[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Very interesting thread Child.

I think that perhaps Tolkien is doing something far more radical than we have yet recognized here. So far, the discussion seems to be proceeding in and from the assumption of Tolkien’s characters as individuals. That is, they are individual characters who may not be presented in a psychological manner, but they are still individuals. I’m not so sure that this is the most effective way to regard them, particularly given how much of their characterization they owe to works like Beowulf.

Quite simply, the whole concept of the individual is a very recent invention. The idea that the “real me” is some kind of floating consciousness or conscience “inside” my mind is an alien thought to worlds like the ones from which Tolkien drew most of his inspiration. The idea that one’s “true” or “real” identity is internal and not external was anathema to the world view of the Anglo-Saxons.

To this point we’ve been characterizing the debate in terms of modern “psychological” models of self in opposition to more ancient “moral” models. I think a more accurate way to put this, however, would be that ‘these days’ our stories (and our lives) tend to focus on how we are in conflict with ourselves: that the real battles we fight are with the inner-self, and that that’s where change is important. I cite the flood of self help books and television shows that try to help us be better people by altering our perceptions of ourselves, of boosting our self-confidence, of getting ‘in touch’ with our own feelings or ‘inner child’ or whatever. These all spring from the idea that we are individuals, that we are being primarily defined by out own unique sense of who we are: that our identity is built around and dependent upon the “I”.

Interesting to put that next to the context of the characters in Middle-earth. The characters who think in terms of self-determination, or even self-improvement, are people like Saruman, Boromir and – most disturbingly – Sauron (with his obsession over the Eye/I). These are the real individuals in the text, in the modern sense, insofar as their identity is defined by what they want, what they desire, what they think of themselves, what they want others to think of themselves. The heroes of the book are just not individuals in the sense we think of individuality. They are not defined by their inner core, by what they are but by what they do.

Back to Beowulf. Beowulf was not an individual who struggled with and overcame his own inner doubts and demons to become a better person. He fought three monsters and defeated them. He is thus, by contemporary standards, a very two-dimensional character insofar as there is no sense of individuality to him. He is a hero like all the heroes before him, and a pattern for all the heroes to come. I find very much the same circumstance and view in LotR. I simply do not try to understand the characters as individuals, but as parts of a larger fabric. Frodo, on his own, makes no sense and is, to be blunt, quite boring – until he is placed alongside his foils/parallel characters: Sam, Aragorn, Gollum and Sauron. It’s the same for all the characters.

Another literary form that comes to mind is the Romance (like Gawain and the Green Knight – another work with which Tolkien was intimately familiar). In Romance the human condition is explored not through individual characters, but as that condition is expressed in its various modes and parts within the stories of different characters. In LotR, there is no one character who sums up the experience of human life, there’s not even an attempt at this. Instead, that experience is explored by all the characters from their unique perspectives, forcing upon us the necessity of keeping the whole fabric in mind rather than focusing on just one character at a time. The radical thing about LotR for me is that it highlights the arrogance of modern constructions of self: we really think that, on some level, the truth of the human condition can be realized by and through intense scrutiny of just one person’s life: usually our own. We are the centres of our own truth, and the basis upon which meaning can be found.

What a lot of pressure to place on an individual! Tolkien has a different view. The human experience is not found in each of his characters, it is expressed by all of them.