Tolkien Chapter 4 - Ainulindalë, Aman, & the Sub-Creation of Arda
The Echoes of Atlantis in a "Feigned History and Imagined Past"
By now, it is well known to LOTR and Tolkien scholars the role that "deep time" and distant past played in Tolkien's legendarium. Tolkien's conception of the Cosmos was that it was originally a flat, immobile spot. This was the "globe" of Arda, or rather a disc, made out of Ea, the Universe. Avakuma was the "void" outside of Arda's disc, and the Ainur descend from Iluvatar's celestial dwelling in order to shape this world. Their dwelling spot or "high place" was Aman, and the tale of the Ainulindalë constitutes the story of cosmogenesis and then theogony.
Tolkien parts ways, here, with any kind of young earth or literal seven day Creationism. In fact, he cannot even be said to "part ways" with them, since his view is so far from considering such or even admitting its possibility without manifest absurdity, that it just does not take cognizance of anything but a very Deep Time, and extremely Ancient and Antique Earth. This world is charged with myth, and can be said to live by the life blood of myth and the breath of poetry. Yet for all that, it is our same world, long ago. Paul H. Kocher puts it this way: Arda is "our own green and solid Earth at some quite remote epoch in the past". (Kocher, Paul H. (1974) [1972]. Master of Middle-earth: The Achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-003877-4. - accessed from Wikipedia, History of Arda, 7/4/2024)
Characteristically, for Tolkien, the flat/round Earth theme, as well as the question of where the lower heavens are, is solved elegantly, by simply making it both: Arda is fluid or plastic, and changes configuration and shape, as the divine Ainur mold and shape her over time. The "road to the West" was once open, presumably when Arda was disc shaped and flattened, but when the rupture between Heaven and Earth worsens, Arda is wrapped into a sphere or globe, and thus the bridge to the divine world closes. The sphere and circle become a symbol of the serpent biting its own tail.
A very stylized Ouroboros from the very Christian Book of Kells...
An interesting and curious result of Tolkien's framing of a "feigned history and imagined past" (WH Auden) is that, depending upon one's point of view, either the distant past, or the present, or the far future can be made into the Golden Age. Some kind of similar, simultaneous telescoping-compressing of the chronological scale occurs in LOTR. Alternatively, the ending of the Third Age is the worst thing that has ever happened, or the dawn of a golden new era, and arguably the best. After all, Sauron is decisively defeated and cast out for many aeons, and Melkor is no longer to be seen anywhere. Although there is much less magic in the world (and far fewer elves, who are all going west over the sea), the age of men has arrived. We comfortably begin to enter into our own prehistory. The world of more familiar myths, those of the Greeks, the Celts, and the Anglo-Saxons, is just over the horizon.
The ellipses and caesuras in this method of putting all known Reality onto one string of prayer beads, is arguably Tolkien's greatest contribution not only to Literature, but Theology and Philosophy and even Sociology, since it implies that he has given us a great "telling" or "weaving" that describes our own situation. Critics may, and will, argue that "it doesn't work". We have seen Michael Moorcock's send-up of Tolkien, for example.
The entire purpose of this short book could be summed up as an answer to this disingenuous hit piece on Tolkien and the Inklings, not in a point by point refutation, which it does not deserve and is impossible given the nature of the attack, but in an unfolding of Tolkien's art to see what he is really up to. Moorcock, it appears, didn't like being beaten to the punch by a doddering old English squire (as he saw him), and so he couldn't help but hate LOTR and all his works.
What was the punch that Moorcock envied Tolkien for? Why, assuming he actually read LOTR (a big assumption), it was the implicit doctrine of sub-creation, which underlies each of the main categories by which Tolkien treats both his world, and the real one. If we are examining "Arda" (as well as Aman and Ainulindalë) in this chapter, we are looking at the "dark materials" with which Tolkien constructed his world: Arda is the stage, Aman is the abode of light on that stage, and the Ainur are the co-creative forces which actively shape the globe. All of them, in turn, are controlled by the doddering old English squire Tolkien, whom, it must be admitted, appears quite adept at the procedure. It is not "as if" Tolkien is at a loss for how this world of Arda came about, took shape and form, and began to embody forth the abode not just of gods, but of men.
The doctrine of sub-creation has been handled extensively by both Verlyn Flieger and Jonathan MacIntosh in their respective masterworks on Tolkien. We regard each of them as a definitive locus classicus departing point, for understanding Tolkien's work, if someone lacks the ability to derive it themselves from the primary text, or (more positively) wishes to develop their own insight. The way this works, in Reality, is that whomever is willing to be mastered by the creative power of the Logos is the one who "gets to sub-create". The fact that Moorcock and others are sore over this, is really an indictment of them, and not of the author.
The science fiction author China Miéville has in Eric Sandberg's view taken on Moorcock's "critique of Tolkien's conservative politics". Sandberg notes that Moorcock called The Lord of the Rings "a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism," while Miéville mentions Tolkien's "small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos" and "belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity" (Wikipedia link, accessed 07/04/2024).
It is doubtless the case that LOTR embodies the pastoral themes that were regnant (at one time) in the British Empire, during its conservative phase. To this, we can only answer in the Apostle Paul's admonition that any competition is to be done in that which is praiseworthy: the virtues, which are underlain with Love through self-control and self-abnegation. St. Paul could rejoice that Titus succeeded, where he had fallen short. That is the apostolic ideal. In the Western world of today, we have all our virtues "trans-virtued", or transmogrophied. Alisdair MacIntyre, for instance, has done an enormous amount of work in showing how discussion of virtue might proceed in a world after Nietzsche's "transvaluations" have occurred.
Your only options are not The Void or the Enlightenment!
Artistically, Tolkien himself constituted an answer as to what happens in the West, "After Virtue". This consisted in Tolkien grasping that sub-creation (or participatory mode of knowledge) underlay any way "higher up and further in", or "a way out further in". Rather than return to an age of Philosophy (Greece and Rome), Religion (Middle Ages), or Science (The Enlightenment), it was through Art, and Art's union of all three in a subtle participatory mode, that there was hope for Arda (Earth).
Just as Melkor's enactment of his dissonant music in the beginning of the world before Arda was born would be mirrored or re-enacted in the concrete history of Middle Earth later, by the singing of another remedy-tune directly from Iluvatar, so understanding how Arda came to be offers clues to how Arda will be re-made, after the rupture of the Fall.
The fires of sub-Creation must find their roots in Music and song, which is an art form, and not (strictly speaking) philosophical, religious, or scientific doctrines purely aimed at dogmatic representation. This "must" is not a categorical imperative, essentially, but a form of magic which simply lies at the heart of the worlds. It is not "created", it is discovered, because it is the uncreated energies of God involved in manifesting the world. As such, it is not "imitated" in an external sense, but "internalized" in a magical one. The operation should be viewed as "magical", not in the technique sense of operative magic (which can be degenerate), but rather as a form of co-synchronicity with God. It is the gardner (Samwise) who is chosen to replant Lothlorien in the Shire after the wars, and set about restoring the Shire. It is the healer (Aragorn) who of right, ought to be, and by destiny infallibly will be, King. It is the sacrificer (Gandalf) who is reborn as Saruman "as he ought to have been". It is the most humble of hobbits (Frodo) who is chosen to be the Saviour, not by necessity, but by ineluctable Divine Freedom. This magic of sub-creation is the Divine Magic, which is different in kind, but not intensity save by greater intensity, from that which fallen man calls "magic". It is in the Imagination (the root of the Fall) that the magic is found to be baptized and turned to the higher magic of Sub-Creation.
Thus there is no question but that the "Squire", Tolkien, is remaking The Shire, just as there can be no doubt that many will find this objectionable. Some of them are "of the Right" (Christian evangelicals) who object to the idea that there is Divine Magic, and others "of the Left" who wish that it wasn't a conservative English gentleman wielding this magery, but don't know how to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit themselves. There is no doubt that there are "Gnostic" themes in Tolkien. Here is another example, for instance. Just as there is no doubt that Tolkien effectively "eternalizes" the Virgilian and classical English themes about the unstained virtue of the countryside.
If we understand what Tolkien is doing, this should be no surprise, nor meet with any objection. The singing of Ainulindalë by the Ainur with Iluvatar, give rise to Arda and Aman and even the Ring-Pass-Not of Avakuma. This "globe" or disc is not made of dead matter and empty space surrounding it, but is plastic and fluid to the will of the encosmic, mesocosmic, and hypercosmic demi-gods who remain creatively faithful to Iluvatar. By extension, we can conceive and infer that Tolkien believed (and perhaps sensed or even knew) that our own world was no different from Arda, for they were the same world.
At the same time, despite Tolkien's maximal macro-cosmic vision of a universe governed by the Music of the Spheres, all of this was remade ab novo in his own singular vision: the "way out" was to individually and personally re-sing the original unity of the fallen world, into existence as a New Creation.
Although not for Lewis' Space Trilogy, or Tolkien's LOTR, it's an example of sub-Creation
The only "way out" was the restoration of an antique Unity, in a new way, much like Iluvatar's interruption of Melkor's discordant themes in the fires of early Creation. Tolkien denies that this is all some "allegory" precisely because a "true myth" cannot be (except in a grossly reduced and redacted form) an allegory at all. CS Lewis was comfortable working with allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia, but Tolkien famously was critical of Narnia.
Lewis was writing a fairy story for children who lived in Britain just after World War II. They lived with trains, airplanes, radios, and tourists. They read the tales of King Arthur and Hercules. Their culture had inherited the stories from around the world. Children are not professors of Anglo-Saxon. As much as Tolkien talked about the boundary between our world and the world of faerie, he did not write stories that involved crossing that boundary, but Lewis did. Tolkien worked hard at imitating a style of elevated language and duplicating a form of storytelling that predated the Norman invasion of 1066. As monumental an achievement as The Lord of the Rings may be, it is not a fairy story. By contrast, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a fairy story for children in 1950 who inherited the global collection of stories of the fading British Empire. For them, Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, was the magical figure who remained in the modern world and helped form a bridge to the world of imagination. Link
Tolkien put it directly:
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."
Tolkien elsewhere admits the necessity of allegory:
"I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language." (Letter 131) "The only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it." (Letter 109)Link
An answer to the paradox can be found in True Myth. Just as the pathetic fallacy becomes poetic power in the hands of a master, so allegory (in the hands of true myth) becomes Reality. For Tolkien, it was crucial that the True Myth was the master, and not the author, an author who would end up manipulating things instead. The author himself would be mastered by the True Myth, rather than "in command" of a chosen allegory. Sir Phillip Sidney famously wrote The Faerie Queene as an allegory that served the Protestant settlement of England, arguably. Although Tolkien would have disliked this aspect of Sidney's work, he shared Sidney's deeper vision and creatively developed it with the doctrine of sub-creation.
Tolkien follows Sidney explicitly, for in his essay "On Fairie Stories" he develops Sidney's insight and brings it to completion in his own doctrine of "sub-creation": Man is creative because he is made in the image of the Creator. "Used or misused, [our] right has not decayed: We make still by the law in which we're made."
That Tolkien believed Reality worked along these deeper lines is clear from the character of Aragorn, who takes the "low road" of the outcast ranger, the despised healer, and the doomed hero, rather than grasp directly at the crown of Gondor and confront Sauron. Naturally, he is victorious, and that because an overarching Providence brings eucatastrophe out of a hopeless situation, along the way, granting each noble character their destiny. Tolkien seems to be telling us, in this way, that it is not our first take of Reality that is reliable, but rather the second look with the eyes of Faith, Hope, and Love. This second look must pierce beyond the veil of Death, which is to say, it must seem to fly in the face of dead matter and empty space, those tyrants of the senses, which tempt man to render subservience to the real god of this world. Sub-creation, then, can be defined as active participation in the vision of Faith, through the virtue of Hope, which does not disappoint, and culminates in the revelation of Love, that re-makes the world. Of course, Iluvatar brings about eucatastrophe! It is child's play, to God. The world, then, is a true fairy tale, in every possible sense of the world. An important caveat to this (for Tolkien) is that the sub-creator has the possibility of indirectly contacting this power of creation, and being guided by it towards the eucatastrophic power of God. As Lewis once put it, the imagination can be "baptized". The more conscious this is, the more real power the poet possesses, although this process transforms what we mean by "power" and "possession".
This sub-creating of Arda, is an actual shaping and molding of the plasticity and fluidity of what others mistake for "dead matter and empty space". Tolkien (of course) is consciously shaping it, with his artifice, in this manner. A cynic might aver that Tolkien crafted LOTR exactly as Sauron labored over his rings of power. This is of course exactly what Moorcock is accusing him of: Tolkien is the crafty but daft English squire laboring to forge a "One Ring" of conservative power that will re-bind all of English mythos back to the Dark Lord's spell.
Just as there is not objective "outward" test to determine if a poet has fallen into the Pathetic Fallacy on the one hand, or breathes the living soul of poetry (and hence Creation) on the other, so there is no definitive way to separate Moorcock's world from Tolkien's. At least, there is no outward test which can be performed in a laboratory. They are both "sub-creating". Moorcock doesn't like what Tolkien has done with his faculty, and it's safe to assume Tolkien would be disgusted by Moorcock's world. The proof, as they say, would be in the pudding. "By their fruits, ye shall know them."
Both authors intuitively understand that Art is more powerful, especially in our day, than either Philosophy, Religion, or Science, precisely because Art embodies the higher spirits of all three of these. It is worth noting, however, that Moorcock gives us a very bleak and nihilistic Reality, in which the anti-hero is equivalent to an exalted psychopath or sublime sociopath. Art, then, can either produce Idols or Icons. Our age is unable to explain the difference, because it is not acquainted with the power of baptism, sub-creation, or true Myth. All it can do, is engage in political polemics and propaganda for power. To be unconscious of the reality of sub-creation, is to inevitably fall "under the Shadow".
Jasun Horsley points out that Hollywood (our Art) glamorizes evil by providing us with aesthetic reasons for plunging down into the abyss of evil, in the name of realism.
Once upon a time, I believed this was because their work was deepening my understanding of evil (and therefore of myself), that it was providing a service of such vitality and depth that it was as good as—equal to—a religious form of revelation. This is precisely the point, I think, of the hallowed imagery of Hollywood. The Jews forbad imagery because they knew it could quickly replace people’s sense of the numinous, by flooding their perceptions with a simulated representation of reality, and by doing it illegitimately, via the combination of artifice and artistry. In a word: the creation of false idols. Link
According to Jesus' doctrine of "fruit", this is exactly what Moorcock is up to. Tolkien, just as clearly, is not "up to" this at all. Regardless of the Squirearchy background that permeates his work, and how one feels about the values of rural English living or the British Empire, Tolkien is rather "on the side of the trees", as he once put it. Ghan Beri-Ghan is not part of "British rural living" or the Squirearchy, & yet is a moral exemplar in LOTR. Gondor, quite as obviously, is neither Britain nor Europe, but rather a Byzantine Empire, another world entirely. Tolkien (in this view) could appreciate what is good in Moorcock, whereas, the inverse is not the case. This is how one tells the difference between "Good" and "Evil" in the realm of Art. Tolkien is busy creating a Cosmos, whereas Moorcock gives us a "Philosophy". Tolkien created a participatory sub-Mythos, while Moorcock gave us a view of "the world".
Tolkien did not require a doctrine or dogma of God to shape Arda and mold the LOTR universe. Jonathan MacIntosh in The Flame Imperishable deals extensively with the merely vestigial traces of the Creator, the lack of rites and prayers and churches, or organized religion of any kind. Equally noteworthy is a lack of Philosophy and Science, of the organized variety. It is instructive to contrast his work also with George R.R. Martin's world.
At first glance, the worlds (sub)created by Tolkien and Martin may seem to have a number of crucial features in common. Both are meticulously crafted, with various, often deeply incompatible, layers of cultural identity and ethics (Gondor vs Mordor, Starks vs Lannisters etc.). Likewise, despite sometimes markedly different approaches in their worldbuilding strategies, the writers' indebtedness to medieval literature, history and values has been repeatedly examined by many a scholar, providing fertile grounds for cross-cultural explorations and evaluations. There are, however, certain vital, perhaps even fundamental, issues where the worlds of The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire are as distinct from one another as the proverbial chalk and cheese. One such issue – clearly discernible to every Christian (or, at least, Christian-raised) reader of Tolkien – is the intriguing spiritual disparity between the characters living in Middle-earth and those that inhabit Martin's Westeros. The world of the former is almost practically devoid of any explicit manifestations of the divine (at the time of its first publication the readers were not yet aware of the (pre) existence of Eru Illúvatar), yet, at the same time, it is suffused with numerous Christian values and underpinnings which cannot be ignored if one seeks to get a fuller (and thus more meaningful) picture of Tolkien's fiction. The latter, on the other hand, appears to be resplendent with all sorts of gods – greater and lesser, "real" and imaginary, more or less merciful and forgiving – yet in the long run it fails (in most cases it seems to fail all along the line) to even partly comply with the Christian (or, as for that matter, any religion-based) ethics, perhaps in some ways implying that all religions (or theologically-based systems of beliefs) are equal, and therefore equally false (or, at least, uncertain) in their nature and moral direction. The following paper seeks to examine some of these differences, juxtaposing Tolkien’s Catholic worldview with that of evidently agnostic (or even atheist) Martin. Lukasz Neubauer
The fluidity and plasticity of Arda, its "suppleness" as it were, comes about thanks to Tolkien's understanding of both human and Divine nature, as well as everything that lies "in between" (Middle Earth). Arda has the quality of a green shoot bursting out of fertile ground, promising the growth of a great tree, which birds will nest in, animals shade under, and humans contemplate. Like the Ents, Tolkien could be "cranky, but not lofty or condescending". This is because he was quite literally "co-creating" both his own world, and through it, participating in the creation of the real one. Like a tree, which can be angular or unpredictable, but whose heights were not filled with false hubris or deluded vision about its own nature, Tolkien was no "philosopher". Moorcock and his hero Elric Stormbringer, are philosophers.
The theme of a cursed magical sword which causes evil deeds when drawn goes back to the sword Tyrfing in Norse Mythology, with which Moorcock was likely familiar. Stormbringer was influential in popularizing this trope in the fantasy genre. Moorcock intended the sword character to serve as a key element of his discussion of "how mankind's wish-fantasies can bring about the destruction of... part of mankind". Claiming influence from Freud and Jung he says: "The whole point of Elric's soul-eating sword, Stormbringer, was addiction: to sex, to violence, to big, black, phallic swords, to drugs, to escape. That's why it went down so well in the rock’n’roll world". Literature scholar Dennis Wilson Wise wrote that "a weapon like Stormbringer reinforces liberal selfhood in a particularly concrete way. It carries a continuous external threat to personal autonomy, and it subverts a fully rational self-determination. Modern fantasy heroes, especially in epic fantasy, often rail against "destiny" or a prophecy, but such destinies and prophecies lack Stormbringer's sentient specificity."Link
Pretty obvious what's going on here - I will opt for the Squirearchy if this is my other choice...
If I am correct in my reading of Moorcock's objection to Tolkien, they tell us more about him than they do about Tolkien. It is not my intention to justify all of Tolkien's character, life, or his political views (or lack of them), let alone issue an apology for the British Empire. I consider myself more of a Jacobite than a Whig, anyway. However, LOTR and its stage setting of Arda presents itself to an almost endless variety of readers of variously diverse backgrounds, not as an artifact of "power" in the worldly sense, but rather as a world which we can enter and find, for a short space, almost as real, as real, and occasionally more real, than our own.
This is an important point - LOTR varies in its quality of "suspension of disbelief". At times, Tolkien keeps us rooted in the real world, such as when he provides narrative hints at dark points in The Hobbit that reassure us that the characters "make it". Other times, we are "side by side" with the characters, such as the Great Council in Rivendell, where we survey the SitRep in our secluded mountain resort. Then there are the times in which we are obviously carried across the border into purest fantasy. This last portion is most obvious in the The Silmarillion, but it is present (for instance) in the forest of Treebeard, when he shelters Merry and Pippin, feeding them on ent-draughts that increase their stature. The encounter with the Balrog in the mines of Moria is a set piece of this nature.
By allowing the work to be "under, equal, and above" at various times, Tolkien establishes a greater sense of the True Myth, since it is something that permeates the sub-human, the human, and the supra-human, with equal facility. In a word, the magic forms the breath (and breadth) of the entire sub-Creation. Iluvatar permeates, and yet transcends, all of Creation.
Rather than give us a "philosophy" (if the reader insists upon one, please consult that of panentheism), Tolkien instead uses Art and the written word to situate the reader in a living universe that is fully connected (after the pattern of the original) to the original. This universe lives in three ways: first of all, by being self-consciously crafted to fit as an artifact within God's Reality; second by existing as much in the mind of Tolkien self-consciously, as upon paper; and third by taking seed and root in the mind of the reader, after the same fashion. When Tolkien is "realistic", he follows the first way of creating memorably apt scenes that have verisimilitude to world history. Thus, the council of Elrond is a war council much like many other such councils we could think of. When he is "below" the real world, he is self-consciously the author or maker, who assures us that Bilbo Baggins will survive his ordeal, and that he the author is "serving" that world by carrying it along in a satisfactory fashion. And when he is "above" his own world, he is giving us inspired insights into Creation by passing a living flame on to us, that goes beyond any pure artificial means.
An allegory that had no poetic power would be something the author told us, or commanded us, to believe and see and feel. True Myth aspires to be both beneath, within, and beyond all experienced or even imagined Reality whatsoever, to touch the imageless power of God which upholds and sustains and guarantees all of Creation. There is, then, something to Tolkien's focus on "Middle Earth" : he both starts, continues, and ends in Midgard, the Middle Realm. In media res is where we find ourselves in Creation's story, so Tolkien re-enchants precisely that. He has no need for the "power allegory" which the likes of Moorcock appeals to, because Tolkien's artistic vision encompasses the reality of the second person of the Trinity, who is also "in media res": Christ is He Who Was, Is, and Is to Come. He is the mediator between the beginning and the end, because He is the beginning and the end. One portrays that, by portraying the suffering servant who holds all of this together, in the middle.
One doesn't grasp the Ring directly, or assume command, with an explicit allegory which dictates ideological terms of surrender from God or His Creation. It is only through sub-Creation that one is initiated into the living heart of Creation, and "possesses power", the only kind of power there really is, in the end, and the only "thing" one can really "possess". In sub-Creation, the paradoxes of free will, Evil, and meaning are resolved in the living process, which simultaneously reaches back to the beginning of God's manifestation, and forward to the consummation and perfection of this Creation in God.
One can spell this out philosophically (of course), and the temptation is there to do it. Or one can translate all of this into actual sub-Creation, & limit the spelling out to clarification of the author's technique, such as it is. The latter is of course what Tolkien chose to do. But one musn't be misled that Tolkien has no Philosophy, Religion, or Science in his Art - he has simply chosen to transfigure them, and to let the medium bear the message, by becoming equal in form and function, to the message itself.
The reason there are echoes of Atlantis in the midst of LOTR is quite simply that Tolkien is suggesting that the myth of Atlantis is not a myth at all, if we mean by that, "something that is entirely untrue and purely imaginary". Tolkien gives us one plausible imagining of that lost pre-history, but not the only one possible. Arda is "still green", if Tolkien is right in his portrayal of Reality. It has not entirely hardened, nor can it ever completely do so, simply because it is always going to be alive, responsive to both the creative action of God, and the sub-creative action of man.
Our vision and making of Arda, therefore, must correspond to what we really desire for it to be, and not merely to what we naively think is "real". If we, for instance, approach the sub-creating of Arda in a cynical fashion, this is of course what we shall find, multiply, and perhaps harvest. "Seeing" reality is itself a creative activity, which involves meaning, purpose, and poetic vision. It is not possible to specify some kind of outer or external "correct" structure which is static and unchanging, and therefore "dead", to which the author or reader must conform their sensibilities and dreaming.
The rural "Winnie the Pooh" trope or "Wind in the Willow" idyll which Moorcock finds so objectionable, is precisely the mark of the ever present Life flowing through the Faerie world. This Light, Life, and Love is not subservient to anything except God. It may take an objectionable form, or be handled in a clumsy manner, but it itself is as real as anything under the Sun, because it is the life of Iluvatar Himself. It could approach the fallen world in no other form but the objectionable one of "un-reality", since the fallen world of power allegorizes itself necessarily as the "one, true Way" or Ring of Power.
It is naive to think that appearances are reality, if by appearances, one means that which is most readily obvious to certain forms of consciousness. Appearances, then, are not what is "first" in the senses. I mean that they should not be, and if they are, there is something already "first". A work of perception, interpretation, and distillation of meaning imposes itself upon us actively, first. The speed and power and simplicity with which mechanical appearances can interpose themselves upon us, prior to this work, can deceive even the "expert". Thus, to all appearances, it is Sauron who is true Lord of Middle Earth, destined to win the long struggle of the Ring. The Dark Lord cannot be long or very safely resisted. To all appearances, particularly in LOTR, the struggle is well nigh hopeless.
Evil is even more exalted in The Simarillion, however, the presence of the Valar and their abode redresses this balance. By contrast in LOTR, there is very little that is not in the process of "falling under the shadow". Gondor does quite literally, Lothlorien lives (as it were) by moonlight, and only Rivendell alone is free (for a time) of any hint or trace of creeping or surrounding darkness.
If it weren't for the Eagles of Manwe in the sky, or Rivendell, you'd think Iluvatar had abandoned them! Link
This maximal strongness of Evil (with a corresponding absence of Good) is actually the source of one of the strongest general objections to Tolkien's work, which is given by John Michael Greer in an excellent on-line article. If Moorcock's objections are both trivial and adolescent (to be charitable), Greer's are cogent and at least partially tangent, worth attending to in every way. There are three relevant articles: here, here, and here.
As Arda takes shape under Tolkien's molding and shaping, one certainly becomes aware that there is a starkness and abundance of Evil. The Shadow comes up a bumper, cornucopia crop. From the very beginning of tales and Time, it is one long story of tragedy and defeat. Evil doesn't just prevail, it "lays over" Good, easy. It seems to. History might be said to be a current catastrophe, which is always in a crescendo and culmination of Evil, Darkness, and Shadow. Greer's objection is exactly this, that the "evilly, evil Dark Lord" (and all his works) is a grotesque parody of Reality, and tells us more about Tolkien's own shadow side, projected (perhaps) from his experience in the trenches of warfare against the Germans, and by extension the Nazis.
Greer might say that it is a long way, a very long way indeed, from the music of Creation, and the exquisite loveliness of the Ainulindalë and Aman, to the horrors of a defiled Arda, as Melkor and Morgoth and Sauron crank up their cosmic war machine. Put the objection this way - just as there is not any evil under the sun that Candide's beloved Cunégonde does not suffer before she is reunited as a disfigured trunk and remnant of a human being to her once-while lover, so there is no Evil so vile nor terrifying that Arda does not undergo it in the process of her sub-creation, at Tolkien's hands.
This, I would argue, is where the artistic vision of Tolkien is perhaps at its weakest. What Tolkien calls "The Long Defeat", and what others might term the "Never-Ending Rape" of Arda, can be examined as the stress point in Tolkien's vision, or the weak point in the load-bearing arch of his art. Connor Sweeney does an excellent study of this concept in Tolkien, & it's useful for seeing more clearly the sub-creation of Arda. An article by the same author is here.
It’s probably true that in the intervening years since my book on hobbits, evangelisation, and the genealogies of a secular age was published, J.R.R. Tolkien’s somewhat gloomy perspective on history as a “long defeat” has only become more relevant. Tolkien once noted that from the point of view of the Christian — who knows that “the world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31) — history is more a story of defeat and decline than it is of victory. “I am a Christian”, Tolkien wrote, “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.”
Precisely opposed to Moorcock's juvenile thesis (that LOTR is an idyllic Winnie-The-Pooh fantasy land), is the stark reality that Middle Earth has been ravaged time-out-mind by epic waves of suffering, misery, and violence. A perpetual World War has been raging, there, since almost the beginning of time. The sub-creation of Arda (at least in outward form or appearance) takes shape under the pressure of pure Evil: the planet's primal Goodness is ravaged intensely and incessantly by the chemical, energetic, and magnetic forces of Darkness, which take the lead in providing impetus to her cataclysmic spiritual geology.
To my mind, the character of Frodo was always the weakest hero in LOTR. He was, quite simply, almost completely passive. His character was unobjectionable, but aside from being Bilbo's favorite nephew, or having a merciful streak, he does very little indeed except tote the increasingly destructive Ring around half of Middle Earth. In the end, he succumbs to its allure, and is saved by Gollum's sharp and amputating bite, removing his finger, at the edge of Mount Doom. Frodo's struggle (we are given to understand, and indeed, must so understand to save Tolkien's art), is invisible and therefore almost totally spiritual.
Tolkien took a risk, in making Good so invisible in LOTR. One sees only the surging and raging Chaos and Horror, endless waves of suffering. Actually, as bad as Middle Earth is in the time of Gandalf, it is practically child's play and a walk in the park, compared to the days of the Silmarils. Evil, it must be said, in Tolkien's Arda, is always stronger than Good, but always in an invisible and subtle way. The "good guys" keep seeming invincible, and then the enemy turns up more cunning, mighty, and devilish still. Whittled down to almost nothing by the Third Age, we are treated to the tortuous last denouement of all this sorry spectacle, as (surprise, surprise) yet again, the Dark Lord rises.
I am unsure exactly how Tolkien would answer this attack, which to my mind is by far the strongest of all that I have seen given against him, but I will assay one here, to close the chapter on the Sub-Creation of Arda. Sweeney has given us his theodicy of LOTR here, in which he argues that a sacramental presence sustains the unsustainable:
Frodo and Sam thus accept the dramatic terms of history, resisting the temptation to water down the meaning and importance of what they must do so as to justify giving up. “To seek comfort”, says Girard, “is always to contribute to the worst.” But it’s what gives them this conviction and resilience that really matters. And here, though they are without the immediate practical support of the Fellowship, they bear it as a seal and memory in their hearts. They carry the formative culture of the Shire with them as well. And so they possess a faith, a hope, and a love that enables them to face Mordor with clear-eyed courage and resilience, even as they experience the full range of suffering that belongs to the particular cross that has been given them to bear. In other words, they draw on the power of something that, though not present in a conventional way, is no less a living and “sacramental” reality that animates, shapes, and sustains them amidst their suffering.
I agree that sacramental theology is essential to understanding (and justifying) Tolkien, but I think this is insufficient. Arda cannot simply be turned to stone, whether by Evil itself, or by the self-justificatory process of Theodicy, in which one shrugs off the Evil as a "long defeat", and focuses (instead) upon the transcendental of the sacramental. Either process turns Arda to stone. This was always the Reformation battle cry against the Church of Rome, that the material world was too lightly held. Luther famously proclaimed - "I am no Marpassian crag!" To echo this, and reply to Tolkien's challenging art, we may declaim - "Tolkien, we are no Olympian demi-gods!"
When a world is threatened with being "turned to stone", as Middle Earth and Arda certainly are risked, if Tolkien were simply reducing it to ash in order to pull it back out of the cinders at the last second, LOTR would be devalued. If Tolkien were simply projecting his own shadow into the orcs, the Ring, Mordor, and Sauron (as Greer suggests is the case), LOTR would be almost valueless.
Middle Earth (I would agree) at times verges on being turned to stone, ash, and shadow. This, of course, is precisely what has happened to Mordor, quite literally.
England's Black Country close to Tolkien's childhood home may have more to do with Mordor than Hitler does...it was "black by day, and red by night".
In Tolkien's defense, the Industrialization of England was not a passing, small, nor pleasant phenomena. It made impressions on more than just a few sensitive or misguided souls. William Blake's phrase "The Dark Satanic Mills" comes to mind, and few scholars or writers have attempted to blame Blake for "projecting the Shadow". If there is an artistic weakness to Tolkien, it would be at this stress or slip point. Mordor is the darkness "made visible" and material. As such, it verges on apocalyptic literalism.
What saves Tolkien's artwork from the nastier fate of pure confessional or psychological redaction, and carries it over this potential flaw, are two things. First of all, there is in Tolkien the presence of sacramental reality which is not a theological overlay, nor a supernatural imposition at all, but which predates the fire and smoke of Mordor, the wrack and ruin of Angband. Tom Bombadil, a character which has greatly irritated or perplexed many, along with the Ents or the Wild Men of the Woods, or the strange "Old Forest", represent an older, untamed primordialness which is not merely residual. Despire the threats of Sauron and the Dark Lord to draw the entire world into chaos and then eternal slavery, Nature in her primal garb keeps showing up in Tolkien's art. Thus, when Bilbo climbs up a tree in Mirkwood, he sees the forest of butterflies living on the canopy. There is a Romantic streak in Tolkien that is hard to miss.
"Theory is Gray. Life is Green." - Goethe (Tolkien might heartily agree)
All of the Evil in Arda, under Tolkien's hands, is like the Ring, in the hands of Tom Bombadil.
'Show me the precious Ring!' he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom. It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing! Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air - and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry - and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile. Link accessed 07/07/2024
Tolkien went to a lot of trouble to give us interpretive letters, to guide us in what he was meaning, and up to, in The Lord of the Rings. He gives us many interpretive cues, in his narratives, as to how things might turn out. His Andrew Lang lecture on poetry and fairy tales is a landmark not just to his work, but with others. Evil in The Hobbit and even The Lord of the Rings, is indeed a bit of a cardboard cut out. The amazing thing is that it works, to the chagrin and annoyance of all his detractors.
It is in The Silmarillion that we get a grander sense of Evil, one far vaster and more sinister than anything given us comparative works, such as Game of Thrones, Eye of the World, or the Elric cycles. The difference, in all of Tolkien's worlds, is that Evil is always a serpent chasing its own tail. Both the ancient deeps of Evil in The Silmarillion, and the more novel Evil of Sauron is incurvatus in se: it is held up (like Bombadil playing with the One Ring) as a silly artefact, and seen as necessarily bounded in its scope. Sauron is countervailed by the Council of Elrond, whereas Melkor/Morgoth is bounded by the alliance between Elves and Men.
Link
Evil is presented as both Beautiful & Ridiculous in Tolkien - that is to say, it is not enchanted for Sublimity, as with modern Authors. Good alone is sublime.
Tolkien's treatment of Evil closes the circle. What began in almost sublimity, and Beauty, ends in banal ridiculousness. The reader, if they are fortunate enough to tag along on the entire journey, is given moral closure. It is not moralistic closure in platitude, but artistic portrayal of where Sin and Evil must, inevitably, end up.
Tolkien's handling of Arda, his love for it, is revealed in the face that Evil never penetrates the mystery of Nature, even at its zenith. It remains merely an artefact. By contrast, the artifices of Good are life-giving. Good is capable of redeeming Evil (The Council's use of the three lesser rings), but Evil is only capable of ruining things. There is no redemption in the music of Melkor, save in that which is worked out in them by the counterpoint of Iluvatar.
LOTR is suffused with the numinous, not merely the artificial, the epic, nor the magical (though it contains all three). Successor writers have managed to give us meditations on history (Martin), philosophical perspectives on the pervasion (but not the perversion) of Evil (Moorcock), and a feast of magic (Robert Jordan). None of them give us the permeation and ferment of Good re-working the original Creation in a New Creation, such as we are presented by Tolkien.
His power as a bard, or weaver and singer of tales, is sufficient to overcome the minor annoyances or imperfections which one encounters in his art. Tolkien seemed to understand the process of History was the invisible unfolding of a continuing Creation: he therefore cast us "into the midst" (in media res) of this Divine Artefact, in order to enchant us sufficiently to overcome our disbelief, to suspend our objections. For some, the appeal will not be enough. For others, LOTR itself is an artefact of Good, a magic that teaches us to see, and then to work, our own "sub-creation".
Arda's evolution from Archetype, into Atlantis, and then finally into the predawn epic world of LOTR, embodies a "Long Descent" of Love as it continues to shape the world into a final, consummate form, which will lose nothing true, beautiful, or good. The continual and breath-shattering loss of all truth, goodness and beauty in the Long Descent raises precisely this ontological or metaphysical question: Can Good Really Die? Only Tolkien tackles this question. It is behind all of the mythological backdrop. At the end of time, Tulkas will wrestle and throw Melkor, and the human who first listened to him will slay him. Evil is given as dominating, but its power is attenuated by its cartoonish quality, which Tolkien gives us as runic outlines. Attention is drawn to an obvious fact - the more insistent or dominating or overwhelming something is, the less real or true it can be. These tales are not, except by those unused to such tales as Beowulf, meant to be taken literally or metaphorically, as an allegory. They are meant to place us in the same frame of mind which Arda shares with her Creator, which is to say, in Middle Earth, In Media Res. This is the only kind of participation, or knowing, which it is possible for mortals to possess.
LOTR is meant, quite literally, to change the quality of the reader's mind. What other epic writer has done that? And managed to entertain, too?