Art! - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

A Little Green · 09-07-2009, 08:54 AM

Beauty itself is a purpose. Of course it is. Whether Tolkien's work has another purpose than beauty is something known by the author alone. (And he has, I think, denied there being another purpose.) We can, however, argue about whether a purpose given to his work later and by other people is a purpose in the same way the original purpose is.

What I find interesting as well is that we seem to have a need to make sense of things by discussing things like "Do Balrogs have wings?" or "Why didn't the eagles just carry Frodo to Mount Doom?" or "What was Tom Bombadil?" When I see a thread like that appear, it always pops into my mind that LotR was, after all, a book, a fiction, a stunning work of art. There is no answer to questions like that because Tolkien didn't answer them in his book. Nor do we need those answers, necessarily, to enjoy the art, the beauty, the poetry of it all. In fact, to me it's rather the same as telling me that something beautiful is actually a chemical reaction in my brain. A killjoy. An attempt to analyse and make sense of a thing of beauty, whether it is an art guy explaining why some element in a painting is in the specific place it happens to be in or a scientist explaining how the sea is made of H2O molecules, is something I can't help but regard as interesting but dull - something that takes away the mystery. For myself, I don't want to know if there was a moral teaching behind LotR. I don't want to know whether Balrogs have wings.

09-07-2009, 08:54 AM	#9
A Little Green Leaf-clad Lady Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 1,571	Beauty itself is a purpose. Of course it is. Whether Tolkien's work has another purpose than beauty is something known by the author alone. (And he has, I think, denied there being another purpose.) We can, however, argue about whether a purpose given to his work later and by other people is a purpose in the same way the original purpose is. What I find interesting as well is that we seem to have a need to make sense of things by discussing things like "Do Balrogs have wings?" or "Why didn't the eagles just carry Frodo to Mount Doom?" or "What was Tom Bombadil?" When I see a thread like that appear, it always pops into my mind that LotR was, after all, a book, a fiction, a stunning work of art. There is no answer to questions like that because Tolkien didn't answer them in his book. Nor do we need those answers, necessarily, to enjoy the art, the beauty, the poetry of it all. In fact, to me it's rather the same as telling me that something beautiful is actually a chemical reaction in my brain. A killjoy. An attempt to analyse and make sense of a thing of beauty, whether it is an art guy explaining why some element in a painting is in the specific place it happens to be in or a scientist explaining how the sea is made of H2O molecules, is something I can't help but regard as interesting but dull - something that takes away the mystery. For myself, I don't want to know if there was a moral teaching behind LotR. I don't want to know whether Balrogs have wings. __________________ "But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."