Minor Works -- 2 - Leaf by Niggle

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

I think that's a bit untrue, but if you were to present a contradiction about his feelings in writing the The Lord of the Rings between a statement in the Letters and something in Leaf, I would instinctively side with Leaf as the truer of the two, ten times out of ten.

Agreed. It reads very much like a long, honest look in the mirror, and maybe also a bit of a plea to the Second Voice.

Like I said above, I first read Leaf as a young man near twenty, in the first rush of discovering Tolkien and wanting to read everything he'd ever written (or at least everything translated into German, which wasn't a lot back then - the Silmarillion had only come out a few years before, UT and HoME were still unheard of). I kind of got what it was about (like Form said, it's hard not to), but I didn't really feel it - I loved the tree, but I cared little for Parish and his potatoes. It reads differently now, at a time in my life when the journey to be undertaken is morphing from a distant possibility to a fact of life that has to be reckoned with sooner or later, and I find myself thinking more and more about what matters in life, what I want to get done in the time I've got left and how much of it I'm likely to accomplish. There's very much a feeling of Tua res agitur in the story, and the reminder that what writers and painters tend to experience as annoying interruptions constitute what other people call living their lives is well taken.

I concur with Findegil that Niggle's Parish, paradisiac though it seems, is not heaven but another, gentler stage of purgatory where both Niggle and Parish learn to appreciate each other fully as a necessary step in their development/improvement/purification before they are ready to move on towards the mountains (which both of them seem to have attained at the end).

Does anybody else see the passage of dialogue between Tompkins and Atkins on the penultimate pages as an intrusion that might as well have been left out? Maybe if either of them had been introduced earlier it wouldn't so much stick out like a sore thumb. The point that utilitaristic folk don't appreciate art has already been made when Niggle's painting was used to patch Parish's roof, there's no need to belabour it. I find Tompkins an overdone caricature, and ascribing an ulterior motive to him ('you had your eye on his house') feels too much like Tolkien may have taken the opportunity to grind a personal axe.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Although Tompkins and Atkins are not bad representations of Oxford faculty today, in terms of regard for Tolkien's legacy. While there are a handful who value his fiction, the Consensus Position is that Tolkien frittered away what should have been a brilliant career on his fairy nonsense, instead of publishing proper papers and books on English philology: the promise of his young adulthood squandered.

(NB: why those names? Derived from Tommy Atkins? Some drollery regarding the diminutive suffix?)
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It's perhaps noteworthy that Tolkien wrote Leaf in 1943- in other words when The Lord of the Rings had been stalled for at least a year and he at the time didn't see it getting on. Both the LR and his Legendarium can vbe seen as the Tree, and so it's interesting how slighting the author's voice is in regard to the Tree's quality and importance. Not really very good, but unusual and thus not entirely devoid of interest. And then Niggle's fantasy, of someone coming in and giving him a public pension so he wouldn't have to worry about anything but painting- how the overworked wartime Professor must have longed for that!

[Estelyn Telcontar]

I would like to add a few thoughts gleaned from Scull and Hammond's "Reader's Guide" on this story before the thread goes "treeish" (appropriately?):

Tolkien himself confirms the allegorical nature of the tale, though he writes (in a Letter to Jane Neave in 1962) that is more "mythological". His Tree is indeed the LotR.

Some commentators consider the religious nature of the allegory, others explore the connection to his views on sub-creation and eucatastrophe, to which this story gives literary form. Another (Ellison, quoted by S and H), examines it as

...concerned with the processes involved in the translation of artistic inspiration into physical reality. Its subjects are skill, craftsmanship, technique; the essentials of bringing any large artwork to completion...

That thought is sure to resonate with those of us who are involved in creative work in any form!

Further posts are not only allowed, but welcome; however, I am ending the "official" discussion for now.

[Huinesoron]

I actually have no idea which branch of Christianity I picked up the following idea from, but: there is a belief that God the Father has created a system of perfect justice, under which any sin or transgression deserves punishment; and since God's authority is absolute, the punishment is also absolute. In other words, in strict justice, everyone should go directly to Hell, neither passing Go nor collecting 200 currency units.

That's where God the Son comes in. Christ's sacrifice, through complex theological reasons, let him take responsibility for all those sins; but because he didn't actually do them himself, he can plead for mercy on behalf of the people who did. Thus, through Christianity, sinful humans can neverthless have a hope of Heaven.

This is the viewpoint on which my firm identification of the First and Second Voices as the Father and Son rests. Their talk of Justice and Mercy is that intercession. I've kind of always treated that as a certain fact, but it occurs to me - rather late - that there probably could be other interpretations. ^_^ (I think Catholicism talks about Mary interceding with Christ on behalf of the faithful, for example.)

~

I also realised a couple of days ago, that the Voices have an echo in the Legendarium. There are two Valar with authority over the dead - Mandos, the Doomsman of the Valar, who stands in judgement; and Nienna, the incarnation of Pity, who pled for mercy for Melkor, and alleviates the sorrow of the dead. Justice and Mercy, Voices One and Two.

What's interesting is that this isn't how they were originally. Fui Nienna of the Lost Tales is a full on dark goddess; her roof is made of bat's wings! It's only later that she became Mercy; and if that change came in the 1930s Silmarillion, then it's just about the same time he was writing the Two Voices in Leaf by Niggle.

hS