Tolkien's summary of his work: what got left out, and why?

[fictualities]

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

Comments

[fictualities]

Hee, thanks! I think the grinding sound you heard was Tolkien spinning in his grave. :D

[fictualities]

some writers, in a zen like, chop wood carry water kind of way, put sheer beauty on the "real life" side and not the "quest" side.

Yes yes yes! It's funny - I was so steeped in Tolkien's way of thinking when I was a kid that very idea that beauty could be inherent in the ordinary just seemed WEIRD to me for the longest time.

it's so poignant that treebeard knew that the entwives would have loved the shire.

Yeah, he recognized the Entwife sensibility at once, didn't he? After so many years, and faced with such different creatures. I think it shows how much he missed them. And I love the idea of Sam and Rose as bringing back the ents and the entwives! Despite his stolidity, Sam has that longing for wildness in him, and that tendency to let things be that shows up when he lets Gollum crawl off in Mordor (just as Treebeard let Saruman crawl off). So he and Rosie are like Ents and Entwives united in some ways (though Sam has more than a little entwife in him, temperamentally at least).

[fictualities]

The fact that he didn't know what to do in the summary about Eowyn, who is in my mind a very successful character and the protagonist of one of the books most interesting plots seems just--oddYeah, I was a little surprised by her absence from the summary: that moment when she kills the witch-king is one of my favorite in the book -- as is the attack of the Ents, also omitted (and then commented on). It's like the summary itself can't incorporate the heroic actions of characters who don't quite fit into the overall plot line of the Middle Earth works as a whole, which overwhelmingly emphasizes both a) male heroism, and b) the union of opposites, and neither Eowyn nor the Ents can be incorporated into this story. Come to think of it Eowyn has her big heroic moment at a time in her life when she's more or less decided to be infertile, when she's embraced heroism as an alternative to life rather than as a means to support it (another parallel to the Ents, I think: Treebeard is aware that this might be the Ent's last march, and that in

[anna_wing]

I think it may also be something to do with the nature of Elves as he conceived them. They're not ethereal. They're more real than Men, more truly part of the world. Men are the ethereal, ephemeral ones. Elves to Men are mountains to mayflies, only more so, since they will outlast mountains too.
Scene after scene in LOTR emphasises this ephemerality of Men -the stories of Tom Bombadil, describing the rise and fall of Mannish Kingdoms on the Downs, Gimli and Legolas discussing the stones of Minas Tirith, all the ruins and reminders of the Numenoreans that the Fellowship passes as it travels. Even the end of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, which is told from a perspective of the far future, as a story of forgotten people.

The hearth and the starlight are also opposites in Tolkien's conception in that the stars will go on, while the hearth will grow cold one day.

[fictualities]

[Eee, I'm reposting this to fix a silly mistake caused by overfast typing. Must have more coffee.] Mmmmm, yes, good point. Two complications: I think that "longing for Elves" in Men and Hobbits represents an aspiration towards transcendence of some kind, towards something beyond ordinary life (that's how Tolkien uses the concept in his remarks about Rosie, and elsewhere). On the other hand, just as you say, Elves are vastly more durable than Men, and endure the way that mountains do. On the third hand, though, in the grand scheme of T's cosmology, mountains don't endure -- men are headed for some destiny beyond the world that transcends anything elves can understand.

To be honest I've never quite been able to get my head around this dual significance of the Elves -- they seem to function for Men as beings who point toward the possibility of transcendence but who are not, in themselves, transcendent. (Maybe the Valar function for the Elves in that way.) Divinity is always one step beyond where you think it is in T's universe, maybe.

[tiferet]

It's funny, reading this, because I love the Silmarillion but could never get into anything written from the pov of the hobbits precisely because I've never been able to identify with them, particularly with their whole, 'this is all there is, and that's okay, and this is important' attitude toward life. Then again, that is so my damage--my inability to come to terms with the quotidian, daily, ordinariness of the world, because of the associations I have with that in my earliest life, which was an unholy mess. I always thought Tolkien was quite on the side of the ordinary; perhaps I ought to read them again (or rather try to) someday.

[fictualities]

I love the Silmarillion but could never get into anything written from the pov of the hobbits precisely because I've never been able to identify with them

I think that from moment one Tolkien's readership has been bifurcated in exactly this way! In his letters he spends a certain amount of time apologizing to mildly appalled readers for the ordinariness and for what he called the "suburban" qualities of hobbits. Ever since the books came out there have been readers who could get on board with the grand epic stuff but who gagged at the tweeness of the hobbits. And vice versa -- there are readers who love the hobbit perspective but who need persuading about the grand epic. (Personally I'm a bit more of a hobbit person by nature than a grand epic person -- and maybe that's just my damage as someone from a bi-religious family who is naturally suspicious of claims to transcendence -- but over the years Tolkien has cajoled me into loving both, and now I find the Silm utterly enthralling

[anna_wing]

Well, in my innermost soul I am Bilbo Baggins, who was a Hobbit, and loved Elves, and got them and yet remained a Hobbit and happily so. Bilbo is the perfect synthesis of the two positions and had an ideal life.

[rosamundeb]

Ah, yes... how we long for and elevate the beautiful and ethereal, but they are dead ends in and of themselves. Tolkien repeatedly mourns the loss of the beautiful and ethereal, and you can't help but feel that Men are a step down from Elves... yet, the Elves are not about ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting... and dying), and Men are - and so Men "win out" in the end.

Excellent points.

[fictualities]

Tolkien repeatedly mourns the loss of the beautiful and ethereal, and you can't help but feel that Men are a step down from Elves... yet, the Elves are not about ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting... and dying), and Men are - and so Men "win out" in the end.

This is such a great way to articulate the central dilemma of LotR! It seems that everything most beautiful is doomed to fade, doesn't it? I think PJ captured this feeling PERFECTLY in that breathtaking scene from the EE of FotR where he showed F&S watching the Elves go to the Grey Havens. Just thinking about that scene gives me goosebumps, sitting here YEARS LATER.

When you think about it, there's something sad about a book so at odds with itself that it ends up rejecting everything it postulates as being most lovable. Well, not quite everything, but by making both Frodo and Sam understand the longing for Elves, I think Tolkien makes even the most hobbit-centric among us mourn the loss of the Elves along with them.

[rosamundeb]

True, true. And if you can't appreciate the elves, or even fear them - as so many of the hobbits who are the most into the eating, begetting, etc. do - you're a bit of a lout, in Tolkien's book. It *is* a bit of a paradox!

[applegnat]

I don't know if Men 'win out' - it seems quite clear to me that Tolkien thinks that Middle-earth is slowly, sadly fading, and the fate of the Elves is tied to that, because of their immortality and their closeness to the fate of the world, so that their leaving it for the Immortal Shores is an attempt to protect themselves, and one that, while desirable to mortal creatures, is simply not available to them. I think the books would have had a stronger element of the carpe diem attitude instead of regret and yearning, had Tolkien meant the changeability of Middle-earth to be a good or even an unpreventable thing. After all, it used to be a perfectly habitable continent before Evil - that of Morgoth and Sauron, certainly, but also of Men and, more importantly in the Silmarillion, Elves - made it a bad part of town. They still have the power to