Kevin's Watch

Thanks mate, will check it out.

Excellent, I hope that you do. It's just the place to discuss these sort of issues, in an environment in which you can speak your mind, as long as you're prepared to back it up.

I'm amazed I've never mentioned it before to you, as I usually hound people about participating there with us, and your posts are just the type that benefit the 'Tank by offering another perspective. (Perhaps it's because you usually stick to discussing TC.)

One of the great things about the Watch is that there is literally something for everybody. You just have to explore.

--Avatar

Hmmmmm.....

There's almost certainly going to be some bait that will be too good not to take in the Tank, probably only a matter of time till the collective assimilates me.....however it's a fair way off this (SRD) beaten track. There's also a hell of a lot to try to catch up on so as to avoid making startling insights that are in fact old hat!

I'm still interested in the effects of SRD's real life as painted in the 3 Chronicles. There certainly seem to be religeous threads, with the deliberate use and reference of names such as Elohim (great post in Sons of Elohim) and its seems, social catastrophe post 9/11. There seems also to be referents to his marriage and maybe yet to be seen allagories of his family.

But what are the consequences of events? Does the fall of Kevin's Watch, close the door between the Land and our Earth? How does this translate to post 9/11 America, a sort of us (you) against the rest of humanity?

If this thread needs to be removed to the Tank, well OK, but I'd be keen to hear from you guys further on your thoughts and feelings. There is a direct theme here which is based in TCOTC and may so far, only be scratching the surface.

Lurch, I think you're right it is a whopper!

..I find it fascinating that the first two chrons seemed to be about overcoming ones despair. There is a dichotomy in the world view of Humankind today. The disgust of the holocost and continuing genocides, rampant greed, etc, leading to the one side view that Humanity is beyond redemption, and therefore eventually doomed, it will be its own downfall. And the opposing,,that no matter how disgusting We have been , its Hope with Passion that finds way to land on the Moon, create symphonies, express beauty in writing, painting etc, find cures for diseases,,etc etc, etc ,.

The first two Chrons seemed to me about overcoming the despair with the Hope of, ones attempted good deed would bring a better world. The 3rd and Last, keeps going on that exploration..possibly,,and takes a look at Hope in its extremism. So, we arc from the extremism of despair that reality can be, and overcoming it,,to the extremism of Hope and its consequences and if any,,overcoming or maybe "tempering" its excessives. Great Twist there,,despair of reality kept in check with passionate Hope,,and extreme Hope kept in balance with healthy Reality checks..Again,,somewhere in the grey zone is where we find ourselves.

Now..the paradox, the authors dilema..current events are of such nature, that they hold sway or have serious effects on your Theme. I mean..9/11 had serious effects on all of us,, changed our view of things from a little to alot,,and therefore, when viewing from a larger perspective, as artists generally do..can demand changes in their work to accomodate the shift in the larger picture. I am not saying,,the artist sells out his beliefs,,but the artist is more strained to remain True to his or her vision.

So events may be such that they can be benefical to the authors work. Its up to the author to find the True expression in his use of all the craft at his disposal. In this case of Donaldson and The last Chrons..its quite possible "events" just happened to reinforce Thoughts that were being formulated for the last 30 years...There is the " eventuality" aspect of the Realists with their Despair. Its interesting for an artist on the Hope side of the Coin,,to use it for his own purposes............MEL

Actually, there's nothing new in reading a well-known fantasy book as an allegory of current events, and it isn't always a mistake: cf. Terry Goodkind. (Well, it might be a mistake to read some of Goodkind's books, but not for that reason.) But that's not the way to bet it.

If you were to ask SRD himself whether Runes contains veiled references to 9/11, I think he would be likely to answer in terms reminiscent of this:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, from the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings

Caveat lector!

VF...and that explains how it is,,that after many attempts, I to this day have not been a Tolkien fan,,and have never been able to get more than 150 or at best 200 pages into his work. I have never been able to forge an emotional attatchment with any of the characters and plot. Taken as he insisted, just a story of Good vs Evil,,it is indeed way to complex and filled with filigre to be worth it. ...MEL

lurch wrote:VF...and that explains how it is,,that after many attempts, I to this day have not been a Tolkien fan,,and have never been able to get more than 150 or at best 200 pages into his work. I have never been able to forge an emotional attatchment with any of the characters and plot. Taken as he insisted, just a story of Good vs Evil,,it is indeed way to complex and filled with filigre to be worth it. ...MEL

I agree Lurch. I have not ever been able to "get into" anything Tolkein has done. That might not be popular to post here, but oh well. People and times change. I cannot see the world in "black and white", because there's to many shades in between. Im sorry if that offends anyone, but Im not simple minded enough to see people the way Tolkien describes them. Good or eveil? Sorry, you can start out good and go bad, or even vice versa. If the character doesnt have the depth, they arent interesting.
Maybe thats why Liand gets on my nerves....LOL

If you think everything in Tolkien is simply black and white, you obviously didn't 'get into it' far enough to discover Boromir, or Saruman, or Denethor, or for that matter, Gollum. Frodo himself succumbed to the evil of the Ring; Sam was tempted, and his hasty anger destroyed Gollum's last, best chance of redemption. And there are no pure heroes in The Silmarillion, except possibly Eärendil, who only appears briefly in the last chapter.

'Nothing is evil in the beginning,' said Gandalf. 'Even Sauron was not so.'

If you don't like Tolkien, that's fine by me. But please don't go justifying it by accusing him of things that he did not do.

Whopper?

Bah, hamburgh!

VF: I love both Tolkein and Donaldson but they are different. I think you're right it is hard to compare and harder still if you limit the criteria for comparison.

There are clearly some changes to Tolkein's characters during the course of events in Middle Earth and you are right that there are more rounded and complex characters in the Silmarillion. But in LOTR and the examples you quote, the characters do go from extreme to extreme, (in any event that's how I read it, but I think that is also contectual).

I think this had a bit to do with two things, firstly that JRRT originally sketched the characters out as a children's tale and then needed to flesh them out with greater depth and gravity as the Lord of the Rings evolved. Secondly, he became more experienced as a writer and as a person and so learned to develop characters with greater depth.

LOTR was in some ways hampered by its origins in the Hobbit, in which the characters were definitely "General Release". LOTR certainly increased the stakes and brought the tone up to "Parental Guidance" level, but I think it had the potential to be more if Tolkein had started it later and had freed it from the Hobbit to a "18+".

That's not to say it was and is not a remarkable piece of work and one I love to re-read at times, but it is different from Donaldson. SRD is able to take the genre into the "18+" realm.

He is also able to write from a contemporary perspective, Tolkein is very "BBC" and his characters are clearly characterised by middle to upper middle class stereotypes, the kind of people he was used to mixing with, post war/pre 60's England was the type of place that Graham Greene became successful at writing about, pointing out its shortcomings and hypocracy.

The bad guys (Orcs Goblins etc,) have working class accents and are clearly less intelligent than "the wise"...I doubt that the Tolkein of that time, given the choice, would have allowed the working people of England Tolkein to vote!

SRD has the advantage of writing post 60's where we do not have to address our betters with suitable deference, where sex and drugs and rock and roll are a part of everyday life, where most people are able to explore their capabilities with less handicaps inflicted by social background. The idea that Eomar or Gandalf (or for that matter even the bad guys) could rape an elf for example, or that Aragorn was a leper would simply not fit into LOTR and would not have been accepted by the audience of the 50s, whereas there really is no restriction on SRD.

So comparing SRD and Tolkein is really not on except to say you either like one or other or both, or not. My own view, like yours I believe, is that they are both exceptional talents and are there to be enjoyed.

Actually, the 'working-class accents' of the Orcs are strictly an artifact of the films. When the BBC did its radio production of LOTR, Tolkien warned them sternly:

I should say that, in the cases you query, no accent-differentiation is needed or desirable. For instance, it would probably be better to avoid certain, actual or conventional, features of modern 'vulgar' English in representing Orcs, such as the dropping of aitches (these are, I think, not dropped in the text, and that is deliberate).

That's from a letter to Terence Tiller, the producer of the adaptation. If JRRT had still been alive in 2000, he would have delivered the same warning to Peter Jackson — and the accents used by the Orcs in the movies would have pained him deeply.

As for your other points, I would suggest that you do some careful study of the 1950s and what an audience of that time might or might not accept. For instance, Lolita was published in 1955 and was immediately recognized as one of the most important novels of the decade. It is now fashionable to look at the 1950s as a decade of bland, white-bread entertainment, McCarthyist xenophobia, and repressive racism and sexism. This is a ridiculous caricature based on the worst events of those years, which were considered scandalous by a great many people even at the time. It is not even broadly true of the U.S., and not at all true of other countries. (Please bear in mind that Tolkien was not an American.)

In any case, Tolkien's work was neither influenced nor limited in any way by the demands of popular culture at the time. He himself was entirely aloof to pop culture and largely unaware of it. Publishing a 500,000-word monster of a novel in 'an age devoted to snappy bits' (as Tolkien called it), and setting it as a high romance in mediaeval style, chock-full of fantasy elements, were far more threatening to the mainstream culture of the 1950s than any amount of mere cultural subversion or even pornography would have been.

If you want a better idea of how Tolkien (and fantasy in general) was regarded at the time and for many years after, I suggest you track down and read Ursula K. LeGuin's brilliant essay, 'Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?' You can find this in her book Language of the Night — if you can find the book, which is not so easy at present. It's out of print, unfortunately.

With respect VF, I don't know if you intended to be condescending or not but I grew up in the 50's in England.

The English class system in the 50's was very rigid, Tolkein was from a family that would be broadly described as Upper Middle Class and his academic standing would also have put him into that category. Bear in mind, catagorising people then was an important part of the social fabric, people were expected to and in many cases were happy to "know their place".

With the arrival of the 60's there was a revolution in social attitudes, fuelled by a youth culture that rejected the previous status quo. In the UK, national service was dispensed with and popular culture found an outlet through music, film etc. which became more readily available especially with the advent of transistors. I say the UK because as you point out Tolkein lived in England in what is still the heart of conservatism, the OxBridge University system.

I reject Tolkein's rationalisation that the way he portrayed his villains was not working class. By the time the BBC radio production was underway, social attitudes had changed to a point where he needed to effectively apologise by distancing himself from what everyone could clearly see, that his villains were based upon "those rude, coarse working people". For example, the Hobbit has trolls who's names were shortened in the manner of working people; Middle Class and above would use Albert, working people used the shortened, Bert. There are other examples of this, but the BBC, despite being a product of and for the middle classes and above, picked the accents based upon the perceptions of other indicators which suggested that they would have accents.

Tolkein's 'stern' letter appeared to have no impact at all and the films are relatively recent even including the half-filmed 'cartoon'. The BBC radio version of the Hobbit and LOTR both portray Goblins, Orcs and Trolls as having English working class accents. Times change and attitudes change with them, contemporary audiences tend to anthropomorphise today's standards onto yesterdays events and villify or glorify them accordingly; Fantasy fiction owes much to this.

At the time much of LOTR and the Hobbit was written, attitudes to class, place, position etc. were central to the balance of English society and that's assuming that Tolkein was not harkening back to his own mellow childhood years. Perhaps also best not go too far into racial stereotypes, his african background and the part played by non-whites in the extended army of Sauron.

Whilst I appreciate your suggestions VF, I lived the 50's and understand how to suck eggs as well as the many of the nuances of those times; perhaps this is why I enjoy Tolkein harkening back to my mellow years. The 50's had its share of adventurous artists, the climate on both sides of the Atlantic created that imperative, Tolkein was not hailed by the [i]literatii [/i]but by readers who had demanded more hobbit stories from the publisher, equally much of the work hailed by the [i]literatii[/i] was not immediately engulfed by an art starved public which then might have looked at the the likes of Lolita, in the same vain as internet porn today.

As for Dragons in the US, I was going to use an example of changing standards with European armies invading Africa and killing thousands to protect their "claim" to mineral resources until I realised some things don't change: the Dragon's hoard is now Oil.

However we are now way off beam for SRD discussion.

To take some points briefly, and in no particular order:

Tolkien's 'African background' has been cited by many people, all of whom conveniently forget the fact that he remembered virtually none of it, having left Africa for ever at the age of three. This is the weakest of all the arguments that have ever been made against him or his work. If it is 'best not to go too far into' this question, it is largely because there is less than meets the eye.

You cite the dialogue of the Trolls in The Hobbit. They did indeed have grossly stylized Cockney accents, something that Tolkien came to regret before the publication of LOTR. (Citations on request.) He deliberately and carefully refrained from giving any modern English dialect to any of the characters in LOTR, except for the indications of rustic (not 'lower-class', except by irrelevant modern association) speech by some of the Hobbits. If you want to accuse him of basing any character on 'those rude, coarse working people', start with Sam Gamgee — who was also, by the way, in Tolkien's own words 'the principal hero'. The Orcs speak in quite a different mode. I should like to know what 'other indicators' you find that 'suggested that they would have accents', and working-class accents in particular.

In his professional work, Tolkien made much of the fact that in Old and Middle English, 'accent' was a function of place and time, and not of social class — as indeed it has generally been in most places and times outside England. He regarded this as a matter fundamentally impossible to portray accurately in non-technical work for a general audience — which is one reason why he also warned the BBC against giving the characters in 'The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth' an East Anglian accent.

I don't believe you know enough about Tolkien to judge that his claim was a 'rationalization' and not a genuine statement of intent. What you claim was 'obvious' to 'everybody' may equally well have been a case of 'everybody' interpreting the work through their own pre-existing prejudices.

Another note on the theme of class. It takes a selective presentation of the facts to describe Tolkien's family as 'upper middle class'. The Tolkiens had risen to some prominence in the 19th century as piano-makers, but had fallen on hard times. Benjamin Tolkien, JRRT's paternal grandfather, was bankrupt before JRRT was born; Arthur Tolkien, JRRT's father, was unable to provide for a family except by taking a job with the Bank of Africa in Bloemfontein. JRRT's maternal grandfather, John Suffield, was a failed draper descended from a family of engravers and plate-makers, and in the 1890s was earning his living as a commercial traveller. And if any suspicion of 'upper' hung about either of those families, it would have been thoroughly disinfected by Mabel Tolkien's conversion to Catholicism and her subsequent ostracism by both families. JRRT's own education fell short of the upper-middle-class standard — private school not public, and a day student not a boarder — and he was distinctly the social inferior of most of his fellow undergraduates at Oxford, which he could not have attended at all without scholarships and the extensive financial help of his guardian, Fr. Francis Morgan. I should venture to classify his immediate background as middle-middle-class, and desperately hard pressed to maintain even that status: what George Orwell once called 'the black-coated poor'. He had at any rate seen the English class system from both sides, and been the victim of considerable class (and religious) prejudice himself. And he immediately recognized the working-class Tommies who served briefly under him during the First World War as superior beings to himself: not the act of a class-ridden snob who thought of working people as tantamount to Orcs.

In short, your view is tenable only if you assume that Tolkien was blatantly and systematically lying in everything he said about himself and his work, both publicly and in his (available) private letters. I do not believe that any other evidence exists on which you can convict him of having been a habitual liar, and absent that, I am more inclined to believe his repeated and consistent asseverations than your own guesswork.

Clearly VF you are well schooled in the subject of Tolkein's life and times and you can incline yourself to believe what you will, however times change and so do attitudes and opinions, I'm sure that Tolkein was not perfect and may have experienced embarrassment at stereotypes which at the time of writing were commonplace, but at a later time were inappropriate.

At the time of writing and publishing LOTR, guest houses in England had placards outside them stating "Rooms for Rent - No Blacks - No Irish" Clearly anyone alive today who put up such a placard would not be boasting about it publicly or probably even privately in correspondence. The times were VERY different to today or indeed to Tolkein's later years. You seem bent on defending him, but I am not attacking him but have some understanding of the environment which he lived in and many of its influences.

Unless you were a friend of Tolkein, I would suggest you know Tolkein as an academic, I am speaking of a lifetime working with people and some understanding of human nature: you do not know me well enough to know what I know or do not know, you may believe what you wish.

The point raised initially was about his characters being more black and white than grey, which despite digression, I still think is the case. I did not think to see the same polarity on this board. If I do not agree with something, I am not by default taking the opposite polar view; that I do not agree with someone about the motive behind something Tolkein has written, does not imply that I accuse Tolkein of being a serial liar. The opinion that my view is only tenable if I think that to be the case is falling into the same trap of black or white polarity.

Equally the "class-ridden snob who thought of working people as tantamount to Orcs" is not what I said at all but a polar view of non agreement. Why so defensive?

VF you and I can disagree or agree on a number of things between now and kingdom come, but lets keep it civil shall we? Play nice, I can really live without the I know better than you attitude.