Eldamar -
Michael D. C. Drout
Comments by squire, February 13,
2007
Given an obviously abbreviated word-count,
Drout goes for the gold and skips any
consideration of the place of Eldamar in the
annals of the Elves in the Silmarillion cycle.
Nothing about the Kin-slaying; nothing about the
differences between the Teleri, the Noldor and
the Vanyar Elves and their varying relations to
the Undying Lands; nothing from the History
of Middle-earth, or the transmission of the
White Tree or the reception of mortals in
Elvenhome.
No, instead he focuses on the description of
Eldamar, quoted at length, and makes a pretty
mini-essay on the Elvish esthetic as a unique
"harmony of the natural and the cultural". A
reference to the medieval poem Pearl is a
nice touch -- a balancing reference to later,
perhaps lesser, instances of this esthetic in
Middle-earth, such as in Lorien, Rivendell, and
even Gondor (in the time of Atanatar Alcarin,
"men said precious stones are pebbles in
Gondor for children to play with") would
have been nice. But word counts are word counts.
Well, why not? Goes for the gold, and gets
it.
Elements -
Cecilia Barella
Comments by squire, July 13,
2007
Barella starts slow, with too much space
spent on establishing that the Four Elements go
all the way back in Western culture. Her next
section is better, drawing clear lines from the
classical elements to some of the major symbolic
divisions in Tolkien's legendarium: the three
Elvish Rings (any candidates for the Ring of
"Earth"?), and the four most powerful of the
Valar.
Unfortunately, her final section of analysis
falls apart. Many of her story examples (all
from The Lord of the Rings) seem too
speculative, indecisive, or inconclusive to
carry much critical weight. This may partly be
because Tolkien himself hesitated to overplay
this kind of symbolism, as is seen in his
underuse of the Valar themselves (with their
clear Elemental associations) in both The
Silmarillion and the LotR.
Barella's point about Fire being
"dual-natured" is perhaps the most interesting
and deserving of further investigation, carrying
as it does connotations of Light, Life, Heat,
Death, and Destruction and Rebirth: witness
Gandalf's challenge to the Balrog, in which both
wizard and demon are servants of their
respective Flames.
The references and bibliography are too short
for a subject of this scope, despite the brevity
of the article.
Elendilmir - Miryam Librán Moreno
Comments by squire, July 13,
2007
Librán Moreno falls into a giant hole of bad
exposition, due to her decision to retell the
story of this royal jewel indiscriminately from
within several of Tolkien's various narrative
fictions. She says in her first long paragraph
that the Elendilmir of Arnor was worn by 36
generations of royalty down to Aragorn Elessar,
clearly implying that this is the same jewel
that Elendil, founder of Arnor, inherited from
his royal ancestors in Númenor.
But this is not the case as Tolkien conceived
the story, as she herself informs us in the next
two paragraphs. In Unfinished Tales,
written after the Elendilmir was invented for
Aragorn and his Arnorian backstory in The
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien arranged for the
original Númenorean Elendilmir to be lost in the
Anduin river, when its wearer Isildur died in
the disaster of the Gladden Fields a few years
after Arnor's foundation. It was then replicated
by an Elvish jewelsmith of Rivendell; but the
original was finally recovered, three millennia
later. The rest of her account distinguishes
between the "true Elendilmir" and the "second
Elendilmir" -- as it should have from the
beginning.
Perhaps some of the very involved retelling
of this history could have been truncated in
favor of a discussion of Aragorn's heritage and
his use of physical tokens to assert his
authority when he, as King, finally Returns: the
Sword, the Ring, the Elfstone, Athelas, to all
of which the Elendilmir might have been
compared: which is most authentic, which most
potent within the story? And why are there so
many?
It is pleasant to turn from all this
confusion to the final paragraph, with its fine
and erudite exploration of the Roman and
medieval ancestors of the tradition of a "jewel
on the brow" as a token of royalty.
The 'Further Reading' list collects the
classical references, with no Tolkien studies
evidently in existence on the Elendilmir. See also is much too brief: why not "Unfinished
Tales", "Dante", "Virgil", "Sam", "Arnor"
(oops, no such thing), "Isildur" (ditto), "Númenor"
(ditto), .. oh, well, perhaps she was doing her
best.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
This is a long article for an object that
Tolkien mentions just six times in The Lord
of the Rings and developed only in notes to
a story that was published posthumously in
Unfinished Tales. To judge from Librán
Moreno’s ‘Further Reading’ list, her article is
the first in-depth examination of the Elendilmir
and its possible literary sources, and her
achievement is more than sufficient to justify
the unexpected decision to make this a topic in
the Encyclopedia. (What inspired that choice?)
As in Librán Moreno’s “Latin Language” article,
she demonstrates impressive erudition here.
But considered as original research, the article
falls short. Probably a thorough analysis of
the Elendilmir would require examination of the
LotR manuscripts –for example, the image
that Bombadil conjures, of Aragorn “with a star
on his brow”, can’t be found in the drafts
presented in The Return of the Shadow or
The Treason of Isengard– and such an
effort certainly is more than could be asked for
an encyclopedia article. But at least Librán
Moreno could have laid out the facts more
clearly to benefit future scholarship.
To start with, she never mentions that
particular image. She muddies the internal
history of the Elendilmir somewhat, as noted by
squire, and with a further error in her
reference to Elendil as Silmariën’s “great
grandson” (more than fifteen generations had
passed in the two millennia that separated them:
see The Peoples of Middle-earth). More
importantly, her article lacks a clear textual
history, to show how Tolkien developed his ideas
about the Elendilmir, which he apparently
created only when LotR was in proof: see
The War of the Ring (p. 370). Oddly,
Librán Moreno, who includes multiple citations
of The Return of the King and
Unfinished Tales, never cites War,
which also includes a note by Christopher
Tolkien (p. 309) that supports Librán Moreno’s
statement that the Elendilmir (in both its
incarnations) differs from the “Star of the
Dúnedain” that Aragorn gives to Sam. Finally,
her description of the Elendilmir misses some
valuable detail: according to Tolkien’s notes
for the LotR index, it was “of diamond”
and “had five rays”.
Only with all these facts clearly arrayed can
one evaluate the likelihood of Tolkien having
drawn on the classical sources Librán Moreno
suggests, and discover what he meant by doing
so.
Elessar
- Paul Edmund Thomas
Comments by squire, July 13,
2007
It is interesting to read this article
immediately after the one on the Elendilmir
(neither of which refers to the other). The
partial accident of alphabetization (both words
take their leading El- from the same
Elvish root = "light/Elves") brings together two
separate jewels wielded by Aragorn, the restored
King-Hero of The Lord of the Rings. Both
capture some quality of heavenly light. One
conveys Aragorn's right royalty and his mortal
heritage, the other his role as healer/restorer
and his Elvish heritage. And as revealed in
drafts from Unfinished Tales, both only received
their deep backstories, going back to earlier
Ages of the World, after their story-role was locked into LotR.
In one of its two indeterminate origin legends,
the Elessar even recapitulates the Elendilmir's
fate of being lost and replicated in a second
"lesser" incarnation.
Thomas's handling of his material is defter
by far -- aided no doubt the fact that the
Elessar has more symbolic baggage to talk about.
He never confuses story details with his
narrative account of Tolkien's imaginative
inventions, as the previous article does.
Unfortunately, he also never really ties the
Elessar in to a more general consideration of
Tolkien's use of jewels and tokens to convey
power, Kingship, virtues, or other moral values.
He does, thankfully, refer to the "Jewels"
article which briefly covers the subject - but
it
does not reciprocate the cross-reference.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
This is a less ambitious article than the
preceding study of the Elendilmir, but it is
likewise weakest on the textual history of its
subject. Thomas says the first appearance of
the Elessar “in Tolkien’s writings” is in the
chapter, “Farewell to Lórien”, in The Lord of
the Rings, when Galadriel gives the stone to
Aragorn. This is correct, but not in the sense
that Thomas seems to intend, since he cites
LotR but not the drafts presented in The
Treason of Isengard. Readers first
encounter the Elessar not in that scene but
unnamed, seven chapters earlier, in Bilbo’s song
of Eärendil: “upon his breast an emerald”, a
line imagined to have been added by Aragorn, who
wanted Bilbo to mention a “green stone”.
However, it was in writing the Lórien
scene that Tolkien first conceived of the gem,
briefly bestowed by him on Gimli, but inspired
by the name “Elfstone” that he had earlier given
without significance to Aragorn.
(Unfortunately, it’s not possible to tell from
the drafts in Treason if the emerald was
already present in Bilbo’s poem, or added after
this change was made in the later chapter.)
Additionally, Thomas notes that Aragorn’s name
of “Elessar” was “foretold”, but never says
where, a puzzler for LotR readers: it was
by Gandalf to Galadriel in a text published in
Unfinished Tales.
Elf-shot – Leslie A. Donovan
Comments by Jason Fisher, February 16,
2007
Donovan makes a valiant attempt to
connect this arcane topic to Tolkien in
an entry of very limited words and
equally narrow scope. Her summary of the
common interpretation of elf-shot is
solid, if almost completely unrelated to
Tolkien – though I would have included
the Old English form as well (ylfa
gescot), since it is often
encountered. She does better in the
second half of her entry by linking
elf-shot to Smith of Wootton Major.
Donovan goes on to suggest, quite
plausibly, that Frodo’s Morgul-knife
injury on Weathertop may owe something
to the elf-shot tradition. But this
theory, of course, owes something to
Edward Pettit’s essay, “J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Use of an Old English Charm” (Mallorn
40: 39-44), which Donovan does not cite.
Perhaps she was unaware of the essay,
which also offers a couple of other
possible connections (missing from
Donovan’s entry) between Tolkien and
Anglo-Saxon elf-shot charms. The essay
obviously deserved to be in the Further
Reading. Carol Leibiger does include it
in her excellent Further Reading for the
entry on “Charms”, to which Donovan
directs interested readers.
Donovan’s entry unfortunately came
too early to cite Gilliver, Marshall,
and Weiner’s The Ring of Words:
Tolkien and the Oxford English
Dictionary. They discuss elf-shot,
with some nice, specific details, in
their word study of “elf”.
Tolkien himself writes about elf-shot
explicitly only once, as far as I know.
In his review essay, “Philology: General
Works” for 1925 (printed in 1927 in The Year’s Work in English Studies
Vol. 6 (1925): 32-66), Tolkien writes
that “the longer article by Professor
Horn on the OE charm against elfshot is
full of interest. Though it does not
achieve the impossible by bringing any
very brilliant illumination into this
dark corner, it does something: more
than has yet been done.” Tolkien would
certainly have been well aware of
elf-shot, but this is the only explicit
mention I have found. I’m not sure
whether it ought to have been in
Donovan’s already very short entry, but
then again, it’s hard to turn down a
direct mention of a subject as abstruse
as this one.
Another question: is it possible that
Tolkien made the bow and arrow the most
common weapon of certain of the Elves of
Middle-earth because of the
elf-shot tradition? It would not be
unlike Tolkien to hide such an allusion
in his work.
Elrond - Paul Edmund Thomas
Comments by squire, April 26, 2007
Thomas takes the interesting and
valuable approach of reconstructing the
career of Elrond as a character in the
order of his various appearances in
Tolkien's stories, starting with the
"Sketch" of 1926. This way, we see how
his introduction in The Hobbit in
the 1930s is almost a random re-use of
an existing but quite undeveloped
character. His majestic self in The
Lord of the Rings, as honed in the
1940s, is the climax of two decades of
literary growth, and his past history as
recounted at the Council of Elrond is
one of the many connectors between the
unpublished Silmarillion and the new
work that careful readers thrilled to.
That said, I think Thomas could have
been more explicit at the beginning that
this would be his mode of presentation;
the bald opening paragraph on Elrond's
ancestry does not serve his essay very
well. More importantly, Thomas leaves
himself no room for a critical
consideration, either his own or other
scholars', of Elrond's character in
these stories.
To focus for example on The Lord of
the Rings: Elrond is the embodiment
of the sad wisdom of the Third Age Elves
of Middle-earth, who are willing to
sacrifice their future and their past to
destroy the Ring and save the world. He
personifies how The Lord of the Rings
is a vast coda to the Elves'
misadventures in the Silmarillion.
Ironically Elrond himself is neither a
High Elf nor even fully an Elf, but his
personal sacrifice in the War of the
Ring will be the most unbearable of all
the Elves we meet. His identity as
Halfelven becomes a symbol of the need
for the various Free Peoples to unite
against the Dark Lord, and he is the
first of "the Wise and the Great" (after
Gandalf) to confront the irony of the
hobbits doing what "mighty Elf Lords"
cannot.
Tolkien comments retrospectively on
these aspects of the LotR's
Elrond in his Letters and perceptive
critics (like Kocher) pick up the clues
from the text alone; it is hardly so
clear to most readers on their first
encounter with LotR. This hiding
of depth of character and history in
what seems like an almost
stereotypically wise and infallible
storybook Lord is typical of Tolkien's
methods, and Elrond (epitomized by his
Council) is possibly a prime example of
what turns some people away from the
LotR.
The See also list is pretty
comprehensive. Consistent with my note
about a lack of critical consideration,
there is no 'Further Reading' list at
all.
Elves - Bradford Lee Eden
Comments by squire, April 11, 2007
Inadequate. Highly inadequate.
Eden
staggers through the basics of Tolkien's
Elf-lore, covering their literary
origins and invented languages, their
history as related in the published Silmarillion and even the question
of their immortality. The sheer number
of awkward or opaque sentences, the
distracting asides and off-topic
discursions, the unexplained references
and mildly factual errors (Tolkien's
early feelings about diminutive
"pointy-eared" elves were demonstrably
ambiguous; the missing mythology was
"English", not "British"; the starlight
was Varda's, not Yavanna's) are enough
to dismay any reader; but the subject is
really too big to be handled in so brief
an article, as Eden concedes several
times.
With that admitted, all other
criticism pales before the lack of any (but one!) references to the
vast and thorough body of critical
writing on Tolkien's Elves, either in
the body of the article or in the
'Further Reading' list. It verges on
hubris or self-delusion to submit a
essay on this subject with only Burns's
fine, but hardly definitive, article on
Perilous Realms offered to the
inquisitive reader. Similarly, the See also list should properly be one of the
longest in the Encyclopedia, given the
centrality of the Elves to Tolkien's
life and works.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
Eden’s best paragraph is a summary of
the elves’ journey west from Cuiviénen
to Valinor, which is clear and direct.
Unfortunately, it is superfluous,
because the next article is devotedly
entirely to elvish “Kindreds and
Migrations”.
One error in particular caught my eye,
from Eden’s second paragraph: “Of all
the Victorian writers, only George
MacDonald’s fantasies influenced
Tolkien.” First, MacDonald’s fantasies
aren’t writers. Second, Eden has
nothing more to say about MacDonald, not
even specifying what about his work
influenced Tolkien. Third, this
assertion flies in the face of several
other Encyclopedia articles, including
those on “Literary Influences,
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” and
“Morris, William” (Tolkien in 1914
expressed a wish to write a story
“somewhat on the lines of Morris’
romances” – Letters, p. 7).
Fourth, although those contradictory
articles naturally don’t appear in
Eden’s See also list, neither
does “Macdonald, George”! Nor do many
other subjects mentioned in Eden’s
article, like “Fairies”; “Immortality”;
“Koivië-néni and Cuiviénen”; “Languages
Invented by Tolkien”; “MacDonald,
George”; “Orfeo, Sir”; “Shakespeare”;
“Spenser, Edmund”; or “Ylfe, Álfar,
Elves”.
Additionally, most of Tolkien’s
reincarnated elves were not “returned to
Middle-earth” but remain in Aman. Elves
follow the “Straight Road” to Valinor,
not the “Long Road”. It is not
“impossible” to assert a “denial of the
possibility of reincarnation”. That
Beowulf is the “earliest surviving
poem in the English language” is
certainly a
debatable proposition. And it’s
odd, that of medieval tales where
encounters with elves have “disastrous
effects for the humans involved”, Eden
should cite only the poems Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight and Sir
Orfeo, both of which have happy
endings.
Elves: Kindreds and Migrations - Matthew
Dickerson
Comments by
squire, April 11, 2007
The only thing more confusing in
The
Silmarillion than the different Elf-kindreds
and their migrations is the actual
geneologies of the royal Elves within
each kindred. Dickerson has taken a
noble stab at summarizing the kindreds
and their movements. I hate to say he
could have been clearer - though he
could have - because it's so darn
confusing no matter how clearly one puts
it.
The reason for this - and Dickerson
creditably begins to address this,
though he doesn't follow through - is
that Tolkien just didn't ever use all
the insane variety of tribes within
tribes, clans within clans, that he
takes such care to delineate in the
early parts of The Silmarillion.
Without credible and characteristic
stories to support their existence, the
Vanyar, Teleri, Avari and Nandor "play
little role" in the legendarium, as
Dickerson says. What's left is,
essentially, the Noldor and the Sindar;
and their interaction provides all the
story one could wish for.
More meaningfully, as Dickerson notes in
his too-short critical summary, the
Noldor and the Sindar are the speakers
of the two Elvish languages Quenya and
Sindarin; and from that perspective it
is possible to rudely state that the
entire Elvish ethnography is so much
window-dressing to give life to
Tolkien's two invented languages.
Rudely - because Flieger at least seems
to think there is more to this subject
than just linguistics. I wish Dickerson
had dug a little deeper into the kind of
analysis she offers.
As so often, one wonders why this
article and "Elves" were not combined.
The thematic categories of Creatures
and Peoples of Middle-earth for
"Elves" versus Characters for
"Elves: Kindreds and Migrations" seem
pretty arbitrary, if not actually
unhelpful.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
This article, generally helpful but
limited (as squire observes) seems to
have grown out of Tom Shippey’s remarks,
in The Road to Middle-earth (3rd
ed., pp. 248-50), on the importance that
a clear understanding of elvish
genealogy holds for a proper
appreciation of The Silmarillion.
A See also reference to “Family
Trees” would thus have been
appropriate.
There are some minor confusions along
the way: Olwë is twice described as
leading Elwë’s elves before being
identified as Elwë’s brother, and
Dickerson never explains why Fingolfin
rather than Maedhros “becomes high king
of the Noldor” on the death of
Maedhros’s father, Fëanor. Dickerson is
also slack in his citation of The
Silmarilion: Rúmil’s “fitting signs
for recording of speech” is a phrase
from “Of Fëanor and the Unchaining of
Melkor”; likewise the term “Earth-gems”
is Tolkien’s from “Of Eldamar and the
Princes of the Eldalië”. Here neither
phrase is set off with quotation marks.
Most amusing is the line that follows
Dickerson’s observation on Tolkien’s
changing structure across years of
manuscripts: “Nonetheless, in the
published Silmarillion, there was
a consistent scheme” – you don’t say!
Elves: Reincarnation - Michaël Devaux,
translation by David Ledanois
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
April 22, 2007
This
essay is a generally useful aid to a
tricky subject. Devaux begins strongly
by contextualizing his topic with
Tolkien’s comments on death and
immortality. Then he notes the
possibility of Dwarvish reincarnation
and Beren’s unique return from death,
before turning to the nature of Elvish
rebirth. The key texts are all
mentioned, albeit somewhat confusingly,
and after a thorough description of
Tolkien’s various explanations of Elvish
reincarnation, Devaux closes with a
brief comparison to reincarnation in
real mythologies. Unfortunately, he
never moves past mechanics and sources
to examine why Tolkien put so much
effort into this subject.
Devaux cites a text by Tolkien that is
unknown to me, and also doesn’t turn up
on an internet search: “Fragments on
Elvish Reincarnation”. It is apparently
an expanded version of material from
Morgoth’s Ring and The Peoples of
Middle-earth, published in 2005 in
Tolkien, l’effigie des elfes.
Since that work was edited by Devaux
himself, it is presumably Ledanois’s
translation here that is responsible for
the comment that material in “Fragments”
that was missing from the HoMe
volumes “appears” to be “of a more
technical nature”. This technical
material includes something that Devaux/Ledanois
mysteriously calls “the principle of the
identity of the indiscernibles”.
There is some further awkwardness in the
translation, as for example, “Tolkien is
prone to repent concerning who is to
carry out the remaking”. And Devaux’s
long paragraph on Tolkien’s several
attempts to work out the methodology of
reincarnation is given almost entirely
in the present tense, which makes it
hard to understand how Tolkien’s ideas
evolved.
Of Tolkien scholars, Devaux cites only
Stratford Caldecott and himself. And in
his text, he mentions Beren; Finwë and
Míriel; Glorfindel; Immortality; and
Mandos, but their articles are absent
from his See also list.
Elvish
Compositions and Grammars - Carl F. Hostetter
Comments by squire, March 24,
2007
This is an amazing but indigestible catalogue
of all the "chief" (?) instances of Tolkien's
writings in Elvish of any flavor, as well as all
his philological commentaries about his
languages. (The title is misleading, since
instances of Dwarvish, Adûnaic, the Black Speech
and Westron are included here too.)
Specifically, it is an exhaustive accounting
of every single word or phrase of Tolkien's
invented languages in all of Tolkien's known
works, whether in his fiction, his posthumously
published ephemera, or in the two specialty
Elvish language journals. In its purely
chronological organization and lack of
distinction between language and literature, it
is clearly of most interest to those who aspire
to achieve an authoritative understanding of
Elvish vocabulary, grammar, and related
linguistic matters as they developed across the
span of Tolkien's life. As a reference tool and
work of archival scholarship, it is stunning and
testifies to Hostetter's unchallenged expertise
in the subject of Tolkien's languages.
However, there is no commentary or analysis
of the meaning of this long and varied list to
Tolkien's life or his non-Elvish works of
fiction or scholarship. Nor is there any
explanation of the provenance or publishing
order of the numerous edited manuscripts.
Readers who might want to understand more about
the "ongoing project" of compiling and
publishing Tolkien's linguistic works, but who
do not intend to start buying all the itemized
reprints of the relevant journal articles, are
left high and dry.
In fact this entire chronological index
should have been a final, appendicial, section
to Hostetter's mammoth and truly encyclopedic
article, "Languages Invented by Tolkien", to
which it is perfectly complementary. Since that
entry is already twelve pages long, the addition
of four more could hardly be objectionable,
absent a total reconception of the proper
treatment of Tolkien's languages in the
Encyclopedia.
This article, so-called, does answer one
puzzle I noted a while ago: that Tom Shippey's
article "Poems by Tolkien in Other Languages"
specifically excluded consideration of Elvish as
well as English. Shippey does not refer his
readers to this article, but here are, listed
but not discussed, poems in Qenya/Quenya ("Narqelion",
"Oilima Markirya", "Nieninque", "Earendel", "Firiel's
Song"); Noldorin (untitled on Damrod); and
Sindarin (untitled begins "Ir ithil..."). If the
Encyclopedia set as its goal a critical
consideration of all of Tolkien's poetry,
including that written in Old English and
Gothic, why did it stop at Elvish?
Hostetter also includes, though only as
sources for the study of Elvish languages, all
instances of Tolkien's compositions in Elvish
prose and his commentaries on Elvish history.
Most appear in Tolkien's published fiction or in
the History of Middle-earth series, and
so may have gotten some consideration in the
relevant Encyclopedia articles.
But some do not, and the same question
applies: aren't these discursive writings in a
different class from the patently philological
exercises like the "Etymologies", "Early Qenya
Grammar", etc.? "Sí Qente Feanor" ("Now said
Fëanor") on that Elf's contempt for Men; five
Catholic prayers translated into Quenya; "Ósanwe-kenta:
Enquiry into the Communication of Thought"; and
"The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor" surely
rate a little more critical attention in the
Encyclopedia than they get here.
Enchantment - Patrick Curry
Comments by squire, May 31,
2007
This is good as far as it goes, which seems
from the 'Further Reading' list to be just as
far as a condensation of Curry's 1999 article on
the topic will take us. Curry reviews the
distinction that Tolkien made between magic and
enchantment in his "On Fairy-stories" essay, and
explores some of the real-world spiritual
effects of enchantment as experienced through
story, especially the story of The Lord of
the Rings.
The discourse is deep but a little flabby,
and at times he seems to go overboard, such as
when he compares Tolkien's interest in this
subject with the philosophy of the "Frankfurt
School" over the past two centuries. It's all
very well to show off some similarities of
Tolkien's concern with enchantment and their
professed "disenchantment" with modernity, but
if he's going to drag Weber and Foucault into
this, he owes it to them and us to show how
those men's views differed from Tolkien's as
well.
At a larger scale, it is disappointing to see
Curry stick to examining Tolkien's uses of
Enchantment and Faerie solely in The Lord of
the Rings. Besides the key story "Smith of
Wootton Major", many of his poems deserve a look
from this angle. And then there's The
Silmarillion. I don't believe the heroic,
tragic Elves of the War of the Jewels, seen from
the Elvish perspective they're written in,
particularly demonstrate Tolkien's theory of
enchantment via a secondary world; or if they
do, it is in radically different mode than the
elegiac mechanism employed in LotR.
Tolkien began his exploration of fantasy with
myth, not enchantment, and moved toward the
latter vehicle as he got older - as can be seen
in the gradual prominence of Men compared to
Elves in his later Silmarillion tales. An early
example is Beren's transformation into a Man
from an Elf so that he might be "enchanted" by
Lúthien; and much later, we see Tolkien adding
numerous philosophic dialogues to his First Age
tales, regarding the difference between Men and
Elves, after he realized what a breakthrough
LotR was in expressing the theory he had
propounded in the Lang lecture ten years
earlier.
Finally, on a more mundane level, Curry does
mention the "perils" of enchantment, but I'd
have liked some discussion of the connection
between Enchantment and Spells, particularly the
malign effect that Tolkien conjures in his
dragon-spells by Glaurung and Smaug; the magic
of Saruman's melodious but evil rhetoric; and
the reputation among mortals that Galadriel,
Melian, and other inhabitants of Faërie have for
"weaving nets of deceit".
England, Twentieth Century - Jared Lobdell
Comments by squire, January 23,
2007
This article seems to twist and squirm to
keep the reader from identifying just what is so
unsatisfactory about it. Perhaps the best way I
can put it is that the author seems to assume
that the reader already knows everything about
the subject that he does, and the resulting
essay is a thus an aimless ramble through the
apparently boringly familiar highlights of
Tolkien's political spleen.
In reality, I guess that many readers today
could have used a brief but clear summary of the
jarring changes that England underwent in the
twentieth century (aside from the Wars, which as
Lobdell notes have their own articles). The rise
of social democracy, collapse of industrial and
trade supremacy, loss of Empire,
semi-totalitarian regimentation of the wartime
state, national impoverishment, and finally the
institutionalization of democratic state
socialism are all factors that underlie the
grumpy reactionary comments that Lobdell
excerpts from Tolkien's letters.
Based on such information, a more
chronologically-ordered review of Tolkien's
opinions over the decades would also have
reflected the fact that both a century and
Tolkien's lifetime are long enough, without
worrying about their boundary dates, to allow
growth and changes in a man's perception of his
times. Such an approach might finally have noted
that contemporary criticism, looking back,
focuses on how Tolkien's pseudo-medievalist
reaction to the twentieth century can actually
be seen as being very "modern" -- that is, very
"twentieth century"!
What readers could perhaps have used less of
are: knowing but unexplained or inaccurate
historical references, quibbles about the
definition of "twentieth century", distracting
parenthesized asides, and meaningless rhetorical
paradoxes.
It is, of course, most interesting to hear
from Lobdell a personal anecdote about Tolkien's
reaction to a joke about "Sending the Twentieth
Century Back to the Factory"!
Comments by N.E. Brigand, April 2, 2007
I agree with
squire’s comments, and will add that Lobdell
wastes most of his opening paragraph arguing
with his editor about the boundaries of his
subject.
Lobdell also
writes, without identifying his sources, that
Tolkien “was a reader of newspapers”, who
“listened to the BBC during World War II”,
“detested” apartheid, and “found to his surprise
that he was remembered as a rugger player” at a
school reunion. This information does not come
from Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century,
which is the only work in Lobdell’s
bibliography. The references are from Niekas
#18 (as noted in Scull and Hammond’s Reader’s
Guide, p. 822), Letter #81, the “Valedictory
Address” (MC, 238), and Letter #58,
respectively.
"English and
Welsh" - John Garth
Comments by squire, May 1,
2007
What a classic of concise exposition. Garth
takes what I suspect is a very difficult piece
of work (it seems Tolkien thought so), and
brings out several themes of interest in
relation to Tolkien's professional work in
philology, his own personality, and his
imaginative fantasy: which three areas are the
subject of this Encyclopedia.
It is gratifying to read that Tolkien's
speculations on the survival of Welsh formations
in the English language and culture have since
been shown to have been almost instinctively
correct. Garth cites Faull (one who did some of
this work) as calling Tolkien's lecture
"inspired rhetoric" rather than "sober"
scholarship!
Tolkien's views on "race" and ancestry are
shown to be an interesting combination of a
realistic understanding of the inevitability of
linguistic, cultural and racial heterogeneity
throughout European history, and a mystical or
romantic belief in the survival of ancestral
"linguistic taste" despite such intermixing.
Garth's best moment here is his tracing of
Tolkien's famous example of a "beautiful" word
formation (cellar door) to its
current-day apocryphal status as "the most
beautiful phrase in English", misattributed to
Poe, Mencken, and others.
Finally we see Tolkien admitting that he has
had a highly personal relationship with Welsh
and its associated Celtic cultures. It afforded
him an extended range of expression in his
imaginative languages, the result of which had
only been glimpsed by his lecture audience in
the previous year or two as The Lord of the
Rings was being published. Whether or not
the listeners at his lecture understood what he
was talking about, we readers of this excellent
article do.
The 'Further Reading' list is excellent, of
course (love that Wikipedia reference to "Cellar
door"!). See also, however, could have been
more substantial, with references to "Mythology,
Celtic", "Sauron Defeated" and "Languages
Invented by Tolkien" for starters; as well as a
few more of the many articles on racism, I
suppose. The lack of a reference to "Welsh
Language" - could Garth have missed it? - is
however no loss.
Ents -
Matthew Dickerson
Comments by squire, January
30, 2007
This is very good as far as it goes.
Dickerson makes some excellent points about the
Ents as "philologists" and as medieval trolls
transformed by Tolkien's imagination into a
giant tree-folk. His opening (which conveys the
mistaken impression that the Ents were written
into the Silmarillion before they appeared in The Lord of the Rings) and his closing
(which speculates on a deeper etymological
meaning for Ent than Tolkien seems to have
intended) are somewhat weaker.
As seems to be so often the case in the
Encyclopedia, Dickerson depends solely on his
own brilliance and that of his collaborator
Evans. He ignores such well-known approaches to
the Ents as Kocher's, which emphasizes their
sexual dysfunction, and Flieger's, which
considers them in the context of Tolkien's
self-deceptive ideology of his always "taking
the part of the trees". And that's just off the
top of my head - I'm sure there is a relatively
rich critical literature about the Ents, and I
wish it was summarized and cited here.
The Ents are one of Tolkien's most original
contributions to the land of Faërie, right
behind the Hobbits. As Treebeard might say about
this article, 'The Ents could say more on their
side, if they had time!'
Environmentalism and Eco-criticism - Patrick
Curry
Comments by squire, May 23,
2007
Curry sketches out an intriguing argument
that The Lord of the Rings deserves to be
honored as an early work of "eco-critical"
modern literature, because of the morally
central role that nature plays in the story, and
because it has inspired a generation or two of
ecological activists from the 1960s onwards; yet
he maintains that "green" literary critics have
ignored it because their modernist training
tells them it is reactionary, escapist,
unironic, and "insufficiently difficult to
read".
It's a fascinating angle, and I only wish
that Curry had more specifics to offer. His
emphasis on the Ring's relation to nature in
LotR is overstated; his glib indictment of
the modernist "green" critics is too easy and
unsourced; and his celebration of the UK's 1990s
anti-motorways movement's debt to Tolkien seems
speculative. He is also rather vague on just
what modern eco-criticism does demand of its
literature besides unreadability; and he brushes
past the distinction between modern
environmentalism and the ideology of the
Romantic authors of the 19th century. His
argument is not helped by his acknowledgement
that Tolkien has not been shown to have been
influenced by the Romantics.
Curry also does not address how Tolkien's
undoubted personal environmentalism was often
subverted by his sense of story and
mythology. From his portrayal of hostile forests
and mountains in the legendarium, to his
invention of "Morgoth's Taint" in which the
entire earth is corrupted with evil practically
from the moment of its creation, Tolkien does
not hesitate to make untamed Nature the bad guy
from the point of view of his humanistic heroes.
If as Curry says, Tolkien's stories plead that
Nature's destruction "is not justified by our
purposes alone", it is less clear that Tolkien
believes the same about Nature's taming or
exploitation.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
One modernist critic who addresses Tolkien’s
environmentalist views is Michael Moorcock, a
noted fantasy author, whose article “Epic
Pooh” takes Tolkien to task for bad writing
and for a “refusal to face or derive any
pleasure from the realities of urban industrial
life … it is simple neophobia which makes people
hate the modern world and its changing society;
it is xenophobia which makes them unable to
imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the
boundaries of their particular Shire.”
Environmentalist Readings of Tolkien - Alfred K.
Siewers
Comments by squire, May 23,
2007
You never know what you'll find when you turn
the page. In this case, to my surprise, I found
the exact same article as the one I just
reviewed. This one is written in the 2000s, not
(seemingly) the 1970s, and is written on a theoretical not a
popular basis, but really, this instance of
direct overlap of two articles is just as
shocking as the "Adventures of Tom Bombadil"
fiasco.
Siewers' depth and erudition make Curry's
article look weaker than it does when taken by
itself. Siewers addresses, and answers, several of my
objections to the previous piece. For instance,
he cites Flieger in contradiction to Curry's book, to the
effect that Tolkien's portrayal of nature is
quite nuanced. But Siewers goes on to cite
scholarship, including his own, that tries to
locate Tolkien's view of nature within the
medieval spectrum of Celtic-to-Christian thought
and literature rather than in contemporary
ecological terms.
Praxis, binarized, patristic -- who can
resist an article that tosses
such terms about? Sure, Siewers' style is a
little high-flown at times; on the other hand,
his command of the subject is indubitable, and
some of his references are simply precious (in a
good way), like the connection of the rising of
the river at the Ford in Fellowship to the
"early Irish Cattle-Raid of Cooley".
The 'Further Reading' list is extensive, and
juicy.
Éomer -
Hilary Wynne
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
April 20, 2007
“When King
Théoden fell in battle,” Wynne writes, “he named
Éomer successor by directing that his banner be
given to the young warrior”. Actually Théoden
had already declared Éomer as his heir in “The
King of the Golden Hall” (thirteen days and
twenty-one chapters earlier in the story). But
why did Wynne feel the need to tell readers
anything more specific than that Éomer succeeded
Théoden? She doesn’t do anything with that
battlefield detail - as is true of most of her
entry, a mere chronological reordering of
Éomer’s appearances in the main text and
appendices of LotR.
Only in the
last of Wynne’s six paragraphs does she address
the importance of Éomer in LotR, noting
the meaning of his names and (citing Tom
Shippey) his “dashing valor in battle” as
emblematic of the vigorous but less noble status
of the Rohirrim compared to the Númenóreans.
Wynne mentions Faramir’s comments on those
peoples here, but ought to have compared (or
noted others’ comparisons of) Éomer and Faramir,
since they are introduced in parallel episodes.
Likewise she needed to turn a critical eye to
some of the incidents listed in her history,
such as what Tolkien says about duty with
Éomer’s disobedience in hunting Saruman’s orcs,
and how Éomer’s grief and rage on the Pelennor
illuminates the Rohirrim.
Éowyn -
Katherine Hesser
Comments by squire, January
28, 2007
Badly organized and repetitive, this article
nevertheless makes a few interesting points
about Éowyn: her battle "style" against the
Nazgul is essentially defensive, and therefore
presumably feminine even though she fights in
masculine guise; and her attraction to Aragorn
is a confusion of a woman's love for a man and a
fighting man's devotion to his lord.
This kind of insight is not really enough
when it comes to Éowyn, Tolkien's most
compelling female character. Most of the article
is a confusing account of her story conflated
with a mish-mosh of reheated old-line feminist
analysis that concludes that Middle-earth
rejects "working mothers" in favor of "trophy
wives"!
It is a shame that Hesser, who quotes
extensively, leaves out Gandalf's analysis of
Éowyn at the Houses of Healing. But it is more
of a shame that the long quotes and summary of
Eowyn's adventures could not have been truncated
so that other critics could have been cited --
not to mention learned from. After all, even
this article in its rambling way makes clear
that Éowyn and the nature of her personal
journey is the single most important point of
entry for feminist criticism of Tolkien.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, April 20, 2007
In the
encyclopedia’s introduction, Michael Drout
writes that he “asked contributors to approach
disputed questions without tendentiousness and
to attempt to explain the various sides of
difficult issues”. He also specifies that this
very entry includes “possible parallels in
twentieth-century culture.” If only! Hesser
could at least have balanced her entry by
referring readers to the articles on gender,
sexuality, women, and feminist critical
readings, but there is no See also list.
Also, how does
Hesser know that Éowyn is “an accomplished
fighter”? Why does she write that Éowyn
“worries about her banished brother”, when Éomer
was imprisoned not banished? Who is Hesser
quoting when she writes that Éowyn tries “to
rectify her ‘relegation to the female
sidelines’” by adopting the guise of Dernhelm?
And what does she mean when she writes that
Arwen forsakes immortality for “an abbreviated
eternity with Aragorn”?
Comments by Jason Fisher,
April 26, 2007
Squire and N.E.
Brigand have already dealt with the entry
pretty thoroughly; however, I wanted to
offer one or two brief thoughts of my own.
N.E. Brigand asks, “Why does [Hesser] write
that Éowyn ‘worries about her banished
brother’, when Éomer was imprisoned not
banished?” The answer – though I shudder to
pin Hesser down to it – is that Éomer is
banished in Peter Jackson’s film version of
The Two Towers. A disappointing slip;
however, Hesser does get it right (“her
brother Éomer is imprisoned”) near the end
of the essay.
Another small
point. In an ideal world, I would have liked
some comment on the connection between the
prophecies regarding the fates of the Lord
of the Nazgûl and of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Tolkien famously “rewrote” the scene of
Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane Castle out
of his disappointment with Shakespeare’s
solution, and this may be similar situation,
where Éowyn stands in for Macduff. Such
connections would have given the entry more
critical breadth. (Just as squire points out
when he writes that “the long quotes and
summary of Éowyn’s adventures could not have
been truncated so that other critics could
have been cited.”)
With that out
of the way, I’d like to take a moment to
caution against the tendency to oversimplify
all treatment of Éowyn’s character into
feminist readings. Yes, these are important,
but I think it’s a mistake to reduce all
discussion of her into these terms – as so
often happens.
Much is made,
for example, of the fact that Éowyn takes on
the guise of a male soldier, as if no
female could ever participate in battle
among the Rohirrim. But how can this be
taken for granted? Éowyn tells us herself
that she’s a “shieldmaiden” who can “ride
and wield blade.” Why would the Rohirrim
have a word like “shieldmaiden”, and why
would it be possible for a woman to be
trained to fight with a sword in the first
place, if it were patently impossible for
her ever to find herself in battle? There’s
too much oversimplification going on here,
mostly in the name of fitting Éowyn into a
feminist mold. Much of that critical
discussion is very valid, of course, but
it’s not the end of the story. And I think
it too easily tempts readers into, for
example, labeling her engagement with the
Nazgûl “feminine fighting”, and so forth.
What is inherently “feminine” about a
defensive posture before a fallen father?
Questions like
this must be addressed, I think, before
simply assigning such labels to Éowyn
without elaboration, just because they
seem to fit. And how do feminist
readings of Éowyn explain that, in the end,
she adopts a more traditionally “feminine”
role as wife and healer? I longed for a
fuller treatment of this rich and intriguing
character, but unfortunately, Hesser’s (like
the majority of scholars writing about
Éowyn) is essentially one-note.
Epic Poetry – Julaire Andelin
Comments by Jason Fisher, April 24, 2007
This is an
adequate essay, for the most part, but
it does stumble at many points, in both
the details and the conclusions the
author bases on them:
-
Andelin
generalizes that, in epic poems in
English, “stanzas are grouped so
that the meter carries evenly.” What
does that mean, the “meter carries
evenly”? And what of epic poems in
English that do not use a
stanzaic structure (e.g., Chaucer)?
-
Epic
poetry in English doesn’t even
always rhyme, come to that (e.g.,
Milton’s Paradise Lost). A
softening of Andelin’s
generalizations in her discussion of
epic form would have made me a
little more comfortable with the
rest her conclusions.
-
Andelin
writes that Tolkien “was drawn to
works of foreign languages,
including those of Anglo-Saxon
origins”, but I daresay Tolkien
would not have considered
Anglo-Saxon to be a “foreign”
language at all.
-
The
statements about word-form versus
word-sense, while well-intentioned,
strike me as too unfocused and
underdeveloped. I won’t parse them
individually, but I feel they should
have been better developed if they
were to be effectively deployed in
support of the subject of the essay.
-
On
“Tolkien’s background in Old English
and Anglo-Saxon philology” – these
are just two ways of saying the same
thing; it’s redundant, really.
-
There
is a conflation of the Old and
Middle English in Andelin’s
discussion of Sir Gawain that
troubles me just a little bit. I
feel Andelin could have been clearer
in making her point.
-
It’s
Gil-galad, not Gil-Galad.
-
There
are some problems with the writing
here also – shifts in tense,
unexpected conditionals (e.g.,
“would give” in place of “gave”),
improper word choices, misplacement
of prepositional phrases, etc.
Nothing that impairs the meaning
severely, but much that could
have been better edited.
Ultimately,
I feel Andelin doesn’t do a clear or
convincing enough job in drawing solid
conclusions about Tolkien’s use of the
epic tradition. I would have like to
have seen more discussion of The Lays
of Beleriand, for example. The essay
isn’t bad, but it also isn’t great.
In the See also, “Lays of Beleriand” should
be “Lays of Beleriand, The”,
“Middle English Vocabulary” should be “Middle
English Vocabulary, A (1922)”, the
entry “Rhyme Schemes and Meter” does not
exist, “Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo: Edited
by Christopher Tolkien” should be “Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir
Orfeo, Edited by Christopher
Tolkien”. And why point readers to “Poems
by Tolkien in Other Languages” but not
to any of the other “Poems” entries?
Eru - Bradley
J. Birzer
Comments by squire, April 16,
2007
Birzer gets carried away in a seeming ecstasy
of Eru-worship at the beginning of this article,
as he thrillingly but confusingly recounts the
creation-myth of the "Ainulindalë". The next two
paragraphs on Eru's later appearances in the
story-cycle are slightly calmer, but again lack
clarity and perspective and even a good grip on
the number of interventions of Eru in the
legendarium at "vital moments".
The fourth and last paragraph could well have
been the first, with a sensible and concise
discussion of the mythic and religious roots of
Tolkien's conception of a One God for his
stories. The conclusion, on the relationship of
Eru to the Christian Trinity, is unfortunately
again weak.
The biggest problem here, I think, is that
Birzer ignores Tolkien's own life-long
development of Eru as a story-figure, as
documented in the History of Middle-earth
volumes, and the conflict it aroused with his
own strong religious faith. For instance,
Tolkien's conception of the relation of the
Music to the Creation changed radically in the
1930s, which is also when the Change of the
World consequent to the destruction of Numenor
was first imagined; the details and nature of
the "Last Battle" were never finalized; and the
idea of Eru incarnating in Arda as the Savior of
Men - on which Birzer must pin his contention
that Eru is congruent with the Trinity - was a
late speculation by Tolkien from the 1950s that
has no place in any of his other writings,
published or unpublished.
Eru appears only once, in the Appendices, in
The Lord of the Rings. That book recounts
the end of the Third Age of the World, but it is
missing from Birzer's list of "each of the
vital moments" in Tolkien's legendarium when Eru
intervenes directly. The question arises: if Eru
"exists" why is he absent from Tolkien's most
important and fully-realized story?
Tolkien regarded his fantasy fiction as a
"sub-creation" in imitation and honor of God's
real creation of the "story" of the real world
and its human inhabitants. When Tolkien tried to
create Eru as a story-God at the hierarchical
apex of an imagined world of which he himself
was in a way already the figurative God, the
inherent contradictions seem almost to have
paralyzed him. The depth and nature of Tolkien's
commitment to his own creation of a God for his
stories is to me the most fascinating and
important aspect of Eru, especially in relation
to his parallel development of a kind of
pantheon (the Valar) who are nominally the
demiurgic actors in his imagined mythology.
Birzer gives an inadequate See also list;
and no 'Further Reading' at all, which is almost
scandalous.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
Verlyn Flieger’s Interrupted Music is
among the several critical works that Birzer
might have cited, for comments like this: “The
supreme godhead, Eru (Ilúvatar), is neither the
Judaic God of Hosts who alternately punishes and
rewards his people nor the traditional Christian
God of love and forgiveness. Rather, he is a
curiously remote, and for the most part,
inactive figure, uninvolved, save for one
exceptional moment, in the world he had
conceived” (p. 140). But Birzer doesn’t once
consider Eru as a character.
Esperanto
- Arden R. Smith
Comments by squire, July 13,
2007
It's hard to tell what the value of this
article is. It seems primarily to stand in
contrast to Tolkien's own theories about
inventing languages, as documented in Smith's
article on "'A Secret Vice'". The most
interesting points are three:
-
where Tolkien admits to admiring Esperanto
because it was devised by a single man;
-
where he later declares that Esperanto (and
other, unnamed, artificial languages) failed
to come alive as languages because "their
authors never invented any Esperanto
legends"; and finally,
-
where Smith points out that Tolkien's Elvish
grammars mimicked the complexities of real
languages, in clear contrast to Esperanto
which aspired to a completely regular and
simple grammar to assist it in being adopted
as a universal language.
What is the point? Did Tolkien imagine,
because he had written legends of the Elves,
that his Elvish languages were more "successful"
than Esperanto? Did he admire Zamenhof, creator
of Esperanto, as a fellow "enthusiast" for the
Secret Vice of inventing languages, though the
object of the two men's exercises were patently
opposed? Does Esperanto, as a language or
concept, really have anything to do with Tolkien
or his Elvish languages, besides being a manmade
language that peaked in popularity during
Tolkien's youth?
Smith does not make a convincing case on any
of these fronts.
I should note that Smith here seems to imply
that 'A Hobby for the Home', aka 'A Secret
Vice', Tolkien's essay on the theory and
practice of inventing languages, was never made
public until after his death. In the
Encyclopedia article on this essay/lecture,
Smith says it was delivered to an audience once,
if not twice, though never set in print.
Essays Presented to Charles
Williams - Charles H. Fischer and Paul Edmund Thomas
Comments by squire, July 14,
2007
It is difficult to criticize this
well-researched and well-written article, but I
will try.
Every word that Thomas and Fischer set down
is interesting to anyone who sees J. R. R.
Tolkien as only one mind in an entire
intellectual milieu, most readily characterized
as the world of the Inklings. In this article,
the Inklings shine as they pay tribute to one of
their own, the prematurely dead Charles
Williams. Each contributory essay, by Sayers,
Lewis (fils et fils), Barfield, and Mathew, is
brilliantly summarized - except Tolkien's which
is simply given a reference to the entire
Encyclopedia article on his "On Fairy-stories".
And that's the rub: where is Tolkien in all
this? Implicitly: everywhere. He loved this
stuff. Explicitly: nowhere. None of the
summaries is tied to the central perspective of
Tolkien's life and works that is the organizing
principle of this Encyclopedia.
The same principle has led me to criticize
the existence of articles on every Inkling that
had too little to do with Tolkien on an
effective literary or personal level. For
instance, in this article, Dorothy Sayers's
essay on Dante is described very well. Yet,
according to the article on her, she never
attended an Inklings meeting (being a woman and
all, you know); and she never met Tolkien. That
was a marginal article accordingly; this one is
beyond the pale.
The thematic category tells its own tale:
this article is under the category: "Scholarship
by Tolkien: Medieval Literature". Say what? The
only mention of Tolkien here is a cross
reference to another article (which is not
really on medieval literature, either, but let
it pass). The scary thing about this article is
that the 'Further Reading' and See also lists are a researcher's dream - if the
researcher is looking not into Tolkien, but
Tolkien's literary context.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
While I agree entirely with squire that this
article fails to make Essays Presented to
Charles Williams relevant to the
Encyclopedia, there is an argument that a
separate article on this collection was more
deserving than one on, say, The Tolkien
Reader (presumably included because that
collection, like this one, was published during
Tolkien’s lifetime and thus with his approval)
or the two entries on 1920s poetry anthologies
in which Tolkien’s work appeared. Though
Fischer and Thomas don’t mention it, Scull and
Hammond’s Companion and Guide report that
Tolkien worked with C.S. Lewis on the Essays’
organization even before Charles Williams’
death, when it was intended as a festschrift
occasioned by his impending departure from
Oxford.
There is one further reference in the entry to
Tolkien besides the cross-reference to the “On
Fairy-stories” article. Fischer and Thomas note
that among the texts examined by C.S. Lewis in
his contribution, “On Stories”, is The Hobbit.
Unfortunately, they don’t say what Lewis wrote
there about it.
Estate - Chester
N. Scoville
Comments by squire, March 29,
2007
The shadow of an 800-pound gorilla looms over
this article. While it does convey a lot of
information about the Tolkien Estate, and in an
odd but apparently necessary detour, the Tolkien
Enterprises company, it leaves as many questions
unanswered as not.
Who are currently the direct beneficiaries of
the Estate? How are Tolkien's grandchildren
involved, as his children reach advanced ages or
pass away? Who will direct the Tolkien Copyright
Trust, obviously meant to preserve Christopher
Tolkien's intentions as to the proper treatment
of his father's work when he is gone? What is
the Estate's relationship with Houghton Mifflin
and the English publishers that succeeded Allen
& Unwin? If we are to implicitly criticize the
"enormous" quantity of film-related merchandise
that Tolkien Enterprises is responsible for,
should we not cast an equally jaded eye on the
fairly enormous number of editions of Tolkien's
books that appear, courtesy of the Estate, each
more elegantly packaged or authoritatively
edited than the last? What has the role of the
Estate been, not in protecting Tolkien's
reputation and property by suppressing internet
piracy, but in allegedly erecting barriers to
the study of his literary and personal papers?
How do the Tolkien Estate's "vigorous" policies
regarding copyright enforcement compare with
those of other popular authors' estates?
If these questions are themselves thought
questionable, I'd return to first principles and
ask, what is the purpose of this article in J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and
Critical Assessment, if not to raise them?
The See also inexplicably omits two of
Tolkien's children, not to mention at least the
articles on Tolkien's fan community and "Lord
of the Rings, Success of", "Publishing
History", "Publications, Posthumous", and
"Manuscripts by Tolkien". There is no 'Further
Reading' list, yet surely Scoville had his
sources, whether published or on the internet.
Eucatastrophe - Christopher Garbowski
Comments by squire, December 12,
2006
What a pleasure to read this article. Clear
and concise. Technical, yet not over the head of
the casual Tolkien reader. Garbowski explains
the medieval story-theoretical roots that
Tolkien drew from, Tolkien's seminal creation of
the word and concept in his "On Fairy-stories"
essay, and the humanist and religious overtones
that the term invokes. He even refers to three
Tolkien critics to show how the concept has been
received and explained up to this time.
Eucharist - Thomas Fornet-Ponse
Comments by squire, July 14,
2007
This article treats the Eucharist first as a
Catholic sacrament, and shows that it was very
central to Tolkien's belief in the efficacy of
Catholic faith. Drawing on this strong
presentation of Tolkien's beliefs, there is a
shorter section that attempts to puncture the
idea that Tolkien's fictional Elvish
"way-bread", lembas, was a reimagination
of the host of the Eucharist.
Fornet-Ponse does direct the reader to the
"Catholicism" and "Christianity" articles for
more details of Tolkien's religious beliefs; but
I think the first section here is still too long
and unfocused in its discussion of the meaning
of the Eucharist. What I found most interesting
were his hints at Tolkien's connection of
Christian grace with Death. Unfortunately, he
did not then make any connections with Tolkien's
philosophy as expressed in his legendarium.
On the other hand, he seems to work too hard
to try to show that lembas is not the
Host. He seems not to want to take the analogy
as anything less than a totally literal
equivalence, which he easily refutes but which
no one would claim. Even his final sentence on
this matter, declaring that the lembas-Eucharist
connection "seems not a central one", is
undercut by his concluding clause about how
lembas in Quenya was called "life-bread".
The 'Further Reading' list seems to be
limited to three books that are religiously
oriented interpretations of Tolkien; while his See also list is fairly complete except it
omits the article "Lembas", which - why
am I not surprised? - does not refer to this one
either. "Lembas", by the way, cites the
exact same letter as this article does (# 213)
but draws a diametrically opposed conclusion
from Tolkien's acknowledgement that lembas
may well share some characteristics with the
Christian host.
Exile - Leslie
A. Donovan
Comments by squire, July 17,
2007
This is first class. Donovan shows how the
experience of exile fit into the framework of
medieval society, gives examples of both
individual and group exile that were treated by
Old English literature as studied by Tolkien,
and cleanly moves on to the uses Tolkien made of
this theme in his fantasy fiction.
With perhaps a little less space given to the
introductory explanations, Donovan might have
analyzed the fiction with a little more finesse.
For instance, it is interesting that the verse
about Rohan "Where are the horse and the rider",
said in the story to show the identity of the
Rohirrim with the land they presently live in,
is based partly on The Wanderer, one of
Donovan's examples of an Anglo-Saxon poem of
exile. Tolkien, in other words, has transformed
the theme of the poem from exile in space, to
(if this can be differentiated from elegy)
"exile in time".
Similarly, the idea that the Noldor are
exiles in Middle-earth, because they were
expelled from the Undying Lands, is a relatively
late angle of Tolkien's, dating from the time of
The Lord of the Rings in the late 1930s
and onward. The early Silmarillion stories
highlight the theme of blood-feud and revenge on
the part of the clan of Fëanor; few Elves in the
Silmarillion are heard to regret their
"exiled" life in Beleriand, until after LotR
was written.
In fact, all of the examples of exile that
are given in this article date from this middle period in
Tolkien's imagination: The Hobbit's
dwarves, the Númenóreans/Dúnedain, and even the
interesting inclusion of the Ents. What does go
back to the beginning in Tolkien is a parallel theme I wish
Donovan had acknowledged, the idea of the
romantic "outlaw". This is seen mostly in the
tales of Túrin, Tuor, and Beren -- all Men not
Elves, interestingly.
I wonder if it is possible to show (beyond
this casual musing from memory) that "exile"
became a more prominent theme in Tolkien's
legendarium only as his stories, and he himself,
matured into those middle years when memories of
lost times begin to bite?
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
This is generally well-done, but there are a
couple mistakes. Donovan describes the Noldor in
Middle-earth as not merely exiles but as
“expelled” from Valinor “for disobeying the
Valar and killing some of their Elven kindred”,
when in fact the Noldor were given a chance to
return and repent, and some did: the others are
self-exiled. Additionally, Donovan
refers to the exiled “Númenóreans in The
Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales”;
only the Dúnedain in Middle-earth after the
Downfall so qualify, and they receive little
attention in those two books.
One notable exile missing from Donovan’s survey
is Gollum, at least as presented in LotR:
he was cast out from his hobbit-tribe by his
grandmother.
Existentialism - Robert Eaglestone
Comments by squire, January
24, 2007
A fine introduction to a subject that I, for
one, am wholly unfamiliar with. Eaglestone
artfully finesses the lack of any obvious
connection between Tolkien and Existentialism as
expounded by its most famous thinkers, Sartre
and Heidigger, by positing that any modern
writer of depth, including Tolkien, must
inevitably encounter and confront the problems
of existentialism, lower case (so to speak).
The following essay, limited to three
existential issues (authenticity, technology,
and language) are models of concision.
Eaglestone's use of a telling citation from The Lord of the Rings at the end of each of
subject discussion masterfully pulls us back to
Tolkien just as the philosophical abyss seems
deepest.
I noted the early retirement of Sartre from
the stage, leaving Heidigger the sole authority
for most of the article; and I wished indeed for
a fuller bibliography than just Tom Shippey, a
usual suspect here if ever there was one.
Exodus,
edition of - L. J. Swain
Comments by squire, April 4,
2007
Here is another fine example of an article on
Tolkien's less well-known professional work that
also suggests how his philology may have
cross-fertilized his fantasy writing.
I was glad to learn quite a bit about
Tolkien's work on the Exodus poem. Once
again, he failed to finish a major
edition/translation to his own satisfaction, and
once again, after his death, another scholar
completed and published it. Swain is careful to
point out that this was not just an outdated
"vanity" edition, meant to ride on Tolkien's
posthumous fame as a best-selling fantasy
writer. He cites two other scholars besides
Turville (the Exodus editor) on the
long-lasting influence that Tolkien's lectures
on Exodus have had on the Old English
scholarly community. Swain's comments on how
Tolkien's personality emerges from his editorial
interpretations of the difficult poem are
wonderful to read.
The examples of the influence of the Exodus poem on
The Lord of the Rings
are more difficult for me to evaluate, without
perhaps more knowledge of the poem. The "shining
cavalry" and "towering banners" of the Pharaoh's
oncoming army do not make me think of Saruman's
or Sauron's black orc-hosts, nor are besieged
fortresses "caught" by the mountains behind
them. However, the semi-miraculous and
eucatastrophic outcomes of the battles of the
Hornburg and Pelennor may certainly be seen to
refer to the famous Biblical miracle of the
parting of the Red Sea.
My understanding of the Sigelwara debate has never been solid, despite having read
Tolkien's articles on it. It seems to me that
Swain is, perhaps, pushing too hard the
connection between Tolkien's philological
inquiry into why Old English had an obscure word
for translating "Ethiopia", and his imaginative
concepts of balrogs and the Silmarils. Both of
these visual images from Tolkien's fantasy world
predate the scholarly article by a decade at
least, suggesting that his imagination drove his
interpretation rather than the other way around.
That said, there is valuable ground to be mined
in LotR for connections between jewels as
light-images, coals as dark-images, and fire as
a mediator of the two, as Flieger and others
have shown.
Swain's ending is too abrupt; and his prose
style throughout could use some tightening up -
yet another example of a missing editorial hand.
The 'Further Reading' list looks excellent,
though I miss Flieger's "Sigelwara" discussion
in Splintered Light. The See also
list is very scanty, lacking the article on Joan Turville-Petre, and many other entries on
Tolkien's professional work with Old English
texts, poems, and translations.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
December 30, 2007
The connection between Tolkien’s interpretation
of sigelwara, and his balrogs and
silmarils, was first put forward by Tom Shippey,
I think. Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth
appears in Swain’s ‘Further Reading’ list, but
Shippey is never mentioned in his text, not even
when Swain puts quotation marks around the
phrase “swart-face, red tongue, and ‘eyes like
coals’”. That’s Shippey describing the orc who
spears Frodo in the Chamber of Mazarbul, in
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (p.
86). Swain has apparently not seen Shippey’s “A
Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest”
from Arda 1982-83. Those lapses aside,
this article is pretty good, for the reasons
squire gives.