Here I’ve posted snippets of a few more various critical essays that relate to
this chapter, and to what we’ve been talking about this week. Any one of them
is interesting; feel free to read and respond to as many or as few as you like.
Shippey, in The Road
to Middle-earth, argues that the infamous connection between hobbit and
rabbit (which Tolkien tended to deny) may be found in the fact that the word
“rabbit”, and rabbits themselves, were not common – were ‘out of place’ – in
medieval England, just as the bourgeois hobbits are ‘out of place’ in the
fantastic world of Middle-earth.
A. Does this illuminate the episode of Sam, Gollum, and the rabbits, for
you?
Lewis and Currie, in The
Uncharted Realms of Tolkien, pursue the identity between hobbits and
rabbits down the hole of the ‘beast-fable’. This includes a deliberate rebuttal
of Shippey’s argument, above.
B. Are Lewis & Currie on solid ground here, or lost in a warren? How would
you grade their work vs. Shippey’s?
Rosebury, in Tolkien:
A Cultural Phenomenon, analyzes why Gollum cannot eat healthy food.
C. I get the part about cannibalism, but what does Rosebury mean that
Gollum’s degradation harmonises with Augustinian theology?
Chance, in Tolkien’s
Art: A Mythology for England, maintains that Book III is about
intellectual sins, but that Book IV is about corporeal sins, the body—about
food. She cites the focus on the disgusting Gollum, Shelob, the Dead Marshes,
the rabbit stew episode, even the hospitality of Faramir and Gollum’s hunt for
fish in the Forbidden Pool.
D. Do you agree? Do you think this is a useful way of thinking about Book
IV?
Croft, in The Great
War and Tolkien’s Memory, draws on Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great
War and Modern Memory. She points out that the use of pastoral
conventions in Tolkien’s fantasy fiction serves the same purposes as it does in
other, more realistic, post-WWI writing. She notes that the Shire primarily
stands for the pastoral, but that the Ithilien episode also has pastoral
qualities.
E. Do you think this is intentional on Tolkien’s part? What has Tolkien
changed in his version of the pastoral ideal from the mainstream tradition,
especially in Ithilien? Does Croft’s construction hold up to Tolkien’s changes?
Sinex, in Tolkien’s
Haradrim and the Medieval Construction of the Other, attempts to link
the Haradrim warriors described in this chapter to medieval cariacatures of the
African Saracens, citing the Haradrim’s use of red and yellow colors, and
reading Gollum’s and Sam’s statements that the Haradrim are “large” to mean
they are distinctly larger than the men of Gondor.
F. Do you agree with Sinex’s interpretation?
Drailog, in Oh You’re
Hopeless, seems to agree with Chance and Rosebury, but also reveals a
hitherto unknown literary connection relating to this chapter.
G. Should Jim Carrey have been cast as Gollum in the New Line films, to
follow this new interpretation more closely?
Text of this
chapter
Everyone is laughing for heart's ease, now that they're in Ithilien! Join me in the Reading Room this week for a squireific topic-oriented discussion of Chapter 4, Book IV of The Two Towers: "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit".
squire online:
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The Valaquenta discussion
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