Tolkien: Man and Myth

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Tolkien: Man and Myth Page 12

by Joseph Pearce


  In other respects Caldecott’s interpretation of the Christian aspects of The Lord of the Rings echoes that of McGrath. Like McGrath, Caldecott also believes that Tolkien’s epic holds up a magic mirror to our world which ‘penetrates below the skin to expose the archetypes within’. ‘It undermines our normal habits of perception, and lays bare the nature and scale of the universal Quest in which we are every one of us engaged: what we stand to lose, and what we stand to gain.’32 Caldecott calls The Lord of the Rings a ‘Christian myth’ because it is ‘a story that embodies Christian wisdom’. Specifically, Christianity and The Lord of the Rings both concern themselves with ‘choice, free will, and sacrifice’.33 Caldecott also concurs with McGrath in perceiving a parallel between the Passion of Tolkien and the Passion of Christ: ‘Each of the four main heroes undergoes a kind of death and rebirth as part of their quest, a descent into the underworld. In this way each participates to a greater and lesser degree in the archetypal journey of Christ.’34

  Besides the themes of ‘choice, free will, and sacrifice’, another of the central precepts upon which The Lord of the Rings is built is the intrinsic conflict between good and evil. The spiritual warfare between the forces of dark and light in Tolkien’s world forms the landscape within which the characters exercise their free will and make their sacrifices. Indeed, it is the knowledge of this conflict, and the responses to it, which give meaning to the sacrifices that the heroes make. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear,’ says Aragorn to Eomer, ‘nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.’35

  ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ writes the theologian Colin Gunton, ‘may not be an overtly theological book, but it is certainly in a broad sense about salvation. It is about the winning back of Middle Earth from the powers of evil.’36 Gunton considered Frodo’s role in the quest to destroy the power of the Dark Lord to be ‘strongly marked by Christian notions’:

  If we recall Jesus’ temptation by the devil to worship him and gain power over all the cities of the world, we shall see the point of Frodo’s behaviour. Again and again, actors in the drama are tempted to use the ring to overcome the Dark Lord. But Frodo, taught by Gandalf who, like him, has some of the marks of a Christ figure, realises that to use evil, even in the battle against evil, is to become enslaved by it. The Dark Lord might be overcome, but those who overcome him will in their turn be corrupted into playing the same role.37

  Gunton also emphasized Tolkien’s adherence to orthodox Christian teaching on the nature of evil:

  . . .evil is parasitic upon the good: it has an awful power, it corrupts and destroys, and yet has no true reality of its own. So it is with Tolkien’s depiction of evil. The ring-wraiths represent some of the most horrifyingly evil agencies in literature. They are wraiths, only half real, but of a deadly and dreadful power. Their cries evoke despair—the incapacity to act—and terror in the forces of light. Their touch brings a dreadful coldness, like the coldness of Dante’s hell. And yet they are finally insubstantial. When the ring is melted in the furnaces of Mount Doom, they ‘crackled, withered, and went out’ (p. 982). Similarly, just as the devils of Christian mythology are fallen angels, so all the creatures of the dark Lord are hideous parodies of creatures from the true creation: goblins of elves, trolls of those splendid creatures, the ents, and so on (p. 507). Evil is the corruption of good, monstrous in power yet essentially parasitic.38

  The parasitic nature of evil is the key to its inherent weakness. Since, of its nature, it is counter-creative and can only destroy, it often destroys itself in the blindness of its malice. ‘Often does hatred hurt itself,’ says Gandalf, a view which is reiterated by Theoden: ‘Strange powers have our enemies, and strange weaknesses! But it has long been said: oft evil will shall evil mai.’39

  Gunton also saw ‘interesting parallels to and borrowings from Christian theology’ in the Christ-like way in which Frodo triumphed against the odds: ‘Like Jesus, Frodo goes into the heart of the enemy’s realm in order to defeat him. And like him he is essentially weak and defenceless in worldly terms, but finally strong and invincible because he refuses to use the enemy’s methods.’40

  The other central precept at the heart of The Lord of the Rings is the relationship between time and eternity, particularly in relation to the question of life and death. The importance of this aspect was stressed by Tolkien himself on more than one occasion. In April 1956 he compared the relative effect on Men and Elves of mortality and immortality respectively. ‘I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story,’ he wrote. ‘The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race “doomed” to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race “doomed” not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.’41

  This sense of the ‘doom’ of death at the heart of Tolkien’s tale was discussed by Kevin Aldrich in his essay on ‘The Sense of Time in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’. ‘A good place to begin an examination of the theme of death and immortality,’ Aldrich wrote, ‘is the Ring Rhyme that begins each of the volumes of The Lord of the Rings.’ In particular, Aldrich stressed the importance of the line, ‘Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die. . .’: ‘The heavily stressed alliterative syllables “Mortal Men” and “doomed to die” sound ominous. And in the space of six syllables we are told three times of man’s mortality. We are “mortal”, we are “doomed”, and we will “die”. The main note of man’s existence, then, in this apparently simple little poem seems to be his mortality.’42

  The Elves, on the other hand, are immortal and, in Tolkien’s words, are ‘doomed not to leave’ the world. This difference between Elves and Men plays an important part in the unfolding of events in The Lord of the Rings and, as with the rest of the tale, has its roots in The Silmarillion:

  It is one with this gift of freedom that the children of Men dwell only a short space in the world alive, and are not bound to it, and depart soon whither the Elves know not. Whereas the Elves remain until the end of days, and their love of the Earth and all the world is more single and more poignant therefore, and as the years lengthen ever more sorrowful. For the Elves die not till the world dies, unless they are slain or waste in grief (and to both these seeming deaths they are subject); neither does age subdue their strength, unless one grow weary of ten thousand centuries; and dying they are gathered to the halls of Mandos in Valinor, whence they may in time return. But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy. But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope. Yet of old the Valar declared to the Elves in Valinor that Men shall join in the Second Music of the Ainur,—whereas Ilúvatar has not revealed what he purposes for the Elves after the World’s end, and Melkor has not discovered it.43

  In this solitary paragraph from The Silmarillion there is much of importance to a deeper understanding of The Lord of the Rings.

  The fact that the One has not revealed what he purposes for the Elves after the world’s end, whereas he has stated specifically that Man has a destiny beyond the grave which he shares with the angelic Ainur, illustrates Tolkien’s concern that his myth should remain true to Christian orthodoxy. Indeed, the fact that he resolutely refuses to bestow an eternal, as opposed to a temporal, destiny on Elves, Dwarves, or Ores, illustrates that, contrary to the claims of C.S. Lewis, he is unprepared to sub-create a new theology. He is prepared to sub-create mythical creatures and legendary histories, but he is not prepared to tamper with the Primary Art of the Creator Himself which Tolkien believed had been revealed through the Incarnation, the scriptures and the traditional teaching of the Church down the ages.

  The other ‘truth’ which finds expressi
on in this key passage from The Silmarillion is the fact that death, far from being a curse to mankind, is a gift of God. It is only considered cursed because it has been cursed by Melkor, or Morgoth, who curses all the gifts of the One. Therefore, ‘Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope.’ This was reiterated in Tolkien’s account of the Downfall of Númenor, when the men of Númenor began to curse their mortality and to envy the immortality of the Elves and the angelic Valar. ‘Why should we not envy the Valar, or even the least of the Deathless?’ the Númenóreans ask the angelic Messengers who had been sent to them by the Valar. ‘For of us is required a blind trust, and a hope without assurance, knowing not what lies before us in a little while.’ To this, the Messengers replied:

  Indeed the mind of Ilúvatar concerning you is not known to the Valar, and he has not revealed all things that are to come. But this we hold to be true, that your home is not here, neither in the Land of Aman nor anywhere within the Circles of the World. And the Doom of Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar. It became a grief to them only because coming under the shadow of Morgoth it seemed to them that they were surrounded by a great darkness, of which they were afraid. . . if that grief has returned to trouble you, as you say, then we fear that the Shadow arises once more and grows again in your hearts.44

  The angelic Messengers then warned the men of Númenor that their death was the will of the One and that they should not ‘withhold the trust’ to which they were called.

  The Númenóreans failed to heed the warning and Tolkien uses their rebellion to illustrate the sociological impact of their theological ignorance:

  But the fear of death grew ever darker upon them, and they delayed it by all means that they could; and they began to build great houses for their dead, while their wise men laboured unceasingly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at the least of the prolonging of Men’s days. Yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of Men, and they filled all the land with silent tombs in which the thought of death was enshrined in the darkness. But those that lived turned the more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more goods and more riches; and after the days of Tar-Ancalimon the offering of the first fruits to Eru was neglected, and men went seldom any more to the Hallow upon the heights of Meneltarma in the midst of the land.45

  Significantly, it was in this age of decadence that ‘Sauron arose again in Middle-earth’.46

  Yet, in spite of Melkor’s efforts to cloud the issue with confusion and despair, Man’s mortality remains a gift which goes to the very heart of his being and points his will in the right direction. It was the will of the One ‘that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and the smallest.’47 In this way, the three central themes in The Lord of the Rings are bound together, connecting the essential nature of man’s mortality with the importance of free will and the intrinsic conflict between good and evil.

  As usual, Tolkien was at pains to ensure that the theology of his sub-created world conformed with the theology of the Church. In October 1958, he wrote:

  In this mythical ‘prehistory’ immortality. . . was part of the given nature of the Elves,—beyond the End nothing was revealed. Mortality. . . is spoken of as the given nature of Men: the Elves called it the Gift of Ilúvatar (God). . . This is therefore an ‘Elvish’ view, and does not necessarily have anything to say for or against such beliefs as the Christian that ‘death’ is not part of human nature, but a punishment for sin (rebellion), a result of the ‘Fall’. It should be regarded as an Elvish perception of what death—not being tied to the ‘circles of the world’—should now become for Men, however it arose. A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift’, if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make ‘punishments’ (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained.48

  Of course, from a Christian perspective the ‘ultimate blessing’ of the gift of death was not the extinction of life but, paradoxically, the fullness of life. As Kevin Aldrich explained, ‘The Lord of the Rings is about immortality and escape from death. But there is no escape from death except through death, if at all. . . What The Lord of the Rings has to say ultimately is that if true happiness is to be found by mortals, it will be found not in time but in eternity.’49 This was the source and the essence of the ‘shadowlands’ imagery which permeates so much of Tolkien’s work, and so much of the work of his friend C.S. Lewis. To both writers this world was but a land of shadows, a veil of tears as well as a vale of tears, which shielded mortal men from the fullness of the light of God. In Tolkien’s work this can be seen most clearly in his story Leaf by Niggle where everything becomes more real after death than it has been before.

  Yet this ‘shadowlands’ imagery dominates the concluding pages of The Lord of the Rings also. The book ends with Frodo and Gandalf leaving Middle Earth forever, bound for the Blessed Realm beyond the world of Men:

  Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth. . . And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.50

  This scene was also recounted in The Silmarillion, though more metaphysically: ‘And latest of all the Keepers of the Three Rings rode to the Sea. . . In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed to the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.’51

  Meanwhile, the other three hobbits who had accompanied Frodo on the quest to destroy the Ring were left behind, watching the ship disappear over the horizon. Their sense of exile is intense:

  But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart. Beside him stood Merry and Pippin, and they were silent.52

  The sense of exile is heightened when put into the metaphysical context of the Creation, as described in The Silmarillion: ‘And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in the Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.’53

  Although The Lord of the Rings ends with the echo of the music of the angels accentuating Man’s exile from the fullness of truth beyond the grave, Tolkien adds an appendix which concludes with the sense of homecoming awaiting those who accept the gift of death. Aragorn’s final words before his death encapsulate the sense of hope at the heart of Tolkien’s sub-creation: ‘In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’54

  CHAPTER 8

  THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS:

  TOLKIEN AND THE CRITICS

  We have come out of the shallows and the dry places to the one deep well; and the Truth is at the bottom of it.1

  Eight months before
The Lord of the Rings was published, Father Robert Murray had written to Tolkien expressing his doubts concerning its likely reception. Murray feared that many critics would not know what to make of it, believing that ‘they will not have a pigeon-hole neatly labelled for it’.2

  ‘I am afraid it is only too likely to be true,’ Tolkien replied. ’. . .I am dreading publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at. I think the publishers are very anxious too; and they are very keen that as many people as possible should read advance copies, and form a sort of opinion before the hack critics get busy. . .’3

  The critics, hack and otherwise, gave The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, a decidedly mixed response following its publication in August 1954. Peter Green, the biographer of Kenneth Grahame, wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 27 August that it was a ‘shapeless work’ and that it ‘veers from Pre-Raphaelite to Boy’s Own Paper’. He also set the patronizing tone adopted by many other critics both at the time and in the years that followed: ‘I presume it is meant to be taken seriously, and am apprehensive that I can find no adequate reasons for doing so. . .’ Green was not alone in this inability to discern the depths beneath the surface of Tolkien’s myth. J.W. Lambert, writing in the Sunday Times on 8 August, declared that the story had ‘no religious spirit of any kind’, asking whether it was anything other than ‘a book for bright children’.

 

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