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The 'Ring' and the remnants of the
West
By Spengler
The most
important cultural event of the past decade is the
ongoing release of the film version of J R R Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings. No better guide exists to
the mood and morals of the United States. The rapturous
response among popular audiences to the first two
installments of the trilogy should alert us that
something important is at work. Richard Wagner's
19th-century tetralogy of music dramas, The Ring of
the Nibelungs, gave resonance to National Socialism
during the inter-war years of the last century. Tolkien
does the same for Anglo-Saxon democracy.
Tolkien
well may have written his epic as an "anti-Ring"
to repair the damage that Wagner had inflicted upon
Western culture. Consciously or not, the Oxford
philologist who invented Hobbits has ruined Wagner
before the popular audience. It recalls the terrible
moment in Thomas Mann's great novel Doktor
Faustus when the composer Adrian Leverkuhn,
finishing his Faust cantata in the throes of syphilitic
dementia, announces: "I want to take it back!" His
amanuensis asks, "What do you want to take back?"
"Beethoven's 9th Symphony!" cries Leverkuhn.
Leverkuhn (on the strength of a bargain with the Devil)
has written a work whose objective is to ruin the
ability of musical audiences to hear Beethoven.
Tolkien has taken back Wagner's Ring.
That may be his greatest accomplishment, and a literary
accomplishment without clear precedent. To be sure,
The Lord of the Rings is not a great work of
literature to be compared to Cervantes or Dostoyevsky.
But it is a great landmark of culture nonetheless. Its
revival in a reasonably faithful cinematic version has
far-reaching effects on the popular mind.
Wagner
had done as much to Beethoven. "People don't like music;
they just like the way it sounds," quipped the English
conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Beethoven's musical
devices are stations along a journey which has a goal.
Wagner turned these musical devices into the haunted
caves and dells of a world in which the listener wanders
capriciously, abandoning all sense of time and
direction. Audiences never liked Wagner's music, but
they loved the way it sounded. Musical effects in
Beethoven, however eccentric, are subordinate to the
long-range musical goal. In Wagner, musical effects are
capricious events. That well suits the introduction of
Wagner's Uebermensch, the hero Siegfried, for
reasons I will make clear in a moment.
It is
hard for us today to imagine what a cult raised itself
around Wagner after the 1876 premiere of his Ring
cycle. Compared to it the combined fervor for Elvis, the
Beatles, Madonna and Michael Jackson seems like a band
concert in the park. Perfectly sensible people attended
a Wagner opera and declared that their lives had
changed. Bavaria's eccentric King Ludwig II literally
fell in love with the composer and built him the
Bayreuth Festival, to which the elite of Europe repaired
in homage. It was something like the mood that swept the
youth of the West in the late 1960s, but an order of
magnitude more powerful.
In 1848, Wagner was a
disgruntled emulator of French grand opera who
stockpiled hand grenades for revolutionaries, a fugitive
from justice after that year's uprising. A
quarter-century later he stood at the pinnacle of
European culture. What precisely did he do?
Wagner announced the death of the old order of
aristocracy and Church, of order and rules. Not only was
the old order dying, but also it deserved to die, the
victim of its inherent flaws. As the old order died a
New Man would replace the servile creatures of the old
laws, and a New Art would become the New Man's religion.
The New Man would be fearless, sensual, unconstrained,
and could make the world according to his will. Wagner's
dictum that the sources of Western civilization had
failed was not only entirely correct, but also numbingly
obvious to anyone who lived through the upheavals of
1848. But how should one respond to this? Wagner had a
seductive answer: become your own god!
Using
elements of old Norse sagas and medieval epic, Wagner
cobbled together a new myth. The Norse god Wotan
personifies the old order: he rules by the laws engraved
on his spear, by which he himself is bound. To build his
fortress Valhalla he requires the labor of the giants,
and to pay the giants, he steals the treasure of the
Nibelung dwarf Alberich. Alberich won the treasure with
a magic ring he fashioned from the stolen Gold of the
Rhine River. Wotan covets this ring, which gives its
bearer world mastery, but is compelled to give it to the
giants.
Wagner's audience had no trouble
recognizing in Wotan and the other immortal gods the
ancient aristocracy of Empire and Church, who made a
fatal compromise with capital (the Ring of world
domination) and thus sealed their own doom. Siegfried
(Wotan's grandson) takes the Ring back from the giant
Fafner, and then shatters the god's spear and wins as
his bride the immortal Valkyrie Brunnhilde. Through the
rest of a silly plot full of love potions and magic
disguises, Siegfried is betrayed and stabbed in the
back. Brunnhilde immolates herself on Siegfried's
funeral pyre and the flames burn down Valhalla as well,
gods and all. A New World Order emerges on the basis of
heroic will. It is not hard to see how appetizing this
stew was for Hitler.
Tolkien himself despised
Wagner (whom he knew thoroughly) and rejected
comparisons between his Ring and Wagner's cycle
("Both rings are round," is the extent of his published
comment). But the parallels between the two works are so
extensive as to raise the question as to Tolkien's
intent. The Ring of Power itself is Wagner's invention
(probably derived from the German Romantic de la Motte
Fouque). Also to be found in both works are an immortal
woman who renounces immortality for the love of a human,
a broken sword reforged, a life-and-death game of
riddles, and other elements which one doesn't encounter
every day. Here is a compilation derived from sundry
websites, along with a few of my own observations. For
those who don't know the details of the Tolkien
Ring - well, you will before long, because it is
a story that everyone will learn.
| Alberich forges a Ring of Power |
Sauron forges a Ring of Power |
| Wotan needs the giants to build Valhalla
|
The Elves need Sauron to forge their Rings
of Power |
| The Ring gives the bearer world
domination |
The Ring gives the bearer world domination
|
| Wotan uses the Ring to pay the
giants |
Sauron betrays the Elves |
| The Ring is cursed and betrays its bearer
|
The Ring is evil and betrays its
bearer |
| Fafner kills brother Fasolt to get the Ring
|
Smeagol kills friend Deagol for the Ring
|
| Fafner hides in a cave for
centuries |
Smeagol-Gollum hides in a cave for
centuries |
| Siegfried inherits the shards of his
father's sword |
Aragorn inherits the shards his fathers'
sword |
| Brunnhilde gives up immortality for
Siegfried |
Arwen gives up immortality for Aragorn
|
| Wotan plays "riddles" for the life of
Mime |
Gollum plays "riddles" for the life of
Bilbo |
| A dragon guards the Nibelungs' hoard
|
A dragon guards the dwarves' hoard
|
| The gods renounce the world and await the
end |
The Elves renounce the world and prepare to
depart |
| The Ring is returned to its origin, the
River Rhine |
The Ring is returned to its origin, Mount
Doom |
| Hagen falls into the river |
Gollum falls into the volcano |
| The immortals burn in Valhalla |
The immortals leave Middle-earth
|
| A new era emerges in the world |
A new era emerges in the
world
|
| Men are left to their own devices
|
Men are left to their own
devices
|
The details are far
less important than the common starting point: the
crisis of the immortals. Wagner's immortal gods must
fall as a result of the corrupt bargain they have made
with the giants who built Valhalla. Tolkien's immortal
Elves must leave Middle-earth because of the fatal
assistance they took from Sauron. The Elves' power to
create a paradise on Middle-earth depends upon the power
of the three Elven Rings which they forged with Sauron's
help. Thus the virtue of the Elven Rings is inseparably
bound up with the one Ring of Sauron. When it is
destroyed, the power of the Elves must fade. More than
anything else, The Lord of the Rings is the
tragedy of the Elves and the story of their
renunciation.
What Tolkien has in mind is
nothing more than the familiar observation that the high
culture of the West arose and fell with the aristocracy,
which had the time and inclination to cultivate it. With
the high culture came the abuse of power associated with
the aristocracy; when this disappears, the great
beauties of Western civilization and much of its best
thought disappear with it. That is far too simple, and
in some ways misleading, but it makes a grand premise
for a roman-a-clef about Western civilization.
Tolkien enthusiasts emphasize his differences
with Wagner, as if to ward off the disparagement that
The Lord of the Rings is a derivative work. As
Bradley Birzer, David Harvey, and other commentators
observe, Tolkien detested Wagner's neo-paganism. He was
a devout Roman Catholic, and explicitly philo-Semitic
where Wagner was anti-Semitic. But this defense of
Tolkien obscures a great accomplishment. He did not
emulate Wagner's Ring, but he recast the
materials into an entirely new form. "Recast" is an
appropriate expression. A memorable scene in Wagner
shows Siegfried filing the shards of his father's sword
into dust, and casting a new sword out of the filings.
That, more or less, is what Tolkien accomplished with
the elements of Wagner's story. Wagner will still haunt
the stages of opera houses, but audiences will see him
through Tolkien's eyes.
What does one do when
the immortals depart? One acts with simple English
decency and tenacity, says Tolkien, and accepts one's
fate. The Lord of the Rings is an anti-epic (as
Norman Cantor puts it), whose protagonist is a weak,
vulnerable and reluctant Hobbit, as opposed to the
strong, wound-proof and fearless Siegfried. The Hobbit
Frodo Baggins does his duty because he must. "I wish the
Ring had never come to me! I wish none of this had
happened!" he exclaims to the wizard Gandalf, who
replies: "So do all that come to see such times. But
that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is
what to do with the time that is given to us." No
utopian is Gandalf; what one must do is to muddle
through.
"I will remain Galadriel, and I will
diminish," decides the Elf-Queen of Lothlorien,
rejecting the chance to take possession of the One Ring
and preserve her powers. The Elves choose between
vanishing and accepting a taint of evil, and choose the
former.
Modesty, forbearance, and renunciation
are the virtues that Tolkien sets against Wagner's
existential act of despair. The high culture of the West
is gone. The world that remains after the Elves board
their gray ships and sail into the West is devoid of
beauty and wonder. The kingdom of Men that emerges from
The Lord of the Rings is a humdrum affair, in
which the best men can do is to get on with their lives.
Even the anti-heroes of this anti-epic, the Hobbits who
bear the evil Ring to its ultimate destruction, cannot
remain in Middle-earth; they sail off along with the
Elves.
Those who hold America in contempt for
its lack of refinement (this writer always has held the
term "American culture" to be an oxymoron) should think
carefully about this conclusion. From their founding on
Christmas Day 800 AD, when Charlemagne accepted the
crown of the revived Roman Empire, the institutions of
the West have been formed in response to external
threat. The Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages,
Tolkien's conscious model for the Kingdom of Gondor,
arose in response to the incursions of Arabs in the
south, Vikings in the north, and Magyars in the West.
Boorish and gruff as the new American Empire might seem,
it is an anti-empire populated by reluctant heroes who
want nothing more than to till their fields and mind
their homes, much like Tolkien's Hobbits. Under
pressure, though, it will respond with a fierceness and
cohesion that will surprise its adversaries.
Orcs of the world: Take note and beware.
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