The
readings for Wednesday were some of the most challenging yet to parse,
incorporating a fair number of abstract concepts that Tolkien describes in
enough detail to make interesting, but not enough detail to make explicit. In
lecture we discussed the concept of time travel as developed by Dunne, which
consisted of an expansion of one’s consciousness until all of time - past,
present, and future was visible at once. Dunne viewed time-travel as achievable
in dreams when one’s consciousness is more able to relax its holds on the
present reality and expand, but also proposed that with enough practice one
could effectively project one’s mind into the past while remaining awake.
Tolkien’s
personal method of time travel, whether he believed in Dunne’s work or not, I
think, relied almost entirely on his philological background. As a philologist,
Tolkien was in the business of reconstructing etymologies for words, which in
class we described as seeking to place the development of the word into its
historical context and construct a narrative that could lie behind the origins
of the word. One cannot truly know exactly where the word’s origins lie, but
tracing its roots relies on, in a sense, looking at “fragments” of the greater
progression, individual words that may be predecessors of the modern one. Give
that many of these fragments, these older words have long since fallen into
disuse, it is often difficult if not outright impossible to discover their
exact relation to each other or recapitulate exactly what they might have meant
in the time they were still used. The best that one can do is to be faithful to
the historical context of the word and create a narrative of sorts about the
origins of the fragment and trace its development to modernity, all the while
trying to see the world through the eyes of those who may have been in the time
and place where the ancient word fragment was still used.
That
process of placing oneself into the position of one who would have used the
ancient word in context is, in a sense, time travel. It is not quite a literal
visit to the past, as it takes place primarily in the imagination, so it is not
quite a recapitulation of history
exactly as it was. It is, in effect, a narrative or story that one constructs about the past – but not just any story.
The proper method of etymological work has the quality of being faithful to
historical context, of the historical narrative being internally consistent,
the latter of which Tolkien stated in On
Fairy-Stories to be essential to properly written fantasy. What then of
historical faithfulness or authenticity? Tolkien also states in his writings
that he is not just seeking to create any fantasy story – he is seeking to add
to the mythology of England itself.
Mythology is in some ways
a narrative about the past, one that may seem superstitious or fantastical, but
nevertheless at the time of its creation spoke to some degree about the
character of the culture that created it. Over time, it is modified and retold
in new ways, gradually becoming quite distinct from its origins but nevertheless
still hiding within its progressive iterations influence from and information
about each successive generation that has contributed to its formation. These
myths thus form a mythic history, stories about a nation’s past that, while
perhaps not literally true or historically accurate, may speak to a nation’s
past culture in ways that recorded history cannot.
This process of
myth-creation is in many ways similar to the process of words being modified
over time to modernity, and it is no accident that Tolkien relates his work
both to adding to England’s mythology and his philological work. As mentioned
previously, Tolkien seeks in his etymological work to construct a believable
narrative about the word or words he is investigating. This narrative must be
internally cohesive, to some degree, much like he describes the genre of
fantasy-writing. And the process of being faithful to the historical context of
the words, the process of time-travel, if you will, through the projection of
one’s mind into the people of the past, is much the same as one would do to
analyze and recapitulate mythology. The work of etymology cannot hope to
perfectly recreate the past – what it constructs is essentially a mythological
past. It has the feeling of history because the process of its creation seeks
to be as historically authentic as possible, but ultimately it is still
nevertheless the spirit of the past that it captures and not necessarily the
exact fact of the past. This then ties perfectly to Tolkien’s process of
crafting his tales of Middle Earth.
Alboin from The Lost Road receives visions and
impressions of words from what is suggested to be if not the actual past, at
least a mythic past that is somehow linked to the present time. It is suggested
that somehow these words and phrases from the past are what allow him, ultimately,
to enter the mythic past itself and literally stand in the shoes of those who
came before, given that the later chapters set in Numenor do not mention Alboin
as an outside observer but instead seem to simply be from the perspective of
Elendil and Herendil. The words and phrases themselves, then, carry a sort of
magic, or enchantment if you will that allows Alboin to effectively travel back
in time. The overlap between this process of time travel through words from the
past is too similar to the construction of an etymological narrative to be a
coincidence, and given the overlap between Alboin’s biographical details and
Tolkien’s own it seems reasonable to suggest that Tolkien is here describing
his own process of traveling to a mythic past and reconstructing it in his
works.
What then of the dreams
from which Alboin receives these all-important words? Tolkien, in various
accounts of his creative process such as his 1955 letter to Auden, speaks of processes
going on in the unconscious that lead to his discovering “what really happened”
in the stories before he can put pen to paper. While he does not explicitly
reference Dunne’s theories about time travel in such accounts, I think the
unconsciousness he references must be related to the expanded consciousness in
Dunne’s theory. Like the dreams that Alboin enters, Tolkien’s unconscious is at
work both in sleep and sometimes even in the waking world, and somehow is able
to tap into fragments of a mythic past to produce a cohesive narrative. In
Tolkien’s case, he may be unconsciously performing the etymological task of
narrative reconstruction he was so familiar with, only this time using
fragments such as “eald enta geweorc” from the Anglo-Saxon poem to piece
together his conception of England, or even the modern world’s mythical past. His
unconscious is better able to tap into this mythical past in the same way that
it is easier for Dunne and Alboin to time travel when dreaming, and it is the
authenticity of Tolkien’s unconsciously-produced narrative that can leave us
wondering if we may not lie in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth.
-Lawrence Wang
1 comment:
“Enough detail to make interesting, but not enough detail to make explicit.” Yes, this is exactly how I feel about many of our readings—but how dull, otherwise! You give us here a very fine summary of Dunne's work, and of philology-as-time-travel for Tolkien. I particularly liked where you note how the fairy tales and etymologies are similar, in that both require an internally consistent historical narrative.
I think this is a rather fine phrasing: “Over time, it is modified and retold in new ways, gradually becoming quite distinct from its origins but nevertheless still hiding within its progressive iterations influence from and information about each successive generation that has contributed to its formation.” You are here referring to myth, but this resonated very strongly with me as fundamental to the practice of history as a discipline! We are forced to recognize how unlikely it is that we will ever know exactly “what happened”—all we have is fragments, like “hey diddle diddle”! I am convinced that this is in Tolkien's mind as well as he thinks through the relationships between myth, history, and language—and you describe this very well in your conclusion about Tolkien's dream-state as a way to combine narrative fragments in a way that feels “authentic” because they invoke, in your words, “spirit of the past that it captures.”
--Jenna
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