*
I continue to be astonished by coming across sections of the Notion Club Papers whose significance I had missed, but which jump-out at me on re-reading.
*
NCPs, Night 65 (page 228).
[Frankley] "Well, I think there's a difference between what really happened at our meetings and Nicholas's record [of the Notion Club]. (...)
[Ramer] "People of the future, if they only knew the records and studied them, and let their imagination work on them, till the Notion Club became a sort of secondary world set in the past: they could [re-view the past as a present thing]."
*
Coming in the midst of a section of debate about whether it is possible really to experience the past as it truly was, this has the force of a personal statement from Tolkien (via Ramer).
A further comment makes clear that the pre-requisites of direct contact with the legendary or mythic past are not 'literal' factuality of record keeping, but derives - as Ramer says - "from the profundity of the emotions and perceptions that begot them and from the multiplication of them in many minds..."
*
Among other things, I get the eerie sense of a coded message planted by Tolkien back in 1946 for the reader today, that if the reader lets his imagination work on these feigned records of a fictional club, they may become real, in the sense of a secondary world set in the past.
At one level the process recommended may (I think Tolkien is saying) provide a mode of access to the real Inklings and their concerns. But this achieved will itself allow further things to happen.
One touchstone of the reality of the past is a sort of non-subjectivity. That the perceived past does not merely mirror or amplify the current reader's understanding, but is capable of surprising and informing the present. Capable of inducing a different perspective.
This new perspective then enables the current reader to perceive things (past and present) that were previously inapparent, which may then induce a further change in perspective.
*
(Of course, such perspectival shifts are not necessarily good, can be harmful as well as helpful. The new perspective that induces further perspectival shifts might prove to be a trap. As we see all around us.)
*
Monday, 30 May 2011
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
C.S Lewis as dreamer
*
Roger Lancelyn Green contributes a chapter on Lewis as a dreamer to C.S Lewis at the breakfast table: and other reminiscences, edited by James Como and published in 1980.
*
Green gives accounts of some of Lewis's recorded dreams, and his use of dream images or pictures as a basis for his fictions:
"Lewis confessed to drawing many ideas for scenes and characters in his stories from mind pictures that came to him either waking or asleep (...).
"When we were discussing dreams and the imaginative literary use to be made of them, I complained that though I dreamed frequently, I seldom remembered anything from my dreams.
"I shall never forget the vehemence with which he turned on me and exclaimed: 'Then you may thank God that you don't!'
"And he went on to explain that he had suffered most of his life from appalling nightmares - which he remembered only too well when he awakened. This personal trial he put to very good and convincing use in the chapter called The dark island in The voyage of the Dawn Treader.
*
Once again it is clear that Lewis, like Tolkien, was much less of a 'plain man' than he is sometimes portrayed; and that his creativity was of the mystical (or shamanistic) kind, based on the 'irrational' associative cognition of visions and dreams.
*
Roger Lancelyn Green contributes a chapter on Lewis as a dreamer to C.S Lewis at the breakfast table: and other reminiscences, edited by James Como and published in 1980.
*
Green gives accounts of some of Lewis's recorded dreams, and his use of dream images or pictures as a basis for his fictions:
"Lewis confessed to drawing many ideas for scenes and characters in his stories from mind pictures that came to him either waking or asleep (...).
"When we were discussing dreams and the imaginative literary use to be made of them, I complained that though I dreamed frequently, I seldom remembered anything from my dreams.
"I shall never forget the vehemence with which he turned on me and exclaimed: 'Then you may thank God that you don't!'
"And he went on to explain that he had suffered most of his life from appalling nightmares - which he remembered only too well when he awakened. This personal trial he put to very good and convincing use in the chapter called The dark island in The voyage of the Dawn Treader.
*
Once again it is clear that Lewis, like Tolkien, was much less of a 'plain man' than he is sometimes portrayed; and that his creativity was of the mystical (or shamanistic) kind, based on the 'irrational' associative cognition of visions and dreams.
*
Sunday, 22 May 2011
The Inklings were historians
*
Although The Inklings are usually considered to be a literary group, they were really much more like historians.
*
With the exception of Robert 'Humphrey' Havard (scientist and doctor) all of the main members took an historical perspective on their subject: Tolkien was a philologist, Jack Lewis wrote about medieval literature and society, Charles Williams published several historical 'potboilers' - and some, such as Warnie Lewis and Gervase Mathew - were straightforward historians, who wrote history books.
But the core Inklings had a specifically mythical interest in history.
*
This was partly intrinsic to the individuals (and a major reason for their friendship), but found an early formulation in the first books of Owen Barfield - Poetic Diction and History in English Words which had a major impact on both Lewis (who had been friends with Barfield since they were undergraduate contemporaries) and Tolkien.
*
The key activity shared by Lewis and Tolkien - and to very varying degrees by the other Inklings - was the recovery of the mythic vision of history.
That was what the Inklings meetings were about.
Yes they were a writing group, and a social group; but what was being written and what kept the group together around Lewis had this core, implicit, purpose and tendency.
*
More importantly, it is why the group is still of interest today.
Because the problem for which mythic history is proposed as (at least the start of) a solution is by now very bad indeed, and much worse than in the 1930s and 1940s.
*
The Inklings were not just historians, nor even historians of ideas: they were engaged in trying to reconnect the modern mind with an historical mode of thought, a mythic mode of thought - by argument, by scholarship, and of course by the imagination.
*
Although The Inklings are usually considered to be a literary group, they were really much more like historians.
*
With the exception of Robert 'Humphrey' Havard (scientist and doctor) all of the main members took an historical perspective on their subject: Tolkien was a philologist, Jack Lewis wrote about medieval literature and society, Charles Williams published several historical 'potboilers' - and some, such as Warnie Lewis and Gervase Mathew - were straightforward historians, who wrote history books.
But the core Inklings had a specifically mythical interest in history.
*
This was partly intrinsic to the individuals (and a major reason for their friendship), but found an early formulation in the first books of Owen Barfield - Poetic Diction and History in English Words which had a major impact on both Lewis (who had been friends with Barfield since they were undergraduate contemporaries) and Tolkien.
*
The key activity shared by Lewis and Tolkien - and to very varying degrees by the other Inklings - was the recovery of the mythic vision of history.
That was what the Inklings meetings were about.
Yes they were a writing group, and a social group; but what was being written and what kept the group together around Lewis had this core, implicit, purpose and tendency.
*
More importantly, it is why the group is still of interest today.
Because the problem for which mythic history is proposed as (at least the start of) a solution is by now very bad indeed, and much worse than in the 1930s and 1940s.
*
The Inklings were not just historians, nor even historians of ideas: they were engaged in trying to reconnect the modern mind with an historical mode of thought, a mythic mode of thought - by argument, by scholarship, and of course by the imagination.
*
Monday, 16 May 2011
John Wain versus C.S. Lewis and the nature of The Inklings
*
The English 'man of letters' John Wain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wain
published an early autobiography called Sprightly Running in 1963, the last year of C.S. Lewis's life, in which he reflected on the period when he was a member of The Inklings.
Although Wain liked and respected the Inklings, especially revering Nevill Coghill about whom he wrote an intensely-felt memoir, he conceptualized them as not only reactionary, but actually a counter-revolutionary group:
"The group had a corporate mind" that was both powerful and clearly defined. They were "politically conservative, not to say reactionary; in religion, Anglo- or Roman-Catholic; in art, frankly hostile to an manifestation of the 'modern' spirit", "a circle of instigators, almost incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life."
*
C.S. Lewis immediately published a long letter strongly disputing this analysis of the Inklings in the January 1963 edition of the journal Encounter (he had presumably seen a review copy of the book) in which Lewis - while graciously thanking Wain for saying many kind things about him, and stating clearly that he regarded Wain as a friend ('friend' being a word Lewis used sparingly and rigorously).
Lewis focused on the ideological differences between various Inklings, the non-overlapping nature of some of the friendships within the group, and stating that "Mr Wain has mistaken purely personal relationships for alliances."
In essence, Lewis hotly denied that the Inklings were self-consciously an explicitly strategic, reactionary, counter-revolutionary 'cell'.
*
Yet, of course, as we now recognize, Wain was substantively correct in every respect except that of supposing that the Inklings was self-conscious in their instigation and incendiary activities.
The Inklings were indeed - at their core of Jack Lewis, Tolkien and Charles Williams, and during their peak years of 1939-45 - a group of Christian reactionaries with very large scale ambitions to redirect the current of modern art and life.
This was very obvious to Wain who opposed this re-directing of art and life back to a pre-modern and religious spirit (at least, he did during the early decades of his life, when he was known as an anti-establishment figure, one of the 'Angry Young Men' of the 1950s - although in later years Wain's work, for instance on Samuel Johnson, strikes me as itself reactionary - or at least nostalgic for the pre-modern era).
That was why the Inklings were friends, that was an essential basis of their friendship: necessary but not sufficient.
*
The reason for the continued interest in the Inklings is precisely what Wain stated.
But of course, Wain's analysis was itself from a 'modern' perspective; a perspective which sees 'political' activity as necessarily self-conscious and explicit.
Whereas the reality was that the Inklings did not subscribe to this view of politics.
Lewis, Tolkien and Williams were individually, and passionately, engaged in recovering a pre-modern, a Christian spirit for life - with re-connecting with the thread of this spirit as it came down through the centuries - a thread which was almost broken, a spirit which they themselves were among that last examples.
And this, at least, was explicitly perceived - Lewis spoke of himself as a dinosaur left over from a previous era, Tolkien spoke of fighting the long defeat, Williams blurred pre-modern past and present and expounded (in The Descent of the Dove) a history of Christendom in which he discerned a two thousand year thread coming through Anglicanism right down to his own spiritual engagement.
*
The substantive disagreement of Wain and Lewis over the true nature of the Inklings was only, therefore, a quibble over the degree of self-consciousness with which their counter-revolutionary activities was being pursued; there was no disagreement of the fact and tendency of the Inklings endeavors.
The Inklings were thus in effect precisely as Wain described them: instigators and incendiaries.
*
The English 'man of letters' John Wain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wain
published an early autobiography called Sprightly Running in 1963, the last year of C.S. Lewis's life, in which he reflected on the period when he was a member of The Inklings.
Although Wain liked and respected the Inklings, especially revering Nevill Coghill about whom he wrote an intensely-felt memoir, he conceptualized them as not only reactionary, but actually a counter-revolutionary group:
"The group had a corporate mind" that was both powerful and clearly defined. They were "politically conservative, not to say reactionary; in religion, Anglo- or Roman-Catholic; in art, frankly hostile to an manifestation of the 'modern' spirit", "a circle of instigators, almost incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life."
*
C.S. Lewis immediately published a long letter strongly disputing this analysis of the Inklings in the January 1963 edition of the journal Encounter (he had presumably seen a review copy of the book) in which Lewis - while graciously thanking Wain for saying many kind things about him, and stating clearly that he regarded Wain as a friend ('friend' being a word Lewis used sparingly and rigorously).
Lewis focused on the ideological differences between various Inklings, the non-overlapping nature of some of the friendships within the group, and stating that "Mr Wain has mistaken purely personal relationships for alliances."
In essence, Lewis hotly denied that the Inklings were self-consciously an explicitly strategic, reactionary, counter-revolutionary 'cell'.
*
Yet, of course, as we now recognize, Wain was substantively correct in every respect except that of supposing that the Inklings was self-conscious in their instigation and incendiary activities.
The Inklings were indeed - at their core of Jack Lewis, Tolkien and Charles Williams, and during their peak years of 1939-45 - a group of Christian reactionaries with very large scale ambitions to redirect the current of modern art and life.
This was very obvious to Wain who opposed this re-directing of art and life back to a pre-modern and religious spirit (at least, he did during the early decades of his life, when he was known as an anti-establishment figure, one of the 'Angry Young Men' of the 1950s - although in later years Wain's work, for instance on Samuel Johnson, strikes me as itself reactionary - or at least nostalgic for the pre-modern era).
That was why the Inklings were friends, that was an essential basis of their friendship: necessary but not sufficient.
*
The reason for the continued interest in the Inklings is precisely what Wain stated.
But of course, Wain's analysis was itself from a 'modern' perspective; a perspective which sees 'political' activity as necessarily self-conscious and explicit.
Whereas the reality was that the Inklings did not subscribe to this view of politics.
Lewis, Tolkien and Williams were individually, and passionately, engaged in recovering a pre-modern, a Christian spirit for life - with re-connecting with the thread of this spirit as it came down through the centuries - a thread which was almost broken, a spirit which they themselves were among that last examples.
And this, at least, was explicitly perceived - Lewis spoke of himself as a dinosaur left over from a previous era, Tolkien spoke of fighting the long defeat, Williams blurred pre-modern past and present and expounded (in The Descent of the Dove) a history of Christendom in which he discerned a two thousand year thread coming through Anglicanism right down to his own spiritual engagement.
*
The substantive disagreement of Wain and Lewis over the true nature of the Inklings was only, therefore, a quibble over the degree of self-consciousness with which their counter-revolutionary activities was being pursued; there was no disagreement of the fact and tendency of the Inklings endeavors.
The Inklings were thus in effect precisely as Wain described them: instigators and incendiaries.
*
Sunday, 15 May 2011
Dom Jonathan Markison OSB = Gervase Mathew OSB
*
Just for the record, I agree with the identification of one of the (peripheral) members of the Notion Club Papers called Dom Jonathan Markison as probably based-on the real-life (peripheral) Inkling Gervase Mathew.
This resemblance was noted by Perry C. Bramlett, Joe R. Christopher in I am in fact a hobbit, 2002.
*
In the NCP list of member there is the brief entry "Dom Jonathan Markinson, OSB . New College, Master of St Cuthbert's Hall. [Polymath]"
Markison has several brief interjections in the text of the NCPs, one on an obscure point of history, another which mentions he had 'dabbled' in about 100 languages, and others of a philological nature.
OSB = Order of Saint Benedict - a Roman Catholic monk; Benedictines are addressed as Dom = Dominus or Master. St Cuthbert's Hall is an imaginary Oxford College, presumably named after the Anglo Saxon Saint.
*
Gervase Mathew OP (The Order founded by St Dominic; OP = Order of Preachers - a Roman Catholic Friar) was at Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican college attached to Oxford University. He was a renowned polymath - who apparently knew everybody and something about 'everything'.
Dominicans and Benedictines are traditionally among the most scholarly of Roman Catholic religious orders.
*
Just for the record, I agree with the identification of one of the (peripheral) members of the Notion Club Papers called Dom Jonathan Markison as probably based-on the real-life (peripheral) Inkling Gervase Mathew.
This resemblance was noted by Perry C. Bramlett, Joe R. Christopher in I am in fact a hobbit, 2002.
*
In the NCP list of member there is the brief entry "Dom Jonathan Markinson, OSB . New College, Master of St Cuthbert's Hall. [Polymath]"
Markison has several brief interjections in the text of the NCPs, one on an obscure point of history, another which mentions he had 'dabbled' in about 100 languages, and others of a philological nature.
OSB = Order of Saint Benedict - a Roman Catholic monk; Benedictines are addressed as Dom = Dominus or Master. St Cuthbert's Hall is an imaginary Oxford College, presumably named after the Anglo Saxon Saint.
*
Gervase Mathew OP (The Order founded by St Dominic; OP = Order of Preachers - a Roman Catholic Friar) was at Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican college attached to Oxford University. He was a renowned polymath - who apparently knew everybody and something about 'everything'.
Dominicans and Benedictines are traditionally among the most scholarly of Roman Catholic religious orders.
*
Friday, 6 May 2011
Anti-dwarf prejudice - justified?
*
When the Fellowship encounter the elves of Lothlorien, Eomer's horsemen and the doormen at Edoras it is clear that there is a pretty general prejudice against dwarves among the other free peoples of Middle Earth.
Is this justified?
Well, yes it is!
*
The reason is that the dwarves are proud and pride is a sin.
Dwarvish pride comes out as a hypersensitivity to personal insults, such that at any moment (whether among friends or foes) a dwarf may feel himself slighted and reach for his axe.
When combined with the great courage and strength of dwarves (the best of all infantry soldiers among the free peoples - with the exception of Numenoreans), this makes dwarves dangerous people to have around.
*
Of course, in Gimli we have the best of dwarves - that much is made clear: Gimli is an exception.
*
Gimli's companions seem to accept the general view that dwarves are trouble, and argue along the lines of 'yes we know about dwarves - but, Gimli was specially chosen by Elrond, he is a member of the Fellowship, he is different from the general run of dwarves - and we will vouch for his behaviour'
(Which is code for: 'don't worry, we will keep him under control...').
*
Yet even Gimli is bad enough! - very nearly provoking suicidal fights with Lothlorien elves and the Riders of Rohan - fights which would have been fatal to the battle against Sauron.
*
So, we conclude that the prejudice against dwarves as such is reasonable, dwarves usually are trouble; but the best people (Galadriel, Eomer, the guards at Edoras) are (rightly, on the whole) able to evaluate the evidence, trust their instincts, and make an exception in the case of Gimli.
*
When the Fellowship encounter the elves of Lothlorien, Eomer's horsemen and the doormen at Edoras it is clear that there is a pretty general prejudice against dwarves among the other free peoples of Middle Earth.
Is this justified?
Well, yes it is!
*
The reason is that the dwarves are proud and pride is a sin.
Dwarvish pride comes out as a hypersensitivity to personal insults, such that at any moment (whether among friends or foes) a dwarf may feel himself slighted and reach for his axe.
When combined with the great courage and strength of dwarves (the best of all infantry soldiers among the free peoples - with the exception of Numenoreans), this makes dwarves dangerous people to have around.
*
Of course, in Gimli we have the best of dwarves - that much is made clear: Gimli is an exception.
*
Gimli's companions seem to accept the general view that dwarves are trouble, and argue along the lines of 'yes we know about dwarves - but, Gimli was specially chosen by Elrond, he is a member of the Fellowship, he is different from the general run of dwarves - and we will vouch for his behaviour'
(Which is code for: 'don't worry, we will keep him under control...').
*
Yet even Gimli is bad enough! - very nearly provoking suicidal fights with Lothlorien elves and the Riders of Rohan - fights which would have been fatal to the battle against Sauron.
*
So, we conclude that the prejudice against dwarves as such is reasonable, dwarves usually are trouble; but the best people (Galadriel, Eomer, the guards at Edoras) are (rightly, on the whole) able to evaluate the evidence, trust their instincts, and make an exception in the case of Gimli.
*
Sunday, 1 May 2011
An Experiment with Time by J.W Dunne and the Inklings
*
This famous book of the late 1920s and 30s was a major influence on The Inklings, and forms a background to the Notion Club Papers.
*
One of the most striking aspects of C.S Lewis's The Dark Tower is the following:
" '... that we see the future is certain. Dunne's book proved that - '
"MacPhee gave a roar like a man in pain.
" 'It's all very well, MacPhee,' Orfieu continued, 'but the only thing that enables you to jeer at Dunne is the fact that you have refused to carry out the experiments he suggests. If you carried them out you would have got the same results that he got, and I got, and everyone got who took the trouble. Say what you like but the thing is proved. It's as certain as any scientific proof whatever.' "
*
Dunne had recorded his dreams in detail and in writing the instant he awoke. The method he describes is very specific, and he is clear that unless this method is followed, then the necessary information will not be available.
Dunne's conclusion - surveying these results, from himself and others - was that some parts of some dreams consisted of recollections of past events (especially the day preceding the sleep) mixed with anticipations of future events - quite thoroughly mixed, so that which-was-which only became apparent later.
My sense is that Lewis and Tolkien both accepted this by the late 1930s into the 1940s, sought an explanation, and discussed its implications - presumably in Inklings meetings.
*
Let us assume that Dunne was right and that Lewis and Tolkien were right to accept his evidence.
And let us take the evidence of the Dark Tower and the Notion Club Papers to conclude that Dunne's experiments were replicated, were verified, at least by Lewis and Tolkien and (probably) some other of the Inklings.
Then why has this idea died-out? Why do so few people nowadays believe that dreams can predict the future?
*
The reason is easy enough to understand on reading Dunne - that the dreams were a mixture of past, future and apparently irrelevant material - but there was no way to evaluate which elements were predictive until after they had been confirmed.
So, although Dunne seemed to show convincingly that some aspects of some dreams were visions of the future - this had no practical value: specifically this knowledge offered no powers.
You could not - therefore - use future visionary dreams to make money (e.g from bets), manipulate people, avoid disasters or anything of that kind.
To the modern mind, this means that Dunne's work seemed trivial, hence ignorable, and was eventually discarded (without consideration) as being fake, or gullible, or something...
*
That dreams contained visions of the future was, of course, believed by everyone until a few hundred years ago - and probably is believed by the vast majority of people in the world even now. But in ancient times, the ability to interpret dreams, and decode the future visions - so that the knowledge they contained might become useful, was regarded as a rare gift (and one associated with a lot of fakery).
*
On the other hand, if Dunne was correct (and I find the testimony of Lewis and Tolkien hard to ignore) then this is very interesting for what it tells us about the human condition.
Among other things, it suggests to me the following:
1. That dreams have a natural function - and not just related to memory (the past) but also to the future.
2. That this natural function happens during sleep - and does not require conscious awareness (since most people most of the time do not recall dreams - and Dunne's results depend on specific techniques of rapid recall, association and the making of an objective record, which techniques were apparently not done by anyone before him; and by very few since).
3. That - therefore - the natural function of dreams is not predictive; and that the use of dreams to predict the future is a special, individual, learned skill.
4. My guess as to one function of dreams is that they locate us in the world in an unconscious, implicit, non-verbal way; that dreams provide our relation to reality, our embeddedness in time, which we carry with us as a background to waking, conscious life.
5. That it is therefore possible that the lack of dreams, or of dreams of the right kind (perhaps as a result of some illness, or unnatural lifestyle, or drugs or something) might cause alienation: might cause someone to feel isolated, un-integrated with life, solipsistic, that life has no meaning nor purpose.
- of course this alienated state is compatible with the individual serving a social function, or operating at a high level in specific roles, or wielding power, or having high status. But that person is subjectively cut-off from the stream of time.
- sounds like the modern condition to me.
*
This famous book of the late 1920s and 30s was a major influence on The Inklings, and forms a background to the Notion Club Papers.
*
One of the most striking aspects of C.S Lewis's The Dark Tower is the following:
" '... that we see the future is certain. Dunne's book proved that - '
"MacPhee gave a roar like a man in pain.
" 'It's all very well, MacPhee,' Orfieu continued, 'but the only thing that enables you to jeer at Dunne is the fact that you have refused to carry out the experiments he suggests. If you carried them out you would have got the same results that he got, and I got, and everyone got who took the trouble. Say what you like but the thing is proved. It's as certain as any scientific proof whatever.' "
*
Dunne had recorded his dreams in detail and in writing the instant he awoke. The method he describes is very specific, and he is clear that unless this method is followed, then the necessary information will not be available.
Dunne's conclusion - surveying these results, from himself and others - was that some parts of some dreams consisted of recollections of past events (especially the day preceding the sleep) mixed with anticipations of future events - quite thoroughly mixed, so that which-was-which only became apparent later.
My sense is that Lewis and Tolkien both accepted this by the late 1930s into the 1940s, sought an explanation, and discussed its implications - presumably in Inklings meetings.
*
Let us assume that Dunne was right and that Lewis and Tolkien were right to accept his evidence.
And let us take the evidence of the Dark Tower and the Notion Club Papers to conclude that Dunne's experiments were replicated, were verified, at least by Lewis and Tolkien and (probably) some other of the Inklings.
Then why has this idea died-out? Why do so few people nowadays believe that dreams can predict the future?
*
The reason is easy enough to understand on reading Dunne - that the dreams were a mixture of past, future and apparently irrelevant material - but there was no way to evaluate which elements were predictive until after they had been confirmed.
So, although Dunne seemed to show convincingly that some aspects of some dreams were visions of the future - this had no practical value: specifically this knowledge offered no powers.
You could not - therefore - use future visionary dreams to make money (e.g from bets), manipulate people, avoid disasters or anything of that kind.
To the modern mind, this means that Dunne's work seemed trivial, hence ignorable, and was eventually discarded (without consideration) as being fake, or gullible, or something...
*
That dreams contained visions of the future was, of course, believed by everyone until a few hundred years ago - and probably is believed by the vast majority of people in the world even now. But in ancient times, the ability to interpret dreams, and decode the future visions - so that the knowledge they contained might become useful, was regarded as a rare gift (and one associated with a lot of fakery).
*
On the other hand, if Dunne was correct (and I find the testimony of Lewis and Tolkien hard to ignore) then this is very interesting for what it tells us about the human condition.
Among other things, it suggests to me the following:
1. That dreams have a natural function - and not just related to memory (the past) but also to the future.
2. That this natural function happens during sleep - and does not require conscious awareness (since most people most of the time do not recall dreams - and Dunne's results depend on specific techniques of rapid recall, association and the making of an objective record, which techniques were apparently not done by anyone before him; and by very few since).
3. That - therefore - the natural function of dreams is not predictive; and that the use of dreams to predict the future is a special, individual, learned skill.
4. My guess as to one function of dreams is that they locate us in the world in an unconscious, implicit, non-verbal way; that dreams provide our relation to reality, our embeddedness in time, which we carry with us as a background to waking, conscious life.
5. That it is therefore possible that the lack of dreams, or of dreams of the right kind (perhaps as a result of some illness, or unnatural lifestyle, or drugs or something) might cause alienation: might cause someone to feel isolated, un-integrated with life, solipsistic, that life has no meaning nor purpose.
- of course this alienated state is compatible with the individual serving a social function, or operating at a high level in specific roles, or wielding power, or having high status. But that person is subjectively cut-off from the stream of time.
- sounds like the modern condition to me.
*
Saturday, 30 April 2011
NCPs and The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis
*
Following a reminder from commenter HenryOrientJnr I belatedly got around to reading CS Lewis's posthumously published and unfinished story The Dark Tower - which was projected to be a part of the Science fiction trilogy - following on from Out of the Silent Planet.
It is an excellent story - but that aside, the relationship to the Notion Club Papers is striking.
*
(Verlyn Flieger has noted some of the following points in A Question of Time, although I had previously overlooked them.)
*
The Dark Tower (DT) was probably written around 1939, which places it chronologically closer to Tolkien's The Lost Road in 1937, then to the Notion Club Papers of 1945-6.
The opening of DT is strikingly similar to the NCPs - a group of intellectual colleagues discussing and debating the possibilities of time travel - both obviously (DT explicitly) having been influenced by An Experiment with Time by J.W Dunne.
The time travel discussion group in the Dark Tower becomes an experimental group, as a machine for watching another time is unveiled - and a member gets exchanged with a copy of himself in that other time.
In broad terms this resembles the way in which the Notion Club's experiments with dreaming begin with observation of the last days of Numenor, but go on to establishing a physical connection with that time (and were at one point probably aiming at the presence of NCP members at the fall of Numenor).
*
My presumption is that Tolkien heard or read the DT (since it was written when the Inklings were at their height) and took this organizational and plot aspect from it for the NCPs.
As was typical of Tolkien, he mulled over the Dark Tower and the Inkling discussions on time travel for several years before trying to use them in fiction; and it was equally typical of Lewis to use this material much more quickly - so these 'companion pieces' were drafted about six years apart!
*
Following a reminder from commenter HenryOrientJnr I belatedly got around to reading CS Lewis's posthumously published and unfinished story The Dark Tower - which was projected to be a part of the Science fiction trilogy - following on from Out of the Silent Planet.
It is an excellent story - but that aside, the relationship to the Notion Club Papers is striking.
*
(Verlyn Flieger has noted some of the following points in A Question of Time, although I had previously overlooked them.)
*
The Dark Tower (DT) was probably written around 1939, which places it chronologically closer to Tolkien's The Lost Road in 1937, then to the Notion Club Papers of 1945-6.
The opening of DT is strikingly similar to the NCPs - a group of intellectual colleagues discussing and debating the possibilities of time travel - both obviously (DT explicitly) having been influenced by An Experiment with Time by J.W Dunne.
The time travel discussion group in the Dark Tower becomes an experimental group, as a machine for watching another time is unveiled - and a member gets exchanged with a copy of himself in that other time.
In broad terms this resembles the way in which the Notion Club's experiments with dreaming begin with observation of the last days of Numenor, but go on to establishing a physical connection with that time (and were at one point probably aiming at the presence of NCP members at the fall of Numenor).
*
My presumption is that Tolkien heard or read the DT (since it was written when the Inklings were at their height) and took this organizational and plot aspect from it for the NCPs.
As was typical of Tolkien, he mulled over the Dark Tower and the Inkling discussions on time travel for several years before trying to use them in fiction; and it was equally typical of Lewis to use this material much more quickly - so these 'companion pieces' were drafted about six years apart!
*
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Can *elves* repent?
*
Following on from the idea about why orcs neither surrender nor accept mercy,
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/03/do-orcs-deserve-mercy.html
is the idea that this may not be because orcs are demons (i.e. fallen angels, fallen maia) - but because orcs are corrupted elves; and that once fallen elves cannot repent.
*
The idea is that Tolkien's elves are - roughly - between Men and Angels - an incarnate angel or a higher form of human than Man.
But it may be that in Tolkien's world higher forms than Man - including elves - are incapable of repentance, therefore incapable of being forgiven.
*
There may be some exceptions to this, but it seems that while Men are already fallen by the time that they enter history, and that therefore all 'good' Men in Tolkien have - in a sense - repented and been forgiven (but, of course, may fall again - but can then again repent and be forgiven again) the higher rational beings of Tolkien's universe seem to be unable to repent once they have been corrupted.
Although even Morgoth is offered a chance or two to repent, and Saruman, and Feanor - none of them take it (or have I missed someone?), and it is possible that they could not take this chance (although maybe there is an obligation to offer it? Perhaps even the Valar do not know whether repentance is possible for themselves? - perhaps only Eru knows for sure).
*
This could be the great advantage of Men - and the reason why Men are destined to dominate and displace other species. Although they are worse (more evil) than elves in most respects, worse even than ents, and overall maybe (maybe) even worse than dwarves - Men can repent.
No matter how deep the hole they have dig for themselves, and no matter their moral feebleness, weakness of will, and recidivism - Man can (and do) repent and try again.
But not so elves - once a bad elf, always a bad elf...
Maybe.
*
Following on from the idea about why orcs neither surrender nor accept mercy,
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/03/do-orcs-deserve-mercy.html
is the idea that this may not be because orcs are demons (i.e. fallen angels, fallen maia) - but because orcs are corrupted elves; and that once fallen elves cannot repent.
*
The idea is that Tolkien's elves are - roughly - between Men and Angels - an incarnate angel or a higher form of human than Man.
But it may be that in Tolkien's world higher forms than Man - including elves - are incapable of repentance, therefore incapable of being forgiven.
*
There may be some exceptions to this, but it seems that while Men are already fallen by the time that they enter history, and that therefore all 'good' Men in Tolkien have - in a sense - repented and been forgiven (but, of course, may fall again - but can then again repent and be forgiven again) the higher rational beings of Tolkien's universe seem to be unable to repent once they have been corrupted.
Although even Morgoth is offered a chance or two to repent, and Saruman, and Feanor - none of them take it (or have I missed someone?), and it is possible that they could not take this chance (although maybe there is an obligation to offer it? Perhaps even the Valar do not know whether repentance is possible for themselves? - perhaps only Eru knows for sure).
*
This could be the great advantage of Men - and the reason why Men are destined to dominate and displace other species. Although they are worse (more evil) than elves in most respects, worse even than ents, and overall maybe (maybe) even worse than dwarves - Men can repent.
No matter how deep the hole they have dig for themselves, and no matter their moral feebleness, weakness of will, and recidivism - Man can (and do) repent and try again.
But not so elves - once a bad elf, always a bad elf...
Maybe.
*
Thursday, 14 April 2011
Tolkien as a Lucid Dreamer of Faery
*
The Notion Club Papers open with Ramer's accounts of what are often termed Lucid Dreams - that is, dreams in which the dreamer is aware they are dreaming, has some degree of control of the dream, and in which the dream experience feels real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
One question is whether Tolkien uses Lucid Dreaming as a literary device (although at the time he was writing there was no concept of Lucid Dreaming - but there was a long tradition of dreams of this type - whether shamanic, mystical, prophetic or pure imagination or fantasy - e.g. 'opium dreams'); or whether, on the other hand, Tolkien was using Ramer to report his own experiences.
I have argued in this blog that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Tolkien was indeed expressing his own dream experiences in a fictional form.
*
This inference has now been confirmed for me by a personal experience of Lucid Dreaming!
From this it is even clearer that Ramer's experiences are consistent with being precise reports of the experience of Lucid Dreaming.
*
From the perspective of the NCPs, the striking feature of a Lucid Dream is the feeling of sensory contact with the dream world.
In most instances, dreams are 'dreamy' - they have a feeling of imprecise unreality due to the constant shifting of association and the shortness of memory - so that the dream is happening to the dreamer (who is trying, but failing, to make sense of it), rather than in Lucid Dreams being dreamed-by the dreamer.
The Lucid Dream is not 'dreamy' - except in that it is known to be a dream, and that events unfold in a somewhat slow motion and emphatically experienced way. By contrast, it is more sensitively appreciated and considered than normal everyday reality: as if realer than real.
*
Furthermore, in a Lucid Dream moral agency is preserved: the dreamer consciously makes choices. This chimes with Tolkien's discussion in NCPs that there is potential for evil influences to enter dreams, but that this can only happen if the influences are invited by the dreamer.
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2010/10/evil-minds-attacking-during-sleep.html
By contrast, normal dreaming is not subject to the agency of the dreamer, and the dreamer is not responsible for what he dreams - because he cannot help what he dreams.
*
Assuming that Tolkien was indeed a Lucid Dreamer - and one for whom this was a regular experience, rather than my own one off experience - this leads onto further speculations.
The Lucid Dream turns out to be phenomenologically (experientially) identical to Tolkien's description of how elves might create Faerian Drama (as described in the essay On Fairy Stories and again discussed in the NCPs) - I mean the presumed elves experience of creating this kind of drama.
*
Furthermore, the rather overwhelming experience of Lucid Dreaming raises may of the problems about fantasy, its validity - and the nature of that validity, and the potential benefits and hazards; matters with which Tolkien so often grappled in his writings.
After all, Lucid Dreaming approximates to being given Absolute Power, and none knew better than Tolkien that Absolute Power has a strong tendency to corrupt.
*
In sum, I am suggesting that Faery, for Tolkien, was directly experienced via Lucid Dreams; and in that sense he was an intermittent visitor to Faery; and perhaps in that sense it was fear of a cessation of Lucid Dreaming which provoked Tolkiens mid-life poem The Sea Bell/ Frodo's Dreme/ Looney - and when the Lucid Dreams had actually stopped in Tolkien's experience, provoked Tolkien's late story of Smith of Wootton Major. The story was his farewell to Faery.
*
I make the tentative guess that Tolkien was always aware of the fragility and unpredictability of his ability to experience Lucid Dreams of Faery; and that when Tolkien stopped having Lucid Dreams in later life, he was (as it were) no longer 'allowed' to visit Faery himself, but had only fading memories of these experiences, and the hope that the ability would be passed-on to others - as the Faery star was passed-on by the eponymous Smith.
*
The Notion Club Papers open with Ramer's accounts of what are often termed Lucid Dreams - that is, dreams in which the dreamer is aware they are dreaming, has some degree of control of the dream, and in which the dream experience feels real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
One question is whether Tolkien uses Lucid Dreaming as a literary device (although at the time he was writing there was no concept of Lucid Dreaming - but there was a long tradition of dreams of this type - whether shamanic, mystical, prophetic or pure imagination or fantasy - e.g. 'opium dreams'); or whether, on the other hand, Tolkien was using Ramer to report his own experiences.
I have argued in this blog that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Tolkien was indeed expressing his own dream experiences in a fictional form.
*
This inference has now been confirmed for me by a personal experience of Lucid Dreaming!
From this it is even clearer that Ramer's experiences are consistent with being precise reports of the experience of Lucid Dreaming.
*
From the perspective of the NCPs, the striking feature of a Lucid Dream is the feeling of sensory contact with the dream world.
In most instances, dreams are 'dreamy' - they have a feeling of imprecise unreality due to the constant shifting of association and the shortness of memory - so that the dream is happening to the dreamer (who is trying, but failing, to make sense of it), rather than in Lucid Dreams being dreamed-by the dreamer.
The Lucid Dream is not 'dreamy' - except in that it is known to be a dream, and that events unfold in a somewhat slow motion and emphatically experienced way. By contrast, it is more sensitively appreciated and considered than normal everyday reality: as if realer than real.
*
Furthermore, in a Lucid Dream moral agency is preserved: the dreamer consciously makes choices. This chimes with Tolkien's discussion in NCPs that there is potential for evil influences to enter dreams, but that this can only happen if the influences are invited by the dreamer.
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2010/10/evil-minds-attacking-during-sleep.html
By contrast, normal dreaming is not subject to the agency of the dreamer, and the dreamer is not responsible for what he dreams - because he cannot help what he dreams.
*
Assuming that Tolkien was indeed a Lucid Dreamer - and one for whom this was a regular experience, rather than my own one off experience - this leads onto further speculations.
The Lucid Dream turns out to be phenomenologically (experientially) identical to Tolkien's description of how elves might create Faerian Drama (as described in the essay On Fairy Stories and again discussed in the NCPs) - I mean the presumed elves experience of creating this kind of drama.
*
Furthermore, the rather overwhelming experience of Lucid Dreaming raises may of the problems about fantasy, its validity - and the nature of that validity, and the potential benefits and hazards; matters with which Tolkien so often grappled in his writings.
After all, Lucid Dreaming approximates to being given Absolute Power, and none knew better than Tolkien that Absolute Power has a strong tendency to corrupt.
*
In sum, I am suggesting that Faery, for Tolkien, was directly experienced via Lucid Dreams; and in that sense he was an intermittent visitor to Faery; and perhaps in that sense it was fear of a cessation of Lucid Dreaming which provoked Tolkiens mid-life poem The Sea Bell/ Frodo's Dreme/ Looney - and when the Lucid Dreams had actually stopped in Tolkien's experience, provoked Tolkien's late story of Smith of Wootton Major. The story was his farewell to Faery.
*
I make the tentative guess that Tolkien was always aware of the fragility and unpredictability of his ability to experience Lucid Dreams of Faery; and that when Tolkien stopped having Lucid Dreams in later life, he was (as it were) no longer 'allowed' to visit Faery himself, but had only fading memories of these experiences, and the hope that the ability would be passed-on to others - as the Faery star was passed-on by the eponymous Smith.
*
Saturday, 9 April 2011
Tolkien's Notion Club Papers completed... (a speculative treatment)
*
(This is a combined and edited version of some previous posts, describing my idea of how JRR Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers might have ended-up.)
*
Having brooded (some would say obsessively - and they would be right!) over Tolkien's Notion Club Papers for a couple of years, I am now going to speculate about where the NCPs were tending; what the NCPs would have been about and what they would have been like - if ever Tolkien had finished the novel.
*
In a nutshell, I believe that the Notion Club Papers were intended to serve an extremely important purpose: to rescue modern England from its spiritual malaise.
At least - that was what the Notion Club themselves would be depicted as doing fictionally - and the finished book would be intended to make this possible in the mundane world.
Tolkien's ouvre (his Legendarium) was intended to make a mythology for England; the Notion Club Papers were intended to link his mythical Legendarium to modern England. (I got this from the work of Verlyn Flieger - especially her book Interrupted Music.)
*
I suggest that the NCPs would - ultimately (if finished) - have provided a feigned history of the processes that brought Tolkien's historical myth/s into action in the modern world.
*
What was Tolkien 'rescuing' England from?
This is made explicit in the NCPs:
[Jeremy] ..."Sometimes I have a queer feeling that, if one could go back, one would find not myth dissolving into history, but rather the reverse: real history becoming more mythical - more shapely, simple, discernibly significant, even seen at close quarters. More poetical and less prosaic, if you like.(...)
"They're not wholly inventions. And even what is invented is different from mere fiction; it has more roots." (...)
"[The roots are] In Being, I think I should say," Jeremy answered; "and in human Being; and coming down the scale, in the springs of History and the designs of Geography - I mean, well, in the pattern of our world as it uniquely is, and of the events in it as seen from a distance. (...)
"Of course, the pictures presented by the legends may be partly symbolical, they may be arranged in designs that compress, expand, foreshorten, combine, and are not at all realistic or photographic, yet they may tell you something true about the Past."
*
With the NCPs Tolkien was intending to tell us something true about the past, something that we need to know because at present England's past is merely history, when it should be myth.
The Notion Club Papers were intended to make England's history into myth - i.e. to reverse the process of myth dissolving into history described by Jeremy in the quote above.
Tolkien wanted, that is, contemporary history to dissolve into myth; and the NCPs were (as they evolved) aimed at achieving this.
*
Arguably, Tolkien achieved his goal, although by other and less direct means - in the sense that many people (like myself) nowadays 'use' Tolkien's Legendarium as a myth by-which (and through-which) they understand and interpret the current world.
We do this despite the lack of an explicit and comprehensive mythical link between the Legendarium (saturated, as it is, with purpose and meaning) and the nihilistic modern world of objective irrelevant 'facts' and purely-individual subjectivities.
However, in order for this to have happened via the NCPs, they would need to have needed to end-up very differently from how they set out: in literary terms, the NCPs would have required very substantial re-writing, in ways which we can only extrapolate from hints and glimmerings.
*
The basic situation which the Notion Club inhabit is an Oxford (England, Western Civilization) that is out-of-contact with Faery: in more general terms, a society out-of-contact with myth. Hence vulgar, coarsened, materialistic; without depth, meaning or purpose.
The action of the Notion Club throughout the novel, I speculate, would have been aimed at restoring this contact between Faery and England; and indeed I speculate that the climax of the novel would have been precisely this re-establishment of contact.
*
As scholars and writers, the Notion Club would have been aware of the necessity for human contact with Faery (i.e. with myth) in order that their work (as well as their lives) may be profound, imaginative and ennobled - and rise above mere 'utility'.
The means by which the club would restore contact with myth would, I assume, be the usual ones employed by Tolkien and of which hints exist in the incomplete and surviving NCP text: by a quest, by a hero who is an 'elf friend', and by a 'messenger' between Faery and the mundane world.
*
As they stand, the NCPs are - to me - an endlessly fascinating fragment, full of evidence about Tolkien and his deepest concerns; but it seems to be a work of extremely limited appeal (at least, I only know of two or three other people than myself who find it at all interesting or enjoyable!) - and therefore I assume that the story in its present form would either be unpublishable, or else destined only for a microscopically small cult audience.
*
If the NCPs had been completed they would therefore, I believe, have ended-up very differently from the way they exist at present.
The overall purpose of the NCPs (within Tolkien's books) would have been to provide a frame for Tolkien's legendarium - in other words, a pseudo-historical 'explanation' for how the legends of the elves, Numenor and ancient Middle Earth were transmitted to our times (transmitted specifically to England, and even more specifically to Oxford).
In other words, approximately to link The Silmarillion, Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to the modern reader by a feigned history.
*
The Notion Club Papers novel would, then, describe how a link between Middle Earth (this modern world) and Faery was re-established.
*
The shape of the novel would presumably have been the same as Tolkien's other works - some kind of heroic quest in which the hero or heroes come into contact with 'Faery' and an ennobled by contact with 'higher things' and made wiser by their experience.
Clearly, the Notion Club Papers would therefore require need a protagonist with whom the reader would identify. That is a character whose thoughts and feelings the reader would get to know in the course of the story.
But such characters are lacking (or indirect and inexplicit) in the current NCP drafts.
*
The existing form of the NCPs, i.e. the literary conceit of their being the formal minutes of club meetings, would therefore need to be dropped or relaxed; to bring in much more direct forms of narrative or reportage.
This was already beginning to happen in the later parts of the NCPs, with the introduction of letters from Lowdham (plus some footnotes), and an extended 'dream sequence' which reports Lowdham's inner state during an Anglo Saxon episode.
So, in the NCP novel there would be a great expansion of such letters, and also probably diaries and journal entries - so as to bring the reader into more direct contact with the action.
*
In terms of character, the ANC would therefore need to get inside at least one of Guildford, Ramer, Lowdham and Jeremy.
My guess is that the protagonist would have been Guildford - the recorder, who would become the narrator, and would speak directly to the reader (to posterity) about the collection of minutes, letters, poems, fragments and journal entries which he has gathered and collated with the aim of preservation and propagation.
Probably, Guildford would have remained a rather background character in terms of the action and excitement, and it would have been the extrovert Lowdham in particular would emerged as the most obvious hero - supported by Jeremy who would, I guess, end-up being the main person responsible for achieving the quest to re-connect with Faery.
*
I suspect the Ramer character might therefore have receded in importance. His role might be in learning the languages necessary to interpret the documentary material eventually recovered from Faery by Lowdham and Jeremy.
Ramer's role at the end of the ANC would perhaps be as scholarly interpreter of the texts brought back to Oxford by Jeremy (who seems not to be skilled as a philologist or historical linguist).
*
I would imagine that Lowdham - accompanied by Jeremy - would make the breakthrough to physical contact with faery: set sail for the West with Jeremy, be responsible for navigating the boat, and eventually actually land in Faery where he would meet his father - and the High elves.
But then Lowdham would stay-behind in faery (with his father) and Jeremy would be the one who returned to England bringing the legendarium - especially the Red Book of Westmarch and Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish.
*
In sum, the Notion Club Papers would be presented as a collection of minutes, letters, journal entries etc. collected by Guildford concerning the Notion Club in general and Lowdham and Jeremy in particular - telling the story of how a link between faery and England was re-established by the efforts of the Club - firstly in dreams then ultimately by a voyage to Faery.
*
However, the link between Faery would be firstly psychic, and only secondly physical - the early parts of the NCPs are concerned with the initial glimpses of myth and faery via dreams, then a break-through of visionary material from the past - so powerful that it had an actual physical effect on Oxford and nearby areas of England (the storm replicating the downfall of Numenor).
This stage would also provide sufficient linguistic information for the Notion Club (with its linguistic, historical and philological expertise) to be able to interpret the extensive documentary material which would eventually be brought back by Jeremy.
*
This requires an intermediary: Dolbear - who turns-out to be a wizard/ angel/ messenger from Faery.
*
The character of Dolbear jumps-out of the Notion Club Papers as somebody about whom there is more than meets the eye. Almost everything he says is wise and cuts-deep. He seems to understand more of what is going-on than anyone else.
We know Dolbear has certainly been working, independently, with Ramer even before the meetings were reported and also later with Lowdham - on their dreams and interpretations.
Dolbear is also hinted to be a kind of grey eminence at the least; someone greatly respected by the other members (underneath their chummy chaffing) and probably somebody who is - in fact - actually stage-managing the whole process by which the Notion Club re-establishes contact with Faery.
*
In this sense Dolbear resembles Gandalf - who is a wizard or an 'angel' in disguise; in the sense of being a higher being from the undying lands who is a messenger and catalyst. Probably the reader would not have access to Dolbear's inner life - he would (like Gandalf) be observed rather than experienced.
Dolbear would make things happen, by hints and directions and providing key pieces of information - never by force. And at the end of the story Dolbear would return (like Gandalf) whence he came - to Faery.
*
This is (I speculate) the meaning of Dolbear seeming to sleep though the meetings, yet remain apparently aware of everything which is happening in them - indeed more aware of the implications of the meetings than are the active participants.
I suspect that during sleep Dolbear is in contact with Faery and with the Notion Club at the same time. He is therefore a conduit or passageway linking Oxford and the undying lands - he transmits the proceedings of the Notion Club to Faery, and receives instructions of what to do.
Dolbear's trance-like states of sleep are therefore (I believe) the specific means by which the inhabitants of Faery are encouraging the renewed contact between England and Faery which the Notion Club themselves seek.
*
The Oxford setting is highly significant, as is the general similarity between the Notion Club and The Inklings.
*
Tolkien saw himself as the inheritor of an English racial memory of Faery. In his earliest legends (now published as Lost Tales) England had indeed been a part of Faery - with a place to place mapping between mythic and modern places, and England was especially favoured for this reason.
Tolkien regarded this inherited memory as coming down his mother's side of the family, and therefore centred in Warwickshire (Mercia).
*
And Tolkien had less strong but similarly mystical feelings about Oxford as he did about the nearby West Midlands of England, and of course he spent most of his working life at the University, and this was where most of his friends lived.
But mostly, for Tolkien, Oxford had a special role in scholarship related to Faery. And from a practical point of view, Oxford in the early and mid-twentieth century was the perfect place from which knowledge of Faery might have been disseminated throughout the rest of England.
*
So, my guess is that the NCP novel would have described the Inkling's-like Notion Club in Oxford as having first established a psychic link with Faery - with visionary material glimpsed during dreams, then having recovered extensive documentary evidence from Faery, and brought it back to Oxford for secret safe-keeping, translation and dissemination.
The benefits of this mythic, faery knowledge would then enhance first the Notion Club members, then the rest of the University, with elven craft, depth, wisdom and mystery.
A special quality in the work of the Notion Club, and Oxford, would have been recognized by the English (who were genetically predisposed to appreciate it) and the effects and benefits would have been spread throughout England by means of Oxford's role in educating the administrators and teachers of the rest of England.
*
So, in order to re-establish contact between Middle Earth and Faery there would need to be efforts form both sides: both a push and a pull.
On the one hand there was a push from the members of the Notion Club, who sensed the shallowness and literalness of their world, the damage of materialism, and the ugliness of industrialization (e.g. Ramer's horrible dream of Oxford through the ages) - and sought to enrich life by contact with Faery.
And on the other hand there was a pull from the inhabitants of Faery. The elves were assumed to have benign intentions towards humans and seek to help them.
*
Especially the inhabitants of Faery wish to help Men to adopt an attitude of love towards nature; to become 'elvishly' capable of disinterested craft, art, science and scholarship as things to be loved for their own sakes, rather than as a means to another end.
*
In sum - the The Notion Club Papers would (I imagine) describe how the post-medieval process of 'myth turning into history' would be reversed; and first the Notion Club, then Oxford, then England, then maybe eventually the World - might again connected with Faery, and re-enchanted by elvish wisdom and suffused with an elvish perspective.
*
In practice, the finished Notion Club papers were intended to be the first Tolkien book which people should read: a modern science fiction type novel which would explain how the Annals (Silmarillion legends) and Romances (Hobbit and Lord of the Rings) came to England, and were translated for a general audience.
Having read the Notion Club Papers - mainstream fiction of a familiar type - the modern reader would be prepared for to move onto reading the much stranger and less familiar Annals and Romances; and would (at some level) then be able to treat them as (or as if) an historical reality.
***
(This is a combined and edited version of some previous posts, describing my idea of how JRR Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers might have ended-up.)
*
Having brooded (some would say obsessively - and they would be right!) over Tolkien's Notion Club Papers for a couple of years, I am now going to speculate about where the NCPs were tending; what the NCPs would have been about and what they would have been like - if ever Tolkien had finished the novel.
*
In a nutshell, I believe that the Notion Club Papers were intended to serve an extremely important purpose: to rescue modern England from its spiritual malaise.
At least - that was what the Notion Club themselves would be depicted as doing fictionally - and the finished book would be intended to make this possible in the mundane world.
Tolkien's ouvre (his Legendarium) was intended to make a mythology for England; the Notion Club Papers were intended to link his mythical Legendarium to modern England. (I got this from the work of Verlyn Flieger - especially her book Interrupted Music.)
*
I suggest that the NCPs would - ultimately (if finished) - have provided a feigned history of the processes that brought Tolkien's historical myth/s into action in the modern world.
*
What was Tolkien 'rescuing' England from?
This is made explicit in the NCPs:
[Jeremy] ..."Sometimes I have a queer feeling that, if one could go back, one would find not myth dissolving into history, but rather the reverse: real history becoming more mythical - more shapely, simple, discernibly significant, even seen at close quarters. More poetical and less prosaic, if you like.(...)
"They're not wholly inventions. And even what is invented is different from mere fiction; it has more roots." (...)
"[The roots are] In Being, I think I should say," Jeremy answered; "and in human Being; and coming down the scale, in the springs of History and the designs of Geography - I mean, well, in the pattern of our world as it uniquely is, and of the events in it as seen from a distance. (...)
"Of course, the pictures presented by the legends may be partly symbolical, they may be arranged in designs that compress, expand, foreshorten, combine, and are not at all realistic or photographic, yet they may tell you something true about the Past."
*
With the NCPs Tolkien was intending to tell us something true about the past, something that we need to know because at present England's past is merely history, when it should be myth.
The Notion Club Papers were intended to make England's history into myth - i.e. to reverse the process of myth dissolving into history described by Jeremy in the quote above.
Tolkien wanted, that is, contemporary history to dissolve into myth; and the NCPs were (as they evolved) aimed at achieving this.
*
Arguably, Tolkien achieved his goal, although by other and less direct means - in the sense that many people (like myself) nowadays 'use' Tolkien's Legendarium as a myth by-which (and through-which) they understand and interpret the current world.
We do this despite the lack of an explicit and comprehensive mythical link between the Legendarium (saturated, as it is, with purpose and meaning) and the nihilistic modern world of objective irrelevant 'facts' and purely-individual subjectivities.
However, in order for this to have happened via the NCPs, they would need to have needed to end-up very differently from how they set out: in literary terms, the NCPs would have required very substantial re-writing, in ways which we can only extrapolate from hints and glimmerings.
*
The basic situation which the Notion Club inhabit is an Oxford (England, Western Civilization) that is out-of-contact with Faery: in more general terms, a society out-of-contact with myth. Hence vulgar, coarsened, materialistic; without depth, meaning or purpose.
The action of the Notion Club throughout the novel, I speculate, would have been aimed at restoring this contact between Faery and England; and indeed I speculate that the climax of the novel would have been precisely this re-establishment of contact.
*
As scholars and writers, the Notion Club would have been aware of the necessity for human contact with Faery (i.e. with myth) in order that their work (as well as their lives) may be profound, imaginative and ennobled - and rise above mere 'utility'.
The means by which the club would restore contact with myth would, I assume, be the usual ones employed by Tolkien and of which hints exist in the incomplete and surviving NCP text: by a quest, by a hero who is an 'elf friend', and by a 'messenger' between Faery and the mundane world.
*
As they stand, the NCPs are - to me - an endlessly fascinating fragment, full of evidence about Tolkien and his deepest concerns; but it seems to be a work of extremely limited appeal (at least, I only know of two or three other people than myself who find it at all interesting or enjoyable!) - and therefore I assume that the story in its present form would either be unpublishable, or else destined only for a microscopically small cult audience.
*
If the NCPs had been completed they would therefore, I believe, have ended-up very differently from the way they exist at present.
The overall purpose of the NCPs (within Tolkien's books) would have been to provide a frame for Tolkien's legendarium - in other words, a pseudo-historical 'explanation' for how the legends of the elves, Numenor and ancient Middle Earth were transmitted to our times (transmitted specifically to England, and even more specifically to Oxford).
In other words, approximately to link The Silmarillion, Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to the modern reader by a feigned history.
*
The Notion Club Papers novel would, then, describe how a link between Middle Earth (this modern world) and Faery was re-established.
*
The shape of the novel would presumably have been the same as Tolkien's other works - some kind of heroic quest in which the hero or heroes come into contact with 'Faery' and an ennobled by contact with 'higher things' and made wiser by their experience.
Clearly, the Notion Club Papers would therefore require need a protagonist with whom the reader would identify. That is a character whose thoughts and feelings the reader would get to know in the course of the story.
But such characters are lacking (or indirect and inexplicit) in the current NCP drafts.
*
The existing form of the NCPs, i.e. the literary conceit of their being the formal minutes of club meetings, would therefore need to be dropped or relaxed; to bring in much more direct forms of narrative or reportage.
This was already beginning to happen in the later parts of the NCPs, with the introduction of letters from Lowdham (plus some footnotes), and an extended 'dream sequence' which reports Lowdham's inner state during an Anglo Saxon episode.
So, in the NCP novel there would be a great expansion of such letters, and also probably diaries and journal entries - so as to bring the reader into more direct contact with the action.
*
In terms of character, the ANC would therefore need to get inside at least one of Guildford, Ramer, Lowdham and Jeremy.
My guess is that the protagonist would have been Guildford - the recorder, who would become the narrator, and would speak directly to the reader (to posterity) about the collection of minutes, letters, poems, fragments and journal entries which he has gathered and collated with the aim of preservation and propagation.
Probably, Guildford would have remained a rather background character in terms of the action and excitement, and it would have been the extrovert Lowdham in particular would emerged as the most obvious hero - supported by Jeremy who would, I guess, end-up being the main person responsible for achieving the quest to re-connect with Faery.
*
I suspect the Ramer character might therefore have receded in importance. His role might be in learning the languages necessary to interpret the documentary material eventually recovered from Faery by Lowdham and Jeremy.
Ramer's role at the end of the ANC would perhaps be as scholarly interpreter of the texts brought back to Oxford by Jeremy (who seems not to be skilled as a philologist or historical linguist).
*
I would imagine that Lowdham - accompanied by Jeremy - would make the breakthrough to physical contact with faery: set sail for the West with Jeremy, be responsible for navigating the boat, and eventually actually land in Faery where he would meet his father - and the High elves.
But then Lowdham would stay-behind in faery (with his father) and Jeremy would be the one who returned to England bringing the legendarium - especially the Red Book of Westmarch and Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish.
*
In sum, the Notion Club Papers would be presented as a collection of minutes, letters, journal entries etc. collected by Guildford concerning the Notion Club in general and Lowdham and Jeremy in particular - telling the story of how a link between faery and England was re-established by the efforts of the Club - firstly in dreams then ultimately by a voyage to Faery.
*
However, the link between Faery would be firstly psychic, and only secondly physical - the early parts of the NCPs are concerned with the initial glimpses of myth and faery via dreams, then a break-through of visionary material from the past - so powerful that it had an actual physical effect on Oxford and nearby areas of England (the storm replicating the downfall of Numenor).
This stage would also provide sufficient linguistic information for the Notion Club (with its linguistic, historical and philological expertise) to be able to interpret the extensive documentary material which would eventually be brought back by Jeremy.
*
This requires an intermediary: Dolbear - who turns-out to be a wizard/ angel/ messenger from Faery.
*
The character of Dolbear jumps-out of the Notion Club Papers as somebody about whom there is more than meets the eye. Almost everything he says is wise and cuts-deep. He seems to understand more of what is going-on than anyone else.
We know Dolbear has certainly been working, independently, with Ramer even before the meetings were reported and also later with Lowdham - on their dreams and interpretations.
Dolbear is also hinted to be a kind of grey eminence at the least; someone greatly respected by the other members (underneath their chummy chaffing) and probably somebody who is - in fact - actually stage-managing the whole process by which the Notion Club re-establishes contact with Faery.
*
In this sense Dolbear resembles Gandalf - who is a wizard or an 'angel' in disguise; in the sense of being a higher being from the undying lands who is a messenger and catalyst. Probably the reader would not have access to Dolbear's inner life - he would (like Gandalf) be observed rather than experienced.
Dolbear would make things happen, by hints and directions and providing key pieces of information - never by force. And at the end of the story Dolbear would return (like Gandalf) whence he came - to Faery.
*
This is (I speculate) the meaning of Dolbear seeming to sleep though the meetings, yet remain apparently aware of everything which is happening in them - indeed more aware of the implications of the meetings than are the active participants.
I suspect that during sleep Dolbear is in contact with Faery and with the Notion Club at the same time. He is therefore a conduit or passageway linking Oxford and the undying lands - he transmits the proceedings of the Notion Club to Faery, and receives instructions of what to do.
Dolbear's trance-like states of sleep are therefore (I believe) the specific means by which the inhabitants of Faery are encouraging the renewed contact between England and Faery which the Notion Club themselves seek.
*
The Oxford setting is highly significant, as is the general similarity between the Notion Club and The Inklings.
*
Tolkien saw himself as the inheritor of an English racial memory of Faery. In his earliest legends (now published as Lost Tales) England had indeed been a part of Faery - with a place to place mapping between mythic and modern places, and England was especially favoured for this reason.
Tolkien regarded this inherited memory as coming down his mother's side of the family, and therefore centred in Warwickshire (Mercia).
*
And Tolkien had less strong but similarly mystical feelings about Oxford as he did about the nearby West Midlands of England, and of course he spent most of his working life at the University, and this was where most of his friends lived.
But mostly, for Tolkien, Oxford had a special role in scholarship related to Faery. And from a practical point of view, Oxford in the early and mid-twentieth century was the perfect place from which knowledge of Faery might have been disseminated throughout the rest of England.
*
So, my guess is that the NCP novel would have described the Inkling's-like Notion Club in Oxford as having first established a psychic link with Faery - with visionary material glimpsed during dreams, then having recovered extensive documentary evidence from Faery, and brought it back to Oxford for secret safe-keeping, translation and dissemination.
The benefits of this mythic, faery knowledge would then enhance first the Notion Club members, then the rest of the University, with elven craft, depth, wisdom and mystery.
A special quality in the work of the Notion Club, and Oxford, would have been recognized by the English (who were genetically predisposed to appreciate it) and the effects and benefits would have been spread throughout England by means of Oxford's role in educating the administrators and teachers of the rest of England.
*
So, in order to re-establish contact between Middle Earth and Faery there would need to be efforts form both sides: both a push and a pull.
On the one hand there was a push from the members of the Notion Club, who sensed the shallowness and literalness of their world, the damage of materialism, and the ugliness of industrialization (e.g. Ramer's horrible dream of Oxford through the ages) - and sought to enrich life by contact with Faery.
And on the other hand there was a pull from the inhabitants of Faery. The elves were assumed to have benign intentions towards humans and seek to help them.
*
Especially the inhabitants of Faery wish to help Men to adopt an attitude of love towards nature; to become 'elvishly' capable of disinterested craft, art, science and scholarship as things to be loved for their own sakes, rather than as a means to another end.
*
In sum - the The Notion Club Papers would (I imagine) describe how the post-medieval process of 'myth turning into history' would be reversed; and first the Notion Club, then Oxford, then England, then maybe eventually the World - might again connected with Faery, and re-enchanted by elvish wisdom and suffused with an elvish perspective.
*
In practice, the finished Notion Club papers were intended to be the first Tolkien book which people should read: a modern science fiction type novel which would explain how the Annals (Silmarillion legends) and Romances (Hobbit and Lord of the Rings) came to England, and were translated for a general audience.
Having read the Notion Club Papers - mainstream fiction of a familiar type - the modern reader would be prepared for to move onto reading the much stranger and less familiar Annals and Romances; and would (at some level) then be able to treat them as (or as if) an historical reality.
***
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Do orcs deserve mercy?
*
A post by Troels sparked a thought to explain the fact that orcs are never offered a chance to surrender nor taken prisoner by the 'goodies' in the Lord of the Rings, but instead never surrender and are always slaughtered.
http://parmarkenta.blogspot.com/2011/02/lord-of-rings-as-transitionary-work.html
He relates this to the evolution of the idea of orcs as originating as demons and ending-up as ruined elves or men.
On the concept of orcs as ruined free folk, they should always be offered a chance to 'repent' and be taken prisoner - in a post-LotR letter Tolkien says that orcs never in fact take this chance, since they are so indoctrinated that they believe they would be horribly tormented by their enemies.
This sounds a bit unlikely; humans that are orclike are terrified of dying, often cowardly and inclined to surrender and hope for the best.
BUT if orcs are indeed demons - and as demons are 'fallen angels', then orc-demons are (according to the theology I have read - and in this respect unlike humans) incapable of repentance; therefore deserve no mercy - or, at least mercy, would be futile.
And this could explain why orcs seem never to surrender (despite being cowardly) and never are (at least not that we see) offered mercy or taken prisoner by elves, men or dwarves.
*
A post by Troels sparked a thought to explain the fact that orcs are never offered a chance to surrender nor taken prisoner by the 'goodies' in the Lord of the Rings, but instead never surrender and are always slaughtered.
http://parmarkenta.blogspot.com/2011/02/lord-of-rings-as-transitionary-work.html
He relates this to the evolution of the idea of orcs as originating as demons and ending-up as ruined elves or men.
On the concept of orcs as ruined free folk, they should always be offered a chance to 'repent' and be taken prisoner - in a post-LotR letter Tolkien says that orcs never in fact take this chance, since they are so indoctrinated that they believe they would be horribly tormented by their enemies.
This sounds a bit unlikely; humans that are orclike are terrified of dying, often cowardly and inclined to surrender and hope for the best.
BUT if orcs are indeed demons - and as demons are 'fallen angels', then orc-demons are (according to the theology I have read - and in this respect unlike humans) incapable of repentance; therefore deserve no mercy - or, at least mercy, would be futile.
And this could explain why orcs seem never to surrender (despite being cowardly) and never are (at least not that we see) offered mercy or taken prisoner by elves, men or dwarves.
*
Saturday, 26 February 2011
Legolas, Gimli and the key passage of Lord of the Rings
*
From Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien:
***
'We will come', said Imrahil; and they parted with courteous words.
'That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,' said Legolas. 'If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising'.
'And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,' said Gimli. 'It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.'
'Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,' said Legolas. 'And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.'
'And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,' said the Dwarf.
'To that the Elves know not the answer,' said Legolas.
***
Ever since I began reading the Lord of the Rings way back in 1972, this has struck me as one of the key passages in the book: perhaps the single most important key.
But my reason for thinking this has changed over the years.
My understanding of the implications of this passage has, indeed, almost reversed.
*
This passage is about two aspects of the human condition, seen from two perspectives: fecklessness versus idealism; or, this-worldliness versus other-worldliness.
At first I identified with the elf and dwarf in terms of dismay at the restless distractability of Men - their inability to follow-through and finish any difficult task, the fact that their arts and crafts are always flawed, imperfect; men are always looking for something different, failing to keep their attention on the job.
Compared with dwarves and elves, men are shallow - almost like children. And the best of men are the Numenoreans like Imrahil, who are ennobled by an infusion of elvish blood and spirituality.
(Dwarves are conceived as a separate species, while Men and Elves are con-specific - and can interbreed, despite their differences.)
But from an elvish perspective this means that - at best - Men are merely second-rate and mortal elves. The best of Men's work - their arts and crafts - is nearly, but not quite, as good as the elves - and in architecture inferior to the dwarves.
*
The ultimate reason is Men's psychology: Men cannot stick to a difficult job right through to the end.
From the perspective of dwarves, the works of Men are a sequence of promising starts and disappointing results: 'merely 'might have beens'.
This my younger self perceived, and sadly agreed with.
*
But the wiser elf Legloas is not content to leave Gimli with the last word.
Although he does not understand, he recognises the limit of his understanding - and admits as much. Legolas perceives that the triumph of Men is part of providence, of the divine plan for Middle Earth - and therefore that there must be more to it than the accident of superior fertility.
Gimli and Legolas both perceive that the distractability of Men is a flaw in this world, in terms of what Men can achieve on Middle Earth.
But the elf seems to recognize that Men's distractability may be a consequence of something higher than either elf or dwarf can perceive - that Men may (in a nutshell) be distracted by something not of this world - that Men are unfitted for Middle earth because their destiny lies elsewhere.
*
Of course this was precisely what Tolkien believed, and what lies behind this passage and which lends it such depth and fascination. It explains my fascination with this passage, and also it explains why I missed the deeper meaning for so long - until I read and understood the Marring of Men/ Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.
*
As such this famous passage represents and illustrates the method and secret of LotR - its subtle glimpses of depths and vistas beyond the frame of the story.
***
Note: the fact that this exchange between Gimli and Legolas was omitted from the movie version of LotR is a strike against the movie, and represents a failure to appreciate the core message of the book. I say this despite being a great admirer of the movies.
*
Monday, 14 February 2011
Death in Tolkien
*
In LotR and its appendices, Tolkien makes clear how Men must (in this 'fallen' world) accept the inevitability of death, and the severance of soul from body - with the soul leaving this world and uncertainty over what happens next.
Thus the necessity for hope - for Men to believe in the reality and trust in the power and benign nature of The One.
*
For elves, by contrast, death is not inevitable, and they know that the One is real and powerful and benign; they know too what happens after their death - and that soul and body may be reunited by reincarnation.
Yet elves do not know what happens after the end of the world, which the elves know they will be there to experience - and elves, too, can rest only on hope that The One will - in ways unknown - make this right.
*
So, Men will suffer severance of soul from body and do not know what will then happen while Elves may suffer severance of soul from body but may have this 'healed' during the life of the world.
And Men go to another place where they may hope for something greater than this world has to offer, while elves will suffer annihilation in this world and may hope for something greater than this world has to offer, after the destruction of the world.
For both Men and elves alike hope is therefore prescribed - although for elves there is no need for faith since they know.
(This may be a point in favor of Men, a chance for them to exercise a higher virtue than that of which elves are capable.)
*
But in The Marring of Men and the associated material, Tolkien injects what seems like a personal note - the wisdom of a life time of reflection on death, when he acknowledges that Men's dread of death is rational: it is rational for Men to fear the severance of body and soul (even though, in this world, they must accept it, and must not try to avoid it: must not cling to life).
His proposed solution is that before The Fall the body and soul were taken, together, into the next world (in the same way and presumably by the same means as happened with the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Tolkien states): that the original plan of The One was that Men's soul never-was severed from their bodies.
*
So we get a situation in the Silmarillion and LotR which resembles the pre-Christian times when a virtuous and courageous pagan had hope but no real reason for hope beyond death; other than a content-less faith that (somehow) things would (eventually) be made right.
*
In LotR and its appendices, Tolkien makes clear how Men must (in this 'fallen' world) accept the inevitability of death, and the severance of soul from body - with the soul leaving this world and uncertainty over what happens next.
Thus the necessity for hope - for Men to believe in the reality and trust in the power and benign nature of The One.
*
For elves, by contrast, death is not inevitable, and they know that the One is real and powerful and benign; they know too what happens after their death - and that soul and body may be reunited by reincarnation.
Yet elves do not know what happens after the end of the world, which the elves know they will be there to experience - and elves, too, can rest only on hope that The One will - in ways unknown - make this right.
*
So, Men will suffer severance of soul from body and do not know what will then happen while Elves may suffer severance of soul from body but may have this 'healed' during the life of the world.
And Men go to another place where they may hope for something greater than this world has to offer, while elves will suffer annihilation in this world and may hope for something greater than this world has to offer, after the destruction of the world.
For both Men and elves alike hope is therefore prescribed - although for elves there is no need for faith since they know.
(This may be a point in favor of Men, a chance for them to exercise a higher virtue than that of which elves are capable.)
*
But in The Marring of Men and the associated material, Tolkien injects what seems like a personal note - the wisdom of a life time of reflection on death, when he acknowledges that Men's dread of death is rational: it is rational for Men to fear the severance of body and soul (even though, in this world, they must accept it, and must not try to avoid it: must not cling to life).
His proposed solution is that before The Fall the body and soul were taken, together, into the next world (in the same way and presumably by the same means as happened with the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Tolkien states): that the original plan of The One was that Men's soul never-was severed from their bodies.
*
So we get a situation in the Silmarillion and LotR which resembles the pre-Christian times when a virtuous and courageous pagan had hope but no real reason for hope beyond death; other than a content-less faith that (somehow) things would (eventually) be made right.
*
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Depth in Tolkien
*
The main reason that the Lord of the Rings has such depth - so that it feels like real life - is not that it is internally-consistent (plenty of fantasy is that), nor even that it is immensely detailed (although in that respect it is indeed unsurpassed); but that LotR has a sense of depth: of vistas glimpsed, and sometimes opening-out but never quite sufficient to satisfy curiosity.
To put it another way, LotR has a magnificent back-story, which is 'complete', but of which we seldom get more than tantalizing glances.
In a nutshell, Tolkien had a ready made back-story by using the vast and mostly-worked-out Silmarillion Legendarium as the glimpsed background.
Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, spelled-out how this effect was attained and why Tolkien valued this so much.
*
But Shippey also describes that this created a big problem when it came to preparing the Silmarillion for publication - since there was no background (because the Silamrillion gave an objective account of everything, right back to the beginning of the world).
Tolkien himself was perfectly aware of the problem, and discussed it explicitly, sought various answers - but never answered the problem to his satisfaction - and the Simarillion was not published during his lifetime.
*
The result was that - in my opinion - when the single volume Silmarillion of 1977 was published, it was an artistic failure.
It was just dull; a great disappointment. It was consistent and it was complex - but, as well as having no characters with whom the reader could identify (no Hobbits, nor even Men from whose perspective we could perceive things), and as well as the problem of having no 'frame' to define what exactly it purported to be; it was just too consistent.
However, almost by accident, the problem of depth was later solved for the Silmarillion Legendarium over the next couple of decades by the publication of first Unfinished Tales then another twelve volumes of the History of Middle Earth.
*
What we have now is multiple versions of Silmarillion legends in the form of unfinished drafts and proposed versions, free-standing and finished but inconsistent segments, editorial discussions from both JRR and Christopher Tolkien, prose and poems, notes and appendices... and much else.
We have, in other words, a vast and implicit depth - so long as we take the stance that these are fragmentary and distorted Annals of lost real history.
In this case depth comes not from a back-story, but from the (spontaneous human) tendency to infer a back-story - or a true and complete version - of which the thirteen volumes (or, perhaps more accurately, the nine-or-so volumes of material which refer to pre-LotR history) are the remaining evidence.
Like 19th century philologists, we must struggle to recover the lost truth behind these 'records' - and it is an endless and fascinating task - tantalizing in just the same kind of way as the scattered references to ancient Silmarillion history embedded in LotR.
*
Paradoxically, Tolkien's failure to finish the Silmarillion, followed by the indispensable and irreplaceable labours of his son Christopher, has given us exactly what JRRT would have wanted us to have.
(Ignoring the false start of the one volume 1977 Silmarillion - which we might choose to regard from this perspective as merely a 'forgery' by later hands - rather like Macpherson's Ossian!)
*
The main reason that the Lord of the Rings has such depth - so that it feels like real life - is not that it is internally-consistent (plenty of fantasy is that), nor even that it is immensely detailed (although in that respect it is indeed unsurpassed); but that LotR has a sense of depth: of vistas glimpsed, and sometimes opening-out but never quite sufficient to satisfy curiosity.
To put it another way, LotR has a magnificent back-story, which is 'complete', but of which we seldom get more than tantalizing glances.
In a nutshell, Tolkien had a ready made back-story by using the vast and mostly-worked-out Silmarillion Legendarium as the glimpsed background.
Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, spelled-out how this effect was attained and why Tolkien valued this so much.
*
But Shippey also describes that this created a big problem when it came to preparing the Silmarillion for publication - since there was no background (because the Silamrillion gave an objective account of everything, right back to the beginning of the world).
Tolkien himself was perfectly aware of the problem, and discussed it explicitly, sought various answers - but never answered the problem to his satisfaction - and the Simarillion was not published during his lifetime.
*
The result was that - in my opinion - when the single volume Silmarillion of 1977 was published, it was an artistic failure.
It was just dull; a great disappointment. It was consistent and it was complex - but, as well as having no characters with whom the reader could identify (no Hobbits, nor even Men from whose perspective we could perceive things), and as well as the problem of having no 'frame' to define what exactly it purported to be; it was just too consistent.
However, almost by accident, the problem of depth was later solved for the Silmarillion Legendarium over the next couple of decades by the publication of first Unfinished Tales then another twelve volumes of the History of Middle Earth.
*
What we have now is multiple versions of Silmarillion legends in the form of unfinished drafts and proposed versions, free-standing and finished but inconsistent segments, editorial discussions from both JRR and Christopher Tolkien, prose and poems, notes and appendices... and much else.
We have, in other words, a vast and implicit depth - so long as we take the stance that these are fragmentary and distorted Annals of lost real history.
In this case depth comes not from a back-story, but from the (spontaneous human) tendency to infer a back-story - or a true and complete version - of which the thirteen volumes (or, perhaps more accurately, the nine-or-so volumes of material which refer to pre-LotR history) are the remaining evidence.
Like 19th century philologists, we must struggle to recover the lost truth behind these 'records' - and it is an endless and fascinating task - tantalizing in just the same kind of way as the scattered references to ancient Silmarillion history embedded in LotR.
*
Paradoxically, Tolkien's failure to finish the Silmarillion, followed by the indispensable and irreplaceable labours of his son Christopher, has given us exactly what JRRT would have wanted us to have.
(Ignoring the false start of the one volume 1977 Silmarillion - which we might choose to regard from this perspective as merely a 'forgery' by later hands - rather like Macpherson's Ossian!)
*
Sunday, 6 February 2011
JRR Tolkien's theology of The Fall and Resurrection
*
From The History of Middle Earth Volume 10 - edited by Christopher Tolkien - excerpted from pages 330-333.
*
With regard to King Finrod, it must be understood that he starts with certain basic beliefs, which he would have said were derived from one or more of these sources: his created nature; angelic instruction; thought; and experience.
1. There exists Eru (The One); that is, the One God Creator, who made (or more strictly designed) the World, but is not Himself the World. This world, or Universe, he calls Eä, an Elvish word that means 'It is', or 'Let It Be'.
2. There are on Earth 'incarnate' creatures, Elves and Men: these are made of a union of hröa and fëa (roughly but not exactly equivalent to 'body' and 'soul'). This, he would say, was a known fact concerning Elvish nature, and could therefore be deduced for human nature from the close kinship of Elves and Men.
3. Hröa and fëa he would say are wholly distinct in kind, and not on the 'same plane of derivation from Eru', but were designed each for the other, to abide in perpetual harmony. The fëa is indestructible, a unique identity which cannot be disintegrated or absorbed into any other identity. The hröa, however, can be destroyed and dissolved: that is a fact of experience. (In such a case he would describe the fëa as 'exiled' or 'houseless'.)
4. The separation of fëa and hröa is 'unnatural', and proceeds not from the original design, but from the 'Marring of Arda', which is due to the operations of Melkor.
5. Elvish 'immortality' is bounded within a part of Time (which he would call the History of Arda [Arda is roughly the earth and solar system]), and is therefore strictly to be called rather 'serial longevity', the utmost limit of which is the length of the existence of Arda. A corollary of this is that the Elvish fëa is also limited to the Time of Arda, or at least held within it and unable to leave it, while it lasts.
6. From this it would follow in thought, if it were not a fact of Elvish experience, that a 'houseless' Elvish fëa must have the power or opportunity to return to incarnate life, if it has the desire or will to do so. (...)
7. Since Men die, without accident, and whether they will to do so or not, their fëar must have a different relation to Time. The Elves believed, though they had no certain information, that the fëar of Men, if disembodied, left Time (sooner or later), and never returned.
* (…)
[Finrod] uncovers a concomitant tradition that the change in the condition of Men from their original design was due to a primeval disaster, about which human lore is unclear, or Andreth is at least unwilling to say much. He remains, nonetheless, in the opinion that the condition of Men before the disaster (or as we might say, of unfallen Man) cannot have been the same as that of the Elves.
That is, their 'immortality' cannot have been the longevity within Arda of the Elves; otherwise they would have been simply Elves, and their separate introduction later into the Drama by Eru would have no function.
He thinks that the notion of Men that, unchanged, they would not have died (in the sense of leaving Arda) is due to human misrepresentation of their own tradition, and possibly to envious comparison of themselves to the Elves.
For one thing, he does not think this fits, as we might say, 'the observable peculiarities of human psychology', as compared with Elvish feelings towards the visible world.
[Tolkien refers here to Finrod's observations that (in these respects, being different from elves) Men seem to feel they are visitors to the earth (Arda), not 'at home', in exile, perpetually dissatisfied, rapidly wearying of things, seeking of novelty, seeking of a satisfaction on earth which they never can achieve... From this he infers that men were not made for this world only.]
* (…)
[Finrod] therefore guesses that it is the fear of death that is the result of the disaster. It is feared because it now is combined with severance of hroa and fea.
But the fear of Men must have been designed to leave Arda willingly or indeed by desire - maybe after a longer time than the present average human life, but still in a time very short compared with Elvish lives.
Then basing his argument on the axiom that severance of hroa and fea is unnatural and contrary to design, he comes (or if you like jumps) to the conclusion that the fea of unfallen Man would have taken with it its hroa into the new mode of existence (free from Time).
In other words, that 'assumption' was the natural end of each human life, though as far as we know it has been the end of the only 'unfallen' member of Mankind.
[Tolkien refers here to Mary, the Mother of Jesus; and the ancient Catholic tradition that she died willingly and was bodily assumed directly to Heaven. However, the Eastern Orthodox Catholic tradition would not agree with Tolkien's Roman Catholic belief that Mary was 'unfallen'.]
My comments:
I regard JRR Tolkien as one of the wisest and most profound of men, and further I take the above discussion seriously as an attempt - within the subcreation of his Legendarium - to grapple with ultimate matters.
Furthermore, I find his reasoning compelling.
*
Note what he says about the necessary assumptions. In the case of the Elven King Finrod, these assumptions were based on his created nature; angelic instruction; thought; and experience.
In the case of Men (who have not lived among the 'angels' (Valar) as had elven King Finrod; the assumptions would be based on created nature, thought, experience - and any traditions concerning divine 'revelation'.
His conclusion is that the Fall (conceived as a turning away from God, and a worship of the Satanic figure of Melkor/ Morgoth - which is a turning away from love to power) led to fear of death, as a severance of (immortal) soul and (mortal) body which is unnatural and horrible.
Eru's original plan was that this would not have happened, but that Men on willingly accepting death at the end of their time on earth would go (body and soul) to another world (i.e. Heaven) which was out of Time.
Following the fall, and a time of fallen-ness where Men's souls were indeed severed from bodies at death, an alternative plan was devised by Eru whereby he himself would become a Man, and thereby (mystically) enable souls which had left the world without their bodies to be reunited with their proper bodies, using (roughly speaking) the 'memory' of the body which was retained by the soul.
*
This was (Tolkien explains elsewhere) the mechanism for elven reincarnation - a new body was 'regenerated' from the memory of the soul.
But the souls of Men were not like this (the special elven gift was memory), nor was reincarnation the destiny of Men.
After all, the souls of dead Men had left Arda (whereas elven souls remained in Arda), and were in a domain out of Time.
*
Only intervention by Eru could heal this situation, and any healing must allow for the free will of Men (which was part of the essence of Men and the 'reason' or purpose of their creation).
Against this was not just the free will of Men to reject any or all of the assumptions or to prefer power to love; but there was also the fact of the presence of evil in the fabric of the world (the tainting of the created world by Morgoth); the purposive evil of Morgoth himself, his allies (Sauron) and his corrupted servants - Balrogs, Dragons, Orcs; and the opposition of free Men who (each, by choice or assent) took Morgoth as their God.
This is Tolkien's indirect description of the Fall and Resurrection; and his explanation of the need for Resurrection.
*
Inter alia, Tolkien's description of Finrod's assumptions is also a description of Faith (belief in the reality of Erus and his nature), Hope (called Estel - by which knowledge of Eru implies goodness of divine purpose) - and the distinctive Christian virtue of Charity (Love, Agape) is implied by the contrast with Pride and Power-seeking which are distinctive sins of the two Falls of Men - the primary fall of the worship of Morgoth in the unrecorded history, and the secondary historical fall of Numenor into pride and power - finally capped by the Numenorean King again reinstating the worship of Morgoth - supervised by Morgoth's priest Sauron.
*
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
The elven 'argument from desire'
*
From JRR Tolkien "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth" in Morgoth's Ring: History of Middle Earth volume 10 (edited by Christopher Tolkien) page 343:
*
Desire
"The Elves insisted that 'desires', especially such fundamental desires as are here dealt with, were to be taken as indications of the true natures of the Incarnates, and of the direction in which their unmarred fulfilment must lie.
"They distinguished between desire of the [soul] (perception that something right or necessary is not present, leading to desire or hope for it); wish, or personal wish (the feeling of the lack of something, the force of which primarily concerns oneself, and which may have little or no reference to the general fitness of things);
illusion, the refusal to recognize that things are not as they should be, leading to the delusion that they are as one would desire them to be, when they are not so.
illusion, the refusal to recognize that things are not as they should be, leading to the delusion that they are as one would desire them to be, when they are not so.
"The last might now be called 'wishful thinking', legitimately; but this term, the Elves would say, is quite illegitimate when applied to the first.
"The last can be disproved by reference to facts. The first not so.
"Unless desirability is held to be always delusory, and the sole basis for the hope of amendment.
"But desires of the [soul] may often be shown to be reasonable by arguments quite unconnected with personal wish. The fact that they accord with 'desire', or even with personal wish, does not invalidate them.
"Actually the Elves believed that the 'lightening of the heart' or the 'stirring of joy' (to which they often refer), which may accompany the hearing of a proposition or an argument, is not an indication of its falsity but of the recognition by the [soul] that it is on the path of truth.)"
*
Comment: Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth may by Tolkien's most explicit statement (or, at least, discussion) of his deepest beliefs, albeit stated in terms of his legendarium. Here, yet again, is the argument from desire, which he shared with C.S Lewis - that when humans desire something deeply that is not of this world, then this may be taken as 'evidence' that something which fully gratifies this desire is to be found in another world, the world that humans are 'made-for', where humans would be 'at home' (which is not this world).
*
The pride of Feanor
*
Being himself a creative genius of a high order, Tolkien felt a temptation of pride which was perhaps greater than for most.
In his depiction of the elf Feanor - he showed how pride can destroy everything which the greatest creative genius can achieve, and more.
*
Feanor was by far the most gifted among the gifted race of elves: as a scholar he invented the written script, as a craftsman he created many wonders but especially the Silmarils: three indestructible jewels of beauty unequalled by any products of human art, in which the light of the Two Trees was captured.
Gandalf said that, above all else in the world, he would wish to see the incomparable hand and mind of Feanor at work at the height of his powers.
Even the greatest of 'the gods' (except for 'the One' creator God - Eru) - the premier Archangel Melkor (later re-named Morgoth, by Feanor) could not match Feanor's creative genius, and coveted the Silmarils above all.
*
Yet Feanor's pride, his possessiveness concerning his own creations, was such that it led to many disasters for the elves: failure to restore the light of the Two Trees (after Morgoth had them destroyed), mass disloyalty, dishonesty and disobedience among the Noldor elves for generations, slaughter of the Teleri and destruction of their wonderful ships, betrayal and death of Noldor kindred, fruitless wars in Middle Earth with huge suffering and death for many centuries, exile from the care of the Valar - most of the major tragedies of the Silmarillion stories.
And all stemming back to the pride of Feanor.
*
Tolkien depicted the same process at many levels, from Melkor himself, to the first and primary Fall of Man into the worship of Morgoth (unpublished in his life but described in the History of Middle Earth Volume X), to the second Fall of the men of Numenor (who developed the most powerful technological civilization ever in Middle Earth), to individual examples such as Sauron and Saruman (minor gods or angelic figures), to Boromir and Denethor.
In Tolkien's world, as in ours, prideful creative genius often leads first to astonishing achievements of power - else there would be no temptation - then to ruin and loss.
For Tolkien, there is no creative achievement so great that it cannot be undone and reversed by pride.
*
And yet - we live, now, in a society which esteems and promotes pride - indeed depends upon pride for its very sustenance.
Of all the many moral inversions of political correctness - this is the most serious, the most damaging, the most damning.
*
Being himself a creative genius of a high order, Tolkien felt a temptation of pride which was perhaps greater than for most.
In his depiction of the elf Feanor - he showed how pride can destroy everything which the greatest creative genius can achieve, and more.
*
Feanor was by far the most gifted among the gifted race of elves: as a scholar he invented the written script, as a craftsman he created many wonders but especially the Silmarils: three indestructible jewels of beauty unequalled by any products of human art, in which the light of the Two Trees was captured.
Gandalf said that, above all else in the world, he would wish to see the incomparable hand and mind of Feanor at work at the height of his powers.
Even the greatest of 'the gods' (except for 'the One' creator God - Eru) - the premier Archangel Melkor (later re-named Morgoth, by Feanor) could not match Feanor's creative genius, and coveted the Silmarils above all.
*
Yet Feanor's pride, his possessiveness concerning his own creations, was such that it led to many disasters for the elves: failure to restore the light of the Two Trees (after Morgoth had them destroyed), mass disloyalty, dishonesty and disobedience among the Noldor elves for generations, slaughter of the Teleri and destruction of their wonderful ships, betrayal and death of Noldor kindred, fruitless wars in Middle Earth with huge suffering and death for many centuries, exile from the care of the Valar - most of the major tragedies of the Silmarillion stories.
And all stemming back to the pride of Feanor.
*
Tolkien depicted the same process at many levels, from Melkor himself, to the first and primary Fall of Man into the worship of Morgoth (unpublished in his life but described in the History of Middle Earth Volume X), to the second Fall of the men of Numenor (who developed the most powerful technological civilization ever in Middle Earth), to individual examples such as Sauron and Saruman (minor gods or angelic figures), to Boromir and Denethor.
In Tolkien's world, as in ours, prideful creative genius often leads first to astonishing achievements of power - else there would be no temptation - then to ruin and loss.
For Tolkien, there is no creative achievement so great that it cannot be undone and reversed by pride.
*
And yet - we live, now, in a society which esteems and promotes pride - indeed depends upon pride for its very sustenance.
Of all the many moral inversions of political correctness - this is the most serious, the most damaging, the most damning.
*
Sunday, 23 January 2011
Free-will, purpose, prophecy and providence in Tolkien
*
From The Quest of Erebor in Unfinished Tales by JRR Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien, published 1980)
*
"Listen to me, Thorin Oakenshield! [said Gandalf]. "If this hobbit goes with you, you will succeed. If not, you will fail. A foresight is on me, and I am warning you."
(...)
Looking hard at Gandalf, [Gimli] went on:
"But who wove the web? I do not think I have ever considered that before. Did you plan all this then, Gandalf? (...)
Gandalf did not answer at one.
He stood up and looked out of the window, west, seawards; and the sun was then setting, and a glow was in his face.
He stood so a long while silent.
But at last he turned to Gimli and said:
"I do not know the answer. For I have changed since those days, and I am no longer trammelled by the burden of Middle Earth as I was then.
"In those days I should have answered you with words like I used to Frodo, only last year in the spring.
"Only last year! But such measures are meaningless.
"In that far distant time I said to a small and frightened Hobbit: Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker, and you therefore were meant to bear it.
"And I might have added: and I was meant to guide you both to those points.
"To do that I used in my waking mind only such means as were allowed to me, doing what lay to my hand according to such reasons as I had." (...)
[Then Frodo said]: "I understand you a little better now, Gandalf, than I did before. Though I suppose that, whether meant or not, Bilbo might have refused to leave home, and so might I.
"You could not compel us. You were not even allowed to try." (...)
Gandalf said:
"It might all have gone very differently indeed.
The main attack was diverted southwards, it is true; and yet even so with his farstretched right hand Sauron could have done terrible harm in the North, while he defended Gondor, if King Brand and King Dáin had not stood in his path.
When you think of the great Battle of Pelennor, do not forget the Battle of Dale. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador! There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now only hope to return from the victory here to ruin and ash.
"But that has been averted – because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring not far from Bree.
"A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth."
***
The Lord of the Rings is permeated by a deep understanding of the Christian concept of how free-will is compatible with with purpose, prophecy and providence.
When such matters seem seem paradoxical, or merely muddled, this is well worth pondering.
*
From The Quest of Erebor in Unfinished Tales by JRR Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien, published 1980)
*
"Listen to me, Thorin Oakenshield! [said Gandalf]. "If this hobbit goes with you, you will succeed. If not, you will fail. A foresight is on me, and I am warning you."
(...)
Looking hard at Gandalf, [Gimli] went on:
"But who wove the web? I do not think I have ever considered that before. Did you plan all this then, Gandalf? (...)
Gandalf did not answer at one.
He stood up and looked out of the window, west, seawards; and the sun was then setting, and a glow was in his face.
He stood so a long while silent.
But at last he turned to Gimli and said:
"I do not know the answer. For I have changed since those days, and I am no longer trammelled by the burden of Middle Earth as I was then.
"In those days I should have answered you with words like I used to Frodo, only last year in the spring.
"Only last year! But such measures are meaningless.
"In that far distant time I said to a small and frightened Hobbit: Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker, and you therefore were meant to bear it.
"And I might have added: and I was meant to guide you both to those points.
"To do that I used in my waking mind only such means as were allowed to me, doing what lay to my hand according to such reasons as I had." (...)
[Then Frodo said]: "I understand you a little better now, Gandalf, than I did before. Though I suppose that, whether meant or not, Bilbo might have refused to leave home, and so might I.
"You could not compel us. You were not even allowed to try." (...)
Gandalf said:
"It might all have gone very differently indeed.
The main attack was diverted southwards, it is true; and yet even so with his farstretched right hand Sauron could have done terrible harm in the North, while he defended Gondor, if King Brand and King Dáin had not stood in his path.
When you think of the great Battle of Pelennor, do not forget the Battle of Dale. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador! There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now only hope to return from the victory here to ruin and ash.
"But that has been averted – because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring not far from Bree.
"A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth."
***
The Lord of the Rings is permeated by a deep understanding of the Christian concept of how free-will is compatible with with purpose, prophecy and providence.
When such matters seem seem paradoxical, or merely muddled, this is well worth pondering.
*
Friday, 21 January 2011
The Notion Club Papers - why England, why Oxford?
*
In the Notion Club Papers as it might have become (i.e. 'Annals of the Notion Club' - ANC - as I term this imaginary production of Tolkien's) the main theme is (I infer) the re-establishment of a link between Faery and contemporary Middle Earth (i.e. the modern world).
But why England, among all of Middle Earth?
*
In a nutshell, Tolkien saw himself (in some way, at some level) as the inheritor of an English racial memory of Faery - in his earliest legends (now published as Lost Tales) England had indeed been a part of Faery, and was especially favoured for this reason.
Tolkien regarded this memory as coming down his mother's side of the family, and therefore centred in Warwickshire (Mercia).
*
But why Oxford?
Tolkien had less strong but similarly mystical feelings about Oxford as he did about the nearby West Midlands of England, and of course he spent most of his working life at the University.
From the earliest writings now published in Lost Tales and in Tolkien and the Great War (by John Garth) we find Oxford given a special role in scholarship and related to Faery.
And from a practical point of view, Oxford in the early and mid-twentieth century was the perfect place from which knowledge of Faery might have been disseminated throughout the rest of England.
*
So, my guess is that the ANCs would have described the Inkling's-like Notion Club in Oxford as having first established a psychic link with Faery - with visionary material glimpsed during dreams, then having recovered extensive documentary evidence from Faery, and brought it back to Oxford for secret safe-keeping.
The benefits of this mythic knowledge would then enhance first the Notion Club members, then the rest of the University, with elven craft, depth, wisdom and mystery.
This special quality in the work of the Notion Club, and Oxford, would have been recognized by the English (who were genetically predisposed to appreciate it) and the effects and benefits would have been disseminated throughout England by means of Oxford's role in educating the administrators and teachers of the rest of England.
*
So, in order to re-establish contact between Middle Earth and Faery there would need to be efforts form both sides: both a push and a pull.
On the one hand a push from the members of the Notion Club who sense the shallowness and literalness of their world and their work, the damage of materialism and the ugliness of industrialization (e.g. Ramer's rather horrible dream of Oxford through the ages) - and seek to enrich it by contact with Faery.
And on the other hand a pull from the inhabitants of Faery. The elves were assumed (see Tolkien's back-story essay for Smith of Wooton Major) to have benign intentions towards humans and seek to help them.
Especially the inhabitants of Faery wish to help Men to adopt an attitude of love towards nature; to become 'elvishly' capable of disinterested craft, art, science and scholarship as things to be loved for their own sakes, rather than as a means to another end.
(So that these arts and crafts are not merely practised - as so often in the modern world - for the power, prestige or money they might yield.)
*
In sum - the Annals of the Notion Club would (I imagine) describe how the post-medieval process of 'myth turning into history' would be reversed; and first the Notion Club, then Oxford, then England, then maybe eventually the World, would be re-enchanted by elvish wisdom and suffused with an elvish perspective.
***
[And - as things have turned-out - Tolkien actually succeeded in his desire to fulfill this aspiration, to an extent which he would hardly have dared to hope-for; but via the Lord of the Rings as its focus, rather than by means of the Notion Club Papers.]
*
In the Notion Club Papers as it might have become (i.e. 'Annals of the Notion Club' - ANC - as I term this imaginary production of Tolkien's) the main theme is (I infer) the re-establishment of a link between Faery and contemporary Middle Earth (i.e. the modern world).
But why England, among all of Middle Earth?
*
In a nutshell, Tolkien saw himself (in some way, at some level) as the inheritor of an English racial memory of Faery - in his earliest legends (now published as Lost Tales) England had indeed been a part of Faery, and was especially favoured for this reason.
Tolkien regarded this memory as coming down his mother's side of the family, and therefore centred in Warwickshire (Mercia).
*
But why Oxford?
Tolkien had less strong but similarly mystical feelings about Oxford as he did about the nearby West Midlands of England, and of course he spent most of his working life at the University.
From the earliest writings now published in Lost Tales and in Tolkien and the Great War (by John Garth) we find Oxford given a special role in scholarship and related to Faery.
And from a practical point of view, Oxford in the early and mid-twentieth century was the perfect place from which knowledge of Faery might have been disseminated throughout the rest of England.
*
So, my guess is that the ANCs would have described the Inkling's-like Notion Club in Oxford as having first established a psychic link with Faery - with visionary material glimpsed during dreams, then having recovered extensive documentary evidence from Faery, and brought it back to Oxford for secret safe-keeping.
The benefits of this mythic knowledge would then enhance first the Notion Club members, then the rest of the University, with elven craft, depth, wisdom and mystery.
This special quality in the work of the Notion Club, and Oxford, would have been recognized by the English (who were genetically predisposed to appreciate it) and the effects and benefits would have been disseminated throughout England by means of Oxford's role in educating the administrators and teachers of the rest of England.
*
So, in order to re-establish contact between Middle Earth and Faery there would need to be efforts form both sides: both a push and a pull.
On the one hand a push from the members of the Notion Club who sense the shallowness and literalness of their world and their work, the damage of materialism and the ugliness of industrialization (e.g. Ramer's rather horrible dream of Oxford through the ages) - and seek to enrich it by contact with Faery.
And on the other hand a pull from the inhabitants of Faery. The elves were assumed (see Tolkien's back-story essay for Smith of Wooton Major) to have benign intentions towards humans and seek to help them.
Especially the inhabitants of Faery wish to help Men to adopt an attitude of love towards nature; to become 'elvishly' capable of disinterested craft, art, science and scholarship as things to be loved for their own sakes, rather than as a means to another end.
(So that these arts and crafts are not merely practised - as so often in the modern world - for the power, prestige or money they might yield.)
*
In sum - the Annals of the Notion Club would (I imagine) describe how the post-medieval process of 'myth turning into history' would be reversed; and first the Notion Club, then Oxford, then England, then maybe eventually the World, would be re-enchanted by elvish wisdom and suffused with an elvish perspective.
***
[And - as things have turned-out - Tolkien actually succeeded in his desire to fulfill this aspiration, to an extent which he would hardly have dared to hope-for; but via the Lord of the Rings as its focus, rather than by means of the Notion Club Papers.]
*
Who is Dolbear? A wizard/ angel/ messenger from Faery
*
The character of Dolbear jumps-out of the Notion Club Papers as somebody about whom there is more than meets the eye.
Almost everything he says is wise and cuts-deep.
He seems to understand more of what is going-on than anyone else.
He seems to be a kind of grey eminence at the least, greatly respected by the other members (underneath their chummy chaffing) and probably somebody who is - in fact - actually stage-managing the whole process by which the Notion Club re-establishes contact with Faery.
(We know Dolbear has certainly been working, independently, with Ramer even before the meetings were reported and also later with Lowdham - on their dreams and interpretations.)
*
In this sense Dolbear resembles Gandalf - who is a wizard or an 'angel' in disguise; in the sense of being a higher being from the undying lands who is a messenger and catalyst.
A catalyst in chemistry is an agent which facilitates a chemical reaction yet itself remains chemically unchanged by the reaction.
This would apply pretty exactly to Dolbear. I would guess that his character is solid, and would not change throughout the story.
And we would not have access to Dolbear's inner life - he would (like Gandalf) be observed rather than experienced.
He would make things happen, by hints and directions and providing key pieces of information.
And at the end of the story Dolbear would return (like Gandalf) whence he came - to Faery.
*
This is (I speculate) the meaning of Dolbear seeming to sleep though the meetings, yet remain apparently aware of everything which is happening in them - indeed more aware of the implications of the meetings than are the active participants.
I suspect that during sleep Dolbear is in contact with Faery and with the Notion Club at the same time.
He is therefore a conduit or passageway linking Oxford and the undying lands - he transmits the proceedings of the Notion Club to Faery, and receives instructions of what to do.
Dolbear's trance-like states of sleep are therefore (I believe) the specific means by which the inhabitants of Faery are encouraging the renewed contact between England and Faery which the Notion Club themselves seek.
*
The character of Dolbear jumps-out of the Notion Club Papers as somebody about whom there is more than meets the eye.
Almost everything he says is wise and cuts-deep.
He seems to understand more of what is going-on than anyone else.
He seems to be a kind of grey eminence at the least, greatly respected by the other members (underneath their chummy chaffing) and probably somebody who is - in fact - actually stage-managing the whole process by which the Notion Club re-establishes contact with Faery.
(We know Dolbear has certainly been working, independently, with Ramer even before the meetings were reported and also later with Lowdham - on their dreams and interpretations.)
*
In this sense Dolbear resembles Gandalf - who is a wizard or an 'angel' in disguise; in the sense of being a higher being from the undying lands who is a messenger and catalyst.
A catalyst in chemistry is an agent which facilitates a chemical reaction yet itself remains chemically unchanged by the reaction.
This would apply pretty exactly to Dolbear. I would guess that his character is solid, and would not change throughout the story.
And we would not have access to Dolbear's inner life - he would (like Gandalf) be observed rather than experienced.
He would make things happen, by hints and directions and providing key pieces of information.
And at the end of the story Dolbear would return (like Gandalf) whence he came - to Faery.
*
This is (I speculate) the meaning of Dolbear seeming to sleep though the meetings, yet remain apparently aware of everything which is happening in them - indeed more aware of the implications of the meetings than are the active participants.
I suspect that during sleep Dolbear is in contact with Faery and with the Notion Club at the same time.
He is therefore a conduit or passageway linking Oxford and the undying lands - he transmits the proceedings of the Notion Club to Faery, and receives instructions of what to do.
Dolbear's trance-like states of sleep are therefore (I believe) the specific means by which the inhabitants of Faery are encouraging the renewed contact between England and Faery which the Notion Club themselves seek.
*
An imaginary completed Notion Club Papers - form and character
*
The Notion Club Papers were probably written over a period of about 9 months between late 1945 and the middle of 1946.
As they stand there are a fascinating fragment, full of evidence about Tolkien and his deepest concerns; but of extremely limited appeal and either unpublishable or else destined only for a small cult audience.
*
If the NCPs had been completed they would, I believe, have ended-up very differently from the way they exist at present.
As argued by Verlyn Flieger in Interrupted music, I believe the purpose of the NCPs would have been to provide a frame for Tolkien's legendarium - in other words, a pseudo-historical 'explanation' for how the legends of the elves, Numenor and ancient Middle Earth were transmitted to our times (transmitted specifically to England, and even more specifically to Oxford).
How a link between Middle Earth (this modern world) and Faery was re-established.
The name I will give to this imaginary completed book is Annals of the Notion Club (or ANC for short; drawing upon the work of Flieger and of TA Shippey in describing Tolkien's fascination for 'Annals' - and their hinted depths beyond)
*
The shape of the Annals of the Notion Club would have been the same as Tolkien's other works - some kind of heroic quest in which the hero or heroes come into contact with 'Faery' and an ennobled by contact with 'higher things' and made wiser by their experience.
This implies that the ANC must have had a hero or heroes, and that (for dramatic interest) the reader would need to know the thoughts and feelings of this hero or heroes.
In other words, there would need to be characters - something which is lacking or indirect and inexplicit in the current NCPs.
In other words, character, feelings, thoughts would need to be more explicit - more novelistic.
*
The form of the NCPs, i.e. the literary conceit of their being the formal minutes of club meetings, would therefore need to be dropped or relaxed; to bring in much more direct forms of narrative or reportage.
This was already beginning to happen in the later parts of the NCPs, with the introduction of letters from Lowdham (plus some footnotes), and an extended 'dream sequence' which reports Lowdham's inner state during an Anglo Saxon episode.
So, in the ANC there would be a great expansion of such letters, and also probably diaries and journal entries - so as to bring the reader into more direct contact with the action.
*
In terms of character, the ANC would therefore need to get inside at least one of Guildford, Ramer, Lowdham and Jeremy.
My guess is that it would have been Guildford - the recorder, who would become the narrator, and speaking directly to the reader (to posterity) about the collection of minutes, letters, poems, fragments and journal entries which he has gathered and collated with the aim of preservation and propagation.
Probably, Guildford would have remained a rather subordinate character in terms of the action and excitement, and the extrovert Lowdham in particular would have emerged as the most obvious hero - supported by Jeremy who would - I guess, end-up being the main person responsible for achieving the quest to re-connect with Faery.
I suspect the Ramer character might therefore have receded in importance. His role might be in learning the languages necessary to interpret the documentary material eventually recovered from Faery. He might have done this in collaboration with Lowdham, or mostly on his own - but Ramer's role at the end of the ANC would perhaps be as scholarly interpreter of the texts brough back to Oxford by Jeremy (who seems not to be skilled as a philologist or historical linguist)
I would imagine that Lowdham would make the breakthrough, be responsible for navigating the boat and actually arriving in Faery; but then would stay-behind in faery (with his father) and Jeremy would be the one who returned to England bringing the legendarium.
*
In sum, the ANC would be presented as a collection of minutes, letters, journal entries etc. by Gulidford concerning the Notion Club in general and Lowdham and Jeremy in particular - telling the story of how a link between faery and England was re-established by the efforts of the Club - firstly in dreams then ultimately by a voyage to Faery.
The link between Faery would therefore be firstly psychic, and then secondly physical - such that at first there were glimpses, then a break-through of visionary material from the past having physical effect in England (the storm replicating the downfall of Numenor), then an actual voyage to Faery and the return of extensive documentary material - including recovered knowledge of how to understand it.
*
The Notion Club Papers were probably written over a period of about 9 months between late 1945 and the middle of 1946.
As they stand there are a fascinating fragment, full of evidence about Tolkien and his deepest concerns; but of extremely limited appeal and either unpublishable or else destined only for a small cult audience.
*
If the NCPs had been completed they would, I believe, have ended-up very differently from the way they exist at present.
As argued by Verlyn Flieger in Interrupted music, I believe the purpose of the NCPs would have been to provide a frame for Tolkien's legendarium - in other words, a pseudo-historical 'explanation' for how the legends of the elves, Numenor and ancient Middle Earth were transmitted to our times (transmitted specifically to England, and even more specifically to Oxford).
How a link between Middle Earth (this modern world) and Faery was re-established.
The name I will give to this imaginary completed book is Annals of the Notion Club (or ANC for short; drawing upon the work of Flieger and of TA Shippey in describing Tolkien's fascination for 'Annals' - and their hinted depths beyond)
*
The shape of the Annals of the Notion Club would have been the same as Tolkien's other works - some kind of heroic quest in which the hero or heroes come into contact with 'Faery' and an ennobled by contact with 'higher things' and made wiser by their experience.
This implies that the ANC must have had a hero or heroes, and that (for dramatic interest) the reader would need to know the thoughts and feelings of this hero or heroes.
In other words, there would need to be characters - something which is lacking or indirect and inexplicit in the current NCPs.
In other words, character, feelings, thoughts would need to be more explicit - more novelistic.
*
The form of the NCPs, i.e. the literary conceit of their being the formal minutes of club meetings, would therefore need to be dropped or relaxed; to bring in much more direct forms of narrative or reportage.
This was already beginning to happen in the later parts of the NCPs, with the introduction of letters from Lowdham (plus some footnotes), and an extended 'dream sequence' which reports Lowdham's inner state during an Anglo Saxon episode.
So, in the ANC there would be a great expansion of such letters, and also probably diaries and journal entries - so as to bring the reader into more direct contact with the action.
*
In terms of character, the ANC would therefore need to get inside at least one of Guildford, Ramer, Lowdham and Jeremy.
My guess is that it would have been Guildford - the recorder, who would become the narrator, and speaking directly to the reader (to posterity) about the collection of minutes, letters, poems, fragments and journal entries which he has gathered and collated with the aim of preservation and propagation.
Probably, Guildford would have remained a rather subordinate character in terms of the action and excitement, and the extrovert Lowdham in particular would have emerged as the most obvious hero - supported by Jeremy who would - I guess, end-up being the main person responsible for achieving the quest to re-connect with Faery.
I suspect the Ramer character might therefore have receded in importance. His role might be in learning the languages necessary to interpret the documentary material eventually recovered from Faery. He might have done this in collaboration with Lowdham, or mostly on his own - but Ramer's role at the end of the ANC would perhaps be as scholarly interpreter of the texts brough back to Oxford by Jeremy (who seems not to be skilled as a philologist or historical linguist)
I would imagine that Lowdham would make the breakthrough, be responsible for navigating the boat and actually arriving in Faery; but then would stay-behind in faery (with his father) and Jeremy would be the one who returned to England bringing the legendarium.
*
In sum, the ANC would be presented as a collection of minutes, letters, journal entries etc. by Gulidford concerning the Notion Club in general and Lowdham and Jeremy in particular - telling the story of how a link between faery and England was re-established by the efforts of the Club - firstly in dreams then ultimately by a voyage to Faery.
The link between Faery would therefore be firstly psychic, and then secondly physical - such that at first there were glimpses, then a break-through of visionary material from the past having physical effect in England (the storm replicating the downfall of Numenor), then an actual voyage to Faery and the return of extensive documentary material - including recovered knowledge of how to understand it.
*
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Curing the 'vulgarization' of England - from Smith of Wootton Major
*
As I infer and guess, the basic situation in The Notion Club Papers is that of Smith of Wooton Major; as explained by Tolkien in the essay which describes the back-story and is published in the (marvellous!) extended edition of 2005 by Verlyn Flieger.
The basic situation is, therefore, a 'vulgarized' Oxford, England, Western Civilization - a society out-of-contact with Faery: in more general terms, a society out-of-contact with myth.
Hence vulgar, coarsened, materialistic; without depth, meaning or purpose
The action of the Notion Club throughout the novel, I speculate, would have been aimed at restoring this contact between Faery and England; and indeed I speculate that the climax of the novel would have been precisely this re-establishment of contact.
*
From Tolkien's essay about SoWM:
"The crafts of Wootton, on which their present prosperity was based, actually owed their fame and commercial success in the beginning to the special skill and 'artistic' quality which contact with Faery had given to them.
"But the commercial success had for some time begun to have effect. The village had become comfortable and self-satisfied. The artistic quality of its products was declining, and to some extent also their traditional manual skill, though this had not yet affected their market
"But the village was in a danger which it did not see: a dwindling of its prosperity, which would not be maintained for ever by 'good name' and established connexions with eastern customers, nor by mere industry and business acumen. If the thread between the villagers and Faery was broken it would go back to its squalid beginnings.
"The vulgarization of Wootton is indicated by Nokes. He is obviously a somewhat extreme case, but clearly represents an attitude fast spreading in the village and growing in weight.
"The festivals are becoming, or have already become, mere occasions for eating and drinking. Songs, tales music dancing no longer play a part - at least they are not provided for (as is the cooking and catering) out of public funds, and if they take place at all it is in family parties, and especially in the entertainment of children. (...)
"History and legend and above all any tales touching on 'faery', have become regarded as children's stuff, patronizingly tolerated for the amusement of the very young.
"This situation is evidently one that has aroused the concern of Faery. Why? It is plainly shown that Faery is a vast world in its own right, that does not depend for its existence upon Men, and which is not primarily nor indeed principally concerned with Men.
"The relationship must therefore be one of love: the Elven Folk, the chief and ruling inhabitants of Faery, have an ultimate kinship with Men and have a permanent love for them in general.
"Though they are not bound by any moral obligation to assist Men, and do not need their help (except in human affairs), they do from time to time try to assist them, avert evil from them and have relations with them, especially through certain men and women whom they find suitable.
"They, the Elvenfolk are thus 'beneficent' with regard to Men, and are not wholly alien, though many things and creatures in Faery itself are alien to Men and even actively hostile. Their good will is seen mainly in attempting to keep or restore relationships between the two worlds, since the Elves (and still some Men) realize that this love of Faery is essential to the full and proper human development.
"The love of Faery is the love of love: a relationship towards all things, animate and inanimate, which includes love and respect, and removes or modifies the spirit of possession and domination. Without it even plain 'Utility' will in fact become less useful; or will turn to ruthlessness and lead only to mere power, ultimately destructive.
"It is probable that the world of Faery could not exist without our world, and is affected by the events in it — the reverse being also true. The 'health' of both is affected by state of the other.
"Men have not the power to assist the Elvenfolk in the ordering and defence of their realm; but the Elves have the power (subject to finding co-operation from within) to assist in the protection of our world, especially in the attempt to re-direct Men when their development tends to the defacing or destruction of their world.
"The Elves may thus have also an enlightened self-interest in human affairs." (...)
*
Comment:
As scholars and writers, the Notion Club would have been aware of the necessity for human contact with Faery (i.e. with myth) in order that their work (as well as their lives) may be profound, imaginative and ennobled - and rise above mere 'utility'.
The means by which the club would restore contact with myth would, I assume, be the usual ones employed by Tolkien and of which hints exist in the incomplete and surviving NCP text: by a quest, by a hero who is an 'elf friend', and by a 'messenger' between Faery and the mundane world (certainly a human messenger, and probably an elven messenger as well).
*
As I infer and guess, the basic situation in The Notion Club Papers is that of Smith of Wooton Major; as explained by Tolkien in the essay which describes the back-story and is published in the (marvellous!) extended edition of 2005 by Verlyn Flieger.
The basic situation is, therefore, a 'vulgarized' Oxford, England, Western Civilization - a society out-of-contact with Faery: in more general terms, a society out-of-contact with myth.
Hence vulgar, coarsened, materialistic; without depth, meaning or purpose
The action of the Notion Club throughout the novel, I speculate, would have been aimed at restoring this contact between Faery and England; and indeed I speculate that the climax of the novel would have been precisely this re-establishment of contact.
*
From Tolkien's essay about SoWM:
"The crafts of Wootton, on which their present prosperity was based, actually owed their fame and commercial success in the beginning to the special skill and 'artistic' quality which contact with Faery had given to them.
"But the commercial success had for some time begun to have effect. The village had become comfortable and self-satisfied. The artistic quality of its products was declining, and to some extent also their traditional manual skill, though this had not yet affected their market
"But the village was in a danger which it did not see: a dwindling of its prosperity, which would not be maintained for ever by 'good name' and established connexions with eastern customers, nor by mere industry and business acumen. If the thread between the villagers and Faery was broken it would go back to its squalid beginnings.
"The vulgarization of Wootton is indicated by Nokes. He is obviously a somewhat extreme case, but clearly represents an attitude fast spreading in the village and growing in weight.
"The festivals are becoming, or have already become, mere occasions for eating and drinking. Songs, tales music dancing no longer play a part - at least they are not provided for (as is the cooking and catering) out of public funds, and if they take place at all it is in family parties, and especially in the entertainment of children. (...)
"History and legend and above all any tales touching on 'faery', have become regarded as children's stuff, patronizingly tolerated for the amusement of the very young.
"This situation is evidently one that has aroused the concern of Faery. Why? It is plainly shown that Faery is a vast world in its own right, that does not depend for its existence upon Men, and which is not primarily nor indeed principally concerned with Men.
"The relationship must therefore be one of love: the Elven Folk, the chief and ruling inhabitants of Faery, have an ultimate kinship with Men and have a permanent love for them in general.
"Though they are not bound by any moral obligation to assist Men, and do not need their help (except in human affairs), they do from time to time try to assist them, avert evil from them and have relations with them, especially through certain men and women whom they find suitable.
"They, the Elvenfolk are thus 'beneficent' with regard to Men, and are not wholly alien, though many things and creatures in Faery itself are alien to Men and even actively hostile. Their good will is seen mainly in attempting to keep or restore relationships between the two worlds, since the Elves (and still some Men) realize that this love of Faery is essential to the full and proper human development.
"The love of Faery is the love of love: a relationship towards all things, animate and inanimate, which includes love and respect, and removes or modifies the spirit of possession and domination. Without it even plain 'Utility' will in fact become less useful; or will turn to ruthlessness and lead only to mere power, ultimately destructive.
"It is probable that the world of Faery could not exist without our world, and is affected by the events in it — the reverse being also true. The 'health' of both is affected by state of the other.
"Men have not the power to assist the Elvenfolk in the ordering and defence of their realm; but the Elves have the power (subject to finding co-operation from within) to assist in the protection of our world, especially in the attempt to re-direct Men when their development tends to the defacing or destruction of their world.
"The Elves may thus have also an enlightened self-interest in human affairs." (...)
*
Comment:
As scholars and writers, the Notion Club would have been aware of the necessity for human contact with Faery (i.e. with myth) in order that their work (as well as their lives) may be profound, imaginative and ennobled - and rise above mere 'utility'.
The means by which the club would restore contact with myth would, I assume, be the usual ones employed by Tolkien and of which hints exist in the incomplete and surviving NCP text: by a quest, by a hero who is an 'elf friend', and by a 'messenger' between Faery and the mundane world (certainly a human messenger, and probably an elven messenger as well).
*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)