Myth, glory, and the Good Death: Homer and Tolkien (I)

Part II explores the Homeric influences that shaped 'The Lord of the Rings'

Homer singing his Iliad at the gates of Athens. Guillaume Lethiere, 1811.

“My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.” — Hector, after missing a spear-throw in combat against Achilles, Iliad, Book XXII.

“My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed.” — Théoden, whilst dying of his wounds on the Fields of Pelennor, The Return of the King.

All the paths of Western literature lead back to Troy. Every great work of the canon can be traced ultimately to Homer through its dramatic form, its influences, and its narrative arcs. No work falls outside the Homeric orbit and its great themes of divine providence, justice, wrath, virtue, and homecoming. It is comprised of two parts. The Iliad depicts the closing weeks of the ten-year Trojan War, and the quarrels, feats and tragic deaths of its greatest warriors. The second half, the Odyssey, tells of Odysseus, the Argive author of the Wood Horse stratagem that finally laid waste to Troy, and his turbulent journey home to Ithaca.

Together, these works have exerted an unparalleled influence on the Greco-Roman culture from which our civilisation was spawned and thus on every important subsequent literary work. Indeed, epics of the English canon, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, were influenced directly and consciously by Homer. Milton’s Satan is distinctly Odyssean. Satan journeys through Hell and Chaos, and deceives Eve. Similarly, Odysseus passes through Hades on his return to Ithaca, and must shroud his identity, and deceive his wife, in order to finally defeat the Suitors that have taken over his estate. The Homeric influence is threaded throughout Western literature, and thus Western culture.

But these paths to Troy are not merely metaphorical — they are also literal, geographic routes. Virgil’s Aeneid, together with Homer’s two epics, forms the tripos at the ancient foundation of Western literature. Aeneas, Virgil tells us, fled Troy during its downfall. He journeyed to Italy, where he became the first true ancestor of the Romans. Hence the foundational myth of the Roman civilisation, and thus Western civilisation itself, has its origins in Troy.

Moreover, the mythic pathway extended northwards to the nascent kingdoms of Britannia. The storytellers of Medieval England told of Aeneas’ fabled great-grandson, Brutus, who brought a great Trojan fleet to Britannia, where he defeated a race of giants and established New Troy (London). And the people of England were thus the legitimate heirs to the civilisational legacy of Rome and, in turn, its Grecian ancestry — and most importantly to the great fabled heroism on which they were founded. Crucially, all three of these founding myths — the Grecian; the Roman; and the English — were not intended as mere stories, situated only in an imaginative plane. They were meant to be of the respective civilisation’s history, not stand apart from it. The myths were intended to form pre-histories in which the civilisations’ spiritual worth was forged through the heroism and sacrifice of their greatest ancestors. And by the light of these original myths, the real cultures and histories were sublimated and enriched. The Trojan War was fabled to have been fought in the 13th century BCE¹. Homer, writing his mythology towards the end of the 7th century BCE, was thus narrating a faux-historical preface to his own civilisation.

It was in this vein that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. Dismayed at the paucity of pre-English myth by contrast with the richness of the Norse and Germanic traditions., he endeavored to write a vast mythology himself — an epic lore that was at once located in some imagined realm but also peculiarly English. The hobbits are mini-Englishmen, possessing the unmistakable mores and mannerisms of the dales and the shires. The story is intended to connect directly to our own world. The tale of the Ring takes place in the Third Age, with our own being the Fourth Age. Thus the heroics of Frodo, Sam and Aragorn are meant to prelude Medieval England, just as those of Hector and Aeneas were told as sincere preludes to the Greco-Roman cultures. As such, Tolkien’s project was linked innately to those of Homer and Virgil: he was authoring a unique founding myth by which the real culture of England could be enriched and inspired.

Myth within myth

Indeed, Homer’s influence is threaded through every core aspect of the work. The very form of The Lord of the Rings is Homeric, with its epic lore, its richness, and its layering of myth within myth. In the midst of the grand narratives on which the Iliad and the Odyssey are centred, the heroes regale the historic feats of their forefathers. We are transported momentarily from the plains of Troy or the waves of the Aegean to some other time and setting, in which great precursory events, or acts of terrific courage, unfolded. In Chapter Four of The Odyssey, in the palace of Menelaus, Helen recounts to Telemachus how his father, Odysseus, infiltrated Troy in disguise:

“He disfigured himself with appalling lacerations and then, with dirty rags on his back, looking like a slave, he slunk into the broad streets of the enemy city…He made his way like this into the Trojan city, and was not detected by anyone…And after killing a number of Trojans with his long sword, he got back to the Argive camp with a great deal of information.”

The anecdote not only presages the deceptions that Odysseus will later undertake upon his return to Ithaca in order to outwit his enemies; but it enriches and deepens his heroism. The trauma and majesty of the Trojan War as a historical backdrop is integral to the moral essence of the Odyssey. It recounts not merely an epic homecoming journey, but one that is undertaken in the shadow of a harrowing, decade-long saga of courage and folly and death.

Furthermore, three times we are told of Odysseus authoring — and leading — the Wooden Horse stratagem that felled Troy from within. From inside the Horse, Odysseus quells the fears of his men so that “the flower of the Argive might” can bring “doom and slaughter on the Trojans”. This retelling of Odysseus’ military feats achieves two things. First, it imbues his character with a moral worth, and a kingly majesty, that transcends and sublimates the epic drama of his journey home. Second, it underlays that journey with a precursory history that not only heightens the saga-like richness of the work, but also elevates its very meaning as a story. It is from the war, and the feats of its heroes, that the true moral importance of the homecoming is derived.

This interweaving of story within story is central to the mythic form. It creates a sense of deep time, eternal memory and moral grandeur that elevates it from the ranks of mere fiction. And The Lord of the Rings is teeming with near-endless sub-creation. The core myth of the narrative — the hobbits’ journey to Mordor — is underlain with dozens of smaller tales and myths: from the history of the Shire that opens the novel; to Sméagol’s tragic fall hundreds of years prior; to the great narrative of the One Ring delivered at the Council of Elrond. These are not simply background contexts to individual characters. They are the histories of entire peoples — a vast foundation of stories that undergird the mythic landscape of the central narrative.

Like in the Homeric epics, there is the intimate retelling of long-passed events that cast a moral shadow upon the present. At the outset of The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf tells Frodo of the Ring’s ancient history and the terrible manner in which it came to Gollum, then an innocent and happy creature “of hobbit-kind” named Smeagol. In the remote Wilderland, while fishing on the banks of the Great River, his friend, Deagol, plunged in after a fish and inadvertently retrieved the Ring from the sediment at the bottom:

‘“Then up he came spluttering, with weeds in his hair and a handful of mud; and he swam to the bank. And behold! when he washed the mud away, there in his hand lay a beautiful golden ring; and it shone and glittered in the sun, so that his heart was glad. But Smeagol had been watching from behind a tree, and as Deagol gloated over the ring, Smeagol came softly up behind.

“Give us that, Deagol, my love”, said Smeagol, over his friend’s shoulder.

“Why?” said Deagol.

“Because it’s my birthday, my love, and I wants it,” said Smeagol.

“I don’t care,” said Deagol. “I have given you a present already, more than I could afford. I found this and I’m going to keep it.”

“Oh, are you indeed, my love,” said Smeagol; and he caught Deagol by the throat and strangled him, because the gold looked so bright and beautiful. Then he put the ring on his finger.’

Told at the opening of the novel, this disturbing tale transcends the rooted homeliness of the fireside in the heart of the Shire. We are transported from the armchairs to the strange, dreamlike world of Wilderland, and the act of murder that determined the fate of Middle-earth and all its peoples. The sense of inexorable security that has hitherto locked us inside the Shire is shattered by a looming, ancient darkness:

“There was a silence. Gandalf sat down again and puffed at his pipe, as if lost in thought. His eyes seems closed, but under the lids he was watching Frodo intently. Frodo gazed fixedly at the red embers on the hearth, until they filled all his vision, and he seemed to be looking down into profound wells of fire. He was thinking of the fabled Cracks of Doom and the terror of the Fiery Mountain.”

The sub-creation of Wilderland tells of the Ring’s awesome power, but also deepens and darkens the moral heart of the quest. And this type of sub-history — the creation of entire microcosms inside an overarching mythology — is the essence of the work’s form. It is Tolkien’s mastery over the mythic depth which creates the story’s epic, near-endless magnitude. And this idea of times long-passed illuminating and elevating the present is quintessentially Homeric. The past confers meaning and purpose upon the present.

Glory, the Good Death, and homecoming

Within this essentially Homeric form, the The Lord of the Rings is linked intimately to the Iliad and the Odyssey by three central themes: glory (kleos); the Good Death (euthanasia); and homecoming (nostos). These ideas are individual golden threads woven through Homer’s epics; but they are also in a complex and constant tension with each other. In particular, the desire for a glorious battlefield death and the cultural legacy it enshrines is in perpetual conflict with the yearning for the comforts of home. The mutual opposition of these psychological forces not only sustains the drama and evokes our sympathies, but forms the moral heart of the works. At its core, the conflict illuminates the very value and meaning of courage itself.

The doctrines of kleos and euthanasia are of paramount importance to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Facing the battlefield — and death itself — with valour is the highest attainable virtue of the Homeric moral cosmos. Argive and Trojan alike are compelled by the imperative to confront the enemy, and their own deaths, like men. Importantly, Homer does not treat this idea with irony: heroic valour and the defence of one’s people is held in unquestionable esteem. Indeed, the fear of cutting one’s life short on the battlefield is supplanted by the higher cultural ideal of kleos. Hector, in a moment of doubt before leaving the walls of Troy to fight once more, tells his wife:

''All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman. But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. Nor does the spirit urge me on that way. I've learned it all too well. To stand up bravely, always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers. winning my father great glory, glory for myself.'' — Iliad, Book VI.

The worst vice of all for the Hellenic man was that of cowardice. And the ultimate reward was the enshrinement of a warrior’s story in the lore of his people, to be retold without end down the generations. Hector desires glory not only for his own sake but for the sake of his family name — for his patriarchal lineage. Indeed, the earning of an immortal name is a foundational ethic of the Odyssey, too. When escaping the Cyclops’ lair, Odysseus risks the safety of his ship’s getaway by goading the monster:

“Cyclops, if any mortal man ever asks you who it was that inflicted upon your eye this shameful blinding, tell him that you were blinded by Odysseus, sacker of cities” — Odyssey, Book IX.

And hence Hector’s final wish before facing his fateful death against Achilles is for cultural, and indeed spiritual, immortality:

“My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.” — Iliad, Book XXII.

The Mighty Dead

The greatest moral outrage of the Iliad is the maltreatment of Hector’s dead body at the hands of the vengeful Achilles. Raging at the death of his young friend Patroclus, who was slain by Hector on the battlefield, Achilles drags Hector’s corpse behind his chariot to the Achaean camp, where he abuses it for twelve days. The nobility of Hector, and his final glorious attainment of euthanasia on the field, are cut through bitterly by the spiteful and poisonous desecration of his body.

And yet it is the gods themselves that sanctify the body of the noble Hector. Apollo and Aphrodite prevent the body from receiving further injury at the hands of Achilles; and Thetis, the mother of Achilles, orders that the body be returned to Priam, Hector’s father. As instructed by Zeus, the highest of the gods, the Trojans are granted twelve days in which to perform funeral rites for Hector. The Iliad ends with Hector’s burial. The moment is elegiacal not only for a valiant and beloved hero that attained euthanasia — the greatest of all kleos — but also for every Achaean and Trojan that suffered, fought and died on the plains of Troy. Thus Homer shows us that nowhere in the human experience is glory and honour more finely distilled than in the majesty of death.

For both Homer and Tolkien the body of the slain warrior-hero is a core symbol. Achilles cremates Patroclus, his greatest friend, on an immense pyre — but only after the ghost of Patroclus appears before Achilles, demanding that he be buried in order to pass into Hades. Such is the importance of the funeral rite: it is both a ceremonial imperative that expresses the mourning of the living, and also a preparation for the soul’s transcendence into the afterlife.

Indeed, it is through the funeral rites for the fallen warrior that The Lord of the Rings expresses the most essential aspects of its metaphysics and morality. The death of Boromir is one of the most morally significant moments of the novel. Overcome by the Ring’s magnetic power and the belief that it must be harnessed to save his beloved Gondor from Sauron’s onslaughts, he attempts to seize it from Frodo. Importantly, however, he is not corrupted in the manner of Saruman, who turns willingly to the darkness out of cowardice and power-lust. Boromir is corrupted by his proximity to the Ring, and by his long-standing rational conviction that it ought to be used as a weapon against the dark forces rather than destroyed. Thus Boromir’s “betrayal” of the Fellowship is a momentary lapse in which his senses are lost in the fog of the quest. On regaining his senses, he sacrifices is life in a final and heroic stand against the orcs so that the hobbits can escape with the Ring. In so doing, he redeems himself, and reveals his heart’s true nobility and honour.

It is their sacrifices above all that sublimate the deaths of Hector and Boromir so poignantly. Indeed, both deaths capture the moral essence of men in war that is expressed with such pathos in the Gospel of John: “Greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” Hence on finding Boromir dying of his arrow wounds, Aragorn understands immediately the moral gravity of his final actions:

“Aragorn knelt beside him. Boromir opened his eyes and strove to speak. At last slow words came. ‘I tried to take the Ring from Frodo,’ he said. ‘I am sorry. I have paid.’ His glance strayed to his fallen enemies, twenty at least lay there. ‘They have gone: the Halflings: the Orcs have taken them. I think they are not dead. Orcs bound them.’ He paused and his eyes closed wearily. After a moment he spoke again.

‘Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.’

‘No!’ said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. ‘You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!’

Boromir smiled.

‘Which way did they go? Was Frodo there?’ said Aragorn.

But Boromir did not speak again.”

“You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory.” Aragorn, the great kingly warrior, understands that the highest form of death has been achieved — a form of the Homeric euthanasia. What has Boromir “conquered”? Ultimately, like, Hector, he has conquered himself: his fear of the enemy and of mortality; his lust for the Ring; and his desire to return to the homeland of Gondor — his nostos.

The higher majesty of Boromir’s death is enshrined in the funeral boat by which he is sent westwards over the falls. Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas place the many swords of his fallen enemies beneath him, and his own shattered sword in his hands. They sing a lament as he drifts down the river. As with the fallen warriors of the Iliad, the rites shown to Boromir’s body are of profound symbolic importance to his living friends, but also gesture towards the soul’s transcendence from the temporal world to the divine. Ultimately, it is his final heroism that justifies this treatment. It is through kleos that body and soul alike are sublimated in death.

The battle between kleos and nostos

Yet for both Homer and Tolkien the reverence of glory stands in perpetual conflict with the desire for homecoming. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the polarity between kleos and nostos forms an important moral tension in the heart of every warrior. The choice between eternal glory and the comforts of home looms larger over the plains of Troy than perhaps any other. Thus Achilles is torn between the diverging paths of two sublime prophecies:

''Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet, that two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies...true, but the life that's left me will be long, the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.'' — Iliad, Book IX

He is pulled between his own death and the death of an eternal legacy. This is not merely a moral choice between the comforts of home and the hardships of war, or between courage and cowardice. It is a spiritual choice between the finite joys of the mortal life and the majesty of eternal glory. And it is a metaphysical choice between the temporal and divine worlds: the Good Life in the beloved material homeland; or the Good Death, which confers eternal honour in Hades and endless memorial among the living. It is a choice which transcends not only the pain of the Trojan battlefield, but also the war writ large and the material world itself.

“It is through the finality of death that the most exalted and important aspects of Tolkien’s philosophy are presented.”

The same dilemma is manifest within Tolkien’s heroes. Hobbits and men alike are pulled continually between turning back to their beloved homelands and journeying into the heart of evil. As with the Homeric warriors, this is not merely a straightforward choice between hardship and comfort: the tension reveals the story’s innermost moral framework. From leaving the Shire until reaching the mouth of Mt Doom, the Hobbits are compelled and driven onwards by the profound inner meaning of the quest to destroy the Ring. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Sam speaks often of his desire to return to the tranquility of the Shire. And yet, as with Hector and Achilles, the yearning yields ultimately to a higher moral ideal — a sense of providence that overarches the entire quest. He tells Frodo:

“I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way. I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back. It isn't right to see Elves now, nor dragons, nor mountains, that I want — I don't rightly know what I want: but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire. I must see it through, sir, if you understand me.”

It is not merely the imperative to overcome adversity and fear that drives the quest to Mordor; it is a sense of deep meaning — of moral fate — that compels them. Sam senses that he has some purpose in this journey, and that that purpose transcends merely serving his master’s material needs. And so it comes to pass: without Sam’s heroically carrying Frodo up Mt Doom, the Ring could not be destroyed. Thus, like the warriors of the Trojan plains, Tolkien’s heroes muster their spiritual strength from a sense of divine telos. The fate of the individual and the fate of the world are inseparable. The world depends upon the hero, and thus his struggle is sublimated by its moral meaning.

Death and metaphysics

Moreover, like the Homeric warriors, the heroes of Middle-earth are concerned perhaps above all with the power of story, and the way in which it enshrines the individual struggle at the moral centre of a whole people. Sam and Frodo talk repeatedly of being memorialised in the lore of the Shire. For Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, there is no greater prize than eternal heroic memory. Importantly, the terror and darkness of the great heroic tale has a meaning unto itself. Sam tells Frodo in The Two Towers:

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”

The stories of his youth edify Sam against the pain and fear of his journey. Not only will fear and darkness eventually pass, but they have a redemptive power, for the world that emerges in their wake shines “out the clearer”. This Christian notion of hardship and terror sitting paradoxically close to hope and the light is a common thread in the greatest literature. In that great tale of suffering and redemption, Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky writes: “The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” And the deep meaning at the root of pathos and suffering first found expression in Homer.

It is at the ending of the Iliad, as the city of Troy mourns painfully the loss of its noblest son, that the true beauty, meaning and tragedy of the heroes’ struggles on the plains are illuminated with the greatest clarity. In Hector’s glorious and tragic death, the majesty and ineffable meaning of life are conveyed. And so too in The Lord of the Rings, it is through death that the deepest profundities of its metaphysics are expressed. Théoden, lying shattered and dying on the Fields of Pelennor, says that it is time to go to his “fathers” — the last homecoming. As with Homer, it is in the finality of death that the most exalted and important aspects of Tolkien’s philosophy are presented: divine justice, the Good, and the transcendence of the soul. And thus it is through death that the precepts which distinguished Tolkien so sharply from Modernity are revealed at their purest.

1. The Ancient Greeks believed the Trojan War to have been fought in the 12th or 13th century BCE, and that Troy was located near the Dardanelles. From excavations of the 19th century, Troy is now believed to have been sited what is now Hisarlik in Turkey. The extent to which the myth is based on historical fact is an open question. Many scholars believe that a real siege of a great city by Mycenaean Greeks did take place during the 12th century BCE, with archaeological evidence point to a catastrophic burning of the city.