XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien, alt.fan.tolkien
From: Troels@ThisIsFake.invalid
In message
Dirk Thierbach spoke these staves:
>
> Troels Forchhammer wrote:
>> Dirk Thierbach spoke these
>> staves:
>>>
Dirk Thierbach wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I wouldn't put it this way. Tolkien frequently took ideas or
>>>>> motifs and played around with them, often in several of his
>>>>> stories.
>>
>> Yes, certainly, but I don't think that this is the same as saying
>> that the two, within the story, are 'supposed' to be the same.
>
> Of course it's not the same. My point was that the question
> "what is it supposed to be" is trying to look at the whole thing
> from the wrong angle. Hence, I would phrase it differently.
Ah, sorry :)
Your re-phrasing seems to deal with Tolkien's reuse of motifs between
different stories (something he was, I think, particularly prone to
do with _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ where he freely used
motifs, narrative elements and other features from the Silmarillion
texts by re-locating them in time and place and fitting them to the
new story). I agree that this is probably the better question to ask
from the critical point-of-view, but I don't think we should forget
the readerly view-point, which deals largely with how things are
intended to be perceived when reading the story.
Recognizing that Tolkien's intentions could change, I still think it
is a valid question to ask whether Tolkien at any point during
composition/revision intended for a reader who knew the Silmarillion
to recognize the Arkenstone as one of the Silmarils?
Despite the complication that the Silmarillion was never published in
Tolkien's life-time, I do think that such a question makes sense
(unpublished doesn't mean unread, and one might also answer for a
hypothetical future reader). It is my belief that the answer is
fairly trivial _after_ the first publication (Tolkien didn't intend
the reader to believe that the Arkenstone was one of the Silmarils),
but it might be interesting to discuss his intentions when he first
made the reuse.
With respect to the initial thought -- the very moment when Tolkien
'borrowed' the Silmaril motif for the Arkenstone, it could be
interesting to know what Tolkien was thinking there and then; and of
course it could also illuminate the process of Tolkien's reuse of
motifs.
Coming to think of it, this is probably what you had in mind anyway
-)
> Yes. Of course there was the little problem of changing a work
> that was already in print :-)
That didn't stop Tolkien before. You have a rather fundamental change
done to _The Hobbit_ to fit the new story in 'Riddles in the Dark'
(there were also other changes, but lesser), and you also have
several changes to LotR -- the change of Galaldriel's lineage, for
instance. Tolkien clearly felt more bound by already published
material than he did by material that had not been published, but the
evidence clearly (IMO) shows that he was perfectly willing to change
a published book to fit a conception that developed later (even at
the smaller scale of changing Galadriel's lineage in LotR or the
accompaniment to the cold chicken in tH).
I don't think that Tolkien would have had any compunction over the
drastic changes he was planning for the narrative voice of tH (along
with minor changes to the setting) -- if he had completed the new
version, it would have been published (possibly with some excuse that
the former version was retold for children or something like that --
not unlike what he did with the known changes).
--
Troels Forchhammer
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