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Tolkien's
Ring: When immortality is not
enough
By Spengler
Alone
among 20th century novelists, J R R Tolkien concerned
himself with the mortality not of individuals but of
peoples. The young soldier-scholar of World War I viewed
the uncertain fate of European nations through the
mirror of the Dark Ages, when the life of small peoples
hung by a thread. In the midst of today's Great  Extinction of cultures,
and at the onset of civilizational war, Tolkien evokes
an uncanny resonance among today's readers. He did not
write a fantasy, but rather a roman-a-clef.
I spoke too soon when I wrote a year ago that a
"reasonably faithful cinematic version" of Tolkien's
trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, was the "cultural
event of the decade" (The Ring and the remnants of the
West, Jan 11, '03). With the third
installment in cinemas, it appears that director Peter
Jackson has buried Tolkien's mythic tragedy under an
avalanche of tricks. One wants to hiss along with
Gollum: "Stupid hobbit! It ruins it!" We are left with a
crackling good adventure, but have lost something
precious.
Despite his huge readership, Tolkien
during his lifetime never published The
Silmarillion, the tragedy of immortals that
underlies The Lord of the Rings. Instead he hit
upon the genial device of leading the reader to the
elements of his story through the eyes of the Little
People who are entangled in it. It is as if Shakespeare
had published something like Tom Stoppard's
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead rather than
Hamlet.
The mortality of the
peoples
Tolkien took by the horns the great
ideological beast of his time. After the Great War, the
newly-hatched Existentialist philosophers were shocked
to discover that human beings fear for their mortality.
In fact, it is quite a commonplace thing to die for
one's country, provided that one believes that one's
country still will be there. The pull of cultural
identity is so strong that men will fling themselves
into the jaws of death if they believe such actions will
preserve their culture. But what if culture itself - the
individual's connection to past as well as future - is
in danger? Now, that is really being alone in the
universe. Death to preserve one's people is quite a
tolerable proposition. The prospective death of the
entire people along with its culture is what creates a
particularly nasty type of existential angst, the
sort that produces a Hitler or an Osama bin Laden.
Small peoples of the Dark Ages, such as
Beowulf's Geats, had to think about such things because
extinction was the normal outcome. As it turned out,
Tolkien's early medieval sources (he had translated
Beowulf) mirrored the existentially-challenged
world after the Great War, precisely because the subject
of national extinction had forced its way back to the
surface. The theme of national extinction permeates the
entire work. "It is not your own shire," the High-Elf
Gildor reproaches Frodo at the outset of his journey in
the forests of the shire . "Others dwelt here before
hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when
hobbits are no more."
A people vanishes from the earth when its language no longer is spoken.
Tolkien did not simply invent languages, but recreated the linguistic
maelstrom of the early Middle Ages, when the high speech of great
civilizations faded from memory while the dialects of small peoples
dissolved into larger language groups. Tolkien's great philological skills
created a unique means of portraying the temporality of the nations.
As a foil to human
mortality, Tolkien invented a deathless and noble race.
His Elves suffer from saiety with immortal life. They no
longer reproduce. We meet no Elf younger than a
millennium. Tolkien's Fair Folk, endowed with marvelous
powers of mind and body, possessors of a radiant high
culture, merely mark the time before they must leave
Middle Earth. Mercifully we are spared their private
thoughts. Imagine what dinner-table dialogue would be
like between Elrond and daughter Arwen, who will
renounce immortality to marry the mortal Aragorn. "Why
do you have to date Aragorn? What happend to that nice
Elf boy you were going out with in Lothlorien?" "Daddy,
I'm three thousand years old and I've dated all the Elf
boys. They are so boring!" Minas Tirith, for that
matter, houses only half the population it could
comfortably hold, as its ancient race of men fails to
bring children into the world. Gondor's military
weakness stems from its declining population; the army
Aragorn leads to the Black Gate in the last battle
numbers fewer than the vanguard of the army of Gondor in
its prime. Mordor encroaches because Gondor cannot man
its borders.
Declining population and crumbling
empire is a theme as old as Rome, of course. Nor is it
only Latin. In Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon sources, the
extinction of the nation lurks behind every setback. The
old woman's lament at Beowulf's funeral pyre, for
example, foresees the destruction of his Geats after the
death of its hero and protector. From the vantage-point
of the trenches of the Great War, though, this echo of
the Dark Ages took on a new and terrible meaning. The
peoples of Europe came out to fight for their
predominance and nearly annihilated each other.
Today's Europeans are willing themselves out of
existence (see Why Europe chooses extinction,
Apr 8, '03). The two world wars of the 20th century
destroyed the national illusions of the European
peoples, their pretension to strut and swagger upon the
world stage. France was the first nation to misidentify
its national interests with the fate of Christendom (The sacred heart of darkness,
Feb 11, '03), emulated in far more horrible form first
by Russia ("the God-bearing nation" in Dostoyevsky's
words) and then by Germany. Why is it that radical Islam
yet may defeat the West? Migrants from North Africa and
the Middle East may overwhelm the shrinking population
of Western Europe, without ever assimilating into
Western European culture. Collapsing birth rates in
formerly Catholic strongholds (including Quebec)
coincide with negligible church attendance, and
demoralization within the Church itself.
When
immortality is not enough
Here is a summary of
the mythic tragedy behind The Lord of the Rings:
Immortality was not enough for Tolkien's "Light-Elves"
(Licht-Alben, precisely what Wagner calls his
gods). Possessive love for their own works led them to
tragic errors, first among which is Feanor's ill-advised
quest for his stolen jewels, the Silmarils. That
motivates the Elves' exile in Middle-Earth. Later, the
Elvish Smiths of Middle-Earth accept the assistance of
the evil Sauron in forging the Three Elven Rings of air,
fire and water. In some way or other, the vague
association with Sauron contaminates the Three Rings,
such that when Sauron's One Ring is destroyed, the power
of the three rings must fade as well. That means the end
of the magical wood of Lothlorien, which Galadriel has
preserved in a sort of perpetual spring, and the demise
of Rivendell, which Elrond maintains as the last bastion
of lore and art. Presumably Gandalf, who bears the ring
of fire, will lose some of his power as well. Sauron
furthermore corrupted the Numenoreans, a noble race of
Men, by convincing them they could wrest immortality
from the Valar (the gods) by invading their Blessed
Realm, Valinor.
The Nine Rings granted to mortal
Men produce a vampire-like caricature of immortality, as
the bearers fade into wraiths. The One Ring bestows a
perverse sort of immortality upon its owner, whose body
ceases to age while his soul decays, like Dorian Gray's
portrait. It is a warped version of the Elves'
immortality within the mortal world of Middle-Earth.
Once touched, it cannot easily be relinquished; Isildur,
heir of the Numenorean "faithful", cannot bear to
destroy it. The Hobbits' great virtue is the inner
strength to part with the Ring. But all of the three
Hobbits who have borne it, Bilbo, Frodo, and Samwise,
ultimately must abandon Middle-Earth. Immortality, once
tasted, poisons the joy of Middle-Earth even for
Hobbits. Galadriel redeems herself by renouncing her
works, although in consequence she and her people must
leave the mortal realm, that is, Middle-Earth. She
refuses the offer of the One Ring ("I will diminish, and
remain Galadriel"). The "faithful" survivors of the ruin
of Numenor, of whom Aragorn is the heir, accept
mortality and thus are redeemed.
Tolkien clearly
stated his intentions in his correspondence: "Anyway,
all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality,
and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive
occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as
it affects art and the creative (or as I should say,
sub-creative) desire ... It has various opportunities of
'Fall'. It may become possessive, clinging to the things
made as 'its own', the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord
and God of his private creation. He will rebel against
the laws of the Creator - especially against mortality.
Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the
desire for Power, for making the will more quickly
effective, - and so to the Machine (or Magic)."
The Faustian bargain and its resort to Magic
were themes long elaborated in Western literature, but
Tolkien added a terrible new dimension. In Middle-Earth,
as in Europe during the Great War, it was not the
mortality of the individual, as in Goethe, but instead
the mortality of nations. No serious critic will give
Tolkien a place in the literary canon, because his
characters generally are stick-figures speaking in
stilted declamation. But that is beside the point. He
has little time to waste on the petty concerns of the
sort of character that populates modern fiction. His
concern is the doom of peoples, or, to coin a phrase,
the decline of the West.
Europe's
decline
Immortality was not enough for the
Europeans. That is, Christianity in the confessional,
and universal Christian empire in politics, offered the
Europeans a form of immortality beyond the existence of
the nation. Europe fell from grace when its great
constituent nations decided that this sort of
immortality was not enough for them, and that they
should instead fight for temporal dominance upon the
earth. Exhausted from their wars, the peoples of Europe
sank into a torpor that is destroying them slowly but
with terrible certainty.
Jackson's portrayal of
Denethor, the feckless Steward of Gondor, doubtless
reminded Americans of European defeatism with respect to
Iraq and other venues in the Middle East. Out of
context, the character has little motivation. Perhaps
Jackson will provide the missing background of Gondor's
decline in a future extended version.
It is
tricky, of course, to draw analogies between the pride
and folly of Feanor or the Numenorians in Tolkien's
fantasy, and the pride and folly of the European nations
in World War I. But it was a commonplace observation
after 1918 that the great European tragedy began with a
misguided attempt to cheat mortality through the
assertion of national supremacy. One cannot make sense
of Hitler's rise to power without observing that many
Germans believed with all their heart that the existence
of the Volk was in jeopordy. Martin Heidegger gave (and
never retracted) his wholehearted support to Hitler,
believing that immersion in the Volk was a legitimate
answer to the Existential crisis.
A tragic flaw
was set in Europe's foundations, in the form of its
Faustian bargain with paganism (Why Europe chooses extinction).
Christianity offered salvation in another world; the
Europeans wanted a taste of immortality in this one. By
allowing the pagans to syncretically adopt their old
gods into the new religion, Christianity left the
Europeans forever torn between Jesus and Siegfried.
Richard Wagner returned to the old pagan sources and
found in them a foretaste of the Nihilism that would
ravage Europe during its Second Thirty Years' War of
1914-1944. Repudiating Wagner, Tolkien hoped to link an
ennobling pagan past and the Christian present. In this
respect he failed utterly. He is reduced to elegaic
yearning for a lost agrarian past. He is a reactionary
looking backwards, for his vision is too clear to allow
false hopes for the European future.
Tolkien
kept faith with the original Christian message. Man must
accept not only his own mortality, but the mortality of
his nation, the extinction of his culture, the silencing
of his mother-tongue, and look instead toward salvation
beyond all mortal hope. That is what Christianity
offered the pagans during the Great Extinction of
Peoples after the collapse of Rome. Frodo knows that the
entire race of Hobbits will become extinct. He begins
his journey with Gildor's warning that one day others
will dwell in the shire when hobbits are no more. Gildor
is the first among the High-Elves he meets as he rides
toward the Havens, in the company of Elrond and
Galadriel, who, along with Gandalf, finally are revealed
in their true capacity as the bearers of the Three Elven
Rings.
But the European nations threw off the
bonds of universal Christian empire and, through
Wagnerian nationalism, sought immortality within the
mortal realm - the tragic flaw of Feanor, Galadriel and
the rebel Eldar. The Great Wars and the fall of Europe
were the consequence. Except in the imagination, there
was no going back.
The sea-passage to the West,
in Peter Jackson's interpretation, represents death. It
might just as well represent immigration to America.
Unlike all other peoples, Americans need not fear the
extinction of their cultural identity, because they have
none to begin with. That is America's great weakness but
also its abiding strength. It is the reason that America
well may endure for all time while the Kulturnationen
dissolve into the dust of the libraries. Americans
bridle when told that they have no culture. But what can
they name whose loss would destroy their sense of
national identity? Erase the memory of Homer, and what
becomes of the Greeks? Forget Herman Melville, Mark
Twain, William Faulkner, and even The Simpsons,
and Americans still are Americans. If German or French
no longer were spoken, the concept of "Germany" or
"France" would become meaningless. At the time of their
revolution, Americans considered German as a national
language. A century from now they might adopt Spanish.
America can withstand the loss of the English language
itself. As long as America's political covenant remains
intact, Americans can change their "culture" as often as
convenient. America may fulfill the Christian project,
as an assembly of individuals called out of the nations,
cut loose from their heathen heritage - an outcome
Tolkien could not have imagined.
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