Tolkien the Metafictionist

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

I feel this argument is quite, er, problematized itself. As it is, the “Translator Conceit” can be readily– a bit too readily, perhaps– used to explain just about any inconsistency or error in the text. Taking it a step further, arguing (as it seems) that such inconsistencies are deliberate, all part of some complex authorial meta-strategy... well, it just seems like that's giving Tolkien the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card. Mistakes? No, no, he meant to do that...

I quite agree.

I first encountered this form of argument in connection to Peter Jackson’s film The Fellowship of the Ring in a web forum where I pointed out what I saw as a flaw in Fellowship. The portrayal of Frodo and Arwen being pursued by the Nazgûl did not hang together. There were shots of Frodo and the Nazgûl in different arrangements which contradicted one another. In one shot, two Nazgûl, the outermost two, were actually abreast of Frodo.

No-one contradicted me on what I saw. But one poster insisted that Jackson must have intended to show a symbolic representation of the pursuit rather than a realistic representation of the pursuit. Therefore I had misunderstood Jackson’s portrayal. Therefore the error was mine, not Jackson’s.

I don’t claim that Jackson’s error—and I do still see it as an error—was nothing more than a minor continuity error. Tolkien himself made minor continuity errors, many of them corrected in latter edition of The Lord of the Rings by himself or his son Christopher, most recently in the republications of 2004 and 2005. Some of these most recently corrected supposed errors involve changes to the text that produce text that differs from that of the first publication or J. R. R. Tolkien’s original manuscript, for example the change of the number of ponies that accompany the hobbits into the Old Forest from six to five.

These corrections, made by Hammond and Scull, have been done very conservatively, with permission in all cases by Christopher Tolkien, and involve changes which at most involve changing punctuation, or changing capitalization, or replacement of a single word, and in one case the insertion of a footnote. In cases when there might be any doubt of the correctness of the change, Hammond and Scull also indicate in their book The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion why the earlier text is felt to be in error.

One may perhaps look at the Sherlock Holmes canon in which the supposed writer of most of it embeds his account with phrases such as “due suppression”, “any details which would help the reader to identify the college would be injudicious or offensive”, “a carefully guarded account”, “somewhat vague in certain details”, “my reticence”, “I am obliged to be particularly careful to avoid any indiscretion”, and “no confidence will be abused” which indicates that the supposed true account upon which the story is based has in general been fictionalized in the story the author has provided. Such open pretense allows the reader to at least pretend to accept the account he or she is reading as mostly true but also allows one to understand why there is no trace of a private detective named “Sherlock Holmes” or of a residence numbered 221 Baker Street before 1930 when the name Baker Street was extended to include Upper Baker Street.

Similarly in The Lord of the Rings the more complex changes which are needed to explicate the existing text need no more to explain them than that Frodo or one of his informants made an occasional error, or that the English author J. R. R. Tolkien has done so.

For the fox which observes the hobbits sleeping in Fellowship chapter 3 one may imagine the Tolkien just invented this, or perhaps that the supposed original Red Book recounted that Pippin observed footprints of the fox on awakening leading to hobbit speculation about what the fox may have thought of finding three hobbit asleep out-of-doors. In fact Tolkien really invented everything in the book, but is fun to make a game about what supposedly really happened, as long as one is aware that it is only a game based on the supposition that The Lord of the Rings is based on a real story.