J. R. R. Tolkien's Philosophy of History
(avg. read time: 12–24 mins.)
A few years ago, I wrote a response to a video by Wisecrack that a friend of mine sent me on Tolkien’s philosophy of history. Since I see the video pop up in Tolkien groups every now and then, and because it encapsulates popular claims about Tolkien’s philosophy of history, I thought I should share my response to it. As is typical from the host channel, it is a well-made video that does well to highlight how Tolkien’s philosophy of history contradicted that of many of his contemporaries and many of our contemporaries. Still, the video gives us a reductive view of Tolkien’s philosophy in this regard through minor and major errors and omissions that I think need to be corrected.
The first error is in the simple statement of the premise: that Tolkien believed everything is always getting worse. It is not surprising that this is the interpretation of his statements because Tolkien pushes back hard against the prevailing simplistic myth of progress from the past to the eschaton of the present or near future. But that does not mean that he simply believed the opposite. The historical processes of the present world include degradation and decay, natural partners of death, but these things are not simply inexorable until something good happens. Tolkien has a more complicated view of history than that, but we will get into the details as we progress through the video. For now, it will do to quote some letters he wrote. In two letters that he wrote to his son Christopher in 1944 prior to Operation Overlord, he spoke encouragement not only about the eschaton, but about what one can learn from plain old history itself. In Letter #64, he writes:
I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days – quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil – historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our lives [editor’s cutoff here] But there is still some hope that things may be better for us, even on the temporal plane, in the mercy of God. And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do. And you were so special a gift to me, in a time of sorrow and mental suffering, and your love, opening at once almost as soon as you were born, foretold to me, as it were in spoken words, that I am consoled ever by the certainty that there is no end to this.
Tolkien obviously does not think that history progressively builds to its eschatological crescendo, but he does think that events in history give glimpses that offer foretastes of that crescendo in which the defeat of evil will be final and permanent.
Likewise, in Letter #69 to Christopher, he writes:
A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All town, all villages, all habitations of men – sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face – not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit – we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!
In both of these letters, he shows that it is too simplistic to call his view of history “pessimistic.” It is a rather complicated and thoroughly Christian view of history, one which is all too aware of the intransigent problems of history at the individual, collective, and systemic levels, but which is all too hopeful of a delivering eschatological conclusion. This is further supported by the underlying conviction demonstrated in subtle ways throughout his fictional work that God is providentially guiding history to its ultimate end, even when such action is often not obvious.
Furthermore, he notes in Letter #165 to Houghton Mifflin Co. a particular scene of his in which the Secondary World of Middle-earth reflects the Primary World; namely, that of Gollum’s near-repentance on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, which Sam unthinkingly thwarts by his faithfulness to his friend and master. He writes, “this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy; and the good are often stumbling blocks.” In instances such as this one, Tolkien shows that the moral and providential picture of his world is more complicated than it is often given credit for being and it is thus more reflective of the Primary World in both of these ways.
Jared is, however, completely correct that Tolkien did not buy into the meta-narrative that the continued development of technology represents an unqualified good. As a lover of nature and as someone who was scarred by the sight of what technology had done to his beloved Sarehole, as well as by his experiences of the technology of death in WW1, he could not regard advancing technology as a good thing full stop. In addition to the quotes Jared draws from The Lost Road and The Hobbit, one could add from LOTR the story of Saruman. His realm of Isengard was once one in which there was much natural beauty and Treebeard says that Saruman once used to walk through Fangorn Forest and enjoy it. But now he has a mind of metal and machines for which the trees are nothing but expendable fuel. He is now run solely by this destructive industrialist instinct so as to make his realm resemble Mordor. And like his own master, he is now so thoroughly callous toward the world of creation that he uses it as fuel to make his own perverted abomination: the Uruk-hai.
Jared’s claim that Tolkien viewed history as cyclical is nearer the mark, but I would note that for his argument to work, Tolkien would rather need to conceive of history as a downward spiral until the very end. As noted before, Tolkien believed that there were intransigent problems of history, including some that were getting worse than his contemporaries cared to admit. But history is not defined by decay alone. It would probably be better to describe history as a web, one in which all things are interconnected and one in which those caught in it cannot see the grand design. This is why patterns repeat and why it can seem in that repetition that the world is trapped. Tolkien captured this idea in a scene that he described to his son Christopher as being especially moving to him (Letter #96) of Sam’s “disquisition on the seamless web of story”. In this disquisition, Sam eventually reflects on another story that he has learned of the ancient history of Middle-earth, that of Beren and Lúthien:
Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got—you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end? (IV/8)
Jared notes this particular repetition, but he misinterprets it as part of a cycle rather than a continuation of a pattern in a web. And in the next segment of the video, we have a clue as to why he misinterpreted in this fashion.
He thinks that Tolkien illustrates history as degradation through his four-age schema of history, which Jared compares to that of Hesiod and Ovid, wherein the four ages are represented by gold, silver, bronze, and iron. But his analogy breaks down here in a way that he does not realize. Particularly, to compare the First Age to a golden age is far too simplistic. The ages as Tolkien describes them are ages of the Moon and the Sun. There are millennia before these years that can be roughly divided into three periods (I say “roughly” because there are intervening years that I do not mention here). The first period is the First War, when the Valar and Maiar construct the world according to the Music they had sung, but which Melkor and his growing band of servants resisted and marred. The second period is the Spring of Arda, during which the world is lit by the Two Lamps: Illuin and Ormal. This time ended when Melkor destroyed the Two Lamps and the Valar and Maiar had to prevent the subsequent tumults from destroying their handiwork. The third period is Years of the Trees, when the Valar and Maiar (mostly) withdrew to a realm of their own and lit it with the light of the Two Trees: Telperion and Laurelin. These trees were the direct precursors to the Moon and the Sun, but far superior to them, such that the heavenly bodies are only the smallest remnants of the light of the Trees after their poisoning (besides the Silmarils, which preserve the true light). There is a pattern of degradation here, but that is not all that there is to it, as Melkor could no longer destroy the lights, the Elves had emerged during this last period, and the land of the Valar flourished, even while the world outside was under darkness, lit only by the stars.
It was during this last period that some of the Elves lived among the gods (the Valar and Maiar), not the First Age. Indeed, the First Age came after the creation of the Moon and Sun. It was in the First Age that the Elves were at their most powerful in Middle-earth, but it was also the age in which they suffered the most tragedy, being thoroughly defeated, though not annihilated, by Melkor, whom they called Morgoth. The First Age corresponds to the time that some of these Elves arrived in Middle-earth after they left Valinor and the continent of Aman under the bloodiest and most treacherous of circumstances until the time when Morgoth was defeated by the Host of Valinor after the Elves who came to Middle-earth had lost so much. There is no real sense in which this First Age corresponds to the golden age.
Jared’s illustration of the entropy at work in Middle-earth also does not work. In fact, the line he quotes from Saruman about Théoden being the lesser son of greater sires is demonstrated as false by the progression of the narrative itself, in which Théoden’s deeds make him worthy of his greatest sires, his legacy is redeemed, and his kingdom is thereafter rejuvenated. Likewise, while Gondor had been in a state of decay since the days of the last king, Aragorn’s ascension to the throne renews that kingdom and he even restores the northern kingdom of Arnor, making him the only king in over 3,000 years to rule over such a kingdom. In many other ways, he demonstrates his quality as one who belongs in the company of the Númenórean kings of old rather than in the company of more recent stewards.
The connections he attempts to make between Rome and the cities of Middle-earth that were more glorious and had seven of something (like Rome’s seven hills) does not work either. For one thing, Minas Tirith was not the capital of Gondor for more than half of the Third Age. That distinction belonged to Osgiliath until its destruction. Likewise, Rómenna was not the chief city of Númenor—that distinction belonged to the capital of Armenelos, though one could also list Andunië above it until the later years of the kingdom. There is no connection of seven with Rómenna and even the etymological connection that Jared makes is not there, as Rómenna means “eastwards.” Tolkien did actually have a name for Rome that he used in the earliest version of his tale of the fall of Gondolin, which was Rûm. The terms are similar, but quite distinct. Gondolin was indeed seven-gated and the greatest city of its time in Middle-earth, though it is simplistic to say that it was burned by dragons, since many others were involved, including Balrogs.
Jared refers to the Gondorian pre-meal ritual of looking to the west towards the old Númenor beneath the seas as a demonstration of the respect for the past as superior. If Gondor never improved, this would indeed be evidence of that, but as I have already noted, Aragorn brings unprecedented renewal when he ascends to the throne. It is not simply that things are getting worse and the Gondorians must hold onto nostalgia. It is decidedly more complex, precisely because, like a proper fairy-story, things are not simply worse off at the end. There is a bittersweetness to the eucatastrophe because most of the Elves are leaving Middle-earth, including the greatest of their rulers and much of what is popularly called “magic” goes with them, and Frodo and other ring-bearers like Gandalf (and, eventually, Sam) must also leave. But the Shire is better off, the kingdoms of Dale and Erebor are better off, Rohan is rejuvenated, Mirkwood is purified, the united kingdom of Arnor and Gondor is restored, and Sauron is defeated. These victories are not permanent because the eschaton has not come yet, but the facts of this story’s ending do not demonstrate a constant degradation.
I appreciate that Jared makes reference to Morgoth’s Ring, which gets its title from the fact that, at a late phase in the development of his mythology, Tolkien described the world as a whole as Morgoth’s Ring. The analogy to Sauron that he makes explains this concisely, but I would like to expand on it with extensive quotes from the work itself:
Thus, outside the Blessed Realm, all ‘matter’ was likely to have a ‘Melkor ingredient’, and those who had bodies, nourished by the hroa [spirits] of Arda, had as it were a tendency, small or great, towards Melkor: they were none of them wholly free of him in their incarnate form, and their bodies had an effect upon their spirits.
But in this way Morgoth lost (or exchanged, or transmuted) the greater part of his original ‘angelic’ powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world. For this reason he had to be fought, mainly by physical force, and enormous material ruin was a probable consequence of any direct combat with him, victorious or otherwise. This is the chief explanation of the constant reluctance of the Valar to come into open battle against Morgoth. Manwë’s task and problem was much more difficult than Gandalf’s. Sauron’s, relatively smaller, power was concentrated; Morgoth’s vast power was disseminated. The whole of ‘Middle-earth’ was Morgoth’s Ring, though temporarily his attention was mainly upon the North-west….
Sauron’s power was not (for example) in gold as such, but in a particular form or shape made of a particular portion of total gold. Morgoth’s power was disseminated throughout Gold, if nowhere absolute (for he did not create Gold) it was nowhere absent. (It was this Morgoth-element in matter, indeed, which was a prerequisite for such ‘magic’ and other evils as Sauron practiced with it and upon it.) (400)
This thoroughgoing view of the Fall that affects the Primary World even as it does the Secondary World is precisely why Tolkien portrays evil as being too deeply ingrained for him to believe in a simple myth of progress. While Jared says that this primordial evil will remain until the earth itself is destroyed, for some reason he stops the story there. But for Tolkien it is clear that the story does not end with the destruction of the world, but with the new creation in the Second Music. Even as the Ainulindalë, the Music by which Ilúvatar creates the cosmos, is completed, the narration tells us of the Second Music that will be better still, for it will bring the new, everlasting creation untainted by the marring of Melkor and his minions. This also reflects Tolkien’s Christian eschatology with his particular emphasis that the sub-creations of the present time will be taken up and hallowed by God in the new creation. As he said in “Mythopoeia”:
In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see
that all is as it is, and yet made free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden not gardener, children not their toys.
Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God's picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All. (Tree and Leaf, 90)
Likewise, in his “On Fairy-Stories”, he states even more directly:
But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know. (The Monsters and the Critics, 156–57)
This is another reason why worldly destruction is not the end of the story, for the sub-creations of this world are taken up and fulfilled.
All of these factors give context to a line that Jared quotes that is often quoted elsewhere to make the same point about Tolkien’s philosophy of history. In Letter #195 written to Amy Ronald in 1956, Tolkien says, “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’”. But here we see an indication of the most significant weakness of this analysis, as the comment section also duly points out: Jared’s avoidance of Tolkien’s Catholicism. In fact, here is the full context in which that statement belongs:
One point: Frodo’s attitude to weapons was personal. He was not in modern terms a ‘pacifist’. Of course, he was mainly horrified at the prospect of civil war among Hobbits; but he had (I suppose) also reached the conclusion that physical fighting is actually less ultimately effective than most (good) men think it! Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.
It is precisely because Tolkien is Catholic that he does not believe that any human processes will lead to final victory. But it is also precisely because Tolkien is Catholic that he always accompanies such statements about the power of evil in human history with statements about final victory guaranteed by his Lord Jesus Christ.
Indeed, it is because of the way in which the eucatastrophe of fantasy points to the gospel that Tolkien calls it the highest function of fantasy. Here I quote the fuller definition from “On Fairy-Stories” for “eucatastrophe” than Jared gave:
the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. (The Monsters and the Critics, 153)
Conspicuous by their absence in Jared’s video are the bolded parts, considering that he quotes the rest of definition beginning with “In its fairy-tale” and yet these parts explain Tolkien’s statements better than Jared’s framework. Tolkien’s analysis of eucatastrophe and his hope for it on the historical level is a function of his Christian faith. It is why he could call the gospel the true fairy-story. After all, he said of the consoling function of the eucatastrophe in fantasy:
It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’ The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): ‘If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.’ That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the ‘eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world. (The Monsters and the Critics, 155)
Eucatastrophes of fairy-stories anticipate the consummate fairy-story by which God redeems humans and thereby anticipate redemption. But the gospel is the consummate fairy-story because the features of fairy-story—including, most importantly, the ending—are raised from Secondary Reality when the Author of history writes them into Primary Reality, at which point, “the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation.” In the grand story of history, Tolkien describes the Birth of Christ as the eucatastrophe of history and the resurrection as the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation, making it the eucatastrophe of a eucatastrophic story. It is thus a story with an inclusio of joy. And it achieves one of the primary goals of sub-creation in having the inner consistency of reality precisely because it has that quality by virtue of happening on the stage of creation and bringing the art of God’s action of creation to fulfillment in redemption.
Tolkien would speak elsewhere in another letter he wrote in 1944 to his son Christopher about eucatastrophes in miracle stories (Letter #89). Clearly, Tolkien believes that there is not simply one eucatastrophe in history, but that there are others that anticipate and reflect it on smaller scales. The climactic eucatastrophe is the resurrection, inaugurating as it does the eucatastrophe of the eschaton, in which Jesus’s resurrection will be writ large in the new creation. This is why Tolkien’s philosophy of history is neither pessimistic nor optimistic: Jesus is risen from the dead. This is why Tolkien reflected this belief in his own story through the eucatastrophe of the conclusion of LOTR. And it is precisely the emotive effect of eucatastrophe that he illustrates in the Field of Cormallen, as the minstrel tells the story of the Quest, “And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet word, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.” (VI/4)
Interestingly, Jared seizes on references to another force in two key quotes from LOTR, which were ways that Tolkien referred to divine providence. But he does not pursue the point further to inquire about Tolkien’s Christian belief. Tolkien’s statements in this context were suitably vague and suggestive, since he is writing of a time between the Fall and the Incarnation (Letter #297) and all the signs of the religion of revelation are not yet present. In his aforementioned letter to Houghton Mifflin Co. (Letter #165), he explains, “It is a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’. The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted…. I am in any case myself a Christian; but the ‘Third Age’ was not a Christian world.” The world’s seeming lack of religion, at least insofar as the world is disclosed through LOTR, is simply due to Tolkien’s attempt at being realistic about the character of this world. After all, it is an imaginative history meant to take place in an earlier time of this planet (cf. Letter #183; #211).
Likewise, he writes to Milton Waldman in Letter #131 that the fact that the Arthurian legends make explicit references to the Christian religion makes them fail as myths. In his evaluation, “For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.” In other words, the appearance of these elements in the Arthurian legends makes them something of an amorphous hybrid which attempts to have its Secondary World cake and eat it in the Primary World. It is not truly part of either creation or sub-creation and therefore it has the inner consistency of neither. While all sub-creation is by nature derivative in some fashion, Tolkien seems to think that the Arthurian stories are both too derivative—drawing too much on the explicit forms of the Primary World—and not derivative enough—not pursuing far enough the inner logic of sub-creation. He believes these unnamed moral and religious truths (or errors) to be true (or false) across Primary and Secondary Worlds, but a proper Secondary World does not have them appear explicitly in the same forms as they do in the Primary World if it has the inner consistency of reality according to which there are proper forms for these truths (or errors) to appear.
One cannot understand Tolkien’s philosophy of history, intimations of a mysterious transcendent force in LOTR, or his ideas about eucatastrophe without reckoning with Tolkien’s Christian belief. And this is ultimately why the argument of the video fails. Jared has done some decent research to put this video together, but he omitted important contextual considerations that present a decidedly more complex picture than his argument allows.