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GaugeMistress
(Mon Mar 3 21:07:42)
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 UPDATED Tue Mar 4 06:31:57 |
I've been loitering around for too long without contributing anything of substance. (After this attempt, you may want to exile me to the off-topic threads.) I'm grateful for the entertaining, supportive, and thought-provoking content put out by many of you, and this is intended to reciprocate. (And, selfishly, to gather still more cool thoughts from you...)
Two parts:
1) Going home
Do the people, places, and stories of Middle Earth ever awaken in you a sense of truth so deep that you cannot distinguish desire from memory? A familiarity that reaches farther back and farther forward than your set of learned experiences, but feels unique to the exact person that you individually and intrinsically are?
(Several of you are now looking at me like you aren't sure what I just said, and you are skeptical about whether I understand it myself.  )
Let me try to give an example. In the two hours before my wedding, a lot of people asked me if I was nervous. I had just graduated two days ago, and in two more days I would move to a new state. A man I had not lived with up to now would be the only thing I would recognize about my life. Walking down that aisle, I remember my thoughts clearly, with no trace of hesitation in them. "I am finally going home. I have never been there before, but I have missed it so much."
Or how about this. Romping around with Tom Bombadil was for me like stepping out of a shadow that I never knew I had been in. There were always gradations of brightness, but now this is sunlight! I can't run or ride horses in real life, but I'm sure that what I felt in some of those passages is what it would feel like. From the movie, I think some shots of Rivendell best captured that feeling for me.
In particular, was there some resonant or archtypal truth that you feel has never been captured anywhere else? (We have some truly impressive scholars here that can perhaps say what is most truly original, and I would be honored to hear from them. But anything you can say from your own experience is interesting.)
2) Extrapolation or design feature?
C.S. Lewis (author of Chronicles of Narnia, and a cohort, collegue, and friend of Tolkien) wrote a scene in which his main characters were trapped undergroud, enchanted by a witch into haziness. They were struggling to remember their home, and retain a desire for it. They spoke about the sun, and the witch said "you are just extrapolating from the lamp you see, imagining something bigger and better." They spoke of returning to their friend, a wise and powerful lion. The witch told them they were exaggerating their memory of a cat they had seen.
When Tolkien shows you something that seems to be more real than you what your senses tell you, does it feel to you like an extrapolation from our own world, the natural extension of biological imperatives? Or does it seems like a taste of something you haven't yet experienced but feel that you were designed for? Is Aragorn's strength or Gandalf's wisdom or Eowyn's spirit or Faramir's nobility a natural extension from the collective experience of humanity? When we recognize truer loyalty and clearer justice than we have known or will ever experience, and call it good, do we see a hint that we are well-adapted to something other than the experience our senses can give us?
(My apologies if this seems too much like the hyper-reality thread. My intention is to go in a slightly different direction, but my expression of these thoughts is limited, to say the least.)
As I occasionally add after particularly long-winded ramblings, if you've read this far into the text, mention this line to me and I'll buy you lunch. Just checking to see if anyone is still reading. ;)
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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For me, I feel like Tolkien is callimg me home in a sense. LotR feels eerily familiar, it's like a deja vu of things that never happened. Or did they? I have to stop and ask myself sometimes. I think it was Ian Mckellan who said it never really took place "except for somewhere in our hearts".
But I have been there... I am the 10th member of the Fellowship by pure desire. Like you also said, I have no clue how to ride horses or engage in battle--but I can somewhere within me because I feel as though I have many times over in different, yet significant ways. If people can't understand this I'm sorry for them.
@~~Renee @~~
In the external scheme of things, this evening is as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinklings is what eternity is made of…
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... to bump your own posts. But perhaps you could find it in your heart to cut some slack for one so new and earnest?  I hope to at least give the people in other time zones a chance to reject this post as well...
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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GM - (hah...those are my initials, too!) I just want to let you know that I've read your post, and plan on responding tomorrow (or later today, whichever you prefer to say). I'm done with laundry for the night and I need to get some sleep before my daughter wakes up at about 10/11AM. Talk with you tomorrow!
Gaby 
"There's only one person in the whole world like you."
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Hi GaugeMistress,
Tolkien was such an integral part of my childhood experience that it actually becomes difficult for me to discuss this topic properly - which is not to say it isn't a good topic, because it is. These characters and experiences presented idealised states for me, and I reached out through the book and experienced things through them that until then I had no idea existed. I suppose that is why LOTR and the Hobbit will always have a special place in my heart accordingly.
Whether this was because they tapped into things beyond sensory experience I really can't say. Certainly they activated and excited my mind in ways I find spiritually invigorating just thinking about now. I don't think anything else will ever quite accomplish what LOTR did for me (and Star Wars too, for that matter) but that was also a function of the young age I was at. I responded to many things fiercely - but the LOTR world incredibly so. It may well have been a central impetus in my decision to become a writer. I have no idea how I would have responded to the books at a later age; I really can't tell.
So, do I get that lunch now?
Sean :)
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Hi Sean,
Now there's an interesting idea that I really hadn't condisidered (perhaps because I got some bad advice and didn't read LOTR until college). The younger you are, the more everything feels the ways I describe. If you favor child psychology theories that emphasize adaptation and learning, it's that children are so quickly learning their environment and taking it into who they are that they quickly cannot remember not accepting and expecting this new stimulus. (eg, Elvish is another language which seems to follow the rules of languages.) If you lean more towards evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker, children recognize and adapt with such fluency because they come with a lot of innate mental machinery which is adapted to life on earth.
While people have encountered events so staggering that they "felt like a child" (like a loss that leaves them helpless), we so rarely find an experience that makes adults open and up learn like a sponge in the manner of a child. The experiences that come closest (immersion in another culture perhaps) are the ones that feel most foreign to me, and keep me constantly aware that I am far from home.
Hmmm...
Well, there's something to think about. Thanks!
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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Oh, and the free lunch...
I decided that the  icon was drawing too much attention, so I edited to the traditional ascii wink. Seems to have relieved the strain on my virtual lunch money...
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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A very intriguing post!
First of all, I would like to say that I know exactly what you mean by this feeling of "going home". (I feel that way every time I visit the Cumbrian mountains in the English Lake District. I've never lived there, but in my heart it is home. It's a feeling I've never been able to explain or express adequately. Maybe it reminds me of M.E!)
Every time I read LOTR, it feels like a homecoming. The characters, whether they are men, elves, dwarves, or hobbits, etc etc, are all essentially human - each has their failings and weaknesses as well as strengths - and they become the reader's friends in a way that other, perhaps more one-dimensional, fictional characters cannot. And Tolkien describes the landscapes with such love that you fall in love with them, too.
As for your second point - (I've always loved that scene from Narnia too!) - perhaps the roots of ancient mythology that Tolkien uses in his works speak to us on a deep subconscious level. We all grow up with fairy tales and myths, with heroes, princesses and dragons, with good fighting evil. It's an expression of how ancient peoples made sense of their world, and Tolkien is able to take that and make it resonate with the modern reader. By taking themes that we are all familiar with, and putting them into a world that is so complete that it feels like history rather than fantasy, Tolkien transports you to a world that you feel really could have existed, and that we can feel a part of.
Perhaps that's why we feel that we could (if pressed!) show ourselves in a heroic light; we identify with Tolkien's heroes on so many levels. "Biological imperatives" such as altruism and fighting for one's very survival exist in us all, but very rarely (unless we are soldiers in conflict) do we, in our comfortable lives, get to experience them - Tolkien gives us the chance to do so vicariously.
And you are very welcome to buy me lunch! Do I have to supply an airline ticket?! (I don't know if you are in lunching distance of Wales!)
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love
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I can only comment quickly right now, although I'll be back with more later. But I just wanted to comment on the sense that Middle-Earth is real, how it seems to tug at the senses and spirit of people reading it. (Especially us poor sods who were indoctrinated to it early ). It would not be until many years after first reading LotR that I would run across something from Neil Gaiman, one of the best authors out there today, (even if he will never have a Stephen King profile), that really explained how I felt.
Anyway, I'm going to paraphrase here, so it might not quite capture the original elequence. "It is true, these things never happened. But that does not mean that they are not real. And dreams are a type of truth that often endure when mere facts have come to dust."
I've always found that to be an excellent way to describe both LotR and a number of other stories that move me in a special way. They may not be cold, hard fact, but the feelings they give you and the dreams they create are more important than that. Otherwise, I doubt we'd have a messageboard with so many people from around the world, so different and from every type of background, who talk about these topics day in and day out.
"His madness keeps him sane, doesn't it?"
"Do you think he is the only one?"
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Broc
(Tue Mar 4 09:28:04)
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"Dreams are a type of truth that often endure when mere facts have come to dust"
Good perspective.
We have to undertsand that there is an essense of the human spirit which bridges cultures -- that we may call truth. Out of this human spirit great artists create echoes which have never before existed, which -- for an instant -- mirror truth in our hearts.
This is why we must approach a symphony as an individual entity. Such-and-such an orchestra performing so-and-so's symphony-No. X is NEWLY created out of the human spirit. It speaks to us as no other orchestra performing the same work has ever done.
In theatre, every performance [of the same show in a run] is an individual expression of the human psyche & spirit.
As an audience, we evaluate how a work echoes "truth" within us. Those works which move us become classics. Those which move us only for a while and fade, fall within the pop domain.
Tolkien reaches deep inside us to draw us into a cross-cultural understanding of truth. He immerses us in interests we love: our beautiful world, our willingness to sacrifice for those we love, our stivings to overcome both evil empires without, as well as evil yearnings within us.
Frodo becomes Everyman -- and, reading along, so do we. We stand in with Frodo and other Great Hearts, because we want to be like them: Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Thomas a Beckett...
Tolkien encapsulates qualities of redemption and richly "sets the table."
We feast. And share in the communion of trans-cultural values. And, like members of the Fellowship, we belong to each other --
It is these values we cherish. And together, we and our children will make the world a better place for our children's children. Tolkien, Gandhi, Mother Teresa and so many others, within real-life and within fiction, lead us to greater heights.
And together, we can over-reach so much higher than we can alone [concept of synergy]. But, alone, even the smallest person can make so much difference... as Galadriel reminds us.
There is an "India-Indian" [two of my daughters are American Blackfoot Indians] proverb, which speaks to us at our deaths: "All that is not given -- is lost"
Tolkien spends 1500 pages elaborating on this.
Our hearts resonate with this truth.
Hence, our message board.
Best Wishes!
~ Broc
As Shakesaid Speare in the Verchant of Menace -- "All that Golders is Not Glit!"
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There's a most interesting response to my question about seeing "new" archtypes in LOTR. Not only is every performance a re-telling, and every re-telling a new story -- no two people ever hear quite the same music, see quite the same picture, hear the exact same story, even when they stand side by side for the telling. Unless we co-exist precisely in time and space, we will always see something just a little bit different. And... hence, our message board. Yes.
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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Broc,
Great, thoughtful, insightful post.
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
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While i won't be nearly as eloquent as some of the other responses, i'd just like to say that i know this feeling painfully well. i get it after watching really good movies--like both TTT and FOTR, as well as after finishing incredible books. It's a feeling of intense longing and restlessness, that after your post i can put a name to: it's like being homesick. Unlike normal homesickness, however, which can be assuaged by returning to comfortable surroundings, it's the homesickness of an exile who can never really go home. you can pretend, or comfort yourself with familiar objects, but you can never really return to that place where you feel you truly belong. Am i making any sense?
Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone...
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I was really touched by this phrasing. I'm often intimidated by the complexity of the language and thought (and sometimes both at once ) that I see on this board. But then I'll go and find some emotional or intellectual resonance just when I wasn't expecting it.
The word exile turns a key to open up more of the images that express these same emotions. Like the psalms of David, or some Cherokee poetry, or Frodo wondering what we're doing out here, or even Pippin remembering the Shire... In the first two bodies of poetry, I always thought I heard a longing for more than the geographic places from which they have been evicted -- for a place that perhaps they came from before they entered the world, and which they will perhaps return to. Their home on earth isn't the whole of it, but in that home they knew continuity with it somehow. There's something similar about the shire, and something similar about my understanding of what heaven is.
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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Aule
(Tue Mar 4 13:28:19)
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| UPDATED Tue Mar 4 13:29:25 |
Well, let's see... The books had a big impact on me when I first read them at 12 years old. On one level, I was able to live vicariously through the characters and the sheer adventure of it all. On another level, the values represented in the book were like an oasis in a vast desert.
Aragorn particularly affected me. At such a young age, I found his combination of strength, artistry, honour, wisdom, lore, and nobility to be quite compelling, and an example to follow. I think I've always been intrigued by individuals who are able to rise above the crowd and do something special. No single fictional character has had such an impact on me.
The friendship of Sam and Frodo was not far behind. My father has always been an extremely loving man. Sam and Frodo demonstrated pure friendship and loyalty. They sort of reinforced to me the idea that love is not always about sex or family and that males can express their feelings and connect with others on an emotional level - very healthy.
Lord of the Rings has always been to me a bastion of truth. It portrays aspects of humanity as it should be. I've found that if we look hard enough and try hard enough, we can actually find some of this in the real world, albeit amidst a sea of mistrust, betrayal, and selfishness. But the optimist in me always wanted to believe that the world is a wonderfull place, and that people are good. Every once in a while, I read these books yet again, and I am reminded to look for the best and to try and be the best I can. It centres me, and brings my outlook back into focus.
In the 26 years since I first read the books, I've come to realize that there is far more to these books than what I first realized. Well, that's not quite true. I think I somehow realized these things when I was 12 but was not able to fully comprehend them. I still savour every page when I'm reading them, and the movies managed to hit the mark for me in terms of what is special to me about the books.
You ask what archetypal truths are represented. More than anything, I say truth itself, along with honour and loyalty. Beyond that, I have learned that what is important is not some sort of realization that you are great, but that nobody is better than you - that anyone can do what they set their mind to do and that each of us can be important in our own way. If this doesn't describe Lord of the Rings, then I don't know what does.
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I moved to the town I now live in, because everytime I came here on holiday, I felt I was coming home. Everytime I left I felt I was leaving where I belonged. I have no family here and when I moved no friends, but in two years I have never regretted it.
Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.
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"A familiarity that reaches farther back and farther forward than your set of learned experiences, but feels unique to the exact person that you individually and intrinsically are?"
That's it, exactly, Gauge. LotR has a mythic quality that transcends time to me. I think because it's a tale that resonates with spirit, and because of that, is eternal.
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Some really interesting notions that you've brought up, GaugeMistress.
I identify with your comment about LOTR invoking a sense of "going home". Reading Tolkien has always invoked for me a sense of, well, nostalgia might be a good way to describe it. Even more than a sense of going home, there's a feeling of longing for a place that I somehow know without ever having been there. I'm reminded of the words of the poet Louis Macneice:
"These are the times at which
Aloneness is too ripe
When homesick for the hollow
Heart of the Milky Way
The soundless clapper calls
And we would follow
But earth and will are stronger
And nearer - and we stay. "
For me, your two points run rather nicely into each other (is that what you intended?) because many of the things in LOTR that evoke that sense of nostalgia and longing for home are, I think, the finer qualities embodied in the characters and settings within the story. Generally speaking, the characters have certain qualities emphasised (nobility, integrity, loyalty) rather than internal conflicts. I suppose that's typical of much of the mythic genre but it serves to remind me of those things that are worth striving after even if they are hard to reach.
Perhaps, then, our achievement of the better is dependent on moving beyond mere "biological imperatives" (as I would understand the term) and pursuing the ideals of truth, integrity, loyalty, compassion and the like.
"How can I not love them, and weep?"
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Yes, I did intend for some synergy or continuity in the two parts, although my thoughts often come out choppier in text than the way they first occur to me. I often find myself jumping from one thought to the next in ways that seem like non sequiters to other people.
The last two lines of that poem will stay with me for a long time.
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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GaugeMistress, this has been an excellent thread, with post after post of stellar quality. I have delayed responding because everyone else has done such a wonderful job of drawing out these feelings. Also, I think, because my own feelings of homesickness and nostalgia are painful.
Somebody (I don't know where - did anyone else see this?) used the word "sehnsucht" in a post to describe this kind of longing. It has a number of English translations (according to some German/English website):
die Sehnsucht: aspiration, longing, wishfulness, yearning
die Sehnsucht nach: desire for, longing for
mit Sehnsucht erwarten: to await eagerly
die Sehnsucht nach etwas: yearning for something
Sehnsucht nach Vergangenem: nostalgia
Somewhere in all these words is the way I feel about Middle-Earth.
I was a military brat, so we lived in 8 places, including 4 countries, by the time I was 17. I read LOTR at maybe 11, and from then on, it could be a refuge and a familiar place no matter where we were living. Maybe the fact that I wasn't "from" anywhere strengthened my longing for a true home. And the feeling of homesickness was already familiar - to this day, I miss almost every place I've lived, with the sadness that comes from knowing you can't turn back time and go back. LOTR homesickness is similar except we can't even visit, and it can be felt by every person, regardless of how attached they feel to their homes.
But of course there are many alternate homes available through books - why LOTR? People on this thread and others have expressed many reasons for this that I agree with - the nobility of the characters, the sense that deep truths and essential struggles displace the petty, mundane realities of every day life, the beauty and richness of the world, and so on.
For me these are all tinged with the poignancy of knowing that we cannot help these characters in their struggle and we cannot see this beautiful place in person. Time has marched on and destroyed almost all that once was. It is lost, like Atlantis. The awful reality of the human condition is that the highest and best thing we can do is to love, but that each of us will ultimately lose everything we love, including life itself. Because we love, we hold on tightly to things and people that are gone, and we should hold on - but we know deep down it is not exactly the same, that time is a one-way gate, that to be mortal is to perish. Even those who believe that they will be reunited with the people they love after death, or will walk the earth again in a new form, must pause to realize it will not be exactly the same.
One of Shakespeare's sonnets ends like this:
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Tolkien's works are shot through with love and sadness. It is a measure of his quality that they are also full of courage and hope.
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What appropriate reflections for me in this hour! I'm actually just returning home from the imposition of ashes for Lent, in which a rector physcially marks the forehead of each parishoner with ashes, saying "Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return." It's a reflection on my own mortality, but also on my continuity with something more permanent than this body; a reminder that I must never mistake this place for home.
"Sehnsucht" -- how interesting that it can be used to express both anticipation and also memory/nostalgia. The hobbits (in the book and in the movie) variously express thoughts they want to return to the shire, and a growing realization that perhaps they cannot. If they never can return -- the quest is not over; the deeper longing is for the "good that's worth fighting for". (Hmmm. Can you tell I'm a military brat too? ).
By the way -- time to put my ignorance on public display  -- can you give a reference/number for that sonnet? It's not familiar to me.
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 73
That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadest in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
The road may pass, but they shall not! Not while Faramir is Captain.
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I just wanted to wrap things up by thanking everybody for putting such time and insight into very thoughtful posts. For me, it's been like the tip-of-the-tongue experience when a person fills in the word or analogy that you can't quite grasp -- but on a conceptual and emotional level. If you've ever come accross an idea that speaks out to you -- you have to just sit still and stare at the idea, and the idea stares back at you -- these posts have all had some word or phrase or image that's been like that for me.
"If you're not for yourself, then who will be for you? If you're only for yourself, what are you?"
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"I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew..."
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This message has been deleted by the poster
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...the angels had guitars even before they had wings...
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A friendly bump from Sponsor #11593: Lady Éowyn
 You are a daughter of kings. A shieldmaiden of Rohan.
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A friendly bump from Sponsor #11593: Lady Éowyn
You are a daughter of kings. A shieldmaiden of Rohan.
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