What was it all for?

[davem]

I suppose my inspiration for this thread is a certain other one which shall remain nameless. I will only touch on it briefly as it deals with the polar opposite approach to this one.

If I can begin with a post of my own from the 'Tolkien's Literary Executor' thread:

At least CT has in the forefront of his mind his father's own wishes & hopes for the work. I wonder if those who follow him in the role will feel the same need or desire. How far one takes 'respect' for the author's wishes is a vexed question. For instance, Tolkien himself repeatedly attacked the breaking down of literary works in search of 'sources'. He first condemned this approach in the 'Tower' allegory in The Monsters & the Critics essay, & towards the end of his life attacked it in terms of approaching his own work - comparing it to a man who, after eating a meal, uses an emetic & sends the result to a chemist for analysis. Tolkien clearly found such an approach to his work wrongheaded & insulting, & requested it not to be done.

One other example could be added - Gandalf's condemnation of Saruman's boast about breaking the Light. Gandalf says that 'He who breaks a thing to find out what it is made of has left the path of wisdom'

Clearly it is not just Gandalf who dislikes this 'breaking down' approach. Gandalf's words could have been said - & effectively were in the essay & interview I cited - by Tolkien himself.

But what is his problem? What is wrong with looking for the sources & inspirations a writer used? Well, let me give some example?

Why does a man (or woman) build a house? Not, one assumes, because one day he stumbled across a pile of bricks & decided to cement them together to make them tidier, or to stop someone walking off with them. No, its far more likely, & far more logical to assume that what happened was that the man wanted a house to live in & went in search of the bricks & other materials he would need to do the job. So the intended use of the bricks comes first, the bricks come second.

Now, in the Monsters & Critics essay Tolkien took on thos critics who wanted to break down Beowulf into its constituent parts, because they considered those parts more important than what the poet had done with them. They effectively condemned the poet for his use of the 'historical' asides he made use of (the story of Finn, etc) in a poem about a dragon & said what he should have done was tell rather the story of Finn.

Tolkien's response was that the story of Beowulf & Grendel, & the Dragon, was not 'inferior', if only because that was the story the poet wanted to tell. The other stories (including references to Cain & Abel) were in there to give depth, & to point up incidents through analogy, but it is not actually necessary to understand those references to 'get' the story. Pulling Beowulf apart in order to find out more about Finn is a dead end, because the poem is not a collection of sources 'cemented' together, but a work of Art.

Tolkien seems always to have felt this way. M&C came at the 'beginning' of his career, Gandalf's statement in LotR around the 'middle' & the interview towards the end of his life. We can say with certainty that he never liked this breaking down approach. Of course, he himself was interested in the story of Finn, but not to the extent that he would shatter Beowulf to get at it.

Tolkien's attitude seems to have been that the sources a writer used were less important than what he did with them. He may have taken certain things from the Bible - but he didn't take everything from the Bible, nor did he take just anything from it. what he took from it (& what, exactly, he did take) he took for a very specific reason. He took what was useful to him. He took the same approach with elements & aspects of Norse, Finnish, Welsh, Irish & Germanic myth, from legend, folklore, Dunne's theories on time, his childhood & wartime experiences, anything & everything he had to hand & needed for the task in hand.

So, perhaps we are nearer to understanding Tolkien's dislike of source hunting. The Art is more than a simple amalgam of the sources he used - it is not a case of if you programmed a computer with the texts of the Bible, the Eddas, the Kalevala, Beowulf, etc you could get it to produce the Legendarium. You couldn't, because what would be lacking in what you programmed in would be the specific vision that inspired the man. The vision (like the desire to have a house to live in) lead him to use the materials he used - he didn't just take the materials he had to hand & decide to 'stick' them together: he 'stuck them together' in a very specific way.

There is a tendency at the moment among Tolkien scholars to focus on a biographical analysis (his childhood, his wartime experiences) or a source analysis (books he read, or might have read) in an attempt to understand his work, Less attention is focussed on what he actually did, & more importantly why he did it.

Now, John Garth has given us letters & diary entries from Tolkmien & the rest of the TCBS, which give the impression he was part of a movement which desired to bring about a 'moral regeneration' of the English people. In the letter to Milton Waldman written before the publication of LotR he stated that once upon a time he had wanted to create a mythology which he could dedicate to England, but that his crest had long since fallen. In the Foreword to the Second Edition of LotR he effectively tells his readers that the story has no 'inner meaning', it is not an 'allegory' of anything, & that he dislikes alllegory profoundly. Although he says he prefers 'applicability' one almost gets the impression that he isn't too keen on that & would prefer people to treat it as he himself does - as 'feigned history'.

Yet, a man who spends the whole of his adult life working to create a coherent 'Secondary World' is driven by something more than the desire to create a mere 'entertainment'. But what was that?

What we can say, given his statements on 'source hunting', is that he wasn't simply out to amalgamate various ideas & source texts into a coherent 'whole', Those things were the raw materials he used to do something - but what was that 'something'? What did he want to build, & what did he want to build it for?

(Please, no-one say it was to proseletiize, or I'll end up banned from my own thread.....)