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【绪论部分】

For all the significance it has assumed in post-Tolkien fantasy——‘worldbuilding’——defined in literary terms as the proliferation, as an end in itself and in superfluity to the requirements of any given plot, of detail about an imagined (alternative, secondary, other) world—was not a shared pursuit among practitioners of early fantasy. But Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien were all masters of world-building in the literal sense. They wrote about god(s) and the creation of reality, adopting allegorical or discursive styles, and drawing upon philosophical models, as well as key theological elements from Christian, Norse, Celtic or Greek mythoi. All three also wrote narratives that took the ‘world’ for granted and chronicled instead the adventures of individual heroes in it. Such texts, modelled on epics, quest romances, fairy-tales or Kunstmärchen, and at times inflected by the techniques of the realist novel, include their best-known publications: Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. But crucially, these texts are not standalone works: they are situated either within or in relation to the authors’ broader cosmopoietic (literally ‘world-creating’) frameworks in a way that has no equivalent in the work of any other writer from the British fantasy ‘back-catalogue’. David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) might rival Eddison’s philosophical ambition, but cannot remotely match the sheer scale of Dunsany’s, Eddison’s and Tolkien’s visions.

… …Dunsany but much more systematically, the interrelations of time and eternity, the creation of worlds and the meaning of death and personal annihilation in the light of a new conception of Beauty as the governing value of existence.

… …To the autobiographical realism of Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel novels, the exuberant archaism and narrative impulse of his early myth-making, and the ever more involved metaphysical speculations about the relationship between the body and soul, the incarnation, and the nature of evil in the imaginary universe, one can add Tolkien’s large and stylistically diverse corpus of poetry, his maps, linguistic essays and etymological dictionaries of invented languages, not to mention translations into Old English of the historical annals of the Gods and Elves.并非独立的作品，而是诞生于作者对于更广阔世界构架的设想

 

Myth is, of course, a pre- or extra-literary category, and the same may be said of other purely theological components of cosmopoietic invention, but in the trio’s work these serve as enablers of literary creativity all along the spectrum from lyrical poetry to prose pastiche.

·神话与文学创作

 

The passage provides an illustration of literal cosmopoiesis that perfectly analogises the task of the cosmopoietic fantasist, whose purpose in writing is the creation of new worlds, a playing around with life, death and time in just the fashion embodied in the myths he creates, a taking on of godlike powers in order to justify the ways of god to man. Cosmogony and eschatology, how it all began and how it is all going to end, and the nature of mortal existence in the interim between creation and apocalypse—that is ultimately what the fantasy of Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien is about.

The gods’ game of life and death is probably the most ‘universal’ theme in existence; and no period or mode of literature has neglected to engage with their slave Time.

·宇宙起源与末世论

·God’s game of life and death, and their slave Time

 

Individual death here is a discrete event or terminus: the cessation of life in time. But it can also be a state: either the absence of life (life’s obverse, nothingness) or a different kind of life (the afterlife) characterised by its timelessness, a part of God’s eternal now, the timeless eternity of Augustine and Boethius. Time, on the other hand, has since Aristotle’s day been associated with change, with successiveness or sequentiality, whether as a perception of the human mind or an actual characteristic of external reality.

·死亡的几种定义

 

For the human individual and for all of humanity’s works, the process not only contains its own

end, but is defined by the end towards which it must inevitably tend, a kind of Heideggerian being-toward-death.

·倾向于海德格尔的“向死而生”的生死定义

 

Life in time, in other words, is but the process of dying. This is the second reason why Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien deserve to be bracketed together. The bodies of work they created, running into many thousands of pages, are characterised by an obsession with temporality, mortality and eternity, with process, event and state.

 

Their main template was the quest romance rather than the creation myth;

·大部分奇幻文学关注的只有这种romantic fantasies (rather than creation myth), a cohesive narrative rather than a multi-generic universe

 

The wanderer in search of lost time and an escape from death is a key figure of romantic fantasy, and so is his opposite, the seeker wishing to embrace death and come to terms with time.

 

Instead of a Morrisian celebration of the sturdy acceptance of natural death (sweetened by the knowledge of a continuing life for the community and the afterlife afforded by memory), and instead ofMacDonald’s reluctant but eventually joyful resignation to the life-indeath offered by God, we find in Dunsany an extended meditation on the glories and ravages of time-as-process and timelessness-as-state.

 

All six fantasists were ultimately aiming for one thing: to capture humanity’s attempts to come to terms with its transience, with the ‘minutes hasten[ing] to their end’. Facing death, fleeing it, or embracing it; desperately trying to freeze time, to rewind it, or yielding—joyfully, bitterly, apathetically—to its flow

·共有的主题

But this power of art is predicated on our mortality. In Tolkien’s allegory of the artist’s journey from life to death, Leaf by Niggle (1945),the live Tree can only grow from Niggle’s painted leaf after he himself has passed the threshold of death. Death and immortality are indissoluble

not just for MacDonald, but—when immortality is understood in the Shakespearean rather than the Christian sense—for all the six authors.

·艺术作品的力量得益于生命有限

·死亡与永生不可调和

·莎士比亚式的“永生”而非基督式的“永生”——but thy eternal summer shallt not fade

 

 

Everything dies that lives – everything dies;

How shall we keep the flower we lov’d so long?

O press to death the transient thing we prize,

Crush it, and shut the elixir in a song. …

Sweet Tuberose, adieu! you fade too fast!

Only a dream, only a thought, can last. (23)

III.

Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither?

Who dream a dream if Passion did not pass?

But, once deceived, poor mortals hasten hither

To watch the world in Fancy’s magic glass.

Truly your city, O men, hath no abiding!

Built on the sand it crumbles, as it must;

And as you build, above your praise and chiding,

The columns fall to crush you to the dust.

But fashion’d in the mirage of a dream,

Having nor life nor sense, a bubble of nought,

The enchanted City of the Things that Seem

Keeps till the end of time the eternal Thought

 

That is the paradox at the heart of Shakespearean immortality. To live in the tale you must die in the world; for the flower to endure, it has to be pressed to death; Tolkien’s ‘multiple enrichment of creation’ can only really take place after ‘Man’ has been ‘redeemed’ (OFS, 79). Just as there is no life without death in Lilith and Lud-in-the-Mist , so there is no fantastic art without ‘the thoughts of death’ that make it possible.

·“先死后永生”

 

【绪论章节的注释】

 ‘Mythology projects itself as theology: that is, a mythopoeic poet usually accepts some myths as “true” and shapes his poetic structure accordingly. Romance peoples the world with fantastic, normally invisible personalities or powers’ (64). In particular, the dying gods of mythology found in Dunsany and…

·神话将自己投射为神学

 

 

J.R.R. Tolkien: More Than Memory

I Introduction

He was consistent in the extreme: ‘Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man’s precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable victory of death’

·托尔金对于贝奥武夫的解读——Defeat

 

… He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy’ (MC, 18). These words, italicised in the original, can be emblazoned at the head of Tolkien’s entire fantastic oeuvre

 

Death was an existential fact (the tragedy of being a ‘Man’ in Time), but also a historical one—the tragedy, if one may put it so, of culture in Time.

·Death being an existential but also a historical fact

 

– but for the poet, and the chance relenting of time’ whose ‘wrecks’ it had miraculously ‘survived’, for it is ‘the doom of men to live briefly in a world where all withers and is forgotten’

 

Whatever may have been true of the ancient English temper, the diagnosis of melancholy was certainly true of Tolkien’s own.

 

that the ‘heroic-elegiac’ Weltanschauung was for Tolkien—increasingly consciously as the years went by—the key both to his own work and to the work of the Old English poets whom he taught and studied (MC, 31). In the Ring verse from The Lord of the Rings, the distinctive defining characteristic of Homo Sapiens is summed up in one line: they are ‘Mortal Men doomed to die’ (FR, prefatory matter). The Elves, a kindred invented branch of what Tolkien called the ‘rational incarnate’ family, were also doomed to ‘fade’, fighting ‘the long defeat’ like the pagan heroes of the North (Letters, 146; FR, 463). Both inhabited, though in fundamentally different ways, a world of loss and ruin, a world marred, which offered no hope of salvation within Time. Both had to live under their own version of déathscua—the shadow of death. But there was one very important caveat. Tolkien, like the Beowulf poet whom he seemed to fashion in his own image, was a Christian making use of ‘heathen’ material for creative ends. Defeat, therefore, could be transmuted into victory.

……In a world created by the One God, transcendence was always possible; the fallen could be redeemed, the dead could live again. For Tolkien, the ‘Drama’ or ‘Tale’ of life in Time had an Author who served as guarantor of a wider reality beyond its finite bounds

ⅡEschatological and Perspectival Uncertainty

Tolkien was his own best critic, and as he famously explained: ‘The real theme for me is … Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race “doomed” to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race “doomed” not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete’ (Letters, 246). The tragedy of being a Man necessitated as its foil the tragedy of being an Elf. In an uncanny echo of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, his face ‘turned toward the past’, ‘irresistibly propel[led] … into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward’ (‘9th Thesis on the Philosophy of History’ in Benjamin 249), Tolkien depicts his Elves as ‘exiles driven forward [into the future] (against their will) who were in mind or actual posture ever looking backward’, facing the accumulating ruin of the past (qtd. in Flieger, Question, 70). This was the primary experience of time, for in terms of the external chronology of its development, Tolkien’s mythology was, to begin with, profoundly ‘Elf-centric’, and only eventually did Men emerge to challenge and usurp the narrative interest.

·The real theme for Tolkien: Death and Immortality

·Elf-centric mythology—with men usurping the narrative interest

·本雅明：历史的天使

克利的一幅名叫《Angelus Novus》的画作展示了一只看上去好像是将要远离他所定睛注视的东西的天使。他的眼睛正在凝望，他的嘴巴张着，他的翅膀伸展。这是对历史的天使的描画。他的脸转了过来，面向过去。在我们察觉到一连串的事件的地方，他看到一个独一的灾难在持续把废墟堆积到废墟之上，把它投掷到他的脚前。天使想要留下来，唤醒死人，恢复被蹂躏的一切。然而一阵风暴正在从伊甸园吹来；它如此猛烈地吹打在他的翅膀上，以至于天使无法再接近它们。风暴不可抗拒地把它推向未来，推向他的脊背转向的地方，而成堆的残骸在他面前如同山积。这阵风暴我们把它称为进步。

It was always Men who were the ultimate receivers and transmitters of Elvish lore, the heirs in a diminished world of the beauty and tragedy of the past, like the Anglo-Saxons inhabiting the ‘deserted’ ‘ruins’ of the departed ‘glory of Rome’ (Beowulf, 349–50). If the conceit of distortions introduced by ‘Mannish’ handling of Elvish traditions did not enter until later, already at the beginning the figure of the human wanderer from historical time and the coasts of north-western Europe was present—a listener, a recorder, a translator for posterity

 

So too did Tolkien’s conception of the shift from mythological to historical time… …though Men may inherit the earth, it is a diminished one, ‘old and weighted with regret

 

‘in fact exterior to my story Elves and Men are just different aspects of the Humane, and represent the problem of Death’; ‘in the relation of their “spirits” to the world in time [they] represent different “experiments”’ (Letters, 236). And with regard to the destination of their spirits out of time, Tolkien did not cease experimenting until his own death in 1973. As in Dunsany and Eddison, uncertainty lies at the very heart of his cosmopoietic vision.

 

But the cardinal difference between the two kindreds was this: that the completion and fulfilment of the design was the especial ‘task’ and ‘gift’ of Men. They alone had the ultimate ‘freedom’ to ‘fashion’ their life beyond the prescription of God, the fate enshrined in the Music, and it was ‘one with this gift … that the Children of Men dwell only a short time in the world alive, yet do not perish utterly for ever, whereas the Eldar [Elves] dwell till the Great End … Yet while the Sons of Men will after the passing of things of a certainty join in the Second Music of the Ainur, what Ilúvatar has devised for the Eldar beyond the world’s end he has not revealed’ (LT I, 59–60). There is no ‘mystery’ about Men, in other words—they will certainly live again after the end of the world; it is God’s purpose for the Elves that is ‘hidden’.

 

（Elves）Though Longaevi, they could not transcend Time, and therefore could not achieve the true immortality that Men’s radical freedom in and from the world (death, in other words) assured them.

 

driver of plot and, later, philosophy, in writing from the late 1930s onwards. Where the Elves are satisfied to preserve the beauty of the past, and resigned (however unwillingly) to living in the past when their longevity condemns them to relinquish agency in the present, Men’s rightful nature is to seek to transcend given circumstances, including the circumstances of their earthly incarnation. To ‘die indeed’ is to break all ties with the only drama of life which Elves or Men have ever experienced, to play their bit walk-on part and leave the world’s stage forever, instead of remaining, whether front or back, till the final curtain.18 But God can author more than one drama, and if in this version of the text the Valar join the Elves in the limbo of uncertainty after the cessation of historical time, Men are still promised a new role in a new musical performance.

 

It is the ‘point of view’ of a race not subject to actual death in Time; and their creation story, derived from the angelic Powers with whom the Elves have lived, is transmitted second-hand to a human listener who will never have an opportunity to encounter the Valar himself.

·视角问题非常重要：Elf-centric; elf-narrative

 

The possibility of certainty receded with every stage in the development of Tolkien’s mythos: theological certainty as much as any certainty derived from wilfully neglecting ‘point of view’.

 

belief in Him, and proceeding from that, hope or trust in Him (called by the Eldar estel )’

·belief, hope and trust—Estel

 

Men are free to question its most fundamental axioms.

·人类能够质疑Illuvatar（与Elves形成对比）

 

To God’s injunction to repudiate knowledge and experience, to willingly embrace uncertainty and turn it into faith, mankind is free to respond with even more doubt. But without faith, there is no ground from which hope can arise.

The Elvish point of view, which enables the Firstborn to ‘contemplate the End’ (of the world and their individual lives with it) without despair, even in the absence of any indication of their subsequent fate, is explicitly founded in their belief in God (MR, 320). Because ‘absolute annihilation, and cessation of conscious identity, were wholly repugnant to thought and desire … in the last resort the Elves were obliged to rest on “naked estel” … the trust in Eru, that whatever he designed beyond the End would be recognised by each [spirit] … as wholly satisfying’ (MR, 332). ‘We have no certainty, no knowledge. And no one speaks to us of hope’, the Elf King Finrod tells Andreth, echoing her own words (MR, 312). Though the lives of the Elves are incomparably longer, they are fundamentally in the same predicament as Men are, yet—the King implies—they still find it possible to maintain their faith.

·精灵对于生与死的消极思考与他们对于上帝的信任紧密相连

 

Generally, the Elves seem incapable of understanding Men’s radical doubt; while Men cannot bring themselves to adopt the Elves’ belief.

·精灵与人类无法相互理解（信仰）

 

ⅢHope, Trust and Faith

The Elves of tradition—without souls, incapable of reaching heaven, denied Christian transcendence by definition—are turned in the later phases of Tolkien’s legendarium into religious proselytisers, the central axioms of whose theology would not look out of place in the pages of a Christian sermon. These are (1) the belief that there is a God, that he designs and that his design is good, and (2) the hope, predicated on this belief, that—in the words of the Victorian laureate of faith and doubt…….the naturalness of doubt in the face of death

 

 

The lack of certainty about God’s existence and intentions, combined with misinformation from a deceiver who takes active advantage of the situation, create the circumstances for the Fall. Men are literally in the dark about their condition, a dark which no light of hope can penetrate.

Faced with existential uncertainty, Tolkien’s new-born Man is, like the speaker of Tennyson’s elegy, ‘An infant crying in the night; / An infant crying for the light, / And with no language but a cry’ (237).

·人类：existential uncertainty; infant in the dark

How can we ‘trust’ that death is not the end, when our position when faced with it is that of an infant helpless in the dark, unable even to communicate the wish for enlightenment on the mysteries of existence?

·于是自然而然无法接受“死亡不是终点”的论断↓

Can Men be blamed if after this they find it hard to maintain the kind of belief demanded of them by the Elvish notion of estel ?

 

Just like the first Men, the Númenóreans misplace their trust—they take the Enemy for their God because his representative (Sauron) promises an answer to the question of mortality, and in place of the mystery of death offers the certainty of continued existence.

·Númenóreans的陷落——because Sauron promises an answer to the question of mortality

 

But the very notions of ‘escape’ and ‘burden’ point to the incompatibility of the two kindreds’ perspectives. Elves and Men want to escape from different things. It is ‘death ineluctable; death the hunter who cannot in the end be escaped’ that Men fear and wish to evade (MR, 311)—the horrible event of life’s termination, not the process of living as such, ‘the weariness of Time’ that haunts the Elves (Letters, 205).

·人类与精灵恐惧的东西是不一样的：人类是渴望逃离的终结，精灵则是对时间的厌倦

 

…the relative merits of mortality and immortality has no rightful winner, so in Tolkien it reaches an impasse. Neither Elves nor Men can truly step into the other’s shoes and appreciate the peculiar kind of loss or sorrow associated with the other’s mode of being.

·人类与精灵不能相互理解对方存在的形式与苦痛

 

…Elves fail in their championing of a semi-Christian worldview, as they strive in vain to persuade Men to believe in their destiny beyond the mortal world.

Indeed, if for the Elves the instinctive love of the world found in every human heart is a sign that there must be something after the end—for it would be inconceivable that God would allow that love to flower in vain—for Men it is instead an inducement to postpone death, to hoard more life.

·for men: an inducement to postpone death, to hoard more life; e.g. Nazgulllll

 

Men—unlike Elves, Finrod implies—are too restless by nature to remain happy in the possession of the familiar, they feel imprisoned by it, their spirits long to be ‘release[d]’ from bondage and to return to their real home, which, as Wordsworth has it, is with God.

……

But the mere suggestion comes as ‘good news’ (MR, 318)—g¯odspel—gospel—evangelium: the suggestion that ‘the errand of Men, not the followers, but the heirs and fulfillers of all’, may have been ‘to heal the Marring of Arda … to enlarge the Music and surpass the Vision of the World … For that Arda Healed shall not be Arda Unmarred, but a third thing and a greater’

·arda healed≠arda unmarred而是a third thing and great约等于天启→a better earth

 

Arda Envinyanta—Arda Healed and renewed—is the New Earth of redeemed humanity so central to Catholic eschatology

 

The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them … in Fantasy [the Christian] may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know. (OFS, 78–9)这段是On Fairies Stories

 

As artists or as Men our role is to contribute to God’s authorship of the world. God will take our sub-creations and hallow them, making them a part of his own glorious design in ways we cannot foresee……The leaves of Niggle’s painted Tree literally enable the ‘effoliation’—the opening into leaf—of new aspects of reality (‘E ffoliate, v.’). This is not something he can achieve in life; the fallen world forgets him and his work. He must die first, and only beyond the mortal world and its Time can he assist in the enrichment of God’s creation

Estel means not just ‘trust’ and ‘hope’, but ‘faith’.

 

 

Ⅳ Evil, Pride and Despair

In an unfallen world—an Arda Unmarred by Melkor’s intervention—Men would have accepted death as the gift that it was; the marring warps their perception of the gift. The true evil is thus the wrong ‘attitude’ to death, as per the letter to Father Murray, not death itself. In Paradise, says Tolkien in his manifesto-like poem Mythopoeia, the eye will not see evil, ‘for evil lies / not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes’

…

The sorrows of a wicked world are ultimately ‘part of [God’s] whole and tributary to its glory’ (LT I, 55). Evil becomes the necessary foundation of good.

So the tendency to hopelessness, like all the other evils introduced by the Enemy, has its part to play in the overall design—it is taken up into the imaginary world’s felix culpa.

As many critics have remarked, the invented Fallis a fortunate one, just as the Biblical Fall is according to Catholic tradition.

 

 

Tolkien the Anglo-Saxon scholar viewed Beowulf as a Christian mediation of the pagan philosophy of ‘death without hope’, and The Lord of the Rings channelled both the Christian and the pagan aspects of the Old English poem. If the Christian aspect stands behind Sam’s vision of hope in Mordor, ‘heathen’ despair (in close conjunction with suicide) reappears at crucial moments as well

… …Pride and despair are the markers of a pagan death; hope and humility of a Christian one.

The Beowulf ‘poet looks back into the past’ and ‘sees that all glory (or as we might say “culture” or “civilization”) ends in night [and inevitable ruin].

·骄傲与绝望，后面举了Denethor的例子：

He is not using his ‘gift of freedom’—the power granted to human will to alter the original design—in ‘harmony’ with God’s wishes, but to thwart them (LT I, 59, 61). Aragorn, on the other hand, by invoking ‘grace’ and ‘gift’, pays its full due to the Christian notion that ‘by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God’ (Ephesians 2.8). These are the words that stand behind Aragorn’s farewell.

Grace【恩典—God’s ‘benevolence towards humanity, bestowed freely and without regard to merit’, which grants ‘salvation’, inspires ‘virtue’ and gives ‘strength to endure trial and resist temptation’—was a key theological concept for Tolkien (‘Grace, n.’).

 

 

In Beowulf , despair (and the accompanying determination to die rather than surrender) is the quality of those who lack knowledge of God’s benevolent ‘design’. The pre-Christian heathens lacked it, and so did the ‘heathen’ Men of Middle-earth whom Denethor and later Gandalf invoke, abandoned to the ruins and darkness left in the wake of Melkor’s defeat at the end of the First Age of the world, ‘before ever a ship sailed hither from the West’, bringing culture and the arts of peace

  ·绝望

This is the ‘fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief’ that Tolkien hymns in On Fairy-stories—laughing and weeping, pain and delight, and all other opposites combine in a moment of absolute transcendence.

The scene enacts a kind of supercharged version of non-Christian fantasy’s similarly ‘bitter-sweet’ philosophies of ‘life and death, of laughter and tears’ (Mirrlees 238). For Tolkien was certainly not alone in positing the impossibility of eucatastrophe without dyscatastrophe.

 

 

 

William Blake’s assertion in Auguries of Innocence that ‘Man was made for joy and woe’:

 

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

Under every grief and pine

Runs a joy with silken twine. (174)

 

Tolkien, unlike most of the others, does not rest content with simply affirming the dialectic; his theodicy ensures the triumph of grace.

Consider the eagles who appear as instruments of grace at the climax of The Lord of the Rings. Eagles are a notorious deus ex machina in Tolkien’s work: they fulfil this function in The Hobbit and in The Silmarillion as well. But his use of these birds of Manwë—the greatest of the Valar and Ilúvatar’s regent in the world—takes on particular symbolic significance here, for the eagles are not just saviours, they can also be signs of God’swrath.

 

 

Ⅴ (Dis)Possession, Exile and Nostalgia

This is why the Rings of Power are produced: ‘The chief power (of all the rings alike) was the prevention or slowing of decay (i.e. “change” viewed as a regrettable thing), the preservation

of what is desired or loved, or its semblance’ (Letters, 152; original italics). But this is the very opposite of the Elves’ God-given artistic purpose, as illustrated in their ‘oldest’ and ‘most beloved’ art-form: ‘the making of speech’ (PM, 398). Language change for Elves is both an inadvertent and an intentional process: they delight (like Tolkien himself) in inventing new, ‘unstaled’ forms of speech because ‘when the union of the thought and the sound is fallen into old custom … then already the word is dying and joyless’ (PM, 397). The turn towards embalming, therefore, is clearly a flaw, a deviation from their natural mode of being—at least so long as they still inhabit the unfolding history of the universe. Nowhere in this conception do we find a place for the familiar celebration of (verbal) art as an efficacious mode of freezing time. Both Dunsany and Eddison were equivocal about the possibility or desirability of such an outcome; Tolkien is uncompromisingly condemnatory. Embalming is the preservation of what is already dead: the obverse of life, growth, change.

in order to regain freedom one must stop ‘clinging’ and give up one’s claim on the objects (times, places, people, ideas) one loves, including, ultimately, oneself. The lesson is the same here as in so much other deathfocused fantasy, from C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (1943) to Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (1973): do not try to halt the flow of time, to hold on to the past; learn to let go. The alternative is mummification, death-inlife.

Spiritual embalming is, of course, another phrase for nostalgia

• spiritual embalming=nostalgia

Nostalgia is ultimately powerless in the face of Time, just as memory and art so frequently prove to be in Dunsany—but unlike Dunsany’s, Tolkien’s Sea will never give back all that it has garnered in the years. ‘For such is the way’ of the world, says Legolas as the Fellowship drifts down Anduin in their boats, down the same river that has borne countless days to the Sea and will bear countless more after Lórien ceases to be even a memory.

 

 

Of all the different ways of handling loss in Tolkien’s world, nostalgia— the refusal to accept and move on, the look backward in regret, as opposed to the gaze forward in hope—is the one explored most fully, but also the one questioned most deeply.

 

 

It is notable that even Eärendil, the mariner destined to become the star of hope, is simultaneously a figure of exile, unable to return to the world he loves (LT II, 255, 265; see also LR, 326), and ‘weary’ of it, like the fading Elves who finally forsake ‘the lands of weeping and of war’ and sail away ‘from the western shores of this world’, never to return.

 

 

This is the tragedy of created beings in Time, ‘in a world where all withers and is forgotten’, to recall again Tolkien’s description of Beowulf ; and as in Beowulf only the ‘chance relenting of time’ can save words, and the memories they enshrine, from the ‘oblivion of ages’. The Lord of the Rings, like The Book of Lost Tales , is steeped in the consciousness of this precariousness. Both are framed narratives, and their compilers are all too aware of the operations of time. So are other keepers of memory in the legendarium, those whose job it is not to forget the loss.

·the consciousness of this precariousness

Death and exile are explicitly equated: both mean the loss of what you love, and both are without hope. The survivors of Númenor literally lose their home, but their condition is also a metaphor for the condition of humanity faced with leaving its earthly home, as the Númenóreans in the early drafts of the Akallabêth so presciently pointed out.

·“死亡”与“放逐”的近似性

 

[特指Númenoreans] In their attempt to act on their nostalgia, to retrieve the past in which not only Númenor but ‘the Deathless Land’ were still part of the physical world (S, 281), they build ships that only find more lands ‘subject to death’.

No matter how far west they sail, they never do reach Paradise, but only set ‘a girdle about the [round] Earth, and return weary at last to the place of their beginning’ (S, 281). ‘There and Back Again’, the subtitle of The Hobbit , is in this context not a comforting assurance of a safe homecoming, but a bitter reminder of human mortality, and an interesting variation on the common trope of time’s circularity (see Letters, 198). Sailing in futile circles around the Earth transforms the ouroboros from a symbol of the eternal renewal of life to one of the finitude of death. The world, as the Elves had warned, becomes a prison, and Men, confined to its sphere while alive, cannot hope to step onto the ‘Straight Road’, that ‘path of the memory of the [immortal] West’ upon which ‘only the gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves could journey’

    ·

 

But the fate of Men, they said, is neither round nor ended, and is not complete within the world’ (SD, 339). Men will not be confined after death to the endless closed circle of the Earth; but neither will they follow time’s finite arrow that together with the Elves leaves behind earth’s sphere but not duration. What awaits Men is something outside time and space altogether.

·人类的命运——neither round nor ended, and is not complete within the world’

 

Ⅵ Sehnsucht and the Final Departure Over Sea

the bitter-sweet and inconsolable desire for something that can never be grasped in the world of time.

 

·“restlessness”

 

This kind of wistful yearning is known in German as Sehnsucht . Tolkien’s friend Lewis is one of the few English-language writers to have given sustained consideration to the concept of Sehnsucht, so it is perhaps fitting that this is the term that most accurately describes not just

Finrod’s understanding of mankind, but the emotional colouring of the earliest and most distinctive parts of Tolkien’s legendarium, which merge the exile’s longing for home with the mortal’s longing for death. The word is notoriously difficult to translate. In her study of the early poetry of Edwin Muir, Margery McCulloch defines it as a ‘longing for a lost land’.

·the exile’s longing for home and the mortal’s longing for death

 

 

 

The imitation brings out instead the pagan undertones of the composition, which owe more to Mahlmann’s Phantasie than to God, to the mythological imagination of paradises of golden fruit (source of immortality in both Greek and Norse myth) than to ‘heavenly rest’. As will be seen shortly, each of these details looks forward to some crucial aspect of what may be called Tolkien’s ‘objective correlative’ for Sehnsucht. In ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, T. S. Eliot defines this as follows:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (100; original italics)

The land of wonder that can only be reached by ship, located beyond the sea in a westward direction and associated with music, fragrance and undying flowers, which a mortal has no guarantee of finding though he has sought it long: this is the ‘formula’ of Sehnsucht in Tolkien’s work. It is a formula with very deep roots, traceable all the way back, as in Schiller’s poem, to the ancient Greek tradition of the Fortunate Isles or Isles of the Blest.

The very possibility of a home found across the mountains, or in the youthful days of the past, is denied. It cannot exist within Time, only outside it—in ‘eternity’. This is the position of Tolkien’s Men, who also have no permanent home in the world of Time—within the circles of the world; neither can they expect any pledges or securities. Metaphorically speaking they are at sea: Gewoge can also be translated as waving, surging, rocking, or swaying, all motions typical of the sea. As has been seen, the sea, that archetypal emblem of ‘flux’ and time, was for Tolkien also the great symbol of thestate of desire.

·大海和水手的意象

 

When one recalls the Elves’ insistence that Men will find their ultimate home only in death, longing for the sea and the nameless land across it—one of the strongest tonal effects in Tolkien’s writing—equates directly to a Sehnsucht nach dem Tode, a Novalis- (or Mahlmann- or Rilke)-like longing for death.

 

 

The Elves’ choice of this same word, ‘stranger’, to signify mankind’s condition of homelessness

implies a corresponding sense of homesickness. ‘Wo bist du, mein geliebtes Land? / Gesucht, geahnt, und nie gekannt!’: Where are you, my beloved land? / Sought for, imagined, and never known!’

 

the ultimate expression of the eternal human search for that unattainable but desirable land

that reminds us of a home we have lost or never known, where the sting is taken from death

 

 

The poem offers no satisfaction to the speaker’s Sehnsucht, it merely channels it; the land cannot be reached, it can only be desired.

In fact, desire persists even when the prize is within one’s grasp. Longing cannot by its nature be sated: once the Nameless Land acquires a name, once it becomes known, the object of desire is merely transferred to another faraway land, another unattainable home.

Eärendil thus becomes a symbol not just of Men’s hope of transcendence, but of their restlessness, their ultimate lack of rootedness in the world of Time, for who among

his former compatriots could tarry on the mortal shore?

This circle of unfulfilled longing, and the depictions of the wanderer unable to be satisfied with either East or West, strongly recall C. S. Lewis’s description of the work of William Morris, where ‘On the one hand we have the passion for immortality … But it is balanced by an opposite feeling

… that the world of mortality is more than enough for our allegiance … [Morris] simply presents the tension. And it is one that cannot be resolved’ (‘William Morris’ in Rehabilitations, 45–6). The tension is not just Morrisian, of course; it could just as well be called Dunsanian. And the wandering protagonists of the German Romantic novel in which a number of Sehnsucht lyrics first appeared, are similarly suspended between the longing for home and the longing for strange, distant lands, between Heimweh (homesickness) and Fernweh (farsickness), associated throughout Tolkien’s legendarium with the Elves.92

 

【托尔金章节的注释】

7/ and for an excellent summary of the Christian vs. pagan debate see Testi. Whittingham devotes three chapters to these matters, as well as to the themes of grace, hope and despair, good out of evil, defeat and victory, and the issue of uncertainty and limited knowledge. Coutras is another worthwhile recent contribution to the subject, especially on death, hope, pagan despair and Christian providence.

 

 

The Númenóreans are a Biblical, mostly an Old Testament, people in all sorts of ways. Tolkien himself referred to them as ‘Noachian’ (in reference to the divine flood that destroys wicked human civilisation, and the few survivors who manage to escape and re-establish life in a new land), and compared them to the ‘Jews’ who only have ‘one physical centre of “worship”’

·托尔金将努门诺尔比作“Noachian”

 

Arda later comes to be identified with the solar system (MR, 337, 403), and Ëa with the universe, i.e. all of ‘Creation’, in the astronomical updating of the whole mythology that occurred late in Tolkien’s life. Arda

Marred signifies a world that is fallen (marred by the Enemy).

 

 

77……See Eilmann, Romanticist, for the most extensive consideration of Tolkien in relation to German Romanticism, both the aesthetic philosophy and the literary practice, and specifically the concept of longing.

Of particular relevance are the chapter on ‘Romanticist Poetology’, the comparative studies of longing in Tolkien and Dunsany and George MacDonald, the sections on Eriol and longing, on Romantic nostalgia,

including ‘existential homesickness’, and the transcendental experience of poetry. The present chapter was written before the German original of Eilmann’s text (J. R. R. Tolkien: Romantiker und Lyriker) became available in English, and its argument is complementary to rather than derivative of the latter. See also Bidlo; and volume 7 of Hither Shore: Interdisciplinary Journal on Modern Fantasy Literature (2010): ‘Tolkien and Romanticism’, which canvasses a whole range of approaches to the subject, including the topic of Sehnsucht and nostalgia.

·托尔金与德国浪漫主义的关联