Tolkien's subcreation - his Legendarium as a whole - is often described as a modern "myth" or its mythic qualities are emphasized. I do not think this is correct, because of a quality of myth that seems essential, but is distinct from the situation with Tolkien's work.
I will first describe what I regard as an essential attribute of a myth - which is that a myth is distinct from any specific expression, and particular "version", of that myth...
While, on the other side; Tolkien's world is ultimately rooted in his own work: his own rather specific words and the actual published structure.
"Fuzziness" - imprecision - seems to be a characteristic of a myth; such that the specific form in which a myth is expressed - e.g. its exact words - does not seem to matter very much. It is as if the myth has a life of its down, and the words or images by which a myth is presented are not its origin; but serve some secondary purpose, as reminders or pointers.
The two great myths of England are King Arthur - including Merlin; and Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
When I think of either of these, no specific version comes to mind; and indeed I find that none of the versions of these myths is very satisfactory.
For instance, whenever I decide to read one of the Arthur accounts - whether historical (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Layamon, Malory) or a modern description, novel, story, TV programme or movie - I am often overwhelmed with a kind of irritation at their inadequacy; and end-up quitting, bailing-out before I have gone very far.
The best I can hope for is odd and brief hints, images, phrases, or gestures; that imply rather than depict the mythical - and many versions lack even this.
I also find the "explanations" of myth to be unsatisfactory - and when a myth gets decoded or unpacked, and its supposed underlying meaning is described - this too always distorts the "reality", and again often evokes a rather strong sense of rejection, or even revulsion.
So what is the myth? On the one hand it is nebulous, indefinable; on the other hand the particular feeling and expectation that it evokes is quite precise.
If I am engaging with some version of Arthur I seem to have a pretty clear grasp of what I am looking for and what is valid - even if I could not say just what that is.
But really, the situation with respect to myth is not really unusual. After all - much the same applies to such everyday and real-life matters as our attitude to a place or nations, or loving a particular someone.
A real myth is a kind of "miniature" or "model" of something in real life. The situation is just that any specific "model" we make of reality, is really just that: a model; whether it is made of words, pictures, or theories.
A model is made by leaving-out almost everything, and only including a few things - so it never captures real life, always distorts it; and indeed the relationship between the model and the real is itself indefinable. And the number of ways that any actual model is wrong are innumerably large.
Unless we have some way of knowing reality directly, and without intermediary communications such as words, images, stories, or other models; then we cannot ever know it At All.
At bottom, our ability genuinely to live in a relationship with this world depends on the ability to know directly and unmediated; and we need to decide, each for himself, whether or not this direct knowing is actually real and actually happens.
By this account a myth that "works" and is not a fail or fake, works first for one person at a time - no matter how national (or international) it may supposedly be; and secondly by a direct, person-to-person sharing of that myth.
And this situation is the bottom line "collective" mythic reality, towards which any particular version of a myth may gesture - or not.
From the above, if the argument is regarded as valid; it seems that Tolkien's world is not a myth-proper; but a literary creation.
The essential depth and relevance of Tolkien's work is not, therefore, the same as that of a myth-proper - although of course there are similarities and overlaps, "mythic qualities" in Tolkien.
This not-myth nature of Tolkien strikes me as significant, because there are malign tendencies that want instead to declare Tolkien's work a myth, with the implication that new "versions" - in other media than literature, and by other authors than Tolkien - validly add-to, re-shape, and re-interpret that myth...
And even, potentially, that these "re-imagined" versions may be equally valid expressions of the "Tolkien myth".
In a nutshell; when Tolkien's world is regarded as a myth, then Tolkien himself and his published work are nothing more than the first and oldest expression of a universal and universally-accessible myth. This line or reasoning would justify - indeed already has "justified" - an "open-season" of commercialization, exploitations, subversions, and inversions of Tolkien's work.
9 comments:
Elves and Orcs are the most "mythic" aspects of Tolkien's world. Both were major departures from existing folklore of elves and goblins, and both have broken loose from his books and become a new folklore which pervades the larger culture and is no longer tied to Tolkien specifically. When it comes to specific named characters and events, though, we are still firmly in the realm of literature.
The question is whether Tolkien wanted his stories to remain literature or instead to create a new national myth comparable to those of Arthur and Robin Hood. I think there's a case to me made that he was shooting for the latter.
@WmJas - You are correct that there are quotes to this effect in letters e.g. from Tolkien during WWI, and after WWII when he was trying to publish LotR. On the other side; he had Anything But a laissez faire attitude when it came to adapting the Hobbit or LotR.
It is possible that (like most people of his era) he would have found it almost impossible to imagine the kind of value-inversion we regard as normal (which it is, statistically defined).
For instance; something like Amazon's Rings of Power, being touted as "Tolkien", or even as having anything to do with his myth - orcs as sympathetic oppressed-minority characters, and an "ends justifies the means" Galadriel?
I middle way to approach this would be to say that if we have an honest and empathic attitude to "myth", then it would be reasonable to take mythic elements from Tolkien's world (in ways you mention).
However, Tolkien's world is really much too "canonical" to be regarded as a genuine myth; in the way that e.g. Arthur became a myth through oral tradition, scant surviving fragments, incremental selection and elaboration, synthesis etc - extending over many centuries.
Part of the trouble is that our alienated age tends to regard myth as a term of accolade, as if all myths are necessarily good.
Instead; I would say that most historical myths are dull because meaningless, given that we don't really understand them or resonate with them (i.e. they are not myth-ic in their effect, and cannot be); and other myths are malign in their nature and tendency. Particularly nowadays!
C.S. Lewis had said something similar about myths in An Experiment in Criticism:
"There is, then, a particular kind of story which has a value in itself—a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work. The story of Orpheus strikes and strikes deep, of itself; the fact that Virgil and others have told it in good poetry is irrelevant. To think about it and be moved by it is not necessarily to think about those poets or to be moved by them.
...
It is difficult to give such stories any name except myths, but that word is in many ways unfortunate. In the first place we must remember that Greek muthos does not mean this sort of story but any sort of story. Secondly, not all stories which an anthropologist would classify as myths have the quality I am here concerned with. When we speak of myths, as when we speak of ballads, we are usually thinking of the best specimens and forgetting the majority. If we go steadily through all the myths of any people we shall be appalled by much of what we read. Most of them, whatever they may have meant to ancient or savage man, are to us meaningless and shocking; shocking not only by their cruelty and obscenity but by their apparent silliness—almost what seems insanity. Out of this rank and squalid undergrowth the great myths—Orpheus, Demeter and Persephone, the Hesperides, Balder, Ragnarok, or Ilmarinen’s forging of the Sampo—rise like elms. Conversely, certain stories which are not myths in the anthropological sense, having been invented by individuals in fully civilised periods, have what I should call the ‘mythical quality’. Such are the plots of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Wells’s The Door in the Wall or Kafka’s The Castle. Such is the conception of Gormenghast in Mr Peake’s Titus Groan or of the Ents and Lothlorien in Professor Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings."
Homer and Virgil still resonate, and I reread them regularly -- but there again we have clearly defined canonical authors. Homer is foundational to "Greek myths," but Homer himself remains literature and never dissolved into the larger mythical soup. That dual legacy makes him almost unique among writers, but Tolkien may yet prove to be a second Homer in that regard. (He's only been dead for 50-some years. Give it some time.)
Would "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" be a satisfactory treatment of the King Arthur myth?
@NLR - Yes, that is surely relevant.
But I think something is missing from that discussion, some important distinction. I think I recall RJ Reilly writing in Romantic Religion was critical of the idea of Tolkien writing a modern myth finding it something like a logical impossibility.
The reference to Jekyll and Hyde is interesting, because in most retellings I have seen, or references, the "moral" of Stevenson's original story (as I took it) has been twisted or even reversed.
I suppose the genuine mythic quality of an effective myth is something so delicate as to be almost intangible - while the extraction and repetition of "tropes", or repetition of plot devices, is so much easier and commoner.
@Edward - I have always presumed it was (mostly) a parody, therefore not a myth - but I never read it.
The 1981 film "Excalibur" captures the Arthur myth better than most.
@Cei - I saw this at its the original cinema release, and a couple of times since on TV/ video/ dvd. I agree it is a very good movie, that does (I would say especially by Nicol Williamson's Merlin) hit some heights.
But I did and still do find it uneven in quality, with something amiss with the flow, pacing and integration. IMO, it falls short of the serious, epic world-building of (say) Blade Runner.
Post a Comment