Koala School

Enjoyed Tom Bombadil vs Old Man Willow galdor battle.

(from @iridescentoracle)

Yes exactly! "i'm not sincerely treating it as an allegory i swear" especially, but also this reminded me of - to jump genres wildly to another guy who was inspired by Norse sagas - Victor Hugo. Bear with me ok.

I love Les Miserables as a story, but also a lot of the characters in it do sort of get doomed to be metaphors. Literally I remember a Les Mis fansong with the lyric "not a man but a metaphor now" re: Enjolras. And I think that's something that Tolkien, (so far, which is currently through the end of Fellowship) doesn't do, despite all his layering. His characters are all constantly flickering and flashing with other places and people and times-- but they are people, and being filled up with ideas and symbols and stuff: that too at its heart is a people thing. People have lots of ideas about Aragorn, Aragorn has lots of ideas about Aragorn, he's lots of things to himself and lots of things to others, and that becomes instead of He's An Allegory for King Arthur (or whoever), a relatable human experience. It's fascinating how this works.

Okay so first of all I've been a lurker in les mis fandom since 2013 when I first read the brick and I've been a fan of the musical even longer, that first sentence had me literally-in-real-life rubbing my hands together with glee to see where you were going with the comparison and I know the exact fansong you quoted and I still follow the OP, please do not feel embarrassed in any way for that.

But you're right, Hugo does care more about the metaphors and symbolism than the characters, and other people might disagree but to me, Tolkien never does. The layers of references and symbolism are part of who the characters are, but they exist in their own right, and I actually think that that was really deliberate on Tolkien's part! He famously hated allegories, specifically because he thought a good story should be able to stand on its own, and so to him a story that could only be understood if everything and everyone in the story stood for/referred to/represented something/someone else was inherently a bad story. The references and symbolism can enrich the story, but they can't ever be all there is to it, and so no one in LOTR can ever only be a metaphor and not also a man. (Note that I don't necessarily agree—I love Les Misérables too! But I do think that view of Tolkien's is part of what makes LOTR what it is, you know?)

"being filled up with ideas and symbols and stuff: that too at its heart is a people thing" i don't even have a specific response to this, just—that's a sentence i already know is going to live in my head rent-free. before i pulled up the reblog window to respond i sent this post to a friend saying i'm going to be lying awake at 3am thinking about it and that right there is half of why, i think

Also this is sort of a side note but your using Aragorn specifically as an example I love because I think one of the reasons the layers of references work so well is that it's not just references to things in the real world, it's references to the history of this fictional world itself. Aragorn is King Arthur but he's also Beren, and Beren is Tolkien's self-insert, and a fairytale hero who has to achieve an impossible task set by a faery king to win the hand of the faery princess in marriage, and probably someone from the Poetic Edda I've never heard of, but also he's a fictional character Tolkien created who's part of a story that stands on its own and is wonderful to read without knowing any of the history or references at all. And to Aragorn he's also a historical figure and a very distant ancestor and he canonically really really really wants to be him. It's so layered and and complex and real and human and I love it.

I've never actually thought about LOTR as being itself a medieval story exactly, but I did take a class on medieval literature once in college and I've thought of LOTR as an amazing example of translatio ever since, so when you put it that way, of course that's what it is. He did put his own spin on it and I do think it's fair to still say he created a genre because (in my admittedly limited experience) I think pre-LOTR medieval epics and post-LOTR high fantasy are firmly different genres but that's not really for lack of trying on Tolkien's part. There's a letter he wrote once, and a poem, where he talks about "sub-creation"—

man, sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single white to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind

—and he all but spells out that he does 100% believe that "crafting and reworking and elaborating [are] the most beautiful and respectable things you could do," and that he thinks that goes IRL and in-universe in the world he created, and I think if you ever read the Silmarillion that's one of a lot of things you'll have fun with. (Also the creation of the world. And the retelling of part of the Kalevala. And—)

There's another letter of his that I think about a lot, where he doesn't use the term "sub-creation," but he talks about how in the early days when he was first conceptualizing the idea of the legendarium, he thought of it as potentially being "a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story," and that he himself "would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." By the time he's writing the letter, he considers the idea "absurd" and prefaces the confession with "Do not laugh!" But I've never been able to read it without seeing a little wistfulness between the lines, like he still even then longs for those "other minds and hands" to "wield paint and music and drama" and fill in the blanks he'd leave, and has just resigned himself to no one else ever taking his stories that seriously or caring about them as he did, and it's sad to me but also wonderful because for decades now isn't that what Tolkien fans have done and do? To borrow and slightly misuse your tree branch metaphor, there's an uncountable number of seedlings and grafts out there, even as the original tree is still green and alive inside too.

I would say that in Tolkien, for all that his characters live in a world crafted by songs and still affected by them, and that, for instance, Frodo and Sam talk about the songs that will be made about them in time to come, being a metaphor is something separate from being a person--metaphor and allusion and song can shape how someone is perceived and remembered, but it's not a part of a living person's identity, in a way that it very much is for Hugo.

And that a lot of Hugo's genius is in writing characters who are metaphors, who are doomed by the narrative at levels intrinsic to the worldbuilding, while still also being psychological real people with histories, and who deal having with the traits and histories the narrative requires of them in the way real people would.

What would it be like to be--not just in one's own conception, but at a supremely literal level--an empty vessel for Authority? What mental gymnastics would be required to maintain that emptiness, that dedication, in an age when actual Authority was being constantly shuffled and reassigned and reimagined? What combination of character and history would make a person choose that, and keep choosing it? What would it do to them? (Destroy them, first by inches, under the surface, and then all at once.)

Some characters are more or less aware of the metaphorical and allegorical shape of the world and their part in it (the Bishop, the Conventionist, Enjolras, Gavroche); others only get occasional glimpses (Jean Valjean, Eponine); Marius thinks he's in some other genre entirely; Cosette is so completely aware of it that she doesn't realize there's something there to be aware of, in a fish-not-seeing-water way. The narrator is more aware than the characters but not entirely omniscient--he has characterized the narrative as a struggle between Providence and Fatality and has a lot of thoughts on how the interplay between these forces makes history, and how they work in the lives of people, but he doesn't always know for certain which of them is at work in a particular event.

Tolkien is working through a whole range of narrative modes, from the low comic realism of the Shire to the mythic and epic; they sort of average out at the Romantic, but the book spends comparatively little time actually in that mode. While Hugo is a Romantic, and the Romantic is aspirational for him--the barricade fighters turn into epic heroes when they start losing and dying; falling into other narrative modes, as the entire denoument does, represents a loss.

Oh! Yes!! Yes, that's exactly it!! It did feel wrong saying Hugo cares more about the symbolism than the characters but it was one in the morning and I couldn't figure out why so I gave up and said all the things I could put into words, but of course that's exactly what it is—being a metaphor is part of being a person, to Hugo.

And it's fascinating to me that the narrative shape of the world is so much more present, as a set of internal and external constraints that characters have to deal with, in the book more nominally set in the real world.[,] but Hugo's wisest and luckiest characters are able--and in fact the signal of wisdom and blessedness is the ability--to see the story one is living at the moment, and to use that narrative momentum.

See I'm not entirely sure I agree with this—all the examples you gave are true, of course, but I do think some of Tolkien's characters are also able to see the story they're living and to use the narrative momentum, because that's essentially what Aragorn does in The Return of the King. With him it's a trick—he knows he's not the real hero here, on some level, and that if the world is to be saved it will be by the destruction of the Ring thanks to Frodo and Sam, but he also knows that he is The Long-Lost Heir To The Throne, Returning To His Kingdom When All Hope Seemed Lost, Leading the Charge against Sauron and all that, and so he uses all of the narrative momentum around him and the weight his story would have if he were the hero, and uses it to distract Sauron long enough for the Ring to be destroyed.

oh that's fascinating—you're so right, both about Aragorn exploiting the difference between a false narrative and the true one, and about how no one (except perhaps Gavroche) manages that in Les Miserables. And yet—Aragorn does manage to exploit a false narrative to deceive Sauron, but he never technically lies, does he? He lets Sauron know the truth about his identity, and his sword, and lets Sauron draw his own conclusions from there. He does lead the Army of the West to the Black Gate in battle, and allows Sauron to assume they hope to defeat him via military might. But it's not simply that misleading via implications is okay but outright lying isn't, because Denethor is driven to madness because he uses the palantír to see what Sauron allows him, and Sauron can't lie through the palantír either. I think, tentatively, without actually going back to the text to see if it's really supported, that it's not really that Tolkien is pro-lying or anti-lying, it's that he thinks deception doesn't require lying, and yet simultaneously that any deception is inherently limited and Truth, on that same deeper level like you mention in your tags from LM, will always make itself known in the end.

THNK YOU THIS HAS BEEN HAUNTING ME.

but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)

or this pic of me

or this pic of me

keyboard layout: the same as english

how it sounds: intimidating