Transcript
J.R.R. Tolkien is often times hailed as one of the greatest authors of Western history. Especially during times like ours, since his work seems to be the antithesis to whatever the “woke” Mainstream espouses. Our culture seems to be in decline, so it’s only logical to return to a state when it was still healthy, right? That’s how this line of reasoning usually goes. I’m critical of that. To me, Tolkien himself already represents a state of cultural decay - a decay that has plagued our culture for centuries, even millennia, with just the occasional ray of hope bursting through. In this video, I will expose this decay and hopefully get some of you to see these unconscious cultural forces I myself seem to see, which led me to come to my conclusions.
Not long ago, the debate of Lord of the Rings versus Game of Thrones re-ignited. Two camps formed, corresponding to both works. The first one claimed Lord of the Rings was boring and for children, whereas Game of Thrones was for adults. Conservatives quickly responded to these allegations with counter-arguments: That Game of Thrones is, in fact, immature and nihilistic, while Lord of the Rings adheres to Western ideals each and everyone may structure their lives around;- ideals, that hold true even in adulthood. I’m largely uninterested in such practical notions and I don’t want to defend Game of Thrones. I’m not a fan of George R.R. Martin and think his work is flawed. Tolkien’s work, on the other hand, isn’t flawed, but the spirit it was written in is deeply non-Western. In fact, it’s the spirit of the Abrahamitic religions, which merely wears the skin of European myths. I will illustrate this with several examples from Tolkien’s works. That means this video will contain some major spoilers for the works of Tolkien.
Since I will accuse Tolkien of being biased, it’s fair to reveal my own: I am an avid reader of Friedrich Nietzsche and a critic of Platonism and Christianity. Most of my critique is built on that foundation. The main point I want to drive home with this video is, as stated previously, that Tolkien’s work is not representative of actual, classical Western values, but merely of Christianity. I don’t think that’s a good model to structure societal morality around. Let’s begin.
The Problem of Good and Evil
Tolkien’s entire universe presupposes the existence of objective Good and Evil. Good is defined by that which originated from God, who is called “Eru” or “Iluvatar” in the Silmarillion, which details the entire background and prologue of Lord of the Rings. Good versus Evil is already a concept that didn’t originate in Europe, in the “West”. In fact, before Christianity emerged in the long aftermath of Alexander’s conquests, no one judged things to be good or evil. That’s not to say that there was no morality, only that it was much, much different from what we’re used to today. Read the Melian Dialogue if you don’t believe me.
In ancient Greece, the birth place of Western civilization, the values of beauty and power reigned supreme. All depended on someone being the best, the most powerful and the most beautiful. The defeated were killed or enslaved and no one had any moral qualms about that. It was only when Greek culture declined that the first cracks began to form in this system of beliefs. With the emergence of Socrates, Greek morality was overturned and inverted. Yes, Socrates isn’t an example of Greek culture, but rather of its opposite, its decline. Plato’s dialogues detail the rhetorical games he played to outsmart his opponents, who by that time were much too civilized and tired to cut him down on the spot - something that would doubtlessly have happened during the times of Homer. Plato and Aristotle were both deeply influenced by him and continued in his footsteps, which led to Christianity following in his foodsteps, as well, as it in turn was influenced by these philosophers.
The other part it was influenced by and originated from was of course Judaism, the first of the Abrahamitic religions. The Septuagint, the “proto bible”, was a Greek version of the holy scripture of Judaism, the Torah. It was this phenomenon that brought the concept of “Good versus Evil” to Europe. It didn’t originate there and everything that followed could be seen as some kind of morphosis: An admixture of both the European, Western mentality, that’s hard coded into our very being, and the morality of the East.
As Christianity loosened its grip on European culture during the Enlightenment, ancient Greek culture was re-discovered. Friedrich Nietzsche, himself a classical philologist, wrote the first essay of his work “Genealogy of Morals”, on just that problem of “Good and Evil”. I suggest you read it - it’s one of the most insightful books out there. He came up with two concepts to explain both the morality of the classical, ancient world and that of the Christian world that came after it. I’m sure you’ve heard the terms: Master morality and slave morality - Master morality being the morality of the masters that judge things in “good” or “bad”, roughly corresponding to “useful” or “not useful”. And slave morality being that of the slaves, which was the antithesis to that of their masters, an instrument of their revenge and revolution against their masters. They achieved it by inverting master morality, claiming what they perceived as bad, was actually “good”, such as weakness, pity or sickliness. The ideals and values their masters chased and built their lives around, such as strength, splendor and beauty, were in turn inverted and declared the new “evil”.
And, indeed, we find that very inversion present in the bible, where it is declared not to hate, but to love thy enemies, and to forgive them - or that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Such notions would have been inconceivable in ancient Greece, in which every man dreamed of ascending to Godhood through wealth and power. And ancient Greece wasn’t alone in that judgement: Ancient Germania was very similar in that regard, at least if Tacitus is to be trusted.
In his works, Tolkien adopted Christian morality, because he was a Catholic himself. Thus, we find a clearly defined Good and a clearly defined Evil. Good being everything that originated from Iluvatar, Evil being that which is most distanced or devoid of Iluvatar’s creation. That’s reminiscent of the privation theory of Evil, which states that Evil is merely the lack of Good and which was an attempt of theodicy by Christians;- an attempt to justify the presence of suffering in God’s supposedly perfect creation. But it doesn’t quite add up, neither in the real world, nor in Tolkien’s. If God is perfectly omnipotent and omnipresent, there can be no place or thing that’s devoid of him. Except there’s a universe that even God is subject to, instead of the other way around - but that’s quite the pagan, pre-Christian notion and it’s found neither in Christianity, nor in Lord of the Rings.
In Tolkien’s universe, Evil first appears with Melkor, the first and greatest of Iluvatar’s Ainur, his angels. Whereas his siblings do as they’re told and sing their melody, Melkor rebels and egotistically tries to create his own song. In Greece, that would’ve earned him admiration, but in the Silmarillion, it earns him scorn from God, who tells him that there’s nothing he could do that would not be part of his grand design and benefit him in the end. Thus, Evil in this world is actually defined by who or whatever is different from Iluvatar, despite amounting to nothing in the end, since he’s omnipotent. Quite the narrow constraints for the Faustian soul: Not at all the story of Prometheus or Achilles.
It’s also quite obvious that Tolkien simply copied the story of Satan, which, too, was an inversion of ancient morality. It’s not random that it’s precisely the first, most powerful and most beautiful angel that falls and is, at the same time, evil incarnate. It aligns perfectly with what Nietzsche wrote about the revolution of the slaves: The revaluation of all values that destroyed ancient Europe.
“The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values—a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says ‘no’ from the very outset to what is ‘outside itself,’ ‘different from itself,’ and ‘not itself’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This volte-face of the valuing standpoint—this inevitable gravitation to the objective instead of back to the subjective—is typical of ‘resentment’: the slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, it requires objective stimuli to be capable of action at all—its action is fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when we come to the aristocrat’s system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously, it merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and exultant ‘yes’ to its own self;—its negative conception, ‘low,’ ‘vulgar,’ ‘bad,’ is merely a pale late-born foil in comparison with its positive and fundamental conception (saturated as it is with life and passion), of ‘we aristocrats, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones.’”
Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, 10.
The Psychology in Tolkien’s Works
Is it really Melkor who’s filled with resentment, or is it Iluvatar? If God doesn’t permit you to create your own works, but at the same time filled you to the brim with ambition and creative impulse, then your only logical conclusion must be to destroy him and his creation, to clear space for your own. Since Iluvatar created Melkor this way and since he’s omnipotent, it means he must’ve known what would happen. Thus, Melkor is effectively a torture doll created for Iluvatar’s enjoyment. Depending on your understanding of the concept of “free will”, you’ll either agree or disagree with me here. Starting a discussion on that would go beyond the scope of this video - and it’s not that important in evaluating whether Lord of the Rings is decidedly European, “traditional” literature or not.
What’s undeniable is that Tolkien’s universe follows a preordained fate, which sees Good triumph in the end, much like Christianity. Thus, its outlook is ultimately an optimistic one, even though one theme of Lord of the Rings is the decline of magic and wonder. But that’s only a temporary development, as in the ultimate end, everyone will join Iluvatar and the Ainur in the second song. That’s very different from the ancient, the classical concept of fate, which is chaotic and random, and to which even the Gods are subjected. Indeed, most of the time, the Greek fate turns out to lead only to destruction, which is depicted in the great tragedies. Oedipus Rex ends with the phrase: “Only the dead are lucky.” The Germanic concept of fate, called “wyrd” in old English has the same dynamic: A chaotic force ending in catastrophe. It’s no coincidence that the modern English word “weird” emerged from that and addresses something uncanny, unknowable. Thus, the actual ancient European concepts of fate have all been pessimistic. They differ greatly from Christianity and Tolkien’s works in that regard, in fact, they’re the exact opposite.
Tragedies depict great heroes reaching the peak of their power - and their subsequent downfall and destruction. Yet there has always been a strange allure in precisely this narrative structure. For most of Western history, the tragedy was considered the highest form of drama. There have been multiple attempts to explain the fascination such stories evoke. Aristotle thought they were an outlet of bad emotions that welled up inside us: catharsis. I think he was wrong: Instead, I agree with Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed tragedies were artful depictions of real life. Nietzsche, in particular, thought that they were a psychological obstacle, tempting the strong-willed to view or read them, even enjoy them. For power always needs an obstacle it can have an effect against. I believe, he was right and that tragedies are the very core of Western mentality.
Thus it’ll be no surprise to you that I think Tolkien’s universe is Un-European, even in that regard. The most European characters in his stories are his evildoers and those that “succumb” to evil. Because the forces of Good literally have God on their side and are sure to triumph in the end - where’s the challenge in that? Sadly, whereas tragedies depict psychologically mature and multiple-faceted men, often times larger-than-life, Tolkien didn’t have it in himself to grant his antagonists qualities worth of admiration, maybe with the exception of their raw power. Melkor is a dark lord, whose name always has to be mentioned in tandem with his “hatefulness” and “envy”. Sauron is also just a dark lord, except for the Smithing-Of-The-Rings- and the Numenor-arcs, where he suddenly becomes a manipulative master mind, after which he regresses to his “dark lord” form we know from Lord of the Rings.
Fans of Tolkien, rallying to his defense, will often times cite Feanor, Turin Turambar or even Smeagol as “morally grey characters”. And indeed, Feanor and Turin are compelling characters, which were modelled after the ancient epics and tragedies. But they’re fringe elements of Tolkien’s stories, at best, and not the main message they convey. Smeagol, on the other hand, is an integral part of the Lord of the Rings. And he is morally grey, but readers are pretty much at every point able to discern whether he is still good or already evil. Compare his psychology to one of Shakespeare’s figures: Was Coriolanus right or wrong? Was Hamlet? I’d argue that no one can tell or even find an answer the majority agrees with - which is much different for Smeagol. Thus, my point stands, despite Smeagol and the sparse morally grey characters in the Silmarillion: The psychology in Tolkien’s works is child-like and uninteresting. It could be argued that this is due to his first published work, “The Hobbit”, being a children’s book. To which I’d answer: A children’s book is perhaps not the greatest source of inspiration for adults - we can do better.
Schopenhauer expressed what makes a story a good one in his collection of essays:
“Shakespeare is far from doing what Schiller does, who likes to paint the devil black and whose moral approval or disapproval of the characters portrayed sounds through their own words. With Shakespeare and also with Goethe, on the other hand, everyone is, while he is present and speaks, perfectly right even if he were the devil himself.”
Arthur Schopenhauer: Parerga and Paralipomena, On Ethics
Tolkien’s characters, too, are blatant expressions of his own moral approval or disapproval. So, yes, his world is actually black and white, in essence. Very few characters don’t fall into one of those categories. The forces of Good wish to “save” this world and the forces of Evil wish to destroy it. They’re constrained by the overarching view of evil as a “lack of Good”. “Evil can’t create, only corrupt” - but despite that, it still ends up creating things, like the fortress Angband, or like the dragons, without which Middle Earth would be unthinkable. Tolkien has to contradict himself to create a world that’s compelling.
And that’s the whole point of stories: Being compelling, being the opposite of boring. We’ve seen how tragedies achieved their rank in the arts. But Tolkien’s stories miss their mark - or at least seem to miss it among today’s youth. I’d wager to say that most critics of Lord of the Rings are Zoomers, who didn’t grow up with the movies, not to mention the books, and who don’t associate them with the nostalgia of their childhood. Perhaps a vibe shift is in order, a return to tragedy.
Romanticism and Optimism
The last of the three great tragedian poets in ancient Greece was Euripides, a personal friend of Socrates. Euripides made frequent use of Deus Ex Machina for his stories;- that is, his tragedies didn’t actually end tragically. Instead of being destroyed, his protagonists were saved in the end, by the Gods themselves. Euripides’ motivations for this particular narrative structure are debated. It may have been Socrates who advised him to write his stories that way. After all, if the audience knows there’ll be a happy end, they are less likely to get gripped by their emotion: the antithesis to Socratic reason.
Isn’t Tolkien the same as Euripides? He, too, frequently employs Deus Ex Machina as a narrative device. Multiple times protagonists are in serious danger, a host of Great Eagles comes swooping down and saves them from certain death. Although that’s not a direct intervention by a god, the eagles are creatures of Manwe, the highest Ainur after Melkor’s fall. Like gods, they intervene from outside, appearing from seemingly nowhere, just when the plot needs them to intervene. The Deus Ex Machina is rightly derided as a lazy tool for writers. Likewise, Tolkien’s “Eucatastrophe” is an even more direct version of it. It’s an inversion of the classical catastrophe, being not a turn for the worse, but for the better. An example is the end of the Lord of the Rings: Smeagol’s or Gollum’s seemingly random slip at the edge of the fiery abyss. In truth, it’s not random at all, for it was preordained by God himself, the omnipotent master over space, time and causality.
Yet there’s still an even more direct case of it in Tolkien’s stories: The fall of Numenor. Here, Iluvatar personally enters the world to shatter Numenor and cast it into the ocean, along with its fleets and armies - punishments for its transgression of getting too powerful and breaking the forbidden rule of not venturing into the West. That’s a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Tolkien’s and Christianity’s morality, who cast their bright glow outwards, but are actually based on mere jealousy. That, of course, inevitably begs the question why an all-powerful God would get mad at his creations for acting according to the way he made them - a question that Christianity couldn’t sufficiently answer up until today and probably never will.
Fantasy literature, including Tolkien’s, would have been unthinkable without the literary period of Romanticism that swept across Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Cultural giants like Richard Wagner drew their inspiration from that and in turn inspired even more artists, like Tolkien. Even though Romanticism had a few “pagan” elements, they were mostly aesthetics only. It’s primary concern was the rejection of reason, atheism and science in favor of emotion and “belief”. Romanticism had a lot in common with Platonism and early Christianity. Although Plato and Socrates have often argued in favor of reason, they believed in a moral world order. The Enlightenment however, gave rise to nihilism, because it thought reason through to its logical conclusion, ending in proclaiming the death of God and the absence of truth. Quite the tragic conclusion.
Romanticism was an answer to that. I’d classify it as a Christian event, perhaps the original “Re-Christianization” of Europe. But as such, Romanticism was far removed from the Renaissance, the re-emergence of antiquity, of which the Enlightenment was a later mirror. In Germany, Romanticism supplanted the literary period of “Weimar classicism”, centered around Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Suddenly, it wasn’t about examining reality anymore, even under the risk of nihilism, but about being morally good in a false world. That’s mirrored in Lord of the Rings, too. And like Lord of the Rings, Romanticism was fundamentally optimistic, believing that all sacrifices would in the end lead to the triumph of Good and God.
But optimism is cowardice. Romanticism and Tolkien’s works are escapism. Life itself is struggle and we’re all doomed to eventually age, wither and die, with no provable prospect of an afterlife, where we’re either punished or rewarded. Morality is but a thin veil, actually pointless and fundamentally empty. It’s only through tragedy that we can come to terms with this reality, even learn to love and want it. That’s Nietzsche’s amor fati, his “love of fate” and the point of his eternal recurrence of the same.
Tolkien had an illusory view of reality. Whether this is due to him despising it, is open to interpretation. Critics of Tolkien often accuse him of painting power as an evil force. That, in turn, is then often recognized as a shallow and false criticism against Tolkien. But it turns out that it’s actually true. Tolkien himself wrote so in a letter to Milton Waldman. There he contrasted “art” and “power”: The creations of his God and his elves are all “art”, whereas those of Melkor, Sauron and so on are all “power”, “magic” or “machine”. Yes, Tolkien literally wrote:
“All this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or should I say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of ‘Fall’. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as ‘its own’, the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator - especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective - and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents - or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form, though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized. (…)
‘Power’ is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods.”
J.R.R. Tolkien: Letter to Milton Waldman, 1951
I don’t believe art hints at some beyond or even some God, just because simple biology can’t explain it. Philosophy certainly can. In particular Nietzsche’s Will to Power, which posits that the entire world, and everything in it, consists of forces waging war against each other, desiring power and domination over each other - recalling Heraclitus’ famous words: Struggle is the father of all things. According to Nietzsche, even creativity is merely a means to acquire power. Each and every creative act is a re-forming of already existing matter, according to the will of the artist. And it always requires destruction: The marble statue was carved out of a rock, the instruments of the musician from of a felled tree;- the artist himself from food, which was formerly alive. Tolkien calls this “sub-creation”, because he presupposes an original creator that made things from nothing. This is once again antithetical to European antiquity, where “Ex nihilo nihil fit” - nothing comes from nothing - was considered a foundational truth and which has since been “proven” by science, at least insofar as it can “prove” things.
Another Romantic aspect of Tolkien’s works is the rejection of technology, what he calls “the Machine”. The “external plans or devices” as opposed to the “inherent inner powers or talents” - the former evil, the latter good - as though there was a meaningful difference between the two. Why should an engineer designing a machine be different from his creation? Wasn’t it what he had in himself that originally came up with the idea and brought it to life? Technology is merely a tool, not some demonic force.
Conclusion
Is it really any wonder Tolkien chose Hobbits as his protagonists? I don’t think so. Classical tales were about great heroes and even gods. Christian stories are about “regular, small people” who “make a difference”, which is really just a hidden rebellion against nobility. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are Christian stories, not classical ones. Their protagonists require plot armor and Deus Ex Machina to succeed in their task, which is actually far too great for their small shoulders. Yet most fans of Tolkien ignore that fact and choose instead to be “inspired” by his weak and unassuming heroes, because they themselves wish to be such heroes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it really is just pure fantasy, as the genre is called, and thus not applicable to reality.
There have been attempts to create a more “mature” form of Lord of the Rings. Those were made by woke Hollywood and resulted in Orcs suddenly being considered “oppressed people”, along with presenting their retconned Orc-children. That’s a childish tear-jerking attempt I despise just as much - so don’t get me wrong. But I also don’t think Tolkien’s works leave much room to go about such an attempt in a serious way. The entire metaphysics at the base of his world are too black-and-white for that. But if you, dear viewers, want to write a fanfiction that’s actually compatible with ancient and actual European spirit, then go for it.
I myself, however, think that we need to transcend Tolkien and return to classical tragedy. Or rather re-connect to it and grow new tales from that very fertile ground. I believe that that’s the way to free ourselves from cultural stagnation.
Main Literature
Thucydides: Melian Dialogue
Tacitus: Germania
Arthur Schopenhauer: Parerga and Paralipomena
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion
