Tolkien and Meaning: Part 1

A more juvenile title for this could be rather “What Tolkien Means To Me,” like a second grade homework assignment.  I can’t tell you what “Tolkien means” or his works, three fat thick books of Lord of the Rings, a smaller one, and a very esoteric dense book called the Silmarillion, and all his other Middle Earth related books, that’s simply too much, and too many to even try to sum up, and I wouldn’t presume to make claims because though I’ve read the main 4 works, a few times, and read through the others, as I go through them (often) I find I have to focus on only one thing or another.  Like “Elves” for instance. My knowledge of his Elves far surpasses anything about his Dwarves, and the tales of the Atani (Men/Humans) I know even less of.  As my own attention drifts simply by attempting to take in the vast stories and lore of multiple times, places which have multiple names, and languages, I find it hard to believe that anyone in existence could know it all. Every detail. Enough to begin to process the all encompassing saga. This is not to say it isn’t fun to try.  It took a lifetime for Tolkien to build, and it would take a lifetime to sort every single detail out, enough to pretend to make broad declarations about his ‘subconscious subtext’ and whether or not it has any strain of secret intentions about religion or politics… perhaps if you became a monk and studied it like scriptures every day, perhaps…

So I can’t tell you ‘what it’s all about,’ for even if I did know it all, one would then also have to be a master of vocabulary and who would presume to try to beat J.R.R. Tolkien, a man who knew many languages, and made several, though incomplete, this is considerably more skillful than anything I could possible create. I can tell you what it ‘means to me’ and as for any reader of such vast works, like Milton, or Joyce, or Homer, one can only ‘draw from’ certain parts something to be gained, something to be inspired by, something to provoke, something to think about.  Books such as these become ‘favorites’ because people will go back to them again and again, finding different things, sometimes something new. 

I do know a bit about the folklore of the British Isles, and parts of Europe, and specifically the folklore dealing with ‘elves’ and I can tell you that it isn’t exactly the same as Tolkien’s. To say that he ‘got it all from’ the common “Fairy Folklore” or “paganism” or “catholicism” is absurd. He’s got things in there that go far beyond the common folklore of this kind from Ireland to Norway, from Wales to Finland, from Scotland to France. This is why there isn’t a book out there that I would spend a penny on which presumes to tell me where they believe “he got it from” or uses other material, political or religious to tell me what “he really meant.”  

What I find in Tolkien, from the Silmarillion all the way to Unfinished Tales and the Lost Road, etc, is a whole new creative narrative that is saying something which he may have believed in as a writer, and that it was not something ever-present in the world around him, that ‘came from around him’ or that there’s some secret religion or political ideology that he’s trying to sell. I don’t think he is, and a good writer doesn’t, they search for something which was previously beyond words, some deep truth that might be within them that they do not find in words outside them. They do things like attempt to write it in poetry, in song, in epic sagas, in stories, dramas, and fantasies. They express. I do not believe (upon gazing at all this material of his) that he was just ‘spinning some crap to hide common religious messages and political ideal.’  I believe he found something more profound than those things, and we get quite a bit of it in his writings. 

Perhaps it is the order or collection or configuration of his writings which seems to imply this to me. It’s one thing to create sci-fi worlds and fantasy places, but there’s something odd about all this he created, stranger than sci-fi, more peculiar and curious than ‘fantasy fiction.’  I’ve noticed a lot of odd things as I’ve read, and though I will continue to process it, I also continue to learn quite a bit just while researching just what it is this material seems to provoke. These things are not the same things everybody else is probably ‘digging up,’ and I couldn’t expect them to. While I have not much interest in Dwarves, therefore I don’t look into them much, nor their language, etc, and what I do take an interest in, as narrow as that may be, there’s still so much to go through and even this is part of the enjoyment of it.  I wouldn’t waste a second playing a ‘Middle Earth’ video-game or role-playing game when I could be learning more, and I believe this is part of what it means to ‘read Tolkien,’ you have to be interesting in “learning.” One “learns” about the Elves, or Dwarves and because it is all so vast, one will have to focus in on something in particular and go from there. Trying to process it all (and I mean all, the Silmarillion, everything) would seem impossible. 

One must find this kind of ‘learning’ fun, and it is this very thing which I think is part of the appeal, I seem to like the Silmarillion more than the other books, which I still continue to refer back to anyways. The richness of the material isn’t even that there is so much of it, there is clearly more than the surface in there, there’s plenty there to mull over and think about, in many many ways. It isn’t just a plot and some interesting characters, there’s more.  What may not draw the surface-skimmers, the overly-simplistic ‘fans’ of the movies, and the games and pop-culture is that they don’t give a shit that there might be anything else ‘in there’ that means anything. As far as they’re concerned, it’s just a bunch of fantasy fiction about dragons and swords and people killing each other and saving the world.

For people that are possibly similar to me, there is something more that draws out certain expression which we seem to relate to in ways that are not ordinary. What I don’t find anybody writing about out there is this exact thing, and one cannot simply start citing Bible Passages and pagan mythology to explain it all away, or some political tract. I don’t think he’s writing about things like that. It requires talking about the material, thinking about it, from it’s own angle and perspective, within it’s very own world and the context which that is in. It certainly does mean something outside itself, for otherwise we wouldn’t be able to relate to it all. What is there, and what it means, still suggests that rather, what one is specifically looking at, on one aspect or another, and not everybody is looking at the exact same things either. So what one finds, one scrap, one piece, one single meaning to them is far more interesting to me than the pedantic rantings of phony ‘Tolkien Professors’ and fake academic writers who’d like to make bold condescending statements like “Tolkien was a Conservative” or “Aragorn is Jesus” or “Gandalf is Jesus” or “Tolkien was a Tree-Hugging Hippie” or “Tolkien was a Secret Pagan.” This is all absurd. Telling me “what it’s ALL about” as I said seems impossible to accomplish, no more possible than one man telling me what every passage in the Bible means.

Rather, I think people can offer up what they themselves have found in their own limited scans of the material, and if they can muster the vocabulary, offer up that inexplicable truth that they believe they might have found, which likely is far greater than religion or politics, having more to do with something one finds in poetry, a ‘greater truth,’ which writers aspire to behold and express. What does Tolkien ‘mean to you?’  Certainly not an unthinkable task nor an impossible expectation as the assumption is that somebody should be getting something out of it more than what happens in the plot, or the physical details of descriptions. The insult to the intelligence on the part of Tolkien Preachers is the same as it is with all others, they stand on a pedestal and recite their authority on the matter, and then tell you ‘what he really meant’ as absolutes and with their own secret inference which is “join the Catholic church,” or “become a neo-pagan” or “become a Republican” or “send your checks to the nearest Environmental group.” Or something as cynical as “buy MY book.” 

I won’t buy such books, as there is never anything in them of any value. They tell me nothing and distort the very outside reference material they’re using to spin Tolkien’s words. Nothing could be more offensive, but it is happening, widely, and one might even say at this point, “everybody’s doing it” or that “it’s gone mainstream” as if this is how to experience Tolkien. By playing video-games or role-playing games, or by watching shitty movies, or by reading, writing, and selling weird books by authors who want to ride the coat-tails of a popularity of the material so they can sell their own brand of politics and religion. This is because they are neither clever or intelligent to write their own material, because they can’t, they won’t and it isn’t because they’re ‘more nerdy’ than you are, it is because in fact they care less about the material than you do. 

(Continued in Part 2)