Fantasy

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Perhaps Tolkien's sanitised battle scenes are part of this deliberate decision not to focus upon evil but upon what is required by those who choose good.

.....Perhaps this is Tolkien's traditionalism coming to effect and his distaste for the modern emphasis on ugliness.

But it still leaves us with evil & ugliness of war being presented as, if not 'good' at least glorious...

Does aesthetics justify lies? Tolkien knew first hand what death on the battlefield was like ('animal horror') & yet do we get that from his stories?

Or are we meant to? Do his Elves, Men (& Orcs) die suffocating in mud & choking in their own blood -

death must often have come by way of suffocation – the air squeezed from your body under the weight of men behind you, jammed in the mangle of battle. The pressure and the impetus came from the army that wasn’t yet fighting shoving and heaving.

, do they butcher each other

The weapons of choice are daggers and maces. Men with iron sallets buckled to the backs of their necks, so they can’t be yanked forward to offer a spine stab, stare wide-eyed through slits, straining and flailing with short, maddened blows and ache-tensed muscles into the faces of men inches in front of them.

but Tolkien, for aesthetic reasons, chose not to mention it?

In short, are the battles in M-e as gross & brutal as Towton but the horrors glossed over by Tolkien so as not to shock or traumatise the reader, or, in his 'Secondary World' are those aspects of war absent? Are Tolkien's battles 'fantasy' battles or real ones - & can he justify such 'fantasy' battles, where grief, loss & 'pain' are undeniably present as well as glory & chivalry, but where the real ugliness & brutality of war

the two armies, screaming obscenities or just howling like mad dogs, slithered together

are absent?

How would a reader with no knowledge of actual warfare (either by personal experience or by historical study) take Tolkien's battles - does Tolkien actually contribute to the pro patria gloria idea - intentionally or otherwise? Yet if he does, is that OK because he's writing fantasy?

[bilbo_baggins]

Originally Posted by davem

How would a reader with no knowledge of actual warfare (either by personal experience or by historical study) take Tolkien's battles - does Tolkien actually contribute to the pro patria gloria idea - intentionally or otherwise? Yet if he does, is that OK because he's writing fantasy?

I have to say I believe that Tolkien's depiction of battles do contribute to idea of pro gloria patriae in the minds of fresh readers. Whether this is intentional is not as easily answered... honestly I have no clue. Obviously, Tolkien did not include the grossly vivid concepts of battle that he had personally witnessed, but I believe that he did not mean to intentionally delude younger readers into believing battle to be a purely beautiful and noble event, either.

Contributing to the idea of noble war is not wrong in any way. Some might take offence at the possible delusion of otherwise ignorant readers, but there are many poems, classical and modern, that glorify battle (although the trend in modern poetry seems to paint a truthful picture of battle). Just because Tolkien's genre is fantasy does not change his right as an author to depict battle in any way he pleases. In fact, if the reader would only understand that it is fantasy, then the author should logically be given even more liberty to "lie" about such things.

Originally Posted by davem

...When does fantasy become lying?

Isn't fantasy the epitome of lying? All fantasy lies at some basic level, and I don't believe that lying about wars or battles somehow changes the premise of fantasy, or the justification of lying in that genre. You could say that at some point, fantasy becomes absurdity, but introducing nobility in a battle scene is not absurd, by any means.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by bilbo_baggins

Isn't fantasy the epitome of lying? All fantasy lies at some basic level, and I don't believe that lying about wars or battles somehow changes the premise of fantasy, or the justification of lying in that genre.

Indeed. I do believe it has been said in the past that 'poetry never lieth, because it affirmeth not' or something to that effect.

[davem]

Tolkien's Mythopoea http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html is clear on his own position - that Fantasy is not (or should not be) about lies

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers bencath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother's womb whence all have birth.
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

[bilbo_baggins]

Originally Posted by davem

Tolkien's Mythopoea http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html is clear on his own position - that Fantasy is not (or should not be) about lies

Hmmm, this is very good. Tolkien himself has made the point, I believe, that man does not inherently lie, and that he should not be a Grima Wormtongue as it were...

But the second bold section in your quote states that it is our right to fill our world with fantastical creatures, etc. Either Tolkien is promoting mass hallucination and belief in his construction of M-e, or, we have to admit that his works are, on a basic level, a deception. To say that his works are about lies is wrong, I admit. I should choose a better way of phrasing it. Perhaps I can't even phrase it properly...

... because the dragons and Elves are breathing down my neck. It was no deception!

[davem]

Perhaps, in spite of what Tolkien states in Mythopoea, Fantasy (in the sense of creating a Secondary World) is about creating a world in your own image - one where the woods are peopled by Elves, where the gods walk, & where battles are simple, straightforward affairs of good against evil & where those on the side of right ultimately win out.

(Or where 'God' is a senile, useless spirit from whom humanity can attain liberation in order to be free to build the 'Republic of Heaven'). Perhaps it really is no more than wish-fulfilment, however an author attempts to justify it with philosophical/theological theorising. The likes of Towton never happened in M-e because Tolkien didn't want it to. Which means that no fantasy (Secondary World) is superior to any other (other than in the quality of its creation, & its believability). To argue that Middle-earth is in someway 'superior' to the world(s) of HDM in a moral or ethical sense is pointless, because both Secondary Worlds are ultimately simply the head trips of their respective creators. Setting limits/restrictions on what may be included in a fantasy world is ultimately to attempt to set limits on what a human being feels he or she lacks. Both Tolkien & Pullman are responding to a perceived 'wrongness'/lack in the Primary world by creating a Secondary World in which that wrongness is put right.

And yet, the question still remains - do writers of Fantasy have an obligation to reflect certain Primary World realities (from the horrors of war to the dangers of smoking)?

[Lalwendë]

For whatever reason Tolkien chose not to be overly graphic in his descriptions of war in Lord of the Rings, but you can't say the same is true of all his work; Children of Hurin is pretty graphic and brutal. I'd say he utilised lightness of touch when writing battle scenes in LotR, our horror at death comes more from being invested in the characters who are hurt, lost or killed.

As for writing of good/evil wars, the War of the Ring is neither, it is simply a war of survival, a war in which, if you do not stand up and fight will certainly result in death or thralldom.

The writer does not have to be overly graphic to portray horrors, they merely have to be just graphic enough. If anyone has had the uncomfortable experience of reading The Road they will know what I mean - in that there are a couple of simple scenes which are not overly described but which are so utterly horrific you cannot scrub them out of your head. Tolkien does the same thing - it's enough to have the Witch King threaten Eowyn with some barely sketched horror or to mention a few of the Orcs' fighting methods to have the skin crawling. He doesn't need to go further.

Originally Posted by davem

And yet, the question still remains - do writers of Fantasy have an obligation to reflect certain Primary World realities (from the horrors of war to the dangers of smoking)?

They can and should do exactly as they please or it ceases to be fantasy The very idea of setting limits on it is vile.

[Bêthberry]

If one accepts the statement I quoted above--that poetry never lies because it never affirms anything--and if one accepts that by poetry Spenser meant all literature--then the answer would be simple. A fantasy writer, as a writer of all literary forms, is bound only by the quality of his or her sub-creation, by the aesthetic demands required to create a 'great reading'. 'Lies' just doesn't cut it in this perspective. In fact, I would suggest that the Mythopoeia poem isn't about lies at all but about the quality of sub-creation, that creativity and artistic vision has its own drummer and is not beholdin' to any other kind of vision.

The problem for Tolkien arises, I think, when he elaborates upon his Legendarium by calling it a prehistory of our world. That then invites comparisons between Middle-earth in the Third Age, First Age, Second Age, etc, with our world. The denizens of the earlier ages are similar to mythological types in other early world literatures. What Tolkien appears to have been wanting to depict, at least in LotR, is the 'moment' when that mythological world fades away into a world more in conformity with our 'Seventh Age.' It is the time when the elves, dwarves, dragons, orcs fade away, even though Tolkien suggests that hobbits still exist with a highly developed ability to hide from our view. It is possible that his difficulty in writing or completing stories for the Fourth Age relates to this loss, that the really inspiring aspect for him was the waning of this mythological time.

For Tolkien, a world perspective which does not allow for wonder, imagination, creativity, the ferment of ideas, as much as a moral stance which allows one to differentiate among the Lobelias, Frodos, Boromirs, Grimas, and Gollems, must remain essential. It is a perspective which grants constant vigilance against human error, which recognises that humans are so prone to aspects of power that they can easily fall into error. That concept of human psychology is absent from much in "progressive thought" that grants to mankind--usually the males of the species--the absolute right to totally dominate other human beings and the natural world. One doesn't need idealism or God or gods to understand that humans are prone to their own self satisfaction which can have disasterous consequences. In fact, Tolkien's poem Mythopoeia suggests that when men replace God/the gods with their own pitiful power tripping--"head tripping" in davem's words-- by thinking that a name is what makes a thing exist, they fall into error. This might not be a caution against human willfulness which Pullman acknowledges, but the baddies in Pullman are every bit as prone to this Tolkien error as any villian in Tolkien.

There's enough evidence in our Primary world, from environmental abuse to domestic abuse to technological abuse of knowledge to suggest that a world view which asks us to question our own claims to power/divinity is not writing fantasy as wish fulfilment. Sometimes, it is easier to see things in front of our own noses if they are coloured to appear different. That then puts the 'onus' as it were, on the reader to interpret.