sigridhr | Epic Tolkien Bookclub: Week One

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Epic Tolkien Bookclub: Week One

*smashes a bottle of champagne over the post* And we're off!

Epic Tolkien Bookclub: Week One (The Hobbit)
Chapter I: An Unexpected Party
Chapter II: Roast Mutton

Rules

I very much doubt we'll require much in the way of formal rules, but just for the sake of formality and clarity:

Discussion is welcome and encouraged, as is disagreement. Name-calling and personal attacks will be punished by a barefoot gauntlet walk across a set of lego pieces.
There is no spoiler policy in place. Although we're reading the Hobbit, please feel free to bring in things from other Tolkien works, any of the films, the History of Middle Earth, the Letters of JRR Tolkien, and, if you should like, other literary sources.
There is no such thing as too nerdy. Or too excited.
If you have any concerns at any point, I'm the closest thing this gong show has to a mod, so feel free to get in touch. I can be reached either by PM through this site, or directly by email at sigridhr.lokidottir@gmail.com.

Discussion on this post will officially run from Friday 11th January 2013 to Friday 18th January 2013. However, the post will remain open after that point, so you're more than welcome to continue discussions on.

(I'm cheating a bit, as it's not quite the 11th here yet, but I want to get this up before I go to work tomorrow, and 6am posting is just asking for disaster). Have at it, guys! :)

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No, no, take the framing device seriously – Tolkien did, and we ought to. Things are pretty carefully written around what the Hobbits either experienced, or could reasonably learn second hand, and the 'surviving' Elvish sources (and crotchety old Elves themselves, presumably).

I think I read somewhere as well – although I can't find it again (dammit!) that the dwarf language is bizarrely complex, and even the Elves who were inclined to learn it, sort of got halfway through and went 'wtf, dude?' and gave up. I imagine it was rather a point of smugness amongst the dwarves that their language was too cool for Elvish school.

I'd forgotten, too, that they'd armed the Elves. That brings a really wonderful symmetry to all of it – you have the awakening of the Dwarves and Elves, and they start of in friendship, and the Dwarves save Elvish butt, then there's a horrible bloody bit in the middle, and Gimli is carried to the undying lands along with the last of the Elves as they leave Middle-Earth.

Gimli is, therefore, the only Dwarf ever to love something *more* than he loves Middle Earth, enough to leave his homeland and follow his heart somewhere else.

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just sitting here SCREAMING.

Those are words of wisdom. You express exactly why Gimli left with Legolas.

Alas, my notes have nothing interesting about the actual chapters, so I will just point out an interesting thing I picked up from reading The Annotated Hobbit for my library book discussion:

The narrative travels, as it were, back in time the further west it goes. These first chapters are very Edwardian, with the Shire and Bilbo and the troll's not-drawing-room-fashion language. By the time we get to Rivendell we're in high Victorian romance, like the retellings of Arthurian legend that were so popular then (picture a Waterhouse painting, which actually is what I always pictured when reading about Tolkien's Elves). Beorn is a much more Germanic fairy tale-like creature who wouldn't be out of place in a Grimm collection. Mirkwood is a medieval Celtic story about the Fair Folk, who are beautiful and dangerous and capricious. And by the time we get to the Mountain, we're in full-blown Norse epic. (The passage with Bilbo stealing a cup from Smaug almost exactly parallels the same incident in Beowulf, and the whole riddling about his name with the dragon is drawn from the song of Fafnir.) And all the way through it's done so elegantly and so seamlessly that by the time you get to the end you can hardly remember what it was like to live in a house with a clock and a pocket-handkerchief.

(The thing that pleases me most about this is that it's exactly the same sort of thing that James Joyce does in Ulysses, only less showy and with much more engrossing effect.)

I had not noticed that, and it makes me extremely happy. Extremely.

I have to say, I loved studying James Joyce, but I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than read him sometimes. He was brilliant, and his work was brilliant, but I find it un-readable. Whereas, Tolkien is brilliant, and actually enjoyable, because he didn't feel a need to be a pretentious twat about it and shove his brilliance in your face.

Oh yes absolutely. There's a great weight of fate in Tolkien's world that I've always liked - there's definitely a way that things are *meant* to happen, in the way that, fr'ex, Gandalf always says that Frodo is *meant* to carry the Ring. It's a manifestation of wyrd, I realize as I am typing this, exactly the same way that Ragnarok is meant to happen in a particular way.

The difference is that Ragnarok actually does happen the way it's supposed to, and in Middle Earth, almost nothing does. Part of this is down to Tolkien's immense Catholicism and his belief in an imperfect world, but part of it is also his modernism - like all the realist writers of the early twentieth century, he is also a product of the Great War, and if you want to talk about things not going the way they're supposed to go, well.

So I do kind of feel that Dwarves and Elves should have been friends, but something went horribly wrong, and Gimli and Legolas are righting a great wrong in becoming friends.

I know, right? :D There's a way in which LotR does the same thing, but it's not nearly as tidy as The Hobbit, which is just this beautiful piece of the history of fairy-stories and I love it.

I enjoyed studying Ulysses, but I agree, it's work all the way through. (Not that Joyce isn't enjoyable - I do read The Dubliners for sheer enjoyment.) I've been rereading the <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/02/lord-of-the-rings-re-read-indexLotR readthrough on Tor.com</a> (spoileriffic and deeply intelligent) and I think that was where I picked up again on the idea that Tolkien is just as much a modernist as Joyce and Yeats and that lot. (Actually, Tolkien has a lot in common with Yeats stylistically. Personally, they probably would have loathed each other.) I would love to read Tolkien in a class on modern literature, to draw out those parallels.

Someday I'd like to sit down and have a proper think, do some actual research, and come up with some thoughts on the extent to which Tolkien's war experiences shaped LotR.

Probably a silly question, but is wyrd a general sort of 'everything is governed by fate and things happen for a reason', or a fate tied to a specific person? Could the song of Eru and the Ainur be a form of 'wyrd' for Arda?

There is almost a sense of the world going from Arda-Marred to Arda-Remade after the War of the Ring - you have Mirkwood becoming Eryn Lasgalen again, the restoration of the line of the King in Gondor, the scouring and rebuilding of the Shire, and the return of the Elves to where they ought to have been in the first place.

I love the fact that the Hobbit is explicitly a children's book, too, and yet isn't afraid to be really dense and wonderful.

I haven't read The Dubliners – I read Ulysses and gave Finnegan's Wake a sort-of honest attempt before just settling on reading the essays about it. I would probably chew my right arm off to take a modern lit class that compared Yeats and Tolkien, tbh.

THANK YOU for that link. I've just skimmed and bookmarked, but I think I'll probably very much enjoy going through it all in detail when I've got the time.

In this particular go-round of the Tolkien obsession I've been thinking a lot about Tolkien's war experiences, and I don't really think there is a way to separate it out from everything else. He was a child who desired dragons with a profound desire, he was a young man who lost all but one of his close friends in what was arguably the most horrific and disastrous war in human history, and he was a scholar not only of language but of Northern European epic heroism. (Which, really, I am moved beyond words that he still loved those kinds of stories, even after the war. Our literary canon kind of says that the First World War destroyed the idea of heroism, but Tolkien refused to let it, and the way he did that is by saying, no, war can be awful and people in it can be glorious and both of those things can happen at the same time. And also by redefining heroism so that it includes things like mercy and pity and going on until you break and someone else picking you up and going on for you. Sorry, making myself cry now.)

I am far from an expert on traditional Northern European mythology, but I do incorporate a lot of it into my personal religious practice, and I am a nerd, so with that disclaimer: My understanding of wyrd is that it's almost like a script. These things ought to happen in this order, improvisation is acceptable but deviation is not. So while most instances of wyrd are tied to an individual, something like Ragnarok is more like the wyrd of all the gods and monsters involved at the same time. I think given Tolkien's Catholic (= monotheist) worldview the song of the Ainur could definitely be considered Arda's wyrd.

Yes, but don't forget that there's this overwhelming sense of "too little, too late" tied in with all that. Like, yes, you finally got there, but don't forget all the opportunities you missed along the way. The world at the end of the War of the Ring is a diminished world, better than it would have been had they lost the war, but not what it was supposed to be.

I am remembering all my modern Irish lit class on Yeats and how into mysticism he was and his personal vendetta with Aliestair Crowley (CROWLEY ONCE HIRED A HITMAN TO TAKE OUT W.B. YEATS, THIS IS MY FAVORITE FACT ABOUT LITERARY HISTORY) and how much he and Tolkien have such different worldviews they would not even be able to *talk* to each other - and also how he used to write all this poetry about Irish myth and legend and then the wars happened and he kind of went into his tower and hid. (Yeats was almost broken by the Irish Civil War, which is nothing at all like Tolkien at the Somme, but yeah, the more I think about this the more I want to write a thesis, can I get a Master's degree in Tolkien And Yates Hate One Another, But Their Work Is Really Quite Interestingly Similar?)

I highly recommend The Dubliners, actually. Full of gorgeous little character sketches, and it makes Stephen much more tolerable in Ulysses.

...dammit, that link wasn't a link at all, was it? Sorry for the munged up html. And stopping with the digression about Irish modernists now.

Which, really, I am moved beyond words that he still loved those kinds of stories, even after the war. Our literary canon kind of says that the First World War destroyed the idea of heroism, but Tolkien refused to let it, and the way he did that is by saying, no, war can be awful and people in it can be glorious and both of those things can happen at the same time. And also by redefining heroism so that it includes things like mercy and pity and going on until you break and someone else picking you up and going on for you.

THIS.

I love how Tolkien's true heroes aren't necessarily the sort to go out with a kleos-seeking bang. His focus, through the perspective of the Hobbits, was on ordinary, good people, who, when dropped into the most hellish situation imaginable, became capable of extraordinary things. And it's not, in the end, fighting and force of arms that saves the day, but Sam and Frodo dragging one another up the mountain – just a lone soldier and his batman (though not the caped crusader variety :P).

That makes sense to me.

Very true – because it will always be Arda-marred, after the fall of Melkor.

I DID NOT KNOW THAT. It's now my favourite fun-fact too, though.

If you can't, you really, really should be able to. Because that would be amazing.

No worries. I managed just fine. :)

And that is the thing that reeks of modernism to me, because modernism is about the individual, and Lord of the Rings is so, so much about individual effort. Victory cannot be won alone, but neither can it be won without every single person involved doing their utmost. They couldn't have won a war against Sauron, they had to destroy the Ring, and that had to be one person's responsibility - but likewise, Frodo couldn't have destroyed the Ring without Aragorn leading that army up to the gates of Mordor and serving as a distraction. (And, of course, Frodo doesn't actually destroy the Ring at all. But he tried until he couldn't any more, and it all worked out in the end. You could call that Tolkien's Catholic worldview, or you could call it hope. Fate is sometimes on your side, after all.)

...I always think that Gondor is my favorite part of LotR, but I actually think it's just that I have SO MANY FEELINGS about Sam and Frodo and the whole end of the Quest that I can't bear to think about it too much. Kind of like the end of Life on Mars, which is so perfect that I can never watch it again.

(I do think it's significant that he does have traditional heroes, too, though. Most modern fantasy doesn't - look at George R.R. Martin, fercrissakes. But Aragorn and Eomer and even Theoden and to an extent Boromir are all traditional heroes, and they're good guys and they do the right thing and their heroic deeds help save the day. They're not sufficient, but they're not insignificant, either. I can't help but feel that this ties into his essay on Beowulf's dragon in a way I can't quite articulate right now.)

I think hope is pretty much the central feature of the narrative in a lot of ways - the people we see lose hope (Denethor being the big one to come to mind) tend to fall off the party bandwagon. Then you have Aragorn, at the opposite end of the spectrum, who marches out with an army pretty much purely on hope. He's not going to win by strength of arms, but, as you say, Frodo couldn't've done it without him. Not to mention Gilraen's portentous: onen i-estel edain, u-chebin estel anim (I gave hope to men, but I kept none for myself). Hope is pretty central to the CoE discussion too - it seems an utterly hopeless task to try and destroy the ring, but they don't have another choice so they muster their courage and do it anyway on the slim chance it might work - and, of course, it does.

When I was much, much younger I used to find the Mordor sequences with Frodo and Sam the dullest parts of RotK, and it wasn't until I was in my mid to late-teens that I actually began to appreciate how wonderful they were.

I feel like Aragorn and Frodo are set up as two very different – I want to say paragons, but that's not quite the right word and my brain is not cooperating – of heroism.

You are 100% right about hope being central to the narrative. (Also, I am impressed by your ability to pull out Gilraen's deathbed pun in the original Elvish.) (Ever noticed that every SINGLE time they use the word "hope" in the movies they cut to a shot of Aragorn? It gets hilarious after a while.)

I was a little bowled over, on this last re-read of The Hobbit, at how much of it does improve with the perspective of a little more maturity. Well, not improve exactly. I loved it as a child, but I also remember being deeply skeptical of the idea that not killing Gollum was the single best thing Bilbo ever did.

I think you're right about Aragorn and Frodo. They're two very different kinds of people and they're heroic in very different ways, Aragorn in an old-fashioned epic way and Frodo in a much more modern, understated way. What I find so significant is that Tolkien gives both of them their due: Aragorn gets all the traditional rewards of the hero, and so does Frodo. In the world of the story, everyone recognizes that these two very different people are both extremely valuable in their own ways. (...And no one but Frodo recognizes how invaluable Sam was, but that's a different issue entirely...)

I would love to, but I can't come up with anything to say other than, "Bless."

I used to use part of it as my password, figuring it was unlikely to be cracked, so it's one of the few bits of Elvish I have memorized. I hadn't noticed that about the films, though! I probably will never be able to ignore it now, dammit. :P

I do sometimes wish that I could get that rush of reading the books for the first time again, but, I have to say, growing up and reading them at varying stages was really, really marvellous because it felt like peeling back layers to reveal something deeper and more mature each time I did.

Didn't Tolkien outright say that Sam was based off a couple of batmen he'd known during the war – who presumably would have been equally as invaluable to their masters, and equally unrecognized by anyone but.

I am sad that you never got to see this in the film. I hope it makes an appearance at some point, because, yellow stockings.

He's so precious.

Glad to share. :D

I know what you mean - Jo Walton once said that she can't really read Lord of the Rings any more, she's read it too many times and what she does isn't reading, it's remembering. But I like that too, sometimes.

I think he did - and while I've always considered Sam's lack of recognition to be a manifestation of Tolkien's own class bias, I'm starting to think it might have been intentional: one of real heroes of the whole thing doesn't even get that much acknowledgement. (I originally wrote "the real hero," but I don't think you can say that, it's so complicated, the way that war ends.)

Hey, there's two movies left. And do you think for one second that these costume designers neglected that detail? They did not.

Part of why I love Thorin so much is thinking about how angry he'd be when I squee and call him "precious bb" in my tumblr tags. <3

They better not have. Or, rather, it better not be one of those things where Armitage has been pottering around all eleventy billion days of filming in mustard yellow socks and they never make it on screen ONCE.

Hahaha, he totally would. That would just encourage us all, though, frankly. Poor dude.

The wonderful thing about LotR is you can sort of do that, because it's a big enough world to submerge yourself in the mix of actual text and memory. There are a couple other book series that I re-read compulsively, but then most others once I've read them I don't get nearly as much enjoyment out of the re-reads.

He does get a sort of acknowledgement – at least in Hobbiton. It's not the same, but if I'm going to jump ship and argue the other side for a moment, it's pretty much Sam getting a huge class promotion to the position of mayor and father of way-more-children-than-is-necessary. So, it could be read as that being 'fitting' as a reward for Sam, given his lower station, I guess.

Ugh, like the way there are Numenorian runes embroidered in black-on-black on the hems of the Ringwraiths' robes? I bet that's how it is. God.

Very true - Sam doesn't get covered in glory or anything, but he does most definitely get a happy ending. Which no one else gets, so.

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Epic Tolkien Bookclub: Week One

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