A Hobbit-esque Peek Along the Beam

“Let us celebrate the mythopoeic imagination of Albion. Let us celebrate the Makers, who made systems and were not enslaved by those of other men, but broke through to the Vision of what lies beyond Language, to the eternal symbols and the unchanging Light. […] Let us celebrate also J. R. R. Tolkien, who single-handed forged the Elvish languages and the myths of Middle-Earth and the lands beyond the Western Sea.” 

-       A.S. Byatt, “Babel Tower”

We have spent a whole quarter now debating whether or not Tolkien’s works can be considered “allegory.” Tolkien himself has given us somewhat contradictory signals in this regard: whereas he explicitly claims he “dislikes [conscious and intentional] Allegory” (Letter 131), he has included, as we’ve discussed extensively in class, undeniable allegorical references to prayer, liturgy and devotional practices in the Legendarium – like the parallels between Galadriel and Mary, and between the “lembas” and the Catholic viaticum, the coincidence of Christian holidays and major events in the plot, to name a few. Those parallels, however, are never fully developed or made explicit: they are rather more like glimpses of something larger than the ‘secondary reality’ of Middle Earth. As Tolkien says in letter 142: “Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” How then could Tolkien’s literary corpus not be allegorical but also be consciously Catholic at the same time? For much of this course, we’ve hinted at possible answers to this problem – as in the discussion on sub-creation and on the actual historicity of the Legendarium – but none more powerful than what we found in Lewis’ Meditation in a Toolshed. By introducing us to the ‘beam of light’ thought experiment and the epistemological problem of analyzing things by looking at them versus looking along them, Lewis has shown us the key distinction between simple allegory and myth. Even further, I propose, he has allowed us to understand Tolkien’s works at a “meta” level: the Legendarium, as a mythology, does not ‘reflect Christianity’ through allegory, because, even more strongly, it presupposes Christianity, which is the truth at its very core.

In the “Mediation in a Toolshed” Lewis presents the distinction between two types of experience: one when you look at a beam of light in a dark toolshed from the side and see only the specks of dust filtering through it, and another when you look along the beam and get to see the trees outside. Depending on the approach one chooses, he argues, one might catch or miss out many details – after all, there is no definite objective reference frame from which one can evaluate something devoid of biases, but at the same time facing things solely from one’s personal perspective can be misleading. He claims, however, that the "looking along things" approach has often been dismissed out of hand by academics that, too often, resorted to anthropologists and sociologists to understand religion, for instance, instead of considering the perspective of those who actually lived those religions from the inside. That is a mistake, Lewis argues, because sometimes objective, detached observations are impossible without inside experiences (i.e. a doctor cannot treat pain properly without having felt it before). Having said that, I believe that we can map Lewis’s important observation onto the differences between works that are explicitly allegorical (like his own) and those who are not, like Tolkien’s. As we've discussed in class, Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is obviously an epic retelling the Christian myths through different names and settings, written from the perspective of a devout Christian. It is, undoubtedly, an invitation for readers to know the Christian mythology through the lenses of someone who looked both along and at it, an introduction to the “one true myth.” Yet, despite his effort to write allegory, Lewis doesn’t necessarily end up making the readers look along Christianity – to the contrary, many readers will simply read Narnia as a sociologist would look at a religious account: by distancing themselves from the true Christian experience. What I propose Tolkien does in his works is the very opposite of that: by not writing explicit allegory, but by creating a mythology that echoes and reverberates the true Christian myths, Tolkien invites the readers – even skeptical atheists – to look along the Christian beam of light, which permeates the Legendarium.

To check this proposition, we must look no further than what Tolkien himself wrote about his mythmaking. He states on Letter 165 that: “it [LOTR] is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions […] it is a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology.’ The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies is simply part of the historical climate depicted […] The ‘Third Age’ is not a Christian world.” Indeed, one will not easily find unequivocal Christian elements by looking at the LOTR: there hardly is any explicit reference to Eru in almost 1000 pages, and barely any mention of religious beliefs. This monotheistic religion that Tolkien speaks of is left implicit in LOTR: it is the background setting, the story taken as given by the characters, who at several points evoke the name of Elbereth, for instance. Where do we see the “consciously Catholic” aspect of the Legendarium then? In its very construction! Tolkien says on letter 212 that the difference between the Christian myth and his own was that in the former “evil was brought in from the outside” and it wasn’t clear whether (if at all) the Fall (“the rebellion of created free-will”) had impacted the nature of the Primary world; whereas in the Legendarium, the Fall took place before the creation of Eä – so the “corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable.” That is a very consequential world-building decision because it means that the Christian struggle between good and evil, between God’s will and “created free-will” is embedded in the Legendarium, it is presupposed by it! 

Another instance in which we can see evidence of this echo of Christian myths in the Legendarium is in the ending of the long narrative arch of Frodo and Sam in LOTR. In Fellowship, before our heroes left Rivendell, Frodo tells Bilbo that he has thought of several possible grim endings to his book, to which Bilbo replies “Oh that won’t do! Books ought to have good endings.” Later, on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam discuss what kind of tale they’ve fallen into, and realizing they were still in the same tale as Beren and Lúthien, Sam wonders whether they too will be “put into songs or tales” in the future. Finally, after the quest of the Ring is ended, Sam sees his dream come true as the people in Ithilien sing high praises to him and Frodo for all that they had done – that was the culmination of the story he had long before found himself into but which he had up until then failed to understand. This joy of happy ending, “the mark of the true fairy-story,” is what Tolkien calls eucatastrophe in On Fairy Stories: it is what gives readers a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (Tolkien Reader, p. 88). That is only possible because the joyous turns in fairy-stories offer a hint at the greatest conceivable eucatastrophe, which “has entered History and the primary world”: “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Ressurection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy” (TR, p. 89). In other words, to find ourselves in Tolkien’s story – like Frodo and Sam found themselves inside the greater stories of the Legendarium – and to see ourselves experiencing their joy despite all the sacrifice they made is to be reminded (again, whether we’re believers or not) of the greatest myth of all: the story of Christ.

Thus, there is a very meaningful difference between Tolkien’s sub-created mythology and Lewis’s allegorical retelling of the Christian myth because as readers go through the Legendarium, they will inevitably experience (consciously or not) the “meta” themes presented by the Christian myth. That is, by finding themselves in the story of LOTR, readers actually look along the Christian beam of light, instead of possibly merely looking at it as in the case of Narnia. Tolkien himself points to this feature when he claims, on his comments to W. H. Auden’s review of LOTR, that “in my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil (…) Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as possible (…) the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom,’ though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honor.” Thus, when readers empathize with and identify themselves in Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and Aragorn (all of whom bore certain Christ features), who fought to oppose a tyrant who “desired to be a God-King,” they are experiencing the Christian perspective, whether they profess a Christian belief or not. Of course, as we’ve discussed in class, one is welcome to side with Sauron and thereby be for the forceful imposition of created will (maybe Nietzsche would do it), but what matters here is that readers are exposed to the Christian dilemma either way. As such, the interpretation of the myth we're presented in Tolkien's works is, I believe, free, but the reality of the Christian myths behind them is inescapable. In this sense, Tolkien’s works are far more Christian or “religious” than those who are explicit allegories of Christianity but which fail to have this effect on readers – and that is the true power of his mythmaking. We see confirmation of this notion in letter 328, where Tolkien speaks of an unbeliever who told him “you create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.” That is remarkably similar to what Byatt wrote about Tolkien in the Babel Tower, as seen in the quote that opens this post, and to what Sam and Frodo felt when they first visited Lothlorien:

“‘If there’s any magic about it, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.’

‘You see and feel it everywhere,’ said Frodo.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘you can’t see nobody working it. No fireworks like poor old Gandalf used to show.’” (LOTR, bk II, ch. 7, p. 361)

-->

-       LR

The Very Wine of Blessedness

“It is sad, as are all the tales of Middle-earth,” says Aragorn to the hobbits on Weathertop of the tale of Tinúviel. And he is certainly correct. A consistent feature of the tales told in verse throughout The Lord of the Rings is a deep melancholy, from the lament Galadriel sings in Lothlórien of her loss of distant Eldamar to Gimli’s chant of the mighty days of Durin long since passed to the ancient poem translated by Aragorn remembering sadly the greatness of Eorl the Young and the Rohirrim. The list goes on. In Middle-earth, lamentations of people, places, and times lost are fundamental to the characterization of the Free Peoples. But if this is such a strong feature of the tales, then it seems rather strange that Aragorn would tell one to the hobbits as they lie in hiding from the servants of the Dark Lord. One would assume that a tale fraught with sadness would be the last thing that they would want to hear in such a situation. But Aragorn believes otherwise, concluding his statement, “and yet it may lift up your hearts.” And it is the complexity of the apparent contradiction raised here that explains the power of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

The contradiction lies at the very heart of all the stories in the history of Middle-earth, perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the very tale of which Aragorn tells a small part. For Beren and Lúthien faced many perils and “many sorrows befell” them. And when Lúthien died, the Eldar “lost her whom they most loved” forever. And this tale is tied inextricably with the Fall of Gondolin, which tells of another union of Man and Elf. Gondolin’s fall is one of the greatest points of despair in all the history of the Eldar, as the beautiful work of the Noldor fell once more to ruin because of the pride of Turgon their king. And yet, from these stories of ruin and death arises the most beautiful triumph in all the Elder Days. For from the line of Beren and Lúthien came Elwing, and from that of Tuor and Idril came Eärendil. And when these two were wedded, the perfect union of the Children of Ilúvatar was realized. The Three Houses of Men, the Noldor, and the Sindar were all represented in the marriage of Eärendil and Elwing. And their journey to the West to plead at the feet of the Valar for the forgiveness of the Noldor and the salvation of the Children from the might of Morgoth Bauglir thus surpasses the despair of the tales before it and even the joy of the resulting march of the Valar to Middle-earth. Without the horrors and sorrows inflicted upon the Children in the tales leading up to it, the account of Eärendil’s quest and especially its success loses a great deal of its exquisite potency.

This is the beauty of Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe. At the very end of all hope, when the victory of the Darkness over the Light seems surer than ever, the transformation of despair to joy in a sudden moment of ecstasy is beyond words. And for Tolkien, this goes far beyond mere stories; there is a theologically grounded reason for humanity’s yearning for eucatastrophe. In “On Fairy-stories” he writes that “the Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history” and that His “Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.” Thus, the story of God’s begotten Son is one that “embraces all the essence of fairy-stories,” which in becoming a part of our real world has raised “the desire and aspiration of sub-creation to the fulfillment of Creation.” We as children of God are embracing a part of our divine connection to the Creator in telling our own sub-created stories of eucatastrophe.

And here we can see also why Tolkien’s stories in particular are so devastatingly attractive in their eucatastrophic elements. He says that if a story can be told that is “primarily” true in its account of history, which at the same time retains its “mythical and allegorical significance,” then that story would elicit a joy that “has the very taste of primary truth.” Tolkien of course believes that the most “pre-eminently high and joyous” version of this story is that of the Great Eucatastrophe in Christ. But he leaves the possibility open to other such stories, which would look forward or backward to the story of Christ. And while it is obviously true that the history of Middle-earth is in fact not “primarily” true, Tolkien’s devotion to the elucidation of details great and minute within his world over the course of nearly six decades resulted in a history that is so consistent and real that it passes for primary truth. Readers can experience his world so completely that when the tale of Eärendil is told, they can without doubt taste the joy that he described.

But even the great power and poignancy of the eucatastrophe of the First Age of Middle-earth falls short of Tolkien’s most resonant account of the complex of emotions that stem from the eucatastrophic tale, which comes at the end of The Lord of the Rings. In a stroke of brilliance, he presents this through the eyes of the humble Sam. Through Sam the humble hobbit of the lowest stature and station, the reader experiences every newly revealed moment of joy with the greatest possible potency. As he walks through the assembled host of the now truly Free Peoples of Middle-earth, the joys build and build, as he sees the guards bow before him, hears the praising song of the gathered men, sees Strider of Bree sitting upon the throne of Gondor. And just when the emotional weight of these moments seems unbearable, Sam’s final wish comes true, as the minstrel sings of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom. All of Sam’s hopes have been realized, and he can only weep with joy. And the passage that follows, among the best that Tolkien ever wrote, can only be given in full:

And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.

In these two sentences, Tolkien manages to encapsulate perfectly the impossible beauty of the eucatastrophe, and in this moment, all the despair that has filled the verses of the story to this point are completely justified. The lament of Frodo for Gandalf in Lothlórien, of Aragorn and Legolas for Boromir by the falls of Rauros, of the future Rohirrim for Théoden on the Pelennor, all are made part of the eucatastrophe that culminates in the minstrel’s song.

And thus, with the ending of the War of the Ring, Tolkien achieves the end of sub-creative work in which he so fervently believed.  The Christian, he writes, “may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation,” knowing that his work will ever be a piece of the Great Eucatastrophe. Tolkien’s stories have stood the test of decades, and will continue to resonate with readers for generations to come, because in them, he succeeded in fulfilling the most fundamental of human yearnings, making his works as timeless as the human condition itself.

   – Andrew Stump

A Perfect Ending to Lord of the Rings

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]

Please Be Creative!

This is a test post.

Quotations are good!

More test.

Tales as old as Time

What makes an ending. A story can be fantastical, freeing, driven, wonderful, but in the end, it comes down to “the end”. A story has to end, like everything, and thus it stays with the reader for better or worse. This begs the question: what goes into an ending? What makes an ending good or bad?

The first key consideration is author's intention. In Whistling Women, Agatha defends her ending by saying, “that is where I always meant [my story] to end” (Byatt 12). A good end must be intended. It is the accumulation of all the actions and events of the novel, the last opportunity to tie up loose threads. An ending that is not planned runs into problems because it feels purposeless. A great example of this is The Walking Dead an ongoing series written by Robert Kirkman. When discussing the origin of his story he stated, “I’ve always loved zombie movies but I hated how they ended, and so I wanted to do the zombie movie that never ends”. His strategy for coping with “the end” was to simply not plan for one. The world he created could expand, fill itself with new characters and antagonists, but there was no direction. The ideas began to recycle. Without an overarching conflict or villain, the story began to repeat itself. The story was about survival and simply that “to survive”. The main problem with ending a story whose purpose is to depict the ongoing struggle to survive is that any form of ending will only be abrupt. Without an end goal in sight, the story will either fizzle out or cut off.

A return to Tolkien’s “Fairy Stories” provides insight on the ending problem. The three vital ingredients of fairy stories are recovery, escape, and consolation. While these are all features of fairy stories, much still applies to stories in general. Readers still look to stories either as a way of recovering what once was or to escape from the misfortunes present in life. It is the third feature, consolation, that comes at the end of the story. In the moment when the characters face their “ultimate final defeat”, they become aware of a “fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (Tolkien 86). According to Tolkien, it is only with imminent defeat, the moment of eucatastrophe, that the characters within the story become aware of the true meaning of life, the appreciation of life and this world. To recognize the joy behind things one must acknowledge that there is an intended joy. Tolkien says that “we ask HOW, perceive patterns and ask WHY, and this implies reasons and motives and a MIND. Only a Mind can have purpose” (Letter 310). If one sees some “Joy” behind the world, they have to recognize there was an intended joy. The ending, the consolation of the story, puts the characters in a position where they simultaneously face their own mortality and recognize that there exists a mind much greater than their own. An intrinsic part of the end is the author’s intention to depict a greater purpose separate from the characters within the story.

It is for this very reason that a good ending must be intended. The Walking Dead cannot have a satisfactory ending because it is only about survival. It would require an answer to the question “Why survive? Why should we fight to live?”, questions that can only be answered in a moment of consolation, when the darkness is at the height of its power. As the story has no ultimate power, only a chaotic mass of the undead, there is no moment of ultimate defeat and no way of reaching the moment of eucatastrophe. An author must have a moment of consolation in mind if their characters are to become fully realized. A purposeful ending is a product of an intentional ending.

Agatha’s story has an intentional ending, yet the children deem that “there are good endings and this isn’t one” (Byatt 13). This indicates that a successful ending requires some additional criterion. The last paragraph of Agatha’s story may offer insight on what her ending lacks.

He repeated, “You are safe in this city.”

And for the first time since they set out, fear left the cave in the back of their minds, and they felt what he said was true. They were safe in his city.

(Byatt 11).

The main difference between this ending and The Lord of the Rings is the condition the main characters are left in. In Agatha’s story, Artegall and his companions make it to their destination, in a similar way to Frodo and Sam who successfully climb Mount Doom. Both characters complete their quest, yet Mount Doom was not the end of Frodo and Sam’s story. To use Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the Hero’s Journey has three main steps: Departure, Initiation, and the Return. In both tales, Artegall and Frodo depart their homes and familiarity, in the unknown, they grow and change with each trial they face. Both stories have a completed departure and initiation of our heroes, yet Artegall lacks a return. Without a return, the end leaves the attentive children without satisfaction. The return is when the hero, now fully initiated, brings back the knowledge of the unknown to the starting point. This closes the cycle and allows a new hero to depart. Indeed, when Federica is pondering on what makes a real ending she thinks about “reunions of parents and children, separated by danger. The ending of Peter Pan, when the children flew back into the nursery and the real world” (Byatt 13). Without a reunion, if the children never returned to the nursery, there would be no story to tell.

The true significance of a monomyth is that stories have an inherent form, or in other words a mindful purpose. Therefore, a good ending is an ending that is true to the story form. If this is to be believed, then stories maintain a level of autonomy separate from the author. Even if the author has an intended ending in mind, the monomyth implies that the hero must return. The journey ends not when the hero gets there, but when the hero gets back again.

The great stories always return to form. For stories to be continuously told, they must retain a coherent structure allowing new stories to arise after each one completes itself. As Byatt puts it, “The reasons for the truth of the tales is that human truths reiterate plainly” (Byatt 129). While the setting, characters, and specific trials within the story may differ, the same narrative form is present. All heroes undergo the same process of departure, initiation, and the eventual return. In Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium “The lesson we can learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside” (Byatt 129). On the surface, a story may appear to change, but the narrative is the true heart of the tale. In “From Efland to Poughkeepsie” Le Guin mentions that good fantasy differs from mediocre fantasy based on style. Even if the style changes with the author, the core elements are always present. An individual may fall in love with the style and become engrossed in the story, but everyone can tell whether an ending is a real ending. A good ending is a real ending; it is when the story is true to form. The hero returns initiated, with a new perspective on the world.

In closing, the great stories inform us of our own endings. We may not all face the great evil in the world, the dragon, the Great War, fear incarnate, but we may live vicariously through the hero. The consolation of the story is the reader’s consolation as much as the hero. All tales reiterate for a reason. Stories offer truths about the world, and it is good endings that bring those truths to light.

In the words of Dream, Neil Gaiman’s masterful character:

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot. (Gaiman issue 19).

Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Print.

Byatt, A. S. A Whistling Woman. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.

Gaiman, Neil, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Colleen Doran, and Malcolm Jones. The Sandman: Dream Country. New York: DC Comics, 2012. Print.

K., Le Guin Ursula, and Susan Wood. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York, NY: Berkley, 1985. Print.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Print.

Webster, Michael. "The Hero's Three-Part Journey." The Hero's Three-Part Journey. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 June 2017.

-->

--Eli Harter

The Ending is the Best Part

Endings are always seen as a sad thing—the story is over, someone has died, a friendship has ended, or all of the above. These are most likely sad because something is finished, and the reader does not get anymore of that thing from the actual author. The journey is over, and there is nothing you can do about it. I would argue the opposite, that endings are the best and most important part of any journey.

            Take The Lord of the Rings as an example. The ending of Sam and Frodo’s story is a fond farewell before Frodo goes off to the Undying Lands. Though they will never see each other again, they exchange meaningful words and gifts. While sad, it is the best for both of them because of the closure it brings them both.

            Another ending within the book is that of the fellowship. That story ends effectively when Frodo and Sam leave and Boromir dies. This ending is also sad because of abandonment and death, but serves an important and greater purpose. It is also necessary because of the individual jobs of each character. The end is an essential component, while sad because the fellowship stood for hope and light, is crucial due to the greater importance of the mission.

            Similar to the great many missions discussed in the book, the overall ending of The Lord of the Rings—as in the ending of typed out and published in books by J.R.R. Tolkien—serves a greater purpose as well and should not be seen as sad. For the readers, the end of the books is necessary to gain closure and explanation. Without an ending, one would not know the fate of the Shire, what Sam does after Frodo is gone, and what the great elf lords and ladies did. More than that, the ending shows the true colors of each character. Rather than following Frodo, his dear master, to the Undying Lands, Sam remains in Middle Earth to be with his wife and children as well as look after the Shire and record the his story. This reflects Sam’s true and noble character of always putting others before himself and staying true to what his duty is no matter the emotional price or pain. Anther instance of an ending revealing the true quality of the characters is in the breaking of the fellowship. Aragorn could have forced Frodo to stay with him as he fought the army of Uruk-hai. This, if successful, would have meant that Merry and Pippen would have been abandoned in favor of Frodo’s mission. It also most likely would have resulted in Gollum’s death and the death of other fellowship members. Rather than doing that, Aragorn let the fellowship break, allowing Frodo and then Sam to leave, burying Boromir, and banding together with Gimli and Legolas to find and save Merry and Pippen. Showing his true quality, Aragorn facilitates a devastating ending to create the possibility of hope. 

            In the words of Sam Gamgee during the end of The Twin Towers,  “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

            In that quote, Sam really captures the human fear and dread of endings. Sometimes, stories are scary and sad, so how could the ending be ok? However, even with the fear, one has to stick it out to the end—even if you didn’t completely understand what happened or why. Endings matter because they teach someone to not turn back, to push past the difficulties, the sadness, the strife, to work to the end to see what happens and be glad you did. People hate endings because it reminds us that the story is not really real. Endings conclude the lives and characters you loved; they finish a great story.

            However, the conclusion does not necessarily mean the story dies. As discussed in class, dedicated readers can continue by thinking about the characters’ lives after the story ends, and fill in the blank spaces themselves. This allows for a closer connection to the story, and an appreciation for an ending because where one story and one author ends, another can begin.

            These qualities: revealing the true colors behind a character, providing closure for the reader, as well as allowing a new story and author to pick up the strands make endings the best and most important part of a story. While the written words are finished, it is something that is necessary because all stories must end at some point otherwise they wouldn’t be good. Endings, like those Sam mention, are so important because those final moments and deeds are really what stick with a reader and make them think on the story after—showing how strong and important they truly are.  

            On a more personal note, lets examine the end-of-class party today. While sad that it is over and that reading and talking about The Lord of the Rings will no longer be a daily part of my life, the party did provide a lot of closure. I got to hear the results of the ring game, listen to awesome presentations by my peers, and see my professor and TA in full regalia and force. It was an event that showed the true colors of my classmates as they realized it was the end—taking happy and satisfied photographs, thanking our professor, and having light-saber duels between a hobbit and Sauron (there’s a sentence I never thought I would write). It shows that while difficult and sad, endings are best because of the closure and finality they bring, as well as the promise for a personalized future—whether that is taking pictures of yourself proudly wearing the ring Professor Fulton-Brown bestowed on to you, continuing on final projects long after they are due, or watching The Lord of the Rings with friends gained from class next year. 

KH

An Elegy for an Angel

Much has already been written about Tolkien's treatment of death.  I think we're so acclimated to the 'death-as-gift' mechanic of his world that we've forgotten just how jarring that notion is - at least, I have.  We've seen how death and the short lifespan of humans in Tolkien's world becomes the impetus for change and history.  It also becomes an impetus for art.

Not -the- impetus for art.  The Elves' songs of praise are among the first sub-creative pieces that appear in Arda.  But aside from the simple desire for power that is characteristic of Morgoth and Sauron, one of the strongest driving forces behind the major characters seems to be grief.  Loss is central to the motivations of many of the First Age's greatest. Feanor and the Exiles, Turin, Beren and Luthien; each are characterized by a single moment that fills them with lifelong grief.  Fast forward to the fall of Numenor, for which sad songs are spun for thousands of years afterward.  And nobody escapes the War of the Ring without cause for sorrow.  But death in Tolkien's world is not quite the same as death in ours.  Is there then a difference in how they mourn?

I don't believe so, though in these stories, the mourning ends up having a larger purpose.  In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien eulogizes the major characters he kills off in the words of other characters who bore witness to it.  Aragorn and Legolas end off Boromir's funeral with an impromptu song in his honor.  Why do they do this?  The text of the eulogy itself addresses the winds, asking for tidings of Boromir, and revealing each wind's answer.  It seems to be a commentary on a subject of great interest to Tolkien - the transition from history to storytelling to myth.  We are explicitly presented with the moment where Boromir's life goes from empirical reality to a poetic story.  Gimli does not sing a verse for the East wind, for doing so would allow the influence of Sauron to corrupt the memory of Boromir, and risk turning his life-story towards his own purposes.  As concerned as Tolkien was with the dangers of myth in our world, he imbued his characters with the same concern.

The account of Theoden's eulogy displays the continuation of this process.  To my untrained eye, it looks a good deal like the introduction to Beowulf, or more generally, an Anglo-Saxon poem.  But the tone of the song is historical; the listener is not driven to mourn Theoden personally, but to understand how deeply Theoden was mourned.  It is a song that does not stand by itself, but is given meaning if the listener is already instructed about Theoden's life.  It is not a eulogy - it is a part of a story.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to justify this interpretation via Lewis's toolshed metaphor.  Imagine a Middle-Earth historian, seeking to understand Theoden the historical figure.  They may be tempted to focus on primary documents - edicts that he signed, direct verifiable quotations, letters - but the eulogy and its poetic descendants, though they allow an entirely different and less empirical form of understanding, would allow them to examine the immediate and long-term cultural impact that Theoden had.  And it would allow the historian to learn how Theoden's contemporaries were driven to feel by his life and loss.

So is that the purpose of mourning - to translate a living being into a mythic figure?  To yield art from reality?  Of course not; it has the capacity to do so and serves that role for certain characters, but the eulogy for Gandalf reveals a sort of mourning that we are all more personally familiar with.  When the hobbits are in Lothlorien, constructing a song in memory of Gandalf, many of the verses don't evoke historical events, or deliver 'news' - they're expressions of the hobbits' personal memories of the wizard.  And these especially include happy and joyful memories.  Every funeral I've been to, whether for someone who lived a long, full life, or for someone whose life was tragically cut short, had at least a partial aim to celebrate the joy brought about in life by the one who had died.  Frodo sings of Gandalf's tragic death, but in his next breath, Sam sings of the simple happiness of Gandalf's fireworks.

I'm sure this isn't a groundbreaking opinion, but I absolutely adore the description at the Field of Cormallen, which reads 'their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.'  It is a feeling understood, I think, by anyone who has known intense grief.  And it captures the way in which grief and joy are two sides of the same coin.  It is evocative of eucatastrophe - but I feel like it goes beyond eucatastrophe.  It is the inherent complexity of emotion.  For how can you grieve somebody without remembering, and thus feeling, the joy they brought you?  And how can you be joyful without the memory of the sadness which the joy has driven away?  We cry at weddings as often as we cry at funerals.  And a song of praise and a eulogy require the same capacity to feel.

A cheesy old saying goes "Don't be sad because it's over - be happy because it happened."  I would like to amend this to "Embrace your grief, which came from an End - but also embrace the joy that came with it."

-AJ Corso

Stories Live On After Us

We have spent a quarter immersed in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, populated by hobbits, orcs, dwarves, elves, and wizards, and now our journey has come to an end. In class, we discussed the meaning of an end to something, and the different ways we can think of the end. Some people said there never is an end - the stories have stayed with them and become a part of who they are and the fabric of their everyday lives. Some said something has ended, but the end is an opportunity to a new beginning - a new reading and a new experience. Still others pointed out that if anything ends, it would be us. The stories are immortal, but we are not. As A.S. Byatt said in "Old Tales, New Forms": "At one point my heroine (who has an Alice-in-Wonderland English empirical stubbornness) realizes that both the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus and the Djinn are more real than she herself, in her mortal and fragile body. More people have known and have believed in the goddess than will ever believe in her....I understood that the tales had power because they were alive everywhere. A myth derives force from its endless repeatability." (132) 

This is the end of our class on hobbits and elves, but it is by no means the end of the tales themselves. They have existed long before us and will exist even when we're gone. As Byatt and Professor Fulton-Brown said in class, it is the young who often feel immortal, while the aging become more and more aware of the fact that we are mortal and in human affairs there is always an end. An end is hard to deal with even for a grown-up. In A Whistling Woman, though the adults acted slightly better than the kids at Agatha's end to the story, they still felt shocked and affronted. Frederica withdrew into her defenses when she thought her love affair was nearing an end. When Leo decries that Agatha's ending isn't a "real end," Frederica replies, "What's a real end? It is always the end that is the most unreal bit..." While stories live on in their infinite repeatability, they do end in the sense that stories do not literally go on forever. What do we do when a story has ended? 

Byatt's title "Old Tales, New Forms" is one answer. To tell and retell a story is to make it immortal. Byatt says, “The pleasure of writing was in...a sense that I was myself partaking in the continuity of the tales by retelling them in a new context in a way old and new.” (131) Stories outlive any single person. They are bigger than anyone, even the author. In contrasting modern novels and stories, the Cardinal in Blixen’s “The Cardinal’s First Tale” says, “It [the novel] is a noble art, a great earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The divine art is the story. In the beginning was the story. The human characters came on the sixth day only and the day of judgment will be the end of the story.” (133) To tell and retell a story is to make it immortal, and it is also to engage in the sub-creation of something bigger than us. Byatt said that storytelling has a lot to do with death and biologic time; perhaps storytelling allows human beings, who are mortal, to be immortal. 

As sub-creators who carry on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work in our own projects, then, we are engaging in something important. The readings assigned for our last class are themselves examples of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work being carried out after his death, and into new contexts and wider horizons. A.S. Byatt in Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman writes a story within a story. Frederica reads The Hobbit to her son Leo, and Agatha tells a story within Byatt’s story. They are stories of storytelling. Similarly, The Lord of the Rings is also a story about storytelling. Tolkien did not create his stories - he transmitted the stories of the hobbits, of the elves, of Middle Earth. His stories are bigger than us because they are not just about humans. Unlike the modern novel, it’s not about psychology, it’s not even about people. Stories have existed before the individual existed. As the Cardinal says, “‘Madame, I have been telling you a story. Stories have been told as long as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished sans water. You will see the characters of the true story clearly, as if luminous and on a higher plane, and at the same time they may not look quite human, and you may well be a little afraid of them. That is all in the order of things...” (133) Critics who criticize Tolkien for writing a fairytale, or for not developing the psyche of a character, are not looking at the stories that came before the modern novel and their importance in the world. In the Happening within Babel Tower and in our own Happening as well, we are sub-creators engaging in the creative act through which we have built our world. At the end of our journey we are reminded of the beginning, where we opened up with Tolkien’s Mythopoeia: 

Man, sub-creator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined 

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled 

with elves and goblins, though we dared to build 

gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sow the seeds of dragons, ‘twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed.

We make still by the law in which we’re made.

--J.F. 

Don't the Great Tales Never End?

Such is Sam’s query, and like the (relatively) learned hobbit he’s become, he cites the tales of Beren Erchamion and of Eärendil to support his point—the connecting thread that is the light of the Silmaril shines through all three stories, and many in between. Given the statements about sub-creation and the supposedly abandoned Pan-Anglican legendarium which we’ve encountered in this story, it is, I think, safe to say that The Lord of the Rings has no “ending,” that if Leo were satisfied by the mass departure from Middle-Earth and Sam’s homecoming (I wasn’t, at his age; I suspected a death-allegory), he would be mistakenly so. It’s open-ended, then, and in a much realer sense than are many explicitly “ambiguous” conclusions (the celebrated television dramas of our time come to mind) because there is, not only something left to be done, but everything, a whole life-age of the world’s worth of action; the phial of Galadriel goes west, but Eärendil the brightest of stars persists, presumably, and inspires the Cynewulf quote at the top of our syllabus.

 In class yesterday, I postulated that sub-creation constituted a continuation of the story, and the response that I got—that we ourselves are in some sense living in the same story, our lives parts of it—was interesting, to say the least. In what sense is it true? Well, in a religious one, first of all—a Catholic one, even, although my grandfather would shudder to hear me say it. But I won’t summarize the lecture; this post is not primarily interested in Lewis’s musings on faith, but rather in the somewhat related ideas about “endings” that Byatt has, and their relevance to a discussion of Tolkien’s ending(s).

 In “Old Tales, New Forms,” she discusses stories that consist entirely of series of endings, or series of beginnings, and chief among these is the Arabian Nights, which, for obvious reasons, strives in some sense towards endlessness. One aspect of The Lord of the Rings which I feel was overlooked in class is the multiplicity, not just of the endings that you can ascribe to the story (Arwen’s death, Aragorn’s death, Celeborn’s departure, Sam’s return home) but of the endings which the book actually presents and recounts in full. Its narrative “arc” (a misnomer if ever there was one) is bizarre—March 25^th is an end, the completed scouring is an end, Frodo’s departure is an end. It almost seems, when four in the morning is fast approaching and your eyes are starting to ache and the appendices are still thirty pages distant and you cannot stop, as if the denouement of LotR is an Arabian Nights writ small. In addition, then, to being one tale among many, the book is in some sense many tales unto itself.

The publication history which Carpenter chronicles in “A Big Risk” reinforces the idea—of course, we were all aware that the novel was published in three volumes, but the fact that people were meant to be and are still confused about the actual size of the book, that they did and do believe it to be a trilogy, proves that Tolkien’s magnum opus seems to contain multitudes. Its extraordinary fertility, greater by far than that of any other best-seller, provides similar evidence: even if we are to disregard movies, board and video games, and the like, as Christopher would no doubt have us do, that same Christopher is intimately familiar with all the work that was left to do after the typescript was submitted, and indeed after the book was published (reasonably enough, as his livelihood seems to depend on publishing at regular intervals volume after volume after volume of substantial and entirely novel Tolkieniana, while still withholding things like that Taliska grammar and lexicon which I needed for my project THANKS CHRIS).

This Byattian endlessness is interesting for its own sake, but also for the sake of what it tells us about the form of the rest of The Lord of the Rings. Byatt’s discussion of endings is framed by a discussion of the nature of tales and stories (as opposed to novels), and even the contemporary, novelistic examples she gives are in some way responding to or appropriating elements of the older narrative mode. LotR, as we’ve established and discussed in previous classes, is not exactly a novel either; I recall one lecture where Professor Fulton Brown said (or quoted someone as saying) that Tolkien wasn’t interested in any English literature from Chaucer onward, and while that’s undoubtedly an exaggeration, it’s evident from what we’ve read of his correspondence (recall the letter in which he discusses the “heroic” rhetorical register that he slips into in scenes involving the Rohirrim) that he is (to make a dramatic understatement) substantially influenced by archaic styles and ideas. We’re familiar as well with how important fairy tales (which also feature prominently in Byatt’s piece) are to the creation of the new genre in which LotR participates. Perhaps, then, the reason that LotR doesn’t have a novelistic plot structure towards the “end” is because it isn’t, in many ways, a novel—because it combines entirely original elements with the various influences we’ve discussed through out the year (epic poems, &c.) to form a part of what Tolkien might have thought of as a story, a chapter in an infinite whole that includes the Quenta Silmarillion and much else besides.

--Charlie Bullock