Enchantment or advancement.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Let's make further comparisons.

How does it feel to be in a house which has been there for a thousand years compared to a house that has been built just last year? There is a marked difference there. But what is it?

How does it feel to look at a spoon at the museum someone used five thousand years ago compared to one you bought from Ikea last fall?

How does it feel to write with a typewriter from the eighties (with the correction-memory of twenty characters) compared to using your Microsoft Word with your PC?

How would it feel to lose your mobile phone and go back depending on a lined telephone stationed in your home?


So is it just pure utilitarianism? When you want to get something accomplished you pick the state of the art thing but when you just need to get kicks out from something you turn to the old ones?

And here the idea of enchanted things comes to the fore. An enchanted thing is better than it's modern-day equivalent because unlike other old things, it's vested with powers or history advanced technology can't beat. So it looks like an argument saying old things can do the things you want to do with them better than the modern ones?

Or should we bring forwards this general idea of a "fall from grace" here? So in the earlier times everything was better and now all is crap? People used to live in paradise but now they are estranged from that holy or primordial union with God / nature / natural relation with the world... what have you?

That's a tough one.

I think the inference Tolkien makes is that there was indeed a 'fall from grace', and things turned to crap afterwards. Even Aragorn is a temprorary restoration of the faded greatness of the Edain. Whether he would admit it or not, Tolkien gravitated to the stoic Elvish sense of conservatism, even while admitting that the Elves were hopelessly stuck in the past to their detriment.

As far as newer technology as opposed to old world craftsmanship, I think we all know Tolkien sided with the latter. Saruman's use of gunpowder is referred to as 'devilry', and Dwarves like Thorin bemoan the loss of skills held by their forefathers. There is a certain glamor to the notion that what was made in previous centuries surpasses modern jerry-rigged contraptions, although the chances of entire cities burning down like London in 1666 have been mitigated by advances in engineering. It's all a matter of opinion, I suppose.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

As far as newer technology as opposed to old world craftsmanship, I think we all know Tolkien sided with the latter. Saruman's use of gunpowder is referred to as 'devilry', and Dwarves like Thorin bemoan the loss of skills held by their forefathers. There is a certain glamor to the notion that what was made in previous centuries surpasses modern jerry-rigged contraptions, although the chances of entire cities burning down like London in 1666 have been mitigated by advances in engineering. It's all a matter of opinion, I suppose.

I do agree with this. It looks like Tolkien was the conservative here - and not without justification when looked from one angle.

It's just self-evident to anyone of us that you can find coats and shoes of your grand-parents that are 50+ years old and are perfectly fine - but the coat you bought from the mall last year is already breaking down - there are an infinity of examples here.

We should also make a difference between modern technology (and science) and the capitalistic market economy which aims for maximum sales compromising quality for selling more. We who buy crap happily are the fools here.

But what you talk about devilry is one of the basic things people do. Everything people are used to before their twenties to thirties they tend to look as natural and everything developed after that they look as "devilry" or as something "un-natural" and to be avoided.

At the same time it's true we have lost some skills we had in earlier times. It was both fun and terrifying when there were news in Finnish media in the end of the nineties that we had to go for the US and Canada to look for expertise on building many-family wooden houses (like wooden block of flats). We Finns! The people of the primordial forest who have lived all alone looking after just our own things and everyone having all the possible skills there would be - and who have built everything from wood from the times immemorial! And now we people of the forest didn't know anymore how to build big houses from wood! That was a shame...

So skills do vanish. How many of you remeber the telephone numbers of your friends and relatives by heart? I used to remember a couple of dozen phone-numbers back in the eighties but now I mainly just (still) remeber some of those I remembered back then... The cellphone remembers the newer ones for me. But I do not.

The so called "Gregorian chant" was invented around 600 AD in view of even the most uneducated guys in the backrow being able to sing along after one strophe. Nowadays only a trained musician can do that as the melodical phrases are just too long for our modern capabilities.

But as you imply, we're pretty happy about some advances and new skills we have learned. Blood transfusion or cancer treatment could be cases in point where we wouldn't like to be treated in a way people were a thousand years ago. Any wannabe mother should also think how she would like to give birth; in a modern hospital or in a medieval envirovment?

So a matter of opinion to be sure, but I'm not sure how relative that opinion is...

The prof was for the conservative ideas and that was his world. And we should see the grandeur in that world-view. People long ago were really good at some things we can't think we could excell today - but we do and see many things better our ancestors did as well.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

All right, just a side comment for clarification to not further disrupt the ongoing discussion.

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Legate called for irrationality. Hmm... I'm not sure if I would like to live in an irrational world (on the level of how things work - just think of living in a perpetual "improbability drive" by Douglas Adams where your arm could change into a bowl of petunias any minute or a giant spermwhale might materialise out from nowhere) - or if I would like to read of one.* Even fantasy-worlds have their "rules" and consistant regularities. They would be totally unintelligible without that. We don't need to spell out those rules out in fantasy though and that's quite okay with me. But fantasy is not irrational.

It is probably just about the use of words. What I meant by "irrationality" was rather "what would seem irrational to our current understanding of our world". So, simply, going along with the laws of the other world.

However, to note, one could say that often it's even subtler than things like that people can use magic to fly or that fire has personality. Basically, any literature is fantasy because it trespasses the laws of this world. In one way or another.

But sometimes - okay, perhaps the word is "mystery" - one does not want to know even all the laws of the fantasy world. In the sense that you want to take it "as it is". To show an example, even the mentioned kabbalah is a way of explanation of the world. But it's just another way, in our case, it's absolutely the same as when I explain the laws of the world based on modern physics. That's what I was talking about as well: sometimes, one doesn't want to search for the laws of the world, but just "live it". Sometimes. I am a seasoned world-builder and have created many fantastic worlds and one who does that usually likes to and describes the laws of that world, often. However, a reader more often than the writer can just accept the world as it is and does not need any explanations, mythical or otherwise, why the sun is green and how magic works. It has, of course, different levels of understanding, but whatever - that all would be for a longer debate and I am not going to start about it here. But I just hope it's clear what I had in mind. To return to the example cited above, we did not want to know how the Force works (midichlorians), it just is.

[Eönwë]

Just thought I'd make an interjection here.

I think that Tolkien, rather than having a hate for modern things, had a hate for mass-produced things. In the old days, people would spend years learning how to make each individual thing, learning a craft, whereas now it is all made by machines. The only physical job we need people for today is to do building and similar tasks. And soon that will probably be overtaken by robotics as well, and we as people will only have to either check that the machines that are checking whether machines are working are working () or just do the purely creative things that machines can't do. And that is the one thing machines can't do- be creative and make new things. They can only work on what they have been given.

Anyway, let's say, in the times before machines, a swordsmith would spend many years learning his craft from another smith, being apprenticed to someone more experienced. They would get better at it, and then, they would create their masterpieces. The craftsman, the smith, would work on his sword, slowly and expertly first carving out a mould, then sharpening the blade and perfecting it. And those that were truly great would be reknowned throughout the land. The swords would contain some emothional, sentimental value because someone's hard work into it and they spent their time and effort making just that sword, perfecting it just for you.

Now compare that to the mass-produced products of today. Would you rather buy a sword crafted by the reknowned smith Telchar of Nogrod at his peak or one made by machine RX67-B? (even if that machine only produced, say, one sword per year)

Even today, there are all sorts of novelty and personalised items, because people like the feeling that something was made especially for them, rather than something mass produced by the millions. Because it is something unique, something that has some thought in it and isn't just automatic. The same goes for hand-made stuff. This is so out of the ordinary today that if someone makes something for someone with their own hands it is looked upon as much better than the equivalent that could be bought, even if the bought product is technically "better".

I think that Tolkien felt that as more things were becoming mechanised and made in factories, we, as people, were losing our ability to craft and were becoming slaves to the machines who do anything that we don't know how.

How many of us would be able to do all the things we do now or make all the things we make now without our technology? Most of the crafting knowledge is lost now that we have turned to machines to do the work for us.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Part of it is Tolkien's adoption of the 'air' of Beowulf etc, where old swords, heirloom swords, simply are better. The blade he subdivides Grendel's mother with is an 'ancient work of giants'- just like the Roman ruins that so intimidated the Old English. There was a pervasive sense that there was an earlier age of 'giants in the earth,' when swords were made by Wayland himself, when heroes (like Heracles or Walse) were the sons of gods.

The other side of it was Tolkien's basic premise in his legendarium, based on his pessimistic Catholicism: this is a fallen world; things are always getting worse. History is the "long defeat." The Silmarils will never be recreated, the Dwarves of Erebor can't rival their forbears' mail, no blades like those of Telchar or Gondolin can now be forged. Aragorn may be a hero, but he's no Beren or Hurin.

[Nogrod]

Well put William C.H.!

As the romances, Arthurian legends, the great mythical stories stem from the Middle-Ages, they naturally bear with them the medieval zeitgeist of feeling inferior to older times eg. the antiquity. (Well who forced them to deny and oppress science from the third century onwards? So it was their own fault in a way... )

And the story of the fall in the Bible just enhanced the notion...


Although I must say Eonwë is up to important things as well with his talk about the craftmanship versus the machanical production of goods. Uniqueness and a known history of a thing make a difference - well, today they do.

But that has been different as well and quite lately so... I'm not old enough to remember the following myself but I have heard and read about the fifties and sixties when something made from plastic & from the assembly line was hip and cool and only the poor had hand-made old drawers, baskets, clothes etc. But there were remnants of that ideology even in my youth in the seventies when a pair of woollen socks made by a grandmother were the un-coolest Christmas-present there was to be imagined. Today they would be priceless!

Is it yet agan a question of rarity then? Things that are rare are valued and those that are common are not? Like being fat was stupendously great at times and now is not (depending how easy it is to be wealthy enough to eat or drink a lot)? Like being pale-white was adored at times and being tanned is at other times (depending on whether spending your days indoors are looked at as high-class or labour-like)? Like wearing hand-made woollen socks or having a two-hundred year old carpentered table in your living room is cool or not (depending on whether the majority of the people have them or not). Etc...

It's easy to see the logic of the Middle-Ages - and that of Tolkien - work this way...

[Eönwë]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Uniqueness and a known history of a thing make a difference - well, today they do.

But that has been different as well and quite lately so... I'm not old enough to remember the following myself but I have heard and read about the fifties and sixties when something made from plastic & from the assembly line was hip and cool and only the poor had hand-made old drawers, baskets, clothes etc. But there were remnants of that ideology even in my youth in the seventies when a pair of woollen socks made by a grandmother were the un-coolest Christmas-present there was to be imagined. Today they would be priceless!

But Tolkien didn't like industrialism and all the hype surrounding it. And though I wan't alive in the times you speak of, I'm guessing that people liked the mechanical made stuff more, because it was new fresh, and something different, but at the same time, it made it possible for everyone one. And everything would be the same, all "perfect" or something. Just like when you get imported fruit and things, they're all regular and "normal in shape. Just as slightly OT side note, for some reason they sell chicken eggs brown here in the UK, but the fact is that they're also all the same. There is a certain appeal to getting something that you know will be exactly what you wanted, nothing more, nothing less.

But now mass-production has become so popular that we are finding it boring, for the very reason that everything is the same- you never get anything better or worse, there is nothing behind it except the emotionless copying of something over and over again.

And even today, though you may not go to a reknowned smith for what you need, people try to get products from certain brands that are known to have a good reputation, so the same sort of mentality continues, just under a different guise.

Rarity is important and that is why people value it so much. Just the fact that Narsil was a blade forged ages ago makes it special, as very few of those sorts remain. It could almost be called "collectible" or "antique" apart from the fact that it was still in serviceable use.

And look at the evil side- they have no special weapons. They have no reknowned smiths or craftsmen. All of their weapons are described as the same (excpet for a few exceptions- the high ranking ones) and are just average and do the job they need to- nothing more, nothing less. They are all mass-produced, maybe not by the same modern machinery as today, but nevertheless they were produced in great haste for one purpose. They were made simply to kill rather than as a form of art, or pride for the creator. I think that this is the horror of Mass-production that Tolkien hated. The mass-produced products have no uniqueness, no "soul" (almost literally if we look at some made especially- think of the talking Gurthang). In the things made by craftsmen, some part of the crfter goes into the item, even if it si just the style in which it is made, whereas in mass-production everything is the same.



PS. I did have another point but I've forgotten what it was, so I'll leave it at that.

[Bêthberry]

Well, it looks as if I will be the only one with hesitations about this craftsman/mechanical division. I've seen brass items, wood work, jewellery, rugs that have been hand made in these modern times and I wouldn't say that all of them were so special. Some yes. But I've seen faults and weaknesses that the modern craftsman has just shrugged off or was too harried and hurried to fix, possibly because he had a quota to meet. Or joints where too much material was blobbed together. At the same time, I've seen hand made modern quilts that are every bit as meticulous and beautiful as historical quilts, but these quilts were not made to be marketed.

Much depends on how 'quality control' is applied. With mechanical construction, that is determined by economics (cost), quality of tooling and machining, and the expected cost that the item will fetch. That is, who the item is being constructed for. A Ford has a rather different construction than, say, a Jaquar or Lambergini. (And some even say that the day a car is constructed has a bearing on the quality of its workmanship.)

I think those same economic factors applied as much in the past. Some smiths might work fast to put more items through to get more bread on the table. Some smiths might take a shine to a particular customer (possibly the wealthier ones but not necessarily only those of deep pockets) and do special work for him or her. Some smiths might work on an object out of pure interest or love--if they had the time and financial freedom to do so. But always, the economic situation would impinge upon the craftsmanship.

I've also heard that some of the Queen's carriages are a tad uncomfortable to ride in as their suspension system or springs and shock absorbers are not as accomplished an art as those of modern, horseless carriages. But I think Morth has suggested this point earlier.

So, its economics + labourers' attention + technical knowledge if we are using objective measures of worth. If we argue that worth lies in the eye of the beholder, though, just as meaning lies in the reader's mind, ( ) then that's a subjective measure where some prefer enchantment or others advancement.