LotR - Foreword

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I had to go back and re-re-read the Foreword to once again get my bearings in this (very interesting) discussion. The thing that struck me about the Foreword this time through – both of them, actually – is the invitation that the author extends to the reader to engage in a dialogue. What came through to me very clearly is the conversational tone of both pieces, and the sense that Tolkien is replying or responding directly to his readers. The significant difference that I see between the two Forewords is that the ‘first’ is addressed to a much smaller group of readers. In this sense the Forewords are very much a ‘forward’ look to the conversation that is about to begin – that’s very much how I think we all wish to think about The Lord of the Rings. Despite the differences in what we find therein, I think that all of us have a very real sense of carrying on a dialogue either with the text, with the author (through the text), or with each other (about the text). Some of us privilege or prefer the conversation with the author, while others prefer the conversations with the text or each other: none of us, I think, is claiming that any one of these conversations is the “only” or the “best” one, we just disagree about which one is the most interesting, fruitful or productive.

I, for my part, tend to privilege each of them at different times and in different manners – and in this regard I think that I am like everyone else here. When reading the book as a pleasurable story, I think of if as a conversation with the text as I concern myself with what I ‘get’ out of it. When approaching it somewhat more critically, I like to engage in conversations with others about the text in order to broaden or extend my understanding (the Socratic method is still, far and away, the hands-down best method to learn, after all!). When I want to learn about or explore the composition of the text, or how it came into being, I have a conversation with the author. All of these modes or kinds of conversation are necessary for a full understanding of the text and I am delighted to see that they are all going on at the moment – this bodes well, I think, for the discussions to come when we get into the ‘actual’ book.

I offer all of this here because I think that there is beginning to emerge in this thread something of an unjustified sense of ‘schism’ much like the one that came to dominate the canonicity thread, as different posters privilege different types of conversation. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing – quite the reverse, as this has lead to a lot of very interesting discussion. I only wish to point out that we are all of us in total agreement on the most important point here: that the conversations we have about and with the text and the author are all parts of a much larger Conversation: one that can’t ever really be concluded or perhaps even conducted except in a fragmentary and particularised way.

Sidebar: I share with Durelin, Seraphim, Mark 12_30, Alatariel Telemnar, Orofaniel, Child, Bêthberry, and Squatter the sense that it is, at the least, useful and, at the most, necessary, to approach LotR as ‘historical’ insofar as history gives us the greatest scope for conversation. When reading a history, we do not seek the meaning of the events by reducing those to the intentionality of the author (who is the chronicler of the events, not the maker of them); nor do we willy-nilly construct our own meaning for those events without making some reference to the meaning of the events to those caught up in them; nor do we seek the meaning of historical events only through conversations about them with our contemporaries. The point I think that I am making – and if I may be so bold as to suggest that many others are making here as well – the strength and promise of Tolkien’s ‘pretense’ or ‘myth’ or ‘fiction’ that he is chronicling history rather than creating a story encourages us to pursue the many different types of conversation that are necessary to get a full (but by no means complete or total) view of the matter he has recorded for us.