meta: so much to enjoy and to be, and to do

[lotesse]

I'm writing Frodo-doesn't-sail-from-the-Grey-Havens fic. I feel sort of ambivalent about the whole thing. I don't think it would be overstating things to say that the Grey Havens were pretty much the central trauma of my adolescence. The pain of that unhappy ending - the loss of the Elves, of Frodo, of the beauties that burn like cold iron - I'm still not over it. I both love and hate Tolkien's ending.

It's not the only ending I feel that way about. Peter Pan, Narnia, His Dark Materials, the Matter of Britain. These awful, inevitable losses of faerie, of innocence, of hope. But all of those terrible endings I can abide by. I feel like they're unquestionable. Right. Proper. I might want Peter Pan to have a different ending, but I would never dream of making a new one. That would be denial of an undeniable truth. Wrong, somehow.

But I keep trying to rewrite the Grey Havens. The first fic I ever wrote was a Sam-sails-too, and the first long piece I ever managed was a Frodo-returns. So what is it about that ending in particular that renders it malleable to me? Why doesn't it feel wrong to try and keep Frodo in the Shire?

It's on Frodo's behalf that I want to object to the Havens. I've never been able to imagine Frodo over the Sea, to picture what he would do or be there. It feels all wrong, too. And I absolutely cannot imagine that any Elf or Maia could give Frodo better care than Master Samwise could. Frodo is a Baggins - he belongs in the Shire. He needs community, not even more isolation.

A while ago, fictualities gave me an interesting - and utterly brilliant - frame to stretch this issue across. She picked apart that quote of Tolkien's, "I think the simple 'rustic' love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, the longing for Elves, and sheer beauty."



She wrote: can we really say that Tolkien was emotionally neutral in the great struggle between "ordinary life" and "sheer beauty"? It seems to me that Tolkien stacks the deck a bit when he puts beauty of the side of quests in the first place. And even though LotR ends in the union of opposites, some aspects of the style and characterization emphasize not the characters' earthy qualities, but what Tolkien insists on referring to as their "high" qualities. Aragorn becomes less and less like Strider as the epic progresses. The Frodo who danced on the table gives way to someone who is immensely more complicated and more alien -- but perhaps wiser as well. I think Tolkien's heart lay on side of sheer beauty and aspiration, and that therefore Rosie was simultaneously crucial and hard to portray. He was intellectually committed to a union of opposites, and so he respected what she represented -- in theory.

Not to overly psychoanalyze my author, but I do wonder if we can't connect Tolkien's aesthetic allegiances to his own positions of race/class/gender. Being as he was a man of a certain socioeconomic standing, working with his mind rather than with his hands, disconnected as men under patriarchy are from reproduction and generation and the body - perhaps he couldn't access the virtues that he recognizes in the earthy. Why he couldn't love them as much.

I know that it's been true of me. When I was a little girl, solitary and independent and living only in my mind, I was all about the Elves. It's only as I've grown up, had sex, worked for a living, taken care of other people, that good plain hobbitsense has begun to usurp Elvishness in my heart.

Anyway. The Grey Havens.

Coming as I've begun to from the opposite side of Tolkien's pretty binary, I see love and healing as being on the hobbits' side. Sam can help Frodo. Elrond cannot. It's on these grounds that I feel comfortable resisting the Grey Havens, rewriting them. Some part of them, that is - the Elves can't stay, and the Age of Men has to begin. But Frodo need not fade away with them, he needn't.

(Note: I would never want the ending of LotR to actually change, in part because I think a happier ending would erase a lot of the anti-war tone of the book. LotR doesn't glorify battle, or soften its consequences - and for that I love it. The bittersweet ending slaps more macho readers upside the head with the indelible destruction of war, makes it real, strips away any veneer of "cool." But.)

And of course something would have to change in the story to get him to stay. I dunno. Maybe Rose needs to go - or maybe we need to pull a Pretty Good Year and introduce polyamory (pgyiscanonitis). Any anti-Havens fic has to find a machine to change the text - I've got a new tactic going right now that I'm pretty excited about, that might achieve a believable context for renewed hope.

Here's the thing: everything that Frodo says of Sam - "You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do....Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere....and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more" - is also true of Frodo himself. Things will never go back to being the way they were, but there are alternatives to death! Sam finds a new place in the new world that their quest made for them. Frodo can also take that last step of the hero journey, enrich the world around him with the wisdom that he gained through his suffering.

(I've also got to wonder if Tolkien's Catholicism had anything to do with his perception of his hero as an absent martyr. Certainly not suggesting Frodo as Christ here though!)

Obviously, part of this is me being all slashy and otp-ful. But I don't think that's all of it. Maybe I'm just overly imprinted on PGY. But I'm working on anti-Havens fic right now, and it's not the first time either - though I'm so not going to link to my last attempt!

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I miss fictualities.

I never even thought to rebel against The Grey Havens. I let Tolkien set the rules of his own universe and didn't question them in some way. I felt sorry for Frodo for being so damaged, and feared that I was more like him than like Sam. Sam, loyal and practical and in the real world, and Frodo, so much in his head that he couldn't experience the present, only the traumatic past.

This reminds me of reading In a Different Voice. Did you read that book? I remember realizing that it was all right to think outside the rules that the game set for itself, and it was a shock. It's a pleasant shock to read the kind of casual literary criticism that fans put forward about the books I read as a kid.

You mentioned Narnia--that book I rebelled against immediately. So it wasn't all of them that I read in such a docile way.

[lotesse]

Is that the Carol Gilligan book? If so, then yes.

I don't really want to rebel - more to gently suggest that there might be another ending possible. That tends to be my modus operandi. Certainly it is re Narnia, which I adore and yet resist simultaneously. Tolkien's not wrong, but I'm looking for another way out.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

(I just checked and I am twenty years older than you are. Holy shit.)

[lotesse]

Fnerk. This is why I only just started giving out my age info online - I have this tendency to hang out with people way older than I am, and sometimes they feel weird about me. But I dunno, my best friend right now irl is a fifty-something professor, so it's not at all out of the ordinary to my way of thinking :)

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

No, of course not. I have many friends who are 20 years younger, and also older, online, and some even more. I just...don't get used to it.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I think when I first read the Grey Havens I thought of it so much as being death that I just accepted it as that. That's why Sam joins him when he's older and therefore dying too. Maybe because I was always a hobbit person and never really into elves, so I couldn't imagine wanting to be anywhere not Bag End for healing!

[lotesse]

Mmm. See, I think that I was so desperate for a happy ending that I couldn't bear to read it as outright death. That would have broken me for true.

And inorite! Bag End would be the best place in the world to go if you didn't feel well! Silly Frodo for not seeing that.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

My first exposure to LotR was when the movies came out. About halfway through, I decided to finish watching the movies before reading the books, so that I wouldn't get them mixed up. I don't remember much of the reading; I need to revisit them.

I have better thoughts on Peter Pan. I know I saw the Disney movie as a child but don't remember when I first read the book...sometime around my freshman year of college, probably. That was around the same time the live movie came out, with Jason Isaacs as Mr. Darling/Captain Hook. I was amazed to realize how much casual potential morbid-ness Mr. Barrie included. (ex. Peter Pan casually talking about waking up pirates before killing them, and cutting off Captain Hook's hand.) I'm listening to the audio book driving to and from work.

The ending is sort of tragic: the Darling children forget to fly, Peter Pan is traumatized when he learns Wendy has grown up and has a daughter, etc. But I think it's worst for Peter, as Barrie tells the reader not to feel too sorry for Wendy because she wanted to grow up. Yet I wonder if he got over it quickly, as he keeps forgetting about things outside Never-Never Land. If you haven't seen it, the DVD extra for the live movie has a cut scene (incomplete) where Peter Pan returns once Wendy has grown.

[lotesse]

That scene is the end of Barrie's book - the one where Wendy has to tell him that she can't go back to Neverland - and oh it upsets me. I had the book as a wee, wee sprog, and I utterly identified with Wendy, and I was so very upset then by the idea that I should have to grow up one day like it or not, and that in doing so I'd lose fairies and adventures and Peter. I kind of still am - tho of course growing up is less terrible when you're actually doing it.

But I do think that there's something very true about Peter Pan, in that yes, in order to grow up one must cease to be a child, and there is something that gets lost in that transition. And once you grow up you can never really be a child again. Childlike, yes, but not a child.

Azo, if you don't know it, there's a fab Peter Pan musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which is the film version that I grew up with. My sister and I used to do all the dances while we watched.