Re-reading Tolkien: Free to choose

[fictualities]

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it came out in the mid-fifties. First of all, we'd all be wearing sweater sets and poodle skirts and bras as heavily engineered as a cantilever bridge. (Yes, even the men: Tolkien fans are a funny lot.) But apart from the appalling burden of fifties

Comments

[fictualities]

it is being so incredibly February all over the place

Three words: eight below zero. Argh. I know what you mean.

sharing Auden's squee

Can you believe how much he got it? He didn't overpraise or gush, I don't think, and he cannily places Tolkien where Tolkien belongs: as having at least one foot firmly planted in the adventure story. It's an insightful take on Tolkien even before all three volumes were available, and of course, it's Auden, whom I fangirl with what is usually a completely different part of my brain. Seeing him squee over Tolkien is like introducing your in-laws to your parents for the first time and discovering that they actually get along. :D

the whole idea of deciding but not acting alone

I'm glad that came across; it was hard for me to put that into words because to me it seems like such a fantastically difficult ideal for someone to pull off. Be open to others, only not overdependent, not for your most important moral decisions. It's tricky.

Tolkien is worried about the sin of pride in a way

[anna_wing]

A healthy individual in Middle-earth is one who is connected to other people. There isn't a place for the Romantic-style glamorous lone outcast. Aragorn looks the part at first, but he is very deeply connected to other people - to his society and his family (dead or alive, mortal or immortal) and his obligations to them all. Likewise we know the family connections of all the Fellowship, and in fact pretty much everyone in the book. Even Tom Bombadil the unique lives with someone and has deep relationships with everything living in his domain. So Saruman and Denethor and Gollum and Sauron fall because they abandoned mutuality in their connections and obligations (even Sauron was the apprentice of Aule, which I suppose counts as family among Valar) in favour of either isolation or the one-way relation of domination.

[fictualities]

Aragorn looks the part at first, but he is very deeply connected to other people - to his society and his family (dead or alive, mortal or immortal) and his obligations to them all.

Ooooh, yes, this is a very good point. I think Aragorn is such a poignant character, particularly at the beginning, because he's in a position that's unnatural to him: he wants not a throne so much as a home. His story in LotR is the story of someone who finally settles down in his long-lost home and marries his long-time girlfriend. I'm not sure Aragorn would have much patience with the mysterious outcast ideal at all.

So Saruman and Denethor and Gollum and Sauron fall because they abandoned mutuality in their connections and obligations

Oh, yes, I think so. All of them HAD connections and abandoned them; and Sauron has a long history of fake mutuality (with the elves, with the men of Numenor) that always turns out to be about exploitation.

[anna_wing]

There is also role conflict due to their social relationship. Frodo is older than Sam, his employer and social superior, and his family, as the local Squires, has a certain quasi-feudal relationship with Sam's family (Bilbo and the Gaffer). Frodo has a strong socio-cultural and moral obligation to protect Sam, as well as the concomitant right to expect Sam to defend him, and this makes his changing relationship with Sam that much more complex.

[sistermagpie]

Good point--yes. And Sam's got a very clear idea about his own sphere--like when he takes the ring he's very aware of it not being "his job" or his place to have decided what to do.

Sorry I deleted my comment and reposted it below. Boromiriad was just too great and I'd misspelled it.

[dichroic]

Thanks. Sam's devotion is for me the most heart-wrenching part of LOTR, and this view of Frodo's side of it makes me feel a little better.

[xylohypha]

Serious choices don't just happen once, but many times

Oh, yeah. And this fits so nicely with the Ring-as-addiction theme, too. It's actually choice on-going, never-ending.

LotR is full of this dynamic, in which the act of looking makes someone visible, and the quest for knowledge about evil makes someone vulnerable TO evil.

Oooh, and after reading this, I have this amazing amalgam of Heisenberg and Nietzsche in my head (ouch!), with the observer affecting the observed, and the abyss looking back at you. Cool.

[fictualities]

the Ring-as-addiction theme,

Yes yes! I think this early view of Frodo's repeated, compulsive choosing casts an interesting light on what the journey through Mordor must have been like. By that time we don't have much access to Frodo's POV, and whatever is going on in his head he mostly keeps there. But I don't imagine that the conflict he experienced throughout FotR ever really stopped.

amazing amalgam of Heisenberg and Nietzsche in my head (ouch!), with the observer affecting the observed, and the abyss looking back at you.OMG, they're breeding! A Heisenberg and Nietzsche amalgam would be scary -- like you can know either the position of the superman or how fast he's going, but not both. :D Seriously, though, yeah: I think these ideas about the perils of observation have been in the air for a very long time. Tolkien was drawing from a long Christian tradition that had a lot to say about contemplating evil, but so was Nietzsche (despite his protestations) and so I guess we shouldn't be surprised to see these two ships at

[fictualities]

Oooh, yes, very good point! Tolkien really underplays this aspect of Frodo's backstory -- we don't hear much from Frodo about his family at all, apart from his feelings Bilbo and the younger cousins like Merry and Pippin. But Tolkien did include this info about how Frodo's parents died, and it's fascinating to speculate how it might have affected him. I just can't think it an entire accident that Frodo's quest takes him to a place where he has to rescue someone else from drowning.