Not an Epoch, or even a Modern "Age", But not quite an Aeon
One of the first things that strikes a careful modern reader in the Tolkien world & legendarium, is the existence of his "Ages". While most educated people do have an analogy in "the Dark Ages" (or the "Middle Ages"), the deepening of modernity has lead to atemporal slurring of all ages and boundaries into an infinitely extended present. In this way, even the past (when notice at all) is read through modern eyes. This infinite present tends to render past time or "Ages" a moral non-entity, or even turn it into a kind of opaque Anti-Reality.
We are thus treated with the spectacle of masses believing that real Time begins somewhere close to their own birth date, or the birth of their generation. History becomes a null set, morally - it has no valuable members, only abortions. Each generation achieves a transcendence over the whole sequence, which they then defend the rest of their life, against successors. This, quite obviously, is a war of all against all. Under this arrangement, "Ages" merely exist as "cohorts" of a decade or even a few years. Tolkien-style Ages are impossible, which stretch for far more than mere millenia. Modern people do not know how to re-unify Time, except through the horizontal of Space. Vertical depth and unity completely elude someone who "thinks" (for example) that everyone in the Middle Ages thought the world was "flat". It is the modern person who is the Flat-Earth theorist, in holding this view that Time ought to be horizontal, just like modern space.
The Modern Era admits only the "quality" of total Quantity. Differences between generations are superficial, only: everyone since the French Revolution defends the present, as the present, but only just as "their" present. Our Era has only one very monolithic Quality, and that qualia is precisely to be devoid (properly speaking) of all real diversity of qualities, except for the exaggerated and monstrous "Quality" of Quantity itself. The Modern or post modern era, when it notices the past at all, symbolizes the difference entirely, by denying any worth or real quality, to the age past. It assumes all ontic reality into the present, atemporal Age of pure Quantity. It is atemporal, because it cannot grant to the Past, that moral dimension and worth, which is demanded by the spiritual universe across (and in) Space and Time.
Spiritual complacency is the marker for this assumed innate superiority, by Quantity. And Quantity means, and can only mean, a collective "Us" right now. People who wish to argue this way, will often hold up their cellphone to the speaker, in a gesture of contempt, if confronted with any shortcoming in the modern era. The qualia of conscience and God and myth are gone - we can "Twitter" our way to a consensus. There is no Justice, there is Just Us.
Quantity has a quality all its own. - Joseph Stalin (Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili)
The in-fighting, for the right to define what this consciousness is, is irrelevant: from a past perspective, these are all merely factions of the same party. This party tries to fragment Time and unite Space. Tolkien's view of Time and Space works exactly the opposite: he unifies Time (except when an "Age" intervenes after many millenia), and divides Space (under the principle, to each his own). Thus, Tolkien's Ages are Providence-driven "revolutions" in the spiral cycle, which come down from the passing of an Age, attended with prophecies, miracles, "the fall of the sun and moon and stars" (present powers), etc. They occur infrequently, and with much fanfare. But there are many miniature cycles, within this grand Cycle. At the big "turnings", there is Sturm und Drang galore. Eagles and ravens and armies gather and march. Races pass over the sea. There is operatic and epic drama.
Critics of this miss the point. These are merely the signs of the Times to signal the sea change of an Age. Tolkien was far more interested in the inner meaning of these sea-changes, and in the quiet spaces in between them. Tolkien's inversion of the usual values for Time and Space, make him hard to read and properly grasp.
If Time is unified on a grand scale (giving way to spirals or cycles of infrequent "Ages"), Space is sub-divided into amazingly discrete and variegated articulations of Beauty. The Old Forest is not the same as the Trollshaws, which differ from the Barrow Downs, or from Rivendell, or the ruins of Hollin. All of these separate magical kingdoms (or diverse kingdoms) exist not-so-far away, geographically, from each other. Yet Life is quiet, and on a small scale, and radically different. Occasionally one goes traveling. This world closely resembles the patchwork pattern of medieval life, which Tolkien deliberately evokes.
Tolkien's ethos sides unambiguously with the world of qualities, not quantity. And this deliberate strategy of subversion was acknowledged by Tolkien:
It is not the not-man (e.g. weather) nor man, (even at a bad level), but the man-made that is ultimately daunting and insupportable. If a ragnarök would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs...I’d go back to trees. #83 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 6 October 1944
We can see that in this erection of Ages, Nature is associated with Qualia. But this Nature includes Super-Nature as well, or is included by it. The existence of Tom Bombadil, who is linked with Nature and the Earth to the highest degree, proves this point, since his natural magic is so strong he can make sport and fun of the Ring of Doom itself, much to the consternation of the hobbits and the curiousity of Gandalf. It is Qualia, here, that counts, and it is a law unto itself. Nature/Supernature is not the realm of mere Quantity (to be improved or conquered) but the aboriginal and innocent primordial Stuff which sums up the entire ladder of Heaven and Earth. This is why, for instance, the "heart of the Lonely Mountain" is found encapsulated in an Arkenstone, or why the eagles of Manwe attend the ring Quest.
Quantity, on the other hand, tends to arrive with Artifacts. One might argue it is present in Tolkien's "matter" or "Nature", but it is accentuated and becomes a problem with the arrival of the Artifact. Thus, the "Ring of Doom" has no natural equivalent, strictly speaking. The Arkenstone is the "heart" of the Mountain, and can awaken desire or even greed, but it is a natural product of virginal Nature, and cannot answer the most twisted depths of Evil. It can inspire normal greed, but it comes to a happy end.
Tolkien held to a medieval vision of matter, which is poorly understood, but is being recovered:
So from a final sophianic-theurgic perspective, matter is not a mere contingent residue, like Hegelian detritus according to Zizek, but nor is it simply a sacramental mirror to be ultimately left behind. Rather, as for Maximus the Confessor in his thoroughly theurgic Mystagogy, it is always to be returned to, because the ultimate points all the way back, always to the rain falling silently on the remote beautiful pond in the earthly countryside. Sophia rests in the Godhead and in the pond: there lies nothing between the two, but -- as ‘the true intermediary – 'metaxu’ -- she brings them most intimately together. John Milbank Source link (page 63-64)
Matter, then, is not purely privation from what is real (Spirit), though it is filled with the darkness of such privation, which flees into matter, and to the lowest parts of matter. Matter, however, possesses an inimitable "something", which Faith and Philosophy tries to tease out.
Paradox... is not dialectical. Paradox is the simultaneous assertion (not the reconciliation) of opposites. Because of the paradox not just of Christ's incarnation (God in the human) but also of divine creation (God's presence in all that is infinitely distant from him), matter was that which both threatened and offered salvation. It threatened salvation because it was that which changed. But it was also the place of salvation, and it manifested this exactly through the capacity for change implanted in it. When wood or wafer bled, matter showed itself as transcending, exactly by expressing, its own materiality. It manifested enduring life (continuity, existence) in death (discontinuity, rupture, change). Miraculous matter was simultaneously - hence paradoxically - the changeable stuff of not-God and the locus of a God revealed (34-35) Source
Like his view of positively medieval Matter, Tolkien's "Ages" are not pure Artifacts caused by Sin, but in some way flow from the essence of Creation and of Time. Tolkien, despite his supposedly "gloomy" take on history, affirms both Creation and Time (History), as gifts from God, and fundamentally Good. Thus, the Ages are not arbitrary divisions induced purely by the wrack and ruin of sin, but superintended and intended by Iluvatar, the Creator. They were "originally intended" as well as "subsequently necessary". That this is a great mystery, has something to do with the doctrine the medieval West developed, par excellence: the doctrine of the "Blessed Fault" or "Happy Fall".
Poetically, one might say that the Sun sets first in the West, and that it is the Age and place of the West, to understand the blessed descent and death of the Sun. The West, then, suffers the most from the viccissitudes and cycles of Time, the wracking of sacred Space into cataclysm and desolation. Beyond the West, and farthest West, over the Sea, one encounters the Valar and the Divine Powers in all splendor. It follows that the West is the place to first undergo, and be tutored, in the doctrine of the Happy Fall. The doctrine of the Eucatastrophe follows strictly from it: the Sun must rise again, after a colorful and bloody passing into the dark. Most obviously is this foreshadowed in the history of Gandalf the Gray, who must journey through Moria, die and be resurrected, before returning as Gandalf the White.
Tolkien naturally drew some of this from his roots, which reached into Western cultural history. It has been the West which experienced the "great migration of the Barbarian tribes" and suffered the Dark Ages and the fall of all order, in Rome. No other region has had this happen with such intensity, and so recently. The West, of course, also "went to the East" by going West, settling the New World.
Ruins of Atlantis
Even the decay of the Golden Age, Creation of the Valar, has value. Inhering, in any age, is the primordial, virginal, innocent reality and substance of "matter". The descent of each age is vastly different, and uniquely qualitative, although they are all rooted in the same story. For Tolkien, each age is somewhat (at least) inferior in quality (eg., magic and epic heroism) to the one preceding it. The Golden Age lies in the past, or in the far future, at the end of Time. Nevertheless, each age possesses its own lawful, legitimate beauty, worth its own telling. There is therefore nothing of "chronological snobbery" in Tolkien toward the past. This raises the question, did Tolkien really believe the Third or the Fourth Age to be "inferior" to the First or Second? In some ways, obviously, yes. But in all?
For if so, why did he choose to make the set piece of the Epic the time of the Third Age? "Why," Tolkien might well ask, "do I tell my story in the Third Age, the Age of Men? Why do I choose to sing of Frodo, and his nine fingers, and the Ring of Doom? Each Age has its story, and this one is the one I choose." Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion as a myth or chronicle, and not as prose fiction: he chose to articulate "the present". He wrote the LOTR as if it was "The Present".
This was a sly literary device, maybe even a coup-de-grace. The past is presented on its own terms, as the present, and so is unobjectionable, formally. It is contemporary. Tolkien writes as if (als ob) we can stroll through Hobbiton, and not be too alienated. Of course, this is precisely what Michael Moorcock resents, this connection to the present. For Tolkien connects the past, not with artifacts, masses, and speed, but with the elements of old England that abide.
Interestingly none of the writers Michael Moorcock praises or lauds, present their worlds as anything else but pure fantasy. Earthsea may be a world of high fantasy, but it "never happened". I am not certain that le Guin even wished for it to be "always was", either. Lewis and Tolkien and Williams did aim for this, that the myth always was, and (even) happened. Hence the concern about "the true myth".
Lewis and Tolkien made the great heresy (as did Williams) of connecting their fantasy world to actual reality. This makes them both more modern than all other fantasy authors, and also, impossibly un-modern. A fantasy writer is supposed to give us a pure nothing that beguiles us, crystalline art. It is supposed to be an imaginary mirror, which is later forgotten. It is supposed to be virtuoso, but inherently faked, almost stylistically so. Tolkien, by contrast, seems to have actually considered his world, in some way, to be real. Tolkien's "Road to the West" (in The Notions Club), his actual half remembered dream of Atlantis, his using of Theosophic terms (Agni, The Secret Fire): these are unforgivable notions. He is a word-smith, but not a virtuoso. He hammers out his poetry like Wayland, he does not spin words like WH Auden. The effect is completely foreign to modern concerns. And yet, Tolkien manages to sing a real myth, in the style of modern prose.
Contrast this with the modern idea that nothing from the Past has any worth, and that nothing in the Present can possibly have any enduring meaning, in the sense of "the permanent things" (Russell Kirk). For us, myths "never were, and can never happen", except as high fantasy, which aspires, additionally, to be utterly imaginary in the sense of absence from reality. We exist, indeed, in a world of "dead matter and empty space", which nontheless permits of infinite human progress in terms of amenities and ameliorations, calculated according to the assumed universals - Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood. It also permits of crystalline, "pure" Art, but not of true myth. So much of pure fantasy is a re-telling of modern concern. Tolkien's genius was to manage to be modern, but to not have exclusively modern concerns. He himself, in himself, connects the modern world with the past, and therefore, the future. This is a heresy.
Morally speaking, our world is both abundant and plastic, but also disposable, in an ultimate sense. This infinitely disposable sense gives us both our greater "honesty" and our perfectly humane and zealous "righteousness", constituting our justified sense of self-worth, vis a vis the past. Any worth we have is derived from a concealed and subconscious rejection of both the Past, and Tradition. The modern human is content to have a novel story that ends with their death, only continuing on as part of the mass quantity of other humans, having value solely as a saga of the species, at its lowest aspect. We aspire neither to sainthood, sageness, combat, or priestliness. We define ourselves as the opposite of the hero. We move, in short, solely along the horizontal line of infinite, uniform Space. Time is present as a dot above us, but it is not unified with any other Time. There is simply "Now".
Tolkien's concept of "Ages" militates directly against this view. Not only does Tolkien affirm heroism (as traditionally understood), he shows how one need not be an intrinsic hero, to be a real one. Tolkien gives us the unlikely hero, embodied in the hobbit. This more subtle insurrection against Modernity did not go unnoticed, precisely because it is such a revolutionary development of ancient Ideals. It is both modern, and yet terribly unmodern, because it still takes heroism seriously. Naturally, this is what modern critics find most detestable -
Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the approval yet to put a new one in...This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad. Link
Where, exactly, was the tea party in Mordor? Tolkien's painting of Mordor is almost too stark, to a fault, it's worse than an "abyss" it is a desolation. Mordor is the opposite of "sub-creation", and is its logical end point. There is nothing there but a wasteland, Lord Dunsany's "cindery plains of Hell". Moorcock is at his most hollow, here - the tea party takes place in the Shire, and not in the Abyss. The banquet in Ithilien with Faramir is the closest we get to a tea party, & it is a solemn Last Supper, rather.
I've been using Michael Moorcock's "Epic Poo" essay as a touchstone, not because he is absolutely wrong in every regard (the Inklings do leave something to be desired in their prose style), but because he seems to be so completely insensate to what we do read the Inklings for. We do not read them for their social commentary, nor their avant garde English prose. Nor do we read them because they make us feel "grown up". We read them because they do comfort us, but at a level much deeper than any Moorcock accuses him of pandering to. Tolkien's fault, if any or at all, is that there is not enough normal comfort, in the LOTR, as there seems to be in The Hobbit. Whatever impression Tolkien's world leaves, it is most certainly not one of comfort, if it is taken at the literal level. Even the Ringbearer (the titular hero of the tale) is so gravely wounded, he passes over the Seas, and King Aragorn is portrayed somewhat tragically as growing old and dying before his time, with his wife, who chose to share his mortal life. Entire continents are devastated and laid waste, as armies surge around, and the Ring itself, if destroyed, almost destroys any hope of rebirth. Even Sauron is not totally destroyed. Evil will be back.
But they do comfort us in an older sense, which is to say, the comfort comes through re-enchantment, and (just as importantly) closure of re-enchantment through grounding in the Urgrund of myth. Giant spiders may eat you, Nazgul may shred your soul, a dragon may destroy your village. The Dark Lord himself may torture you in his dungeons, but underneath all of this, lies the essential goodness, power, beauty, glory and triumph of Nature. And it is out of her body that the power of the myth is generated. Tolkien's world actually has a happy ending, in which the tragic Turambar will slay Morgoth with a death stroke. But none of this is known, necessarily, to the reader.
Tolkien actually improvises upon the usual "Traditional" theme. His heroes of the Third Age are not the titanic warriors of old, so much as they are the "soldiers" of the little place. Nor does the value of these people stem solely from their subordination to some mythical hierarchy. The Shire is important, in the end, because hobbits find it to be so, and Tom Bombadil is beyond all categorization whatsoever - he is his own man, Ipsissimus (The Most Himself).
Elves and men (and hobbits) have a great deal of local value, tribal value, family value, and moral value, or potential, quite apart from their presumed governments, leaders, or even the mythic back story. One of the things which the concept of an Age does is allow a certain amount of latitude from the Creator, in that "for everything there is a season". One Age has qualities which the succeeding one does not, and yet there remains a unity, all the same, as well as continuity, despite a persistence in maximal "diversity". The exceptional, the lucky, and the virtuous of each Age are capable of acting, to some degree, independently within an Age, which also (as a whole) acts independently, thus self-defining the Age. The convergence of these two currents, creates the heroic. Feanor is the greatest of Elves, so he defines the First Age, the Age of the Silmarils.
The paradox is that while the First Age was qualitatively "greater" than succeeding Ages, for that very reason, it contained more possibilities of disaster, and free choice leading to great tragedy and evil. There is a kind of divine balance in this, directly alluded to in The Hobbit, when Thorin repents of his desire for the Arkenstone and subsequent wrath (a mirror to Feanor and the blood oath to protect the Silmarils) -
“Farewell, good thief,” [Thorin] said. “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.” Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. “Farewell, King under the Mountain!” he said. “This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet, I am glad that I have shared in your perils – that has been more than any Baggins deserves.” “No!” said Thorin. “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”
For Tolkien, this non-ideological approach to the past allows him to tell stories and narratives, to encapsulate his "meaning". As McLuhan might say, the "medium is the message". This places him with the post-Moderns. Against them, however, Tolkien is able to speak about "Iluvatar" or the Creator, but only through the narrative itself. We cannot know how the Eschaton unfolds, for we may know nothing of Turambar, and the outcome of the war over the Ring is uncertain. Yet more like the Modern Age, Tolkien can unabashedly use universals, embodied in an over-arching and unified grand narrative, a narrative not simply dissolved into atemporal and competing raw existence. His characters can appeal (and demonstrate) that these universals are both transcendent, and yet undeniably actually present in the sense of immanency.
Tolkien, in short, simply cannot be categorized within the Modern versus post-Modern dialectic. Nor can he be "exhausted", by cherry picking components of each, to construct a "third" in the excluded middle between them. Tolkien does not synthesize the Modern with the Postmodern. He inverts both, and uses both, and subcreates a Third. This, by the way, may be the source of the "Third" Age and "Middle" Earth. The middle "Third" is made novel and vertical and lifegiving, precisely by the power of subcreation, which is present at all times and in all spaces. Tolkien simply shows us how the trick is done.
The ending of the Lord of the Rings is the ending of the Third Age, and the beginning of the Fourth. Tolkien affords us a bird's eye view of the tragedy and the hoped-for eucatastrophe, in which despair and hope contend to see how the ending shall be. The doom of Iluvatar falls upon the Third Age, that much is certain, unavoidable. The Third Age will end. Galadriel, Elrond, and Gandalf and all the wise know of this coming reality. The Fourth Age will be the true Age of Men, and what is left of the Elves, will pass, is already passing, into the West. In Tolkien's subtleties, a "doom" is a judgement, and is not necessarily tragic. The "doom" of men is actually a gift - the gift of mortality. Iluvatar chose to give that gift to men, indeed it defines them. Thus, the "doom" of the Third Age will define the story or narrative that is told about the Third Age, by those who come after. A line from Charles Williams, here, also illustrates this ability to alternate between two seeming opposites:
“It may be,” the stranger said, “but perhaps a happy ruin and a fortunate despair. These things are not evil in themselves, and I think you fear them over much.” War in Heaven, CW
This thinking in terms of epic Ages has more in common with the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, & world cosmic myths, than it does with the flattened modern view, in which there is a never ending upward arc of material Progress, without metaphysical transcendence or existential immanence, only moralistic, humanitarian, or ideological scales of arbitrary assigned value. Middle Earth does not progress; it changes, but it does not improve. It alters, but it does not move. Aragorn will eventually die. Elrond will journey over the sea. Gandalf will depart. Even Sauron's defeat at the end of the Third Age does not guarantee his permanent absence.
Rather, History serves as the crossroads between good and evil, where the Lord of All stands, invisibly. Iluvatar is the crossroads himself : "the Gate and the Guardian of the Gate" (John Michael Greer). Tolkien will insist that Iluvatar is all Good, and yet that He mysteriously stands over, and is Lord over, Evil. This allows History in Middle Earth to consist of Ages as a divine drama, not reducible to an equation, unless it be the harmonious music in the mind of Eru the Creator. In any case, it is not an equation that man can solve, unless it be by his spark of creative being, as an instrument of Eru's Providence. This spark is what, for instance, serves Frodo and Samwise inwardly upon the Quest to the Mountain of Doom, as the outward forms of help, mythical or magical, begin to fail.
The progression of this "Spark" and all the smaller "sparks" through the matter and time and space of Creation constitutes the dramatic narrative of the one Object: Iluvatar's Creation. This inward spark in the hidden interior temple was Eru's "gift" from the beginning, to His children.
There was, however, one element in the Design of Eru that remained a mystery: the Children of Eru, Elves and Men, the Incarnate. These were said to have been an addition made by Eru Himself after the Revelation to the primal spirits of the Great Design. They were not subject to the subcreative activities of the Valar, and one of the purposes of this addition was to provide the Valar with objects of love, as being in no way their own subject, but having a direct relationship to Eru Himself, like their own but different from it. There were, or were to be, thus “other” than the Valar, independent creations of His love, and so objects for their own reverence and true (entirely unselfregarding) love. Another purpose they had, which remained a mystery to the Valar, was to complete the Design by “healing” the hurts which it suffered, and so ultimately not to recover “Arda Unmarred” (that is the world as it would have been if Evil had never appeared), but the far greater thing “Arda Healed". J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Knowledge of the Valar,” in The Nature of Middle Earth. Ed. Carl F. Hostetter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2021), 233. Source (Henry Karlson).
Tolkien himself, narrates this mystery:
And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labour of their music had been busy with the preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone; and they came with the third theme, and were not in the theme which Ilúvatar propounded at the beginning, and none of the Ainur had part in their making. Therefore when they beheld them, the more did they love them, being things other than themselves, strange and free, wherein they saw the mind of Ilúvatar reflected anew, and learned yet a little more of his wisdom, which otherwise had been hidden even from the Ainur...Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined Source
Henry Karlson points out that the medieval tradition of the Felix Culpa is present here, acknowledged also (for instance) in the writings of St. Anselm, in which he speculates that humans were created to take the place of the fallen angels, which had become demonic. As far as I am aware, there is no Eastern equivalent to the developed Felix Culpa tradition, not even in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The Eucatastrophe and the Felix Culpa, in Providence, govern the gyre of the "Ages".
It is worthwhile citing the medieval sources that encapsulate the Felix Culpa:
Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere. For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist. St. Augustine Enchiridion VIII
O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem, "O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer the Catholic Paschal Vigil Mass Exsultet
Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long.
And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkës finden written
In their book.
Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never Our Lady,
A-been heaven's queen.
Blessed be the time
That apple taken was!
Therefore we may singen
Deo gratias!Old English song/poem
Tolkien, concerned with history, and as an artist, operating "within" the present, but appealing to a true myth, uses the term Eucatastrophe. This is Felix Culpa applied to History, or applied Theodicy. The theodicy implicit in the Felix Culpa theme produces the "Ages", and also leads back to Cosmogony, or the Myths. Olszanki makes the point when he argues:
The discussion of Tolkien's theodicy must start with cosmogony. Source
Cosmogony is what births Time, Space, and the "Ages". These are the manifestations of what is Unmanifested. The "Ages" are a mediating term between both Time and Space, and between them and Eru/Iluvatar. The "Ages" are how man experiences both the Fall and the Redemption, in the curvature or spiral, of Time and even Space. This metaphysical background and turning in Tolkien attracts enormous hostility and inevitable ignorance of understanding. This is despite the fact that we know more about Tolkien than ever. Some, but only some, appear to appreciate his depth and breadth:
No, I don’t know for a fact that Tolkien was influenced by The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, but when I first read the book some years ago I was struck forcefully by just how many of the key themes of the earliest phases of Tolkien’s great legendarium can be found in its pages. Tolkien was certainly powerfully influenced in later years by the books he read in youth—for example, the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo is imprisoned by the barrow-wight is influenced, almost to the point of unconscious plagiarism, by a comparable scene in Walter de la Mare’s 1910 fantasy The Three Mulla-Mulgars—and we know, thanks to the labors of his son Christopher, that the themes I’ve described were major influences from the earliest sketches Tolkien wrote to his last writings on Middle-earth. What makes this especially fascinating to me is that Tolkien, devout Roman Catholic that he was in later life, was profoundly influenced by the Theosophical alternative history. From a timeline divided into numbered ages—the Third Age of Middle-earth would fit quite comfortably into the historical cycles Blavatsky described—to an Atlantis-story that is Blavatskian through and through, dominated by the conflict between a majority that worshiped the power of evil and a minority that fled the doomed continent at the last moment, Middle-earth is a creation of the Theosophical century. “I am a servant of the Secret Fire,” Gandalf says at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm; that term is nowhere defined in Tolkien’s papers, but any well-read Theosophist knows what it means. It seems likely that during his younger years, before middle age brought its traditional conservatism, Tolkien fed his imagination with scraps of Theosophical literature. Source
Theosophy relies heavily upon the concept of spiritual "Ages", as does Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), and esoteric Eastern teaching does this, generally. While the West has the additional element of the "Happy Fault" or "Fall", it did not possess the concept of "Ages", except through the convenantal "Ages" of Scripture (eg., the Davidic Covenant, etc.). But how vast can these Ages be, crammed into Archbishop Ussher's 4000 year old Earth timeline? In the West, "Ages" were short "phases", compacted into a brief Time, functioning more as theological outlines. They had none of the epic or epochal quality suggested by the more explicit Eastern traditions. Tolkien, in a word, drew on both Western and Eastern themes; the Eastern theme of "Ages" he baptized, and the Western drama of the "Happy Fault", he intensified through the story.
Modern Theosophists fully recognize and embrace what Tolkien was doing, vis a vis "Ages". Drawing a parallel between Tolkien's "Shadow" and Carl Jung's work, Helene Vachet writes -
The shadow is a psychological manifestation of the occult and scientific concept of polarity. Ed Abdill, a Theosophical writer and speaker, says that all polarities derive from the initial polarization of the One, which results in the breaking of the primordial unity of all things to form the universe. From this act, come such polar opposites as space and substance, inner life and outer form, positive and negative, and good and evil. Without polarity, there would be no universe, no struggle, no contrast, no limitation, no growth, and no shadow. Source Originally printed in the November - December 2002 issue of Quest magazine. Citation: Vachet, Helene. "The Lord of the Rings and the Journey to the Heart of the Universe." Quest 90.5 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2002):204-213.
Sadly, many Christians express virulent animosity to JRR Tolkien's spirituality, over exactly this issue. It is telling that Tolkien is attacked, from the far "Right", by Christians who see him as compromising with "the Occult".
For starters, Tolkien, despite his abhorrence of the occult and the practice of it, still indiscriminately and carelessly wove many biblically-condemned occult elements throughout his narratives to enhance the pagan mystique and mythic landscape of his stories, without anticipating its immediate appeal to the adherents of Theosophy and Neo-paganism. Secondly, Tolkien’s extensive cosmology, created outside the bounds of Genesis and other books of the Bible, reflects in many ways the esoteric understanding of Gnosticism, the ancient enemy of biblical Christianity, to the delight and approval of most modern-day gnostics. And lastly, Tolkien’s published letters and essays reveal his other missteps which do not align with Christianity: 1) the frequent veiled assertions that his myths were not invented, but “recorded” by him as revealed ancient truths, perhaps divinely inspired; and 2) his regressed ancestral memories of Atlantis which hint at a belief in both reincarnation and Plato’s imaginary “island of Atlas.” These are the grim facts concerning the “religious affordances” of Tolkien’s literary works which have given the growing Neo-Pagan community just as much spiritual insight and guidance for their particular beliefs as it has given Christians in theirs, if not more so. The extensive proof of this dangerous syncretism in Tolkien’s mythology is compelling and overwhelming, as revealed in the groundbreaking analysis by Markus Altena Davidsen in his 2014 doctoral thesis, The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based Religion. His findings should at least give every thinking Christian pause. Besides Neo‐Paganism, Tolkien religionists draw on the Western magic tradition, theosophy, and Christianity, in roughly that order of importance. Source
Tolkien, as we shall see when we come to his literary reception in the last century, was a lightning rod. It is true that Tolkien had an ambiguous relationship with it, which shows in seemingly contradictory ways. In Smith of Wooton Major, he sides with the reality of Faery, and in his Welsh poem, he condemns association with Faery. yet is a mistake to see him as drawn to the esoteric out of "occult" considerations (except as they lay in his inevitable and immediate past). Instead, his interest in "Ages" of the Cosmos could have come from the microcosmic "Ages" he beheld (with scholarly sensitivity) in the Anglo-Saxon Dark Age, specifically as it unfolded in England. We know, for instance, that Tolkien's inspiration for the series came, at least partly, from a visit to a Roman ruin at Lydney Park Estate.
Temple of Nodens at Lydney Park
J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and its famous sequel The Lord of the Rings, was particularly fascinated with Nodens and published a philological essay in 1932 discussing his etymology. Tolkien theorized that it was cognate with the names of other (and more significant) Celtic deities such as Nuadha and Nudd, concluding that the word means “the catcher” or something similar...Several inscriptions mentioning the deity have been found within the site, including one concerning a curse over a lost ring by someone named Silvianus. It was believed that the ring was stolen by a man named Senicianus, whom Silvianus curses in the inscription. The ring was eventually unearthed in Silchester in 1785. Link
There, the historian and the artist would have encountered "the time that once was, and still is". Yet, somehow, it was emphatically not the same "Age", although the unity of Time unites even the Ages, in the purpose of Iluvatar the Creator. How could the past time be evoked, except precisely through the resurrection of imagination in the sub-creation? Or the future anticipated, except in the same manner? In the imagination, Time is restored, along with primordial states of Creation.
This exercise through the patterns of Rise, Fall, and Restoration, and the Cycles of Ages, was so powerful that his work can promote Faith or actually induce Doubt, depending upon the reader. For example,
Tolkien’s work has had me questioning all things religion. It started particularly after reading The Silmarillion a few years ago and the further I get in his works the more I question. I’m sure his writing in parts was heavily influenced by existing religious stories, but if a modern mind can think up all this then no religion is believable to me. If I had picked up The Silmarillion with no background I would of thought it could very much be a religious book. Source
This is the dilemma and the power of Tolkiens artifact, or work. Is it an Arkenstone, or a Ring of Power? The most dangerous critique of Tolkien would have to use his terminology and the questions, as he put them to himself, but Tolkien was willing (like Galadriel) to undergo this test. Like a finger pointing at the Moon, his doctrine of subcreation refers back to the central source of the Creator. Unlike most other subsequent writers of "high fantasy", his world is implicitly connected with our own through the rephrased theological content woven into the mythology of Middle Earth:
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. Absence of gods vs. Absence of God: The Spiritual Landscapes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and George R.R. Martin's Westeros Łukasz Neubauer Source
If we regard Tolkien as re-unifying Time (in the purpose of the Creator for His utterly good Creation), and dividing Space by articulating organic, local orders of "permanent things", we can catch a vision that is positively medieval (CS Lewis' phrase). The Middle Ages regarded themselves as in between Creation and the Eschaton, hence, a Middle Time. Tolkien appropriates and reclarifies this symbol by naming his realm "Middle Earth".
Time, then, ceases to operate as part of the lower, horizontal "Space-Time continuum", and assumes a mythic mode of depth, which unites all Time in a vertical transcendence fully incarnated in the will of Iluvatar, and partly instantiated in the Eucatastrophes which vindicate the Creator (and his allies) at the "end of an Age". We are, at this point, no longer moving horizontally on a "timeline" that moves through Space at the lowest level, but rather, the weight of meaning transfers to the plenum of the immanence and transcendence of the vertical. Reality moves upward, into the re-unification of Time. Meaning saturates from below, as well as above.
The meaning below becomes a Plenum. The meaning from above is the Pleroma. Space is not "burdened" with the transcendence of Eternity, but is instead translucent to that Pleroma. The sign that God's grace is not burdensome is the articulation and perfection of the "shields of the earth" (Psalm 47:9). This separates and divides Space, according to the reunification of Time. Each "shire" receives its unique consummation. Everything becomes more itself. Grace does not destroy, but rather perfects, Nature. Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.
Any Restoration from Love will soften the view of our Ruin
Nevertheless, in its accomodation of the granulation and the weakness of Space, pleromatic Time assumes the shape of spirals, cycles, and "Ages". This prevents the annihilation of Space under the weight of the Pleroma, and assures that the Burning Bush of Matter is aflame, but does not consume. The wideness or horizontal of Space is summed up in the Providence, or the point of the will, of Iluvatar. Conversely, the wideness of Iluvatar's mercy, focuses down to even the smallest point of Space, where a lonely hobbit or two toils up the slopes of Mount Doom, on an errand of true mercy.
Space and Time, then, in Tolkien are inversely related, but not in a linear fashion, and they take the form of the Cross, through which the energies of God ripple, back and forth. One begins as a speck in Space, and ends as a revelation in Time. Yet the specks of Space acquire a new meaning, far beyond "light sparkles floating in the aether of Deity" (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus). This "ending" is just the beginning of the rest of the story. The revelation or eschaton or end restores the innocence of virginal Matter and Space. It is the end of the "end", or the fall of the Fall, its Resurrection to Eternal Life.
Dead matter & Empty Space - the Space Time Continuum of Modernity
The memory of man tells us Time can be reunified
This was such excellent reading!! I've enjoyed most of your prior writings, but I do think this first chapter of "Tolkien's Grand Project" was stellar! Just FYI - none of the links work, they all just go to the 'blogger reading list' page.
I want to add my apologies for not being able to offer a financial pledge with my subscription...my husband holds the 'internet' purse strings and his budgetary concerns don't allow for paid Substack reading, no matter how 'valuable' I may find it to be.
But, when you have this 'project' published into book form - I will absolutely purchase a copy! I actually bought and read, "The Flame Imperishable" due to it's being referenced in one of your earlier essays.
God Bless you, Mr. Smallwood!