Tolkien the Metafictionist

[NogrodtheGreat]

Originally Posted by avar

I think there are statements of Tolkien that should be interpreted exactly like this - that the Lord of the Rings is a translation/adaptaion of (parts of) the Red Book, a fictional work mentioned in the text. The difference in tone between the Hobbit and LotR, for instance, is due to Bilbo being responsible for the former.

Yes, this is correct. The Red Book of Westmarch, is, as I understand it, that copy of the memoirs of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam that is kept by Sam's family for generations at Undertowers in the Fourth Age. - but it is only one copy of several that were made.

In order to flesh out Brljak's thesis a little more I'll quote a couple of passages. Here he makes the point that 'depth' is created by Tolkien's style, and thereby a sense of "reality" is created.

The vistas remained in background, unexplained and unattainable, but depicted against such a background, the foreground could jump off the page, immersing its reader in a fantastic world realized with an unprecedented "reality" or "depth".

He then sums up what he calls the "dominant view":

...according to...[Shippey, Flieger et al.] the metafictional element...is important, but primarily as a frame, validating and authenticating the frame by producing the quality one may refer to as verisimilitude, depth, credibility and so forth.

Brljak then goes on to challenge this view, and reading about his ideas here prompted me to create this thread, because they genuinely challenge a 'consensus' that has developed in Tolkien studies in a very fascinating way:

In the midst of great adventure the reader, especially a careless one, is prone to submit to the illusion: after all, a good tale is supposed to "take us there". But the pseudophilological metafictional interface fulfills a task which is equally, if not more important - the task of dragging us back again, back to the "here", into the poignant awareness of the distance, of the chain of mediations stretching across an immense span of time and through the hands of various intermediaries. Tolkien's mature fiction is centrally concerned precisely with this inability of the text to ever take us to that vanished, irretrievable "there", from which even living memory was but the first remove.

[avar]

I see, you wished to discuss the implications of this. (I read the first post to cursively )

I agree that strictly, one may not be bound to take stuff recorded even in the LoTR - for instance, concerning the wings of the Balrog - as necessarily "canonical". As implied by the Red Book fiction, they are supposed to be ultimately based on the observations of the participants.

Then again, are there not statements by the author who suggest that he himself regarded the stories as recorded as basically "accurate"? (If you are right about the "pomo" inclination of the mentioned scholars, they may not regard this authorial intention as relevant, though.)

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

. . .

Brljak then goes on to challenge this view, and reading about his ideas here prompted me to create this thread, because they genuinely challenge a 'consensus' that has developed in Tolkien studies in a very fascinating way

I don't think one needs to go to po-mo theory to discuss the sense of layers of story--if that is what is meant by depth and not degree of realistic detail.

Tolkien himself had a theory of the the transmission of story and it's effect in story. See his essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. His comments are tantalizingly brief but I do believe he was there first.

And welcome to the Downs, NogrodtheGreat and avar. We already have a Nogrod so my money's on folks coming up with a different short nick for you than 'Nogrod'.

[NogrodtheGreat]

hmmm, "nog"?

[NogrodtheGreat]

hmmm, "nog"?

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

hmmm, "nog"?

Even that is sometimes used, and still might produce confusion. The nickname should make it perfectly clear which person we are referring to, so it should be completely different: therefore, I'm afraid you'd have to settle with "Great".

In any case, welcome both to the 'downs...

[Mornorngûr]

Yeh welcome NogrodtheGreat and avar, I am only new here too really and I think its great.

How bout we call you Tumun? Short for Tumunzahar. Or Firebeard?

[NogrodtheGreat]

Tumun - I like that

[jallanite]

Tolkien wrote an original Forward to The Lord of the Rings which he later replaced in the second edition. This Foreward reads in part:

I have supplemented the account of the Red Book, in places, with information derived from the surviving records of Gondor, notably The Book of Kings; but in general, though I have omitted much, I have in this tale adhered more closely to the actual words and narrative of my original than in the previous selection from the Red Book, The Hobbit. That was drawn from the early chapters, composed originally by Bilbo himself. If “composed” is a just word. Bilbo was not assiduous, nor an orderly narrator, and his account is involved and discursive, and sometimes confused: faults that still appear in the Red Book, since the copiers were pious and careful, and altered very little.

This then can be used to explain much of the chronological and geographical discrepancies in The Hobbit, in that the account is supposed to derive from the writing of a single person, possibly years after the events, with no help at the time from anyone who was with him on his journey. That errors are to be supposed to have been made is understandable, some by the original author, some by later copiests, and some by the modern teller.

Whether Tolkien originally intended this as an explanation for these problems I do not know.

Tolkien once in The Lord of the Rings explains an error in his account, supposedly derived from Frodo, by this method. In a footnote to the first page of Appendix F Tolkien in the second edition:

In Lórien at this period Sindarin was spoken, though with an ‘accent’, since most of its folk were of Silvan origin. This ‘accent’ and his own limited acquaintance with Sindarin misled Frodo (as is pointed out in The Thain’s Book by a commentator of Gondor). All the Elvish words cited in Book II, chs 6, 7, 8 are in fact Sindarin, and so are most of the names and persons, But Lórien, Caras Galadhon, Amroth, Nimrodel are probably of Silvan origin, adapted to Sindarin.

This footnote is referenced by Tolkien in a further footnote in the chapter “Lothlórien” attached to the statement that:

Frodo could understand little of what was said, for the speech of the Silvan folk east of the mountains used among themselves was unlike that of the West. Legolas looked up and answered in the same language.

When Tolkien wrote this passage in his mind the Elves of Lórien did speak a Silvan tongue different from Sindarin and Tolkien later corrects this by making it an error attributed to Frodo.

There are various other apparent discrepancies in The Lord of the Rings some of which might be explained by a metafictional assumption. See http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Mista...kien%27s_works which includes most of them. Whether Tolkien intended them to be explained in this fashion I see as dubious. Cannot most of them be simple errors?

Besides these two examples I mention, the only other well-known example I know of is Tolkien’s statement in Morgoth’s Ring that:

What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions (especially personalized and centered upon actors, such as Fëanor) handed on by Men in Númenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back – from the first association of the Dúunedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand – blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas.

Tolkien then partly imagines a scientific version of his cosmos in which the earth rotates around the Sun and the Sun is as old as the Earth. But in his Silmarillion story the Sun and Moon are created late in history from the Two Trees.

But this is only two versions of the history, a false but poetic mythological version and a supposedly historical version. Tolkien surely knew that genuine mythological traditions have stories that greatly contradict each other while he, except for the one case, continues to write a single version of his legendarium which changes. For example, his story of the Children of Húrin is a version of the tale that is consistent with itself, not like genuine mythological stories which have many variants.

Tolkien in general makes changes in his thinking which replace his earlier ideas across-the-board. Brljak states:

Tolkien’s mature fiction is centrally concerned precisely with this inability of the text to ever take us to that vanished, irretrievable “there”, from which even living memory was but the first remove.

That seems to me to be very wrong. The Lord of the Rings and The Children of Húrin work very much by taking us to what Brljak would like to see as a “vanished, irretrievable ‘there’”. So do individual genuine mythological works for the most part. Homer tells one version of a story, Apollonius Rhodes tells another, Ovid also tells another, and the stories often disagree when they overlap. Euripides’ plays sometimes disagree with one another when they touch the same story.

Tolkien also puts a strong emphasis on consistency. I see his works putting us there as much as any author’s works do, whether the author is writing in an existent mythology as Shakespere does in Troilus and Cressida and A Midsummer Night’s Dream or an invented mythology as Mervyn Peake does in his Gormenghast books or Lord Dunsany does in The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

That Tolkien has two versions of The Silmarillion in theory comes, it seems to me, from is growing to dislike much of his Silmarillion mythology because it breaks with science but still liking it for poetic reasons. Tolkien is attempting to have his cake and eat it too.