Sacrifice -
Christina M. Heckman
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
Though organized into paragraphs, most of this
entry is just a list of sacrificial characters.
These examples are thoroughly sourced to The
Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion,
but there is almost no critical treatment, apart
from the weak introduction and conclusion. The
former strays unnecessarily into a discussion of
the Boethian and Manichean views of good and
evil; the latter is a trite note on what Tolkien
once called “the ennoblement of the humble”. The
appearance of only Tom Shippey in the
bibliography shows the entry’s weakness (the
See also list, however, is quite good).
Heckman’s focus is on “self-sacrifice or
sacrifice chosen to preserve good and defeat
evil”, and though this is an important theme in
Tolkien’s works, she should, but does not,
indicate that Tolkien uses the word “sacrifice”
in other ways: in the waning years of Númenor,
for example, “men made sacrifice to Melkor that
he should release them from Death” (The
Silmarillion, p. 273).
The list of noble sacrifices Heckman provides
are variable in supporting her general
argument. To defeat Sauron, the Elves and
Dwarves don’t “sacrifice their pride, forgetting
ancient rivalries”: except for the particular
example of Legolas and Gimli, this is just not
at issue in LotR. Lúthien and Arwen
relinquish their immortality for personal love
not the greater good, and Heckman misreads
The Silmarillion when she calls these acts
“redemptive because they unite the two kindreds”:
the passage she cites presents Lúthien’s act
more as exchange than sacrifice: she is lost to
the Eldar, but her likeness lives on in her
descendants. And it’s stretching to see
sacrifice in the Ents’ decision to “relinquish
their rest” when they choose to overthrow
Isengard. The sacrifice of the Elves, in
relinquishing the power of the Three Rings and
thus Middle-earth to defeat Sauron, is a
stronger but problematic case, as the Elves face
defeat whether the One Ring is destroyed or not.
The deeds of Finrod, Galadriel, Théoden,
Gandalf, Frodo, and even Aragorn, enumerated by
Heckman, are clearer examples of sacrificial
action. But her presentation of Gandalf’s
sacrifice, for instance, is merely descriptive:
Gandalf faces the Balrog, falls, is mourned, and
returns. In fact, her description of his
reappearance is so matter-of-fact that it’s hard
to see how Gandalf sacrificed himself at all.
Likewise Frodo’s case is oddly managed,
concluding with the remark that “Despite Frodo’s
enduring pain, his sacrifice is most
significant.” Despite?
To interpret these cases, Heckman could have
started with Tolkien’s own comments: Gandalf's
decision to face the Balrog alone was a
“humbling and abnegation of himself in
conformity to ‘the Rules’ … all his mission was
in vain” (Letters, p. 202). And Frodo at
Mount Doom was in a “sacrificial” situation, “in
which the ‘good’ of the world depends on the
behavior of an individual in circumstances which
demand of him suffering and evidence far beyond
the normal” (Letters, p. 233). But even
this obvious beginning is missing here.
Saint
Brendan – Jared Lobdell
Commentary by Jason Fisher, June
20, 2007
This short entry suffers most from a striking
lack of any attempt at organization – all its
facts are run together in a single, very long
paragraph — itself composed of just a few very
long sentences. Otherwise, there is some useful
information here. It’s a shame it’s all mashed
up the way it is, with lengthy parenthetical
quotations from Tolkien just adding to the
disorder. I give Lobdell credit for mentioning
Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader – an
excellent point of comparison. But I have to
take that credit back again for his egregious
misquote of Samwise at the end of The Lord of
the Rings (for the record, it’s “Well, I’m
back,” not “Well, I’m home”).
Lobdell missed a great opportunity to mention
Tolkien’s lesser known poem “The Nameless Land,”
which also alludes to Brendan. And he should
have mentioned or at least included in his
'Further Reading' The Annotated Hobbit,
Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth,
Flieger’s Splintered Light, and
Carpenter’s biography. In the weak See also,
Lobdell is right to refer readers to “Ireland”,
a far superior entry in comparison to which
“Saint Brendan” really suffers. Additionally, he
should have included “Mythology, Celtic”,
“Sauron Defeated”, and “Poems By Tolkien:
Uncollected.”
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
To be fair, Lobdell merely refers to “Well, I’m
home” as a Tolkienian motif, without
specifically attributing the phrase to Sam or
even The Lord of the Rings. And as Jason
Fisher observes, Lobdell does at least tell
readers why St. Brendan appears in this
Encyclopedia, describes Tolkien’s poem “Imram”
about Brendan with reference to its imagery and
themes, and notes its publication in Time and
Tide and Sauron Defeated.
On the other hand, Lobdell doesn’t address the
merits of the poem or Tolkien’s reasons for
writing it; he doesn’t make much of its
connections to Tolkien’s other works; and
includes no comments on “Imram” by other critics
(in addition to the absent works listed by
Fisher, Paul Kocher comments on the poem).
Perhaps he assumed those would be more
thoroughly addressed in the articles on
Tolkien’s poems (Tom Shippey and Reno Lauro each
afford it a short paragraph). But if the poem
is covered elsewhere, why have this separate
entry?
Finally, Lobdell quotes Tolkien on the “Celtic”
beauty he tried to bring to his stories without
noting the source of this comment (Letters,
p. 144), and he writes that the poem “was
published … as Tolkien’s friend Lewis was
writing his Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader.’”
But Lewis’s book was published in 1952, with
“Imram” following in 1955.
Saint
John - Bradley J. Birzer
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
Citing a passage from Tolkien’s largely unseen
essay, “The Ulsterior Motive”, that was printed
in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings,
Birzer notes that Tolkien took John as his
patron saint. Birzer speculates on Tolkien’s
reasons for this, but he never indicates what
Joseph Pearce mentions in the “Saints” article,
where it is somewhat less appropriate: Tolkien’s
birthday, January 3rd, is the “Octave” of St.
John’s feast day, December 27th (as noted in
Letters).
Birzer’s suggestion that John’s attention to
“the gift of imagination” is what endeared him
to Tolkien is interesting, as is the slim
connection he makes to Tolkien’s “subordinate”
heroic figures. Still, Birzer should have
examined the opposite case: why did C.S. Lewis,
as Carpenter reports, think St. John was quite
unlike Tolkien?
On a tangential note: according to the index,
“The Ulsterior Motive” is mentioned only twice
in the Encyclopedia (here and in the article on
C.S. Lewis), as is not surprising for a work of
which only a few snippets have been released.
Tolkien himself said that the essay, which was
his response to Lewis’s book Letters to
Malcolm, “would not be publishable” (Letters,
p. 352). Still, it would be nice to see the
release of at least the non-libelous passages,
for what they might reveal of Tolkien’s life.
Comments by squire, August 15, 2007
N.E. Brigand makes a good point about "The
Ulsterior Motive". Its continued unpublished
existence should remind us that perhaps not all
points of Tolkien's complex personality have
been encompassed by current scholarship. For
instance, here I found interesting Tolkien's
humiliated remark that he felt like a "shabby
little Catholic" after Lewis's withering snub.
It suggests to me that Tolkien's pride in his
faith remained occasionally tempered by the
shame he and his family were subjected to in
protestant England after their conversion (and
also re-emphasizes with his returning crack
'Evangelical' that not all English
anti-Catholics were C. of E.). Typically of
accounts of Tolkien's religious life, Birzer's
article "Catholicism" speaks only of the pride.
In his other article Birzer also mentions the
anecdote about Tolkien using St. John's gospel
in Anglo-Saxon classes, but there he does not
give us the detail that the passage in question
is a poem -- nor does it refer the reader here
for that telling detail.
Saint
Oswald – Jared Lobdell
Comments by Jason Fisher, June 20, 2007
Almost
the entirety of Lobdell’s first very
long paragraph (a bit more than half a
column) consists of straight quotations
from Tolkien. This should have been
replaced with a much shorter summary of
the point, followed up with some
consideration of its importance.
The second paragraph, though
mercifully shorter than the first, is
nothing more than a recital of useless
facts, introduced by a prominent “in
fact”, as if to say we’re in for a real
treat. Sadly, not so. The third and
final paragraph is an unhelpful
assortment of genealogical facts (which
reads like the “begats” in the Book of
Genesis) and ends with no conclusion at
all. A couple of the names in the
paragraph jump out at me in italics.
Why? I have no idea.
A useless, useless, useless entry.
Saints
- Joseph Pearce
Comments by squire, August 17, 2007
After an all-too-brief consideration of
Tolkien's devotion to Saint John, Pearce
spends the rest of his article on the
Virgin Mary, "Queen of All Saints", with
the standard recapitulation of her
connections to Elbereth and Galadriel in
Tolkien's fiction. The too-long
conclusion, about Tolkien's personal
belief in miracles through the
intercession of saints, leading to his
literary theory of eucatastrophe, seems
to have left the topic completely.
Why
did Pearce not tackle the concept
of "Saints", as the article's title
invites? Are there any analogues to the
Catholic doctrine of the Communion of
Saints in Tolkien's legendarium? Is
Eärendil a Saint? Is Eonwë, herald of
Manwë? Is Lúthien? Gandalf? Durin the
Deathless? Are the Valar "saints" in the
sense that they (or at least Varda,
Manwë, and Ulmo) receive prayers and
have access to Eru? Or are saints
strictly an invention of an organized
religion, which is precisely what
Tolkien wished to keep out of his
invented world?
One's faith in Pearce as an authority
on this topic is lessened, not
heightened, by his citation of only his
own books in the 'Further Reading'. See also ignores the adjacent three
articles on Saints Brendan, John, and
Oswald, not to mention the less
consistently alphabetized "Aquinas,
Thomas", "Augustine of Canterbury, Saint
[etc.]", "Augustine of Hippo", "Bede
(St. Bede [etc.])", and "Guthlac, Saint"
articles. The presence of eight articles
on saints in the Encyclopedia seems to
suggest that more could have been done
here than an orthodox shakedown of St.
Mary.
Sam - Stephen
Yandell
Comments by squire, June 23,
2007
The organization is a bit random, and the
character analysis is not as deep as it might
be, but the essence of Sam is here. The really
interesting part is at the end, when Yandell
suggests that Sam most represents the part of
Tolkien that kept him from completing The
Silmarillion after The Lord of the Rings
was written. This makes Sam the ur-hobbit, so to
speak, where "hobbit" becomes the one-word
descriptor for the leavening element that was
missing from the Silmarillion material.
Yandell does not complete his analysis of
this question - to compare Sam to the hobbit
heroes Frodo and Bilbo, and to a lesser extent
Merry and Pippin (who grow into heroes) - in
favor of a somewhat generic conclusion about
Tolkien's interior conflict between high romance
and low comedy. But Sam's heroism, more romantic
and less motivated than Merry and Pippin's, is
actually evident from the beginning of
Fellowship, where he is introduced as a
pupil of Bilbo's in more convincing terms than
Frodo himself. Some have argued that Sam is
Bilbo's heir, in his role in LotR -- torn
as Bilbo was and Frodo is not, between mundanity
and romance.
The question comes down to just how "comic"
Sam is. Yandell comes close in his citations of
Tolkien's commentaries about Sam, but misses the
remarks that Sam is the true "hero" of The
Lord of the Rings (e.g. Letters, #93,
#131), a counterintuitive proposition that never
fails to shock new readers whose attention is
always on Frodo and Aragorn, despite the fact
the book ends with Sam's words, "Well, I'm
back."
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
At the conclusion of Yandell’s opening
paragraph, he does quote Tolkien calling Sam
“the chief hero” in Letter #131.
Saracens and Moors
- Sandra Ballif Straubhaar
Comments by squire, August 17,
2007
This article might have been better titled "Haradrim"
or "Southrons"; that might have helped
Straubhaar keep her focus on Tolkien. As it is,
she spends most of the article reviewing the
sources for Medieval European and Victorian
English images of various North African and Near
Eastern peoples. However, she never
characterizes those images, except to say they
represent "extreme racial and cultural alterity"
while simultaneously showing with examples like
Saladin and Othello that the "otherness" was
fictional, ambivalent, and anything but extreme.
So when we finally get to Tolkien's Haradrim
in The Lord of the Rings, we still have
no specific real-world references. All the
colorful quotes in the world don't help us see
how Tolkien actually adapted any real cultural
constructs for his Africanic enemies of Gondor.
But "enemies" remains the word, by any
conventional reading of the story, no matter
what Straubhaar says about the Southrons being
"noble and proud" or "misled" like good old
Saladin.
Straubhaar also fudges the racial issue: it
is disingenuous to say that "Moor" means
"Muslims of African and Iberian origin" without
adding that the word also connotes a very
dark-skinned African of no particular religion.
Tolkien's critics have seized on his use of
enemy hordes from what we might think of as
North Africa and Arabia ("swarthy men"), and his
"half-trolls" of Far Harad, clearly Negroes from
Central Africa, to accuse him of promoting
morally prejudicial racist imagery. Rather than
frittering away her word count with asides about
C. S. Lewis, the Easterlings, South African
blacks, and Dante, Straubhaar should have
investigated to what extent Tolkien's
transformation of Africa and Africans in his
fiction represented ideas or realities -- from
Medieval or modern times.
The 'Further Reading' is unhelpful; Said's
Orientalism is invaluable for understanding
Christian Europe's historical response to its
southern and eastern neighbors, but I believe
there is other critical work that actually
addresses Tolkien's specific take on this issue.
See also is missing "Middle-earth",
"Gondor", "Race and Ethnicity in Tolkien's
Works", and "Race in Tolkien's Films". And as
with her "Easterlings" article, I am surprised
she does not give a cross reference to my
article "South, The" which must have been on her
list of the Encyclopedia's articles, since this
one was not on mine at the time of my deadline.
Saruman -
Jonathan Evans
Comments by squire,
March 15, 2007
This is okay as far as it goes, though a
little disjointed and out of focus. The extended
and completely overweight mini-essay on the name
Saruman practically derails the article right
out of the station. Once past that, Evans makes
some good observations on Saruman's ultimate
perdition, his effective foreshadowing by
Gandalf at the Council, the devices of his
rhetoric at the denouement at Orthanc, and his
diminishment in the Shire. The ending
unfortunately peters out to no effect, relying
on an unattributed quote from the book about his
deathly dissipation that Evans has already
described.
I wished for a more conventionally-organized
account of Saruman's role in The Lord of the
Rings: one that followed the chronology and
brought out more clearly that Saruman was a
traitor to both the West and to Sauron, and that
his initial drive to power was aimed at
conquering Rohan. For finer details, such as how
Tolkien came to invent him as a device to
explain the absence of Gandalf during Frodo's
journey to Rivendell, the later Unfinished
Tales material on his earlier relationship
with Valinor, Gandalf and the Shire, his role as
a foil for the Ents, and his replacement as the
White Wizard by Gandalf, there was obviously no
room.
There are some annoying errors, too.
Saruman's name in Valinor was Curumo; it was the
Elves of Middle-earth who called him Curunír.
Gandalf does not use Saruman "as an unwitting
double agent to discern Sauron's secret plans".
His flashes of anger during the parley with
Gandalf are anything but "carefully controlled".
Gandalf does not pronounce "his removal from
Orthanc". An editor should have caught such
clumsy constructions as "Saruman is portrayed as
a character who...", "the only extensive scene
featuring him in the whole book", and "he
appears considerably reduced in stature finally
as an exile vagabond in the Shire".
Evans comments on Saruman's character
throughout, in asides and non sequiturs. What is
missing is some more systematic consideration of
what Saruman represents to the story as a whole,
and his symbolic relationships to Gandalf,
Radagast, Galadriel, Treebeard, Theoden, Gríma,
Denethor, Sauron, Celebrimbor, Fëanor, and Aulë.
Satan and Lucifer - Matthew Dickerson
Comments by Entwife Wandlimb,
January 19, 2007
Matthew Dickerson wrote a nice entry on
“Satan and Lucifer”. He's a computer science
professor at Middlebury College, but he also
coauthored From Homer to Harry Potter: A
Handbook on Myth and Fantasy, which he lists
under “Further Reading.”
The first two paragraphs of his encyclopedia
entry are a survey of the doctrine of Satan,
which I suspect many readers might skim over
despite their clarity. The other three
paragraphs of the entry compare Morgoth with the
biblical Satan and Milton’s Lucifer. I
particularly enjoyed the distinction between the
Norse Loki and Satan/Morgoth.
To nitpick, I wish we had a little less
doctrinal survey and a little more on Tolkien’s
personal beliefs as reflected in his letters.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
Four critical works appear in Dickerson’s
bibliography, but none are cited in his text.
The article’s treatment of Satan in the Bible is
very helpful; if Dickerson was relying on the
“Milton” and “Old Norse Literature” articles to
support his scantier explanations of Loki and
the Lucifer of Paradise Lost, he should
have included them in his See also
list.
One error: Dickerson says that Morgoth is called
the “Father of Dragons”, a name Tolkien actually
gives to Glaurung.
Sauron - Jared
Lobdell
Comments by squire,
February 4, 2007
There really are better ways to write a short
reference article than firing random shotgun
blasts of quotes at the page. Even Sauron, the
prime agent of Dark Evil across two Ages of
Middle-earth's history, deserves better than
this.
To begin at the false beginning, Sauron does
not "begin as the Necromancer, in The Hobbit."
He begins as Tevildo, Prince of Cats in the
Book of Lost Tales - whose cat-like Eye
survives even into The Lord of the Rings.
But to be most useful, this article might have started with some true facts about
Sauron as he appears in LotR. That is how
most Tolkien readers know him, after all. From
that point one could backtrack to fill in his
background, both within the legendarium, as the
demon-vassal of Morgoth in the First Age and the
Dark Lord redevivus in the Second Age; and
without, by recounting how his character
developed and changed as Tolkien extended his
Silmarillion tales into the world of The
Hobbit and its sequel, so that the vaguely
menacing Necromancer did in fact eventually
"become" Sauron the Great of the War of the
Ring.
Sauron makes several memorable personal
appearances in the Silmarillion legends, and at
least one in LotR; Lobdell does not make
use of them to explicate the character. Instead
he quotes from Tolkien at length to make points
that a single summary sentence could have made.
Tolkien speculates several times in his
letters and later unpublished essays on the
nature of Sauron and his power, and how he
differed from Morgoth, the "other" Dark Lord;
Lobdell never mentions these, inexplicably
spending an entire paragraph on a meaningless
change in wording in one of Tolkien's
Silmarillion drafts.
Sauron has a prime role in the Akallabeth,
facilitating the downfall of Númenor; this
phase of his career is completely ignored in a
closing paragraph of confusing chronology that
arrogantly asserts that Sauron's role in The
Lord of the Rings is fully known and
understood by the reader.
Sauron as the devilish antagonist of Gandalf,
personification of the One Ring's corruption,
and general symbol of Evil in Middle-earth has
been the subject of innumerable critical
analyses for over fifty years now; my favorite
is Kocher's entire chapter analyzing Sauron as a
character. Lobdell gives no critical references,
but spends another paragraph on the minor point
of the etymology of Sauron's name. There is no
"Further Reading" list and a laughably short
"See also" section.
The style of the article is (unsurprisingly)
confusing (and circular, e.g. "Tolkien attempted
(or began an attempt) once and for all..."), but
features a minimum of parenthetical asides (for
once). On the other hand, the speculation about
the origin of the Necromancer character (in a
Victorian romance about Bluebeard) was very
interesting to me (at least).
Comments by N.E. Brigand, April 2, 2007
John Rateliff
has recently
confirmed that even in the Hobbit
drafts, the Necromancer was the same character
“who was defeated by Beren & Luthien”. This
doesn’t overturn Lobdell’s supposition that the
character of Sauron was influenced by Gilles de
Retz in The Black Douglas, a book that
Tolkien acknowledged as a source for The
Hobbit’s wargs (Letter #306). But it does
weigh against Lobdell’s supposition that “In his
beginnings, in Tolkien’s mind, it may have been
that Sauron was a man”.
This article
does at least include long quotes (all properly
cited!) from Tolkien’s letters and various
HoMe volumes, which gives readers parts of
Sauron’s biography within the mythology, and a
little hint of his development over the course
of Tolkien’s writings(though as squire notes,
Sauron’s role in the downfall of Númenor goes
unmentioned).
But
Lobdell’s closing sentence makes clear the
limitations of his article: having taken
Sauron’s story to his reappearance in the Third
Age, “of course what happened thereafter is told
in The Lord of the Rings, and (unlike the
story of the First Age) need not be retold
here”. Retelling Sauron’s story should never
have been the point of this article.
Sauron Defeated - Jason Fisher
Comments by
squire, December 5, 2006
This offers a kind of bare-bones summary of
this interesting volume of The History of
Middle-earth. Fisher restricts himself to
giving the basic outlines of the material, with
occasional editorial commentary by himself.
The oddest part of Sauron Defeated is
the fact that two thirds of it is not the finale
to The History of The Lord of the Rings,
but instead covers the material called The
Notion Club Papers and other Numenorean lore
that Tolkien wrote before he completed LotR.
Fisher takes this for granted. Yet Christopher
Tolkien himself was upset by this forced
dichotomy; as have been so many subsequent
readers that the paperback tetraology of The
History of the Lord of the Rings sub-series
offers an anomalous slimmed-down fourth volume,
The End of the Third Age. This omits the
Numenor material, for those who just want to
read about Frodo and Aragorn, not Lowdham and
Jeremy.
I know that Alex Lewis, for one, uses
Tolkien's discursion into the Notion Club
Papers before LotR was finished to
argue that even in 1945 the author was not sure
what relationship his new epic had with the Silmarillion material. Likewise, Verlyn Flieger
treats with The Notion Club Papers
extensively in her book on Tolkien's literary
uses of time and time travel. Fisher notes none
of this; there is no bibliography (despite an
unfortunate "Further Reading" header, alone and
forlorn).
Fisher's style is also a bit over the top.
"Penetrating analysis" is not the essence of
Christopher Tolkien's work in The History of
the Lord of the Rings: textual
reconstruction is more like it, by CT's own
admission. The announcement "Christopher Tolkien
presents for the first time" the epilogue with
Sam begs the question of when the second time
might be. "Taps into the Númenorean legend in
quite a novel way" hardly characterizes The
Notion Club Papers, for those who have read
Tolkien's earlier HoME work, The Lost
Road. The general tone resembles an
enthusiastic publisher's or fan's blurb rather than a
critical review.
Saxo Grammaticus
- Scott Kleinman
Comments by N.E. Brigand, March 26, 2007
This is about
as good as a 250-word entry can be. In three
short paragraphs, Kleinman briefly introduces
his subject, connects him to Tolkien’s
scholarship and fiction, with a nod to Tom
Shippey, and even includes a caveat about the
uncertainty of such source-work as he presents.
Kleinman’s
treatment left me wanting to know more, as a
good entry should. I wish he had been allotted
space to include more specific citation, as well
as some indication of why Tolkien’s
Legendarium appears in his bibliography, and
why his See also list includes
“Eärendil”. Having no Latin or Old Norse, I can
only guess that there is a connection to the
names Orvendil and Aurvandil that
Kleinman mentions in passing.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
I have since learned that Tolkien refers
specifically to Saxo Grammaticus, and in
reference to Eärendil (as “Horwendillus”) in
“The Notion Club Papers” (p. 301 of Sauron
Defeated), though Kleinman doesn’t mention
that work.
Sayers, Dorothy Leigh (1893–1957) -
Richard C. West
Comments by Jason Fisher, February 8,
2007
West’s
short biographical blurb is solid, so
far as it goes, but it fails to
establish more than a tangential
connection to J. R. R. Tolkien. A more
important point of contact lies hidden
in Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker
(1941). West mentions the book but fails
to illuminate the important similarities
between it and Tolkien’s essay “On
Fairy-Stories”, which was written around
the same time. In both works, the
creative impulses of man (which Tolkien
calls sub-creation) are likened to the
creative powers of God – a key argument
buttressing many of Tolkien’s and
Sayers’ other writings.
A smaller
point: though West does mention Sayers’
translation of Dante, I would also have
mentioned her translation of The Song
of Roland from the Old French, which
is still in print today. This
establishes additional, albeit minor,
points of contact with Tolkien (cf. “The
Carolingians”).
And
finally, I’m very surprised to find
Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride’s
Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C. S.
Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles
Williams missing from the
bibliography.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, March 26, 2007
As West notes,
Tolkien read at least Sayers’ “Lord Peter Wimsey”
novels (with mixed feelings) but he never met
her. As much could be said of many writers
during Tolkien’s life; presumably Sayers
receives her own entry because of her friendship
with Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis, and her
contribution to Essays Presented to Charles
Williams, the collection to which Tolkien
offered “On Fairy-stories”.
Unfortunately
West doesn’t mention the Essays, nor does
its entry appear in the See also list.
He also doesn’t say how he knows that Sayers and
Tolkien read each other’s work. In fact Tolkien
mentions Sayers on p. 82 of Letters.
Presumably Sayers comments on Tolkien in her
collected letters, no volume of which appears in
West’s bibliography.
West might
also have included an article from the
Proceedings of the 1992 Centenary
Conference, “Tolkien, Sayers, Sex and Gender”,
by David Doughan, who examines the dislike
Tolkien professed for Sayers’ later mysteries.
Scholars of Medieval Literature,
Influence of - Tom Shippey
Comments by
squire, August 17, 2007
There's a lot to learn
here, and a lot to enjoy. Like Tolkien and
Chambers, Shippey cherishes the ideal of a
"fluent, often colloquial" essay. His review of
philological scholarship up to Tolkien's time is
wide-ranging and staggeringly erudite. One
thrills to imagine that Shippey has read not
just the corpus of ancient northern European
literature, but also the critical and editorial
commentaries on it that have been produced over
the past two centuries. He brings alive academic
debates that are now long dead, and he shows
that Tolkien the philologist was a late,
English-speaking, entry into a world that was
dominated until his time by German and
Scandinavian experts.
But structurally, Shippey
is often too fluent, too colloquial. To remind
us of the nominal subject of his essay, his long
epic of the history of pre-Tolkien philology
repeatedly hints of how Tolkien was
"influenced", negatively or positively, by this
warriors' catalog of scholars. In fact, at times
Shippey is almost coy in noting which
interpretation of Beowulf Tolkien was
eventually to adopt in his 1936 lecture; perhaps
he should have started in media res as he
did so successfully with his C.S. Lewis article.
The problem of condensation
is obvious too. Despite the intimidating length
of this article, all too often Shippey breaks
off or leaves a line of thought unfinished. What
were Tolkien's "rather different views"
from his famous Beowulf lecture, as expressed in
Finn and Hengest, on the need to read Old
English literature on its own terms? Shippey
uses "likely" and "surely" to characterize their
intellectual relationship, but do we have any
idea what Tolkien actually thought of R. W.
Chambers? Whatever became of Liedertheorie:
Shippey calls it "effectively dead" by 1912, yet
elsewhere he says it is "not without some
grounds", citing the Saga of the Volsungs.
And did Tolkien despair of the lack of an
"English" mythology because of the creation of
the United Kingdom in the 18th century -- or
because of the Norman invasion of the 11th?
Notably missing is any
discussion of what "influence" (if any, as per
C. S. Lewis) Tolkien's contemporary
colleagues may have had on him; Shippey mentions
Onions, both the Gordons, and Dickins as
professional acquaintances of Tolkien's, but
only E. V. Gordon's The Battle of Maldon
is given as something Tolkien "clearly" had in
mind when doing work of his own. And after all
this buildup, one wants to know just how Tolkien
was perceived by his fellows, both domestic and
foreign, when they considered his work in the
light of all that had come before.
Still, this is very fine. I
loved Shippey's connection of Tolkien with
Macaulay in the matter of their fictional
"Lays"; the revelation that English philology in
the 19th century was regarded by foreign
scholars as being populated by cranks and
losers; his speculation as to why Tolkien got
his big break at Oxford; and his long but
fascinating profile of R. W. Chambers as a kind
of academic proto-Tolkien, literarily speaking.
The 'Further Reading' looks
superb, of course. As for the See also....
well, it seems probable to me that Shippey
limited this list to what he thought were the
most germane cross-references to his article.
But even his occasional asides are worth reading
by those who might be researching other aspects
of Tolkien and his works. Although I would add "Ancrene
Wisse", Battle of Maldon, The", "Beowulf:
Tolkien's Scholarship", "Bliss, Alan
(1921-1985)", "Danes: Contributions to English
Culture", "Danish Language", "Epic Poetry", "Farmer
Giles of Ham", "Finn and Hengest",
"Gordon, Ida (1907-)", "History, Anglo-Saxon", "Homecoming
of Beorhtnoth", "Icelandic Language" (oops!
doesn't exist), "Inklings", "Kolbítar", "Lang,
Andrew (1844-1912)" (oops! doesn't exist), "Lays
of Beleriand, The", "Middle English
Vocabulary, A (1922)", "Old Norse
Translations", "'On Fairy-stories'", "Oxford", "Silmarillion,
The", "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Pearl, Sir Orfeo, Edited by Christopher
Tolkien", and "Wrenn, C.L. (1895-1969)" (oops!
doesn't exist), I even more wish that those
articles had referred their readers to this one,
which seems to be a kind of lost child of the
Encyclopedia.
Beyond regret, passing into
rage, is the feeling one has on discovering that
none of the four "Beowulf"
articles refers to this piece, which does so
much to establish their very context.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, January
5, 2008
Do we have any idea what Tolkien actually
thought of R.W. Chambers?
In Letter #15 Tolkien refers to Chambers as an
“old and kindhearted friend”. And Douglas
Anderson’s 2006 article, “R.W. Chambers and
The Hobbit”, in Tolkien Studies 3,
discusses their friendship and scholarly
interaction at length.
Seafarer, The - Leslie A. Donovan
Comments by squire, January
28, 2007
It's really nice, the way Donovan sums up the
contents and themes of this Old English poem,
establishes Tolkien's professional expertise in
editing and interpreting it, and finally uses
everything she's said to point out specific
examples of its influence on Tolkien's fiction.
Seafarer: Ida Gordon Edition - Alexandra
Bolintineanu
Comments by squire, January
28, 2007
With reference to my review of The
Seafarer article just above this one, this
is another, particularly egregious, example of a
topic that could have been one article rather
than two. In the Thematic table of contents, the
poem itself is considered to be among Tolkien's
"Literary Sources: Anglo-Saxon", while his
scholarly edition of the poem is considered to
be "Scholarship by Tolkien: Medieval
Literature". Perhaps the problem is that the
editors conceived of and collected the work
using only the thematic schema, without
considering the sequential duplications and
absurdities that the alphabetic order reveals.
That said, one must regard Bolintineanu's and
Donovan's two reviews of the same poem as one
would the competing arguments of two loudly
opinionated people at the same party. Once
pulled into separate rooms, so to speak, the two
authors do diverge into the respective
specialties of their separate articles, and
Bolintineanu's account of the Tolkien-Gordon
edition is quite interesting.
Her conclusion, that we will never know
Tolkien's own critical interpretation of the
poem, since he abandoned his critical edition
for Ida Gordon to rework and complete, seems
less relevant than Donovan's strong case for its
influence on his fiction. It could have, I
think, usefully led to a review of the issue of
Tolkien's lifelong dilatoriness in publishing a
body of scholarship in the quantity that was
expected of a professor at Oxford.
"Secret Vice, A" - Arden R. Smith
Comments by squire, April 30,
2007
I've never read "A Secret Vice" and enjoyed
Smith's apparently comprehensive summary of its
contents and theme.
As with other articles in the Encyclopedia
that cover similar aspects of Tolkien's art, I
missed a sense of context, both internal and
external. Internal, because as with "On
Fairy-stories", Tolkien apparently turns a
review of a general philological subject (here
the "hobby" of invented languages) into a
presentation strictly of his own tastes and
preferences in that area. I got the sense from
Smith's article that Tolkien actually had no
idea of the prevalence or patterns by which
children and adults generally invent languages
but was only interested in explaining and
justifying his own. External, in that (as with
"Alphabets, Invented") Smith does not present
any critical response to Tolkien's essay; or
show that any academic work has been done before
or since on the subject of invented languages,
by which we might relate Tolkien's apparently
extraordinary tastes and talents to more general
examples of the phenomenon.
Without maligning this article which on its
own ground is of very high quality, I'd note
that this lack of external context is consistent
with Rosebury's warning that Tolkien has been
too often worshipped by his fans and even
critics "in a temple in which he is the solitary
idol."
See also is good, but incomplete:
"Alphabets, Invented" and "Languages: Early
introduction and interest" also belong here; as
does, oddly, "Elvish Compositions and Grammars"
which contains at least references to the Elvish
poems Tolkien includes in his essay. On the
other hand the article "Poems by Tolkien in
Other Languages" does not take on Elvish as an
"other language" and so has no relation to "A
Secret Vice" - I have shared Smith's confusion
here, having wondered several times why
Tolkien's Elvish poems as literary works were
not covered in the Encyclopedia.
Sexuality in Tolkien’s Works – Anna Smol
Comments by Jason Fisher,
January 24, 2008
I approached this entry
with my usual mental checklist of points and
references, and Smol satisfied all of them – and
more.
The pièce de résistance
was her inclusion of “The Fall of Arthur”, which
I was fully prepared to find missing. A terrific
entry, the very model of what an “Encyclopedia
[of] Scholarship and Critical Assessment” ought
to offer. And as with Smol’s other entries, here
is another very impressive 'Further Reading' and
See also!
Shakespeare - Janet Brennan Croft
Comments by squire, January
24, 2007
A fine survey of Tolkien's expressed disdain
for Shakespeare (as literature) and the
accompanying paradox of the many instances of a
"dialogue" between him and the Bard in his
fiction. Croft is an "expert" on Tolkien's
relation to Shakespeare, but because her work
was to edit a collection of essays on the
subject, she succeeds (where many an "expert" in
this Encyclopedia fails) in citing more opinions
and observations than just her own.
However, it is hardly a distinguishing
feature of educated authors writing original
stories in English to betray a debt to
Shakespeare! What gives the entire article its
kick is the myth that Tolkien did not "like"
Shakespeare. Accept that this is a myth, and the
examples of influence that follow become far
less remarkable.
The conclusion is quite overblown, comparing
Tolkien to Shakespeare directly. It's a
comparison that fails on many levels, starting
with the four-century lea d that Will enjoys in
the literary longevity and influence stakes. A
better ending might have been to take the
opposite tack, and show how Tolkien's writing,
aside from the "dialogues", does or does not
measure up to Shakespeare's, and why.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
Apart from the weak conclusion, I find this to
be a very strong article, more thorough than
most of the encyclopedia’s articles that show
either influence or similarity between Tolkien’s
work and that of other authors. As squire says,
Croft refers to many other critical opinions
(not all from her recent collection) and even to
a biographical study, by J. S. Ryan, that covers
ground missed by Carpenter.
Shaping of Middle-earth
- Amy H. Sturgis
Comments by squire, June 18,
2007
This is, generally, a sound summary of the
contents of one of the most difficult-to-love
volumes of History of Middle-earth. This
is the book that is the subject of David
Bratman's famous anecdote of the Tolkien scholar
who, when Bratman tried to say that Shaping
improved on a second reading, gasped "you read
it twice?"
Sturgis, unfortunately, does not give the
book some context as to its actual place in the
History it is a part of. For instance, she never
mentions that the 'Sketch' was written to
provide a reader of Tolkien's epic poems (later
published in HoME III, The Lays of Beleriand)
with a grasp of the entire legendarium as it
stood at that point. She passes over the key
point that the 'Sketch', and the Quenta
that followed, are not just "the only complete
account of the First Age", but the turning point
in Tolkien's approach to writing his legends.
From then on, the material that would eventually
become The Silmarillion was characterized
by Tolkien's so-called archaic 'heigh style',
rather than the mock-Morrisean medieval pastiche
that makes The Book of Lost Tales so
lively, distinctive, and faintly ridiculous.
Some critics have even suggested this was a
wrong turning, that Tolkien squeezed the juice
out of his tales by making them too serious and
sterile for their own good.
Similarly, the early "Annals" that appear in
this volume mark the beginning of one of
Tolkien's most fascinating and frustrating modes
of story-composition. In an attempt to give
chronological structure and consistency to his
intertwined legends, he often began a simple
list of dates and annalistic notes, that soon
ballooned into detailed new narratives and
rewrites of existing tales (this is apparent
even in the various chronologies that appear in
the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings).
The Annals thus compete with the actual
written-out stories as non-obvious sources for
analyzing Tolkien's ever-changing conception of
his legendarium.
Even more interestingly, the Annals that
specifically appear in Shaping are
attributed to Ælfwine/Eriol, Tolkien's old
English voyager who was the narrator/recorder of
the Elvish Lost Tales. This shows that
Tolkien was trying to preserve his original
"framing narrative" even as he was separating
the Quenta itself from that same device.
Then there is Tolkien's fascinating experiment
with putting Ælfwine's records into Ælfwine's
language, that is, his translations of the
Annals into actual Old English! Again, Sturgis
presents the facts of all the fascinating
material in this volume, but does not analyze it
at all.
The concluding paragraph, aspiring perhaps to
such analysis, is instead a bland collection of
platitudes about the "value" of the volume to
Tolkien studies. 'Further Reading' is also
dismayingly inadequate, lacking (for starters)
the indispensable Tolkien's Legendarium:
Essays on The History of Middle-earth by
Flieger and Hostetter.
Shelob
- Marjorie Burns
Comments by Jason Fisher,
February 7, 2007
A largely
excellent essay all around. Very solid,
and it hit all the major points I
expected it to hit as I read along. It
seemed well-argued, well-structured, and
it seemed to strike a good balance
between summarizing the narrative
details, citing possible analogues, and
addressing the most common critical
approaches to Shelob. The comparison
with Galadriel is especially good. The
only surprising omission from the story
summary is Gollum’s betrayal of Frodo
and Sam to Shelob and his hope to
reclaim the Ring thereby.
Some
additional small points that were
missed: Burns ought to have mentioned
where, exactly, Shelob lived and pointed
out that she gave her name to the pass,
Cirith Ungol, in the Mountains of
Shadow. Mention of the Elvish name of
her lair, Torech Ungol, would also have
been appropriate. Additionally, Burns
might have augmented her parenthetical
comment about Shelob’s great age by
tracing her apparent flight from
Beleriand following the War of Wrath
(“flying from ruin”, she came to the
Ephel Dúath “before the first stone of
Barad-dûr”).
Her
bibliography is also solid and it
included all but one of the works I
expected. The omission is Timothy R.
O’Neill’s Individuated Hobbit: Jung,
Tolkien, and the Archetypes of
Middle-Earth, which dovetails nicely
with the Mythlore article she did cite.
Comments by
squire, February 7, 2007
I would add to this my belief that Shelob's
sexuality is over-emphasized by critics. The
primary theme that Shelob represents is not lust
but gluttony. Images of eating and excreting
prevail in her descriptions. Partridge pre-emptorily
defined sex as the key to Shelob's
identity, and the sheer "sex-appeal" of the
argument seems to have survived the subsequent
demolition of Partridge as a Tolkien critic, as
Burns's article demonstrates. But
Chance, in A Mythology for England,
though her analysis is dismayingly inexact,
seems nevertheless to me to be more on the right
track.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, February 20, 2007
I agree that
this is in most respects a good entry. Burns
could hardly have ignored the critical
literature which interprets Shelob sexually, but
her failure to consider Shelob as figure of
appetite is all the more odd in light of her
chapter on food symbolism in Tolkien’s work,
titled “Eating, Devouring, Sacrifice, and
Ultimate Just Deserts”, in her recent book,
Perilous Realms. Among her comments there
on Shelob is this: “For the Orcs and Shelob (and
for Sauron, the devourer of souls), the
repulsion we feel over what they eat is
magnified by the pleasure each takes in the
willful infliction of pain. This above all is
what gives spice to Orc or Shelob meals” (165).
However, Burns’s book does appear in the
article’s bibliography.
Shire,
The - Michael N. Stanton
Comments by squire, March 1, 2007
There is way too much "Middle-earth Studies"
to this article. Most of it is mock-descriptive,
or even hopelessly historical (chief events in
"Shire history"? why?).
Only the last paragraph admits that the Shire
is literary fiction, and by then it is too late
to begin to look into the rich secondary
literature on how the Shire relates to the rest
of Middle-earth, English geography, Faërie, the
pastoral ideal, Eden, industrializing and
postwar England, the English nursery, Victorian
rural mythology, and the ideas of time travel
and the frame narrative. Instead we are treated
to a last few inaccurate bromides about
anachronism and anomalies.
Comments by Jason Fisher,
March 2, 2007
In addition
to what’s missing – pretty thoroughly
inventoried by squire already – much of
what’s in the entry doesn’t
belong there. In addition to the random
selection of events from the Shire
Reckoning, presented entirely out of any
context, why do we have a paragraph on
the different kindreds of the Hobbits?
This is more than adequately covered in
the entry on Hobbits. Also, Stanton’s
claim that the Shire “is probably the
best-defined geopolitical unit in all of
Middle-earth” is a contentious one,
requiring defending. But he doesn’t even
try.
The entry
is also rather strangely written at
times – e.g. “In these four areas, the
topography of the Shire is pleasingly
varied but tame: hills, brooks and
rivers, woodlands and meadows.” Pleasing
to whom? To Stanton or to its
inhabitants? Tame(d) in what way and by
whom? And – splitting hairs, I know –
the omission of a serial comma leads to
confusion here, too.
Turning to
the 'Further Reading', it’s nice to see
some attempt to point readers to other
critical perspectives on the Shire
(e.g., Burger), but unfortunately, it’s
too little too late. What’s most
troubling is that two of his references
(Fonstad and Strachey) are really
nothing more than maps. And why is
Languages in the See also?
Comments by N.E. Brigand, April 2, 2007
I haven’t read
Strachey, but Fonstad’s map of the Shire is
accompanied by a 600-word essay that includes
ten specific citations, as compared to one cite
in Stanton’s 1,000 words here. There are nine
sources in Stanton’s bibliography, but much of
his information originates in the LotR
Prologue and Appendices, which are never
mentioned.
A few
questions: Stanton writes that the addition of
the Westmarch means “the total area of the Shire
is thus about” 21,000 sq. miles – why adopt a
viewpoint of more than 32 years after the events
of LotR? How does he know the Shire post
is “somewhat casual”? Where does Tolkien say
that the Northfarthing has “frequent winter
snow”? And to whom is the Green Dragon
“famous”?
Silmarillion, The - Gergely Nagy
Comments by squire, March 2, 2007
It is a pleasure to read such a fine
"flagship" article as this one. The
Silmarillion, and the "Silmarillion
tradition", each properly defined and
distinguished by Nagy, are so central to any
study of Tolkien that it would have been a true
shame had this been handled badly.
He gives first the textual history, both
during and after Tolkien's lifetime; then a
quick summary of its stories and themes, and
finally and most importantly, a review of its
critical reception so far. Rampant errors in
copyediting suggest that Nagy never received
feedback from his editors. Possibly because of
that, there are at least three points that I
think could have stood some rethinking and
revision.
One, there is no cross-reference or
coordination of Nagy's integrated history of the
writing of the Silmarillion with the appropriate
History of Middle-earth volumes, although
at the end he gives due attention to the HoME
as a posthumously published Silmarillion
apparatus.
Two, in his summary he ignores the relative
weight of the Quenta Silmarillion (First
Age) section within the tradition compared to
the rest of Middle-earth's history; and within
the Quenta he does not mention the trend
noted by Tolkien himself away from the Elvish
annals and towards the heroic adventures
of Men in aiding the Elves in their war with
Morgoth. In general he does not discuss the
Sil in terms of Tolkien's ideas about Elves
v. Men.
Three, in his brilliant theoretical
commentary on the quality and literary import of
the Sil, he writes as if the "final
presentation frame" of Bilbo being the compiler
had been executed in the 1977 edition, which is
hardly the case. He does not address Christopher
Tolkien's own retrospective doubts as to how the
Sil should have edited and presented, and
he underplays the flaws, including the writing
not by JRRT inserted in the final chapters of
the Quenta, that CT himself has since
revealed and apologized for.
Still, I don't want to downplay the value of
this article. It seems to me to be an excellent
roadmap to what I hope will be some truly
comprehensive and up to date scholarship on the
entire Silmarillion corpus.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, March 18, 2007
Nagy’s entry
includes all the elements necessary for a great
Silmarillion article, but misses the mark
due to some lapses in quality and an imbalance
in his presentation.
Following a
good, short introduction on the difference
between The Silmarillion of 1977 and the
complex of “Silmarillion” texts (not usually
abbreviated “Silmarillion (tradition)”, as only
he terms it here), Nagy describes the
development of Tolkien’s legendarium in the
first and longest of the entry’s three sections.
I think it is given in excessive detail, since
the encyclopedia has an overview article on
The History of Middle-earth by David Bratman
-- which does not appear in Nagy’s See also
list (Nagy lists only the Book of Lost Tales
of the HoME volumes; and also refers to a
non-existent entry on “Rhyming Poetry”). I have
a general familiarity with HoMe, and
could follow Nagy’s intelligent but
densely-packed explanation, but I wonder if
readers new to those texts or even to The
Silmarillion itself will understand this
history – and surely this article was partly
intended to serve as an introduction for just
those readers.
Generally, Nagy
seems to assume that his readers are already
familiar with the contents of the published
Silmarillion. He explains that the
“Ainulindalë” is “strictly speaking independent
of the ‘Silmarillion’ proper (as the Quenta
tradition)” without ever having explained what
the “Quenta” is, beyond a name in a list. He
likewise discusses the development but not the
nature of the “Valaquenta”. Concerning the
1937 “Quenta Silmarillion”, Nagy pauses to note
that it includes a previously introduced “end of
days” story, without indicating the importance,
if any, of that story. And when Nagy writes
that “the themes and motifs that emerged” in
LotR “made necessary the revision of earlier
stories (such as the character of Galadriel, or
the One Ring itself)”, does he mean that the
Ring and Galadriel emerged in LotR or
that they were present in the “Silmarillion” and
revised because of LotR? And is
Galadriel a “theme” or a “motif”?
Nagy’s history
concludes well, particularly in two clear
paragraphs on the publication of The
Silmarillion and HoMe volumes (he
also ought to have mentioned Unfinished Tales).
However, as squire notes, to write that the
conceit of the “Silmarillion” as Bilbo’s
translation “finally became its presentation
frame” is to accept unquestioningly Christopher
Tolkien’s post facto explanation from the
foreword to Lost Tales I; even if that
was the final intent of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is
nowhere evident in The Silmarillion.
And Nagy should have noted that Christopher
Tolkien's and Guy Kay’s “selecting and
arranging” also including some wholesale
inventing where they couldn’t resolve
inconsistencies.
I think Nagy’s
second section, “Summary and Themes”, is too
short, particularly the summary, scarcely longer
than the encyclopedia’s synopsis for Farmer
Giles of Ham. Nagy confusingly writes that
the story presented in The Silmarillion,
implicitly including Second and Third Age
events, “had been largely fixed from its first
emergence in The Book of Lost Tales”, but
Tolkien conceived of the later Ages well after
abandoning the Lost Tales. In fact,
about 80% of The Silmarillion is First
Age history, but Nagy’s précis covers that
material in only five sentences.
Curiously, in
this Silmarillion article there are
multiple references to Galadriel, Frodo and
Bilbo, but Beren, Finrod, Finwë, Lúthien, Melian,
Thingol, Túrin and Ungoliant, to name only
characters who receive separate Encyclopedia
entries, go unmentioned (they also don’t appear
in the See also list) along with Gondolin,
Nargothrond, Angband, Beleriand, Glaurung, Ulmo,
the Kinslaying, and the Music of the Ainur.
Turning to
“themes” (and where are “characters” or
“styles”?), Nagy bizarrely claims that, “The
Silmarillion is primarily a context for
The Lord of the Rings, explaining a number
of allusions in the later work.” He ably goes
on to show how The Silmarillion can serve
this purpose. But that wasn’t Tolkien’s original
purpose, nor does Nagy demonstrate that this is
how most readers approach the text. However,
Nagy does well in briefly enumerating some major
“Silmarillion” themes.
He continues
on strongly into his final section, “Reception
and Criticism”, though even with more than two
columns to fill, his comments suffer from
compression. He should have provided citations
for the “explicitly disappointed reception” that
the 1977 Silmarillion received, and also
examples of the “Silmarillion” studies in which
“medieval models and parallels have been
efficiently mapped”. His bold, complicated
theoretical arguments, largely derived from the
work of Verlyn Flieger and from his own articles
in Tolkien the Medievalist and Tolkien
Studies I – though only Flieger is cited in
his text – are heavy on jargon and at times come
across as unsupported assertions: he fails to
convince me, for instance, that “how cultures
deal with traditionally meaningful stories” is
one of the most important ideas in The
Silmarillion.
Silmarils -
Jason Fisher
Comments by squire, August 15,
2007
Jason Fisher spends too much time recounting
the tale of the Silmarils, and too little on
what they mean. He opens with the interesting
point that Tolkien's early mythology the Lost
Tales did not emphasize the Silmarils very
much although it had roughly the same plot
structure as the published Quenta
Silmarillion. After retelling at length the
published version, Fisher returns to that early
phase of Tolkien's creation in his conclusion,
proposing that the Kalevala's "Sampo" was
a kind of model for the Silmarils as a
meaningless MacGuffin. Fisher's closing
sentence, about how Tolkien subsequently "chose"
to adapt the Sampo "in whatever ways he wished"
begs for more interpretation of just what the
Silmarils did end up meaning in the long
tale we have just been retold.
For instance, why did the Valar allow the
Eldar to make the Silmarils? Was their making a
sin: are they Good, or Neutral? How is it that
Morgoth could possess them without being
destroyed as Carcaroth, Maedhros, Maglor and
Shelob were? How do the Silmarils relate to the
Rings of Power as central metaphors for
Tolkien's two great epics? How is their light
variously described, and how does it relate to
other manifestations of Light in Tolkien? If
they contain the light of both Trees, then why,
by the interesting etymology that Fisher gives
us, is their name more suggestive of silver than
gold -- and so of Telperion, the elder tree and
ancestor of the light of Ithil, the Moon?
Fisher's 'Further Reading' list is first
class. See also is relatively short for
so central an element in Tolkien's fiction: it
could surely include "Arkenstone", "Elves",
"Elves: Kindreds and Migrations", "Magic:
Middle-earth", "Palantiri", "Pride", "Silmarillion,
The", "Symbolism in Tolkien's Works",
"Technology in Middle-earth", "Ungoliant
[etc.]", "Valar", and "Valinor".
Comments by N.E. Brigand, January
5, 2008
While the plot summary should have been
shortened, I think it might also have been
brought forward: Fisher doesn’t explain that the
Silmarils are jewels until halfway through his
second paragraph. Likewise his note on the name
“silmaril”, while necessary –and I love
the connections to “Idril” and “mithril”–
could certainly have been compressed.
It’s good that Fisher describes the changing
conception of the Silmarils over time, but his
chronology isn’t clear: for instance, from
Tolkien’s fiction, he only quotes from the 1977
Silmarillion. But when did Tolkien
decide on the jewels’ importance? When did he
start calling his First Age saga the “Quenta
Silmarillion”? Fisher doesn’t say. And his
history describes the Silmarils at the end of
the First Age as in their “final resting place”,
but this ignores the tradition of the Second
Prophecy of Mandos, which foretells that they
will be recovered and broken to restore the Two
Trees.
Sin - Jared
Lobdell
Comments by Jason Fisher, May
1, 2007
A sloppy,
confused, and not very useful essay.
Lobdell’s opening needlessly complicates the
issue by introducing a series of challenges
to any straightforward, practical definition
of sin – not a promising beginning. Lobdell
fails to convince me that the distinctions
between the views of Paul, Matthew, James,
Origen, and Augustine – not to mention his
needless differentiation between Ante-Nicene
and Post-Nicene, which even Lobdell admits
“has added little … to the discussion of
sin” – are of any real use in understanding
sin as a concept in Tolkien’s fictive
creations. Tangents attempt to bring Tolkien
into the view, but they don’t go anywhere –
for example, if “the Medieval view of sin …
is miles from Tolkien’s view,” why is this
so? Lobdell makes no attempt to substantiate
the claim in the first place, nor to explain
why Tolkien might have adopted such a
different view, if he did.
Lobdell only
really delves into Tolkien in the second and
fourth of his five paragraphs. But even
here, he makes claims I’m not sure he can
back up. Why does he write that the
textus receptus ("accepted text") for
Tolkien’s idea of the Fall is in “Myths
Transformed” and not in the published
Ainulindalë and Quenta? Perhaps
it would have been, had Tolkien been able to
complete the transformation of the
mythology; but since he didn’t, its use is
questionable. Also, Lobdell’s assertion that
“Middle-earth … is neither fallen nor
unfallen” requires elaboration. If it is
neither of these, then why not, and what
then is it? Lobdell (rather slyly) points to
his own book for the answers.
In the end,
Lobdell does very little to tackle the
central issues of how Tolkien used sin in
his writings – not to mention, its
relationship to Good and Evil, Mercy,
Penance, Redemption, and Temptation (all of
which, save the last, have their own entries
in the Encyclopedia).
As a side note,
many passages bothered me for more
superficial reasons. For example, Lobdell’s
Origen / Original pun (which he dares to
call “Tolkienian”) is much too twee for my
taste. Similarly, the mnemonic “paggles” has
no place in a serious essay. And is it
really necessary to explicitly tell us that
“Melkor = Morgoth”?
The 'Further
Reading' is not particularly good, omitting
many relevant works on Tolkien and religion.
The See also misses several key entries, e.g., “Mercy”, “Penance”, and “Redemption”,
not to mention the various entries on
Christianity and Catholicism.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Pearl, Sir Orfeo,
Edited by Christopher Tolkien
- Carl Phelpstead
Comments by squire, April 14,
2007
Phelpstead unravels a most complex tale about
as well as can be expected. I found it to be
heavy going, trying to keep straight three
different translations of three different poems,
all started by Tolkien at different times in his
career and none published at his death. To ask
that this article be "consolidated" with others
on similar subjects in the Encyclopedia becomes
absurd, because the ultimate result would be one
huge article on Tolkien and Middle English;
still it is weird that the next article after
this one is on Tolkien's 1925 edition
(not translation) of "Sir Gawain".
Phelpstead takes for granted that his readers
will understand the difference between a
scholarly edition (Tolkien published it) and a
scholarly translation (Tolkien never published
it) of a Middle English work like Sir Gawain,
but I had to slap myself a couple of times to
keep the two straight in my head.
Not long ago, while doing some research on
translations of Pearl, I got the
impression that Tolkien's 1925/1940/1975
translation is now considered to be a bit out of
date: modern students are steered towards other
translations, based on the amount of editorial
emendations the translators have made to the
original manuscript. Without knowing much more
than what I read on the internet, I found the
idea of scholarly "fashions" intriguing, and I
wonder if Phelpstead could not have taken a
paragraph or two to tell us where Tolkien's
translations of these three poems currently
stand in the Middle English academy's favor.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
Michael Drout, in his recent Tolkien Studies
article, “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship
and Its Significance”, writes that Tolkien’s
translation of Pearl, “by near consensus
opinion among medievalists, is the most
successful Modern English translation of that
poem.” So I think Phelpstead’s article is too
short, and needs that extra paragraph suggested
by squire to address the artistic achievement
and reception of Tolkien’s actual translations:
not one line from any of the three poems is
quoted here.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
Edition with E.V. Gordon - Gerald Seaman
Comments by squire, April 14,
2007
Seaman kicks off in high gear, spins out, and
recovers for a fabulous finish.
The account of Tolkien's relationship to
Sir Gawain in his early years, and of the
technical distinction of his and Gordon's
scholarship, is first rate. I particularly liked
the notes regarding the current status of
Tolkien's edition - and as well, the current
popularity of his posthumously published
translation (see previous article's review).
Seaman does not say just why or by what this
1925 edition has only "recently" been
superseded, but at least we have some idea of
how Tolkien's scholarship has endured.
Unfortunately, he then drifts off into an
interesting but irrelevant account of Tolkien's
years at Leeds, and the unfortunate later career
of E. V. Gordon. It's all very well, but let's
face it: for better or worse, Seaman should have
left this material for the more relevant
articles by other contributors.
But the final paragraph, on critics'
connections between Sir Gawain and The
Lord of the Rings, is fascinating; and fully
justified, since the poem Sir Gawain does
not have its own article in the Encyclopedia
under the theme "Sources". The long and thorough
'Further Reading' list should gladden any
researcher's heart.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
In contrast with the preceding article by Carl
Phelpstead, on Tolkien’s translation of Sir
Gawain and two other poems, which sticks
perhaps too closely to the history and
description of the texts finally published in
1975, this entry seems mis-titled, as only the
second of its four paragraphs is actually about
Tolkien and Gordon’s 1925 edition of Sir
Gawain. Instead, most of the first
paragraph is about Tolkien’s lifelong
relationship with the poem, including material
covered in Phelpstead’s entry and in the article
on Tolkien’s 1953 essay, “A Fourteenth-Century
Romance” (missing from Seaman’s See also
list). The third paragraph is a biography of
Gordon, who has his own entry. And Seaman
concludes with connections between Sir Gawain
and Tolkien’s fiction, which is excellently
done, as squire observes.
Seaman’s See also list includes two
pre-announced entries which don’t appear in the
published Encyclopedia. One, titled “Pearl,
Sir Orfeo: Edited by Christopher
Tolkien”, was apparently superseded by
Phelpstead’s article on the 1975 translation of
all three poems, but Seaman seems to have
believed that the other article would skip
Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain.
Another, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”,
was presumably intended to have addressed the
poem’s influence on Tolkien. (Seaman also lists
a non-entry on “Beowulf”.) Both elements
are now incorporated into Seaman’s conclusion
here. For Seaman, the changes largely worked
out, apart from his misleading title, but it
seems Phelpstead may have found himself
squeezing commentary on three poems into space
originally meant for two.
Smith, Geoffrey Bache (1894-1916)
- Douglas A. Anderson
Comments by squire, June 23,
2007
This is a competent, almost excessively
detailed, review of the abbreviated life of G.
B. Smith, one of Tolkien's closest friends who,
as mentioned in the revised Foreword to The
Lord of the Rings, was dead by the end of
the Great War. Smith's greatest contribution to
Tolkien's development seems (as per Carpenter)
to have been encouragement of his poeticism.
Anderson covers this, but does not add any kind
of evaluation of Smith's talent as a poet,
although Tolkien, with the aid of their King
Edwards School English master Reynolds, managed
to publish Smith's extant poetry posthumously.
In fact there is a separate article "Spring
Harvest, A" on this collection, and the only
real question remaining at the end of Anderson's
article is: Why? Why separate the article on
Smith's poetry from the article on Smith's life?
Smith of Wootton Major - Verlyn Flieger
Comments by squire, March 31, 2007
Flieger is a scholar with
an unmatchable expertise in Smith of Wootton
Major. She has published a critical
edition that incorporates the "companion essay"
that Tolkien wrote for it, to which she refers
in this article, and her coverage of this lesser but
interesting book is erudite and comprehensive
given the article's relatively short length. She
places the story in context with Tolkien's other
short works (but not with The Lord of the
Rings or The Silmarillion,
unfortunately), reveals its roots in Tolkien's
dissatisfaction in 1964 with George MacDonald's
concept of fairyland, very briefly covers the
plot, setting, and characters, and reviews its
critical reception and its various
interpretations.
Flieger's prose is dense
and dry, perhaps revealing the compression she
has been forced to perform; but also suggesting
that Smith of Wootton Major is anything
but a tale that is just plain good to read. I
wish she had made more clear how much, if any,
of her interpretation is based on a reading of
the text, and how much is based on Tolkien's
companion essay.
As so often in the
Encyclopedia, this expert contributor shuts the
reader out from further inquiry: the bibiography
meagerly gives only her and Tom Shippey's 2001
article. Tantalizingly, Flieger does make it
clear there has been substantial attention paid
to Smith. In her essay she cites the
positive and negative reviews the book got on
publication, Tolkien's own off-center
allegorical key, and three serious symbolic
interpretations that the book has received. One
is Paul Kocher's, from his excellent nine page
essay on Smith; but neither Kocher nor
the source for any of the others is identified
or referred to in 'Further Reading'. The See also list is disappointing as well.
Smith of Wootton Major (Character) -
Matthew Dickerson
Comments by squire, March 31, 2007
The peculiar duality of the
Encyclopedia's thematic schizophrenia strikes
again. For once, the result is coherent, though
still puzzling in the editorial context. Flieger
discusses the book as a whole in the previous
article. Dickerson in this article tackles
Smith, the lead character, and gives him a brief
but thorough critical workup. The articles do
not really overlap, rather they are intensely
complementary; so the logical question arises,
why not combine them?
One answer is, obviously,
that we cannot know whether Flieger in a longer
article with a more comprehensive treatment of
Smith, would have (for instance) mentioned
Dickerson's interesting point about Smith's
resemblance to MacDonald's character Anados. Nor
are we sure that Dickerson, writing about the
book and Smith together, would have included
(for instance) Flieger's expansive range of
interpretations which so transcend his simple
"autobiographical allegorical" one. By
effectively assigning Smith of Wooton Major
to two contributors, the Encyclopedia here
succeeded in giving the reader some additional
value for the price of reading two articles.
But this is so rare an
occurrence, that it hardly counterbalances the
rampant inefficiencies so common elsewhere in
the Encyclopedia where two nearly identical
articles appear, often side by side.
Dickerson's 'Further
Reading' and See also are almost completely
different from Flieger's (and there is no
article on "Leaf by Niggle" for Dickerson to
reference).
“Some Contributions to Middle-English
Lexicography” - Jane Beal
Comments by N.E. Brigand, March 18, 2007
A fascinating,
detailed summary of Tolkien’s six-page 1925
linguistic article, which I have never read.
Beal gives Tolkien’s preferred definitions for
all twelve Middle English words he discusses.
She lists nine languages, fourteen texts, and
nine scholars cited by Tolkien to indicate the
range of his knowledge. She also notes that the
article reveals something of Tolkien’s personal
interests and point-of-view, including “insight
into his perception of gender roles … in
medieval literature”. I would have like a
little more of this, along with some indication
of how Tolkien’s work here connects to his other
scholarship, and how it has held up, if indeed
it has ever been referenced since 1925: this
entry includes no bibliography. The See also
list includes non-existent entries on “Middle
English”, “Philology”, and “Scholarship”.
Solomon and
Saturn - Kathryn Powell
Comments by N.E. Brigand, August 15, 2007
This article is well done, but with some
frustrating repetition:
it duplicates the article, “Riddles: Sources”,
but with an even narrower focus on just the Old
English source for Gollum’s “dark” and “time”
riddles in The Hobbit.
Song
Contests - David Gay
Comments by
squire, May 7, 2007
Gay knows his stuff. His
review of the Finnish and Norse roots for
Tolkien's use of the "song contest" and the
related theme of the "power of song" is deep and
quite interesting. He also skims close to, but
does not land on, a connection with the riddle
contest; and he mentions a song contest that
ends with a dwarf turning to stone at sunrise.
It's all fascinating, for those interested in
Tolkien's sources.
What is missing is a sense
of balance. Gay's summary of Finrod's song
contest with Sauron is barely sufficient to
establish the connection with the Kalevala
and Poetic Edda examples that are
apparently Gay's main interest. It should be the
other way around. Gay should have focused on
Tolkien's work, not his sources.
Finrod's song contest with
Sauron is, first of all, retold in the Lay of
Leithian at second hand, and in the
published Silmarillion at third hand. We
do not hear the contest, we hear about
the contest in the form of a poetic retelling.
Second, the contest is structurally quite
different from Gay's sources: the themes of the
singing bounce back and forth, reflecting
Finrod's and Sauron's competing tactics; but
Finrod's final attempt to invoke the nobility of
the Elves in order to resist Sauron's evil,
founders on the Elves' own sins such as the
Kinslaying, which Sauron retells to complete
Finrod's destruction. This battle for moral
superiority seems quite different from the
Kalevala and Poetic Edda duels that
Gay cites as Tolkien's examples, where the
songsters compete only to display greater
knowledge.
As for other examples of
song contests in Tolkien, they're rare enough to
make one wonder why this article is here at all.
But is it reaching, to think of the
Ainulindalë as a kind of primeval song
contest between Eru and Melkor? Is it reaching,
to think of the Song of the Ents and Entwives
as a kind of beneficent song contest?
Gay's secondary topic, the
idea of the song of power, is not unconnected
with the primary topic. But what is it doing
here? Readers will hardly know to look for it
under this title. Still, his Danish song "Power
of the Harp" is a good example of a source for
Tom Bombadil's threatened song to destroy Old
Man WIllow unless he releases Merry and Pippin.
Why stop there? Why not mention Tom's song that
destroys the barrow wight (and isn't there a
hint of a contest, between two sung
charms/curses, in that scene as well)? And
especially why not mention Lúthien's songs, that
subdue Morgoth and melt Mandos's heart, in
The Silmarillion? I'm less sure about Sam's
song in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, but in a way
it overcomes the power of Mordor and leads to
Frodo's liberation. Indeed, seen in a certain
light, few of Tolkien's songs are not
songs of power, but Gay does not go there.
The references tend to
confirm that Gay is on a wrong track: the
'Further Reading' has no Tolkien criticism at
all; and See also does not mention Lay of
Leithian or any other aspect of Tolkien's
legendarium save the single article "Music in
Middle-earth".
Comments by N.E. Brigand, May 27, 2007
This might
stray too far from Gay’s subject, but the themes
of Finrod’s contest with Sauron, noted by
squire, are very reminiscent of the weaving
contest of Arachne and Athena in classical
mythology. There Athena illustrates one of her
triumphs as a goddess, only to be bested by the
mortal Arachne’s imagery of the failings of the
gods.
South, The - John F. G. Magoun
Comments by Jason Fisher,
April 4, 2007
A very good
treatment of the topic.
Magoun opens
with the claim that “the South … is the
least symbolic of the four cardinal
direction,” but in the absence of entries in
the Encyclopedia on the North or the West
(incredibly!), I think the claim ought to be
substantiated, even if most readers would
tend to agree on an intuitive level. Magoun
then refers to the “suggestion … that a hot
climate implies evil inhabitants.” Though
softened by the word “suggestion”, I think
this is too facile a conclusion.
I would say,
rather, that the shadow of Sauron may be
responsible for much of that evil, but that
the inhabitants themselves might be good or
evil, individually, just as anywhere else.
This is a slippery debate, because Tolkien
himself sometimes oversimplified the South
in the way Magoun does. But for my evidence
that more care is needed here, I would point
to Sam’s musings about the dead Southron
during the battle in Ithilien. Though these
may say more about Sam than about the
unknown Southron, I would submit that
Tolkien may be cautioning us against a too
hasty judgment.
A few random
points, all minor. Magoun mentions the South
in Valinor, referring to the region called
Avathar (though he doesn’t provide this
name), but I think it would be more accurate
to call this the South in Aman,
rather than Valinor. Númenorean should be
Númenórean – though the diacriticals are
correct in the See also. Magoun mentions
“Southrons” as a name for the Haradrim; I
would have added “Swertings” also, which is
the word used in the tales of the Shire. (As
Harad is “the Sunlands.”)
The 'Further
Reading' and See also are good. I was
pleased to see Magoun work a reference to
“Sigelwara Land” into this short essay;
though it’s rather a tangent, it’s an
interesting one. I will say that the
inclusion of an unpublished manuscript goes
against the editors' guidance to
contributors that references be “preferably
those that are available to the general
public. Obscure and otherwise hard-to-find
works should be avoided.” I was also
surprised not to find “The East” in the See also.
Finally, though
I’m not sure this was in time for Magoun’s
essay, it should be noted that the version
of Tolkien’s “Guide to the Names in The
Lord of the Rings” in Lobdell’s book has
been superseded by the more complete
"Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings"
in Hammond and Scull’s The Lord of the
Rings: A Reader’s Companion.
Spain: Reception of Tolkien - Eduardo Segura
Comments by squire, August
12, 2007
While this
piece follows the general pattern of the
Cook's Tour "Reception of..." articles, with
its emphasis on the history of translations
and the local Tolkien Societies, there are a
couple of distinctive elements, both for
better and for worse.
Segura provides
far more detail than usual about the
technicalities and even legalities of the
business of producing Spanish translations
of Tolkien. He gives what is so rarely
offered, actual sales volumes of the
resulting books, but his assurance that the
numbers reflect a "best seller" is tempered
by the admission that sales of the Spanish
editions of Tolkien include the Latin
American market as well as the Spanish one.
(And why is there no "Latin America:
Reception of..." article?) He diligently
notes that the "Spanish" (Castilian? he
should have been clearer) translation El
Senor de los Anillos does not account
for all of Spain's readership. The Catalan
translation El Senyor dels Anells is
only just out, and the Galician and Basque
readership has not yet been served.
Most
importantly, Segura twice addresses the
issue of how well The Lord of the Rings,
a sophisticated but mock-medieval
English/Northern European story, translates
into the "Mediterranean" and "Romance" world
of Spain and Spanish culture. Compared to so
many other "Reception of..." articles that
ignore this question, Segura's glib
assurance that Tolkien's myth is both
universal and congruent with Spain's own
traditions of "wisdom and enchantment" is
less important than his bringing it up in
the first place.
Spanish Language - Eduardo Segura
Comments by squire, August
12, 2007
This is
charming. Segura takes Tolkien's juvenile
love affair with Spanish, courtesy of his
guardian Fr. Morgan, and spins it into a
reverie about Tolkien's insistence on the
importance of the sound of a language
in thinking about why a book grabs its
audience. Bravely, he concedes that
Tolkien's original focus on Spanish as a
vehicle for developing an engaging invented
language, "Naffarin", was eventually
distracted in favor of Welsh and Finnish.
More than most
articles about the various languages that
Tolkien studied, knew, and put to use, this
one really addresses what a specific foreign
language meant to Tolkien.
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
January 5, 2008
Segura’s analysis depends on comments made
in a 1967 letter to a “Mr. Sands”, a
potential translator of Tolkien’s work.
Where is this note to be found? It’s not in
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and
Segura doesn’t provide a bibliography (nor a
See also list). I’m also surprised
that he didn’t fit Sands into his preceding
article’s history of Tolkien’s translations
into Spanish.
Spenser, Edmund – Julaire Andelin
Comments
by Jason Fisher, September 25, 2007
Andelin spends
most of her short entry explaining how,
despite some common source material, The
Faerie Queene and The Lord of the
Rings are very different, the former
allegorical, the latter expressly not. This
is an important distinction, to be sure, but
might have been expressed much more
succinctly, especially as the demonstration
of differences doesn’t do much to
justify Spenser’s place in the Encyclopedia.
But Andelin misses two important points.
First, that Tolkien acknowledges Spenser as
the last in the line of the more ancient and
proper characterization of the Elves – as
memorably contrasted with Shakespeare (see
Letter #131, Letters p.143; see also
“On Fairy-stories”). Second, a very
important similarity between Tolkien and
Spenser is that both were writing in a
deliberately archaic style for their time.
In fact, I believe Tolkien disliked
Spenser’s archaisms, finding them affected
and arbitrary rather than founded on any
genuine understanding of sound change in the
history of English. However, that they were
both employing an archaic style, looking
backward to Chaucer in many ways, is
central.
Finally, a
minor reference, perhaps too much to ask.
Would it have been worth noting that early
blurbs for The Lord of the Rings
compared the work to Spenser, among others?
One Richard Hughes “remarked that nothing
had been attempted on the same scale since
The Faerie Queene” (see Letter #145,
Letters p.181).
The Further
Reading is not bad. One omission is Nan
Braude’s “Tolkien and Spenser” in
Mythlore 1.3 (1969), pp.8-13, but I will
admit I’m asking a lot to expect a
contributor to get her hands on that! Also,
I believe both Lin Carter and Giddings and
Holland turn to Spenser in their (otherwise
dubious) works. The See Also is quite
substantial, perhaps even overly so. And I
found one erratum in the text itself: for
palantiri, read palantíri.
Spring Harvest, A:
G. Bache Smith, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien - John
Garth
Comments by
N.E. Brigand, July 9, 2007
In his book Tolkien and the Great War,
Garth quotes some stanzas from “The Burial
of Sophocles” by Smith, one of Tolkien’s
T.C.B.S. friends who was killed in World War
I. One couplet caught my eye for its
suggestion of Tolkien’s later poetry:
There’s rest within for weary feet / Now all
the journey is complete (p. 212).
In this article on the posthumous collection
of Smith’s poetry edited by Tolkien in 1918,
Garth doesn’t mention that passage, but he
identifies several other images and phrases
strongly reminiscent of Tolkien’s work, and
cites scholarship by Verlyn Flieger and Tom
Shippey in support of those connections.
Garth nicely contextualizes Smith’s work and
shows the influence of other poets on Smith,
and by way of a review from another of
Smith’s friends, he conveys something of its
quality. Unfortunately, to judge from this
article, no comments survive from Tolkien on
the merits or flaws of his friend’s poems,
whose editing Garth calls Tolkien’s “sole
contribution to mainstream modern
literature”.
Comments by squire, July 9, 2007
Although both
articles cross-reference each other, I think
a strong argument could be made that this
belonged in an extended version of the
biographical article on G. Bache Smith. It
was only while reading this that I got a
strong sense of the young man's personality
and sensibility, and something of why he and
Tolkien were so close.
Additionally,
such a choice would have reinforced Garth's
approach of reviewing this book entirely in
terms of Smith's writing. Although this
article is categorized thematically as one
of Tolkien's "Works of Literature", there is
not a word here about Tolkien's contribution
as editor, per se, except the lone
remark that this was his "sole contribution
etc." (as N. E. Brigand notes above).
The See also
should include references to Tolkien's early
poetry and fiction, against which we
inevitably compare what Garth shows us of
Smith's verse.
Subject Theory and Semiotics
- Gergely Nagy
Comments by squire, August
12, 2007
I have too much
respect for Nagy's writing, which when I can
follow it is extremely engaging, to call
this article gibberish. The fact remains, on
a second or third reading I still can't make
head or tail of it. Something about how all
elements of fiction must be understood as
being from some subjective point of view,
which incorporates influences that are both
internal and external to that subject?? I
dunno. This makes his "Silmarillion" article
seem clear as day.
I can only
guess that even Nagy cannot write an essay
about "subject theory and semiotics" without
using the peculiar vocabulary and syntax of
that discipline. I daresay that usages like
"problematize", "pointing attention to",
"highlights the subject's embeddedness in
these discourses", "identity is seen as an
aspect of", "constitutive aspects of the
subject" would in more mainstream venues be
red-penciled and returned to author for a
rewrite. Here I have to assume they are part
of a compressed technical vocabulary
comparable to higher mathematics, or similar
abstruse disciplines. Perhaps more
self-explanatory expressions, if possible at
all, would require three or ten times more
words to make clear to laymen what adepts
can quickly scan, nodding in easy
comprehension.
Probably, too,
Nagy was constrained by the Encyclopedia's
word count to keep this piece too short to
allow any other approach than to reproduce
subject theory in its own terms, rather than
explain it to inexperienced readers in
understandable language. Could anything have
been done? What is he saying that subject
theory tells us about Gollum? about the
Ainulindalë? Can I ask, in an educated
layman's frustration, Who was the intended
audience for this article?
Comments by N.E. Brigand,
January 5, 2008
Who is this entry’s intended audience?
Literary theorists, I think: on several
occasions, Michael Drout has argued for more
engagement between Tolkien studies and
modern literary theory. Several of Nagy’s
articles, like “Authorship”, “Fictionality”,
“Orality” “Textuality”, and this one (the
most impenetrable of the bunch), as well as
the entries on “Existentialism”, “Gaze”,
“Homosexuality” (that is to say, Queer
Theory), “Marxist Readings”, and others seem
to have been included to improve Tolkien’s
standing in the academy. I’m not competent
to say how well the Encyclopedia succeeds.
But if this article warms Tolkien for the
theorists, it certainly won’t endear theory
to Tolkienists. Can macrodynamics be
“interested in” something? How does Tolkien
“problematize” mythological or religious
discourse? Why in this article and in
Nagy’s entry on “Plato” does he stress this
quality – why is it important that fiction
“problemetize” its concepts? Finally, what
is a “subject”, anyway? Nagy’s “Gollum”
article suggests it is anything that
produces meaning. Shouldn’t he have defined
the term here?
Suffield Family – Patricia Tubbs
Comments
by Jason Fisher, April 19, 2007
This is a
short, fairly dry, but generally informative
essay.
I have mixed
feelings about citing Margaret Burns’s
private research. On the one hand, this is
in direct challenge to the contributors’
guidelines, which directed authors to
include only those reference works generally
available to readers. And I’m not even sure
who Margaret Burns is, come to that. But on
the other hand, if Burns is the only source
for the aggregation of certain widely
dispersed facts, then I see some value in
appealing to her work. Tubbs even went so
far as to enumerate Burns’s sources,
so that the most resourceful readers might
possibly track them down first-hand. Still,
Tubbs’s first citation of Burns was entirely
unnecessary, as the fact it corroborates may
be found in Carpenter Tolkien
Appendix A as well as in The Tolkien
Family Album.
I didn’t take
the time to check each and every fact and
date here, but one jumped out at me. Tubbs
gives the dates for Mabel’s father, John
Suffield, as 1833–1930, which is backed up
by Carpenter. However, on the genealogical
tree in The Tolkien Family Album,
John Suffield’s dates are 1802–1891! Looking
back at Carpenter, it appears these are the
dates of Mabel’s grandfather,
another John Suffield, but not the one who
married Emily Sparrow (as would appear in
TFA). So it appears that Tubbs has it
right, and TFA has it wrong. I’d
probably never have noticed this were it not
for reviewing the present entry.
I’m a little
uncomfortable with the claims made in
Tubbs’s final paragraph about the
conflicting nature of “Tolkien’s dual
Sheffield and Tolkien heritage …
contribut[ing] to his inner conflict between
academic and fictional pursuits.” I was
unfamiliar with her source for this claim,
Moseley; however, a cursory look at his work
(and reviews of it) suggests it may not be
the best source. A claim like this ought to
be backed up with a better source and/or
elaborated upon in more than just a
single-sentence assertion if I’m going to
buy into it.
Suicide - Richard C. West
Comments by squire, August 11, 2007
This article is hard to get a grip on. West
seems to treat all aspects of suicide in
Tolkien's fiction exclusively by the
standard of how they fit into Christian
doctrine -- presumably because Tolkien was a
faithful Catholic, in whose view suicide was
a mortal sin. West suggests this was
Tolkien's main concern, even for his
fictional characters.
He
even goes as far as to suggest Tolkien "need
not entirely despair" about Denethor's soul
despite his suicide, because by 1994, the
Catholic Church had made allowance for
psychological stress in evaluating a
suicide's fate in the eyes of God. This was
decades after Tolkien's time - why did West
not research the catechism that was in force
when Tolkien was writing?
Not that there
aren't some signs of religion in Tolkien's
treatment of suicide. West is strongest when
he recounts that Gandalf condemns Denethor
for aping the "heathen" practices of evil
lords: that word choice suggests that there
is some kind of a religious prohibition in
Middle-earth against suicide -- although
there is no reason to align it with
Christian doctrine per se.
But West seems not to acknowledge that
suicide in Middle-earth often appears to
have nothing to do with the Christian
viewpoint.
-
Gandalf's
full line, "The heathen kings, under the
domination of the Dark Power, did thus,
slaying themselves in pride and
despair..." is a good working indictment
of Túrin, though that is not Gandalf's
point. But when we go back to his own
time, nowhere in the tale of Túrin is it
implied by his people (or by the
narrator) that Túrin or Nienor should
not on moral grounds have committed suicide
(and infanticide); there is only reget that
their lives were lost to the cruel
workings of fate and/or a divine curse.
-
Sam's
suicidal thoughts when Frodo is
apparently dead, "...[T]he bright point
of the sword...an empty fall into
nothingness. There was no escape that
way. That was to do nothing...", are a
remarkably practical and nihilistic view
of an afterlife. There is no question of
guilt or salvation, just of
effectiveness and duty.
-
Fëanor's mother Miriel, burned out
by the effort of bearing her son's
supernally powerful spirit, lies down and
dies, although healthy and uninjured.
This may not be suicide as mortals
reckon it, but it gave the Elves and
Valar a major headache (as retold in
"Laws and Customs of the Eldar") about
whether her husband was free to remarry
when her soul lived but refused to
reincarnate. The clear lesson is that
she did a bad thing, even under the
peculiar circumstances of birthing a
genius.
I
wish West had paid attention to his own
introduction, and been more flexible in
considering Tolkien's use of non-Christian
traditions in writing his stories. These
ranged from Classical, to Northern, to those
of his own imaginary world where suicide by
mortals and immortals (whatever did become
of Maedhros after he cast himself into the
abyss?) is judged severely but not cruelly,
by the Vala Mandos. Tolkien in his letters
explicitly contrasted the non-Christian
aspects of his legendarium's fantastic
theology with his own beliefs; his stories
are not a simple calque of his own Catholic
faith, as West seems to believe.
Sweden: Reception of Tolkien - Beregond,
Anders Stenström
Comments by
squire, August 11, 2007
This follows the usual unimaginative course
of most of the "Reception of..." articles,
with lists of translation titles and dates,
accounts of the various Tolkien societies,
etc. There are some interesting points here
that I wish Stenström
had enlarged upon.
Ake Ohlmarks' self-promotion aside, what was
it about his translations that annoyed both
Tolkien in the 1950s and English-reading
Swedish fans in the 1990s? Why do Swedish
fan societies "generally" indulge in
"Middle-earthly manners as to dress, naming,
and so on"? Are "secret societies" (like
Midgårds Fylking) common in Sweden for fan
interests? Do Swedish readers identify as
strongly with Tolkien's use of Norse sources
as Norwegian or Danish readers do? Is two
million copies over forty years for
Härskarringen
(the standard Swedish LotR) a notable
sales achievement in Sweden?
Swedish Language - Beregond, Anders
Stenström
Comments by
squire, August 11, 2007
By
thoroughly scouring Tolkien's philological
publications and letters, Stenström makes a
good case that Tolkien knew Swedish entirely
on an academic research basis. This played a
minor (though no doubt useful) role in his
professional work, and had no apparent
influence on his fiction and invented
languages. Since that's about it, one has to
wonder if this article couldn't have been
combined, with Danish and Norwegian, into
one on the entire modern Scandinavian
language family.
Symbolism in Tolkien's Works - Brian Rosebury
Comments by squire, January
20, 2007
In a very short essay, Rosebury covers all
the bases. He comes on strongly for the ideas
that an overly symbolic critical interpretation
of Tolkien can "strain the sense of the text"
and that Tolkien's fiction "sufficiently
explains its own elements". I particularly
enjoyed his distinction between medieval and
modern literary symbolism which puts Tolkien in
the modern camp!
A joy to read. Not that I expected anything
less from Rosebury.
Comments by N.E. Brigand, January
5, 2008
Another strength of Rosebury’s beautiful article
is how he makes one example serve multiple
duties, as with his examination of the Standing
Silence of the Dúnedain, and what that ceremony
symbolizes both for the characters and
(possibly) for the reader.
My only suggestion: since Rosebury points to the
symbolism in Pearl; he might have
specifically directed readers to one of the
Encyclopedia’s articles on that poem, and added
to his ‘Further Reading’ list Tolkien’s
translation. In the introductory comments
Tolkien
addresses the symbolic and allegorical nature of
the poem.