Let’s begin with the version of the anecdote told about Aesop himself, as found in the Roman poet Phaedrus:

Once when Aesop happened to be the only slave in his master’s household, he was ordered to prepare dinner earlier than usual. He thus had to visit a few houses looking for fire, until at last he found a place where he could light his lamp. Since his search had taken him out of his way along a winding path, he decided to shorten his journey on the way back and go straight through the forum. There amidst the crowds a talkative fellow shouted at him, “Aesop, what’s with the lamp in the middle of the day?” “I’m just looking to see if I can find a real man,” said Aesop, as he quickly made his way back home.

Phaedrus’s story gives a practical reason why Aesop was carrying a lighted lamp during the daytime: the fire had gone out at his house, and he needed to relight it. The person in the forum, however, thinks that Aesop is being a fool, carrying around a lamp when it is perfectly light outside. Aesop, however, manages to make the man look like a fool: it may be broad daylight, but men worthy of the name are so hard to find that he needs a lamp to look for them.

This story about Aesop as a “wise fool” is based on an even older story about the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, who rejected human society, lived inside a tub, and ate nothing but onions. The oldest version of the story consists of a single sentence: “Having lighted a candle in the day time, Diogenes said, ‘I am looking for a man.’” Unlike Aesop, Diogenes plays the fool on purpose. The Cynic philosopher carries the lamp around in broad daylight precisely in order to provoke people, so that he can then turn around and insult them. This public performance in which the audience itself becomes the butt of the joke thus encapsulates the provocativeness of Cynic philosophy itself.

Over time, however, this anecdote has lost all its sharp edges. In preparing this article, I asked ten people if they knew the story about the philosopher and his lamp. To my amazement, every single person knew the story! Yet when I asked about the meaning of the story, each person told me that the man with the lamp was looking for “an honest man” and he needed the lamp because honesty is so hard to find in the world. This modern version of the story still expresses a social critique, but the philosopher is no longer a “wise fool” and he no longer insults his audience.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we just don’t think much about lamps these days! Take the popular saying “to burn daylight.” Nowadays the phrase means “to waste time,” as if the limited number of hours in the day were fuel in a gas tank about to run dry. Originally, however, “to burn daylight” meant to act foolishly, as Diogenes and Aesop did, by burning precious lamp oil when there was no need to do so, “burning (a lamp during) daylight.” No less a writer than Shakespeare shows us that this was the original meaning of the phrase: “Come, we burn daylight, ho! […] We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day”  (Romeo and Juliet). Both Diogenes and Aesop were foolishly “burning daylight” when they carried their lighted lamps into the marketplace, but in the end they proved themselves to be “wise fools” after all, getting the last laugh by insulting their detractors.

When we turn to this story in Rumi’s Mathnawi, however, the man with the lamp does not get the last laugh. Instead, Rumi provides the story with an entirely new message of divine transcendence which is unprecedented in the Greco-Roman tradition. The story begins straightforwardly enough:

A person was going about in a bazaar in the daytime with a candle, his heart full of love and ardor. A busybody said to him, “Hey, what are you seeking beside every shop? Hey, why are you going about in search of something with a lamp in bright daylight? What is the joke?” He replied, “I am searching everywhere for a man who is alive with the life inspired by that Divine Breath. Is there a man in existence?”

As Rumi proceeds, however, the busybody in the marketplace turns out not the butt of the joke after all. Instead, he turns out to be the true sage, preaching a Sufi sermon to the man with the lamp:

“Consider well! You regard the branch; you are unaware of the root: we are the branch, the ordinances of the Divine decree are the root. […] Since thou hast seen the revolution of the millstone, come now, see also the water of the river. Thou hast seen the dust rise into the air: amidst the dust see the wind. Thou seest the kettles of thought boiling: look with intelligence on the fire, too.”

For Rumi, to insult the world for its failings, as Aesop and Diogenes do, is no real accomplishment. To look upon the reality of this world is to see only the branch but not the root, which is God; to see the millstone of the world’s daily activities is to miss the motion of the river, which is God; to see the dust of our daily confusion swirling about us is to miss the wind, which is God. Finally, to focus only on the boiling kettles of human thought is to overlook the essential fire, which is God.

To invoke the humanistic and religious themes which Randy has used as a schema for examining mythological storytelling, we can see that once again in this little story of the philosopher and his lamp that there is a humanistic approach one can take, or a religious one. In the humanistic approach, the philosopher is an agent of social criticism, launching a sharply pointed barb at the self-satisfied bluster of human society, where the question of God simply does not arise. In the religious interpretation, however, the question of God is used to trump the social criticism, obviating it entirely in order to take the light-bearer down a new and unseen path. When Rumi appropriated the Aesop’s fable about “the lion’s share,” he turned the fox’s sharp social critique of the lion into an acknowledgment of the transcendent power of God. We see the same process at work here in Rumi’s use of the story of the philosopher’s lamp, where God is the fire that lights the mind of the philosopher, a flame far greater than any earthly lamp.

References

• Gibbs, Laura. Aesop’s Fables. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. (Full text of this fable is available online.)
• Nicholson, Reynold A. (editor and translator). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi. 1926 (reprinted 1990); The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi: Commentary. 1937 (reprinted 1985).

Campbell detailed many steps in the hero’s journey, but he often summarized the pattern in three fundamental stages: separation, ordeal, and return. Separation pulls the hero away from his or her comfortable living area and throws him or her into a new realm full of fantasy, metaphor, and surreal experience — an Other Place. To enter this new realm, the hero must cross a threshold separating the known from the unknown. The hero can be completely willing to face the quest regardless of consequence, like Lancelot going to save Guinevere or Theseus volunteering to slay the Minotaur. Sometimes, the hero is curious about the Other Place and unknowingly crosses the threshold, like Pinocchio voyaging into the Land of Play or Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Occasionally, the hero is reluctant and must be pushed, pulled, or otherwise forced across the threshold: Arjuna in the Hindu epic The Mahabharata is at first unwilling to fight his kinsmen, and Hamlet refuses to avenge the death of his father.

Once over the threshold, the hero undergoes a series of ordeals that shapes his or her ability, such as making friends, sparring against minor enemies, and receiving magical items and tools needed to complete the journey. All this is in preparation for the ultimate test against the Guardian. This character, often found near the end of the hero’s adventure, is the ultimate trial for the hero, standing in the way of the hero’s quested object or return, which Campbell called “the boon” — an elixir for the hero’s village, a damsel in distress, or a piece of knowledge needed to accomplish the mission. If the Guardian is fully defeated, the hero can easily return home; if not, then the return is a fight or flight for the hero’s life. Once home, the hero then must reintegrate with his or her society and share the boon.

To best understand the importance Campbell placed on the hero’s journey, it is necessary to understand his four functions of myth. As Randy mentioned in his previous article titled “Myth: A Definition,” Campbell believed that myths historically served four functions: a mystical function, a cosmological function, a sociological function, and a psychological function. This fourth function, the psychological, Campbell described in these words: “The myth must carry the individual through the stages of life, from birth through maturity through senility to death […] in accord with the social order of his group” (Bliss 9). This psychological function is the realm of the hero’s journey.

In ancient or traditional mythology, these stories often emphasized the community. These cultures taught that the individual had a specific and often unchangeable role in society, and the myths served as instruction and initiation for the individual to take on that role. The journey in these myths often originated outside the hero, initiated by the gods or by some threat to the hero’s community: Rama submits to exile to ensure peace in the kingdom, the gods order Aeneas to establish a settlement in Italy, and Beowulf aims to rid his people of the threat of the dragon. With the romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, Campbell saw an important shift in emphasis in the hero’s journey stories to the individual (often in the name of love for a forbidden lady). Lancelot’s quest to rescue Guinevere, for example, in Chretian de Troyes’s “Lancelot” or “The Knight of the Cart,” is motivated entirely by personal love and not by any heroic duty owed to the community to rescue its queen.

This emphasis in the hero’s journey pattern has only increased in the wake of the psychoanalytic revolution, when scholars began to seriously focus on psychological interpretations of myth and literature. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung identified the mythic realm with the collective unconscious, a level of the psyche in which he thought all humans share and participate. Jung spoke often of archetypes, primordial images that appear in all world mythologies and that he argued originate in this collective unconscious. Drawing on the emphasis on the individual in Arthurian romance and in Jung’s work, Campbell identified the hero’s journey as one such archetype pointing to the psychological process by which an individual integrates the conscious with the unconscious:

The fourth function of mythology is [now] to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him towards his own spiritual enrichment and realization. […] The adventure of the Grail […] has become today for each the unavoidable task. (Occidental 521-522)

The popular hero’s journey stories of the twentieth century focus on the psychological aspects of the struggles of the hero. While these heroes still often benefit their communities in some ways, the emphasis is internal: Frodo struggles against his own inner demons induced by the power of the Ring;  Luke Skywalker resists fear, anger, and the seductive power of the Dark Side; and Harry Potter overcomes the dark magic Voldemort has left inside his head.

Joseph Campbell may have over-emphasized the similarities in these hero’s journey stories, going so far as labeling this pattern the monomyth and thereby implying that all myths follow this pattern (Hero 30). Other writers have expanded on this notion, presenting this pattern as a formula upon which all successful stories must be written. I would object that not all myths fit perfectly into the model Campbell outlines, and I would insist that good stories can be written that do not follow this pattern. Even so, I agree with Campbell that the existence of such similarities in many ancient and modern stories may tell us something about human psychology and may provide us direction and inspiration for finding our own place in this world.

References & Works Cited

• Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  2nd ed. Princeton: Bollingen, 1968.
• Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss. Chicago: New World Library, 2004.
• Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New York: Penguin Compass, 1976.
• Segal, Robert A. ed. Encountering Jung: Jung on Mythology. Princeton, 1998.
• Storr, Anthony, ed. The Essential Jung. Princeton, 1983.

Randy Hoyt: Why did you think The Lord of the Rings has been so popular?

Verlyn Flieger: I think it’s been so popular because it is an extraordinarily good book: a remarkable achievement in terms of fantasy. I wouldn’t call it unique because I don’t think many things are unique; but I think it is almost sui generis in its complexity, in its craftmanship, and in the power of the story. I just think it’s a really good book.

RH: When did you first encounter the works of Tolkien? What impact did they have on you?

VF: I first read The Lord of the Rings in the winter of 1956/1957. It was a very new book at that time. Not very many people had read it. One of my co-workers at the time was from England, and her brother had sent her the first English edition. We all passed it around and read it. Even then, I recognized that Tolkien was drawing on a vast body of mythological material: there was Beowulfian material, Arthurian material, Celtic material — all of which he had reconfigured into his own secondary world.

RH: And the published Silmarillion?

VF: I first read that in 1977, when it came out. I guess we were all sort of waiting for it to appear.

RH: You now teach courses in Tolkien at the University of Maryland. Did you play a role in getting these courses into the curriculum there?

VF: Single-handed.

RH: Why would you say that Tolkien deserves courses in the curriculum alongside such greats as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton?

VF: Why not? They were writing about the human condition, as they saw it in their own time. Certainly Chaucer and Shakespeare were writing about the human condition, though I’m not sure Milton was. Tolkien is writing about the same thing.

RH: What do you cover in these courses?

VF: I teach Tolkien in a number of different ways. I teach an Honors Seminar in Tolkien as “Author of Century” (to borrow from the title of Tom Shippey’s book on Tolkien). There we cover the two big essays, “On Fairy-stories” and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and then we read, right the way through, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings — more or less in order of the chronology of Tolkien’s secondary world — in order to get an overview of Tolkien’s whole corpus of major fiction, to get some notion of the continuity and the discontinuities among them.

I started out, however, back when I myself was in graduate school, teaching a course in fantasy, which was really just an excuse to get The Lord of the Rings into the curriculum. I very soon realized that it overbalanced the course, that it was too big for everything else. Another faculty member and I pulled out Tolkien and introduced another course called “Tolkien, Myth, and Medieval Tradition,” which consisted of the Beowulf essay, Beowulf, some aspects of the Arthurian story, and then The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. With some modifications, I’ve been teaching that course ever since.

This fall, I’m teaching what I think is going to be a very exciting course called “Tolkien On War.” Our whole campus has devoted the fall semester to courses on war, new courses on war or existing courses adapted to war. I thought that to cover Tolkien, an author in whom you have a secondary mythology, a children’s book, and a fantasy that all focus on war, would be an interesting angle from which to look at it.

RH: Do you find that students taking your courses expect it to be easy because it is about a “fantasy” book and not about “real literature”?

VF: Not any more. They did to start with, yes, but they don’t now.

RH: I guess word gets around.

VF: I think so, yes.

RH: A lot of professional academics, critics, and journalists have been surprised by the popularity of The Lord of the Rings.

VF: I think most of those who are surprised — or who express surprise — either haven’t read it or find it not to be to their taste. If it’s not to their taste, that’s fine: then they shouldn’t read it.

RH: Some go even further, showing disdain towards Tolkien and horror at its success. What do you think drives that disdain?

VF: Snobbery.

RH: Did you encounter any of this disdain or snobbery as you were working to get Tolkien into the curriculum?

VF: Oh yeah, I still do. I got teased horribly when the movies came out. I was known for some time as “the fantasy lady.” My colleagues — not all of them but many of them — do not take the material I teach seriously. And that’s OK. My students do, and it’s my students that I’m really concerned about.

RH: You said that in your Tolkien as “Author of the Century” seminar you cover two of Tolkien’s essays, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-stories.” Why would you say these two essays are important? What impact did they have on myth scholarship and fantasy literature?

VF: The essay “Beowulf: Monsters and the Critics” was originally a lecture given to the British Academy on Beowulf. It changed the direction of Beowulf scholarship. Up until that time, scholars had acknowledged the poem’s importance, but had only studied it for philology, for social customs, for all kinds of things — never as a work of art. Tolkien said, “Hey guys. This is a poem. Why don’t we look at it as if it were a poem and see what we can get out of it in terms of its art?” That really did open up a whole new avenue in the way of looking at the poem. There are Beowulf scholars who disagree with him, but since that lecture nobody has been able to ignore what he said. You go to the library and look at any anthology of Beowulf criticism, and Tolkien’s essay will be there.

The essay “On Fairy-stories” also was originally given as a lecture, this one as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This essay is not as well-known in general scholarly circles, but I think it is Tolkien’s most important essay. It reveals more about his art and his own feelings about his art than any other essay. It looks at philology, it looks at where mythology comes from and its importance, it looks at fantasy and fairy story. He really pulls together a lot of strands.

RH: How does this essay about his art relate chronologically to his own works of fiction?

VF: He had been working on “The Silmarillion” since 1917, when he came back from World War I. Sometime in the early 1930s, he began work on The Hobbit, which started as a story for his children and then turned into something a little more formal. That was published in September 1937 and was a great success. The publisher said, “People are going to want more. Can you write a sequel?” After several false starts, he did begin a sequel which was very clearly imitative of The Hobbit in its tone. As early as December 1937 he was thinking about what he called “the new hobbit” but which became over time The Lord of the Rings. So he started in let’s say 1938/1939 and he finished it in ten or eleven years, and then he had trouble getting it published. In the meantime, in a sense à propos his publication of The Hobbit, he was giving the Andrew Lang lecture in March 1939. He began to codify a lot of what he had been working toward instinctively in The Hobbit and realized that he had made some mistakes in it: there were lapses in tone, places where it didn’t hang together. His thoughts on these mistakes found their way into the lecture, particularly in the section on fantasy, and in turn affected The Lord of the Rings. So the chronology goes The Hobbit, “On Fairy-stories,” and then The Lord of the Rings.

RH: You have edited a new edition of the “On Fairy-stories” essay that came out this summer.

VF: Yes, with Doug Anderson. The book is called Tolkien On Fairy-stories.

RH: What is in this new edition, beyond just the essay itself?

VF: A huge amount of previously unpublished material. Doug and I were given access to all the manuscripts pertaining to “On Fairy-stories” and to all of the draft materials. It was first the lecture, then it was greatly expanded and turned into a published essay, and then Tolkien further edited and tweaked the published essay. Doug and I were able to trace the way that certain ideas began, developed, grew, moved into this or that category. You can see the growth of his thought. It’s a fascinating thing to read.

RH: What would you say has been Tolkien’s impact on fantasy literature as a whole?

VF: Huge. Enormous. And not altogether positive. He casts a very long shadow. It’s very difficult to get out from under Tolkien. I published Pig Tale in 2002, a fantasy novel that I had been working on for quite some time. It was a struggle to get away from Tolkien and to write something that I thought could really be just my own. It was hard to do. I’d be typing along, and I’d think, “Uh-oh. I know where that comes from!” And then I had to back up. Most of the fantasy that has come after The Lord of the Rings has either imitated it or reacted strongly against — which is also in a sense a form of imitation.

You can learn more about Verlyn’s work by visiting her web site, mythus.com. The book Tolkien On Fairy-stories that she edited with Douglas A. Anderson is available from HarperCollins at Amazon.co.uk and other booksellers. Mythlore 103/104, the current issue of the scholarly journal of the Mythopoeic Society, contains a review of this book; this review is available online at the society’s web site.

References

• Flieger, Verlyn and Douglas A. Anderson. Tolkien On Fairy-stories. HarperCollins: 2008.