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noWizardme
Half-elven


May 8 2017, 4:49pm

Post #1 of 63 (4624 views)
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Those under-sharing First Agers Can't Post

I wanted to share and discuss here an article that I've found interesting in several ways. An aspect that's relevant for this forum is its relevance to Tolkien's style in Silmarilion versus LOTR ad The Hobbit.

The article, "Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?" is by Julie Sedivy and appeared in Nautilus in 2017. Here's a link http://nautil.us/...-talk-about-feelings

The article is long but worth reading. My quick summary for the main points is however:

1) Ancient and medieval literature tends to focus on what characters are doing. Over time Western literature has moved "from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities."

2) Literature in which the motivation of characters is implied or discussed appeared round about the time of the rise of printing. Perhaps " these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, re-reading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts."

3) Perhaps this presented new opportunities for authors and readers, such that "The emergence of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced omniscient narrators who could penetrate their characters’ psyches, at times probing motives that were opaque to the characters themselves. And by the 20th century, many authors labored not just to describe, but to simulate the psychological experience of characters." Possibly such literature would have been incomprehensible to earlier readers.

4) How can this idea be tested? "If mentalizing skills can be burnished by language that draws attention to mental states, has literature’s increasing use of such language improved readers’ social intelligence over the centuries? Psychologists can’t go back to the 1200s to administer batteries of tests to medieval denizens, but they can test and compare present-day humans whose reading habits differ. Such research shows a clear link between people’s mentalizing skills and the books on their nightstands."

--
I found this interesting generally, but also thought it explained why I find the ancient-text-like Sil. much harder going that modern-literature-like LOTR: I miss the insights into the characters.

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


Darkstone
Immortal


May 8 2017, 9:28pm

Post #2 of 63 (4447 views)
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Working as intended [In reply to] Can't Post


In Reply To
1) Ancient and medieval literature tends to focus on what characters are doing. Over time Western literature has moved "from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities."


On the contrary, ancient literature was indeed interested:

Again, the poet should work out his play, to the best of his power, with appropriate gestures; for those who feel emotion are most convincing through natural sympathy with the characters they represent; and one who is agitated storms, one who is angry rages, with the most life-like reality. Hence poetry implies either a happy gift of nature or a strain of madness. In the one case a man can take the mould of any character; in the other, he is lifted out of his proper self.
-Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapter XVII

As for medieval literature, some may indeed seem a bit emotionless as most written literature was stories exchanged among the religious communities which tended to be rather self-censored because:

Among the philosophers there are two opinions about these mental emotions, which the Greeks call πάθη, while some of our own writers, as Cicero, call them perturbations, some affections, and some, to render the Greek word more accurately, passions. Some say that even the wise man is subject to these perturbations, though moderated and controlled by reason, which imposes laws upon them, and so restrains them within necessary bounds.
-St. Augustine’s City of God, Book Ninth

So religious writers would use code words, and for someone in the know that literature was emotional indeed! (Not to mention often extremely rude and hilarious!)

As for the saga of King Harold that Ms. Sidivy cites, that is part of oral medieval literature. In that case it was the scod’s performance that provided the emotions. One scod might have been a Lawrence Olivier, playing the saga as high tragedy, serious and dramatic. Another might have been a Stephen King, lingering on the gore and varying between telling it in quiet whispers and loud screams so as to scare the hwaet out of his audience. Still another could have been a Jim Carrey, making comically exaggerated mannerisms, faces, and pratfalls playing for big laughs. Yet another might have been a Michael Bay, accenting the action pieces with sound effects and stage magic. And one might have been a Peter Jackson, cutting out familiar scenes and adding in new ones that caused purists to harumph and throw axes. Of course the occasion (spring festival or mustering for war) or the mood of the crowd (in their cups or filling up the corners) could also affect how the scod told the story and thus form, modify, or intensify the local emotions. (No wonder they never got tired of hearing the old stories. It was not what you told as much as how you told it.)



In Reply To
2) Literature in which the motivation of characters is implied or discussed appeared round about the time of the rise of printing. Perhaps "these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, re-reading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts."


And printing also gave rise to the Five Solas, especially the Sola Scriptura (“By scripture alone”) that became the basis of the Reformation and Western Protestantism. One might argue that it was because of the widespread availability of The Holy Bible that people “could now read in private and at their own pace, re-reading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts."



In Reply To
3) Perhaps this presented new opportunities for authors and readers, such that "The emergence of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced omniscient narrators who could penetrate their characters’ psyches, at times probing motives that were opaque to the characters themselves. And by the 20th century, many authors labored not just to describe, but to simulate the psychological experience of characters." Possibly such literature would have been incomprehensible to earlier readers.


Well, of course with printed literature (not to mention *anonymously* printed literature!) the narrator moved from broadly addressing the crowd in public (“Friends, Romans, countrymen!”) to discretely communicating with the individual in private (“Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?”). New ideas and indeed new emotions could now be presented. For a scandalous example, see the emergent genre "amatory fiction" of the late 17th and early 18th century, works that would have gone down in history as the very first novels of Western literature except that the literary scholars who decide such things are male.

Of course, a true understanding of Western literature from the 12th century up until just after the middle of the 20th is impossible without an in-depth knowledge of The Holy Bible.

(And impossible from the mid-1950s until today without an in-depth knowledge of Western mass media.)



In Reply To
4) How can this idea be tested? "If mentalizing skills can be burnished by language that draws attention to mental states, has literature’s increasing use of such language improved readers’ social intelligence over the centuries? Psychologists can’t go back to the 1200s to administer batteries of tests to medieval denizens, but they can test and compare present-day humans whose reading habits differ. Such research shows a clear link between people’s mentalizing skills and the books on their nightstands."


Studies show reading can increase the brain’s connectivity:

http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/...ries-may-change.html

And also empathy, which explains a lot:

https://www.theguardian.com/...proves-empathy-study



In Reply To
I found this interesting generally, but also thought it explained why I find the ancient-text-like Sil. much harder going that modern-literature-like LOTR: I miss the insights into the characters.


Well, as Tolkien said, The Hobbit, and to a slightly lesser extent The Lord of the Rings, is from a human point of view. The Silmarillion is from an Elvish point of view:

As the high Legends of the beginning are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale blends them.
-Letter #131

So it's no wonder we humans find The Sil a bit heavy going. It’s from an alien point of view:

The 'Elves' are 'immortal', at least as far as this world goes: and hence are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death.
-ibid

So if we as humans find the Elves of The Silmarillion rather difficult to identify with, then Tolkien has succeeded.

Wink

******************************************

Once Radagast dreamt he was a moth, a moth flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Radagast. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakably Radagast. But he didn't know if he was Radagast who had dreamt he was a moth, or a moth dreaming he was Radagast. Between Radagast and a moth there must be some distinction! But really, there isn't, because he's actually Aiwendil dreaming he's both Radagast *and* a moth!
-From Radagasti: The Moth Dream


noWizardme
Half-elven


May 9 2017, 9:52am

Post #3 of 63 (4378 views)
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Yes, we should consider how the role of storyteller is intended to be shared out. [In reply to] Can't Post

Many thanks for this most interesting reply. If I have understood you correctly, you make the excellent point that we should consider both the way a work is intended to be consumed. Perhaps a near-contemporary reader of a medieval saga would assume that they were reading the bare-bones performance notes for a storyteller. Therefore, such a reader might imagine the work re-created as a performance, being their own storyteller as well as reader. In that case, the 'progression' in literature becomes not [just] one of increasing mental sophistication, but [also] one of how much direction the writer expects to provide, and how much is left to the performer. The 'performer here might be anything from a company of players, a live storyteller, someone reading aloud to others; or a reader 'performing' the story silently inside their head alone as they read.

A consequence of making the reader more of a co-creator and less of a passive consumer would be that there are a wide range of 'readings' , each of them as 'valid' as any other.

During the last Sil. read-through, the 2013 cast of the Reading Room had an epic discussion of the character and motives of Aredhel (who appears in 'Of Maeglin" (http://newboards.theonering.net/...i?post=609889#609889)
Aredhel insists on travelling, becomes separated from her companions and lost, partly because of the enchantments of Eol, who uses magic to bewilder her, before appearing as her rescuer. She stays with him some time and they have a son. Date rape and Stockholm syndrome? A morality tale on what happens to rash girls? "It wasn't real love, but some kind of unhealthy obsession from Eöl, and Aredhel in her part was drawn to him in an unhealthy way for her time - perhaps merely sexually. There is an undertone of him seducing her and her being excited about it all for a while... " (Faenoriel). Other interpretations? We had a long discussion. Perhaps the point though is that all of those ideas are right - how do you tell yourself this story this time?

Then again, perhaps we should imagine that the Sil. is a collection of elvish tales, for and by elves. For all we know 'getting lost in the woods' was a well-established courtship game for that culture, and we wouldn't understand, being just mortals.

I have some more thoughts about the Sil. being 'from an alien point of view, but I'll post those separately...

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


noWizardme
Half-elven


May 9 2017, 10:39am

Post #4 of 63 (4373 views)
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"no wonder we humans find The Sil a bit heavy going. It’s from an alien point of view" [In reply to] Can't Post


In Reply To
So it's no wonder we humans find The Sil a bit heavy going. It’s from an alien point of view:

The 'Elves' are 'immortal', at least as far as this world goes: and hence are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death.
-ibid

So if we as humans find the Elves of The Silmarillion rather difficult to identify with, then Tolkien has succeeded.


I also liked that point!
In LOTR we see Legolas and Gimli as characters realised in the style of romances and novels. perhaps as an inevitable consequence of that, they lose their alien mysteriousness - except for the odd special effect Tolkien tosses in (elves can see far, and do not need to sleep) they might as well be Men. Or at least we read the descriptions of their speech and actions and interpret them as if they are Men (what else can we do? What else would Tolkien expect?).

The 'ancient literature' style in which Tolkien pere et fils present the Sil. is perhaps the opposite - it holds readers like me away from the story somewhat, just as you suggest. It's a risky move though - anything that makes a story more difficult is going to frustrate some potential readers. (I appreciate that JRR was writing, and C was completing, a work whose primary goal was not the widest possible readership and greatest possible commercial success).

The Tolkiens could have gone further, I suppose. Another of my favourite book is Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. It's presented as the memoir of a young man writing in a far-future society in Kent, when civilisation has once again reached something like the Iron Age, after a nuclear war. It's written in an extreme dialect, which the reader must puzzle out. I expected to find this an intolerable authorial affectation and expected to hate the book. Instead, I though it was a brilliant device - Riddley English not only keeps the reader at a distance (trying to figure stuff out just as the protagonist is), but it beautifully expresses what Riddley's culture has become -a mix of superstition, some worn-down stumps of Christianity, and garbled memories of the high-tech past.

Clearly there's some reader taste at work here - I expect we have some folks who love the Sil. and have been frustrated or bored by Riddley Walker.

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


Darkstone
Immortal


May 9 2017, 3:35pm

Post #5 of 63 (4337 views)
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That's Active Entertainment! [In reply to] Can't Post

 
”The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.”
-Joseph Campbell definitely NOT talking about Elvish archetypes, from The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers



In Reply To
Many thanks for this most interesting reply.


Many thanks for the stimulating subject.



In Reply To
A consequence of making the reader more of a co-creator and less of a passive consumer would be that there are a wide range of 'readings' , each of them as 'valid' as any other.


Yes. In my parents’ day families would huddle around radios listening to programs like “Inner Sanctum” or “Light’s Out!” and scare *themselves* silly with their own mental images conjured by the voices of the actors and the sound effects of the Foley artists. (Perhaps even the sound effects of the legendary Jack Donovan Foley himself!) In my youth I’d be in awe of spaceships suspended by faintly visible string and terrified by jerky stop-motion monsters. I could do so because I suspended my belief and left it at the theater door. That’s definitely active entertainment. Today’s media instead relies upon passive entertainment where consumer just lies back and says “Make me believe!” Of course this demand for instant gratification allows film, TV, and video games to provide the exact same things over and over again because people are just looking for the momentary stimulation, rather than any thoughtful experience.

I mean, sure you can modernize Shakespeare, but without the poetic prose and wordplay you would have some pretty bland and formulaic story-telling. (Could the same apply to Tolkien?)

The human mind has an innate instinct to uncover order in chaos, which is why it takes some active effort to enjoy some types of art like jazz or Picasso. Otherwise we just say “Hey, would ya rather go see ‘Fast and Furious 17‘ or ‘Transformers XXXI’?"



In Reply To
Then again, perhaps we should imagine that the Sil. is a collection of elvish tales, for and by elves. For all we know 'getting lost in the woods' was a well-established courtship game for that culture, and we wouldn't understand, being just mortals.


Yes. One might well assume Elvish archetypes are rather different from human ones, so we would not have the social or cultural references to understand the characters and situations. Further, Jung notes archetypes are “instinctual images”, and the instincts of Elves are surely vastly different from the instincts of Man. So the Elvish Hero’s Journey would of necessity be different from the Human Hero’s Journey. So for us as humans to even begin to understand the Elvish point of view we would have to know their myths and their heroes. (But thankfully Tolkien has thoughtfully provided both of those, so one might say it has been left as an exercise for the reader.Wink)

So The Sil is definitely active entertainment!

******************************************

Once Radagast dreamt he was a moth, a moth flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Radagast. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakably Radagast. But he didn't know if he was Radagast who had dreamt he was a moth, or a moth dreaming he was Radagast. Between Radagast and a moth there must be some distinction! But really, there isn't, because he's actually Aiwendil dreaming he's both Radagast *and* a moth!
-From Radagasti: The Moth Dream


Darkstone
Immortal


May 9 2017, 6:41pm

Post #6 of 63 (4325 views)
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"Write me a creature who thinks *as well as* a man, or *better than* a man, but not *like* a man.” [In reply to] Can't Post


In Reply To

In Reply To
"no wonder we humans find The Sil a bit heavy going. It’s from an alien point of view"

I also liked that point!
In LOTR we see Legolas and Gimli as characters realised in the style of romances and novels. perhaps as an inevitable consequence of that, they lose their alien mysteriousness - except for the odd special effect Tolkien tosses in (elves can see far, and do not need to sleep) they might as well be Men. Or at least we read the descriptions of their speech and actions and interpret them as if they are Men (what else can we do? What else would Tolkien expect?).


Even then, the point of view of non-hobbits can be disconcerting. Modern readers often consider Aragorn and Boromir unbecomingly prideful and boastful. But in ancient days pride in one’s ability, lineage, and accomplishments was a virtue, as opposed to the vices of false pride or false humilty. Indeed, in ancient times boasting as Boromir did at the Council of Elrond and as Aragorn did in Rohan was vitally necessary to establish one’s bonafides when meeting strangers. Both hubris and its opposite could result in disaster when hosts found out their guest had misrepresented their status, ability, and/or fame.

Interestingly humility, even false humility, became a virtue in our Christianized Western culture. Ironically, though Tolkien wrote Aragorn as rightly and confidently pursuing his blood destiny as a king, the good professor seemed to have had a different point of view in real life:

Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari [“I do not want to be a bishop” -Darkstone] as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop.
-Letter #52

BTW, I note that Aristotle would have found movie-Aragorn's self-doubt and reluctance to be a vice, not a virtue.

Value dissonance can cause quite a shock when reading classic literature such as, say, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. It’s not so much the then disgrace of illegitimacy, the cruel treatment of women, or the barbarity of slavery that is so dissonant, but the blithe acceptance of such by our protagonists! (On the other hand, lots of bad historical novels and films feature protagonists who improbably possess late 20th/early 21st century sensibilities.)

But it’s comforting to know that Tolkien was quite progressive as shown by his loving marriage to Edith, his helpful attitude towards female students at Oxford, and his horror at the treatment of people of color around the world. (That last little tidbit from Letter #61 would cause quite a few cases of apoplexy on the Storm Front Tolkien board. It’s awfully tempting to go there and post it. But trolling is wrong. Angelic)



In Reply To
The 'ancient literature' style in which Tolkien pere et fils present the Sil. is perhaps the opposite - it holds readers like me away from the story somewhat, just as you suggest. It's a risky move though - anything that makes a story more difficult is going to frustrate some potential readers. (I appreciate that JRR was writing, and C was completing, a work whose primary goal was not the widest possible readership and greatest possible commercial success).

The Tolkiens could have gone further, I suppose. Another of my favourite book is Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. It's presented as the memoir of a young man writing in a far-future society in Kent, when civilisation has once again reached something like the Iron Age, after a nuclear war. It's written in an extreme dialect, which the reader must puzzle out. I expected to find this an intolerable authorial affectation and expected to hate the book. Instead, I though it was a brilliant device - Riddley English not only keeps the reader at a distance (trying to figure stuff out just as the protagonist is), but it beautifully expresses what Riddley's culture has become -a mix of superstition, some worn-down stumps of Christianity, and garbled memories of the high-tech past.

Clearly there's some reader taste at work here - I expect we have some folks who love the Sil. and have been frustrated or bored by Riddley Walker.


I note similar frustration is experienced by many who encounter the incomprehensible aliens of René Laloux’s film "La Planète sauvage" (1973).

Stanley G. Weinbaum’s highly influential short story “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) is considered one of the top five greatest works of science-fiction. It was the first story to feature an alien who actually thought and acted like an alien, satisfying John Campbell famed editorial dictum “write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man”. Weinbaum had conceived of an alien creature that was half animal and half plant, and then reasoned that that creature’s thought processes had to be intimately linked to that character’s biology.

Similarly Tolkien linked the Elves' thought processes to the Elves’ immortal biology and so created one of the greatest works in fantasy literature.

Sometimes it pays to think outside the biome!

******************************************

Once Radagast dreamt he was a moth, a moth flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Radagast. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakably Radagast. But he didn't know if he was Radagast who had dreamt he was a moth, or a moth dreaming he was Radagast. Between Radagast and a moth there must be some distinction! But really, there isn't, because he's actually Aiwendil dreaming he's both Radagast *and* a moth!
-From Radagasti: The Moth Dream


noWizardme
Half-elven


May 9 2017, 9:39pm

Post #7 of 63 (4303 views)
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Hmmm- science fiction elves? [In reply to] Can't Post

I might be wrong about this but I think Tolkien worked outwards from a language and some poems and stories: his elves were the answer to "what kind of people speak that language and inhabit my writing?" At some point he invented the (original, I think?) idea that elves didn't age, and only died by accident, violence etc. So they are not immortal like gods (indestructible), but are massively and potentially endlessly long-lived.

I wonder what the difference would have been if Tolkien had started with the idea of that kind of immortality, and imagined the elvish cultures from that? It would be more of a science fiction approach, I think: like Ursula K LeGuin's attempt to imagine a culture effectively without gender, which led to the (excellent) story The Left Hand Of Darkness.

For one thing, the stories of the Sil. ought to be elvish journalism rather than legend. Bilbo, the likely translator/editor had access to eye witnesses or elves who might have spoken to eye witnesses for most of the events. And memoirs ought to have been plentiful- long years for witnesses of interesting events to record their stories, and no failing memories to let them down.

It's probably quite unlikely really, that you'd conclude such a thought experiment with stories that so resemble mortal human legends; the literary model that Tolkien chose.

There is, I think, a big element that legendary forms seem to us humans to capture the high and far off nature of the elves. It's an artisticly "realistic" choice rather than a science fiction "realistic" one.

And that's fine...

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


noWizardme
Half-elven


May 9 2017, 9:56pm

Post #8 of 63 (4295 views)
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Reading The Hobbit [In reply to] Can't Post

 The Hobbit, I suppose, is the popular Tolkien work that's easiest to see as performance. It's probably also the one most performed - by adults reading to young children. There's that strange narrator who sometimes steps up to address the reader directly with a number of informative or somewhat subversive asides. He (or of course she) can be made part of the fun too.

Or, you can miss the point as I did as an older child, and see this as trainer wheels sort of stuff that I'd now outgrown for more 'sophisticated' literature (sorry about that). I think my error was to be speed-reading for plot, rather than imagining the work as performance.

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


Otaku-sempai
Immortal


May 10 2017, 12:52am

Post #9 of 63 (4277 views)
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Un-aging Elves [In reply to] Can't Post


In Reply To
At some point he invented the (original, I think?) idea that elves didn't age, and only died by accident, violence etc. So they are not immortal like gods (indestructible), but are massively and potentially endlessly long-lived.


I think when we look at folklore we can find many examples of elves and other beings of Fairie who live far longer than mortal men (if not effectively immortal).

"He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows." -- Favorite proverb of the wizard Ningauble of the Seven Eyes


squire
Half-elven


May 10 2017, 1:21am

Post #10 of 63 (4288 views)
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Elven stories that eerily resemble mortal human legends [In reply to] Can't Post

I like your introduction of the 'science fiction' approach to literary invention as being what Tolkien didn't do but perhaps should have. I agree that Tolkien in some ways never really resolved the relationship between his Elven "tales", meant to evoke (and at first to serve as) the legends of historical Western European nations, and his imagined Faerie-inspired race of the virtually immortal Eldar.

Along with your questions of memory and imperfect preservation of the past (which he began to answer in his later writings by postulating that all the tales, even those of the Elves, had been transmitted to us for many centuries by fallible generations of mortals), there is the problem of language changes. His dearest hobby was inventing and then playing with historical grammars, but presumably Elvish would not mutate, if it was spoken by the same individuals or at most one or two additional generations, over the many thousands of years during which, according to his scheme, Sindarin and Quenya evolved from the ancient first Elven language. Again, he fudged this (I think I remember) later in his life by suggesting that the language changes were actually purposeful works of art by the various (bored?) sub-races.

Finally, I remember my own surprise at realizing a while ago that the entire Feanor sub-plot of the step-mother and step-brothers didn't really make sense in terms of Elven life-spans and family life. Tolkien wrote practically an entire short story (in HoME X), dragging the Valar themselves into it, to explain how an Elven wife could even die in such a way that her husband might be able to re-marry! And all just to execute a common plot found in zillions of European and Mediterranean annals: royal families torn by the father's remarriage and the subsequent squabbles of his bitter brood. (Speaking of science fiction, the Amber series depends on such a plot - but then so does the real-life history of the English reformation and any number of Grimm's and other folk tales, etc.). The chronology of the HoME shows that Tolkien wrote the Feanor story, driving as it does much of the Silmarils mega-tale, well before he had thought through the near-impossibility of step-siblings in an immortal but sexually moral race!



squire online:
RR Discussions: The Valaquenta, A Shortcut to Mushrooms, and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
Lights! Action! Discuss on the Movie board!: 'A Journey in the Dark'. and 'Designing The Two Towers'.
Archive: All the TORn Reading Room Book Discussions (including the 1st BotR Discussion!) and Footerama: "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
Dr. Squire introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary


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noWizardme
Half-elven


May 10 2017, 9:07am

Post #11 of 63 (4249 views)
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Not complaining, btw... [In reply to] Can't Post

I feel an urge to explain that I'm not complaining (even though nobody has claimed that I am!). I'd enjoy a conversation about what a culture of immortal humans would logically be like, but my idea is not 'Tolkien got it wrong' (and that therefore his work is flawed). That would seem to e to be a rather unreasonable position. We would be trying to apply a 'hard science fiction' approach to a work that didn't set out to achieve those kinds of goals (principally, of letting the audience enjoy how everything follows fairly logically from a few initial premises). "I demand that this work be hard science fiction!" What a silly demand that would be. It would be like the joke in which a cat reviews To Kill A Mockingbird ("This disappointing work does not contain any useful information about killing mockingbirds...")

I think I also missed mentioning an important starting point for Tolkien's elves - as I understand it, they were always going to be a parallel culture of magical medieval people, like the elves of British folk lore (and not like the bowdlerised and sanitised wee amusing fairies about which Tolkien complains in his lecture On Fairy Stories). I'm thinking here about the fairies or elves of stories such as Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer.

Lastly, I think the immortality part is important. Tolkien's more 'Mannish' LOTR (and, to an extent TH) seem to me to have much thought about mortality: "what shall we do with the time that is given to us?" "What if anything are we *meant* to do?" "How shall we bear it when the world is full of bad as well as good, and even the cost of victory can be high?" The immortal elves, perhaps, provide a useful useful alternative angle on these themes.

So I think Tolkien had a number of needs and purposes and starting points for his elves, and worked them out in the way he needed.

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


noWizardme
Half-elven


May 10 2017, 2:04pm

Post #12 of 63 (4223 views)
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Feanor [In reply to] Can't Post

Your mentioning Feanor made me realise he is an excellent example of what I've been thinking about.

In Flight of the Noldor, the Sil.'s writing which has been remote and historical, suddenly becomes urgent and immediate. So that is one point we've been discussing - Tolkien 'zooms in' stylistically when he need to focus on a character, rather than a history.And, focused on a character, we need to understand the pressures building upon Feanor, and then what he does in reaction.

We need to understand Feanor, and so he must be understandable - Mannish rather than distinctly elvish - for a while. I don't think Tolkien has a choice there.

Feanor's acts in starting the flight of the Noldor are far from stereotypic and simple, but they are the kinds of actions that a charismatic and furious revolutionary human leader might take. The Noldor must repudiate the current, Valar administration - it is incompetent or corrupt! The Noldor must arm themselves and take matters into their own hands! It must all happen immediately! They must be bound forever to this cause and all resistance to their will from any source whatever must be beaten down! We understand this, I think, because we have heard of demagogues and mobs and revolutions. And most of us at some level or another have felt let down by the Authorities, betrayed, or impatient of any except the most direct and dramatic route towards our goal.

I think that, whatever Feanor does at this point, I can't help but try to interpret it as a reaction to the events (the murder of his father; his feelings about being asked to give up the silmarils to save the trees and finding himself unable to do it; the news that the silmarils have in any case been stolen).
For example, if Tolkien had Feanor prepare for an elvish version of formal suicide, I'd be moved to interpret it as either despair , or as a furious protest over the heads of the Valar to Eru himself. If Feanor (say) baked seventeen cakes of carefully diminishing size and iced them in different colours, then I'd just be baffled. Id be baffled because I would not see how these actions are a reaction to murder theft and betrayal. The story would quickly fail for me unless Tolkien came up with an explanation.

So at this point, Feanor just can't be the sort of incomprehensible creatures that elves and fairies are in some stories (typically where they appear as antagonists, I think). For example The Fairy Queen of Tam Lin has enslaved Tam and might now be preparing to make him a sacrificial victim. Tam's lover Janet sets out to save him by undertaking a strange ordeal. She must grab Tam and hold on to him despite him undergoing a series of magical transformations into things that are frightening, dangerous or hard to hold. If she succeeds however, the Fairy Queen is obliged to give Tam up - no simply enslaving Janet too, or shooting them both. The whole business of the ordeal, someone might say, makes no sense. But that seems not to matter - the Tam Lin story works because the audience can understand the great courage of Janet in undertaking the ordeal.

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


noWizardme
Half-elven


May 10 2017, 6:38pm

Post #13 of 63 (4205 views)
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A summary of sorts? [In reply to] Can't Post

I am greatly enjoying this thread. But I'm aware I have been lobbing in many ideas, perhaps making it confusing. Apologies if so, and perhaps a summary of some points might help?

We started with an article claiming (among other things) that ancient literature didn't discuss states of mind, and that perhaps ancient readers lacked the training to understand such content. I agree with Darkstone this is unproven. Ancient readers will often have been used to a storyteller making an interpretation of the basic tale, and anyway perhaps they did all the inferring of mental states and motives they wanted, and (for all we know) they were bolder in doing so than we are today, when we expect the creator of the story to guide us.

We discussed reasons why Tolkien had used a more ancient form of fiction for the Sil. which is therefore more 'distant': than LOTR - The Sil, is (in most parts) less likely to give dialogue or observations from which a character's mental state or motives can be learned. One effect (though, I argued, not the only intended one) is to make the characters seem a bit more alien. Perhaps this is appropriate since they are all elves or other immortals, and so are literally aliens to us mortals.

We have also discussed some of the limitations in how alien Tolkien's elves can be. One is that he didn't start from a blank sheet of paper, envisage an immortal race and extrapolate their culture from that immortality. He knew that he wanted to end up with his idealised version of elves from folk tales, and to tell their stories in a form that was very like his favourite human literature from the ancient and medieval period. And so we have a work on that basis - someone else can do the extrapolation exercise and write those stories, if they want.

Another limitation is that writing stories about alien characters involves a problem or dilemma. If aliens are mysterious and inscrutable, then we'd expect that audience can't make sense of their thought patterns or motives (or at least not without a lot of explanation). But this must preclude them taking up any roles in the story where the reader DOES need to (or is likely to attempt to) make those inferences. I'm currently rather taken with this idea and wonder whether it is why alien races in science fiction or fantasy so often end up being extreme humans, rather than seeming truly alien. I can think of some stories involving really incomprehensible aliens, but they tend to cause a set of problems for humans (or more comprehensible-to-humans aliens) to solve.

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 12 2017, 12:57pm

Post #14 of 63 (4104 views)
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An admittedly brief reply, but [In reply to] Can't Post

I'll hope to catch up this weekend, but skimming this thread, a few things stood out at me:
1. Yes, old fiction generally focuses on action & doesn't describe feelings.
2. But! Old non-fiction definitely discussed feelings, all the way back to the first writings.
3. Another form of writing--personal correspondence, which was only betweeen the rich & powerful--also could go on at length about emotions & psychological motivations, etc.

And maybe you've covered this already, and I'll find out this weekend. But just wanted to point it out.


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 13 2017, 10:27pm

Post #15 of 63 (4042 views)
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That was indeed an epic discussion, and I don't use that word lightly. [In reply to] Can't Post

Thanks for the link and bringing back great memories of some of our robust discussions. And we were all over the map on that story in our interpretations, with no one emerging as The One True Insight.

But that is the result of mass education and mass communication. Heavens, even women are mass-educated in this day and age. To go back to the original article about past vs. present literature and its readers and your comment in this post, what do we know of classics that most people would have known in their time and how people reacted to them? Did Greeks in 500 BC all agree on the character of Odsysseus in the Iliad: was his trickiness to be admired & emulated, or was it born from a deceitful character and even cowardice? (I'm recalling a debate we had in college about him.) Were readers, who were a small part of the population back then and in the Middle Ages, all in agreement, and were they pressured by other readers into interpretive orthodoxy? Or were they entitled to their own opinion.

To shift from literature to theology, I have read original sources in early Christianity where people fumed and excoriated each other for misinterpreting the religious message, and the nature of Christ (was he divine, semi-divine, and various other permutations), and that led to feuds over heresy. Readers constructing their own interpretations in that context was frowned upon, and thought was all about orthodoxy, and which faction/heresy you adhered to. Would that have happened if the writing had been more nuanced and showed characters having internal contradictions and surprising reactions as it does today?


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 13 2017, 10:43pm

Post #16 of 63 (4035 views)
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Degrees of taste [In reply to] Can't Post

For me, reading The Sil as a teenager made it seem even more magical to have it in a quasi-King James style of writing, because everything I'd read before that had always been contemporary.

But as you say, there are degrees of taste. I've struggled to read The Book of Lost Tales because the language there is so much more stylized, and also the premise of fictional characters reciting fictional tales to each other over & over gets tiresome, so it seems more work than pleasure to read it, but of course there are those who enjoy it.


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 13 2017, 11:09pm

Post #17 of 63 (4033 views)
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Egad, now I'm gagging on the mere thought of "Storm Front Tolkien." [In reply to] Can't Post

I didn't know they existed. And having just posted about heresy (in a disapproving tone), I would still like to contradict myself and burn down their website with fire & brimstone in the name of Tolkien purity! (I'll have to work out how one burns down something in the cybersphere, but hey, when you're in torch & pitchfork mood, you fight first and reason later.)

Anyway, thanks for the connection to Campbell, as well as the reference to Weinbaum's story, which I had never heard of and now want to read.

I was thinking about your discussion of ancient pride vs. modern humility, and I think humility is equally important in Muslim and Buddhist thought, so if you look at Christianity covering the Americas, Aus-NZ, Europe, and southern half of Africa, Islam in the Mideast and northern half of Africa, and Buddhism in East Asia, there's really not a lot of room left in the modern world for a pride-based society, is there? Yet in the ancient world, it was all the rage. That's a profound global cultural shift.

Which made me wonder about a related phenomenon: divisions of society into hereditary classes, with the rich nobility/monarchy class having different lifestyles and expectations than the lowly and much larger worker class, and little to no mobility between them. There is more resistance in the modern era to the idea of a hereditary elite who owns all the land, is the only recipient of education, etc. Not that elites have gone away, but there's more criticism of them, and I wonder if that's related to the idea of humility, since you can't be both humble and superior. But which came first: the idea of universal equality, or humility, or do they reinforce each other over time in an aggregate way?


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 13 2017, 11:20pm

Post #18 of 63 (4026 views)
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Would immortals impose a quota on how much complaining one could do? Otherwise, it would last forever. [In reply to] Can't Post

OK, jokes aside, one thing that actually undermines the notion of immortality specifically in The Sil is (*spoiler*) almost everyone important dies. It wouldn't be a tragedy without a lot of death, or even heroic without a lot of death, and he wanted tragedy and heroes. And except for a little teaser about Finrod, none of them are mentioned coming back to life, so they die in the same sense of removal from the world as mortal Men and Dwarves. In that sense, it seems less alien and more human to me.


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 13 2017, 11:40pm

Post #19 of 63 (4025 views)
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Anthropomorphizing [In reply to] Can't Post

Finally, I came up with a header that didn't try to autofill from past headers, so I'm certain I haven't said this before.

From Wiz:

Quote
Another limitation is that writing stories about alien characters involves a problem or dilemma. If aliens are mysterious and inscrutable, then we'd expect that audience can't make sense of their thought patterns or motives (or at least not without a lot of explanation). But this must preclude them taking up any roles in the story where the reader DOES need to (or is likely to attempt to) make those inferences. I'm currently rather taken with this idea and wonder whether it is why alien races in science fiction or fantasy so often end up being extreme humans, rather than seeming truly alien. I can think of some stories involving really incomprehensible aliens, but they tend to cause a set of problems for humans (or more comprehensible-to-humans aliens) to solve.

And from Darkstone:

Quote
The human mind has an innate instinct to uncover order in chaos, which is why it takes some active effort to enjoy some types of art like jazz or Picasso.

I would synthesize this: no matter what alien you put on a page or on a screen, we human readers/viewers will anthropomorphize it because we are trying to find the familiar in a confusing chaos of unfamiliarity. I think we're hard-wired to do that. So if you create a race of cloud-aliens whose main sport is throwing cheddar cheese balls around the sky, and along comes a dark cloud that melts the cheese and ruins the fun, we would go from a state of perplexity to epiphany and say, "Oh, there's the villain!" And we'd continue to look for other familiar traits and archetypes. (And everyone in the world except here in the Reading Room would just accept that clouds can make cheddar cheese and not start a whole discussion on the mechanics and physics of it. Smile)


CuriousG
Half-elven


May 14 2017, 12:12am

Post #20 of 63 (4024 views)
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How emotionally sophisticated ancients could be: [In reply to] Can't Post

Get in your TARDIS and go back 2300 years, and you'll meet Aristotle. Now go back another 1600 years before Aristotle to 1900BC, and you'll encounter the author of this Egyptian tale of a man debating suicide with his soul is revealing in how nuanced and sophisticated ancient people could be--pretty much like people in the present.

The entire piece is about a man struggling with his feelings of personal despair and frustration with social decay, which he lays out both explicitly and through poetry, and all of that within the story structure of his mortal body debating with his immortal soul. Not only are his feelings exposed, but his soul (spoiler) has feelings of its own, and while first trying to talk him out of burning his body and thus depriving the soul of a home, the soul concludes that whatever the man decides, even something catastrophic, it will support him in what I would clumsily call a spirit of friendship.

So, 4,000 years ago, someone wrote for an audience all about these feelings and motivations which are profound and complex. And one rule of thumb about ancient literature is that if it survived at all, it was because a contemporary thought it was worth keeping. Hence, I think that answers the question from the blog OP:


Quote
These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?



noWizardme
Half-elven


May 14 2017, 6:06pm

Post #21 of 63 (3997 views)
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First- Age problems [In reply to] Can't Post

There was an amusing web page of problems you would have if you were elf immortal.

One was something like: "You work hard to build the conversation up to an awesome pun, only to realise that it no longer works, because vowels have shifted since your youth. "

I think it was on tumblr. I can't find it now (does anyone know the page I'm thinking about?)

Thanks for the many good replies, CG!

~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm


FarFromHome
Valinor


May 15 2017, 11:52am

Post #22 of 63 (3948 views)
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"Western literature's progression" [In reply to] Can't Post

I suspect the writer is only thinking of what we now call "western literature" - i.e. the literature of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. That developed along cultural lines that reflected the lives of the people who lived in those times. For many of the peoples of northern Europe, who either lost their literacy after the Romans left, and/or who never had a written literature in the first place, the storytelling needs and preferences were quite different from those of literate people in stable civilizations who had the time for personal reading and reflection. "Literature's progression" as discussed in the article, in other words, is not about a single line in human development but a particular development in the post-Roman European world, from an oral culture to the rediscovery of the written word and the reintroduction of literacy and private reading.

This rediscovery of the lost traditions of Greece and Rome changed the course of western literature and led to the literary culture we have today. But there was a time, such as the Anglo-Saxon period in England (which was of particular personal and professional interest to Tolkien), when a simpler, more "mythic" style of storytelling held sway. That is really the style that we are most separated from now, and I think Tolkien's interest lies in that very difference - he actually wanted to give us a flavour of the more mythic and less individualized style of storytelling that can seem quite alien to us now but in which he saw great interest and beauty.

The writer of the article you linked to in your first post makes a strong argument for literacy increasing the complexity of human thought and culture, but I suspect that Tolkien might have argued that too much complexity and too close a focus on the individual was masking the underlying "bones" of what storytelling is really about. (A similar thing happened in art, with Picasso, for example, drawing on the power of pre-literate, "primitive" forms of art to strip away the built-up layers of overt emotion and complexity in western art tradition and present a perspective that seems new and alien but is actually older and deeper than the artistic styles we are more familiar and comfortable with.) I'd say, though, that emotion isn't missing from these more ancient styles but just that it's not spelled out for us. We have to find it for ourselves, according to what our heart tells us.

So going back thousands of years isn't really the point - civilizations have risen and fallen many times, and the early stories (such as the Greek myths) seem always to have something in common with each other, and strike a particular chord that seems to be lost in the chatter of the more complex emotional, individualized stories that follow as societies become more literate and "sophisticated". The writer of the article takes as a given that what we think of as "progress" is always positive. I'm not sure that Tolkien would necessarily agree!

They went in, and Sam shut the door.
But even as he did so, he heard suddenly,
deep and unstilled,
the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth.
From the unpublished Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings



squire
Half-elven


May 15 2017, 12:11pm

Post #23 of 63 (3952 views)
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Nice connection to PIcasso [In reply to] Can't Post

Which places Tolkien squarely among a group of Moderns who began questioning the linear progression "upward" of Western art and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- for better or worse. It's fun to read his "Notion-Club Papers" if only to see that when he wasn't writing his consciously backwards-looking and Romantic mythology, he enjoyed talking with his friends about a much more widely-ranging set of topics framed by modern trends in art, technology, and history.

I've always been interested in how Tolkien's untrained art captures the essence of both Arts & Crafts (Morris) as well as elements of Art Deco (see The Hobbit cover). He often claimed to suspect The Machine of destroying hopes of an organic or traditional lifestyle, but like most of his contemporaries he was torn between machinery's anti-human aspects, and its simultaneous tendency towards aesthetic abstraction and elemental power. Not to mention its sheer labor-saving features in some cases, leaving more time for art, pipe-smoking, nature walks, etc.

Sorry to get off topic. Back to the point: people who bemoan this or that about 'literature' and 'art' are usually speaking way too generally about what comes down to their own preference in such things. That preference may be due to long and studied consideration, or simply to an acculturating education in the local state's schools.



squire online:
RR Discussions: The Valaquenta, A Shortcut to Mushrooms, and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
Lights! Action! Discuss on the Movie board!: 'A Journey in the Dark'. and 'Designing The Two Towers'.
Archive: All the TORn Reading Room Book Discussions (including the 1st BotR Discussion!) and Footerama: "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
Dr. Squire introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary


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noWizardme
Half-elven


May 15 2017, 5:31pm

Post #24 of 63 (3939 views)
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interpretive orthodoxy [In reply to] Can't Post


In Reply To
To go back to the original article about past vs. present literature and its readers and your comment in this post, what do we know of classics that most people would have known in their time and how people reacted to them? Did Greeks in 500 BC all agree on the character of Odsysseus in the Iliad: was his trickiness to be admired & emulated, or was it born from a deceitful character and even cowardice? (I'm recalling a debate we had in college about him.) Were readers, who were a small part of the population back then and in the Middle Ages, all in agreement, and were they pressured by other readers into interpretive orthodoxy? Or were they entitled to their own opinion.


Well, I suppose one question is "Who would stop them having their own opinion"?
For modern texts there's usually one 'official' version, which we can all study, and in which the author might be explicit, or deliberately ambiguous. There are also commentaries, websites like this one, Professors teaching courses - all that was presumably different in older times.

Firstly, as per Darkstone's post earlier, the story might be intended to come to you via a live stoyteller or actors, adding their own interpretation. And in those pre-copyright days, stories tended to change and mutate, and breed different versions.


So, take an Ancient Greek play with a deus ex machina plot. As it's been explained to me, they used literally to have a machine like a chariot or spaceship lowered onto the stage. An actor playing a god would come out, and resolve all the plot complications and entanglements. It sounds so daft to modern audiences that "deus ex machina" has come to mean "any artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot." (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/deus-ex-machina ) I remember wondering once what the ancient Greek audiences would have made of it. Did it not seem funny or contrived because it reflected something they believed in? Or was it intended to be a joke? Or (I'm now thinking) maybe both - you'd play it straight in a conservative polis and have people nodding at how merciful the gods were. Maybe later in the tour you play it for laughs to the hip, impious young gentlemen of the Athens Academy. (And then you get out of town quickly if the Elders have been offended!)

Some old stories we have (I think) in only one version, but I suppose that that might mean that's the only surviving version not the only one there ever was, nor necessarily the original one, or a typical one. Other stories have survived in many, contradictory versions (this fine website lists 46 variant of 'Tam Lin' http://tam-lin.org/analysis/index.html ). Janet, the protagonist in Tam Lin, goes to a piece of land that she rightfully owns, but which has been taken over by Tam Lin, who is a servant of the Fairy Queen, and is exacting tolls. The audience knows that these tolls might be physical treasure, or the intruder's virginity.
Before Janet sets out, she prepares in an odd way - shortening her skirts, braiding up her hair, and wearing green. She picks the flowers which summon Tam Lin, and one way or another returns home pregnant by him. It is difficult not to wonder what she intended to happen, and what did actually happen.

Interpretations include:
=>She is an extremely rash and foolish girl, randomly deciding to pick flowers, and dressing in a risque fashion to boot. Green is associated with fairies and also with promiscuity. In this interpretation, Janet has not only worn a highly provoking colour, she has done her hair to be attractive, and is also showing off her legs. Some versions push the interpretation that way.

=> Or, Janet is actually a determined and brave young woman. The fairies are not only usurping her rights to her land, but they are also kidnapping folks. Perhaps she means to wrest control (a little like Aragorn daring to try the palantir)? In that case the green dress is part of forcing an encounter, but the hair and skirts are a sensible precaution in case it goes badly and she has to run.

"Which is correct" is most likely a meaningless question - the story has portrayed a brave and independent young noblewoman in some versions and been a cautionary tale about independent young women in others.

There is a fine essay about the various versions and interpretations here http://tam-lin.org/...am_Lin_and_rape.html I think the author deals sensitively and sensibly with the matter, starting with this disclaimer:


Quote
This essay will be discuss interpretations of sex and consent in a sixteenth century ballad, including attempts to understand in a historical and narrative context the beliefs about sex, consent, and rape that underlie the story. Many of these beliefs will be offensive from a modern perspective. The examination of these beliefs does not constitute an endorsement of them or condone the behaviors they lead to. Neither does the examination or criticism of these beliefs constitute an attack on the ballad or disparagement of those who love it. We have to examine our stories critically and honestly in order to understand them. Striving for understanding is, itself, a form of love.

I am writing under the assumption that the reader will be able to distinguish the identification of reasons for which rape may occur in the ballad from real-world victim-blaming or excuse-making, and appreciates that ballads recorded in the sixteenth century about faeries who sacrifice people to hell are unlikely to constitute a reasonable guide to viewpoints on sexuality or societally responsible frameworks of behavior.

ibid


~~~~~~
Where's that old read-through discussion?
A wonderful list of links to previous chapters in the 2014-2016 LOTR read-through (and to previous read-throughs) is curated by our very own 'squire' here http://users.bestweb.net/...-SixthDiscussion.htm

(This post was edited by noWizardme on May 15 2017, 5:33pm)


FarFromHome
Valinor


May 15 2017, 9:04pm

Post #25 of 63 (3928 views)
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Acculturation [In reply to] Can't Post


Quote
...people who bemoan this or that about 'literature' and 'art' are usually speaking way too generally about what comes down to their own preference in such things. That preference may be due to long and studied consideration, or simply to an acculturating education in the local state's schools.

Well yes, that's essentially what culture is really, isn't it? The preferences of the general mass of the people at a given time and place. There are always some who reject the current preferences and find a new way of seeing the world, and make new art that may be met with hostility or lack of understanding at first before becoming accepted as the "preference' of a later generation (think Impressionism, rejected at first but now seeming almost too safe and easy to like) and so the evolution of art and literature goes on. Tolkien opposed the current tastes of his own generation to some extent - certainly he didn't subscribe to the mainstream of academic opinion, as Beowulf and the Critics, for example, makes clear. I think this same perspective (of the value of apparently "primitive" early literature) is found in his fictional work too, even though, as you say, he was open to the ideas of modernity as well. I guess it's all about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater - appreciating many aspects of the modern world without believing that everything that isn't modern is worthless and needs to be torn down. There was certainly a taste for ripping down anything that didn't conform to 'modern standards' in the mid 20th century, as Tolkien had noted earlier in his metaphor of the Tower, pushed over by the critics who saw Beowulf as too primitive to be worth studying except as a source of historical or linguistic data, because it didn't conform to their idea of what literature should be.


They went in, and Sam shut the door.
But even as he did so, he heard suddenly,
deep and unstilled,
the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth.
From the unpublished Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings


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