Christopher Tolkien to finish lost Middle Earth novel

[davem]

Just glanced at the Sun-Chronicle review
http://www.thesunchronicle.com/artic...news/news4.txt

The novel's pessimism is a product of its time, according to Drout, who said Tolkien wrote of Túrin's flaws to rebut the Nazi myth of the "Übermensch," or superman. (comment by Michael Drout)

Does this make any sense at all? The story originated in the BoLT (circa 1917), & the Narn was composed in the 1950's.

Is Drout kidding, or just being provocative?

[davem]

Tolkien podcast
http://www.sqpn.com/

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I don't know if Tolkien in the 50s really had the Nazis especially in mind, any more than he did when writing Lord of the Rings (when they were still around)- and of course the basic lineaments of the story go back to the old Kaiser.

I do think however that Tolkien was more-or-less consciously creating an anti-Siegfried, a counter to the Wagnerian portrait which JRRT I'm sure found repulsive. Wagner's hero was indeed an Ubermensch, at least in the Nietzchean if not quite the Nazi sense, an embodiment of Might Makes Right and Triumph of the Will. For Tolkien, both notions were not only wrong but extremely dangerous- as Turin's story shows.

[davem]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

I don't know if Tolkien in the 50s really had the Nazis especially in mind, any more than he did when writing Lord of the Rings (when they were still around)- and of course the basic lineaments of the story go back to the old Kaiser.

I do think however that Tolkien was more-or-less consciously creating an anti-Siegfried, a counter to the Wagnerian portrait which JRRT I'm sure found repulsive. Wagner's hero was indeed an Ubermensch, at least in the Nietzchean if not quite the Nazi sense, an embodiment of Might Makes Right and Triumph of the Will. For Tolkien, both notions were not only wrong but extremely dangerous- as Turin's story shows.

Up to a point - I can almost accept - at a stretch - that the story of Numenor owes something to what was happening in Germany in the 30's/40's, but was the ubermensch in his mind to such an extent during the writing of CoH? After all, by the time of writing CoH the world had already seen the failure of the Nazi 'ideal'?

I did start a thread some time back on Tolkien & the Nazis - asking whether his desire to create a 'mythology for England' (& his subsequent statement that in that his 'crest had long since fallen') had been shattered by the use to which the Nazis had put Northern myth. It seems at least possible. National myth suddenly seemed to carry a very dangerous potential. Yet, as I say, by the time he turned to write CoH its clear that if all he was doing was attempting to show the flaw in the Nazi ideal he was pretty much preaching to the converted.

[Aiwendil]

Does this make any sense at all? The story originated in the BoLT (circa 1917), & the Narn was composed in the 1950's.

It makes very little sense as stated. However, one certainly could see the 'Narn' as a rebuttal of the 'ubermensch' in a different context. Tolkien draws, of course, on the whole body of Germanic myth concerned with Siegfried/Sigurd and the Volsungs - the same body of myth that Wagner drew on (Tolkien would probably say 'perverted') in his Ring cycle. If there's any connection between Nietzsche and the Turin saga surely it lies in the analogy between Turin and Siegfried.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

It makes very little sense as stated. However, one certainly could see the 'Narn' as a rebuttal of the 'ubermensch' in a different context. Tolkien draws, of course, on the whole body of Germanic myth concerned with Siegfried/Sigurd and the Volsungs - the same body of myth that Wagner drew on (Tolkien would probably say 'perverted') in his Ring cycle. If there's any connection between Nietzsche and the Turin saga surely it lies in the analogy between Turin and Siegfried.

You see, that makes sense, but Drout's comment doesn't. Of course, I don't see CoH simply as Tolkien sticking two fingers up at Wagner. Turin isn't simply an anti-ubermensch figure - for all his reckless pride he is a sympathetic figure, a human being. Tolkien isn't satirising, or mocking the Nazi ideal in the figure of Turin. He is showing a man whose reach exceeded his grasp. Turin constantly fails, but he fails heroically. I can't escape the feeling that Tolkien did consider Turin a hero, that he admired him for what he attempted, rather than offering him as an example of overweening pride.

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

Of course, I don't see CoH simply as Tolkien sticking two fingers up at Wagner. Turin isn't simply an anti-ubermensch figure - for all his reckless pride he is a sympathetic figure, a human being.

Oh, certainly. As with most of Tolkien’s work, there many layers or shades of meaning in the ‘Narn’. Actually, I think that the Siegfried/Wagner thing is one of the less important thematic threads. But I do think it’s there. It’s as if Tolkien was fashioning a great heroic masterpiece without a thought about ubermenschen, then, by chance, he happens to think of Wagner and says, “Incidentally, this is the true spirit of those old Germanic myths, not that nonsense about supermen.”

[davem]

Aiwendil

Good review here

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/04/26/MiddleEarth/

In a sense, Tolkien is satirizing medieval heroic romances just as Cervantes did in Don Quixote. But Tolkien finds little to laugh at in his own hero, and much to pity. It is tempting to read The Children of Húrin as one of the first novels of World War I, transposed into a different era but presaging the destruction of a great civilization.....

Tolkien's silence in this novel is even louder. Húrin's children, for all their high birth and prowess, destroy themselves in a brutal war. The best they can offer us, like the House of Atreus and like the ignorant armies of World War I, is a warning against self-deceiving pride.