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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2040855" data-attributes="member: 2205">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.No, it really isn't.  Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings, and in fact invented Middle-earth, specifically to reflect a pre-Medieval, or at least very early Medieval worldview that resembles very little the Medieval worldview you are trying to assign to it.  It was designed to represent the heroic worldview of Beowulf, or the Eddas.  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.  If you want Medieval fantasy, read William Morris, not Tolkien.Quite right.  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.  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, being much more a lover of the "Heroic" period preceding it, which had quite different views on the world.  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.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.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.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.  There's a big difference, and he was actually much more inclined to do the former than the latter.  He had, naturally, a professional interest in doing so, and a professional interest in avoiding the latter, as it was a literary convention and throughout his professional life he had to deal with bitter rivalry between the linguistic and literature aspects of the English department at Exeter.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.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.As I said, Tolkien was no medievalist.  And I don't think that implication is really there; it never occured to me even until you brought it up.  And now that you have, I still see no compelling reason to accept it.</blockquote>

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