A Tolkien lecture from Carnegie Mellon

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

As some of you may have noticed I've not been around much lately, and the search function doesn't always turn up everything. I apologise in advance if this has already appeared somewhere while I was busy with less important matters.

Trawling through Youtube, I found this lecture by Michael Drout, who's one of my favourite Tolkien scholars. Some of the ideas he explores here, such as the similarity between the experience of reading Tolkien and that of studying medieval texts, had occurred to me already. Inevitably a lot more hadn't, because Michael Drout knows a lot more about Tolkien and literature, both medieval and modern, than I do. In particular, I find the main approach of comparing the effect of Tolkien's writing, especially LR and the Silmarillion, with that of a ruin fascinating. I was quite surprised, given the subject matter and Professor Drout's own long experience with Old English literature, that he wasn't more explicit in linking physical ruins, LR and the Old English poem usually known as The Ruin. Much of the Old English poetry that survives is suffused with a profound sense of nostalgia, which in several cases finds expression in considering the ruins of Roman buildings that the earliest English builders could never hope to replicate. I suspect the influence of time constraints.

I was very much struck by the lecture's movement from a light-hearted, almost flippant opening to an increasingly moving exploration of nostalgia as the primary emotion provoked by the works discussed, the word in this case appearing in its rarely used correct sense. This is a rhetorical technique that Milan Kundera discusses in The Unbearable Lightness of Being in talking about Beethoven's re-imagining of a joke between friends about repaying lent money ("Must it be?" "It must be") to a consideration of the inexorability of fate. Incidentally, his contention that this only works in that direction proves more than anything else that Milan Kundera is neither English nor a Hobbit.

Considering the opening and closing parts of the lecture also serves to explain why Tolkien fans feel so deeply antagonistic towards hostile critics. Since the emotional response Drout describes is often so profound, for it to be dismissed without consideration is not so much annoying as painful. I'm reminded of Yeats:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

[Edit: I forgot to mention the passage from LR that occurred to me while watching this video. Come to think of it, I think it's used in the lecture itself - a favourite of mine.

...the trees and the grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago.

]

That's quite enough waffle from me. I hope that those of you who haven't already seen this enjoy it.

Michael Drout: How to Read J.R.R. Tolkien