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Second-guessing and Misunderstanding Tolkien

This idea may have been based on concept art for the film. The painting of the Ring being cut from Sauron's finger in Rivendell was, originally, supposed to show Sauron on the ground and Isildur standing above him, cutting off his finger.

Radaghast said:
Here's one I'd forgotten about:

Why not give the Ring to Ungoliant? Ungoliant eats the ring, destroys it, and kills Sauron. Game over. Why is there such a huge plot hole?
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"plothole" Well, Ungoliant as likely dead by now, that's one reason.
 
True enough, but my point was that Shelob's indifference is explicit in the text.
But her lust was not his lust. Little she cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind or hand, who desired only death for all others, mind and body . . .
Click to expand...
Someone didn't read that before answering, apparently. The same goes for the "pet" remark -- Sauron didn't call her that, an orc did. I've seen it several times with the "cat" reference too, although that's the narrator inserting himself.
 
I believe, because Tolkien was a catholic, he intended to leave the Valar and Eagles out of the trials and tribulations of middle-earth in the same way theists believe God takes a back seat to all things. As far as the plot goes, I found nothing wrong with it. (Characters + conflict = plot.) Main protagonists Frodo & Sam (characters) find themselves in a predicament not of their choosing (conflict), the story is simply how they overcome the many obstacles to resolve the conflict. The way in which Tolkien chose to write, rewrite and change LOTR so often shows his own conflict with the publisher’s demands.
 
Actually theists, at least of the Christian variety, think God is both transcendent to and immanent in the world and working through providence. LOTR has many examples of providential events. Taking a back seat is more a characteristic of deism. Roman Christianity has, especially since time time of Aquinas (as I understand it) has often seen Divine action occurring through secondary powers, this is similar to the Eru and the Valar in the larger ME mythos.
 
I love the implication that Elrond is hard up for cash and would normally nickle-and-dime hobbits who enjoyed his hospitality. Pretty sure Elrond could spare some rent money.

Seriously, never in my life has the thought 'Elrond needs money' passed before my mind. This is golden oblivion. I'm literally LOLing. Of all the things Elrond is short on, I'm pretty sure change isn't one of them.

I envisioned Isildur chopping off Sauron's finger in the heat of combat. I cannot recall if any details on this are ever given. I don't see it either as Isildur is wrekd or Sauron is on the ground, they're just flailing at each other and Isildur pops that sucker in the knuckle joint with his magic knife (formerly sword). Is this wrong?
If you've ever fenced you might understand how easily this could happen. Getting stabbed in the hand is a thing.
Edit: It is, the Elves took Sauron down somehow first. Anyway, this thread is ludicrous.
 
I agree. It probably would have also made the story much shorter. Tolkien was after all, writing a story (stories). If it had just been given to someone with whom it had no effect on, we might have ended up with a very short novel.
 
Gil-galad and Elendil, brought down Sauron. Isildur merely cut the Ring from his body.

Sauron

Sauron was a highly gifted Maia, originally an apprentice of Aulë, who became skilled at crafting and making. Coveting the power through which he would coordinate...
tolkiengateway.net
 
''Actually theists, at least of the Christian variety, think God is both transcendent to and immanent in the world and working through providence. LOTR has many examples of providential events. Taking a back seat is more a characteristic of deism. Roman Christianity has, especially since time time of Aquinas (as I understand it) has often seen Divine action occurring through secondary powers, this is similar to the Eru and the Valar in the larger ME mythos.''

This is perfectly true, I'm a Christian so I should know.
 
Ugluk answers the "why didn't Tolkien..." pretty well....
One thing to keep in mind is that all Christians (not just RCs) believe God gave humans free will.
If all readers of Tolkien apprehended this (and most do) it would go along way toward answering those questions of the variety: "Why didn' t Tolkien do [this] with [name character or situation]."
There is always in any good story, the matter of agency.

Attend, please 😉, to an essay by Patricia Wrede... Agency in Fiction
(I've edited it for brevity---if you can believe it--- the full essay can be found HERE )

The best short definition I found was “Agency is an actor’s ability to make purposeful choices.” (“Actor” in this sense being “a person who takes action,” not “Robert Downey, Jr.”)

Note that in order for a character to have agency, he/she has to have a choice to make. If you are out in the rain with an umbrella, you have a choice: put up the umbrella, or don’t put it up. If you have no umbrella, you have no choice: you are going to get wet. Also note that the definition talks about the ability or capacity to make choices, not whether someone actually uses their capacity, and certainly not whether the results are what the person choosing wanted or expected. (My emphasis)

And that’s where fiction comes in. When you start looking, agency is all over all kinds of fiction, from different angles. There are stories about people who made good or bad choices in the past and then suffer the consequences; stories about people who face current choices, large or small, personal or public; stories about people who have no choices and want some, or who struggle to find or create choices where there seem to be none. Fiction is, to a large extent, about the choices characters make and the desirable or undesirable results those choices have. (My emphasis)

A character who gives up and accepts his/her fate at a critical moment in a story – especially someone who still seems to have choices, but who refuses to do anything about them or make any further moves to achieve his/her goals – loses a lot of readers, even though choosing not to act when one is able is, theoretically, still a choice. It is almost always a huge, horrible let-down when someone who has struggled through half a novel or better, against increasingly heavy odds, decides to give up the fight.

As always, there are exceptions. The two that come to mind are the character who has truly exhausted all his/her choices, and the character who still has choices but who has succumbed to despair and thus can’t see or act on any of his/her few remaining options. ...For my money, the character who succumbs to despair is a bit easier than the character who truly has no more choices, because if there is any other option that the reader can see (and readers can get really creative when it looks as if their favorite character is about to succumb to some inevitability or other), they will never believe that the character couldn’t/wouldn’t think of the same thing. And having a choice but not using it is far worse than having no choices at all. ...
....
There are also stories where the whole point is a character’s moral and spiritual decay, like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984; the entire plot is a slow stripping away of whatever agency the characters started with, until by the end they have no choices left. Note, however, that in both cases it takes the author an entire novel to get the characters to the point where they have no options – this is not a surprise plot twist that can be thrown in at the last minute, not if it going to be convincing.

For most stories, though, the point is that the main characters have options, and usually the power to choose among them – in other words, they have agency. It is annoying and frustrating when they don’t exercise their agency ...but instead sat around waiting until someone else came to the rescue).** It is especially annoying and frustrating when characters refuse to make choices or to act at a turning point or climactic moment in the story. ...

** Like the Valar or the Eagles 😄😉 (my editorial comment)
 
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The various “Why didn’t they…” questions are all due to not understanding the Theology and Metaphysics of the forms of Vatican I, Thomist Catholicism to which Tolkien subscribed.

That Theology and Metaphysics answers every one of these questions, and every possible question that can be asked about Middle-earth.

And these answers will either be in the form of a direct, explicit and specific answer to the question, or it will produce a Domain of Possible Answers, where everything outside of that Domain is NOT a Possible Answer, and in most cases are categorical impossibilities within Middle-earth.

The real “Questions” regarding Middle-earth involve Catholic Theology itself, and mostly the Vatican I Catholicism that is Middle-earth itself.

Vatican I was the Catholic Church’s Reaction to Modernity, The Enlightenment, The Sciences, and Social Changes that were creating a Challenge to the Absolute Monarchies and Feudal Societies of the Previous Ages of European Christendom. It grew out of the earlier Syllabus Errorum of Pope Pious IX, that became the Basis of the Encyclical of the First Vatican Ecumenical Council we now know as “Vatican I.” The Syllabus of Errors compiled by Pious IX was an attack on everything that was happening in the world due to the Sciences separating themselves from Philosophy, and becoming more than just “Philosophical Speculation on the Material World.”

The Syllabus Errorum can be summarized as (per the Wikipedia Article, which has authoritative references and sources):



If you read the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors), or the Vatican I Encyclical (and can decipher the Catholic Theologese) you will see Tolkien repeating it verbatim in his many condemnations of “Modern Society” “Cities” and the loss of “Rural, Agrarian Societies.” You will also see the contemporary criticisms in certain contemporary Religious Extremists’ attacks on everything they “do not like¹.”

But… These things all produce a Set (in the Formal definition of “Set”) or Domain of Possible Answers, and these things produce a boundary that Excludes anything else, categorically in many cases, such that the existence of such things is impossible in the Middle-earth that Tolkien Defines (however vague, ambiguous, and/or incomplete is that definition).

I should point out, as these subjects tend to produce a lot of acrimony among many, and accusations that I am trying to claim to have “all the answers.”

That is not the case.

As a demonstration….

If we are given a Math problem akin to:

(x³ + 3x²y - cos(x)sin(y))∂ = (1/y³ -⅓y²(cos(x))² + Acrtan(y)∂y

Anyone familiar with Differential Equations will know that we can categorically rule-out an infinite number of “Possible Answers” that are “Categorically Impossible.”

These start with things like “Horse” or “A ¾” Socket drive.” But they also include things like “Sin(3π),” or “2,345,678” or “[[1, 2+3i, 4], [π-τi, 9, 3.141], [cos(3π), 9, 27]].”

We know that we can exclude these answers, without having to know the actual solution to the above equation because ANY REAL ANSWER will be of the form:

ƒ(x, y) = axⁿ + bxⁿ⁻¹y + cxⁿ⁻²y² + ….. px²yⁿ⁻² + qxyⁿ⁻¹ + ryⁿ + C

Similarly, we have other Domains (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Neuroscience, Theology, Philosophy, Metaphysics, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Law, etc…) where similar constraints exist, and the form of a Possible Answer dictates what can and cannot BE in that Set of Possible Answers to a given question.

In some situations, we might even have a case where there is a recursive application of Possible Forms, where we have a Set of Possible Constraints, each of which will produce a Set of Possible Answers that may or may not vary in terms of what is allowed and what is prohibited as a Possible Answer.

MB


1. With Tolkien it was far more than just he “did not like these things,” and Tolkien (and the Catholic Church of his day) was far less Strident in his pursuit of Political “Solutions” to these ”Problems” as he and the Catholic Church saw it.

One of the reasons being was that ever popular Catholic/Christian saw “Free-Will.” Tolkien, like any devout Catholic of the day, believed that pushing Government to “enforce” such Policies “Defied Free-Will” and was thus “A Device of the Enemy” (to put it in the Context of Middle-earth).

Catholicism, and thus Tolkien believed that unless people chose of their own Free-Will to live according to the fashion he depicts in The Shire (and much of the rest of Middle-earth, such as Bree, Stock, Staddle, Chetwood, Rohan, Dale, Erebor, and even Gondor, Imladris, and Lindon, etc.) that ”forcing” people to live in this fashion by the “Force of Law” (note the word “Force”) would just “corrupt and pervert the intent, so that, like trying to use The Ruling Ring for “Good,” it would only result in Evil and Bad Outcomes).
 

The issue of “Agency” as connected to “Free-Will” is one that is involved in the distinction between the Pagan Religious Theology and the Christian Religious Theology that is immediate to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

The Nordic and Germanic Myths have no real “Free-Will” for Humanity. We are “bound by Fate” to certain outcomes. Tolkien solution to this is quite novel in how he allows for “Free-Will¹“ and includes the “Fated/Doomed” outcomes.

Megatons of Ink have been spilled by Theologians over the ages on this exact subject¹, but Tolkien found a solution to it that many in the Gaming and Entertainment Industries have found:

Just “Create” a Universe where such a “Thing“ ACTUALLY EXISTS.

The Catholic Theology concerning Free-Will gives us a few Mechanisms whereby Free-Will could exist, were our Universe “Different than it is.”

We know that what Christianity, and prior Polytheistic, Animist, and other Religious Ideologies, posit to be a “Soul” is a necessity for “Free-Will” as they define it.

Tolkien calls this the “Nassër of the Fëar” (the “Materials of the Universe that make-up the “Soul/Spirit” and the “Idenity” of a person connected to the Biological components of the “Mind,” or Indo in Middle-earth). And it provides a means of connecting the “Soul” to the “Body” via what is called “Hylomorphism” in Catholic Theology.

So within Middle-earth, these things can be resolved pretty easily.

Yet we’ve not found anything in our reality that allows such a thing, given what I explained in the earlier Post regarding “Possible Answers” that exclude such things given what we already know.

That is why Pious IX put out his Syllabus of Errors, and the Vatican I and Vatican II Encyclicals, and why many of the Religious are now rebelling against the Sciences, which since the 16th Century have increasingly and more definitively/determinatively shown the Theology to be among the “Impossible things” of our Universe.

But within Middle-earth… Free-Will and Fate/Doom are resolved perfectly by conforming to that Theology as best as can be described.

MB


1. Free-Will as a Theological concept is interesting, but as the Modern Neurosciences have revealed, contrary to all the ink spilled on the Subject:

Free-Will is an impossibility.

This does not mean that we do not make choices. It only means that those Choices are:

1) Not Made Consciously (and I have participated in Hundreds of Experiments Demonstrating that our “Conscious Thoughts” are merely the Transcript fed to “us” by our Brain, who is operating anywhere from 7 seconds to many minutes ahead of the Conscious Transcript. This is rather like a “Live” broadcast that in on a “delay” so that the Directors and Editors can push the BLEEEEP! Button should someone say certain words.
2) Made based upon information and beliefs the brain has at the time, and that no other “choice” is possible based solely upon that information and the existing beliefs. This means that one possible “choice” that some will make is to “seek more information” so as to make a more informed choice. But this too is something that we have no “choice” over, Consciously.

The various attempts to “Solve” this conundrum, such as positing that the “Soul” controls the Mind from an External Source does nothing to help realize “Free-Will” as a thing.

If it is an External “Soul” that is making these “choices” then we haven’t any “Conscious Control” over the Choices, and it is no different from what Modern Neuroscience shows.

Those who try to claim that various “Quantum Events” create Randomness” that alters our Possible Choices don’t seem to understand how horrifying this is.

That particular “solution” only makes things worse by removing ALL CHOICE, and making us the victims of a random number generator that controls our thoughts and actions, where we have absolutely no more “Control” or “Conscious Choice” than does a piece of popcorn bouncing around a popcorn maker…

It would be like rolling a die to decide everything. That isn’t “Free-Will.”

Some Philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, try to “Rescue” or “Save” Free-Will by just re-defining it, as a so-called “Compatiblist.” The enormous irony of this, given Dennett’s rather Strident Atheism here is bending its knee to a Theistic Concept in order to preserve it. That has always struck me as odd.
 
Matthew, I read that you probably mean well with your extended deliberations, however, I just feel I'm being lectured to. May I suggest shorter statements to get your points across.
Anyway, Tolkien suffered, as we all do, the continued manifestations of the evil that is the 'Human Condition'. I would just say, try to enjoy his stories as I think we were meant to.
Regards.
 
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