BOOK
REVIEW Tolkien's Christianity and the
pagan tragedy The
Children of Hurin, by J R R
Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
Reviewed by Spengler
J R R Tolkien
was the most Christian of 20th-century writers,
not because he produced Christian allegory and
apologetics like his friend C S Lewis, but because
he uniquely portrayed the tragic nature of what
Christianity replaced. Thanks to the diligence of
his
son
Christopher, who reconstructed the present volume
from several manuscripts, we have before us a
treasure that sheds light on the greater purpose
of his The Lord of the Rings.
In
The Children of Hurin, a tragedy set some
6,000 years before the tales recounted in The
Lord of the Rings, we see clearly why it was
that Tolkien sought to give the English-speaking
peoples a new pre-Christian mythology. It is a
commonplace of Tolkien scholarship that the
writer, the leading Anglo-Saxon scholar of his
generation, sought to restore to the English their
lost mythology. In this respect the standard
critical sources (for example Edmund Wainwright)
mistake Tolkien's profoundly Christian motive. In
place of the heroes Siegfried and Beowulf, the
exemplars of German
and Anglo-Saxon pagan myth, we have the accursed
warrior Turin, whose pride of blood and loyalty to
tribe leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the
forces of evil.
Tolkien's popular
Ring trilogy, I have attempted to show,
sought to undermine and supplant Richard Wagner's
operatic Ring cycle, which had offered so
much inspiration for Nazism. [1] With the
reconstruction of the young Tolkien's prehistory
of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose:
to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of
pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is
the pagan's tribal identity. Tolkien saw his
generation decimated, and his circle of friends
exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of
World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace
the cult of Christ during World War II. His life's
work was to attack the pagan flaw at the
foundation of the West.
It is too simple
to consider Tolkien's protagonist Turin as a
conflation of Siegfried and Beowulf, but the
defining moments in Turin's bitter life refer
clearly to the older myths, with a crucial
difference: the same qualities that make Siegfried
and Beowulf exemplars to the pagans instead make
Turin a victim of dark forces, and a menace to all
who love him. Tolkien was the anti-Wagner, and
Turin is the anti-Siegfried, the anti-Beowulf.
Tolkien reconstructed a mythology for the English
not (as Wainwright and other suggest) because he
thought it might make them proud of themselves,
but rather because he believed that the actual
pagan mythology was not good enough to be a
predecessor to Christianity.
"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," I wrote in an
earlier essay. [2] Christianity demands of the
Gentile that he reject his sinful flesh and be
reborn into Israel; only through a new birth can
the Gentile escape the death of his own body as
well as the death of his hopes in the inevitable
extinction of his people.
Tolkien is a
writer of greater theological depth than his
Oxford colleague C S Lewis, in my judgment. Lewis
is a felicitous writer and a diligent apologist,
but mere allegory along the lines of the Narnia
series can do no more than restate Christian
doctrine; it cannot really expand our experience
of it. Tolkien takes us to the dark frontier of a
world that is not yet Christian, and therefore is
tragic, but has the capacity to become Christian.
It is the world of the Dark Ages, in which
barbarians first encounter the light. It is not
fantasy, but rather a distillation of the
spiritual history of the West. Whereas C S Lewis
tries to make us comfortable in what we already
believe by dressing up the story as a children's
masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly
uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our
language, our toehold upon this shifting and
uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a
thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a
greater hope than that of the work of our hands
and the hone of our swords must avail us.
Tolkien set The Children of Hurin
in a doomed world menaced by a fallen angel of
sorts, the Lucifer-like Morgoth. An alliance of
mortal men and immortal Elves attacks Morgoth's
stronghold but is crushed and dispersed; only a
few hidden Elvish strongholds remain free. Hurin
is the lord of a small land and a leader of the
failed alliance against Morgoth. He is taken
prisoner and his country overrun and occupied, his
people reduced to slavery. His young son Turin
escapes and is adopted by the Elven-king of the
secret city of Gondolin. Rather than remain with
the Elves and await the divine intervention of
Elvish prophecy that ultimately will destroy
Morgoth, Turin grows to impetuous manhood and sets
out to seek revenge or death.
Morgoth has
cursed Turin's family, and the curse succeeds not
by force of magic, but through Turin's own
stubbornness and resentment. With the occupation
of his homeland and the destruction of his clan,
Turin would rather perish in a futile gesture of
resistance than master his own hatred. Through his
agents, Morgoth entraps Turin in a web of lies
that prevent him from reuniting with his family
except under sordid circumstances. It is Turin's
own flaws, not Morgoth's magic, that make him
susceptible to these traps.
In Tolkien's
mythology the Valar are gods of whom Morgoth was a
renegade. It is through their aid that Morgoth's
fortress of Thangorodrim one day will be thrown
down. An Elvish lord attempts to convince Turin
that thoughtless pursuit of warfare will not
succeed: "Petty victories will prove profitless at
the last ... for thus Morgoth learns where the
boldest of his enemies are to be found, and
gathers strength great enough to destroy them ...
Only in secrecy lies hope of survival. Until the
Valar come."
To this Turin rejoins: "The
Valar! They have forsaken you, and they hold Men
in scorn. What use to look westward across the
endless Sea to a dying sunset in the West? There
is but one Vala with whom we have to do, and that
is Morgoth; and if in the end we cannot overcome
him, at least we can hurt him and hinder him ...
Though mortal Men have little life beside the span
of the Elves, they would rather spend it in battle
than fly or submit." His lack of faith makes him
desperate, and his acts of heroic desperation have
terrible consequences.
In The Lord of
the Rings, Tolkien returned to this theme of
faith in a higher power rather than in one's own
force of arms. It is not the valor of the small
remnant of free peoples that overcomes Sauron
(Morgoth's successor) but rather the improbable
mission of the Ringbearer that will overcome the
Darkness that threatens Middle-earth.
After the exchange cited above, Turin's
arrogance causes the destruction of the Elvish
stronghold of Nargothrond by the dragon Glaurung.
Once again a fugitive, Turin becomes the leader of
a band of woodmen. When Glaurung reappears to
menace them, he sets out to kill the dragon and
save his people, in precise emulation of Beowulf's
single combat with the barrow-dwelling dragon.
Like Beowulf, Turin slays the dragon, and like
Siegfried, he is bathed in the dragon's blood when
he stands upon the dying beast to gloat.
Siegfried's bath in dragon's blood,
however, makes him invulnerable to weapons (except
for the one spot on his back where a treacherous
spear-thrust will kill him). Turin, by contrast,
is immobilized by the venomous blood, long enough
for a horrible event to occur; this will provoke
him to kill himself with his own blade. Morgoth's
vengeance is complete at the conclusion of this
dark and sad tale.
What made Beowulf a
great man to the anonymous Saxon bard who composed
the only major Old English work of the 9th century
was his willingness to defend his people against
monsters. His death in single combat with the
dragon might mean the destruction of his people,
as the Old Woman's lament at his pyre makes clear.
Turin saves his little band by destroying the
dragon, but only after he has allowed the dragon
to destroy a great Elven city. Gloating over his
victim leads to his own destruction.
Siegfried's fearlessness before his dragon
is rewarded in the form of invincibility; Turin's
fearlessness is born of despair and therefore
expresses self-destructiveness. It is punished by
an awful chain of events that I will leave readers
of the book to discover for themselves.
It
is useful to contrast Tolkien's purpose to that of
T S Eliot, too often held up as the exemplary
Christian poet of the 20th century. Eliot sifted
through the detritus of the pagan past in the
cellars of Christianity. [3] As he wrote in his
notes to The Waste Land (1922), "To another
work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one
which has influenced our generation profoundly; I
mean The Golden Bough" of James Frazer.
Frazer attempts to show that all Christian imagery
and ritual derive from pagan myth, for example,
the commonplace idea of a sacrificed god. His
conclusions have been rejected by later scholars,
but the relevant point regarding Eliot is that he
embraced the pagan antecedents of Christianity as
he thought it was (even though it turned out to be
something else than he thought).
Tolkien
knew far more about the pagan past than Eliot; as
the great philologist of his time, he produced the
first readable translation of "Beowulf", as well
as seminal editions of the most important
Anglo-Saxon classics. He loved the material more
than any man living, but unlike the dilettantish
Eliot, the authority Tolkien sacrificed his love
for the Anglo-Saxon sources, and chose to
transform the modern memory of it by creating a
variant of it more congenial to Christianity.
That is the miracle of The Children of
Hurin. Not the least of Tolkien's legacy is a
son with the devotion and craft to reconstruct the
projects of his father's youth. We owe Christopher
Tolkien a great debt of gratitude for putting this
work before us. Readers who enjoyed The Lord of
Rings as a work of fantasy (which it most
surely is not) will find the present volume tough
going, for it comes out of the world of
Anglo-Saxon epic. As the editor reports, Tolkien
originally cast it as poem in alliterative verse
in the Anglo-Saxon fashion. But for readers who
want to understand better what Tolkien was driving
at, this work of the writer's youth will provide
insight, as well as a few tranquil hours of
respite from the noise and clutter of the world.
The Children of Hurin, by J R R
Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 2007. ISBN 10:0618894640. Price
US$26, 320 pages.
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German
and Anglo-Saxon pagan myth, we have the accursed
warrior Turin, whose pride of blood and loyalty to
tribe leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the
forces of evil. 
