Blogging The Silmarillion: Closing the book on the Third Age

Part nine of Blogging The Silmarillion concludes with Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

“Many are the strange chances of the world,” said Mithrandir, “and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

A recurring theme in The Silmarillion is Elves and/or Men meeting force with force, the result of which is endless cycles of war and ruin. In the Quenta Silmarillon Melkor steals the three Silmarils, and their maker, the Noldorin Elf Fëanor, vows to recover them at all costs. Fëanor’s destructive oath sets in motion a millennia-spanning series of conflicts that continue until the Valar intercede in the War of Wrath, another horribly destructive affair which mars Arda forever and ends the First Age of Middle-earth.

But even after Morgoth’s defeat in the War of Wrath, evil is not destroyed, nor are possessiveness and pride stamped out of the hearts of Men. In the Akallabêth the Númenóreans fall victim to the same Fëanor-like sins of pride and overreaching when they try to wrest immortality from the Valar. The result is the destruction of their civilization.

Thus far it’s been pretty bleak stuff from Tolkien, and with only one section of The Silmarillion left it’s still very much an open question whether Men and Elves will ever learn from their mistakes, or whether Middle-earth is doomed to ever more destructive wars of possession. And so we arrive at Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: A straight road is bent and Men suffer punishment divine

Part eight of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with the Akallabêth.

According to scholar Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien struggled to reconcile his belief in a Christian heaven with the uncertain fate of the pre-Christian heroes he so adored. Un-baptized and living in a pagan age, where would the spirits of great Northern heroes like Beowulf dwell after their death? Likewise, what would be the fate of his Middle-earth creations, for example the slain Elven heroes Fëanor, Fingon, and Fingolfin? And where would their living, immortal brethren ultimately take up residence? The answer as explained in The Silmarillion is twofold: The Halls of Mandos, which houses the spirits of Elves slain in battle, and Valinor, the Blessed Realm, a paradise on earth removed from the darkness of Middle-earth.

Valinor and the Halls of Mandos serve as halfway houses for pre-Christian souls, or as Shippey notes in The Road to Middle Earth, a “middle path” where they remain until the Ragnarök-like ending of the world. While the Halls of Mandos can perhaps be thought of as a less rowdy Valhalla, Valinor makes a wonderful, shifting metaphor: The Garden of Eden; a lost time of innocence; a dim remembrance of a better time in our own lives; a loved one separated by death but who we hope to rejoin one day; they’re all applicable ways of assigning meaning to the Undying Lands.

Of course Valinor is sadly beyond not only our reach, but the reach of the denizens of the Third Age of Middle-earth. It’s a divide not merely between heaven and earth, but a split on Middle-earth itself. This is Tolkien’s myth of The Lost Road, an impossible straight path on a curved earth that leads to a land of magic and deathlessness. Frodo, en route to the Grey Havens, sings of this myth in the final pages of The Lord of the Rings:

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Out of ruined lands and cities, a star of hope arises

Part seven of Blogging the Silmarillion concludes the Quenta Silmarillion with a look at Chapters 22-24.

—-

No careful reader of Tolkien’s fiction can fail to be aware of the polarities that give it form and tension. His work is built on contrasts—between hope and despair, between good and evil, between enlightenment and ignorance—and these contrasts are embodied in the polarities of light and dark that are the creative outgrowth of his contrary moods, the “antitheses” of his nature.

–Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World

J.R.R. Tolkien was, paradoxically, a man of deep faith who was subject to extreme bouts of despair. He believed that life here on earth is a long defeat, an inevitable march toward the destruction of man and all his creations. However, he also believed in an afterlife. Despite numerous defeats and endured miseries, there existed for Tolkien the possibility of final, unlooked-for victory (coined by Tolkien as a “eucatastrophe”) in this world or the next.

These contrasting sides to Tolkien’s personality are revealed in the final three chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion. In chapters 22-24 we experience (Middle)-earthian defeats that result in unimaginable ruin, followed by the Valar-backed defeat of Morgoth, a victory of truly epic scale.

It’s foolish to think that we can ever have a paradise on earth, for life here is transitory, a passing thing. So too it was in the First Age of Middle-earth. The Elves built cities of surpassing beauty and strength, but each in turn fall into ruin. While Part Six of Blogging The Silmarillion revisited the sack of Nargothrond, in this section of The Silmarillion we witness the ruin of the kingdom of Doriath, followed by the fall of the hidden mountain city of Gondolin. This is the culmination of the Long Defeat for the Elves, whose greatest and seemingly most enduring works come to a violent and ruinous end.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Of Túrin Turambar and the sightless dark of Tolkien’s vision

Thus was the fate of Túrin woven, which is foretold in that lay that is called Narn i Hîn Húrin, the Tale of the Children of Húrin, and is the longest of all the lays that speak of those days. Here that tale is told in brief, for it is woven with the fate of the Silmarils and of the Elves; and it is called the Tale of Grief, for it is sorrowful, and in it are revealed most evil works of Morgoth Bauglir.

----

Are our lives lived in vain? Are we ultimately slaves to our own weaknesses and pre-programmed natures? Does life have any real significance when death’s mouth yawns blackly at its end?

These are some of the questions with which J.R.R. Tolkien grapples in his writing, but perhaps never so clearly and forthrightly as in Chapter 21 of The Silmarillion, “Of Túrin Turambar.”

I haven’t read as much of the Northern myths as I would like, but I can say with certainty that “Of Túrin Turambar” would fit right alongside any of the stories in The Sagas of Icelanders, for example. Along with the tale of Fëanor it is the most northern story in the book: heroic and studded with mighty deeds and feats of arms, but bleak, tragic, and ultimately fruitless. This is Tolkien in his darkest hour.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Of Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-earth

In this week’s Blogging the Silmarillion, I’ve decided to take a temporary detour into two tastes that taste great together: Heavy metal and J.R.R. Tolkien. Following is a review of Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-earth, aka. The Silmarillion with electric guitars.

I can’t speak for all readers of The Cimmerian and The Silver Key, but back when I was in high school—circa 1987-91—there was a bright line drawn between fantasy fiction and heavy metal. The former was the province of D&D-playing nerds, and the latter was for bad-asses who hung out in the back parking lots, wore denim and smoked cigarettes. And never the twain shall meet.
This divide was equal parts myth and reality, of course. Some people liked both. For example, I always prided myself on having one foot in each camp, and I was not alone—most of my friends were into metal, and many were also fans of books like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

In addition, you could find a few examples of successful metal-fantasy alliances back then. For example, Iron Maiden attracted both stoners and readers alike with songs like “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Alexander the Great,” and “To Tame a Land” (the latter was a song about Frank Herbert’s novel Dune). Black Sabbath’s album Heaven and Hell (fronted by Ronnie James Dio) had plenty of fantasy imagery in its lyrics, too.

Still, in the main, the two camps were on opposing sides of the battle-line, perennially at odds like the forces of Gondor and Minas Morgul.

After high school I lost touch with the day-to-day happenings in the heavy metal scene. I kept listening to bands like Maiden and Judas Priest, but I stopped paying attention to new trends and upcoming bands. Specifically, I failed to keep up with a new metal force rising like a steel wave out of the heart of Europe, until I woke up one day to find that heavy metal and J.R.R. Tolkien had inexplicably become bedfellows. The unholy offspring of this unlikely coupling was the 1998 album Nightfall in Middle-earth by Blind Guardian.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site .

Blogging The Silmarillion: The breaking of the siege of Angband and other (myth) busting

Part five of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with chapters 16-20 of the Quenta Silmarillion.

—

By the command of Morgoth the Orcs with great labour gathered all the bodies of those who had fallen in the great battle, and all their harness and weapons, and piled them in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en-Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, “Of the Fifth Battle”

If you had but four words to describe the action of Chapters 16-20 of The Silmarillion, you could do worse than all hell’s breaking loose. It’s a section I equate to a great turning of the tide against the forces of good.

In fact, Hell breaking loose is almost a literal interpretation of what happens in the fourth great Battle of Beleriand, the Dagor Bragollach (Battle of Sudden Flame). From the deep pits and mines of hellish Angband issue great streams of fire, followed by hosts of orcs, Balrogs, and the dragon Glaurung. It’s very much as if Gehenna, on the orders of Satan, were to empty its bowels of fell spirits and demons. The Noldorin guarding Angband are destroyed or driven back as Morgoth, pent up in his fortress for nearly 400 years, breaks out with a fury and a vengeance.

Seventeen years after this eruption, the forces of good marshal for another great cast at overthrowing Morgoth and ending his reign of terror. The result is the Nirnaeth Arnoediad (Battle of Unnumbered Tears), whose enduring image is a great hill of corpses of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, captured magnificently in the above piece of art by the incomparable Ted Nasmith. The Doom of the Noldor comes home fully to roost as the grieving wives and children of the slain indeed shed “tears unnumbered.” With the defeat, Elven might in Beleriand, save in a defensive capacity only, is smashed. It’s one of the greatest and at the same time most heartbreaking scenes of battlefield ruin I’ve read.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Of northern-ness, the death of Fëanor and the creep of doom

Part four of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with chapters 10-15 of the Quenta Silmarillion.
—–---

“If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man’s unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest: hammerstrokes but with compassion.”

—C.S. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power,” from Tolkien and the Critics

J.R.R. Tolkien said in a letter that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” While true, this oft-quoted statement has led some critics and observers to pigeonhole it and his works as simple analogues of Christianity. This leads to conclusions that The Silmarillion is a parable of the Fall of Man, for instance, when in fact Tolkien’s legendarium is perhaps more akin to a hauberk of hard scale armor, its iron plates hammered together from a mosaic of influences, both Christian and other.

The deeper you get into The Silmarillion the more you feel a coldness grip your spine. It’s a bitter wind whose source is the wild North. As the late Steve Tompkins once said, “Norse and Celtic elements are as integral to The Silmarillion as are hydrogen and oxygen to water; the book is so northern that compasses point quiveringly in its direction.” While it may have been only hinted at in past chapters, this northern-ness resounds like the great hammer of Thor in the section of The Silmarillion that I plan to cover here.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Melkor strikes back, and the pride and exile of Fëanor

Part three of Blogging The Silmarillion continues with chapters 6-9 of the Quenta Silmarillion.

——–

Say farewell to bondage! But say farewell also to ease! Say farewell to the weak! Say farewell to your treasures! More still shall we make. Journey light: but bring with you your swords! For we will go further than Oromë, endure longer than Tulkas: we will never turn back from pursuit. After Morgoth to the ends of the Earth!

—from Fëanor’s speech to the Noldor, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion


Difficult and boring. Too dry. Too much history and too many names. Not enough heat and passion.

These are some of the typical complaints often leveled at The Silmarillion. As you can probably guess I don’t have much sympathy for them, and I hope that my first two Blogging The Silmarillion posts have helped dispel the myth that nothing exciting or worthwhile happens in this book. But after 50 pages of The Silmarillion it’s not an unfair question to ask (literally and figuratively): What’s the story, JRRT?

The disappointed and befuddled critics who reviewed The Silmarillion back in 1977 wanted a main character upon whose sturdy frame the story could be told; at the outset of the book such a protagonist does not seem to exist. Instead of hobbits, we’re fed a steady diet of creation myths and lists of demigods.

But I would counter with: Did these critics and disappointed readers ever get beyond Ainulindalë and Valaquenta? And if they did, how did they miss the great, proud, headstrong, damn the torpedoes Noldorin Elf known as Fëanor? Fëanor is what I would consider the first “big name” in The Silmarillion, a larger than life hero that seems to have strode out of some wild northern legend and into the pages of Tolkien’s magnificent legendarium. He shatters the pale, washed-out, emotionless Elven stereotype that people have unfairly associated with Tolkien.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Of the coming of elves, and several degrees of separation

Part two of Blogging the Silmarillion picks up with the end of chapter 1of the Quenta Silmarillion (“Of the Beginning of Days”) and continues through the end of Chapter 5 (“Of Eldamar and the Princes of the Eldalie”).
———-
“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—all stories are ultimately about the fall—at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters

If the opening chapters of The Silmarillion introduce us to the first painful split on Arda—the evacuation of the godlike Valar from Middle-earth to Valinor, a sort of heaven on earth—in the following chapters the sunderings both multiply and grow more acute. First, we’re introduced to the divisions between Men and Elves—both are Children of Ilúvatar, but have some important differences. Next comes a series of painful rents that occur when the Elves dissolve into various groups, sometimes freely and other times against their will. Finally, there’s the little matter of death, the king of all sunderings.

Why is The Silmarillion so concerned with these small separations (adding up to a great fall) from the early paradise of Middle-earth? I believe the reason is twofold. First, we know that Tolkien constructed his legendarium to create either a foundational myth for Middle-earth and/or for England itself. He needed to provide an explanation for how magic went out of Middle-earth, and how it evolved (devolved?) to become the humdrum, human-populated England that we know today, and/or the Fourth and subsequent Ages of Middle-earth. Each step away from Ilúvatar/the Valar/Valinor/the Elves is a distancing from this magic time, and a step closer to the prosaic age of Men.

Secondly, remember that Tolkien was suffused in death from his earliest days. Both his parents died when he was young, and two of his best friends were killed during World War I. How to make sense of this tragedy? Spend your life creating a grand myth to explain it. The Silmarillion provided him with a stage on which he could grapple with its mystery and create a myth for death itself.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Blogging The Silmarillion: The creation of Arda and myth-making

Blogging The Silmarillion: Series introduction

In part one of Blogging the Silmarillion, I’m sharing my thoughts on the first two sections of the book, “Ainulindalë,” and “Valaquenta,” as well as Chapter 1 of section three of the Quenta Silmarillion, “Of the Beginning of Days”.

The Silmarillion begins with “Ainulindalë,” which means “Music of the Ainur." This is Tolkien’s creation myth. As I re-read this chapter, I was struck by its affinity with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, both in terms of its imagery and characters, and in its thematic similarity to the Christian fall of man. The language is also similar, biblical and epic and “high.”

In “Ainulindalë” we learn that Ilúvatar is the creator of the known universe, including Arda. This place of wizards, heroes, orcs, dragons, and dark lords, has an omnipotent, single creator. This is an incredibly important fact. We can guess at the presence of a creator in The Lord of the Rings, but only barely. For example, Sam, journeying with Frodo in the heart of Mordor and at the nadir of his faith and endurance, senses the presence of something greater beyond this world, buoying his spirit and giving him the strength to continue:

"Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Though we don’t have a name for which to assign Sam’s divine revelation, upon re-reading The Silmarillion I realized that this is Varda (Elbereth), whose face radiates the light of Ilúvatar. It’s always been one of my favorite moments in Tolkien, and The Silmarillion helped me understand why.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: Blogging The Silmarillion

Nevertheless it was the work of his heart, which occupied him for far longer than The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. The better-known works are in a way only offshoots, side-branches, of the immense chronicle/ mythology/legendarium which is the ‘Silmarillion.’

--Thomas Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century

Few works of fantasy are as maligned and misunderstood as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. As the late Steve Tompkins noted, it’s a work that seemed to have been much-purchased upon its 1977 publication but is anecdotally little-read, and is certainly the subject of many strong opinions, both positive and negative. Wikipedia sums up a good portion of the critical response to The Silmarillion upon its release as follows:

Some reviewers, however, had nothing positive to say about the book at all. The New York Review of Books called The Silmarillion "an empty and pompous bore", "not a literary event of any magnitude", and even claimed that the main reason for its "enormous sales" were the "Tolkien cult" created by the popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The School Library Journal called it "only a stillborn postscript" to Tolkien's earlier works. Peter Conrad of the New Statesman even went so far as to say that “Tolkien can't actually write.”

Putting the ridiculousness of “Tolkien can’t actually write” and “a stillborn postscript” aside, there is some truth to the difficulty of reading The Silmarillion. Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey remarks in The Road to Middle-Earth that “it could never be anything but hard to read.” It’s not hard in terms of diction or structure, but rather, as Christopher Tolkien explains in Part One of The Book of Lost Tales, because it “lacks mediation of the kind provided by the hobbits (so, in The Hobbit, ‘Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons’).” The second reason is because it is not written as a novel. There is no main character in the foreground through which the story is relayed.

Prompted by the 118th anniversary of Tolkien's birthday and the dawn of the New Year, it’s my intention over the next several weeks to blog about The Silmarillion. I’m re-reading it in its entirety after the interval of several years and thought it would be enjoyable to write down my thoughts, impressions, and observations, and hopefully in the process make a small case for why it’s well-worth reading. I did something similar recently here at The Silver Key while re-reading The Lord of the Rings, and had a lot of fun with it. Please note that I am no self-appointed scholar or expert on Tolkien, just a fan. Writing about that which I read helps to further my own understanding and appreciation of the material.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Williamson’s reading of The Hobbit available on Youtube

If there was ever a story meant to be read aloud, it’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Tolkien intended the tale to be delivered orally, and inserted an authorial voice into the text which imbues it with a lively, conversational quality. He himself read The Hobbit aloud for the Inklings, and countless parents have read it to their children.

If you could name someone perfectly suited to read The Hobbit, who would it be? Boomed by the deep-throated Orson Welles, perhaps, or intoned by the inimitable Christopher Lee? Narrated by the smoky-voiced John Huston, he of Gandalf fame from the Rankin/Bass animated film of The Hobbit? Sung by Hansi Kürsch of German power metal band Blind Guardian ?

While all of the above are great choices, arguably the perfect-sounding version already exists, delivered by veteran stage and screen actor Nicol Williamson. Originally released as a four LP vinyl record set by Argo Records in 1974 (now rare and expensive to obtain), you can listen to the entire recording courtesy of Youtube. It’s split up into 23 parts and is obviously a direct recording from the vinyl. There’s crackly record static, but that only adds to its wonderful atmosphere.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site .

Cimmerian sighting: My top five reads of 2009

Merry Christmas! With the end of the year approaching I thought I would put together one of those ever-popular “best-of” lists for your consideration.

Following are my top five books that I’ve either read or re-read in 2009, and that I thought may be of interest to readers of The Cimmerian. If you’re looking for a few ideas for those book gift cards in your stocking, I highly recommend any of the following for purchase.

They make for pretty grim reading, but hey, The Cimmerian has always been less about “caroling out in the snow” and more of the “scary ghost stories, and tales of the glories” bent when it comes to the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: High hopes and black fears for Del Toro's The Hobbit

Casting for The Hobbit has apparently begun, the news of which means that I’m back to split feelings of incredible exhilaration, and a terrible, impending doom. The Hobbit was my introduction to fantasy literature and made me a lifetime reader, both of the fantasy genre and of literature in general. It’s an important, central work for me and for many others.

While of course we’ll always have the book, regardless of what we get in the final film product, my fervent hope is that producer Peter Jackson and director Guillermo Del Toro get the movie right. It’s too important to screw up.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: "Fantasy” a worthy entry in Anderson’s canon

While others seek the passageway to elven realms in vain, Poul Anderson throws wide the gate to let his readers enter into wonder … Anderson is a “literalist of the imagination.” He makes what is magical real and what is real magical. Of such power is poetry born.

—“An Invitation to Elfland,” Sandra Misesel, from Poul Anderson’s Fantasy

Poul Anderson gets a lot of love around these parts, and with good reason. While I can’t speak to his metric ton of science fiction, he’s written a lot of great fantasy novels, including Three Hearts and Three Lions, and the Nordic-flavored War of the Gods, The Broken Sword, and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. All of these are worth finding and reading.

But Anderson also wrote some excellent short stories. I have a couple of his collections and will vouch for the excellence of Fantasy (1981, Pinnacle Books, Inc).

Belying its vanilla title (Fantasy? Was Pinnacle Books considering Men with Swords as an alternative?), Fantasy is actually a wide-ranging, eclectic group of short stories that includes “soft” sci-fi (debatably fantasy) stories, a handful of essays, including a satirical non-fiction look at the sword-and-sandal brand of fantastic fiction (“On Thud and Blunder”), and a few excellent traditional fantasy tales.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: The Living Dead zombie anthology a feast for the brain

When I ordered the new John Joseph Adams zombie anthology The Living Dead, I was hoping for stories of zombie carnage on a large scale, a-la Max Brooks’ terrific World War Z and George Romero’s classic “living dead” films. As I read one story after the next, however, it soon became evident that all-out zombie war was (mostly) not the focus of this book.

Some disappointment naturally ensued. When the book arrived with its cover shot of a horde of shambling undead, zombie wars and tales of gun-porn survival were what I thought I was getting. I liken the experience to purchasing a book entitled “heroic fantasy” with a barbarian on the cover, and opening it to find that, instead of warriors and wizards, it’s mostly about everyday, modern people involved in acts of bravery, sans battle-axes.

In short, sometimes all you want is a little zombie mayhem. I was hoping that The Living Dead would afford me the opportunity to just turn my brain off and enjoy.

But once I got past my initial disappointment, The Living Dead turned out to be a very good collection of horror stories. On a scientific scale of 1-5 stars, I’d give it a solid 3 ½, a very good score for an anthology, given that any collection of short stories is going to contain a few duds. And upon further reflection, The Living Dead does have its fair share of carnage and zombie apocalypse, albeit not as much as I was hoping for.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: Knocking some stuffing out of Moorcock's "Epic Pooh"

According to Michael Moorcock, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has endured solely because it’s comfort food. So proclaimeth the author of the Elric stories in his seminal essay “Epic Pooh".

Well, I’m here to knock a little stuffing out of his puffed-up essay.

“Epic Pooh” criticizes The Lord of the Rings on the weakness of its prose style. It also attacks Tolkien’s underlying themes and ideas. It accuses him of failing to challenge the reader and offering artificial happy endings instead. According to Moorcock Tolkien is guilty of glorifying warfare, of failing to question authority, and for ignoring the problem of death. He makes other spirited attacks of the work (and the author) as well.[*]

The first argument is highly subjective, a matter of taste for which I have little argument. Moorcock is entitled to dislike Tolkien’s prose, and if he finds it too coddling, removed, or just plain sub-par, that’s fine. I happen to enjoy it very much, but different strokes for different folks and all that.

But once you get past its criticisms of style, “Epic Pooh” fails rather epically as a critique of Tolkien’s themes. Let me explain.

Moorcock takes Tolkien to task for many perceived crimes in “Epic Pooh,” but perhaps most of all for using The Lord of the Rings to tell “comforting lies” and coddle the reader. Says Moorcock:

There is no happy ending to the Romance of Robin Hood, however, whereas Tolkien, going against the grain of his subject matter, forces one on us – as a matter of policy.

I’ve heard this argument made elsewhere and always found it to be a gross misreading of Tolkien’s work. Presumably because The Lord of the Rings ends with the defeat of Sauron, and the restoration of order, it is therefore a simplistic, neat, bow-tied conclusion in which our heroes return home happy and whole, safe and sound.

On the contrary, I would argue that the victory over Sauron is only a temporary reprieve against the encroaching dark. This is the great sadness of The Lord of the Rings—there is home and hearth for some of the victors, but not all of them, and perhaps not even for most. When Frodo departs for the West it’s on a full ship: Gandalf, and Elrond, and Galadriel, and the main of Middle-Earth’s elves are sailing away, too. Magic has left the world. The great evil of the Third Age is defeated, but its void will be filled with other, more banal but equally sinister incarnations of evil. In the wake of the likes of the elves and of Gandalf (and even Saruman and the Balrog and the orcs) comes the vagaries of men, and with them their propensity for both great good and unspeakable evil.

Wounded soldiers return with traumas seen and unseen, and this is evident in Frodo, who bears wounds that are deep indeed. Some essential part of him has been left on a foreign field, and his wounds are too grave to allow him to enjoy the peace he has so dearly bought:

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.
In summary, The Lord of the Rings has a complex, bittersweet, melancholy ending. Happy it is not.

Moorcock also derides Tolkien for contributing to the glorification of war and the death of young soldiers:

It was best-selling novelists, like Warwick Deeping (Sorrell and Son), who, after the First World War, adapted the sentimental myths (particularly the myth of Sacrifice) which had made war bearable (and helped ensure that we should be able to bear further wars), providing us with the wretched ethic of passive “decency” and self-sacrifice, by means of which we British were able to console ourselves in our moral apathy (even Buchan paused in his anti-Semitic diatribes to provide a few of these). Moderation was the rule and it is moderation which ruins Tolkien’s fantasy and causes it to fail as a genuine romance, let alone an epic.

This statement is also inaccurate. Nowhere does Tolkien claim that war is a good thing. Rather, the implication in The Lord of the Rings and elsewhere in Tolkien’s writings is that it is, at times, necessary. Lest we forget, Tolkien served in the trenches in the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. He saw unspeakable carnage and death. But he also witnessed heroism of the highest order.

As I stated elsewhere in a review of John Garth’s Tolkien and The Great War, unlike many of the famous WWI combat veterans whose experience resulted in poems and stories of disillusionment and disenchantment (Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms), Tolkien refused to believe that the sacrifice of brave young men was a waste. Says Garth: “In contrast, Tolkien’s protagonists are heroes not because of their successes, which are often limited, but because of their courage and tenacity in trying. By implication, worth cannot be measured by results alone, but is intrinsic.” This is Frodo’s lot: Thrust into a larger war beyond his control, his selfless heroism in carrying the ring to Mount Doom is but a tiny, insignificant role in the great sweep of combat at Minas Tirith and elsewhere. But it mirrors the great acts of unrecorded bravery on the battlefields of World War I.

The sacrifice of Frodo and Sam is not sentimentalizing, it is Tolkien expressing an honest respect and admiration for the soldiers who suffered through horrific, unbearable circumstances. Tolkien said that the character of Sam was inspired by the British rank-and-file soldiers who served and fought and often gave their lives without fanfare in the blood-filled trenches of World War I, expecting nothing and possessing only the hope of home at the end of it all. Said Tolkien, “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

Moorcock states that the hobbits represent a “petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo.”

I would counter with: What is so sentimental and consolatory about Sam’s endurance and will to go on, hoping only to return to home and hearth? I suspect that Moorcock has a problem with the social organization of the Shire to which the hobbits return, not necessarily their bravery in defending it.

Here’s another misguided Moorcock-ianism from “Epic Pooh”:

I don’t think these books are ‘fascist’, but they certainly don’t exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don’t ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.

This statement makes you wonder whether Moorcock missed the scene from LOTR in which Sam looks upon the slain Southron and questions the very nature of war, including its participants and causes, laying it bare in all its futility. From The Two Towers:

It was Sam’s first battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

Tolkien believed that war is terrible and of last resort, and slain foes are, in the end, just men–and therefore to be pitied. War is necessary when “destroyers” like Sauron or Hitler would impose their will on the free peoples of the world, but it is a duty to be carried out, not glorified. In his famous forward to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote:

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

Here’s another telling quote (from Faramir, again from The Two Towers) that tells you all you need to know about Tolkien’s views on war:

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
Moorcock also attacks The Lord of the Rings for fostering an attitude of selfish self-protection and insularity:

The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire, are “safe”, but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are “dangerous”. Experience of life itself is dangerous. The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.

While the woods beyond the Shire are certainly wild and dangerous, Moorcock’s statement is far too simplistic. Experience of life (i.e., that encountered beyond the borders of the Shire) can be dangerous, and often is, but as Tolkien demonstrates, it’s more dangerous to engage in isolationism, to stick one’s head in the sand and do nothing. War is coming to the Shire, and the hobbits must venture beyond its borders to save it. Self-protection and complacency is not a viable option. I note that Sam, Merry, and Pippin return as stronger hobbits, enriched from their experience. Is this experience dangerous? Yes. Is it necessary, and in the end, a good thing? Yes.

Yet the above statements are not Moorcock’s most egregious misreading of The Lord of the Rings. I reserve that for the following:

The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent.

This statement completely falls apart when viewed against the entirety of Tolkien’s works, which confront the problem of death head-on. Take The Children of Hurin, for example, which is an expansion of a story Moorcock would have read in The Silmarillion.[*]Here Morgoth is a dark demi-god, and a symbol of all that is twisted in mankind’s soul, all that of which we despair in the dark of night, rolled into a being of unspeakable malice. When he lays his curse upon Hurin and Turin, they are truly doomed. Morgoth evokes the ultimate fear of all mankind: that death is the end, and that nothing—literal, uppercase Nothing—awaits us in the grave. Says Hurin:

“Beyond the Circles of the World you shall not pursue those who refuse you."

“Beyond the Circles of the World I will not pursue them,” said Morgoth. “For beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing. But within them they shall not escape me, until they enter into Nothing.”

The Children of Hurin begins and ends with death. The Silmarillion contains far more darkness than light, and carnage (and much defeat for the forces of good) on the scale of some of the worst battlefields of World War I. Even The Hobbit, begun as a children’s tale (though morphed in the writing to something quite different), touches on mortality: Following his epic journey and the costly Battle of Five Armies, Bilbo emerges a very different character, far less insulated and more appreciative of the fragile peace of the Shire, with “eyes that fire and sword have seen, and horror in the halls of stone.”

And as for The Lord of the Rings, its entirety can be viewed a metaphor for death. Where do you think the gray ship bore Frodo? He was dying, man.

In short, Tolkien’s works actively grapple with the terrible reality and uncertainty of our mortality. Demonstrably, they do not ignore it.

In fairness, I do agree with some of “Epic Pooh’s” points. Moorcock laments the ignorance of the reading public when it comes to writers like Fritz Leiber, who are often overlooked in favor of lesser fantasy authors that have achieved more popularity simply because they’re an easy, safe read (agreed). I also think that second-rate Tolkien clones—many of which I enjoyed as a youth—have muddied the waters of fantasy literature and contributed to dragging the genre down in the eyes of critics. However, I don’t think they should be actively avoided as Moorcock suggests, just recognized as derivative.

It’s undeniable that Tolkien was nostalgic. He hated seeing the English countryside disappear, to be replaced by factories and fabricated housing. The polluting mill that appears in “The Scouring of the Shire” was based off of an incident that occurred during Tolkien’s lifetime.

In “Epic Pooh,” Moorcock chides Tolkien for not being able to take pleasure from the realities of urban industrial life. But can you blame Tolkien for feeling embittered at the dwindling of the rural countryside? I cannot.

In conclusion, I’ve returned to The Lord of the Rings time and time again over my lifetime. I enjoy slipping into Middle Earth and meeting up with characters that now feel like old friends. I do take comfort in these aspects of the work.

But each time I do, additional unique and challenging facets of this one of a kind work are revealed. It gets better as I grow older, which tells of its surprising depth and multitude of meanings. The Lord of the Rings is not a comforting lie, but a living, breathing book that changes with each re-reading. The more one reads of Tolkien’s legendarium in The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin, and The History of Middle Earth, the more suffused in darkness and uncertainty works like The Lord of the Rings (and even The Hobbit) become.

So Mr. Moorcock, pardon me while I return to the table for another helping of this one of a kind “comfort” food, prepared by the finest chef ever produced by the culinary arts school of fantasy fiction. You can take “Epic Pooh” and stuff it.

——

[*]
*A third strand of Moorcock’s dislike for Tolkien also emerges in “Epic Pooh,” that being his antipathy for Tolkien’s Toryism and conservatism. Moorcock takes Tolkien and C.S. Lewis to task for their politics and, to a lesser degree, their religion. It’s noteworthy that Moorcock in a post-publication author’s note lavishes praise on Phillip Pullman, a lesser literary light than Tolkien by any measurable standard, but a writer whose politics fall into lockstep with his own. But while I suspect that political disagreement is the true genesis of “Epic Pooh,” I’d prefer to leave this debate out of The Cimmerian.

[*]
* I was prepared to cut Moorcock some slack on the basis that he may not have read The Silmarillion before writing “Epic Pooh.” Puzzlingly, Moorcock has read it, and actually cites it in the essay. Therefore, I feel perfectly justified in using it and The Children of Hurin in Tolkien’s defense.


–Artwork by Ted Nasmith

The Burning Land set to reignite the Saxon Stories

The cover blurbs on Bernard Cornwell’s books read “Perhaps the greatest writer of historical adventure novels today,” and frankly, you’ll get no arguments from me. I've come to love Cornwell, who is in every sense a Man's writer. There's no romance in his books and no literary pretension, so if you're looking for those elements, try something else. On the other hand, if you like bloody battles, cowardice and heroism, grim suffering and cruel murder, oath-making and breaking, hard drinking and mirth, and, most importantly, darned good storytelling, Cornwell's your man. His greatest strength is probably his ability to spin a compelling, fun tale, and he does it with a keen eye for historic accuracy.

Cornwell's ongoing series The Saxon Stories features vikings, shield walls, axes, dark ages combat, hall-burnings, and general mayhem. If this stuff sounds appealing (and if you're a reader of The Cimmerian or this blog, how could it not?), you owe it to yourself to pick up the first book in the series, The Last Kingdom, and get started.

The Saxon Stories is an ongoing historical fiction series about the reign of Alfred the Great and the clash of Danes and Saxons in 9th century Britain. The stories are told through the viewpoint of Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a warrior who was born a Saxon and fights for their cause, but was raised among the Danes, and so has an iron-plated boot in each camp. Uhtred is a fun character, as he's torn between hereditary love for his ancestral homeland and a passion for the Danes. Although they're murderous raiders, the Danes drink deep of life, scorn Christian "virtues" of humility and pity, and worship the pagan gods of Thor and Odin. These qualities appeal strongly to Uhtred, who grew to love the Danes during his capture and upbringing under Earl Ragnar.

I read the first four books in the Saxon Stories with gusto (these include The Last Kingdom (2004), The Pale Horseman (2005), The Lords of the North (2006), and Sword Song, published in 2007), and eagerly anticipated the next book in the series, so much so that Cornwell's decision to interrupt Uhtred's saga with Agincourt was a bit of a let-down, even though I wound up enjoying the heck out of it.

But I was very pleased to find out that the fifth book, The Burning Land, has been released in the UK and will be available in the United States in January 2010, according to Bernard Cornwell's official Web site.

Looks like 2010 will be off to a fine, blood-soaked start.

(Cross posted from The Cimmerian ).

Cimmerian sighting: Best battle-speeches

I’m no war-monger, nor do I make light of real battles and their terrible cost. But there’s no doubt that mass-combats make for great cinematic drama, especially in their build-up and occasionally in their denouement. Here on the day after Veterans Day, I’m marking the occasion by taking a look back at a film that every battle-aficionado should watch at least once: Henry V.

Many fantasy fans lament the lack of good movies in the genre, myself included. But I will say that you’re missing out if you haven’t given Henry V a chance (I speak here of the Kenneth Branagh 1989 film. I haven’t yet seen the 1944 version with Laurence Olivier). While it’s obviously not fantasy, Henry V has a lot of the trappings of the genre (armored knights, archers, kings, castles, etc.). It’s also got some surprisingly good combat sequences, as well as a few of the most rousing battle-related speeches/sequences ever put to film.

Despite its excellent reputation, I held off watching Henry V for a long time. My reasoning: How good could a Shakespeare film be? Impenetrable? Likely. Boring? Most certainly. Or so I thought.

I admit it; I was wrong.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian web site.

Cimmerian sighting: The Book of Merlyn and its Howardian connection

A good man’s example always does instruct the ignorant and lessens their rage, little by little through the ages, until the spirit of the waters is content: and so, strong courage to Your Majesty, and a tranquil heart.

—T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

The King Arthur myth has been told, re-told, and re-imagined countless times. I’ve read many interpretations, though far from all, from authors as diverse as Bernard Cornwell (The Warlord Trilogy) to Mary Stewart (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, et. al.). But of all these, The Once and Future King and its separately published conclusion, The Book of Merlyn, is probably the most approachable version of the Arthur myth I’ve ever encountered. And it’s certainly my favorite.

For obvious reasons, I often feel a need to draw parallels between Robert E. Howard and other authors when writing blog posts over at The Cimmerian. But in this case, I didn’t have to look far, nor make any dubious, tenuous connections. At their core, White and Howard share the same pessimistic view of humanity. For Howard, barbarism was the natural state of mankind. White believed that mankind’s natural state was Homo Ferox, or “Ferocious man.” There is no leap required; these two men of different nationalities and stations in life drew the same bleak conclusions about mankind.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.