Lots of Tolkien discussion lately. Avedon very sensibly took the exchange that proliferated on her site and moved it into a Sideshow Annex, to which I hope she will append the thoughtful response that Eric Tam was good enough to cc to David Bratman and me. [UPDATE: She did, along with further comments from David as well. Worth reading.]

Meanwhile, Chris Mooney has posted links to two Tolkien pieces of his own. One, in the Washington Post, makes a point similar to what Eric Tam was saying, which is that, notwithstanding Aragorn and Gandalf’s entreaties to Theoden in The Two Towers (a bit of plot punched up in the movie), attempts to enlist Tolkien as a cheerleader for aggressive war are liable to founder on his deep distrust of power.

Mooney also says something I tried to get across in the Sideshow argument, which is that it’s probably a mistake to read Tolkien’s orcs as fully and irredeemably evil. In fact, Tolkien goes out of his way on several occasions to depict them as brutalized infantry rather than ravening hellspawn. Interestingly, the passages Mooney quotes in this regard are the same ones cited by Tom Shippey in his very intelligent J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Shippey argues that Tolkien’s universe encompasses an unresolved and unresolvable tension between two views of evil: one, the “Boethian” (and Catholic) view that evil is only the absence of good, and the other the pagan (and Manichean) view of evil as an active and malign force in the world. The narrative constantly pulls us in both directions: we overhear orcs who wish for creature comforts, who demonstrate a sense of justice (even if self-serving and depraved), and who long for the war to end; and we also sympathize with the Rohirrim who overtake a party of orcs and slaughter them without mercy.

This tension is also alluded to in Mooney’s other piece, in the Boston Globe, taking issue with the evangelical Christians who have laid claim to The Lord of the Rings as a work of unalloyed Christian apologetics. Of course it’s a novel by a Christian, and Tolkien himself called it “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” But for such a supposedly Christian work, the morality of The Lord of the Rings is as much infused with the stoical pessimism of the ancient world as with hope for redemption. Professor Shippey addresses this at length, observing that Tolkien spent his academic life on works like Beowulf and the Elder Edda, works of grim paganism passed down to us by later Christian writers. “The whole poem Beowulf,” writes Shippey, “is a meditation between contrary opinions, with strong similarities to The Lord of the Rings.” Mooney quotes Christian critics who extol the trilogy’s images of “Christ-like sacrifice,” but as Mooney points out, The Lord of the Rings is a story of universal loss. Evil is defeated for a while, but the world is diminished. As a medievalist quoted in Mooney’s article observes, it’s a “very Norse outlook: Even the winners lose.”

Tolkien was serious, serious about his Catholicism and serious about his love for the virtues of ancient Northern myth and legend, the virtues of courage in the face of hopelessness and certain defeat. He never fully resolved the contradictions between them—as David Bratman notes, at his death he was still worrying over matters that hinge on them, such as the redeemability of orcs. The actual text of The Lord of the Rings encompasses both outlooks, stated at various points with dramatic energy and rhetorical force, which is one of many reasons the book exerts more appeal than the more morally-schematic fantasies of, for instance, C. S. Lewis. Or, well, pick a name.

The Lord of the Rings is an affectingly Christian work. It’s also a work of abiding darkness and loss. Which may be one reason that, for all its obvious flaws and sometimes silliness, it still inspires so much thoroughly-engaged argument. Like the real world, Tolkien’s subcreation is haunted by contradictions and warring impulses. Those who read Tolkien’s novel as a simple Christian allegory are missing half of why it works. I’ll end this overlong post with more from Shippey:

It would be quite wrong to suggest that [Frodo] is a Christ-figure, an allegory of Christ, any more than the Ring is one of nuclear power—the differences, as Tolkien pointed out in the latter case and easily could have in the former, are greater than the similarities. Yet he represents something related: perhaps, an image of natural humanity trying to do its best in native decency…with no certain faith in rescue (or salvation) from outside, from beyond “the circles of the world.” In this he is once again a highly contemporary figure, an image for a society which Tolkien knew perfectly well had largely lost religious faith and had no developed theory to put in its place. Could “native decency” be enough? As a Christian, Tolkien was bound to say “no”, as a scholar of pagan and near-pagan literature he could not help seeing that there had been virtue, and a wish for something more, even among pagans. The myth, or story, that he created expresses both hope and sadness. It is a mark of its success that it has been appreciated by many who share its author’s real beliefs, but by even more who do not.

[10:13 AM]