I finally got my hands on a few of Tolkien’s less available works, or at least the ones which have continued to elude me thus far. The one I am most impressed with at this point is Leaf By Niggle. If you haven’t read any of Tolkien’s non-LOTR or Hobbit works, be prepared, this is by no means a middle earth themed story, and many of his more recently published work is very drastically different from the formats and tone set with his popular fiction.

Leaf is a really amazing read. Tolkien was a very harsh critique of writing in allegorical form. He believed strongly that story telling contains such an intrinsic value that to make it into a simple vessel to force a point or prove a moral was an abuse of a glorious medium. Needless to say, he was not really a fan of the Walt Disney companies story telling skills.

This is what intrigued me about Leaf By Niggle. It is a story that is very confusing at a couple of crucial points, unless one takes it in some form allegorically. The difference with this allegory (if you would truly even call it that), is that there is be no means any clear cut comparison of story elements to truths, morals, etc. There is only the distinct understanding that this story is designs so that it is very confusing as a narrative, but completely sensible as a tale about the effects of beauty and the possible implications of pursuing the creativity we have been imparted with.

Personally, I was confused as I read it, and once I had finished, I had to mull over the elements for awhile. The more I thought about the progressive state of things the more truths popped out at me, and the more I smile over what I read.

If you would like to read it and don’t despise reading fiction on a computer screen, check out this fully available copy, free online!

Peter Jackson deserves the thanks of all mankind. 

Not simply because he created a great movie adaptation that no one thought possible, converting the best fiction from the past century into an equally epic film trilogy. He also deserves our thanks because in doing so he translated a story which contains almost unsurpassable amounts of truth and perspective. He took a most popular book, chock full of wisdom characterized, and turned it into one of the most popular movie series of all time. It is especially interesting to see the number of people across the board, regardless of background or ideals, who are so passionate about the themes revealed to them in Lord Of The Rings. Perhaps many would not ever come to understand such paradigms as we see packaged there if it where not for this new well spring.

There is talk that he may do the same once more!

The one greatest aspect of the story which his screenplay did not entail, to the dismay of readers worldwide, is the end of the tale. It is the true completion of what Tolkien set out to tell. The Scourging of the Shire.

The Scourging of the Shire can be summed up quickly thus. In the book, Saruman is not killed, but escapes, and when the four battle-hardened  hobbits come back after the end of the war they find that the Shire has been ravaged by a large gang of evil men under his leadership. The hobbits live in fear and give all their crops to the men, who give them meager portions back.

The hobbits ride through and immediately begin to remove a portion of the men from control were they travel, disregarding their false rule and mocking them along with the few hobbits who work with them. They then rally the other hobbits to stand together, and they have a final showdown to defeat the men. Rule is eventually restored to the people.

The hobbit is such an interesting character. Everyone who meets the hobbits is eventually amazed by their resilience and determination. This is especially evidenced in Gandalf’s comments about the resolve of both Frodo and Bilbo. The hobbits are also those most willing to adapt to the positive characteristics of the other peoples of middle-earth. While the various sects of Dwarves, Elves, and Men come to greatly respect one another’s ways of living and understanding life, the hobbits are the characters who actually take on aspects of each culture. They also start out with no knowledge or wisdom of the world and end up as widely recognized leaders even among those who dwelt always in the reality of the world outside the Shire. They adapt to truth and are molded by it most readily.

It is these characteristics which made it necessary for a hobbit to take the ring. No other people possessed any person so fundamentally built to take on such a task. Without the hobbits, there was no chance that the mission of the ring would have been completed. Gandalf could not have led any other so willingly molded.

Tolkien said that this story was always within him, waiting to be fleshed out. He also said that his mythology was dedicated to England, since he believed it to have no central culturally binding mythology. The hobbits, Shire, and Hobbiton were developed greatly from his understanding of specific areas of rural English countryside. The tale of the war of the one ring both starts and ends within the Shire, and the bookends of the story highlight the changes in the hobbits and the core within that always made such possible. It is ultimately a story of them, and how necessary their people were to the continuation of middle-earth.

As of lately, I have really been struggling with some great monstrous things. A friend told us of someone whom she knows who is planning on having an abortion. Probably having something to do with my wife being pregnant, I cannot express how heart broken I have thus been. I have had trouble sleeping.

Also, I am still constantly hearing about the recent effects of the BP oil spill, and the wildlife it has only begun to effect is greatly terrorizing my thoughts. I can only assume that entire species and ecologies will no longer exist before all is said and done.

All this goes to say that I have had trouble in finding the beautiful as of late. I am constantly wondering where worth can last, and art seems like foolishness when nothing can remain truly beautiful. How can “it is good”* be ending so quickly and with so much effort put forth directly against it?

I read a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s, written to his son Christopher who was in service during WWll, as he reflected also on his time serving in WWl, and he says this.

“A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men - sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face - not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is there. But I fear in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance of debit - we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

This really resounds with me, putting to words emotions I have not fully come to terms with yet. Tolkien foresaw, on a far weaker scale at the time, the destruction of the earths natural beauties. He also witnessed firsthand the pure evil on every side of two World Wars.

As the ship seems to sink more quickly, it is a small comfort to realize someone was still playing the right note.

*Quoting God’s personal thoughts on the original creation.

After much dreaming and wishful thinking, I finally purchased an old. hardback edition of “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, which I have been long pining for. It came (rather quickly I might add) in the mail today, at my old address, so I promptly picked it up their. The book is literally just an accumulation of personal correspondence Tolkien wrote to many friends, family, and acquaintances.

Which brings be to another point. As I am winding down my reading of “Defending Middle-Earth” by Patrick Curry, I get the overarching feeling that Curry may have never read any works like “Letters”. Curry is extremely passionate about the emotional conclusions he has come to, which he believes The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit have helped him reach, and which he contends support completely his philosophies. This would automatically be true if one believes, as he does, that the work itself can mean whatever a read so chooses, and that the author has no ultimate control of a text meanings. The book provides much insight, but it is more of a “Middle Earth Can Defend My Ideas” than a “Defending Middle Earth.”

I was born into time in the history of this world where fantasy literature consisted of blue women wearing barely any clothing and alien knights fighting trolls and wizards. To be honest, I have never been able to greatly appreciate the fantasy genre as it exists in most modern graphic novels, books, and board games.

When Tolkien’s books where first made into movies, I loved them. I wasn’t as obsessed as many people I knew, but I definitely admired both J.R.R. Tolkien for writing and Peter Jackson for developing such a wonderful screen adaptation.

I didn’t really learn such a great respect for the author, or the roots of fantasy literature, until I began to learn about the man himself. I was gifted an awesome book of essays on Tolkien’s life and works, and realized that this was a man seen deeper in his journal entries and personal letters than most men are seen in daily interaction. From here I learned to love his works, once I saw from where they found source matter.

Tolkien was passionate about mythology. Norse, Greek, British, and every other deep culture. His works where the natural outcome of his understanding of how and why these great people groups built so much into and upon narratives. It is because of this that he became what I would describe as a founding father of classic fantasy literature.

Since Tolkien, much has been dulled down. While much of the adventure or creativity which fantasy allows for is still active in the genre, it seems hollow when there is nothing greater in a story than the progressing of a handful of characters through a chain of events. This is true originally in the thought processes of the author, and becomes obvious when the story is built. The depth at which the author is processing his stories and their surrounding implications, or the implications of their fictitious surrounds upon them, is the depth at which the story becomes real to the reader. Or so I assume is also true for others.

I will end by saying this. Tolkien was not largely a fan of his good friend C.S. Lewis’ Narnia fables. While I greatly admire the philosophic and emotional efforts and expressions put forth in these books, I think Tolkien saw within them the death of the genre he was nurturing. Tolkien is a great founder of a genre which went on to lead a rather ill fated historic progression in my opinion.

I just started reading “Defending MIddle-Earth” By Patrick Curry.

I still haven’t finished the Introduction, which is actually also the first chapter of the book. I can already tell that Curry will be feeding me much to ponder philosophically, and I cannot wait to dig into all that is contained within. As for an introduction, Curry is surprisingly dogmatic about his opinion on Tolkien verses literary critics and modernist thinkers of his day. Why I agree with him completely that Tolkien was very obviously staunchly opposed to the great majority of modernism’s effects, I disagree with his opinion that postmodernism is the key to Tolkien and roughly speaking, to comprehension in general. Tolkien was not in any way a postmodernist, and I believe, would not stand for postmodernism in the slightest. Truly, postmodernism had not even come onto the scene before his death, let alone during his lifetime of writing.

Tolkien was, as I would term it in this situation, a premodernist. He did not look forward to modernisms demise due to new understanding, he looked back and saw when things had gotten off track, and from there expounded upon a world which held to those old principles, but which was further unified than this world has existed in quite a long time. Tolkien took a world of classic, pre-modern diversity (various cultures of Men, Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, etc.) and simply gave tem a unified belief in what was true (the well being of all through the destruction of a commonly accepted evil). This is multiple cultural expressions of one truth.

Curry asserts, as an implicit postmodernist, that we can understand Tolkien’s works to have different truths in different generations, not withstanding contradictory truths. Along those same lines, he recognizes all the diversity of opinions and lifestyle from the many Middle-Earth cultures, but he doesn’t realize the ultimate reality that all of these cultures must come to accept the same overarching truths to be unified. This is seen true both for entire people groups coming to term with what is true about existence (Roham and its leadership) and with individuals who clash over belief in different truth (the relationship between and actions of Gandalf and Denethor).

If Middle-Earth where existing in a postmodern mindset, unity would never be a conclusion, because no one would be able to come to agreement about the situation at hand, or how to deal with it. If anything, it is a story of cultures which have strayed from one another coming back together and realizing the unifying truth they had all wandered from in their own directions.

The author of this blog attempts to be a gentleman, passionate about Straight Razor Shaving, Philosophy, Pipe Smoking, Aesthetics, Dark Beers, Classical Literature and Narrative Development, History and its Greatest Figures, and Traditional Manhood.