They're Reading Tolkien at Guantanamo

So, this one is weird even by my standards, and I'm not as easily weirded out as some people. I have not confirmed the story, but according to the following website, which I discovered thanks to Wendell Wagner's posting the link to the Mythsoc site, a prisoner in the Gulag at Guantanamo Bay has just had the script for the Peter Jackson LotR movie taken away from him (which installment it did not say). The reason given is that a lawyer is not allowed to give a prisoner there anything "not related to the defense of his military commission case". The lawyer has similarly been forbidden to play chess with the prisoner, or dominoes, all activities he'd undertaken to get to know the prisoner and win his trust. Apparently this particular prisoner "wants nothing more in life than to see Lord of the Rings".

As if all this were not strange enough came the news that the Gulag library has "all three installments of the book version of J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy . . . available to prisoners. It was not clear why [the prisoner] wanted the screenplay. Some detainees have complained through their lawyers about long waits for books from Guantanamo's library." Not surprising it'd take them quite a while to read, since so far as I know LotR has never been translated into Pashtun or even Arabic.

So, for humanitarian purposes should we be shipping more copies of Tolkien's work to the Gulag?*

Here's the original link:
http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=141334&in_page_id=2

--JDR


*This particular prisoner, by the way, is in the Gulag for having killed an enemy soldier in a firefight six years ago. At that time he was a boy soldier of fifteen. He's been in prison ever since; the Military Commission is seeking a life sentence.

The Mimosa, and Tribal Dancing

So, today I finally planted my mimosa tree, which I grew from a seed (provided by the tree in Jennifer Clarke Wilkes' yard; many thanks JCW). For several years it's been in a successively larger series of pots, the earlier ones on the window-sill at the old WotC building, the most recent so big it rests on a wheeled coaster. It spent this past winter, its first outside, on the back porch (protected from above and one side but otherwise exposed to the elements), and I wasn't sure it'd survive. Luckily, it did; just this week I noticed that the first buds are starting to form. So I went ahead and took the plunge and planted it out back, where the ill-fated cherry tree briefly grew. Tomorrow I'll need to put a rail of some sort around it to protect it from groundskeepers and their mowers, and possibly also some flowers just to re-inforce the 'this is supposed to be here' message. Wish it luck.

And, speaking of out back, I was only joking when Janice asked me what that percussion sound was in mid-afternoon when I said "tribal dancing". Turns out I was right; over at the school (Neely-OBrian) there was a large group of folks who, as best we could tell, were getting lessons in how to do tribal dances. They were a long way off, but from their general appearance and dress they seem to have been Polynesian. Now I'm curious what event they were practicing for.

Just as with the mimosa, time no doubt will tell -- but in the one case I'll be monitoring the result daily, while with the other I may never know.

--John R.

C. S. Lewis's Worst Essay? (part one)

So, I've recently enjoyed skimming through C. S. LEWIS: ESSAY COLLECTION AND OTHER SHORT PIECES, ed. Lesley Walmsley [HarperCollins, 2000]. Apparently published only in the U.K., this is a massive (894 page) collection that brings together everything from his short fiction (e.g. THE DARK TOWER, "Forms of Things Unknown", &c) to all kinds of ephemera: letters to the editor, pieces written in response to articles he'd read in some journal, and the like. Naturally, out of such a mass of material (135 separate pieces), the quality varies enormously. But I was struck both by how readable the whole collection is and by how far off the mark Lewis could sometimes be. This division is evident in his longer works, of course -- for every SCREWTAPE LETTERS or DISCARDED IMAGE there's also a MIRACLES or ABOLITION OF MAN -- but somehow it seems starker in his shorter pieces. Hence I thought it might be interesting to look in more detail at some of his worst essays, since his best work is so well known as to need no analysis.


Second Runner Up: "Why I Am Not A Pacifist" [1940]

To be fair, I shd note that Lewis never attempted to publish this piece; it survives only because his friend George Sayer requested a copy and, many years later, provided Fr. Walter Hooper with a transcript. It was first published in THE WEIGHT OF GLORY [1980], itself an expanded edition of the 1949 book TRANSPOSITION AND OTHER ADDRESSES (which had included five of the latter book's nine pieces); see page 18 of Hooper's Introduction to that book. Thus it is a better representation of Lewis as a debater than as an essayist.


Delivered to a pacifist group at Oxford in the early part of World War II, this one made it onto my short list not so much because I disagree with him (which, of course, I do) but by how weak I found his argument. That is, I read the piece knowing full well that Lewis was no pacifist, as his service in World War I and the actions of his characters in his novels clearly show. But I expected him to make a good case against pacifism, and sought out this piece because while I didn't expect him to sway my own opinion (I don't think I've ever changed my mind on any subject because of anything I've read in Lewis) I wanted to see what he had to say.


In brief, since it's a long article (more than a dozen pages in this densely packed anthology) and a complex one, I was surprised by the degree to which his argument hinges on an appeal to (civil) authority and majority opinion. He denies that individual revelation (what he calls "intuition") can be taken seriously when it goes against the example of most political leaders (in whom he includes the fictitious King Arthur!) and many of his favorite writers. Thus, for Lewis, belief in pacifism would put one in a minority, and on that ground alone is probably wrong. This seems to me such a strange argument that at first I thought he must be joking, but it's clear he really is arguing that the majority position must thus be the correct one ("the universal opinion of mankind"), as if morality were simply decided by majority vote (in which case, what about "give us Barabbas"?).

This alone of course would not make this essay rank among his worst, of course. Much more troubling are his tactics. Like a speaker more concerned with winning a debate than arriving at the truth, Lewis very carefully works to exclude all evidence that counters his point. For example, he quotes The Book of Common Prayer in support of Anglicans supporting 'a just war' in good conscience, wh. is fair enough, but then goes on to imply that ALL Christian denominations support 'the just war' --which is of course flatly untrue: cf the Quakers, Amish, Shakers, Mennonites, &c., not to mention the early church before Constantine got his hands on it. But what he actually says is "All bodies that claim to be Churches -- that is, who claim apostolic succession and accept the Creeds -- have constantly blessed what they regard as righteous arms". Can he really be claiming that if you're not a member of such a 'Church', you're not really Christian or your opinion doesn't count?

Finally, he does tackle the most difficult point of any Christian who is not a pacifist: the 'turn the other cheek' passage in the Gospel. Lewis's solution is to argue that this cannot possibly have any military application, since "the audience were private people in a disarmed nation" --which is disingenuous, given the long string of uprisings that bedeviled the area, the most well-known of which are the Maccabees' revolt a century before and the disastrous revolt a generation later that ended at Masada. He goes on to assert that Jesus would surely approve of anyone with rightful authority using force to defend himself against violence, most amusingly using as one of his examples a tutor fighting back against a student who wanted to hit him (just how heated did CSL's tutorials get?). He concludes this section with references to two New Testament epistles, both from passages urging submission to civil authority: ROMANS Chapter 13 ("Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment") and 1st PETER Chapter 2 ("Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right"); the latter comes from the same section that admonishes servants to obey their masters (long used as a justification for slavery) and for wives to "be submissive to your husbands". I shd have thought it much more apropos to cite the scene in Gethsemene where Jesus rebukes Peter for striking the guard (an example of violence in defense of the innocent if ever there was one).


So, in conclusion: Lewis was proud of his oratorical skill, and rightly so; he was by all accounts a marvellous speaker, and the few surviving bits of audiotape bear this out. But his gifts fail him here, leaving him with an overly complex essay marred by several ad hominem attacks on his audience in passing. Far better as a presentation of Lewis's ideas about the duty of submission to civil authority is "The Conditions for a Just War" [1939] (pages 767-768 in the same collection), where he argues that it's not the hangman's job to decide who is and isn't guilty, merely to hang those sent to him for hanging; so too he claims that a citizen can't know whether a given war is just or not and so must leave that to his government, who alone can make that decision, and serve as a soldier in whatever war his government deems necessary. But even here he complicates his point by adding that the hangman "must not hang a man whom he knows to be innocent", nor the soldier "murder prisoners or bomb civilians", which acknowledges individual responsibility based on individual judgment after all. Even so, this short, focused piece is far superior to "Why I Am Not A Pacifist".

--JDR

current audiobook: LOST CHRISTIANITIES by Bart Ehrman.

Giles Revisited

So, since making my 'Ubiquity' post over the weekend, I've now heard, both through the comment to the post and in private e-mail (thanks 'Trotter'; thanks Mike) that 'Giles' is a traditional farmer-name in England, rather like 'Jeeves' has become a joking default butler name over here (ironically so, since Wodehouse's Jeeves is not a butler but a valet). The piece in BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE obviously drew on this traditional lore, then, not JRRT's little story. But I suspect the reference in FOYLE'S WAR (see my post of Jan. 25th) genuinely does refer to Tolkien, since it mentions the blunderbuss as well.

Unless, of course, both 'farmer Giles' AND his blunderbuss are part of the traditional lore, in which case FGH is closer to, say, Tolkien's recasting of 'Cat & the Fiddle' than, say, THE HOBBIT. If anyone knows more about how far back 'Giles' goes as the generic farmer name, or any pre-Tolkien connection of that stock name with a blunderbuss, I'd be v. interested to hear about it.

--JDR

The Golden Age of Tolkien Studies

So, hard to believe, but it's already more than half a year since I gave my Marquette lecture ("A Kind of Elvish Craft: Tolkien as Literary Craftsman"). My essay has now been accepted for publication, but in the process of revising it I cut out most of the opening section, which had been focused towards the oral presentation. Still, since I put a lot of work into it, and it's on a topic that means a lot to me, so thought I'd share it here. Enjoy.

Seventy years. It was almost exactly seventy years ago today* that Tolkien scholarship began, with publication of a short review of THE HOBBIT on October the 2nd, 1937 in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, followed up a few days later (on Friday October 8th) by an even briefer piece in the London TIMES by the same anonymous reviewer (in fact, Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis**). Certainly works in what we now think of as Tolkien’s legendarium had been critiqued before--the early Earendel poems by a rather baffled G. B. Smith in 1914 (Carpenter 75, Garth 64), the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ and Lay of Turin by an equally puzzled Dickie Reynolds around 1926 (HME.III.3, HME.IV.11), and, more perceptively, the Lay of Leithian (the Beren & Luthien story) by an attentive and wholly sympathetic C. S. Lewis in 1929 (HME.III.150–151 & 315–329), the year before Tolkien began work on THE HOBBIT. But only with published commentary on a published work did the tradition of Tolkien criticism properly begin; a tradition that has continued, intermittently but in ever-growing volume, down to the present day.

And on the whole we have been fortunate. While there have been many bad books and misguided articles, from Edmund Wilson’s notorious ‘Oo Those Awful Orcs’ [1956] to more recent but equally inept examples we need not name, and many more inoffensive but unremarkable pieces, or interesting but flawed ones, there have been a number of superlative works, from Paul Kocher’s MASTER OF MIDDLE-EARTH (still after thirty-five years the best single-volume introduction to Tolkien’s work) through Tom Shippey’s THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH and AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY.

Indeed, in his recent review of the published proceedings from Marquette’s 2004 Tolkien Conference, Brian Rosebury conveys his sense that

". . . fairly gentle adjustments and additions are now being made to a generally accepted understanding of Tolkien’s art and thought. We are on the putting green of scholarship, as it were, rather than the fairway." --TOLKIEN STUDIES Vol. IV [2007], p. 282

Leaving aside his unfortunate metaphor, which suggests a coziness wholly at odds with the ongoing battles over the ultimate impact of the film adaptations upon Tolkien’s audience, or the continuing fratricidal struggle among Tolkien linguists, or even the exact role Tolkien’s faith did or did not play in his work, Rosebury’s remark suggests that we are now nearing the end of Tolkien scholarship: that little remains to say other than to add a few refinements upon an almost completed picture. Such a conclusion does not accord with my own impression of the field at all; in fact, I am reminded of the apocryphal story about the head of the U.S. patent office who supposedly predicted a century or so ago that there would soon be nothing left to invent; an anecdote invented solely to show that such a prediction would have been egregiously wrong.

And indeed, just the three years since the conference whose proceedings prompted Mr. Rosebury’s remarks have seen the publication of major works such as Verlyn Flieger’s INTERRUPTED MUSIC, which explains better than anywhere else just what it means to sit down and create a mythology; Marjorie Burns’s PERILOUS REALMS, which not only shows how Tolkien drew on a balance of both Norse and Celtic mythological elements but is the best analysis ever of Tolkien’s characteristic ambiguity; Christina Scull & Wayne Hammond’s J. R. R. TOLKIEN COMPANION & GUIDE, with its masses of biographical detail. And more work of comparable importance is on its way: an expanded critical edition of Tolkien’s most important essay, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, is due out soon, shortly to be followed by a collection of all Tolkien’s interviews, an important primary source never before gathered in one easily accessible place. Add to these the relatively recent advent of the journal TOLKIEN STUDIES [debuting in 2004] and the now well-established ‘Tolkien Track’ at the annual Medievalism Conference at Kalamazoo, which has produced several erudite volumes over the last four years,*** plus a number of active Tolkien websites, including the soon to be launched Tolkien Estate website, and I think you could make the case that we are in fact living in the Golden Age of Tolkien Studies, where we have a community of Tolkien scholars in regular touch with each other, constantly exchanging information and critiques of each others’ work, and increasingly beginning to collaborate on joint projects.

This is, I think, a development after Tolkien’s own heart . . .




*[Nt 1]This paper was originally delivered as the 2007 Blackwelder Lecture at Marquette University on October 4th, 2007.

**[Nt 2]Both these two brief reviews together total only a little over seven hundred words. In them, Lewis compares THE HOBBIT respectively to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and to Grahame’s THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, praising Tolkien’s world-building. Lewis of course had the advantage of having been the first outside Tolkien’s immediate family to read the book back in February 1933, immediately upon its completion, and had more recently heard it read aloud to the writers’ group to which both men belonged (and indeed had co-founded), the Inklings. The first piece is reprinted in ON STORIES, ed. Walter Hooper [1982], pages 81–82, while Douglas Anderson quotes a goodly portion from the second piece in THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT [rev. ed., 2002], page 18.

***[Nt 3]The three volumes so far are TOLKIEN THE MEDIEVALIST, ed. Jane Chance [2003]; TOLKIEN AND THE INVENTION OF MYTH, ed. Jane Chance [2004]; and TOLKIEN'S MODERN MIDDLE AGES, ed. Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers [2005].



--JDR

Peake on Tolkien

So, today I was at Half-Price Books, buying a book I'd seen on my last visit there some weeks ago,* and I happened to come across a biography of Mervyn Peake I hadn't seen before: MERVYN PEAKE: MY EYE MINTS GOLD by Malcolm Yorke [2002]. Thumbing through the index, I found several references to Tolkien, one of which gave a second-hand account of Peake's opinion of JRRT.

"The three men [Peake, Jn Wood, and Aaron Judah] discussed ULYSSES and then Mervyn had a rather trenchant comment to make about Tolkien's THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, which had just been published. He described it as 'rather twee' and mildly mocked the character of Goldberry, Tom Bombadil's lady-friend, as 'precious' -- which proves that Peake was well aware of his better-selling rival. He always resented the critics' habit of linking them, thinking that Tolkien wrote primarily for children whilst he [Peake] wrote for adults. Tolkien's creation relied on magic and supernatural props, while Peake's fantasy world never did." (page 221)

Yorke's source for this is John Wood's piece 'Mervyn Peake: A Pupil Remembers' by one of the art students Peake tutored, published in MPR (the Mervyn Peake Review) No. 13 (Spring 1981), page 28. It's interesting to see that Peake knew about Tolkien, but cd not appreciate his work (the children vs. adults comment sounds remarkably like the sort of chuckle-headed remark that has made Edmund Wilson's name a hissing and a byword among Tolkien scholars); rather odd that it was Goldberry rather than Bombadil himself he was dismissive of. The book also included a reference to Lewis, who first read Peake in 1958 and wrote him a letter of high praise (no doubt a genuine expression of CSL's response to the first two Gormenghast books but also probably an act of charity, since Lewis knew of Peake's mental and physical breakdown of the year before); both this and another letter, I now see, are printed by Hooper in COLLECTED LETTERS OF CSL Vol. III.

--John R.



*THE FIRST EMANCIPATOR: THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF ROBERT CARTER, THE FOUNDING FATHER WHO FREED HIS SLAVES by Andrew Levy [2005].

Ben Ladin as Sauron

So, I was lying on the couch last Saturday evening (a bit past six pm on Sat. March 29th), letting the over-the-counter cold medicine do its work, when I came across something both surprising and appalling. Not feeling up to watching something with subtitles and no longer having access to Book TV, I was switching back and forth between the four cable news channels (as opposed to the two I usually watch), when I caught a Tolkien reference on one of them. Fox News, which I rarely watch, was running some kind of special designed to stir up fear and trembling in the viewers, one of those Are-You-Scared-Yet?/We-Can-Make-You-Scared things. This particular one was called "JIHAD USA: HOMEGROWN TERROR" and was looking at the phenomenon of copycat attacks and would-be attacks by people who have no connection to al-Qaeda. Rather than drawing what would seem to be the obvious conclusion -- such hairbrained plots are a predictable side-effect of the war, and our conduct of the war, and unpreventable in a society as heavily (and irresponsibly) armed as ours -- they had a pundit (whose name I unfortunately missed) who saw the whole thing in terms of a Tolkien analogy:

"ben Ladin is the Lord without the Rings".

Granted, this is not an exact quote and I missed the context that had led up to this remark, but if I understood him rightly he was claiming that Ben Ladin was like Sauron, holed up in his lair, but that he'd sent the Rings of Power (jihadist doctrine) out into the world where they were working his evil (inspiring terrorist plots).

Like I said, appalling.

I consider this the down side of Tolkien's permeation of our culture: he now has admirers across the board, from the white supremacists who are forging evidence that he was sympathetic to their cause (a fraud exposed by David Doughan in a recent issue of AMON HEN) to, well, this guy.

Gah!

--JDR

current audiobook : JOHN ADAMS by David McCullough (still)