Put this Phission in your Preterit Pipe and Poke it

[tess marek]

Or toke it. 

If it's about the Bomb or the War maybe it is about
these things because that is what the book says to us
today. Certainly that is one of the readings that will
be common in the minds of so many young and old that
have never read the books but will see the films. 
Even for those that have read them or will read them,
we can expect that minds while reading will connect
the 
books with war and bombs and power and all that. 

Death, says Pynchon, is what makes all the difference.

It's what his fictions about. What about Tolkien's
books? How do the deal with Death? And what about
comparing the heros of P with the heroes of T? 
Preterit, powerless? Moral vision? 

P was a slow learner because he was slow to come to
terms with Death in his fictions and everything
suffers because of this slowness. 



It is T. A. Shippey's well-documented argument that
for Tolkien such a mythology is rooted in Old English
and in other languages that derived from a postulated
common source. Tolkien knew a number of ancient
languages, and their epics, but he especially knew Old
English and loved the great stories told in it. His
essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics” (1936) is not only a defense of the poem
against the kinds of misreadings he felt it
had received for too long, but also a defense of his
own work against similar misreadings to
come; and they did come. The negative critics not only
disliked The Lord of the Rings (taste
is, after all, personal), but they insisted that the
work had no right to an audience because it
was a “failure,” and therefore must soon prove as
unpopular as they wished it to be. Thus
far they have been proved wrong. Tolkien's great work
has touched a sympathetic chord in
many readers, and that seems reason enough to treat it
seriously. And there are other
reasons as well: however eccentric his major writings
may appear in this age of low
mimeticism, they are works of literature; and they
speak to their audience because they are
carefully constructed and linguistically complex, 
expressing a moral vision. 

Tolkien had written some of the major tales of The
Silmarillion in various forms before he
discovered a new race in Middle-earth, though he did
not realize at the time that this was
what he had done. Hobbits do not appear in any of the
stories of the first two ages, and
Tolkien had, by the early 1930's, written versions in
both prose and verse of some of the
major events in his mythic history. But he wrote these
tales in a deliberately high mode,
while composing light tales about characters with
names like Tom Bombadil for his
children's entertainment. As he discovered the whole
narrative of The Hobbit, however,
Tolkien began to fuse the two sides of his
imagination, creating a work that would have
great popular appeal and also touch on the deeper
concerns of his slowly growing
mythology. Although he did not realize it until later,
the hobbits were the image of the
ordinary that he needed to ground his grand vision in
the popular imagination. As he 
once told an interviewer: “The Hobbits are just rustic
English people, made small in size because it reflects
the generally small reach of their imagination — not
the small reach of their courage or latent power.” To
put it another way, the hobbits represent
the combination of small imagination with great
courage which (as Tolkien had seen in the trenches
during the First World War) often led to survival
against all chances. “I've always been impressed,” he
once
said, “that we are here, surviving, because of the
indomitable courage of quite small people against
impossible odds.”



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