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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5765284" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Sure. Tolkien has a lot going on in the story, and its easy to miss a lot of the substance in the big epic sweep of events and the detailed word pictures he spends so much time painting. Also, I think that the sort of literary analysis that we are trained to do leaves us rather ill-prepared for somone like Tolkien - even if we think to do it during an 'escapist' adventure story.</p><p></p><p>Ioreth is an old 'wise' woman who works in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith, and she has a couple of minor roles in the story. Her larger purpose in the story - beyond providing comedy - is to provide a ground level viewpoint of the big epic events going on around her. She, along with a few other common voices, is our representative in the story. After the culmination of the quest and the ring is destroyed, one of the first things that happens is the coronation of Aragorn as the king. Now Ioreth has a cousin who lives in an outlying village who has, throughout the course of events, been hiding in the safety of the hills far from the war, and now that's she has come to the big city for the coronation she wants a recap of the main events and players. So, during the coronation, Ioreth tries to keep her abreast of things. Of course, since Ioreth herself has only a limited viewpoint, in addition to enlarging her own importance, she gets almost all of it wrong. </p><p></p><p>In particular, Ioreth in describing Frodo's role in the story says, paraphrased down, "You must not judge him by his stature, for he went alone into Mordor with only his squire and defeated Sauron in a duel, and threw him down and his tower." </p><p></p><p>What Tolkien is pointing out through the tale of Ioreth is how we as humans prefer to view heroism. We would like the essential element of the heroic to be: kicks ass. We want: "Little monkey man beats up big monkey man and has sex with girl monkey." And so the vast majority of the hero tales we tell are about 'kicking ass', and the vast majority of heroes we create have as their defining feature 'kicks ass'. What Ioreth imagines the story of the Ring to be about is, in brief, "It doesn't matter how small you are, you can do great things like defeat your enemies through acts of violence." This is the natural, common sense view of the story, but it is - as Tolkien makes great effort to point out - entirely and ridiculously wrong. Indeed, in some small way, Tolkien is pointing out that the reason the world is so broken is that we want and admire the wrong sort of heroes, and faced with a real hero, we will do all we can to make them fit in to our wrong way of looking at things.</p><p></p><p>Tolkien's story is an anti-quest. A small and unimportant person goes on a quest to defeat evil by destroying a weapon for no other reason than a people he trusts ask him to do so, and having no hope of reward for his sacrifice. Meanwhile, while the humble do great things, the great wise people are sent to perform a pointless diversion in a largely pointless war in which they cannot win. This is not the story we naturally want to hear, but it was the sort of story Tolkien thought we should cultivate a taste for. Intead, when we bring his story to the masses and try to explain it to them, we end up doing just as Ioreth did. And it really does make me sad, and I think it breaks the good Professor's heart (though he fully expected it).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 5765284, member: 4937"] Sure. Tolkien has a lot going on in the story, and its easy to miss a lot of the substance in the big epic sweep of events and the detailed word pictures he spends so much time painting. Also, I think that the sort of literary analysis that we are trained to do leaves us rather ill-prepared for somone like Tolkien - even if we think to do it during an 'escapist' adventure story. Ioreth is an old 'wise' woman who works in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith, and she has a couple of minor roles in the story. Her larger purpose in the story - beyond providing comedy - is to provide a ground level viewpoint of the big epic events going on around her. She, along with a few other common voices, is our representative in the story. After the culmination of the quest and the ring is destroyed, one of the first things that happens is the coronation of Aragorn as the king. Now Ioreth has a cousin who lives in an outlying village who has, throughout the course of events, been hiding in the safety of the hills far from the war, and now that's she has come to the big city for the coronation she wants a recap of the main events and players. So, during the coronation, Ioreth tries to keep her abreast of things. Of course, since Ioreth herself has only a limited viewpoint, in addition to enlarging her own importance, she gets almost all of it wrong. In particular, Ioreth in describing Frodo's role in the story says, paraphrased down, "You must not judge him by his stature, for he went alone into Mordor with only his squire and defeated Sauron in a duel, and threw him down and his tower." What Tolkien is pointing out through the tale of Ioreth is how we as humans prefer to view heroism. We would like the essential element of the heroic to be: kicks ass. We want: "Little monkey man beats up big monkey man and has sex with girl monkey." And so the vast majority of the hero tales we tell are about 'kicking ass', and the vast majority of heroes we create have as their defining feature 'kicks ass'. What Ioreth imagines the story of the Ring to be about is, in brief, "It doesn't matter how small you are, you can do great things like defeat your enemies through acts of violence." This is the natural, common sense view of the story, but it is - as Tolkien makes great effort to point out - entirely and ridiculously wrong. Indeed, in some small way, Tolkien is pointing out that the reason the world is so broken is that we want and admire the wrong sort of heroes, and faced with a real hero, we will do all we can to make them fit in to our wrong way of looking at things. Tolkien's story is an anti-quest. A small and unimportant person goes on a quest to defeat evil by destroying a weapon for no other reason than a people he trusts ask him to do so, and having no hope of reward for his sacrifice. Meanwhile, while the humble do great things, the great wise people are sent to perform a pointless diversion in a largely pointless war in which they cannot win. This is not the story we naturally want to hear, but it was the sort of story Tolkien thought we should cultivate a taste for. Intead, when we bring his story to the masses and try to explain it to them, we end up doing just as Ioreth did. And it really does make me sad, and I think it breaks the good Professor's heart (though he fully expected it). [/QUOTE]
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