@Talk Tolkien @Book Club

I was watching the film adaptation of Out of Africa on TV yesterday... and yes, I do know that nothing requires a movie to be a faithful tribute to the novel it's based on. But once again, I was reminded of nothing at all (nothing I had read in Blixen's book). At best, you might suppose that the book - or rather, its publishers - and the film formed a nifty commercial symbiosis.

I also re-watched the LOTR movies, last week. To be fair, you have to admit that Peter Jackson took one hell of a lot of liberty - and yet he curiously manages to match many readers' imaginations in many details.

I'm not sure this is entirely Jackson's achievement. Perhaps there simply isn't very much scope for variation on Gandalf or Saruman - or Galadriel, for that matter. Which brings me to a rather wild conclusion almost certain to infuriate the Tolkien faithful.

Didn't Tolkien publish LOTR in a period when successful novels were rather likely to become Hollywood movies? Was the possibility perhaps always on his mind as he wrote? And if so, was the precision of some descriptions a precautionary device - or perhaps even a positively anticipatory one?

@Talk Tolkien

Patrick Rothfuss, interviewed by the Los Angeles Times HERO COMPLEX, talks about a problem I don't really have. Getting annoyed by latter-day 'imaginary' worlds aka fantasy novels is futile. They're mostly just poor attempts at money forgery, as opposed to novels woven by inquisitive minds. When they are the latter, it doesn't really matter whether anyone slaps a genre on them. In my mind, J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen Donaldson mingle with Martin Amis and J.D. Salinger. Sentences leap out of the books to describe life as it happens to me.

So a fantasy cover will never make me curious about what's inside. But here's the interview's closing question:

HC: So if you were to make a list, what would be the top five fantasy clichés that people should avoid?

PR: Boy, it's hard to limit it to just five...

1. Prophecy. I don't ever want to read another novel about "the chosen one."

2. The helpless damsel. I've known a fair number of damsels in my day. The vast majority of them don't need saving.

3. Elves with bows who live in trees. Dwarves with axes who live in caves. It was fine when Tolkien did it, but that was 60 years ago. It's time for us to move on.

4. Brooding vampires. Any sort of vampire should probably be avoided at this point. The genre is kinda overrun.

5. Dragons. As above.

http://jpub.de/12

@Talk Tolkien

... well, first time here. But again and again and again everywhere else. The mightiest ever of the Noldor after Feanor, perhaps even his equal (as Tolkien's late notes have it). There's always this progressive-conservative friction with Tolkien. The sexes are equal, almost... and then they aren't. Natively powerful Galadriel contentedly plays second fiddle to Elrond in Middle Earth (who is actually her much younger son-in-law). And her husband Celeborn is called "the Wise" - though she is far wiser, and he never actually issues any striking wisdom in the books. And then again, Galadriel and not Celeborn wears one of the three elven rings that are the ultimate emblems of seniority among the Eldar.  But to convolute things, male Gilgalad (a mere kid by comparison) got an even better ring and left it to male Elrond...

Why am I writing this muddle? Because Paul's post earlier on reminded me how confused I am about Tolkien as soon as I apply the standards I apply to the rest of fiction and reality. It's clear that he sometimes almost embraces very progressive ideas by the standards of his own generation, but then shies away from them - or even sincerely fails to realise where they ought to lead. (The Shire is another blatant example. The hobbits have no government and no institutions of power at all, but are nevertheless contented to live in a very English rural class society.) Is that part of the attraction? Does Tolkien appeal to the secret conservative element in people who are mostly progressive, and perhaps even to the hidden progressive potential in people who are ostensibly conservative? I keep thinking that Tolkien is reactionary in a very human sense. He reminds us that even those who advocate and desire progress are secretly also a bit frightened by the prospect. Most of the time when reading Tolkien, we play that down as harmless nostalgia.

What's interesting is that Tolkien apparently spent the last few years of his life reworking what was to become the Silmarillion after his death - but that his most recent changes of direction didn't find their way into the book as 'edited' by his son Christopher. But judging by what Christopher Tolkien has told us since he cast the Silmarillion in stone some 35 years ago, Tolkien was working on plots and stories that would have made Galadriel far more important than she actually became in the published work - pivotal, in fact (though we don't quite discover why).