The Lord of the Bible?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

What I'm trying to say is that a culture which was inherently pessimistic would not invest huge amounts of resource into making long lasting monuments, temples, scientific observatories - whatever these enigmatic remains might be. Pessimistic cultures would live for today and not look to the future generations, not assume that time invested in constructing elaborate structures would be worth it in the long run. Look at the great cathedrals of the world - built by people who felt assured of their future, just as did the peoples who built Stonehenge.

Originally Posted by Tolkien via Legolas, The Ring Goes South

"But the Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stone lament them: deep they delved us,fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago."

Originally Posted by Beowulf poet, from Heaney, ll.3150 ff

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
[Heofon rece swealg.]
Then the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away,
and in ten days they had done the work.
It was their hero's memorial
. . .
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

Originally Posted by Beowulf via Beowulf poet, from Heaney, ll. 2814 ff

Fate swept us away,
sent my whole brave high-born clan
to their final doom. Now I must follow them.

Why does the epic poem end not with victory but with the death of the hero king and the defeat of his people, their loss?

Why does LotR end not with Frodo's recovery or Aragorn's coronation and wedding but with the inescapable consequence of Frodo's decision and the departure of the elves?

Perhaps you would prefer the word elegaic rather than pessimistic, as I see you have also suggested nostalgic. Nostalgia suggests a bit too much sentimentalism, from my way of thinking. I will respectfully submit that we are dealing here with your interpretation and mine and I will respectfully insist upon my right to call these mythologies and world visions pessimistic.

Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.

EDIT: Sorry, cross posted with several and no time to reply further, except yeah, what Fea said.

[Lalwendë]

I wasn't talking talking about Saxons nor was I talking about Elves, I was talking about ancient Britons (and Bretons, because they built these cultures too). These are the people who did not have a pessimistic view, but looked to the future as shown by their building of remarkable structures which would last down the millennia.

Yes, the Saxons may have had a sense of pessimism as they actually left us with little physical evidence - their wealth was portable (and this is reflected in the culture of the Rohirrim, who only left one substantial, optimistic cultural landmark, Helm's Deep, and possibly their barrows). But even so I would argue against the Saxons being totally pessimistic. We can only see a small proportion of what they most likely did produce in terms of literature, and its by no means all doom and gloom, they also left books of riddles. So we can't just make the sweeping statement that they were pessimistic.

And like it or not, nostalgia is a part of life in Britain. There's a whole industry based around it from selling National trust memberships to peddling 1950s CDs to producing endless TV shows which look back to what it was like in our schooldays. The word Retro excites us, and we argue about whether to save an old building or knock it down to put up new ones. Where I work they have had to create an entire division called Change, just to deal with out reluctance to let go of the past. It's real.

[mark12_30]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I wasn't talking talking about Saxons nor was I talking about Elves, I was talking about ancient Britons (and Bretons, because they built these cultures too). These are the people who did not have a pessimistic view, but looked to the future as shown by their building of remarkable structures which would last down the millennia.

Isn't this logic a bit circular? Those who left stone monuments were optimistic, those who didn't, pessimistic? How do we know, unless we also have their literature to look at?

[Lalwendë]

Investing valuable resources in building complex constructions, as I've already said, suggests a culture which has a sense of permanence and optimism, whereas a culture which senses it is transient does not invest its resource in fixed objects and constructions. We see the same with the builders of the great medieval cathedrals - they felt their culture would endure for ever. Likewise the builders of the monumental waterfront in Liverpool - they felt that the sun would never set on the empire.

Funnily enough, there are more things in culture than books. Older socities may not have had literature, and there are still cultures today which do not have literature. To suggest that we can't learn anything about them because they do not hold the written word in the same way we do is cultural supremacism.

In fact, even Tolkien's work bears out what I've said. Contrast the Gondorians who have a culture existing for thousands of years, they have been shapers, builders, creators of monumental architecture which is permanent, with the Rohirrim who are newly arrived, living an uncertain existence - they are not builders, they have a sense of transience. And contrast Faramir's sense of hope when he looks to the West and thinks of Numenor and remembers a cultural memory of promise and even paradise, with Theoden's words on his death. He doesn't go to a place he simply goes to his ancestors. Even so, the Rohirrim are not strictly pessimistic, more that they simply live for the now, whereas the Gondorians live for the past and for the future, not in the now. Even Tolkien knew the significance of transient versus permanent cultures.

Look at the modern world. I would only take a mortgage if I felt assured of my permanence but if I felt insecure I would instead rent, and be transient.

[littlemanpoet]

I can't help wondering if the assertion that cultures which build great monuments are essentially optimistic, and those that do not are essentially pessimistic, does not bear up against scrutiny. Bethberry's quotes are much to the point. Is it not just as plausible to reason that cultures that have little hope of long continuation, build monuments precisely because they expect that these will be all that's left to represent them some day? This seems to bear up when we listen to individuals in our own culture who intend to leave some kind of legacy to their own short lives. The concern for legacy seems to go hand in hand with a recognition of approaching death rather than with "lightness of being" or whatever you want to call it.

Bethberry, I think elegiac is perhaps the most useful word for the present turn of the discussion.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

I can't help wondering if the assertion that cultures which build great monuments are essentially optimistic, and those that do not are essentially pessimistic, does not bear up against scrutiny. Bethberry's quotes are much to the point. Is it not just as plausible to reason that cultures that have little hope of long continuation, build monuments precisely because they expect that these will be all that's left to represent them some day? This seems to bear up when we listen to individuals in our own culture who intend to leave some kind of legacy to their own short lives. The concern for legacy seems to go hand in hand with a recognition of approaching death rather than with "lightness of being" or whatever you want to call it.

Bethberry, I think elegiac is perhaps the most useful word for the present turn of the discussion.

No, the quotes were not to the point of what I was saying, as I was not talking about either Saxons or Elves, but about ancient Britons (and other ancient civilisations). They only cast light on what Tolkien or the author of Beowulf thought. They don't cast any light on the anonymous architects of Avebury because they can't. To look at what they thought we must use our minds and interpret what we have got. Not assertion but archaeological theory.

The urge to be personally remembered is in fact more a product of modern secular society, or indeed a vain and self-centred society, witness the current Cult of Personality. That is also the ultimate in luxuries. We might create personal legacies today but then we are also a throw-away-live-for-today society. Also bear in mind how long both megalithic structures and great cathedrals took to build. Centuries. Cultures under threat of destruction simply do not have that luxury of time. You don't fiddle while Rome burns.

Elegiac might fit the sense of loss that Tolkien expresses very well, but Elegiac is definitely not the term to use to describe the nostalgic feelings that British people as a society feel. Why? Because we aren't just mourning, but remembering the good times. See the quote that Fea put on. He's also remembering the good laughs, the nights supping in the ale hall.

Anyway, arguing over a word is a familiar way to divert a discussion, but you won't wear me down that way. Pedantry is how people in my line of work earn their wages, and I can easily spend a two hour meeting arguing about one word in an entire document.

[Nogrod]

Making generalisations with history is always a bit dangerous...

I visited Newgrange (in Ireland) some ten years ago. It had taken the people there something like two hundred years to build it - more than four thousand years ago. They probably were not thinking that as our fleeting culture is just about to die, so let's do this in a hurry. They must have been optimists in our sense of the word used here.

The counter example.

Adolf Hitler and his visions of the eternal Germany, to be realised with the help of Mr. Speer. The eternal monumets being imagined and in some cases begun by the third Reich... Were they optimists or pessimists? Or where they more vaguely the culture that did not believe to make for any lasting mark, and thence craved for any marks to out-count the days of their makers?

The urge to be personally remembered is in fact more a product of modern secular society, or indeed a vain and self-centred society, witness the current Cult of Personality.

Exactly. We must bear in mind that even the idea of "myself" as a self-centered notion is a new invention... The feeling of "me" today as the center of individuality was for the ancient Greeks and Romans the animality in us. Emotions and feelings happen to us and are not governed by us. They thought that a human was a human only when he (yes, he!) shut down the thrives and desires and was thinking things with the reason (differentia specifica of the humans).

In that world one couldn't think of being the center of all, but needed just to find his place in the order of the universe...

So there was no possibility of being optimistic or pessimistic on a grander scale then. Individual personality is a modern idea...