March 31, 2005
LotR Boring? Blasphemy!
Conscientious Objector discusses some of LotR's problems:
One critic infamously complained that the characters in LotR are "sexless." I find their lack of a sense of humor much more damning. A lot of the characters "smile" and "laugh," but there's something cold in the way they do it; they do so because the situations "call" for a smile or a laugh, not because the characters find amusement welling up within themselves. Can you imagine Elrond laughing a joke, let alone telling one? I can't. "Strider" gets off some funny lines and funny business in Fellowship, but he soon turns into George Washington. Sam calls some of the Elves "merry as children," but you never see them act that way.
My recommendation? Don't read the Silmarillion if you find LotR humorless or dry. While I agree that there's not much humor in the book (though there is a small amount, at least: Tom Bombadil, for example), that's more a function of Tolkien's tone and aims than a real flaw. Perhaps I'm just taking the role of apologist because I love the book so much, but since he was trying to create an epic, it only makes sense that there's little humor. Nobody faults the Iliad for lacking humor do they? I don't know, maybe they do, but such a criticism would be a bit beside the point for either work. Most literature excludes some register or another (ignoring poets like Whitman and Ashbery, who manage to fit just about every tone and register into their poems). Granted, the best writers tend to have a wide range they use, but not all. T.S. Eliot, for instance, has about two notes: weary and sad. That doesn't make him a bad poet or his poems less beautiful. I'm not equating Tolkien's artistry with Eliot's, of course. Tolkien was not a master prose stylist or what one would call a wordsmith. Instead, he excelled at telling tales, creating plots that engage us for thousands of pages. In the process, he does exclude quite a bit of life that had it been included would have made his achievement even greater, but the book would have also lost a bit of its stuffy charm.
Cool! My Lovecraft post didn't get a rise out of anyone. But I was betting a Tolkien post would! :p
I actually do love LotR; TT and RotK only feel *comparatively* wan in comparison to FotR, which I find very nearly perfect. I have read "The Silmarillion": I read it when I was ten or twelve and then reread it in college. It's tough going, I'll admit, and I don't remember it that well. I've mostly used it as an auxiliary Appendix when I want to remember what the background was on so-and-so in LotR or The Hobbit.
But I would never apply the same criticism to it that I did to LotR. They're different sorts of things. The fact that LotR *has* character comedy in its early chapters tells me it's the kind of book that could work with that kind of thing in it (actuality being the best proof of possibility). And I feel the loss when people get so stiff and solemn toward the end.
I dunno. Maybe it's Tolkien's recognition that the humor of medieval-esque characters would be of a different kind than the modern, "suburban" (his word) humor of the Hobbits. Maybe it's a culture clash I'm reacting to. I'm only reporting on my visceral reaction to the book. Which is, I repeat, almost uniformly positive.
Yeah, I was kinda just giving you a hard time. It's obvious from your post that you're a fan. It's possible (and likely) that he purposefully scales back the humor as the book progresses to mirror the grimness of the characters' situations. There's simply not a lot of room for mirth trekking through the Dead Marshes or fighting a seemingly doomed battle against Mordor. I find it interesting that he saw the Hobbits as the most modern characters in the novel since they pass away when the Age of Men rises. I've read an article the discusses how he splits the traditional hero into two: Frodo and Aragorn. Does he say anything about the medievalism of the humans in the novel? They seem pretty knightly/chivalrous, perhaps patterned on Arthurian legends.
Yeah, I knew you were giving me the business. What's the point of being an LotR fan if can't do that to other fans? Actually, I did reread my post and think "Damn, I sounded REALLY negative."
Yeah, I think Tolkien did mean to scale the humor back. He says in one of his letters that both CS Lewis and Rayner Unwin thought there was too much hobbit humor in the early chapters. But it probably would have scaled back anyway as the book turned out to be darker than originally intended. It did start off as a "Hobbit" sequel, after all!
On the "medievalism" I don't recall off-hand what he might have said. The impression I get from my own reading *about* Tolkien was that he was trying to imagine what the pre-Norman mythology of England might have been like. That pre-Norman culture would have been a combination of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic/Viking. The Rohirrim and Hobbits (who, you might recall, have some distant memory of each other in LotR) represent the Anglo-Saxon strain, even down to the names of the founders of the Shire getting their names (somehow) from the supposed leaders of the A-S invasion of England. The Elvish stuff derives more from the Icelandic strain, apparently.
Time seems to move "slower" in Middle-Earth than in the Primary World. Thirteen hundred years passed between the settling of the Shire and the journeys of Frodo; an equivalent passage of time would bring our world from the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England up to about the time of the American Revolution. Little probably changed during the 1300 years in Middle-Earth, so I would *guess* that society in LotR might be close to the immediate post-Carolingian period. That's deep enough into the Middle Ages that there would be a feudalistic structure, though I don't think they had the stirrup at that point and so wouldn't have had knights, strictly speaking. (Are there stirrups in LotR?) Interestingly, though, there doesn't appear to be the kind of society in place in either Eriador or Gondor that would recapitulate the European feudal order. Only Rohan might.
You don't think Gondor could recreate a feudal order? Is this because it's a strictly urban society, which wouldn't allow for serious land-owning? Even then, we just have to look at medieval London (admittedly a less impressive place than Gondor) to see that they would just own land out in the countryside. Or is there some other reason you think that's not possible there? I always had the sense that all the cities of Men were strictly class-divided between nobility and everyone else.
I really am NOT a scholar on these things, so I'm totally talking out of my ass here, but ...
Tolkien (IIRC) explicitly compared Gondor to ancient Egypt--he even did a sketch of the crown of Gondor and remarked on the (I guess intended) resemblance to the pharaonic double crown. The history of the Kingdoms in Exile are also suggestive of the late Roman Empire (the era of Diocletian onward). Both of these were orientalized bureaucratic states: They had a semi-divine ruler at the top and were generally run by professional bureaucrats. They seem to have been more "modern" than the Middle Ages in that respect. There were, of course, "classes" even these states, but they were based on wealth (not all of which derived from *ownership* of land), learning and on performing certain government functions (such as being priests and lawyers) within the state apparatus.
The feudal state, though, was a "privatized state" (that's a term--complete with scare quotes--used by one historian I'm currently reading). The ruler granted lands and offices to vassals in return for personal loyalty. Lord-vassal relations, not state-citizen relations, were the key concept. Kings might have had divine sanction, but the division of power tended, over time, to reduce the kings to ciphers. (That's one reason France was so disordered for so many hundreds of years, especially in the Merovingian and post-Carolingian periods.)
The Dunedainic emphasis on lineal descent from Elros (who, though not divine, was pretty damn close, being a half-elf) suggests a quasi-divine majesty attended their monarchs. The early bands of the Edain might have been remarkably "Germanic," but by the time of Ar-Pharazon Numenor sounds very much like an "oriental" state like Egypt, Babylon and Persia. Certainlly, I don't think you can build and maintain a fleet such as theirs without a tremendous directing organization behind it. Elendil and his sons were still a product of late Numenor and would likely have brought many of its habits (purged of the evil of Ar-Pharazon and Sauron, or course) with them. Gondor, it seems to me, would initially have been very similar to late Numenor. There seems to have been too much "central direction" in its building projects (such Orthanc and the Pillars of Argonath) for it to have been otherwise.
There are "nobles," such as the Lord of Dol Amroth and the "Lords of Andunie" in Numenor, that are mentioned in Tolkien's texts. I'm not sure what to make of them. It might be that there was a "feudal" tradition that survived in Numenor, just as you can find dukes and counts in Europe today. Or perhaps as Gondor waned and warriors became more valued (as Faramir says happened) feudal-type relations and institutions were gradually introduced. It's interesting that the southern regions of Gondor sent only sparing numbers of troops to the defense of Minas Tirith; perhaps such areas as Lossarnach and Belfalas exercised considerable autonomy.
You might even look to non-European lands for parallels. The sons of Elendil took over lands that were already occupied (they had been conquered by Numenor) and the Dunedain might have been only a ruling elite, similar to the Qing in China and the Mughals in India. I don't know how those societies worked, however, and can't even begin to speculate on how their structures might have been recapitulated in Gondor.
Interesting. I had always assumed that Gondor was based on the Romans, and of course the recent film backs up this impression. But now that you've reminded me of narratives from the Silmarillion (not to mention the crown) I find the Egyptian interpretation quite plausible. For better or worse, Jackson decided to go with the "silver trumpets" angle--grainy white hues evocative of decay and silver armor.
Yeah, aesthetically, Gondor probably was Rome. I vaguely recall that Tolkien visited Italy and said that Venice (or someplace like that) was his idea of Pelargir. And his geography was oriented around northwest Europe in a way that put Gondor on the north shore of the Mediterranean. If you've not seen it yet, check out this radically cool map by a UCLA professor. Best part: Mordor is located in ... Transylvania!!!
But the aesthetics don't mean much. Just because you've got an "Egyptian" society doesn't mean you've got Egyptian architecture. All the people who think "Celtic" when they read Tolkien are apparently wrong, but if that's a pleasing "look" to wrap your imagination around, go for it, I say!