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How do you fit The Lord of the Rings into the above idea?
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts before I post mine.
Also, the epic did precede the novel, and the novel's conception was due partly to the fact that society was beginning to evolve in a different direction. Um, in case you didn't realize that...Who am I kidding? Of course you do. But perhaps the history of both should be taken into account when addressing the LotR?
Also, is a novel necessarily a fairy-tale and a fairy-tale necessarily a novel? And are you sure about the fact that in our modern world we tend to celebrate the epic hero more? I would agree with that if we were talking about the realm of cinema, but literature? I am not entirely sure.
Also, are you positive that Odysseus is a fairy-tale hero?
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Gracious! That’s a lot of questions – and all of them really really good questions too…hmm – I shall attempt inasmuch as possible to give them the attention they deserve!
I fit
LotR into the idea of different heroes/different narratives in the sense that there are, very broadly speaking, two stories going on at once in the book, and that each is centered on a different hero: there’s the circular story of Frodo going about his fairy-tale transformation from Nobody to Somebody (Bag Eng – Mordor – Bag Eng); and the linear story of Aragorn coming into his own by becoming the Somebody he was always meant to be (Bree – Minas Tirith). To this extent, it makes perfect sense that the Fellowship is broken at the end of Book Two: for a time, the paths of the fairy-tale Frodo and the epic Aragorn lay parallel, but only for a time. The remarkable thing about the book, though, is the fact that the fairy-tale hero is given precedence in a very real way over the epic hero. This does not happen often. This is why I would agree that the history of the epic, the fairy-tale and the novel should all be very much part of our approach to
LotR.
Next, I don’t think that the fairy-tale narrative is synonymous with the novel, but I would argue that there is congruence between the two, inasmuch as contemporary novels are almost uniformly concerned with the “growth” or “development” or “triumph” or whatever of the “ordinary person” (generalizations, generalizations, generalizations! Bear with me). I think that the split you point to between ‘good novels’ and ‘popular culture’ is also relevant – in movies and pulp fiction the relatively flat epic hero is always more celebrated than the limited fairy-tale hero. Unfortunately, the moral fiber of the epic hero, the sense of moral (divine) purpose is all too often left out and all we have left is the militaristic shell of violence and physical ability.
And finally (whew) I take it back about Odysseus as a fairy-tale hero. He’s very much a reluctant hero (like Sam), though, bringing the heroic types to three. Actually, I would peg the heroic types of the book at four with Gollum coming in as the Modern hero (or the anti-hero). Interestingly, for each type of hero I’ve identified there is a different narrative pattern isn’t there… Frodo and Sam on a circular journey (Ring) with Frodo arriving back changed and Sam not; Aragorn and Gollum on a linear journey (Road) with Aragorn finding success and fulfillment…I was going to say that Gollum does not, but he
does succeed and have a ‘happy’ ending doesn’t he! Just as Aragorn gets his precious Arwen, so too does Gollum get his Precious and die happily – not just happily for him, but for the whole of Middle-Earth.
Hmm…I sense a whole new thread topic coming on…