Lust

[Ephtariat]

@Chrysophylax Dives wow, I actually thought that you had read Tolkien's Dante paper too, since he calls himself a Northern barbarian and talks about the interplay between North and South of Europe!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Chrysophylax Dives wow, I actually thought that you had read Tolkien's Dante paper too, since he calls himself a Northern barbarian and talks about the interplay between North and South of Europe!

You should take seriously what I say about our/my ignorance. Only now, with our discussion about sin here and also carried on at home (my children are as confused about sin as am I), do I even get a glimpse. And I am awed. Really, I love the way that exploring the nature of one sin opens up the roads to other sins, and one can start to glimpse the various 'natural cycles' of human fall. I recognize the constituents of the depictions of the fall of, say, Saruman and Denethor, and yet this is a new way of thinking to me, who grew up in London. But as I read you I dimly become aware that you have to hand, as part of your mental furniture, the elaborate map of all of this drawn by Dante.

On your last post distinguishing Silmarils and the Ring - that is really awesome, and I am still pondering. Don't wish to dilute that great contrast, or get us sidetracked, but can the frame be extended to encompass other jewels? Specifically,

1. What of the Three Rings (on the border of sin, surely)?

2. What might be said of the 7 Seeing Stones?

3. The Arkenstone?

[Ephtariat]

1. I'd say that the three Rings represent the three times, past, present, and future, but all united in their submission to the past. They represent the power to preserve the past in the present and future, so they are recollection, memory, and re-enactment. Their elemental character is due to the fact that air is intangible like the past, water flows from the source to the mouth of the river like the present, and fire is everchanging like the future. Considering sins, the three Rings are not sinful in themselves, but only in their wish not to surrender to change. The seven and the nine seem to me to be tied to the political, the seven like the kings of Rome, the nine like the Nine Worthies of medieval lore .

2. The Palantiri represent the seven planets in their astrological power to influence events, so that those who possess the stones can read these influences and "see far". It is a warning against occult practices.

3. The Arkenstone is an eorclanstan, an holy stone, so it must be something sacred. Considering that the Dwarves are connected to Jews by Tolkien, it could be the Ark of the Covenant, or the Torah, or something less tangible like God's Law or his Alliance with man. In any case, it becomes sinful only when people possessing it wish to claim their exclusive entitlement to it.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Chrysophylax Dives wow, I actually thought that you had read Tolkien's Dante paper too, since he calls himself a Northern barbarian and talks about the interplay between North and South of Europe!

Young scholar, I give you a lecture in an obscure pocket of earlier local history. Read, or reread, E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), a tale spun in Cambridge about the tragic love and issue of an Italian man and a wayward young English woman. Here one walks over the true, deep English racism of this era, which was not directed at imperial subjects, which is not to deny that languages of race were inseperable from colonialism, only to point out that what really mattered to the educated English upper middle classes was the peoples of sourthern Europe, particularly those who dwelled in the lands of the Renaissance and ancient Rome and those who lived in the ruins of Athens and the rest of ancient Greece. Southern Europeans were the Other and this because their culture was manifestly not that of Protestant northern Europe, and yet the Protestant northern culture of England, or at any rate of Oxford and Cambridge, was founded on ancient Greek and Latin literature.

Of all Victorians and Edwardians I have read, the nastiest, the most unpleasant piece of work, is undoubtably William Ridgeway, an Anglo-Irish classical scholar and the Cambridge Disney Professor of Archaeology (he has a cameo as Disney in an M.L.R. James ghost story). His Early Age of Greece (1901) gives the blueprint for northern cultural appropriation of the south of Europe. Providing voluminous evidence from archeology and forceful readings of Beowulf and Homer, Ridgeway argues that a northern European warrior tribe, marked by the patriarchal culture found in Beowulf, swept south and conquered matriarchal Mycenaean Greece, just before the Trojan war, thereby establishing the peculiar conditions whereby a native poet wrote in the native Greek an epic about northern heroes of the kind found in Beowulf. The racial model then invokes metaphors of ice melting in the sun, by which is meant that the blond-haired, blue-eyed, white warriors soon enough intermarry and the northern blood is soon mingled and diluted and as if it never were, leaving only the strange ancient memory of Homer.

I suggest that the above is worth pondering, and that the more one does the more horrendous it will appear. As a matter of fact, Ridgeway is a seminal influence in all these Edwardian Cambridge developments in Classics and Anthropology that get celebrated today as cutting edge and progressive, and though those that came after him did shift the discourse from race to culture, there is in these Cambridge discourses always a hint of Ridgeway, something unwholesome, a suggestion of the Necromancer.

On these matters, Tolkien appears in the first instance clean. One can say why in different ways. On the one hand, he throws all his weight behind the effort to cut the bond between southern and northern ancient mythologies and cultures that was the foundation of Ridgeway's cultural colonialism. On the other, he is a member of the Oxford Dante Society. (One cannot imagine Ridgeway reading Dante, unless it was by a bonfire.)

But Tolkien is operating in a world that is arguing over this, and his talk of northern barbarians, here as elsewhere, always touches this, as other, contexts.

[Ephtariat]

Thanks for the advice, I should read Forster's novel. It has little to do besides a few oblique references to the Inklings, but I recently discovered the late A.S. Byatt's "Possession", and loved it. Did you read it?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

yes, but i forgot about it. if you want to take it into these books there is a thread called 'What you reading?' or something somewhere down below.

[Ephtariat]

I hope I didn't say anything wrong. If so, I sincerelly apologize. I agree of course with you that Tolkien had no racial prejudices whatsoever, and he is pretty clear about that in his own words. But we already talked about it in our e-mails, and if we have to re-discuss it we should probably start a different thread.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I hope I didn't say anything wrong. If so, I sincerelly apologize. I agree of course with you that Tolkien had no racial prejudices whatsoever, and he is pretty clear about that in his own words. But we already talked about it in our e-mails, and if we have to re-discuss it we should probably start a different thread.

Thing is, you have not been a member of this site so long and therefore you do not appreciate, as perhaps do others here, quite how many sincere apologies I owe quite how many people. Honestly, if I had an issue I wished to bring up you would know about it. And in any case, I have invited you to this site and asked you to explain things from your perspective - as you say, I have a sense what that is. So no worries.

Still, if the Goose had said that about the sin of exclusivity of the Torah I would have replied kindly but sternly. And that even if I might agree with the sentiment.

But I invited you here not only because it seemed we might benefit from what you had to say, but also because they are good people and you might even learn from them.

[Ephtariat]

Thanks a lot for your kind words, dear Simon. I apologize for my words on the Torah and I should specify that they were not meant as a critique of Judaism but rather in the sense that the holy texts of Judaism are a patrimony for the whole humanity. I hope this is better and that it clarifies my intentions. Of course I can learn from you all, and indeed I already am doing so since I'm here, and with you since we started getting in touch in 2019 (and let me say, boy, do I miss that year!). Let me affectionately return your kiss even though I'm not sure how to post emoticons. :-*

[Chrysophylax Dives]

O my. And I work so hard to avoid these group emotion situations. I think to be honest that you got paranoid that I was offended about the Torah when actually what I was trying to do was stop you from getting side-tracked talking about the last book you happen to have read, generating a flurry of threads that buries the good stuff about Rings and things above - but that flurry comes, regardless.

Let's try getting back on track. Can you clarify the nature of the 'is' and 'represents' in the following? I mean, on what level is this identity, are we talking about metaphors?

2. The Palantiri represent the seven planets in their astrological power to influence events, so that those who possess the stones can read these influences and "see far". It is a warning against occult practices.

3. The Arkenstone is an eorclanstan, an holy stone, so it must be something sacred.

Btw, thanks on that etymology! Never knew that. You are a treasure.

eorcnanstan
eorcnanstan (Old English)
Alternative forms
earcnanstan, eorcanstan, eorclanstan
Origin & history
Compound of eorcnan "special, noble"(?) (more at erchan) and stan "stone". Parallels Old Norse jarknasteinn, which is generally regarded as a loan from Old English. Translates margarita in 9th century biblical glosses but is used generically as "precious stone, gem" in Beowulf (line 1208) and The Ruin (v. 36).
Noun
eorcnanstan
precious stone, pearl

[Ephtariat]

What I meant by glossing eorclanstan as 'holy stone' is that in "The Shaping of Middle-earth" we find it translated so (although as a supposition). But I have taken it as a given, since it was mentioned.

“The Silmarils are Eorclanstanas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, earcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns 'holy'”
(The Shaping of Middle-earth, 201)

The seven stars and seven stones of the Gondorian poem were connected by me to the seven stars/planets and seven stones (astrologically connected) in the legend of Alexander the Great. I did not explain because I think I may have sent you my paper about it last year, but perhaps I am mistaken. This legend exists in Middle English too.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

þone hring hæfde Higelac Geata,
nefa Swertinges, nyhstan siðe,
siðþan he under segne sinc ealgode,
wælreaf werede; hyne wyrd fornam,
syþðan he for wlenco wean ahsode,
fæhðe to Frysum. He þa frætwe wæg,
eorclanstanas ofer yða ful,
rice þeoden; he under rande gecranc.

'That ring had Hygelac the Geat' is how it begins, and the lines go on to describe what else had the doomed king on his Frisian adventure (an event known to be historical). Tolkien in his translation has for 'eorclanstanas' this fair thing of precious stones.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The seven stars and seven stones of the Gondorian poem were connected by me to the seven stars/planets and seven stones (astrologically connected) in the legend of Alexander the Great. I did not explain because I think I may have sent you my paper about it last year, but perhaps I am mistaken. This legend exists in Middle English too.

Tis all very interesting, indeed! But I am not asking why you make the connection but rather what significance you give the connection. You run up against Tolkien's warning against allegory, as I am sure you know.

But also, your exegesis of the meaning of these two other jewels - the 3 Rings and 7 Stones - seems more vague and less direct to the heart of the theology than your exegesis of 3 Silmarils and 1 Ring.

[Ephtariat]

Usually in alchemy the connection between stars and precious stones is taken to indicate that each planet has its own related stone, for example Venus has copper, and so on. The sight provided by the stones in connection to the planets is not a physical sight, but an inner sight.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

What do you say to someone who quotes you Tolkien's cordial dislike of allegory?

[Ephtariat]

That he should read what he has to say about allegory and story in his Introduction to Pearl. Don't have it at hand to quote, but I can paraphrase to the effect that the meaning of a story should not supersede the story itself, nor the other way around. Every story once it's explained in any way becomes an allegory and every allegory once it is exemplified in any way becomes a story. It contraddicts his other statements that "it's just a story", because there is never such a thing as "just a story", not only in literature, but even in real life, in his view. I think an introduction to a translation to which he worked throughout his whole life is better well-thought and representative of his views than any letter written to dismiss readers's mistaken theories.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

“The Silmarils are Eorclanstanas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, earcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns 'holy'”
(The Shaping of Middle-earth, 201)

Right! And now I think we get back to my original question of how lust comes into play with the holy? I was thinking about The Hobbit, and it is a story that in its first edition has very little to do with sin, or so it seems to me. Smaug is said to come because he is greedy, and with Smaug's reaction to the stolen cup we do get a very nice character analysis based on the fusion of sins that makes the special hoarding avarice of the dragon, but I'd say sin has little part to play in the whole story to that point. This reflecting my first edition reading of The Hobbit as a study of stupidity in chancy conditions. But this study comes to an end with the conversation with the dragon, after which the author has really done what he set out to do but still has to deal with the dragon and return his Hobbit to his hole.

And so now The Hobbit wanders off into a totally different story - the 'epic' last bit that all the Lorists like because it is recognizable as Lord of the Rings stuff. And the reason that the story of Bilbo Baggins is all of a sudden recognizable is because the Arkenstone is an object of lust. A holy stone, Dwarvish lust, an epic story - all a sort of glorified appendix to the story of Bilbo Baggins proper.

[Ephtariat]

I see The Hobbit as a story of Beren and Luthien with Luthien removed, only appearing in the form of Bilbo's ancestor's presumed fairy marriage. This is because I take very seriously the first draft of An Unexpected Party, where Bilbo says he's leaving in order to get married. In my opinion both the Ring and the Arkenstone originate as substitutes for the Silmaril the story of which Tolkien could not get published.

[Ephtariat]

e.c. read: the first draft of A Long-expected Party.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I see The Hobbit as a story of Beren and Luthien with Luthien removed...

Well, such a story is no longer that of Beren and Luthien, is it?

A quite different kind of story, with echoes of fairy marriages in the background of the genealogy of Bilbo Baggins, as actually goblin marriage too - and now you mention it the whole issue of Hobbit marriage is possibly something that should be hammered out more fully - on 'A Case for Lore' where the matter has some substantial significance, maybe. When Hobbits get married they vanish - both of them; that is how you can tell, because the marriage is secret. That was as far as we got on the Hobbit marriages.

I do fear that you push the defence of allegory a tad blithely, without maybe reconciling yourself to the rejection of allegory of 1966, which is strident and cannot merely be dismissed.

[Ephtariat]

The 1966 rejection as I see it is due to the political readings of LotR as an allegory of WWII.