a myth, and therefore expressing a value and belief system that describes and embodies the world we live in”).
This is why I make my second point. Because a reader decides that the book is mythic and the film is not, or the film is mythic and the book is not – well, that’s their subjective response, and they are not only welcome to it, I cherish that response and embrace it. But to take the step beyond that and start claiming that the film is categorically not myth but the book is, is to make the mistake of assuming that something one has attributed to the book (the mythic ‘feel’) is part of the book. Again, this is not how myth is. Myth does not adhere to the work of art that represents it: Odysseus is not a character in a poem by Homer. Rather, the
Odyssey is a work of art that is meant to capture and reflect a myth that already has cultural, social, religious reality in its world. That is why LotR, great as it is, cannot be myth, and that is why to say that it is myth and the film is not is to do what I can only describe as a form of interpretive violent to other viewers, for that statement assumes that one’s own subjective assessment of the book is somehow part of the book, not part of one’s individual experience of the book.
And another thing…
The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy, it’s a single book in three volumes. I know that nobody in this thread has made this mistake, here or elsewhere, but as long as I was being cranky I figured I’d get that one off my chest too.