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Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

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Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#91

Post by eredengrin »

notahacker wrote: post #39
eredengrin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also the whole mythology is directly based on christian mythology That sounds like a pretty big stretch to me, could you elaborate? I agree there are most certainly elements from Christianity in it, but claiming the entire thing is based directly on it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, nor does that seem to be how Tolkien viewed it, at least as far as I can tell. For example, in one particular quote in the p…

He apparently said 'the Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.' But what he didn't like were crude 'Saruman represents Judas' type comparisons, not least because he'd criticised his friend CS Lewis for being as explicit as to incorporate Jesus as a talking Lion who is resurrected into his novels and said he found their sy…

Yeah that quote does sound familiar, but I'd say that's a bit different than "the whole mythology is directly based on christian mythology". I think the moral framework of his world certainly has strong roots in the Christian tradition and I expect that is what Tolkien was referring to in that quote, but the stories themselves are generally quite distinct from anything you'd find in Christianity. I think this is pretty much what you are saying as well, so I think we're mostly in agreement here.

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#92

Post by yters »

macleginn wrote: post #86
yters wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does MacDonald rely on medieval literature for his characters and plots? I've read a fair amount of both Tolkien and MacDonald, and I can see some similarities, but nothing obviously stands out as Tolkien copying wholesale from MacDonald. OTOH both of their writings remind me of medieval stories, e.g. faerie queen, arthurian legends, beowulf, etc.

Moving sentient malevolent trees (from Phantastes) are, AFAIK, MacDonald’s own invention. Also the depiction of the goblin kingdom under the mountain is deeply original, even though the idea itself is older. Tolkien copied both. There are other examples.

The tree thing in MacDonald seems pretty different. In MacDonald's story it looks like a normal person. In Tolkien, we have ents, which are treelike moving giants. The idea of sentient trees in general is very old and appears in a lot of folklore. The root of goblin is kobold and the name means hollow in a rock, and goblins are also a very old and widespread folklore trope. But, perhaps an entire underground kingdom is unique to MacDonald, so Tolkien took that idea.

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#93

Post by atombender »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23
macleginn wrote: post #13

One fascinating aspect of Tolkien’s oeuvre is that his writings are, how to put it, endlessly derivative. Not only did he use words from different languages, motifs from different mythologies, and images from different poetical traditions. He also mercilessly raided the writings of George MacDonald for characters and plot elements (try reading ‘Phantastes’ or ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ to appreciate just how freak…

He did it so well that most "high" fantasy that came out after him felt derivative of Tolkien. I'd really like to see counter-examples though; I feel like I haven't dived into the genre enough, in part because I'm turned off by the sheer volume of some book (series) on the one hand, and the juvenile tropes (generic hero's journey formula) on the other.

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun would be a great counter-example.

The novel owes absolutely nothing to Tolkien; it's entirely its own thing, subverting generic fantasy tropes left and right, while providing a clever variation on the classic hero's journey. And the same time it has this magnificent aura of otherwordliness, like a mythological narrative written thousands of years into the future (which it purports to be). It's an absolute masterpiece.

Wolfe really made a career out of subverting fantasy tropes. His Latro series [2] (Soldier of the Mist, etc.) is set in Ancient Greece, and features an amnesiac mercenary whose memory resets every day. The Wizard Knight is another good one; essentially a riff on Tolkienesque Norse mythology and Medieval romances, it features a prepubescent boy who is accidentally transported to a fantasy dimension, and then into the body of an adult knight. It's absurd, but also deliciously weird, just like some of Wolfe's other books (the Long Sun and Short Sun books, etc.).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B08...

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#94

Post by amyjess »

jfengel wrote: post #55
dash2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps, one can say that Tolkien is 20th century‘s Shakespeare Hmm, I doubt it. The Hobbit is fun, but many adults returning to LOTR think "gosh, this is long, dull and badly written". Here's an example, which is also a more interesting review than the unherd one: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons...

It's not uncommon for great literature to also seem long, dull, and badly written. And everybody is entitled to their taste. I don't like lots of great literature. But Tolkien is uncannily like Shakespeare in that it appeals both to people who come looking for Dungeons and Dragons, and also to academic literary scholars. There are academic conferences, and one literature professor has been doing a close reading of Lo…

Finding out that hippies in the '60s were into The Hobbit was a huge headtrip.

For example, Leonard Nimoy sung a ballad about it in 1967, with a music video full of dancing hippies. It's a lot of fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#95

Post by eredengrin »

goto11 wrote: post #31
eredengrin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also the whole mythology is directly based on christian mythology That sounds like a pretty big stretch to me, could you elaborate? I agree there are most certainly elements from Christianity in it, but claiming the entire thing is based directly on it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, nor does that seem to be how Tolkien viewed it, at least as far as I can tell. For example, in one particular quote in the p…

Just read the creation myth in the first chapters in Silmarillion. It's basically Paradise Lost with more diacritics. What other mythologies have angels anyway? The Tolkien mythology is monotheistic and morally dualistic (good vs evil), which is fundamentally different from the pagan cultures he is otherwise inspired by. I actually think this is key to his success: He takes a lot of cool stuff from pagan mythologies…

Yes, the creation of the Tolkien universe most certainly has the most direct inspiration from Christian myth, but to say the entire thing is based on it is a much stronger statement. Once the earth is formed to the point of the arrival of the elves, most of those stories afterward have very little comparison to anything in Christianity. Beren and Luthien, the creation of the rings, the wars over the Silmarils...perhaps I was just misunderstanding what you meant by the "whole mythology is directly based on christian mythology". As I mention in another comment, there is certainly a lot of Christian inspiration in the framework of the world, and you do see that in how it is all set up in the first few chapters. The stories themselves (built within that framework) seem no more related to Christianity than any of the other places they draw inspiration from.

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#96

Post by eredengrin »

goto11 wrote: post #27
jacobush wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it have been WW1 he would have processed? Both because he was in it and because it was the first industrialised war. Mordor makes one think of trenches and devilish factories.

> Mordor makes one think of trenches and devilish factories. Tolkien hates you now! But seriously, he was open about how WWI influenced his writing. I think his rant against allegories is more about direct allegorical reading like "Mordor is supposed to symbolize WWI trenches etc."

I totally agree here. I think there's a difference between recognizing where Tolkien's inspiration came from vs saying that an element which took inspiration from elsewhere was necessarily meant to specifically represent that thing in his work.

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#97

Post by setr »

bjz_ wrote: post #40
have_faith wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we have an unhealthy obsession with trying to achieve 100% original thoughts and ideas, to the point that people often hide their influences unless they feel people will understand that they didn't borrow too much. Feels like a psychological trap.

Yeah, it's not an uncommon to feel this way, especially if you've not learned the humanities formally. Pretty much the first thing I learned in art theory at university was how much art depends on influence and appropriation, and that it's important to accept and embrace this. It was a hard lesson to learn as a young person striving to be original, but it's served me really well. Even as I now move into programming,…

If you take enough sources, any particular combination of them is very likely to be unique -- but anyways uniqueness never mattered; everything interesting in CS was discovered in the 70s. Even cloning & updating a forgotten paper can be of extremely high value.

The bigger risk is that by not knowing your sources, you end up repeating the same work from the same start, and end contributing little

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#98

Post by macleginn »

yters wrote: post #92
macleginn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving sentient malevolent trees (from Phantastes) are, AFAIK, MacDonald’s own invention. Also the depiction of the goblin kingdom under the mountain is deeply original, even though the idea itself is older. Tolkien copied both. There are other examples.

The tree thing in MacDonald seems pretty different. In MacDonald's story it looks like a normal person. In Tolkien, we have ents, which are treelike moving giants. The idea of sentient trees in general is very old and appears in a lot of folklore. The root of goblin is kobold and the name means hollow in a rock, and goblins are also a very old and widespread folklore trope. But, perhaps an entire underground kingdom…

I meant the tree from early on in LOTR that tried to swallow the hobbits.

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#99

Post by yters »

macleginn wrote: post #98
yters wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tree thing in MacDonald seems pretty different. In MacDonald's story it looks like a normal person. In Tolkien, we have ents, which are treelike moving giants. The idea of sentient trees in general is very old and appears in a lot of folklore. The root of goblin is kobold and the name means hollow in a rock, and goblins are also a very old and widespread folklore trope. But, perhaps an entire underground kingdom…

I meant the tree from early on in LOTR that tried to swallow the hobbits.

Ah, that makes more sense. I would still say they are both drawing on common mythic material, e.g. myths of daphne, narcissus, and I think in the odyssey there are bleeding reeds. However, the tree smoothering is similar, so I can grant Tolkien was inspired by MacDonald.

Re: Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

#100

Post by ttctciyf »

macleginn wrote: post #32
ttctciyf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Endlessly derivative" aligns pretty well with Tolkien's idea of the "Cauldron of Story": > Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. > For this reason, to take a casual example, the fact that a story resembling the one known as The Goosegirl (D…

Yes, so I hope it was okay with him when Lloyd Alexander took LOTR, watered it down, combined it with everything he could profitably extract from Mabinogion, and published the end result as the Chronicles of Prydain. On a more serious note, I would suggest that Tolkien with his unabashed traditionalism was actually a major figure in the 20th c. postmodernist tradition. The "Cauldron of Story" is not very far removed…

Interesting take on The Cauldron! I find it surprisingly Jungian, personally.
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