Tag: *SINGING*

sathinfection:

emilyenrose:

not-a-lizard replied to your post: 13, 12, and 11 s’il vous plait

okay PLEASE TALK ABOUT PAGAN MODELS OF HEROISM, I don’t really know what’s going on but it sounds fascinating

fuck ok short version:

a ‘pagan’ (i.e. pre-Christian) hero is:

– super good at killing people
– hella emotional
– obsessed with personal glory
– beautiful 
– also: musical, eloquent, probably doomed

see Achilles especially, but actually these tropes as heroic tropes are all over the place pre-Christianity. My personal favourite is the story of the Spartan warriors the night before the big battle with the Persians all sitting around oiling each other up and combing their hair.

(caveat to everything: I am a classicist, Tolkien is obviously working more off the Anglo-Saxon/Norse epic tradition than the classical one. Caveat to the caveat: Anglo-Saxon heroism involves literal boasting battles so I think we’re safe carrying the obsession with personal glory across at least.)

Pagan heroes, basically, often come across as jerks or vain idiots (or ‘effeminate’ sometimes gets tossed around, with all the unfortunate implications you’d expect) if you don’t have the cultural context for them. But in context this is the behaviour of the manliest of manly men. 

Meanwhile a lot of our modern ideas about what makes a hero are informed by the last couple of thousand years of culture in Europe and places Europe colonised, which in turn were informed by Christian thinking. The Christian model of heroism relies a lot on ideas about martyrdom and self-sacrifice (and also a whole lot of pilfered Stoic and Neoplatonist stuff + the Aeneid + borrowed Jewish mysticism, because early Christianity basically ransacked the pockets of Mediterranean culture for stuff it liked.) It sets itself up as the opposite of everything that came before – so no killing people! No enormous emotional outbursts! No quests for personal glory! No doing your hair before the battle!

Obviously Tolkien was very Catholic and that comes across in his work. I think it is interesting & pretty effective to read the characters as the Silmarillion as collectively stuck in the same philosophical predicament as, say, Beowulf – who is a hero in the pagan model (boasts a lot, super good at killing shit) and who as a pagan hero does nothing wrong. But he lives in a world that is explicitly, textually Christian! Only none of the characters know. 

It is interesting & effective & really fun to write all the Silm characters like they are starring in a pre-Christian epic. Their concepts of what constitute heroic behaviour are not like ours – because they’re admirable but missing key information, in the same way Beowulf is missing key information. 

In conclusion you better believe everyone spent the night before the Nirnaeth getting their hair perfect and singing about how fucking great at defeating their enemies they are.

Now I myself Never Meta because it’s exhausting, but I’m so happy @emilyenrose is here to rep the pagan hero, which is honestly 90% of my interest in Silm fandom anyway. I think the model of the Christian hero tends to be why Túrin gets so much flack, since he’s a perfect example of the pagan model but definitely not someone who rubs up against Christian virtues at all. 

tl;dr give me the pagans doing their hair pretty any day