[Belin]

Sorry if these comments seem rather garbled. I have three things to say, and they all contradict each other. Ah, the joys of Negative Capability. (Incidentally, and totally out of place, "The Ghastly Neekerbreeker"??? That's GREAT, Birdland!)

The idea of journey is, I think, one of those things that's common to lots and lots of literature, and (to synthesize more or less unrelated ideas) I think it has a lot to do with the role of women generally as well as mothers. Have you read Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”? It takes place in the Old West in this sort of wild, unreal world where violence and rambunctiousness and freedom and excitement reign, until the sheriff commits the terrible act of GETTING MARRIED and introduces a woman into it, and everything is ruined. Women are frequently seen as a civilizing influence (and this is certainly true of LotR, which is why I think there are so few women and why everyone gets married at the end; they hold things together and the story is about things coming right down to the chaos. Check out Galadriel. Check out the Entwives. Check out what’s expected of Eowyn.), and mothers are even more so than brides. With a mother there to keep the world safe, a lot of stories can’t happen. Can you fend off Sauron by calling for your mommy? Well, no, I suppose not, but there’s some sense that Sauron and your mommy don’t belong in the same world, and of course this is speaking very broadly and is not always correct (first of all, some mothers are not like this at all), but I do think this force has something to do with it.

And, then again, here’s an interesting phenomenon. I glance cursorially at my bookshelf and look for books with important mother figures and come up with the following list:

A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe (dead? That’s what YOU think!)
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (this is basically a book about mother/daughter relationships)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (yes, she’s stupid, vulgar, hypocritical and obnoxious, but she certainly matters)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (see Joy Luck Club)
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino has an interesting mother but not one that strongly influences the plot or gets a lot of screen time
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke has a VERY interesting mother, but she’s dead and gone and poor old Malte is completely (yes, completely) alone in the world, having left everything he knows behind.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. She’s not terribly powerful but she’s very present.
and, I suspect, La casa de los espíritus by Isabel Allende, but as I’m still near the beginning it’s hard to say.

It could just be my bookshelf, but as far as this list goes it seems that women write most of the books in which the mother is both alive and important. On the other hand, I don’t notice a similar preponderance of strong fathers in books written by men. Figure that out. In any case, Tolkien certainly seems to follow the pattern.

And then again (hah, I can contradict both my points at once!), does it seem to anyone else that Galadriel serves as a mother-like figure in LotR? She certainly fulfills the roles I’ve described, (yes, the argument is slightly circular, but then nobody’s questioned my claims about the meaning of a mother yet either) providing a Sauron-free space in which the Fellowship lingers and serving as a definite opposition to him, which is what makes her temptation by the Ring particularly disturbing. Or is this a highly controversial reading that deserves its own thread?

Just stirring the cauldron. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

--Belin Ibaimendi... or shall I say, Anne Belin???