Tolkien, Europe, and Tradition

Middle-earth as the alternative framework to secular modernity

Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, have a peculiar relationship with modern literary giants such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They remain completely unaware the extent to which these men, having keenly developed mythical-historical states of mind, would completely despise the lifestyle and cultural instincts of the modern mass.

Those components of contemporary life that are deemed evidence of human progress (such as technology and suburbanism), are to Tolkien and Lewis aspects of man’s surrender to new and strange gods. They represent a Faustian abandonment of history in exchange for the fleeting experiences of momentary titillation.

“Western civilization” is a thing not to be preserved, for Tolkien and Lewis, so much as it is something to be remembered as having once been, something that has been deserted and conquered to make room for its civilizational replacement: modernity.

With this perspective, we read with interest the English translation (from French) of Armand Berger’s short monograph Tolkien, Europe, and Tradition. Tolkien, we are reminded, was not just a man with a fantastical imagination, but a uniquely skilled philologist who sought to craft for his beloved England a mythos analogous to the founding myths of Scandinavian and Germanic cultures.

Berger informs us of Tolkien’s awareness of the English “mythological crisis:”

When Tolkien was introduced to philology and mythology, it soon became clear to him that England, although an heir to our European civilization, lacked the kind of authentic tradition that man naturally feels drawn to connect to. Germany has its Nibelungenlied, Italy has its Commedia, and France has its Chanson de Roland. But what about England?

While Beowulf was written in Old English, it was Scandinavian in setting and cultural periphery. Thus, Tolkien’s earliest thrust was to integrate into broader European mythology the English experience, something that could provide the imaginative tapestry against which the more recent sociological dogmas of England could be said to have their backdrop. Such an inspiration works heavily against the impulses of modern man, who amuses himself in a quest to rationalize all things; that is, to de-mythologize and de-sacralize the world. Tolkien then, from his very beginnings swam against the current.

Not interested in the modern project of mere material advancement for the sake of sensational prosperity, Tolkien emphasizes the indispensable nature of an historical consciousness in the development and binding of men with fellow men. A metaphysic community—rather than an artificial community of material coincidence that characterizes modernist geographical groupings of men—requires a shared mythology of history. History is not facts and data points, but a vision of cosmic proportions.

To this end, Tokien labors to integrate his mythos into the world of greater European legend, crafting it in a way that serves the interests of particularly and profoundly English experiences and sentiments. From the races and languages and symbolism that flood his world of Middle Earth—and the scenic peripheries of his earlier poems, songs, and stories—there is constant reworking of Anglo-Saxon themes, drawing clear and clever analogies to a universe of forgotten and abandoned pre-England literature. The purpose of imagination, for Tolkien, was not to created irrelevant worlds, but to write the mythic history of his own people. This is mythic history in a way that strikes the modern mood as ridiculous and distracting from the more important occupations centered around consumption, entertainment, and money-making.

Tolkien therefore must engage with lost themes from the classical world—themes completely at odds with modern life. Among these themes include culturally-particular views of heroism, royal duties, and self-denying courage; all of them emphasizing the metaphysical connection between man and his fellow man; the individual and his particular people. There are enemies in Tolkien’s world, and these enemies take on themes that Tolkien sensed were analogous to the threats that conspired against his own country of England.

It was the function of heroes to adopt an aristocratic imagination and live with honor against a world that mocked such ideals. In repudiation of modernity’s emphasis on individualism and consumption, Tolkien’s work issued a call to return to ages of valor, hero-worship, and the spirit of aristocratic exemplification. To this end, Tolkien sees in Anglo-Saxon legendarium an impulse that prefers the harmonious relationship between culture and nature to the excesses of either. Nature without culture is barbarianism, culture without nature collapses into philistinism.

Thus, Tolkien ties the impulses of industrial modernization to the great enemy of Middle Earth: Sauron. Sauron casts his efforts against not against great cities, but in pursuit of great cities. He seeks to liquidate the Forests because in the landscape of trees and hills lies ancient memory. It is the creation that has observed the march of history, bearing witness to the struggles of Tolkien’s people and the mindless hysteria of these new agents of Evil who wish to tear down the people’s memory. The key to severing a people from their past, from their historical consciousness, is to wipe out the sensual landscape. This includes old structures, memorials, forests, and streams, and so on. He writes of the destruction of the countryside in the following way, in The Two Towers:

Once it had been green and filled with avenues and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams that flowed from the mountain to a lake. But no green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman. The roads were paved with stone-flags, dark and hard; and beside their borders instead of trees there marched long lines of pillars, some of marble, some of copper and of iron, joined by heavy chains.

It was a technological revolution—which of course Tolkien saw before the rise of digital technology as we now know it— that Tolkien recognized as the threat of his people. They were be subsumed by it; they were not to be conquered purely by swords, but by visions of material splendor.

Berger offers an interesting reference to Junger’s own admonition of a Forest retreat when he writes:

“Tolkien’s strong criticism of the modernization, mechanization, and industrialization of the world, in his work decorated with traditional elements drawn from the riches of our civilization, bears witness to an ecological way of thinking. In a letter dated 6 October 1944, Tolkien wrote to his son: “if a ragnarok would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs, it could for me burn all the works of art—and I’d go back to trees.” We are not far from Ernst Junger’s "Recourse to the Forest.”

For Berger, Tolkien’s project is a grand stand on behalf of Europe and her civilization. It was not the creation of irrelevant worlds, but a mythologization effort in pursuit of European civilizational restoration. It is historical because only in light of history can modern man find his true place among his people; it is mythological because in “archetype and myth” man can truly see the “unveiling of a strangely… familiar civilization.”

Berger quotes Stefan George to say:

A new degree of culture occurs when one or more original minds reveal their life-rhythm, which is taken on first by a community and then by a larger section of the population. The original spirit does not act by its doctrine, but by its rhythm: doctrine is later made by the disciples.”

Thus, says Berger, Tolkien is a great defender of old Europe, a Europe that stood majestic before the coming of Saruman and other prophets of revolutionary material upheavals.

Little by little, as the work of the weavers [among whom is Tolkien] takes shape, a monumental tapestry rises before us. What is blurry now becomes clearer. The contours and shapes become more precise. We finally take a step back, after being thrown into it, to contemplate with new eyes the whole piece that comes to life before our fixed gaze. We can hardly believe it. Middle-earth, this enclosure of men dear to the Germanic imagination, is in reality a projection of our world, that of our Europe, into more remote times.

He built an “imaginary time, but kept his feet on his own mother-earth for place.”

Tolkien, Berger reflects in conclusion, “like an Anglo-Saxon bard,… is one of those noble heralds who have brought our civilization wealth to its pinnacle.” Middle-earth is European; specifically, it is the origin story of the English sentimental framework. His legendarium belongs to Europe.

Tolkien as Christian

While not derived from the book, one further thought is relevant to this article. It is an aspect of modernist “Conservative” Evangelicalism to seek in Tolkien and Lewis analogies to the Christian gospel. This is an obvious example of my own accusation regarding Evangelicalism, which I describe as:

the product of carving out the evangelical side of certain historical-theological debates within the metaphysical-sociological paradigm of Christian Europe and making the evangelical position into the whole of the Christian religion while casting away the metaphysical-sociological paradigm and letting it crash by the wayside.

Taking Tolkien as drawing up a Christian-infused project is completely fair and true; but relegating this infusion to the narrowness of evangelical categories is ridiculous. Tolkien is a serious Christian in the classical sense, in the Augustinian sense; in the sense that he sees in world history a grand theater for cosmic forces. It is a battlefield of the gods that takes place ultimately in the realm of metaphysics; yet being Christian, he of course sees such a battle as culminating in the victory of Christ over all other claimants to the cosmic throne. In history we see the unfolding of a grand drama; there is Providence in history, for his engagement with history and its mythological renditions is to assert that historical unfolding is sanctified.

Tolkien takes the world of gods and myths seriously. They are not the products of unenlightened pre-rationalist man, but rather vital endeavors to explain and pass on what has really happened in the clash between men and higher beings. Mythological history is real for Tolkien, and in that sense he is Christian against the Darwinian animal that strips history and destiny of transcendent meaning. There is meaning in history because God is a God of history and its dynamics.

Behind our material struggles lies metaphysical realities that are, as Brad Birzer points out, perhaps more real than our obsession with “facts” and information and materialist-nominalist understandings of sensual objects.

It is in this sense that Tolkien draws upon his classical Christian instincts to assault modernist empiricism and the sociological projects that derive from it. The world of Tolkien is an indictment of his evangelical bourgeois consumer base that has participated gleefully in what Max Weber has referred to as the disenchantment of the modern world.