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The One Ring Forums:
Tolkien Topics: Reading Room:
The 20th C looks back at the 19th?:
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Feb 17, 7:05pm
Views: 307
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The 20th C looks back at the 19th?
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A delayed response becaue of all the bots. Lets hope it's improved with extra time to think!
Prof Tom Shippey has suggested thinking of Tolkien alongside other authors writing in the post second-world war period and concerning themselves with problems of evil. Specifically, how do seemingly very nice normal and reasonabe people seem to be quite easily persusaded to do it. I remember that William Golding (Lord of the Flies) is one such author Prof Shippey suggests,. I think you could add George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984), or Robert Bolt (Man For All Seasons - for example a passage I quoted earlier) And probably many other authors.
In LOTR, Shippey sees this idea coming out in the nature of the One Ring. That is, we are told again and again, inevitably corrupting. There is no way of being sufficiently wise, powerful, high-caste, moral of good character or anything else to resist it. In the end it (or just the thought of it) will get absolutely anyone. Which indeed we see actually happen (Saruman, Boromir, Denethor and in the end even Frodo himself). About the best you can do is to realise this situation and refuse the Ring. Send it away, which we see done by a succession of characters who are offered it by Frodo, but decline.
I find this a compelling set of ideas.
I think the absoluteness of that is sometimes missed. I wote an earlier post about how I think The LOTR-movie scriptwriters chose their 'Men are weak' idea instead, and got (to my mind anyway) into a swamp over the character of Faramir. Movie-Faramir cannot possibly just turn the Ring down, as book-Faramir does. A whole movie subplot has to be invented to teach movie-Faramir a lesson before he can do it.
I also notice something else when I think about LOTR in comparison to Lord of the Flies. Golding's British schoolboys stranded on their tropical island quickly revert to a dysfuntional, savage society ruled by a narcissist and a psychopath. Golding is having an argument here with an earlier book, The Coral Island (RM Ballantyne, 1857), which is very much more in the plucky lads and deeds of valour genre we've been discussing. Ballantyne's white English Protestant Boys ace everything, quite likely within the story by virtue of being white English Protestant Boys (and, of course, being characters in that sort of story, for that kind of audience). So the Twentieth century (you might say) looks back on the Nineteenth from the other side of poison gas attacks in the trenches, Fascism, Stalinism, carpet bombing, nuclear weapons etc. etc.
I like the idea that Tolkien is somewhere in the middle. I think of him as having that 'no-one is safe' Twentieth-century perspective. But his fictional world allows things to (just about) work out when the danger is realised and temptations are refused. In LOTR anyway. And I see in LOTR a moving elagic tone - all those dashed hopes and lost empires. A look back to those old simple Victorian ideas?
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
(This post was edited by noWizardme on Feb 17, 7:20pm)
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Edit Log:
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Post edited by noWizardme
(Gondolin) on Feb 17, 7:07pm
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Post edited by noWizardme
(Gondolin) on Feb 17, 7:09pm
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Post edited by noWizardme
(Gondolin) on Feb 17, 7:18pm
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Post edited by noWizardme
(Gondolin) on Feb 17, 7:20pm
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