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I say this is beautiful, I think you are strange
I really hope someone has written some good papers on the theme of outsiderness in Middle-Earth. For all his meticulous classification of Stoors and Fallohides and Vanyar and Teleri and cetrer, more often than not Tolkien's protagonists are outliers in their own cultures. "Still it is probable that Bilbo . . . although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father, got something a bit queer in his make-up from the Took side, something that only waited for a chance to come out"—which is the entire emotional arc of The Hobbit, as Bilbo realizes this unsuspected flair for riddles and adventures and all sorts of heroic, disreputable πολυτροπία (The Annotated Hobbit: look at these Norse and Germanic inspirations! My brain: look at these Odyssean motifs! I fail critical study forever) that will characterize him for the rest of his days.1 Frodo never even passes for ordinary; upon coming of age, "he at once began to carry on Bilbo's reputation for oddity," studying maps and visiting Elves and dreaming of far-off mountains, "and to the amazement of sensible folk he was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight." A king's niece of Rohan, Éowyn would die in battle before she would consent "to stay behind bars, until use or old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire"; so it is appropriate that the man she marries is "gentle in bearing . . . a lover of lore and of music" whose heart is not in warfare, the reluctant Captain of Gondor, Faramir. Arwen relinquishes not only immortality, but all her kindred and their world in choosing Aragorn over Valinor.2 And Sam, the steadfast gardener? "Crazy about stories of the old days he is"—and a storyteller himself: "I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?" There's not a farmboy with a destiny in the lot. The vaguely closest we get is Aragorn, as Elrond's fosterling and Isildur's heir, but he's frankly too complex for a die-stamped Campbellian archetype. And somehow out of this model we get David Eddings' Belgariad and Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, whose character development I can barely contemplate without bleeding from the ears? It's very strange. Tolkien's imitators seem to have taken his maps, but very little of his atmosphere.
1. And beyond, immortalized by his eccentricity and his disappearance as "a fireside-story for young hobbits . . . Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold."
2. And not even their spirits will meet in the afterlife, something that did not quite register the first time I read the books: "None saw her last meeting with Elrond her father, for they went up into the hills and there spoke long together, and bitter was their parting that should endure beyond the ends of the world." There is familial precedent in the choices of Lúthien and Elros, but that does not make Arwen's decision any less grave.
1. And beyond, immortalized by his eccentricity and his disappearance as "a fireside-story for young hobbits . . . Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold."
2. And not even their spirits will meet in the afterlife, something that did not quite register the first time I read the books: "None saw her last meeting with Elrond her father, for they went up into the hills and there spoke long together, and bitter was their parting that should endure beyond the ends of the world." There is familial precedent in the choices of Lúthien and Elros, but that does not make Arwen's decision any less grave.
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Oh, trust me, I never finished it. I can't even remember if I made it through a chapter straight, or if I just flipped pages in increasingly hemorrhagic horror and went back to Peter S. Beagle until my brain healed.
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This. This is something on which I need to meditate as I work on Hare Water and the next bits of Autumn War. It's a distinction that I've overlooked, but, now, encountering it, it seems extremely important.
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I'm reminded too of Nathaniel in Lud-in-the-Mist: isn't he somewhat given to un-Luddish flights of morbid fancy, before ever the fairy fruit inveigles its way over the border?
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Absolutely. Bilbo and Nathaniel Chanticleer are both people who are weirder than they realize or allow themselves to think—a gift for thievery and riddle-games, the Note that can sound at any minute of the commonplace—and that weirdness rises them to the occasion, as little as they or anyone else would have believed it.* More generally, both books are about the transition beyond the fields we know, taking as their thesis that the fey and faraway is really much closer at hand than common belief is comfortable with: fairy influence is underneath even the off-the-cuff oaths of Dorimare; the Shire is so small a fragment of its world that it's only when Bilbo returns (even more so the case with Frodo) that the reader realizes the hobbits' cozy comfort is the exception, not the rule, of daily life in Middle-Earth. And there is both humor and insight to be mined from the clashes in registers of language, although I think Lud-in-the-Mist is more numinous and The Hobbit more what the hell? I will have to re-read the former to be sure, but having just finished the latter, it's a tonal crazy quilt, full of mythic motifs alongside snips and snaps of fairy tale and deadpan modern understatement to point up the heroism of its characters and undercut it at the same time: "Victory after all, I suppose! . . . Well, it seems a very gloomy business." The fact that it all holds together in the first place is nearly as much of a feat as its enduring classic-of-children's-lit status.
* Bilbo has a harder time of it than Nathaniel, of course. I haven't looked into Guillermo del Toro's thoughts on the matter, but any adaptation worth its mushrooms should be able to spin a setpiece of social comedy out of the five-dwarf pileup on the doormat while Bilbo is juggling too many plates in the air of flustered manners and temper and dashing about and, well, plates: culminating with our hero melting down spectacularly in the drawing room and being stashed somewhere dark with a glass of brandy while the dwarves figure out what to do next. To be able to move from that sort of Ealing Studios silliness to the genuine suspense of "Riddles in the Dark"—and then the Battle of Five Armies, which changes gears again into the epic—is not and should not be impossible, because Tolkien achieved it, so I'll just pray it's a balance del Toro gets right.
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Yes, that's exactly right, I think. Yet these juxtapositions, initially startling, also reveal some continuities. Understatement and resigned heroism are Anglo-Saxon qualities too, which Tolkien allows us to hear and appreciate in Bilbo's apparent superficiality.
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I'm finding at least The Hobbit weirder than I remember, which I appreciate.
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I've never been able to get far enough into The Silmarillion to be turned off by its philosophy—I can read Beren and Lúthien, and the myth of Eärendil, and the rest sticks like a bad translation from the Sindarin.
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First of all, in reality, there is some correlation between moral character and physical composition; the same genes that yield symmetrical facial features, etc., appear to also be involved in mental health. The entire process by which we select mates for physical attractiveness has an evolutionary rationale: they do (on average) make better mates.
In Tolkien, you see this reality reflected in the ugliness of the orcs. However, among Ainur, Elves, and Men I don't think there's any significant correlation among moral character and physical composition. I mean, I seem to recall something abut the heroes being three and a half feet tall. And Sauron in his guise as Annatar, Lord of Gifts is sexy as hell and is so able to seduce the smiths of Eregion.
The Numenoreans covet eternal life, plain and simple, which is not to my knowledge a generally approved-as-cool motif in mythology. Can't recall too many stories of humans desiring eternal life and getting it and living happily ever after, probably because the actual obtaining of eternal life is impossible and we're all probably better off mental-health-wise if we accept that we'll die at some point. The Numenorean falling-out with the Elves is not a matter of being disrespectful but of being really pissed when they're told they can't live forever. Their lifespan begins to shorten at that point not because their physical composition is linked to their moral character but because it's, you know, ironic.
The banning of the Elvish language by the Numenorean kings (and the taking of royal names in Adunaic) happens 1200 years after the first falling-out with the Elves, so I kind of think it's symptomatic of their fall from grace rather than causative, eh?
Oh, and BTW, all of this happens immediately after the page that says "Here ends The Silmarillion". (Although admittedly it was published in a book with that overall title for convenience's sake.)
There is undoubtedly a loss-of-Golden Age theme in Tolkien which I'd argue is way too complex and nuanced to be described as merely "nostalgia" and in fact works because it reflects universal truths about our relationship with the past (both the cultural and our personal). You have every right, of course, to react badly to that theme. But the text is the text and it certainly doesn't say what you claim it says. I'd in fact be curious as to why you actually didn't like Akallabeth, since I find it hard to believe that you were rooting for the Numenoreans to kick Elvish butt.
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Sorry, I don't really play the evpsych game here. And yes, I know it's a very common trope that's exaggerated in fantasy novels, but it's one of the more distasteful aspects of them that lingers on and on. "Their lifespan begins to shorten at that point not because their physical composition is linked to their moral character but because it's, you know, ironic." When correlations like that happen in fiction, I tend to regard them as deliberate, thematic, and meaningful, particularly coming from, you know, Tolkien.
I was indeed referring to "The Silmarillion" as the book in toto. I can't say that I really care for the decline-and-fall atmosphere saturating the entire thing--nor do I believe it reflects Universal Truths about the past. I do, as always, reserve the right to be flippant in the journal of a friend.
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I must tell you, my first reaction is (a) you had better have some extraordinarily sound and thorough research to back up your first set of statements, because it is not my experience of the world that conventional physical attractiveness and whatever complex amalgam of stability, intelligence, trustworthiness, etc. you would like to define as good moral character are linked in any way reliable enough to serve as a guide for avoiding shmucks and/or sociopaths, while it is my experience that the trope of beautiful-good/ugly-bad is problematic at best, pernicious at worst (b) if your research on symmetry and mental health is sound, mental health is still not the same as moral character; it is quite possible to come up clean on the DSM-IV and to be a world-class asshole nonetheless (c) I'm guessing the research postdates Tolkien, so what he was reflecting with the Orcs was a combination of literary convention and personal taste.
Can't recall too many stories of humans desiring eternal life and getting it and living happily ever after, probably because the actual obtaining of eternal life is impossible and we're all probably better off mental-health-wise if we accept that we'll die at some point.
I can't think of too many off the top of my head, either, but now I want some. (I think there are some traditions in Taoism in which you can become immortal and this is viewed as a desirable rather than a fear-driven bad idea, but it is not a belief system I have studied at all.)
—Actually, I have thought of an example in fiction, but I can't tell you which one until you've read it.
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There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms.
Basically: how great the world was when everyone knew their place and what they should be and we wanted to be ruled by "those better than us".
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I never needed to have Gene Wolfe and John Norman take up the same space in my brain.
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*ducks and runs*