Friday, July 03, 2020

Wagner and Tolkien and the Ring connection

Given that I care little for Tolkien, and gave even less thought to Wagner until his Cycle was coming to my city and I was convinced by someone on the radio that to see it is "a life changing experience", I never really pondered the question of how derivative one Ring was of the other.

So, I am happy to have just read a discussion of this from The New Yorker in 2003.   Some quotes, but you should go read the whole thing:
Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner’s. “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,” he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of “Die Walküre” not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas. True, the Volsunga Saga features a ring from a cursed hoard, but it possesses no executive powers. In the “Nibelungenlied” saga, there is a magic rod that could be used to rule all, but it just sits around. Wagner combined these two objects into the awful amulet that is forged by Alberich from the gold of the Rhine. When Wotan steals the ring for his own godly purposes, Alberich places a curse upon it, and in so doing he speaks of “the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring.” Such details make it hard to believe Tolkien’s disavowals. Admit it, J.R.R., you used to run around brandishing a walking stick and singing “Nothung! Nothung!” like every other besotted Oxford lad.

It is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things. Power, for them, was not a baton that could be passed from one person to another; those with power were born with power, and those without, without. By Wagner’s time, it was clear that a marginal individual would soon be able to unleash terror with the flick of a wrist. Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Nor did the ring have to be understood only in terms of military science. Mass media now allowed for the worldwide destruction of an idea, a reputation, a belief system, a culture. In a hundred ways, men were forging things over which they had no control, and which ended up controlling them. 
 Now here is a crucial take on what I might now take to calling "the real Ring" to annoy Tolkien fans:
There is a widespread conception of Wagner’s cycle as a bombastic nationalistic saga in which blond-haired heroes triumph over dwarfish, vaguely Jewish enemies. Wagner unquestionably left himself open to this interpretation, but the “Ring” is not at all what it seems. It is in fact a prolonged assault on the very idea of worldly power, the cult of the monumental—everything that we think of as “Wagnerian.” At the beginning, the god Wotan is looking to expand his realm. But every step he takes to assert himself over the affairs of others, to make his will reality, leads inexorably to his downfall. He is marked from the outset, and the ring becomes a symbol of the corruption of his authority. Tolkien believes in the forces of good, in might for right. Wagner dismisses all that—he had an anarchist streak early on—and sees redemption only in love.

When Tolkien stole Wagner’s ring, he discarded its most significant property—that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it’s hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.) The sexual opacity of Tolkien’s saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron’s bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-dûr? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction.
This is fantastic!  It's giving me a whole new explanation as to why I didn't respond to Lord of the Rings - because it makes no, um, meta-emotional sense, to coin a phrase.  Back to what the real Ring - heh - is about:
Wagner, by contrast, uses the ring to shine a light on various intense, confused, all-too-human relationships. Alberich forges the ring only after the Rhine maidens turn away his advances. Wotan becomes obsessed with it as a consequence of his loveless marriage; he buries himself in his work. Even after he sees through his delusions, and achieves a quasi-Buddhist acceptance of his powerlessness, he has nothing else to lean on, not even his Gandalfian staff, and wanders off into the night. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, lost in their love for each other, succeed in remaking the ring as an ordinary trinket, a symbol of their devotion. They assert their earthbound passion against Wotan’s godly world, and thus bring it down. The apparatus of myth itself—the belief in higher and lower powers, hierarchies, orders—crumbles with the walls of Valhalla. Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.
Cool.

6 comments:

  1. People I listen to see these connections, and perhaps if I had seen the ring cycle I would see connections too. But I'm very doubtful. You see they are both pulling from dark ages pre-Christian stories. So there is going to be a resemblance there that is more of cousinship rather than direct. But if you look at the way the ring starts off in the first and more perfectly crafted kids book, the ring doesn't take on that majestic purpose. The themes of the Hobbit are far more down to earth.

    In the first book the ring doesn't deal with any great lords or wizards. The ring confers eternal youth. But has a psychological and sometimes physical effect on you, as if you were a junkie. Its not a force multiplier for an already powerful practitioner of the dark arts. Its not a super-weapon at that point, that would make a white wizard even more powerful, but yet pervert him into becoming an evil tyrant.

    Because I never had heard of Wagner, when I read the second book many times over, I understood that the themes of the story had grown massively more large. Kind of like where you start off in Scarface where these guys are poor migrants doing dishes and swearing every other word, and everything very down to earth. But by the end of Scarface its been blown up into this huge Shakespearean drama.

    So in the second book I just saw the ring as the moral equivalent of nuclear weapons. And so since the first book was completed well before World War II and the second was finished only after the nuclear bombs were used, thats where I figured the ring was coming from. So I thought of the second book as being a bit of a product of the War and a story about power making you evil. A bit like books like "1984", "Lord Of The Flies", Even perhaps "Atlas Shrugged."

    Now let me tell you some good reasons why you may not have liked the Lord Of The Rings. Coming after a children's masterpiece, like Huckleberry Finn or Wind In The Willows, you'd have to say its really quite a flawed book. From a character point of view Bilbo was very strongly drawn. But since his nephew is virtually the same character the second fellow waters things down a bit. Gollum is a fantastically memorable character ....... And Gandalf the Grey is so strongly drawn that he's more real to people than their own relatives. But he becomes totally cut out and flat as soon as he returns as Gandalf the White. A similar effect happens to Strider. Once he becomes a King as opposed to a "Ranger" all the life is sucked out of him. Both of them start acting as if they were posing for cameras.

    I think the old man got a little bit tired towards the end of the writing. There are memorable scenes and all that. But the characters aren't as strong, and he may have not had sufficient creative energy left over, to actually come up with a valid portrayal of this mysterious Sauron character. We never meet Sauron when really we should have, if he could have had a fairly rich character portrayal and be differentiated powerfully from the other wizards.

    So in some ways its a comparative dud. But what are these giant themes? Well I'll let you others think about that. But I want to point out one idea to contextualise the two books taken together.

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  2. You see this book cover? You see this?

    http://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/data/media/53/cover_lotr_green.jpg

    This came out on a reprinting about 1991 or so when I was in Brisbane. I looked at that and I was kind of captivated. Thats a key thing about what the two books ended up being about. It was Gandalf. It was Gandalf that waged a hundred years war, against the forces of evil. Maybe it was a war as long as the 100 years war. Maybe it was as long as the 100 years war and the war of the roses taken together.

    And he did it getting about this strange Gondwanaland-like continent .........ON FOOT. Hows this guys form???? He's walking all over this massive, dangerous and enchanted continent, just with his staff, a few odds and ends, and one change of clobber. He's doing it all on foot.

    And thats the only answer for the human race really. We are so controlled by the rotten people. And we need to have that 100 year or more likely 500 year perspective to make this a better world. So we can't go killing anyone. The better world is demi-Georgist, permaculture heavy, there are canals everywhere ...... and only manufacturing billionaires and only billionaires in terms of their depreciating plant and equipment. Billionaires who cannot possibly stay billionaires for very much longer in other words. But whatever ones view of a better world it can only come about by Gandalfian like action. Because there is no way to take the bad guys head on.

    I just don't see a great deal of Wagner in what this is all about. I think its mostly cousinship. And perhaps only a smidgen of direct inspiration.

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  3. Sexual opacity in Lord Of The Rings is all about the fact that the first book was a kids story. So sexual themes weren't going to be passed off on the kids. Whereas Wagner went from being an outright revolutionary to being a bit of a sexual revolutionary ..... at least for some part of his life. So the writer is pushing way too much into it. There is a bit of dirty dancing alluded too in one of the hobbit parties. A male and female hobbit dancing on the tables. But its handled pretty delicately. Otherwise the whole thing is desexed because of its children's book origin. Whereas some parts of Wagner are infused with sex from tip to stern. Its opera and not a kids book. So yeah some troubled analysis here.

    Also there is not enough female characters in the two books to really have a good time with. There are more female characters than in Moby Dick sure. But not an whole lot more.

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  4. The New Yorker seems to leave the way open for alternative interpretations by noting the idea was in the Zeitgeist by Wagner’s and Tolkien’s time anyway.

    I agree with Bird. The genesis of the ‘ring’ idea is found in Tolkien’s earlier, much more sound book ‘The Hobbit’. There the ring is essentially a well-timed plot device. It makes a pleasant side adventure in a book full of comic and fantasy diversions. When Tolkien picked the idea up again and attempted epic he seemed to be doing his best to ruin both his earlier work and the whole fantasy genre. It makes a crappy central plot device.

    The stuff about sex is neither here nor there; clearly sex/romance was not Tolkien’s strength as a writer but it’s just a modern inversion of Victorian prudery to claim that everything *has* to have sex in it or it’s not complete. I suppose, though, Tolkien saw the emotional core of his epic - if he thought of it in that way - as being in one of the battle scenes (is it in ‘The Two Towers’ that there is a litany of the dead such as we might find in a medieval Icelandic saga?)

    I shall read the NY article even if it is by the irritating Gopnik.

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  5. have you taken leave of your senses. Lord of the rings was the greatest novel EVER written

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  6. One reason why he would have found it hard to do a three-dimensional evil wizard/tyrant character is it would tend to bring the adult world with him. Tyrants are usually sex fiends just for starters. Imagine transmuting Tiberius over from "The Kingdom Of The Wicked" or pulling out the Grandfather from "Ancient Evenings" and making him a really bad guy. What would the kids think? Or their parents?

    But this phenomenon of running out of steam in long books seems to be almost natural. Atlas Shrugs loses it in the latter bits. I don't want to see Francesco pussy out to Galt over Dagny again. That was humiliating. That terrible scene probably reflected a bunch of excuse-making to do with Rand's own life. Game Of Thrones took a real nose dive after at least 5 pretty amazing seasons. So its a bit of a problem when you've made everything interesting so far but you don't know if you can tie all the threads together while being true to the characters.

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