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Old 11-06-2006, 02:29 AM   #47
Lalwendė
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Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Going right back to your first post here, I was thinking about whether other writers use this 'mythic unity' idea (and I know I've discussed this with you elsewhere, though it might be useful to pop it on here); it would be useful to have other writers who do/did this in order to put things into context.

William Blake is the immediate person who springs to mind. He quite literally strove for unity with his use of art and poetry in combination; I recently went to an exhibition on Poetic Vision, looking at how art and poetry have been and are used in tandem (sometimes in a way that neither can be divorced from the other) to create something entirely different. Blake was of course one of the poet/artists included. But the exhibition also included work by Hughes who worked with a photographer to produce Elmet (another mythic work based on the old kingdom!), William Morris who intended works such as The Wood Beyond The World to be printed by the Kelmscott Press in beautiful hand made editions filled with medieval style illuminations and engravings (and having seen one of these books close up I can now see why this was not going to be economically viable!). Then again we had various pre-Raphaelite artists and poets who combined the two disciplines to create something 'other'. And we also have those who did not strive for 'unity' but who nevertheless touched on the visionary aspects of Art such as Samuel Palmer.

Some of the above of course were inspirations to Tolkien which raises other questions.

However, back to Blake who said "the imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself." He was one writer who did indeed believe that the physical and spiritual were inextricably linked. In using the old sense of the word "pneuma" in the first post here I instantly recognised that this was what Blake wrote about. Of course there is also the way he could 'see God' in the smallest thing, how he thought the world itself was thronged with angels and deities, that they suffused its being, and ours.

We often apply the words 'mystical' and 'visionary' to things we just don't understand, and Blake suffers from this. However Tolkien does too, depsite his use of more direct language and an easy narrative. Both make use of archetypes (and indeed its been said many a time here before that Tolkien's characters are rarely if ever 'seen from the inside' and he has been pinpointed as using archetype characters); Blake has his Four Zoas in Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Great Albion who fulfill the archetype purpose - in fact this epic is about Jerusalem achieving 'unity' once more. Then we also have Milton which is about 'Unity'.

And niftily tying in to the latest thoughts from lmp we come to language, as Blake of course was one of the greatest users of language, understanding the complexities of meaning and how seemingly simple words could have so many other meanings. Read Songs of Innocence and Experience and you can get seemingly endless new interpretations each time you read the poems, and yet they are so easy to read (especially in contrast to Blake's epics). Sound familiar? Yup, Tolkien created this easy to read work (LotR if you can't guess) too, one which seems to throw up endless interpretations and harnesses the power of words.

Finally, moving off from Blake, now it might also be useful to consider which other writers realise and make use of the power of words. In fantasy there is Ursula le Guin who makes great play of the power and potency of Names, but there is someone else who got 'inside language' as Tolkien did - Anthony Burgess. Its too long since I read any of his work, but in the most infamous work, Clockwork Orange you can see how he does a reverse Tolkien, and instead of going back to the source and recovering meanings of words, he takes them forwards and sees where words might end up. I could write more on this and carry on all day, likely, but I must get me breakfast now, alas. The point is, I suppose, that Tolkien was not alone...
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