[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

I suppose in a way I'm 'arguing' in order to keep the debate going - I think this chapter thread alreay has over three times the number of posts the previous one got.

I don't want to imply that your approach is 'wrong' in any objective sense. I can see 'external' references which were probably put in deliberately by Tolkien - the line 'His weariness was growing but his will hardened all the more.' does seem to echo the famous lines from the Battle of Maldon:"Heart shall be harder, strength the keener, spirit shall be the stronger, as our might lessens." I suspect Tolkien was deliberately referencing this verse, & would have expected any reader who knew the Anglo-Saxon poem to pick up on this. If he was aware of the Lilith legend maybe that was also in his mind, but I see little connection between Lilith & Shelob in their backstories, only a vague similarity in the way they are described. If you make that connection that says more about you than about anything Tolkien was doing, consciously or unconsciously. As we see with some of the 19th century mythographers, virtually any myth can be reduced to a 'solar' myth (I'm again influenced by something Flieger has referenced in her latest book!). I think we have to distingiush between what was in the author's mind (whether he or she was aware of it or not) & what is in our minds as we read. We may bring things to the our reading of the text - its probably inevitable that we do - but we have to keep those things seperate from what the author put in there. Yet

Quote:
Myth & fairy story must, as all art, reflect & contain in solution elements of moral & religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.


If the Lilith legend is an example of 'moral & religious truth (or error)' - ie if it has some 'archetypal' dimension or aspect then that may well have seeped in to the story Tolkien was writing without him realising it - or it may have been placed in there deliberately, as part of the 'consciously so in the revision' process. But either way it is not there 'in the known form of the primary 'real' world'. Shelob is not Lilith transported lock, stock & barrel to Middle earth, neither is Sam one of Beortnoth's retainers deliberately placed into that secondary world. What I mean is, if we take the approach Shelob=Lilith then we'll be neither in Middle earth, in the ancient Middle east, nor in our own 'primary' world, & our whole experience will crumble away before our eyes. Once we cloe the book & come back to our own world we can analyse & deconstruct to our hearts content, but while we're in Middle earth we have to let the story work on us, climb the Tower & look out on the sea. Within Middle earth at least Shelob is 'an evil thing in spider form', not a Middle eastern demon. In discussing The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe Flieger makes the point that when Aslan sacrifices himself in place of Edmund the story 'no longer has its own life but has been put in the service of another story.' I think this doesn't only happen when a writer deliberately writes allegory, but also when we bring too much of our own ideas & experiences to the stories we read - we put the story to to the service of 'another story' - our own.

Your turn....

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

But this is not to say that what we read into the text is necessarily correct.

To take the current chapter as an example, I do not read Shelob as Lilith, rather I see her as an immense creature with all the nastier traits of female spiders magnified. To me, she is the ultimate in scary spiders. Relating her to non-arachnid comparisons, my own equivalent to what we see in Shelob would be the black hole, reducing matter to nothing (as Shelob does when she eats), indiscriminate in that she swallows anything just as a black hole does. Ungoliant, her mother, even swallows Light just as a black hole does.

The other example which I read differently is the passage about Sam challenging Shelob:

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Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master's sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate.


Rather than suggest to me anything about Sam's feelings for Frodo, this instead seems to me to be a metaphor for Sam's courage.

. . . .
I suppose it would be impossible to always know exactly what Tolkien's intentions were, so we cannot expect to be reading the 'right' thing into the text all of the time.

From the other point of view, I can also see that it is not always good to delve too deeply; sometimes simple pleasure is what we ought to get from reading, to be carried along with the fantasy. I suppose that this is the danger with such in depth analysis as we have here, it is all too easy to spoil the pleasure of reading by extracting every last drop of meaning. I know for myself that to study literature brought me dangerously close to disliking reading altogether; it took me some years to shake off the theorising (funnily enough it was very much the fashion to look at texts from a Freudian perspective at the time, which is possibly why I dislike Freudian analysis of literature), and thankfully return to the simple pleasure of reading. Now I have a happy balance of being able to read for fun, and analyse when it suits me, and more importantly, find what meaning lies beneath a text for myself, and decide for myself if it is relevant. That's enjoyable, and why I like these discussions on the Downs - nobody is telling us we are wrong.

Hmm. Let me point out that I have not made any kind of bald "Shelob=Lilith" equation such as both davem and Lalwendë assert. I praise Tolkien for not writing the kind of allegorical equations such as Lewis did in the Narnia series. I have simply suggested a conceptual framework in which to consider the character of Shelob. Nor did I say anything about Sam's feelings for Frodo when I quoted the "fallen mate" passage. I was discussing collocation of words.

I have yet to see any argument which convinces me that we must "stay in Middle-earth" as we read or risk destroying the truth. Where does one determine when reading/interpretation takes place--in the moment of reading or when one closes the book? It is, I posit, logically impossible to postulate such a split. Interpretation of meaning is an always ongoing process, not start and stop, for we are always reading ahead, to imagine where this leads, how the characters inter-relate.

But as for what an author can 'put in' or not, let me give a long quotation, as I know davem loves long quotations. It is about Shakespeare, so I suppose I am having a little bit of fun about Tolkien's opinion of the Bard. Because the idea belongs to George Steiner, I am going to use his words. And because this isn't Freudian, perhaps Lalwendë will forgive me for delving too deeply. Like Aiwendil, I do not believe that good art can be destroyed by too much thought.

First, let me quote the passage which Steiner discusses. It is Postumous's rant about the perfidious nature of women when he thinks that Imogen has betrayed him with Iachimo. Act II of Cymbeline.

Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd,
And pray'd me ofte forbearance: did it with
A pudency so rosy the sweet view on't
Might well have warm'd old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn'd snow. Oh, all the devils!
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour, was't not?
Or less; at first? Perchance he spoke not, but
Like a full-acorn'd boar, a German one,
Cried 'O!' and mounted; found no opposition
But what he look'd for should oppose and she
Should from encounter guard. Could I find out
That woman's part in me--for there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it,
The woman's: flattering, hers; deceiving, hers:
Lust, and rank thoughts, hers: revenge, hers:
Ambitious, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longings, slanders, mutability;
All faults that name, nay that hell knows, why hers
In part, or all: but rather all. For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still;

Steiner's close reading (part of his argument that all language interpretation is essentially translation, even in the same language) begins by considering what the meanings of some of these words might have been in 1611. It the phrase 'yellow Iachimo' which is the most interesting. Here's what Steiner has to say:

Yellow Iachimo is arresting. The aura of nastiness is distinct. But what is being inferred? Though 'green' is the more usual appurtenance of jealousy, Middleton in 1602 uses yellow to mean 'affected with jealousy.' Shakespeare does likewise in The Winter's Tale, a play contemporary with Cymbeline, and in The Merry Wifes of Windsor (I.iii) 'yellowness' stands for 'jealousy' (could there be a false etymology somewhere in the background, associating the two words?) Iachomo is jealous, of Posthumus's nobility, of Posthumus's good fortune in enjoying the love and fidelity of Imogen. But does Posthumus know this, or does the dramatic strength of the epithet lie precisely in the fact that it exceeds Posthumus's conscious insight? Much later, and with American overtones, yellow will come to express both cowardice and mendacity--the 'yellow' press. Thought these two nuances are beautifully apposite to Iachimo, neither was, so far as we can tell, available to Shakespeare. What latent undertones in the word and colour give rise to subsequent, negative usage? Shakespeare at times seems to 'hear' inside a word or phrase the history of its future echoes.

I would suggest that Tolkien, as much a genius as Shakespeare in his own way, was able to hear inside mythology its latent echoes. It is like a tree falling in the forest. Who is there to catch that echo? No, no, not a personal imposition of "our own stories."