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Old 02-17-2006, 11:53 AM   #16
Ardamir the Blessed
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Alkanoonion posted:
Quote:
With the Inklings all meeting in The Eagle and Child for a regular drink and discussion, it should have been the wives looking for the men (or entwives looking for the ents)
I think that Tolkien was so often away at such meetings that his wife started to feel bad about it.

Biography:
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Even then, family life never entirely regained the equilibrium it had achieved in Leeds. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald. In terms of actual hours he was certainly in the house a great deal: much of his teaching was done there, and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was really a matter of his affections. He was very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was about his) and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the company of men of his own kind. More specifically she noticed and resented his devotion to Jack Lewis.
Of course, she did not leave him, like the Entwives left the Ents. Perhaps Tolkien took his relationship problems one step further in the Ents-Entwives relationship.



Quote:
I was going to post that this says all that needs to be said that the entwives are no more.
I know that the letters about Entwives may be interpreted as indicating fairly strongly that the Entwives are dead, but I think that it is quite an 'amateurish' approach only to rely on these letters without bothering to check for hints about Entwives in the narrative.



Quote:
Could the disappearance of the entwives be a link to what was happening to Tolkien in his life at that time?

I ask this because Tolkien was fighting in the war, and was separated from his loved ones?
Tolkien 'invented' the Entwives in the 40s, but he did not fight in WW II - therefore I am pretty certain that the Entwives do not have anything to do with that war. He did fight in WW I, but he had not come up with the Entwives at that point, only 'proto-Ents', it seems.


Formendacil posted:
Quote:
Quite frankly, I am highly skeptical that Tolkien would have written any clues into his story regarding the Entwives. He was a good deal more enamoured of leaving some things complete mysteries, such as Tom Bombadil, than he was of private in-jokes, clues, and hidden messages. When he felt the urge to explain something, or fit in a new historical explanation, he did so completely straightforwardly, albeit in his usual, alternate-versions/indecision mode of draft writing.
It seems that there are quite a few elements in Tolkien's writings of which there is not any explicit description. There are hints scattered throughout the texts that you have to piece together in order to get a better view of Tolkien's thinking, and there might be some things that Tolkien came up with but never wrote down, but they still work within and are a part of what he did write down. Actually, if everything were explicitly clear in his texts, we would not have these discussions, would we?

But I realise that some sort of a hidden joke would be different. However, the investigations of Child of the 7th Age have made me almost convinced that Teleporno at least thought that he had found something that he called a 'joke'.

He posted on MT:
Quote:
The reference of being "born of no woman" is to Julius Ceasar. The reverse, "slain by no man" (sic) is clearly his [Tolkien's] little joke.
I am thinking that the joke could be a similar "reverse joke" - I checked all the famous Shakespeare quotes, but none of them looked familiar. But the joke does not necessarily have to be a reverse Shakespeare quote, it could be of someone else too. Maybe C.S. Lewis or Charles Williams?


Some weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Teleporno regarding his discovery, but have not received any reply.

Last edited by Ardamir the Blessed; 02-17-2006 at 05:06 PM.
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