Mythic Unities in The Lord of the Rings

[The Saucepan Man]

Your points are well made, davem, and no doubt account for the appeal of Tolkien to his more committed fans (such as us). But the evolving nature of his work cannot account for his broader appeal, given that most of his readers will only have read LotR and (possibly) The Hobbit.

Where it is quite possibly relevant in this regard, however, is in giving the impression of a wider history and wider world than simply that depicted in the book. Because there was such a vast wealth of evolving material for Tokien to draw on, he was able to incorporate aspects of it within LotR (the tales of Beren and Luthien and of Earendil the Mariner, for example). Not only does this enhance the credibility of the world that he portrays, but it gives it its own sense of mythology. Thus Tolkien is weaving "real world" myth and folklore in with his own mythology (itself deriving in many respects from our own myth and folklore) to create something akin to a "complete" mythology.

[davem]

Originally Posted by SpM

Where it is quite possibly relevant in this regard, however, is in giving the impression of a wider history and wider world than simply that depicted in the book. Because there was such a vast wealth of evolving material for Tokien to draw on, he was able to incorporate aspects of it within LotR (the tales of Beren and Luthien and of Earendil the Mariner, for example). Not only does this enhance the credibility of the world that he portrays, but it gives it its own sense of mythology. Thus Tolkien is weaving "real world" myth and folklore in with his own mythology (itself deriving in many respects from our own myth and folklore) to create something akin to a "complete" mythology.

So there's a 'dual' process of growth & development percievable, a 'parallel evolution' - the evolution within the Legendarium which I described & a corresponding one - the evolution of England's mythology into Tolkien's Legendarium.

Its as if we have the process taking place in both the Primary & the Secondary worlds at the same time???

That's if I understand your point correctly....

[littlemanpoet]

By way of summary, I'm going to try to state that which we have either agreed on or at least suggested:

LotR and The Hobbit ...

• touch us at a deep level
• are qualitatively different and better than any other literature like them
• often do not lose their appeal over the course of readers' lives
• have had lasting appeal to a broad readership

...and this has been accomplished by Tolkien through the use of varied and rich mythic unities.

Q1: How did Tolkien do it?
A1: He was uniquely gifted in terms of his knowledge and understanding of language, myth, folklore, and history, and the ways they are connected to each other; he used these as the means by which he wove the mythic unities into the fabric of the story.

Q2: What are the mythic unities?
A2: We have pointed out the following so far:

• Elves as both natural and spiritual
• Hobbits as both human and animal
• Tom Bombadil and Goldberry as married to each other and the land
• holiness and light
• spoken word and power
• music - specifically singing - and power (subset of the previous)
• name and power
• language and allegiance

There are most likely many more; they will best surface in the context of the next question.

Q3: How did Tolkien do this "weaving" of mythic unities into his story?

SpM, if I have adequately paraphrased your question, I have generated, so far, six possible, provisional and overlapping answers to the question.

1. Tolkien had a mission to give England its own mythology. This does not so much answer your question as posit a basis for the following answers.

2. Tolkien created something he could believe in. I do not mean this only in terms of Secondary Belief, although that is certainly important. This provisional answer harks back to davem's fascinating statement which seems true to me:

I think we respond to Tolkien in the way we do because on some level we feel we're learning (or re-learning) something important.

I think that Tolkien was answering questions like, "what story/events in the past could have generated a name like Earendil?" His language capabilities (as drigel has said) made him singularly gifted to posit believable answers to such questions.

3. Tolkien wove feigned language, history, myth, and folklore into a believable if seamy fabric. The very seaminess of it is part of its charm.

4. The works were never completed. This is an additional aspect of the feignedness/life-likeness.

5. The content is real; that is, we feel its realness in our bones. Tolkien has modified that which really was to fit his corpus.

6. Tolkien was a realist and modern who straddled the "great divide" between the pre-modern and modern eras. Tolkien was born in the pre-modern era, and loved it. He lived through the change to the modern era, and while mourning the losses that accompanied it, had a modern man's mindset, and was therefore able to communicate all he knew from myth to a modern audience such that we could make it our own.

In the late Humphrey Carpenter's biography (paperback page 66), quotes Tolkien as having said of the Finnish Kalevala in his first year at Oxford (1912),

These mythological ballads are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people .... I owuld that we had more of it left - - - something of the same sort that belonged to the English.

One last thing. I've played around with a theory that Western Civilization is made up of three branches: the Romano-Greek, the Celto-Germanic, and the Judeo-Christian. All three of these branches are still functional at very deep levels in all Western people. Tolkien's LotR is grounded in all three branches as well. By this I'm not saying that Tolkien was using LotR as an evangelical tool! Not even that LotR was "consciously Christian in the revision", which Tolkien himself claims; rather, I'm saying that the mindset of LotR consists of Christian content, although at a very deep level, every bit as much as it consists of Romano-Greek and Celto-Germanic content.

[Kuruharan]

holiness and light

Painfully obvious observation here, but evil and darkness.

Tolkien had a mission to give England its own mythology

Now for a vague observation/question of sorts.

I’m not entirely certain how Tolkien’s work fulfilled the role of providing a mythology for England. I’ve never really been able to see a strong connection between the tales and some feeling of primordial “Englishness.” Yes, I know the hobbits are sort of English, but the stories are so much more than them. Any theories on this?

It may be that my sense of history is too strong that I can’t suspend it. The fundamental problem with developing a mythology for “England” is that the “English” all came from someplace else and knew they had come from someplace else. Of course, Tolkien referred to his desire as “absurd.” (Letter 130)

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Now for a vague observation/question of sorts.

I’m not entirely certain how Tolkien’s work fulfilled the role of providing a mythology for England. I’ve never really been able to see a strong connection between the tales and some feeling of primordial “Englishness.” Yes, I know the hobbits are sort of English, but the stories are so much more than them. Any theories on this?

It may be that my sense of history is too strong that I can’t suspend it. The fundamental problem with developing a mythology for “England” is that the “English” all came from someplace else and knew they had come from someplace else. Of course, Tolkien referred to his desire as “absurd.” (Letter 130)

It was Tolkien's ORIGINAL intention to create a mythology for the English. By the time he had written and published the Lord of the Rings I don't think that the good professor was actually working with the English (or any modern culture) in mind. By then he was simply working within the confines of his own world. It was the dearth of English mythology that gave them the drive to START his legendarium, and if it has turned out to be the mythology of the Geeks rather than the English, it is not perhaps that bad a thing.

[Kuruharan]

True, but the Sil (in one form or other) was the beginning and the basis for all that came later.

I thought it might be worth considering if some 'roots' of the original intention might still be discernable in all the stories taken as a whole.

(psst...nice avatar. )

[littlemanpoet]

I agree with Formendacil, but would like to go a little deeper (surprised, anybody? I thought not. ) "A mythology for England" was not, to be sure, his sole motivation, not even at first. There was his deeply emotional response to languages and words, from which derived his hunger for Welsh and Finnish, clearly not English languages in the least! Which means that his Elves were not really meant to be English at all, but strange and wonderful beings that his Englishmen - no, let us say, his Men - would encounter in Faërie.

His faith was also a key element.

I recently read Carpenter's take on Tolkien's motivation for the Sil and the Legendarium. Qualifier: Yes, it's an authorized biography, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything in it is complete accurate; just quite likely. p. 103:

...in what sense did [Tolkien] suppose The Silmarillion to be 'true'?

Something of the answer can be found in his essay On Fairy-Stories and in his own story Leaf by Niggle, both of which suggest that a man may be given by God the gift of recording 'a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth'. Certainly while writing The Silmarillion Tolkien believed that he was doing more than inventing a story. He wrote of the tales that make up the book: 'They arose in my mind as "given" things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew ... I always had the sense of recording what was already "there", somewhere: not of "inventing".'

Make of it what you will.

But I think I may have stumbled across the critical element to at least a few of the six preliminary answers I offered above. It is something that I already knew, but failed to connect to this discussion, namely how Tolkien went about sub-creating the entire mythos. To summarize Carpenter, Tolkien had two approaches.

First, he carefully created names in his made-up languages. Then he asked himself, "how did that name come to be?" A typical philologist's question. So he subcreated stories that explained the names.

It was in the stories that the second, and to my mind more crucial element arose. In the heat of writing the story, Tolkien would come up with a good sounding name on the spur of the moment, following his artist's sense rather than his philologist's care. Then he would go back and see the name he had created, and ask the philologist's question: How did that seemingly impossible construction arise?

Now, most writers (I have done this myself), when faced with these problems of inconsistency, take the seemingly obvious way, and remove the inconsistency. Not Tolkien. His approach was to research the linguistics, to search out the histories, the myths, the legends, and figure out how the inconsistency actually fit after all!

Now, will this approach not more likely create a legendarium that feels more real than the cleaned up stuff most writers write? But they way, writers are taught to do the obvious thing, and perhaps rightly so, since Tolkien was the linguistic genius and none of us can possibly hope to get anywhere with his approach.