SanjaySingh

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The Gift of Men article

Latest comment: 18 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

Hi, Sanjay. I hope you didn't take my edits to Gift of Men as a critique of your writing: I do indeed appreciate it, and recognize that as prose it's better than a lot of Wikipedia pages. My edits were really just an attempt to make the article fit more with Wikipedia "house style". I'm not a hard-core Tolkien scholar, but I am a Tolkien fan (that is, I've read the Silmarillion several times, and most of the History of Middle-Earth volumes at least once, but I'm not au fait with the ins and outs of "Tokien criticism").

I hope you noticed that I didn't remove the note about the choices which Elves and Men have had to make; I just formatted it so that it was a standard footnote, instead of a jury-rigged one indicated with an asterisk (*). I removed two comments which explicitly suggested that the reader might find such-and-such interesting, because I don't think it's appropriate encyclopedic style to tell the reader what he or she should find interesting: we should present information with pointers towards further study, which the reader can choose to follow up on or not as he or she sees fit. But that's mainly a stylistic problem — I think that it should be possible to present the same indicators in a way that isn't leading.

As for the specific line about the Great Music, I presume that your argument about its incorruptibility is based on something in Tolkien's writings. If so, it should be possible to quote or reference it without having to resort to saying "the interpretation of this author". Alternatively, if the interpretation is one which has been discussed in Tolkien scholarship, we could say "Tolkien scholar so-and-so wrote in My Big Book of Middle-Earth Theology that the freedom of Men does not extend to the capacity to damage the themes of the Great Music, as Melkor did before Ilúvatar made the Music manifest in the creation of Arda", or something like that. (Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting the argument, but I hope you understand the presentational point I'm trying to make.)

If you can find a way to introduce these ideas without expressing them either as your own point of view, please feel free to do so. If I had felt confident enough in my own Tolkien scholarship to rephrase the note myself, I would have done so, but as you say I'm more of a "tourist". (However, I hope I'm one who's sufficiently familiar with the guide book that I won't damage the artefacts, to stretch the metaphor.)

My concern in the edits was to preserve a neutral point of view in the article. You're correct that a certain amount of interpretation is inevitable in an article of literary criticism. However, my understanding of Wikipedia policy is that in subjects of this kind, if there is a strong scholarly consensus on a subject, it can be presented without qualification ("The earth revolves around the sun"), and if there's a notable division among scholars, both sides should be presented with appropriate attribution ("Most scientists believe that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, but a few religious scholars and biblical literalists believe that it is much younger.") See NPOV tutorial for better examples of what I'm getting at.

Or, as WP:NPOV puts it:

"Debates are described, represented, and characterized, but not engaged in. Background is provided on who believes what and why, and which view is more popular. Detailed articles might also contain the mutual evaluations of each viewpoint, but studiously refrain from stating which is better. One can think of unbiased writing as the cold, fair, analytical description of debates. When bias towards one particular point of view can be detected the article needs to be fixed."

So we should be able to say either "The Gift of Man allows the younger Children of Ilúvatar freedom to act in accordance with or opposition to the themes of the Great Music, but does not allow those themes to be damaged as they were when Melkor introduced his own themes in the first Great Music" (or something better worded), or say "According to insert notable Tolkien scholar here, the Gift of Man etc.", or say, "Scholars such as so-and-so believe that the freedom of men does not extend to the ability to damage the themes of the Great Music, but in an essay in Imaginary Theology no. 362, such-and-such argued that this was not consistent with comments made by Tolkien in a 1947 letter to Dom Bede Griffiths." Or whatever.

I've been very long-winded here and probably said very little. The most important thing is to note that I didn't mean to step on your toes, and was only operating out of a desire to improve the encyclopedia. I assume good faith of you, and hope you can do the same of me. We can work together with other editors to retain the relevant content on the Gift of Men page, and keep it consistent with Wikipedia style guidelines.

Best, Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 21:56, 5 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

Hi again, Sanjay. I think we're mostly on the same page about the Gift of Men. I've read some philosophy myself (I touch on my philosophical and religious views very briefly on my user page). I generally view the Silmarillion as more mythopoetic than philosophical, but there are certainly philosophical implications there. The only thing that we should be careful of is to avoid anything which smacks of original research. I'm sure that you are, as you say, "not an idiot", and that you are capable of insightful interpretations of free will and destiny as expressed in the notions of the Great Music and the Gift of Men — however, Wikipedia might not be the best place to express those ideas, no matter how well-thought-out and valid. When I mentioned Tolkien scholars, I wasn't just thinking of people on the web, but of Tolkien criticism in print, which I gather is a small but flourishing industry. I'm sure that someone has published something on these subjects in the journal of the Mythopoeic Society, for example. I don't dispute that you "have a brain, and ... can provide quality discourse about the topic"; it's just that on Wikipedia we shouldn't be generating our own discourse, only reporting the notable discourse of others.

But this is only a minor concern. I don't think that anything on the Gift of Men page now is problematic — as you say, it's derived pretty directly from Tolkien's writing. However, if we become much more speculative there's a danger that it could become original research, which is a big Wikipedia no-no. That said, I seem to recall some discussion of the theological aspects of the Gift of Men in Tolkien's Letters, which could provide material for a textually based discussion that wouldn't be original research (as it would be based on Tolkien's ideas, not yours or mine). If I have the time this week or next, I'll try to dig up my copy of the Letters and see what I can find.

Best, —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 23:40, 10 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

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