Smith of Wootton Major in Middle Earth?

[Bêthberry]

So much to contemplate here and reply to! If I may, I shall begin at the beginning and see where the currents lead me.

littlemanpoet quotes from that most fascinating letter, # 131, Tolkien's very long explanation to Milton Waldman about not simply the interdependence of LotR and TheSilm but of the generation of Tolkien's habits of thought and creation. I have always wished that Carpenter had not expurgated the letter: knowledge that something has been left out has always made me curious. Not to say that Carpenter mispresented anything, of course. The absence makes me fonder!

So much for my preamble. I am well aware that a goodly part of the discussion here at the Downs has been to consider this same question of the interdependence of Tolkien's works and the internal consistency of the Legendarium. Much jocularity has ensued, of the sort which I suspect Tolkien himself would highly approve. And of course I have approved also.

Yet picking through for strands for inconsistencies and logical conundrums has never quite been my (tea) bag, any more than has the theme of defining Reality/reality or Truth/truth, perhaps in part because when we link Middle-earth (or Tolkien's sub-creation) too closely to the 'primary world'--our world--the whole delight of fairey begins to unravel. This quotation about the Numenorians is exactly a tempest in this particular (tea) pot.

In those days [the Númenóreans] would come amongst Wild Men an almost divine benefactors, bringing gifts of arts and knowledge, and passing away again - leaving many legends behind of kings and gods out of the sunset.

You see, I live in a land where Europeans came upon "Wild Men", aboriginal tribes who are now referred to as "First Nation Peoples." And the terrible part of that misadventure is that the Europeans were anything but divine benefactors. And even worse, the Europeans by and large, at least in their legal and official status, did everything they could to erradicate the legends and tales and myths of those First Nation. Potlach was banned and participation in it made illegal on the West Coast. Children were sent far from home to "residential schools" where they could be "englightened" away from the supposed pernicious influence of their parent's primitive culture and made to embrace the European faith. So, for me, this question of "Truth/truth" or "primary/subcreated world" tends to result in a highly tannic, over steeped brew. I don't want to have to choose between birch or pine tea, sweetened with maple syrup, and PG Tips.

I don't want Smith to be part of Silmarillion Arda because parts of it, when I view them in the harsh sunlight of my primary world, begin to fade. This is why I laugh so sardonically when I see elves joking that all men look alike, for that gives to the elves the sorry, blinkered, parochial, fearful perspective of the western world and all it must atone for. I want to stir through the loose leaves of Tolkien's fairey without some of the cultural baggage. I want to revere his appreciation of that space where imagination is whetted and explored for its own sake and benefit. I want it to remain, as Aiwendil has called it,

the character of a meditation on the nature of fantasy literature, as opposed to a work of fantasy literature.

Perhaps for me The Silm is not fairey? Would I go so far as to say this? Well, however that may or may not be, this meditation in Smith has for me the mystery which Helen identified, and the power of such a mystery.

The word "trespassing" comes to mind. (Remember the salmon swimming into the hot spring at the bottom of the lake? The narrator was out of his element, and you loved it, as I fondly recall.) Smith is essentially trespassing; Frodo is frequently trespassing; by contrast the Sil narrator has every right to be there. So where's the mystery that creates thirst in the soul? I suspect that what moves you is your desire for transcendance-- and that hunger is best whetted by mystery.

Perhaps the Sil creates regret, longing for the good old days, rather than the longing to pierce and percieve a mystery.

Trespass, to go beyond the normal boundaries and borders, and come back with greater knowledge of an unexpected mystery, lies at the heart of faerie, which is less a long ago world of stark contrasts and more the realm of imaginative creation where eucatastrophe is possible (not that it isn't possible in the primary world, but that it doesn't happen often enough, or at least not as often as in faerie). However, The Silm doesn't do this for me.

But Aiwendil also posited a theory about Smith and The Silm.

I am curious regarding other people's opinions of Smith vs. the Silmarillion. In particular, I wonder whether the divide between those who find Smith more moving and those who prefer the Silmarillion might roughly coincide with the divide between those who are interested in authorial intention and those who fall into the "reader's freedom" or "textual supremacy" camps. For it seems to me that in Smith the voice of the author is more clearly revealed; there is a stronger authorial presence. In the Silmarillion, the art and the artist seem to be more fully concealed.

Now, I am one of those who prefers Smith to The Silm but I am also one of those who is far more cautious about thinking we can ascertain authorial presence or intention. The text's the feeder wherein we catch the conscience of the reader.

It is very, very tempting to read Smith as an allegory of Tolkien's own experience as a writer of fairey. But I wonder if this is not a believed effect of the story's structure and conventions. (Is there any kind of admission in the Letters and if so, how is it to be taken? with lemon or sugar?) The Wootton Major story follows Smith's own personal experiences far more closely than The Silm follows the personal feelings of any of the elven characters of the Legendarium. Smith is a story of personal feeling and experience and as such it is closer to the kind of narrative that has held sway in our culture for the last two hundred years or so, "realistic fiction" which examined in psychological detail character's minds. It is tempting to relate this personal view of Smith with Tolkien, but what evidence do we have for equating Smith's experience with Tolkien's? Maybe we want to think this is Tolkien because we want to find some place where we are certain he speaks to us, the reader? We want to know him and so we resurrect him in those places of his fiction which give us a sense of intimacy with the character.

The Silm on the other hand is written in a different kind of style, the style of ancient mythologies and hero legends. It has a distance from the kind of emotive feeling we have come to expect in fiction. Yet who is to say that Tolkien did not in fact create "himself" as an omniscient authority, speaking/writing a world into being but withdrawing from that world? Why do we not say, here is Tolkien the artist telling us about the artist's omnisicent control?

From my personal perspective, The Silm never leaves me wanting more. Admittedly, I am a late comer to its appreciation and often early on used it encyclopedically rather than for its story value. I mined it, dwarven-like, but let us hope not so deeply as to raise balrogs.

I keep harping on story as construct, as convention, as work of art which is intended to make us feel as if. Perhaps this is because every one of Tolkien's texts takes a different style, different form of narrator/narration. It is almost as if he explores in each tale a different kind of story form in early literature--all the kinds for which he hungered himself. Let's look back at Letter # 131.

But once upon a time [oh, that recurrent opening of all things Fairey, which Tolkien himself spoke so highly of!] ... I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story... I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. . . .

Of course, such an overwhelming purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew.

The realm of legend which Tolkien hungered for was various and vast, and so his stories themselves are various, and not all of the same piece, despite the fascinating, overarching Legendarium which supplies the bag for the various mixtures of tea leaves. I tend to think that what we have as The Silm was a stupendous map of the kind Tolkien sketched for LotR, his very own Encyclopedia of Arda, out of which he drew elements for his fascination with fairey. Those with a taste for such anatomies will find it incredibly rich. Those with a taste for something smaller and more personal might prefer the smaller stories along the way. Tolkien's work is heterogeneous, just as is the Bible and each story has something unique to commend itself.

But who knows. Perhaps because I am not especially anamoured of elves I can't appreciate the story told mainly from their point of view.

Cuppa anyone?