"They Began to Hum Softly", Murray Smith

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Faramir Jones

He looked closely at the chief republics in Italy at that time, Florence and Venice. Regarding the latter, as Tolkien explicitly compared Gondor to it, what Burckhardt had to say about it is interesting.

Originally Posted by Faramir Jones

I'm intrigued by the image of Minas Tirith as a queen. As well as the quote from Aragorn above, Faramir also earlier hoped to see that city 'as a queen among other queens''. Constantinople, the capital of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire, was called 'Queen of Cities'; and Tolkien explicitly compared Gondor to that state, saying that the former 'fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium'. (Letters, Letter 131, p. 157.)

These are fascinating comparisons Tolkien makes. Clearly he was not implying an allegorical equivalence (his meaning of allegory) whereby Gondor literally is both Venice and Constantinople. Gondor cannot be both: it cannot wholly resemble an up-and-coming modern nation state if it is crumbling into impotence the way Tolkien thought Constantinople did—and there is a reason why cold stone is the distinguishing characteristic of Gondorian architecture. These comparisons seem to function much like Tolkien’s explanation of how the Anglo Saxon nature of Rohan “does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons, or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances.” (Sorry, I’ve lost the reference to which letter and my Letters is misplaced as well so I’m quoting from Heidi Steimel’s paper, which quotes it from Hargrove’s book. Terribly incorrect to mount a discussion this way, eh wot?) Gondor, then, is a literary amalgam of several suggestive allusions rather than a specific depiction of any one city.

I think our differences here relates to the various meanings the word ‘modern’ can have. (See modern at dictionary.com.) Certainly Burckhardt (and Jones) use the word in contrast to the classical world and the medieval world but other meanings relate the modern age as something pertaining to a more recent time. Tolkien’s complaint about modern English clearly uses the word to imply early twentieth century usage even though in philology modern English means—for ease of explanation—Shakespeare to now (because the major characteristics of the language we speak today were set by the sixteenth century, in the dialect that became the base for our English.) Sometimes modern can mean authors such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Lawrence, in contrast to Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold. (Hardy and Kipling are as difficult to place in this context of modern as is Tolkien.) In each discipline-- literary, linguistic, and historical studies--the word modern has several meanings. So I don't think modern, as related to Gondor, can be both "not classical" and "contemporary."

My first comment comparing Gondor to Venice was derived from Tolkien’s comparison, the geography of the city within Middle-earth, and its limited range of power. Gondor does not have an empire, nor even much of a kingdom any more. Despite its kingship and steward, the overall tone of Gondor is that of a small clique of men who owe allegiance to each other and whose place in the hierarchy of power is dependent upon personal relationships rather than a rule of law or meritocracy. Blood lines still matter as does the ancient belief that the hands of the king are hands of healing. If it is a nation, it is a nation in the old, original, racial meaning of the word—descendents of Numenoreans-- rather than in the new political meaning of a large group of people who seek their own particular government. (See nation at dictionary.com. So, from my perspective, Gondor has dwindled to a military entity largely (although not exclusively) confined to the site of Minas Tirith and is not a full nation state in the political sense.

I would not, then, ascribe to your use of the word modern, even with your quotation marks.

Originally Posted by p. 210

Gondor more “modern”

In contrast to the Shire, which was set in the past, Gondor resembled the United Kingdom in both World Wars.

Unfortunately, I cannot see Gondor in any way resembling the UK in the first half of the twentieth century. True, it has the characteristics of a city under siege, but that does not make it resemble Old Blighty even with Britannia’s crumbling empire. For one thing, Tolkien’s words in the Foreword to the Second Edition stand as a stark warning about the difference between the shadow of WWII and the shadow of Sauron. For me, the long march to Gondor represents a journey to an even more distant past than that of The Shire, not a journey out of a recent past towards to an era contemporary with the writing of LotR.

To me, Tolkien was attempting to resurrect an heroic or cultural ideal that was being lost with the incursions of industrialization and technology. He started writing a sequel to The Hobbit, but the Legendarium flowed into his imagination and LotR became something different. His response to his WWI experiences was very different from those of the War poets--Sassoon, Owen, Brooke to name a few--who wrote bitterly with sarcasm and irony and satire; they wrote without any place for that perilous realm called Fairie but it was that realm which gave Tolkien his inspiration, rather than historical realism.

Thus, it would be preferable to me to consider Tolkien’s aesthetic object and world view when considering the absence of similarity to actual war songs and ditties than to say that he was avoiding making Gondor resemble the UK too closely.

Perhaps your quotation marks around modern were meant to provoke this kind of discussion.