August Thesis
August ThesisAims: I want to understand what makes the world of LOTR 'magical' (using the term loosely). How did Tolkien weave Faërie into a Middle-earth recognizable as our own? How did he craft a modern fairy-story?
Aims: I want to understand what makes the world of LOTR 'magical' (using the term loosely). How did Tolkien weave Faërie into a Middle-earth recognizable as our own? How did he craft a modern fairy-story?
Here is a proposal for a revised framework for our essay. Any and all comments are welcome.
Proposed title of essay: 'The Tower in the Mirror' (or something like that).
Key sources: Flieger's discussions of Lothlórien and Galadriel's mirror in her A Question of Time, my essay 'On the Shores of the Shoreless Sea', and our own Wiki notes on Emyn Beraid and related topics - see especially Oliver's post 'Emyn Beraid and dreams'.
Theme: two places, one near the north-western shores of Middle-earth (Emyn Beraid), one near the very center (Lothlórien), contain three items: the seeing-stone, the Red Book, and the mirror of Galadriel. Our essay consists of an extended meditation upon the contrasts, similarities, and relationships between these three items (and two places).
Postscript by Simon, June 28 2015: this post constituted an initial attempt to articulate a comprehensive framework for the project that I now feel should be discarded.
It is possible that Tom Hillman and Verlyn Flieger herself have provided a key to unlocking the mystery of Emyn Beraid...
Flieger has demonstrated that, for Tolkien, places like “the Barrow-downs are more than mere scenery or topography, more than human-made relics become monuments of history. They are at once repositories of the past and gateways to it, portals through which old memory can touch the present, and the present can connect back to the past” (Flieger 2007: 110), i.e. the same can be applied to Elostirion, the Palantir-bearing white tower on the Tower Hills, west of the Shire. Flieger draws the above conclusion within her larger argument for Tolkien's belief in reincarnation, basing this broader hypothesis on the link to dream theories in the early 20th century, e.g. Jung and Cline, and on inherited / transmitted or extra-personal memory in the cases of Alboin and Audoin (The Lost Road), of Lowdham and Jeremy (The Notion Club Papers) and of Merry Brandybuck (Fog on the Barrow-Downs).
The dark lord sits in the tower and looks over the dark seas and the dark world [and] his hand stretches over the cold sea and the dead world.
The initial idea for this essay arises out of my pondering what to make of the different objects associated with the Elf Towers on the Tower Hills (Emyn Beraid) to the West of Hobbiton.