High tragedy — and no hobbits

A couple of months back I ordered The Children of Hurin for my mom for Mother’s Day — as I’ve muttered elsewhere if not yet on here, it’s rather satisfying to be able to buy Tolkien-related gifts for her, ever since her world changed when Orlando Bloom first came riding in on the screen back in 2001, blonde tresses flowing in the wind. (We were joking the other day about the death-grip handclamp on my shoulder she gave me along with a “Who is THAT?” in my ear. Now if only I had that impact whenever I walked in a room, screen-fame as yet not being mine.)

I read it yesterday in fits and starts — the sun was just almost too beautiful and it was better to clear my mind every so often from what is one of Tolkien’s darkest tales. If The Lord of the Rings is eucatastrophe — his own coined term for the happiest of resolutions after the most horrific of times — then much about his work that made up the background of his story consisted of catastrophe, disaster upon disaster resulting from the initial fall of his legendarium’s Satanic figure Morgoth. The distinction can easily be seen in which characters survive the story — if in LOTR the only major ‘good’ characters who perish during the story are Boromir, Theoden and, arguably, Denethor, in Children of Hurin, discounting a few secondary figures who meet their own doom separately in later years, the sole survivor is Hurin himself, literally left holding the last victim in his arms as her life ends. The line from Galadriel in LOTR about ‘fighting the long defeat’ has some of its greatest resonance here and most effective — the only reality is that of the briefest of conditional victories followed by utter despair. If the theme of story could be summed up in one word, it might simply be ‘frustration’ — a bland term for describing a situation where there is no way out, nowhere to escape, nothing that can ultimately be done to escape fate.

It should be noted that Tolkien drew on a clear model for the lead character of the story, Turin Turambar — the Finnish mythological figure Kullervo, whose life course and final resolution bears many similarities to Tolkien’s creation. What makes his story all the more compelling in Tolkien’s universe is that it again proves the lie to what has often been one of the arguments against his work — namely, that there is no emotional shading in his characters, that the split between good and evil is absolute without means of distinction. That many of his figures evince this distinction is undeniable, but it is inaccurate to say that they all do, and it’s little surprise as well that many of the most memorable characters are caught between these impulses, and that not all make the ‘right’ decision even as they make a logical one — thus my mention of Denethor above, a far more compelling figure in the book than the strong but still oversimplified portrayal in the recent movies allowed for outside of a few key moments.

But it could be argued that Denethor fails because he despairs in the face of other possibilities — the corrective voice of Gandalf even at the end provides an alternate choice which is rejected. Turin, the only other major figure who commits suicide in Middle-earth’s history besides Denethor, has no such figure of hope — he literally has nothing to rely on in the end but his sword, and does what he feels is the only possible thing to do with it, while the last person he talks to merely confirms all the horror he has already experienced. Turin’s fate and those of all those he comes in contact with (as he sees it) is merely to work out the worst possible crimes in the moral universe of the legendarium, from the abandonment of family to the slaying of friends to incest.

That last point can’t be emphasized enough, though it should be noted that as through so much of his work Tolkien is carefully reticent about the details — he doesn’t need to spell them out, when the bare facts are detailed, and while ‘the children of Hurin’ themselves do not act with conscious knowledge, they react with despair when they realize what has happened. Sexuality in Tolkien reaches its peak in this story, touching on everything from forced marriage via a conquering power to love triangles to attempted rape — it could be argued that precisely because nearly everything sexual in the story is an example of something twisted that Tolkien himself had a horror of it, and certainly there’s plenty of grist for that mill (the Shelob sequence in LOTR has been an understandable focus of that for many years, and not without reason). Yet somehow it makes the remote stories that eventually made up The Silmarillion more understandable as well — that Tolkien never was able to organize those overlaid stories and tales to his own final satisfaction can be seen as unfortunate, but in all the various collections that have come out over the years under the stewardship of his son Christopher, a decades-long effort which this book likely culminates, the wrestling with these issues and many other ones, up to and including the question of if there was something immoral in the very act of sub-creation, another one of Tolkien’s own terms, shows again that there’s something more to his work than often meets the eye.

That many of Tolkien’s moral conclusions and strictures are not mine does not overrule my attraction to his work, of course; I’ve wrestled with that long ago myself and life goes on. And the story in The Children of Hurin is not an unfamiliar one, I’d already read variants of it plenty of times over my own decades-long commitment to his work. But isolated as it was from a larger narrative where things finally resolve happily — though far too late for most everyone who participates in it — and illustrated deftly by Alan Lee, who remains one of my favorite illustrators in general as he has since the 1980s — it felt all the more grimly overwhelming and sorrowful, the antithesis of LOTR in so many ways. Tolkien at the least knew this — not everything works out as planned, and not all fairy-stories come true.