Tolkien’s Crusaders & Nostalgia for the Golden Age

[Buster's Uncle]

Tolkien’s Crusaders
Dec 11  by theredsheep      

When J.R.R. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings in the mid fifties, it was broadly assumed–at least by some–that his fantasy trilogy, much of which was written during World War II, was meant as an allegory for the war itself.  Here Gondor stands for Britain, Rohan for the U.S., Mordor and company for the axis powers, etc.  It makes sense, from a certain point of view, but the speculation irritated Tolkien intensely, to the point that, in an introduction added to later editions, he explicitly debunked it, explaining, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its forms,” and noting that, if it were properly an allegory, Sauron would be enslaved, not destroyed, and Isengard would wind up creating its own ring, setting off a lengthy period of hostilities with Gondor.  Or some such.

I’m willing to take Professor Tolkien’s word that no conscious allegory was intended.  Still, there are intriguing historical parallels, which I think are worth examining.  One of the critical errors made by the “allegorizers” (for lack of a more graceful term) was to seek out links to modern history, when the author was a medievalist, and his magnum opus takes place in a world which is not just technologically, but spiritually, medieval.

First, consider the Medieval world.  Rome fell, gradually but perceptibly, by the fifth century in the West.  Waves of barbarians washed over it, but meeting no resistance (and having no particularly strong, unifying cultural identity of their own) each wave eventually settled down and was assimilated by Western culture, generally blending some of its own traditions into the existing Western Christian framework.  What we think of as Medieval civilization was the result: a fusion, or perhaps confusion, of Germanic customs, Christian faith, and Roman tradition.  Most non-historians don’t realize the tremendous extent to which these people looked back with fondness and regret on the Roman past.  Charlemagne, and all the kings who followed him, ruled as heirs to Rome.  But for all that, Western Europe was a chaotic and unhappy place for many centuries, and standards of living dropped dramatically.

In the East, however, the Roman Empire held fast, though it had abandoned Rome itself.  We call them “Byzantine” today, but they still called themselves “Roman,” even after centuries had passed, they had become substantially Greek, and almost nobody remembered how to speak Latin.  Civilization endured, but it was not what it had been.  The Empire, instead of expanding and ruling like the Caesars of old, was forced onto the defensive as the barbarians crashed into them.  But if the East still had a strong, unifying law and culture, so did their “barbarians.”  Absorbing the Muslims, as the West had absorbed the Franks, Goths, Vandals and Vikings, was out of the question.  It was simply a fight to the death, played out over centuries.  And while “Rome” put up a stiff fight, the barbarians kept coming, and they kept losing ground.

If you are quite familiar with Tolkien’s world, you have likely already seen the parallels here.  Tolkien’s Gondor was the remnant of a much more powerful kingdom established three thousand years before, after the downfall of the mighty kingdom of Numenor.  It was still strong, and kept the memory of its heritage, but it had declined greatly, and knew it.  Still, it could have been worse.  Gondor was originally just the southern half of a state covering almost all of Middle Earth; the North Kingdom had fallen to pieces under invasion many centuries earlier, and was now inhabited only by little pockets of people here and there.

The geographic parallels continue.  The Shire, located in the Northwest of Middle-Earth, was essentially Tolkien’s portrait of England, and its insular but good-natured hobbits are quintessentially English in character.  They are somehow related, at least linguistically, to the men of Rohan to their southeast, in much the same way England has close ethnic ties to Germany.  Here the analogy is spoiled somewhat by the giant, uninhabited blank space on the map of Middle Earth where France should be, but it must be noted that Tolkien had no particular enthusiasm for French culture.  To put it mildly.

Shift to the East.  The dark-skinned Haradrim, with their “oliphaunts,” come from the Far South, and here the point is too obvious to dwell on.  Rhun, a vaguely defined area, doesn’t seem comparable to anything in the real world.  Mordor, on the other hand, uses the Black Speech, a (to European ears) rather harsh, guttural tongue with phonetic similarities to Turkish.  It sits on a desolate, desert plateau to the east of Gondor’s rump state.  I think it’s probably pure coincidence that central Anatolia is pretty similar, right down to the ring of mountains.  On the other hand, Tolkien was both very learned and obsessively detail-oriented, so who knows?

As for Gondor itself, most of its territory sits to the west of its “capital,” Minas Tirith.  Said territory is mostly mountainous, with some coasts, and thus rather similar to Greece.  The old capital, Osgiliath, is ruined, but like Constantinople it straddled a crucial waterway.  Minas Tirith acquired Constantinople’s legendary defenses, and more: seven concentric walls, the outermost so strong that (like Constantinople’s) it requires a specially made superweapon to breach it.

And here we depart sharply from history.  In our world, the Muslims, especially the Turks, did attack with overwhelming force, and like Gondor the Byzantine Emperor “lit the beacons,” calling the West to their aid.  And aid they did, at first.  But cultural differences got in the way from the start; the estranged halves of the Christian world despised each other, and the rift only widened with time.  The crowning indignity was the Fourth Crusade, which set out for Jerusalem but ran into financial difficulties, and wound up invading Constantinople, looting it mercilessly, and setting up a puppet state.  The Byzantines eventually won back their capital, but they never really recovered.  When Sultan Mehmet came up to the walls with his hordes of Janissaries and his enormous cannon, he was only giving the deathblow to a terminally ill man.  The Emperor had sent emissary after frantic emissary to the West for years, and received only halfhearted replies.

So Tolkien’s world is a might-have-been: one where the North/West and South/East are not divided by suspicion, pride and hate, but come to each others’ aid in good faith, driving back the Enemy and eventually setting up a new, reunited kingdom.  Again, I do not mean to suggest a conscious allegory, or even a very neat one.  The non-humans and Isengard don’t fit in here at all, and there is no equivalent to Moorish Spain, the Pope, and so on.  The only hints of Byzantium in LOTR itself are “dromunds” (dromons, a type of Greek warship) and possibly “Variags” (which I once read was possibly a reference to the Emperor’s elite Varangian Guard).  Both are used by the Enemy, not Gondor.

Tolkien was, after all, a Catholic, from a generation raised to sneer at the history of “oriental despotism.”  But, in one of his letters, Tolkien did explicitly compare Gondor to “a kind of withered Byzantium.”  Middle Earth is a kind of echo of the Medieval world.  Perhaps a much louder echo than we usually think.

https://theredsheep.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/tolkiens-crusaders/


I'd say this essay strongly underlines a thing I concluded a long time about Tolkien -especially if you've read the Silmarillion in addition to The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy; he was a medieval conservative in a very real way.  I'll try to briefly lay out an overview of my reasoning.

As any widely-read person with at least a perfunctory sense of history under their belt has probably noticed, between the fall of the western Roman Empire and -roughly- the Renaissance, western Europeans looked back at Roman times as a golden age; it's all over western history and literature, often as a mere background assumption not always explicitly articulated, but always present.  The Romans were glorious conquerors, lawgivers, enforcers of the Pax Romana, with culture and roads and powers and technology sorely missed in These Degenerate Times; the Apex of History.  -It was not an irrational perspective in hard, poor, violent and chaotic times, and an attitude that held for around 1,000 years, until, roughly 400 years ago and the technological/cultural progress of the Renaissance.  As more of the world was explored and travel across Europe became more practical, and as it became increasingly obvious that guns and other mechanical devices were surpassing anything the Romans had been able to do, period literature less and less reflects reverence towards The Heroes of Old and a concept of the greatness on Modern Times grows, though it was a slow process up through the late Victorian/Industrial age.

Tolkien's Middle Earth begins with godlike angels dwelling on Earth in Amar -The West- by the light of the Trees - The Enemy poisons the Trees, and the Lords of the West create the Sun and the Moon from the fruits of the dying Trees, the High Elves follow Morgoth east to the Middle Earth continent, and for nigh on a thousand years engage in grim Epic Battle against The Devil Himself, gaining victories, but ever losing ground until the Lords of the West finally get fed up and intervene, casting Morgoth beyond the Walls of Night until the end of time; the cataclysm of that final war sending most of Beleriand beneath the waves and leaving few survivors, many of whom accept the Lords' amnesty and return to the West.  -Thus passed the epoch of Elven domination of Middle Earth and the First Age; and the mortal world was less than it had been.

(To be continued...)

[Elok]

Please do note that much of the root of this, for both Tolkien and the Western world even after Roman nostalgia was dwindling, lies in the Biblical notion of the Fall.  A lot of people sincerely believed that the world had been perpetually dwindling from the start.  Tolkien riffs on that idea.  First come the great lamps, then the lesser trees, then the still lesser sun and moon . . .

[Buster's Uncle]

Right - and a lot of mythologies have something like the Titans for that extra step down from the beginning, so many traditional influences feeding into that mix.  -All of which slowly became coincidentally less influential on the prevailing valuation of past v. present from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to the Industrial Age.

(And acknowlowleged that I left off the Lamps and an entire previous era with the Valar dwelling on the Middle Earth continent -among a multitude of details- that beginning of a 'brief' overview got away from me as it is.  I'm going to resume the Progressive Decline of [Middle Earth] History tomorrow, but that's not everything I've got in my thematic quiver...)

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, as Elok's mention of the Lamps hints, there are two previous eras that aren't even numbered as Ages, and summarizing the Silmarillion is a tricky business - those who've read it a few times don't much need a summary, those who haven't mostly aren't going to and don't care.  I'll just say this:

Age of the Lamps
The Valar dwell in the Middle Earth continent finishing up creation; the first rebellion of Melkor and the toppling of the Lamps and the move to Aman, leaving what ages subsequent to the First considered 'the world'.

Age of the Trees
In the West, the Valar made the Trees, and when the Elves -the first earthly race- awoke in Middle Earth, summoned as many of them as would go to heavenly Valinor to dwell in beauty and light and grow to become the High Elves.  Ends with the murder of the Trees and theft of the Silmarils by Melkor, now dubbed Morgoth, and the departure of a large contingent of Elves (against the will of the Valar, thus exiling themselves) in pursuit.

The First Age
Earthly 'history' begins with the first rising of the Moon, coinciding with the landing of Fëanor's host in Middle Earth, beginning a war of 1,000 years.  The somewhat otherworldly inherent quality of Elves had been non-trivially enhanced living by the Light of the Trees and learning at the feet of the Lords of the West - when Men and Dwarves awoke to the world in this Age, they -and people of the subsequent diminished ages- found the High Elves to be very nearly a different order of being.  Witness the impression Galadriel, last known survivor in Middle Earth of this generation of High Elves, made in the Third Age; she could have taken the ring and used it and supplanted Sauron - she had the technology and she had the mojo.  All the grandest, most epic stuff that didn't take God's Own Archangels happened in this era.  It's the vast bulk of the Silmarillion, and very much the most interesting part, ending in the Valar intervening to put paid to Mortgoth and most of the surviving High Elves accepting an amnesty and sailing back West out of history.

The Second Age
Half-elven (thus exalted) Men found Numenor (Middle Earth's Atlantis/Rome and the peak of human history to the previous (sorta legendary) era's Titomachy/Divine/Heroic ages) on a large western island halfway to Aman.  Morgoth's understudy Sauron arises on mainland Middle Earth and ends up corrupting the Numenorians into serious enough blasphemy provoke the Valar into their destruction; Aman becomes no longer part of the "paths of the world", only accessible to returning Elves and very special cases. Small closing act of the last High King of the remaining elves allying with a mainland successor state of uncorrupted Numenorian refugees to overthrow Sauron.

The Third Age
The Numenorian successor state dwindled to just what's left of Gondor and the Gondorians themselves dwindle to not much more than regular guys for most of the age, then Sauron finally comes back and the stuff with Hobbits and the Ring happens, finally ending Sauron.  Then almost everyone interesting who survived leaves the world forever for the Blessed West, taking almost all the magic left with them


Elok, not to move the goalpost or anything, and I'm still not through laying out the case, but I petition the court to allow me to amend my original thesis to "The Middle Earth legendarium is medieval ultra-conservative" and not the author, in light of your (excellent and well-taken) point - I think there may be a case there, but I'm not enough of a Tolkien scholar to want to contest that particular hill, though I'll be bringing in what I know of the man anyway, for reasons of what-the-heck.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've been relying on memory up to now, but I think I need to do some cursory googling and find that foreword to the 70s US LOTR editions - I have it in the next room, but I'd rather copy/paste, and I'd just as well cheat and see what I can find of others thinking along similar lines before I go on.  Just as well look for quotes from the text of Return of the King and see if I can't find the Russian fanfic sequel, too; it had some interesting interpretation of what was really going on in LOTR.


On a related but OT note, I've noticed online over the years that most Tolkien fanboyz didn't care for The Silmarillion at all, while I've found it worthy of multiple re-readings for the fun of doing so.  Elok, would you happen to have whiled away a lot of church services as a boy reading stories in the Old Testament?  I am drawing a comparison and a conclusion, here.  Kings and Chronicles are pretty good reads, if you're comfortable with the dialect...

And everyone is invited to just talk Tolkien stuff in here without worrying about the OP topic too much...

[Elok]

Sorry this thread croaked (and is likely to do so again, as our Lent starts Sunday night); we Orthodox don't have much OT exposure.  At least, not in America.  We tend to mine it endlessly for NT parallels (tree in the Garden vs. life-giving Cross, Moses holding his staff crosswise, Jonah's three days, etc.), and gloss over the question of what, say, Elisha and the bears actually means for its own sake.  I had a beautifully illustrated book of the Gospels as a child, full of illuminated manuscript pictures with real gold leaf, and I spent services going Matthew to John and back again.

I really bumped this thread because I just checked out "The Letters of JRR Tolkien" from the library, and highly recommend it for a deeper insight into the man's real worldview.  He was extraordinarily stiff-necked and persnickety, revolted by modernity, but at the same time a highly moral man; he was disgusted by motorcars and jazz, but also by the callousness of the press towards the suffering of German civilians.  He could also be very insightful.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've been wondering when we were going to lose you for Lent, it being about that time of year...

I do wish Christians didn't dwell quite so much on the OT - it's so much more work finding justification for doing evil deeds in just the NT, to say the least.  Parts are a good read, even so.

[Elok]

More importantly from a theological/believing perspective, the OT law is only ever brought up in the NT to disparage it, especially by Paul.  The much-quoted "not a jot shall pass" line only holds "until all is fulfilled," which happened c. 30 AD on a hill outside Jerusalem.  Even there, there are strong hints to the contrary--see the bit about new wine and old wineskins.

Our Pascha often coincides with the Western one, but not always.  This year, it's May 1.  The reasons for the discrepancy are arcane, but the commonest reason given is that Western calculations frequently put Easter before Passover.  Strange as it is for a man to rise from the dead, it's even stranger if he ain't even dead yet.  Passover this year is the last week in April.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yah - that's Old Covenant/New Covenant theology that goes back to at least Martin Luther for the Protestants, and why the Gideons give away New Testaments for a preference.  The OT is part of the history, but full of outmoded commandments.  (Thou shalt not murder/covet/etc. and the like being covered in Christ's teachings one way or another.)

Great.  We're talking religion here, nobody's talking religion in the religion thread...

[Elok]

Re: Golden Ages, as Tolkien makes quite explicit in his letters, the primary sin of the Noldor exiles--all the "high elves" we meet in LOTR--is wanting to have things stay the way they were forever.  The world is changing, generally for the worse, but they don't try to take part in it in any particularly helpful way.  Technically they're not supposed to do even that--they were ordered to leave mortal lands at the end of the First Age, something like five thousand years earlier--but their way of living is very nearly the most useless possible: they set themselves up in insular little bubbles of beauty, like Lorien and Rivendell, while the outside world goes to pot.  They won't go back to Valinor, but they won't properly live in Middle Earth either.  They stick around and make little pretend Valinors to squat in with their rings.

[Buster's Uncle]

Which is both a sin against the wishes of Iluvatar and not even being very useful while at it, yes.  Very little good done since Gilgalad...

There IS an issue of fairness, though, to all but a few like Galadriel who had actually met any Valar -Elrond was born in Middle Earth and it was a commandment to leave his home...

[Elok]

Elves reincarnate, so it's not entirely clear that that would be an issue for any but perhaps the half-elves.  Even without it, the elves necessarily reproduce very slowly; Elrond didn't have any kids until he was maybe three thousand years old, and then only three.  Given their general immortality, the bulk of the elves are likely leftovers from the FA who knew Feanor in person.  Moreover, the land Elrond was born in got destroyed in a cataclysm.

[Buster's Uncle]

Details, details...

Seriously, we can't assume anything about Elrond was typical - and breeding at a low rate can account for an awful lot of immortals over 5,000 years.

The reincarnation was a handwave for the Glorfindel continuity mistake, IIRC, (wassername being Luthien Tinuviel reborn was just hyperbole for a remarkable familial resemblance with no evidence of shared memory or anything) and I'd question taking that very seriously as happening often.  I still suspect that almost everyone left in he Third Age was younger than Elrond, else Galadriel wouldn't be so special as she was made out to be, as one of the oldest beings left in earthly realms who'd seen the light of the Trees - and had had the dubious honor of having met Feanor...

[Buster's Uncle]

See - I don't imagine halfbreed Elrond himself being anyone special when dudes who'd seen the Trees and seen Morgoth himself across the battlefield were running around in numbers as high as 10...  He was rare for having known any dudes who did - almost everyone was dead or gone back to Valinor five weeks after the First Age ended and I betcha almost all the High Elves left two ages later -after the Last Alliance of Elves and Men against Sauron and the horrible slaughter that broke Elves as a power for good- were actually more Doriath Sindar blood than anything else...

[Buster's Uncle]

it has been supposed by some that The Scouring of the Shire reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does not. It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever. It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.