Mythic Unities in The Lord of the Rings

[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.