Fantasy

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

You realise how long it is since you've regularly posted when you try & rep people & find you can't ...anyway..

One argument is that the only responsibility a fantasy writer has is to create a convincing secondary world, internally consistent & true to its own laws, but.. what if a writer does their job so well that they convince a reader that war is cool & exciting & that, if death results it is a beautiful & poignant thing, rather than ugly & dirty butchery? Or that smoking is an entirely safe activity?

Is a writer of Fantasy literature absolved of any responsibility for such things, in the way a writer of other kinds of fiction is not?

Allow me to amplify on Tolkien a bit, and then I will reply directly.

As I inferred in a previous post, perhaps the time period in which Tolkien was writing precluded such graphic presentations of reality (whether in a fantasy or fictional presentation). Editorial boards and censors certainly were more prevalent than they are now (consider the present ludicrous movie rating system as the afterbirth of more stringent earlier censorship). James Joyce's Ulysses, first published in its entirety in 1922 was banned in the U.S. as pornographic and obscene (although nowadays it is merely annoying), which a district court judge didn't overrule until 1932.

If one looks at the movies of the time period, the sanitization is near complete in regards to war represented in films (Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn's blades are not even required to puncture their enemies' bodies to cause instantaneous death). Ethically speaking, wholesale lopping of heads and body parts was forbidden during most of the first half of the 20th century, and it seems certain Tolkien would have to subscribe to some level of self-control in the matter of graphic presentation (even though, as Alatar pointed out, there is the head-lobbing of the orcs at Minas Tirith).

Another classic fantasy of the 1st half of the 20th Century, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, also doesn't dwell on gorgets being knit to necks by axes or knights struggling on with arrows through their testicles or through their cheeks or noses (as detailed in the chronicles of Dom Pero Nino, a famous 15th century Castilian knight). The time period and the taste of the readership (or perhaps more so the taste of the censorship) must be taken into account for the level of graphic violence or sexuality presented in a novel (or movie).

Now, to your posits, davem.

I don't believe the writer of a fantasy (or fiction) is bound to present factual data in a graphic manner, nor is a writer bound by a sense of morality or ethics to maintain an idealized view of 'the good' or the 'correct' because such ideas are transient and relative even geographically and individually during any specific era. The writer may present truths or lies depending on his/her perspective in an effort to sway the reader to their point of view, or may try to impress upon the reader an altered vision of reality based on the author's perception, whether for political, religious or emotional ends, or a writer may simply create based on their personal convictions and store of knowledge and not care at all if what is published meets anyone else's criteria.

During WWI H.G. Wells referred to Germany as 'Kiplingistic', obviously equating the Kaiser's roughshod imperialism in terms of Kipling's jingoistic glory of war. I mention that because I saw you posted a poem elsewhere on this forum regarding the death of Kipling's son in WWI. Who then was right, Wells, with his aversion to senseless war and foolhardy glory, or Kipling's reverence of righteous war and patriotism?

So, in the end, a writer is not absolved nor seeks absolution for what he writes, his work is accepted or not accepted on whether or not it is read. There are many works of literature that were derisively panned or ignominously ignored during an author's lifetime that are now considered classics, and conversely, many great classics are now considered tedious, overwrought and dated. In the end, most writers who cater directly to an audience are viewed as hacks, while authors who followed their own convictions are considered visionary. *shrugs*

[davem]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

I don't believe the writer of a fantasy (or fiction) is bound to present factual data in a graphic manner, nor is a writer bound by a sense of morality or ethics to maintain an idealized view of 'the good' or the 'correct' because such ideas are transient and relative even geographically and individually during any specific era.

Now I've found a moment to get back to this thread....

In his book on Towton Christopher Gravett speaks of bodies found in a grave pit from the battlefield:

The skeletons demonstrate the damage of which medieval weapons are capable, probably in many cases against partially unarmoured bodies. The fact that arrows can punch through bone reinforces the visual record of contemporary manuscripts & shows, for those who look carefully, that flesh was cut through like butter as shafts buried themselves almost up to the fletchings in unprotected bodies. Such wounds inflicted on war-horses helps demonstrate that here was one reason why armoured riders frequently dismounted in battle. Secondly, multiple wounds & possible mutilation show the ferocity that is unleashed in a battle when adrenalin is pumping & comrades are falling. In the bitter climate of the time, with scores to settle, there was little charity shown to a wounded foe. The other item of note is that several of the skeletons exhibit previous wounds that had healed up. Here were men who in some cases had experienced the horrors of close combat & suffered for it , yet had faced the same agonies again on that freezing, bleak field on Palm Sunday. (Gravett 'Towton 1461')

The highlighted section reinforces the point I'm making here - men behave in a less than 'ideal' way on the battlefield - adrenalin, anger, desire for vengeance all make otherwise ordinary, decent blokes behave like orcs. Yet in Tolkien's world only the Orcs behave like orcs. Knights in armour bearing shining swords may look cool on screen or in paintings, but anyone who has seen actual armour & genuine medival weaponry can have no doubts that they are designed to hurt, maim & kill real human beings. A knight in shining armour in a pre-Raphaelite painting is a beautiful image. A man at arms on the battle-field bearing down on a partially armoured footsoldier & about to stove in his skull with a pole-axe is not. Maybe Tolkien felt the medieval world (& by extension medieval warfare) was more 'civilised' than the meat grinder of the Somme, but actually there was little difference in terms of behaviour, only in terms of the technology used to dispatch the enemy. Tolkien clearly knew this, but chose not to acknowledge it - chose, in fact, to say the opposite. The point is, one doesn't have to describe in graphic detail bereaved & vengeance driven Gondorians hacking apart & mutilating Orcs & Southrons - one can simply state that they did it. But in Tolkien's world they simply didn't 'descend' to that level. Yet, given what we know of human nature, we have to say 'only in Middle-earth'.....

EDIT

Its not, I think, that Tolkien glorifies war so much as 'sanitises' the rough end of it. One example that springs instantly to mind is the death of Boromir. The fact that he dies pierced by arrows means that when Faramir sees the Elven boat bearing him pass by he looks as if he is sleeping peacefully & thus even in death he retains dignity. He does not die on the recieving end of an Orc poleaxe which takes off half his face so that Faramir sees him looking like he died an agonising death, choking on his own blood & broken teeth . We don't encounter any of our heroes with ugly, badly healed facial wounds.

WARNING - THESE LINKS SHOW THE EFFECT OF MEDIEVAL WEAPONS ON THE SKULLS OF VICTIMS FROM THE GRAVE PITS AT TOWTON. AVOID LOOKING IF YOU'RE AT ALL SQUEAMISH.

Poleaxe blow to face http://www.the-exiles.org/Images/lej...xe/image11.gif
Various head injuries from pole weapons/swords http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/archsci/d...resgrp/towton/

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

Its not, I think, that Tolkien glorifies war so much as 'sanitises' the rough end of it. One example that springs instantly to mind is the death of Boromir. The fact that he dies pierced by arrows means that when Faramir sees the Elven boat bearing him pass by he looks as if he is sleeping peacefully & thus even in death he retains dignity. He does not die on the recieving end of an Orc poleaxe which takes off half his face so that Faramir sees him looking like he died an agonising death, choking on his own blood & broken teeth . We don't encounter any of our heroes with ugly, badly healed facial wounds.

I would agree that Tolkien offers a sanitization of war, but as I mentioned previously, I think that has a lot to do with 1) the heavier censorship and higher moral codes of the time, and 2) the 'dignified' presentation of a a fierce faery epic in the medieval mold (like TH White's Once and Future King, or its precursor Le Mort D'Arthur), which purges the utterly gross from its heroes, and does not dwell on the true mayhem and obscene violence that was medieval war. Another instance from an earlier period, Shakespeare's Henry V, presents a glorified version of Agincourt as well, considering a great number of France's preux chevaliers died not of battle wounds inflicted by Henry's noble few, but rather horribly drowning face down in mud, unable to rise from the muck due to their armor, or by stealthy kerns jabbing their daggers through the visors of the fallen.

I suppose in regards to a medieval faery tale, many readers of the time (and presently for that matter) do not necessarily want to dwell on arrows ripping through testicles, gorgets knit to necks by axes, and brave knights walking about dazedy with their disemboweled entrails dripping in their bloody hands. We really don't see such presentations of graphic violence in fantasy literature until the 1970's (like Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), or in films of a medieval nature even later on, like Braveheart (if you remember Excalibur from the 70's, it rarely even displays any blood on those ultra-shiny metal coifs).

[davem]

But (& maybe this is just me) I never get the sense that the kind of 'attrocities' we've both noted (including at Towton both noses & ears being hacked off fallen - but not necessarily dead- opponents) are not commited by the 'good guys'. Again, I'm not asking for graphic descriptions of such attrocities in Tolkien's work - I don't think that would work - but I am asking about the absence of such behaviour on one side. Tolkien's Men are good, upright & entirely moral even in battle while watching their best friends hacked down by Orcs. And if a warrior can fall under a hail of arrows (no graphic desriptions of blood spurting or internal organs bursting) he could also fall by being 'struck in the face' by a poleaxe or halberd (again no more 'graphic' description than that would be needed). Deaths in Tolkien seem to be overly clean & neat &, while tragic, are not really shocking or disturbing to the reader - in reality just about every death in a medieval battle would be horrible.

Death may be Tolkien's theme, & the inevitability of it is clearly laid out before the reader, but the fact of ugly, violent dying is avoided not, I repeat, not because Tolkien refuses to indulge in graphic descriptions of killing, but because Tolkien's characters all tend to die clean & tidy deaths - & usually live long enough to make a moving final speech...

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

Death may be Tolkien's theme, & the inevitability of it is clearly laid out before the reader, but the fact of ugly, violent dying is avoided not, I repeat, not because Tolkien refuses to indulge in graphic descriptions of killing, but because Tolkien's characters all tend to die clean & tidy deaths - & usually live long enough to make a moving final speech...

Yes, but all such Tolkienish requiems, dirges, soliloquoys, threnodies, elegies and epitaphs are due to his adherence to the classical form. Here we have an 'old school' Oxford Don steeped in Beowulf and Arthurian cycle translations (and more important to my point, his love of Greek drama in his youth); thus, his prose was considered archaic in style even when it was first published (and almost alien to the bulk of fiction produced in the 40's and 50's), and hence, I suppose, its timeless quality.

Take Greek tragedy, for instance. From what I can recall of my brief encounters with Aristotle (I would add Racine and Corneille, but I'm not sure if Tolkien was interested in French tragedy), noble characters do not indulge in the gross and they do not knowingly commit reprehensible acts (these vile acts, such as cold-blooded murder, are generally reserved for the nemesis of the piece). Evil is never rewarded (which is very Tolkienesque) and those with noble character retain this inherent quality even when facing death or worse. There is a reason Tolkien coined the term eucatastrophe from the Greek.

Boromir is a near perfect Greek tragic hero, don't you think? Boromir exhibits the four principal characteristics of a tragic hero: 1. He is of noble birth, 2. He has a tragic flaw (hamartia), 3. He has a reversal (a catastrophe), and 4. he undergoes a catharthis, or recognition, a realization of his own flaw that caused his reversal. And, as is usual in Greek tragedy, his recognition comes too late to prevent his succumbing to the reversal.

Such attention to classical form leads inevitably to the death speeches (Shakespeare's plays are chock full of them), the lack of viciousness and sanguineness in the noble characters (like Aragorn or Faramir), the inevitable fall of evil characters, and the many tragic heroes in Tolkien's work that follow the Greek example (Turin and Boromir as prime examples).

I really don't think Tolkien had it in himself to portray violence of a truly sustained and graphic nature. It was just not part of his literary experience. And perhaps because he personally experienced the horrors of WWI, it stratified his reliance on classical forms, whereas other authors and poets of the WWI era sought catharsis through venting that horror, and thus are considered more 'modern' than Tolkien.

[davem]

Not much time for a long reply at the moment, but I did want to just throw out the following -

You're right in everything you say about Tolkien's motivation, about the sources he draws on & how hw has used them. But

Tolkien had seen real warfare. He knew how men behave in battle, & principally, he knew that when men fight & die such deaths are not clean & tidy, but dirty, painful & ugly, & usually leave the victim neither time nor capacity for a noble speech. A real life Boromir would in reality have been more likely to die screaming for his mother & spewing blood- & the sound of tens of thousands of such death screams (not just from men, but from animals too) across the Pelennor would have added an extra hellish dimension.

The real point is - Tolkien may be true to his traditional sources but he is lying through his teeth when it comes to the reality of death in battle - & he must have known he was lying . Does the fact that he was writing a 'fantasy' novel excuse him? Was he presenting the opposing view to a WWI veteran like Wilfrid Owen - or was he trying to pretend that he hadn't written what he did? One can right about a morally justified war, but ought one to lie about such a simple fact of human nature that when men fight & kill in battle they do horrible things to each other, & that an arrow in the gut, or a sword slash to the face, is a vicious & ugly way to die. Is such a 'fantasy' morally justifiable after the Somme?

Tolkien's 'sin' is not that he fails to depict violent death in a graphic way - its that he goes to the other extreme & shows it as too clean & neat.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

The real point is - Tolkien may be true to his traditional sources but he is lying through his teeth when it comes to the reality of death in battle - & he must have known he was lying . Does the fact that he was writing a 'fantasy' novel excuse him? Was he presenting the opposing view to a WWI veteran like Wilfrid Owen - or was he trying to pretend that he hadn't written what he did? One can right about a morally justified war, but ought one to lie about such a simple fact of human nature that when men fight & kill in battle they do horrible things to each other, & that an arrow in the gut, or a sword slash to the face, is a vicious & ugly way to die. Is such a 'fantasy' morally justifiable after the Somme?

Tolkien's 'sin' is not that he fails to depict violent death in a graphic way - its that he goes to the other extreme & shows it as too clean & neat.

Yes, clearly Tolkien took another path than Wilfrid Owen, Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon:

(Excerpt from 'Counter-attack', 1918)
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,— the jolly old rain!

(Excerpt from 'Suicide in the Trenches', 1918)
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

I suppose, in retrospect, that it is for the very lack of graphic violence and dwelling on the gross and horrific that Tolkien receives such adulation, and a wide demographic of readers. I doubt very much that Tolkien's work would find its way into grade school (or primary school) libraries if he dwelt on clumps of brains and clots of hair and sodden buttocks like Sassoon. It is the restrained nature of the presentation that allows it to be enjoyed by eight year-olds and eighty year-olds alike.

I don't recall him referring to this topic specifically in his letters, but I'll give them a brief perusal over the weekend to see if he offered any clarifications regarding his depictions of battle or violence.

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by davem

Its not, I think, that Tolkien glorifies war so much as 'sanitises' the rough end of it. One example that springs instantly to mind is the death of Boromir. The fact that he dies pierced by arrows means that when Faramir sees the Elven boat bearing him pass by he looks as if he is sleeping peacefully & thus even in death he retains dignity. He does not die on the recieving end of an Orc poleaxe which takes off half his face so that Faramir sees him looking like he died an agonising death, choking on his own blood & broken teeth . We don't encounter any of our heroes with ugly, badly healed facial wounds.

I've thought of this often and always intended to respond to this post, since I read the myth of Cuchulainn. (sp?) The seminal mythic story in regard to this Celtic hero is that he goes into a berserker rage and single handedly kills a whole army, leaving bodies six deep on the battle field. The story is told in a way that revels in the gory details. Compare this to tales from the Nordic mythos. There is violence, but there is not revelry; rather, tragedy. The details serve to heighten the emotional intensity of the story rather than excite one to revel in the amazing (and happy - for the hero) effects of a berserker rage on the hero.

In other words, it seems to me that what is being called "realism" here is not actually more real than a so-called "sanitised" description. Tolkien writes in an essentially Nordic mode, if you will, because that's the kind of story he is writing. It is not Celtic in the sense of reveling in gore.