tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post8174274865752970512..comments2024-03-28T13:10:04.655+00:00Comments on The Notion Club Papers - an Inklings blog: Tolkien's Epic Fail - the tale of Turin TurambarBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-75474991495043955292016-03-19T17:18:37.053+00:002016-03-19T17:18:37.053+00:00Having studied The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales ...Having studied The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, and (I hope) most if not all of the relevant History of Middle Earth 'stuff' for my Lembas-extra 1993/1994 paper, and read the separate Children of Húrin volume in 2010, I'm still not sure, off the top of my head, whether I'm confident Tolkien doesn't, or does, make Turin 'good' enough, or the heavy influence of curse and fate, is, or isn't, alien to the rest of the Silmarillion, but I'm inclined to think the scope for Morgoth 'engineering' what are, in effect, 'curse' and 'fate', is consistent with the rest of the Silmarillion, and that Turin's being so impressively better than Kullervo and Wagner's Siegmund and Siegfried, is an important consideration.<br /><br />It seems to me that Tolkien's attention to the spiritual dangers involved in the need to be war-like, of which I think his treatment of Rohan first made me aware, is emphatically at work, here.<br /><br />David Llewellyn DoddsAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-69515341215430884342016-03-19T05:38:07.659+00:002016-03-19T05:38:07.659+00:00@David - It is possible that Tolkien was doing som...@David - It is possible that Tolkien was doing some or all of those things - my my points still stand that Tolkien doesn't make Turin 'good' enough - indeed, he hardly seems good at all; plus that the moral universe, with the heavy influence of curse and fate, is alien to the rest of the Silmarillion. <br /><br />Tolkien was certainly fasinated by the philological idea of reconstructing the original story behind the later distortions. In Vol 9 of the History of Middle Earth, there is a version of the Numenor legend which he wrote as if it had been 'garbled' by later men - he was apparently trying to show the kind of way that things being garbled.<br /><br />Have you read Tom Shippey's Roots and Branches? He mentions that Grimm tried but failed to do for mythology what he tried and succeeded in doing with philology - and draws parallels with Tolkien's methods. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-67623499582834333222016-03-19T04:53:10.927+00:002016-03-19T04:53:10.927+00:00I've read this, your earlier posts linked, and...I've read this, your earlier posts linked, and the comments (with their discussiona), with interest.<br /><br />Have you run into my paper, "The Centrality of Sex in Middle-earth", in Lembas-extra 1993/1994? A lot of it's about Turin. I haven't reread it recently, myself, and may even sloppily contradict it, here, but... <br /><br />I think part of the interest in Turin is seeing it as a putative 'true' original history behind such human stories (or versions of it) as those in the Volsunga sage, Nibelungenlied, and Kullervo (and maybe Oedipus, in part - one of the commenters mentions it). I would contend that, in writing it, Tolkien is also especially tackling and countering Wagner's rewriting of much of the material in his Ring cycle. <br /><br />As a part of a larger Hurin-and-his-children 'matter', I think Hurin is doing something similar with respect to Prometheus: tackling a lot of modern Prometheanism (such as Karl Marx's), and reaffirming in some ways the Aeschylean Prometheus (the madness of opposing Just Divine order) but also working in keeping with what he says in 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics' about the compromised nature of Greek (or Greco-Roman) mythology, and so giving an analogue or source to part of modern Prometheanism (Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, in part?). Hurin does not improperly oppose Iluvatar, or the Jupiter-like Manwe (Iluvatar's representative in good part), but Morgoth (a depraved demiurge). <br /><br />Hurin and Turin (and his sister) are basically fighting the good fight against the properly-recognized truly invidious enemy. But they are also doing it in all sorts of flawed and culpably compromised ways. As, ultimately, even Frodo is. But, if they had done it as well as Earendil, or Frodo, or Gandalf versus the Balrog, or even better, the mere-creaturely-best is still limited and insufficiently radical. In that way, in themselves distinctly as well as in the context of the whole Middle-earth legendarium, the tales of his children and Hurin are preparatory, typological, looking to the Incarnation, whether that is clearly speculated about as in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, or not.<br /><br />David Llewellyn Dodds <br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com