Tolkien's summary of his work: what got left out, and why?
Many of you write fic, and not so long ago posts were popping up all over my flist about that dreaded last-minute fic-posting chore: writing the summary. There you are, vaguely dazed from being immersed in your characters, and you're supposed to say what your story is ABOUT. Yikes.
Well, if you think summarizing your 5,000 word fic is hard, pity poor Tolkien, who in a letter to a prospective publisher had to summarize (excluding drafts and notes) 774,854 words of text: 525,408 in LotR; 95,620 in The Hobbit; 153,826 in The Silmarillion. That's quite a lot, and I suppose it would have been forgivable if Tolkien had resorted to something zen-like and oblique, such as a haiku (or two).
Elves fall, then men fall.
Later, there's stuff about a
ring, and Frodo lives.
I'm not too sure what
it all means, but it's SO not
Allegorical.
Erm, well, maybe not. No doubt Tolkien could have done the haiku thing much better than I did, but he didn't have the luxury of writing verse, good or bad, under the circumstances: as I mentioned in a previous post, he wrote the summary in an effort to persuade a publisher to print The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion as a connected whole. The summary is thus not intended as a neutral representation of the epic. Tolkien was writing with a purpose, and that purpose was to get into print the unloved (by publishers) child among his works, The Silmarillion.
What can the summary tell us about LotR? I've been thinking about that for several weeks now, ever since baranduin very kindly reprinted the LotR portions of the overall summary in four fascinating posts ( 1, 2, 3, 4). (The rest you can find printed as Letter 131 in the published Letters; if you want the summary and have difficulty accessing any of these parts of it, contact me.) The summary is so rich that it's hard to talk about, so I'm going to divide what I have to say into two posts. This one will be about the things that the summary of LotR does NOT include. The second, which will go up in a few days, will be about the enormous amount of attention the summary devotes to Sam.
In both cases I'm not trying to use the summary as a key to LotR's "true" meaning. Any summary is inherently an interpretation, and any story is greater than the sum of its parts. But I'm fascinated by this glimpse of what LotR looks like when Tolkien is interpreting his own work in an effort to make it serve as part of a larger whole. Which bits fit? Which bits don't, and why?
Tolkien's problem children: Rosie, Eowyn, and the Ents
In my next post, I'm going to go into slightly grisly detail (complete with a geeky chart) about how the summary's pattern of omissions shapes the story to emphasize the acts of Aragorn and Sam at the expense of other characters. But today I'll start with the omissions that bothered Tolkien himself the most. We know that they bothered him because he said so. At the end of his letter, after the LotR summary, he notes that there are three elements that he failed to incorporate. The first is the Ents. The second is "love-stories": Arwen's and Aragorn's, and Sam's and Rosie's. The third is the "theme of mistaken love" -- Eowyn's relation to Aragorn.
What strikes me about all these elements is that they're oddly situated in LotR itself, not just the summary. They're elements that seem essential but problematic, which may be why Tolkien couldn't include them in the summary but felt guiltily compelled to acknowledge this fact. Aragorn and Arwen's romance is relegated to an appendix. It's a lovely appendix, but it's an appendix. As for Eowyn, she has been a point of debate among readers for years: is she a heroine? A traitor? A doormat? A realist? What? As for the Ents -- my favorite characters in LotR -- they're aware of their own marginality to the struggles around them. No one, Treebeard says, is exactly on the Ents' side.
So Tolkien seems richly aware of where the tricky places in his own epic lie, the parts that both do and don't fit. This becomes most clear with the omission he spends the longest time discussing, namely Rosie. Rosie appears briefly in the summary, but very suddenly as Sam's wife (we're not told when they married, so as far as the summary is concerned, Sam might have been married all the time!). She pops up just in time to be the person Sam chooses over Frodo, and the person to whom Sam turns in the end. Tolkien feels oddly compelled to defend this absence at length, even though she's more nearly present than any of the other absent characters. You get the impression that he's defending her absence from the book more than her absence from the summary. And perhaps that's necessary: while I love what we see of Rosie in the book, we don't see much of her, and to many readers she comes as a big surprise at the end. Given her elusiveness, Tolkien is strangely insistent on her thematic centrality:
I think the simple 'rustic' love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential [Tolkien's emphasis] to the study of his (the chief hero's) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, the longing for Elves, and sheer beauty.
In this comment, Rosie represents one side of the great thematic binary that informs the epic as a whole: she is, for Sam at least, all about the breathing, eating, working, and begetting side of life. To some extent she stands in opposition to quests and sheer beauty. That opposition seems consistent with what she actually says and does in RotK: she implies that Sam's whole adventure was a waste of time. If that seems harsh of her, remember that her world lay in ruins around her when she said it. Tolkien very cannily gives us a Sam who has genuine obligations both to Frodo and to the Shire, and while he was fulfilling one set he was neglecting the other.
So in Tolkien's analytical statements about Rosie, he insists that she's central; yet he had to make these statements because he couldn't bring himself to construct the summary in such a way that this importance was obvious.
To me, not just these absences but Tolkien's belated acknowledgments of them represent something important. He can see how crucial both the Ents and the women are, but they don't quite fit gracefully into his overall account of LotR. Why? That's a topic that could generate endless debate, so I'll just sketch in a couple of quick theories.
Girls, girls, girls
Theory one, for the women, is the obvious one: Tolkien just had trouble with women characters. I am now going to dive into a bunker and hide from this eternal debate, but will acknowledge two things right off: first, when Tolkien does get his act together to portray women characters, they kick serious butt. Second -- well, they do tend to hover in the background when they're not kicking serious butt. Eowyn is a case in point: Tolkien can't find a place for her in the summary. It's not just her love life that disappears, but her killing of the witch-king, which Tolkien never mentions at all. Female heroism vanishes when Tolkien is describing his main themes.
Well, maybe it's true that Tolkien just found Eowyn too tricky to discuss: he says rather testily in the letter that he will not defend his decision to include her mistaken love for Aragorn, and that he doesn't think much can be done to "heal the faults" of the narrative. Maybe with Eowyn, Tolkien thought something was genuinely wrong. But that won't help us figure out what to make of Rosie. His defense of her on thematic grounds is firm and uncompromising. Why is she then so difficult for him to incorporate into the story, even in a summary?
The difficulty of the ordinary
Here's my second theory: Rosie falls by the wayside because of the position she occupies in that great thematic contrast Tolkien mentions even as he defends her, that contrast between (on the one hand) ordinary life and (on other hand) quests, love the Elves, and sheer beauty.
To understand how crucial this opposition is, we have to step back from Rosie and take a look at how this contrast plays out in Tolkien's description of his entire work. Variations of it come up again and again: over and over, characters are torn between the earthly and the ethereal. Furthermore, the most successful civilizations and individuals in his universe are the ones that manage to achieve at least a temporary synthesis between these opposites. The most important moments in The Silmarillion happen when Men unite with Elves; the most powerful or significant cultures are cultural hybrids of one kind or another (the Númenóreans are the men who had most to do with the Elves; the Elves who made the Rings had most to do with the Dwarves).
As for LotR's heroes: Both Frodo and Aragorn derive a great part of their strength as heroes from their ability not just to appreciate both sides of this opposition, but to manifest both sides in their own characters. Aragorn is BOTH Strider AND Elessar; neither of those identities is false. Frodo is BOTH the hobbit capering on the table in Bree AND the dreamy lover of song and story, staring at Arwen from afar.
So these thematic opposites -- and their union -- were hugely important to the way Tolkien thought about his work. But can we really say that Tolkien was emotionally neutral in the great struggle between "ordinary life" and "sheer beauty"? It seems to me that Tolkien stacks the deck a bit when he puts beauty of the side of quests in the first place. And even though LotR ends in the union of opposites, some aspects of the style and characterization emphasize not the characters' earthy qualities, but what Tolkien insists on referring to as their "high" qualities. Aragorn becomes less and less like Strider as the epic progresses. The Frodo who danced on the table gives way to someone who is immensely more complicated and more alien -- but perhaps wiser as well.
I think Tolkien's heart lay on side of sheer beauty and aspiration, and that therefore Rosie was simultaneously crucial and hard to portray. He was intellectually committed to a union of opposites, and so he respected what she represented -- in theory. But in practice, he could not quite bring himself to enter fully into her imaginative life. So she's there, but not quite.
Come back to me
I think this great thematic binary can also help us understand why creatures as delightful as the Ents could not find a place in the summary. It might seem awfully strange that they don't get mentioned, since they're instrumental to the downfall of Saruman, and Tolkien does discuss that. But no: in the summary proper it SOUNDS as if Saruman was defeated by a combination of the Rohirrim and the Fellowship. Very odd indeed, considering that Gandalf says at one point that Saruman's big mistake was that "he forgot the Ents." Why did Tolkien do the same -- Tolkien the ur-tree-hugger! -- only to remember them at the last minute and apologize for leaving them out?
What follows is perhaps just wild theorizing, but: The Ents represent a culture in a long, slow decline because they have failed, finally and decisively failed, to incorporate the two sides of Tolkien's great opposition between ordinary life and aspirations toward extraordinary beauty. The Ents take pure joy in nature, however alien and terrifying that nature may be; the Entwives turned nature to the purposes of ordinary life and begetting. And the Entwives are lost. All the Ents can do is mourn them. LotR as a whole leads to a joyous union between these opposites. But the Ents, delightful as they are, represent the possibility of tragedy; the possibility that a combination of evil chance and temperamental incompatibility will prevent the two sides from coming to terms.
Maybe the Ents are, for Tolkien, an alternative too terrifying to include, but too important to exclude. They are living out the consequences of a moral failure that will lead to the death of their culture. They are life without the synthesis that Rosie and Sam's marriage represents.
If this ability to synthesize opposites represents victory in Tolkien's universe, then Rosie and Sam are the subplot of success, and the Ents are the subplot of failure. It's curious that both these subplots end up on the sidelines when Tolkien tries to describe his work: again, they're there, and yet not quite there. That's a sign, perhaps, of how terribly fragile the union of opposites was for Tolkien -- how close it was to being unimaginable, how essential it was to imagine.
Well, if you think summarizing your 5,000 word fic is hard, pity poor Tolkien, who in a letter to a prospective publisher had to summarize (excluding drafts and notes) 774,854 words of text: 525,408 in LotR; 95,620 in The Hobbit; 153,826 in The Silmarillion. That's quite a lot, and I suppose it would have been forgivable if Tolkien had resorted to something zen-like and oblique, such as a haiku (or two).
Elves fall, then men fall.
Later, there's stuff about a
ring, and Frodo lives.
I'm not too sure what
it all means, but it's SO not
Allegorical.
Erm, well, maybe not. No doubt Tolkien could have done the haiku thing much better than I did, but he didn't have the luxury of writing verse, good or bad, under the circumstances: as I mentioned in a previous post, he wrote the summary in an effort to persuade a publisher to print The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion as a connected whole. The summary is thus not intended as a neutral representation of the epic. Tolkien was writing with a purpose, and that purpose was to get into print the unloved (by publishers) child among his works, The Silmarillion.
What can the summary tell us about LotR? I've been thinking about that for several weeks now, ever since baranduin very kindly reprinted the LotR portions of the overall summary in four fascinating posts ( 1, 2, 3, 4). (The rest you can find printed as Letter 131 in the published Letters; if you want the summary and have difficulty accessing any of these parts of it, contact me.) The summary is so rich that it's hard to talk about, so I'm going to divide what I have to say into two posts. This one will be about the things that the summary of LotR does NOT include. The second, which will go up in a few days, will be about the enormous amount of attention the summary devotes to Sam.
In both cases I'm not trying to use the summary as a key to LotR's "true" meaning. Any summary is inherently an interpretation, and any story is greater than the sum of its parts. But I'm fascinated by this glimpse of what LotR looks like when Tolkien is interpreting his own work in an effort to make it serve as part of a larger whole. Which bits fit? Which bits don't, and why?
Tolkien's problem children: Rosie, Eowyn, and the Ents
In my next post, I'm going to go into slightly grisly detail (complete with a geeky chart) about how the summary's pattern of omissions shapes the story to emphasize the acts of Aragorn and Sam at the expense of other characters. But today I'll start with the omissions that bothered Tolkien himself the most. We know that they bothered him because he said so. At the end of his letter, after the LotR summary, he notes that there are three elements that he failed to incorporate. The first is the Ents. The second is "love-stories": Arwen's and Aragorn's, and Sam's and Rosie's. The third is the "theme of mistaken love" -- Eowyn's relation to Aragorn.
What strikes me about all these elements is that they're oddly situated in LotR itself, not just the summary. They're elements that seem essential but problematic, which may be why Tolkien couldn't include them in the summary but felt guiltily compelled to acknowledge this fact. Aragorn and Arwen's romance is relegated to an appendix. It's a lovely appendix, but it's an appendix. As for Eowyn, she has been a point of debate among readers for years: is she a heroine? A traitor? A doormat? A realist? What? As for the Ents -- my favorite characters in LotR -- they're aware of their own marginality to the struggles around them. No one, Treebeard says, is exactly on the Ents' side.
So Tolkien seems richly aware of where the tricky places in his own epic lie, the parts that both do and don't fit. This becomes most clear with the omission he spends the longest time discussing, namely Rosie. Rosie appears briefly in the summary, but very suddenly as Sam's wife (we're not told when they married, so as far as the summary is concerned, Sam might have been married all the time!). She pops up just in time to be the person Sam chooses over Frodo, and the person to whom Sam turns in the end. Tolkien feels oddly compelled to defend this absence at length, even though she's more nearly present than any of the other absent characters. You get the impression that he's defending her absence from the book more than her absence from the summary. And perhaps that's necessary: while I love what we see of Rosie in the book, we don't see much of her, and to many readers she comes as a big surprise at the end. Given her elusiveness, Tolkien is strangely insistent on her thematic centrality:
I think the simple 'rustic' love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential [Tolkien's emphasis] to the study of his (the chief hero's) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, the longing for Elves, and sheer beauty.
In this comment, Rosie represents one side of the great thematic binary that informs the epic as a whole: she is, for Sam at least, all about the breathing, eating, working, and begetting side of life. To some extent she stands in opposition to quests and sheer beauty. That opposition seems consistent with what she actually says and does in RotK: she implies that Sam's whole adventure was a waste of time. If that seems harsh of her, remember that her world lay in ruins around her when she said it. Tolkien very cannily gives us a Sam who has genuine obligations both to Frodo and to the Shire, and while he was fulfilling one set he was neglecting the other.
So in Tolkien's analytical statements about Rosie, he insists that she's central; yet he had to make these statements because he couldn't bring himself to construct the summary in such a way that this importance was obvious.
To me, not just these absences but Tolkien's belated acknowledgments of them represent something important. He can see how crucial both the Ents and the women are, but they don't quite fit gracefully into his overall account of LotR. Why? That's a topic that could generate endless debate, so I'll just sketch in a couple of quick theories.
Girls, girls, girls
Theory one, for the women, is the obvious one: Tolkien just had trouble with women characters. I am now going to dive into a bunker and hide from this eternal debate, but will acknowledge two things right off: first, when Tolkien does get his act together to portray women characters, they kick serious butt. Second -- well, they do tend to hover in the background when they're not kicking serious butt. Eowyn is a case in point: Tolkien can't find a place for her in the summary. It's not just her love life that disappears, but her killing of the witch-king, which Tolkien never mentions at all. Female heroism vanishes when Tolkien is describing his main themes.
Well, maybe it's true that Tolkien just found Eowyn too tricky to discuss: he says rather testily in the letter that he will not defend his decision to include her mistaken love for Aragorn, and that he doesn't think much can be done to "heal the faults" of the narrative. Maybe with Eowyn, Tolkien thought something was genuinely wrong. But that won't help us figure out what to make of Rosie. His defense of her on thematic grounds is firm and uncompromising. Why is she then so difficult for him to incorporate into the story, even in a summary?
The difficulty of the ordinary
Here's my second theory: Rosie falls by the wayside because of the position she occupies in that great thematic contrast Tolkien mentions even as he defends her, that contrast between (on the one hand) ordinary life and (on other hand) quests, love the Elves, and sheer beauty.
To understand how crucial this opposition is, we have to step back from Rosie and take a look at how this contrast plays out in Tolkien's description of his entire work. Variations of it come up again and again: over and over, characters are torn between the earthly and the ethereal. Furthermore, the most successful civilizations and individuals in his universe are the ones that manage to achieve at least a temporary synthesis between these opposites. The most important moments in The Silmarillion happen when Men unite with Elves; the most powerful or significant cultures are cultural hybrids of one kind or another (the Númenóreans are the men who had most to do with the Elves; the Elves who made the Rings had most to do with the Dwarves).
As for LotR's heroes: Both Frodo and Aragorn derive a great part of their strength as heroes from their ability not just to appreciate both sides of this opposition, but to manifest both sides in their own characters. Aragorn is BOTH Strider AND Elessar; neither of those identities is false. Frodo is BOTH the hobbit capering on the table in Bree AND the dreamy lover of song and story, staring at Arwen from afar.
So these thematic opposites -- and their union -- were hugely important to the way Tolkien thought about his work. But can we really say that Tolkien was emotionally neutral in the great struggle between "ordinary life" and "sheer beauty"? It seems to me that Tolkien stacks the deck a bit when he puts beauty of the side of quests in the first place. And even though LotR ends in the union of opposites, some aspects of the style and characterization emphasize not the characters' earthy qualities, but what Tolkien insists on referring to as their "high" qualities. Aragorn becomes less and less like Strider as the epic progresses. The Frodo who danced on the table gives way to someone who is immensely more complicated and more alien -- but perhaps wiser as well.
I think Tolkien's heart lay on side of sheer beauty and aspiration, and that therefore Rosie was simultaneously crucial and hard to portray. He was intellectually committed to a union of opposites, and so he respected what she represented -- in theory. But in practice, he could not quite bring himself to enter fully into her imaginative life. So she's there, but not quite.
Come back to me
I think this great thematic binary can also help us understand why creatures as delightful as the Ents could not find a place in the summary. It might seem awfully strange that they don't get mentioned, since they're instrumental to the downfall of Saruman, and Tolkien does discuss that. But no: in the summary proper it SOUNDS as if Saruman was defeated by a combination of the Rohirrim and the Fellowship. Very odd indeed, considering that Gandalf says at one point that Saruman's big mistake was that "he forgot the Ents." Why did Tolkien do the same -- Tolkien the ur-tree-hugger! -- only to remember them at the last minute and apologize for leaving them out?
What follows is perhaps just wild theorizing, but: The Ents represent a culture in a long, slow decline because they have failed, finally and decisively failed, to incorporate the two sides of Tolkien's great opposition between ordinary life and aspirations toward extraordinary beauty. The Ents take pure joy in nature, however alien and terrifying that nature may be; the Entwives turned nature to the purposes of ordinary life and begetting. And the Entwives are lost. All the Ents can do is mourn them. LotR as a whole leads to a joyous union between these opposites. But the Ents, delightful as they are, represent the possibility of tragedy; the possibility that a combination of evil chance and temperamental incompatibility will prevent the two sides from coming to terms.
Maybe the Ents are, for Tolkien, an alternative too terrifying to include, but too important to exclude. They are living out the consequences of a moral failure that will lead to the death of their culture. They are life without the synthesis that Rosie and Sam's marriage represents.
If this ability to synthesize opposites represents victory in Tolkien's universe, then Rosie and Sam are the subplot of success, and the Ents are the subplot of failure. It's curious that both these subplots end up on the sidelines when Tolkien tries to describe his work: again, they're there, and yet not quite there. That's a sign, perhaps, of how terribly fragile the union of opposites was for Tolkien -- how close it was to being unimaginable, how essential it was to imagine.