Tag: Minas Tirith

LotRFI Pt.49–At The Houses of Healing

On By Luke SheltonIn First Impressions, TolkienLeave a comment

I really enjoyed the passages which take place among the members of the Fellowship in the Houses of Healing because they are like the chapter “Many Meetings.” There are many old friends who come together and catch up on what the others have been doing since they were last in each other’s company. The humor that arises here is reminiscent of the joviality that overtakes them sitting in the rubble at Isengard.

One of the most memorable passages for me comes from these sections. Merry apologizes for speaking to Aragorn in the wrong tone, saying:

‘it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place’ (RK, V, viii, 870).

Merry’s words struck home in this reader, and this is one of the phrases that I stored away to use when necessary. To keep a long story short, I was quite tactless as a child, more so than other children, and I frequently said the wrong thing or diverted attention with an awkward or untimely joke. My sense of social awkwardness found expression here.

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Image copyright Anke Eissmann

Another interesting observation to make of these passages is that I made a rather meaningful thematic observation, but I am unsure how. I will have to do a bit of digging to find out why, but I somehow knew the fact that Aragorn could heal people was a very good sign. I had a sense, albeit not a well-formed sense, that rulers being healers was a metaphor for something. I, of course, had no concept of the trope of the king who heals the land until much later.

A final consideration from the Houses of Healing is the relationship that forms here between Éowyn and Faramir. To be completely honest, this relationship baffled me for many years. It seemed to me that the relationship developed too quickly and I did not understand how these characters could be drawn together from such opposing perspectives. Again, reading Éowyn as an extension of myself, I thought that I would be mad at Faramir for presuming to know how I felt about anything, much less another person. This may largely be because one of the things I hated most as a child was being ‘talked down’ to. Perhaps I interpreted Faramir’s explanation of Éowyn’s feelings as condescending (and not in the good, medieval sense).

Where Do We Go From Here?

The Last Stand, then on to Book VI!

What Do You Think?

Which part of the Houses of Healing was your favorite? why?
How did you, or do you, interpret the relationship between Éowyn and Faramir?
​Did I miss anything? Let me know!

LotRFI Pt.40–Minas Tirith

On By Luke SheltonIn First Impressions, Tolkien1 Comment

Minas Tirith was an altogether novel experience in my first read of LotR. It holds an interesting place in my memory because it is so different from the rest of LotR, but is more like other fantasy stories that I read before LotR.

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Image copyright Ted Nasmith

Here is what I mean: Most of LotR felt original and new to me in the settings and many of the interactions, but Minas Tirith was like an allusion to stories with which I was familiar. Minas Tirith was the first ‘castle’ in the book, which automatically brought up associations with knights, damsels, jousting and quests for adventure. Most notable among these tales, I was aware of Camelot and Arthurian legends (which ones particularly, I cannot recall). For better or worse, I started to think about knights errant and chivalric tales.

This made the setting seem more remote and ancient to me than the rest of the text. I do not mean that it felt like it had a long history, several parts of the text feel like that. I mean that it felt like part of an older story to me. While most of LotR was a novel experience, I thought Minas Tirith was going to revisit fantasy of the medieval court variety. This was probably because, unlike with most of the other characters, events, and settings in the story, my only reference frame for Minas Tirith was other fantasy books. I had not living thing to equate Minas Tirith to. These other fantasy text were always set in distant lands or in earlier times (or ‘long ago’ and ‘far away’ if that were not banished as a cliché at this point).

In a sense, Minas Tirith was more storied for me as a location, but also more remote. I have often wondered how Europeans and Brits might feel about this point, since they grew up in places where they could have visited castles as a kid. To me, a castle was an element of make-believe, I wonder if it was just an element of history to them.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I would like to take a breath and talk about Merry and Pippin before we move on to the larger picture.

What Do You Think?

Did you think of Minas Tirith as a castle?
How did this influence the way you perceive(d) the events in Minas Tirith?
​Did I miss anything? Let me know!