Gondor and Byzantium

    Frequently, it is asserted that Tolkien consciously rejected the Classics in his works to focus on Medieval themes. But this assertion is unmerited. Most prominently, Numenor is explicitly a recasting of the Atlantis myth (and the name of the island is even Talante in Elvish). The most blatant in LotR itself are the overt parallels running between the Gondor storylines and the Iliad. An excellent paper on this topic is Troy and the Rings: Tolkien and the Medieval Myth of England by Michael Livingston. Briefly, Livingston argues that Minas Tirith parallels Troy; Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor parallel Hector, Paris, and Priam; and a connection is made to Layamon’s Brut to explain why the Trojan-like characters are good. But more interesting are the ways in which Tolkien has changed the legend. Boromir’s belt parallels Hector’s, but while Hector’s corpse is dragged around Troy by it, Boromir’s is only laid on his body before it is sent out to sea. But Tolkien has made history and myth not tragic but eucatastrophic: the men of Gondor triumph and the City does not fall; Faramir is not nearly so cowardly as Paris and happily marries a foreign princess instead of abducting another’s wife; and Boromir’s death ultimately saves his city.

    But there is an intersection between the Classics and the Medieval world, for the break was far from clean. During the summary of the history of Middle Earth in Letter 131, Tolkien confirms a long-time suspicion of mine about his world’s geopolitics:

But in the north Arnor dwindles, is broken into petty princedoms, and finally vanishes. The remnant of the Númenóreans becomes a hidden wandering Folk, and though their true line of Kings of Isildur's heirs never fails; this is known only in the House of Elrond.

In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.

Other than the geopolitical situation vis-a-vis being the struggling remaining half of a fallen empire: what, if anything, is Byzantine about Gondor? What can we learn from comparing the two?

    A quick refresher: after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the Eastern half survived in one form or another for another thousand years until finally being conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. (Terminology is an issue here; the people of that state only ever referred to themselves as “Rhomaioi”, lit. Romans. But here I will stick with the misnomer Byzantine to avoid confusion). More-or-less as a direct consequence of the competition for legitimacy as heir of Rome, after Charlemagne’s crowning as Holy Roman Emperor, Western authors were dismissive of the state as a whole. Even Gibbon, possibly the most influential historian of Rome in the Anglosphere, hand-waved the survival of the East—in my opinion, because the survival of the Christian Empire squarely contradicted his thesis about Christianity destroying Rome. Regardless, the Western blind spot for the Empire meant that almost all Byzantine texts had never been translated into English until the mid-late 20th century. 

But the prevailing attitude towards Byzantium is best summed up in the introduction to my copy of Chronographia of Michael Psellos, written by the translator, the English Byzantinist E. R. A. Sewter:

Fifty years ago any English schoolboy who professed admiration for things Byzantine would almost certainly have been reprimanded. The Golden Age of Athens, the fifth century before Christ, was the most profitable age of study, and Roman History was respectable up to the reign of Hadrian; after that (had Gibbon not said so?) there followed a period of decline and fall. The miserable Byzantines were pale reflections of decadent Greeks: their art was stereotyped, lacking in inspiration, and stiff; their form of government was static and inefficient, their literature debased. Byzantinus est, non legitur* was the accepted maxim…

* [it is Byzantine, not readable—a play on Graecum est, non legitur]

A fantastic analysis of this work is The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia by Michael Kaldellis.

    Certainly it is true that there are more than a few parallels to Constantinople and the Empire in the descriptions we get of Minas Tirith given as Gandalf and Pippin enter (bk 5 ch 1, “Gandalf passed now…” to “where the White Tree had grown.”). The great wall far from the city resembles the Anastasian Wall; the beacon system of Gondor had an exact parallel in the beacons that ran from the Taurus to Constantinople to warn of Arab razzias. The architecture and layout of Minas Tirith is somewhat Byzantine, but mostly not. Constantinople had seven hills, like the seven levels of Minas Tirith, and had famous fortifications in its threefold Theodosian Walls (replacing the earlier Constantinian Walls) with the Golden Gate, which the Great Gate of Minas Tirith maybe resembles. Constantinople dominated utterly as the religious, political, and economic heart of the Empire, especially in later years, as Minas Tirith utterly dominates Gondor. Were one to stretch overly, Osgiliath could be the city of Rome as the original, fallen capital of the Empire, recovered later in ruins. The palace being at the top of the city matches somewhat the Great Palace of Constantinople being at the tip of the peninsula; though there are no parallels to the great Hippodrome or Hagia Sophia. In the latter matter, the great tombs of the kings of Gondor resemble the great tombs the Numenorean kings built when they became paranoid of death; but they have little parallel in the Byzantine Empire, except (stretching again) for the massive, ornate churches sponsored by the emperors. Much of the description of dilapidated houses of nobles matches with the decline of the City, which continually lost population from the 6th century onwards, though it recovered at times. By the end, the population was so small (maybe a tenth of its peak) that there were fields well within the walls. Gondor and Byzantium had vastly different political systems. The Byzantines had few settled rules of succession, and kept on as the later Roman emperors did: the current emperor groomed his successor, typically a relative and did not always succeed because of frequent civil wars.

    But Tolkien's primary point of comparison is the decline of both states, so an investigation is in order. The causes of Byzantine decline are subtle and difficult to pin down. If they could be summed up shortly: the, well, byzantine political system that held up the Empire both robustly sustained it and caused constant political maneuvering that led to civil wars, and the internal weakness of the state made it unable to deal with its constant external threats. Another cause was the Empire’s military weakness. The reorganization from the system of Diocletian into the theme system of military districts settled by soldiers saved the Empire from total obliteration under the invasions of Arabs and Slavs in the 7th and 8th centuries; but the gradual decay of the theme system and renewed reliance on foreign mercenaries completely handicapped the capability of the Byzantine state to protect itself. Even the famous Varangian Guard, originally formed of Norsemen but later dominated by Anglo-Saxon exiles from Norman England, was a symptom of this reliance on mercenaries. The most successful Byzantine ruler (other than Justinian) was most likely Basil II, a harsh man who lived a Spartan lifestyle and did not care much for literature or art (though they flourished modestly under his reign). He subjugated Bulgaria so brutally and effectively that his usual epithet was Boulgaroktonos, “Bulgar-slayer”; infamously, at the Battle of Kleidion, he blinded 99 of every 100 prisoners and left the last with one eye to lead the rest home. And though he left a stable state with overflowing treasuries and a robust military, he had no children and within a hundred years of his death the empire was in severe decline again (the topic of the Chronographia, for Psellos was an eyewitness to most of it). The battle at Manzikert became an irreversible disaster because the emperor was captured and there followed ten years with as many civil wars; the sack of Constantinople in 1204 was the product of yet another claimant to the throne hiring foreign mercenaries. At the critical moment after Basil II's death when new enemies had gathered on the frontiers, the urban aristocracy fought tooth and nail for new bureaucratic positions and urban amenities when the theme system which held the country together was in severe decline. And the Byzantine state, as inwardly-conflicted as it was, could not withstand the pressure of constant nomad invasions by Cumans and Pechenegs and Bulgars and Hungarians and Normans and Turks, so on and so forth, from the east and north, invasions and piracy by the Arabs, and several plagues. And the material causes of the decline of Gondor, stated only briefly in the appendices, do somewhat match this factors: for they suffered a great plague (like the Plague of Justinian), a brutal civil war (the Kin-Strife), and nomad invasions from the East (the Wainriders), all of which left the state in dire straits.

However, Gondor's spiritual-moral decline is presented by Faramir in The Two Towers (though a more on-the-nose variation of these lines was delivered by Gandalf in the film of RotK):

…The old wisdom and beauty brought out of the West remained long in the realm of the sons of Elendil the Fair, and they linger there still. Yet even so it was Gondor that brought about its own decay, falling by degrees into dotage, and thinking that the Enemy was asleep, who was only banished not destroyed.

Death was ever present, because the Numenoreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And the last king of the line of Anarion had no heir...

This description does match the stereotyped decline of Byzantium presented by Sewter, that of unoriginal preservation. (Ironically a total inversion of Sailing to Byzantium: "That is no country for old men.") For one thing, it is at least true that the Byzantines were extremely conscious of their Classical heritage, both Roman and Greek, and preserved and commented on numerous texts lost in the West; the Greek phase of the Renaissance could largely be attributed to the reception of Byzantine scholars fleeing to Italy from the final Sack of Constantinople. Even the popular literature of the period like Digenis Akritas, an epic poem about the frontier written in a lower, Demoticized register, still heavily features Classical allusions. The lower-case Greek alphabet with diacritics was a product of the Byzantine written tradition; and written, courtly Greek of that period is heavily Atticized. But what is the great sin in reflecting back on the past? Or, if it is not generally wrong, what does Tolkien take as the wrong attitude towards preservation? I don't have the answer; fortunately, in a few classes we may, when we discuss immortality.