Archetype, not Allegory: A War Without End

In The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien discusses the role of monsters in stories, especially in the Norse/Germanic tradition. In his writings he seemingly comes close to celebrating them as allegory, which elsewhere he so despises. I do not, however, believe Tolkien views the monsters as purely allegorical; rather I believe that in the struggle against monsters Tolkien sees a piece of the Truth, the over-arching human narrative that all good sub-creative work must speak to. If there is an allegory, it is certainly not in Tolkien’s sense of the word, a one-to-one comparison where the monster stands in for something more real. Indeed, the monsters don’t stand in for anything in Tolkien’s view, they are simply themselves, and are Real in a grander sense because of how they relate to Truth.

            The dragon is perhaps the quintessential monster, the grandest of its order. It is ancient, knowledgeable, avaricious and malevolent. It is tempting to see it then as a stand in for that sort of evil, but Tolkien wants us to resist that temptation, or at least not give into it completely. The dragon is not a stand in for greedy men, and it is not a stand in for the concept of Greed, though that is closer. The dragon is the archetypal hoarder. It kills and pillages without thought to others in order to build its own treasure. It is every instance of this evil, not in that it is representative of them, but in that it is that sort of evil made perfectly manifest.

            This view of monsters goes along very well with the black and white dichotomy that Tolkien seems to view the universe in. There is an over-arching struggle between good and evil, with little room for intermediacy. There is little that is morally gray in Middle-Earth. The most obvious “grayness” is that of Gandalf the Grey, who is solidly on the good end of the spectrum of good and evil. That analogy, of course, doesn’t even really work in Tolkien’s view. He doesn’t see good and evil as a spectrum, but as two points, with every willful being belonging at exactly one of them. There is little room for ambiguity in true good and evil.

            But humans are complex creatures and for the most part have defied attempts to be categorized in such stark terms. Gods and monsters, however, are in some ways more simple. God is good, and that which opposes God is evil. It is very important to Tolkien’s argument that Grendel and the dragon are portrayed as foes of God, their pitch-black evil depends on it. Monsters can embody True evil in the same way God(s) can embody True good. Even in the Norse/Germanic polytheisms, there is the kind of universal struggle between True good and True evil. The True good is that which creates, and the True evil is only concerned with destruction, with reducing that creation to Nothingness. This is an important aspect of Tolkien’s Truth, that which all good stories speak to.

            This isn’t to say that the Gods and monsters that war in Norse/Germanic traditions are Tolkien’s Truth. That much is clear from his Christianity if nothing else. They are rather the purest form of this archetypal narrative: the eternal struggle to be good in the presence of evil. This is what it means to have free will, what it means to be human. It is a struggle we all face constantly, as individuals and as humanity as a whole. And while we may win as individuals, as a whole it is a war we are doomed to lose, just as the monsters will eventually kill the gods during Ragnarök.

            The quote from the article that I found most poignant, and that I believe speaks to this is “The wages of heroism is death.” Not all humans will be good, and almost no one will be good all the time. The struggle is doomed to end in failure, but that is not what Tolkien means here. It is the struggle that is important. Good is its own reward. To those who spend all their lives struggling to be good against the immeasurable odds and temptation towards evil, the reward is the same – death. Of course, in a Christian sense the reward is in the afterlife, and this is also true of those who fall in this eternal struggle in Norse/Germanic paganism – these are the Einherjar, the heroes who feast forever in Valhalla. Nonetheless, heroes are doomed to death as all men are. There is no reward in this life for goodness but goodness. It is inherently a struggle for its own sake; and a doomed one at that. Humanity on the whole will succumb to temptation, else there would be no evil in the world. The monsters, the superhuman and terrifying foes with power beyond us mere mortals, are this unstoppable evil. A man may slay a monster, but he cannot end the monstrous. The power of the tale is that, in the face of this knowledge, the man will still put his life on the line to fight the monster. He chooses good in the face of insurmountable evil.

            Is this allegorical? Perhaps, in some sense. But it is not the allegory Tolkien hates, the one-to-one correspondence of a monster to some “more real” thing. Indeed the monsters are the most Real, because they are the quintessential evils that we battle. They are the archetypal evil, and the heroes are all those who struggle to be good.

-Sam Sobel