It would explain a lot

Eagle is from the Latin Aquila, deriving from the word Aquilo, the North Wind.

This is further evidence of Tolkien’s cultural prejudice, in which the saviours in each story are Northern, Evil lurks in the South and East, and Heaven is in the West.

J. R. R. Tolkien saw several close friends killed, more or less before his eyes, in WWI. On his own account it gave him a lifelong fascination with the problem of death – how can it be the one human universal, the one thing absolutely everyone is certain to undergo, and yet at the same time be utterly unthinkable and impossible to accept when it happens? This in turn gave rise to the idea of the eternal being in love with mortal life, which – as well as being a way of thinking about the Incarnation – is at the root of the story of Aragorn and Arwen: the story of the tragic love of an immortal being for a mortal. And this (again, on his own account) was the story that gave rise to The Lord of the Rings.

So yes, the Great War does explain a lot. But eagles don’t come into it.

If Tolkien was saved by Eagles in WW 1, I would expect some bitterness in that no-one saved any of his friends. I would certainly think that Thorin’s group and the Fellowship would have suffered more losses.

Niall, I am sure you are right about JRRT’s cultural (not to mention racial) prejudices.

I’m also pretty sure you are wrong about the derivation of “aquila”. So far as my sources go, the answer is “origin unknown.”

Of course, if JRRT believed the same false etymology, then his belief that eagles are symbols of the north might still be evidence of his cultural/racial/geographical prejudices. But I already granted you that stuff.

C.S. Lewis also has a phrase about the swarthy garlic eaters (I believe) in one of his Prince Caspian books. I noticed it when I happened to observe my child’s teacher reading it aloud to her class on an overnight school trip.

I think this was just the standard ball-park racism of the time.

Frankly, I greatly prefer Lewis’s other books (Allegory of Love, Discarded Image), which are actually good, to his fiction. Tolkien (hope I don’t offend anyone here) I just consider a bore. The movies struck be as both boring and racist. Movie (I should say), since I only saw the first one. You couldn’t pay me to see the others.

I think an author can share prejudices unthinkingly, without malevolence.
And this is probably more true of a popular author, who writes according to formula. Such an author is not in the business of questioning the status quo. Such an author would by definition not be popular. The question is how much does this detract from the enjoyment of readers in an era with different values.

Rea: Heaven being in the West is an element also of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Irish mythology. I’m not sure that make it particularly racist.

Incidentally, in Irish mythology Ulster, in the north, is the province of valour, haughtiness, strife, boasting, battle and death. Query whether that was entirely a matter of cultural prejudice.

#1 Tolkien was self-consciously writing an epic for northern Europe, which was the place where his philological knowledge was based. So the heroes are Northerners, and heaven is to the west, over the (stand-in-for-the) Atlantic Ocean. I’m not sure this is particularly racist, any more than the fact that the characters in the Arabian Nights are all Muslim is an example of religious bigotry, or the fact that Marvel’s superheroes all seem to live in New York City is evidence of bias against Chicago.

They were all saved by eagles–American eagles! U! S! A! U! S! A!

I’m not aware that Tolkien ever said this, but he did say that the Black Speech of Mordor is an agglutinative language and Turkic languages are agglutinative, while European languages are not.

So are the Uralic languages, of which the best known and most spoken would be Hungarian. Origins point to Central Asia. Personally, I don’t find anything harsh or guttural in them, but from a Romance language perspective they might come across that way.

I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but a WWI veteran might have been thinking of the Angels of Mons. Not that angels are eagles, but it seems like the sort of thing that could spark an idea.

Val: sorry, but Australian speculative interpretation of English facts is, as I’m sure you realise, not infallible.

JRRT was educated at day grammar schools in Birmingham.

Bloix: in English usage before WWI, Edward VI School and King Philip’s School, Birmingham, where JRRT was educated, were not public schools (the confusingly-named private boarding schools). They were grammar schools: day schools, where a large proportion of the pupils were scholars, and all lived at home with their families. Val’s belief, founded on a fallible intuition about the far side of the world, that JRRT might have been one of those “taken from their homes as little children and made to live in a weird all male world” would have been accurate if he had been sent to a public school. He wasn’t.

What his Oxford scholarship – an acknowledgement of his academic merit – has to do with anything, I don’t know.

Tolkien didn’t live at home as a young teenager because he didn’t have a home. He lived in a boarding house. Although he did not live in an all-male environment (when he was 16 he fell in love with another boarder, also an orphan, and married her as soon as he turned 21) his schools were all-male.

I mention the scholarships because there is a tendency to think that Tolkien must have been a toff from a wealthy family. He wasn’t – he was fatherless almost from birth and an orphan from age 12 and his family had no money. HIs scholarship at Edward VI was earned by merit as was his scholarship at Oxford.

That “the heroes are Northerners” (15) wouldn’t be so bad in itself if it weren’t for the fact that most of the bad guys are associated with the South and East and the descriptions of both heroes and villains – including the languages – clearly corresponded to racial stereotypes. And what makes it worse is that most characters are determined by their racial character, which they hardly ever transcend. In particular, Orcs are bad from birth and killing them is always a good thing. These stereotypes are pretty blatant even for their time. I for my part found my enjoyment of reading Tolkien considerably diminished once I was old enough to question such things. And btw the movies suck badly, especially the Hobbit (I only watched the first – enough is enough).

Seconding 29.

I’m currently reading _The House of the Wolfings_, having worked my way through the more popular Morris*, and the protagonists are Dalesmen and Markmen vs the Burgundians, the latter said to be backed, or displaced, or both, by the Romans.

*_Well at the World’s End_ doesn’t remind me much of either Bunyan or Rowlings. Possibly Marie de France but with the wonderful events written out.

Bloix

“as I understand it, in Tolkien’s day, grammar schools were considered public schools ….”

Well you understand wrong.

Women complain about mansplaining – this seems like an example of Yanksplaining – Americans correcting us about our own culture and history without doing the proper research because they have to know better! Since Victorian times working class people might get to go to grammar schools if they “passed the scholarship”: the scholarship being originally a grant to pay the school fees if the examination was passed. Although they were far from uniform in constitution, many, including the one I attended, were created and funded by local government and were overwhelmingly day schools. A few former grammar schools, including King Edward VI school, became independent schools when and where selection by examination was abolished in the state sector, but Eton they are not. The “Public Schools” are a handful of ancient charity schools which were founded for the benefit of the poor, but subverted and stolen by the ruling classes and the wealthy elite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Schools_Act_1868

True, and I think there are witchy wormy icy precedents in Morris and the actual source eddas.

Hesperion XXI had a concert based on those, with names now only found in Tolkien (attached to different characters & events). Also a swans’-bone flute, more piercing than clear in tone.

28: Orcs aren’t people, at least in the sense that they aren’t humans and don’t represent a particular human culture.

I mean, I know it’s fun to play the “let’s look at things from the Orcish point of view” game and talk about Orcs as a marginalized people subject to racial discrimination trying to win some better farmland from the Europeanish oppressors who are trying to exterminate them … but within the context of LOTR, Orcs aren’t really people. What they are is kind of complicated (I’ll get to it in another few paragraphs), but they’re literally supposed to be Morgoth’s (Lucifer’s) perversion of life.

Other races of humans are represented in LOTR by … other races of humans. The Southrons and Easterlings are problematic! They simultaneously reflect Tolkien’s conscious decisions about world-building and whatever prejudices we tend to assume he had as a culturally and politically conservative person born in the late 19th century. The whole corpus of Tolkien’s mythology wound up being structured as a self-consciously “English” legend and the geographic orientations, including who the good and bad guys are, follow suit from the conceit that Middle Earth is literally our world, some unspecificed ages ago. And yet Tolkien does have room to have Sam (I think) reflect on a fallen swarthy foe that he probably had his reasons for taking up arms in Sauron’s service, and could he really judge him any more harshly than he would a Gondorian soldier? It’s a small window into a more even-handed point of view, and perhaps not enough to excuse the rest, but it’s there.

And FWIW, the Orcs thing really bothered JRRT. His post-LOTR writing includes some essays where he struggles to reconcile his spiritual beliefs, and the way he ported them into the books, with the fact that he basically treats the Orcs as soulless arrow-fodder. (As I recall, he was stuck between the position that as creations of evil the Orcs didn’t have true spirit or intelligence and the fact that he had the Orcs talking and making jokes and so forth in the books; the difference-splitting suggestion that the Orcs were not manufactured but somehow bred out of captured and tortured elves especially makes them tragic in origin.) Of course, that’s not in the actual novels, and the novels shouldn’t get credit for stuff that’s not in them, but when judging Tolkien as a guy, I think it’s fair to point out.

And maybe the Black Speech had something to do with some or other Middle Eastern language, but Dwarvish definitely had something to do with Hebrew, and so far as I know where Tolkien encountered blatantly politicized racism (Nazism, apartheid) he expressed opposition.

This Franco?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuMpDMDJ564

or this one?

In Homer the bad guys had flaws and virtues just like the good guys — and also in Virgil. Manicheanim, perhaps deriving from fairytales, is a flaw in popular fantasy, and I think, a reprehensible one in modern cinema. I feel that it is the very fascistic tendencies in Tolkein, which are somewhat veiled in his novels, that is hyped in the film version — and I suspect it was done for propaganda purposes, frankly, because of the Iraq war.

Fascist? I think monarchist suffices.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have some doubts that a film whose shooting was largely concluded by October 2000 was designed to be propaganda for a war that started in March 03, never mind the minor detail of Peter Jackson being a New Zealander, and…

etc

Sasha Clarkson, Bloix, English public schools are public in the public telephone sense, i.e. accessible to the public as opposed to provided free at point of sale to the public, which private education was not – that was done at home, by tutors and family members – and which education in religious institutions before the Reformation was not.

The public schools were not, in general, founded for the benefit of the poor, except incidentally; they were founded – or reworked, in some cases – a generation or so after the Reformation, when a shortfall of educated people began to show up. They were primarily intended to remedy that, though it was also understood that they would benefit those educated there. At that late Tudor stage, they were the grammar schools, and were called that. That general usage continued at least as late as the opening scenes of Lorna Doone, and was known as something nominal even in Tolkien’s early days.

However, the charitable foundations running public schools were not simply co-opted and their purposes subverted by wealthy elites. In at least some cases they deliberately set up grammar schools in the nineteenth century, deliberately to fill the niche that changes to their earlier public schools had left vacant – a shift that was barely a generation old, as it only came to pass when railways made wider catchments realistic for schools that could build up their reputations enough. So grammar schools never were necessarily state run and/or established, right up until state involvement increased under various twentieth century initiatives. In Tolkien’s early days, they would have been fully understood to be successors of both the original grammar schools and the original public schools, and might have used either term depending on where they fell in a spectrum; the whole thing was much more a continuum than a divide (even full blown public schools had day boys, and separate boarding arrangements might be made at almost any school – hence “houses”, which originated from masters doubling as boarding house operators).

Stephen @ 23
“Val: sorry, but Australian speculative interpretation of English facts is, as I’m sure you realise, not infallible.”

Don’t quite know what to make of this.
Speculating is wrong?
Speculating is ok, but speculating while being Australian is wrong?
Speculating and being Australian are both wrong, so it’s a double whammy?
I’m a colonial upstart who shouldn’t speculate about my superiors?

Cmon Stephen, we all know which it is.

When I was young, many years ago, I taught in an English school. One day the Bishop came to bless us with his presence, and said to the children, apropos of nothing in particular, that they should be glad they were English not Australian, because Australians dont have any folk songs!

I should have denounced the old fool, but I didnt, partly because I’m a lousy singer and I was scared someone would ask me to sing an Australian folk song (which would have brought shame on me and my country). Anyway Stephen I think you’re a good substitute for the Bish, and you can’t make me sing on the Internet, so I denounce you.

Val, calm down. You left out the possibility that the words simply meant: pre-supposing is not the same as knowing, and presupposing from afar is usually less than pre-supposing from somewhere nearer.

Also Stephen has form on this.

The Old English for eagle is earn or ern, which has a direct etymological link to the Ancient Greek ὄρνις, ‘bird’. What this says to me is that, unlike common English birds, for which the Anglo Saxons had specific names, eagles were rarely-enough encountered to carry an essentially generic name. Consequently, it’s possible that Frodo and Sam are saved not by eagles as we think of the bird, but by some other Big Ernie, Big Bird or other Sesame Street-ish entity.

: “So, was J.R.R. Tolkien saved by eagles in W.W. I?”

In a sense, yes he was. The US entry into WWI is arguably the most important cause of the Allies’ victory, and the internationally recognised symbol of the US is an eagle. I don’t personally claim this is what Tolkien had in mind, but if we insist on interpreting the Lord of the Rings as a WWI allegory, it’s certainly tempting to see the US as the Eagles of the Lords of the West, who show up and save things at the last minute when all seemed lost, without giving any clear reason for their absence from the first 3/4 of the narrative.

Proximately, however, he was saved by trench fever, or so a quick search informs me.

Peter Erwin @ 56: “are we missing deeper truths about the secret Antipodean influences on world affairs?”

Put me down for “missing deeper truths”. Clearly the point of the whole plot is to depict Muslims as orcs. This will mean, inevitably, that New Zealand becomes the world center for anti-Muslim tourism. Whenever Jeffrey Goldberg writes another screed about Muslims in Europe, he’ll have to make a ritual trip to Hobbiton to talk about the simple lives of the good people in the Shire and how they are all under threat. Finally New Zealand will become a state somewhat like Saudi Arabia, based on its guardianship of a holy shrine, but with milk instead of oil.

The definition of public school that was generally accepted in the late nineteenth century and thereafter – accepted by the schools themselves – was membership of the Headmasters’ Conference.
Membership was not restricted to fee-paying schools, and KES Birmingham, like Manchester Grammar School, or my old school in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and many others, admitted students by examination at age 10, without charging fees. These schools were funded by local authorities but retained a fair degree of autonomy.

Rich Puchalsky @57: and whatever one feels about the way Christopher Tolkien has managed his father’s legacy over the past couple of decades (my eyebrows go a little higher with every new release of “hey, we found this bit of story scattered amongst three different boxes, and all Chris Tolkien had to do was some VERY LIGHT editing to make it a cohesive text!”), he’s been rather contemptuous of the way the movies turned the books into action flicks, and I suspect he finds the notion of the video games, being even more violence-mad, deplorable.

Also this.

The Last Ring-bearer, an alternative account of the other side of things. In this story, we learn more of the political and social situation from the point of view of the cosmopolitan and technologically-progressive Mordor.

A second edition translation from the Russian into English: here.

Yeskov himself explains his motivations and ideas in the writing in this article. A specific quote:

However, a diversity of opinions doesn’t mean that those opinions lack clarity; quite the contrary. I see fantasy as a genre with very strict rules (only the classical “closed” detective story has stricter ones). Among those rules (such as medieval space-time structure of the world and medieval structure of the spiritual world, meaning a conflict of Absolute Good with Absolute Evil) Pereslegin lists this one: “A consistent romantic ethic – a romantic attitude of the author, the characters, and the readers toward war, love, heroism, and death.” It follows inexorably that the characters have to be classified as “good guys” and “bad guys” – it is precisely this “black-white” contrast that makes fantasy so appealing to teenagers. In other words, the very canon of fantasy forbids moral relativism – sort of like having a classical tragedy in more than one place or having the detective be the murderer in a classic detective story.

Tolkien adheres to this rule perfectly, which is why for many readers, especially older ones, LOTR has forever remained a kind of an American action movie – a bunch of good guys goes to wipe out a bunch of bad guys, who are bad if only because they are on the other side. In reality it’s not quite so, and possibly not so at all, but this view is very common. So when it was time to set up the pieces in LRB, I have decided that although I have to have “black” and “white” (as per the canon), at least I would draw the boundary between them in a line somewhat more meandering than the Anduin – more like it usually lies in real life.

Perhaps this is one of those works we can say is the fantasy analogue to hard sci-fi, given how Yeskov describes working off a geological model of Middle Earth to refashion its political and social realities, whereas Tolkien began with a linguistic model. Both, though, are doing geography, literally.

Harold hears a puff piece on C.S. Lewis on NPR, writes a comment dissing C.S. Lewis on their site, gets an enraged personal Email from a staffer, and from this concludes that they were embarked on some kind of right-wing crusade. I also once said that Harry and Hermione should have been a couple but got an enraged personal Email, so there must be a world feminist plot of some kind.

H and H should indeed have been a couple according to J.K.Rowling.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/02/showbiz/rowling-hermione-ron-revelation/

I would be tempted to apprise the outraged emailer of this fact.

I found “The Hobbit” pre-high school in a back shelf in the basement of the county-seat loaning library, to which my mother, the town librarian of my small home town, made bi-weekly visits. I loved it. Then the LoTR’s came out in the USA (due to its copyright having expired) when I was in college, and I read it about 12 times. The sheer depth of consistent detail about a strange world was the main attraction. My sense of wonder has long since atrophied and I wouldn’t get the same pleasure from it today. I tolerated the commercial, hollywoodized movie versions of the LoTR, but hated the first Hobbit movie and haven’t seen (won’t see) the others. Car chases and comic-book superhero elves, forsooth.

I couldn’t get past the first few pages of the first Harry Potter, but it made readers out of some of my nephews and nieces who might not be otherwise. So here’s to Tolkien and Rowling, and others who make up imaginary worlds which expand the minds of youngsters.

OTOH, his poor reputation on feminism seems mostly deserved. There is an account of a bad marriage in Numenor in Unfinished Tales. I was mostly on the woman’s side, but Tolkien clearly favors the man and in the end has the Numenorean king and son agree on how badly she was behaving. Even in Atlantis people were mansplaining.

“Fwiw, Rich, NPR’s ritual centrism, embodied for example by fawning treatment of people like Alan Simpson, could just probably and even possibly have something to do with fonsors and spunding.”

The curse of our times is that people will supposedly agree with you for all sorts of weird reasons. I could write “Obama shouldn’t be assassinating people with drones” and someone else could write “Yes, he shouldn’t, but what else can you expect from a Kenyan Islamofascist.” I don’t think that we are actually in agreement in this case. Similarly, I could write something about NPR’s ritual centrism and their funders and having Harold chip in “Yes, and when I dissed C. S. Lewis a staffer sent me an enraged personal Email” is not really agreement.

Getting back to JRRT, he is critically invaluable IMO in studies of fantasy because of his idea of subcreation. This provides a positively-valued version of creating a fictional world in the imitation of God, as opposed to the neutrally valued “worldbuilding” or the generally (through ironically) negatively valued use of “demiurgy” by James Branch Cabell.

Stephen has to append “And my axe!” to all of his comments here from now on.

I seem to have a talent for getting people’s goat!

Walt @50 you are right. I apologise unreservedly to Bloix for being a grumpy curmudgeon – I would buy him a drink in recompense if I could! :)

There are the few real Public Schools, which were investigated by the Clarendon Commission in 1864. Then there are the pretend public schools (sometimes known as minor public schools if they are boarding schools) of the Headmasters Conference (HMC) of Independent Schools. Some HMC, schools, like Manchester Grammar School (MGS), are former Direct Grant schools which accepted a proportion of pupils from the local authority. This no longer happens because of various educational reforms and reorganisations. MGS is NOT a Public School and does not describe itself as such. Note that there are also some rather prestigious independent schools which aren’t members of the Headmasters Conference because their ethos is not compatible. Bootham, a Quaker School in York is one such.

The real poison of the Public School system is that so many state schools try to ape them and their habits, but a discussion of this is irrelevant to a thread about JRRT.

Of course Tolkien was a creature of his time and upbringing, and LOTR no doubt reflects some of his experiences and prejudices. But some critics seem to think it ought to have been a work of realism; it was not: above all, it is a work of created mythology, reflecting the Norse Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions he knew and loved. I like to interpret the tales in terms of Jungian ideas; if one is going to apply sociology to Tolkien, then one ought to do it to the myths which inspired him first.

BTW here is a rather nice piece of short LOTR fanfiction which does push the boundaries somewhat.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6775719/1/LOTR-Prelude-to-the-Storm

Stephen @ 72
I think you are taking my comment about the bombs in a spirit that it wasn’t intended. I was actually living in England between 1972 and 1974. My comment wasn’t in any sense intended to be offensive.

I think we had better let this go.

Matt @78 –

It seems to me that about once a decade some new crop of fantasy gets lauded for finally moving past the “cliches” of Tolkien, and once anew writers are to be congratulated for discovering nuance and moral complexity of exactly the same nature as every other notable fantasy author of the last fifty years, excepting the people whose book covers really do look like Dragonlance spinoffs.

Tolkien is certainly grandfathered in for me – LOTR was one of my two or three favorite books as a child, and unlike some of my other childhood fascinations (Star Wars, alas) it hasn’t diminished in my estimation as I’ve gotten old and jaded. But I also think a lot of supposedly Tolkienish stuff that is understood to be calcified cliche in the genre doesn’t really apply to the genuine article.

The curse of our times is that people will supposedly agree with you for all sorts of weird reasons. …Similarly, I could write something about NPR’s ritual centrism and their funders and having Harold chip in “Yes, and when I dissed C. S. Lewis a staffer sent me an enraged personal Email” is not really agreement.

A Curse? My Kingdom for a curse. Or possibly just a data point. And btw, we need our data points.

As a JRRT virgin I will now shut up.

Some critics seem to think it ought to have been a work of realism; it was not: above all, it is a work of created mythology, reflecting the Norse Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions he knew and loved.

Bingo. He was quite explicit about what he intended to accomplish in his writing.

Val: OK, I accept there was no offence intended. Let’s leave it be.

#77 – Sasha Clarkson, you’re quite right, I AM a grumpy curmudgeon. :-)

John Holbo, you have a perceptive and empathetic daughter. That is a charming story and I hope you have many years of reading and talking about books together.

Ursula LeGuin on Tolkien:

“Take his handling of evil: his villains are orcs and Black Riders (goblins and zombies: mythic figures) and Sauron, the Dark Lord, who is never seen and has no suggestion of humanity about hi, These are not evil men, but the embodiments of evil in men, universal symbols of the hateful. The men who do wrong are not complete figures, but complements: Saruman is Gandal’s dark-self, Boromir Aragorn’s; Wormtonge is, almost literally, the weakness of King Théoden. There remains the wonderfully repulsive and degraded Gollum. But nobody who reads the trilogy hates, or is asked to hate, Gollum. Gollum is Frodo’s shadow; and it is the shadow, not the hero, who achieves the quest. Though Tolkien seems to project evil into ‘the others,’ they are not truly others but ourselves; he is utterly clear about this.”

I think this rings true to a great extent. I still find it a little disturbing the utter dehumanized evil of the orcs, and where that can lead – but throughout the quest, the biggest challenge is not to defeat the enemy in battle, but to defeat the temptation and greed for power that is embodied in the ring. After all, they do not, in the end, defeat the armies of Sauron. They are facing utter defeat at the gates of Mordor, and only saved when Gollum inadvertently destroys the ring.

Sometimes an orc is just an orc.

Isn’t the point to keep evil at bay and hail the proposition that sometimes the few can defeat the many despite the odds? Seems like all the rest is letting overthinking detract from an awesome read.

Some of the comments by those who don’t like Tolkien seem oddly forced. Heaven is in the West is a sign of cultural prejudice? Huh? That isn’t quite a universal cultural understanding, but it is damn close. (If forced to guess I’d assume it is because that is where the sun sets).

Focusing on evil being in the South misses the rather important concept of temptation being everywhere. The whole series is largely about the importance of people resisting the temptation to gather dangerous power–even for ‘good’ reasons.

A big part of the problem with Tolkien for the modern reader is that he doesn’t use the omniscient narrator style. He doesn’t let you into interior thoughts about things. That is hard for a modern reader who has been trained to be given and then judge the thoughts of the characters. What many readers experience as a lack of complexity is really them only being shown complexity rather than being told how complex things are from the inside. Tolkien is actually quite good at exposing inner turmoil entirely from outside a character’s mind. In a more modern novel we would be endlessly told about Frodo’s struggles with the ring from the inside. In LOTR we have to witness it largely from the outside. Huge portions of the criticism of Tolkien are because of this–especially those based on the alleged lack of complexity.

ragweed: “The whole bit in Prince Caspian – that Asian can sort things right if he wants, but he would rather see us fight a bit, with all the bloodshed and death that would cause, because God.”

But Lewis has to do that, because from Lewis’ point of view, God does that.

This thread is too soon to be dead for me to go into a long digression about subcreation vs demiurgy. But subcreation generally reflects the actual theological / moral questions that people think about, like the problem of evil. Demiurgy assumes that the problem is humanly flawed author, and that the problems of the author aren’t necessarily those of the Author. James Branch Cabell did give a devastatingly understated bad review of God’s reality in connection with the death of JBC’s wife, though.

@98 Rich

If you can be persuaded to pen your long digression about subcreation vs. demiurgy, I for one would avidly read, respond and as necessary critique your thoughts….its a far more attractive prospect than endless ramblings elsewhere on thread concerning the demiurgy of the Israeli (and or Palestinian) states – a debate which seems to involve no eagles whatsoever.

That said, I don’t mean to impose upon your time…but should you have the urge….

@101
Thank you. Quite interesting.

Sticking primarily within the authors mentioned, its interesting the Tolkien and Lewis both interject characters into their worlds (Galadriel and Azlan) who possess their own God-like qualities. To some extent this allows the author to ‘play God’ as author and then more directly influence the action though those characters (bringing people back to life or curing otherwise mortal injuries seems to be a popular use).

I’ve always been a little confounded by Mieville (I’ve not read all, but have read the series that ends with Iron Council). Your explaination provides me a good clue as to why I tend to be a little dissatisfied with some of the conclusions/endings. If I wanted to be critical I’d say Mieville refuses to imagine the “better ending” that I might like to envision. The Demiurgical explanation might be that he’s not refusing to imagine, but is bounded by his own limitations in being able to imagine….I don’t know that I’m excited about that as a reason, but its a stronger literary stance than I had credited.

Have you by chance read the fairly recent Magicians series by Lev Grossman? If you have, I’d propose that he actually manages to straddle both a subcreation world and a demiurigical through a particular plot devise – I’ll not say it in case you (or others) haven’t read the books which I found pretty interesting on a number of levels (the first and third ones were the best).

Richard Burton on Romance vs the novel is good, too. Presumptively classist, but in a way that can be reused for other purposes.

dn’s (@87) reference to Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories is rather interesting. When I read this as a young teenager 40-odd years ago, I didn’t understand it: indeed I find that Tree and Leaf is the only Tolkien book which seems to have escaped from my library. However I do like this Wiki quote: “… he (Tolkien) defends fairy stories as offering escapist pleasure to the reader, justifying this analogy: a prisoner is not obliged to think of nothing but cells and wardens.”

Tolkien’s fantasies were written for his own and others’ pleasure. Although they reflect his outlook, there is no deliberate attempt to convert others to his worldview.

I read CS Lewis too, but as I got older I found that I greatly resented his attempts to brainwash/proselytise. I read a book of his poetry once and found the misogyny cringeworthy – especially in a poem where he excoriated some poor girl/woman who was obviously the object of his unrequited passion. In The Last Battle, Lewis’ denunciation his character Susan for being interested in nothing but“… nylons, lipstick and invitations” and for being “a jolly sight too keen on being grown up” was similarly rather uncomfortable reading. It is not unsurprising that his principle of Evil was female. Lewis killed off his other child heroes rather than allow them to grow up. Even though he could tell a good tale, there are threads running through all his stories which are rather unwholesome.

On the other hand, Tolkien’s Sam is stopped from going West by Frodo, because Sam’s destiny and reward was to have a full and happy life with Rosie. It might be necessary for some people to be heroes, but but this is not an end in itself: the justification of heroism is to enable others’ carefree enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures.

Sasha Clarkson: “Although they reflect his outlook, there is no deliberate attempt to convert others to his worldview.”

Someone upthread mentioned Tolkien’s aversion to allegory; building on that, here’s from the preface to LotR:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have done so ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

There’s a long tradition of writers wondering whether an author has to respect the free will of his or her creations, and in what way. David Lodge has an essay about Muriel Spark, in a collection my library no longer has, about this. But Tolkien’s ideas about doubles and character types and myths seem to come from Jung. I don’t see how imposing a scientific theory on characters is better than imposing a socially, traditionally, or individually imagined pattern on them. There’s a kind of allegory I don’t like either, the kind that excuses bad writing by claiming it has to be that way because of the secret meaning, but there’s no denying Tolkien was doing allegory (though usually in the good sense).

IOW I’m not sure allegory is the problem with the most annoying parts of Lewis.

Apropos of nothing really but OP interest (and probably this was already well known), I learned from the Jacobs bio that Lewis attempted, vehemently, to mansplain philosophy to Elizabeth Anscombe. Which seems in retrospect not especially wise.

My impression has always been that Tolkien loved life, and that his attitude helped him live a long and full one. Having accepted his mother’s and guardian’s faith, he did not waste his energies by torturing himself with religious doubts.

Lewis on the other hand seems to have a much more troubled individual, which is reflected in his work, both fiction and non fiction. I don’t know whether either Tolkien or Lewis read, or cared about, Jung, but the Jungian interpretations of aspects of both their work are obvious. Lewis’ Anima archetype is however much darker and less nuanced than Tolkien’s.

The disagreement between Lewis and Anscombe was about his attempt to justify miracles philosophically: it was she who criticised him and not vice-versa. Her account of their debate is given in the link below. It was nothing to do with “mansplaining”, and she was actually quite complimentary about him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._M._Anscombe#Debate_with_C._S._Lewis