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In Reply to: Re: Franco you said? Please tell me where did you find that info, Patrick: I´m all ears... posted by patrickU on January 9, 2004 at 04:20:29:
I have Tolkien´s work in high esteem, for several reasons: as you know, I am deeply interested in linguistics and ethimology, and this man has amply shown a very high level of competence and inventiveness in these fields..., and I am very interested in anything related to the structure and ways of our minds, especially in the approach Jung and people related to him have done on this matter, too; and Tolkien´s monumental work on the creation of that whole world, both utopic and ucronic, was deeply rooted in the depths of human mind and, if properly read, have the power to stirr the reader´s mind.His books must be read in a way somewhat different from the way you´d read good novels, or essays: I´d dare say that they must be read in the same state of mind you´d do with old fairy tales, which carried inside themselves fine portraits of human mind and soul, and which were able to exert a deep influence on the reader´s (or listener´s) mind. And to that effect it´s better to use that technique psychoanalists describe as "floating attention", where you are always trying to keep the whole picture in front of you, not paying special attention to details, but always ready to bring them to focus in order to make sense of what´s happening, and to get a richer picture.
That stated, I´ll say now that, even when being ucronic, the Zeitgeist of Tolkien´s times is always present in them, and manifest to those who can read them with an open mind: these books are an epic about Power, and about the dangers power brings on those who are not prepared to cope with it, about how it can corrupt those who are lured by it, and who forget that, while it can be a good servant, it is always a harsh, dangerous master.
In Tolkien´s days, Europe was quite different from how it is today: remember that English crown was of Germanic ascent, their name changing to Windsor after the war..., and that it was pretty common for educated English people to spend some time visiting Germany (do you remember the conversation Gabriel had when dancing with that young lady, in Huston´s "The Dead", when she invited him to come with a group of friends to Germany, while she was reproaching him for writing in an English paper?: that´ll give you an idea of what I mean...). German culture was deeply engrained in English minds, more than they would now accept, and it was just natural that when Tolkien, after having written "The Hobbit", started a more ambitious work, one which faced the creation of a whole mythological background to an epic in English language comparable in scope to what the Greeks had in Homer´s "Ilyad" and "Odissey" (remember that Joyce´s "Ulysses" was given to print in 1922), or to what Babylonians achieved in "Gilgamesh" resourced to Germanic mythology, and to its very roots in Nordic mythology (he learned Finnish, just to be able to understand the Kalevala, that epic poem Sibelius put to music), with their dark overtones, with Gods struggling for power while consciousness was arising in mankind, with dwarves hiding deep into mountains to obtain gold, and treasures...(remember how someone, whose name I can´t recall now, talked about Swiss bankers as "those gnomes in Zurich"), with dragons and powerful swords -the sword being a symbol for what Greeks called "logos", especially when it came to the hands of the hero...
More about the Zeitgeist: Karl Gjellerup, who finished "The Pellegrin Camanita", a work about Buddhism, in 1906, had earlier published his poem "Brynhild", inspired in Wagner´s "Ring", and "Die Weltwandered", again on a Buddhism, in 1910; Hermann Hesse published "Siddharta", another seminal book, in 1922, and "Narziss und Goldmund" in 1930; Richard Wilhelm translated "The Secret of the Golden Flower", an essential book on Chinese philosophy in 1923..., and C.G. Jung´s works on Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious were shaping our knowledge about our mind...: as you can see, spirituality, and a deep interest on the roots of our behaviour, were gaining adepts among Europe´s intellectuals all around.
Tolkien´s trilogy (better, a tetralogy -like Wagner´s was, this one with an appendix, "The Silmarillion"), which started in a way pretty similar to that a fairy tale does, when, in "The Hobbit", he first describes Bilbo´s whereabouts: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit", is as powerful as fairy tales have been before they were corrupted by Walt Disney´s manichean approach. And it is so because both are rooted in archetypes, which come from the depths of our collective unconscious, and which, not being rational, have a strong influence on our minds: there´s the Innocent, there are Wizards, there´s the Sage,..., and there´s the eternal fight between Good and Evil, here seen as two sides of a same coin, instead of from the purely manichean approach those idiots now in power do.
It is true that Tolkien´s characters are not described in the same detailed way they are in most novels, and that´s what is to be expected in this type of work, in which the characters themselves are carriers, vectors if you like, over which archetypal forms are projected: he never was as interested in depicting them with so much detail, for what really mattered in this epic was not how they looked, but how they behaved, what happened to them, and how they were transformed along their journey: about Ulysses himself, we only know that he was not especially beautiful, but that he was not tall, that his legs were not quite straight, that he had a big scar in his thigh, and that he was witty beyond measure...
These books are, as I have repeatedly say, about Power. And they were written at a time when the black tide of unbridled Power was rising high all around in Europe, and then in the whole world. And Tolkien used, as I have said in this same forum, images taken from Shakespeare´s "Macbeth", which is another masterwork on the dangers of power.
About Tolkien being a racist, I don´t think so. Certainly, what we now call Political Correctness was not something people paid much attention to in those days, and a certain feeling about the white race being somehow superior to the black races in Africa is something we must accept as part of the whole European cultural background of those days. But I have never found anytraces of clear racism in any of his writings, or in anything he ever was reported to have done.
And now, to the films. In few words, I was disappointed by the two I have seen, "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King": I think Mr. Jackson was not at the height of that difficult task, and the power of Tolkien´s writings to move the reader, and to stirr his soul, has been lost in translation, as he has paid more attention to show than to suggest (ah, the now lost power of ellipsis...!). And his selection of characters has been poor, too: Smeagol/Gollum is by a wide margin the best, with Sam being good, too..., while Aragorn, Gandalf, the Elves..., pffftt! Well, some images in the siege of Minas Thirit were not bad, they were even powerful..., but in the whole, the films were disappointing, and easily forgettable. And he was especially incompetent at handling the double situation near the end of the film, and the whole journey through the Dark country, and the climbing of Mount Doom were simply boring. And yes, I hate that stupid, cowish "tortured" look of Elijah Wood: he reminded me of Harrison Ford, in his idiotic inexpressiveness!
Bored enough?
Best regards
Bernardo
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Follow Ups
- Thank you Patrick. About that work, the books are very good..., the films far from that - orejones 10:15:31 01/09/04 (1)
- Re: Not even a hint of boreness, my only regret is that..... - patrickU 10:50:26 01/09/04 (0)
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