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Lights behind Thick Curtains: Images of Fear and Familiarity in Tolkien

2020; West Virginia University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tks.2020.0005

1547-3163

Bo Kampmann Walther,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Lights behind Thick Curtains:Images of Fear and Familiarity in Tolkien Bo Kampmann Walther (bio) Introduction This article looks into the landscape of tropes, figures, and themes in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Its main hypothesis is that the author is strongly in the habit of using metaphors and symbols to signify both fear and familiarity at one and the same time. Often, these imaginings are the result of a distressing and inauspicious geography. They are settings so stunning as to leave the observer speechless. When Frodo first lays eyes on Lothlórien his perception seems to be in a simultaneous state of shock and rebirth. Tolkien's descriptions are perspectives of an individual subject on the ground, as in the case of Frodo and Sam approaching the land of Mordor; and they are worlds slightly out of time and space seen through magical devices, like Galadriel's enchanted mirror. Clearly, Tolkien's imagery does not always work solely through similes or candid metaphorization, but rather, and more delicately, through animated, sensuous energies, agencies, and carefully naturalized personifications. Famously rejecting the putative allegorical constitution of his own sub-creation—and especially how it should be interpreted, the allegoresis—he relies instead on the symbolic function of writing, notably in his descriptions of nature (see Agøy).1 Goethe's dictum (in Maximen) that poetic language should at once be manifesting a literal authenticity and referencing an inner, deepened, and transferred meaning, and that it should also avoid any subtextual dependency (i.e., allegory), is very much that of Tolkien. However, as we shall see in the passage on Frodo's roused, sub-creative powers when entering Lothlórien for the first time, the rhetoric of Lord of the Rings becomes ars imitatio, a set piece designed in accordance with the classical topos of the locus amoenus, the paradisiacal site. Here, the text is constituted by an allegory (the literary subtext of the locus amoenus) but speaks of the desire of symbolization. The following will proceed very much in the footsteps of Frodo and the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring. We begin at the creepy but also familiar site of Bree, move on to picturesque Lothlórien and the [End Page 117] alarming gates of Mordor, and, finally, we stand before the Cracks of Doom. Each scene invites a close reading of rhetorical depth and tension, of fear versus familiarity, and of the sublime and the perceptible. The article concludes tentatively with a reading of the illustrious 'Tower and the Sea' dream, once again logging the dynamics of fear and familiarity and furthermore pondering a potential poetological nerve in Tolkien's fiction, a fiction about his own fiction. Inns and Mirrors During the first book of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins and three companions travel eastward from their home, the restful Shire, and arrive in Bree, an assembly of communities which house both hobbits and men. Samwise Gamgee is at first suspicious about Bree's eerie otherworldliness. He pictures "black horses standing all saddled in the shadows of the inn-yard, and Black Riders peering out of dark upper windows." Even from the outside the inn looked a pleasant house to familiar eyes. It had a front on the Road, and two wings running back on land partly cut out of the lower slopes of the hill, so that at the rear the second-floor windows were level with the ground. There was a wide arch leading to a court-yard between the two wings, and on the left under the arch there was a large doorway reached by a few broad steps. The door was open and light streamed out of it. Above the arch there was a lamp, and beneath it swung a large signboard: a fat white pony reared up on its hind legs. Over the door was painted in white letters: THE PRANCING PONY by BARLIMAN BUTTERBUR. Many of the lower windows showed lights behind thick curtains. (FR, I, ix, 164) Note the implicit expansiveness to a wider world in allusions like "black horses," "Black Riders" (obviously from Mordor far, far away), and the dim...