Posted on 01/09/2003 8:29:39 AM PST by ksen
Tolkien teaches us to take courage
Tom Shippey
The Daily Telegraph
Monday, January 06, 2003
J.R.R. Tolkien was not a professional author nor, for much of his life, even a much-published one. He had a certain success with The Hobbit in 1937, when he was 45 -- enough for his publisher, Stanley Unwin, to ask for a sequel. But though Tolkien dutifully began to write one almost immediately, it was 17 years before the first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published, by which time Tolkien had almost reached retirement.
For much of his life he was haunted by the fear of never finishing anything -- the theme of one of his few short stories, Leaf by Niggle. In The Notion Club Papers, not published until 20 years after his death, he imagines his own work as a manuscript discovered on a dusty shelf sometime far in the future, incomprehensible and anonymous.
Tolkien's fears have been proved false, but they were not unfounded. His work is now known to hundreds of millions of readers and viewers, but the non-professional nature of his writing still shows through.
An experienced professional author, writing to make a living and with a good sense of potential markets, would not have produced a 1,000-page romance with only vestigial love interests. Nor would he have added 100 pages of appendices about dates and scripts and languages. And he would have known not to stop the action dead with a 15,000-word account of a confused committee meeting, which is "The Council of Elrond."
Peter Jackson's first film had to take stern action to deal with that problem, and his second one has to deal equally sternly with Tolkien's decision -- how Jackson must have torn his hair! -- not to bother with the Ents' attack on Isengard, the stronghold of the corrupt wizard Saruman, but to have the junior hobbits Merry and Pippin report it in flashback.
At the end of one chapter, they are gazing down from the Ent Treebeard's shoulders on Saruman's valley, and then they disappear from the action until, 70 pages later, they turn up picnicking in the ruins. It was a dead certainty that Jackson could not allow his version of the story to go like that. It breaks a basic rule: "Show, don't tell."
But basic rules are made to be broken, at least by authors who are not writing for the market but for themselves. And if there is one thing that publishing history shows, it is that the market does not know what it wants -- except novelty, which is by nature unpredictable. Again and again, great writers of fantasy have been loners, starting off without agents and against sensible advice. Tolkien was not a professional author. He was a driven one, and one ought to ask what drove him because, whatever it was, it draws other people too.
Things like missing out the sack of Isengard perhaps provide a clue. Tolkien dropped a big action scene, yes. What he got in exchange, and what he clearly wanted to get, was a major surprise, as one plot strand --Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, now mixed up with the Riders of Rohan -- quite unexpectedly runs across the results of another -- Merry and Pippin and Saruman and the Ents -- although the day has already been saved for the first group by the marching wood at Helm's Deep in Rohan. None of the characters, as Tolkien wrote the story, really understands the whole of what is going on.
Not even Gandalf. In fact, the only thing they do know is that their fate will not, in the end, be determined by visible events but by a mostly invisible one: the stealthy crawl of three insignificant-looking characters into the lion's mouth of Mordor. The great ones and the heroes are continually trying to see what is happening elsewhere, through the palantirs and the Mirror of Galadriel and the Eye of Sauron. The attempt is repeatedly disastrous. Denethor commits suicide because of what he sees in his palantir, but he has read it wrong. As Gandalf says, "Even the wise cannot see all ends," and the really wise remember that.
The moral is, to quote Gandalf again -- and Jackson picked out just these words to repeat in the first movie, varying the pronouns cunningly -- "That [the future] is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
Tolkien surely did not mean these words just for Frodo. They were a major part of his own conviction and a part of his own cure for the defeatism, the appeasement, the lack of will and the weary calculation of odds that he saw dogging the Western democracies as he was writing The Lord of the Rings and still after he had finished it. Tolkien's achievement, it may be, was to reintroduce a heroic world view, drawn from the ancient texts he taught as a professor, to a world gone ironic.
And this world view was put across not only by the obviously heroic figures such as Aragorn and Faramir and King Theoden, but by the hobbits -- and, most of all, by the very structure of the story. In this story, all the characters find themselves, literally as well as figuratively, bewildered: their bearings lost, not sure what's for the best, but slogging on regardless. The most important ones, moreover, the hobbits Frodo and Sam, think they're on their own. All the time, their friends are risking everything to distract the Eye of Sauron from them, but they don't know that. They go on anyway.
The film version, adapted to the limited attention span of the modern viewer, can't handle all of this, but it handles a surprising amount. Tolkien himself, commenting on the first of several attempted film scripts back in 1957, remarked that he had no objection to people cutting things out, but he disliked compression, trying to jam everything into three hours. It loses the uncertainty, the false trails and the fog of war that link The Lord of the Rings and the battle of the Somme, where Tolkien fought with the Lancashire Fusiliers.
Peter Jackson has inevitably built up the action scenes and straightened the tangled threads, but the message survives the change of medium. Courage is what you need after you've lost hope: Things may not be as bad as they seem. Tolkien learned that nearly 90 years ago, but it isn't obsolete yet.
But when he thinks Frodo is dead, he does decide to take the ring to the Crack of Doom alone:
... 'He's dead!' he said. 'Not asleep, dead!' And as he said it, as if the words had set the venom to its work again, it seemed to him that the hue of the face grew livid green.
And then black despair came down on him, and Sam bowed to the ground, and drew his gray hood over his head, and night came into his heart, and he knew no more.
When at last the blackness passed, Sam looked up and shadows were about him; but for how many minutes or hours the world had gone dragging on he could not tell. He was still in the same place, and still his master lay beside him dead. The mountains had not crumbled nor the earth fallen into ruin.
'What shall I do, what shall I do?' he said. 'Did I come all this way with him for nothing?' And then he remembered his own voice speaking words that at the time he did not understand himself, at the beginning of their journey: I have something to do before the end. I must see it through, sir, if you understand.
'But what can I do? Not leave Mr. Frodo dead, unburied on the top of the mountains, and go home? Or go on? Go on?' he repeated, and for a moment doubt and fear shook him. 'Go on? Is that what I've got to do? And leave him?'
Then at last he began to weep; and going to Frodo he composed his body, and folded his cold hands upon his breast, and wrapped his cloak about him; and he laid his own sword at one side, and the staff that Faramir had given at the other.
'If I'm to go on,' he said, 'then I must take your sword, by your leave, Mr. Frodo, but I'll put this one to lie by you, as it lay by the old king in the barrow; and you've got your beautiful mithril coat from old Mr. Bilbo. And your star-glass, Mr. Frodo, you did lend it to me and I'll need it again, for I'll be always in the dark now. It's too good for me, and the Lady gave it to you, but maybe she'd understand. Do you understand, Mr. Frodo? I've got to go on.' ....
I can't wait either. I want to see old brave Sam deliberating his choices outside Shelob's lair. Oh, and I want to see Shelob, too! Should be cool.
How many days left? :o(
Too dang many. 
I managed to survive the first time, I'm not sure I can make it this time!
Am I pathetic or what?
Great choices! And I would add Daniel Day-Lewis.
Viggo lost all credibility for me as an actor. I think Viggo has TOO hard an edge. Sean Bean, in general though is almost TOO old.
Who is this Roger Howarth? What has he been in?
So far, its been hard to imagine anyone as good as James Wilby.
If so, I'm right there with you, Friend. :-/
He was actually Peter Jackson's first choice for Aragorn, but he declined.
I'm very happy with Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn though. BUT I wish Viggo would shut up! He's the kind of actor who isn't content with the gift for being an outstanding actor. He thinks of himself as an intellectual too. Big mistake! Viggo is gorgeous and an extraordinary actor, but he isn't anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is. He should be more humble and thank God for the gift for acting he was given.
Viggo, do us all a favor: NO MORE INTERVIEWS. You're ruining my Aragorn!
Didn't know him either. Did a Google search. He's a soap star. Here's a picture I found. But I'm not impressed...
carton, how can you say that Lij wont be able to pull off the 'haunted' look after doing Frodo???!!! I am blown away by how well that young man emotes. Just by his personality alone, he seems older than he really is. But, you know, he probably is *still* a bit too young...still, I have always pictured Darnay to be what Carton would be if things had worked out for him.
as for Carton's downfall, I would surmise its simply spending all his money on wine women and song...and eventually just wine.
But Elijah is safe since the odds of me making the movie are 1,000,000,000,000 to 1.
Daniel Day-Lewis is handsome, but you can find handsome actors by the truckload. Very few however are outstanding actors. I was actually suggesting Daniel Day-Lewis because he just happens to be (in y book) the very best actor around.
As for Roger Howarth, I admit I'm prejudiced against soap actors/actresses, the majority of whom I consider very bad actors.
But you got a point: I never saw Roger Howarth act though and I shouldn't be prejudiced against him. I stopped watching soaps a long time ago because of the terrible acting, to say nothing of the plots. So I don't think I'll ever have the stomach to watch his soap, but maybe you can recommend something else he's done (besides soaps) so I can see for myself.
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