Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. Patrick Curry

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Middle-earth in Postmodernity

      I believe Tolkien’s books speak to precisely these conditions. Drawing on the power of ancient Indo-European myth, they invite the reader into a compelling and remarkably complete premodern world, saturated with corresponding earlier values, which therefore feels something like a lost home – and by the same token, offers hope for its recovery. They are just the values whose jeopardy we most now feel: relationships with each other, and nature, and (for want of a better word) the spirit, which have not been stripped of personal integrity and responsibility and decanted into a soulless calculus of profit-and-loss; and practical-ethical wisdom, which no amount of economic or technological ‘progress’ will ever be able to replace. As John Ruskin wonderfully asserted, in the face of Victorian materialist triumphalism in full flood:

      To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray – these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have the power to do more. The world’s prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise.

      But as we begin The Lord of the Rings, this is exactly the world that is under severe threat from those who worship pure power, and are its slaves: the technological and instrumental power embodied in Sauron (after whom the book itself is named, after all), and the epitome of modernism gone mad. We thus find ourselves reading a story about ourselves, about our own world. That is one reason why so many readers have taken it so to heart.

      This analysis has recently found remarkable confirmation. As Bauman also observed, ‘people who celebrate the collapse of communism, as I do, celebrate more than that without always knowing it. They celebrate the end of modernity actually, because what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed. It failed as blatantly as the attempt was blatant.’ Now, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were already underground ‘cult’ classics in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before 1989. Since then they have boomed there in a way reminiscent of the late 1960s in the West. But the exhilaration of liberation is already fast succumbing to the discovery that ‘free market’ capitalism, as such, is simply a more efficient version of the same economic logic as its former state form. I fear Tolkien will have no shortage of newly disillusioned readers there.

      Tolkien himself, of course, was deeply hostile to modernity, root and branch – capitalism (especially industrialism), unrestrained science, and state power alike. For him, they were idols whose worship had resulted, in our century, in the most efficient ever devastation of both nature and humanity alike. He once remarked that ‘I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind) …’ And he described the detonation of the atom bomb in 1945 as ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists.’ But that is not a very original observation, and neither so interesting nor significant as what has become of his anti-modernism, lovingly and skilfully embodied in a literary artefact, in postmodern times. As he himself put it, ‘it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered, that is the most interesting thing to consider.’

      Now, it is perfectly possible to imagine Tolkien’s books ‘being’ truly reactionary: racist, nationalist, etc. I contend, however, that as it happens – as things have actually turned out – his implicit diagnosis of modernity was prescient; and his version of an alternative, progressive. That is, in the context of global modernization and the resistance to it, his stories have become an animating and inspiring new myth. It joins up with a growing contemporary sense, represented in postmodernism, of history’s sheer contingency: a liberating perception that things might have been different, and therefore could be different now. It suggests that just as there was life before modernity, so there can be after it.

      In short, Tolkien’s books are certainly nostalgic, but it is an emotionally empowering nostalgia, not a crippling one. (The word itself means just ‘homesickness.’) One contemporary writer, Fraser Harrison, goes straight to the heart of the matter: ‘While it is easy to scoff at the whimsicality and commercialism of rural nostalgia, it is also vital to acknowledge that this reaching-out to the countryside is an expression, however distorted, of a healthy desire to find some sense of meaning and relief in a world that seems increasingly bent on mindless annihilation.’ Accordingly, says Harrison, ‘it becomes meaningful to talk of “radical nostalgia”.’

      Only those who cling to the modernist myth of a singular universal truth (as opposed to myth and story and indeed interpretation as such) which is somehow directly accessible to those with the ‘correct’ understanding – only such people will look at Tolkien’s glorious tree and see, to use an apt image of William Blake’s, nothing more than ‘a Green thing that stands in the way.’ To the modernist, the choice is between truth and myth (or falsehood), whereas the postmodernist, giving up the pretence of a direct line to the Truth, sees the choice as between different truths; or to put it another way, between myths and stories that are creative and liberating, and those that are destructive and debilitating. As Tolkien put it, ‘History often resembles “Myth,” because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.’

      Ironically, therefore, it is Tolkien’s critics who have been overtaken by events. Behind their instinctive antagonism lies an uncomfortable sense that here is a coherent fictional critique and an alternative, in every major respect, to the exhausted myth of modernity which has so far underwritten their own professional status; and worse, it is a popular one! Not for the first time, those who claim to know better than and even speak for ‘the people’ are lagging behind them.

Three Worlds in One

      I have said that Tolkien’s literary creation presents a remarkably complete alternative world, or rather, alternative version of our world. I myself only realized its depth and complexity when I tackled it in a spirit of determined but non-reductionist analysis. There are almost no threads that can be tugged without them leading on to others, almost indefinitely. But I found I could make sense of most of it in terms of three domains, each one nesting within a larger: the social (‘the Shire’), the natural (‘Middle-earth’), and the spiritual (‘the Sea’). I was encouraged in this by Tolkien’s own remark in his superb essay on the subject, that ‘fairy-stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.’

      Thus, The Lord of the Rings begins and ends with the hobbits, in the Shire. This is the social, cultural and political world. It includes such things as the hobbits’ strong sense of community, their decentralized parish or municipal democracy, their bioregionalism (living within an area defined by its natural characteristics, and within its limits), and their enduring love of, and feeling for, place. In all these respects, the ultimate contrast is with the brutal universalism and centralized efficiency of totalitarian Mordor.

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