What does the sixpence = ?

[Bergil]

Some sage once described every political group going to the library and destroying anything that could possibly be contrued as offending them. Nothing was left, not even the thesaurus.

[littlemanpoet]

Translation broadens our topic. Perhaps it is not language. But I recall that Tolkien was generally displeased with many of the translations into other languages because the translators thought they knew so much and actually knew so little, which drove JRRT to distraction.

Still, to the degree that the translations are true to Tolkien's careful word choices (not to mention all the other aspects of story), LotR seems to reach down to something that contemporary novelistic fiction can't touch. Myth made applicable to people now.

On page 221 of Author of the Century, Shippey relates Northrop Frye's five literary modes:

• myth - the characters in a work are 'superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men' ... the 'hero is a divine being and the story about him will be myth'
• romance - characters are superior only in 'degree (not kind) to other men, and again to their environment'
• high mimesis - (tragedy or epic) - where the heroes and heroines are 'superior in degree to other men but not to natural environment'
• low mimesis - level of the classical novel - characters are on a level with us in abilities, though maybe not in social class
• irony - we see ourselves looking down on people weaker or more ignorant than us

LotR, according to Shippey, functions at all levels at different times, depending upon the purpose at a given point in the story. This gives it scope such that it can deal with issues in a way that a story written in only one of the five modes, cannot.

So think of these characters, and think about what mode(s) s/he is written at:

Gandalf
Samwise
Frodo
Saruman
Sauron
Aragorn
Boromir
Gaffer Gamgee
Tom Bombadil
Elrond
Eowyn
Faramir
Denethor
Theoden

What's the point? Maybe this is a little bit of the sixpence, and maybe this helps explain why contemporary literati simply can't get their minds around what LotR is doing.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

. . . .

• myth - the characters in a work are 'superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men' ... the 'hero is a divine being and the story about him will be myth'
• romance - characters are superior only in 'degree (not kind) to other men, and again to their environment'
• high mimesis - (tragedy or epic) - where the heroes and heroines are 'superior in degree to other men but not to natural environment'
• low mimesis - level of the classical novel - characters are on a level with us in abilities, though maybe not in social class
• irony - we see ourselves looking down on people weaker or more ignorant than us

LotR, according to Shippey, functions at all levels at different times, depending upon the purpose at a given point in the story. This gives it scope such that it can deal with issues in a way that a story written in only one of the five modes, cannot.

So think of these characters, and think about what mode(s) s/he is written at:

Gandalf
Samwise
Frodo
Saruman
Sauron
Aragorn
Boromir
Gaffer Gamgee
Tom Bombadil
Elrond
Eowyn
Faramir
Denethor
Theoden

What's the point? Maybe this is a little bit of the sixpence, and maybe this helps explain why contemporary literati simply can't get their minds around what LotR is doing.

Well, I was hoping to have time to comment on your idea about Hebrew/Classical/Germanic sources for western culture and now I have this to consider! The first idea is intriguing, especially thinking of Matthew Arnold's thesis about the two cultures, the Hebraic and the Greek. "Barbarian" cultures had much to overcome in terms of aesthetic and cultural assumptions.

But time only for a quick observation. Isn't it true that usually (although not always), irony is considered not compatible with myth or romance? I can see myth, romance and the two forms of mimesis operating at different times in LotR, but to what degree is irony represented? I'm not saying we can't find irony in it, but I wonder how much an ironic stance would impede or obstruct the mythic or heroic stance.

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Well, I was hoping to have time to comment on your idea about Hebrew/Classical/Germanic sources for western culture and now I have this to consider! The first idea is intriguing, especially thinking of Matthew Arnold's thesis about the two cultures, the Hebraic and the Greek. "Barbarian" cultures had much to overcome in terms of aesthetic and cultural assumptions.

But time only for a quick observation. Isn't it true that usually (although not always), irony is considered not compatible with myth or romance? I can see myth, romance and the two forms of mimesis operating at different times in LotR, but to what degree is irony represented? I'm not saying we can't find irony in it, but I wonder how much an ironic stance would impede or obstruct the mythic or heroic stance.

Sorry to overload thee!
From memory
since I do not have the book with me...
Usually, yes, if not handled well.
Tolkien however chooses his story to tell
through the mediation of halfling wit
to whit,
hobbits such as Gaffer,
always a laugher,
give us a chance to look down
at a perspective lesser than our own
as a mediation from the high
such as Elves who are not so nigh.

[Bêthberry]

I'd like to turn this thread back to an earlier comment lmp made on it.

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

On page 221 of Author of the Century, Shippey relates Northrop Frye's five literary modes:

• myth - the characters in a work are 'superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men' ... the 'hero is a divine being and the story about him will be myth'
• romance - characters are superior only in 'degree (not kind) to other men, and again to their environment'
• high mimesis - (tragedy or epic) - where the heroes and heroines are 'superior in degree to other men but not to natural environment'
• low mimesis - level of the classical novel - characters are on a level with us in abilities, though maybe not in social class
• irony - we see ourselves looking down on people weaker or more ignorant than us

Now, I've lately been doing some reading other than Tolkien--don't laugh, some of us do escape his lure from time to time!--some of which has to do with how we understand language. And I've been wondering about this last description of irony. Does Shippey really describe Frye's sense of irony as "looking down on people weaker or more ignorant than us?" 'Cause I really don't see that as Frye's or the more common understanding of irony.

Here's a couple of online definitions: Cambridge online ; Dictionary.com.

This might ramble a bit, and I'm not sure where it's going, but I wonder about this idea that irony involves words which mean other than they first appear to mean.
This is just an extension of all literary language, which is non-literal, much like metaphor itself. It also might suggest deceit in some hands, of course, and that might itself be something absent from Tolkien. (Hmm, this could get us into that old 'poetry never lies' thing.)

So, I've been thinking, this kind of irony, how common is it in Tolkien's art? How common are metaphors, for that matter?

Maybe it is the absence of this kind of literary language which drew the ire of critics? After all, the modernist writers were heavy on irony and detachment. Is it possible that Tolkien, in aspiring to write a history for his fantasy, in fact created a style which ran against the main tendency of story, to create non-literal language? Could those critics have been spooked by Tolkien's attempt not at fantasy but at making fantasy appear real, historical, literal?

[Estelyn Telcontar]

I've been reading Patrick Curry's Defending Middle-Earth and found some good thoughts in the section "Readers vs. Critics" of his introductory chapter. Here are two pertinent quotes:

...the literary community, whose silence on Tolkien ... is broken only by an occasional snort of derision which seems to pass for analysis.

The single greatest obstacle to appreciating Tolkien's work is sheer literary snobbery.

The rest is well worth reading, but time constraints allow me only to serve this little appetizer that will hopefully intrigue others to read the whole menu!

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Thanks for those, Estelyn. I've been reading Persuasion lately and remembering that the by the end of The Big Read everyone who wanted to be identified with the intelligentsia was recommending that people vote for Jane Austen to keep Tolkien out of the top spot. What occurred to me last night, as I read a conclusion that was as unnecessarily long as it was predictable, is that Austen isn't any better than Tolkien; she's just such an accepted part of the landscape of English literature that her status as a 'great' writer is simply taken as read. That's not to say that Austen doesn't deserve to be rated highly - after all, Persuasion was published posthumously and unrevised - but that if one were disposed to find fault with her novels it would not be difficult to compose quite as much vitriol about her as certain intellectuals do about Tolkien. 'Literary snobbery' was the phrase that should have occurred to me then: some people are in, some are out; artistic merit is only one of the considerations.

Further to Bêthberry's comments, I've had occasion to read other works by Tom Shippey, specifically on the subject of humour (and not in any way touching on Tolkien). When describing Anglo-Saxon humour, he sees adversarial comedy (he recycles the German term gegeneinanderlachen) as a major theme. Apparently he subscribes to the school of thought exemplified by Anthony M. Ludovici, that laughter is primarily a display of self-perceived superiority, and that humour is an attempt to provoke such a response. He was probably a little careless with his terms in Author of the Century, largely as a result of using somebody else's, and perhaps he would have done better to have found another German phrase. Certainly 'irony' is not the best term for a style of humour in which we look down on the characters, but I find myself unable to think of a better. Perhaps 'satire' or 'lampoon' would be closer to what he was trying to say.

I think, Bêthberry, that you have something in Tolkien's seriousness and realism, but I think that it causes trouble for him because it is focused on something that is not regarded as important. We have embraced empirical science as the arbiter of truth, to the extent that the terms 'truth' and 'reality' have to some extent become blurred into one another. In pursuing a more medieval view of truth, Tolkien has devoted too much seriousness to something unworthy, something that is not 'real' (a direct portrayal of an empirically demonstrable reality). Tolkien's truths are spiritual, worse still explicitly Christian. It's acceptable for the Gawain poet to talk about green giants riding into Camelot with perilously absurd challenges, but only because he wrote in the fourteenth century and is now old enough for simple membership of his readership to suggest intellectual accomplishment. More importantly, the spirit of our age is very different to that of his. We live in an age that distrusts authority, is uncomfortable with ceremony, and feels at best embarrassed by Romance in its medieval literary sense. We are an age of iconoclasts, and Tolkien was not only paying the old respects to those symbols, but building a whole museum in which to preserve them. Any form of magical or divine kingship looks to modern eyes like an attempt to establish a natural order, in which every person is assigned a role by an undeniable authority. In an age in which 'democracy' is the watchword (to the extent that the meaning of the term has been lost in a haze of incense), an age in which we applaud social mobility and fluidity, and promote equality even at its own expense, Tolkien's structured hierarchies, objective truths and rejection of advancement and progress as synonyms is bound to ruffle one or two feathers.

Witness Philip Pullman, Oxford scholar, fantasy author and poster-boy for opponents of Tolkien. He seems uncomfortable with C.S. Lewis' statements about Susan in the Chronicles of Narnia. He says that her ceasing to be a friend of Narnia by becoming more interested in invitations, nylons and so forth is a statement that reaching adulthood (perhaps I should say 'sexual maturity') made one wicked, or in some way cut one off from God. What he has apparently failed to notice is that Lewis only mentions the superficial trappings of maturity: of course an overriding interest in parties, cosmetics and fine clothes (it was post-war Britain - my grandmother still remembers painting fake stockings onto her legs) are the antithesis of spirituality. Actual spiritual maturity, expressed in placing these things in their proper perspective, is more important in this or any other time than the mere physical ability and desire to reproduce. However, somehow in Pullman's thinking the idea that spiritual growth is more important than physical experience has become confused with the actions of the Inquisition, which is one of the reasons why I find his philosophy to be adolescent and petulant.

Perhaps, far from being immature, Tolkien is too mature for an age that has invented the teenager, then made youth, beauty, wealth and pleasure its gods, democracy its king, equality its law and progress - in any direction and at any cost - its goal. The childish elements in his writing are on the surface: hobbits and goblins, whereas the deeper themes, the more serious thoughts, provide a foundation and an underpinning for them. Too often I read a novel and feel that the childish and superficial has formed the basis, whereas the profound and contemplative lie on the surface like a cheap veneer. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the result of a profoundly immature adolescent desire to appear mature. Perhaps, and I think that this is probably true of more of Tolkien's detractors than we might like to think, the dislike really does stem from the elves, dwarves, dragons and hobbits. These things belong in the nursery, and grown-ups should not take an interest in them. Otherwise we imperil our dignity and our credibility as readers: we risk appearing silly, and that would never do. Tolkien himself might add that our word 'silly' derives directly from Old English sælig, 'blessed, fortunate', but such philological flippancy scarcely aids the current discussion.

Of course, many of these things were as true in Tolkien's day as they are now. He addresses the issue of the fantastic as a theme for the nursery in his own essays, and many of the comments on the immaturity of his writings came from critics of the 1950s. Perhaps, though, this can be explained by Tolkien's situation: he adhered to Victorian narrative styles because he was himself a Victorian, albeit sufficiently late-born to qualify as an Edwardian too. His chosen field was perfectly adapted to enable him to live in the past, and his own convictions, so out of step with the fashionable intellectual mood of his time, were only reinforced by his immersing himself in a literature that took for granted his own outlook. I doubt that it was possible for a man like him to write something fashionably intellectual after about 1650, but had he been writing then, I expect that The Lord of the Rings would appear in the same course syllabi as The Faerie Queene. It would appear that in terms of literary merit, time heals all faults as well as all wounds.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Squatter

Perhaps, far from being immature, Tolkien is too mature for an age that has invented the teenager, then made youth, beauty, wealth and pleasure its gods, democracy its king, equality its law and progress - in any direction and at any cost - its goal. The childish elements in his writing are on the surface: hobbits and goblins, whereas the deeper themes, the more serious thoughts, provide a foundation and an underpinning for them. Too often I read a novel and feel that the childish and superficial has formed the basis, whereas the profound and contemplative lie on the surface like a cheap veneer. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the result of a profoundly immature adolescent desire to appear mature. Perhaps, and I think that this is probably true of more of Tolkien's detractors than we might like to think, the dislike really does stem from the elves, dwarves, dragons and hobbits. These things belong in the nursery, and grown-ups should not take an interest in them. Otherwise we imperil our dignity and our credibility as readers: we risk appearing silly, and that would never do. Tolkien himself might add that our word 'silly' derives directly from Old English sælig, 'blessed, fortunate', but such philological flippancy scarcely aids the current discussion.

I think it could be right that many people do not look beyond the surface of Tolkien's work. Thinking about many of the discussions on here, we talk quite often about how what we have read in Tolkien reflects the human condition; it's even something of a convention among Tolkien fans that his work is primarily about mortality, as Tolkien famously stated his work was about Death in a television interview.

Now, I am thinking of reading some Ursula le Guin again as I have not done so for some time, so I was looking up what it said about her on Wikipedia. Here's an interesting passage. Yes, another example of a mis-reading of Tolkien's work:

Le Guin is known for her ability to create believable worlds populated by strongly sympathetic characters (regardless of whether they are technically 'human'). Her fantasy works (such as the Earthsea series) are more concerned with the human condition than the works of traditional fantasy authors (such as J.R.R. Tolkien), and they often explore political and cultural themes from a very "un-Earthly" perspective.

We know that Tolkien explores the human condition in his work. We also know that though his work is not allegory, it contains some very important lessons on power, bravery, forgiveness etc. etc. I would also argue that Tolkien's work is hugely Modern (with a big M) as he gives us what is at face value a secular world, and a world which is beset with suffering without reward. His work is a product of War, as Modern (maybe even as post-Modern) as Gormenghast or Slaughterhouse-Five. This work was created out of a love for old languages and old stories; it has swords and epic poems and Elves and so-on. But it isn't an antiquarian work at heart, it's a big, sprawling work of modern fiction which appeals to us in some way because of the relevance of what he was saying. Even the style is Modern as Tolkien plays with form and structure in so many ways.

At Tolkien 2005 Verlyn Flieger made a little hint about Tolkien's work being Modern - it was in the title of a lecture she was scheduled to give, a 'mask' for her actual lecture which was to read from Smith. But she introduced the session with her statement that she thought Tolkien was Modern and said she would leave it at that for the present. I'm hoping she does work on this, because I'd love a respected critic to come out with a work focussing on and arguing for Tolkien's place as Modern.

[davem]

Just in case anyone's interested I found this response to accusations of racism in Tolkien's works.

Some very insightful comments, including:

The good guys in the story are not racially segregated, but representative of various types of social structures. In fact, the good guys' race is incidental, because the "bad guys" in the story are not another race. Sauron is an evil wizard, not a foreigner, and the orcs are elves who were tortured out of their minds and souls until nothing but empty husks remain. They're "black" in the story not because torture somehow robbed the elves of their Caucasianess, but because they're burnt by hellfire and have become creatures of the night.....

As for the "slant-eyed" thing, well the eyes are the windows to the soul, and the fact that today we use more PC terms "shifty-eyed" and "beady-eyed" doesn't mean we get to point fingers at a years-dead author for not knowing the term "slant-eyed" would one day become offensive.