Timdalf
Active Member
As I try to make sense of the Silmarillion material -- which is what I was doing during the last -- 12/18/15-- podcast when I asked, "Is there some inherent flaw in the Valar that enables all this deterioration to happen" and Prof Corey replied, "their free will". Right, of course. But... I meant the question to go a bit deeper than that. Yes, free will is the mechanism that enables wrong choices like Melkor's and the Valar who make errors in judgement (incl. the eventual problems with the Elves who refuse to leave Middle-earth for Valinor) like Aule's creation of dwarves, or the (to me) most baffling "mistake" of the Valar: the summons of the Elves to Valinor. Baffling because I don't see why it is a mistake! I find describing that summons as a "mistake" so very problematic. If Valinor is a paradise, why is calling the Elves into it a mistake. Isn't the mistake that of the Elves who refuse to go or get distracted/detoured on the way there?
My question really was: "Why do they -- Valar now, and Elves down the road -- misuse their free will?" Is there something in their very identities that actually, concretely evokes, through free will, the realization of the potential for degeneration?
In other words, I am trying to follow the ethical logic of what Tolkien has given us... assuming there is one and that the material is not just a jumble of nice stories that have no inner consistency meant to beguile us entertainingly and further, are unfinished at that!
Or let me put it this way: OK, so free will enables wrong choices. But why are the wrong choices made at all? If we are given such superior beings as Valar and Elves, why don't they have the simple good sense to do the right thing?! Why does Melkor misuse his free will? Or Aule? Or the Elves?
Since Melkor is much in the "news" these days, the focuse of the podcasts,... yes, he is an arrogant SOB full of himself, but why does he choose to let that rule his choices? (I think this issue is at the root of Prof. Corey's drive to make Melkor, not justified, but understandable, as it were; that his choices to go it alone arise naturally, almost surreptitiously to take over his personality)?
Let me suggest this as an answer: Tolkien is not just fabricating nice stories of adventure and impressive beings. He is actually trying to create edifying thought experiments: Namely: what would it be like if we had our fondest wish fulfilled? That being: to live everlastingly. Or what would it be like if indeed instead of the All-holy Trinity with its theology of unity with diversity -- for the perfect minimal social number is three. (Just two in a relationship can get self-absorbed, but if you have three this is ontologically avoided -- I can't go into examples here, but I suggest to you the American Constitution with 3 branches, or the tragedy of Tristan und Isolde where obliviousness to the third party results in disaster)... as I say, having digressed, instead of the Trinity one had polytheism (which was so in vogue in 18th and 19th c. classically oriented academic and literary English culture that was Tolkien's milieu -- that is, a nostalgia for the Ancient Pagan world that raised it to paradigmatic status)?
In other words, the Valar and Elves are *not* ideals, but warnings. Not wish fulfillments, but caveats. In the first instance, because polytheism leads to demeaning conflicts within its "divine"... Homer and the ancient poets are full of this sort of very un-divine behaviour! And in the second instance, if we were to live everlastingly without first becoming ethically perfected, we only would find ourselves in perpetual misery. The idea here as Tolkien stated: death is a blessing, not a curse, given not just our fallibility, but the agony of the ruinousness of that fallibility. Not least because we would be still in a mortal world dying around us while we live on, and on, and on... Not to mention ontological problems with how does one deal with the cycle of generations. Imagine elvish marriages... They have a child at 600 years, 800 years, 1200 years, 3000 years.... How does this work!? Or what about the problem of simple tedium with living that long? Or the more drastic problem of how this longevity apparently is totally independent of ethical integrity (the two of which are inextricably co-dependent in the Judeao-Christian worldview!). But more importantly than these practical problems, is the real problem of the soul-body amalgamated creatures that we are; our physical law of degeneration is coinherent (loaded word!) in our ethical degeneration. We die because we morally are weak, and we are morally weak because we die: The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness. This is core Christian (and we can never forget Tolkien was very much a Christian) tenet of our psychology, our anthropology, our humanness.
What I am saying is that I think the more Tolkien lived with his initial impulse to create the Valar and the Elves he more and more sensed these sorts of problems were just over the horizon (like Wellington's troops behind the hill at Waterloo -- result: defeat of the greatest military mind since Caesar!). This, I submit, is the real reason he did not finish and work out and make the Silmarillion more than just a prose abstract of his cultural PhD "thesis"! It couldn't be finished... just as the frame narrative attempts of the Book of Lost Tales led to insurmountable problems... or the flat-earth/straight road "trope" he foresaw would lead to astronomical problems for a modern reader... So the two most basic features of his legendarium led to such improbabilities that violated the "green sun principle" of his subcreative work: that there be an inner consistency in the imaginary world that would make it believable, and thus effective in the reader's imagination.
But there is a within this conundrum a surprising resolution of it:
You see, if this is really what Tolkien is about (perhaps unconsciously? intuitively), then the very problematics of everlasting existence and polytheism are not obstacles, but very point of the exercise. Such a world cannot exist for us because it violates our most central premises of our ethical criteria.
My point, then: Until we have resolved these implications -- either that we want to embody the problematics of the thought experiments, or we want to resolve the problems generated by the nature of the Tolkien subcreated world, these both overarching and fundamental problems, we cannot even begin to render The Silmarillion material into a coherent and believable world that is anything more than just a haphazard, serialized episodic adventure yarn, as entertaining as that might be. This was the problem with the Medieval Romances (which were the mini-series, I guess, of the courts of their day). They just rambled on and on (like the comic strip Prince Valiant does after 75 years of King Features Syndicate)!! Getting no where, really. And no matter how detailed we get with a "close reading of the text", which is perhaps fascinating, but tends to end up wandering forever in the fogs of the Barrow Downs or the ravines of the Old Forest in need of a Tom Bombadil to get back into an ethically coherent plot.
I am not, by the way, saying we should devolve into a "Pilgrim's Regress" or Narnia Chronicles sort of allegorization... That is the other extreme. But (to pun) there has to be coherent thread (!), a guiding star, a "through composed" standard around which our forces can rally and lift us out of the fog of war, the chaos of detail, and into a genuinely meaningful arc of the development of the character of Middle-earth itself, of its Valarian "guardians" and its Elvish "inhabitants" if there is to be any aesthetic unity to the end result.
And we have to face the reality, that this has to be (however flexibly) somehow established before all else can be worked out and the result be a really effective work of art.
My question really was: "Why do they -- Valar now, and Elves down the road -- misuse their free will?" Is there something in their very identities that actually, concretely evokes, through free will, the realization of the potential for degeneration?
In other words, I am trying to follow the ethical logic of what Tolkien has given us... assuming there is one and that the material is not just a jumble of nice stories that have no inner consistency meant to beguile us entertainingly and further, are unfinished at that!
Or let me put it this way: OK, so free will enables wrong choices. But why are the wrong choices made at all? If we are given such superior beings as Valar and Elves, why don't they have the simple good sense to do the right thing?! Why does Melkor misuse his free will? Or Aule? Or the Elves?
Since Melkor is much in the "news" these days, the focuse of the podcasts,... yes, he is an arrogant SOB full of himself, but why does he choose to let that rule his choices? (I think this issue is at the root of Prof. Corey's drive to make Melkor, not justified, but understandable, as it were; that his choices to go it alone arise naturally, almost surreptitiously to take over his personality)?
Let me suggest this as an answer: Tolkien is not just fabricating nice stories of adventure and impressive beings. He is actually trying to create edifying thought experiments: Namely: what would it be like if we had our fondest wish fulfilled? That being: to live everlastingly. Or what would it be like if indeed instead of the All-holy Trinity with its theology of unity with diversity -- for the perfect minimal social number is three. (Just two in a relationship can get self-absorbed, but if you have three this is ontologically avoided -- I can't go into examples here, but I suggest to you the American Constitution with 3 branches, or the tragedy of Tristan und Isolde where obliviousness to the third party results in disaster)... as I say, having digressed, instead of the Trinity one had polytheism (which was so in vogue in 18th and 19th c. classically oriented academic and literary English culture that was Tolkien's milieu -- that is, a nostalgia for the Ancient Pagan world that raised it to paradigmatic status)?
In other words, the Valar and Elves are *not* ideals, but warnings. Not wish fulfillments, but caveats. In the first instance, because polytheism leads to demeaning conflicts within its "divine"... Homer and the ancient poets are full of this sort of very un-divine behaviour! And in the second instance, if we were to live everlastingly without first becoming ethically perfected, we only would find ourselves in perpetual misery. The idea here as Tolkien stated: death is a blessing, not a curse, given not just our fallibility, but the agony of the ruinousness of that fallibility. Not least because we would be still in a mortal world dying around us while we live on, and on, and on... Not to mention ontological problems with how does one deal with the cycle of generations. Imagine elvish marriages... They have a child at 600 years, 800 years, 1200 years, 3000 years.... How does this work!? Or what about the problem of simple tedium with living that long? Or the more drastic problem of how this longevity apparently is totally independent of ethical integrity (the two of which are inextricably co-dependent in the Judeao-Christian worldview!). But more importantly than these practical problems, is the real problem of the soul-body amalgamated creatures that we are; our physical law of degeneration is coinherent (loaded word!) in our ethical degeneration. We die because we morally are weak, and we are morally weak because we die: The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness. This is core Christian (and we can never forget Tolkien was very much a Christian) tenet of our psychology, our anthropology, our humanness.
What I am saying is that I think the more Tolkien lived with his initial impulse to create the Valar and the Elves he more and more sensed these sorts of problems were just over the horizon (like Wellington's troops behind the hill at Waterloo -- result: defeat of the greatest military mind since Caesar!). This, I submit, is the real reason he did not finish and work out and make the Silmarillion more than just a prose abstract of his cultural PhD "thesis"! It couldn't be finished... just as the frame narrative attempts of the Book of Lost Tales led to insurmountable problems... or the flat-earth/straight road "trope" he foresaw would lead to astronomical problems for a modern reader... So the two most basic features of his legendarium led to such improbabilities that violated the "green sun principle" of his subcreative work: that there be an inner consistency in the imaginary world that would make it believable, and thus effective in the reader's imagination.
But there is a within this conundrum a surprising resolution of it:
You see, if this is really what Tolkien is about (perhaps unconsciously? intuitively), then the very problematics of everlasting existence and polytheism are not obstacles, but very point of the exercise. Such a world cannot exist for us because it violates our most central premises of our ethical criteria.
My point, then: Until we have resolved these implications -- either that we want to embody the problematics of the thought experiments, or we want to resolve the problems generated by the nature of the Tolkien subcreated world, these both overarching and fundamental problems, we cannot even begin to render The Silmarillion material into a coherent and believable world that is anything more than just a haphazard, serialized episodic adventure yarn, as entertaining as that might be. This was the problem with the Medieval Romances (which were the mini-series, I guess, of the courts of their day). They just rambled on and on (like the comic strip Prince Valiant does after 75 years of King Features Syndicate)!! Getting no where, really. And no matter how detailed we get with a "close reading of the text", which is perhaps fascinating, but tends to end up wandering forever in the fogs of the Barrow Downs or the ravines of the Old Forest in need of a Tom Bombadil to get back into an ethically coherent plot.
I am not, by the way, saying we should devolve into a "Pilgrim's Regress" or Narnia Chronicles sort of allegorization... That is the other extreme. But (to pun) there has to be coherent thread (!), a guiding star, a "through composed" standard around which our forces can rally and lift us out of the fog of war, the chaos of detail, and into a genuinely meaningful arc of the development of the character of Middle-earth itself, of its Valarian "guardians" and its Elvish "inhabitants" if there is to be any aesthetic unity to the end result.
And we have to face the reality, that this has to be (however flexibly) somehow established before all else can be worked out and the result be a really effective work of art.
