Ah, see, now this is the scary thing about LJ. You figure no one's reading (or at least no one outside your immediate circle), and suddenly a daunting personage arrives. Hello! I've been lurking around your blog for some time now, and it's always strikingly erudite (though done in teeny font). I'm also quite fond of the Fredegund/Beruthiel comparison. I like Beruthiel's position as a fairy tale figure even to the characters in a legend, but it would have been nice if Tolkien had decided to flesh out her story a bit more. Ah well.
Surely it's not too screamingly positivistic to observe that while all texts may or may not be created equal (depending on one's theoretical and/or moral allegiances), all sources are certainly not? Not at all. Any responsible scholar would agree with you. I suppose it depends on how much you're willing to trust your translator, since all we have is a "translation". I'm certain I do the good professor a disservice, since he was a careful scholar by all accounts (I read "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" some years ago and remember being impressed, but it's been a while). So it isn't fair to him that I should tar him with the same brush as other translators and scholars of his generation, some of whom were rather less careful about avoiding inserting their own preoccupations into their translations than they should have been. But that is, of course, just what I have done.
Elves at Helm's Deep left out? Not seeing the likelihood or the logic. Ah, well, my acceptance of that is probably affected by problems in the sources I'm currently working with for something else, problems of the "look sideways and vital things disappear" variety. I have people suddenly turning up present at councils they hadn't been attending a minute ago, important declarations that were made, then weren't, then were again... that sort of thing. I have a whole synod that every reliable source but one fails to mention occurring, but since that one source is the prologue to the major work produced at said synod, obviously it did happen. I'm just not certain why it isn't mentioned elsewhere.
it doesn't wipe out my irritation at some of the more gratuitous alterations. I wouldn't expect it to, since you obviously have a much greater love for the books than I do. Actually, I would be surprised if it worked as well for anyone else as it does for myself. The hard-core book fanatics certainly wouldn't be swayed (and I can hardly blame them), and those who haven't read the books probably wouldn't see the point of the exercise in the first place. I suppose someone like myself, who has read the books but not recently and for whom the details have become blurred, and who has seen the PJ-versions but doesn't worship them as the "best movies ever!!!", might be interested. But maybe not, even then.
Since you obviously have quite a bit of familiarity with the more arcane Tolkien works, and since I don't often get to pick the brains of Tolkien scholars (one of which I emphatically am not), mind if I ask you a question? Did Tolkien ever say, in his letters or elsewhere, what source "Frodo" used for the Rohan episode? Several of the other sources are mentioned, I believe (I seem to recall Gimli being responsible for the information of dwarfs in the Appendices, for example), but I don't remember one for Rohan. Are we to assume it was Aragorn, perhaps? Just out of curiosity, really.
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Date: 2003-03-10 02:31 pm (UTC)Surely it's not too screamingly positivistic to observe that while all texts may or may not be created equal (depending on one's theoretical and/or moral allegiances), all sources are certainly not? Not at all. Any responsible scholar would agree with you. I suppose it depends on how much you're willing to trust your translator, since all we have is a "translation". I'm certain I do the good professor a disservice, since he was a careful scholar by all accounts (I read "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" some years ago and remember being impressed, but it's been a while). So it isn't fair to him that I should tar him with the same brush as other translators and scholars of his generation, some of whom were rather less careful about avoiding inserting their own preoccupations into their translations than they should have been. But that is, of course, just what I have done.
Elves at Helm's Deep left out? Not seeing the likelihood or the logic. Ah, well, my acceptance of that is probably affected by problems in the sources I'm currently working with for something else, problems of the "look sideways and vital things disappear" variety. I have people suddenly turning up present at councils they hadn't been attending a minute ago, important declarations that were made, then weren't, then were again... that sort of thing. I have a whole synod that every reliable source but one fails to mention occurring, but since that one source is the prologue to the major work produced at said synod, obviously it did happen. I'm just not certain why it isn't mentioned elsewhere.
it doesn't wipe out my irritation at some of the more gratuitous alterations. I wouldn't expect it to, since you obviously have a much greater love for the books than I do. Actually, I would be surprised if it worked as well for anyone else as it does for myself. The hard-core book fanatics certainly wouldn't be swayed (and I can hardly blame them), and those who haven't read the books probably wouldn't see the point of the exercise in the first place. I suppose someone like myself, who has read the books but not recently and for whom the details have become blurred, and who has seen the PJ-versions but doesn't worship them as the "best movies ever!!!", might be interested. But maybe not, even then.
Since you obviously have quite a bit of familiarity with the more arcane Tolkien works, and since I don't often get to pick the brains of Tolkien scholars (one of which I emphatically am not), mind if I ask you a question? Did Tolkien ever say, in his letters or elsewhere, what source "Frodo" used for the Rohan episode? Several of the other sources are mentioned, I believe (I seem to recall Gimli being responsible for the information of dwarfs in the Appendices, for example), but I don't remember one for Rohan. Are we to assume it was Aragorn, perhaps? Just out of curiosity, really.