Anachronisms in HoMe

[Olme]

I've been working through the drafts in The History of Middle-earth (HoMe) chronologically, and this one from The War of the Ring, Part two, chapter II struck me in particular. Tolkien is outlining events to be narrated/written in the future (essentially notes to himself), and writes,

They come to a point where the gully falls into the marshes. Brief description of these...Describe the pools as they get nearer to Mordor as like green pools and rivers fouled by modern chemical works.

Of course there are many anachronisms in Tolkien's writing, but I often tend to think of these as being rooted in The Hobbit, with the particular narration style of TH, or with aspects of life in the Shire. Writing this before I need to leave for work keeps me from digging through the secondary sources discussing these anachronisms. However, this passage struck me as particularly uncharacteristically anachronistic (and did not end up being used in descriptions of the marshes in the published text.

[Lirimaer]

I am not sure I would call that an anachronism - since it's a note to himself about what he's going to write in LotR, I would expect him to use modern language to outline the effect he wants to achieve. If he was actually writing a draft of the canon description and used it, that would be a different matter and definitely anachronistic in my mind.

I went through and pulled out what I could see of the 'as like green pools and rivers fouled by modern chemical works' and think he did a great job both of the description in canon and the simile he gave in his note to himself. Props.

beyond its tumbled skirts lay livid festering marshes where nothing moved and not even a bird was to be seen.
[...]
‘We can’t get down; and if we did get down, we’d find all that green land a nasty bog, I’ll warrant. Phew! Can you smell it?’ He sniffed at the wind.
‘Yes, I can smell it,’ said Frodo [...] The wind was chilly and yet heavy with an odour of cold decay.

He pointed south and east towards the marshes. The reek of them came to their nostrils, heavy and foul even in the cool night air.
[...]
On either side and in front wide fens and mires now lay, stretching away southward and eastward into the dim half-light. Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air.
[...]
It was dreary and wearisome. Cold clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers. As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey, and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.
[...]
Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water,’ he said with horror.
[...]
At last they came to the end of the black mere, and they crossed it, perilously, crawling or hopping from one treacherous island tussock to another. Often they floundered, stepping or falling hands-first into waters as noisome as a cesspool, till they were slimed and fouled almost up to their necks and stank in one another’s nostrils.
[...]
For two more nights they struggled on through the weary pathless land. The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths.
[...]
Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.
They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak.
For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning through the shadows. The light broadened and hardened. The gasping pits and poisonous mounds grew hideously clear. The sun was up, walking among clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled. The hobbits had no welcome for that light; unfriendly it seemed, revealing them in their helplessness – little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the Dark Lord. Too weary to go further they sought for some place where they could rest.
For a while they sat without speaking under the shadow of a mound of slag; but foul fumes leaked out of it, catching their throats and choking them. Gollum was the first to get up. Spluttering and cursing he rose, and without a word or a glance at the hobbits he crawled away on all fours. Frodo and Sam crawled after him until they came to a wide almost circular pit, high-banked upon the west. It was cold and dead, and a foul sump of oily many-coloured ooze lay at its bottom.

[Elenhir]

A good part of moving from outline to full text is finding different, longer, subtler ways to say something. One of the outlines in that chapter also says 'the dry reeds hiss like snakes'. But the word 'snake' never appears in the context of the reeds in the written chapter. Are we then to think that Tolkien didn't end up going through with this description? No, because we do find:

Dry reeds hissed and rattled though they could feel no wind.

A little application of 'rattled', something the reader understands particular varieties of snakes also do, and we have Tolkien evoking the concept of reeds like snakes without having to use the word 'snake'. Even though he does, in other places, use it in similes. The description was used, though not in the most simple, direct way we might imagine to use it. We can get the 'modern chemical works' feel in the same way, without using the phrase.



edit: fixing a typo in the quote

[Olme]

Lirimaer and Elenhir, I totally agree. Upon reading the passage the first time, I read it, without questioning, as Tolkien writing a note to himself to use that specific phrasing, rather than a note for him to characterize the water as appearing that way, albeit in other words.
Without being able to read the full manuscript, since it's not all in The War of the Ring, obviously, Christopher seems to indicate that Tolkien's description in the first manuscript was basically that of TT: "...the story of the passage of the Dead Marshes as it appears in The Two Towers seems to have been achieved almost to the form of every sentence..."

My suspicions were well founded had I just kept reading a bit!

[Lirimaer]

Interesting though! I like the idea of going though his ideas and plans, then matching them to the final product, especially given Elenhir's specific (and short) example!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

A peculiarly illuminating discussion on this thread. Just to return to the modern chemical works for a moment, it seems to me that we have not anachronism but applicability, as Tolkien might have it, such that the Mordor pools and pools polluted by modern industrialization are of the same source.

[Olme]

Interesting though! I like the idea of going though his ideas and plans, then matching them to the final product, especially given Elenhir's specific (and short) example!

Agreed! Very interesting. It makes one wonder how often Tolkien thought of a modern image such as green chemicals or "the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel", and then simply re-worded it. Here we have a note to himself to describe a clear modern image, but in other words. One wonders how often he had the image, and we just don't have the note. I'm not so sure I'm interested in digging into that rabbit hole (too many others to explore), but it hadn't occurred to me before!

[Lirimaer]

yes, it would be nice to read the results of others' investigations!!

[Androthelm]

I think @simon is on the money here. Tolkien, of course, claimed that the theme of Lord of the Rings was one of Death (and the effort to avoid death) I think anyone would agree that the conflict between the natural world and industrialization is also key to the story. In fact, thinking about it now, one might even argue that industrial mastery of the world is just one way that mortal beings endeavor to master death.
So, Tolkien is writing "about" (understanding that I mean his applicability and not the analogy that he despised) the destruction of the natural world by industrial machines, and that destruction was seen in his lifetime in the form of chemical warfare, so it certainly makes sense that he would borrow that image and attribute that sin to the great machine-maker, Sauron.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Thank you for putting my point better, @Androthelm. :)

In a way, LOTR describes a complete circuit, beginning in Bag-end, with the dream of the tower in the last night in the Shire in the house at Crickhollow, all the way to Mordor and back again. At the shadowy, mythical center is Sauron, of whom Saruman is a lesser imitation, Wormtongue a mortal imitation of Saruman, and Ted Sandyman a Wormtongue in the Shire. The last blow of the the great tale of the legendary War of the Ring is struck on the doorstep of Bag-end. Tolkien might take us beyond the reaches of our own imagination, but Middle-earth was always our world a mythic long time ago and he knows his story has applicability today.

[Elenhir]

I am going to try to say this politely. It is going to be exceedingly difficult.

A simple question was asked. It was not a question that warranted rambling mysticism. It isn't improved by that. It isn't answered by that.

The question really isn't improved when, in the process of that rambling, terms and ideas are mistaken and misused in ways that leave people who haven't the need or want to wade through the deliberate thick of it just the option to sit there and nod, and assume this is all correct and in good faith. If the goal is to answer questions, to inform people, to actually put knowledge out there and present it into others (instead of making knowledge a pedestal and putting yourself there high above on top of it), communication is key. And this is some of the worst communication I have ever seen.

So these technically not-incorrect statements like 'Tolkien, of course, claimed that the theme of Lord of the Rings was one of Death (and the effort to avoid death)' aren't helpful when you fail to point out that you're paraphrasing Letter 203, where Tolkien takes the position that the theme of "Death and the desire for deathlessness" means it "is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man". Acting as if this is something that distinguishes Tolkien from other works, or has some aspect that will help in regards to any of the questions previously raised in this thread, or is at all meaningful in any particular context that has been touched upon here, is not information. It's obscuration. If written in understanding of the source, the best it seems is something empty meant to add window-dressing. But needlessly, and with the only possible effect being confusing the uninformed reader.

Another thing: Tolkien and Allegory has a long and storied past in the fandom, with people misinterpreting and championing certain passages from Letters and ignoring others, not understanding that the word has a variety of senses, from wide to very strict, in order to act like Tolkien was against the idea of this or that. If, at this point in time, you're wondering why I've said this, understand that the word 'analogy' does not belong in the phrase 'and not the analogy that he so despised'; 'allegory' does. And that makes that phrase somewhat more readable to the person who might be asking a question without having a complete understanding of Tolkien's Letters, though of course it is still suffering from the first issue I raised in this paragraph. It works when you define 'allegory' in the strictest sense, but unless you're pointing out that you are doing this (and using the proper word is a useful first step in that), all you're going to accomplish is convincing people that Tolkien doesn't engage in the loose sense of the word. Which is ridiculous, because he's used the word himself to describe the meaning of his works and that's just as easily referenced and quotable as the times when he strictly defines it to say he doesn't do that. But instead of an explanation, something that might help this be understood, we just get this byblow, made even more incomprehensible by misuse of terms.

Equally indecipherable is why the circularity of the story (widely understood as part of the Hero's Journey, so hardly special to Tolkien or our ability to see applicability in his descriptions) is deemed relevant here. I mean, the other stuff I can at least parse. Simple facts are relayed as if they contain some hidden wisdom, like how the 'last blow of the legendary War of the Ring is stuck on the doorstep of Bag-end'. But I could say the same thing, plot and setting terms exchanged, for nine out of the last ten books I've read, because the end wrapping around into relevance of the beginning is rather fundamental to story-telling. Yes, it is a true statement. But *why* that means the story has applicability and Tolkien knows it? Completely absent. We're left to guess how this functioning-as-normal element of the story (or, random element, if we're taking the perspective of someone who may not be as versed in the structure of stories) is supposed to lead us to this other functioning-as-normal element of the story. And why the brief aside into an unexplained (and frankly, not satisfactorily explainable) diversion into a scheme of concentration circles of villainous characters? What does that add? What does that even imply? No, I get the Sauron/Saruman comparison. But the rest seems forced. There isn't an attempt at explanation (which, again, if we're trying to impart knowledge, is a bit crucial), nor any sense of working it in to the rest. If you take the post and remove that, it actually reads better, as there isn't an unexplained diversion separating two connected ideas. It feels there just to seem high-brow. Is that all?

So the question I suppose you have to ask yourself is are you here to help people? Because this is not helping. It's clear, given the words, given the references, given the level of attempted analysis, that there is a potential to help other people here. It's not a lack of skill that's keeping these ideas from being presented in a readable, sensible, arguable fashion. There's nothing substantive that's making you phrase things in ways that seem almost designed to be unapproachable to the common reader. Nothing that demands the interjection of completely arbitary, off-topic, high-spoken fluff. What's going on here?

[Androthelm]

Hey @Elenhir--First off, thanks for the feedback overall. I'm struggling in turn to parse some of your comments, in part because I think you seem to be assigning a degree of malicious intent that certainly wasn't my goal in my comments above.

First and foremost, I'm not a Tolkien scholar. I'm not even particularly well read, when it comes to things beyond The Hobbit and LoTR (I've read the Silmarillion a few times and the Children of Hurin once). So, to begin, thank you for calling on places I may be misinterpreting. Even the quote which I paraphrased is one that I had only heard cited by other essays and articles--I don't own a copy of the Letters.

The other thing is, yes -- I mistakenly typed "analogy" when I should have said "allegory". You'll forgive me for that -- it was a slip-up and nothing more. I wont edit the post, for the sake of good record-keeping, but there's an explanation.

In response to the broader two issues you seem to have taken with both my and @simon's comments -- the argument that they are 1. random, spurious, or disconnected from the original question and 2. that they're high-brow, unapproachable, or even written intentionally to confuse "the common reader" I have little more than... an apology, I suppose. The conversation had wandered a bit from the original question, you're right -- although, to our credit, that original question had already been answered and I do think our tangent developed fairly naturally from it. As far as your second concern goes (while I can't speak for simon), I am... about as much "the common reader" as anybody here. That, honestly, seems to be the root of the issue -- I don't know the material or its secondary literature nearly as well as you seem to. I'm sorry that my mistakes as an amateur commentator seem to have frustrated you to such a degree, though I suppose there's not much to do besides promise to try and do a better job of meeting the standards before replying to threads in the future. I guess I just hadn't approached responding to this thread as an effort to help other people--my interest was in having an interesting discussion among amateurs, and I'm sorry to have caused any damage.

[The Elf Imperishable]

Wait my nurnen “natural” water in my parody rpg actually is canon compliant?

[Lirimaer]

Accidents will happen, on stage and backstage.

[Woggy Hardbotom]

Which is ridiculous, because he's used the word himself to describe the meaning of his works and that's just as easily referenced and quotable as the times when he strictly defines it to say he doesn't do that.

@Elenhir when/where does he describe his works as such? I'm not saying he doesn't, I'm just interested in the context.

[Elenhir]

@Woggy Hardbotom

Letter 186 begins with:

Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power exerted for Domination).

Letter 109, after denying a strict Allegory (the letter is a response to comments on early LotR drafts in which the phrase 'pure allegory' appears), spends a couple paragraphs loosening up the description and ending with:

You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like; an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.

Even the 'I dislike Allegory' quote from Letter 131 continues with qualifications:

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable as just a story.)

When Tolkien is railing against the idea of his works as seen as allegory, he's by and large doing it in response to someone trying to hone in on a narrow or individual topic that his work is itself supposed to be representing or mimicking in the guise of a story. Something along the lines of what Animal Farm is. Tolkien doesn't seem to believe that taking a highly specific real circumstance and working it around into a thinly-disguised story leaves much room for the story to be a story, and he appears to like it when it is 'acceptable as just a story'. So his allegories are broader, built off a deeper level of human behavior and so not based on any particular contemporary example, and he uses other terms too, like applicability, or the moral, when he feels the need to get the point across. But at the same time he'll still use allegory because the word works. Like most words, there's a broader sense to it, not only how it is used by certain parties who will annoy him by 'asking for an authoritative exposition of the allegory of The Hobbit'. (Letter 34)

[Woggy Hardbotom]

That is very interesting, thank you.

It has been a good long time since I have read any non-LOTR or The Silmarillion, and I just re-read Letter 109 upon your post, and the beginning of the letter is very relevant to your point. You could just about quote the entire first half of it and it be relevant.

The point where Tolkien says

"But in spite of this, do not let Reyner suspect 'Allegory.' There is a 'moral,' I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phrase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals - they each, or course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory.""

Any mistakes in quotations are of course mine (as most mistakes are...) but it is a topic of conversation that I am now interested in, and perhaps it being so different from the topic of this thread it may warrant another?

It seems like, and again I'm only inferring this from this letter I have re-read for the first time in probably 15 years, but there seems to be either

a) a difference between what the commentator believes what an allegory is, and what Tolkien believe an allegory is, or,
b) a fundamental difference of what the actual story is about, or;
c) something else I haven't thought of (very likely)

I really like how Tolkien makes the distinction between allegory and moral, and this is possibly where most of the grey area comes from? There's no real clear boundaries between the two. And then Tolkien mentions that "Allegory and story converge," so now you have an intertwined web of all three, with plenty of common area between them all.

I'm interested in your opinion @Elenhir that given this letter, where do you believe Tolkien drew the line between allegory and story? (broad question I know, but pallpark me - do you think that Tolkien wrote anything specifically to be allegory in the broader sense of the word? Or do you think he just consented the word to be used in its broader sense to describe what was just pure story?)

[Elenhir]

@Woggy Hardbotom , I tend to think (a) is on the marker, with the caveat that Tolkien seems to understand these different senses and is intentionally highlighting them. After all, if he came out and said just the part about how his work isn't allegory, and didn't qualify what that meant, he'd likely have started getting a bunch of people saying his story had no moral, message, or meaning. But that just might be my cynicism about lit crit coming through.

I'm pretty sure they let you make topics about whatever you want.