This
week we turned our attention to the gothic in Tolkien’s fiction. This session
was not inspired by the closeness of Halloween but by a chapter by Sue Zlosnik
in Reading the Lord of the Rings, entitled
‘Gothic Echoes’.[1]
In this article, Zlosnik argues that more attention needs to be paid to the
influence of the Gothic on The Lord of
the Rings. The novel, she says, is ‘best read like a Gothic novel’.[2] She writes:
What I remembered as archetypal evil
forces, I found represented through the discourses of late Victorian Gothic
fiction. This perception has been enabled by the emergence of a wealth of
scholarship in Gothic studies over the last 25 years. The work of Gothic
scholars has established critical paradigms that enable us to read The Lord of the Rings as a text that,
although set in a mythical past, is preoccupied with the fears of a twentieth
century still haunted by a legacy of late nineteenth-century anxieties.[3]
We started our response by
brainstorming the various aspects of Gothic that can be found in Tolkien’s
fiction. We came up with some key ideas, including the use of ruins, Gothic or
uncanny creatures and the undead. We talked about the fact that Tolkien
mentions vampires in his fiction and has a character called Thuringwethil who
Tolkien Gateway describes as ‘a Vampire servant of Sauron during the First Age’
and ‘Sauron's messenger’. We looked at the following excerpt from the Lay of
Leithian:
…The wolves whimpering and yammering
fled
like dusky shadows. Out there
creep 2810
pale forms and ragged as from
sleep,
crawling, and shielding blinded eyes:
the captives in fear and in surprise
from dolour long in clinging night
beyond all hope set free to
light. 2815
A vampire shape with pinions vast
screeching leaped from the ground, and
passed,
its dark blood dripping on the trees;
and Huan neath him lifeless sees
a wolvish corpse – for Thu had
flown 2820
to Taur-na-Fuin, a new throne
and darker stronghold there to build…
It was remarked that this passage
evokes something of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned’
and his Dulce et Decorum est as much
as the Gothic:
Bent double, like old beggars under
sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we
cursed through sludge,
[…]
Men marched asleep. Many had lost
their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went
lame; all blind;
Are lines 2810-15 influenced by the
horrors of the trenches that Tolkien himself experienced or an evocation of the
Gothic?[4]
Reading this passage, we also noted how it is difficult to get a sense of
Tolkien’s vision of vampires in his work – what do they look like? Are they
human? Bat-like? Or both? The poem gives very little away, although we observed
that Thuringwethil, with her ‘pinions vast’ is meant to be interpreted as
having a bat form.
We then started to think about how the
concept of the vampire might appear in Tolkien’s fiction in other ways. We
thought about the ring as an evil force that can control another’s will and
were taken with Zlosnik’s discussion of vampiric infection:
There are vampiric resonances in The Lord of the Rings. The insidious
evil that the Ring represents infects the artefacts that serve it and, by
extension, those whose bodies come into contact with them. The knife that
pierces Frodo in an early struggle takes from him his strength in a way that is
different from the trauma of a normal wound. It also infects him with a
nameless poison that enhances the temptation of the Ring; like the bite of the
vampire, it infects him with desire.[5]
In The
Lord of the Rings, victims of evil can be controlled by the will of dark
forces and can also be transformed into the immortal, the undead. For example,
the nine Kings of Men who were given rings of power become the undead
Ringwraiths and bound to Sauron’s will. We
compared, too, the death of the Witchking with the death of Dracula – both of
whom are malevolent, undead characters. ‘Almost in the drawing of a breath,’ Stoker
writes, ‘the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight…’ (Stoker,
p. 377). The Witchking similarly vanishes from sight; his clothes are left ‘empty’
and ‘shapeless’ and it is said that ‘a cry went up into the shuddering air, and
faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin
that died, and was swallowed up, and was never heard again that age of this
world.’ Tolkien’s description, we agreed, is certainly evocative of the Gothic.
Finally, we turned our thoughts to the
Uncanny. We considered the following two terms and how they might feature in The Lord of the Rings:
Heimlich: belonging to the house; friendly;
familiar; I, b: tame (as in animals); I, c: intimate, comfortable; i.e: secure,
dometic(ated), hospitable.
Unheimlich: unhomey, unfamiliar, untame,
uncomfortable = eerie, weird, etc.
The Lord of the Rings, we reflected, is fully of references
to both what is homely and unhomely, familiar and unfamiliar. We found that the
gothic was not so much to be found in the contrasts of homely and unhomely, however,
but rather in the familiar and unfamiliar. In the portrayal of Gollum as
neither Hobbit nor animal we found echoes of the uncanny. There are
similarities to be drawn between Gollum and Dracula. In her article, Zlosnik
draws our attention two passages, one describing Dracula’s descent down the
castle walls and one describing Gollum climbing down a rock:
Down the face of the precipice, sheer
and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was
moving with its thin limbs splayed out. Maybe its soft clinging hands and toes
were finding crevices and holds that no Hobbit could ever have seen or used,
but it looked as if it was just creeping down on sticky pads, like some large
prowling thing of insect-kind. And it was coming down head first, as if it was
smelling its way. Now and again it lifted its head slowly, turning it right
back on its skinny neck, and the hobbits caught a glimpse of two small pale
gleaming lights, its eyes that blinked at the moon for a moment and then were
quickly lidded again. (LotR, TTT, p. 268)
...my feelings changed to repulsion
and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to
crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out about him like great wings.
At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the
moonlight, some weird effect of shadow...I saw the fingers and toes grasp the
stones, worm clear of mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every
projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a
lizard moves along a wall. (Stoker, p. 34)
We agreed that these depictions were
remarkably similar. It was pointed out that the similarities could simply be
coincidence, but there are a number of things about the descriptions that suggest
otherwise, including the way they both move – the emphasis on uncanny,
downwards movement – and the description of both characters as unhuman-like
creatures – Gollum is described as looking like something of insect-kind,
Dracula a moving like a lizard. Other similarities outside of these passages
include their general appearance – both have sharp teeth and pale complexions. Tolkien
writes of Gollum, ‘His tongue lolled out between his sharp yellow teeth,
licking his colourless lips’, whilst Stoker describes Dracula as having ‘peculiarly
sharp white teeth’ which ‘protruded over the lips’ and as have ‘extraordinary
pallor’. It is worth noting that Dracula’s lips have ‘remarkable ruddiness’ and
actually suggest he has ‘astonishing vitality’.
We concluded that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is not overtly
Gothic, but that the Gothic permeates the text; it is, to quote one Thinklings
member, ‘woven deeply into the novel’s DNA’.
