Tolkien the Metafictionist

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Nogrod II

He therefore argues for a new approach to Tolkien that "problematizes", to use that hideous piece of Po-Mo jargon, the novel's claim to authenticity. Furthermore, he argues that the prevalence of novelistic technique argues against the status of the work as a straightforward translation of 'Frodo's memoir' - instead we should see it as a 'history' that has been 'novelised' by successive generations of scholars.

I feel this argument is quite, er, problematized itself. As it is, the “Translator Conceit” can be readily– a bit too readily, perhaps– used to explain just about any inconsistency or error in the text. Taking it a step further, arguing (as it seems) that such inconsistencies are deliberate, all part of some complex authorial meta-strategy... well, it just seems like that's giving Tolkien the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card. Mistakes? No, no, he meant to do that...

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

I feel this argument is quite, er, problematized itself. As it is, the “Translator Conceit” can be readily– a bit too readily, perhaps– used to explain just about any inconsistency or error in the text. Taking it a step further, arguing (as it seems) that such inconsistencies are deliberate, all part of some complex authorial meta-strategy... well, it just seems like that's giving Tolkien the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card. Mistakes? No, no, he meant to do that...

I quite agree.

I first encountered this form of argument in connection to Peter Jackson’s film The Fellowship of the Ring in a web forum where I pointed out what I saw as a flaw in Fellowship. The portrayal of Frodo and Arwen being pursued by the Nazgûl did not hang together. There were shots of Frodo and the Nazgûl in different arrangements which contradicted one another. In one shot, two Nazgûl, the outermost two, were actually abreast of Frodo.

No-one contradicted me on what I saw. But one poster insisted that Jackson must have intended to show a symbolic representation of the pursuit rather than a realistic representation of the pursuit. Therefore I had misunderstood Jackson’s portrayal. Therefore the error was mine, not Jackson’s.

I don’t claim that Jackson’s error—and I do still see it as an error—was nothing more than a minor continuity error. Tolkien himself made minor continuity errors, many of them corrected in latter edition of The Lord of the Rings by himself or his son Christopher, most recently in the republications of 2004 and 2005. Some of these most recently corrected supposed errors involve changes to the text that produce text that differs from that of the first publication or J. R. R. Tolkien’s original manuscript, for example the change of the number of ponies that accompany the hobbits into the Old Forest from six to five.

These corrections, made by Hammond and Scull, have been done very conservatively, with permission in all cases by Christopher Tolkien, and involve changes which at most involve changing punctuation, or changing capitalization, or replacement of a single word, and in one case the insertion of a footnote. In cases when there might be any doubt of the correctness of the change, Hammond and Scull also indicate in their book The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion why the earlier text is felt to be in error.

One may perhaps look at the Sherlock Holmes canon in which the supposed writer of most of it embeds his account with phrases such as “due suppression”, “any details which would help the reader to identify the college would be injudicious or offensive”, “a carefully guarded account”, “somewhat vague in certain details”, “my reticence”, “I am obliged to be particularly careful to avoid any indiscretion”, and “no confidence will be abused” which indicates that the supposed true account upon which the story is based has in general been fictionalized in the story the author has provided. Such open pretense allows the reader to at least pretend to accept the account he or she is reading as mostly true but also allows one to understand why there is no trace of a private detective named “Sherlock Holmes” or of a residence numbered 221 Baker Street before 1930 when the name Baker Street was extended to include Upper Baker Street.

Similarly in The Lord of the Rings the more complex changes which are needed to explicate the existing text need no more to explain them than that Frodo or one of his informants made an occasional error, or that the English author J. R. R. Tolkien has done so.

For the fox which observes the hobbits sleeping in Fellowship chapter 3 one may imagine the Tolkien just invented this, or perhaps that the supposed original Red Book recounted that Pippin observed footprints of the fox on awakening leading to hobbit speculation about what the fox may have thought of finding three hobbit asleep out-of-doors. In fact Tolkien really invented everything in the book, but is fun to make a game about what supposedly really happened, as long as one is aware that it is only a game based on the supposition that The Lord of the Rings is based on a real story.

[NogrodtheGreat]

Michael Drout expands on this thesis in the following talk

Drout Talk

I think it is a brilliant explanation for the effects LOTR has on readers. Do you think it plausible?

[jallanite]

No I don’t think that, altogether.

I fell in love with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings long before I got into studying real ancient manuscripts. But there are many lovers of The Lord of the Rings who don’t have my later experience with old documents or any real interest in them.

Drout never really gets into why some reputable scholars quite hate Tolkien, including some I suspect hate Tolkien in part as a dumbing-down of what they really like about ancient literature. Victorian hobbits with umbrellas just annoy them.

His discussion of Beowulf ignores entirely the Icelandic tales of Böðvar Bjarki whom some suspect is a cognate of Beowulf, but if so the tale is much changed in the way that Drout claims that only the other tales referenced by Beowulf were changed.

That Glofindel’s horse sometimes has a bridle and reins and sometimes does not is explained when Tolkien admitted to correspondent Rhona Beare in letter 211 that he had not properly understood Elvish ways with horses when he wrote the passage for the first edition. When Tolkien revised the passage for the second edition to give the horse a headstall only, he missed revision of the later passage where the bridle is unfortunately still mentioned once.

If this was at all connected with hatred for The Lord of the Rings, then one should find the hater equally hating Melville’s Moby Dick which also contains fragments of earlier writings in the published text. Possibly there is a likeness between hatred of Moby Dick and hatred for The Lord of the Rings.

Drout’s talk explains some problems that some readers have with Tolkien’s writing, that it is archaic. Myself, I have always enjoyed archaic writing. But I have encountered this complaint with other writings, mostly with translations, and just don’t feel it. Edmund Spenser seems to be the one writer that literary pundits must express respect for, though his archaism in fact is rather phony. I suspect that the haters of archaism just know that Spenser is one of the literary giants whom one is not allowed to criticize, and so shut up about their real feelings. Besides Spenser was inventing his archaic poems in the the time of Elizabeth I, so I suppose his bad archaism was too early to matter.

Drout gives a very good talk but he doesn’t provide any more of a genuine answer than does Tolkien as to why his prose rubs some people the wrong way.

[NogrodtheGreat]

That wasn't the point of his talk. Rather, it was to explain why many readers respond to LOTR in a certain way. That's his argument about the "least knowledgeable character" intersecting with an "epistemic regime" which produces the effect of 'learning' along with the character, thus evoking nostalgia etc - a very interesting and plausible thesis.

yeah, perhaps some of his comments about archaism are disingenuous, and I personally think there are places where Tolkien could have been more "modern' without losing the intended effect.

[jallanite]

I posted a reply to Drout a few days ago. My post has not appeared, so I reposted it.

I reprint what I posted below:

Searching for a website called "The Cats of Queen Berúthiel" returns a large number of sites, providing mainly the information most readers will be looking for.

“But what makes Beowulf similar to the The Lord of the Rings—or more properly vice versa—is that none—and I mean absolutely none—of the references in Beowulf disagree with each other or with the few times they appear in historical sources. The Beowulfian material—get this!—does not even contradict itself when it shows up in later texts that do contradict each other. Let me explain what I mean by that. If we go through Beowulf and we construct whatever we can from the hints and allusions, none of those stories are directly opposed to what shows up in the later sources.”

Internally Heremod is pictured as reigning over the Scyldings, though his reign is almost certainly imagined as preceding the Scylding dynasty.

For space reasons I will only compare other accounts in an English translation of the Norse Saga of King Hrolf kraki (http://www.northvegr.org/sagas%20ann...north/034.html
) and in a translation of the first nine books of Saxo Grammaticus which overlap Beowulf tradition in http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/saxo/saxo02.htm with the paragraph beginning “Frode left three sons, …”.

In Beowulf King Healfdene/Halfdan/Haldan’s kingdom of Denmark is invaded by King Froda the Heathobard. Later two of Healfene’s sons Heorogar and Halga/Helgi/Hegi are dead and the third son Hrothgar/Hróar/Roe now rules Denmark with his nephew Hrothulf/Hrólf/Rolf as coregent. In the Saga of King Hrolf kraki Froda becomes Froði, the treacherous brother of Healfdene/Halfdan/Haldan, whose reign is brought to an end through vengeance by the brothers Halga/Helgi/Hegi and Hrothgar/Hróar/Roe with no counterpart to the Old English Heorogar. Saxo Grammaticus instead makes Healfdene/Halfdan/Haldan a wicked king who slays his own brothers Roe and Skat, continues with other atrocities, and dies peaceably in old age. These sources give differing accounts of how Hrothgar/Hróar/Roe is slain and how his death is avenged by Halga/Helgi/Helgi whereas Beowulf makes Hrothgar/Hróar/Roe to be the last surviving brother.

The Beowulf story of the marriage of Hrothgar’s daughter to Ingeld is told by Saxo Grammaticus at the end of Book 6 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/saxo/saxo06.htm , beginning with the words “But Swerting, …”). Here the princess is the daughter of Swerting, not of Hrothgar/Hróar/Roe, though she is still married to a king named Ingeld/?/Ingel.

Beowulf himself does not appear in Scandinavian sources by that name, but many scholars believe that Bǫðvar Bjarki in those sources was originally identical with Beowulf. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins..._Kraki#Beowulf .

“Is Tom Bombadil the oldest living thing in Middle-Earth? Or is Treebeard?”

Tolkien includes the Valar, the Maiar, Sauron, and the Balrog of Moria among beings of incredible age. Gandalf also refers to other beings within the Earth whom Sauron knows not, for they are older than he. Treebeard, on the contrary is a kelva. Valar or Maiar or beings of similar sort do not appear in Treebeard’s list of speaking peoples, but only other kelvar.

“Does Glorfindel’s horse have a bridle and reins, or not?”

Tolkien originally gave Glorfindel’s horse a bridle and bit.

Rhona Beare wrote to Tolkien on 11 October 1958 (in a letter numbered 211 in Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien) and asked among other questions why “Glorfindel’s horse is described as having a ‘bridle and bit’ when Elves ride without a bit, bridle, or saddle.”

Tolkien accepted the point raised and explained that he would change bridle and bit to headstall.” He did so in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, neglecting to remove bridle in one place, I assume accidentally.

I also sent this comment to Michael Drout directly by email to the address given at http://wheatoncollege.edu/faculty/pr...michael-drout/ .

I don’t find Drout’s argument particularly convincing, in that an author making a prime narrator the most ignorant character is nothing new. See, for example, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The reason why there is such dislike for Tolkien among academics remains, to me, a mystery, as it was to Tolkien. Drout does not explain why academics would have problems with this procedure.