Tolkien Fans: Comments and Questions

[Bramblethorn]

One could also argue that the warriors of the time of the Silmarillion were people of the calibre of Hurin, Glorfindel, Beren, and not least Ecthelion - who single-handedly killed Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs.

Definitely a bit of both going on.

So while Durin's Bane definitely got buffed (boo), I think Tolkien also leaned heavily into the heroes of the Third Age being far less powerful than the mythical warriors of the First and Second ages.

Mind you, one of those Balrog-slaying warriors of the Silmarillion is still around for LotR. (Or perhaps "again around", since Tolkien screwed up and had to retcon a divine resurrection to explain why he'd accidentally reused a character who'd previously been killed off.)

From what I remember, the Balrogs were corrupted Maiar - so a single Balrog was a match for a Maiar like Gandalf.

They were, yes, although I gather they weren't originally conceived as such.

 

[Britva415]

No! Just no!

Bilbo Batmans?

 

[StillStunned]

Mind you, one of those Balrog-slaying warriors of the Silmarillion is still around for LotR. (Or perhaps "again around", since Tolkien screwed up and had to retcon a divine resurrection to explain why he'd accidentally reused a character who'd previously been killed off.)

Didn't he die in the process, though? So essentially the same as Gandalf.

 

[onehitwanda]

What are your favorite scenes in LOTR?

Éowyn and Merry defeating the Witch King.

The death and redemption of Boromir.

and, finally, this scene:

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

These staves he spoke, yet he laughed as he said them. For once more lust of battle was on him; and he was still unscathed, and he was young, and he was king: the lord of a fell people. And lo! even as he laughed at despair he looked out again on the black ships, and he lifted up his sword to defy them.

And then wonder took him, and a great joy; and he cast his sword up in the sunlight and sang as he caught it. And all eyes followed his gaze, and behold! upon the foremost ship a great standard broke, and the wind displayed it as she turned towards the Harlond. There flowered a White Tree, and that was for Gondor; but Seven Stars were about it, and a high crown above it, the signs of Elendil that no lord had borne for years beyond count.

And the stars flamed in the sunlight, for they were wrought of gems by Arwen daughter of Elrond; and the crown was bright in the morning, for it was wrought of mithril and gold.

Thus came Aragorn son of Arathorn, Elessar, Isildur's heir, out of the Paths of the Dead, borne upon a wind from the Sea to the Kindom of Gondor; and the mirth of the Rohirrim was a torrent of laughter and flashing swords, and the joy and wonder of the City was a music of trumpets and a ringing of bells.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Didn't he die in the process, though? So essentially the same as Gandalf.

Yep.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This is an interesting theme of LOTR, a reflection of Tolkien's conservatism and Catholicism -- the idea of the fallen world. That the people of the Third Age don't match up to the people of the First or Second.

I'm not sure if this "descent of humanity" (including Elves etc.) is coming from Tolkien's Catholicism specifically. It's something that shows up in a lot of myths; it's where we get the term "Golden Age". The Greek version is discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man with links to various others, including Tolkien's.

 

[TheLobster]

I'm not sure if this "descent of humanity" (including Elves etc.) is coming from Tolkien's Catholicism specifically. (…)

I believe this is also less about his Christian beliefs and more about his life experience, specifically seeing the industrialization of his rustic hometown and of course his time in the trenches of WWI.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm not sure if this "descent of humanity" (including Elves etc.) is coming from Tolkien's Catholicism specifically. It's something that shows up in a lot of myths; it's where we get the term "Golden Age". The Greek version is discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man with links to various others, including Tolkien's.

I'd put it this way. His Catholic/Christian way of thinking made him sympathetic to other similar mythological systems in which the present represents a come-down from the past. It's a way of thinking that isn't unique to one religion, but his religious way of thinking influenced his embrace of this world view.

 

[BeechLeaf]

I'm sure he felt that, ultimately, his subcreation of an imaginary world was not incompatible with his personal beliefs. But he did create a new world: the Valar, the Maiar, Elbereth, they were not simply Roman Catholic orthodoxies in a different light. Compare and contrast Lewis's much cruder Aslan imagery: Tolkien never did that. The invention was dominant and he was free to pick and choose. His religion was one source to choose from, as were Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied and the Elder Edda.

 

[Writer61]

I'd put it this way. His Catholic/Christian way of thinking made him sympathetic to other similar mythological systems in which the present represents a come-down from the past. It's a way of thinking that isn't unique to one religion, but his religious way of thinking influenced his embrace of this world view.

Also, he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford for 20 years, and then of English Language and Literature for 14 more. Thus, he was steeped in early literature, much of which records ancient stories and traditions.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm sure he felt that, ultimately, his subcreation of an imaginary world was not incompatible with his personal beliefs. But he did create a new world: the Valar, the Maiar, Elbereth, they were not simply Roman Catholic orthodoxies in a different light. Compare and contrast Lewis's much cruder Aslan imagery: Tolkien never did that. The invention was dominant and he was free to pick and choose. His religion was one source to choose from, as were Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied and the Elder Edda.

I agree. As I recall, Tolkien disclaimed any notion that LOTR was an allegory. I think he's right. It's influenced by his beliefs, but it's not an allegory intended to push them.

 

[Writer61]

I find it interesting that Tolkien imagined a world built on a broad range of influences, whereas his fellow Inkling, CS Lewis, focused on Christian tradition.

 

[SimonDoom]

I find it interesting that Tolkien imagined a world built on a broad range of influences, whereas his fellow Inkling, CS Lewis, focused on Christian tradition.

I'm not a big fan of Lewis. I think the Narnia books are overrated, and the allegory overdone. Tolkien was far more inventive.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I'm sure he felt that, ultimately, his subcreation of an imaginary world was not incompatible with his personal beliefs. But he did create a new world: the Valar, the Maiar, Elbereth, they were not simply Roman Catholic orthodoxies in a different light. Compare and contrast Lewis's much cruder Aslan imagery: Tolkien never did that. The invention was dominant and he was free to pick and choose. His religion was one source to choose from, as were Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied and the Elder Edda.

His aim was to ‘create a mythology for England,’ one to rival the Norse mythologies. He wasn’t aiming to create or promote a religion.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I agree. As I recall, Tolkien disclaimed any notion that LOTR was an allegory. I think he's right. It's influenced by his beliefs, but it's not an allegory intended to push them.

He claimed to hate allegory and disdained Lewis’s Narnia books.

 

[RocketGrunt]

I'm not a big fan of Lewis. I think the Narnia books are overrated, and the allegory overdone. Tolkien was far more inventive.

There are like ... two good Narnia books. TLTWaTW and The Magician's Nephew are good books. Not on the level of LotR, but good. The others are varyingly less good, and The Last Battle is actively bad. His non-fantasy philosophy writings are comically inept and very unpersuasive if you aren't religiously inclined to accept his conclusions.

Even the good fantasy is good as fantasy. It's whimsy, not hard sci-fi. I mean, parts of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe are supposedly written specifically to annoy Tolkien by not making sense from a world building perspective, and I choose to believe that this is true. The idea of C.S. Lewis telling Tolkien over a pint that he put Santa Claus and a random unexplained London lamp post in his Isekai fantasy world while Grampa Tolkien sputters about how that doesn't make sense is very funny to me.

 

[Writer61]

I'm not a big fan of Lewis. I think the Narnia books are overrated, and the allegory overdone. Tolkien was far more inventive.

For reasons that I could not articulate at the time, I never liked The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I loathed Out of the Silent Planet, which I had to study at school. Consequently, Lewis is about the only author that I actively dislike.

 

[Writer61]

His aim was to ‘create a mythology for England,’ one to rival the Norse mythologies. He wasn’t aiming to create or promote a religion.

Had not heard that one before.

If so, I think he was well off target. I'm no expert on English cultural history, but I don't get any ringing bells from LotR. I think I would at least pick up on Arthurian parallels.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm not a big fan of Lewis. I think the Narnia books are overrated, and the allegory overdone. Tolkien was far more inventive.

Susan was my first literary crush, when I was twelve (so we can't talk about that here).

For someone who grew up in an atheist household, and my dad a Marxist, it's curious that he read the Narnia stories to me and my siblings as little kids, and I in turn read them to my kids. Very odd.

Tolkein was less inventive, more derivative, I think, given that so much of his content came from Norse mythology. As a teenager I found reading LOTR like wading through mud, and I've only read it twice in the decades since. It's like Star Wars for me, meh, there's much better.

Setting aside Gormenghast, which is far more to my taste, I reckon the other great fantasy romp is The Worm Ouroboros by E.R.Eddison (1922), where a bunch of fantastic heroes go around on huge long campaigns to give themselves something to do. When the good guys win, which they obviously do, they all get bored and go back in time to do it all over again. All very machismo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros

 

[Voboy]

Had not heard that one before.

If so, I think he was well off target. I'm no expert on English cultural history, but I don't get any ringing bells from LotR. I think I would at least pick up on Arthurian parallels.

Well... he started over a hundred years ago with a framing device that involved an Anglo-Saxon sailor who ended up stranded on Tol Eressea and heard the stories that later became the Legendarium, returning home late in life to "translate" the stories into... a mythology for English people. It was never "about" England, per se, except that Tol Eressea was vaguely associated with the later Britain.

He abandoned that device, but his later conceit was that the Legendarium were ancient works begun by Bilbo that had ended up in English hands, anyway: his own.

So his overall idea wasn't that his works were "English," just that they were "for the English." What they were not, MOST emphatically, were references to Christianity.

 

[YmaOHyd]

That idea is littered throughout both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, too; that hobbits are still around, we're just bad at seeing them, among other things. I think it's going too far to say that emphatically they weren't references to Christianity; Eru Iluvatar and the Elves are an exploration of "the infinity of His potential variety":

I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysics — there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones — that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!

This is in the course of defending Elvish reincarnation as not un-Christian.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Had not heard that one before.

If so, I think he was well off target. I'm no expert on English cultural history, but I don't get any ringing bells from LotR. I think I would at least pick up on Arthurian parallels.

It’s an actual JRRT quotation. And the Authurian myths are French.

 

[YmaOHyd]

It’s an actual JRRT quotation. And the Authurian myths are French.

The Arthurian romances are French. Arthur is pretty firmly Welsh. Edward I Longshanks Anglicizes him, and in the French romantic tradition he is a semi-benevolent father figure slash romantic rival; the romances focus on Lancelot, Guinevere, and the various Grail-questing knights.

 

[Voboy]

The Arthurian romances are French. Arthur is pretty firmly Welsh. Edward I Longshanks Anglicizes him, and in the French romantic tradition he is a semi-benevolent father figure slash romantic rival; the romances focus on Lancelot, Guinevere, and the various Grail-questing knights.

Their cultural background is firmly Norman, though, regardless of Arthur's mythical geographic origin. NOTHING about the cycle, in terms of its tone and major ideas, borrows from Anglo-Saxon or Celtic culture; almost everything that makes Arthur's court great is from the Continent. Lancelot, the flawed hero of the whole piece, is explicitly not British at all.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Their cultural background is firmly Norman, though, regardless of Arthur's mythical geographic origin. NOTHING about the cycle, in terms of its tone and major ideas, borrows from Anglo-Saxon or Celtic culture; almost everything that makes Arthur's court great is from the Continent. Lancelot, the flawed hero of the whole piece, is explicitly not British at all.

In the romances, this is true. It's not true of Arthurian myth broadly, which is much weirder and goes back to... difficult to say, really, but maybe the 6th century and certainly no later than the late 9th/early 10th. Arthur there is the protector of Britain against Saxons and monsters but most interestingly supernatural foes from the Underworld. Figures from the Old Welsh tradition survive into the Norman, English and French, usually ruined. Sir Cai, peerless warrior who may only be killed by God, becomes Sir Kay, boorish bully, and Sir Bedwyr, gallant one-handed marshal, becomes Sir Bedivere who tries to defy Arthur's last command. Gawain's character changes drastically over time, too; in the French traditions his good character and purity are given to Galahad, while Gawain becomes a villain.

ETA: Sort of a distinction between the mythology of Arthur and the mythology of Arthur's court and Camelot, which the French especially were a lot more concerned with. Arthur is a traveling hero in the Welsh rather than sitting on his can letting the knights do the work, as in later works.