This episode is brought to you by Vincero Watches.
What’s up, Wisecrack.
Jared again.
With the recent release of J.R.R.
Tolkien’s final book and the upcoming Middle-earth Amazon series
with a production budget of a half-a-billion dollars, it’s a great time to be a Tolkien
fan.
But while the growing body of work set in Middle-earth means everything is always improving
for fantasy fans, Tolkien himself was of the opposite opinion: everything is always getting
worse.
A self-avowed pessimist, Tolkien went so far as to say that he didn’t believe history
would be anything more than one long defeat.
This idea of defeat and decline is the very quality that infuses his fiction with such
a sense of longing and nostalgia.
But is progress really a pernicious myth, or was Tolkien hitting that pipe-weed a little
too hard?
*laughter* Well let’s crack open some dusty tomes and
find out in this Wisecrack Edition on J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Philosophy of History.
But before we get there, just a quick shoutout to our sponsor Vincero.
They’ve been massively supportive of us and let us do cool stuff, like get super nerdy
about Tolkien.
Right now I’m wearing their Chrono S, and it’s helped me stop checking my phone every
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to the show.
Here’s a quick breakdown for the uninitiated.
You’re probably aware of Tolkien’s most famous works, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit,
or at least Peter Jackson’s phenomenal and then just God-awful adaptations of them, respectively.
But what you may not know is that Frodo and Bilbo exist in an entire Tolkien Literary
Universe set in Middle Earth.
The history of Middle Earth is long, and set into distinct ages, with Lord of the Rings
occuring at the end of the third age and the beginning of the 4th, but that’ll be important
in a little bit.
These ages are, of course, fictional.
But they also sync up with our own very real timelines right around the period between
prehistory and history.
In other words, Lord of the Rings happens on Earth, just a really really long time ago.
Which, for reasons I’ll get into, is very important.
But before we get into why Tolkien thought everything is always getting worse, we have
to understand one thing.
The dude loved history.
In The Lost Road, his abandoned book about time travel from our own era back to the Second
Age of Middle-earth, Tolkien, through a clearly autobiographical character, writes that his
most permanent mood “had been since childhood the desire…
to see the lie of old and forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, to hear their
languages as they spoke them, in the days before, when tongues of forgotten lineage
were heard in the kingdoms long fallen….”
This deep passion for history shows in just how much it pervades his writings.
There are over six hundred references to the history of Middle-earth in The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s own brush with world history had an even more obvious influence on Middle-earth.
Faithful servant Sam Gamgee was inspired by the servants who helped officers such as Tolkien
in the trenches of World War I, and Sam’s journey through the blasted and barren land
of Mordor is an unmistakable image of No Man’s Land.
Tolkien’s interest extended beyond events themselves and into the development of languages,
literature, and legends.
Punctuation: "I first started inventing languages about uh, when I was 13 or 14, and I've never
stopped, really."
In fact, the exploration of his artificial languages were Tolkien’s main concern.
Believe it or not, the entire history of Middle-earth is really just a history of the development
of Tolkien’s constructed languages.
Tolkien himself said, “The invention of languages is the foundation.
The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”
“What do you suppose that means?”
“Well it’s quite simple, if you are a friend you speak the password and the doors
will open”.
Tolkien was also fascinated by the historical composition and transmission of the written
word, undoubtedly stemming from his work as a specialist in medieval culture.
The conceit for Lord of the Rings was that it was his own English translation of a book
written by hobbits: The Red Book of Westmarch.
Incidentally, this fictional book also has a rich history with no less than five fictional
editions, tracing back through writings made by Samwise, Frodo, and Bilbo.
So the Lord of Rings isn’t meant to be read as a perfect representation of historical
events, but as stories that have been passed down, altered, and inevitably, corrupted.
"I wonder if people will ever say ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring’ and they’ll
say ‘Yes it’s one of my favorite stories’".
So it’s safe to say that Tolkien was obsessed with history and the process of writing it.
But that’s what makes it so strange that his thoughts about history were so radically
different from most contemporary historians and laymen alike.
Many philosophers of history – especially those popular in Tolkien’s time – thought
the move from past to future represented some kind of progress.
Technologically, we’ve gotten the wheel, the steam engine, and frozen pizza.
And morally, most people would agree that we became a more just society after the adoption
of the Bill of Rights, and even more so after the end of slavery,
and again after the end of segregation.
Martin Luther King summed up this thinking when he said, “the arc of the moral universe
is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Tolkien vehemently disagreed.
He thought that our technological progress wasn’t entirely a good thing and that we
weren’t progressing morally whatsoever, proclaiming in On Fairy-Stories “The way
men were living in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate….”
While Tolkien acknowledged that technology grew increasingly complex, he mocked the idea
that industrialization represented an advancement for society.
He witnessed his beloved boyhood home of Sarehole despoiled by the encroachment of men and machinery.
It’s a scene which replays itself during the Scouring of the Shire, in which trees
are needlessly uprooted to make room for ugly rows of housing and a pleasant water mill
is replaced by one billowing black smoke all over the countryside.
In The Lost Road he conflates the human kingdom of Númenor’s industrialization with their
cultural decay.
“Our towers grow ever stronger and climb ever higher, but beauty they leave behind
upon the earth… men are ceasing to give love or care for the making of other things
for use or delight.”
In The Hobbit Tolkien claims that technological development is a symptom of orcish thought,
commenting “It is not unlikely that [goblins] invented
some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices
for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always
delighted them”.
Those wheels and engines were rolled out for the first time in the form of tanks upon the
Western Front, where Tolkien at the Battle of the Somme witnessed firsthand the goblin-work
wrought by the explosive power of modern artillery.
Despite the horrors of trench and chemical warfare, many of Tolkien’s contemporaries
at the time regarded the Great War as emblematic not only of technological progress in the
form of more innovative means of mass killing, but as a necessary step in human history for
social progress too.
Tolkien, always the pessimist, disagreed.
He believed conflict to be inevitable, and recounted years later that this idea arose
as a reaction to the contemporary discussions about a War to End All Wars.
He didn’t believe such rhetoric during the war, and disliked it even more after it.
That conflict must be perpetual is part of his idea of history as being cyclical.
Instead of there being a straight line from a primitive past to a more civilized future,
Tolkien envisions societies throughout the ages all dealing with the same perennial set
of circumstances arising from unchanging human nature.
"War will make corpses of us all."
Many of the events in Middle Earth are meant to be reminiscent of the past.
So we have Frodo Nine-Fingered in possession of Sauron’s ring during the third age, aka
Lord of the Rings, which resembles another amputee hero from the past, Beren One-Handed,
who recovers a magic jewel from Sauron’s former master in the first age.
But Tolkien is no George Lucas, building a second Death Star, or J.J. Abrams creating
a third… and good god I hope not a fourth.
The repetition of this motif is not the result of a lazy author returning to the same well
for lack of an original idea.
Rather, Frodo bears likeness to Beren because the world they inhabit, though separated by
thousands of years, is once again in similar straights.
history is repeating itself because it is cyclical.
"The Eagles are Coming” “The Eagles!
The Eagles are Coming!"
But the history of Middle-earth is not simply cyclical, it’s cyclical but always getting
worse.
These overarching cycles in the history of Middle-earth were broken up into four distinct
ages that illustrate history as degradation.
These bear conspicuous resemblance to Hesiod and Ovid’s myths of the Ages of Man, in
which they established the now familiar pattern of Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages.
In mankind’s Golden Age, perfect people lived in an Edenic State of Nature, not dissimilar
to the Elves in Tolkien’s First Age coming to live among the gods in the earthly paradise.
Then succeed the Silver and Bronze Ages, each progressively worse for man and filled with
worse men, followed by the current Iron Age, the most evil and unhappy yet.
Likewise, across the ages of Middle-earth there is an overriding entropy, each cycle
less mythic and more mundane.
There is a grandeur in the past that can be echoed in the later ages, but never fully
recaptured.
"You are a lesser son of greater sires."
Consider Rome, aka the City on Seven hills, which Caesar Augustus bragged he left as a
city of marble.
Yes, the real ROME.
Remember Tolkien’s history happens before our own real history.
To drive the point home, we learn of the many cities that preceded Rome, also are adorned
with marble and have seven of something.
But the further back in time we go, the more grandeur we see.
In the Third Age, it was the seven-leveled city of Minas Tirith in Gondor.
In the Second Age, there was the city of Rómenna, from which Tolkien implies that Rome derives
its name.
In the First Age, there was the original and oldest, the seven-gated city of Gondolin.
But as grand as we know Rome was in its heyday, Tolkien would say it had nothing on Minis
Tirith during the reign of King Elessar.
And he would have said, “Yeah, but this ain’t nothing compared to Númenor in its
Golden Age” (though he’d probably say it slightly more regally).
And King Elros of Númenor would’ve said to that “Y’all should hear my dad talk
about Gondolin when Turgon was king, before those dragons burned it all down to the ground!”
(Again, more regally.)
The point being, for Tolkien, older equals better.
Having the same pattern repeat time and again throughout the cycles of history, but becoming
a progressively poorer and poorer copy, is his way of illustrating that point.
"The blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten!"
Tolkien’s portrayal of history can be partially attributed to aesthetics.
Tolkien wished to imbue his work with a Medieval flavor, and the Medieval period is primarily
viewed as the ruins of a more glorious antiquity.
Because in the history of Middle-earth each age is inferior to the one which preceded
it, its whole history is imbibed with a nostalgia for a past that can never be recovered.
"Long have I desired to look upon the kings of old.
My kin."
But it’s also, as we mentioned, a direct challenge to the Myth of Progress.
Instead he favors looking backwards and appreciating past, perennial, and even eternal matters.
It’s for this reason that the noble knights of Gondor always look Westward before eating
each meal.
“We look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which
is beyond Elvenhome and ever will be.”
His friend CS Lewis coined the term “chronological snobbery” to describe those who had an irrational
preference for anything new over anything old.
But Tolkien was no mere debbie downer.
He had an actual philosophy of history that he espoused, one which he and Lewis shared
with the medieval minds they spent their careers studying.
Middle-earth and the real world are in constant decline for Tolkien because of the way he
understands the fundamental nature of reality.
Tolkien and Lewis believed that Evil was real, not merely some idea or social construct,
but a real and powerful force.
Indeed, the most powerful force in the world.
Sometimes Tolkien would portray Evil as personalized, as with Sauron, or with Sauron’s master
from the First Age, Morgoth, who was himself more powerful than all the forces of good
in the world combined.
But Tolkien also portrayed Evil as an impersonal force, something even the most pure and innocent
hearts were capable of being bent towards.
Gandalf refuses the Ring for that very reason, knowing he could and would be corrupted.
And it’s worth remembering that when he stood at the Cracks of Doom, Frodo failed;
he abandoned his mission, gave into temptation, and took the Ring for himself.
“The ring is mine” “No” Tolkien called the earth “Morgoth’s Ring,”
just as Sauron poured most of his potency into the One Ring, his master Morgoth poured
his spirit throughout the earth and everything else in existence.
So whereas particularized evils like Sauron could be addressed, there is a primordial
evil in existence that will remain until the earth itself is destroyed.
It is because of this belief that he stated “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything
but a ‘long defeat.’”
This was what Tolkien originally envisioned as the ending for his Book of Lost Tales.
“And now is the end of fair times come very nigh, and behold, all the beauty that yet
was on the earth – fragments of unimagined loveliness... now goeth it all up in smoke.”
The same despondent pessimism is best surmised by Frodo as he lay dying on the cliffside
of Mount Doom.
“It’s like things are in the world.
Hope fails.
An end comes.
We have only a little time to wait now.
We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.”
But of course Frodo lives and the ring, the stand-in for the inherent evil of the world,
is destroyed.
So what gives?
Was Tolkien chickening-out from taking his views of history and evil to their logical
conclusion?
Did he feel compelled by the conventions of the genre to have a happy ending?
Well that would certainly make sense.
After all, he did write “I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories
must have [the Consolation of the Happy Ending]… the eucatastrophic tale is the true form of
the fairy-tale, and its highest function.”
Of all the many words in the many languages that Tolkien invented, this word, ‘eucatastrophe,’
is undoubtedly the most important.
He defines it “in its fairy-tale setting, a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be
counted on to recur.
It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure...it denies (in the
face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat… giving a fleeting glimpse
of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world.”
So basically- everything will continue to go to shit, but there will be a sudden change
towards good fortune that works against this dire conclusion.
Now, “Beyond the walls of the world” here is telling.
Tolkien alludes to another force, as Gandalf hints to Frodo,
"There are other forces at work in this world besides the will of evil.
Bilbo was meant to find the ring.
In which case you also were meant to have it.
And that is an encouraging thought."
Later Agent Smith, doing his best Morpheus impression, elaborates,
“You have come and are met here, in the very nick of time, by chance, so it seems.
Yet it is not so.
Believe rather that it is ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find
council for the perils of the world.”
So something is driving history toward a goal.
This kind of eucatastrophe isn’t limited to fictional stories.
Tolkien thought that real History “contains a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind
which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.”
As such, Tolkien envisioned the End of History, as being likewise eucatastrophic; that though
history would be nothing more than “the long defeat,” it would ultimately have a
happy ending as unexpected as the eagles arriving at Mount Doom.
Ultimately, this was grounded in what Tolkien called Estel.
More than merely being Aragorn’s elvish name, Estel was one of the two elvish words
meaning “hope” which also meant “trust.”
All throughout life Tolkien looked around at the world, and between the scouring of
his own boyhood shire, his living through a veritable Mordor in the trenches of the
Western Front, and later while writing Lord of the Rings
witnessing the rise of real dark lords in Hitler and Stalin, Tolkien had no reason to
look up and reasonably expect good.
And yet through it all he never faltered in Estel, in trust.
Just as Tolkien’s writing awakened an appreciation of the past among the chronological snobs
that had been enamored by modernity, so too do his myths stir something in us that certainly
hopes for there to be real good in the end.
When we read The Silmarillion, or The Hobbit, or most especially Lord of the Rings, we are
all like Sam, in the black night in the enemy’s own land, struck by the beauty of a white
star twinkling above him.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw
a white star twinkle for a while.
The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned
to him.
For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was
only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”
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