Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  The other side of contemporary individualism is the longing for a lost Eden of membership, community, ceremony. . . even at the expense of rationality. All political leaders need myths which rouse this longing, but Fascism is founded on it. Tolkien is no Fascist, but his great myth may be said, as Wagner’s was, to prefigure the genuine ideals and nobilities of which Fascism is the dark negation. Instead of the raucous bawling of Il Duce, the pentameter,—instead of tanks and the goose step, horses and cloaks and lances; instead of Nuremberg, Frodo’s farewell. But I noted Tolkien’s Englishness, and if Fascism were to come to England it would, in E.P. Thompson’s phrase, come by ‘steady vegetable pressure’ rather than by murder and burning down the House of Commons.25

  Inglis has clearly failed to find the pulse at the heart of The Lord of the Rings. The ‘longing for a lost Eden’, the sense of exile, at the core of Tolkien’s myth is a mystical expression of the desire for Heaven, a closer union with God beyond this world, which is the very opposite of those creeds of both left and right which offer quick-fix solutions to the world’s needs. To Tolkien, and to Frodo, Galadriel and Gandalf, there is no heaven on earth; nor would they have listened to any demagogue of left or right, be they Hitler, Mussolini, Marx, Mao, Lenin, Sauron or Saruman, who suggested otherwise.

  Perhaps the issue should be laid to rest by quoting the words of Evelyn Waugh, another writer who has been falsely accused of fascism. Waugh had written plaintively to the New Statesman on 5 March 1938, four months before Tolkien’s letter to the German publishers:

  There was a time in the early twenties when the word ‘Bolshie’ was current. It was used indiscriminately of refractory schoolchildren, employees who asked for a rise in wages, impertinent domestic servants, those who advocated an extension of the rights of property to the poor, and anything or anyone of whom the speaker disapproved. The only result was to impede reasonable discussion and clear thought.

  I believe we are in danger of a similar, stultifying use of the word ‘Fascist’. There was recently a petition sent to English writers. . . asking them to subscribe themselves, categorically, as supporters of the Republican Party in Spain, or as ‘Fascists’. When rioters are imprisoned it is described as a ‘Fascist sentence’; the Means Test is Fascist; colonisation is Fascist; military discipline is Fascist; patriotism is Fascist; Catholicism is Fascist; Buchmanism is Fascist; the ancient Japanese cult of their Emperor is Fascist; the Galla tribes’ ancient detestation of theirs is Fascist; fox-hunting is Fascist. . . Is it too late to call for order?

  The sub-editors at the New Statesman headed Waugh’s letter ‘Fascist’, presumably as a juvenile jibe intended to annoy their hostile correspondent. In doing so they were only reinforcing his point. In fact, the reductio ad absurdum of labelling everyone and everything as either ‘Bolshie’ or ‘Fascist’ was finding tragi-comic expression in Spain even as Waugh was writing. The communists and the anarchists, erstwhile allies against Franco’s fascists, had begun turning their guns on each other, each accusing the other of being ‘Fascist’. In such circumstances it had certainly become ‘too late to call for order’ because order itself was deemed ‘Fascist’.

  The madness caused by this reductionism was at its height in the mid-’50s when The Lord of the Rings was published. As the Cold War threatened nuclear devastation, and with the East calling the West ‘Fascist’ and the West calling the East ‘Bolshie’, it was not surprising that many perceived the importance of the political dimension in Tolkien’s myth. Although Tolkien was at pains to stress that the parable of Power within The Lord of the Rings was a sub-theme, subsisting within the greater religious themes at the heart of the work, many saw in Middle Earth the same sense of sanity in an increasingly mad world which had made Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm so poignant and popular.

  Fascism was not the only f-word thrown at The Lord of the Rings by critics. For Nigel Walmsley, the key to understanding Middle Earth was not to see Tolkien as Fascist but to see him as Fashion:

  The popularity of The Lord of the Rings has to be understood in the context of that group which most surely guaranteed its reputation, the young, disaffected section of the Western industrial middle class of the mid-1960s. The book was a seminal influence on the popular sub-culture of that period, an artifact as commercially enticing as a Bob Dylan record. As an apparent literary success it has perplexed some academics, and in 1967 a protracted correspondence on the merits of the book took place in the letters column of The Times between British University teachers anxious at what they saw as a sign of the collapse of their students’ critical judgement in embracing Middle-earth. The key years in establishing Tolkien’s popularity as a writer were from 1965 to 1968, during which period The Lord of the Rings sold 3,000,000 copies in paperback.26

  Like many good pop stars, Tolkien’s success would be short lived and Walmsley states that by 1968 ‘the style of Middle-earth had become passe’:

  Those who had a year before aspired to look like Bilbo Baggins now sought political credibility and sub-cultural acceptance by cloning themselves on Che Guevara,—knee-length leather bikers’ boots replaced bare feet, paramilitary berets replaced ethnic woolly hats, beards were shaped to imitate two months hard-won growth in the Bolivian jungle instead of the gnome-like outcrops of pubic-type facial hair. . . Harsh aggressive leather, dark and sombre hues, ousted soft, agrarian wools and the bright, kaleidoscope Hobbit colours of ‘67; action displaced contemplation, electric blues displaced acoustic folk. The fashionable gaze was no longer open and beatific but forbidding and pugnacious. And the reading: Marx, Engels, Regis Debray and Herbert Marcuse’s 1966 work, The Ethics of Revolution. Tolkien was back on the shelf.

  These were the signs, the surface indicators, of a sharp change in cultural attitude which was effectively to end Tolkien’s brief period of coruscating contemporary relevance.27

  One wonders if ‘Nigel Walmsley’ is really a pseudonym of John Cleese, and his essay ‘Tolkien and the Sixties’ a Pythonesque pastiche, but if, as one suspects, the author is in deadly earnest, he has not only missed the point but, to employ the modern fashionable idiom, he has ‘lost the plot completely’. Walmsley concludes his essay with the assertion that the success of The Lord of the Rings was due to ‘its radically imaginative appeal to a transient sub-cultural atavism and a related hallucinogenic hedonism which forced it into mainstream international popularity and academic acceptability’. Perhaps no reply is necessary, or possible, but one wonders how this theory squares with Tolkien’s continuing popularity in the ‘glam’ ‘70s, the cynical ‘80s and the ‘techno’ ‘90s, culminating in his emergence as the most popular writer of the century in several nationwide polls.

  Other critics, having failed to fathom the philosophical depths, have floundered in the sexual shallows of Freudian ‘analysis’. Perhaps the most comic, and tragic, of these ‘sexual’ readings of Tolkien’s myth is Brenda Partridge’s ‘No Sex Please—We’re Hobbits: The Construction of Female Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings’. Partridge’s sex-obsession, omnipresent throughout the essay, is most noticeable in her interpretation of Frodo’s and Sam’s battle with the giant spider, Shelob:

  Shelob’s lair, reached by entering a hole and journeying along tunnels, may also be seen to represent the female sexual orifice. At the entrance Frodo and Sam have to force themselves through the bushy, clutching growths (the pubic hair). . . These growths turn out to be cobwebs which enmesh the victim but Frodo, with the obvious phallic symbolism of the sword, pierces the web. . . The diction used to describe the tearing of the web, ‘rent’ and ‘veil’, is traditionally associated with the tearing of the hymen.

  Galadriel’s phial. . . also represents a phallus more potent than their swords. . .

  Despite the phial’s powers, Frodo as a man is ultimately overpowered by the female Shelob; paralysed by her venom he lies helpless waiting to be sacrificed at her will. He is rescued only through the valiant struggle of his male companion, Sam.

&nb
sp; The description of Sam’s battle with Shelob is not only a life and death struggle of man and monster, good against evil but also represents a violent sexual struggle between man and woman. Shelob’s ‘soft squelching body’ is a metaphor for the female genitals swollen and moist in sexual arousal. . . Her impenetrable skin hangs in folds like the layers of the labia. . .

  So Sam valiantly stabs at the monster, pitifully helpless as she rears over him. . . The male organ puny compared with the vast, evil smelling mass of the female is described in euphemistic sexual terms as his ‘little impudence’. . .

  And so Sam and Shelob interlocked climax in an orgasm with the male phallus thrusting hard inflicting great pain and a deadly blow deep into the female sexual organ. . . In the aftermath of the climax as the erection subsides the male, though victor, is again seen as frail and overwhelmed by the female’s bulk.

  Shelob then crawls away in agony as Sam in a final gesture holds up the phial, once more asserting male supremacy, brandishing the phallus, male symbol of power. . .

  The imagery portraying this gesture appears at first sight to be more overtly religious, representing the Christian victory over paganism. However, as we have seen before, in The Lord of the Rings sexual implications are shrouded in religious symbolism. . . Once again Tolkien interprets myth in such a way as to reveal his inner fear or abhorrence of female sexuality, but his attitude is reinforced by the prejudices inherent in religious symbolism itself.28

  It is ironic that a similar sex-obsession has afflicted many later writers in the fantasy genre with results that Brenda Partridge would doubtless find horrific. These writers have forsaken the ‘religious symbolism’ altogether so that the ‘struggle’ between good and evil in much modern ‘fantasy’ is reduced to the level of ‘voyeuristic sadism, where good is “beautiful”, over-muscled (if male) and scantily clad (if female), and evil revoltingly and not very plausibly ugly, in a world where, in the end, right is right because it wins’.29 Such ‘fantasy’, so prevalent today in comics, computer games and films, as well as in fiction, are imitations of Tolkien which are as much a travesty of the original as are ores to elves.

  Ultimately what both the sexist and the anti-sexist interpretations have in common, apart from the overemphasis on sex itself, is a spiritual blindness. They have left out the most important part of the picture because they cannot see it. The ‘soul’ that breathes life and meaning into Tolkien’s myth is the religious dimension and it is a failure to recognize this which is at the root of much of the misunderstanding about The Lord of the Rings. Many critics have failed to see this dimension and have looked for meaning in the wrong places, while others have assumed that there is no meaning at all. ‘The trouble is,’ wrote the critic Derek Robinson, ‘Tolkien’s message is that there is no message.’30 In both cases the failure to understand the deeper meaning results in an assumption that Tolkien’s myth is ‘unrealistic’ and ‘escapist’. ‘It is perhaps the escapism which its mythology offers,’ wrote the literary editor of The Times in the wake of the triumph of The Lord of the Rings in the Waterstone’s poll, ‘that has provided its enduring appeal, the same escapism that has kept Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek going for decades.’31

  As ‘escapism’ is probably the most persistently recurring label to be attached to The Lord of the Rings by critics desperate to find a ‘pigeon-hole’ for it, it is fortunate that Tolkien discussed the subject in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’:

  I will now conclude by considering Escape and Consolation, which are naturally closely connected. Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and (to some) outrageous forms of ‘escapist’ literature,—and it is thus reasonable to attach to a consideration of them some considerations of this term ‘escape’ in criticism generally.

  I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. . . Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing. . . the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.32

  There is much in this incisive riposte to the critics that helps to illumine both The Lord of the Rings and the failure of many critics to come to terms with it. Tolkien perceives that ‘realist’ critics use the word escapism in a negative, patronizing or derisive sense because they object to what they see as the wilful desertion by ‘escapist’ writers from the ‘realities’ of life. To these ‘realists’ all views of life which are not constrained by the straitjacket of their own scepticism and their implicit philosophical humanism is ‘escapist’, a desertion from modernist dogma. Yet Tolkien did not accept this dogma, believing it fundamentally flawed and therefore not ‘realist’ at all. For Tolkien, true reality, the fullness of reality, was to be found beyond the physical in the metaphysical, beyond the natural in the supernatural. ‘Nature is no doubt a life-study,’ Tolkien wrote, ‘or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not “Nature”, and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it.’33

  There are parallels here with the work of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose concept of ‘inscape’ is as relevant to an understanding of Tolkien as any concept of ‘escape’. Hopkins was one of ‘those so gifted’ who made the loving observation of Nature ‘a study for eternity’. For Hopkins, as for Tolkien, the true reality of a thing, be it a tree, a kestrel, a cloud, a sunset or a man, was to be found in its beauty not in the physical properties defined by its molecular composition. This concept of inscape, the metaphysical design which gives a thing its beauty, was developed by Hopkins from his reading of philosophy, and particularly the metaphysical writings of Duns Scotus, who stressed that each thing had an essence, something intrinsically essential, beyond its outward appearance. This was its haecceitas, its ‘thisness’. An entry Hopkins made in his Journal in July 1872 is remarkably applicable to Tolkien’s critics: ‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it.’34

  The metaphysical insight which can be gleaned from The Lord of the Rings was stressed by Stephen R. Lawhead in his essay on Tolkien:

  . . . the best of fantasy offers not an escape away from reality, but an escape to a heightened reality—a world at once more vivid and intense and real, where happiness and sorrow exist in double measure, where good and evil war in epic conflict, where joy is made more potent by the possibility of universal tragedy and defeat.

  In the very best fantasy literature, like Lord of the Rings, we escape into an ideal world where ideal heroes and heroines (who are really only parts of our true selves) behave ideally. The work describes human life as it might be lived, perhaps ought to be lived, against a backdrop, not of all happiness and light, but of crushing difficulty and overwhelming distress.35

  In Lawhead’s view, Tolkien’s achievement in The Lord of the Rings was the transporting of the reader to a ‘heightened reality’ which was only dimly discernible in the partial reality in which we live. This heightened reality led the reader closer to ultimate truth which Tolkien believed was God Himself. Therefore, since Truth, properly understood, was Perfect, it was to perfection that our quest for reality, or realism, should be directed. The imperfections of life, the ambiguities and ambivalences of everyday existence, though real in a limited sense, only detract from the greater reality, blurring the vision. This was the view of the Jesu
it, Father James V. Schall, expressed in his essay ‘On the Reality of Fantasy’: ‘The unsuspecting reader who thinks he is only reading “fantasy” in reading Tolkien will suddenly find himself pondering the state of his own soul because he recognizes his own soul in each fairy-tale.36

  Father Schall’s view also illustrates the chasm of difference between the ‘escapism’ of The Lord of the Rings and that of science fiction creations such as Star Trek. The latter, however much its language is couched in scientific ‘reality’, offers an escape from ourselves and a distancing of ourselves from the ‘real world’. This is the ‘escape’ which Tolkien likens to the Flight of the Deserter. The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, is an escape into ourselves, the quest to rediscover the essence of the self amidst life’s distractions, the ‘escape’ which Tolkien likened to the prisoner who tries to escape in order to ‘go home’. Whereas Star Trek expresses the desire to leave home and explore the universe, The Lord of the Rings expresses the desire to find home and discover the universals.

  Concomitant with this desire to escape into spiritual truth is the realization that complete ‘escape’ is impossible in this life. Hence the sense of longing and the feeling of exile which is integral to the spiritual quest.

  This sorrow at the heart of life was expressed by Tolkien soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, in a letter dated 15 December 1956: ‘Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.’37 Such glimpses were certainly present in The Lord of the Rings, but they were always tempered by the sorrow of the ‘long defeat’, particularly in Sam’s sense of exile following Frodo’s departure from the Grey Havens.