Tolkien v. Howard v. Lovecraft

[InzeladunMaster]

On Mongoose's Board, G. Lynch posted this, which presented Tolkien in a light I had never considered before:

"Though he's my favorite fantasy author, I don't think Tolkien was an optimist. One of the main themes running through his work is that things don't get better, they get worse. It's just a matter of how much worse.

True, at the end of LotR you have Aragorn assuming the throne of Gondor and forming the house of Telcontar (wow - I really out-geeked myself with that), and you have Sam and Rosie breeding a small herd of hobbits, which seems all well and good until you look at the big picture - the loss of the elves and wizards.

Essentially, Tolkien's view of the world was of an entropic spiral, where everything slowly and inexorably worsens. We assume evil never wins, but at the end of the day, good is left with a rather dull, grey world.

Just as the world worsens, victories lessen. In the War of Wrath, you got the Valar riding in to whup on Melko/Melkor and take him out of the picture permanently. The Last Alliance also wins, but does not dispatch Sauron. By the time you get to the end of the Third Age, things have gotten even worse, which brings us to a central element of LotR. Frodo doesn't win; he loses.

Sure, the ring goes into the fire, but no element or agent of good puts it there. By this point in Middle-Earth history, good no longer has the strength to defeat evil. Evil (in the form of Gollum and his greed) has to defeat itself (Sauron).

In the end, I'd have to give Howard's work the edge in optimism, though barely. Howard's world has an endless cycle of primitives rising to barbarians rising to civilization - then being destroyed from within or without and starting all over again. In Tolkien, on the other hand, things just get steadily more drab. We'll never return to the 'days that were' - they are gone forever.

Lovecraft, of course, gets my vote for most pessimistic. After all, how can you beat a worldview that offers nothing but a nihilistic abyss of alien malevolence and madness?"

 

[Grimhelm]

Tolkien's work is relevant to our times for a reason. I feel that the books echo a theme of our own humanity that cannot be denied, and that is our quest to control the forces of the world and so reduce the mystery that surrounds us. We can either view this trend as the loss of magic and mystery, or the gaining of such power for ourselves, in a sense. When the elves left Middle Earth, there was a romantic/nostalgic quality about their going that equates to the loss of eternity. In a sense this leaving echoes the story of the Garden of Eden. It also echoes man's inherent feeling of having been disconnected somehow from god. I suppose this is tragic, but it isn't necessarily depressing. Tolkien ends the book with the birth of Sam's child, saying to us: This is eternity. This is how we compensate. This is how the great story just keeps on going for us.

Howard's work is about how we compensate for this loss, too, in a sense. He says, live, fight, kill, do whatever, for tomorrow we die!

Lovecraft, though I have not read much, agrees with Howard, saying that all life is pointless and man's place in the universe is utterly insignificant. Again, is this bleak or depressing or pessimistic? Not really. It's just the damned truth. People need to stop equating these sorts of truths with pessimism and flip the coin. The flipside of all this is that admitting these things is liberating to the mind and spirit.

 

[InzeladunMaster]

You are right. I think I will have to re-read The Lord of the Rings. I usually don't re-read books anymore unless I can come at it from a different point of view (I find myself re-reading Frankenstein a lot for this reason; it seems to have a lot of hidden layers). I first read LotR (7th grade) as a straight adventure story; I read it again after having read The Silmarillion, which really enriched the story and gave it a whole new dimension as a historical but fictional world. I'll have to read it again!

 

[Grimhelm]

I think we tend to miss a lot, at least consciously, when we first read a story. We typically read for entertainment and not evaluation. I think that because of this we tend to gloss some themes, though I would argue that these themes work on a subconscious level and are ultimately what decides for us whether we like or dislike a work. Music is like this. There are many well crafted songs out there, but what strikes us is something apart from the craft. What strikes us is something universal and immediately understandable within the piece that touches us on a level that requires no evaluation or reflection. Strangely, as we have these themes explained to us, as we evaluate them, they tend to lose their mystery and magic just a little. I am getting off the subject, but I believe that is why music is the truest art form we have. We can never really explain why we like a song, we just know that we do.

 

[InzeladunMaster]

The subject of music as you have it would make a decent thread-discussion on its own.

Strangely, as we have these themes explained to us, as we evaluate them, they tend to lose their mystery and magic just a little.

Religions work this way as well. Most religions (historically speaking) function as mystery religions, wherein certain initiates earn the right to have certain themes in their religion and myths explained to them - thus the religion loses mystery and magic as the initiate moves up in ranks. Those who only get the surface myths believe their religion is magical - those who move up higher and higher begin to understand other truths, but lose the magic that originally drew them to the religion in the first place. Christianity used to be a mystery religion (the Gnostics, for example), but somehow people who only understood the surface myths (the Bible) decided those were literal truths and managed to get those who had gone past that level killed as heretics. Now I am digressing.

Anyway, you are right. I consider Frankenstein to be one of the most amazing books ever written - and LotR is right up there in symbolic complexity and genius. We do miss a lot on initial reads though. Makes me wonder what books I ought to revisit.

 

[Grimhelm]

I really need to read that book, I guess. These days, however, I feel like my attention is too scattered to focus on anything for more than 5 minutes.

Anyway, I do agree with you about religions. I think I have realized what you said before, but I had not heard it put in this way. I think that this is the same reason the Catholic church is still successful. It maintains a certain amount of mystery. In a sense Modernity has killed every religion that has allowed its influence. Catholicism seems to have weathered this influence well...

 

[InzeladunMaster]

I think Catholicism will long outlive the protestant religions just because of that factor. Luthor made a huge mistake in de-mystifying the religion. I wonder if Catholicism still has elements of a mystery religion and that cardinals, bishops and on up to the pope learn things unavailable to the masses. I think I now understand what a Catholic priest once told me: "We teach myths so that people can learn truths." At the time that made no logical sense, but now...

I think that is why cults succeed - they offer mystery. Scientology, for example, is definitely structured like a mystery religion.

I wonder if that is why I am often offended by schlock fantasy - books that offer nothing beyond what is offered on the surface. They have no mystery, nothing to unravel. I know some books I enjoyed as a child I can reread and find gems, but a lot of them do not stand up to an adult re-read.

 

[Grimhelm]

I think that as an audience, whether we are reading or watching a film or a play or what have you, we desire mystery, just as you say. I would venture to say that our minds are not particularly intrigued by what we do know. It is more interested in what we don't.

There are some themes that will always grab us, and when none of them are present in a work, then we go away unsatisfied. Such entertainments are like bubble gum, quickly enjoyed and spit out. I would say that the major mystery themes are man's origin, love, death, sex, and the nature of our own awareness. Incidentally, these are all complete mysteries to us, and all so fundamental, essential, and immediate that it is a mystery to me why they are mysteries at all!

Though I have not read Frankenstein, I can gather that it has these themes: origin, love, death, and the nature of awareness. I don't know if it deals with sex, but it doesn't really have to. Without having read it, it is certainly a creative and magical way to tackle the issues...

 

[InzeladunMaster]

You're exactly right - and Frankenstein does deal with all of those issues, even sex (although not in a literal way; there are no sex scenes, but the symbolism is there, much like it is there in Dracula).

It seems like a lot of those fundamental mysteries you list are taboo in American modern society - and modern religion downplays many of them as well - but ancient religions treated them all as important. Modern religion does not like people looking into the origins of man or into sexual experimentation or play, for example. I haven't looked into it, but I wonder if most of the books banned by various religions mostly deal with those fundamental mysteries.

Incidently, I read somewhere that one reason Lovecraft's work endures despite its pomposity and literal flaws is because it is a symbolic statement of man's fears about sex - that many of his "monsters" are vaginal images: great black gulfs surrounded by a great many tentacles (pubic hair). I am not sure of the validity of that, however. He does delve into the nature of awareness a lot though.

 

[Grimhelm]

I would instinctively have to say yes, religions probably ban books precisely that deal with those issues, though the reasons might not have to do with taboo so much as control. Religion would like to step in and attempt to offer explanations and answers to just these mysteries. Other explanations are viewed as hostile and threatening, and are therefore banned.

Where some religions ultimately miss the boat is in their symbolic expressions of these mysteries. Their mistake, in a sense, is their attempt to explain at all. Religion would serve humanity's needs better if it re-introduced symbolic ritual, rites of passage, and mythological themes, for it is on these thematic/subconscious levels that we truly understand life. When logic does not coincide with our instinctual knowledge, I believe that it can cause distress, sometimes even breakdown of the spirit. I believe that we have suppressed our instinctual knowledge for too long, and that many of our societal problems can be traced back to the need to have our truest feelings validated through ritual and symbolism, not contradicted by Modern explanation.