Tolkien's lever

"Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world." - Archimedes

Many people have wanted to move the world, and lacked that place to stand outside of it. J.R.R. Tolkien solved the problem with Middle Earth: a place outside this world but still near enough to touch it. And through that he moved our imaginations, where we can see civilizations that are beautiful and kind instead of merely efficient, civilizations that grow from compatibility with the natural surroundings. He built a world in which the forest-dwellers write with scripts shaped in the flowing lines of trees and leaves, where mountain-dwelling miners chisel writing with the crystalline angle of minerals, and where to all of them the beauty and integrity matter. Living among these peoples, even simply in our imaginations, gives us the place to stand to see our own world more clearly. 

Memory eternal to Professor Tolkien! 

d. 2 Sept 1973

Christianity in Tolkien: Our fight is not against flesh and blood

In Lord of the Rings, there is a good deal of fighting with battles and armies. Still, the villain of the piece is not physical. The evil of Sauron is physically insubstantial, seen as a great eye wreathed in flame. Sauron dominates his subjects through fear, through manipulation, through temptation, through deceit. The greatest danger from Sauron comes not directly from him, but from those who willingly go along with his agenda to dominate, in the hopes of sharing the spoils or at least being on the winning side. 

Evil can be dangerous and destructive. But I am not aware of any naturally-occurring physical thing that is inherently evil, or where we can point to identify the source of evil. If evil had that kind of physical existence, we could destroy it by physical means. 

So Tolkien portrays a world in which the physical battles must be fought to protect the homes and lives of the free people, but the physical battles will never be fully successful so long as evil remains to go on recruiting and corrupting. The real battle is not against flesh and blood. 

Christianity in Tolkien: The risk of corruption and the hope of redemption

One spiritual insight developed by Tolkien is that everyone is corruptible. In the Lord Of The Rings books, we see the major characters each take their turns interacting with the One Ring, all tempted by it. The wisest of them know that they are corruptible and keep their distance from it. Some of them even get a glimpse of what they might become if they pursue that kind of power. 

Tolkien spends some time developing the theme that anyone could be corrupted. Saruman, former leader of the wizards, betrays Gandalf and joins forces with Sauron. And again Boromir, representative of the strongest kingdom in the alliance of the free lands, is the one who turns on Frodo. Those who trust to their own wisdom and strength have underestimated their opponent. Finally, even long-resilient Frodo falters in his battle with such temptation, being saved not by his exhausted strength but by the result of an earlier moment of compassion. 

By the same token, Tolkien portrays everyone as redeemable, or at least as having moments when they can be reached. Frodo refuses to break ties with Smeagol / Gollum not because of a misplaced trust, but because of the growing realization they are in the same predicament. 

It is easy to let ourselves imagine that we cannot be corrupted (or our heroes cannot be corrupted), or to imagine that anyone who missteps is a villain. In Tolkien's insight, the path forward is humility combined with hope and friendship. 

J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of Ancient Beauties

Professor Tolkien once said that a new word should be created, something that meant the opposite of a catastrophe, the opposite of a disaster. He wanted a word for when, against all odds, when all hope seemed lost, through an unexpected turn of events the good triumphed anyway. He suggested "eucatastrophe" for this word.

But Tolkien's work also leaves me searching for a word that I cannot find in our language. He is so determined to entice and allure with the goodness of the world, and the appeal is so strong and insistent, that the closest word I can find is "seduce". But "seduce" is always used of the appeal of bad things: the appeal of the bad is so strong that it corrupts our minds, our will, our character, and leads us down the wrong way to disaster. Tolkien has achieved what few others have done: he has shown the good in all its beauty and desirability, so that the appeal of the good is so strong and alluring that it un-corrupts our minds, our will, and our characters, and leads us down the right way towards health and sanity. When we have finished reading Tolkien, it seems genuinely unthinkable to lie or to betray a friend, or even speak too harshly with our neighbors. Aren't we supposed to be off somewhere helping to heal the world, or building a thing of beauty, or sitting with our friends and raising a toast?

Tolkien creates a world with layer on layer of history, each age leaving its own traces behind. Ancient poems in forgotten languages, hauntingly beautiful, are sprinkled through the pages. The landscape is scattered with the ruins of monuments of earlier ages. And the possibility is never quite gone: someone might take up those songs again, or take the empty throne again, and the crumbling ruins will then become the placeholders for rebuilding the glory that once was. The enchanting past never quite loses its sense of possibility, that it might have a living part to play in the future.

And so the good professor's works inevitably leave us with the impression that he was, after all, talking about this world. They leave us with a sense of unfinished business.

Professor Tolkien invites us to love what is good, what is just, what is pure, what is lovely, those things that are worthy of praise, and to think on these things.

Title for scholars:
Professor of Ancient Beauties

Other holders of the Tolkien chair:
C.S. Lewis
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On being like God (3): creativity and righteousness

Everyone has an ethical system. Everyone makes decisions based on what they think is good and right. Even those who claim that morality and ethics are meaningless go right on every day making judgment calls based on a value system.

Every system of ethics -- every different thing we might value -- leads us to have certain role models, certain people who are living examples of what is good and right, to the best of their ability. I don't mention this to promote a person or group and designate them as having pride of place; I mention it to see what kinds of role models you might get from different ways of thinking about right and wrong. Would the most upright people be the ethics police, those who enforce and uphold the rules? How about the ethics instructors who teach the others? What about people who live ethically (by the rules) more often than others?

But on a view of walking after God, the craftsmen and skilled artists are worthy role models because they increase the objective amount of good in this world that is worthy of loving. The heroes of the Bible include skilled craftsmen; here we find records of acts of worship such as making embroidery and carvings, sculpture and incense. Writing the stories of the people of God was a holy act; writing songs for worship was a holy act. Playing a musical instrument was a holy act.

Those who recognize God as creator, and us the image of God, have gone to great lengths to devise new musical instruments, new art, new literature, new songs. When God created, he saw that it was good. One of the greatest things we do, acting in his image, is to also increase the good in this world by creating something of beauty.

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On September 2, 1973, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien died to this world and was born to eternal life. "Memory eternal!" as they say in the East.

Tolkien: Reality, Fantasy, and Awakening Desire

“I didn’t want it to be a fantasy. I wanted it to be a history.” – The Fellowship of the Ring special extended edition, dir. Peter Jackson, New Line Home Entertainment, Inc., 2002, cast commentary, comment by actor Sean Astin

“Isn’t this just the place everybody wants to have grown up?” – The Fellowship of the Ring special extended edition, dir. Peter Jackson, New Line Home Entertainment, Inc., 2002, cast commentary, comment on the Shire by actor Orlando Bloom

J.R.R. Tolkien was not content just to write a story. It was not enough for him that people should like his world, like his story, like his characters. It was not enough that we should admire or appreciate his world. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien did not set out merely to entertain; he set out to entice. He set out to awaken desire, to arouse longing. A reader hasn’t really understood Tolkien until he has wanted to go to the Shire, to visit Rivendell and Lothlorien, to see the great dwarf city of Dwarrowdelf in its day.

How far Tolkien succeeded in arousing desire is seen not only in the enduring popularity of the story, but in the unprecedented extent to which people want to make that world their own. An entire new genre of games – the modern fantasy role-playing games beginning with Dungeons and Dragons – began with fans of Tolkien who were not content to let the story be someone else’s story, the world someone else’s world. Tolkien succeeded in making us want those places as part of our lives, those friends as our friends, that quest as our quest.

Many authors are said to treat the themes of good and evil, and many authors do treat the subject of evil seriously and extensively. But relatively few treat the subject of good in any depth at all. Tolkien has one of the more deep and sustained focuses on goodness – and its desirability – in modern literature. He adeptly sidestepped shallowness, triteness, and (possibly worse) a dry, inorganic approach to good that renders it impossible to desire profoundly.

Tolkien also did a great piece of workmanship by making the most desirable parts of this fantasy world to be entirely natural. Magic appears in the story – but it is not what gives the world its allure. The Shire has no magic; it has little more than grass, sunshine, and friendship to commend it. The dwarven city of Dwarrowdelf was not made by one dwarf with a magical ring, but by a host of dwarves employing a great natural wonder: the ingenious craftsmanship of those who pour their hearts and souls into their work. The elven kingdoms’ greatest boasts are the forests, poetry and music, and the memory of ancient beauties. What we most desire in Middle Earth is already part of our own world. Neither is it beyond our grasp – we could live in the hillsides and carved mountain-halls if we chose. The humbler, still satisfying joys of sustained friendship and enduring accomplishment are still available to us.

So Tolkien has made his answer as to the value of this world, and of goodness. If we get to the end of Lord of the Rings and think, “I want to go on the ship to the Undying Lands,” then he has won us over.

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Originally blogged at CADRE comments January 1, 2005.

Christianity in Tolkien: A traitor's place in salvation

Tolkien's work is usually too subtle for plain allegorical comparison.
Frodo is not exactly a Christ figure. At the end his goodness fails; the temptation to claim the ring overcomes him.
	But Gollum is much closer to a Judas figure, a traitor. Gollum's treachery was predictable and long-expected. The only thing that was largely unexpected was that his treachery worked out for the good, much like the treachery of Judas Iscariot or of the brothers of Joseph son of Jacob.
Tolkien brings out one of the themes of Christ's life in the character of Gollum: even treachery tends to go wrong, and traitors often do good that they never intended. It's not that Sam Gamgee was wrong to distrust Gollum; it's that Frodo was righter still to bring him anyway.

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All graphics from New Line Cinema's Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, presented under fair usage.

Christianity in Tolkien: Compassion and Redemption

In the Lord of the Rings, one of the central relationships and conflicts revolves around Frodo and Gollum/Smeagol.
Frodo recognizes that he is not so different from Smeagol. He knows that the same temptation would destroy them both, so he knows that abandoning hope for Gollum also means abandoning hope for himself,
	and that keeping hope for himself means refusing to give up on Gollum.
In Tolkien, several central teachings of Christ are shown most clearly in the relationship between Frodo, the most resilient against evil, and Gollum, long since conquered by it. Frodo knows humility, the inseparable link between the best of us and the worst of us, the commonness of sin even in the best, and therefore the commonness of hope for redemption, even for the worst.

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All graphics from New Line Cinema's Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, presented under fair usage.

Christianity in Tolkien: What is Strength?

In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien also challenges our worldly ideas of strength. Is there a land in all of Middle Earth strong enough to defeat Mordor?
A land like the Shire
	could defeat a land like Mordor
not by might of arms such as the long stalemate waged by Gondor
	but like this, with compassion for the enemy.
In Tolkien's scheme, the Shire was stronger than Gondor. Gondor, for all its might of arms, had become a little too much like Mordor, just as Saruman had become a little too much like Sauron. But the Shire was a humble land filled with people who boasted no great deeds. They loved good tilled earth, good food and celebrations. They alone in Middle Earth had the strength needed to defeat Mordor. They still had humility, compassion, and hope. Frodo's love of his enemy played an essential role in the rescue of Middle Earth.

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All graphics from New Line Cinema's Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, presented under fair usage.

Christianity in Tolkien: What Is Wisdom?

In Tolkien's Middle Earth, Saruman began as wisest of the wise. He spent his time in arcane research in a high tower. He had rare forms of knowledge, uncommon access to information. Isn't that wisdom as the world conceives it?
	Gandalf was not generally reckoned to be as wise as Saruman. He spent his time with his feet on the ground, and found himself drawn to the humble.
And when he chose specialized knowledge, the kind he chose was the knowledge not of domination but of friendship, the kind of knowledge that could lead him to know when a friend needed help, or when to show up for a long-expected birthday party.
In Tolkien's scheme, Gandalf was wiser than Saruman, and Gandalf's view of wisdom was truer than Saruman's. A wisdom that forgets why life is worth living, and why good is worth defending, is not wisdom at all. True wisdom is not proud but humble; true wisdom does not exalt itself but exalts the lowly. It has room for friendship, even room for self-sacrifice if that is the price for maintaining these things. True wisdom places love first, and is recognized by joy and gladness. The other may appear wise, but is not.

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All graphics from New Line Cinema's Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, presented under fair usage.

Visions of Paradise: Tolkien

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lorien there was no stain.

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Previous in the Visions of Paradise series:
Coleridge's Xanadu

Tolkien and the shadow of evil

I've written before on Tolkien's treatment of goodness. Tonight I'd like to glance at the other side of the coin: Tolkien's acknowledgment of evil. The evil wizards and the orcs and the explicitly evil elements are obvious enough in his works. But in Tolkien's writing, unlike many heroic epics, the heroes do not all simply live happily ever after. In Tolkien's reckoning, on October 6 of each year Frodo was visited by returning pain, likewise in March of each year, on the anniversaries of serious wounds he had taken. When Frodo returns to the Shire, he cannot take up his life again. Something similar had happened long years before to Celebrian, who was Elrond's wife, Galadriel's daughter, and Arwen's mother.

In Tolkien's earlier work, The Hobbit, Bilbo's adventures stay with him after his return, though not in a bad way at first. Bilbo spends much of the rest of his days in his study, writing, while the evil he has unwittingly brought back with him slowly grows on him. Frodo's darker adventures leave him at times haunted, and again after his return he spends much of his time in his study, writing.

As for Tolkien, after he returned from his own adventures in the Great War / World War I, we all know where and how he spent much of his time: in his study, writing. I've made a few searches and haven't found what I was looking for. But I'd be very curious if anything had happened to Tolkien on the dates he chose for Frodo's yearly visits of pain: March 13 and October 6.