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Et Tu, Faramir? - Page 6

© Michael Martinez

Nonetheless, Herodotus' hand is quite evident in Tolkien's Middle-earth stories. Tolkien, like Herodotus, was trying to preserve something. Like St. John viewing the apocalypse, Tolkien was granted a vision and he hastened to write down whatever he saw. But Tolkien saw so much he couldn't describe it all, he couldn't record it all. He became sidetracked time and time again. For Tolkien, history only became interesting when it was tied to a word. A word is such a simple thing, and yet it has a long history. Words seldom just appear, although we seem to coin them all the time. They mostly come down to us from other people, and often the subtle changes we make in the uses and meanings of words compress volumes of history which will be forgotten. Tolkien often stopped to explain where a word came from, and that of course entailed relating the history of the thing the word described, which in turn led to other words. As a formal historian, Tolkien was worse than Herodotus. Herodotus at least followed some plan. Tolkien would start a book and leave it unfinished, abandoning the work near the end, halfway through, or near the beginning, as whimsy or real life led him. Maybe somewhere in all the never-realized plans, Tolkien did indeed intend to create a literature for Middle-earth. He certainly didn't lack for basic plots: the children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, Aldarion and Erendis, Feanor, and at least a half dozen other stories actually made it through the process in coherent enough shape that Christopher Tolkien really did not need to do much work on them. One such experiment may have been the "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth". Tolkien says the purpose of the "Athrabeth" is "dramatic: to exhibit the generosity of Finrod's mind, his love and pity for Andreth, and the tragic situations which must arise in the meeting of Elves and Men". Tolkien's commentary on the "Athrabeth" makes it clear the narrative is simply a modernist perspective on the cultural differences between Eldar and Edain. But it would not have taken much work, since the narrative consists mostly of dialogue, to present the "Athrabeth" as a translation of an ancient text. However, Tolkien seems to have abandoned the motif of feigned translation for most of his post-LoTR writing. The only significant corpus of feigned translations was published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but that collection of poems is unsatisfactory, as most of them were written independently of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and they do not reflect much of Tolkien's thought about the styles and voices of the ancient narrators whose traditions he was passing on.

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