One major issue was that Tolkein passed around his manuscripts to his friends for their input. They would often make suggestions and Tolkein would make some revisions. The problem was that he was doing this with several people so his friends were reading and Tolkein was revising different versions of a book (and he often sent out manuscripts in sections). This process led to some narrative inconsistencies and not all of them got reconciled in the final text.
I disagree. While the Shire was part of Middle Earth it was pretty much isolated from the rest of world. The Shire was essentially Tolkein’s idealized England which was relocated into a epic fantasy setting. So the Hobbits were essentially ordinary people visiting extraordinary lands.
I must admit I sort of made a childish noise of delight when I saw this.
I must have these books!
Must.
Thanks for the link, fellow Tolkienian enthusiast!
I can see how that POV is appealing, but it doesn’t jive with the Scouring.
The Scouring was explicitly a way of pointing out that you don’t get to have your adventures elsewhere in some far off land, come back, and simply pretend it’s all happening to unrelated people in some world that’s not really connected to your own, as in the case of Alice or Gulliver (or even your namesake).
Even if it’s a little pocket hick province, the Shire is supposed to be part of the rest of that world. Now, that little pocket province may have been basically Tolkien’s idealized England, but it was always supposed to be part and parcel of the rest of the fantasy world he created.
Fanciful setting from our perspective, not from their perspective. The Shire is good old comfortable England, disrupted by visitors from outside. Any fairy tale journey starts off from a fantastic place from our current view, but that isn’t what is important. Luke Skywalker sets off from a boring place from his perspective also.
Sure, but Luke understands there’s this big fantastic world outside. He just happens to inhabit a relatively boring part of it. Likewise, the hobbits know there’s this big scary world outside the Shire, even if they choose never to explore it and stay in their boring little piece of that world.
That’s not true for either Alice or Gulliver, who didn’t know about fantasy worlds and couldn’t have been expected to know about them, either.
I don’t think that’s the case especially. For example, towards the end of his life he wanted to throw away the creation stories in The Silmarillion and start again. Tolkien proved he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to revise his work, greater than any other author I can think of. His work is characterised by obsessiveness and meticulousness.
Why would he fundamentally change a tale if he was happy with the structure of it? The Lay of Luthien had special importance to Tolkien, as it relates to himself and his wife. He was forbidden from courting her by his guardian, for the duration of his undergraduate studies. Tolkien grew up in a very different world from us.
I think you’ve created a false dilemma for the author here. Writing the story from the perspective of the Hobbits was a good artistic decision, but there is no reason an author should feel bound to follow this slavishly. Why would Tolkien see this as a problem? At one point in the 3rd chapter, the story jumps to the POV of a fox.
I don’t see it like this, and given Tolkien’s views on what he would call “grace”, he almost certainly didn’t either. Through their persistence Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin are rewarded, and given the opportunity to influence events. I imagine he drew on his own feelings of responsibility, impotence and guilt from the two world wars he lived through, and used this to give the characters a bit more depth.
You are of course entitled to your opinion on what you feel are failings in the story, but I don’t think your explanation of them carries any weight, as your assumptions are contrary to known facts about Tolkien’s writing process.
I agree that the world building adds a great deal of richness to LOTR, but I also think he was a master storyteller. Unlike you, I find the overall arc of the story very satisfying.
Nor do I. However, I take a different view from you on LOTR flaws. For example, I agree Celeborn “The Wise” is a poorly drawn character, but I see this as more of a compromise than bad writing. His purpose in the text is to serve as foil for Galadriel, giving her an excuse to demonstrate her larger sense of perspective, and develop her rapport with Gimli. Expanding on Celeborn’s character would detract from Galadriel (an important character to Tolkien, he drew on the virgin Mary for inspiration), and could be fruitless, as the fellowship are destined to leave Lothlorien. Fleshing out every minor character excessively would just bloat the book.
Other flaws of the book are more fundamental, but are perhaps bound up with it’s strengths. LOTR is not strong on social realism, but that wasn’t Tolkien’s goal, he was trying to write an English mythology. It’s an expression of his idealised values. I’ve always felt his conception of evil as an external force was wildly unrealistic, but I don’t think it would improve the story to change this.
just pressed my imaginary “like” button for your post, Alka-Seltzer.
I still think that Celeborn being “the wise” is just a polite fiction. Galadriel is really one of the wisest beings in the world, but she’s willing to pretend that it’s her husband is the wise one, and they’re both OK with that setup. Sounds like a good arrangement for a marriage that lasts for twenty millennia.
In that context, maybe. But Gulliver was a sailor, not someone staying at home, and while he may not have been aware of the specific fantastic places he found, he certainly saw many nearly as fantastic from his perspective.
It is not clear to me how much the hobbits knew, or wanted to know, about the outside.
For all practical purposes, the Scouring wasn’t part of the story. It wasn’t a historical event within the context of the story and it didn’t occur during the main storyline. It was the second-to-last chapter in the trilogy and was essentially an epilogue. Its purpose was to show that the events of the book had been so significant that its effects reached even into isolated areas like the Shire, which had never before been touched by outside events. But that just reinforces the point that up until the very end of the story, the Shire had been an isolated area untouched by outside events.
He wasn’t bound to follow slavishly, and indeed he didn’t, because starting with the Two Towers he let his non-hobbit characters have chapters to themselves without a hobbit intermediary.
Writing from the perspective of Hobbits was probably a deliberate artistic decision in the beginning. It’s what he did in The Hobbit, to good effect. But in LOTR it just didn’t work out so well, which leads to the pacing problems that are evident in Fellowship Of the Ring. While we’re visiting Tom Bombadil and slogging through the Midgemarsh with the Hobbits, the real story is what Gandalf’s doing off in Isengard.
Halfway through, the story comes to a screeching halt while we go back and recap all of that. If Tolkien’s manuscript had gone to a more hands-on editor (someone like John W Campbell for instance), I imagine it might have come back with the direction to rewrite Fellowship from the point of view of Gandalf.
And yet, we know that Tolkien was not a careless or unskilled writer. Something else has to account for the oddities we find in LOTR – chiefly the pacing issues in Fellowship, the sometimes flat characterizations, and the inconsistencies in the tone. Hence, my theory…
No argument there. An attempt at social realism would have been absolutely wrong for LOTR, and probably for Tolkien as well. Other writers, like Michael Moorcock and Mervyn Peake were much better placed to tackle that sort of thing.
My feeling is that Tolkien could have left it out altogether and gone straight onto the The Grey Havens and nobody would have known the difference (which is what Peter Jackson did). But I do wonder whether it was meant to be more integral to the story than it is. It seems odd to me that Tolkien goes to all the trouble of establishing Bill Ferny and Fatty Bolger as characters, and then doesn’t do anything with them. I’ve speculated that perhaps they were meant to be part of some subplot that didn’t make it into to the book.
Re: Comparisons with Gulliver…
Gulliver’s Travels is Jonathan Swift’s take on the traditional quest plot. LOTR is Tolkien’s take on it. I think the differences are trivial, because the main difference is that Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a self-contained secondary world, and so the Shire is necessarily placed within it. But in that first chapter, Tolkien goes out of his way to establish the shire as familiar and mundane – to the extent he refers to it as “the shire” instead of by it’s proper name (Arthedain, I think), and gives everyone folksy sounding nicknames like Merry and Pippin and Fatty.
Even so, what’s central to the quest plot is the idea of the journey. The journey itself drives the action of the story, and it’s motivations are pretty-much secondary to that. (It’s not significant that Alice and Gulliver don’t appear to have any particular motivation.) Compare this to tragedy, where the hero’s fatal flaw drives the action, or the traditional comedy where a misunderstanding between the principle characters drives the story. You can see the quest plot at work in LOTR and in Gulliver’s Travels. It’s also somewhat in the Pilgrim’s Progress, though I’d classify that more as an allegory. It’s parodied in Don Quixote. It goes at least as far back as The Odyssey.
just gotta keep disagreeing with you, Kim, about the Scouring. don’t see it as an epilogue. With the hobbits THE main characters, their return home to find that no where is untouched by evil and that they have to fight it there is indispensable.
and I like the structure of Fellowship. We’re following the Ring. Pretty darn important, I’d say.
While I’m at it I have to say, I think a lot of people misunderstand genre writing. The point of writing to a genre is not to perfectly and slavishly reproduce the conventions of that genre, but to use the genre to set up the expectations of the reader. And having set that baseline, the author can then play against those expectations, twisting them to his own end to create an original work of fiction.
Tolkien did exactly this. He invokes the traditional quest plot, but instead of setting it in Fairyland or an exotic foreign country (the traditional venues for such stories) he invented an entire world. He was after all a twentieth century writer, an no doubt instinctively understood that the old Fairyland or foreign parts thing wasn’t going to cut it with modern readers. He followed Robert E Howard’s lead by invoking a distant and long forgotten past, but in the end elected not to emphasize that aspect of it and simply presented Middle Earth as its own thing without explanation.
Also as a twentieth century writer who survived two world wars, he would have understood that the home-front could not endure a war unscathed, or remain in complete ignorance of significant world events. So in the Grey Havens he makes it clear that the elves were leaving and that the old ways were passing, and that henceforth Middle Earth would be the land of men. That’s a theme that fits very well with popular sentiment after the first world war (the same period where we see the rise of modern and abstract art, and modern literature).
Genre writing stagnates and dies when its conventions become absolute rules that cannot be broken – where the reader’s expectations are considered sacrosanct and cannot be challenged.
How could it not be? The main climax has already happened. How can there be another rise of conflict during the falling action? How can it be presented as anything other than an epilogue?
I think the scouring of the shire was probably meant to be their moment of glory. But in the end, the hobbits acquitted themselves quite well in the main part of the story, so there was no need of it. And you can sort of see that in their reactions, when they learn what’s been going on. They more or less say, “What’s all this nonsense? We’re heroes, we’re not putting up with this!” Then it all sort of goes away. It’s all over and done with in a single chapter.
But for me personally, the scouring of the shire does one thing I can’t forgive. It turns Saruman into a Snidely Whiplash style cartoon villain. Saruman is supposed to be a powerful wizard – one of the Maiar – not a moustache twirler.
I know, and there is no reason to assume he wouldn’t have done so sooner in the tale if he’d felt the need.
I don’t know if a chapter or two written from Gandalf’s POV would improve the story, as no such version exists, but I tend to disagree. Again, it’s about compromise. Gandalf is already a well established and vivid character, so it’s probably better to concentrate on the Hobbits and Aragorn. Having Gandalf absent for reasons unknown greatly adds to the tension of the story.
The midgewater marsh is a single page, you really think that’s a pacing problem? I’m neutral on Tom Bombadil myself, but I can see why a lot of readers don’t like him, and I agree he is unnecessary.
Trying to be objective, I really can’t see how Gandalf’s tale can be described in that manner. We hear of Gollum’s capture and escape, and Saruman’s treachery, while learning more about the history of Middle Earth. It also hints at events in Rohan and Gondor. Above you’ve talked about the importance of Tolkien’s world building, and the council is a perfect opportunity to explore this.
I personally like the fact that quite a bit of the action happens off stage. It also has the effect of shortening the book considerably. A character presenting a summary is a lot more concise than following each event as it happens. For example, Gollum’s escape would be a chapter by itself.
That’s actually quite funny. Tolkien’s initial refusal to split LOTR into three books and his insistence that The Silmarillion must also be published held up LOTR’s publication for five years. He would grudgingly accept the advice of some friends, such as C. S. Lewis, but he’d never have submitted to the control of an editor. He could have taken the easy route of a straightforward sequel to The Hobbit, which is what his publisher asked for and was well within his ability. Greatly to his credit, he chose to follow his creative muse, despite how painful the process was for him, and the financial pressure he was under.
In it’s final form, both Tolkien and his publisher thought the book had no commercial potential. Raynor Unwin estimated their firm might lose £1,000 (a considerable sum at the time), but that the book should be published anyway, due to it’s importance. Under Tolkien’s contract, he received no advance, and would receive no royalties until the book had broken even. As compensation, he was given a much larger share of the profits once that point was reached.
To be blunt, your theory is bunk, as you’ve made the mistake of making some unfounded assumptions and running with them. It’s a trap I’ve fallen into before. Your criticisms of the book itself may or may not be valid, is inconsistent tone really a problem? I find it quite effective, as the hobbits enter a larger, more dangerous world. The hobbits start out as very naive, and the author’s voice reflects that.
I think you misunderstand the main point of the scouring. Yes, it does show the character growth of the hobbits, but it’s overall tone is of sadness. It certainly isn’t the climax of the story, that’s clearly the destruction of the ring, which happened several chapters earlier. The final chapters are about the passing away of the old world and the establishment of the world of men.
Tolkien was explicit that The Shire was an idealised version of England. However, you might be surprised to hear what he thought about it’s inhabitants. Hobbits are basically decent, but they are also for the most part very small minded. We see this in their total lack of curiosity in what the travellers have been up to.
Thanks. I spent quite a bit of time composing it and checking things, so sometimes it’s nice to hear it hasn’t been completely swallowed by the black hole which is the internet.