Two Liars

I’ve already written about my favorite part of Kate Neville’s paper at Mythmoot VI, but it has a second-favorite part, too. Warning: Contains Star Wars Episode V spoilers.

By BGBOXXX Design via the noun project

Tolkien’s dragons started out as a mythological counterpart to tanks and machine guns. They didn’t lie because they were machines. Kate tracks down the dragons available to JRRT in his youth, who also didn’t lie. In William Morris’s Volsung Saga, Fafnir is all brute strength, no guile. But as Middle-earth evolved, Tolkien’s dragons picked up a psychological dimension as well as physical power. If we look at what Glaurung says to Turin, for example, the word the narrator uses repeatedly is “lie”. That’s not exactly right, though. All of it would pass a fact-check at the Newspaper of Record. It’s much more subtle than mere lies.

Deception, maybe. Definition 2a in the OED for “deceive” is “To cause to believe what is false; to mislead as to a matter of fact, lead into error, impose upon, delude, ‘take in’.” This is how I see what’s going on with Glaurung, and later when Smaug talks to Bilbo. Saruman is good at it, too. Kate says he’s “dragon-hearted”.

You know who flat-out lies? Gandalf, when we first meet him at the beginning of The Hobbit. Bilbo is not a burglar, nor any kind of adventure. It’s diametrically different from the dragons, though. Dragons say things that are almost true, so you believe that little twist at the end. Kate points out that nobody believes Gandalf when he says Bilbo is a burglar. And Gandalf is OK with that. He’s making a prophecy with an incorrect verb tense, more than stating a fact about the world. Whether anyone is actually misled by the lie makes the difference between a good character and an evil one.

Off on a tangent from the paper, now. You know who else flat-out lies to the hero of his story? Obi-Wan Kenobi. [1] That behavior always seemed wrong for the character and made me not trust him an inch, even though it’s effortless to forgive Gandalf for a similar untruth.  Now that I’ve heard this paper, I see why I had that reaction. The lies from ostensibly trustworthy elder figures in Star Wars are intended to be believed, so they’re not acting like good guys do. But they don’t have any of the subtle psychological manipulation that dragons use to make the deception interesting. And the whole plot turns on those lies. Some mentor the Jedi turned out to be.

[1] Confession: I don’t really like Star Wars. I suspect that its staggering popularity comes from its shallowness. Its fans supply depth from their own imaginations. At the end of the process, the fans have awesome special effects to go with whatever they thought up on their own. It’s like a “call for fanfic.” For me, though, the constant lies from the Jedi ruin the process. Darth Vader looks like a paragon of good management practice, next to them.