I’ll agree that the Scouring of the Shire could have been left out, and readers would not have missed it. However, I like it, and often see it mentioned with fondness in discussions – it’s a good inclusion. Probably many episodes could have been left out with just a few narrative patches needed to cover their omission. You’re right in that it was not needed to show the hobbits’ heroism, but that was not its purpose. Instead it translated the need for extraordinary heroism into the need for everyday heroism. A battle with 100,000 casualties is going to be an intellectual abstraction, but a story where 15 of your neighbors are killed is something that can be grasped by almost anyone.
Saruman’s degradation was also an interesting tale. After his staff has broken, he was just a smart, bitter guy with an attitude. No great powers. But Tolkien’s point was that he did not have to be shattered by his downfall. It is **not **better to rule in hell than to be a decent member of society. Saruman made his choice and it ended up with him being stabbed by a grubby underling.
I’m not sure Middle Earth is substantively different than the Hyborean Age – just exquisitely filled out. They’re both prehistoric Earths with gods, demons, warring nations. Howard ties his to the Earth’s timeline more than JRRT, but not with any passion or precision.
yes, thanks for the thoughtful thread, although I disagree with many of your points Kim. As already stated, I think the Scouring is vital. (we can quibble about the definition of epilogue. If Tolkien had retained the horrible bit he wrote where Sam is talking years later with his daughter Elanor, that would have been a true epilog.) I think the evil Saruman shows is frightening and true. The inconsistencies you see in the book that bother you never bothered me, and i just finished a slow reread of it, so I’m pretty aware of the pacing and tone. I especially disagree with your need to restructure ‘Fellowship’. Telling the story from the hobbits’ point of view increases the tension. Including ‘non-essential’ story bits allows for time to flesh out the characters a bit and make us care about them more.
Regarding your last point, I thought it was rather brilliant of the Professor to demonstrate the banality of evil: Saruman the White, stripped of power and position, resurfacing as Sharkey, showing his malice and pettiness and dying from a knife wound in the back from his own minion.
Regarding your first, I felt the Scouring of the Shire was to show not only that there were no corners of Middle Earth left untouched by the shadow of evil but also so that we could see how the hobbits had grown over the course of their journey.
Numerous parts of LOTR evoke (in me) images of Nazis, Hitler, Napoleon or Mussolini. I’m sure Tolkien strove to avoid obvious political symbolism, still when you’re writing about dictatorial warlords in the middle of the 20th century there are going to be some relationship to actual events.
In the Scouring, Saruman was a petty bully with good oratorical skills. Most dictators start out as petty bullies, and if they’re nipped in the bud they don’t end up plunging the world into chaos. I don’t know that Tolkien was advocating democracies being more aggressive about quashing local bullies before they became powerful, but if you lived through the World Wars it would be hard not to feel that way. The hobbits came back from Gondor ready to meet the challenge, but its a situation that will arise again and again over the centuries and the battle is never completely won.
I think the fundamental flaw in this entire theory is that it is approaching the entire situation as if Tolkein were a modern author, who was sitting down and plotting all this stuff out in advance, and honestly, that runs contrary to everything I’ve ever read about the man’s creative process.
There’s a reason the Professor decided to represent this as a story he “discovered” rather than a story he “wrote” and it has to do with his fundamental mindset when creating this stuff.
I find the very idea that he had everything parcelled out neatly in an “Okay, Frodo will be the PoV character for a while, with Sam tagging in later when Frodo is too corrupted, and we’ll need a hobbit for Rohan and a Hobbit for Gondor…” fashion to be completely groundless based on all indications, and without that degree of preplanning, the entire theory comes crashing down.
I meant to add, sorry if my post comes across as a little harsh Kim, but it seems you haven’t checked your facts before putting your theory together. You’ve obviously spent some time thinking about it, but I think you’ve started from the wrong place. There is a lot of published material covering the development of his works, and his letters shed a lot of light on what he thought about various aspects of Middle Earth. I’ve found it an interesting thread, as it’s encouraged me to think about some aspects of the story I hadn’t given much thought before.
Nothing that I’ve spoken about here would suggest conscious pre-planning on Tolkien’s part. In fact, the pacing problems I’ve noted in Fellowship would suggest a lack of it.
To me, Tolkien comes across as a very organic writer. He’s not interested in the typical writerly sort of stuff like plot-arcs, tone, pacing, foreshadowing, and the dramatic curve. He’s interested in the details – the language, the history, the incidental poetry, the landscape. When you compare LOTR to something written in a much more systematic way (say, Michael Moorcock’s Hawkmoon series), the difference is obvious.
Actually Gulliver was an educated man and a surgeon who took employment aboard ship. The point of Gulliver’s Travels and the “fantastic” places he finds himself in is to parody a) travel genre writing and b) to satirize contemporary politics in Europe. The fantastic is not all that important other than to place the satire in an unfamiliar place in order to highlight the satire.
No. The Scouring is as vital to the novel as the first chapter, they in fact form a “ring composition” in the novel. Others have expressed the theme in those chapters better than the above, but I refer you up thread rather than merely repeat.
I confess that I think you need to read and think more about this. The techniques of pacing and interlace that Tolkien used are well-known, well-accepted, and evident to those, like his original European, educated audience, who read more than modern fantasy novels. There are no “pacing issues”: Chapters of high intensity and adventure are followed by chapters of rest and those are followed by a chapter of preparation for the next adventure. That’s good construction and pacing. The use of conversations and dialogue to fill in what other characters have been up to is also a good technique and leaves the reader desiring more. And your theory doesn’t work, founded as it is on a belief that is simply contrary to fact.
There is no “quest” in Gulliver’s Travels. It is evident that in Tolkien’s work, the motivations are not secondary, and that LoTR (unlike The Hobbit) is not mere journey tale.
So? Simple stories have a single climax. The success of Tolkien is that there are a series of climaxes…climax, falling action, rising action, new climax…
I’ve addressed this notion upthread already, so won’t merely repeat. But Saruman has lost his power…go back and read The Two Towers. Saruman’s downfall also teaches a lesson about evil: compare Saruman at the end with Faustus in Marlowe’s version of the tale.
I think you’re both wrong on this one. LoTR is a carefully constructed, complex work that borders on being a “cycle”, albeit a small one. There are no pacing problems save in the mind of certain readers who need to be thrilled on every page; Tolkien’s careful plotting, careful constructions of points of contact between various threads, the complex interlacing, the tone change, the constant foreshadowing, and dramatic curve’s construction and the structure of the novel as a whole point to a man hyper concerned with those issues as well as language, history, poetry and landscape. That some readers don’t see the systematic artistry of the author does not mean the artistry is not present.
Kim - Tolkien’s pages of exposition kept me enthralled. He did not fail as a writer. I can’t put it any plainer than that.
and as was stated by other posters Saruman is used in Scouring to show the banality and pettiness of evil. would not have worked with an unknown character in that position.
I seriously don’t see the problems with pacing, pov, or scouring etc that you do. They are not problems with the work so much as just stuff that you personally don’t like. not a failing of the author necessarily.
Yes, Tolkien put a lot of work into it. But LOTR’s plotting is nothing to write home about. Nor is the interlacing of various threads. As I’ve pointed out, the dramatic curve is all over the place, because the scouring of the shire is step down from dramatic battles that precede it, and Gandalf’s imprisonment in Orthanc doesn’t make it into the book at all except as post-hoc exposition. The landscapes of middle earth are at best generic.
Those aspects of LOTR I’d describe as mostly adequate, but not particularly notable, and I can think of plenty of other books that do it better.
honestly, Gandalf being imprisoned “offscreen” never bothered me in all my rereads of the book. The Scouring never seemed like a ‘step down’ to be. The plotting and the landscapes are strong suits - I understand you less and less with every post. we can agree to disagree, and I definitely disagree.
Kim, although I find your considerations interesting, it seems you came to them without taking much time to find out more about Tolkien and his work, judging merely by your reading of LOTR.
The result is you operate from several misconceptions about how the LOTR came into being. Others have pointed out The History of Middle-earth, which shows fully the changes he made along the way (and they were many) - not just in characters, but in plot.
But more than that, you breezily commented that you didn’t think he gave much attention to foreshadowing (among your other breezy dismissals), something I find astonishing. Tolkien not concerned with foreshadowing? Frodo’s dream of the kings while at Tom Bombadil’s is foreshadowing of Aragorn (down to the green gem he wears as King Elessar); Sam looking in the Mirror of Galadriel is explicit foreshadowing of the choice Sam will have to make in the pass of Cirith Ungol; Boromir’s information at the Council of Elrond that his brother had had the summoning dream several times, but he only once - that’s a foreshadowing of how Faramir handles meeting the Ring far better than Boromir. One could write several papers about foreshadowing in LOTR.
Also, although you have a fair grasp of fantasy as a genre, there wasn’t much “tradition” before Tolkien began his creation. Other than the tradition of heroic and epic literature from ancient to medieval times. Before Tolkien began his world creation during WW I, there wasn’t much “tradition” in the genre other than William Morris and Lord Dunsany. Everyone else dates after he’d already set his foot on that fantasy pathway – Howard, Lovecraft, Cabel, Eddison. The “ordinary hero” is more prominent in fairy-tale tradition than in heroic/epic fantasy. And Tolkien knew the difference between the two traditions, although he drew from both.
And just as a stickler for “period” in English lit (it was my major), Tolkien comes from the Edwardian era, not the Victorian. He is definitely a 20th century writer.