{"id":382,"date":"2018-11-17T21:05:43","date_gmt":"2018-11-18T02:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/?p=382"},"modified":"2018-11-17T21:05:43","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T02:05:43","slug":"literary-dark-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/2018\/11\/17\/literary-dark-device\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary Dark Device"},"content":{"rendered":"

Article by S. Dorman<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Tevildo Prince of Cats was the first imaginative incarnation of Sauron the Dark Lord, whose power was destroyed in the unmaking of his Ring in the Third Age of Middle-earth. As many know, the process of writing is drafting and redrafting, a sort of making and remaking. An early incarnation of one character told of his learning the tongues of animals, tongues of various elves, of monsters and the early incarnation of orcs, called goblins. And it told of this character’s frustrations in such learning. He even learned the speech of beetles. Yet most of all, learning the languages of men vexed that character. Here we have just a bit of Tolkien himself and how he was inspired under turmoil of WWI to work hard at his invented languages. According to John Garth\u2014teaching Tolkien and the Great War\u2014war provided necessary pressure to do good and continuing work.<\/span><\/p>\n

The subject of Sauron’s appearance came up in the Signum University course on Tolkien and the World Wars, which brought in Paul Fussell\u2019s discussion of \u201cgross dichotomies\u201d in enemy characterizations during time of war. On my first reading of LotR<\/em> I lived in imaginative expectation of Frodo\u2019s eventual meeting with the Dark Lord. As fellow Inkling Warren Lewis suggested in his journal after listening to Tolkien read harrowing scenes, the presence of the Dark Lord is strong in imagination, making one anticipate Frodo\u2019s encounter with his actual form. Because of the elaborate sub-creation of this world I was so involved I felt sure climax must<\/em> involve a face-to-face with Sauron. One may keep wondering how this is going to be handled by the author. I saw discussion on a weblog some time ago about the non-showing in person of Middle-earth\u2019s Dark Lord. One commenter was emphatically grateful that Tolkien had not displayed evil in an imaginatively personal form.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was partly an extra-textual expectation: a scarcely recognized lookout for how authors did things. I was lightning-struck and then completely wrapped up in how this was (not) accomplished. Hugh Brogan, in \u201cTolkien\u2019s Great War,\u201d called it one of the story\u2019s best literary devices. There was a thrill as I listened to Rob Inglis\u2019 dramatic reading\u2014hearing and standing imaginatively beside the wizard as this great battle turned and Gandalf cried the quest had been achieved.<\/span><\/p>\n

Probably scholars and critics have discussed this \u201cdevice\u201d often. And I have considered it over the years, realizing every time how effective it was, but also coming up with an extra-textual reason for it. This may sound off \u2014on account of his handling of Shelob, Ungoliant, Melkor and Melko; Glaurung<\/em>! and others. However, these characters are handled somewhat remotely or in snippets, not always\u2014but largely\u2014from a distance. Maybe it was Tolkien\u2019s own interior innocence stopping him here. For whatever reasons, whether extra-textual, narrative or story-bound, its effectiveness would be bound up in distance.<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked this question in a Mythgard forum for the course, and one student answered in confirmation of course lecturer John Garth\u2019s explication that Frodo was encumbered with the Dark Lord\u2019s presence throughout the quest to unmake the ring. The imagination of both reader and character work brilliantly in this handling.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a non-showing, powerful and suggestive, but more effective than any face-to-face with a person Tolkien might have provided. Perhaps I could call it showing suggestively: Spiritual combat rather than a face-to-face. The face-to-face meeting for Frodo and readers is nonexistent.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my experience of Tolkien\u2019s evil ones, which is not scholarly, nor deep-reading, I feel them in my imagination at some remove. However, while reading and listening to John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War<\/em><\/a>, I had a much greater sense of the spiritual dilemma of the inhabitants of Middle-earth. And through spiritual descriptions of the evil influence of Melko in The Book of Lost Tales<\/em>, and in the later reimagined Melkor, and in then the \u201cnameless one\u201d (Sauron) in his various textual incarnations, I wondered\u2014is there to be no true crushing imaginary face-to-face? We do have face-to-face confrontations between Hurin and Melkor in The Silmarillion<\/em>, and maybe one or two others, and Sauron with other names, earlier, as well, but they seem removed, remote, just as the telling of The<\/em> Silmarillion<\/em><\/a> itself seems remote.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously Tolkien was face to face with his evil characters in imagining them. And perhaps he continued to be for the rest of his life as he reworked them. That is, he did not become disenchanted after they were created. I disagree with his friend Christopher Wiseman who wrote to Tolkien that finished work is vanity, that, once created, characters are essentially dead. Wiseman’s idea? That characters are solely alive in being worked out on paper. Mr. Garth compared the continuing process to the ongoing living music of the Ainur<\/em> in Tolkien\u2019s sub-creating world. Also, I wonder if Christopher Wiseman was perhaps thinking on paper, wanting to map out his own thoughts, prod his friend, and be alive himself, while doing so, during the war. And many of Tolkien\u2019s characters seemed never-finished in his recreation of them as he kept retroactively refitting them for continuity. But to readers such as myself they seem living, and (maybe) not finished, either. Yet I feel something<\/em> true in Wiseman\u2019s words on this. A sub-creator so absorbed in the process feels \u201cdisappeared\u201d into it. (Anyone else looking sees them at their easel or desk, the reverse invisibility of a would-be Ring wielder.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But I think that Tolkien did give us a person-to-person, face-to-face with Sauron. That he gave us the imaginative close-up without remoteness or more impersonal narrative later used by elvish framers of tales. Mr. Garth describes this particular incarnational dark lord\u2019s face-to-face as \u201castonishing[ly] grotesque, vain, capricious, and cruel.\u201d And his name, in The Book of Lost Tales<\/em>, was Tevildo Prince of Cats. Maybe Tevildo is the one Frodo would have seen face-to-face had he been taken before Sauron.<\/span><\/p>\n

Artists don\u2019t need temporary charismatic or political power, or the might granted to Hitler in his later life. To express evil, they need only be able to paint postcards, extend vision on pieces of paper. Controlled and precise, Tolkien\u2019s artistic acuity rejected display of the \u201cruddy little \u2026\u201d as pathetic. This is what Tolkien called Hitler in real life: \u201cruddy little ignoramus.\u201d Perhaps \u201cThe Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest,\u201d would not have been such a powerful thrilling moment for readers if the thing using the ring\u2019s power were shown as a Tevildo or a Gollum. One might almost say Tevildo was the creature Frodo saw face-to-face, day in and day out, on his guided tour of Mordor: and that it was ignorant little Tevildo who bit off his finger and fell into the fire, consumed.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the textual history students were given, we learned that he wasn\u2019t the nameless after all. He had many names. Sauron Deceiver, Gorthaur the Cruel, Th\u00fb, Abominable, Thauron<\/em>, the Enemy, the Dark Lord of Mordor, the Eye of Barad-d\u00fbr, Lord of the Rings. \u2014This?<\/em> This paltry being deceiver<\/em> of all Endor? (Though some were not deceived but still had to fight.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Tolkien\u2019s narratives shape-shifted\u2014in a continuous state of recreation, refitting, rethinking. We know CS Lewis relied on images, \u201cpictures,\u201d and tying them together with narrative. But from Lewis and Tolkien we also learn to research things needed to make a story picturesque, deep, live. This course showed me detailed unity in Tolkien\u2019s work over time, bringing aid in imagining a face-to-face between Frodo and the Dark Lord. I\u2019m not a reader of poetry and so don\u2019t know Milton\u2019s intellectual Satan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Otherwise, and younger, I might have immersed my imagination in his charismatic Satan. Because for some devilish reason it then interested me to know about <\/em>the devil, to see Sauron face-to-face. But Tevildo is not the great Miltonian figure, as I understand from Paradise Lost<\/em> summaries. Sauron\u2019s shape-shifting days were over after the downfall of Numenor (where he achieved intellectual power, and the uncorrupted man form)\u2014before loosing much in the destruction he planned.<\/span><\/p>\n

If power were stripped from Sauron, power which can only be on loan to him, what\u2019s left is Tevildo the kitchen master, bullying, paltry and proud. As Sauron (n\u00e9e Tevildo) he could only have been a bully using that spirit in bodily form face-to-face to harm Frodo after retrieving the ring in Mordor. I don\u2019t think, given these pathetic qualities, he would have said to himself, \u201cNow where was I?\u201d \u2014and forgotten about Frodo. On Gollum he used intimidation with a purpose, but the dark lord\u2019s pathetic selfishness would have taken vengeance on someone who is not craven. And Frodo, I\u2019m imagining, would have stood up to it without the ring, no matter the frightful form standing before him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps this is wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

Venom in a small creature can kill. The venom was in the ring on Sauron\u2019s hand for his use until Isildur cut off and carried it away. Frodo, after his experience of oppression in Morgul Vale, might not have loved his life enough to care. Seriously, imagine Frodo sticking his tongue out: If he were undeceived. Power, cloaking the paltriness of Sauron, goes with the ring. When the ring goes, power is gone, and we see the surprising little thing. What, this!?<\/em> \u2014this paltry being deceived (almost) the whole world?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a9 S. Dorman<\/span><\/p>\n

This essay is part of a collection on creativity. There are three essay books, each of which has the phrase “free will” in its title.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Dorman is author of Fantastic Travelogue: Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis Talk Things over in The Hereafter<\/em><\/a>, a science fiction spun off her Master’s thesis in humanities from California State University Dominguez Hills. (The thesis revolved around the Christian foundation of the humanities.)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Visit S. Dorman’s Author Page<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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