Obscure Tolkien Reference in Turn Coat?
Hey, All:
Just doing my (who knows how many) re-read of TDF via audiobook, and I'm not sure if anyone has ever brought this up before (or if it is just merely a coincidence) but I am wondering if JB was making a very obscure reference to Tolkien when he described the geography of the summit of Demonreach.
A little explanation is necessary here. Tolkien gave a famous lecture on Beowulf in the 1930s. Indeed, according to many, it is the most influential lecture about Beowulf in the last century. In that lecture, he demanded that the poem be treated as a work of art in its own right, and not criticized for what it was not (a history of northern Europe, for instance, among other things). In that lecture, Tolkien made an analogy about the poem and its history. Here I quote from Thomas Shippey, who is quoting from the lecture.
"A man inherited a field, in which there was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had once belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings...They all said "This tower is most interesting." but they also said (after pushing it over): "What a muddle it is in!" And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur, "He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did he not restore the old tower? He had no sense of proportion." But from the top of the tower the man had been able to look upon the sea."
Now, in this analogy, the tower is the poem, the 'old stone' is the history of northern European poetry that the Beowulf-poet had used, and the friends are the 19th-century scholars who pissed all over Beowulf because it didn't address what they wanted.
Now, in Turn Coat, we have a bit of the opposite: A lighthouse that has been destroyed, with some of the remaining stone used to make a cottage. But every time I come across the passage, there is something about the very deliberate way Butcher describes the layout of the top of Demonreach that makes me think he is both familiar with Tolkien's lecture, and that he is making an allusion to it.
Thoughts?