AND I SAW SATAN FALL LIKE LIGHTNING FROM HEAVEN Happy Tolkien Reading Day !) And I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven ... Jesus (Luke 10: 18) Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms ... John Milton (Paradise lost) “The realm of Sauron is ended! The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.” And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell. Tolkien 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 Tolkiens 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. Tolkiens popular Ring trilogy, I have attempted to show, sought to undermine and supplant Richard Wagners operatic Ring cycle, which had offered so much inspiration for Nazism. [1] With the reconstruction of the young Tolkiens 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 pagans 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 lifes work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West. It is too simple to consider Tolkiens protagonist Turin as a conflation of Siegfried and Beowulf, but the defining moments in Turins 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 childrens 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 Morgoths 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. ... It is useful to contrast Tolkiens 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. 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. Spengler atimes/atimes/Front_Page/ID24Aa01.html
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:24:42 +0000
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