Random Rant: Dwarves vs. Smaug in Erebor

About two weeks ago, I was able to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on DVD, and for the most part I was content. However, after two hours I decided I may as well throw my copy of The Hobbit out the nearest window.

For the last half hour, I watched dumbstruck as the dwarves scampered round Erebor trying to kill Smaug with all manner of industrial mining stuff. It’s a complete departure from the dwarves in the book who push Bilbo into Erebor and wish him luck with finding the Arkenstone. For me, Jackson has forgotten one of the reasons I love The Hobbit – the good guys are complicated. They’re not there to take back Erebor, they’re there to get their gold back. It’s this that gives them depth because they’re going to the Lonely Mountain is out of greed rather than some noble quest.

However, Jackson does give us this awesome last scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-vfsZdrK0

- Michael C

Maps and Memories: Navigating Landscapes and Ruins in Tolkien's Fiction

This week in Thinklings we talked about landscape and ruins in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. We began by considering how Tolkien uses landscape in his fiction and how it features throughout the novels. We discussed the following assertion made by Steve Walker:

Tolkien’s topographical anatomy is the more natural for its responsiveness to the systole and diastole of narrative; the relative prominence of anatomy in the landscape directly reflects the relevance of setting to the immediate situation. Thus, when the ruggedness of the landscape becomes a prominent threat to the progress of Frodo and Sam towards Mordor, setting previously peripheral asserts itself, dominating the narrative through a vividly hostile animistic profile.[1]

After decoding the author's body metaphor, we agreed that anatomy in the landscape was indeed something that occurs often in Tolkien's fiction. One member suggested that the landscape seems to get more vivid and more prominent as Frodo and Sam enter Mordor. We looked at the way the following passage makes use of personification to suggest that the landscape is trying to hinder the hobbits' progress:

‘Before them, darkling against a pallid sky, the great mountains reared their threatening heads…they swung out long arms northward; and between these arms there was a deep defile. This was Cirith Gorgor, the Haunted Pass, the entrance to the land of the enemy. High cliffs lowered up on either side, and thrust forward from its mouth were two sheer hills, black-boned and bare…’[2]

We then thought about how Tolkien personifies the landscape in general. We had a rather lively debate about the stone giants in The Hobbit and whether or not these are meant to be literal or metaphorical. Most members of the group tended to believe that Tolkien was trying to personify the landscape and that the 2012 film interpretation was inaccurate and merely there to provide more action.

This debate brought us eventually to Shippey's notion of Tolkien's 'cartographical plot'[3] and Tolkien’s assertion that he ‘wisely started with a map, and made the story fit…’ For Tolkien, the geography of Middle-Earth came before the plot; we considered to what extent this is an unusual approach to story-telling and compared the cartographic plot of LotR to the plot of The Hobbit. Members generally agreed that The Hobbit’s story may have been driven more by plot and less by geography. We also considered the following notion from Shippey:

…for their first hundred-odd pages the Hobbits seem to be wandering through a very closely localised landscape…and that landscape and the beings attached to it are in a way the heroes. They force themselves into the story. But while they slow its pace, appear strictly redundant, almost eliminate the plot centred on the Ring, they also do the same job as the maps and the names: they suggest very strongly a world which is more than imagined…one which has been ‘worn down’, like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millennia.[4]

This led us from landscapes to ruins and the way in which ruins might serve to suggest a world ‘worn down’ or ‘do the same job as maps or names’. We began by thinking about ruins we had visited ourselves and how they made us feel. We thought about how they might make us feel reflective, might recall a memory, as well as how the present intersects with the past in these ancient places. We discussed a member's visit to the Rollright Stones (see picture) and how Tolkien’s visit to this place influenced his depiction of the Barrow Downs and their ‘hills…crowned with green mounds and…standing stones pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums’.

From thinking about our own experiences we were able to interpret the Old English poem The Ruin and the narrator’s feelings as he considers a Roman ruin. We thought about the following summary of the poem’s narrative by Lawrence Beaston:

Howsoever ephemeral are the objects of material culture in the long stretches of geological time, the speaker sees that those works are much more durable than the people who constructed and used them. The poem’s central truth, then, concerns not the mutability of the world but the fleeting nature of human life. The poem’s point is that the things that people make out of the substances of this world have the capacity to outlast their makers. Not only could human artifacts last beyond the span of a single life. They could, the speaker realizes, survive any given socio-political order. And perhaps nothing represents the difference in the durability of physical artifacts and their makers more aptly than an uninhabited city. [5]

We thought about the role of ruins in The Lord of the Rings, contemplating each ruin we come across. Ruins stir memories, like the stones atop Amon Sul, which generate discussion of the past and invite Aragorn to sing a song about a piece of Middle-Earth history. In light of this, Deborah Sabo’s reflection on the nature of ruins seemed especially relevant:

The particular role of a ruin or archaeological place in a cultural landscape will depend upon how that place is remembered, the degree of attachment, and especially the way in which stories drawn from the deep past, or perhaps more recently invented and woven around that place, serve the needs of the present.[6]

We thought about how the ruins in The Lord of the Rings might serve the ‘needs of the present’ and the way in which different places are remembered. ‘The material leavings of more ancient inhabitants’ and the memories they stir, says Sabo, ‘contextualize the story's present events, simultaneously for the reader and for the characters’.[7] One of the best examples of LotR’s depiction of ruins comes from Legolas’ ‘Lament of the Stones’ – a lament that seems an apt conclusion to this blog entry:

'The Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the Silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them; only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago.'[8]

- Corinne

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[1] Steve Walker, The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style (London: Macmillan, 2009), p. 44.

[2] J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (London, Harper Collins, 2012), p. 622

[3] Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, (London: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 118.

[4] Shippey, p. 124.

[5] Lawrence Beaston, ‘The Ruin and the Brevity of Human Life’, Neophilologus, 95 (2011), 477–489.

[6] Deborah Sabo, ‘Archaeology and the Sense of History in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth’ Mythlore, 26 (2007), 91-112 (p. 91).

[7] Sabo, p. 93.

[8] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (London: Harper Collins, 2012), pp. 283-4.

Random Rant: Thranduil's Face

Random rants and random reflections from fellow Thinklings - the rules: No more than 150 words!

I read an article in Empire magazine recently in which Philippa Boyens answers some questions about the movies. One of these was about Thranduil's scarred face. This is what Boyens had to say:

'The conceit is that Thranduil has faced the great fire-breathing dragons and been scarred by them, physically and emotionally. He's used the magic of elves to conceal it. That also perhaps explains what's happened to Legolas' mum.'

Not another backstory! Just how much of The Hobbit are the writers going to write themselves? Why try to find ways to justify and explain things all the time?

- Corinne