all good things must come to an end

I have loved this class and talking with all of you about Tolkien. Thank you all! I have definitely appreciated having people to talk to outside of my house during this crazy time! I hope all of us are able to get through it safely.

I don't have much more to say, so bye for now I guess, and hope I will see most of you around campus whenever it reopens. Congratulations Michael, Ashleigh and Taylor on graduating!

-Isaac

Another thought about Endings

I realized something right after class, which is there is something really paradoxical about the endings of LoTR. That is, Tolkien relentlessly emphasizes THIS IS NOT THE END.

Every "ending" for a character is really Tolkien showing us the road that the character has reached a turning in, but not the end.

All too many stories end with some variation "and then he lived happily ever after" that tends to imply that these characters can go back to their old lives. And certainly for some stories and some characters that is true, like for Sam. But it is still vastly better to show the reader what happens than just to tell them everything is good. For other characters like Frodo they cannot go back to normal because they are no longer normal people. 

Stories that have a heavy aspect of psychological and emotional component for the characters triumphing over evil but then that ends instantly when the evil is vanquished, just feel really fake. If a character is capable of going back to a normal life after going to war and seeing their friends die, then that is an unusually strong character, and it makes the story more full to explore that strength and see what makes it tick.

I have to imagine that this ending was inspired by Tolkien's experience in WW I. For those of us who weren't there the story ends in 1918, but for Tolkien and his fellow veterans the story went on for the rest of their lives. I think that Tolkien wanted to communicate that feeling to us, and he did a great job.

Responsibility for failure and success in leaders.

On Thursday we debated whether Frodo failed or succeeded. The second most important question of the debate, after the definition of Frodo's quest, was to what extent and under what circumstances does a leader take responsibility for the success or failure of his group.

I want to think about this objectively and come up with a set of rules.

First, extreme cases, because they are easy. If the group fails and the leader's orders were followed, the leader takes responsibility for the failure. If the group succeeds and the leader's orders were followed, then the leader can take credit for the success.

Now there is somewhat more variance in the middle cases, because I think there is an additional variable to be considered when the leader's orders are not followed, which is what often creates these more grey situations. That is, the extent to which the leader's orders are considered to be absolute. For instance, a king ordering a servant should expect to be followed to the letter, however often a king ordering a general has the expectation of a certain amount of freedom in the general's actions, because the general is considered to be a responsible person, who can change the plan based on changing situations. I will call this variable order flexibility.

So now there are five middle cases to consider.

Group fails, leader's orders not followed, low to no order flexibility. The leader can blame his subordinates who failed to do what they were told for the failure, and need not take responsibility himself, although a good leader may still take responsibility for choosing people who were not up to the task.

Group fails, leader's orders followed, high order flexibility. In this case one of two things can happen, either the leader can blame his subordinate for not exercising his power to change orders based on his observations, or the leader can take the blame for issuing a bad plan in the first place.

Group fails, leader's orders not followed, high order flexibility. in this case the responsibility is almost entirely on the subordinate who changed the plan and then failed.

Group succeeds, leader's orders not followed, low to no order flexibility. In this case the credit for success belongs entirely to the subordinate/s who defied orders to succeed. a good leader will reward these people for their success and good decision making, while a poor leader will likely punish people for defying orders even when they succeeded.

Group succeeds, leader's orders not followed, high order flexibility. The leader can take a certain amount of credit for correctly giving responsibility to someone who deserved it, but most of the credit should go to the subordinate.

I'm not really sure which of these cases corresponds to Frodo's situation, but it was interesting to think about.

On Denethor and courage.

I just realized something really interesting about Denethor, which I am not sure if Tolkien intended or not. I realized that while all of us would like to think we would act like Frodo or Aragorn or Gandalf in the face of the war against Sauron, it is quite likely that many or most people would really react more like Denethor, with terror and despair.

This is one of those really interesting biases in storytelling, where only those who are brave, or else at least cowardly in a particularly interesting way, get the spotlight. The rest of us, who might not go so far as to burn ourselves alive, but who would not go out to battle against monsters, tend to essentially not exist in stories. But the truth is that I doubt if you put me in Minas Tirith at the end of the third age, that I would have the courage to pick up a sword and go to battle on the fields of Pelennor.

I think that we see courage in a lot of characters where they go up against impossible odds and win is really above and beyond anything that most people can achieve. One of the brilliances of Tolkien is that he managed to frame Frodo's courage in a slightly different way, where it was not necessarily courage in battle, but rather the courage to make the best choice he could. We can still look up to people like Aragorn who are great warrior's, but Frodo's willingness to do his best in the face of great consequences is something we can really emulate, even if we are often tempted to run like Denethor.

More thoughts on perspectives.

The exercise we did on Tuesday got me thinking about the perspectives in LoTR and to a lesser extent The Hobbit.

It is something that you don't really think about but that is so absolutely crucial to our understanding of the story.

There are scenes where it is crucial to be in the perspective of the important characters, to know what they know, and there are other scenes where we must be in the perspective of one of the side characters to see it from the proper perspective of awe at something awesome.

This is something that Tolkien juggles so perfectly that when reading the books I barely thought about it, but looking back so many things would be different if a few of these choices had been changed. What would the journey through Mordor have looked like if we only saw it through Frodo's eyes? Only Sam's? if we had not had pieces of Gollum's perspective? Even if the facts had been the same it would have been a totally different story.

In many stories I find the way that the author jumps back and forth between multiple groups separate in space and often time to be grating, when they cut away just as something important is happening, especially when they go to characters I care less about. However Tolkien handles this almost seamlessly, and with a great sense of the unification of the purposes of all the characters, even if their situations are different.

TL; DR: this whole post is me ranting about how the more I think about it, the more I am in awe of J.R.R. Tolkien's writing skills.

What is a myth?

on Thursday in class we discussed the myths being created in the beginning of two towers. I thought I would consider for a bit the more basic question of myths themselves.

I'm sure I could look on wikipedia, or Merriam-Webster, and quickly get a tidy definition. But that doesn't really answer my question of what myth means.

When I hear myth I think of a belief in a past event shared between people. It's the feeling that the world has been shaped by epic events in the past, but it is myth and not history because it is only what people believe, not what they know.

Myths are an essential part of every culture, often more so than their history, because yes maybe a culture is shaped by such and such a war, but myths are the reasons people go to war, to preserve their own mythic righteousness, and the mythic evil of their enemies. People are people, but myths can make them into heroes and monsters.

I think the existence of myths or lack thereof is what makes a fictional story. A world like middle-earth, where the people all have their interwoven myths about the past and the future that motivate them feels real, while one where people do what they do in the near vacuum of their own personal situation feels fake and 2-dimensional.

Types of Heroism

I hadn't thought about this as clearly before reading Gawain and the green knight, but there are really two different main types of heroes in stories.

There are heroes who slay evil creatures with great prowess in battle. Here the hero is often someone on a long path of ambition or vengeance, and they need to become stronger in order to overcome their enemies. This puts the focus on training, learning new skills and gaining experience in combat.

In other stories, heroes may do battle from time to time, but that is not what makes them heroic. They are heroic because they do the right thing where others don't, and because they have the courage to face evil not in a contest of swords, but in a contest of will.

Both types of heroes can make for good stories, but the former leads to a world in which the better killer is right. This means that if you want to convey some clear moral message through a story, the hero's ability to kill his enemies must somehow derive from his morals, which is somewhat hard to do convincingly. The latter allows the hero to triumph through pure strength of will, which allows the story to be a clear case of good morals triumphing over evil ones, rather than a fighter triumphing over a weaker fighter.

Further exploring the placement of Boromir's death.

I'm posting here to try to expand on our discussion of why Boromir's death is where it is.

I think that one of the reasons that Tolkien chose to place Boromir's death at the beginning of Two Towers is to emphasize the increasing seriousness and danger of the story. If Boromir had died at the end of fellowship, it would have made it more of a routine climax at the end of the book type of event, whereas by putting it at the beginning of Two Towers we get this sense of "oh shit, this is happening, and it's only the first chapter? What's going to happen next?"

Of course another reason that we briefly mentioned in class is commercial. Cliffhangers are of course good for book sales, however looking at it again I realized there is foreshadowing, but no clear indication that something is wrong or that anyone is about to die. This makes me think that the cliffhanger aspect is a smaller part of the calculus than I had thought.

Tolkien's WW I experience and it's influences on middle-earth.

Something interesting I noticed as we were watching everyone's videos this week was that all but one of the stories seemed to have clearly been impacted by Tolkien's experiences fighting in WW I. However thinking about it I realized that I didn't notice anything so obvious on the surface within the hobbit and the lord of the rings.

So I am now thinking about what parts of those stories might be drawn from Tolkien's experience. The first things that came to my mind were the battle of five armies and the battle on the fields of Pelennor. These are the only two truly large-scale battles that we read about in the hobbit and the lord of the rings. I am thinking that these two massive battles, and the way that the buildup for them casts a shadow across each of the books means that they are either consciously or unconsciously representing the way that WW I tended to involve long times of relatively small scale conflict mostly consisting of skirmishes, building up to the massive battles like the battle of the Somme.

Thinking about it this way Tolkien's experience may really have substantially informed the way that these two stories were written, even though they were focused on the small but important adventures of the characters we cared about, they were inevitably drawn into these huge battles, much as it could have felt being a soldier in WW I.

Essential vs. nonessential details in stories

One thing that I found fascinating about our exercise on Thursday was that a lot of the passages chosen by people as "nonessential" were not advancing the plot but they were, in my view, crucial to the quality of the story. For example the two passages we discussed about the ring, the one where Frodo shows Bilbo the ring and the other one where Frodo puts on the ring to try to avoid the black riders. When I first heard those passages my first thought was "These are nonessential? Really?" But as I thought about it more I realized that what we were talking about was the advancement of the plot, but the way I had been thinking about it was more about what you could remove without affecting the quality of the story too much.

These two passages I mentioned certainly would not be mentioned in a bare-bones plot outline, but at the same time without them you would not have the slow building understanding of the powers of the ring, and the sense of a dread hanging over everything that comes with it. Without this you could have a story with the same plot, but it would not be the same story. These touches of detail and foreshadowing are what distinguish a good plot from a good story.

Monsters of Middle Earth

I noticed something interesting when thinking about the monsters of middle earth, which is that they are more about the attributes that they represent than their actual physical forms.

I first started thinking about this with Smaug, the way that the emphasis is mostly on his greed and wrath, not his wings or his claws. The wings and the claws are mentioned sure, but the crucial points of his character are his love of gold and his hatred of thieves. This lets Thorin become a dragon after Smaug is slain, when he is overcome by his greed, and lashes out at those who he perceives at thieves.

In the case of goblins and orcs, they are characterized as creatures of wanton violence and destruction. Or the giant spiders who are essentially gluttons.

This whole idea suggested to me that the monsters of middle earth are more allegorical than I had thought, with monsters really just being men with different vices taken to the extreme, so that they become less than men.

Fate, Destiny and Free will.

Fate, destiny, and free will are all crucial aspects of The Hobbit and they are tightly interwoven. I will start with some definitions. I consider fate to be the idea of a definite sequence of events laid out by some higher power. Destiny I think of as the general outline of a person's life, with lots of wiggle room for free will.

I think the hobbit largely embraces the idea of destiny over fate, because the characters are shepherded down a general path, but they make important choices that greatly influence how the story plays out. For example I would say that Bilbo was fated to discover the one ring, but the choice to give Gollum mercy was purely his. Bilbo's choice to give the Arkenstone to Bard to help break the siege of the kingdom under the mountain, helped make it so that the dwarves and elves and men were able to unite against the goblins and the wargs.

In a more general sense, all books are kind of a form of pure fate in and of themselves because nothing will change once they have been published. This often leads to a certain predictability of events, where you know what must happen because of what has happened before. If a book is too predictable this can detract from the story, but I think in the case of The Hobbit there are so many factors the reader cannot account for that there is a great deal of unpredictability.

Sorry for ranting, I don't really know how to wrap this up cleanly.

Natural/Unnatural: Wargs

Wargs are an interesting combination of both natural and unnatural.

They are natural because they are like normal wolves in many ways, such as hunting in packs, gathering under the moon, and howling.

However they are also unique in some other ways. They are bigger than, regular wolves, have a language comprehensible to Gandalf and the goblins, and they seem to be much more intelligient as well.

This is a good example of Tolkien's habit of taking something familiar and twisting it into a more evil and scarier version of itself. Natural wolves don't attack towns or people except under unusual circumstances. The wargs go out of their way to plot an attack against the men who are moving north into the woods at the feet of the misty mountains. The wargs' alliance with the goblins immediately establishes them as evil creatures, by association with the goblins that we have already seen as an evil force. 

The question of perspective in what we decided was natural or unnatural was a fascinating one, because clearly what is natural on earth and what is natural in middle-earth are totally different. From an earth perspective magic is unnatural, but from a middle-earth perspective it is an accepted force in the world. This question of reference frame has always fascinated me, and I think Tolkien does an excellent job of showing us what is and is not natural in his world independent of our own. For example the Nazgul are shown as being unnatural even in middle-earth, but things we do not have in our primary world like hobbits, dwarves, elves, goblins, and wizards are perfectly normal in middle-earth.

I'm Merry

Hi, My name is Meriadoc Brandybuck. Please call me Merry. I am a very unusual hobbit, because I am interested in the world outside of the shire. I am fascinated by maps, and I always listen attentively to Bilbo's stories when I get the chance. I was instrumental in figuring out the existence of the ring, and subsequently plotting along with Pippin and Sam to go with Frodo on his quest.

At the breaking of the Fellowship I was captured by the Uruk-Hai of Isengard, along with Pippin, after they killed Boromir. Pippin and I managed to escape during the Uruk-Hai's fight with the Rohirrim. Then we fled in to the forest of Fangorn and helped rouse the Ents to crush Isengard.

In the battle of the Pelennor fields I snuck up behind the Witch-king of Angmar and cut into the back of his leg, giving Eowyn the chance to cut him down. 

My opinion on Merry is mixed. I have always viewed Merry and Pippin (I can only think of them as a unit really) as the dumbest and least useful members of the fellowship. However they both manage to prove their bravery later on, and on my second read through of the books I have gained more of an appreciation for their willingness to go to Mordor with Frodo, and failing that, their decisions to fight. all the other members of the fellowship have more of a clear purpose, and most of them have more experience, but Merry is able to end up doing a great deed on the fields of Pelennor.