#this was sparked mainly because I was reading a collection of essays/writings done by old people who fuck LMAO

[bottomvalerius]

I gotta go back to my “Sam getting his hip replaced post him and Donna breaking up” shit because I think it’s funny if 1.) he refuses to acknowledge it when they’re back together and just says “I stayed in Prakra for a bit when our dynamic ended. No biggie” (A/N: it is a biggie because he never stays there longer than a few weeks lmao) and 2.) it’s 110% because he could not keep up with Donna’s mid twenty ass and the power it holds lmfao

[dawnfelagund]

Rereading LotR: The Prologue

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings because it has been a dreadfully long time since I last read it in my first semester in my MA program. I can no longer read Tolkien purely for pleasure. Part of me wants to append an “unfortunately” to the front of that statement. Part of me also recognizes that reading Tolkien is now such a deep, minds-on experience that is also very pleasurable. Knowing this, I stuck a small stack of post-its into the front of the book this morning when I left the house, knowing I’d find stuff and have ah-ha moments and want to jot down notes. Because, frankly, I am far less familiar/comfortable with LotR than The Silmarillion.

And I’ve also decided to blog about the experience. I doubt I’ll do every chapter, but when I bump into stuff that makes me all flappy-hands excited and like I must write an essay right now or I might explode, I will try to blog about what provoked this.

So today Mr. Felagund was on-shift all day at Jay Peak and needed me to get the groceries for the week, so I treated myself to lunch out alone and the Prologue of LotR. Most of my musings on the Prologue have to do with historiography: Tolkien went to extensive lengths to create fictional authorship of the legendarium, and that authorship which relates to LotR is discussed in the Prologue. And of course this fictional authorship--and particularly the bias I believe JRRT deliberately wrote into the texts--is a major research interest of mine right now. But I also discovered lots of interesting stuff in there about oral versus written tradition among the Hobbits.

“To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar [the Hobbits] sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it.”

This is exactly what I mean. The Prologue also states that the Hobbits had primarily an oral tradition and many were not literate. This quote is interesting because it brings to the fore the valuation of oral histories versus written histories.

We see this in The Silmarillion as well, where precious little of the story is devoted to the histories of people who are not explicitly literate, such as the Avarin Elves. Literate people--the Noldor, Sindar, and Edain--receive most of the attention. The sons of Fëanor lived among the Elves of Ossiriand so they weren’t inaccessible; presumably oral histories could have been collected from among them, except that Pengolodh seems to have fallen into the literate fallacy that the written word is inherently and unequivocally superior. (Tell that to someone who has memorized a text like the Rig Veda or who is competent enough with oral formulas to construct an hours-long epic retelling ex tempore!)

Our (presumably Hobbit) author here seems to feel the same way. The “or so they maintained” has a qualifying, dismissive ring to it. Take that line out and the tone of the sentence changes significantly. As it is, that aside introduces doubt, like, “It wasn’t written down? But why not if it didn’t happen? So maybe it didn’t happen?” (Taking it out makes the sentence read, to me, like the Mortals who failed to record it had ulterior and not entirely magnanimous motives.)

Of course, according to the Prologue, the authors of the texts that form LotR and the Appendices were highly literate--as was Pengolodh, the “author” of much of The Silmarillion--and likely put a lot of weight on written texts and records. Nonetheless, this single line lends credence to my theory that Tolkien was aware of these kinds of historiographical dilemmas in his legendarium: Who got to determine what stories were told and how they were told? I do believe he thought about this and made narrative choices based on such considerations.

“[Hobbits] liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.”

More on Hobbit historiography! This makes me think that this is a trait of a society that relies heavily on oral tradition, which is inherently conservative, functioning to preserve the past and traditions/wisdom that everyone already knows rather than fording forward into inventiveness the way we think of literature as doing.

This also strikes me as the opposite of The Silmarillion, which it appears Tolkien constructed in such as way as to open multiple contradictions from a historiographical perspective. (Hence my work on historical bias and who gets to tell their story in The Silmarillion.) But The Silmarillion is written with a completely different sense from LotR, which reads like a story. Obviously, there is a clear point of view, but short of wading through the Prologue and/or Appendices, one could escape a reading of it without being aware of it as a “historical text” per se. I think this is far less easily done with The Silmarillion, which is written in such a style as to invite comparisons with ancient and medieval texts of dubious historicity. The characters of The Silmarillion are also much more morally complex: the Fëanorians (”bad guys” whose deeds are often positive or noble) and Thingol and Túrin (”good guys” who don’t seem to do much actual good).

This quote makes this make sense, though. As progressive as the Hobbits who authored and compiled research for LotR may have been, as much stock as they seem to have put in written versus oral tradition, they still come from a conservative culture that holds these values. So the story they write leaves very little room for ambiguity, either in terms of what happens or the moral message one should take away from it.

“Of the Finding of the Ring”

This whole section is fascinating because it recounts how Tolkien essentially leveraged the status of his story as an imagined history (rather than a “story” with clear events that unequivocally happened) to rewrite the riddle scene in The Hobbit to better accommodate its “sequel,” which would become The Lord of the Rings. I know this is common knowledge by now, but it still delights me every time I read it.

An interesting tidbit from this section: “[Frodo and Sam] seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself,” even after they learned the truth of the riddle episode from Bilbo. Both were willing to make notes about the text but not to actually change it. Of course, this can be read as a form of deference to Bilbo. It can also be seen as another “symptom” of the conservative oral tradition where the predominant narrative is indeed still the “true” narrative, even if not the factual one, and where the wisdom taught by such a story is more important than the factuality of the details. (On the latter point, the behavior of the hero fitting a certain type--namely, not that of a thief, trickster, and liar--might have motivated keeping the original story intact. See above about the Hobbits’ distaste for contradictions ...)

“At the end of the Third Age the part played by the Hobbits in the great events that led to the inclusion of the Shire in the Reunited Kingdom awakened among them a more widespread interest in their own history; and many of their traditions, up to that time still mainly oral, were collected and written down.”

And so the Hobbits transition from a primarily oral society to a definitively literate one in the Fourth Age. This passage again contains a whiff of superiority of written over oral culture: The notable events of the Ring Quest and the return of the King triggers interest, which sparks a sudden surge in literacy; therefore, literacy must also be a good thing. The idea that participation in the great events of the world might encourage an interest in the oral tradition doesn’t seem to occur to the author of this text. Although, somewhat ironically, when Samwise imagines how their experience will be represented in the Shire, he imagines it recounted as part of the oral tradition.

The passage that suggests that Bilbo translated what we know as The Silmarillion as part of the Red Book of Westmarch occurs in this last section of the Prologue as well:

“But the chief importance of Findegil’s copy is that it alone contains the whole of Bilbo’s ‘Translations from the Elvish’. These three volumes were found to be a work of great skill and learning in which, between 1403 and 1418, he had used all the sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But since they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days, no more is said of them here.”

Christopher Tolkien, in the preface to The Book of Lost Tales 1, expresses regret in not making this more explicit, having doubted that there was enough certainty when he compiled and published The Silmarillion to say definitively that the Red Book contained the texts we know as The Silmarillion. The Tolkien scholar Robert Foster first suggested it, and Christopher--citing this passage--later came to agree and regretted not making this clearer. I also feel the loss of the loremasters in The Silmarillion but, hey, hindsight is 20/20 and The Silmarillion is indeed a “work of great skill and learning.”