Tolkien's Foundations through Philology & Perspective

I find it most interesting to examine Tolkien's creative process through the lens of him as a linguist who happens to be a good writer, rather than the reverse. In most other fantasy, there may be some varying level of capability applied in the creation of languages, but it is for the most part applied after the worldbuilding and even writing process, translating songs or texts originally written in the author's native language into the target artificial language. Tolkien's process of creating a legendarium that is not only translated into english, but one built on being translated from several unrelated texts in different languages (Those of the Elves, Westron of the Men, various Dwarvish tongues, and all their various dialects). The main narrative of Lord of the Rings for example is held within the Red Book of Westmarch and was handed down from Bilbo, to Frodo, to Sam, and then through many unnamed hands and survived into the modern day to be translated from Westron into English. It is important therefore to emphasize that Lord of the Rings is meant to be read as a historical account that is as limited in scope and scale as its authors own perception. This was immediately clear when returning to the map in the beginning of the book: Besides vague place names and the occasional mention of specific cities, the maps omit the vast majority of any detail that is not directly interacted with by the characters that contribute to the Red Book. This is of course a generalization, and Lord of the Rings does include in it's appendices various elements from outside of the Hobbit's direct experience, but for the most part things that they did not see are omitted from the story. We can assume to some extent that the additional material from Frodo, Sam, and possibly(?) later authors may have added these, and that the accounts of non-hobbit characters in the fellowship was likely still penned by the Hobbits after oral recount of their experiences. 

But why the trouble? What does it matter to the casual reader that Lord of the Rings was supposedly not a novel but supposedly a translation of an 'original' text? What does it change to those that simply skip the introduction and never even know? It matters because it determined every subsequent creative decision that Tolkien made in his process. On the road to creating an artificial mythology to replace what was stripped by the Norman conquest, Tolkien had to first build the linguistic substrate from which the mythology could emerge organically, as opposed to a post hoc translation. The languages Tolkien created preceded legend, grows to explain the language in retrospect, the opposite of what many other fantasy authors do. This is most visible in the philology of the Elvish languages. Quenya and Sindarin where not exclusively developed for the purposes of Lord of the Rings. They where projects that he had began years before writing - systems developed for their own sake, and the mythology grew around the questions they raised. Why do these languages exist? Who spoke them? What happened to the speakers? Tolkien's subsequent works are in some regards (as reference in Letter 131) an attempt to create a world for these languages rather than the reverse. This is absolutely not a minor distinction in method either, it means that the internal structure of mythology is is linguistic rather than narrative. It turns the way I read 'plot holes' and such into philological, instead of writing problems.

The Lost Road makes this process legible because it is intentionally incomplete, whereas Lord of the Rings is specifically a finished, translated, and edited text presented to an audience. HME 5's text is layered, a narrative from many voices across different timeframes, without ultimate resolution. The project ultimately collapsed because the legendarium was not yet stable enough to support the transmission structure Tolkien was building on top of... What survives is the scaffolding that HME 5 leaves behind. Tolkien works out how myth travels across centuries, degrades, transforms, etc, and how a modern receiver would interpret it. This is the same problem that Tolkien had during the creative process for framing Lord of the Rings that was saved by the Red Book of Westmarch concept, except that the Red Book was mostly one narrative as opposed to a collection of stories, making the final narrative much more coherent and consistent. This is why Lord of the Rings has the atmosphere of of a historical document, even though those that skip the pretext may be ignorant of the fact that it is intentionally written to be one.

This is most directly visible in the Lord of the Rings prologue, were Tolkien lays out the chain of transmission for the Red Book, including it's various alterations and losses over time. As already discussed, the casual reader will likely skip this section (as I did in my haste to re-read the book over spring break), but it's presence is important for setting the lens through which the book must be read. The fact that the original Red Book is entirely written from the perspective of Hobbits, and as such is limited to their perspective or those they encountered, is crucial to the way in which we perceieve Middle Earth. This was discussed earlier in regards to the map, but in the actual text becomes even more clear. For example what comes to mind are scenes were Sam writes about his own uncertainty and fear of the future during the tenure of their journey, but only writes so after the conclusion of their greater journey, with the benefit of hindsight. Simply put, the account is not omniscient because the Red Book never was. Shippey in his own writing identifies this as one of Tolkien's central achievements in Lord of the Rings: The creation of thematic and linguistic depth through omission. 

"I wonder if you will ever read this ??"
-JRR Tolkien
I aim to include this in a future email someday

-LR

Elf-Friends of All Kinds

  One of the defining characteristics of Tolkien’s Fairy Stories is that they must maintain an “inner consistency of reality”, that is, not rely on a suspension of disbelief in the reader. A natural question that thereby poses itself is: how does one achieve that sense of reality within a story? Perhaps the first answer ought to be language, or, more specifically, adjectives, which others in this blog have discussed more deeply than I will do here. My main concern lies with another mechanism that Tolkien uses consistently throughout his stories, which is that of the “Elf-Friend.”

    In her essay “The Footsteps of Ælfwine”, Flieger presents the Elf-friend as, “the link, the connector or mediator between the ‘real’ or natural world and the world of Faërie–the supernatural world of myth and the imagination.” The importance of this figure, as we will see, is that elf friends  serve as a vessel through which the reader is able to navigate the world of Faërie without experiencing it as wholly foreign. In many cases the elf-friend will take on the role of storyteller, through which descriptions of the realm of Faërie are told and retold for the benefit of the reader. As we discussed in class and as Flieger notes, “the tale exists only in its telling.” What interests me, however, is the range of elf-friends that we encounter throughout Tolkien’s works. 

The first and perhaps salient example we shall treat is Aelfwine, whose name translates exactly to “elf-friend”. He was a bard of some renown, which already reinforces the idea of the elf-friend both experiencing the unknown and relaying such experiences to us. Moreover, he is stated to have traveled “the straight road” of the Elves and returned to tell the tale; he is the bridge between the reader and Faërie, without which we would be unable to properly understand or receive tell of such a world. 

Another major example is present in two of Tolkien’s major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both are largely concerned with, well, hobbits, as Tolkien describes in his not-so-brief sketch of his works to Milton Waldman: “...the tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale (LotR) blends them” (Letters, p. 204). It’s important to note that while The Lord of the Rings does have a larger narrative focus than The Hobbit, the story is told from the point of view of hobbits whenever possible. This is in large part because hobbits are the characters we are likely to feel closest to, being largely unfamiliar and unacquainted with the wide, complex world of Middle-Earth. It’s also an important reason why these works are more approachable to many than that of The Silmarillion, which is concerned primarily with elves, and thus feels more remote and ancient (though not necessarily a bad thing). It should be noted that hobbits also play a fundamental role in how the narrative is told, in that the story is canonically written by Bilbo and Frodo, which eventually becomes The Red Book of Westmarch. However, I will not go further into detail on this idea here, as we have other things to discuss.

These first two examples of elf-friends have been more typical, or middle of the road. The next few we will see will either drift too far into the world of Faërie, or stray too far away from it. The former is represented largely through The Silmarillion, whose elvish accounts allow us to step back in time and glimpse many of the stories that were mere legends and myths referenced within The Lord of the Rings. However, in doing so, they lose some of the familiarity that we grew used to in Middle-Earth. Arda and the Valar are far above what we could ever experience as mortals, and there is no character who serves as the bridge between reader and story that we are able to relate to (although it does progressively become more concerned with Men as it approaches the Third Age). 

To go in the other direction is to lose some of our connection with Faërie and elves. The first step this way is through Smith in “Smith of Wotten-Major”, who gains temporary access to the world of Faërie. The fay star on his forehead acts as his passport throughout his adventures, which seem more remote and foreign in a different way than those in The Silmarillion. Those tales, while distant, were so because of the person through which we received them. We are not elves, and are thus removed from their experiences. Smith, however, is human, and we feel a closer kinship with him. The foreign nature of his adventures stems from the lack of description that we receive on the land of Faërie. Whether it be elven mariners returning from the Dark Marches, the birch that saved him from “wild Wind”, or the elf-maiden that he danced with, we receive no further elaboration aside from that which describes his experiences alone. All we can glean is that Faërie is a land both mysterious and perilous, and one in which Smith is consciously and painfully a stranger. Importantly, Smith fails to recount his experiences properly, either because he cannot remember them or he is unable to put them into words. In any case, this is not his main objective, and he remains a traveler in those lands until he returns the fay-star at the request of Alf-prentice, the King of Elves. 

The final example I will use, and to me the most poignant, is that of the narrator in “Sea-Bell”. This is by far the furthest removed we have seen any kind of elf-friend, if we can name him as such. The call to Faërie is similar to Smith in that they both receive an object which serves as a bridge to the other world (in this case, a shell). In Sea-Bell, however, the narrator catches only glimpses of the elvish inhabitants, who seem to be avoiding him. All he witnesses are fleeting echoes of their presence in this land: 

“I heard dancing there, music in the air,

feet going quick on the green floors.

But wherever I came it was ever the same:

the feet fled, and all was still;

never a greeting, only the fleeting

pipes, voices, horns on the hill.”

Unlike Smith, who, while clearly a stranger in Faërie, this speaker is bereft of any connection. The land he inhabits, like Smith, is foreign and perilous, but further, it is more actively malevolent towards him. This is provoked primarily once the speaker declares himself as king of the land (as he has seen no challengers to this claim), after which a dark cloud arises and chases him into hiding. While the speaker eventually returns to his home, the price he pays is severe; he is old, beaten, and bent, and no one has ears to listen to his strange tales:

“To myself I talk;

For still they speak not, men that meet.”

Smith is able to end his adventures to Faërie with some modicum of autonomy, even if it is bittersweet. Moreover, he is able to return home in peace, that is, in good standing with the elvish kingdom. While he does have to give up the key to entry to Faërie, he is given some choice in the matter. In "Sea-Bell", the narrator has no such choice; he is forced from Faërie, never to return again, and finds his key into Faërie “silent and dead”. 

I would wager to say that, along with some other allegorical implications that Flieger and Shippey propose (i.e. Smith represents Tolkien, Nokes as the critic lacking imagination), “Sea-Bell” provides the most severe condemnation of those who venture into Faërie in arrogance and ignorance. In opposition to Smith, who attempts to treat Faërie with respect and displays some sense about where he is to go and the powers above him, this narrator rushes with no knowledge of the land he wanders through and little respect for its inhabitants. He abuses the rare chance at entrance into Faërie and is driven out and suffers heavily because of it. This narrator embodies the literary critic who approaches fairy stories with disdain, and leaves with the misconstrued idea that there is nothing of substance there. I’m sure they perceived nothing of substance, or thought they did; but that is because they ventured into Faërie without the willingness or Sight to perceive and experience another world. Faërie rejected the critics just as much as the critics rejected Faërie from the realm of significance. 

The larger concern I hold, though, is not a criticism of critics, but to rue their relationship, or lack thereof, with Faërie. Like the narrator of “Sea-Bell”, they are at most able to catch memories of wonder or enchantment, not directly participate in them. Instead of experiencing the joy of eucatastrophe, they are left haunted and troubled by the feeling that a Mystery has passed them by, not to return again. 

- GTB