What was it all for?

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

Originally Posted by davem

I suspect we all have a very deep sense that it is about something very important & very specific - if only in its effect on us - & we feel very annoyed when someone says its about something else...

Self preservation. Literature emotes. If a writer wanted to Say Something, he could just say it. But he doesn't. He covers the barest fact with painted lace, writes in calligraphy, dances with his words. If he wanted us to know, he would tell us. But instead, a literary master shows. He makes us feel.

And when we are told that he didn't mean for us to feel that way, we don't like it.

Given that, think about what he made us feel. Was he writing tragedy, such that in the end, we feel as though we have lost something and can never have it back?

Sure. Elves are gone. Frodo can't be healed. Life goes on, but nothing was as it once was. In the Bible, Job gets new kids, new goats, new whatever, and it's all Better Than Before, but it's not what it was. Tolkien did write a tragedy.

But he also wrote a comedy. And a romance. And a hero quest. He wrote fantasy and history and hope and wonder.

He wrote an epic. He took his readers through as many emotions as he could carefully draw out of them.

I'm less curious about what he was doing, what his final purpose was, than why that was his purpose.

Why would anybody actively manipulate emotion? Seems like a pretty sketchy thing to do. Power trip, anyone? Perhaps he was unpopular in junior high school.

I should be ignored.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil

I'm less curious about what he was doing, what his final purpose was, than why that was his purpose.

Me too - among other things. If we agree he intended to get somewhere we can speculate on where that was.

It strikes me that when most of us come across a magnificent stone building - columns, gargolyes, flying butresses, etc, our first, instinctive, question is 'What's it for, why was it built, why is it there?' Not 'I wonder where the stone came from?' And even if we do ask the latter question it usually follows the former, because we assume there is a reason for things to exist.

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

It strikes me that when most of us come across a magnificent stone building - columns, gargolyes, flying butresses, etc, our first, instinctive, question is 'What's it for, why was it built, why is it there?' Not 'I wonder where the stone came from?' And even if we do ask the latter question it usually follows the former, because we assume there is a reason for things to exist.

When I come across such a building, my chief response is not to ask anything - rather, it's to enjoy the sight of the building. I may ask questions about why it's there later, but what I am generally chiefly interested in is the thing in itself (not to sound too much like Kant, I hope) rather than in the circumstances surrounding its creation.

So it is, for me, anyway, with Tolkien's work (or with any literature). My chief interest is in LotR, the Silmarillion, and The Hobbit in themselves, as great and magnificent stories, rather than in the circumstances of Tolkien's life which caused them to be produced.

And does this not suggest another possible answer to the "why" question? I am, as I type, sitting in a dorm room in a great and, I think, magnificent stone building, complete with gargoyles, vaulted ceilings, archways, and towers. Why was it built that way? It is, after all, in the New World, and was built no more than about a hundred years ago - certainly not a 'genuine' piece of Gothic architecture. I rather think that it was built this way because people enjoy Gothic architecture. The arches and gargoyles are there for me and the other inhabitants - to create a certain atmosphere, to give us aesthetic pleasure, etc.

So why can we not say the same about Tolkien's work? Why can he not have written it for us - to read, to enjoy, to be moved by? Why can he not have created his Legendarium because he thought stories are valuable in and of themselves, not merely as means to some other end?

For that matter, why can he not have created it for himself, because he enjoyed writing stories? I myself spend a good deal of time writing fiction and composing music, for no other reason than that I enjoy doing those things. Now, of course, my skill in neither of these fields is even on the same order of magnitude as Tolkien's skill at storytelling; nevertheless, I don't find it hard to imagine that his motivation was the same as mine.

Or, as Feanor of the Peredhil so concisely put it:

Presumably it had something to do with telling a story.

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by davem

Now, there are two ways of looking at most things - 'Where did it come from?' & 'What is it for?' Source analysis tells us a great deal in answer to the former question, but almost nothing in answer to the latter. Just because the former question is the easier to answer does not make it the more important, or more interesting, question.

I still find it difficult how you can make any attempt to answer the question "What is it for?" without considering "Where did it come from?"

To take your analogy of the house builder, there are a number of levels at which one can answer the questions: "What is the house for? Why did Tolkien the Master Builder build it?". One can look at it and make a general assessment, namely that he built it as a house for people to live in. This would be analagous to saying that Tolkien wrote LotR as a book for people to read and enjoy. One might look further and notice various features and themes: windows, doors, partition walls, a roof. Just as one may consider LotR and notice particular features and themes: fantasy, friendship, the enoblement of the humble, good and evil etc. But this isn't really telling us anything we didn't know already or couldn't work out for ourselves with a litle thought.

So we have to look more closely if we are to try to understand why Tolkien built this particular house. We need to consider his purpose in selecting that particular style of window, or that precise archway, or those particular tiles for the roof. Perhaps we need to consider his influences - what training he had as a builder, what particular styles caught his eye at builder college, what materials he assessed might be best for his intended construction. And, ultimately, to gain the best understanding possible of Tolkien's purposes with regard to the house, we have to consider just what kind of an environment he intended to provide for those who would occupy it. What kind of protection against the weather, the climate, subsidence etc did he intend it to provide? And so, as I see it, we end up knocking it down to examine its inner workings and its foundations.

Without being there as it was built, I really don't see how you can hope to answer the question "What is it for?" in anything other than the most cursory of ways without at some point asking "What materials did he use to build it and how did he put those materials together?"

That said, like Aiwendil, I am one of those who would rather sit and admire the building for what it is and take what pleasure I find in my own reactions to it, rather than considering what the builder's purpose was in building it, much less what he used to build it. So I really don't see the point of these questions in the first place.

Of course, if you and others are interested in considering and discussing the question, and feel that you may have something to gain in doing so, there's no harm in that at all. You don't need me continually sticking my oar in and telling you how pointless it all is. So, good luck to you. I hope it goes well.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

So why can we not say the same about Tolkien's work? Why can he not have written it for us - to read, to enjoy, to be moved by? Why can he not have created his Legendarium because he thought stories are valuable in and of themselves, not merely as means to some other end?

We can say that. From his words in the Foreword to LotR that was his sole intention. Except is wasn't always his sole intention. At one point he wanted to bring about the moral regeneration of England & saw his mythology as having that purpose. What if he had died after completing the Book of Lost Tales? We could still treat that work as an 'entertainment', but we wouldn't have Tolkien's 'authority' (given us in LotR) to treat it so - if we did treat it so we would be going against his wishes.

Yet, as I said, over the years his intention changed (well, apparently it changed. In the letters we see a writer who is pleased when his readers point up religious parallels, almost feeling he has 'succeeded' in some way) but while his intention changes, his stories essentially don't. At first they are 'moral' tales: not so much tales with specific morals, ie 'parables' as tales which are in conformity with the moral value system Tolkien wished to inculcate in the English. Later as his intention changes & his crest falls, the motivation is merely to entertain, to move, but the stories remain the same.

I'm not saying anyone is wrong to read the stories as 'stories' I do so myself. This thread is asking what Tolkien's motivation was, as opposed to the 'raw materials' he used. In partial answer to SPM's point about considering sources I'd point out that whatever Tolkien drew on his creation, the whole, is far greater than the sum of its parts. So we won't be able to fully account for the whole merely by finding out all the sources. In the analogy the man built a house - not a church, or a tower, or a shop, or a school. He built a specific thing, because he wanted that specific thing & no other thing. In that context, the 'raw materials' are less important than what is made with them. A house can be built of brick, wood, stone, wattle & daub, concrete, plastic or paper.

Tolkien may use imagery, or take inspiration, from say Jerusalem, Rome, Alexandria, for his descriptions of Minas Tirith, but his purpose is to get the reader to think of Minas Tirith as a Great City, not to make them put down LotR & pick up their Bible or a history of Rome. In the same way, he may use images & language in his account of Gandalf's fall which bring to mind everything from Christ's sacrifice to Ragnarok, but again his intention is not to get you to put down LotR at that point & pick up your Bible or your copy of the Eddas - it is to emphasise the significance of the event within the secondary world, because that event is the point - Gandalf's fall is not a 'parable', or a re-write of something else. Exactly as the Beowulf poet did in bringing in references to Finn or the Bible - those references are meant to point up, intensify, the incidents in the poem for the aid of the reader.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by davem

Tolkien may use imagery, or take inspiration, from say Jerusalem, Rome, Alexandria, for his descriptions of Minas Tirith, but his purpose is to get the reader to think of Minas Tirith as a Great City, not to make them put down LotR & pick up their Bible or a history of Rome. In the same way, he may use images & language in his account of Gandalf's fall which bring to mind everything from Christ's sacrifice to Ragnarok, but again his intention is not to get you to put down LotR at that point & pick up your Bible or your copy of the Eddas - it is to emphasise the significance of the event within the secondary world, because that event is the point - Gandalf's fall is not a 'parable', or a re-write of something else. Exactly as the Beowulf poet did in bringing in references to Finn or the Bible - those references are meant to point up, intensify, the incidents in the poem for the aid of the reader.

This is an excellent point.

As we've found out, Tolkien took his influences from far and wide. He was catholic (small c), meaning his influences were diverse. He was also extremely well read and intelligent, knowing that to put all your references in one basket would a. not be satisfactory for all readers, and b. would risk missing out on some wonderful image or icon from another time or culture.

What Tolkien uses are cultural touchstones. So Minas Tirith makes one person think of Jerusalem, it makes me think of something else quite grand (I often think of York or indeed Oxford). Tolkien is subtle, far too subtle to be finding x, y or z in his work and sitting back and saying "ah, so that's what it is" with certainty. I think he does this for a very good reason. He was creating a secondary world. Not our world. Not even our past world. But another one. And how often have we read rubbish fantasy with overly contrived places, names and natural landscapes. Tolkien instead takes things we all recognise (call them universal, archetypal, cultural touchstones, what you will) and weaves them into the fabric of that world to create something we will all recognise.

As an example, the Shire is on one level rural England in 1900, but it might also be rural England now, or in 1700, or it might be New England, or just a village somewhere that we remember from childhood. The point of The Shire is not that it is Sarehole in 1900, but a blue remembered hill as t'were, a place of comfort from deep in our memories.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

It seems to me that if we ask what Tolkien's legendarium was for, we are asking for it to be something it is not. So far a lot of comments appear to assume that there was some sort of common purpose behind The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which seems difficult to support; and if we try to tie in other works, such as Smith of Wootton Major or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil there are even more insurmountable difficulties in our path.

Tolkien began writing the stories that became The Silmarillion during the First World War, one of the earliest being a poem inspired by the Old English word Earendel. At this time he seems to have been writing a personal legend to put a story to the word. He said himself that a good name was often his main inspiration, and Tom Shippey has demonstrated very ably how philological problems often led Tolkien to build up fictional explanations. Later he composed other legends, such as that of Beren and Lúthien, which again seem to have been written for the sake of writing them, with no particular audience or any motive in mind other than to produce the story. This seems to have been his primary motivation until one day he relieved the tedium of marking examination scripts by writing 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'. Given the word 'hobbit', Tolkien had all the material he needed to write a story about one, and since he had children of his own it became a children's story with which to amuse them. It was only after several years that the question of an audience outside Tolkien's own circle became an issue, when he was persuaded to publish this first tale.

At that point in the late 1930s everything changed. After The Hobbit was published, he began systematically to revise the Silmarillion material with a view to publication. He was now trying to create a finalised and definitive version of his legends for public consumption. Having found that he had an audience, Tolkien wanted to share with them the stories which he had enjoyed creating. This seems to have been his major motivation: to publish the work that was closest to his heart. When Allen and Unwin asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and intimated that the Silmarillion was not what they wanted, Tolkien duly sat down and began to write a sequel; but as his drafts show us the import, structure, themes and connection with the earlier legends arose during composition, not as premeditated aims. Even when, after nearly twenty years, he finally published The Lord of the Rings, he was still looking for a way of getting his legends of the Eldar into print. The Silmarils were in his heart, as he said himself, and he wanted to share what he had created with the world.

The point, which really only echoes Lalwendë's post above, is that in every case other than The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had begun to write with no purpose other than to do just that. The stories were what mattered, not the audience or any sort of agenda, less still a single meaning. Work on The Silmarillion was tied up with his private languages, and all of his stories were involved in some way with his professional interests, but these were inevitable in that Tolkien the philologist, Tolkien the mythmaker, Tolkien the storyteller, Tolkien the father, Tolkien the Roman Catholic and Tolkien the composer of languages were all the same person. To return to the well-worn analogy of the man and the tower, Tolkien didn't know what sort of structure he wanted to build, or what it would look like. He liked building and happened to have a large stock of stone lying around. At first he thought, perhaps, of a shed to house some tools related to his work; then a workshop; then a gallery, perhaps even a cathedral, and finally a tower, so that the structure became all of these things and none. He used the stone that was to hand, but, like the Beowulf poet, he chose each piece and its setting for an aesthetic reason: because he liked its colour or shape, or because its carvings were pleasing to him. It is not profitable to pull Beowulf to pieces to find out more about Finn and Hengest, although coincidentally it contains a lot of what we do know about them; but the selection of that particular story for the particular place it occupies in the narrative has a specific and intentional effect, and unless we know more about the tragedy of Finnsburh we will not entirely understand that effect. In fact we will think, as the critics thought against whom Tolkien set himself , that the story is light, with little value other than what it tells us about other matters.

Similarly, it will profit us nothing to pull Tolkien's work to pieces to find out about Voluspá or The Wanderer, since we will not actually learn any more about those texts by so doing. We may, however, appreciate the effect that Tolkien was trying to achieve by considering a particular borrowing in its narrative setting. Tolkien used the materials that he did in the way that he did because he found the result aesthetically pleasing, and part of that effect for him, just as for the author of Beowulf, was the knowledge of the whole story and his personal appreciation of the borrowed material for its own sake.

So what is it for? Nothing. It all exists for and of itself and the act of creating it, except The Lord of the Rings, which arose out of a specific demand from Tolkien's publishers. Even that work was composed ad hoc, and eventually reflected more what Tolkien wanted to write than what Allen and Unwin wanted to publish. Although he often composed stories to entertain people close to him, particularly his own children, he was mainly writing things which gave him pleasure, and I think that a lot of his motivation in trying to publish the earlier Silmarillion was to share that pleasure with any like-minded people there might be. Once he knew without a shadow of doubt that there were a lot of like-minded people in the world, he began to worry about other issues: the religious orthodoxy of his creations, their internal consistency or simply what on earth was beyond that horizon. The idea that there was a single purpose or aim at all times and for all works is reaching too far.

[davem]

Well, the 'moral agenda' was there at the beginning - we only have to read Garth:

Some quotes from members of the TCBS given in Garth's book: (

(p14)Tolkien once compared the TCBS to the pre-Raphaelites, probably in response to the Brotherhood's preoccupation with restoring Medieval values in Art.

(p56) Tolkien maintained that the society was 'a great idea which has never become quite articulate'. Its two poles, the moral & the aesthetic, could be complemantary if kept in balance...While the Great Twin Brethren (Tolkien & Wiseman) had discussed the fundamentals of existence, neither of them had done so with Gilson or Smith. As a result, Tolkien declared, the potential these four 'amazing' individuals contained in combination remained unbroached.'

(p105) Gilson proposed that feminism would help by banishing the view that 'woman was just an apparatus for man's pleasure'

Smith declared that, through Art, the four would have to leave the world better than they had found it. Their role would be ' to drive from life, letters, the satge & society that dabbling in & hankering after the unpleasant sides & incidents in life & nature which have captured the larger & worser tastes in Oxford, London & the world ... To re-establish sanity, cleanliness, & the love of real & true beauty in everyone's breast.

Gilson told Tolkien that, sitting in Routh Road... 'I suddenly saw the TCBS in a blaze of Light as a great Moral reformer ...Engalnd purified of its loathsome moral disease by the TCBS spirit. It is an enormous task & we shall not see it accomplished in our lifetime.

(p 122) Rob Gilson: I like to say & to hear it said & to feel boldly that the glory of beauty & order & joyful contentment in the universe is the presence of God....GB Smith was closely attentive to Tolkien's vision & in some measure shared it....Smith saw no demarcation between holiness & Faerie.

(p136) TCBSianism had come to mean fortitude & courage & alliance. ...But the TCBS had absorbed patriotic duty into its constitution not simply because its members were all patriots. the war mattered because it was being fought 'so England's self draw breath'; so that the inspirations of 'the real days' of peace might survive'...

Gilson: 'I have faith that the TCBS may for itself - never for the world - than God for this war some day.

Tolkien already believed that the terrros to come might serve him in the visionary work of his life - if he survived.

(p174) Tolkien: 'Regarding, presumably, those same 'idle chatterers', the journalists& their readers whom Smith execrated, he wrote that 'No filter of true sentiment, no ray of feeling for beauty, women, history or their country shall reach them again.'

(p180) Smith (after Rob Gilson's death in battle) 'The group was spiritual in character, 'an influence on the state of being', & as such it transcended mortality; it was 'as permanently inseperable as Thor & his hammer'. the influence, he said, was, 'a tradition, which forty years from now will still be as strong to us (if we are alive, & if we are not) as it is today.

(Tolkien) 'the TCBS may have been all we dreamt - & its work in the end be done by three or two or one survivor ... To this I now pin my hopes..'

(p253) Smith had wanted them to leave the world a better place than when they found it, to 're-establish sanity, cleanliness, & the love of real & true beauty' through art embodying TCBSian principles.

(p308) 'The 24 year old Tolkien had believed just as strongly in the dream shared by the TCBS, & felt that they 'had been granted some spark of fire ... that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world

(p309) But The Lord of the Rings, the masterpiece that was published a decade & a half later, stands as the fruition of the TCBSian dream, a light drawn from ancient sources to illumnate a darkening world'.

I commented on this in another thread:

So right from the start of the Lost Tales, Tolkien is attempting to cast the TCBSian philosophy into artistic form. It culminates in the publication of LotR - at least during his lifetime. So, its not, or was never intended to be, simply a story. Its not an allegory in the strict sense, but the Legendarium could be seen as a mythologisation of TCBSianism vs the 'world'.

If there is an underlying 'truth' it is perhaps the 'truth' that the TCBS believed in - & so we're back to the question of what 'truth' Tolkien is revealing to us in his works - some kind of 'absolute', archetypal TRUTH, or simply what he felt to be true about the world, & we have to ask ourselves how close the two are.

Wherever we come down, its clear that whatever he was doing, he was attempting to do more than simply 'entertain' readers, because the TCBS was born in the hearts & minds of idealistic young men in peacetime & blasted apart on the Somme. Tolkien's mythology came into being during the horrors of mechanised warfare. But we enter it (or most of us do) as the TCBS would have originally, & it represents for us, as it would have for them, before the war, as a place of escape, of beauty, excitement, sadness, so we simply cannot read it as Tolkien would have read it himself when he came back to it to comment on its meaning for him. For us, it will have no 'meaning' beyond itself, & wahtever meaning we find in it for ourselves & our lives in this world, they will not, cannot, be the same as they were for Tolkien, so, our interpretations of it are as valid as his.

Which is not to say that he didn't intend us to find TCBSian values in it, & to find them more attractive than what was on offer in the 'primary world'. So, I'd say the book certainly contains deliberate 'meaning', that there is an intention on Tolkien's part that we should find in it waht he wants us to find, & also that he wants us to agree with him - but we never really could, because we're our own people, living our own lives, with our own experiences which we take to Middle Earth with us, & bring back out transformed.

Hence, there was a very clear intent for the Legendarium on Tolkien's part - it was to be 'in service' of TCBS-ianism. Later the intent changes (or disapppears). I go back though, to his comments that he 'was trying to discover 'what really happened' in writing LotR. If nothing else his 'intent' for the work could be said to be an accurate represntation of something which he percieved, or at least believed to be, 'external' to himself.

BAck to the point on 'sources' & the way he used them. Clearly, as Lalwende stated, he was using 'cultural touchstones' examples which would be recognisable & easily understood by his potential audience. In the first draft of FoG we find:

Glory dwelt in that City of Seven Names, & its ruin was the most dread of all the sacks of cities on the face of the earth. Nor Bablon, nor Ninwi, nor the Towers of Trui, nor the many takings of Rum that is greatest among men, saw such terror as fell that day upon Amon Gwareth....

So he is using references to Babylon, Nineveh, Troy & Rome, but these stories are not 'sources' but cultural references - & that's the danger in superficial 'source-hunting'.