Tolkien problematics...

[Timdalf]

I am going to risk sticking my head above the parapet... call me Gimli!! Call me confused... Get me a box!!

I don't know the answer to these questions. I admit I find myself at sea in The Silmarillion material... I think I have a sound beginning of a grasp of LotR and TH. I am hoping the SilmFilm Project will begin to shed some light on them... Some day I would like to put these questions before the Tolkien experts, Flieger, Shippey, Anderson, & of course, Prof Corey...

Problematics of the Tolkienian legendarium – scientific and theological:

It is a given and fairly clear to all that Tolkien initially created his Elves and their history to “explain” (more accurately perhaps: to have an excuse for) his linguistic hobby of creating invented languages. I have a hypothesis, however, that since the main engine for linguistic change in the real (human) world is mortality. . . Namely, as generations come and go, their linguistic characteristics begin (and are allowed) to change and with Elves (due to their longevity) this is not possible. Single individuals live through the entire multi-millennial history and so linguistic change becomes virtually impossible. Hence he had to create a complex Elvish “tribal” history of the Elvish divisions to account for differences among and developments within the languages (Quenya vs Sindarin, and their dialects). . .

Further, as time went on he began to realize there were other difficulties with his invented world: the cosmology of a later created sun and moon, the world made round and loss of the “straight road”. . . and the whole concept of Elvish “immortality”. . . not to mention problems with Elvish afterlife, reincarnation. . .

An example of this sort of unintended consequence is the issue of Gandalf/Olorin – why would he have to consult the libraries of Minas Tirith, when he is a being of thousands of years in age himself? He is an immortal himself, of a grade higher than any Elf. . . wouldn’t he have known the history of The One Ring. . .?

Further, with such immortal beings like the Valar what about the problem of spiritual omniscience. . .?

The problem of the longevity of the Elves divorced from ethical purity (a conjunction clearly basic to the Old Testament). . .?

In Christian teaching the Angels are immortal spiritual (bodiless) beings. . . of two types; those that remain in obedience and communion with the Divine and are holy and those that rebel and separate themselves from Him and are demons. . . Thus those that remain holy are not fallible (while those that are not holy become fallible) and so this creates a fallibility problematic for the Valar as Tolkien depicts them in his legendarium. . .

Further throughout real human (pre-Christian in the popular sense) history there were prophesies and fore-shadowings and preliminary cultural phenomena that lead up to (prepared for) the Incarnation-Resurrection. . . The lack of these means a major core element of human history is overlooked, omitted by the Tolkien legendarium in his attempt to exclude Christianity from Middle-earth. This is a consequence of his Valar being rather deistic (remote uninvolved) divinities as compared with the benevolence of the Christian God in the pre-Christian era.

Some if not all of these problematics began to emerge as Tolkien lived with his legendarium longer. . .

None of these problems arise in TH and LotR because these works remain severely confined in time and space to brief and local situations and conditions. . . and the Elves thus remain peripheral not central to the main line of the plot. . . dropping in, as it were, for significant “visitations” or detours. These stories are centered on Hobbits and Men. . . not the Elves nor the Valar. This is not the case in The Silmarillion. . . hence the problems noted above become major obstacles to the “realism” that Tolkien thought essential to the credibility of this work.

But once Tolkien had gone through the process of thinking out the Middle-earth late Third Age events, he found himself also confronted with going back over The Silmarillion to reconcile the two major formulations. The classic case is the identity and personal history of Galadriel. Another prime issue in The Silmarillion is the relation of the Elves and Valar to the Music, in other words where is the line (if any) between free will and fatalism in the Elvish reality? Once this problem was resolved demonstrably in LotR with the implicit distinction between the Powers that Be creating (determining) ethical situations to which the Hobbits, Men and even Elves responded to with choice (non-determinate) he was forced to reconsider this aspect in The Silmarillion: are the Elves free agents and able to make ethical choices or are their actions determined by the Music?

Tolkien of course can invent any sort of world, peoples, laws of development he wants. And I am not implying that his imagined universe is not effective and brilliant. Those are not the issues. The question is, how realistic is it, how consistent is it. The unintended consequences of such a daring enterprise. Those are characteristics he himself cited as necessary... (in On Fairy Stories and in his extant letters) I bring up these questions only because I suspect that confronting them will help this Project (as well as us the readers of his works.)

 

[MithLuin]

You bring up a lot of different points, but to address the issue of linguistic change....yes, he introduced geographic separation to mimic the spread of real-world languages, and for the isolation in distance to allow independent development. But to make up for the longevity of the elves, he created distance in time by giving the elves a particular delight in the sound of language. So, as their tastes developed, they were always altering and improving their languages. Thus, we get the Shibboleth of Fëanor, where he took it personally when the Noldor shifted from TH to S for some words...including the name of his mother Míriel Serindë. Is this a 'cheap' answer? Perhaps....but Tolkien certainly changed his own invented languages repeatedly over his own lifetime, so giving the elves an equal taste for creativity and changing tongues was not that far-fetched. If anything, he allowed it to shape elven culture.

 

[MithLuin]

An example of this sort of unintended consequence is the issue of Gandalf/Olorin – why would he have to consult the libraries of Minas Tirith, when he is a being of thousands of years in age himself? He is an immortal himself, of a grade higher than any Elf. . . wouldn’t he have known the history of The One Ring. . .?

I do not think that this is as much of an issue as you think. Certainly, Tolkien considered this issue and addressed it within the pages of Lord of the Rings. Gandalf came to Middle Earth about 1000 years into the Third Age. So, he was not around when the Rings of Power were made. He did not know Celebrimbor. He was not part of the war of the Last Alliance. All of the information he had about these events that happened a millenium earlier would have come from talking with surviving elves (Elrond, for instance)...or by studying. Both Saruman and Gandalf seem to have learned by studying.

And for readers who think that the emissaries of the Valar should have been a bit better informed than that, we get the wonderful quote about how he has forgotten much that he once knew, etc. There is a strong implication that the incarnation (and in Gandalf's case, re-incarnation) of the Istari in some way altered their access to their memories of life in Valinor. They certainly didn't forget everything (they had their mission from the Valar, after all), but 'Olórin I was in my youth in the West which is forgotten.'

I do agree that we will have to deal with the knowledge of characters and viewers as the years and seasons pass, remembering who knows what.

 

[MithLuin]

If you are missing the pre-Christian prophecies that point to the Incarnation of Christ in Tolkien's work, then I recommend you read the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. In that, it is revealed that the Edain do have such prophecies, but the elves (or at least the exiled Noldor) know nothing of them.

Corey Olsen has specifically said that he has no intention of including the Athrabeth in this project, as it is essentially a philosophical debate, and will make for riveting television no more than the legal ramifications of Finwë's remarriage debated by the Valar.

Tolkien, of course, was *very* leery to bring Christianity in any form into his work, and so he contented himself with creating a world that came from the mind of a Christian and leaving it at that.

 

[MithLuin]

Further, as time went on he began to realize there were other difficulties with his invented world: the cosmology of a later created sun and moon, the world made round and loss of the “straight road”. . . and the whole concept of Elvish “immortality”. . . not to mention problems with Elvish afterlife, reincarnation. . .

Yes, Tolkien recognized that the more implausible elements of his mythological history would be difficult for his readers to swallow. In particular, a flat world made round and any sort of world without the Sun (and moon, but mostly the sun)...how would *any* reader be able to accept these stories as 'true'...surely we would look at that and say....nah, that's made-up. A complete knee-jerk reaction to reject it wholesale.

But...it's a good story, and his attempts to re-write it fell flat. The Sun and Moon from the beginning versions of the Tale just aren't as interesting as the Lamps and the Trees (obviously, we've opted for the Lamps/Trees backstory).

We have decided not to show that the world is flat, so the 'straight road' might never need to come up. We are never going to see Arda hanging in space as a flat land, because we know the viewers can't take it.

We will have to deal with the creation of the Sun and Moon in Season 3, which means dealing with whether or not it is the result of part of the Trees, or....? It was one thing to create the Lamps and Trees when the Valar were our only characters - it made sense for them to do mythic world-building stuff. In Season 3, it might be a bit incongruous for them to make the Sun and the Moon like part of a left over throwback to a creation story in the middle of a historic war scene. But...we'll deal with that when we get to it. In Season 2, we have the much more minor issue of the 'floating island ferry' - that's not how islands work, and our viewers will be aware of that. So...how do we depict that sequence? Ulmo and Ossë are involved, but...what are we going to *show*?

We will have the Halls of Mandos, and we will show dead souls in them (at the very least in Season 5 with Lúthien before Námo). Will we show elvish re-incarnation? Likely yes. We will have Glorfindel in Rivendell in the Frame, and we're going to eventually see him die in the Fall of Gondolin. And so I am fine with showing Finrod walk again in Valinor with his father Finarfin and with Amarië, just as the text states, after his death and burial in Middle Earth. We don't have to show the process or explain it too much (are they returning as adults or being reborn as children, and how does that work? Who knows!) We can just occasionally show formerly-dead characters and be like, yep, they returned to life...they're elves.