Tolkien's frame stories

Last updated

J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium, to make the works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.

Contents

The frame story for both Tolkien's novels published in his lifetime, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , is that the eponymous Hobbit Bilbo Baggins wrote a memoir of his adventures, which became The Red Book of Westmarch . This was continued by his relative Frodo Baggins, who carried the One Ring to Mount Doom, and then by Frodo's servant, Samwise Gamgee, who had accompanied him. The Lord of the Rings contains an appendix, "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", which, being written by Men rather than Hobbits, has its own frame story.

The legendarium, the body of writing behind the posthumously-published The Silmarillion , has a frame story that evolved over Tolkien's long writing career. It centred on a character, Aelfwine the mariner, whose name, like those of several later reincarnations of the frame-characters, means "Elf-friend". He sails the seas and is shipwrecked on an island where the Elves narrate their tales to him. The legendarium contains two incomplete time-travel novels, The Book of Lost Tales and The Notion Club Papers, which are framed by various "Elf-friend" characters who by dream or other means visit earlier ages, all the way back to the ancient, Atlantis-like lost civilisation of Númenor.

Tolkien was influenced by William Morris's use of a frame story in his epic poem The Earthly Paradise , in which mariners of Norway set sail for the mythical place, where they hear and narrate tales, one of them of a wanderer much like Eärendil. Tolkien was familiar, too, with the Celtic Imram sea-voyage legends such as those of St Brendan, who returned to tell many stories, and published a poem called "Imram" from his legendarium.

Context

Tolkien was following in a long tradition by framing his stories in another tale explaining how they were told. That tradition includes One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade kept the king entertained with one story after another. Painting by Ferdinand Keller, 1880 Ferdinand Keller - Scheherazade und Sultan Schariar (1880).jpg
Tolkien was following in a long tradition by framing his stories in another tale explaining how they were told. That tradition includes One Thousand and One Nights , where Scheherazade kept the king entertained with one story after another. Painting by Ferdinand Keller, 1880

Frame stories

A frame story is a tale that encloses or frames the main story or set of stories. For example, in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein , the main story is framed by a fictional correspondence between an explorer and his sister; [2] in One Thousand and One Nights , compiled during the Islamic Golden Age, the many stories are framed by a tale that Scheherazade keeps the king from executing her by telling him a story every night, each time not completing the story by daybreak so that he spares her life for just one more day. [1]

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

Red Book of Westmarch

In the last chapter of The Hobbit , Tolkien writes of the protagonist and titular character Bilbo Baggins returning from the journey to the Lonely Mountain and composing his memoirs, to record the events described in the book. Bilbo thinks of calling his work There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Holiday. [T 1] Tolkien's full name for the novel is indeed The Hobbit or There and Back Again. [T 2] In the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings , Bilbo's There and Back Again tale is said to be written in his red leather-bound diary. [T 3] While living in Rivendell, Bilbo expands his memoirs into a record of the events of The Lord of the Rings, including the exploits of his kinsman Frodo Baggins and others. He leaves the material for Frodo to complete and organize. [T 4] Frodo writes down the bulk of the final work, using Bilbo's diary and "many pages of loose notes". At the close of Tolkien's main narrative, the work is almost complete, and Frodo leaves the task to his gardener and close friend and heir Samwise Gamgee. [T 5]

Detail of the runes that provide a frame story in Tolkien's 1937 dust jacket painting for The Hobbit. The runes here shown running horizontally read in English "journey made by Bilbo Baggins of Hob[biton]". The Hobbit Dust Jacket Runes Detail.jpg
Detail of the runes that provide a frame story in Tolkien's 1937 dust jacket painting for The Hobbit . The runes here shown running horizontally read in English "journey made by Bilbo Baggins of Hob[biton]".

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien, seeking to present his Middle-earth writings as a credible mythology, needed to create a "credible book tradition". He went to "elaborate lengths" to achieve this, including many mentions of Bilbo's "diary" and "Translations from the Elvish", supposedly created during his years of retirement, complete with "the masses of notes and paper in his room at Rivendell". [3] She observes that the simulated tradition is already in evidence, hidden in plain sight, in The Hobbit, whose dust jacket is "surreptitiously" ornamented by Tolkien with ancient-looking runes, which read: [3]

The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a year's journey made by Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton; compiled from his memoirs by JRR Tolkien, and published by George Allen and Unwin Ltd. [3]

Flieger notes that The Hobbit's frame story is rather fragile, since the book's narrator often speaks in a voice that cannot be Bilbo's. [3] In The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, Tolkien carefully embedded the frame story in the text, from the earliest drafts. He has Bilbo talk in the Council of Elrond about getting on with his book, saying that he was "just writing an ending for it", but realising that it now needed "several more chapters" because of Frodo's adventures on the way to Rivendell. [T 6] [3] She comments that Tolkien "went so far as to draw up a title page" for his Red Book, showing Bilbo's "largely unsatisfactory tries" at finding an appropriate title. [3] The final title is Frodo's: [T 5]

My Diary.My Unexpected Journey.There and Back Again. And
What Happened After.
Adventures of Five Hobbits.The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by
Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends.
What we did in the War of the Ring.

THE DOWNFALL
OF THE
LORD OF THE RINGS
AND THE
RETURN OF THE KING

(as seen by the Little People; being the memoirs of Bilbo and
Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends
and the learning of the Wise.)

Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo
in Rivendell.

Flieger writes that at the time of the release of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien had not yet included that text in the Red Book; its prologue spoke of The Hobbit as containing "a selection from the Red Book of Westmarch". [3] Tolkien went on developing the frame story, and in the second edition he added a "Note on the Shire Records" to the prologue. It explains, in the voice of the fictional editor, that the "account" (the main text of The Lord of the Rings) was taken mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch, stating that this was begun as "Bilbo's private diary", continued by Frodo with an account of the War of the Ring, and extended by Sam. [3]

Near the end of the main text, Tolkien has Frodo give the Red Book to Sam. Flieger notes that, seeing it, Sam says "Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!", and describes Frodo's answer as "both definitive and revealing": "'I have quite finished, Sam', said Frodo. 'The last pages are for you'." [3] She comments that where Sam says "it", meaning the book, Frodo does not, leaving open whether he means the book or his life in Middle-earth as he has recorded in the book. [3] She briefly considers what Sam might have been supposed to have added, if the suggestion is to be taken at all seriously. She points out that they could have been books 4 and 6 of The Lord of the Rings, where Frodo is never seen without Sam, but there are times when Sam is alert while Frodo is absent or unconscious. Further, no other observer was present, especially at Mount Doom where Sam is the only person who sees Gollum fighting an invisible Frodo for the Ring. [3]

The medieval poem Beowulf contains a passage about a scop reciting the tale of the hero Beowulf. Illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton, c. 1910 A minstrel sings of famous deeds by J. R. Skelton c 1910.jpg
The medieval poem Beowulf contains a passage about a scop reciting the tale of the hero Beowulf. Illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton, c. 1910

Flieger observes that on the stairs of the dangerous pass of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam talk about what a story is. Sam says "We're in one, of course, but I mean put into words, you know ... read out of a great big book with red and black letters". Frodo answers "Why Sam ... to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story were already written". Flieger writes that this is "the most self-referential and post-modern moment in the entire book", [3] since it constitutes the book itself looking both back at its own creation, and forward to the printed book that the reader is holding. She compares this with a passage that Tolkien certainly knew, lines 867–874 of Beowulf , where the scop who is reciting the poem sings of a poet singing about Beowulf. In her view, Sam's "put into words, you know" is a deliberate echo of Beowulf's "glorying in words". [3]

Beowulf's self-referential account of Anglo-Saxon artistry in story-telling
Beowulf 867–874 Roy Liuzza's translation [4]

     ...    Hwīlum cyninges þegn,
guma gilphlæden,    gidda gemyndig,
se ðe ealfela    ealdgesegena
worn gemunde    —word oþer fand
soðe gebunden—    secg eft ongan
sið Bēowulfes    snyttrum styrian,
ond on sped wrecan    spel gerade,
wordum wrixlan;    ...

      At times the king's thane,
full of grand stories, mindful of songs,
who remembered much, a great many
of the old tales, found other words
truly bound together; he began again
to recite with skill the adventure of Beowulf,
adeptly tell an apt tale,
and weave his words.

Bilbo writing his memoirs titled There and Back Again in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, at that stage representing Tolkien's book The Hobbit Hobbitstale.jpg
Bilbo writing his memoirs titled There and Back Again in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring , at that stage representing Tolkien's book The Hobbit

Peter Jackson chose to continue the use of the frame story of Bilbo's memoirs in his film adaptations. In his 2001 The Fellowship of the Ring , Bilbo's There and Back Again provided the basis for the voiceover for the scene "Concerning Hobbits"; this was greatly extended in the Special Extended Edition. The memoirs' title became the working title for the third of Jackson's The Hobbit Films in August 2012, [5] but in 2014 he changed it to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies . [6]

"The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen"

The Lord of the Rings contains a second frame story, for the appendix "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen". The tale describes how the hero Aragorn came to marry an immortal Elf-woman, Arwen. Tolkien stated that it was "really essential" to the work. Its frame story is that the tale was written by Faramir and Éowyn's grandson Barahir after Aragorn's death, and that an abbreviated version of the tale was included in a copy of the Thain's Book made by Findegil. This in turn was annotated, corrected, and extended in Minas Tirith. [T 7] The narrative voice and the story's point of view are examined by the scholar Christine Barkley, who considers the main part of the tale to have been narrated by Aragorn. [7] [lower-alpha 1]

Paratexts

Tolkien included a mass of paratexts – prefaces, notes, and appendices of all kinds – in The Lord of the Rings, and some in The Hobbit. The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft comments that these "resonat[e]" or "collaborat[e]" with the main text to amplify its effect, making it more believable. Several of these contribute to his frame stories, which place him not as author but as the last of a line of philological editors of ancient documents originally written by characters such as the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. These paratexts thus support a found manuscript conceit, which in turn supports the frame story. [9] The Tolkien scholar Giuseppe Pezzini writes that the "meta-textual frame [of The Lord of the Rings] ... is duly harmonised in the text through the use of formal features; the appendixes are indeed full of scribal glosses, later notes, and editorial references that are meant to match the elaborate textual history detailed in the Note on the Shire Records." [10] For example:

Tolkien's representation of historical editing of ancient documents in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings [9]
Appendix A. II "The House of Eorl". The Kings of the Mark. Third Line. Comments
2991—F.A. 63 (3084) Éomer Éadig. When still young he became a Marshal of the Mark (3017) and was given his father's charge in the east marches. In the War of the Ring Théodred fell in battle with Saruman at the Crossings of Isen. Therefore before he died on the Fields of the Pelennor, Théoden named Éomer his heir and called him king. In that day Éowyn also won renown, for she fought in that battle, riding in disguise; and was known after in the Mark as the Lady of the Shield-arm.1 Annalistic text recording great events of the past
 
1For her shield-arm was broken by the mace of the Witch-king; but he was brought to nothing, and thus the words of Glorfindel long before to King Eärnur were fulfilled, that the Witch-king would not fall by the hand of man. For it is said in the songs of the Mark that in this deed Éowyn had the aid of Théoden's esquire, and that he also was not a Man but a Halfling out of a far country, though Éomer gave him honour in the Mark and the name of Holdwine. Later editor's footnote
[This Holdwine was none other than Meriadoc the Magnificent who was Master of Buckland.]  Scribal gloss

Tolkien's legendarium

Tolkien thought of his legendarium, the large body of documents of many kinds that lies behind the text of the text published in 1977 as The Silmarillion , as a presented collection, with a frame story that changed over the years, first with an Ælfwine-type character who translates the "Golden Book" of the sages Rumil or Pengoloð; later, having the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins collect the stories into the Red Book of Westmarch , translating mythological Elvish documents in Rivendell. [11]

Ælfwine

The brothers Hengest and Horsa are the legendary founders of England; in The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien places AElfwine as their father. Illustration from Edward Parrott's 1909 Pageant of British History Hengist and Horsa.jpg
The brothers Hengest and Horsa are the legendary founders of England; in The Book of Lost Tales , Tolkien places Ælfwine as their father. Illustration from Edward Parrott's 1909 Pageant of British History

In The Book of Lost Tales , begun early in Tolkien's writing career, the character who becomes Ælfwine the mariner is named Ottor Wǽfre (called Eriol by the Elves), and his tale serves as frame story for the tales of the Elves. He sets out from what is today Heligoland on a voyage with a small crew, but is the lone survivor after his ship crashes upon the rocks near an island. The island is inhabited by an old man who gives him directions to Eressëa. After he finds the island, the Elves host him in the Cottage of Lost Play and narrate their tales to him. He afterwards learns from them that the old man he met was actually "Ylmir". He is taught most of the tales by the old Elf Rúmil, Eressëa's lore master. [T 8]

In these early versions, Tol Eressea is seen as the island of Britain. He earned the name Ælfwine from the Elves; his first wife, Cwén, was the mother of Hengest and Horsa; his second wife, Naimi, bore him a third son, Heorrenda, a great poet of half-Elven descent, who in the fiction would go on to write the Old English epic poem Beowulf . This weaves together a mythology for England, connecting England's geography, poetry and mythology with the Legendarium as a plausibly reconstructed (though probably untrue) prehistory. [12]

The Book of Lost Tales

The first title for The Book of Lost Tales framed the stories as a transmitted collection:

The Golden Book of Heorrenda
being the book of the
Tales of Tavrobel [T 9]

In the fiction, a series of named Elves [lower-alpha 2] told the "lost tales" to Eriol/Ælfwine. He transmitted them via Heorrenda's written book. [13] As edited by Christopher Tolkien, the 1983 Book of Lost Tales, Volume 1 is inscribed:

This is the first part of the Book of the Lost Tales of Elfinesse which Eriol the Mariner learned from the Elves of Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle in the western ocean, and afterwards wrote in the Golden Book of Tavrobel. Herein are told the Tales of Valinor, from the Music of the Ainur to the Exile of the Noldoli and the Hiding of Valinor. [T 10]

The Notion Club Papers

Tolkien began and abandoned The Notion Club Papers in 1945. In the novel's frame story, a Mr. Green finds documents in sacks of waste paper at Oxford in 2012. These documents, the Notion Club Papers of the title, are the incomplete notes of meetings of the Notion Club; these meetings are said to have occurred in the 1980s. During these meetings, Alwin Arundel Lowdham discusses his lucid dreams about Númenor, a lost civilisation connected with Atlantis and with Tolkien's Middle-earth. Through these dreams, he "discovers" much about the Númenor story and the languages of Middle-earth (notably Quenya, Sindarin, and Adûnaic). While not finished, at the end of the given story it becomes clear Lowdham himself is a reincarnation of sorts of Elendil. [14] Tolkien selected the names of these characters to indicate their affinity: Alwin is another form of the Old English name "Aelfwine", meaning "Elf-friend", while the Quenya name Elendil can carry the same meaning. [15]

Names of the frame story characters reincarnated in different times [16]
Germanic Old English MeaningModern name Quenya (in Númenor)
Alboin Ælfwine Elf-friendAlwin, Elwin, Aldwin Elendil
Audoin Eadwine Bliss-friendEdwinHerendil
—OswineGod-friendOswin, cf. OswaldValandil ("Valar-friend")

Analysis

Tolkien's frame stories began as a mariner's sea-voyages, encountering strange lands. One of the types of story influencing these was the Celtic Imram legend, such as of the voyages of St Brendan, shown here in a 15th-century manuscript. Saint brendan german manuscript.jpg
Tolkien's frame stories began as a mariner's sea-voyages, encountering strange lands. One of the types of story influencing these was the Celtic Imram legend, such as of the voyages of St Brendan, shown here in a 15th-century manuscript.

Anna Vaninskaya, in Blackwell's 2014 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien , notes that Tolkien was directly influenced by William Morris. She suggests that the legendarium's frame story, starting from the travels of Ælfwine the mariner, was modelled on Morris's 1868–1870 epic poem The Earthly Paradise , whose frame story is that "mariners of Norway, having ... heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it". [18] She notes that Morris's "wanderers" reach "A nameless city in a distant sea / White as the changing walls of faërie", where they hear and narrate legends including "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon"; Tolkien's Lost Tales II contains one of the legendarium's foundation-poems that similarly describes the "Wanderer" Earendel (forerunner of Tolkien's Eärendil), who sails "West of the Moon, east of the Sun". [18] [lower-alpha 3]

Tolkien's biographer John Garth, in the same volume, writes that in 1920, Tolkien revised his frame story so that the Lonely Isle was no longer equated with England, and Eriol became the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine; this began the process of revising the legendarium that continued throughout his life. He notes that in 1945 and 1946, Tolkien added The Notion Club Papers, visiting ancient Númenor by travelling in time rather than by ship, but with a poem about St Brendan's Imram sea-voyages that he revised as the 1955 "Imram". [17]

The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance describes the 1920 version of the Ælfwine story as "Tolkien's complicated penultimate version of the pseudo-historical and Anglo-Saxon frame-story", calling it important to any understanding of "Middle-earth's kernel mythology". [19]

Dale Nelson, in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia , writes that Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis admired David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus , but that Tolkien "regretted" the science fiction style frame story machinery that Lindsay had used – the back-rays and the crystal torpedo ship; he notes that in The Notion Club Papers, Tolkien makes one of the protagonists, Guildford, criticise those kinds of "contraptions". [20]

Notes

  1. ↑ The scholar Helen Armstrong examines the implications of Arwen's being one of the narrators of the tale after Aragorn's death. [8]
  2. ↑ See the "Storyteller" column in the table in the article on The Book of Lost Tales .
  3. ↑ The phrase "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is used in fairy-stories and similar tales to refer to another world that is fantastically difficult to reach – in this case Aman, which can only be reached by the Straight Road. An example of the use of this phrase is in the fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Moon". See also Tolkien's use of this phrase in a late variant of his 'The Road Goes Ever On' walking songs.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rivendell</span> Fictional valley of Elves in J. R. R. Tolkiens Middle-earth

Rivendell is a valley in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth, representing both a homely place of sanctuary and a magical Elvish otherworld. It is an important location in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, being the place where the quest to destroy the One Ring began.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fiction, Man and Men denote humans, whether male or female, in contrast to Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and other humanoid races. Men are described as the second or younger people, created after the Elves, and differing from them in being mortal. Along with Ents and Dwarves, these are the "free peoples" of Middle-earth, differing from the enslaved peoples such as Orcs.

The Red Book of Westmarch is a fictional manuscript written by hobbits, related to the author J. R. R. Tolkien's frame stories. It is an instance of the found manuscript conceit, a literary device to explain the source of his legendarium. In the fiction, it is a collection of writings in which the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were recounted by their characters, and from which Tolkien supposedly derived these and other works. The name of the book comes from its red leather binding and casing, and from its having been housed in the Westmarch, a region of Middle-earth next to the Shire.

The Notion Club Papers is an abandoned novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in 1945 and published posthumously in Sauron Defeated, the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth. It is a time travel story, written while The Lord of the Rings was being developed. The Notion Club is a fictionalization of Tolkien's own such club, the Inklings. Tolkien's mechanism for the exploration of time is through lucid dreams. These allow club members to experience events as far back as the destruction of the Atlantis-like island of Númenor, as narrated in The Silmarillion.

Ælfwine the mariner is a fictional character found in various early versions of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium. Tolkien envisaged Ælfwine as an Anglo-Saxon who visited and befriended the Elves and acted as the source of later mythology. Thus, in the frame story, Ælfwine is the stated author of the various translations in Old English that appear in the twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth edited by Christopher Tolkien.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the real-world history and notable fictional elements of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy universe. It covers materials created by Tolkien; the works on his unpublished manuscripts, by his son Christopher Tolkien; and films, games and other media created by other people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tolkien's legendarium</span> J. R. R. Tolkiens mythological writings

Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a unique English mythology. The earliest story drafts are from 1916; he revised and rewrote these for most of his adult life.

"The Council of Elrond" is the second chapter of Book 2 of J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy work, The Lord of the Rings, which was published in 1954–1955. It is the longest chapter in that book at some 15,000 words, and critical for explaining the power and threat of the One Ring, for introducing the final members of the Fellowship of the Ring, and for defining the planned quest to destroy it. Contrary to the maxim "Show, don't tell", the chapter consists mainly of people talking; the action is, as in an earlier chapter "The Shadow of the Past", narrated, largely by the Wizard Gandalf, in flashback. The chapter parallels the far simpler Beorn chapter in The Hobbit, which similarly presents a culture-clash of modern with ancient. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls the chapter "a largely unappreciated tour de force". The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge writes that the chapter brings the hidden narrative of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings close to the surface.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gollum</span> Monster in Tolkiens fantasy series

Gollum is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He was introduced in the 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit, and became important in its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. Gollum was a Stoor Hobbit of the River-folk who lived near the Gladden Fields. In The Lord of the Rings it is stated that he was originally known as Sméagol, corrupted by the One Ring, and later named Gollum after his habit of making "a horrible swallowing noise in his throat".

Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn was a Ranger of the North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor. Aragorn was a confidant of the wizard Gandalf, and played a part in the quest to destroy the One Ring and defeat the Dark Lord Sauron. As a young man, Aragorn fell in love with the immortal elf Arwen, as told in "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen". Arwen's father, Elrond Half-elven, forbade them to marry unless Aragorn became King of both Arnor and Gondor.

Frodo Baggins is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, and one of the protagonists in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo is a hobbit of the Shire who inherits the One Ring from his cousin Bilbo Baggins, described familiarly as "uncle", and undertakes the quest to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom in Mordor. He is mentioned in Tolkien's posthumously published works, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.

<i>The Silmarillion</i> Collection of J. R. R. Tolkiens mythopoeic works

The Silmarillion is a collection of myths and stories in varying styles by the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien. It was edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977, assisted by the fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay. It tells of Eä, a fictional universe that includes the Blessed Realm of Valinor, the once-great region of Beleriand, the sunken island of Númenor, and the continent of Middle-earth, where Tolkien's most popular works—The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—are set. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien's publisher Stanley Unwin requested a sequel, and Tolkien offered a draft of the writings that would later become The Silmarillion. Unwin rejected this proposal, calling the draft obscure and "too Celtic", so Tolkien began working on a new story that eventually became The Lord of the Rings.

Christianity is a central theme in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional works about Middle-earth, but the specifics are always kept hidden. This allows for the books' meaning to be personally interpreted by the reader, instead of the author detailing a strict, set meaning.

"The Shadow of the Past" is the second chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy work, The Lord of the Rings, which was published in 1954–1955. Tolkien called it "the crucial chapter"; the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey labelled it "the vital chapter". This is because it represents both the moment that Tolkien devised the central plot of the book, and the point in the story where the protagonist, Frodo Baggins, and the reader realise that there will be a quest to destroy the Ring. A sketch of it was among the first parts of the book to be written, early in 1938; later that year, it was one of three chapters of the book that he drafted. In 1944, he returned to the chapter, adding descriptions of Gollum, the Ring, and the hunt for Gollum.

J. R. R. Tolkien's presentation of heroism in The Lord of the Rings is based on medieval tradition, but modifies it, as there is no single hero but a combination of heroes with contrasting attributes. Aragorn is the man born to be a hero, of a line of kings; he emerges from the wilds and is uniformly bold and restrained. Frodo is an unheroic, home-loving Hobbit who has heroism thrust upon him when he learns that the ring he has inherited from his cousin Bilbo is the One Ring that would enable the Dark Lord Sauron to dominate the whole of Middle-earth. His servant Sam sets out to take care of his beloved master, and rises through the privations of the quest to destroy the Ring to become heroic.

The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien set out to explore time travel and distortions in the passage of time in his fiction in a variety of ways. The passage of time in The Lord of the Rings is uneven, seeming to run at differing speeds in the realms of Men and of Elves. In this, Tolkien was following medieval tradition in which time proceeds differently in Elfland. The whole work, too, following the theory he spelt out in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", is meant to transport the reader into another time. He built a process of decline and fall in Middle-earth into the story, echoing the sense of impending destruction of Norse mythology. The Elves attempt to delay this decline as far as possible in their realms of Rivendell and Lothlórien, using their Rings of Power to slow the passage of time. Elvish time, in The Lord of the Rings as in the medieval Thomas the Rhymer and the Danish Elvehøj, presents apparent contradictions. Both the story itself and scholarly interpretations offer varying attempts to resolve these; time may be flowing faster or more slowly, or perceptions may differ.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychological journeys of Middle-earth</span> Analysis of Tolkiens fiction

Scholars, including psychoanalysts, have commented that J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories about both Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit, and Frodo Baggins, protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, constitute psychological journeys. Bilbo returns from his journey to help recover the Dwarves' treasure from Smaug the dragon's lair in the Lonely Mountain changed, but wiser and more experienced. Frodo returns from his journey to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom scarred by multiple weapons, and is unable to settle back into the normal life of his home, the Shire.

In Tolkien's legendarium, ancestry provides a guide to character. The apparently genteel Hobbits of the Baggins family turn out to be worthy protagonists of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo Baggins is seen from his family tree to be both a Baggins and an adventurous Took. Similarly, Frodo Baggins has some relatively outlandish Brandybuck blood. Among the Elves of Middle-earth, as described in The Silmarillion, the highest are the peaceful Vanyar, whose ancestors conformed most closely to the divine will, migrating to Aman and seeing the light of the Two Trees of Valinor; the lowest are the mutable Teleri; and in between are the conflicted Noldor. Scholars have analysed the impact of ancestry on Elves such as the creative but headstrong Fëanor, who makes the Silmarils. Among Men, Aragorn, hero of The Lord of the Rings, is shown by his descent from Kings, Elves, and an immortal Maia to be of royal blood, destined to be the true King who will restore his people. Scholars have commented that in this way, Tolkien was presenting a view of character from Norse mythology, and an Anglo-Saxon view of kingship, though others have called his implied views racist.

References

Primary

  1. ↑ Tolkien 1937, "The Last Stage"
  2. ↑ Tolkien 1937, Title page
  3. ↑ Tolkien 1954a, "A Long-expected Party"
  4. ↑ Tolkien 1955 "Many Partings"
  5. 1 2 Tolkien 1955, "The Grey Havens"
  6. ↑ Tolkien 1954a, "The Council of Elrond"
  7. ↑ Tolkien 1955, "Prologue: Note on the Shire Records"
  8. ↑ Tolkien 1984b, p. 103
  9. ↑ Tolkien 1984b, p. 290
  10. ↑ Tolkien 1984, Title page

Secondary

  1. 1 2 Hoh, Anchi (26 October 2017). "A Thousand and One Nights: Arabian Story-telling in World Literature". Library of Congress . Retrieved 7 May 2021.
  2. ↑ "Frame narrative". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 7 May 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Flieger 2005 , pp. 67–73 "A great big book with red and black letters"
  4. ↑ Liuzza 2013, p. 36.
  5. 1 2 McClintock, Pamela (31 August 2012). "Third 'Hobbit' Film Sets Release Date". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 31 August 2012.
  6. ↑ Child, Ben (24 April 2014). "Peter Jackson retitles The Hobbit part three The Battle of the Five Armies". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 May 2014.
  7. ↑ Barkley, Christine (1996). "Point of View in Tolkien". Mythlore . 21 (2): 256–262.
  8. ↑ Armstrong, Helen (1998). "There Are Two People in This Marriage". Mallorn . The Tolkien Society. 36: 5–12.
  9. 1 2 Croft, Janet Brennan (2018). "Doors into Elf-mounds: J.R.R. Tolkien's Introductions, Prefaces, and Forewords". Tolkien Studies. Project MUSE. 15 (1): 177–195. doi:10.1353/tks.2018.0009. ISSN   1547-3163.
  10. ↑ Pezzini, Giuseppe (2018). "The authors of Middle Earth: Tolkien and the mystery of literary creation" (PDF). Journal of Inklings Studies. 8 (1): 31–64. doi:10.3366/ink.2018.0003. hdl: 10023/13159 . ISSN   2045-8797.
  11. ↑ Flieger 2005, pp. 87–118.
  12. ↑ Drout, Michael D. C. (2004). "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England". In Chance, Jane (ed.). Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: a Reader. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 229–247. ISBN   978-0-8131-2301-1.
  13. ↑ Flieger 2005, p. 108.
  14. ↑ Flieger 2001, pp. 117–141.
  15. ↑ Luling, Virginia (2012). "Going back: time travel in Tolkien and E. Nesbit". Mallorn (53 (Spring 2012)): 30–31.
  16. ↑ Shippey 2005, pp. 336–337.
  17. 1 2 Lee 2020 , John Garth , "A Brief Biography", pp. 13, 18
  18. 1 2 Lee 2020 , Anna Vaninskaya, "Modernity: Tolkien and His Contemporaries", pp. 350–366
  19. ↑ Chance, Jane (2016). "Forlorn and Abject: Tolkien and His Earliest Writing (1914–1924)". Tolkien, Self and Other. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 19–45. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-39896-3_2. ISBN   978-1-137-39895-6.
  20. ↑ Nelson, Dale (2013) [2007]. "Literary Influences: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries". In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia . Routledge. pp. 372–377. ISBN   978-0-415-86511-1.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.