Could there have been a perfect ending to Lord of the Rings? Could there have been a way to completely satiate the audience? Did Tolkien try to do this through the additive works he completed such as The Silmarillion? Is there even such a thing as a perfect ending? I find myself asking these questions after our final class.
The thing about endings is that they are rarely perfect, if the reader imagines beyond where the words stop. And I believe, generally speaking, they do imagine beyond where the words stop. I’d say the only perfect ending I have ever seen was in Andrew Sean Greer’s Less (a great read), but that is besides the point. I think Tolkien could have given readers a very clean, somewhat perfect ending if he had wanted to. If, at Mordor, Frodo was not corrupted by the ring and tossed it neatly into the vat of lava beneath him, remaining a hero in the truest sense and ended it with his glorious ride through middle-earth, being praised for his destruction of the One Ring. But that is of course not what happened; we looked inside the story and saw Frodo’s corruption. So when he gets on the ship, we do not know what necessarily happens to him. But that’s okay because endings do not have to be perfect.
However, what I was most struck by on Wednesday’s discussions of endings and readings was C.S. Lewis’ work “Meditation in a Toolshed.” He talks about looking at experiences verses looking through experiences using a beam of light. When you look at the beam, all you can see is the beam, but when you look along it you can see trees, leaves etc., whatever the beam’s light makes visible. Looking at is being on the outside and looking along is being on the inside. He talks about how this relates to experiences. I believe, alongside Terry Pratchett, stories come from the inside, so it’s important to be inside them to understand people. To understand the world, I believe people tell themselves narratives that they’ve learned through reading stories. Tolkien, I also believe was unconsciously framing Lord of the Rings around biblical stories just because the narrative is something that had been engrained in his head. Like love stories we come to see in movies today about meet-cutes with attractive women and men who play cat and mouse games until the story eventually resolves itself in a happy ending, the characters the whole time focused on the significant other. In a way, Frodo focused on the ring in the same manner, telling himself that his story is significant. I know this by looking inside the character, looking inside his motivations and desires. It's not hard to understand someone, even if it's a character, if you look along the beam.
Endings are almost never perfect because the story lives on. There are two endings according to Aristotle, where the story ends with a wedding or a funeral. Whether it's happy or it's a tragedy. But as far as human life goes, and life for all the creatures of middle earth, nothing is permanent. Tolkien's work may have ended technically with a wedding for Sam and Aragorn, making it a happy one but as life continues both happy and sad trajectories live on. "Nothing gold can stay."
[IG]
The thing about endings is that they are rarely perfect, if the reader imagines beyond where the words stop. And I believe, generally speaking, they do imagine beyond where the words stop. I’d say the only perfect ending I have ever seen was in Andrew Sean Greer’s Less (a great read), but that is besides the point. I think Tolkien could have given readers a very clean, somewhat perfect ending if he had wanted to. If, at Mordor, Frodo was not corrupted by the ring and tossed it neatly into the vat of lava beneath him, remaining a hero in the truest sense and ended it with his glorious ride through middle-earth, being praised for his destruction of the One Ring. But that is of course not what happened; we looked inside the story and saw Frodo’s corruption. So when he gets on the ship, we do not know what necessarily happens to him. But that’s okay because endings do not have to be perfect.
However, what I was most struck by on Wednesday’s discussions of endings and readings was C.S. Lewis’ work “Meditation in a Toolshed.” He talks about looking at experiences verses looking through experiences using a beam of light. When you look at the beam, all you can see is the beam, but when you look along it you can see trees, leaves etc., whatever the beam’s light makes visible. Looking at is being on the outside and looking along is being on the inside. He talks about how this relates to experiences. I believe, alongside Terry Pratchett, stories come from the inside, so it’s important to be inside them to understand people. To understand the world, I believe people tell themselves narratives that they’ve learned through reading stories. Tolkien, I also believe was unconsciously framing Lord of the Rings around biblical stories just because the narrative is something that had been engrained in his head. Like love stories we come to see in movies today about meet-cutes with attractive women and men who play cat and mouse games until the story eventually resolves itself in a happy ending, the characters the whole time focused on the significant other. In a way, Frodo focused on the ring in the same manner, telling himself that his story is significant. I know this by looking inside the character, looking inside his motivations and desires. It's not hard to understand someone, even if it's a character, if you look along the beam.
Endings are almost never perfect because the story lives on. There are two endings according to Aristotle, where the story ends with a wedding or a funeral. Whether it's happy or it's a tragedy. But as far as human life goes, and life for all the creatures of middle earth, nothing is permanent. Tolkien's work may have ended technically with a wedding for Sam and Aragorn, making it a happy one but as life continues both happy and sad trajectories live on. "Nothing gold can stay."
[IG]
2 comments:
This feels more like the sketch of a post than a fully formed argument. You make some good points about different kinds of stories, but I needed to hear more! Pratchett does not say we are inside stories—he says the stories tell themselves and we have to wrestle with them. What kinds of stories end in marriages and what kind in funerals? What do we make of LotR which ends in both? RLFB
Following up on RLFB's comment, I'm interested in your citation of Aristotle's verdict on marriages and funerals. The fact that "The Lord of the Rings" has both among its many endings might be taken, in Aristotelian terms, to make it both comedy and tragedy. We've been talking all quarter about epic, romance, and literary genre. Do you find comedy and tragedy helpful categories for Tolkien's work? My hunch might be that both are too narrow, because the Legendarium has ambitions to encompass all of life. That being the case, what kind of ending could be appropriate. You might look into what Tolkien hints about Dagor Dagorath, the climactic battle between good and evil. But, as Gandalf reminds us, "Even the very wise cannot foresee all ends." ~LJF
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