Lord of the Rings: How To Read J.R.R. Tolkien

it's been about 20 years since the last time I was at CMU and it's been longer than that since I was in Wien hall where I had freshman calculus I was walking around campus today and I was walking through Baker hall of the slanting floors and I thought well I'm back so tonight I'm going to be talking about how to read Tolkien and you might be wondering why such a topic needs a how-to since well over 100 million people of read Tolkien over the past 50 years and they seem to be doing quite all right without me or the advice of any professor or at least any professor that's not named Tolkien but if Tolkien is easy to read and he must be you know because his work is pop culture not literature we have to ask why so many critics miss read him and so hilariously my favorite being the anonymous and lucky for him critic from The Times Literary Supplement who wrote this is not a book that many adults will read right through more than once which first of all weird what kind of criterion is that and second of all like Wow talk about epic fail and prediction because he's writing about the Lord of the Rings which is probably the one 20th century book that people do read over and over again well I'm also good night moon but they're kind of different also there's there's a number of important and powerful critics including that mr. anonymous but also patricia meyer spax solomon Rushdie Katherine Stimpson and Edmund bunny Wilson who even if they are dead apparently needed desperately need a how-to on reading Tolkien because they are doing it wrong and one of the wrong things they do and many other people do as well is to Stampede right to the question why is Tolkien so popular because the answers to that question usually take a sharp turn at shallow politics and then make a beeline right for pop sociology and since I find both of those places less congenial than Mordor I won't be trying to do that and therefore I won't be telling you directly why Tolkien is so popular instead I'm going to explain in part why Tolkien's work has the particular effects on readers that it does and then you can decide if that has anything to do with its popularity but before I go further I want to tell a story it's about professor Peggy Knapp who is in part responsible for my becoming a medievalist now in order to tell the story I have to set things up a little because the story relies on the audience having a bit of information about the strange cultural practices of the distant past specifically the process of course registration at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s and yes there is nothing more exciting than that here's how it was way back then things that are now done seamlessly online were done physically in person with pencil and paper even at CMU I know I'm not making this up to make sure you actually got the classes you wanted you camped out overnight in the academic buildings and in order to be first in the registration line you slept there really really with sleeping bags and with sports bottles filled with vodka mix with Tang or I heard some people did that once I mean that so after you signed up for your openings then you had to meet with your advisor and get your classes approved and this is the key point your adviser signed your course sheet and handed it in you didn't get the course sheet back this is important you'll you'll see why in a minute I think it's safe to say that the specifics of the registration process at Carnegie Mellon in 1989 are not known by the current students and they're probably hardly remembered among the faculty and be honest they don't keep me up all night reminiscing either but in another 50 to 60 years when all the people my age are dead the knowledge will be entirely lost trivial social procedures often don't get recorded right we have no idea how the Vikings organized lining up for battle or for getting into their ships though it's kind of fun to imagine like Ragnar is cutting me so now you have so and the point is this if you don't know the registration process then my story loses something but so now that you have the cultural background here's the story it was the end of the first semester of my senior year and I saw from the schedule which is printed on paper by the way that Professor Knapp was going to be teaching a choice or class that met at 8:30 a.m. now I hadn't had an 8:30 a.m. class since freshmen calculus and I didn't go to that very much so thinking that as a second semester senior I was going to need my sleep I didn't sign up for Chaucer I didn't put it on my registration form I just took what I needed to graduate though I did camp out in Baker hall so I could get into Sharon Dilworth writing workshop and if I remember correctly professor Margo Livesey who's now a famous novelist had to step over my sleeping bag to get into her office that morning later I brought my form to Professor Knapp and she this looks reasonable she said and it fulfills all your requirements for graduation but you missed my Chaucer class there was a pause I don't see a time conflict I said yeah well I get there there's no conflict but you know it's my second semester senior year and there was a long pause and then professor Knapp said you know Chaucer be a good class for you no I'm sure it would be but you know it's an 8:30 a.m. class and you know a second semester senior there was another long pause I'll just add it to your form this time there was a long pause by me don't worry you'll pick up the middle English but but I stopped because I might have been lazy but I wasn't stupid and that was how I ended up with an 8:30 a.m. class the second semester senior year and it turned out to be the best single class I ever took at Carnegie Mellon and it prepared me so well for graduate school in Medieval Studies that even though I had a couple year digression into getting degrees in journalism and creative writing when I did figure out I wanted to be a medievalist I was still ahead of all the other students in my seminar but there's a bigger point to this story in all this setup and it's not just a long way to go to praise professor Knapp who as the story shows wasn't just an amazing teacher but also a wise advisor which is by the way why I dedicated this book tradition and influence in anglo-saxon literature to her and to my two other great teachers John Foley and Alan Fran now the story is related to my topic tonight and try and explain how to read Tolkien as I learned from Professor Knapp a good medieval sermon like the pardners tale needs an exempt lung it needs a little story that dramatizes some of the important ideas so now I want you to imagine someone reading the story I just told five hundred or thousand years from now and trying to figure it out and buy the story I mean the way I told the story back in 1989 over in the dining room at Phi Kappa theta where I was surely mocked for being a wimp and giving in to my advisor but if you left out all that setup about the registration process so centuries in the future it should be easy to figure out the basic information right the advisor who knows better pressure is the lazy student into doing the right thing and only well after the fact is the student realized how right the advisor was you get the theme it's the triumph of wisdom right but there's also a character-driven level of the story where the humor arises from the soft-spoken and kindly advisor being nevertheless being an unfinished flinching badass and forcing the more expressive or opinionated or from New Jersey student to bend to her will without actually saying anything so the point being that future readers will get something from the local context but they won't get the social technological and procedural writing of the story where professor naps power came from how both parties knew exactly what that power was and how the hearers of the story over at ten sixty nine more what happened you knew the minute that I said I'll just add it to your form that fate was fully determined those future readers might get a sense of how the whole thing worked they might have some general idea that there was a joke that they were missing but they wouldn't know all that context and in summary there's a difference between what the characters in the story know and what the reader of the story knows and at this point I'm guessing every single English major here is thinking yes drought this is a little thing called irony maybe you've heard of it but oh straw student into whose mouth I just put the words you've got it backwards because normal irony as I learned from Professor Knapp comes when the reader of the story knows more than the characters so when our protagonists go out and they book their honeymoon cruise on this beautiful new cruise ship we shake our heads we readers know something that the characters don't and there's always the omnipresent irony that the readers know that we're reading a book with a certain title and a certain number of pages left till the end while the characters they usually usually don't have that information let's all build to be really technical for a moment and say that in every story and every human interaction there's an epistemic regime a particular distribution of knowledge in my little story if it's read a thousand years in the future the normal epistemic regime is inverted the characters know stuff the reader doesn't and finally how many minutes into this lecture I get to the Lord of the Rings in junior Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings the epistemic regime is the same as the one I've created for my little story the characters know a fair bit more than the readers do because they live in middle-earth while we live in Pittsburgh and this epistemic regime means that things that are unknown to the reader are going to be obvious to the characters we have no idea where the blue mountains are or who Elrond is but the characters know these things and they take them for granted and so they will refer to them utterly casually and that dynamic will naturalize many of the things about middle-earth that are otherwise distant and different from our world no one boggles at the existence of a glowing sword or a magic ring so far so good it's a standard technique of fantasy and science fiction it goes back a ways before Tolkien's but wait there's more not all the characters know everything about their own world most importantly the hobbits who've spent their whole lives in the insular bucolic Shire don't know much at all Frodo has chatted with some travelers he's looked at some maps but he's never been anywhere and he's the most cosmopolitan Kabat in the whole Shire the others are pretty much but ignorant of the outside world's geography history and culture but the story is focalized through the hobbits for pretty much the entire Fellowship of the Ring most of the two towers and all the Return of the King Tolkien's sticks to the point of view of the various hobbits there's only one major exception and that's at the beginning of the two towers when Aragorn Legolas and Gimli are chasing the orcs who have captured merry and pippin and they're also worrying about what's happened to Frodo and Sam they've seen footprints they've seen a missing boat but they're not a hundred percent sure a hobbit point of view at that point would ruin the suspense so instead we get Gimli x' point of view Gimli and that leads us to a very useful generalization about point of view on the Lord of the Rings which I think we can call the least knowledgeable character hypothesis in any given scene Tolkien uses the point of view of the least knowledgeable character in that scene how accurate is the LKC generalization well it's pretty accurate in the few places where Tolkien tells the story through an omniscient narrator or he gives a point of view of a seemingly knowledgeable characters like Aragorn at the very beginning of the two towers or Gandalf at the beginning of book two of the Fellowship of the Ring it turns out that the least knowledgeable character is generally unconscious occasionally asleep sometimes asked absent and when the point of view is of that of a genuine generally knowledgeable character in the particular scenes even that character doesn't know something that's focal Gandalf doesn't know how Frodo is going to come out from under the Morgul knife spell if he's going to be partially invisible like a glass filled with clear late Aragorn doesn't know where the rest of the company is now let's see how that least knowledgeable character point of view interacts with the epistemic regime the characters know more than the readers do but inside the story the other characters know more than the point-of-view character what happens then is that the point-of-view characters have multiple occasions to learn things about the world in which they're in and as they learn the reader will learn the same information at the same time so when Frodo says of cerumen who is he I have never heard of him before and Gandalf answers somewhat elliptically the character Frodo and the reader both simultaneously learn about cerumen they learn about him in the same way they have to piece together Gandalf's rather opaque statements that cerumen is one of the wise with a capital W and that he's part of Gandalf's order with a capital o he's a PhD in ring lore and so forth but you notice even in that particular scene Tolkien neatly avoids the dreaded chapter to the treatise of tedium which is so common in fantasy literature if you've ever read fantasy or tried to write fantasy you know exactly what I'm talking about right chapter one has an exciting battle and a black cloak demon shows up and so forth and then in Chapter two you get now I will give you a summary of the physics geology geography mythology religion history social structure technology and customs of my imagined world george RR martin i am looking at you it's by the way very hard to avoid writing a chapter a treatise of tedium because you need to get this information out to your readers right if your Dark Lord's major weakness is going to be the Crimson gauntlets of Fenway Park then you need to work that information into the story somehow there's some of this in the chat that the shadow of the past but that chapter is 83% less boring than most chapter 2 treatises I'm sure because Tolkien imparts the information through the conversation with Gandalf who lectures surprisingly little Frodo has to drag the information out of him and that information is incomplete its fragmentary and Ulf sometimes says he doesn't know other times he refuses to tell things that he knows which are actually relevant and the reader and the character experienced the same thing at the same time learning which is a fundamentally different reading experience than the other emotions or sensations that can be invoked by literature that's a pretty extreme assertion sigh baby I better argue for it here's the difference between learning and other reading experiences when we read about a character feeling sadness we can feel sad but despite the ability of art to invoke feelings in us the cognitive experience is not the same as that which the character has when we read about a character being sad we feel sadness for the character but we're not experiencing the same sadness as the character who is sad about what's ever happening to him or her not sad about what's being read that's fundamentally different and so I feel reasonably safe and saying that very few other readers are having the same experience at the same time as Frodo standing inside a volcano getting his finger bitten by Gollum but when a character learns and you learn at the same time you are experiencing what that characters experience experiencing the same mental processes that would be taking place in the character are taking place in you they're still mediation because there's always mediation since we're reading while the character is being told by a wizard but the cognitive experience of learning is fundamentally alike now if you interviewer survey readers of the Lord of the Rings you find some really consistent strands of discussion the most significant of these is a lot a high percentage of readers report that reading the Lord of the Rings is an experience that it's qualitatively different than other books that they've read and loved even the critic Edmund bunny Wilson recognized this quality in the Lord of the Rings I think although he attributed it to the book being long that's really that's all he had not a note by the way that the Lord of the Rings doesn't require the cognitive investment that you need to put into James Joyce's Ulysses or into Faulkner's the sound and the fury or into Toni Morrison's beloved the language is clear and straightforward you always know where you are in time and space and yet the books are an experience and they're an experience in part because the epistemic regime and the least knowledgeable character point of view contribute to the readers learning at the same time as the characters producing this similarity of experience but that's not all the next piece of the puzzle contributes to this phenomenological quality under an epistemic regime in which the characters know stuff that the reader doesn't characters are going to refer to things in their own culture in as we've noted in the entire casual offhand way for instance Gandalf says of Aragorn says of Gandalf he is sure of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen borough Fjell because none of the characters react with a what you talk about Strider or queen who instead we are given the impression that everybody in the company knows who queen borough Fjell is there's this world full of history and culture that surrounds the characters and by the way how can it be there is no website the law cats of Queen birth yell it would combine pictures of cats and Tolkien and yet it doesn't exist the Internet has failed cultural by the way someone should set this up but cultural knowledge that speakers assume to be widespread gets referenced all the time in conversational journalistic literary discourse and we just don't notice it because most of the time it works so well the reference just gives us information and by the way people don't use references just to seem clever either though that's undoubtedly part of the pleasure references are useful they communicate more information than they themselves contain this may seem to violate principles of Shannon Weaver information theory but it doesn't because what's happening when a reference works is that a whole lot of pre of information that's previously passed into the mind is being invoked by a very small reference let's say I make a mistake and go Joe all I did was utter a mono syllable but if you're part of the same culture then that vano syllable invoked information that you had already received and put into your minds this principle in oral traditional studies is called communicative economy the use of references is just part of regular discourse we don't notice them very much but when they don't work they stand out and that's where the cats of Queen Bru thell comes in for the characters it's just an ordinary reference for the reader instead of invoking of information about what the cats of Queen Bru feel might possibly mean you get this you get a 404 the reference does exactly the opposite of what a regular reference does instead of communicating information efficiently it highlights the failure of communication let's call those 404s broken references and note that the extreme communicative economy for the participants in the culture means that there's no redundancy in the information and therefore almost no information at all once the continuity of culture is broken a broken reference emphasizes that the reader is not part of the same cultural world as the characters and it emphasizes that that cultural world is rich and complex enough to have a whole pile of references which are now broken now we're not done with broken references but let's tie them in with the epistemic regime and the least knowledgeable character point of view the characters know stuff that reader doesn't apparently who those damn cats are the broken reference so the broken reference can arise directly from that epistemic regime however that could work it cross purposes with the LKC with the least knowledgeable character a broken reference can distance the reader from the characters but Tolkien had a clever solution to this problem for example at the eponymous Council of Elrond Elrond says that by accepting the quest of the ring Frodo has earned himself a seat among the great elf friends including hador and Hulan and Baron himself now Elrond I'm sorry Elrond may be annoying sometimes and actually he might be more annoying than the real Elrond but he's not deliberately confusing here since that would completely undercut his rhetorical purpose he's instead speaking in an idiom that he expects to be understood by his interlocutors he may be wrong because he's six thousand years old and you know young hobbits these days with their attention spans and everything but he's trying to communicate I mean although as Hugo Weaving plays the character Elrond has managed to get through six thousand years without ever learning that just yelling at people and raising your eyebrow doesn't actually convince anyone but I digress now there are those first three names in the lists of elf friends are at this point of the narrative entirely unknown to the reader of the Lord of the Rings and therefore their connotations are unavailable even any denotations beyond some general idea a positive notion of an elf friend can only be interpreted in the local context because the character making the reference apparently also understands the backgrounds of the stories of hador and who are in and Turin and assumes that the readers do also readers have to infer the existence of a rich cultural context outside that of the story the overall effect then of the combination of the epistemic regime the LKC point of view and the appearance of broken references is to make the cognitive experience of the reader very much like that of the focal characters participants in the culture but not the most knowledgeable who are learning about their own world's history and culture in an organic way the way that we as children learn about our world overhearing conversation making connections putting things together from messy data rather than being given it all in a treatise of tedium or a long lecture on the history of the world now this overall effect may go a bit further towards an explanation of why Tolkien's works seem qualitatively different both for mainstream literature of the 20th century and the rest of the fantasy genre again it's a cognitive experience analogous to being a child learning about culture in its world which also may explain another aspect of the phenomenology of the Lord of the Rings that so many people link it to experiences of growth or initiation as Gandalf notes the hobbits have grown during the course of the story and like wise readers feel as if they have an experience of development I think it's the experience of learning which is certainly much intertwined with childhood and growth and development and now we go back and pick up the thread of broken references because all they though they contribute to the experiential of the Lord of the Rings that's not all they do if you are a true tolki and geek then you already know that there is a fundamental difference between the cats of Queen Brucie L and L Ron's list of elf friends but just in case you're not a complete toki geek i will tell you the difference is that in 1954 when the Lord of the Rings was published there was no reference anywhere in Tolkien's writings published or unpublished to the cats of Queen Baruti L while all of Elrond elf friends that sounds like a name for a band like a really nerdy band like They Might Be Giants like Elrond cell friends but all of Elrond super elf friends were in the unpublished Silmarillion material Tolkien had already written their stories now from the point of view of the reader this makes absolutely no difference at all a broken reference is a broken reference but for Tolkien himself there's a distinction what we can mark by calling Queen Bruce yells cats which would be a good name for a jazz quartet by the way a pseudo reference and Elrond super elf friends is a broken reference now surprisingly almost all the references in the Lord of the Rings are broken rather than pseudo Tolkien himself said it was just the cats of Queen Bru CL and the otherwise unexplained two extra wizards that cerumen mentions or nor thanked everything else according to Tolkien as best I can tell shows up in The Silmarillion material or in the appendices now Tolkien is not the first fantasy or science fiction writer to create pseudo references by the way Jules Verne's cryptic manuscript by Arne saknussemm in The Journey to the Center of the Earth HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon Robert Chambers is the king in yellow all of those are pseudo references and these guys are hardly the first to invent them Mallory's French book from which he claims he gets a lot of his Arthurian material or Geoffrey of Monmouth's my favorite liebherr Vito Sysomos the oldest oldest book where he claims he gets stuff that he's actually just making up all these are pseudo references also and maybe even Chaucer's book of the lion which possibly or maybe even probably never existed the pseudo reference is a way of authenticating the author's inventions making them seem like they're part of a long tradition which is a point we'll come back to but in Tolkien's case although the fake references weren't actually fake the reader can't know that they are but the existence of the references still has an effect because those pseudo references all point to actual stories they have to use one of my favorite German words as of Sahlin hang a hanging together a subtle consistency how do you know that there used to be more arches here well when you've seen as many arches as I have can fill in the pattern right Tolkien's references fit some sort of subtle out of view pattern and they hang together in a way that HP Lovecraft's or Steven R Donaldson or Terry Brooks references don't readers can tell a similar coherence of background gives Beowulf much of its particular quality of feeling historically true or as tolki at in the named lands of the north even if it includes trolls sea monsters and a dragon but what makes Beowulf similar to the Lord of the Rings or more properly vice versa is that none and I mean absolutely none of the references in Beowulf contradict with each other or with a few times that they appear in historical sources the bay wolffian material get this doesn't even contradict itself when it shows up in later texts that do contradict each other let me explain what I mean by that if we go through Beowulf and we reconstruct whatever we can from the hints and the allusions we find that none of those stories are directly opposed to what shows up in the later sources even though sometimes those give a fuller picture now those stories are often much elaborated and what it looks like is that tradition moved off in a variety of different directions it spread out from the source at the same time the source that was the Beowulf poet source so that you eventually do get conflicting versions of the Sigrid and sigmund story but the Beowulf version is basically consistent with either of the later developments over as the conflicts are in them not in it between them now Beowulf itself is maddeningly elusive does wealth AO intentionally give Beowulf a curse necklace or is the necklace cursed but she doesn't know about it or is it not cursed at all and just later scholars have made up this curse thing does froth cross off later murder his cousins and siege the Danish throne and if so did the audience know this was happened we just don't know there's lots of stuff we just don't know because the references are broken but in Babel if you never get the sense that you do in the Nibelungen lead or invoke some Gus Agha or in Kudrin that the writer has this general idea that two events go together but doesn't really know why and so messes it up by sticking them together this is what happens for the quarrel of the Queens in the volsung material that conflict was the things that don't make sense made sense to someone they just got messed up in translation later on but not in Beowulf all this suggests by the way that the bay of pote was working in a living culture that he knew very well while later writers were working from half understood historical material and references that were broken even for them five hundred six hundred a thousand years ago the references in the Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion material do the same thing as those in Beowulf even though Tolkien just made that stuff up and that's another reason why the Lord of the Rings reads differently than almost any other 20th century book and why you have to read it in a certain way Tolkien's work contains references that point not to the common stock of shared external cultural material that everybody knows like TS Eliot's the wasteland but he also doesn't just make crap up at the spur of the moment whenever it's useful the way that Lovecraft or Thomas Pynchon does so the Lord of the Rings has the coherence of Eliot but the estrangement of Pynchon and the combination of these two seemingly orthogonal forces creates something new and something different and there's an analogy which I think is useful which you may have guessed from the vacation snapshots I've been projecting behind you behind me and actually they're not from my vacation they're from this company called scholarly so Juran's that I've been doing tours with of anglo-saxon England and Iceland and Tolkien's England you should you should come we could get together but I'm also projecting these here to avoid having say a picture of Homer Simpson saying doh hanging over my head for 15 minutes but I also wanted to semi subliminal II get you thinking about ruins because I think that the idea and the image and the analogy of the ruin is extremely helpful for understanding Tolkien in some ways a ruin is coherent it's usually just from one source and it's usually more compact than the original building sometimes it's just a pillar but a ruin is also fragmentary it's a part estranged from its original context a ruin is a reference that is at least as broken in information and cultural terms as it is physically it makes concrete both loss and coherence both damage and persistence and blatant self-promotion here the book I'm in the process of finishing on Tolkien is called the tower and the ruin so you might guess that I think ruins are very important to understanding Tolkien you would be right if you guessed that now it's not just that there a lot of ruins in The Lord of the Rings or though there are plenty including the Tower of Amon Soul on Weathertop the stones of Auriga and the ruined cities of Oz Goliath and Minnis Morgul and various other fallen statues abandoned high seats moss covered walls collapsed castles broken bridges and unmaintained roads that are littering middle-earth really they need a building code more than they need a white Council but I will spare you an exhaustive tracing of all the ruins in middle-earth you can get that in the book if I ever finish it but I want to show you this little graph which shows that despite there being ruins all over the place the only section of the book that really contains a great deal of something being actively ruined is the scouring of the shire the verb ruin achieves its greatest prominence here when the beloved home of the main characters has been partially destroyed creating great pain and our protagonists a pain - which will also return beyond the particular ruins in middle-earth there's also a deeper analogical relationship between what we read in the book and what Tolkien creates with it as a whole he builds if that's the right word he builds a textual ruin in The Lord of the Rings and so reading the book in those terms helps us to understand how it works and what effects it has on its readers so short digression my my long-suffering wife is a PhD student or that pastry student she's a PhD who was a student when I was a student she's a PhD in engineering although she went to some engineering school in Massachusetts Cambridge rather than to CMU but she's still okay she really is so when I first figured out this ruin parallel I was working through these ideas and I was saying things like oh my gosh you know I wonder what you have to figure out like how to make a ruin I doubt there's any kind of field in like how to make ruins I mean this could be like a whole new interdisciplinary thing you could study ruins and you can figure out how to make it and Raquel kind of sighed and she went tribology and she also told me that even at Carnegie Mellon no one was going to laugh at a tribology joke and she was right so I think I owe her something now I said people would even though Carnegie Mellon by the way has one of the best tribology labs in the entire world in this building by the way I think or it's over it maybe it's over in meki it's apparently caught not common knowledge that tribology is the name of the study of surfaces moving across each other friction and wearing it's about how things get ruined so this is a picture of Phi Kappa theta in 1989 Spring Carnival booth the theme was children's toys and the beautiful house for which I among other things carved all the gingerbread and built the cupola represented the board game Clue and all the work I put in was justified when we won the booth competition that year except oh we didn't win the booth competition we came in second place I'd almost forgotten that that had happened I am NOT bitter I am just pointing out there was a spiral staircase inside and it passed Building Code this is Sutter's Mill it's a picture of Phi Kappa theta is 1990 Spring Carnival booth and even though that year I mostly only built the working waterwheel and the game and I didn't skip Spring Break and I didn't stay awake for 56 consecutive hours leading up to Carnival and then sleep through the entire carnival itself and I didn't step on a nail that came out through the top of my foot nevertheless this booth won first place the way clue should have but although I'm not bitter even though clue had stained-glass windows on the first floor there's a relevant lesson in the two booths one that was taught to me by my roommate Jim Kemp who was a drama production major and you may have seen some of the windows he recently designed for fao schwarz another Carnegie Mellon success well after after the Sutter's Mill booth was built Jim went to work he filled up an old fashioned metal fire extinguisher with some kind of hideous mix of stain paint oil and ink and he sprayed it all over the boards and he had me and about 10 other people spend hours and hours sanding down all the steps in the Middle's so that the treads formed a shallow parabola he walked around the booth with a hammer banging on things making dents on the corners in the walls he knocked boards out and then nailed them back just slightly crooked and in the end Sutter's Mill looked like what we would expect Sutter's Mill to look like and yes I used to have hair while clew looked like the really awesome beautiful far too blue Victorian house that Peter paws ours now the CEO of multiply and I wanted to build one day another CMU success story he's a multi-millionaire and I'm not it wasn't in other words it wasn't quite enough like the creepy old house from clue because it wasn't warned enough because nevertheless it was still better than the allegedly first place fisher-price garage that somebody else built which I think looked just like that that didn't even have an inside much less a cupola but it turns out that there are characteristic ways that human artifacts wear over time so it's not surprising that the study of the phenomenon has a name that forementioned tribology which I guess if nobody learns anything else tonight you learned about tribology but it may be surprising how good our eyes are at recognizing these signs and thus requiring very clever drama production majors to develop a whole set of methods for artificially wearing props so that they don't dispel the illusions by being too new to perfect we recognize the patina of age right here on campus we have Hammer slag in his nose and then there's the fence which has a look and a feel you can only get by applying hundreds and hundreds of coats of paint of different qualities and colors and different climate conditions with different intervals between them and then there are ruins like those of Whitby Abbey or the monastery at Lindisfarne and these show not only the weathering of time but the damage caused by human violence and then again by the elements we recognize the marks of deep time on objects and often we like it supposedly when Yale University built their Gothic Revival buildings they had acid poured on the newly carved stone to make it soft and weathered and look like that at Oxford and then they regretted this 100 years later when they had to rebuild it all the artist Joseph Cornell whose aesthetic sense is surprisingly often like Tolkien's artificially weathered some of his famous boxes you can see where this is going the analogy I want to make is between Tolkien's texts and the ruin in the landscape made precious in part because the patinas and the wear patterns are so difficult to counterfeit but how do you make a textual ruin well this is one way this is a picture of Tolkien's original intentions for the key leaves of the book of mazzaroth the damaged volume found in the chamber with baylin's tomb instead of having the scene written the way it is with Gandalf puzzling through the text and reading it out loud Tolkien wanted to publish a facsimile of these leaves which he created and then distressed that turned out to be too expensive by the way I think the book of mazzaroth was actually inspired by the rag and Rudess codex which supposedly Saint Boniface uses to ward off the attacks of the heathen and you can see they slice marks in the top and and that's oh it might even be true it's also a little bit like the Beowulf manuscript which was part of Sir Robert Cotton's library and so was housed in the unfortunately named ash Burnham house yes and it caught fire in 1731 and you can see that the manuscript was singed though fortunately not destroyed other manuscripts were less lucky we've lost maybe 1500 letters out of Beowulf many of which we can puzzle out with various techniques but some sections of the manuscript including the key transitional section are sadly very hard to read so one thing Tolkien's done was to write his book and then physically damage it set it on fire rip the pages chop it with a battle-axe and then pour some blood on it that might be troublesome for a publisher and it would also make the Lord of the Rings kind of fundamentally alien to the culture in which Tolkien wanted to be received but here's another way when most people encounter Beowulf it's in a book like any other not only lacking fire damage but lacking gaps and in problems where we don't have our full understanding of the work the final smooth modern English translation by Seamus Heaney however is not how a philologist like Tolkien or me or professor Knapp engages with this work philologists work at a place in the continuum between damaged manuscript and paperback translation that Tolkien had created the most important Edition ever of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and he understood how editions of texts like kleiber's Beowulf have to handle the gaps and inconsistencies of the manuscript record sometimes using the remarkable powers of scientific philology to reconstruct a missing word or make sense of an opaque passage but other times requiring pure speculation and even then relegating it to the apparatus critic Asst the footnotes of the discussion at the back of the book the gaps and inconsistencies are in many ways the most interesting part of the text and yet they're left out of the modern English translations that we read as students thus some of that patina of age is polished away Beowulf becomes a monster fighting superhero without any of the poems cultural depth Tolkien could see in Beowulf in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sir vo and the Reeves Tale the marks of the wearing of the text as it tumbled down the stream of culture philologists are the tribology Civ texts I'm going to get that word into your head falala gist are the tribology subtext minds lucky enough to be trained by great teachers like Professor Knapp know how to detect the inconsistencies the gaps the broken references and all of these features give old texts a certain feel a sense that though they're incomplete now they once were coherent broken references are markers of age their features of the textual patina that in the case of Beowulf or the volsangs saga developed over vast cultural time or in Tolkien's writing process over the many drafts and reticulated textual histories of the silmarilian material and the Lord of the Rings a broken reference has become separated from its background information but if the reference nevertheless continues to be replicated it can evolve into what scholars of oral tradition of called a traditional referent just like a reference a ref traditional referent metonymically invokes previously accumulated information through communicative economy but unlike a reference which is linked to cultural information that is outside the text po che Derrida but he's wrong anyway on that count a traditional referent becomes linked not linked only to information inside the discourse for example at certain Icelandic sagas in which he appears BR knee broad helgesen is a peaceful man in boppin fear think a saga he's reluctant we're gonna be going there if you go on my Iceland trip he's reluctant to take revenge he's eager to reconcile Invo through Braun's daughter and he's clever and honourable in Thorstein status Tanner Tanner hugs so his nickname viga biani killer Barney is somewhat at odds with his character especially in the sagas that come from the east part of Iceland where Barney was from the distinction between name and personality seems to be the point especially in Thorstein staffs truck but the denotative meaning of viga be Arnie's name appears to have overpowered his character in the later sagas from the West part of Iceland where people had not known be Arne brought helgesson or they didn't know the transmitted knowledge about his personality in those texts killer Barney is now a blood loving death-dealing maniac I hate you you hate me I had to slaughter members of my family sorry the killer Barney effect shows how references get separated from external material to which they originally pointed and then take on a new set of meanings based on their surface forms in their local context a broken reference becomes a full traditional referent when it begins to be replicated in its own form references that evolved then into mnemonic lease table forms are more likely to become traditional reference and mnemonic least able forms are exactly those of a cultures poetry marked by certain formal features like alliteration meter and rhyme I tried to come up with it with a traditional reference to drop into my little registration story and the best I could come was like registration legislation which actually made me throw up in my mouth a little bit so I decided not to use that but by definition mnemonic lease table forms change less or more slowly than their matrices therefore they're more likely to preserve RK isms and older forms and thus linguistically marking traditional reference which are already because they're broken mark semantically marked the level of content as some of the references in the Lord of the Rings have the characteristics of traditional reference Elrond's comparison of Frodo to those heroes in the first age is marked by patterns of formal features elf Friends of old hador and hirin and Turin and Baron himself were assembled the passages organized power tactically practically without subordination and the repeated coordinating conjunctions and is an example of anaphora these poetic features contribute to the passages reproduction if its own form you can also see this in things where the Palantir eye are the stones of seeing the ruler of L of Rivendell is Elrond half-elven the row Hyrum are descended from HOD or the golden-haired the presence then of not just broken references but what seemed to be traditional reference in the Lord of the Rings maids the work not only appear to participate in a wider culture but to be part of a tradition and other features of the book indicates it's a tradition of a specific kind a textual tradition throughout the Lord of the Rings we find hints that the cultural background that's informing the broken references is instantiated and transmitted primarily through texts most prominently there's the frame narrative of the Lord of the Rings being a translation of the red book of Westmarch but not just the red book itself which was based originally on Bilbo's and Frodo's Diaries but a certain copy of the red book that was revised and updated and expanded by finding Gil the King's scribe in Gondor you've already got at least a three stage and probably a five stage textual tradition right in that frame narrative not just one frame ever wonder why in the Lord of the Rings people could just burst into speech and languages that they don't actually speak or spontaneously respite metrically flawless poetry that they are supposed to have made up on the spur of the moment or translate elvish to the common speech on the fly and have it come out as well-formed verse yes you're not the only ones who have wondered that but the answer is that the Lord of the Rings give us gives us the impression of being part of a textual tradition in the case of the poetry it's like the manuscripts of the venerable beads ecclesiastical history in which bead gives his Latin translation of the poem Cadman's him which was originally written in Old English soon afterwards somebody else comes along and writes the actual poem down there in the margin later copies then interpolate this poem into an Old English translation and leave out the Latin entirely this is one of the ways you have to read the Lord of the Rings differently from mainstream novels of the 20th century rather than characters bursting into poetry being an embarrassing flaw people say oh my god nobody does that it's a powerful mimetic feature it's just not mimetic of real life it's mimetic of the textual traditions of the Middle Ages and it's not just the traditional references inserted into poems that give this there's also a mix of pro styles from almost biblical high style such as singing and rejoice to people of the toe or hoof guard - goofy hobbit jokes and everything in between this is a dendrogram that illustrates the vocabulary distributions and you'll see how many large branches there are that's characteristic of multiple novels by multiple people not one person in his own novel which usually ends up looking something like just that part of the dendrogram a step going down so it's very inconsistent and those in consistence don't inconsistencies don't only operate at the level of the vocabulary they operate at semantic levels and higher for example is Tom Bombadil the oldest living thing in middle-earth or is Treebeard Gandalf says that tree beard is Tom says that he is tolki never resolves it does Glorfindel horse have a bridle and reins or not says he doesn't accept Frodo pulls on it at one point where did it come from we must ask in these and other features of the Lord of the Rings we get the hint of it being part of a textual tradition one that has been contributed to by various minds and hands and that has been worn by the passage of time and that's why you have to read Tolkien in a special way one that medievalists are used to employing but which ordinary critics often don't get because they didn't have professor Knapp as their teachers let's take a moment to criticize one shall we Catherine Stimpson who was once a big-time famous critic she mocked Tolkien for she said always writing to the eaat they came rather than they came to an island bummer for her that the phrase to the eaat they came never appears in The Lord of the Rings oops but don't worry that's just a trivial error and she's actually larger wrong in her larger Bigpoint also because she's wrong about yacht as many other critics who've gotten worked up by Tolkien by saying it's archaic he said leaving his hands when he just meant washing it's artificial no good writer writes this way except that as we just noted the servation of archaic forms is characteristic of traditional reference and those words are contributing to the pervasive sense that the Lord of the Rings is part of a long textual tradition not something just invented by one Oxford Don oh and by the way also Yad is the technically correct name for what Tolkien's talking about alo gravely semi island that only sticks out of the water when the river water level is low furthermore the etymological source of eaat is the anglo-saxon word it-- and since the place where the e aughts r is on the border of rohan where they speak anglo-saxon turns out that yacht is exactly the appropriate word fail for poor ms Stimpson also laving which was some other critic whose name i couldn't remember was wrong laving wasn't bad because at that particular moment they are not just washing off blood or dirt but actually having a sort of quasi magic ritual where Strider is taking herbs scented liquid and putting it on the foreheads of people under a magic spell of the black breath and so in fact laving would be the precise correct word they are used in Beowulf in the same sense and having almost a biblical sense going back so protip modernist critics do not meddle in the affairs of philologists for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup I mean for they are subtle and quick to anger and know more than you do indeed if I had to give a one phrase answer for the question of how should we read Tolkien I'd answer like a philologist and then maybe I take pity and say that what you should read is that someone who studies histories of languages and texts because when you do you see very clearly that the features of Tolkien's texts that are different from mainstream modernist fiction of the 20th century aren't necessarily errors or flaws but are factors contributing to the particular effects of the Lord of the Rings oops so the epistemic regime and the least knowledgeable character point of view combine to make us experience some of what the characters are experiencing they're learning about the cultural world in a piecemeal way at the same time the broken references the traditional reference the archaism and vocabulary style and the many variations in prose the use of multiple frames the references to multiple texts all combined to distance us from the very world that we are experiencing we are part of that world it's vividly present in the way that tolki and Wright's description almost always from the point of view of 4.5 feet above the ground limited mostly the line-of-sight described in terms of broad impressions rather than explicit sensory detail all of which I learned in creative writing workshop was bad and it is in creative writing but not in Tokyo so we're part of this world but at the same time we're separated from it by a vast gulf of time we might be holding a paperback book with Barbara Remington's ridiculous illustrations on the cover I mean really amuse bulbous fruit but when reading we get the impression of vast cultural depth and that simultaneous feeling of immediate presence an irreparable loss of connection and utter separation is also the effect of the ruin in the landscape because a ruin despite all its permanence no because of all its permanence is a tangible marker it's an absolute insistence on the past nosov the past and that absolute past Ness combined with everything else we've discussed is the generator of the dominant emotion in Tolkien's work and that emotion is nostalgia the pain for the loss of one's own home a nostalgia has a pretty pretty bad reputation in twentieth-century literature so I was tempted to use the German word high moi home pain but they're the same and nostalgia doesn't deserve this opprobrium anyway real deep nostalgia is an intense love for an unrecoverable past a joy triggered by tiny glimpses of the past in the present and most of all a pervading sadness its fronds Hofmeister a Dutch videographer filmed his daughter for a couple minutes a day every week once a week for 12 consecutive years and then ran it all as one film so you can see her growing and aging as that goes on we don't have to do any deep psychoanalysis of Tolkien in his personal history to understand why he might have felt such a longing of nostalgia made for the idyllic rural days and work sure before his mother's death or for the beautiful summer of 1914 but you don't have to have Tolkien's tragic childhood and youth to feel deep nostalgia you don't have to have your father died and then your mother be shunned by her family for her conversion to Catholicism and then have your mother die and leave you an orphan and then have almost all of your friends killed in the trenches of World War one and then get trench fever and never fully recover your health you don't have to have that happen to you to feel the pain of a lost home simply being a human incarnate in the irreversible stream of time is enough and for me the sense of high moi is utterly acute almost unbearable when I watched that little film that Franz Hofmeister made by photographing his daughter once every week for 12 years I know from clear memory that I would not want to re-experience some of those moments again with my own child the anxiety the illnesses the exhaustion but what wouldn't I give to be able to go back to some of those moments in more than memory the pain is only made bearable the sadness only may blessed by love and by art one doesn't need to go down the rabbit hole of Deleuze and Guattari especially because Saint Agustin said it all first to see that reading is a kind of doubled consciousness existing somewhere between pure memory and lived experience when we look at our own children we see not only their current forms but all they have been before in this kind of double perception love and sadness are intertwined the ruin in the landscape or the textual ruin created by all of Tolkien's techniques catalyzes this change linking together the imagination the current experience and recollection in twining the past and the present which each other so they are in aragorn's dying words more than memory more than memory transmutes the pain of Exile of separation and loss through the moment of time the heimlich into something still sad but now as Tolkien's says of the tears of the hobbits that their parting at the Grey Havens blessed without bitterness in the year 1110 the bodies of King heard his wife Al Smith and their son Edward the elder were translated from the new Minster to hide Abby where they were buried in front of the high altar the abbey was so thoroughly destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries that only they get the gatehouse remained not until the 20th century did archeologists identify the previous location of the old high altar and for years the spot was unmarked a stretch of King Alfred place between monks Road and al swetha Terrace commemorated in the words of simon keynes only by the flowers that grow in a suburban back garden but in more recent years a park was built with three cent of TAFs to mark the old locations of the graves and then artist Tracy Shepard created a next glass panel that depicts the interior of the Abbey if you stand so that the grave markers in the etching are aligned with those in the ground you have the uncanny sense of being in two times at once but the edifice the accomplishment of human building is a thousand years past faded in white it is there in front of you but it's forever beyond your reach just as the lost days of the past can be called to memory but cannot be lived again by standing in this place you can experience the doubling see more see with more than the mind's eye and yet always the houses and the parked cars and the lamppost and the electric wires are ghosts just beyond the white walls peeping through the mist no matter how hard you try not to see them the present overcoming the past I feel this walking on Carnegie Mellon's campus today the past is every wearing it at the same time out of reach overlaid permanently by the present worn away by time and change and even fallible memory you won't have to wait a quarter century from the time of some of your most cherished memories to have this feeling though such a gap certainly accentuates it the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings says the song pain for the lost home is common to every human as we are separated from our childhoods from our youths from our first experiences how do you read Tolkien by paying attention to the ways that different features of his works combine to produce and transform sadness not into bitterness but into something richer greater something fully human reading talking in this way you see the true scope of his achievement to touch the heart and you understand how much more fully how Sam's words well I'm back are both joyous and heartbreaking thank you

Channel: Carnegie Mellon University's Dietrich College

Views: 173,668

Rating: 4.8599267 out of 5

Keywords: The Lord Of The Rings (Book), J. R. R. Tolkien (Author), michael d.c. drout, literature, Carnegie Mellon University (College/University), dietrich college of humanities and social sciences, English Language (Human Language)

Id: lXAvF9p8nmM

Length: 60min 59sec (3659 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Keoni9]

Middle Earth is an imagined primeval phase of Europe, and The Lord of the Rings, as a story supposedly from The Red Book of Westmarch, immerses the reader through interaction with the text itself, which feels like it could've come from this imagined culture. Tolkien intended LoTR as something akin to a Midieval romance, and not a modern novel that achieves immersion through "realism". "Realism" itself is a conceit and a convention specific to Western artistic endeavors starting from the 19th century, and therefore Tolkien, being a philologist, judged that it would be inappropriate for a story set in Middle Earth. You're not going to see Éowyn narrating her own story like some Rohirric Jane Eyre.

People complain that Tolkien's diction feels antiquated and stuffy, but it's supposed to be a translation of a copy of a hobbit-compiled account of events, within a culture full of formulaic epithets and verse-based storytelling. Tolkien's prose and verse--which feel relatively unnatural to 21st century readers--are not at all unusual to anyone who reads pre-modern or early modern works. And why would Tolkien limit himself to a "natural" variety of English anyways? As a Don of Old English, he was intimately familiar with the evolution of English, and with the other languages of its sprachbund. So not only does he use a mannered form of Modern English for the core of the text, but he uses Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Celtic and Norman names to represent how the sound of these Mannish names would feel to a Westron speaker. "Hobbit" sounds like a centuries-old English word for "hole dweller". And "Samwise Gamgee" and "Rivendell" feel a lot more familiar than Banazîr Galbasi and Karningul, which are the "actual" Westron names.

This leads to some interesting interactions with real-world works. For example, the company of dwarves in The Hobbit all take their names from a cataloging of dwarves in the first section of the Poetic Eddas. This works within Middle Earth because Dalish is represented with Old Norse. However, it also enriches the source work because it gives some commentary and invented context: In the Edda, "Gandalf" was the name of a dwarf. Tolkien most likely saw that and thought it to be a discrepancy" "'Gand-alf' An elf with a wand? Why would such a figure be associated with dwarves?" The Hobbit gives the story why. Eventually, throughout Tolkien's works, you see how Gandalf has many names to different people (eg Olórin, Greyhame, Stormcrow, Incánus, Tharkûn, Mithrandir, The Grey Pilgrim, The White Rider, Láthspell). The fact that he picked up the name "Gandalf" means some men, unaware he was a maia, thought that he was an elf, and just called him, literally, "Wand-elf" in Dalish/Old Norse.

Tolkien did something similar in his fairytale, "Farmer Giles of Ham". He gives the River Thames a completely different etymology, giving a story about how a farmer became "Lord of Tame" by getting a dragon to be at his disposal.

There's also "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" which is Tolkien's "original" version of "Hey Fiddle Diddle".

[u/Ace-Slick]

An interesting perspective on Tolkien's work, it may or may not cause you to focus on different aspects of his work and appreciate it more.

On a side note where does Glorfindel say that his horse doesn't have a bridle and reins? (mentioned at 49:50). From what I could find Tolkien mentions that he does use a bridle, "His hand left the bridle and gripped the hilt of his sword" pg.278 Flight of the Ford. Which is not the only mention of the reins.

[u/Dangger]

Although I found the lecturer a little bit annoying at times when he is trying to be funny I think this was a great lecture. I have no background whatsoever but found this piece very friendly and I think I now have a greater understanding of some concepts like LKC. I thoroughly recommend this lecture.