In my last blog post, I explored
Tolkien’s use of the Atlantis story and its influence on his writing. Tolkien
was obsessed with the fall of the Numenoreans, writing and rewriting about their
plight throughout his career. However, Tolkien was not just interested in their
demise; this week’s readings emphasized that Tolkien was captivated by the
traces of fallen civilizations themselves. When passing through Hollin, Legolas
discusses a previous race of elves who had lived there. He describes how “only
the stones lament them. Deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they
builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago.”
(318). Legolas’ elegy is mournful. The poem has no air of consolation or
reconciliation—it simply laments the loss of the elves and that no one else has
any memory of the elves, their impact, or civilization.
Throughout LOTR Tolkien describes
many other ruins: the hobbits and Strider fight on Weathertop, the fellowship
marvels at the decaying grandeur of Moria, and Frodo explores Amon Hen while
contemplating his next move. Along each step of the journey, members of the
fellowship face the ruins and decay of old. These passages resonate with melancholy,
but also with awe. When the Fellowship sails down the Anduin, they stare in
wonder at the giant statues of Argonoth. While they are on a quest to save
their civilization, they constantly encounter relics that remind them how no
civilization lives forever, and that, as Gollum’s riddle says, time devours all.
The characters struggle with their inevitable end and are struck with wonder of
how they can ever live up to the past. Tolkien seems to grapple with questions of
transience and decay. Though he realizes his characters are fighting for a
battle of survival, he parallels their fight with images of the inevitable rise
and fall of civilization.
Tolkien is clearly struck by the
frailty and fall of civilizations. I think these passages are significant,
however, because they not only prompt questions of transience but also are
connected with Tolkien’s stories and ideas of history. Tolkien uses fallen
civilizations as fuel for his writing, as he explores civilizations before
their fall. To do this, Tolkien bases his stories off of details and seeds from
the present world. As we saw in class, Tolkien’s drawings of Rivendell emulate the
ruins of Ynys Mon, while Barad Dur is reminiscent of Roman walls. Tolkien did
not just lament and mourn the passing of civilizations through his depictions
of ruins but also seems to try to cope with his awe and sadness by writing
accounts behind fallen civilizations.
Tolkien inlaid these records with
incredible depth and breadth of detail. In The
Notion Club Papers, Jeremy remarks how creations like Tolkien’s have roots
“in the springs of History and in the designs of Geography” (227). Tolkien’s
maps can be seen to line up latitudinally with those of Europe. Tolkien used
geography as another seed for his stories.
Tolkien also creates vast lineages for
his characters. The Annals of Beleriand and the appendices in LOTR seem
reminiscent of biblical genealogies. They create a depth to the history in his
stories, and give his stories more of an inner logic and familiarity. Tolkien
also takes great care in aligning the chronology of Middle Earth so that the
civilizations rise and fall in correlation with civilizations viewed in our
primary reality. By creating elements of time that align with our primary
reality, he continues to root his stories in the past, which give his writing
an air of authenticity.
Tolkien however is doing more than
simply marking and providing possible stories behind past civilizations.
Wainwright connects the old English word Holegn, meaning holly, to the place
“Hollin,” the location is where Legolas’ mourns the loss of the elves. While
spending the night at Hollin, Tolkien describes how the fellowship stays in a
glen “shrouded by great bushes of holly” (318).
Holly is an English symbol for everlasting life. In the midst of sadness
over a forgotten civilization, Tolkien inputs a symbol of eternity. I think to
Tolkien, the idea of holly, of something eternal, is important to his
conception of history.
In his letters Tolkien describes how the world
he writes in is that of man and not of an imaginary world (Letters 239).
Tolkien views his writing as something more than stories and mythology, but
rather is a work that begins to cross over into the realm of history. In The Notion Club Papers, Jeremy and Ramer
defend intermingling ideas of history and myth. Jeremy discusses how real
details “crystallize like snowflakes”—and how central to history King Arthur is (227). The legendary king is forever immortalized
in history because of his significant impact on our views and conceptions of
the past. He has been so influential in our knowledge and beliefs of the Middle
Ages that it ceases to be important whether or not he actually lived.
Tolkien
therefore sees history not as an absolute idea, because history and myth can
overlap. What people think is important, or what has shaped their views or
ideas can be considered a history that is worth studying. In a sense, this is
the holly. A character like Arthur, though he may not be someone who actually
lived or walked the earth, is significant but because the ideas surrounding him
are everlasting.
Tolkien
seems to struggle greatly with the rise and fall of civilizations. He mourns
the loss of the tales of the past and leaves his characters to struggle for
survival, while being perpetually faced with reminders of the finiteness and
transience of life. From this fascination with the fall of civilization,
however, Tolkien creates complex stories. However he also uses these stories to
create a nuanced idea of what is history. Although his stories may not reflect actual
historical events in our time and place, they can still be seen in a way as
historical. Tolkien, using seeds from our primary reality, uses the ruins of
civilizations to cope with questions about transience and rise and fall, and
also to present a new idea of truth in history.
-Hope
-Hope
3 comments:
My bad: the images I showed in class were not Rivendell, but the Elven-King's Hall (in Mirkwood?) and Nargothrond in Beleriand.
RLFB
I'm so sorry!! I definitely mixed it up while taking notes!
Hope,
You creatively connect some absolutely central, profound themes in this post: transience, loss, history, myth, immortality and continuity. I would say that the invoking an “absolute idea” of history is the one, tiny false step, as Tolkien, as a practitioner of the history of language, seems to have believed firmly that history is a provisional, limited, subjective, and fragmentary practice—not an idea or an absolute. When done right, history, like all inquiry, tries to move in the direction of the Absolute Truth that it knows it’ll never reach. The hobbitish Prof. Tolkien, though possessed of Baggins-like gifts and erudition, had nevertheless a very Gamgeevian humility and diligence in his work.
Other than that, I think you do a terrific job in tying together the fundamentally tragic view of history that Tolkien constructs across so many of his works, with glorious civilizations going under (sometimes literally) due to inborn flaws present almost at their creation. The parallels with Biblical literature and human history you draw are, to me, all but undeniable fingerposts to his thinking.
Finally, your invoking his use holly is quite discerning. It is important, and I think it represents not only continuity, as you say, but—appositely enough—Hope, a virtue (of a particular kind) which lies at the heart of The Lord of the Rings
Bill the Heliotrope
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