Quote:
The Lord of the Rings is not so much a novel of character as it is an evocation - almost musical, an opera or a symphony - of a mood & a time of life. The time of life is early adolescence, & the mood is sehnsucht, fernweh, nostalgia, Sweet Desire. the experience of reading the book is the experience of those spring days when one is thirteen or fourteen, when the wind seems to be blowing from somewhere beyond the end of the world, when life seems almost unbearably full of possibilities of romance & adventure, & yet also of a sense of loss: the sense that one;s conscious personality is taking shape & acting as a filter to the immediacy of experience - life is actually, & inevitably, growing more ordinary. Yet in this pre-sex stage one's inner world still seems limitless...
There is no going back. Accordingly, the magical world of the Lord of the Rings is one person's inner world, with no real, clashing, messy relationships between different selves; &, when couples wed at the end of teh story, this world ends too: childhood & its magic have to pass into memory...
It is no longer good for people to live in the bosom of nature or within mythical systems, or even pretend to. But it is good for them to remember how it may have felt, & that is one service that Tolkien provides....
What if there's a whole bright, elvish world out there, where pleasure & wonder come with no price attatched? And this is the point of The Lord of the Rings: an invitation to experience joy, the 'koy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief'....Yes, joy is 'infantile', & no, you can't feel it & look clever at the same time. Joy is not The Lord of the Rings 'answer to evil, nor does it make up for suffering - if defenders of Tolkien claim this, they play right into the detractor's hands. But it stands alongside them, undiminished by them, as a fact in this world.
Tolkien haters refuse joy for fear of being decieved. Their predicament was precisely rendered by that smarter-than-they-think writer CS Lewis: they are the dwarfs who Refused to be Taken in. Sitting in a huddle in their imaginary dark prison while the sun shines & the green grass grows all around.
Caroline Galwey,'Reasons for not liking Tolkien', Mallorn 42
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So, is LotR a novel about childhood? And if it is, is that really a bad thing. Of course, we grow up, & have to put aside childish things, & terrible things happen to us when wew have grown up - or in the process of growing up, yet I wonder whether that's what draws us back, & whether Galwey isn't right. Why do we go back to LotR? To experience the traumas of growing up, & the inevitable suffering that results, or to experience again the wonder of being a child. Aren't we invalidating childhood if we focus on how terrible are the possibilities of being grown up?
I wonder whether what really draws us back is not the 'facts' of the story, the suffering, the pain, the inevitability of loss, but rather the 'possibilities' - the wonder, the mystery, the awe, the possibility of the happy ending. When we read & re-read LotR, & especially The Hobbit, we want the possible to be made real - to believe ' there's a whole bright, elvish world out there, where pleasure & wonder come with no price attatched'.
Of course, Tolkien seems reluctant (incapable?) of ever quite giving us that - but is that why we love his works so much? Isn't it what he offers us that draws us - in spite of the fact that in the end he takes it away, & tells us we must now grow up & leave it behind, do without it, that its all gone, none left now. At almost every moment in the story there's a glimpse of what we really wish for, always just out of reach, but at the same time, even though its never quite possible to take it in our hands, we can't shake the feeling that that's what our hands were shaped to hold, so we keep reaching out for it.
So, I think maybe
LittlemanPoet is right, & the hobbits are 'children', & the child in us, who has never really gone away, identifies with them, with their hopes & dreams & desires.
Oh, to be 'only quite a little fellow in a wide world' again!