For Tolkien, the Ends Don’t Justify the Means, the Ends Determine the Means!
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
- In a quest fraught with practical problems, like how to get into Mordor, how to evade capture, and how to make good time, it turns out most of the decisions made have little to do with these practical details.
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Háma at the doors of Meduseld: "Yet in doubt a man of worth will trust to his own wisdom. I believe you are friends and folk worthy of honour, who have no evil purpose. You may go in." He's not got a specific practical goal in mind, but he decides to trust his own judgement as to which of Gandalf and Gríma is more likely to have his king's best interest at heart, and comes to the obvious conclusion.
Famous war journalist & ordained minister Chris Hedges is asked how he didn’t loose his faith while bearing witness to so many terrible, terrible things. He responds by referring to the Devine morality of the decisions made by the innocent, common people responding to the violence. Our common man Hobbits, guided by their guardian angle through the valley of darkness, are the moral compass that the wise follow over their own political and strategic understandings.
This is one of the most intelligent Tolkien-related videos I've seen - it doesn't just regurgitate lore from the legendarium, but also analyses Tolkien's approach to his plots, his characters and the decisions they make, as well as the deeper meaning underneath these stories. But I only had one quibble with it, and that was when you said that it was only because of the pity of TWO hobbits towards Gollum that the Ring was destroyed. In fact, it wasn't just Bilbo and Frodo who had pitied Gollum, but also Sam - after Gollum had attacked Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom. This is the same Sam who had never trusted Gollum previously and strongly advised Frodo not to, and the same Sam who had apparently been proved right about this assessment of Gollum when his master was stung by Shelob and then imprisoned and tormented by orcs... all due to Gollum's scheming. And now he has seen him launch a direct, murderous attack on his master... but this is what happens next (it's worth quoting in full!):
‘Now!’ said Sam. ‘At last I can deal with you!’ He leaped forward with drawn blade ready for battle. But Gollum did not spring. He fell flat upon the ground and whimpered.
‘Don’t kill us,’ he wept. ‘Don’t hurt us with nassty cruel steel! Let us live, yes, live just a little longer. Lost lost! We’re lost. And when Precious goes we’ll die, yes, die into the dust.’ He clawed up the ashes of the path with his long fleshless fingers. ‘Dusst!’ he hissed.
Sam’s hand wavered. His mind was hot with wrath and the memory of evil. It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature, just and many times deserved; and also it seemed the only safe thing to do. But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched. He himself, though only for a little while, had borne the Ring, and now dimly he guessed the agony of Gollum’s shrivelled mind and body, enslaved to that Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again. But Sam had no words to express what he felt.
‘Oh, curse you, you stinking thing!’ he said. ‘Go away! Be off! I don’t trust you, not as far as I could kick you; but be off. Or I shall hurt you, yes, with nasty cruel steel.’
You could read this as just a reiteration of the pity shown to Gollum by both Frodo and Bilbo previously, but I think it encapsulates best what Tolkien was aiming at with this tension between practical and moral decision-making. And not just that, this is pity shown right at the end of the quest, without which the whole enterprise would have failed. If Sam had killed Gollum there and then - when he was the most mad he had ever been at him, when it seemed the best practical course of action and when Gollum most fully deserved it... then the quest would have failed, right at the very end. Of course, Sam didn't fully understand why he took this decision, but it was the moral part of him that took it, rather than the emotional or practical side. And then, maybe because of Sam's decision, Providence was able to take over and ensure that the quest was fulfilled.
It’s these moral decisions that make me love Tolkien. Good one.
Minor correction it took 3 Hobbits having pity on Golum Sam eventually also had pitty on him on the slopes of Mt Doom
Dang ol, yo, man.
A constant theme in Tolkien's creation is that the great or heroic are so thru wisdom or intrinsic strength of character, whether hobbit, dunedain or maia, insight and integrity trump all other qualities for those who remain true. Ps. Admittedly totally biased : when uncertain take the dwarven road to quality Galadriel time. 😎
_The good end happily; the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means._
This is the first video I have watched on this channel. Excellent analysis! I like the way the host talks about Middle Earth almost as if he has been there.
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Like when Gandalf advised Frodo to not be too eager to deal out death and judgement? And when They chose to free, FREE, Wormtongue ro go off and blab to Saruman about that storm drain that lead to that infamous Olympic torch run?
Which is not in the books.
It leads to Saruman death without the Shire being cursed ... and the Palantir of Orthanc getting into the hands of the party ... allowing Aragorn to use the Palantir
I know you're referencing the movie (Saruman already knew about the drain without Grima's help in the book), but even in the movie it makes sense. Theoden killing Grima in a vengeful rage would have done more harm to his character and the respect his people had for him.
What do you think about Denethor's decision to send Boromir to Imladris instead of Faramir? I don't think you touched on it although I had a few phone calls while listening to you today. If you did I apologize. I think Denethor made his decision out of fear of Sauron and a belief that Faramir was too weak. What would have been the difference if Faramir had been one of the Nine Walkers? And speaking of Denethor and his sons, have you discussed them? I'm off to find the answer in your videos.
I definitely have a video or two on the Steward family, but I didn’t discuss it here because I was focusing on the “on-screen” decisions, as it were.
It was pity that stayed his hand. It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets, he thought. That’s from the old satire Bored of the Rings, which is so nonsensical, I don’t regard it as heretical. Tolkien gave the Harvard lampoon permission. I believe it is still in print might be dated for younger readers.
I read Bored of the Rings as a teenager. As a massive LOTR fan, no offence taken, very funny but affectionate satire.
There are plenty of time-specific and product specific references in it that younger readers almost certainly won't get, but that's what the internet is for.
My own personal favourite from BotR is Legolam and Gimlet's discussion on their first meeting.
Well, I was thinking about Gandalf's decision to battle Durin's Bane. It does not seem to be a logical or practical decision, as it cost him his life, yet out of his death came Gandalf the White. There was never a practical way for Gandalf the Grey to become Gandalf the White. Nevertheless, he was able to make this transformation by doing the right thing, not knowing his death would result in a vast upgrade of his powers in Middle Earth.
39:40 wait a minute, but the good guys have always won every war! Surely bad guys wouldnt win a war and then paint themselves as the good guys? Egad
To the Victor goes the Morality Tale !
naturally, because we don't actually get history from stories told by the victors. we get history by being historians and finding as many sources as possible from inside and outside of a given event.
@@GallumAit's cute that you believe that.
@@vileluca that is in fact, literally how we get history. there isn't literally a history book that victors write in, it's a saying. in reality, we get history often by comparing the documents, anthropological evidence, archeological evidence and documents, records from other cultures about that culture.
@@vilelucathe saying "history is written by the victors" was never meant to be taken literally. There are obvious examples of that not happening, indeed of the total opposite being true from both the modern day and antiquity. What it was intended to point out is that writing is largely a pursuit of the privileged, the ability to step back and look at the arc of history is something you can only do if you're not wrapped up in the present. The Hittites, Persians, Assyrians and Egyptians all fought for control over the Middle East and were all cruel about it. But it's the Assyrians who have the image of being the brutal ones. This is mostly an illusion, molded in large part by a book the Assyrians would never have considered worth destroying because it only mattered to a few people in their time. How could they have known that 2,000 years later a different empire would march in and the people would dig up these old manuscripts to lead an absurdly successful revolution against that Empire? Or, ask anyone with Chinese heritage about the Qing dynasty. Kublai Khan would never have imagined the Ming restoration, at the time it seemed like he had truly subjugated all of mainland East Asia. But the people whose culture he repressed got their revenge and rewrote the history books. Percy Shelley was directly quoting Ramses II with "look on my works ye mighty and despair", but... history had changed what that phrase meant. Ramses in Shelley's time had been targeted as the Pharaoh of the Exodus because archaologists were confused about how old the Pyramids actually were and how they were constructed, since they weren't nearly as good at reading hieroglyphs or dating rocks as we are now. He still is that icon of cruelty in the popular consciousness, despite it being widely understood that that chronology makes no sense (and Exodus itself no longer being treated as a faithful historical record). Ramses' own propaganda does little to rehabilitate his image: he seems boastful and egotistical going only off his own inscriptions and sculptures. Only now that we can read Linear B do we know the man behind all of this, a shockingly affable person who knew perfectly well that his erstwhile opponent was claiming to have won the same battle he claimed to have won and didn't care. A man who put proving himself as a general second to doing what was right for his country, and gave Egypt a 60 year long peace that we are still praying to have repeated to this day. It was Ramses II who was first given the title Prince of Peace, after having presided over three generations of stability and economic growth which helped Egypt survive the subsequent era of invasions. The entire idea of the Messiah descends from the memory of this very real person. Yet, the narrative of history has obscured that fact and slandered the person behind the myth. Egypt in Ramses' time was a superpower, but it was later conquered by another superpower. The tables turn, and the victor becomes the victim. History marches on, and is rewritten over and over. Give it enough time, and the most virtuous hero can be painted as a villain and vice versa. All these rewrites however, are done by scholars: people who have time to study and who are prone to ignoring the oral tradition. Though at least modern scholars are considerably less bad in the latter respect than they were at the time the "history is written by the victors" line was written, thanks in no small part to Tolkien. In the modern day, metrical translations of ancient poetry are so ubiquitous that you would be forgiven for thinking they have always been available. But the fact is, Tolkien was one of the first to publish such a translation. Before his time, translators sought narrative integrity over faithfulness to the text and produced prose translations in most cases which might have reflected the plot and characterization well but didn't preserve the character of the original text at all: as is still the norm in Biblical translations (the entire Old Testament was originally written in verse, not just Psalms). While others had advocated for preserving oral traditions, Boas and his students were still much more focused on preserving the narratives than on the text as art. Plus, they overlooked the possibility of preserving the sound of speech via writing, and emphasized the then novel recording technology. This has become a problem now, because those recordings degraded somewhat before they could be digitized: forever altering their character. Only those which had transcriptions can be digitally restored to their original state (the WPA required transcriptions, but other projects did not always). Tolkien was prescient in this as in a great deal else.
Nice, as always...
How about Frodo volunteering to take the ring at the Council of Elrond?
IMO the most heroic decision in the entire story (I’m in agreement with Elrond!)
I think also his decision to try to go alone to Mordor in order to spare his friends is in the same league.
Essentially totally agree, although there may be times where a writer gets to a plot point and essentially thinks 'Where do I go from here?', rather than having a route map laid out for everything.
Noted that you managed to say Christian rather than Catholic, although this of course doesn't discount a non-Christian essentially making character decisions based on a moral perspective.
An author nurtured outside of Christian value-systems ( regardless if Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox ) would - if not in any way influenced by these norms later on - not make the same moral choices and this would influence the character he creates. A Hinduist regards morals differently to a Christian.
An author nurtured outside of Christian value-systems ( regardless if Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox ) would - if not in any way influenced by these norms later on - not make the same moral choices and this would influence the character he creates. A Hinduist regards morals differently to a Christian.
@@chrismath149how so?
@@TitusCastiglione1503 The commenter above seems to think that Christian morals are universally accepted on the whole world but Christian values like charity and compassion are not even fully established in Europe let alone places like North Korea or China or Russia.
First.