A Hobbit-esque Peek Along the Beam

“Let us celebrate the mythopoeic imagination of Albion. Let us celebrate the Makers, who made systems and were not enslaved by those of other men, but broke through to the Vision of what lies beyond Language, to the eternal symbols and the unchanging Light. […] Let us celebrate also J. R. R. Tolkien, who single-handed forged the Elvish languages and the myths of Middle-Earth and the lands beyond the Western Sea.” 

-       A.S. Byatt, “Babel Tower”

We have spent a whole quarter now debating whether or not Tolkien’s works can be considered “allegory.” Tolkien himself has given us somewhat contradictory signals in this regard: whereas he explicitly claims he “dislikes [conscious and intentional] Allegory” (Letter 131), he has included, as we’ve discussed extensively in class, undeniable allegorical references to prayer, liturgy and devotional practices in the Legendarium – like the parallels between Galadriel and Mary, and between the “lembas” and the Catholic viaticum, the coincidence of Christian holidays and major events in the plot, to name a few. Those parallels, however, are never fully developed or made explicit: they are rather more like glimpses of something larger than the ‘secondary reality’ of Middle Earth. As Tolkien says in letter 142: “Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” How then could Tolkien’s literary corpus not be allegorical but also be consciously Catholic at the same time? For much of this course, we’ve hinted at possible answers to this problem – as in the discussion on sub-creation and on the actual historicity of the Legendarium – but none more powerful than what we found in Lewis’ Meditation in a Toolshed. By introducing us to the ‘beam of light’ thought experiment and the epistemological problem of analyzing things by looking at them versus looking along them, Lewis has shown us the key distinction between simple allegory and myth. Even further, I propose, he has allowed us to understand Tolkien’s works at a “meta” level: the Legendarium, as a mythology, does not ‘reflect Christianity’ through allegory, because, even more strongly, it presupposes Christianity, which is the truth at its very core.

In the “Mediation in a Toolshed” Lewis presents the distinction between two types of experience: one when you look at a beam of light in a dark toolshed from the side and see only the specks of dust filtering through it, and another when you look along the beam and get to see the trees outside. Depending on the approach one chooses, he argues, one might catch or miss out many details – after all, there is no definite objective reference frame from which one can evaluate something devoid of biases, but at the same time facing things solely from one’s personal perspective can be misleading. He claims, however, that the "looking along things" approach has often been dismissed out of hand by academics that, too often, resorted to anthropologists and sociologists to understand religion, for instance, instead of considering the perspective of those who actually lived those religions from the inside. That is a mistake, Lewis argues, because sometimes objective, detached observations are impossible without inside experiences (i.e. a doctor cannot treat pain properly without having felt it before). Having said that, I believe that we can map Lewis’s important observation onto the differences between works that are explicitly allegorical (like his own) and those who are not, like Tolkien’s. As we've discussed in class, Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is obviously an epic retelling the Christian myths through different names and settings, written from the perspective of a devout Christian. It is, undoubtedly, an invitation for readers to know the Christian mythology through the lenses of someone who looked both along and at it, an introduction to the “one true myth.” Yet, despite his effort to write allegory, Lewis doesn’t necessarily end up making the readers look along Christianity – to the contrary, many readers will simply read Narnia as a sociologist would look at a religious account: by distancing themselves from the true Christian experience. What I propose Tolkien does in his works is the very opposite of that: by not writing explicit allegory, but by creating a mythology that echoes and reverberates the true Christian myths, Tolkien invites the readers – even skeptical atheists – to look along the Christian beam of light, which permeates the Legendarium.

To check this proposition, we must look no further than what Tolkien himself wrote about his mythmaking. He states on Letter 165 that: “it [LOTR] is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions […] it is a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology.’ The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies is simply part of the historical climate depicted […] The ‘Third Age’ is not a Christian world.” Indeed, one will not easily find unequivocal Christian elements by looking at the LOTR: there hardly is any explicit reference to Eru in almost 1000 pages, and barely any mention of religious beliefs. This monotheistic religion that Tolkien speaks of is left implicit in LOTR: it is the background setting, the story taken as given by the characters, who at several points evoke the name of Elbereth, for instance. Where do we see the “consciously Catholic” aspect of the Legendarium then? In its very construction! Tolkien says on letter 212 that the difference between the Christian myth and his own was that in the former “evil was brought in from the outside” and it wasn’t clear whether (if at all) the Fall (“the rebellion of created free-will”) had impacted the nature of the Primary world; whereas in the Legendarium, the Fall took place before the creation of Eä – so the “corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable.” That is a very consequential world-building decision because it means that the Christian struggle between good and evil, between God’s will and “created free-will” is embedded in the Legendarium, it is presupposed by it! 

Another instance in which we can see evidence of this echo of Christian myths in the Legendarium is in the ending of the long narrative arch of Frodo and Sam in LOTR. In Fellowship, before our heroes left Rivendell, Frodo tells Bilbo that he has thought of several possible grim endings to his book, to which Bilbo replies “Oh that won’t do! Books ought to have good endings.” Later, on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam discuss what kind of tale they’ve fallen into, and realizing they were still in the same tale as Beren and Lúthien, Sam wonders whether they too will be “put into songs or tales” in the future. Finally, after the quest of the Ring is ended, Sam sees his dream come true as the people in Ithilien sing high praises to him and Frodo for all that they had done – that was the culmination of the story he had long before found himself into but which he had up until then failed to understand. This joy of happy ending, “the mark of the true fairy-story,” is what Tolkien calls eucatastrophe in On Fairy Stories: it is what gives readers a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (Tolkien Reader, p. 88). That is only possible because the joyous turns in fairy-stories offer a hint at the greatest conceivable eucatastrophe, which “has entered History and the primary world”: “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Ressurection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy” (TR, p. 89). In other words, to find ourselves in Tolkien’s story – like Frodo and Sam found themselves inside the greater stories of the Legendarium – and to see ourselves experiencing their joy despite all the sacrifice they made is to be reminded (again, whether we’re believers or not) of the greatest myth of all: the story of Christ.

Thus, there is a very meaningful difference between Tolkien’s sub-created mythology and Lewis’s allegorical retelling of the Christian myth because as readers go through the Legendarium, they will inevitably experience (consciously or not) the “meta” themes presented by the Christian myth. That is, by finding themselves in the story of LOTR, readers actually look along the Christian beam of light, instead of possibly merely looking at it as in the case of Narnia. Tolkien himself points to this feature when he claims, on his comments to W. H. Auden’s review of LOTR, that “in my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil (…) Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as possible (…) the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom,’ though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honor.” Thus, when readers empathize with and identify themselves in Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and Aragorn (all of whom bore certain Christ features), who fought to oppose a tyrant who “desired to be a God-King,” they are experiencing the Christian perspective, whether they profess a Christian belief or not. Of course, as we’ve discussed in class, one is welcome to side with Sauron and thereby be for the forceful imposition of created will (maybe Nietzsche would do it), but what matters here is that readers are exposed to the Christian dilemma either way. As such, the interpretation of the myth we're presented in Tolkien's works is, I believe, free, but the reality of the Christian myths behind them is inescapable. In this sense, Tolkien’s works are far more Christian or “religious” than those who are explicit allegories of Christianity but which fail to have this effect on readers – and that is the true power of his mythmaking. We see confirmation of this notion in letter 328, where Tolkien speaks of an unbeliever who told him “you create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.” That is remarkably similar to what Byatt wrote about Tolkien in the Babel Tower, as seen in the quote that opens this post, and to what Sam and Frodo felt when they first visited Lothlorien:

“‘If there’s any magic about it, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.’

‘You see and feel it everywhere,’ said Frodo.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘you can’t see nobody working it. No fireworks like poor old Gandalf used to show.’” (LOTR, bk II, ch. 7, p. 361)

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-       LR