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Et Tu, Faramir? - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

With each retelling of the story, one must assume there would have been lost details, and new embellishments. In attempting to rationalize the obviously unscientific history of the Two Trees and the creation of the Sun and Moon as recounted in the Silmarillion legends, Tolkien at one point in his life concluded that the original stories had become confused and misunderstood through serial retellings. As a linguist who knew the relationship between Indo-European *dyeu- and its descendants Tyr (a Norse god of war), Zeus (the king of the Greek gods), and Latin Deus, Tolkien understood very well how words and the traditions bound up with them could change through the centuries. Tyr, Zeus, Jove, and other derivatives were associated with the sky, but Tyr went on to become a warrior-god of secondary importance (his most notable adventure consisting of his sacrificing his right hand in the capture of the Fenris wolf, which undoubtedly inspired Beren's confrontation with Carcharoth). Hence, Tolkien would have had no problem with all these stories-behind-stories. Somewhere in each he preserved enough of the true legend that the reader can understand Tolkien is sharing a memory of what really happened. But he is not sharing the literature which originally preserved that memory. To be faithful to the concept, Tolkien would have had to write fairly simple verses and narratives. For example, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is often cited as the first great adventure story, but modern English translations of it -- were they presented as original works -- would hardly win any readers because of sheer textual boredom:

He who saw everything in the broad-boned earth, and knew what was to be known
Who had experienced what there was, and had become familiar with all things
He, to whom wisdom clung like cloak, and who dwelt together with Existence in Harmony
He knew the secret of things and laid them bare. And told of those times before the Flood
In his city, Uruk, he made the walls, which formed a rampart stretching on
And the temple called Eanna, which was the house of An, the Sky God
And also of Inanna, Goddes of Love and Battle
Source: http://www.angelfire.com/tx/gatestobabylon/temple1.html

Admittedly, a modern translation sinks or swims largely on the talent of the translator, but modern readers have the luxury of buying concise paperback books, whereas the original readers of the Gilgamesh epic had to handle clay tablets. The tale was preserved from a true oral tradition, too, and most audiences would not have been able to wallow in a story the way we can follow Hobbits from book to book, night after night, week after week. The really great stories were probably told at festivals, weddings, and on holidays celebrating special events.

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