ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 20 Nov 2020

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The Hero or the Villain

#tolkien #fantasy

The model of the quest is the same for all the stories, so much so that they make one great story. Within this model, the characters change, they come and go according to the part assigned to them. However, for the brief moment in which they have life - a moment that is repeated at each reopening of the book - they are persons and not characters, and they drink to the bottom the cup of bitterness or joy imposed on them.

"Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the iron crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it. And the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got - you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the lady gave you! Why to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end? “No, they never end as tales” said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later or sooner. "

We must remember here the similarity with the subsequent "The Neverending Story" by Michael Ende.

Sam wonders if he will end up in some written story or not. He is sure he is living a story, but not all stories are written: much heroism remains unknown.

“Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. "

Tolkien's characters ask themselves: will we be able to see the book in which we are contained published? And again, will the author and readers allow us to know how it ends?

We're going on a bit too fast. You and I Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: "shut the book now, dad: we don't want to read any more."

As in Michael Ende's famous fantasy novel, the reader is dragged inside the book by a game of mirrors, the reflection of which passes from the author to the character and from the character to the reader, sucking him into an "endless story". Frodo and Sam belong to the same tale as Beren and Lùthien, we belong to the story of Frodo and Sam.

Even the most trivially polarized story in "good and bad" can be relative:

"Things done and over and made into parts of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks he's the hero or the villain? "

"The hero or the villain?" who knows, it would be enough to look at the story from a different perspective and everything would be transformed.

Gollum, “the hero or the villain”, at the reader's choice, has a moment of genuine goodness. He has just betrayed the hobbits, delivering them, like a Judas, into the hands of Shelob, yet when he finds them asleep together, innocent and simple in their sleep of righteousness, something moves in him, old memories of a past of normality, when he too he was a hobbit and had friends. So,

"Slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee. But almost the touch was a caress. "

Gollum's is a gesture of love, but Sam, awakened with a start, interprets it incorrectly. Gollum finally decides to abandon them to Shelob.

It is significant that this happens only two pages away from Frodo's speech about the possibility for Gollum to be "the good" or "the bad" of the story. If Sam, “the hero”, hadn't been so quick to condemn Gollum, “the villain”, the story, perhaps, could have been different. Or maybe not. The decision is up to the reader.

Tolkien, at the end of the story, no longer identifies with the fifty-year-old Frodo at the beginning of the book, but with old Bilbo. It has been fourteen years since Tolkien began writing the book. He is now in his sixties and there have been times when he has even feared that he is not, like Bilbo, able to see "the last chapters of history". Tolkien is now experiencing the irreversible experience of old age; it expresses it in the accentuated figure of the sleepy, confused old hobbit, unable to finish the book and even to tell the reason why he started it.

The metanarrative reflection continues with Bilbo / Tolkien talking about his great novel now winding down:

"What’s become of my Ring Frodo, that you took away?"

here “Ring” is clearly a synecdoche for The Lord of the Rings

“I have lost it Bilbo dear”, said Frodo. "I got rid of it, you know!" "What a pity!" said Bilbo. “I should have liked to see it again. But no, how silly of me! That’s what you went for, wasn’t it: to get rid of it? But it is all so confusing, for such a lot of other things, seem to have got mixed up with it: Aragorn's affairs, and the White Council, Gondor, and the Horsemen and Southrons, and oliphaunts - did you really see one, Sam? - and caves and towers and golden trees, and goodness knows what beside. "

and compares it to The Hobbit:

"I evidently came back by much too straight a road from my trip."

At the end of the third book, mention is made of the fact that chapter eighty of the red book is now complete, followed by a study on the possible titles of the Red Book; the one adopted provides an indication of the limited perspective chosen by the author: "as seen by the Little People".

In conclusion, Tolkien seems to wonder throughout the book about the form this must take, about the quality of his characters, about the type of story he is writing. Basically

"Frodo's quest coincides with the author's quest in search of his identity as a writer of fairy tales for adults" (O. Palusci)

By examining the structure, components and some stylistic techniques of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, we have come to the conclusion that there are undeniable structural similarities between this work and the fairy tale. Tolkien, however, reworks the fairy-tale material from the inside and then detaches himself from it. In fact, in order for the fairytale technique to still have value for adult readers, it must be transformed into a means capable of transmitting modern and current messages as well. Through an internal evolution, the Tolkien fairy tale is enriched. It does not just tell a story that can be easily summarized in a series of functions, but creates a “secondary world”, thanks to the very particular subcreative technique. Then deepening the psychological analysis of the characters, it turns into a genre that is a synthesis of fairy tale and modern novel, or better still, a great fairy tale for adults. This, moreover, is the main feature of all fantasy literature, which derives precisely from the fusion of the fairytale world with the "realistic" narrative technique:

"Fantasy, a new genre which used narrative conventions to remake the world of fairy-stories by way of realistic fiction." (P. Grant)