“Living
life on the surface” has always been a negative adage about the dangers of action
without reflection. Tolkien himself has delved into the question of what it
means to live merely a surface life—and the consequences, or disadvantages, of
never digging past the surface. He especially makes a point to really find out
not only how history, myth, and location (i.e. being in a certain place) help us to avoid this fate, but also why they
can do so. This discussion leads to the idea that perhaps Tolkien’s entire idea
is a therapeutic or polemic one—a wise lesson on the importance and uses of
history in our own lives.
While this may seem farfetched,
Tolkien indeed expresses his distaste for the “surface life” in his own personal
letters. In Letter 53 to his son, he complains, “The bigger things get the
smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one
blasted little provincial suburb” (Letters,
65). He is speaking here of what he calls “Americo-cosmopolitanism”—what sounds
like the too-often-used and thrown-about word “globalization” that now seems to
carry no meaning. But Tolkien is being far more specific, and wise, than this.
Compare these words to another letter, in which Tolkien explains why place and
history are so important to an active experience with the world. In the letter
(No.153), Tolkien responds to a critic who deemed The Lord of the Rings as merely “using the traditional properties
of the Quest” in order to allegorize subjective experiences (Letters, 239). First, he explains that
it is not the quest itself—that is, the actual physical journey, that carries
import; instead, one needs to “exercise [her] will” and arouse or satiate one’s
curiosity in order to be “[delivered] from the plantlike state of helpless
passive sufferer” (Letters, 239).
That is, it is not the movement itself, but the mental journey, brought about by exercising the will to find
something new or illuminating to “deliver” one from a passive suffering of the
world, which is the crux of Tolkien’s stories.
Tolkien here raises, and partially
answers, an important question: if “cosmopolitanism” is making everything and
everywhere the same, how can one get
from point A to point B—not merely point A again? That is, how does one have a journey and change? Obviously, in
Letter 153 he suggests it is a certain kind of mental struggle that allows one
to do so. But what does this “mental act” consist of exactly?
In “Farmer Giles of Ham,” Tolkien
presents two opposing worlds. On the one hand, there is the King and his
knights and servants, who have an excellent grasp of contemporary economics,
etiquette (see: “The knights were discussing points of precedence and
etiquette,” 168-9), and other issues that are relevant to any era in any place
among any kind of peoples. On the other, there is the world of the titular
Farmer, his dog, his fellow villagers, and other characters (like the parson)
who, while probably uncouth in the eyes of the knights, possess an entirely
different sort of knowledge: an historical one.
The most exemplary clash of these
two sorts of knowledge—one general, the other specific—is represented by
Tailbiter, the sword unwittingly given to Giles by the King for the former’s
efforts in “routing” the giant. While the King merely gave the sword to Giles
as a feudalistic gesture of royal support along with “a red letter” (which,
says the miller, makes Giles “a knight in a manner of speaking”), the parson
translates these overlooked words to find that the sword is actually an ancient
dragon-slayer (144; 146-7). While the knights are concerned about the dragon
merely so they can continue the tradition of serving dragon’s tail at the King’s
Christmas feast and have only “quite unofficial” knowledge of it (that is, as
heard by tongue, 142), the Farmer and his friends are able to utilize their
deeper, historical knowledge in order to both make sense of the situation and
solve it and, ultimately, have an actual journey
(what a psychologist might call an “experience”). When the King goes to
confront Giles on the bridge, he carries with him an army of men and (perhaps
most importantly) makes various political and legal threats to him, demanding
his crown and reputation back. But Giles has at his disposal the dragon—the
fierce, undying representation of history, which comes at Giles’ request to
spook the King, even if it does not intend to actually kill him.
Here we begin to see what Tolkien
means by a journey being an experiential issue, not one of distance. While the
King and his men make multiple trips, sending messengers all over the kingdom
and setting up pavilions far and wide, it is Giles, who largely remains in his
spot in the countryside (except for forays to defeat the dragon), who wins out
in the end. And not only that—Giles also changes
the landscape itself, adding to the history of the place he lives in (by adding
names, e.g. Thame), by his own utilization of previous history. Like Tolkien
says in his letter, “a man is both a seed and in some degree also a gardener,
for good or ill…the development of ‘character’ can be a product of conscious intention, the will to modify innate
tendencies in desired directions; in some cases the change can be great and
permanent” (Letters, 240). Giles is a
seed of his village—he has sprung out of the earth there and is a product of
its historical soil—and also a gardener, as he tilled the earth for information
and planted the seeds of new history.
If before we have seen how The Lord of the Rings partakes of an
etymological dialogue, we can now see that it also represents the “planting” of
new historical seeds—as Tolkien says, his stories are “an imaginary historical
moment on ‘Middle-earth,’” just like “Farmer Giles”. History isn’t merely the
background or plot outline of a story, but represents the very soil on which we
stand and, eventually, we add to when we die. If globalization is making the
world flat and changing formerly vastly different cities into copies of New
York and suburbanizing the countryside, we now more than ever need to dig into
that soil and find what makes us us,
even if that means ignoring (for a time) whatever the fashionable etiquette of
the day is.
--Scotty Campbell
1 comment:
Scotty,
Thanks for the post. Your points about the difference between “travel” and “journey” are well-made and suggestively contextualized in the discussion of our increasingly small world.
I’m curious whether you think that if a modern person digs in today’s “soil,” they’ll actually find a distinctive, rich nourishment or if the homogenizing processes you allude to have exhausted the environment and left us a shallower, weaker, like strain.
Also, the idea of Blut und Boden, blood and soil as existential lodestars, had a pretty horrific run in the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century. Do you think that we as twenty-first century people can recover and reclaim some good in the particularities of locality and peoplehood—like those that Tolkien dearly cherished—or that we must reject or replace the very idea, deeming it not only discredited but anathema? (One thinks of the evolution of the European Union over the past few decades as something that would have given Tolkien the howling fantods, driven as it explicitly is by a generic anti-national Enlightenment individualism.)
Bill the Heliotrope
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