LotR - Foreword

[Bêthberry]

SaucepanMan and Firefoot, this was really what I was suggesting way back in my first post when I noted that the Second Foreward did not contain the statements of intent which can be found in the Letters. How are we regarding this chapter by chapter reading? Firefoot's remembrance is I think close to what I would find very intriguing about our process here.

SpM's statement: Readers approaching his work for the first time will have nothing else to go on.

Perhaps few of us here can 'go back' and recall entirely what it was like the first time we read LOTR (for some it was so long ago! ). Others cannot dismiss easily everything we have learned about Tolkien from a variety of other sources. It is not easy to return ourselves to the state of naive (I would use the word virgin, but fear many might object to that concept) reader again. Still, I think it would be very interesting to discuss here in this sub-forum the process whereby so many come to see the moral intent which they profoundly profess to find in Tolkien's work and which his Letters suggest. How and where and by what means do these readers take on this meaning where others do not?

My first post seemed to provoke a sense that this moral intent must be found in the Forewards. None of the arguments put forth by davem or Mr Underhill or Helen persuade me that Tolkien was obliquely hinting at a specifically Christian or Catholic meaning in the Forewards. Instead, I see, as Saucy has suggested, that Tolkien

may have hoped that his readers found in it what he did, but he does not here require this of them.

Tolkien is not the only author who takes this kind of approach, believing that his or her book serves a particular purpose, but wanting to leave readers free to find that purpose for themselves. (For those of you who might be curious, Charlotte Brontë was another author who wrote explicitly to create a 'page turner' but who also left records which suggest that she was content to sit back and let readers make of Jane Eyre what they would, simply a straight forward romance or a more complex perspective on the narrator, Jane, as a girl whose imagination is governed and controlled by her own reading in romance. Note, I am not saying this specific interpretation applies to LOTR, but the method.)

I think this moral freedom of the reader is absolutely imperative in Tolkien and relates crucially to his notion of free will. Telling readers explicitly as Lewis or the author of the Morte d'Arthur has done that there is a specific worldview that one must get from the books was, I believe, for Tolkien the wrong way to help people find the moral bearings which he discovered as he wrote in his story.

Tolkien came slowly to understand the full significance of his mythology--it was not something he planned consciously at the outset, but was led to realise in the very process of his writing. This, by the way, is for me a very significant point about writing, that the very act of writing somehow engages the creative mind to generate ideas. (It is certainly a way I come to know the characters I create in RPGs despite all the planning aforehand.) Mr. Underhill is very right to point out that there are different ways of proceeding as a writer and this was Tolkien's way.

I suggest that Tolkien wanted his readers to proceed in a similar way, to find for themselves in the act of reading this vital and profound truth if possible. He was content to accept the possibility, perhaps even probability, that not all readers would necessarily find this, but would still find worth and value in his writing. Perhaps Tolkien learnt, from his insistence that Edith convert to Catholicism for their marriage and her subsequent unhappiness or unease with various aspects of it, that faith is a personal experience that cannot be forced. (The Catholic Church does not itself demand that spouses convert to Catholicism upon marriage with a Catholic and this idea is speculation of course.)

All of this is, of course, an interpretation of the man and the writer based on my reading of his Letters and other works and various biographies. Yet even today when I read the Forewards, I see a writer content to suggest a general direction and tenor of interpretation without stating explicitly what his meaning was. Very few writers of the calibre of Tolkien choose to be so 'flatfooted' or empirical about their work. They rather hope that the writing itself will lend itself to interpretation without extraneous signposts. They place their faith in the story itself rather than in prose exposition about it.

I would reply to Durelin about my use of the term "personal self-expression" but I am called away and must return later.

[tar-ancalime]

Bethberry said:

I think this moral freedom of the reader is absolutely imperative in Tolkien and relates crucially to his notion of free will.

I think it goes even farther than that: it is a way for Tolkien as an artist to show confidence in the art he has made. Only if the reader (or listener, or viewer--this is true of any medium) is free to interpret the art as s/he sees fit can the creator ever know if it stands alone and achieves any meaning at all, let alone the intended one. Authors who use forewords to go on endlessly about meaning or metaphor have always seemed to me to be the literary equivalent of parents who can't stop smoothing cowlicks, straightening collars, and wiping faces long enough to send their children out into the world to succeed or fail. And in the end, that's what any piece of art has got to do: regardless of the high or low intentions of the creator, it must stand on its merits. Both Tolkien and Bronte are quite right to step back and let their readers find what they will in their stories.

[davem]

Bethberry:

'Tolkien came slowly to understand the full significance of his mythology--it was not something he planned consciously at the outset, but was led to realise in the very process of his writing.'

Up to a point - yet his mythology grew out of the 'soil' of the TCBS, as much as it grew out of his love of mythology & language, & the TCBS was essentially a High Church/Catholic group of individuals, who had a dream of bringing back 'medieval' moral values & virtues to the modern, secular world. The Legendarium did what he wanted it to do. Or at least it bacame what he wanted it to become.

Of course no-one needs to accept his value system or accept his beliefs, anymore than they need to study Sindarin, or learn the Tengwar, or even read the Silmarillion, to understand LotR. My own feeling though, is that the more you know of the man & his beliefs the more you will gain from the books. I still can't go along with the idea that the art can be totally divorced from the artist.

One can read LotR in two ways, & get different things from both - it can be read as a fairy story, a traditional tale, in which any 'meaning' it may have for the individual is 'imposed' by that individual, who will decide whether the story is relevant to them or not. This seems to be what Tolkien wishes his readers to do with LotR.

But the novel can also be read as the product of Tolkien's mind, moral value system, personal experiences transformed into epic story.

I feel there is something to be gained from both. The first gives us access to Middle Earth, the art, the second gives us access to the man, the artist. The Legendarium is not simply the story of Middle Earth, it is also the story of Tolkien himself. Is the one to be considered relevant & the other irrelevant?

This is why I feel we have to take into account Tolkien's beliefs & values. Take Lembas (& to a lesser extent Miruvor). Can we truly understand what Tolkien is doing if we limit ourselves only to what Lembas is in Middle Earth? Lembas is too much like the Host, the body of Christ - & statements Tolkien makes about it in the story itself & in the letters make it abundantly clear that it is as close to being an allegory of the Host as it is being simply an Elven food concentrate. Now, only a Catholic would come up with Lembas - a non Catholic writer would simply have produced a magic food concetrate, which would not have the symbolic value of Lembas (Yet if we see Lembas as the Host what do we make of movie Gollum taking it & casting it away, & accusing Sam of stuffing his face with it? The point I'm trying to make with this example is that in the movie, Lembas is not a 'sacramental' substance, it is merely a food concentrate, so there is no sgnificance in the way it is treated). If we don't see Lembas in the light of the Host, divorcing what it meant to Tolkien the Catholic from its presence in the story, we won't get a real insight into what Lembas is, even in its Middle Earth form. The fact that it is Galadriel who gives the Lembas to the Fellowship emphasises her 'Virgin Mary' aspect.

That's just an example which springs to mind, & will be better pursued when we get to the relevant chapter. The point is, though, that LotR is full of such symbolism, which is not present on the surface, but it is there, under the surface, & is as much a part of the 'art' as what is on the surface. LotR is a work which contains many primary world elements 'mythologised'.

Is Lembas 'unsuccessfully' mythologised? Should Tolkien have gone further in (Middle)'Earthing' it, so that there would be no reason to connect it with the Host? Yet no Catholic could fail to see the symbolism. And what better way to bring out Galadriel's nature than by linking her with such a life giving substance?

Galadriel as Elven Queen, offering the Fellowship food concentrate bars, or Galadriel as 'pointing to' the Mother of God offering the body of Christ to preserve the lives of those who must Harrow Hell. How important is Tolkien's belief to our understanding of the story?

[Mister Underhill]

Very succinctly and well put, tar-ancalime!

Bethberry -- for the record, I wasn't trying to persuade anyone that "Tolkien was obliquely hinting at a specifically Christian or Catholic meaning in the Forewards". On the contrary, I think in Tolkien's view it was "fatal" to try to overtly impose or even discuss meaning or to link the truths of his story to a specific system. I think Tolkien would agree with the excerpt I posted on our old friend, the Canonicity thread, regarding story. For those not inclined to click over, the salient point is this: "A great story authenticates its ideas solely within the dynamics of its events."

I think this is why Tolkien resists, as Saucepan has observed, getting specific about theme and meaning, though you can feel the temptation to lecture burning behind his refutation of certain approaches and interpretations which had arisen in the ten years between First and Second Forewords (incidentally, Sauce, I agree completely with your assessment of Tolkien's use of the term "allegory" in the Foreword -- harmony for once!). He is content to hope that his tale will at times "maybe" excite or deeply move his readers.

And that's as it should be. As t-a has observed, you have to send your children out into the world to stand on their own two feet (or not) sooner or later.

Dang it -- cross-posting with davem means I have neglected his latest provocative post. I have thoughts on it, but alas, not time to address them at the moment.

[Mister Underhill]

Actually, I will add this, briefly -- I think the sort of one-to-one interpretation that equates lembas with the Host is precisely the sort of allegorical reading that Tolkien was trying to discourage.

[Alatariel Telemnar]

That Letter provides interesting correlation, Alatariel Telemnar for Tolkien's claim in the Second Foreward that LOTR was "primarily linguistic in inspiration and begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues." Thanks for providing it here. Being a great fan of words and language myself, I am not sure that this necessarily downgrades the value of his desire to write a good story. It would think they would be complementary. He would want the best story to highlight or reflect his created languages to their best advantage. For Tolkien as a philologist, everything began with words and structures of language, which then moved out to create patterns and order in stories.

Bêthberry, I agree. For if he would bother with such a story for his languages, of course he would want the best for them. And if I put off anything that made anyone get the feeling that it downgraded anything, then I didn't mean to.

The prime motive was the desire of a taleteller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times, maybe excite them or deeply move them.

Per'aps he was just killing two birds with one stone, as some say (three, possibly?) Maybe he wanted to create a world for his languages, yet write a good story, and hold the attention of readers as well (or, in other words, entertain us.)

[mark12_30]

Mr. Underhill and davem-- about Lembas and the host, as well as Galadriel and Mary (and Aragorn and the harrowing of hell and.... -- Augh! Brakes! Brakes!... phew.)

Regarding Tolkien and the one-to-one correspondence of these things, I agree with you, Mister Underhill, that caution is advised. However I also see davem's point that these things (lembas, Galadriel) sprang from somewhere deep, and I think must bear some imprint of Tolkien's faith. How to reconcile?

A "type" is not the same as an "allegory". A type is an imperfect forshadowing rather than a tight one-to-one correspondence. Allegories are properly one-to-one correspondences. Types are less tightly bound. With this I think Tolkien would have been comfortable, because (from his perspective) types have prophetically arisen in historical personages since the beginning of the Pentateuch.

Alert: Those uninterested in Biblical discussions may happily skip to the next post now.

For those few who are still with me: Isaac, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jeremiah, and other historical personages are each considered a 'type' of Christ, meaning that they are an imperfect foreshadowing, and it is the 'job' of each of them to foreshadow only certain aspects of Christ, not the whole deal (which would be difficult.) This is the most sensible application here as well. Three of the main characters exhibit imperfect foreshadowings of certain aspects, and may therefore be considered 'types'. (They commonly are.) Taken together, the three make a fair beginning of a picture, whereas any of the three individually would not.

In addition, this leaves room for more 'types' to be discovered. I can think of a Tolkienish fourth right off.

This expands into other areas as well. Lembas, yes; what about Miruvor? Etc. I don't want to go into it here but I think it allows more of Tolkien's own beliefs to shine through (in various places) without his intending to dominate the reader. I interpreted that when he was asked, "Lembas?" his answer was essentially a pleased "Okay, yes, I see that too", not "Well, finally somebody got it."

[davem]

As to Lembas as the 'Host: we have in Letter 210:

'It also has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a 'religious' kind. This becomes later apparent, especially in the chapter 'Mount Doom'.

And Letter 213 specifically:

'Or more important , I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), & in fact a Roman catholic. The latter 'fact' perhaps cannot be deduced; though one critic (by letter) asserted that the invocations of elbereth, & the character of Galadriel as directly described (or through the words of Gimli & Sam) were clearly related to Catholic devotion of Mary. Anoother saw in waybread (lembas) = viaticum & the reference to its feeding the will (vol. III, p213) & being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is: far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy story.)'

We can also take the examples of the Fellowship setting out from Rivendell on Dec 25th, & the destruction of the Ring & the Downfall of Barad Dur taking place on Mar 25th - which as Shippey points out is the date of both the Annunciation & the old date of Good Friday. Neither of these dates has any significance within the calendars of Middle Earth. But their Christian significance is obvious. As perhaps is the 'apocalyptic' ending - a 'sacred' tree & a symbolic marriage.

What we have in LotR is a story that works on two levels. One is as a straightforward fairy story, which can be read as simple entertainment. The other level is highly symbolic (& 'consciously so' as Tolkien admitted).

Of course, one can read, & explore, the story on the level of fairytale, leaving out the symbolism, but that is to miss a great deal of what Tolkien put in there.

There is constant 'symbolic' overshadowing running through the story - some deliberate, some unconscious on Tolkien's part. Much of it, admittedly, he only came to realise later, after finishing the story, yet, he has told us that it is consciously Catholic, & I can't see the point in refusing to acknowledge that.