The Return of the Blogging

Sorry to have been absent for so long, but for the first time since before graduate school started, I decided to avoid doing new work between Christmas and New Years. I did grade a stack of papers and exams that was over 20 inches high, but other than that I was slack, spending most of my time playing with my daughter. No one gets into Christmas like a 3-year-old.

So I may have missed out on some good discussions of Return of the King. But Andrea Harris' review of Return of the King is pretty much what I would have written: she points to the same problems I thought marred the film (particularly the lowest-common-denominator character of Denethor; he should be a Lear, not a typical drooling villain from central casting). I think that the overall flaws in Jackson's execution are that in many places the screenwriter and the director didn't respect their audience enough: they could have left things challenging and complex, but they over-simplified. Thus the Frodo / Sam fight about the missing lembas (really a stupid 'Sam is fat' joke drawn out way too much) instigated by Gollum was far more shallow than necessary; the audience would have just understood a real fight simple about trusting/not-trusting Gollum (though, as I've said before, no one is offering me 300 million dollars to make movies). But RoK was a fine movie and I think I would have really loved it if I didn't know LotR so well.

Now, just in case you were thinking that a professor lives a life of luxury, I have to: finish entering changes in the proof copy of Tolkien Studies volume I and send to the printer; edit and re-layout my grammar book; enter the editor's suggested changes for the manuscript of How Tradition Works (and the editor is a genius so she's almost certainly given me a lot of good stuff to enter and revise); update all of my websites; revise my syllabi for Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer for next semester; write an article on Tolkien's Beowulf translations (without quoting them) that's due in three days for a collections coming out from Western Michigan University Press; give a talk at the University of South Carolina on January 15. All of these things must be done before classes start on January 27.

Quick news: NPR Today

I'll be on NPR's Talk of the Nation today in a segment that runs from 3:00-4:00 p.m. So you can hear me talk about JRRT. More importantly, Ursula Le Guin will also be on the show!!!!!!
I'm feeling a little star-struck...

Beowulf and Christianity (and by extension, JRRT and same)
Andrea Harris in this entry points out a number of flaws in some superficial 'Christian' readings of Tolkien. She also mentions that she wrote a paper on Christian themes in Beowulf, and one of her commenters mentions a hostile reception by Anglo-Saxonists of a Christian-focused Beowulf translation.

I thought it might be useful to mention what exactly we do know about the Christianity of Beowulf and what Tolkien thought about it, since I've read more than a few things on the web that are, well, confused.

Beowulf the poem, as we have it (i.e., in its manuscript form, not some postulated earlier version), is definitely written by a Christian. However, there is not a single reference to Christ, the Trinity, the resurrection, or the New Testament, which is very strange for an Anglo-Saxon Christian poem. The only real proof of a Christian (as opposed to a general monotheistic) poet is the inclusion of Cain and Abel (and, strangely enough, "Cain" is spelled wrong both times the word appears in the manuscript. More on that in some other post).

As Tolkien points out, the references to God aren't to Christ or specifically the Christian God, but to The Ruler, The Lord, The Measurer, etc. Why would a Christian poet, who knew about Cain and Abel, do this?

Tolkien's explanation has never been bettered: the poet was a Christian, but he was setting his story back in the pre-Christian past. He knew that the people in his story weren't Christian, but he also believed that Christian truths explained the way the universe worked. So he can say that The Ruler determined the outcome of a battle even if he knows that Beowulf wasn't Christian himself.

Now part of the brilliance of this interpretation is that it can't really be disproved by any one example. Tolkien even notes a few places he thinks that the poet has failed in tone (when pagan Hrethel is said to have "chosen God's light", i.e., died, Tolkien says that the phrase has "escaped from Christian poetry). And Tolkien thought that lines 175-188, which sound, to the ear familiar with Anglo-Saxon poetry, much more like a Christian homiletic piece than do any other lines in Beowulf, had been added to the poem at a later date. So the idea of a poet who is deliberately writing a kind of 'historical fantasy' is still preserved.

Now I think it's not a great stretch to suggest that Tolkien was doing much of the same thing in his work. If you look at the Athrabeth na Finrod Andreth, which is in Morgoth's Ring in the History of Middle-earth, you see Tolkien suggesting that men, back in the First Age, had a kind of prophesy that one day the creator would enter his own creation for the purpose of healing it. That day hadn't happened yet, so Tolkien was setting his Middle-earth stories before the incarnation. Thus he doesn't mention Christ, etc. Just like the Beowulf poet.

Andrea mentions Christian themes in Beowulf, which is a slightly different kettle of fish. I think Tolkien, and many scholars, would argue that the poet put those Christian themes there, but you actually don't need that hypothesis if you're a Christian who truly believes: since in the Christian worldview, the world works in a certain way, you'd expect to see those workings be universal. Similarly, physics is universal, so someone who knows no physics could describe, say, the behavior of a spring and we'd recognize the phenonemon. Thus if someone described, say, mercy, 'sapientia and fortitudo,' forgiveness, etc., a believing Christian could say that these fit into the way the world works.

As for the Beowulf poet, I think that he was a Christian looking back on the pagan past. Actually, I think he was a tenth-century monk revising an old and received poem, but that's the kind of assertion that starts bar-fights (or at least beer-throwing) among Anglo-Saxonists. And as for Tolkien, I think that his Christianity could not help but influence the world he created, but that looking for a didactic Christian message that was somehow hidden in the Lord of the Rings is perhaps not the most critically useful approach.

Also: Tolkien discovered Finnish in college and he never became fluent in the language, though he used its phonology as a basis for Quenya.

Also: I'm going to be talking about Tolkien and WWI on National Public Radio's "The Talk of the Nation;" we're taping tomorrow, so I'm guessing it'll be broadcast on Friday. I was on WBUR today; link when I find one.

GOTF in Toronto

Just got back from the Gathering of the Fellowship in Toronto. Over 2000 people, about 75% of them in full costume, attended. Over 100 showed up one afternoon to hear me talk about Beowulf. It was a great experience, more professionally run than all but the ISAS-level conferences, in a beautiful location and with wonderful people. I wish I'd been able to stay longer. Anthony and Jessica -- thank you for inviting me. I got to meet some great people, including my favorite Tolkien illustrator of all time, Ted Nasmith, and I was able to bring the importance and beauty of Beowulf to a whole new audience. Great, exciting stuff.

After the reaction to the OE reading, I definitely need to do the recording of the Beowulf MP3 sometime soon (my idea is to record the entire poem and then allow it to be dowloaded in sections; I'll be talking to the college radio station.

Did some interviews with Christian Science Monitor, WBUR, and a few others today and have an NPR interview on Talk of the Nation tomorrow between 2 and 3. Will post more later when I dig out from under the avalanche of email and pre-Christmas (and pre- seminar students over for dinner) work I have to do. And I have to figure out how a baby grand piano makes its way up to the second floor tomorrow....

Tedious Topic: Tolkien and Race
I normally try not to feed the trolls, and there's more trolling going on over here, but I'll take one more swing at this annoying, shallow topic.

I've previously shown, in this post, that the charge that Tolkien was personally a racist is completely contradicted by biography and published writing.

But there are actually three different charges mixed in with the tiresome 'Tolkien is a racist' attack. The first is the intentional, discussed in the links above. The second is only a little harder to counter: it's that the work itself is racist because readers can make links between, say, orcs and African Americans (my African-American wife and daughter have, well, strong feelings that this comparison is not polite or accurate). I think it's pretty simple to show the origins of the orcs as tortured elves, their lack of humanity, and, most importantly, this distinction from the Southrons, who could be matched up with people of African descent, shows that the case for orcs=black people is pretty weak.

Likewise the foolishness about the blond, blue-eyed overlords doesn't quite work if you actually read the books. Almost all the elves are supposed to be dark-haired and gray eyed (Galadriel is a major exception due to her ancestry; more on her later). Likewise the "high men" of Gondor. It's the "middle men" of Rohan who are Nordic blonds. [n.b.: there are some complexities here that I'll deal with in a moment].

But there is a third thread in the racism charge that is harder to deal with only because it is cast an an irrefutable charge: Tolkien is racist because he posits entire races of creatures that can only be dealt with by genocide (orcs; trolls). Q.E.D., Tolkien is promoting the genocide of 'inferior' or 'evil' races.

I think Tolkien obviates this problem by making the evil 'races' exist without true free will. That is, they came about either via the torture of elves or, and this is the latter, more developed explanation in the Athrabeth na Finrod Andreth, they proceeded from Morgoth like icebergs calving from a glacier. The amount of evil in the world remained the same, but Morgoth reduced himself by breaking off dragons, orcs, trolls, etc.

The real source of new evil in Middle-earth, then, is from Men who can be converted to evil through the mis-use of their free will. Since they are Men, the same 'race' as the other men, racial genocide isn't an option.

There are still problems here, because Tolkien ended up, through the power of literature, giving the orcs more "personality" than their metaphysical natures warranted (see Shippey, "Orcs, Wraiths and Wights" for the best discussion). All of a sudden it's not so clear cut that exterminating them is morally unproblematic. But that's a good thing about literature: as Iris Murdoch said, it forces you to admit that other people really exist. Frodo says that he pities even Sauron's slaves, and he is right to. But that doesn't mean that they don't have to be killed when they are a threat.

Thus I would say that if you want to read the Lord of the Rings as advocating genocide, I can't stop you. But I think your reading is shallow and uninformed, and I wonder at the kind of experiences of life and literature had by people who seem so intent on applying theories (political or otherwise) that they miss the great and beautiful individuality of the works that they are not really reading.

[*the complexities of the blond overlord class in elves comes because while 90% of the Noldor and Sindar in Middle-earth are dark-haired, the golden-haired strain of the House of Finwe comes from the Vanyar, the "higher" kindred of the elves. Feanor is jealous of Fingolfin, his younger half-brother, in part because half of Fingolfin's blood is from the "higher" caste among the elves. Thus, while there aren't any real "blond overlords" in the Lord of the Rings, you can find them in the Silmarillion (though the Vanyar pretty much just sit at the feet of the gods and sing; not much overlording for them...).]

The Wisdom of Students

In the final meeting of my senior seminar on Tolkien and Le Guin, I asked students to make some kind of judgment about the value of fantasy literature, particularly these two authors. Now these students are senior English majors; they don't just read fantasy by any means; they've had a full complement of courses in the traditional canon and beyond.

Yet to a one, they thought that Tolkien belonged right in with all of the other great writers they had studied. "He's trying to do different sorts of things than they are," one said. "So he set himself some major aesthetic goals, and met them. Isn't that the definition of a great writer?"

Another student talked about Tolkien's heroes: "We've got all of these books, hundreds of books, with anti-heroes or failed heroes: Gatsby, Absalom, Absalom! Beloved, Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye... but can the anti-hero even work when you haven't had a regular hero? And is there even a regular hero in Tolkien? Aragorn, maybe, but Frodo and Gandalf really save the world (one directly, one through inspiration), and neither of them fits the hero template. If Normal Mailer is a genius for coming up with an anti-hero, isn't Tolkien more of a genius for coming up with a hero without supernatual powers who also isn't an anti-social, violent, destructive, self-involved jerk?

I love my students.