The Poetry of JRR Tolkien: "Cat" - Part 4: The Blake Connection

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Darkstone

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For Blake’s The Tiger see http://www.bartleby.com/101/489.html.

How is this poem similar to Tolkien's Cat? How is it different?

Consider:

“TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Does Tolkien’s fat cat on the mat burn bright?

What hand or eye framed the less than fearful symmetry of the fat cat on the mat?

Compare with Tolkien’s

“far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;”

Is Tolkien actually hinting at evolution? Man’s mastery of nature? Or is the fat cat on the mat part of Tolkien’s Middle-earth theme of The Long Decline?

Is the fat cat on the mat a perverse imitation made in mockery of creation?

Do you think orcs ever thought back to when they were Elves? If they did, what do you think were their thoughts? How would they feel?

How would a tiger feel about the fat cat on the mat?

Would it be similar to how Big Folk thought about Little Folk?

Hobbits seem awfully domesticated, especially in contrast with the rest of Middle-earth. Who or what domesticated them? Did hobbits ever '"burn bright"? Any hobbits in particular?


Next: The Sandburg Connection
 
I cannot really consider Blake's Tiger, without also considering his Lamb. By itself, the poem about the lamb reads as sickeningly sweet and rather pointless--but when you read "The Tiger" immediately after, you realize that the first poem sets you up for the second. Sort of like that movie (uh-oh--senility setting in! What was that famous movie about the Great White Shark?) with peaceful, happy families enjoying a carefree day at the beach, when suddenly everything explodes with screams and blood and gnashing jaws ("Jaws"! That was it!)

Tolkien more tidily wraps it all up in one poem. You have your lazy fat cat, and then you discover that at heart he is still a tiger, from the same source, just as Blake said.

As for what orcs might think about having sprung from elves, here's one of my fanfic answers, for those with the free time and inclination to tackle a chapter out of context: http://dreamdeer.grailmedia.com/tolkien/frodogardner013.html Please excuse the fact that the dialogue's buried in the midst of a rather messy battle-scene. But I think I capture the essence of what I at least might expect of orkish opinion.

Who domesticated hobbits? I think hobbits domesticated themselves, most likely through the females (Don't tell Ufthak.) See, I speculate on two equal and balancing drives: there's the male drive, testosterone/adrenaline fueled, for competition, and the female drive, estrogen/oxytocin fueled, for harmony (naturally this all takes place in overlapping bell-curves, with plenty of competitive women and nurturing men out there.) The male drive keeps the tribe moving forward, and the female drive keeps it hanging together.

All-male societies (in my observation) either become dangerous with so much competition, such as the pre-settler wild west, or gold-prospecting settlements, or they rigidly gird themselves in with rules to control themselves, such as monastic life, the military, scientific colonies, or life aboard a ship. All-female societies (convents, villages where the men have all gone to war, lesbian-separatist communes) initially seem idyllically harmonious by comparison, but gradually the harmony drive demands more and more conformity, with more and more unspoken rules that everybody's just supposed to get by osmosis, and though stable, they stagnate--excellence being as much a violation of conformity as slacking.

The Shire very much resembles a female-predominant society. And here I tread on dangerous ground, with my theory that hobbits might be (unconscious) metaphors for women!

Think about it. Hobbits are smaller than Men. Fat makes up more of their body mass. They have pleasant, high voices. They display feminine preoccupations with family and ancestry, food, clothes (Bilbo had entire rooms devoted to clothing) gardens and flowers. They appear soft, weak, and cowardly, but when motivated by love for friends or home, they can surprise you in a pinch, and do whatever it takes to defend what they love. Despite which, men (excepting scoundrels that other men despise) seem to feel this overpowering urge to protect them. They have surprising endurance, more than a Man, and also excell in dexterity. They recover faster from sickness and deprivation. And they tend to regard manly competitions for money, power, and prestige as idiotic whenever these get in the way of harmony and comfort.

One could, in fact see the entire Lord of the Rings as this struggle for a hobbit (metaphorical woman) to save all of the competition-crazed men from a feminine symbol (the ring) and its unbalanced harmony drive (pandering to the men's competitive drive while enjoyng being fought over) by dissolving it into the most primordial of feminine symbols (the volcano, which some psychologists equate with breasts or explosive wombs of creation) thereby returning femininity back to its root context. It helps that Mt. Doom is the Ring's birthplace. (Or, if one goes the Freudian route, one could see Mt. Doom as eruptingly phallic, and the dissolution of the Ring as the Taming of the Shrew in matrimony, losing identity to the masculine in the marriage act. But that makes me squirm uncomfortably.)

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just running with a passing thought and going crazy with it. The whole thing is probably ludicrous, but fun to play with. Laughter allowed.
 
Actually, I love all of them, but I had read them before, and I'd never seen the Smart one.

For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
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Where Blake's Tyger poem takes the human point of view, horrified at the awesome power of the cat, Tolkien's Cat poem imagines the feline point of view, dreamily considering its wild cousins' gory glory with no hint of censure.

I think Tolkien's Cat is more a study in Innocence than Experience, though -- its subject is like a hobbit who has dreamed of adventures but has never actually suffered the discomforts and inconveniences of living through one.
 
I wonder about what you said. It is an interesting theory - I don't usually know what to make of this. But I'll just make three comments:

1. I find the clear differentiation between men and women quite surprising, coming from you. Someone like myself, who is more of a socal conservative, and does not see such differences as contradicting equivalence, could more easily accept it; but you always struck me as more of a hard-liner feminist - at least, that is how how I read posts such as this one.

2. Accepting your basic theory, I think the names of the books are quite suggestive - the name of the trilogy as a whole, and of each seperate volume.

3. But I'm not sure how correct it actually is.
The Lord of the Rings does not stand in itself.
If we approach it like Tolkien, coming from the Silmarillion, I think the women's roles seem quite different. I would see the Silmarils as a feminine symbol of desire, and the Three Rings as continuing them - actually building havens of safety and bliss. But that would make the One Ring a masculine symbol, wouldn't it?
So how would you see Frodo's quest in that context? As the struggle of a woman to free the world from the symbol of masculine tyranny, only to find out all her sisters have whithered, and she actually sacrificed herself for the dominion of men - true, better men, but men nontheless?
Is it actually a man's fantasy - having a woman volunteer to become a victim, so he could build a better male-dominated world?

But I assume most readers will read it coming from the Hobbit (and so did Tolkien himself, of course). But in that context, the hobbits already have a well-defined role - that of the modern reader, finding himself slowly in the ancient heroic landscape. This actually is how the books are written, and the reader identifies with the hobbits as such.
Perhaps a woman reading the book could identify with this theme, of a woman struggling in a men's world - but it will be quite difficult to read the Hobbit that way, or to shake off the impressions (and inner symbolism) of the earlier book. Or at least, that is how I see it - but no woman am I, and neither do I make any claim to be in intimate touch with my inner self.

Of course, there is a third way to approach the book, without coming from either direction. That is, in effect, the way movie-firsters will experience it. Do you think they would?

To sm up - I'm not quite convinced. But I do not feel very good in this kind of analysis, either.
 
[tongue] Actually, I wrote it in self-parody, as you suspected, with tongue firmly in cheek (I have no idea where that American colloquialism comes from, but it means to joke with a straight face, feigning seriousness.) That's why I concluded by inviting laughter, in case translation to the internet made the mood obscure.

I attempted to test Curious's thesis that one can prove anything symbolically. There might, in fact, be some faint (very faint) psychological truth reflected in it--once I started looking for support for my thesis, I did not lack for examples! However, there is a saying among writers: "When one sees everything as symbolizing everything, it is time to sober up!" (Not that I was drunk on anything save for my own imagination.)

The real test is that while one can find what one looks for, too much of the story does not fit with my premise at all. Hobbits are not really women. And more to the point, it is not a fullfilling answer, at least not for me. It does not do what a symbolic analysis should do, which is discover a layer of why a story resonates so deeply--what makes it beautiful, what makes it ring true.

I must say, though, you rose to the challenge admirably in playing along! One could equally make a case for the ring as, if not a masculine symbol, then one of the feminine turned against itself, sort of an Athena symbol. Maybe, in fact, you saw more clearly than I did.

And I was serious about the differences in male and female drives and the different societies that they create. That perhaps was the flaw in my joke, that I gave it too sincere a figleaf, disguising it perhaps too well. I just got carried away.

Oh heck, I'm not sure what I intended. I was in kind of a giddy, escapist mode, trying not to worry about Grandma, right before the worry completely overwhelmed me. The idea of hobbits as disguised females was not sincere. Maybe seeing the Ring itself as feminine was, but not seeing the story as centrally about male/female relationships. That layer might be in there, but it is not the most important layer. It is definitely not the only meaning in the story. But then symbols allow for many layers of significance--the whole point of symbols is that one can compress more into them than bald recitals of facts.

(I'm finding it kind of hard to think straight, right now. My mind keeps going back to Grandma, worrying about her, how best to meet her needs, worrying about conflicting duties, worrying about her suffering and how best to ease it.)

Ohhhkay. I opened up a can of worms, didn't I, right when I don't feel entirely up to wrestling the squiggly things back into the can.

The Ring: Yes, I do see the Ring as inherently female, for certain Freudian reasons that I need not describe in anatomical detail on a family site, except to quote from the LotR parody penned by the good folks at "The Burping Troll", wherein they recast the Ring inscription as: "One Ring so slutty that she'll go on any finger/ if you get involved with her, you'll wind up on Jerry Springer." They wrote that years before I met them. One sign of a true archetype is that similar symbols with the same interpretation pop up in different places independently. Rings have a feminine quality about them, and this particular ring is a baaaad girl.

Yet she supports the dominion of Sauron--competitive drive grown way out of whack, threatening to devour the entire world. But when you get right down to it, the out-of-balance triumph of patriarchy depends, absolutely, on the treachery of women. Mothers perpetuate gender-roles more than any other group, and that has happened all over the world. That holds true of the American mother telling her daughter not too appear too smart in front of the boys, the Chinese mother binding her daughter's feet, the African mother demanding that her daughter undergo "female circumcision". We want to harmonize so badly that we will not only support the competitive drive (which does have its uses) we oversupport it, suppressing ourselves more than men ask for, throwing them and ourselves out of balance.

And how does the Ring work? It creates a desire to submit to the wielder.

Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes have written extensively on female archetypes, one being the Athena archetype. This is, in its balanced form, the tomboy, the woman not afraid to exhibit masculine traits (or Galadriel, if you will, the man-maiden.) In unbalanced form, she becomes a traitor to her own kind. Athena springs fully-formed out of Zeus's mind, his brainchild, his creation of a woman in his own image, and she rebukes other women for thinking too well of themselves, citing herself as an example of how men don't really need women even to reproduce (what she doesn't mention is that Zeus devoured her mother, who then gave birth inside him--isn't that rich in symbolism!) The unbalanced Athena-woman holds other women in contempt and tries not to be like them, worshiping all aspects of the masculine like Zeus. I do sincerely postulate that the Ring is an unbalanced Athena-symbol, a champion of oversubmission, enticing men to becoming tyrants that they would otherwise not be.

The part about hobbits was the silly part. But then, without even knowing it, I strayed into serious stuff. And you did correctly respond to that. And put forth a good argument that helped me to clarify exactly what I do think. By setting forth good arguments for the unbalanced-masculine agenda served by the Ring, you helped me define specifically what kind of feminine symbol I was grappling with, here. Which is exactly what a good discussion can do. Metaphorically, it's like kneading blue and red modeling clay together until gradually you get a true purple, while flicking out any bits of detritis that the clay might have picked up, like my farcical hobbit reference.

THANK YOU!
 
So perhaps Treebeard thought of the Shire as feminine, or a land that would appeal to women.

In a book so devoid of female leads, I think it is fair to look for men who have feminine characteristics. But I think it may be more accurate to see the hobbits as childlike, and those childlike features are often associated with women, as well as children.

I think my point is that we cannot prove anything symbolically if we ignore the intent of the author and the textual evidence. Instead, we are left with subjective symbols which no one can dispute, because they are purely subjective. If I say that I want to see the hobbits as female and I don't care what Tolkien or the text say, how can you refute me?

As you say, most of the story does not fit with your premise at all. I judge, as you do, that it fails the test. I also judge that the premise that the hobbits are childlike passes the test.

Squire and I have disputed whether the hobbits are more childlike or childish, i.e. whether their resemblance to children is, on balance, more positive or negative. I'll admit that there is a subjective element to that argument: do we consider the resemblance between hobbits and children a feature or a flaw? But as long as we label that opinion subjective perhaps we can voice it and move on.
 
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I think my point is that we cannot prove anything symbolically if we ignore the intent of the author and the textual evidence.
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...despite this sentence, we know that you understand not everyone who posts to the Reading Room cares whether their reactions are supported by any proof at all. [;)]
 
A third option might be that the hobbits are both childish and childlike, that this is both their flaw and their virtue, that we cannot come to terms with hobbits without accepting this gray area. That, in fact, our deepest flaws sometimes support our highest virtues, and our highest virtues sometimes cast deeply flawed shadows.

I have spoken in the other thread of how Tolkien has inspired me to boldness, to stand up to bullies. The shadow-side of that is that I must then guard against becoming a bully, myself. Boldness can easily tip over into rudeness or obnoxiousness. I don't let fear stop me from taking a stand. But I must then guard against foolhardiness, not choosing my battles wisely, taking risks without sufficient cause.

The hobbits are what they are. They do, however, have the choice on whether or not to manifest the good side or the bad side of their childlike nature. Gollum, for instance, is the ultimate brat, the exemplar of someone shut off from maturity. Frodo, in contrast, acts with childlike trust in following the advice of parental figures--but he chooses to humbly step down into this role, with a kind of contradictory adult view of the larger picture, and a mature sense of empathy.
 
I'm expressing my own frustration, which may be totally misplaced, and do not want to impose requirements upon anyone else.
 
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