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

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СКАЧАТЬ world, just as the Shire itself does: namely the extraordinarily varied and detailed natural world of Middle-earth. Note that this therefore includes the human world. Tolkien plainly had a profound feeling for nature, and perhaps especially its flora; his love of trees shines through everywhere. The sense in The Lord of the Rings of a tragically endangered natural world, savaged by human greed and stupidity in every corner of the globe, is confirmed for us in every daily newspaper. But this ‘nature’ is neither romantic nor abstract. There are plenty of dangerous wild places in Middle-earth; but they are all, like their blessed counterparts, very specific places. Indeed, Tolkien’s attention to ‘local distinctiveness’ is one of the most striking things about his books. It contributes greatly to the uncanny feeling, shared by many of his readers, of actually having been there, and knowing it from the inside, rather than simply having read about it – the sensation, as one put it, of ‘actually walking, running, fighting and breathing in Middle-earth.’

      Above all, Tolkien’s is no add-on environmentalism. It suggests rather that whatever their differences, humans share with other living beings a profound common interest in life, and whatever aids life. Thus Middle-earth’s most distinctive places defy the separation, so beloved of modernist scientific reason, into ‘human or social and therefore conscious subjects’ and ‘natural and therefore inert objects.’ They are both: the places themselves are animate subjects with distinct personalities, while the peoples are inextricably in and of their natural and geographical locales: the Elves and ‘their’ woods and forests, the Dwarves and mountains, hobbits and the domesticated nature of field and garden. And some of the most beautiful places in Middle-earth are so, in large part, because they are loved by the people who share them. Tolkien’s prescient ecologism is therefore radical, in the modern sense as well as the old one of a return to roots. It anticipates, in many ways, both ‘social’ and ‘deep’ ecology, and retraces a premodern way of understanding the world which is still that of surviving indigenous tribal peoples. Time is running out for the rest of us to re-learn it.

      Following this up, I then found myself at the edge of the second circle too. In Tolkien’s terms, I had been brought up short by the Sea. This third sphere proved to be the most encompassing of all: an ethics rooted, so to speak, in spiritual values as symbolized 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.

A Mythology for England?

      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 СКАЧАТЬ