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
No comments:
Post a Comment