Over at Earth and Oak, there’s an interesting discussion going on about how seeking after knowledge can destroy characters in Tolkien’s writing. The two that are held up for our inspection are Gollum and Saruman.
By chance, a wonderful contrast to Gollum just came across my twitter feed. The Japanese space agency has just landed a pair of rovers on an asteroid, and photos are coming in. Gollum was disappointed to learn that ‘all the “great secrets” under the mountain had turned out to be just empty night…” (LotR, I, ii). Hayabusa 2 took off into the empty night, knowing perfectly well that there were things there “which have not been discovered since the beginning.” (ibid.) Let’s go find out what they are.
The surface of asteroid Ryugu. Source
I’ve joviated at length about how I disagree with JRRT about the morality of seeking knowledge. He seems to come down on it pretty hard in LotR, despite his interest in science in real life. [1] I think the resolution is one layer down: the problem is more about keeping things secret than about finding them out in the first place. C.S. Lewis was on about the same thing in That Hideous Strength, after all.
I feel confident that the team running the Minerva II1 rovers will not come to a bad end because they’re not trying to keep secrets. Publishing discoveries the moment they come in is a foolproof antidote for any of the moral hazards faced by scientists.
You can guess what Idiosophers think about current intellectual-property law.
[1] Now that I think of it, why is breaking white light into its component colors foolish when Saruman does it, but a thing of beauty and wonder when the Men of Gondor divert a waterfall at Henneth Annûn?
Jeff Snider
Seeking knowledge as a path to power, is that the category of seeking derided by the authors? Maybe it’s less about knowledge and more about
foolishly seeking power.
Joe
“Foolishly” is the key word here.
Kate Neville
I thought of this recently, after listening to a Tom Shippey talk at Oxford U on Tolkien and philology being the turning point in his creative life. It struck me that Tolkien’s entire creative approach is the direct opposite of Saruman’s. Tolkien wanted to understand how language evolved, so he CREATED a language, complete with its own evolution. He wanted to understand Anglo-Saxon poetry, so cast his Turin tale into alliterative verse. He wanted to understand Breton lais, so he cast the Beren and Luthien story into rhyming couplets. His entire Legendarium might be said to be a CREATIVE effort to understand the matter of Earendel. His critique of Saruman is a critique of deconstuctiveness, like those.in his Beowulf essay who tore the tower to pieces. Tolkien would have endeavored to understand the tower by replicating it. (Which one might say prompted his Sellic Spell story.)
As for Henneth Annun, the object of its construction was not to produce the beauty of light on water — that was a secondary effect of the primary goal of secrecy. And Gondor did not break the light — what we see is the interplay of Varda and Ulmo.
Joe
That makes sense. Someone took a photo of Richard Feynman’s office chalkboard on the day he died. In one corner, in block capitals, was “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” An admirable sentiment, even though it implies that I only really understand messes.
Kate Neville
I, on the other hand, really really understand procrastination