Yes! This is the key paragraph to line up with Tolkien's intentions in telling his allegory of the tower. But on this thread the discussion has not yet arrived at a position to line it up because we have not yet worked through the 'equations' of the allegory. From Shippey (1982), the secondary literature has generally assumed that the allegory of the tower is mechanical, that is, a set of 'equations' to be solved - and that is the end of it; an approach that ensures an allegory does not work! Shippey is the Beowulf authority, so his lead has been followed, but actually Verlyn Flieger (1983) observed that Shippey provided no solution to the sea-view and herself claimed that the sea has no allegorical solution. But nobody took the next step - the utterly obvious step - of identifying the sea as mythical. The sea seen from the top of the tower is the same sea that we find in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.Aikári Salmarinian wrote: ↑Tue Oct 29, 2024 3:15 pm If there is an answer to the starting setup of the dissertation, you may find it on page 15:
"The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allergory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected."
It is astonishing. What everyone is after is understanding the stories of Tolkien. They read a short story, presented as an allegory, and because it is told in an academic lecture nobody reads it as one of the stories they are seeking to understand - readers refuse to recognize that we are in the same world of the same stories!
Do you remember a year ago my pushing you on the question of who sent the mythical king of the exordium of Beowulf to his people? You had no idea of what I was talking about, until I linked you to Tolkien's poem 'King Sheave', where we see very clearly how the exordium segs with Tolkien's legendarium, with the answer obviously the Elves.
This thread began with my posting a link to one of my SWG posts. This post deals with the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. But it is part of a series that began with the exordium to Beowulf and explained how it inspired 'The Fall of Númenor', which embodies Tolkien's reading of this exordium. Once this is taken on board the sea-view of the allegory comes into view as the mythical sea over which Elendil sails (to Middle-earth) and Frodo sails (to Valinor).
I am completely OK with discussing the allegory, which after all gives us the tower that reappears in The Lord of the Rings as Elostirion. But the primary thesis of my last four SWG posts is that 'The Fall of Númenor' is at the very heart of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism and, therefore, The Lord of the Rings is a product of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism (and continues it by other means).