LotR, an Edwardian Adventure Story?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

For Davem it concerns. The thought occurred to me, reading the idea herein that "Preachiness is Englishness" that Davem, one of the most "English" of 'Downers from my point of view, certainly fits this narrow vision of what is English. For, from my point of view, Davem's mode of posting is rather... preachy.

As an impartial observer, can I just say that I feel it would be more accurate to describe davem's approach as argumentative, rather than preachy, as he has no interest in converting anybody (& probably if he did 'convert' anybody he'd start arguing with them). He has always come across to me as someone who wanted to get people to think for themselves & not just blindly accept other's opinions. I think he's probably the closeset thing to a modern Socrates one could find.

(He also gets bored easily, & as a result posts a lot of dubious stuff - luckily there's no harm in him

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by lmp

Pray might you consider informing us less well informed, as to what you are implying?

I'm not implying anything, just wondering if Lobdell posits anything about this merry band of brothers who go questing as lads are wont to do. Chariots of Fire had this feel to it as well as the passing of the privileged class. You could think, too, of Sean Connery--ha, ha, the Scot!--and Michael Caine in the movie of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Perhaps the feel I am getting from your quotations of Lobdell are best expressed by this description I found for the miniseries Brideshead Revisited.

Originally Posted by http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/bridesheadre/bridesheadre.htm

Brideshead Revisited was made by Granada television, scripted by John Mortimer and originally shown on ITV in October 1981. The 11 episode adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel of the same name helped set the tone of a number of subsequent screen presentations of heritage England such as Chariots of Fire (1981), A Jewel in the Crown (1982), A Passage to India (1984), A Room with a View (1986)). These "white flannel" dramas, both on television and on the big screen, represented a yearning for an England that was no more, or never was. Brideshead Revisited opens in England on the eve of the World War II. Charles Ryder (played by Jeremy Irons), the main character and narrator, is presented as a rather incompetent officer in the British Army. He stumbles upon an English country house, which he has visited more than twenty years before. Upon seeing the house, Charles begins to tell the story of his years at Oxford, his meeting Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) and his love for Julia (Diana Quick). This retrospective narrative is nostalgic in two senses. It is concerned with Charles' nostalgia for his affairs in the interwar period. But it is also concerned with a nostalgia for a time before World War I--a longing for a lost way of life, for an Edwardian England.

I suppose it is just not helpful discussing a book I haven't read.

[littlemanpoet]

Lobdell doesn't say a lot about the "we few, we happy few", but he does say something.

...the adventurers in the Edwardian adventure story are, in general, not solitary. They may indeed be "we few, we happy few," but (if only so that one may tell the story of the others), they are at least two in number -- Holmes and Watson, for example. They are likely to be more than two: indeed, the charateristic Edwardian adventure story is that of Sir Henry Curtis, Captain Good, Allan Quatermain, and Ignost, or of G.E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Edward Malone, and Professor Summerlee -- the band of (very different) brothers. And the narrative is in the first person, eve if it involves that first person's bringing in parts of the story of which he had no firsthand knowledge. That is, there is a convention that the story should be told by those whose story it is. In general, the narrator is the most ordinary member of the band of adventurers (Allan Quatermain, Edward Malone, John Watson), and the tone of the narration tends to be self-deprecating.

Obviously, there are aspects of this description that clearly do not apply to LotR. However, Lobdell does say:

I find this [by this Lobdell means "Englishmen abroad in the wide and mysterious world ... looking for ... not so much the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece as ... the wide world itself} this parallels LotR: it does not seem to me that Frodo sets out on a quest much more than Bilbo set out on one in TH. Certainly, Frodo and Bilbo, though they are Hobbits, are Englishmen, and to them the "back again" in the subtitle of TH is as important as the "there".

This second quote does not strictly adhere to the sub-issue of "we happy few", I grant. What it does is show that Lobdell keeps trying to tie LotR back into the Edwardian adventure mode after showing ways in which it clearly departs from it. Nevertheless, I found the book interesting and worth discussing, at least in order to soundly reject much if not all of what Lobdell says.

There is one thing that he said that I found rather persuasive, though I have not given it a great deal of thought:

Tolkien's

mind was chiefly attuned to languages and the past -- which is not, I should emphasize, the same thing as being interested in words and history.

I think Lobdell was onto something with this, and I rather wish that he had proceeded to write a book about that instead of his pet theory about Edwardian adventure stories.

So what do you think? There is a difference between word and language, and between history and the past. It seems that Tolkien used the respective former, in each case to create at least a sense of the respective latter, in the two pairs.

Does this distinction seem important to anybody else? What's there? Curious to learn what others think about this...?

[davem]

Two passages from an essay by Stratford Caldecott 'Tolkien's Elvish England' seem relevant here. The first is from an essay by Chesterton, the second is by Caldecott himself.

It is also in fairy-tales, or in Faerie itself, that our nation, or landscape, our place in the world is made luminous, and revealed to be more than it appears to the mundane consciousness. "Elvish England" is in this sense the only true England, because it is England seen with eyes that reveal the meaning of things, and the meaning of things (as Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy) is simply that they are "magic." They might not have been at all, and the fact that they are as they are is due to an act of will on the part of the Creator. Thus "England" cannot be perceived-we will miss it entirely if we do not view it as an imaginative construction, in other words as a story. And furthermore this is a story we are helping God to write. We are part of the magic. We imagine "England" into existence, and if we cease to believe in it, it will cease to be. The National Census cannot reveal England. It can only truly be seen wrapped in the mists of imagination, in the myths and folklore that tell us what it feels like to belong to this landscape & this tradition.

The essay is in the latest issue of the Chesterton Review. An interesting point Caldecott makes in the context of this thread is that what ended the 'Edwardian' period, in art as in every other way, was the single most formative event in Tolkien's creative (& personal) life: WWI. LotR could not be an 'Edwardian' novel for that reason alone - after WWI there was no real going back...

[Lalwendë]

The Edwardian period was, in terms of Britain's longer history, just a flash in the pan, but it was also Britain at its greatest heights. This was the time when there was empire, opulence, and the beginnings of the education system and democracy. In those respects, we might say that Tolkien did look to that time as an inspiration, as his idyllic Shire might be the idealised (but definitely not realistic) country village of the early 1900s. But it was also a time of huge cultural change, and rather than the adventure stories of the day, the literature which best represents that time would be works such as those by EM Forster, which challenged the outgoing Victorian values and gave a hint of the changes to come.

I think Tolkien has more in common with writers such as Philip Larkin and others from around the late 40s/50s, which instead of challenging the Empire, accepted that there was now little Empire left and instead focussed on Britain. Tolkien rails against the fate of the English countryside just as did Larkin, and he himself admitted that Death was a main theme in his work, just as Larkin did. I think there are also similarities with John Betjeman.

Perhaps its a symptom of age that I often find the adventure aspects of Tolkien's work less important to me than the lyrical aspects - though the importance of story is still the most paramount aspect. But the sword fights and the near escapes are something I focus on less than the sadness and the poignancy of his work. And so I find Tolkien has more in common with his poetic and even musical (Britten, Vaughan Williams) contemporaries than with either the boisterous adventures of Rider Haggard or the challenging social views of Forster. I think Tolkien's work reflects the middle years of the Twentieth century more than the early ones.

[littlemanpoet]

I think you both are "hitting good targets". Which makes it all the more intriguing that Tolkien would use (at least aspects of) a mode the use of which had come and gone; the use of which, but not the popularity.

[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

I think you both are "hitting good targets". Which makes it all the more intriguing that Tolkien would use (at least aspects of) a mode the use of which had come and gone; the use of which, but not the popularity.

I think Tolkien was influenced subconsciously by the books he had read - at first at least. So its not so much that he was deliberately copying the late Victorian/Edwardian novel but that, to him, that was the novelistic style. Its interesting that he breaks away from that style so quickly. Whether that was because LotR took on a life of its own, or whether it was due to the change in style that came about in the post Edwardian period is another question.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

I think you both are "hitting good targets". Which makes it all the more intriguing that Tolkien would use (at least aspects of) a mode the use of which had come and gone; the use of which, but not the popularity.

I suppose it depends upon which aspects of that 'mode' we think Tolkien used, and whether they were exclusive to it? The whole idea of a quest or adventure isn't unique to Edwardian adventure stories, in fact it is common to many eras. I often think LotR has a lot of similarities to Huckleberry Finn, in that it is not just a journey, but a journey on which a lot of lessons are inadvertently learned, not just for characters but for the reader too.

Hmm, like most of us, I'm sure Tolkien enjoyed a good narrative, and there certainly is evidence that he enjoyed a lot of the adventure stories, along with the fantasy and sci-fi of his day. But Tolkien had a wider range of reading and that is reflected too, if nor more so when the reader really gets into the text.

I can see why a critic casting a superficial (supercilious?) eye over a story like Tolkien's might assume it is just an adventure, as many fans read it on that level too, so maybe their idea that it is an 'Edwardian adventure story' does indeed have an effect on the reception of LotR by some. But it doesn't mean, to me at least, that it is a book of that genre.

Has that mode come and gone though? Aren't the Harry Potter books just grand old adventures on the surface too?