Joshua,
In your last post, you misrepresented a number of my arguments.
Your insistence that Tolkien used Healing king symbology merely because he could and because it's medieval is absurd.
I made no assertion that Tolkien did any such thing. I simply made the following points:
1. Tolkien extensively studied medieval literature in the process of obtaining his doctorate.
2. Tolkien therefore must have been aware that medieval ideas of kingship included a belief in healing through the laying on of hands.
3. Tolkien chose to make the revelation and reclamantion of Aragorn's true kingship a significant part of his LOTR narrative.
4. He wrote scenes about Aragorn healing through the laying on of hands, using a plant called kingsfoil, in full knowledge that healing through the laying on of hands was a proof of medieval kingship.
5. He created a Gondorian oral tradition that "the hands of a king are the hands of a healer."
6. Given that Tolkien was a careful and intentional writer, the most rational explanation for this behaviour was the intention to make this reference.
So what's your story? Tolkien depicts two healing scenes in the novel. Both involve the true king, healing someone using a plant called kingsfoil. He does so in full knowledge of the medieval tradition of true kings having the capacity to heal by the laying on of hands. What do you think was going through Tolkien's mind when he wrote these scenes and the prophecy fully cognizant of what they would evoke for any other scholar of the medieval period?
Clearly you cannot argue that Tolkien did not know what these passages would evoke for someone with similar education to his own. So, how do you think he wanted these people to regard what he had written?
Just because it's literature rather than historical, I do not accept that negative evidence is any more meaningful than it would be in any other field.
Well, here we are just at an impasse. I don't especially like your chracterization of this kind of thing as "negative evidence" either. Tolkien goes to the trouble of showing Aragorn healing, and
only Aragorn healing twice.
Nobody else did any healing on screen because the plot did not call for it,
You talk about this as though Tolkien hadn't deliberately constructed a plot in which Aragorn gets to heal people.
As the point above, the fact that your "evidence" is no more than your subjective interpretation of absences in the books, makes it completely suspect if not absolutely disposible and discountable immediately.
So, let's suppose an author manages to write a book in which no women do anything significant. Can we conclude that this provides us with no evidence about the role of women in the world the author depicts? Surely even if you don't want to accept this point, you must concede that, at least in general, lacunae in books can give us significant information.
As to your insistence that symbolism must have been inherent in the works because "Tolkien was a good writer," that's absolute baloney.
That would be a good point if that is what I had asserted. But in fact, what I asserted was that Tolkien would have been aware of the symbolic meaning already inherent in the healing "prophecy" and laying on of hands. My argument is not that every good writer uses symbolism. My argument is that Tolkien would have known how scholars like himself would read what he had written.
Again, let's look at a different example. Let's suppose there is a scene in a novel in which a character is executed wearing a crown of thorns, or executed by crucifixion. Would you argue that a good writer should produce such a product without taking into account that his symbols would be seen as Christian?
Along those same lines, you contrast reading literature and reading history, by essentially saying that literature must be read with an eye for symbols and parallels. To quote Tolkien on this very subject: "I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of the readers."
Have you read Roman Catholic historiographic theory? I would suggest that before you make too much of this, you should look at writers like de Lubac or Chenu or go to the original sources and look at people like Augustine or the Victorines. Premodern Roman Catholic theories of history allow history to proceed with free will be also recognize that tropes will reoccur in the history. Developed for Scriptural exegesis, idea of multiple signification and recurring patterns in history was first used by Saint Augustine on secular history. So I don't see any conflict here.
The advocates of this reading of history, in the past, made the same point Tolkien does in your above quotation -- that history could be read completely satisfactorily without this eye for symbols and parallels but that this did not discount other things that could be pulled from the text of unfolding events.
Also I don't buy that this was some deep use of symbolism here. This was just a direct reference. But if you didn't have the reference, you could just read what the text itself said: "the hands of a king are the hands of a healer."
I also have a wariness of reading Tolkien as modern literary criticism would teach us to anyway. Throughout Tolkien's professional life, his own priorities in the English department at Exeter were almost constantly at odds with the literature "half" of the department. He very much disliked the way "literature" folks thought, and in some ways, consciously wrote the Lord of the Rings as a foil to their way of thinking, and expressed at various points in his life both unsurprise (and indeed satisfaction) that not only did literature folks "not get it" but that the works were quite successful in spite of their scorn of them, a scorn which he politely confirmed that he felt for their own tastes and prefered forms.
The tools I am using are not the tools of modern literary criticism. There are no hidden symbols or complex parallels here -- just a direct reference to a thing in the past that, in case the readers don't get, he spells out the meaning of in the text anyway.
Also, to suggest that finding non-literal meaning in texts or references in texts is somehow automatically grouped with the modern literary critics with whom Tolkien had differences is a great insult to the traditions of reading and writing that came before the modern period. I don't think Tolkien intended to paint Hugh Saint Victor and Saint Augustine with the brush with which he painted his colleagues.
it was indeed a mytho-historical work.
So are you seriously now going to take the position (a) that intentionally-written myth histories are not literature or (b) that myth does not include symbolism?
billd91 said:
Tolkien is also not choosing to show anyone going to the bathroom. Does that mean they don't do it?
Let's actually use a comparable example. What you're looking for in the text is an instance of only one character being able to do something. So, is the fact that only Gandalf does fire magic significant? Yes. Is the fact that Eowyn is the only woman who goes to war significant? Yes.
Sometimes symbolism and metaphor mean things that are more mundane than some literary analysts want them to mean. Sometimes a turn of phrase or reference is a work of fiction was just a good and convenient way to get from point A to point B and not some deep symbol to be found by people spending too much time engaging in navel contemplation.
Ok. (a) There is no metaphor here. (b) There is no deep hidden meaning here. (c) The text also directly states the information Tolkien references. So there is no big complex literary navel gazing going on. Why did I even bring this up? Because I was providing additional evidence in support of my 100% literal direct reading of the text.
