t’s been said that J.R.R. Tolkien has divided the world’s population into two categories: those who’ve read The Lord of the Rings and those who have avoided doing so all their lives.
I admit that I’ve been in the latter category until recently. But my seven-year-old son has developed an obsession for the Peter Jackson film trilogy based on the novels, and I feel guilty talking like an expert about the story simply because I can quote movie dialogue in my sleep.
So at night, when the boy’s in bed, I read The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s hefty even for a paperback, and occasionally I’ll flip through the remaining pages, wondering if I’ll make it to the end. Because, in truth, the story has not grabbed me yet, and I desperately wish that it would. Every time one of the characters launches into another long explanation of who-did-what-that-resulted-in-dreadful-consequences-generations-hence, I feel my eyes glaze over.
No doubt my Tolkien-loyal friends and family members – and maybe even a few trolls of the Internet variety – will get back to me on this and set me straight. I’ve been told that the books will eventually suck me in, like the Dead Marshes around Mordor, and one day I will come to love Tolkien, and appreciate how truly great he is.
But here’s my defense: I don’t doubt he’s great, and not just because millions of people around the world have loved his work for decades. Not even because he’s changed the world’s language and is responsible for legitimizing fantasy writing as a genre. Those facts are telling, and I don’t think it has to do with commercial interests or because I think Tolkien fans live in an alternate universe.
I came around to reading Tolkien because one of my hobbies is World War I history, and a number of new books have been published to commemorate the war’s 100-year anniversary. Among these is Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918. While other works have touched on the impact of the war on these two authors, this is the first study to be written for a general audience.
The spiritual consequences of WWI have gotten little attention during the centennial, which is surprising given how completely the war destroyed humanity’s belief in anything. As Loconte points out in his introduction, the Great War laid waste to a continent and destroyed the hopes and lives of a generation. It blew apart family life, ruined the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, impoverished nations, and laid the groundwork for WWII. To top it off, it ushered in a devastating influenza pandemic, which killed at least 20,000,000 people before waning out.
Those who are fed up with the current political ruckus can identify – a little – with the wholesale collapse of faith in governments, traditions, and religious institutions that took place in the years following the Great War. The majority of hereditary rulers, civic leaders, military decision-makers, newspapers, and clergy had supported the conflict, and helped sustain it through a steady campaign of propaganda and coercion. (By the way, anyone who thinks that war can be a “cleansing” instrument for improving society needs to read this book before deciding.)
As survivors tried to absorb the war’s aftermath, religious faith took a special kind of hit. What kind of God would allow such a horrible situation to unfold? It was a powerful emotional argument, and it influenced a lot of people, including artists, who as a monolithic block turned their back on religion and went looking for another kind of belief system. Many found it in politics and totalitarian social movements. Others celebrated sex and hedonism. Sentiment and nostalgia were avoided.
Whatever one may feel for writers like Tolkien, he has to be admired for being deliberately counter-cultural at a time when nobody else was writing as he did. Tolkien and Lewis both experienced first-hand the horrors of the Western Front, but they chose not to contribute to the deluge of anti-war novels that appeared in the decades after WWI.
Both authors have been accused of writing escapist literature. Some critics have claimed that they avoided discussing the war, or even condoned it through their rosy-tinted mythologizing. I feel this does Tolkien and Lewis a great discredit. Instead, they used the tools of myth and fairytales to understand what the conflict meant to them on the soul level. That’s why their work is so different, and why it still resonates when social movements and politics – and all the art they spawn – get relegated to the dust heap of history.
I’m not going to make a religious argument here, but I do want to draw attention to how closely his vision aligns with my belief that tales (myth being among them) are different from other forms of fiction because they speak to the need people have to understand their lives at the soul level. Call it a spiritual understanding, or moral, or what-you-will. But most people want that understanding, and they will often turn to allegorical stories for it, rather than works of realism.
For Tolkien, that need reflected the reality that our lives are stories, tales that are being told in real time. One of the most powerful aspects of Tolkien’s characters is that they accomplish so little on their own (no superheroes here, even with all the magical forces in the air). Consider that the main challenge presented in the novels – a ring needs to be thrown into the fires of Mordor in order to save Middle Earth – is not resolved by a great wizard, or a king, or even a lowly hobbit. All these characters contribute to the final end, but it’s Gollum, the ultimate anti-hero, who finishes the deed by grabbing the ring and accidentally falling into the pit.
This is the way reality is, lived out through a combination of effort and coincidence. We all play our part. What would life really be like, if we had the Avengers rushing in to save us all the time? Unbearable. Humans are born to face conflict with the same instincts salmon have as they swim upriver to their destiny, facing waterfalls and grizzly bears as they go. It’s in our DNA.
Certainly this was Tolkien’s response to the Great War, although he needed to write The Lord of the Rings to figure it out. He saw unforgettable carnage on the Front, but also acts of human courage and generosity that somehow shone through it all. He never forgot the common soldiers who served under him, and they informed his depiction of the hobbits. The war may have been a tragic waste of life, but it wasn’t just that. It was part of a larger picture, a world story that we are all part of whether we like it or not.
Reading Loconte’s book, I was struck by one other insight into Tolkien and his thoughts on the role of myth and storytelling. For him, myth did not originate with men, but with God. As Loconte writes, “(stories) are his means of communicating at least a portion of his truth to the world . . . It is not only man’s abstract reasoning, but also his imaginative inventions that find their origin in God.”
Readers and writers do not have to be Catholic, or even religious, to find that idea appealing. That all the stories that have ever been told – the ancient myths of all the various traditions, all the folklore told around the fire, even the earnest scribblings of closet bards — have an origin in the universe that goes far beyond what we know, and are meant to be told. That idea has a genuine appeal.
Yes, there’s always a risk that we can take the idea too far, but it’s as good an excuse as any for me to keep writing, and to keep reading Tolkien late into the night.