Child-like fascination

[Overread]

So after a recent thread on Tolkien (what if he'd been born today) I'd gotten to thinking in the back of my mind, about what it was that defined Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and indeed all his Middle Earth writing. What element comes to mind when one things of them and what are the core qualities.

And into that I figured one element is his descriptions; indeed he gets away with a lot of world building that many a publisher/editor would heavily discourage a writer to spend so much paper and print upon. And I got to wondering why.

Why these descriptions were so important to him; why he went to such lengths and what in him drove him to go into levels of detail most of us dare not or do not.


And I came to the conclusion, upon remembering Gimli's description of the Glittering Caves during the Battle for Helm's Deep, that part of his description is childlike. Not in the language he uses nor the conclusions he (his characters) draw from it, but from the approach. The detail and fascination are child-like. It's that moment that a child first eyes upon something amazing and is caught in awe; when the eyes are wide and drinking in every detail that they can and then the mind revels in the joy of that moment. I feel as if Tolkien has that in his writing but tempered with an adults experience and skill with words to describe it to others.


I think its also something many adults lose especially today. With television and films and computers we are bombarded by the amazing and the horrific. By the shocking and the mystifying to the point where we are swamped and almost drowned until many of us find it hard to muster the energy to find that child-like moment to then describe and impart our thoughts to others. We also don't need to for this saturation is almost universal to most of our audiences to the point where we need not mention much for we know they've probably seen it or its likeness before.

 

[Wiglaf]

Perhaps. He seems to care more about the world than the mechanics of the story. In some ways, it seems like a story made to fit a world. I'm not sure if the world was made to fit languages or the languages to the world, but he worked on both far longer than he worked on the LOTR.

 

[Extollager]

I think Tolkien scholar John Rateliff gets closer than just about anyone to a key element in Tolkien's way of writing. I quote from an essay by him in TOLKIEN STUDIES #6.

Rateliff:

first I want to draw attention to Tolkien’s own description of how his prose works, of what he was trying to achieve. In one of the endnotes appended to “On Fairy-stories,” he includes the following revealing passage setting forth his narrative method, in which he makes clear his goal of writing in such a way as to draw in his readers, making them participate in the creation of the fictional world by encouraging them to draw on their own personal memories when reading one of his evocative passages:

[quoting Tolkien:]..... If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word. ....

Rateliff continues:

Tolkien’s contrast here of a single image presented to the passive viewer with the internal personalized visualization of a reader, who thus participates in the (sub)creation of the work, is of a piece with his championing, in the Foreword of the second edition to The Lord of the Rings, of what he calls applicability: his refusal to impose a single authorial or “allegorical” meaning on a work.8 I would argue that the style in which he chose to write, which he painstakingly developed over several decades until it reached its peak in The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham and The Lord of the Rings and some of the late Silmarillion material, is deliberately crafted to spark reader participation. That many readers do get drawn in is witnessed by the intense investment so many people have in these books, the strong personal connection they form with the story, the almost visceral rejection of illustrations or dramatizations that do not fit their own inner vision of the characters, the returning to reread the books again and again to renew our acquaintance with the imaginary world.

[Rateliff quotes a Tolkien passage and a John Bellairs passage. He comments:]

note that in the passage from Tolkien, he does not describe every detail—what color were the rocks? who was on either side of Frodo as he sat huddled against the bitter cold? But Tolkien does tell us everything we need to know, in general terms with just enough specific detail to bring the scene home, to guide the reader’s imagination, to draw on our own memories of being cold and frozen, exhausted and miserable. We do not need to know what Frodo looked like, because we are looking through his eyes; too much detail would actually limit the applicability......

.....he often describes a scene not as you would experience it but as you would remember it afterwards. That is, his prose assumes the tone of things which have already happened, as they are stored in our memory. Thus the “walking bits,” which have so annoyed impatient readers who are only reading for the plot, do not in fact detail every day of Frodo’s year-long journey but instead are rendered down to a relatively few vivid images, such as would linger in the memory long after the event. After you have read these passages and think back on them, they very strongly resemble your actual memories of similar events (in fact, the very ones that provided the mental images that flashed through your mind when reading them) : a general recollection of where you were and what you were doing anchored by a few sharp, vivid, specific details that stand out. Thus the memory of reading the story gains the associations of events in the reader’s own life, because the one has already drawn upon the other.

 

[Wiglaf]

That might explain why it feels like real history; it is the exact opposite of the current first person present approach.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Last year I listened to an unabridged reading (I forget the reader's name - but he sang the songs as well!) for the first time, and what really struck me was how listening to the prose makes you spot things you'd missed before. In my case, the whole Forest of Fangorn scenes were rather re-imagined in my mind. I do think Tolkien was able to write a fantastic story, but there's no doubt that the landscape is a big "character" in the novel, as it is in The Hobbit, which I re-read again last week.

I've often wondered how "realistic" it is to have vast tracts of land unpopulated, with a few cities, towns and villages scattered here and there…

 

[Overread]

I've often wondered how "realistic" it is to have vast tracts of land unpopulated, with a few cities, towns and villages scattered here and there…

I think that is something very hard for many people today to actually imagine properly - especially if you come from a country like the UK where you are never more than a stones throw from a road or house or even a trackway. The idea that you could walk for days and not see habitation or development is almost alien to some areas of the world now. You still get it in some very remote areas which are very hostile to live within, but even then it can be shocking how humanity touches so far - even areas like vast tracks of savannah are thought to be a fully man-made environment (a result of slash and burn of vegetation by native people)

 

[Extollager]

I have lived most of my life in Oregon and North Dakota, and haven't found imagining vast tracts of unpopulated land difficult to imagine. I lived also in Utah many years ago, and flying over that state a few weeks ago I found the bare mountains and lakes of non-potable water reminding me of Mordor.

 

[Dan Jones]

In some ways, it seems like a story made to fit a world.

You're actually spot on here; the history of Middle Earth, and its populaces, and languages, had long been incepted before Tolkien started work on The Hobbit and LOTR. He created a world, but also paradigms at play within that world, and the stories were stories of that world, rather than building an appropriate world that would contain a story about a Ring, or a Hobbit.

 

[galanx]

I've often wondered how "realistic" it is to have vast tracts of land unpopulated, with a few cities, towns and villages scattered here and there…

I believe that Eriador in the Third Age is modelled on western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. It is now generally accepted that the Dark Ages weren't that quite that Dark; the population didn't drop that low and the inhabited places were scattered more thickly on the ground.

In Tolkien's day however that image was much more prevalent: Huns, Vikings and brigands for the Orcs, a few huddled towns and cities for the Shire and Bree, the monasteries for Rivendell and Lorien. It was mostly believed that outside a few centres the land was uninhabited except for dangerous outlaws or roaming bands of pillagers.

 

[aThenian]

The detail and fascination are child-like.

Yes, there's a sense of wonder and awe, that you don't get from a lot of fantasy.

Of course the hobbits are a bit like children - they are compared sometimes to children - which means that Tolkien can have this childlike perspective in what is not really a children's book.

one element is his descriptions; indeed he gets away with a lot of world building that many a publisher/editor would heavily discourage

Not sure why modern readers/publishers are so against description. You can always skim it when you're on that first read, in pursuit of story - but the if you reread there's an extra layer to enjoy. That's how I tend to read books, anyhow.

 

[Extollager]

It is now generally accepted that the Dark Ages weren't that quite that Dark.

In fact, isn't the term "Late Antiquity" preferred by many historians? That's what I've told some of my students, anyway!

 

[Overread]

Yep although I think the dark-ages is also one of those things that got twisted over time from researchers to common people; in that dark ages was a name given to an age where paper records are very few and far between after an almost golden age of the Romans who recorded everything they could. So its a dark gap in history where its harder to put together the puzzle because there's far less recording going on in general and far less surviving as well.

I think also its something that is romantically influenced (as many things are) and that no matter what science says there will b things that won't change or won't change in perception for a long time. Much like how we always see Roman statues as white marble whilst written records and fancy science has shown that they were, in fact, mostly painted.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

This was a good tv series on the Dark Ages.