LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 05 - The Window on the West

[davem]

Originally Posted by Esty

What autobiographical elements do we detect in Faramir? I would definitely see the author as an idealist, as davem describes Faramir, and his biography tells us that he had a strongly pessimistic strain to his character. What about the humility, the truthfulness, the connection with a high, mythological past? I think those elements are all visible in JRRT. What others do you notice?

I think Farmir certainly seems to have adopted an 'Elvish' approach to the past. He seems to desire Gondor to become not what Numenor actually [I]was[/I, but rather what Numenor should have been. He holds up the ideal of Numenor, & wishes to make it real - almost as the Elves hold up their ideal past & seek to manifest it in the world in places like Lorien & Rivendell. In other words they are seeking to make the world what they feel it ought to be.

Yet, like Tolkien himself, they believe that there is an ideal which should be striven for: 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for?' The strange thing is that while Tolkien himself seemed to hold this belief he also seemed to believe that it was an impossible ideal - all his characters & races fail to live up to the standards they set themselves, perhaps because they are fallen beings. Yet they never forsake the ideal. They never reach a point where they decide, 'Right, we've tried & failed, so we may as well give up now.' They 'fight the Long Defeat', but its as if they are not fighting an external enemy, but rather their own fallen natures. I wonder if this is the cause of their pessimism & lack of hope - they will not shrug their shoulders & walk away from the ideal, but keep on striving to live up to it.

If we take Sam for instance - Sam rises in the 'hierarchy' of society, not just the hierarchy of the Shire, but also within the hierarchy of the greater society of Middle-earth under the returned King. There is no 'revolution' within Middle-earth, no casting away of the old ideals, merely a continued striving to live up to them. The social structures remain but it becomes possible to rise above what one had been. Middle-earth becomes a meritocracy.

This makes me wonder about Tolkien's own life experiences & how they shaped his thinking. The old ways will not just magically re-establish themselves, they will have to be built up by struggle & sacrifice. But the old ideals will not themselves be sacrificed, they will remain like a light on the mountaintop, something to guide the struggling traveller. Novelty for its own sake, new ideaologies, will not be considered, because they are (in Middle-earth at least) not 'right'.

As I've said before, the Gondorians, & Gondorians like Faramir in particular, are not simply fighting against evil in the person of 'He whom we do not name', they are fighting for their ideals. So we seem to have a 'tension' - the ideals of the past provide them with a reason to fight (even if they are fighting a 'long defeat'), but they must face reality - the reality that the past was not itself ideal. Life is an eternal struggle for an ideal which will never be attained (not in this world) but that does not justify ceasing to struggle, still less changing the goal.

So, the more I consider it, the more Tolkien does seem like Faramir. So, my answer to Mithalwen's question:

The second point may belong elsewhere, but I have just reread the biography,I came across the extract from Tolkien's diary on Faramir's arrival, ‘I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking through the woods of Ithilien’. So who did?

would be, Tolkien didn't 'invent' Faramir - anymore than he 'invented' himself. He had something to say, experiences & realisations to communicate, & in Faramir he discovered a 'spokesman', wandering in the woods of Ithilien...