David Newgreen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
4thofeleven) wrote2009-08-19 05:26 pm
4thofeleven) wrote2009-08-19 05:26 pm
Reread Lord of the Rings
Doing a unit on Fantasy narratives this semester – which, so far, consists mainly of sitting around Tuesday mornings discussing Lord of the Rings. It’s hard work, but someone’s got to do it!
Haven't actually re-read Tolkien for many years, so it was fun to revisit it. Thoughts, in no particular order:
- Tolkien doesn't really use unreliable narrators per se, but he does deal a lot with how and who tells stories and who copies them. There’s the entire pretence of the whole work being a translated historical work written by the main characters, of course, but there’s also little things like the use of older narratives that are clearly the product of different cultures to the main narrative, different characters having different names in different contexts, and asides from the author about how the legend of ‘Mad Baggins’ survived in Hobbit folklore long after the real events, or that the ‘original’ Book of Westmarch contains far more detail about Hobbit genealogies that the ‘translator’ has omitted. It’s interesting in that it’s almost as if it’s using unreliability as a mark of authenticity, the author effectively saying “I have told the story as well as I know, but I am limited by my sources and by language.”
- On the topic of unreliability, deception is also a common theme, and often it is not outright lying as the misrepresentation of truth. The obvious example, of course, is Denethor’s final decent into despair on being shown the Corsair fleet sailing towards Gondor – which is interesting, because the description of the battle is also written to initially deceive the reader as well into thinking the fleet is reinforcements for Sauron.
I find it interesting that the Palantir – communication devices – are used almost exclusivly in the novel as tools of deception. Not just by Sauron, either – Pippin unintentionally deceives Sauron into believing Saruman had captured the Hobbits, and after that Aragon’s revealing himself via the Palantir seems to have little purpose save to imply to Sauron that he has claimed the Ring’s power himself.
- I remembered the Tom Bombadil section as being much longer and more irritating, but it’s not too bad – and most of it is less Tom and more the encounters with Old Man Willow and the Barrow-Wight, which are both damn creepy! Bombadil himself feels almost deliberately out of place in Middle-Earth – like one of those odd hold-overs you sometimes find in mythologies and epics, where some tiny element of an older folklore is still clinging to life in the newer story, but now divorced from its original context.
- Side-note: ‘Wights’ are, of course, very common nowadays in Dungeons and Dragons-inspired books and games, where they’re powerful undead monsters. The problem? ‘Wight’ just means ‘person’ or ‘creature’. The Barrow-Wight is literally a ‘Grave-creature’; dropping ‘Barrow’ from the name, and it’s not a monster anymore!
- Oh my god, I’d completely forgotten about the fox! You remember the fox, right? He sees the hobbits sleeping out in the wilderness on the edge of the Shire, and thinks “Huh, that’s really weird. Something odd’s going on…”, and the narrator points out that he never found out what was happening.
He needs to team up with Radagast or someone and have his own epic adventure!
- I found the racism a lot harder to overlook than I did last time I read the book. Particularly egregious to my eye was the descriptions of Bill Ferny’s ally in Bree: “a sallow face, with sly slanding eyes.”, which Sam says “looks more than half like a goblin.”. Well, yes, that or he’s Asian.
- I find I like Boromir a lot more than I remembered. He’s got a certain pragmatism about him that’s rather likable compared to some of the other members of the fellowship – he’s the one who insists they need to collect firewood before entering the mountains, and is the strongest voice against entering Moria, instead suggesting they take a longer but much safer route south.
- By contrast, Aragorn really rubs me the wrong way. Part of it is, of course, my aversion to chosen ones and Aragorn’s a particularly annoying example of one. His aura of kingliness is particularly egregious, since it feels too much like Tolkien is telling us how awesome Aragorn is, not showing it. Saruman has a similar effect of convincing people he’s awesome, but there its presented both as being an illusion, and also Saruman’s speeches tend to be well written, so the reader is convinced he’s being very persuasive. Aragorn, on the other hand, never really gets a chance to show off his supposed awesome charisma and leadership.
It does not help that his two main impressive feats – challenging Sauron via Palantir and walking the Paths of the Dead – happen largely off-page, and are related only in very brief flashbacks.
- New favourite character: Ugluk, the commander of the Uruk-Hai that capture Merry and Pippin. Ugluk’s notable for being the only character in the whole book who’s noticed the Nazgul don’t seem to ever live up to their fearsome reputation, and that they seem to lose mounts at an alarming pace.
Actually, Orcs in general have a rather refreshingly irreverent attitude towards the things that other characters view with awe. It makes it hard for me to see them as pure villains, and I felt a little sad when I noticed a line from one of the Orcs in Mordor about how they may not like working for Sauron, but things would be much worse for them if he was defeated – which appears to be a fairly accurate assessment of the situation. How many Uruk-Hai do you think survived Saruman’s downfall?
- One thing that strikes me about Gondor and Minas Tirith is how sterile it seems to be. We get lots of description of architecture and banners, but the only sign of non-human life is the dead tree in the courtyard. Even Mordor seems to have more life than this.
- On the subject of not liking Aragorn – I realise that's not their reason, but it doesn’t strike me as a particularly auspicious sign that every major Elven ruler seems to take his coronation as the signal to immediate get as far away from Middle-Earth as possible.
- I found the Scouring of the Shire a little weaker than I remembered: the whole book is filled with an anti-industrialisation, pro-environment theme, but here it seemed to be much more blatant than usual. I guess among the other fantasy clichés we can trace back to Tolkien, we can add "the chapter where the story is abandoned so the author can rant about his political obsession".
- Crackpot theory: Treebeard says that if he’d seen Merry and Pippin before hearing them, he’d have trodden on them, taking them for Orcs. He also says he can’t work out what the Uruk-Hai actually are, if they’re twisted men or Orc-Men hybrids. Of course, Treebeard is equally unsure about how he should categorise hobbits.
Saruman has clearly had a strong interest in the Shire for some time when the hobbits return, but surely full-scale industrialisation and turning the Shire into a police state is overkill just to secure his supply of pipe-weed?
Are the Uruk-Hai not man-orcs, but hobbit-orcs? As I said, the Uruk-Hai seem to have a very irreverent and down-to-earth attitude to things – very hobbit-like – and follow Saruman because he feeds them well… a very hobbit motivation.
Haven't actually re-read Tolkien for many years, so it was fun to revisit it. Thoughts, in no particular order:
- Tolkien doesn't really use unreliable narrators per se, but he does deal a lot with how and who tells stories and who copies them. There’s the entire pretence of the whole work being a translated historical work written by the main characters, of course, but there’s also little things like the use of older narratives that are clearly the product of different cultures to the main narrative, different characters having different names in different contexts, and asides from the author about how the legend of ‘Mad Baggins’ survived in Hobbit folklore long after the real events, or that the ‘original’ Book of Westmarch contains far more detail about Hobbit genealogies that the ‘translator’ has omitted. It’s interesting in that it’s almost as if it’s using unreliability as a mark of authenticity, the author effectively saying “I have told the story as well as I know, but I am limited by my sources and by language.”
- On the topic of unreliability, deception is also a common theme, and often it is not outright lying as the misrepresentation of truth. The obvious example, of course, is Denethor’s final decent into despair on being shown the Corsair fleet sailing towards Gondor – which is interesting, because the description of the battle is also written to initially deceive the reader as well into thinking the fleet is reinforcements for Sauron.
I find it interesting that the Palantir – communication devices – are used almost exclusivly in the novel as tools of deception. Not just by Sauron, either – Pippin unintentionally deceives Sauron into believing Saruman had captured the Hobbits, and after that Aragon’s revealing himself via the Palantir seems to have little purpose save to imply to Sauron that he has claimed the Ring’s power himself.
- I remembered the Tom Bombadil section as being much longer and more irritating, but it’s not too bad – and most of it is less Tom and more the encounters with Old Man Willow and the Barrow-Wight, which are both damn creepy! Bombadil himself feels almost deliberately out of place in Middle-Earth – like one of those odd hold-overs you sometimes find in mythologies and epics, where some tiny element of an older folklore is still clinging to life in the newer story, but now divorced from its original context.
- Side-note: ‘Wights’ are, of course, very common nowadays in Dungeons and Dragons-inspired books and games, where they’re powerful undead monsters. The problem? ‘Wight’ just means ‘person’ or ‘creature’. The Barrow-Wight is literally a ‘Grave-creature’; dropping ‘Barrow’ from the name, and it’s not a monster anymore!
- Oh my god, I’d completely forgotten about the fox! You remember the fox, right? He sees the hobbits sleeping out in the wilderness on the edge of the Shire, and thinks “Huh, that’s really weird. Something odd’s going on…”, and the narrator points out that he never found out what was happening.
He needs to team up with Radagast or someone and have his own epic adventure!
- I found the racism a lot harder to overlook than I did last time I read the book. Particularly egregious to my eye was the descriptions of Bill Ferny’s ally in Bree: “a sallow face, with sly slanding eyes.”, which Sam says “looks more than half like a goblin.”. Well, yes, that or he’s Asian.
- I find I like Boromir a lot more than I remembered. He’s got a certain pragmatism about him that’s rather likable compared to some of the other members of the fellowship – he’s the one who insists they need to collect firewood before entering the mountains, and is the strongest voice against entering Moria, instead suggesting they take a longer but much safer route south.
- By contrast, Aragorn really rubs me the wrong way. Part of it is, of course, my aversion to chosen ones and Aragorn’s a particularly annoying example of one. His aura of kingliness is particularly egregious, since it feels too much like Tolkien is telling us how awesome Aragorn is, not showing it. Saruman has a similar effect of convincing people he’s awesome, but there its presented both as being an illusion, and also Saruman’s speeches tend to be well written, so the reader is convinced he’s being very persuasive. Aragorn, on the other hand, never really gets a chance to show off his supposed awesome charisma and leadership.
It does not help that his two main impressive feats – challenging Sauron via Palantir and walking the Paths of the Dead – happen largely off-page, and are related only in very brief flashbacks.
- New favourite character: Ugluk, the commander of the Uruk-Hai that capture Merry and Pippin. Ugluk’s notable for being the only character in the whole book who’s noticed the Nazgul don’t seem to ever live up to their fearsome reputation, and that they seem to lose mounts at an alarming pace.
Actually, Orcs in general have a rather refreshingly irreverent attitude towards the things that other characters view with awe. It makes it hard for me to see them as pure villains, and I felt a little sad when I noticed a line from one of the Orcs in Mordor about how they may not like working for Sauron, but things would be much worse for them if he was defeated – which appears to be a fairly accurate assessment of the situation. How many Uruk-Hai do you think survived Saruman’s downfall?
- One thing that strikes me about Gondor and Minas Tirith is how sterile it seems to be. We get lots of description of architecture and banners, but the only sign of non-human life is the dead tree in the courtyard. Even Mordor seems to have more life than this.
- On the subject of not liking Aragorn – I realise that's not their reason, but it doesn’t strike me as a particularly auspicious sign that every major Elven ruler seems to take his coronation as the signal to immediate get as far away from Middle-Earth as possible.
- I found the Scouring of the Shire a little weaker than I remembered: the whole book is filled with an anti-industrialisation, pro-environment theme, but here it seemed to be much more blatant than usual. I guess among the other fantasy clichés we can trace back to Tolkien, we can add "the chapter where the story is abandoned so the author can rant about his political obsession".
- Crackpot theory: Treebeard says that if he’d seen Merry and Pippin before hearing them, he’d have trodden on them, taking them for Orcs. He also says he can’t work out what the Uruk-Hai actually are, if they’re twisted men or Orc-Men hybrids. Of course, Treebeard is equally unsure about how he should categorise hobbits.
Saruman has clearly had a strong interest in the Shire for some time when the hobbits return, but surely full-scale industrialisation and turning the Shire into a police state is overkill just to secure his supply of pipe-weed?
Are the Uruk-Hai not man-orcs, but hobbit-orcs? As I said, the Uruk-Hai seem to have a very irreverent and down-to-earth attitude to things – very hobbit-like – and follow Saruman because he feeds them well… a very hobbit motivation.
no subject
Evil Overlords always forget details like checking what cell tower the Palantir call is coming through... But seriously, it is interesting how often it comes up in these books that being able to exchange messages is not the same as actually communicating the truth, even when there aren't any actual lies as such involved. (Tolkien would have been all over the topic of how you shouldn't believe everything on the internet even when it looks technically true, sort of probably.) The framing device of the story as a translation of excerpts of the Red Book reminds me so much of doing history: you have some records, and they seem to match up with what other facts you can verify, but you only have some of the facts and for all you know the ones you're missing could change the context and the meaning of everything completely, and the things you can't verify might not be true at all, and some bits you will probably never know... It sure encourages engaged, critical reading!
Which makes me feel even more justified than usual in reading against the grain when it comes to things like that "slant-eyed" halfbreed-something fellow in Bree and the Haradrim and Easterlings and Orcs and women. Hey, the author practically invited us to suspect we're not getting the whole story and there might be biased reporting at work! I say Saruman and Sauron seduced their foreign allies by pointing out all the very real structural injustices in Middle-Earth society and suggesting that they work together to form a new, better order (okay, and probably telling the Orcs and Uruk-hai that they owe them for their existence or at least support). By the time they all figured out something was rotten in Denmark, they were stuck, and a few of them had been good and corrupted to boot and others were terrified and the rest figured they had better chances of fixing things if they waited to revolt until after the forces of the West had S&S distracted. Plus, with a multinational coalition, coordinating a revolt was probably hard. But I bet the eventual transition from Fourth to Fifth Age will involve a lot of these guys.
no subject
And, given that Gondor isn't the only sterile-seeming place, that might not be as far off as all that, Elessar-Renaissance aside. The Dwarves live in caves - nice caves, granted, but devoid of living things - and have few women and thus few children. The Ents have no women or children. The Elves are fading and splitting town, and you don't see any Elven kids either. In fact, Rivendell and Lorien are notable for their changelessness - time seems to stop in both places, and Lorien has a distinctly autumnal feel to it. You can go there to rest, but you can't live there. All these peoples have also gone beyond appreciating their history to pretty much wallowing in it and forgetting the present a lot of the time. They're all clinging to that dead white tree and broken sword-bits and Moria. And look how trying to go back to Moria worked out!
The tension between past and present in these books is really interesting - on one hand, the old songs and stories and heroism enrich the present, give the characters inspiration and ideals and so forth, but they can also be terrible traps leading to stagnation and death. Bilbo starting the Red Book is a good thing, but then he starts fiddling with it and fiddling with it and never doing anything new, and when he tries to set off and start fresh he gets stuck in Rivendell... I think it's notable that Aragorn doesn't rule the reborn kingdom alone; Arwen is Queen, and she deliberately gave up immortality to be there.
Oh yes. That fox? Its descendant got murdered by Bellatrix Lestrange in HP and the Half-Blood Prince. Radagast needs to show up and start an animal rights campaign. (I'm guessing the Blue Wizards will be helping with the East/South coalition, which Tolkien sorta implied in his letters.)
no subject
And yes, I think one of the things that Tolkien did very well was subtly emphasising that this is a biased narrative, that all stories depend on the teller. There's clearly, for example, another side to the story of the conflict between Rohan and the Dunlanders - we just don't get it because none of the hobbits ever got the chance to speak with Dunlanders!