A boy's world?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I brought up this subject in another thread, but from comments it inspired it's clear to me that it has the legs to make a discussion in its own right.

On 27th November 1955, Edwin Muir published a review of The Lord of the Rings in the Observer entitled A Boy's World (he had reviewed each volume as it was published). In this article he wrote:

The astonishing thing is that all the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes. The hobbits, or halflings, are ordinary boys; the fully human heroes have reached the fifth form; but hardly one of them knows anything about women, except by hearsay. Even the elves and the dwarfs and the ents are boys, irretrievably, and will never come to puberty.

Later in the same article, Muir commented:

The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do.

This article was probably the first to voice this criticism of The Lord of the Rings: that it is sub-adult; that its characters are like schoolboys who have exchanged their school ties for heraldry and their blazers for hauberks. Muir admitted no objection to the medieval atmosphere, and approved of the ents in general (as boys, clearly), but he wanted heroes and heroines who 'knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows': heroes and heroines like Malory's Lancelot and Guinevere.

Tolkien's response was short and caustic. In a letter to Rayner Unwin, he wrote: "Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence. He is old enough to know better. It might do him good to hear what women think of his 'knowing about women', especially as a test of being mentally adult." but he really didn't address the issue in any detail, and in fact I can't find any serious response to the charge of 'knowing about women'. I would be very interested to know which women spoke to Tolkien about this issue, and what they had to say.

For many, the very lack of supporting evidence in Tolkien's letter indicates a touched nerve, that it stands as a tacit acknowledgement that Muir had a point. I'm not so certain. Tolkien was writing to a long-time reader and friend concerning a partially related issue (a review of the BBC radio adaptation). He was mainly concerned with debunking W.H. Auden's comment on his book: "If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again". "I also thought Auden rather bad..." he wrote; "and deplored his making the book 'a test of literary taste'. You cannot do that with any work - and if you could you only infuriate". By the time he got to Muir, he was well into his stride and was ready to regale his publisher with a suitably irascible response.

Perhaps Muir did have a point, though. His argument has re-appeared on numerous occasions with modification. Some say that there are no women; others pick up on this to say that the relationships between men and women in The Lord of the Rings are unconvincing. Still more pick up on his lack of suffering, pointing out that of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring who survive the wars, only Frodo has truly become a casualty. In a global war, there are worse things, one might say, than to see a lot of people die.

The issue of women has been covered ad nauseam here already, but strangely relationships seem not to have been discussed in any great detail. Indeed there are few such relationships to cover. The majority of the narrative is concerned with a large medieval war. This is, as Tolkien was acutely aware, a man's affair. He even has Éowyn speak for the women of saga (foreshadowing his later use of Tídwald to argue the old soldier's case against the saga poets in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth), when she says:

All your words are but to say: you are a woman and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.

Of course, on Éowyn's side this conversation has a hidden agenda, of which Aragorn is more than aware. Unlike a boy in this situation, he speaks with understanding and compassion, whilst trying to keep the conversation away from its obvious undertone. This is finally made explicit in Éowyn's parting shot: "Neither have those others who go with thee. They go only because they would not be parted from thee - because they love thee."
Aragorn's later words to Éomer indicate his complete understanding of the situation; quite remarkable in a fifth-former.

This is only one relationship, though; and it is only romantic on one side. A good example of one of Tolkien's more endearing scenes comes in the house of Tom Bombadil, in which we see Tom and Goldberry in their domestic setting:

Then Tom and Goldberry set the table; and the hobbits sat half in wonder and half in laughter: so fair was the grace of Goldberry , and so merry and odd the caperings of Tom. Yet in some fashion they seemed to weave a single dance, neither hindering the other

Surely here Tolkien is in rather a modern sense showing us a successful relationship literally in motion. The two characters do not move in the same manner, or in some choreographed dance, but each as is natural to them, with a common aim and neither impeding the other. Whatever we may say about the setting, the relationship itself as seen here is quite convincing.

It is necessary, I should think, to address here the issue of the most mythic of the relationships of The Lord of the Rings; that of Aragorn and Arwen, which Tolkien claimed was essential to an understanding of his book. That their story was relegated to Appendix A, he explained as a narrative necessity: "...it is part of the essential story, and is only placed so, because it could not be worked into the main narrative without destroying its structure: which is planned to be 'hobbito-centric', that is primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble."

What, one might ask, would a convincing relationship be doing in this sort of deeply symbolic union? One would probably largely be right, but I find that people identify too strongly with Aragorn and Arwen for this to be entirely so. Disregarding the timeless romance of his facing tremendous hardships to be worthy of her, and of her giving up family, race and serial immortality for him (hardly realistic, at least in a conventional sense), there are few hints in the story of what is going on here. The situation does come through in the narrative in places, though: Aragorn's quotation of the Lay of Leithian on Weathertop is the first foreshadowing, although at the time the reader is as in the dark as are the four hobbits. Later in the house of Elrond, Bilbo is confused that Aragorn did not attend the feast, since Arwen was there. Aragorn has been putting business before pleasure again, for he says: "...often I must put mirth aside." Only on reading the Appendices do we discover what an understatement this is.

When we do see Aragorn and Arwen together for the first time in the Hall of Fire in Elrond's house, it is also the first time that we see him as Elessar, future king of Gondor. For the first time Tolkien describes Aragorn as a lord and not a strange wanderer. Later still, and notably in another Elven enclave, we witness the following scene:

And Aragorn answered: 'Lady, you know all my desire, and long held in keeping the only treasure that I seek. Yet it is not yours to give me, even if you would; and only through darkness shall I come to it.'
'Yet maybe this will lighten your heart,' said Galadriel; 'for it was left in my care to be given to you, should you pass through this land.' Then she lifted from her lap a great stone of clear green, set in a silver brooch... 'This stone I gave to Celebrían my daughter, and she to hers; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the house of Elendil!'

On the first reading this is meaningless, but once we know to whom Celebrían was married, and who Galadriel's granddaughter is, it becomes clear that only one person could have sent that brooch for Aragorn. Here he begins to come into his inheritance, and again Arwen is there, if only because he is thinking of her and she of him. Is this convincing? For me the idea that a man and a woman who are in love but separated by necessity might be thinking about one another is an easy one to credit. It is certainly easier to believe than Igraine's joyous reception of her husband's killer as his replacement; and equally joyous acceptance of the story that he slept with her by deceit on the very night his men killed his predecessor.

My time grows short, so I shall have to turn reluctantly to the issue of global warfare and the suffering therein as portrayed in Tolkien's works. The first point should be that The Lord of the Rings was never intended to portray global war in any form. Its entire setting is so overtly medieval, and the military organisation and procedure so antiquated, that for a modern global conflict to take place there would itself be another of many anachronisms. As for there being a global conflict in the book, the action spans a continent, granted; but this is hardly the world. The actual military action takes the form of a number of set-piece battles and minor skirmishes, so the most suffering that I would expect for combatants would be death or maiming. It is interesting to note, though, that Tolkien's characters are either killed or heroically wounded: there are no cripples visible after Middle-earth's battles; although he was well aware of the horrific wounds that could be inflicted by swords and axes.

Is there no suffering, though? We are shown entire civilian populations uprooted; we are shown loyal soldiers forced to choose between treachery against a mad commander or loyally conspiring in the death of his son. We are shown the noble and courageous Boromir snared by his desire to protect his people and then made aware of the fallacy of his trust in men and even in himself; we see the suffering of Éowyn in seeing her beloved uncle killed, and of Éomer when he thinks his sister dead. Tolkien does not flinch from the unpleasantness of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields: Forlong has been hacked to death with axes, however he may put it; people have been trampled to death by elephants; every one of the enemy is dead. These are the comprehensible horrors of medieval warfare. To many ears, those of the war in which Tolkien himself fought are little more than meaninglessly huge statistics. Tolkien picks certain names and describes their owners' deaths precisely in order to give the casualties a personal touch. When Frodo and Sam witness Faramir's men destroying the Haradrim, one particular man is picked out for description; not because he is the only casualty, but because this lends a human element to the dead that was profoundly lacking in the trenches. In a way Tolkien tries to avoid the bald statistics of modern battle reports and the blank glossing of early-medieval poets and show us just war: sometimes heroic, sometimes prosaic, sometimes horrific and always cause for lament. His last comment on The Battle of the Pelennor Fields is in the words of a later singer:

There Théoden fell, Thengling mighty,
to his golden halls and green pastures
in the Northern fields never returning,
high lord of the host. Harding and Guthláf,
Dúnhere and Déorwine, doughty Grimbold,
Herefara and Herubrand, Horn and Fastred,
fought and fell there in a far country:
in the Mounds of Mundburg under mould they lie
with their league-fellows, lords of Gondor
Neither Hirluin the Fair to the hills by the sea,
nor Forlong the old to the flowering vales
ever, to Arnach, to his own country,
returned in triumph; nor the tall bowmen,
Derufin and Duilin, to their dark waters,
meres of Morthond under mountain-shadows.
Death in the morning and at day's ending
lords took and lowly. Long now they sleep
under grass in Gondor by the Great River.
Grey now as tears, gleaming silver,
red then it rolled, roaring water:
foam dyed with blood flamed at sunset;
as beacons mountains burned at evening;
red fell the dew in Rammas Echor.

The very landscape shares in the battle, and afterwards in the sadness: the river is at times red with blood and, afterwards, grey as tears, forming the constant that runs between the reality and the memory of war. It is significant that Tolkien links this memory with tears, and with the river: "Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away" as the hymn runs.

Perhaps he did fail to show the full horror of war. For Tolkien there was always a conflict between the glorious battles of the poets and the grim reality of warfare as he had seen it. He returned to this subject again (and with a good deal more success, since it was the purpose of the narrative) in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and his accompanying essay Ofermod, in which the idealistic young poet Torhthelm's stirring quotations are countered by the down-to-earth pity of the old soldier Tídwald. It is clear that the battles in The Lord of the Rings represent the slight resurgence of the Torhthelm side of this equation, but in the poem I quoted above, Tídwald's cynical old head is certainly looking over the battlements. Certainly the aim of the piece seems to be to rescue the sad battalions of faceless casualties from obscurity and give them names.

Looking back at the length of this post, I think I see why Tolkien was so short. Hopefully there is still plenty of scope for dissent and illustration, although I will add the caveat that if I think that the discussion on any hand is getting nasty I will delete the entire thread.

[Foolofatook]

To try and respond to your post is an undertaking indeed. However, I would like to touch on my own interpretation of a few of your points and questions.

1. Adolescent Heroes: It certainly explains a lot as to when fans become fans. I myself picked up the books in fourth and fifth grade so the characters would speak to me better if they weren't adult yet. Looking back with the question in my mind I would say that Muir is quite right in this argument. However I too would like to question his standing on what makes a character adult. And what makes him such a ladies man that he can call one of the greatest epics of all time unreal in its relationships. Furthermore I would argue that despite the characters being young boys there is a depth of character rarely seen in epics of adult characters found in the Lord of the Rings. Even though the story appealed to me at ages 10 and 11 they still appeal to me now at age 18. I have grown up and discovered more detail and depth to Tolkien as a result. Huir simply did not take the time to look over the characters before condemning their relationships as unmeaningful and adolescent.

2) While it may be true that few major characters die in the Lord of the Rings and of those that live most live happily ever after there is an overall theme of sadness permiating the books. The passing of the elves is the loss of so much that is good in the world that there is more loss than gain. Characters may not be casualties but the world as a whole is casualty.

Ok, sorry I cant answer the rest but good luck getting a full response. Whooh

[Child of the 7th Age]

Squatter,

I will address myself to just one small point --- the charge of the book being filled with schoolboys.

First, you have a great deal more patience with critics like Muir than I do.

Muir's contention that the LotR is filled with schoolboys masquerading as adult heroes was, as you mentioned, a common theme in the criticism of this early period. Indeed, I would go further and state that this charge of immaturity was the single most common criticism originally levelled against the book and its author.

A little over four months after Muir's review, Edmund Wilson writing in The Nation dismissed LotR as "juvenile trash" along lines similar to Muir. Wilson described LotR as "a children's book which has somehow got out of hand....an overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity." (Perhaps significantly, another critic once said of Wilson that he was "pompously obsessed with being the Adult in the room.")

Maurice Richardson, the first critic to review The Two Towers, used similar words. He said that TTT had begun as a "charming children's book" but "proliferated into an endless worm." Richardson maintained it "would do quite nicely as an allegorical adventure story for leisured boys" but no audience wider than that.

Even in the sixties and seventies, the critics continued to charge that the book was suitable only for children or contained childlike characters. Among the descriptions of the book were the following: "Winnie the Pooh posing as an epic" and "Faërieland's answer to Conan the Barbarian ". In 1961, Phillip Toynbee rejoiced that Tolkien's 'childish' books 'have passed into a merciful oblivion'. (Oh, how wrong he was!) In 1978, Toynbee went on to argue that Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams were all "childish" in their devotion to "make-believe" with additional comments on the "immaturity" of The Lord of the Rings.

It is certainly a legitimate thing to examine male/female relationships in LotR, or any other relationships for that matter. And I would be very interested to see what posters in the Downs have to say about such a topic. But I honestly think that Muir's insistence on "adult heroes and heroines who were sometimes unfaithful to their vows" is little more than a smokescreen.

Why must all relationships depicted in books be cut out of the same cloth? For that matter, why must every book deal with 'Relationships' (with a capital 'R')? Surely there can be some books that deviate from these arbitrary standards and still have something to say. Mr. Muir may have a preference for books of a certain type, but that is a lot different than saying that all books must be of that particular type if they are to be worthwhile. And that's what I feel he's doing.

So what is really going on here? Noted fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin has noted that many critics, champions of modernism, "have a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy" and they "confuse fantasy, which in the psychological sense is a universal and essential faculty of the human mind, with infantilism and pathological regression". Hence, they see tales of myth or faerie only in chldlike terms.

Tolkien himself anticipated the argument of some of these critics with his earlier essay "On Fäerie Stories" (finished sometime in 1946). But it's interesting to note that on 18 November 1956, C.S. Lewis came out with a piece "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said" in the New York Time Book Review , which seems to answer back to some of these critics who'd been taking their pot shots at LotR over the last year. Lewis bemoaned that fairy tales were now out of favor with adults, since myth should be accessible to both younger and older folk. He went on to point out that fairy stories can give us experiences we've never had and denied the critics' claims that, in literary terms, they were suitable only for children:

'Juveniles', indeed! Am I to patronise sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?

Squatter, please forgive my rant. I hope others will respond to your query about relationships. But I am suspicious of charges like these regarding schoolboy characters on the part of Muir and other critics. Hopefully, now that we are in the age of "postmodernity" we will get beyond these biases.

BTW, I have shamelessly borrowed from Patrick Curry. His Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity has a great deal more to say on this theme.

Child

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 2:41 AM December 19, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Excellent topic, Squatter, and well worth discussing! You've addressed several aspects, but as I have only a brief moment, I'd like to reply to Foolofatook's point about the age of fans. The age at which a person is introduced to the LotR is subject to so many different factors that it can't be used as an argument to prove much of anything. I encountered the book when I was no longer a teen, and in addition, was (and still am! [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] ) female. I loved it instantly, reading it a second time immediately after finishing it the first time. And I'm no exception; anyone who reads the forum attentively will realize that there are at least as many girls and women here as there are males. Perhaps that says something about Tolkien's understanding of human nature? ...with no divisions into genders.

Child, excellent points you make there - yes, not only literature, but also criticism must be seen within the framework of its time. The verdict on LotR has changed by now - and I shall have to read the copy of Defending Middle-earth that's waiting on my book-shelf...

[pandora]

LotR suffers partly from its setting (during a war) and partly from its idealism. Wartime is not a time of deep complex releationships between men and women; it is a time of disrupted relationships, long partings filled with worry (on both sides) and occasional moments of desparate "might-have-beens" or even "shouldn't-have-beens".

Getting a deep man/woman relationship into the frame of JRRT's story would have been either pathetically unrealistic or would have required introducing a whole new sub-setting. There's just no point, particularly if you feel that your readers are adult enough to understand what losses the characters are facing, something British crtics in the 50's should have been very aware of.

The idealism in the story is another point where critics struggle. In particular, they see the platonic love of the characters for each other as hard to swallow. As an example of this one review I read of the RotK movie contained the phrase "the homoeroticism between the hobbits is laughable" but I have seen similar, more veiled references to the same thing in other commentaries about the book over the years and in fact the thought is really behind the "boys' story" comments.

The implication really is that adult men are not capable of such strong and non-sexual feelings for each other; such comradeship is the province of pre-pubescent boys.

While such a view might be understandable in a modern time when peace has ruled most Western people's lives for 60 years, it is beyond me how critics that had seen the effects of two world wars could have held them. Particularly, to have lived through the trenches of WWI and not realised that the ending of all hope leads to just such feelings between those facing the Enemy in distant lands far from everything one knew is a serious flaw in those who make this accusation.

To pick one aspect of the book itself which may have helped cause this problem: Tolkien perhaps does not really drive home just how totally hopeless the situation is. No major character dies and there is until the end little that demonstrates the fact that this is a final battle in a war already won. It's true that this is not a global war in the modern sense but in Tolkien's mind it is the final phase of a global conquest.

The dispair that many of the characters feel about this has to be taken on trust a lot of the time. Which is fine with me but a critic frankly is not going to read into the depths of a book this size, they have deadlines to meet, and the absense of overt widespread destruction probably makes it hard for them to grasp just how desparate people like Aragorn actually are. It's not until the final battle at the Black Gate that the reader is absolutely forced to face the fact that Sauron can't lose militarily. The reader's hope is often well out of sync with the characters', especially if the reader is only a casual reader like Muir.

As regards the more general topic of men and women, JRRT wrote very well and realistically about their roles within the setting. To complain about his depiction of women in the society he was writing about is no more sensible than complaining about a writer depicting suffragettes as being weak because he doesn't give them the vote in his story!

I believe that Tolkien's work shows that he was an equalitist writing in and about an inequal world, but that's hardly his fault.

[Finwe]

All I'd like to say is, if Lord of the Rings is a "boy's book" then why are so many Lord of the Rings fans around the world female? Why, you ask? It's because reading the books gives us hope (at least it gives me hope) that I don't have to be a 6-foot 180-pound man to accomplish anything. I can be a woman, and still become one of the greatest heroes of this world. Just look at Eowyn. If she isn't a hero, then I don't know who is. Look at Galadriel, and at all the Elves. They remained behind out of free will and love of Middle-earth to make sure that this evil was overthrown. That, in my mind is a hero. We are given so many ideals to look up to and emulate, that it is impossible to delineate Lord of the Rings as just a boy's book or just a girl's book. Each person, regardless of whether they are a boy, a girl, or an adult, comes away from reading it, a different person, with a different gem of knowledge.

[lindil]

In what was an extremely pleasant suprise to me, Michael Martinez uncovered a rich mine of marital studies within the LotR contrasting the relationships of Tom and Goldberry with that of the Ents and the Entwives, found here.

It is one of countless cases were major things seemingly ignored in LotR are in fact treated with subtlty and depth.

Tolkien went on to explore the theme of potential and real discord between the sexes in Aldarion and Erendis [in Unfinished Tales] in a very upfront fashion, and indeed how it began the first steps into darkness towards the Fall of Numenor.

But leaving aside non-LotR referencs, the criticisms of Muir and Wilson, to me stem from hearts that have long ceased to actively wonder and feel joy and sorrow apart from themselves, and lash out violently anyone who would dare disturb theirs [and so many others] slumber.

Excellent topic Squatter.

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 10:36 AM December 19, 2003: Message edited by: lindil ]

[Bill the Pony]

First of all, bravo to all for such well-written and thoughtful posts!

Here's one of my theories about the early criticism:
Perhaps the early critics' inability to accept platonic relationships was a product of the war. Often the bereft will stuff their feelings and become numb to deep emotion. If this happens in one's years of transition from the late teens to the mid twenties or thirties, then the result is a grown man who is numb to emotion. This man would come to view emotion and strong platonic attatchments as a province of childhood. There were likely many such men after WWI, who then taught their sons that line of reasoning. These sons fought in WWII, and those teachings found resonance and became thus entrenched in their thought processes. The effects of this are still found today.

Another possibility is that some of the critics themselves were gay, and as it just wasn't done in those days, the repression would have been trememdous. Such a situation would lead someone to call the same-gender relationships "laughable."

Hope I made sense...

[pandora]

Another possibility is that some of the critics themselves were gay, and as it just wasn't done in those days, the repression would have been trememdous.

In the UK in the 50's it wasn't just "not done", it was illegal.

[Lost One]

There seem to be two main dimensions to the 'boy's own' criticism. One is an objection, or down-grading, of literature focussed (superficially) on action and adventure as opposed to character. The 'novel of sentiment' is, of course, highyl abberant in the histoy of literature, and some modern scholars feel that it is now too much neglected, and that(for example) it makes it harder for boys to become engaged in literature. LOTR is a great adventure story, albeit one imbued with ethical and modern purpose, and written with great literary skill. The other dimension is, of course, sex (to put it bluntly). Even for someone of his generation,Tolkien was wary in the extreme of the role of passion (as opposed to love) and it, essentially, has no place in his created world. He creates races like dwarfs, ents and even elves where the sex-drive is attentuated or absent altogether. Other races (orcs and trolls, for example) appear to have no means ot reproduction, since there's not even a suggestion of females among them. There is no goddess of love in his pantheon. All of this may encourage the homosocial elements in his story to topple over into homoeroticism, to some readers - greatly encouraged by the films! (this seems unproblematic to me). It is possible to made a positive point of this: that the Ring and it's influence is having a deadening affect on Middle-earth - hence the explosion of fecundity once it has gone - but still, this is a missing element in Tolkien's world that has to be accepted. And this is fair enough, given that most of 19th and 20th century literature is fixated on passion, however sublimated.

[Finwe]

I believe that there is plenty of "love" apparent in Tolkien's works, it just doesn't fit into the modern definition of "love." You can't deny that Pippin loved Merry, or Sam loved Frodo. We know they loved each other. Why does loving someone instantl mean that you are sexually attracted to them? Why can't two people love each other? The relationship between Sam and Frodo was so pure, heartfelt, and true that it had me in tears throughout the book, and throughout the movie. The books aren't to fault, for seemingly being devoid of love or relationships. It is society's fault, that it has to brand and define every form of love and relationship, and make them fit a certain category.

[Lush]

To answer Squatter's original question:

The majority of relationships in the book satisfied me on that level that makes a good adventure story great (i.e., I wasn't just being entertained, I cared deeply about the majority of Tolkien's characters).

Yet the importance that Tolkien himself placed on the relationship between Arwen and Aragorn makes that particular aspect of the story seem all the more unsuccessful to me.

The relationship works as just one of the many subplots that add depth and definition to the main plot-line, but I do not see it as, perhaps, Tolkien might have intended for me to see it. If Aragorn and Arwen are indeed representations of figures of timeless romance, and are "essential" to the story as a whole, then I think Tolkien goofed up a little.

Then again there are plenty of readers that are perfectly satisfied with Aragorn and Arwen as lovers in love; Sharkey, I think, and Underhill being among those persons on the forum that have been most convincing in their arguments that this relationship has great merit...and Squatter too, of course. But even this sum of exulted members'opinions still hasn't changed my mind on the matter.

There is no goddess of love in his pantheon.

An excellent, succint, and at the same time deep observation. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

I believe that there is plenty of "love" apparent in Tolkien's works, it just doesn't fit into the modern definition of "love."

Actually, the sort of definitions that you are probably thinking of have been around since the dawn of time, it's the West's attitude to them that has slowly been changing, I believe.