I think that it is interesting that as Tolkien wrote his books he had no idea where he was going with them. At one point Shippey says that Tolkien does not know any more than his characters what lies on the other side of the mountain. I could not imagine sitting down to write a book and having no guideline to build off of. It is crazy that Tolkien came up with such a story line as he did as he was coming from this background. I also think that maybe that is why the Lord of the Rings did end up being so long and detailed. Maybe if he had had some kind of guideline to it, he would not have needed to keep going and going. Not that it is a bad thing, but maybe that was the effect of not having something to build off of. I wish that I could sit down and write a novel without knowing what I was going to write about.
I knew already that names meant a lot to Tolkien because he did a lot of research when it came to them. But as it is explained more, I think that the way he actually views names is amazing. I have never read a book and wondered where the name came from or why it is being used for a particular character. As I read the part of the chapter on how Tolkien thought of names of people and places as a an assurance connecting name to reality, I started thinking about the Lord of the Rings and how the reality of the names really does need to be there. Otherwise, they just seem like nonsense names. We all know that is not what they are meant to be. It is even more realistic because Tolkien tries to keep locality in his names. Without studying about this and reading Shippey’s book, I never would have guessed that these names came from somewhere. I guess I will try to read into character and place names from now on. From studying the hobbits names and the names of the Shire, I think it is interesting that hobbits are basically English. They have pipeweed and the postal service. That is interesting. I still love the story that in England there was a mail service where you could write to someone and get a response back the same day.
I like how Shippey goes into detail about how the characters speak at The Council of Elrond. Again, I am amazed by Tolkien’s knowledge of his subjects. He uses old archaic language for Elrond and a whole different speech for Gloin the dwarf. He makes Gloin’s speech more broken up where it should be connected, etc. I am learning more and more about what was going on in Tolkien’s mind and I love seeing how the books were eventually put together. I never would have thought that it took so much effort for the Lord of the Rings to be created. I love the detail Shippey goes into in explaining that at the Council, nobody is saying exactly what they mean. No wonder I got a little lost in that part of the book! It can be confusing.
I think that The Council of Elrond could have been shorter and more cut to the point (or rather three main points), but I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing that so many interjections were made. They all had to do with issues that would come up in the book at some point, so I think that even though it made the meeting a little more confusing, that it was good to have the other connections in there.
I wonder if many other authors work off of the names of their characters and places. It seems like Tolkien based all of his story off of the names he came up with which were in turn based off of all the other poems, resources, and languages he knew. I can’t think of many other books that may have been written that way. It’s somewhat unbelievable to me that Tolkien was able to come up with such a long story working off of his knowledge of other subjects. As I think of all of the original resources that Tolkien used in writing the Lord of the Rings, I could almost say that the story is true. Maybe not true as in nonfiction, but maybe true in Tolkien’s mind as everything he wrote came from research of Middle-earth and other past events and names.
It is intriguing that as the books went on, time passed very fastly. Book one took years in the character’s lives, book two took a couple of months, and the following books took a few days. I am also interested that Tolkien was able to take ancient and modern and make a book out of both of them.
I knew that the books of the Lord of the Rings weren’t completely chronological, but I guess it didn’t hit me until now that the books actually interlace with each other. After the fellowship breaks up, all of the pairs and groups of characters have their own narratives and stories to tell. Then at certain times, parts of the fellowship or the whole bunch will end up coming back together. In the meantime, along with the interlace of all these groups, Sam and Frodo have their own story going on in books four and six. I think it is cool how Tolkien lined up certain characters stories with other character’s stories in a whole different book. You can actually take the chapters out and line them up chronologically with each other even though they aren’t chronological in each book. That is just so neat to me. the fact that is set to be more of a reality that surprise gets me too. It is meant to show us the confusion that the characters are going through.
Keilah Bradley October 22, 2008, at 10:39 PM
