Joshua Dyal said:
Rather, I'd say you extract, and even invent symbolism that the author has never indicated that he intended. I take what I read more at face value and don't try to make it say things that it does not.
But look at why we're having this argument. Underneath this argument is fact that I am reading the text more literally than you are.
Extracting a "Lives of the Medieval Saints" interpretation of Aragorn is, IMO, ridiculous, because it is completely inconsistent with everything else Tolkien wrote in the Lord of the Rings or about it. It's a completely different genre, that Tolkien had little interest in.
Given that European saints' lives started being written in 397CE, I don't know how you can make a purely chronological argument against what I am saying. The production of medieval saints' lives in Germanic Europe proceeded contemporaneously with the Eddic tradition for hundreds of years. Furthermore, saints' lives are where he got the names of a whole bunch of characters -- Frodo, Drogo, etc.
If you want Medieval fantasy, read William Morris, not Tolkien.
This is like saying "Tolkien couldn't have been talking about the Somme because he told us repeatedly the books were not an allegory of any twentieth century event." That's all fine and good until you find Tolkien's own letter telling someone he drew inspiration for some of his battle scenes from his experience in the Somme. What you do throughout this response is argue that because the
focus of Tolkien's interest was on the age and culture that produced the Eddas, it is therefore impossible that his text is pointedly referencing things outside of this age and culture. What you are doing here is privileging secondary scholarship about Tolkien's words over the words themselves.
Which is why I reject your interpretation of Aragorn as a "lay on hands" type of healer, or athelas being some special plant only he could use. Those are not symbols Tolkien used, are inconsistent with the worldview presented in the Tolkiens work, and are anachronous to the time period and literature to which Tolkien looked for inspiration.
Tolkien used the period between about 500 and 1100 for inspiration; right?
If you're going to construct a careful interpretation of what an author means symbolically and as a "subtext" between the lines, be more careful with your designation. Tolkien was not a Medievalist, and he had little interest in the "classic Medieval" period or literature,
I think you're engaging in some sloppy reasoning here. Can we agree that the bursting horn references Roland? Or would you also argue that because Tolkien was not interested in the time period in which the
Song was written that we cannot view the sundering of Theoden's horn in this way? We also know that Tolkien drew some of his inspiration for key passages from his experiences in the Somme, even though he was adamant that the book was not an allegory of any twentieth century event. [/QUOTE]I see what's going on here. I am using the term "medieval" to refer to the period to which it now refers; whereas you are using it to refer to the period to which it referred when Tolkien wrote.
being much more a lover of the "Heroic" period preceding it, which had quite different views on the world.
There are a number of continuities in worldview between the early medieval and high medieval periods as well as, as you note, a number of discontinuities. But because scholars tend to view the number of continuities as greater than the number of discontinuities, they renamed the Dark Ages the Early Middle Ages.
It's entirely possible (in fact, Tom Shippey makes this specific argument in The Road to Middle Earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century that Tolkien was trying to reconstruct the pseudo-mythological work of literature that we just barely couldn't quite see; it was just beyond sight, hiding subtlely in Beowulf (which was a late Christianization of an earlier pagan story) or the various other works which he studied. The mythological past was mentioned tantalizingly, and then discounted and covered up by writers who didn't want to be associated with it.
I think this is a reasonable argument. However, I think that you are again using this as a way of excluding things it does not exclude. If Tolkien was willing to tell us he was gaining inspiration from the Carolingians, I think it is really dubious to discount arguments I am making on this basis. Also, remember that Bede predates our Beowulf; there is no straight developmental narrative here.
Tolkien was a philologist first and foremost, and in fact considered himself "the last of the philologists" as he understood the term. Folks like Rasmus Rask, the Grimm brothers and others were the classic philologists; they were linguists, but they believed that entire cultures and worldviews could be reconstructed via linguistics, and in many ways that's what Tolkien's work was about; reconstructing the lost Old English folklore and mythology, and making it concurrently compatible with his own Catholic worldview was what he was all about.
I agree with the above paragraph. However, I think you are using it to argue that Tolkien did not use or care about other aspects of the medieval world. I think this is a mistake.
Your insistence that Tolkien was a medievalist, or that he often used, or was even particularly interested in medieval "tropes" (BTW, your consistent misuse of the word trope is a pet peeve of mine, although irrelevent to this discussion) is flat-out incorrect.
I don't know if he was "interested" in the use of these tropes (and thanks but there are enough definition of "trope" for all of us); what I will say is that the books are full of conscious references to archetypal episodes in medieval history and literature. For someone who wasn't interested in such things, he sure used them a lot.
Quite right. Which is why kingsfoil is such an interesting word. It is not a translation of the elvish name athelas, but a common word used by the common people to refer to the plant. The reason they did so was because it was associated with the Numenoreans, and to the common people, the Numenoreans were "the kings." This was precisely the kind of linguistic word game that Tolkien loved, and he used many times. But that's just it; he loved creating these phony etymologies for invented words, not use words as symbolism.
Scholars of medieval language and rhetoric would not disentangle these things. The whole purpose of medieval etymology was to prove rhetorical points on a symbolic level. One of the things that Tolkien tries to do is adopt medieval conventions of storytelling; so if he puts a phony etymology in the story, that means that he is speaking symbolically to the reader.
As stated above. Everything I know about Tolkien, what he liked, what he did, and what was going on around him outside of the writing of the Lord of the Rings itself suggests to me that you are putting a much greater symbolic burden on kingsfoil than it was ever intended to bear.
I think that what you know about Tolkien's statements about his project are one of the biggest obstacles in Tolkien scholarship. Tolkien was not writing a narrative allegory; but this does not mean that he did not fill his book with direct references to the past he studied.
Only in the sense that it becomes a very singular moment with no other analogs anywhere in the work. Given that, I'd be very surprised that he could possibly have meant it as you claim without it being a good deal clearer.
I think that there is a big problem in Tolkien scholarship in that because Tolkien had to deny that LOTR was a direct allegory of a bunch of things it clearly was not an allegory of, these statements are used to discount very obvious and textually grounded references in his works. For instance, there is a document from approximately 870 AD called
the Vision of Charlemagne that writes about the four ages of the Franks. The third age is called "Nazg" -- it is the time in which the realm splits and everyone starts pursuing their own self interest. At the end of this age, there will either be a renewal or total defeat. Given that Nazg wasn't even a real word in Frankish at the time, it seems pretty clear to me that the document is being directly referenced. But the way people employ Tolkien's statements about allegory, even a clear reference like this would be discounted.
I don't know what you mean by "no other analogs anywhere in the work" -- the book is full of references to things. But these references are not allegorical narrative references. There are lots of ways that Tolkien references real world things but he consistently does so in such a way as to break any attempt to make his book into a narrative allegory. There is not way, for instance, that Denethor's explanation to Boromir of why the house of
Mardil are stewards and not kings is not making a pointed and negative reference to Charles
Martell decision to transform his family from the ruling stewards of France into the kings of France by crowning his son Peppin as king.
As I said, Tolkien was no medievalist.
What do you mean? That was his job. That was where his paycheque came from. He was a professional medievalist -- as in, he was a professor of Anglo Saxon (ie. early medieval English) at Oxford university. And we know that in order to get this job, in order to get his doctorate, he studied both the early medieval and high medieval periods.
