All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

So. Welcome to The Crackpot. Please theorize, discuss, and debate to your heart’s content!

As part of my goal to catch up on my reading list during the semester break, I am trying to track down and read secondary sources of information about JRRT’s writings. I recently found at the library the book Master of Middle-earth by Paul H. Kocher and have been slowly working my way through it. It’s mostly about LotR and was published in 1972–five years before The Silmarillion hit the bookshops–and so is quaint in some places and, in others, mind-bogglingly accurate regarding aspects of the mythology that remained, at that point, unpublished.

So I’m up to the “Aragorn” chapter. And, while reading at lunch today, this passage leaped out at me regarding some critics’ contentions that Aragorn needed more complexity as a character in the form of “a sharp taste for sin”:

It is not clear why this demand, more appropriate to a realistic novel than to heroic fantasy, should be made . . .. What is clear is that if it were made of all alike it would blur the clear dichotomy between good and evil on which Tolkien has chosen to build his epic. (pg. 128)

Now, it’s really easy for me to say, “Pssh. This was clearly written before The Silmarillion made its way into the ‘canon,’” and disregard it as an anachronism. Only this is a point I’ve also seen made by people who have read The Silmarillion.

I remember when I was first dipping my toe into the Tolkien fandom, I had an almost insatiable hunger for textual analyses done by people who had read more than me. Which, at that point, was nearly everyone. This was in the heyday of TheOneRing.net before it became primarily a source for information and gossip about the movies, when Green Books still had a prominent place on the homepage and tORN still published fan fiction. Green Books was a favorite of mine in those days, and in reading a Q&A written by one of their columnists, I encountered the semi-rant against modern literature, which sullied its heroes and where one of Aragorn’s unquestionable goodness had no place and represented weak writing. Abashed, I realized that that was me: I had been taught and had myself aspired to write “complex characters,” who broke free of the constraints of “good guy” and “bad guy.” Yet, as I read more of JRRT’s writings and gained the confidence to question how others interpreted the texts, the more I realized that I did not agree with this columnist’s opinion at all. Traditionally, yes, epics make use of moral dualism, but I felt that JRRT’s writings were, largely, not so simplistic.

In fact, a “clear dichotomy between good and evil” is exactly the opposite of how I see JRRT’s writings. Especially in light of The Silmarillion, which–if anything–muddies the waters of clear good-evil dualism that LotR gives the impression of existing. With few exceptions, there are none in The Silmarillion who can be plunked neatly into Good or into Evil. Even Melkor: I remember once writing on the SWG email list that no one in the Silm is entirely evil except Melkor, and Rhapsody rightfully called me on it. Is Melkor even fully evil or is he the product of his circumstances? It’s a valid question to ask, I think, and once you start debating whether Melkor might be something other than fully evil, then the dichotomy to which Kocher and others refer goes out the window.

Of course, LotR presents characters that are more easily dichotomized, especially without knowledge of the earlier “Silmarillion” mythology to complicate characters like Sauron who appear, in LotR and The Hobbit, to be utterly evil but are shown as being more complex in the Silm. But I still don’t think that LotR is a “clear dichotomy between good and evil.” Firstly, there are characters like Boromir, Denethor, and Gollum, who walk the line. Secondly, there is the broader context of the novel as a history or set of myths passed down from loremasters who lived through the age (like Bilbo), presumably to JRRT in the role of the modern “loremaster” charged with bringing the forgotten myths back to our culture. This allows characters like Aragorn (or Lúthien, in The Silmarillion) to achieve a degree of moral perfection that they never could have possessed in reality. So while the story as it is told to us certainly creates that impression, awareness of it as a story about a period in history rather than an accurate historical account allows us to understand that the good-evil dualism is more in the bias or imagination of the storyteller than anything factual. (Of course, Kocher likely would not have been aware of this broader framework in which JRRT set his stories, but modern students of his work certainly should be.)

At the same time, when I read the History of Middle-earth books, I’m left with the impression that, in many ways, JRRT was pushing his characters, morally, to one side or the other as his work on the legendarium progressed. The Book of Lost Tales is rich with characters that are hard to place in one bin or the other as far as morality goes. Námo and Nienna, for example, are delightfully creepy, and Makar and Meássë certainly liven things up. The sons of Fëanor, at different points in JRRT’s early writings, all had their moments when they were depicted more sympathetically, as did Fëanor himself. Of course, as Douglas Charles Kane meticulously demonstrates in the recently published Arda Reconstructed, a lot of these losses were the result of Christopher Tolkien’s edits, not his father’s, and we often do not know why those edits were made. Perhaps JRRT indicated to CT that he wished the stories to move in this direction, or perhaps it is, as Kane argues, “editorial intervention” on CT’s part. Regardless, without even considering the published Silmarillion, the stories have always seemed, to me, to progress toward moral dualism as they evolved.

So, heretics and loremasters, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think that any of JRRT’s books show a good-evil dichotomy? Do you think The Silmarillion can be read this way? I realize that my reading of the books falls at one extreme and readings like Kocher’s at the other, but I’m curious what is out there in the way of middle ground.

You know, I may be committing a mortal sin as a Tolkien fan in acknowledging this publicly, but when I heard about this, I wasn’t even a little bit excited. I mean, I can already get Sigurd and Gudrun if I want it. (And I already intended to read it at some point between the end of this semester and beginning of the next but because of its influence on his books, not his relationship to it as a translator.) So what if it doesn’t have Tolkien’s name on the cover. It’s not Tolkien’s story.

Juno mentioned the new book on her journal, and I commented there that I felt like the Tolkien Estate is becoming crass in trotting out unfinished, doctored, and reworked (by CT) manuscripts every few years. Not because I don’t think that JRRT’s early and incomplete writings and notes should not be shared: quite the opposite! I consider myself not just a fan but a student of his work and, as noted already, S&G was already on my radar for its influence over his Middle-earth-based writings. And his version of S&G might allow additional insights as to how he saw the story, which might illuminate how S&G came to influence his own original writings. I probably will buy it but my excitement over its imminence only marginally eclipses the excitement I felt for reading S&G in the first place and, trust me, given some of the other books on my between-semesters reading list, that wasn’t particularly overwhelming.

My distaste isn’t caused by the book itself but, rather, the feeling that the reputation of The Lord of the Rings (and, to a lesser extent, The Hobbit, though I expect this to change once the movie’s out) is being used to fuel interest in and hype a book that is really better aimed at students and scholars of JRRT’s writings. This is not to say that fans of his more popular books can’t and should not try to enjoy S&G. To the contrary, I hope that at least a few of the people who pick it up only because of his name on the cover do enjoy it and perhaps develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for the mythological influences on LotR and TH. Furthermore, I hope that for at least a few of them, S&G will act as a springboard into a deeper, lifelong interest in medieval literature and mythology, much as The Silmarillion jumpstarted my interests in the same topics. It would be fitting to allow a professor to continue to inspire students in his field.

But I doubt that’s what will happen because I doubt that the new book will be presented in such a way to foster that attitude and approach by its readers. Adam B. Vary of Entertainment Weekly gushes that,

Maybe this new Tolkien story — which the good professor reportedly wrote before spinning his tales of furry-footed Hobbits and ring-seeking dark lords — would prove just as richly filled with fodder for a sweeping fantasy epic that wins oodles of Oscars.

Until he realizes that, ick, “it’s written in verse. Eeep. And it’s a retelling of old Norse epics. Yikes.”

Yeah, I suspect that will be the reaction of a lot of people who pick up S&G (a reaction likely compounded when they realize that “verse” isn’t even the lilting metered, rhymed verse of French origins, certainly not limerick, but alliterative verse, that kind that doesn’t even rhyme! Double ick.) Only they probably won’t have even done the minimal research required of an EW blog post beforehand; they will see a favorite author’s name on the cover, which will inevitably be appended with the exclamation Author of the bestselling The Lord of the Rings! Now a major motion picture! and correctly assume that the book is more of the same.

I know because it happened to me. I was smitten by LotR when I heard of The Silmarillion and tracked it down in the store, expecting it to be a lot like LotR. The cover didn’t do much to dissuade me. “The Epic History of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings,” it promised. The blurb on the back didn’t help much either:

The Silmarillion is Tolkien’s first book and his last. Long preceding in its origins The Lord of the Rings, it is the story of the First Age of Tolkien’s world, the ancient drama to which characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in which some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part.

Elrond! Galadriel! I know them! Lord of the Rings! (Mentioned three times on two covers!) The blurb is more about LotR than the Silm, intentionally written to snare LotR fans. No one tells you that The Silmarillion is the Old Testament with Elves; no one tells you that it’s nothing like LotR. I hated it. Yes, your resident heretic loremaster and the founder of the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild hated the Silm the first time she read it. It was only when I went back and read it again–prepared, this time, for what to expect–that I could here the story past the anguished scream in my brain of “THIS IS NOT LotR!!” to appreciate the stories it contained on their own merits.

This, I think, is the reason for my distaste with the Tolkien Estate’s long-running habit of drudging up old stuff to put into print. It’s not that I don’t think that his unpublished works shouldn’t be published, and it’s not that I don’t think that they can’t be read and enjoyed by readers who aren’t normally inclined to Norse epics written in alliterative verse. (No modern reader is normally inclined to Norse epics written in alliterative verse, so we must arise from somewhere.) What I dislike is that, through JRRT’s primary association as the author of LotR and The Hobbit, they are presented as writings by JRRT the Popular Author and not JRRT the Scholar of Medieval Literature. And anyone who knows anything about JRRT knows that his incarnation as the Popular Author was fleeting, an accident of chance, and the Scholar was the one who was there to stay, and did. Presenting his scholarly writings otherwise is deeply unfair to readers who go in expecting “a sweeping fantasy epic” and get something very different.

But what to do, what to do? On the one hand, Dawn (you might say), you want his writings published because you want to geek out over them. On the other hand, you don’t want readers feeling misled by what those writings are. What do you want, a disclaimer like: LotR fans beware! Severe nerdiness enclosed! Don’t buy this unless you want to become a nerd! (possibly enclose a photo of Dawn Felagund staring vacant-eyed at her computer screen on a Friday night, partially obscured by a pile of books) Legolas sold separately! Trying to have our cake and eat it too, are we?

Not necessarily. My unasked-for suggestion to the Tolkien Estate is to, yes, please continue publishing JRRT’s drafts and notes and unfinished works for those of us who wish to study them without taking our vacation at Marquette University every year. But publish them online. Make some free–so that fans of his books can explore and see what they’re all about–and require a subscription for the rest and the compilations that CT is inclined to produce. Maybe make such compilations available in print through the site for those who want them. (Some, I hear, like to keep a shelf with all their Tolkien books, even though they use e-books for almost all research purposes, just because it looks impressive. *ahem*) But this habit of riding the wave of success from LotR and The Hobbit to peddle almost completely unrelated scholarly books looks like you’re just trying to make a killing on a legion of fans who salivate at the mention of Tolkien’s name (yes, the deplorable cult), and it’s getting unsightly.