"J.R.R. Tolkien and the Reclamation of the Pre-modern West and the Vision Presented in Peter Jackson's Film Trilogy"

Faerie and the Purpose of Escape

ISI WEB EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first installment of a three-part series on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's movie trilogy by the same title. Bradley J. Birzer is the author of ISI Books' J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth.


If anything of Western civilization still remains half a millennium from now, J.R.R. Tolkien’s works will be read by students of English literature as well as by historians of the twentieth century. With his vast, penetrating mythology, Tolkien created—or “recorded,” as he claimed—something of enduring value. Developed from 1916 to 1996, over the lifetimes of two Oxford dons, John Ronald Reuel and his son Christopher, and recorded in nearly twenty volumes, Tolkien’s mythology will proudly stand in a long line of creative efforts detailing the essence of the West as well as outlining the need and means by which to preserve it. Homer the Greek, Virgil the Stoic Roman, the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of “Beowulf”, and Dante the medieval Italian: each represents and defines the best of the West of his respective era. Each calls the future reader to remember the greatness of Western civilization—through the medium of myth—so as to reawaken it. Tolkien, historians and literary scholars will conclude, preserved the best of Western civilization in a century that mocked tradition, desecrated the human person, and ignored the Author of Creation. Tolkien, they will write, stood athwart a culture that valued entertainment rather than leisure, and utility rather than beauty, while mutilating the souls and the temples housing those souls in the holocaust camps, gulags, and abortion clinics.

And, they will not be wrong.

Along with his closest friend, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was an “Old Western Man.” He cherished the Western tradition of the ancients and the medievals, but he saw in modernity the perversion of all that was good and sacred. "I look East, West, North, South, and I do not see Sauron,” Tolkien told a Dutch audience in 1958. “But I see that Saruman has many descendants. We Hobbits have against them no magic weapons. Yet, my gentle hobbits, I give you this toast: To the Hobbits. May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.”1 Tolkien, like Lewis, “was an Old Western Man who was staggered at the present direction of civilization,” an English professor from Wheaton College, Clyde Kilby, recorded after spending much of the summer of 1966 with him. “Even our much-vaunted talk of equality he felt debased by our attempts to ‘mechanize and formalize it.’”2 Like many Christian Humanists of his generation, Tolkien feared a world divided in two, in which the smaller peoples would be swallowed into nothingness. Only fifteen years earlier, in reaction to the Teheran Conference, Tolkien had written in disgust: “I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny and intolerance!” And further: “I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be one blasted little provincial suburb.” Soon, he feared, America would spread its “sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production” throughout the world.3 Neither “ism”—neither corporate consumer capitalism nor communism, both of which are radical forms of materialism, as he viewed it—seemed particularly attractive to Tolkien, a patriot of England (but not Great Britain!) who loved monarchy according to medieval, Thomistic conventions, while hating statism in any form.

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were radicals for tradition, desiring a return to the pre-modern West. With the Inklings, the famous Oxford discussion group, Tolkien and Lewis formed a “circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life,” Inkling John Wain explained.4 Like most of the Christian Humanists of the twentieth century, Tolkien adamantly desired the re-formation of some form of Christendom. His Middle-Earth mythology, he hoped, would serve as a wake-up call for the West, to return it to its pre-statist, pre-imperialist, pre-materialist phase. With the return of Aragorn the king, he wrote, the “progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome,” Tolkien wrote in 1967.5 And certainly, as Tolkien wrote it, the coronation of Aragorn resembles Anglo-Saxon St. Boniface’s coronation of the Martels in what is now France.

Therefore, when I first learned that Peter Jackson would be making a multi-million dollar version of The Lord of the Rings, I became worried (and I still am, even though all three are now out) about the direction that Tolkien’s mythology would take within popular culture. Jackson, while certainly gifted in imagination, was best known for such films as Heavenly Creatures, a movie I would easily rank as one of the most diabolical films I have ever seen. Indeed, it’s to my great shame that I sat through the entirety of such a ghastly film. The story, based on a true event in New Zealand in the 1950s, concerns two teenage girls who decide they are in love with one another. When the mother of one of the girls attempts to stop the lesbian romance, the girls beat her to death with a brick in a sock. Jackson’s camera zooms in on the dying woman’s face and lingers there for what seems an eternity. I remember not only being sick to my stomach (I saw this film at an art house theater in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1994), but I also thought that Jackson must have wanted the mother to appear as some form of cow as she was being mercilessly executed by her daughter and her daughter’s partner. Hence, I knew which side Jackson took in the dispute between mother and daughter, and it certainly wasn’t my side. And this was the man who in 1999 was claiming to understand Tolkien’s Christian worldview and to have what it took to translate it to the screen? To write that I was skeptical would be an understatement. Jackson, as far as I knew, embodied what Russell Kirk defined as the “diabolical imagination.”

Would Tolkien approve?

In his own academic career, as well as in his fictional writings, Tolkien relied on a traditional definition of myth. Rather than representing something false, as the word has been defined since the beginning of the twentieth century, myth is simply the supernatural acting in history. The Oxford English Dictionary defines myth as “a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.” It tells us much about our own society that myth has come to mean something false, as we have divorced the cult—the belief in the Divine—from the culture. Religion and faith, when they exist at all, must do so within the private realm, not the public. Therefore, in our world, every single person has some set of beliefs, equally valid to the beliefs of every other individual who holds his different set of beliefs.

In his justly famous 1938 academic presentation, “On Fairy-Stories,” delivered at the University of St. Andrews, Tolkien argued forcefully that it was dangerous for anyone to enter the realm of faerie.

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The realm of the fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should shut and the keys be lost.6

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In other words, as Western culture has become decadent and cynical, Western men would quake or be destroyed if they encountered real beauty.

Faerie, though, allows one to see things for what they really are, to come close to discovering the true beauty of a thing, as God intended it to be prior to the Fall. Rather than being fooled by the accidents—that is, the outward appearances—of a thing, one can focus on the essence of the thing, and grasp its true meaning.

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We may indeed be older now, in so far as we are heirs in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and ‘pretty' colours, or else to mere manipulation and over elaboration of old material, clever and heartless. But the true road of escape from such weariness is not to be found in the willfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium . . . . We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like ancient shepherds, sheep, dogs, and horses–and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make.7

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When properly understood and explored, faerie allows one to escape the drabness of the mechanized world of modernity. It allows one, for example, to see bread and wine as much more than bread and wine.

The perilous realm of Faerie reveals truth and beauty beyond normal comprehension; the true and the beautiful lead us to the Good and the One.

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The Gospel contains a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels–peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality.' There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it either leads to sadness or wrath.8

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Art, for Tolkien, should only glorify the Creator and His Creation. It serves no other legitimate purpose.

Would Peter Jackson, the director and co-writer of Heavenly Creatures, follow any of this, I wondered?

Perhaps most damning for Jackson, Tolkien had argued clearly in his 1938 essay that fantasy and the realm of faerie “is a thing best left to words, to true literature.” Since one’s understanding of the fantastic is necessarily individual, to make it general—as in the visual arts—would bring it down to the lowest common denominator of an audience, thus demeaning the integrity of the art. “Silliness or morbidity,” Tolkien concluded, “are the frequent results.”9



ISI WEB EDITOR'S NOTE: This concludes the first installment of a three-part series on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's movie trilogy by the same title. Bradley J. Birzer is the author of ISI Books' J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth.
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1On Tolkien’s Dutch bash, see Rene van Rossenberg, “Tolkien’s Exceptional Visit to Holland: A Reconstruction,” in Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. Goodknight, eds., Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, Keble College, Oxford, 1992 (Mythopoeic Society, 1995), 301-09.
2Kilby, “Tolkien the Man” from TOLKIEN AND THE SILMARILLION, unpublished parts of chapter, “Woodland Prisoner,” pg. 13 in Wheaton College Wade Collection, Kilby Files, 3-8.
3Humphrey Carpenter, ed., Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 65.
4John Wain, Sprightly Running (New York: St. Martin’s, 1962), 181.
5Carpenter, ed., Letters, 376.
6Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 109.
7Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 145-46.
8Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," in The Monsters and the Critics, 155-56.
9Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” chapter in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 140.

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When it first appeared on ISI's website, individual comments on the article were solicited and posted. The following is an example of one such reply.

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I agree that Sam is the real hero. Sam is essentially Frodo's "Batman"--British military lingo for personal servant (In US Military parlance the commander's "Striker"). Tolkein was a Battalion Signal Officer in a battalion of the Lancashire Regiment, I believe, and was wounded at the Somme. This spurs a question: who was Tolkein's Batman--if he had one? Is there one or several soldiers he served with who are the inspiration for Sam? Someone may be able to mine this for a while.
PJJacobsmeyer
3/26/04

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Concerning Russell Kirk's "diabolical imagination" as stated in Part I of Dr. Birzer's article

Dr. Birzer writes:

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Kirk took his definition of the "diabolic imagination" from T.S. Eliot's 1933 University of Virginia lectures, published as After Strange Gods: A Primer on Modern Heresy.
"If one denies the divine incarnation, Eliot believed, one must affirm a different though inferior power. The diabolical enters into literature, and into society, when we grow fascinated with ‘the unregenerate personality, partly self-deceived and partly irresponsible, and because of its freedom, terribly limited by prejudice and self-conceit, capable of much good or great mischief according to the natural goodness or impurity of the man; and we are all, naturally, impure." [Quoted from Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (1971), 215.]

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When it first appeared on ISI's website, individual comments on the article were solicited and posted. The following is an example of one such reply.

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If I am correct, Bradley J. Birzer wrote that essay or commentary on Mr. Tolkien's mythology and ideas expressing that "Art must be to glorify The Creator and His Creation." What a wonderful review. Profound and full of meaning.
Perhaps Mr. Jackson will begin to see the true meaning of beauty. Perhaps he'll become a new man.....literally born again. We pray that is the case.
I can't wait to read the next installment. God bless you,
Margarita DH
1/22/04

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When it first appeared on ISI's website, individual comments on the article were solicited and posted. The following is an example of one such reply.

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Bradley Birzer's first installment of a three part series on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's movie trilogy concludes with the assertion that making the fantastic "general" has the effect of "demeaning the integrity of the art." Birzer's' shortsightedness misses what may prove to be a blessing.
Yes, Tolkien may not have been that happy with the trilogy. But Tolkien and the likes of C.S. Lewis and Russell Kirk would not be disappointed in the fact that the movie trilogy has spurred both adults and children to revisit Tolkien's work. What could be more important than our youth reading Tolkien instead of sitting in front of the television. What could be better than exposing our youth and reintroducing adults to Tolkien's wake-up call for the West. We should not, as Birzer does, underestimate the effects of Jackson's trilogy. We should, instead, embrace and stoke the interest in Tolkien. We may not have another opportunity like this. To ignore it because Jackson is supposed to embody the "diabolical imagination" would be folly.
Jordon B. Barkalow, Ph.D., Bridgewater State College
1/22/04

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