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Interesting essay about invisibility in speculative fiction

noWizardme
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 3:46pm

Post #1 of 9 (873 views)
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Interesting essay about invisibility in speculative fiction Can't Post

Philip Ball writing in The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/...ream-of-inivisbility

I thought the observation...


Quote
...magic in fairytales: it just happens, because it is not about the doing but the consequences.
(my italics)


...is astute. How does the One Ring turn you invisible? best not to ask, maybe. Tolkien is more interested in the moral effects than the optical mechanisms.

The alternative is that, like H G Wells, you try to offer an sciency-wiency explanation:

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"For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly," Wells wrote in 1934, "he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis … instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible."

In other words, Wells wanted to turn myth into science, or at least something that would pass for it."


..but that is bound to peter out, since of course Mr Wells doesn't know how to turn someone invisible.

~~~~~~

"nowimė I am in the West, Furincurunir to the Dwarves (or at least, to their best friend) and by other names in other lands. Mostly they just say 'Oh no it's him - look busy!' "
Or "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

This year LOTR turns 60, and I turn 50 (and old enough for Going On An Adventure: who's that fellow in the grey hat scratching at my door?)


squire
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 5:12pm

Post #2 of 9 (741 views)
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Some nice thinking [In reply to] Can't Post

Thanks for passing that on.

I like the point that Tolkien, unlike Wells, felt no need to worry about how magical invisibility actually works - with his ever-so-slight exception that the Ring-wearer casts a faint shadow in the noontime sun! Where did that one come from, I've sometimes wondered? The best I've come up with was, in keeping with Tolkien's spiritual bent, a moral explanation: if invisibility is in some sense a property of Darkness, it must be most counteracted at the time when the power of Light is strongest, i.e., at noon. It's really almost a moral exception, and is actually more in keeping with what the ring becomes in the next book. Ironically, however, that exact feature never even appears in LotR. In fact it really only took effect during Bilbo's escape from the goblins' back gate, leaving us perhaps to conclude that it was more of an puffed-up plot device than a statement about a moral universe's struggle between light and dark!

In a larger context, I can't agree that Tolkien was interested in the moral effects of his ring of invisibility. In The Hobbit, invisibility's only moral effect on Bilbo is to make him braver and more altruistic, completely the opposite from the effect invisibility has on Gyges and Wells' antihero. And in The Lord of the Rings, the invisibility feature actually turns into a burden for the author. It is no more than a parlor-trick, a fairy-tale legacy from the previous story and has no connection with the extremely meaningful moral symbolism the Ring acquires in the epic, about the corruption that must result from the power of compulsion.

Yes, Tolkien dabbles with the 'wraith world' and the 'other side' as explanations for what is going on when a mortal wearer puts the Ring on, but that (perhaps deliberately) completely sabotages its usefulness for hiding from the Dark Lord's forces. After Book I, it is no longer Bilbo's handy-dandy burglary ring in any useful sense. As Sam says, what a nuisance!



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'.
Footeramas: The 3rd & 4th TORn Reading Room LotR Discussion and NOW the 1st BotR Discussion too! and "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
squiretalk introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary


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noWizardme
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 5:45pm

Post #3 of 9 (721 views)
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Moral effects [In reply to] Can't Post

I probably should have put "moral perils of using the ring".

Unlike Gyges, who behaves badly because the ring allows him to, Bilbo and Frodo manage to behave well.

~~~~~~

"nowimė I am in the West, Furincurunir to the Dwarves (or at least, to their best friend) and by other names in other lands. Mostly they just say 'Oh no it's him - look busy!' "
Or "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

This year LOTR turns 60. The following image is my LOTR 60th anniversary party footer! You can get yours here: http://newboards.theonering.net/...i?post=762154#762154


squire
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 5:53pm

Post #4 of 9 (747 views)
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There is a somewhat ridiculous episode in the LotR drafts [In reply to] Can't Post

preserved in HoME, in which Frodo bops around Farmer Maggot's house while wearing the ring. He torments the farmer by stealing his food while invisible, in revenge for his childhood mistreatment.

That's the closest I can see to Tolkien beginning to explore the 'evils of invisibility' in the sense of the Gyges fable - possibly he was exploring just how 'evil' the Necromancer's Ring should prove to be, and for what reasons or by what mechanisms. But that kind of thing has no place in LotR as the book evolved, and it is long gone - except in the memory of CT and thousands of HoME fans.



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'.
Footeramas: The 3rd & 4th TORn Reading Room LotR Discussion and NOW the 1st BotR Discussion too! and "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
squiretalk introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary


= Forum has no new posts. Forum needs no new posts.


noWizardme
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 6:49pm

Post #5 of 9 (724 views)
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Ah: I see what I'm conflating here [In reply to] Can't Post

Gyges' ring gives Gyges a superpower such that he can get what he wants whilst evading the normal consequences. The invisibility, I'm
Thinking, is in one way just a mechanism by which he can dominate and suborn other wills (doing non-consensual things to people like stealing, raping and murdering). In the comments on this Guardian article, someone mentions a story in which a character can stop time, and be the only person unaffected. They go on a similar rampage.

So I'm seeing "don't use the Ring to turn invisible and steal Lobelia's spoons" as the same kind of moral choice as "don't use the Ring to raise armies and subjugate the world". Different scale, mostly.

I see a lot in LOTR about being able to make that kind of choice: and other choices, such as renouncing and destroying the Ring.

Am I making more sense, or adding more confusion?

~~~~~~

"nowimė I am in the West, Furincurunir to the Dwarves (or at least, to their best friend) and by other names in other lands. Mostly they just say 'Oh no it's him - look busy!' "
Or "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

This year LOTR turns 60. The following image is my LOTR 60th anniversary party footer! You can get yours here: http://newboards.theonering.net/...i?post=762154#762154


Darkstone
Immortal


Jul 29 2014, 7:14pm

Post #6 of 9 (714 views)
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What about... [In reply to] Can't Post

..."don't use the ring to avoid social contact"? Bilbo was respectable gentry, and surely had some local responsiblities. (Noblesse oblige and all that.) He seems to have at times used the ring to avoid such,. A good or bad thing?

******************************************
"We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."
-Robert Wilensky


noWizardme
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 8:38pm

Post #7 of 9 (710 views)
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An early draft... [In reply to] Can't Post

If I recall, an early draft of FOTR has Bilbo's ring being one of a great number circulated by a sketched-out evil power to cause mischief (mostly because of the Gygean temptations of invisibility). But there was already the catch that if you used such rings for evil you became permanently invisible, and under the control of the evil power. Bilbo had avoided this by using the ring "lightheartedly" (to avoid the S-Bs, for example)

Of course then the idea of the Ring then grew...

It's only in LOTR, come to think of it, that the Ring is directly morally hazardous. In Hobbit, Bilbo could theoretically use it for bad purposes, but the suggestion doesn't come up, as far as I remember. Glaucon would presumably expect Bilbo to murder Thranduil....

The ring in The Hobbit is just a useful gadget, like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, or a gadget James Bond might have.

But, though I certainly don't claim Tolkien was setting out to counter Glaucon, that's what he ends up doing, since both the Gyges story and Tolkien's involve the effect on people of such a power (and don't get into the mechanism of it).

~~~~~~

"nowimė I am in the West, Furincurunir to the Dwarves (or at least, to their best friend) and by other names in other lands. Mostly they just say 'Oh no it's him - look busy!' "
Or "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

This year LOTR turns 60. The following image is my LOTR 60th anniversary party footer! You can get yours here: http://newboards.theonering.net/...i?post=762154#762154


dernwyn
Forum Admin / Moderator


Jul 29 2014, 9:20pm

Post #8 of 9 (707 views)
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*does double-take* [In reply to] Can't Post

*looks at squire's footer's url*

Hah, just as I thought - that's not one of Magpie's "official" footers! Laugh

Well done, squire! I wonder how many others have realized what that is?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I desired dragons with a profound desire"





CuriousG
Half-elven


Jul 29 2014, 10:09pm

Post #9 of 9 (764 views)
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Some strands of science fiction [In reply to] Can't Post

go on and on about how a warp drive would work. I like science (astronomy, physics, etc), and I like it when sci-fi teaches me something new, but endless detail about how something works is like reading a user manual for an appliance. I think it's when fiction becomes so concerned with legitimacy that it reads like non-fiction that it's gone too far.

Besides being dull to read, all the technical detail can kill the imagination. If Bilbo puts on a magic ring and disappears, it's left to me to construct the rest in my mind. Are his clothes invisible too? What if a button comes off his coat and falls to the ground--does it become visible because it's crossed some magical boundary, or stay invisible because it was part of his coat when he put on the ring? I ask questions like that, and I like getting answers, but too many answers makes me stop asking.


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Tolkien is more interested in the moral effects than the optical mechanisms.



 
 

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