ℑt should come as no surprise that I read webcomics, perhaps more avidly than is good for me. I am, after all, a nerd, as the simple fact of my having written here and having returned to writing here (after far longer than should have been the case, I admit) indicates. But then, it's not a bad thing to be a nerd, and it is at least the case that my focus and attention doesn't result in much that can be used to do harm.
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| One subject of the comic Image from Wikipedia, here, and presumably public domain |
In any event, as I was reading the webcomics I regularly read (and there are a few of them), I came across Existential Comics #611, "Carnap Finds the One Ring." For obvious reasons, it piqued my interest; for similarly obvious reasons, I thought a discussion of it here might be fitting. (If I'm wrong, I don't think I want to know.)
The comic itself pokes fun at both Carnap and Tolkien. The former is of a piece with the webcomic series as a whole; the entire premise of Existential Comics is that it presents philosophers and their works and ideas as somewhat absurd, something that no doubt finds much agreement among the reading public (and likely would among the non-reading public did they bother to look at the comic--but as non-readers, they would hardly be expected to do so). Carnap's struggle towards wholly objective language is made no more or less silly by the comic than is Plato's concept of ideal forms or the inevitability of certain puns in the context of philosophy. The latter is perhaps less common in my experience; those I've encountered who decry Tolkien's works rarely do so from a place of having actually read them in any detail but often on the grounds of disliking fiction or fantasy fiction or "that old shit," generally.
So much said, the comic does raise some good points. One is that riddles depend for their effect on a tension between exactness and ambiguity of meaning. Indeed, I recall one of my professors at UL Lafayette, the late James E. Anderson, remarking that they were used in early English scriptoria specifically to help teach multi-level thinking. I know that in my own teaching, my use of riddles with students worked to that end, and generally well. (I've written about it more formally, for those interested; it's in Ballad of the Lone Medievalist, and an abstract can be found here.) For someone who strives toward exactness and away from ambiguity, engagement with riddles is an easy way to make a joke; addressing them in such a manner as is presented usefully points out the limitations of the riddle as a genre--namely that there is always another possible answer to them, depending on the approach taken.
Another point is that it is somewhat absurd that the riddle-game in The Hobbit happens at all. "For some reason" is, admittedly, something of a misrepresentation of the interaction between Gollum and Bilbo in the damp darkness under the Misty Mountains--both of them had good reason to stall for time, and riddling offers them both opportunity for such--but moving to such a game also admittedly can strike more modern audiences than those original to the novel as an oddity. Playing along with a threat to gain time for assessment makes sense; a word-game as the means for doing so, perhaps less so.
Of course, it must be remembered that the comic is a comic. The point is to get money for the comic-writer make a joke, and so misrepresentation can be excused in the service of that point so long as it does not proceed to the extent of making the subject matter unrecognizable. It does not in the present case. Indeed, the comic does work, or at least it did for me; I laughed at it when I read it, even if doing some dissection on it kills the humor later on.
There is this, too: the treatment of Carnap and Gollum is not the only time Existential Comics has taken up Tolkien...but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to go there at the moment. Another time, perhaps?
