On 'The Lord of the Rings', part one: myth and materialism
The introduction to an essay series on the true meaning of Tolkien's greatest work
“We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a sub-creator and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic “progress” leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
J.R.R. Tolkien to C.S. Lewis in September, 1931.
This was how Tolkien instigated Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. Lewis lost his faith shortly before his admission to Oxford University in 1916 to study English Literature. In the summer of that same year Tolkien fought at the Somme, taking part in the terrible assault on the Schwaben Redoubt. He was invalided to England with trench fever in November of that same year. As with Lewis, who also endured the savageries of industrial combat, many of Tolkien’s dearest friends were lost. But Tolkien’s faith remained intact.
Fifteen years later, Tolkien, Lewis and Hugo Dyson — all professors at Oxford — were discussing religion and myth during an evening walk. Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.” Tolkien replied with the words above, presenting perhaps the central idea of his life’s work: that myth contains “fragments” of the eternal, the divine, our hope for Man’s perfection, and the truth.
The greatest myth of all, he continued, was the true myth of Christ. Through Christ, God revealed Himself not as a fragment, but in full. The mythologies of the Ancient, Norse and Anglo-Saxon worlds, in which Tolkien spent his academic life engrossed, allowed Man to glimpse partially at God and the eternal truth. The myth of Christ, however, was The Truth. Lewis, whose atheism had been creaking and fracturing for years beforehand, regarded that moment as the final epiphany, the moment at which his denials eventually ceased.1
The highest influence: the great mythic form
So deep was Tolkien’s conviction in the power — indeed, the veiled divinity — of myth that it moved him to create the great “mythopoeia” for which he is famed: the world of near-endless imaginative lore of which The Lord of the Rings formed the final part. The story — a thousand-page quest undertaken by a brotherhood of hobbits and demi-men to destroy a ring in the heart of an evil land — was created by a singularly unique mind. Tolkien refused to read anything that was written after the Middle Ages. Middle-earth is a world inspired by the mythologies and ancient languages of Homer, Virgil, the gospel, Norse paganism, Beowulf and Sir Gawain. It is from these worlds that The Lord of the Rings takes its epic form, its moral paradigm, and its great heroic theme. It is an Old Testament for an imagined land.
“Tolkien refused to read anything that was written after the Middle Ages…The Lord of the Rings is an Old Testament for an imagined land.”
Founded on these, the greatest of influences, the Middle-earth cosmos — with its histories; its peoples; its wars; and its epic lore — is itself a great mythic creation. It is a land not of magic and cheap sorcery, but of prophecy, fate, corrupted kings, embattled armies, and strange beasts that test the endurance of heroes. And, in the same vein as Odysseus and Beowulf, the heroes of Middle-earth become heroic through their feats.
Hence The Lord of the Rings, like all mythology, is something distinct from fiction, which is simply things of our world bolted together by the author’s imagination, however brilliantly. Myth, by contrast, is story that is sublimated by an ineffable depth. It is situated in deep, almost indefinable, time; it bears an essential and spiritual connection to a whole people; and its characters become saviours by enduring the tests of strange evils that are not of our material world. And at the heart of all myth lies the distilled wisdom and truth of the culture’s highest ideals. Myth captures our deepest compulsions for heroism, struggle, virtue and the transcendent in a way that fiction does not.
An endless appeal: Tolkien and the modern reader
It is for these reasons that The Lord of the Rings has been voted consistently by the reading public as the single greatest work of the twentieth century. This has been to the dismay of the literati, which has largely despised the book since its publication in the nineteen-fifties for its profound conservatism and its rebellion against modern artistic archetypes. And yet groups of academics have also frequently returned the same result as the public. Entire university modules are taught just on The Lord of the Rings. Endless PhD theses are written on it, so deep and broad-ranging is its true meaning, and so extensive are its influences.
“Tolkien violated every precept of the modern paradigm. His mythopoeia is a world infused with meaning.“
The work moves and enchants modern readers like nothing that was written in living memory. This is because it was created not according to the conventions of modern fiction, but in the richer mythic tradition. Indeed, this should not surprise us. In every era and in every culture it is myth, not fiction2, that endures the generations. A great hero tied to a ship’s mast to resist beautiful, deadly singing, or a sword locked in a stone, or a dragon slain by a young man, has an unmatched power not only to move imaginations, but to endure endlessly in the cultural memory. We want, in some measure, to be in that world — to hear the Sirens sing, and to see the sword unsheathed from the stone. Modern fiction does not make us feel this way. Do we yearn to meet Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses3? No. If anything, he bores the modern reader stiff.
But The Lord of the Rings does enchant us. We yearn to see the Shire and Rivendell, and the Mines of Moria, and to witness the radiant return of Gandalf. Its scenes and landscapes are re-imagined continually by artists — just as the great dramatic episodes of Homer and the gospel inspired millennia of artistic creation. Its characters — Frodo, Aragorn, Sauron, Gollum — are now imprinted in the common imagination like Achilles, the Cyclops and Merlin were centuries before.
This is because they are archetypal mythic creations. We are fascinated in particular by Gollum — by his strange beast-like form, his near-timeless age, his unforgettable private dialect (“We wants it, we needs it…”), and by the tragic moral corruption that warped him from a happy manlike being into a lonely creature haunted by the ring and fated to die with it. In short, it is his mythic qualities that fascinate us. They distinguish and sublimate him from the rubric of other modern characters. Major Major Major Major in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is brilliant, unforgettable and tragicomic. But he does not truly thrill us, or lead a kind of secondary life in the broader culture, in the way that Gollum does. Only a character wrought in the richer narrative forms of lore and myth could ever achieve this.
An infinite rebellion against the modern world
But not only has the mythic in The Lord of the Rings piqued readers’ most innate urges for epic storytelling, it has also distinguished the work from the Modernist paradigm of its era. With its sense of infinite and epic sub-creation, the book is a reprieve from the sparseness and concision of many Modernist works4, and the often lifeless or mournful messages of their central themes. The twentieth century’s artistic fashions sought increasingly to unpick traditional norms and to lay the world’s purported meaninglessness bare in its atomised parts. As T.S. Eliot remarked, the main idea behind Modernism was the essential “futility and anarchy” of this world.
“At its core, The Lord of the Rings pitches the divine against the ‘yawning abyss’ of atheism and materialism.”
Tolkien violated every precept of this paradigm. His mythopoeia is a world infused with meaning. It is built in the image of those centuries-old ideals that Modernity assumed to have been long ago destroyed. Everything in The Lord of the Rings is a rebellion against Modernity: the epic, endlessly rich style; the unironic heroism; and the metaphysics and morality, which gesture towards an intelligible order beyond our material world. It offers respite from the drabness, the conceits and the sophistry of our modern cultural decline. This is a core reason why modern readers cannot get enough of it. People not only read the work — they yearn for it to continue; they learn its strange languages; and they establish Middle-earth societies. It has captivated the Western mind in a way that literally no other work of recent history has. It is ironic, although not incidental, that in the age of atheism the most popular book should be one that transcends the material and points us towards the divine.
What is the meaning of The Lord of the Rings?
Yet, what is the true meaning of myth in The Lord of the Rings? Why is the work built upon a vast mythology? And what are the ideas that underpin Middle-earth — ideas that could not be expressed through the Modernist conventions of Tolkien’s era? The answers to these questions lie in the nature of the mythic form itself. Myth provides the dramatic setting, but one in which a set of ancient ideals now lost in the West can be recovered. Tolkien gives us a world in which the homely, agrarian idyll of the Shire is contrasted against the anonymous urbanity of our world; in which good and evil exist unto themselves, rather than as mere bywords for neutral states of affairs in the world; and in which free will and moral choice reign, not the vapid, nihilistic doctrine of determinism. At its core, it pitches the divine — the “true light” — against the “yawning abyss” of atheism and materialism.
Myth is the lynchpin around which Tolkien’s mythopoeia revolves. It unlocks everything meaningful about the work: its influences; its metaphysics; its appeal; and its ideals. Through its kaleidoscopic mythology we can trace Homer, Norse and Anglo-Saxon lore, deep and complex Christian allusions, the pillars of a long-lost morality, and a timeless critique of the “Iron Crown” of temporal power. Only by the light of the great mythic form could these “fragments” be truly illuminated. Over several essays, I hope to elucidate these great strands of The Lord of the Rings so that some measure of the work’s importance, to our time and to our decaying culture, can be glimpsed.
C.S. Lewis became one of the twentieth century’s great Christian apologists.
The fiction that does endure the generations either borders on the mythic or exhibits mythic traits. The great plays of Shakespeare, for example, present beasts like Caliban, and follow epic, Homeric narrative arcs. Likewise, the great fiction of Dostoevsky upholds objective morality, explores transcendence of the material world, and pushes its characters through a vast myth-like struggle to salvation or ruin.
Ulysses, a work based on Homer’s epic, The Odyssey, fails to move or enchant us precisely because it deliberately spurns the mythic tradition. It chooses the banal and material over the epic and otherwordly, and draws a false equivalence between them. And it quite intentionally makes a sham of the idea of heroism (this is Joyce’s entire point, in fact). It “deconstructs” the idea of the epic and leaves our imaginations and intellects impoverished.
A principal Modernist theme was the sense of spiritual decay in the world following industrialisation and the Great War. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land mourns the West’s loss of its ancient cultural roots. The American Modernists also meditated on this central theme of spiritual and cultural decline. The Modernist and Postmodernist works of Tolkien’s era either mourned the spiritual death of Western civilisation, or actively sought to unpick and humiliate its core precepts. Tolkien, by contrast, created a full-blooded world that embodied the vitality of the Western tradition, and in so doing held up a mirror to Modernity’s cultural corruptions.