Tolkien among the Moderns

178 Pages·2015·1.38 MB·English

by  Ralph C. Wood (ed.)

TOLKIEN AMONG THE MODERNS
Edited by
RALPH C. WOOD
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2015 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-268-09674-8
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any
formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]
CONTENTS
Introduction: Tolkien among the Moderns
Ralph C. Wood
CHAPTER 1
Philosophic Poet: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Modern Response to an Ancient Quarrel
Germaine Paulo Walsh
CHAPTER 2
On Fate, Providence, and Free Will in The Silmarillion
Helen Lasseter Freeh
CHAPTER 3
Unlikely Knights, Improbable Heroes: Inverse, Antimodernist Paradigms in Tolkien and Cervantes
Michael D. Thomas
CHAPTER 4
Tolkien or Nietzsche; Philology and Nihilism
Peter M. Candler, Jr.
CHAPTER 5
A Portrait of the Poet as an Old Hobbit: Engaging Modernist Aesthetic Ontology in The Fellowship of the Ring
Phillip J. Donnelly
CHAPTER 6
Pouring New Wine into Old Bottles: Tolkien, Joyce, and the Modern Epic
Dominic Manganiello
CHAPTER 7
The Consolations of Fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien and Iris Murdoch
Scott H. Moore
CHAPTER 8
“That the World Not Be Usurped”: Emmanuel Levinas and J.R.R. Tolkien on Serving the Other as Release from Bondage
Joseph Tadie
CHAPTER 9
Tolkien and Postmodernism
Ralph C. Wood
Contributors
INTRODUCTION
Tolkien among the Moderns
Ralph C. Wood
J.R.R. Tolkien is neither an escapist nor an antiquarian writer. On the contrary, his work
addresses the most clamant questions of our age. This collection of essays is devoted to the
proposition that Tolkien’s work is animated and undergirded by a profound moral and religious
vision. It has been made evident not only by its many formal interpreters but also by the
millions of readers who have been braced by it. The Lord of the Rings—like all of Tolkien’s
other major texts: “The Monsters and the Critics,” “On Fairy-Stories,” The Hobbit, and,
chiefly, The Silmarillion—is imbued with profound ethical and theological concerns. What has
gone largely unnoticed, however, is that Tolkien’s work also engages with major literary
figures and philosophical movements of our time. Tom Shippey, in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of
the Century, has given glancing notice to Tolkien’s kinship with such apocalyptic writers as
George Orwell and William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, and Thomas Pynchon.
Yet Shippey does not explain how Tolkien’s moral vision engages the specific concerns that
animate the work of such major modern writers. This book seeks to fill this considerable gap.
It does so, not by claiming any literary or historical influences on Tolkien, nor does it take a
“view from nowhere,” as if his work could be read while hovering in the ether. Instead, it
offers a quite particular “listening from somewhere.” This is to say that we place modern
writers and modern quandaries in lively engagement with the textual particularities of
Tolkien’s masterpiece, in the conviction that we can thus illumine Lord of the Rings in
provocative and constructive ways.
We begin with Germaine Walsh’s contention that Tolkien is strangely modern in his very
recourse to things ancient. For in taking up the celebrated quarrel between poetry and
philosophy, Walsh maintains that Tolkien answers both of Plato’s objections to creative art: not
only the conviction that poetry offers beautiful lies masquerading as truth, but also that poetry
undermines morality by depicting both gods and heroes as overcome by passion and thus as
living subrational lives. On the contrary, argues Walsh, Tolkien gives us no mere “likeness” of
the world but rather a profound experience of its inherent wonder. Even more importantly,
Walsh shows that Tolkien depicts the subtleties of moral virtue and its proper development—
especially in engaging with the huge and vexed question of the role of women. In a surprising
defense of Lord of the Ring’s primary female character, Éowyn, Walsh demonstrates that
Tolkien is indeed a writer for our time.
Bringing us further toward our own era, Helen Lasseter Freeh (in chapter 2) traces Tolkien’s
abiding concern with fate and thus with the seeming helplessness of human beings in the face of
circumstances that repeatedly overwhelm them. Under the hegemony of modern science, most
of us moderns have come to regard ourselves as creatures whose destiny is largely determined
by our social and bodily conditions. From a Newtonian kind of determinism, we have adopted
another kind of impotence—the kind born of the conviction that the universe is both
unsponsored and undirected. On the contrary, Freeh’s analysis of Tolkien’s Silmarillion
reveals that all people remain free, not to determine their own destiny in autonomous ways but
rather to shape their lives in accord with the deep providential intentions that order the
universe.
Approaching our late age still further, Michael Thomas (in chapter 3) links Tolkien to
Cervantes in unanticipated ways, showing that—as knights accompanied by comic
companions, as heroes doing battle with evils both real and imagined—Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza have odd resemblances to Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. Their
improbable comic heroism, Thomas argues, is of their very essence. Yet theirs is not a valor
and intrepidity of the antiheroic kind that pervades much of modern literature. Cervantes’s and
Tolkien’s heroes serve, albeit often inadvertently, to shore up our confidence that the human
quest is indeed a road worth traveling.
In chapter 4, Peter Candler demonstrates that Tolkien answered Friedrich Nietzsche’s
critique of Christianity as unconsciously nihilistic because it was necessarily linguistic.
Nietzsche believed that once the language of Christians had been thoroughly deconstructed
their faith would collapse. Turning the tables on Nietzsche, Candler argues that Tolkien is not
at all troubled by the linguistic character of both divine revelation and human truth. Rather than
leading to nihilism, our irreducible linguisticality proves, in Tolkien’s work, to be our abiding
hope, since human beings are sacramentally created to participate in the life of the triune God,
who creatively speaks all things into being.
Phillip Donnelly argues in chapter 5 that Tolkien’s inset verse narratives in Lord of the
Rings embody an alternative to some of the aesthetic and ontological assumptions typical of
literary modernism. Three inset narratives in The Fellowship of the Ring, when taken together,
imply the artistic development of Bilbo Baggins, from a composer of traveling lyrics and
bathing songs to a composer of heroic court poetry on the myth of Eärendil. This alternative
story of development in poetic skill ultimately reveals a deeper contrast between Tolkien’s
ontology and the vision of reality most commonly assumed by modern authors, including James
Joyce.
Dominic Manganiello returns to Joyce again in chapter 6. He argues that Tolkien shared with
Joyce the fundamental premise that the great book can serve as an image of the cosmos itself.
But whereas Joyce’s Ulysses turns the artist into a countercreator and thus an epic maker of a
world without God, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings revives the ancient trope of the world as a
book written by human scribes or “subcreators” and thus as glossed by the hand of providence.
Tolkien’s paradigm of collaborative authorship, when set alongside Joyce’s antitheological
bias, also issues in radically opposed notions of heroism.
In chapter 7, Scott Moore explores still further startling evidence of Tolkien’s link to non-
Christian figures—namely, to the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. She was fascinated
with Tolkien’s work, Moore reveals, for very good reason. They were both interested in the
remarkable kinds of moral and spiritual consolation that are to be found in fantasy, but they
construed the term in almost diametrically opposed ways. Murdoch believed that Tolkien’s
work belonged among those few compelling works of art that not only legitimately console
their readers but also embody the moral vision that Murdoch thought was indicative of
authentic virtue and that she sought to show in her own fiction.
Joseph Tadie in chapter 8 brings us into the contemporary arena of ideas by showing the link
between the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas and the fantasy fiction of Tolkien—
especially, though perhaps also surprisingly, The Hobbit. From Levinas, Tadie has learned
how dreadfully difficult it is to attend to the other without reducing them to our own
comfortable categories. This conundrum is made acute when dealing with those who are
deemed weak and dependent, since we are likely to treat them as creatures in need of our help.
Tadie demonstrates, exactly to the contrary, that Tolkien joins Levinas in regarding the
allegedly strong and wise as those needing to be transformed by the lowly and the broken. In
their very powerlessness, they help prevent the mighty from “usurping the world,” a fine
phrase from Pascal that Tadie explicates in the texts of both Levinas and Tolkien.
My own essay, chapter 9, seeks to establish Tolkien’s surprising relevance to the vexed
question of postmodernity—how he shares many of its questions while embracing almost none
of its solutions. There I attempt to show that Tolkien does not begin, in standard Enlightenment
fashion, with abstract universal principles that he then seeks to instantiate in his fiction, but that
he always proceeds from the particular and the historical and the linguistic, locating his
deepest beliefs in the habits and practices of specific communities, especially the hobbit world
of the Shire.
These nine essays were born of a seminar sponsored by the Lilly Fellows Program in
Humanities and the Arts held at Baylor University. For four weeks, a group of scholars from a
variety of U.S. colleges and universities—and also from a variety of disciplines: English,
philosophy, political science, Spanish, theology—met daily to discuss the various ways in
which the work of J.R.R. Tolkien impinges on the modern world. Our seminar was entitled
“Reading Tolkien and Living the Virtues,” for we sought to discern how Tolkien’s work offers
a fresh imaginative vision of the moral and religious life as it might yet be lived in the early
twenty-first century. Yet our conversations soon revealed that Tolkien’s legendarium—the
huge mythological and linguistic world that he spent his entire adult life creating—has
resonances that extend well beyond the seven classical virtues, though never excluding them.
We discovered, in short, that Tolkien’s work trenches unexpectedly on our various disciplines
and that it participates in a conversation that is altogether as much modern as it is classical.
This volume is the result of our firm conviction that Tolkien has a permanent dwelling place
“among the moderns.”
CHAPTER 1
PHILOSOPHIC POET
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Modern Response to an Ancient Quarrel
Germaine Paulo Walsh
Perhaps more deeply than any other twentieth-century author, J.R.R. Tolkien reflects on the
problematic question of human creativity, of man as maker. Tolkien maintains that the
calamitous events of the twentieth century, events he witnessed firsthand, were due, at least in
part, to a fundamental misunderstanding of human creativity. In accepting the notion that human
beings are makers but not that they are made, that human beings are creative but not that they
are created, modernity places man in the position of God, an arrogation that is both futile and
self-destructive. What is needed, Tolkien suggests, is a reintroduction to an older view of
human creativity, one recognizing both the dignity and the limits of man’s capacity as maker.
Considered in this light, one may understand Tolkien’s work as being an attempt to reacquaint
the modern mind with that complex human capacity referred to by the ancient Greeks as
poiesis.1
The creativity theme underlies the whole of Tolkien’s legendarium, the vast collection of
writings conveying the history of the mythical elves, recounting their origin, deeds, and final
passage from Middle-earth. The primary focus of the saga is on one particular elvish clan, the
Noldor, who are distinguished from the other clans by virtue of their extraordinary creative
ability, their “maker’s power” (S, 68).2 In telling the history of the Noldor, Tolkien explores the
sense in which the possession of this power is a gift, albeit a perilous one. As the Noldor
develop their creative capacity in many and various ways, they forget that, although they are
responsible for the use to which they put this ability, they are not responsible for the fact that
they possess it in the first place. They forget that the source of their extraordinary power in
making is not themselves but their creator, Eru, called Ilúvatar, who has gifted them, above all
others of their kind, with a share in his own creative power; and so they become increasingly
proud of their accomplishments in making “many new things fair and wonderful” (S, 63).
Failing to recognize the inexorable contingency of their creative ability, the Noldor fail to
recognize its limits, and they suffer for it.
In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien argues that, properly understood, all art, all
poiesis, is “sub-creation.” In defending the often derided form of literature known as fairy
story, from which the genre of fantasy emerged, Tolkien argues that the poetic art, like all
human making, is not purely and simply “creative.” Given that human beings cannot bring forth
something from nothing, the ability to “create” is, strictly speaking, limited to God. Yet within
the limits and possibilities of the world established by God, human beings are capable of re-
forming and reordering the objects of the world, and in this more limited way, share in the
divine creativity. Tolkien’s deep reflection on the biblical teaching that human beings are made
in the image and likeness of God underlies his own mythopoetic vision. For Tolkien, the human
likeness to God is expressed most fully in the capacity for creativity. Furthermore, it is in light
of this teaching, Tolkien maintains, that the underlying order of the world—which so often
appears, paradoxically, as disorder—is most fully and comprehensively disclosed. As Tolkien
writes in his poem “Mythopoeia”:
Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned. . . .
. . . though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seeds of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.3
Tolkien’s account of subcreation, as with many aspects of his work, entails a
reconsideration of modern conceptions and presuppositions in light of the older, deeper
tradition of Western thought. In arguing that the artist is a maker, not a creator, Tolkien tacitly
rejects one aspect of the modern view. Similarly, he stands in accord with ancient thought in
viewing the poet as the quintessential maker,4 even as he also holds that the activity of the poet
involves not just making5 but discovering. That is, Tolkien maintains that poetry entails the
making of stories, but the stories disclose the poet’s vision, the poet’s discovery, as it were, of
an intelligible order—despite the appearance of disorder—that underlies the world. In order
to arrive at an understanding of this intelligible order, the poet must confront several central
concerns of both philosophy and theology.
I shall explore Tolkien’s legendarium—the huge mythological system that he created over
more than fifty years of labor, and that is found in The Silmarillion and in the twelve volumes
of The History of Middle-earth, along with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit—in light of
what is commonly regarded as the most famous philosophical analysis of poetic art, Plato’s
critique of poetry in the Republic, which culminates in his discussion of the “ancient quarrel
between poetry and philosophy.” I shall proceed by providing a brief discussion of each
charge that Plato raises against poetry, followed in turn by some reflections on how Tolkien’s
legendarium may be regarded as offering a response, as it were, to each charge.
Approaching Tolkien through the lens of Plato’s two-pronged critique of poetry, I shall
argue, leads to some previously overlooked insights into the philosophic character of Tolkien’s
work. In particular, this approach may enable us to acknowledge and more fully grasp
Tolkien’s comprehensive vision of the whole, a poetic achievement intended both to rekindle
the experience of wonder and to defend its enduring value. Furthermore, this approach may
lead us to more fully appreciate Tolkien’s deft and complex depiction of moral virtue and its
development. In following this approach, we will eventually be drawn to the character of
Éowyn of Rohan, and thereby, perhaps most surprisingly, to consider the aspects of Tolkien’s
work that deal most directly with the claims of modern feminism.
PLATO’S CHARGE THAT POETRY OFFERS “LIES” MASQUERADING AS TRUTH
In book 10 of the Republic, Socrates states that there is an “ancient quarrel between
philosophy and poetry” (607b).6 It proves to be a long-standing quarrel, predating Socrates and
his contemporaries. Plato suggests, by having Socrates report several seemingly well-known
statements made by poets against philosophers, but none by philosophers against poets, that the
poets have been the more contentious parties to the quarrel.7 Subjecting the poetic art to
philosophical questioning, and arguing presumably on behalf of philosophy, Socrates raises
two distinct but related charges against poetry. The first charge is that by producing images of
things rather than providing direct access to the things themselves poetry offers lies
masquerading as truth. This charge, which centers on the role of imitation (mimesis)8 in poetry,
is connected to what is generally known as the Platonic theory of forms, or ideas, the most
explicit discussion of which occurs in the Republic. The second charge is that poetry
undermines morality, and thus the good of the political community, by supporting the rule of
desire rather than the rule of reason. Poetry on its surface seems to exalt models of heroic
virtue, but Plato holds that a deeper examination of poetry reveals that it does not ultimately
support virtue.
In considering these charges, there are several matters of which one should be mindful.
First, in speaking of poetry, Socrates refers to the whole tradition of ancient Greek poetry,
including epics, tragedies, and comedies. However, given the preeminent place held by the
Homeric epics, Socrates’ comments about poetry are often aimed directly at Homer.
Furthermore, Plato conveys his critique of poetry in a text that is itself a work of poetry.
Although Plato offers, through Socrates, a sharp criticism of the role of imitation in poetry, he
himself engages in imitation. In reading the Republic, as in reading all of the Platonic
dialogues, one encounters an author who excels at the poetic art, revealing himself to be a
master at imitating a variety of characters, from Socrates to Thrasymachus, and at employing an
array of images and myths, from the Allegory of the Cave to the Myth of Er. With this in mind,
it may not be surprising to find that, the more deeply one examines the charges made against
poetry, the more ambiguous and insufficient these charges seem. Hence one must consider not
only the arguments themselves but also Plato’s intent in raising them.
In discussing the first charge against poetry, Plato explores the question of whether poetry is,
given its very nature, necessarily detrimental to human life. Book 10 opens with Socrates
expressing approval of the interlocutors’ earlier decision to ban all imitative poetry from the
city-in-speech, since such works “maim the thoughts (dianoia) of those who hear them and do