Today’s academic papers were very interesting. I don’t want to go into every paper in detail here as it would bore most of you. However, I do want to highlight a couple of ideas that came out of the discussion on Jyrki Korpua’s paper on Tolkien.
Firstly we are all used to thinking of The Lord of the Rings as the archetypal secondary world fantasy. However, Adam pointed out that one of the functions of the hobbits in the story is to stand in for the modern, middle class novel reader who can then visit the far stranger medieval and Anglo-Saxon worlds of Gondor and Rohan. When Tolkien tries to do without our hobbit intermediaries, such as in The Silmarillion, we find his books much less accessible. This makes LotR much more of a portal fantasy.
We also discussed the whole idea of the novel as the story of a character’s life journey, the Bildungsroman, and how this is actually a Renaissance invention that was possible only when people abandoned the medieval world view of an unchanging society and started to see the world as something that could and should be changed.
The idea of hobbit-as-modern-reader is even more obvious in The Hobbit than it is in LOTR. One of the chapters in Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth is titled “The Bourgeois Burglar” and is largely about the comedy of the contrast between Bilbo’s modern, naive attitudes and the harsh Nordic world of dwarves and dragons that he’s stumbled into.
But whether “we” find the Silmarillion less accessible depends on who “we” is. I have seen a strong generational difference among Tolkien fans here: those who grew up reading LOTR before the Silmarillion was published find it a little daunting, but those who first read it young as just another Tolkien book, not a long-awaited treasure, take it in stride.
DB: Fascinating. You should write about that.
“Adam pointed out that one of the functions of the hobbits in the story is to stand in for the modern, middle class novel reader who can then visit the far stranger medieval and Anglo-Saxon worlds of Gondor and Rohan.”
This is a good thought–I think it comes up in Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, too, but Im toolazy to check.
The hobbits are portal characters for kids entering a fantasy world of adults, too–portal characters in a variety of ways, I suspect.
I’m not so sure about the accessibility of The Silmarillion. My limited experience is that it’s a personality thing: if people ate up the appendices of Lord of the Rings and wanted more, they rock on The Silmarillion; otherwise, usually not.
It seems to me that the medieval mindset was less static than the discussion may have allowed for, and also that the advent of the Bildungsroman was a little later, during the Enlightenment, or even the Romantic era. That’s prime time for the cult of the Individual Genius, which seems to be at least a parallel development.