History, Fantasy and Historical Relativism

            Often history gives us glimpses of a past in which the historical actors themselves are glimpsing a yet more distant past. The effect is powerful in multiple ways; it not only shows us the great depth of history, but also links us in the present day to this chain of historical ruminating, inviting obvious comparisons between past histories and present ones. Tolkien appears to have been quite fond of this device. As noted in Lee and Solopova’s essay on “The Ruin” in The Keys to Middle Earth, there are repeated instances of members of the fellowship reflecting on ancient ruins and the bygone people who built them: Weathertop, Moria, the Argonoth, even the stones in Hollin speak to Legolas of the long-gone elves who built with them. Given Tolkien’s assertion that he is writing history – that his writings “present a kind of legendary and history of a ‘forgotten epoch’” (Letter 151), the reader of the Lord of the Rings experiences the same impression as a modern reader of “The Ruin”: looking back at a forgotten era, only to find people looking back at their own forgotten eras.

            The key difference, of course, would seem to be that the Lord of the Rings (along with its accompanying mythology) is a work of fantasy, whereas the Anglo-Saxon poet of “The Ruin” and the Ancient Romans who he is writing about really did exist. Yet this distinction does not seem to concern Tolkien, who “always preferred history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers” (LotR, xxiv; emphasis mine). According to this view, the veracity of an event or a story is irrelevant to its being historical. What matters is the reader’s experience: the feeling of being grounded in a world with real people who have come and gone, built monuments and then let them decay into ruins waiting to be rediscovered. This makes all the more sense when one considers Tolkien’s singular writing method, which involved creating elaborate backstories and entire languages for the races who would populate his world before he even began writing the stories that would take place in it. In this way, history and fantasy intermingle in the legends that set the stage for the stories Tolkien wants to tell. As Galadriel says in the introduction to Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy: “History became legend. Legend became myth.” But the ring was not gone.

            Yet apart from this greater engagement for readers, Tolkien’s view of history and mythology raises interesting epistemological questions about the nature of historical inquiry. When we look back at historical events, even from the perspective of modernity and all the advantages it affords, do we objectively observe a real historical past? Or do we, as Ramer puts it, find “the story that has the most power and significance for human minds” (Notion Club Papers)? Nietzsche, for one, answered this question in the negative, writing that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Here, once again, the image of looking back on those looking back on their own past has great import. The author of “The Ruin” conceives of the Roman ruin in terms familiar to Anglo-Saxons: it is replete with great armies and a “wealth of horns” and mead-halls. Clearly, this interpretation is the story that has “the most power and significance” for the writer. Interestingly, the writer does not make any clear distinction between history and myth: the ruins must be the “work of giants” – but this certainly seems plausible given that they must date back to “a hundred of the generations of the people departed”.

Today, we might remark on the silliness of such musings – the ruins could not have predated the author by more than a couple dozen generations, and were certainly not built by giants. Yet the fact that we are inherently connected to this chain of history, looking at the ruins of the past, reminds us that eventually time, or wyrd, will overtake all. We have no way of knowing that we will not seem just as wrong to future generations who read our present histories. 

-Amory K.