by the Sea. Here we shall discover the way Tolkien deals with the problem of spirit in a secular age; a problem with, as Salman Rushdie once put it, a God-shaped hole in it, but equally, with some very good reasons to resist any simple reinsertion of God. Indeed, despite his personal religious convictions, Tolkien was acutely aware of writing in and for a divided post-Christian audience – just as one of his heroes, the author of Beowulf, had been at the beginning of the same era. His book therefore makes no explicit references to any organized religion at all, and (unlike those of his sometime friend C. S. Lewis) offers no hostages to a religiously allegorical interpretation.
As we shall see, the spiritual world of Middle-earth is a rich and complex one. It contains both a polytheist-cum-animist cosmology of ‘natural magic’ and a Christian (but non-sectarian) ethic of humility and compassion. Tolkien clearly felt that both are now needed. The ‘war against mystery and magic’ by modernity urgently requires a re-enchantment of the world, which a sense of Earth-mysteries is much better-placed to offer than a single transcendent deity. (As Gregory Bateson once remarked, when the loss of a sense of divine immanence in nature is combined with an advanced technology, ‘your chance of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.’) But the Christian dimension of humility and ultimate dependency, exemplified by Frodo, is the best answer to modernity’s savage pride in the efficiency, and self-sufficiency, of its own reason. Rising above the dogmas of his own religious upbringing, Tolkien has thus made it possible for his readers to unselfconsciously combine Christian ethics and a neo-pagan reverence for nature, together with (no less important) a liberal humanist respect for the small, precarious and apparently mundane. This is a fusion that couldn’t be more relevant to resisting the immense and impersonal forces of runaway modernity.
In what follows, I shall be looking at the social, natural and spiritual aspects of Tolkien’s world in turn, and their crucial overlap. That is where their heart is to be found, and any meaning found in or derived from his work must embody all three concerns to be considered essential. Taken together, they comprise the whole implicit project of his literary mythology, and a remedy for pathological modernity in a nutshell: namely, the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature, in the local cultural idiom. I am not at all suggesting, of course, that were everyone to read Tolkien everything would be fine; just that his books have something, however small, to contribute to a collective healing process.
More modestly still, critical recognition of this project and contributions to it like Tolkien’s might help restore a pathologically, almost terminally jaded critical community. To quote Ihab Hassan, ‘I do not know how to give literature or theory or criticism a new hold on the world, except to remythify the imagination, at least locally, and bring back the reign of wonder into our lives.’ Such a response to modernity is no mere escapist sentimentality. In fact, as we ought to know at the end of this bloody century, it is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters, but sleepless reason. Tolkien realized this, with implications I shall discuss in relation to ‘mythopoeic’ literature:
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason … On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy it will make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish … For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.
For Tolkien himself, of course, and for English readers, the native cultural idiom happens to be an English one. Part of Tolkien’s ambition was ‘to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own’ – something that he felt was lacking in their national literature. (The Arthurian myth-cycle was, he felt, powerful but ‘imperfectly naturalized’: more British, that is, Celtic, than English, with its faerie ‘too lavish,’ and in addition – what struck Tolkien, for reasons we shall explore, as ‘fatal’ – it explicitly contains Christianity.) Tolkien was not the only one to feel such a lack. In 1910, E. M. Forster wrote: ‘Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our countryside have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and fairies …’
Tolkien blamed this on the brutality of the Norman occupation beginning in 1066, and not without reason. It was a savage assault on a relatively peaceful land, which eventually left one person in ten there dead from war or starvation. It also imposed a new phenomenon on the British Isles: a foreign and highly centralized ruling class, including secular, ecclesiastical and educational élites. The new Norman archbishop, bishops and abbots regarded their Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical predecessors as rudes et idiotas (uncouth and illiterate), dropped the worship of many pre-conquest saints and even destroyed some of their shrines. Education now demanded Latin, and ‘culture,’ as well as power, French; for as long as two hundred years later, the nobility still did not speak the native tongue. And Tolkien’s modern critics today are the heirs of precisely the same caste, almost as divorced now from the common reader as their forebears were from the common people, and no less lofty in attitude.
For our purposes here, however, the point is the way biography can transmute, through art, into contemporary relevance. For Tolkien’s deep dislike of the Norman virtues of bureaucracy, efficiency and rationalization, as it manifests itself in The Lord of the Rings, provides the contemporary reader with an instant ‘recognition’ of the global modernization which the Normans, as it happens, anticipated in these important respects.
But Englishness is not inscribed in the text. This is something I finally realized after talking to Russian and Irish and Italian readers, and discovering that each one had found in the hobbits an accessible native tradition, centred on a ‘small,’ simple and rural people – and self – with which to begin, and end renewed.
I am not just talking about long-vanished peasants, either. I know one man living within a few minutes of both the diabolical London motorway ring-road and Heathrow Airport whom Farmer Maggot could have been modelled on: ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open.’ Of course, he was living there before these monstrosities appeared; but they haven’t driven him out. Such people in such places may have gone to ground, but they’re still around, and there are even some younger ones coming up. As the Donga ‘tribe’ (named after the ancient trackways on Twyford Down, Hampshire) sing, ‘We are the old people, we are the new people, we are the same people, stronger than before.’
Nor are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ethnocentrically limited to northwestern Europe – even though the qualities of their peoples, lands, seasons, the very air belong to that part of the world. The reason is another of Tolkien’s master-strokes. The anthropologist Virginia Luling has pointed out that he presents us with a northwestern Europe, the home and heartland of the industrial revolution, as a place where it has never happened; and by the same token, with the birthplace of colonialism and imperialism as an unstained ‘Fourth World’ of indigenous tribes. Accordingly, the cultures of Middle-earth’s peoples are pre-modern or ‘traditional,’ and indeed pre-Christian, while their religions and mythologies are animist, polytheist and shamanist. But Tolkien’s choice of a ‘Norse’ mythology for his tale as a whole, over the usual Graeco-Roman one, situates his story still more precisely. (It also effectively bypasses all the élite critical apparatus