M. Ridoux has published a book-length study on Tolkien (Le Chant du Monde, 2004), as well as numerous shorter pieces, such as the essay translated by myself below: J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium: A Visionary Opus for the Twenty-First Century. My hope, in translating this piece, is that it can serve to give a flavour of the depth and breadth of its author's thought and help bring his work to the wider audience it deserves.
Charles Ridoux has a profound affinity and connection with the Sacred. We see this especially in his love for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and his instinctive response to the richness of Tolkien's religious symbolism. Linked to this is his awareness and affection for what this blog calls Albion and the great cycle of myth and story surrounding Joseph of Arimathea and Glastonbury. This essay, I believe, shows both these aspects of Ridoux's worldview. Any hints of literary clumsiness, I hasten to add, are entirely due to my own shortcomings as translator.
For those who read French - to view M. Ridoux's website and all available articles, interviews and astrological reports and forecasts (including a new one on the U.S Presidential election) please go to www.ridoux.fr
J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium:
A Visionary Opus for the Twenty-First Century
Once upon a time there
lived a man, born under Antipodean skies, who contemplated the Southern Cross
the moment he opened his eyes. He came into the North, gazing at Arcturus and
the Great Bear's seven stars. Long ago, in ages past, this man had been granted
the gift of waking buried memories. It is thanks to him that we know now how
Varda fashioned a myriad of stars to celebrate the waking of the Elves at Lake
Cuivienen. So, as Orion crosses the purified heavens of our ice-bound winters,
we remember Orvandel and the glory of the Silmaril burning on Earendil's brow.
Charles Ridoux, Tolkien, Le
Chant du Monde
*******
J.R.R. Tolkien's stated literary aim was
to create a 'mythology for England'. The Legendarium that he has given
us is much wider and more spacious than that. It is a visionary opus for the
twenty-first century - breathtaking in its sweep of time and
space; awe-inspiring in its cosmic range and aspiration. Tolkien reconfigured
the mythologies of Northern Europe in the light of the Gospel, achieving a
fresh and dynamic synthesis of European traditions. He brings to today's
de-Christianised, de-mythologised world a high and noble frame of reference,
offering those born into our century - challenged as they are by a culture of
nihilism and death - reasons to live and to rebuild a society
where the good, the beautiful and the true will once more be held in the
highest esteem.
Tolkien's Legendarium spans all
historical and archaeological ages, reaching back to the Ainur's Great Song of
creation and forward to the consummation of this age, the advent of a new
creation and the sound of a new Great Song, sung by elves, dwarves and men,
sharers of the burden and the glory of the War of the Ring and the end of the
Third Age.
These are the characters, throughout The
Lord of the Rings - singing the ancient songs and evoking the
legends of times past - who give the text its multi-dimensional
resonance and depth. The means by which this effect is achieved has a unique
and distinctive character. Rather than deploy a deceptive narrative technique
to create an illusion of historical depth, the novel's songs and legends guide
the reader back to times gone by in Tolkien's own life, to texts conceived and
written long before its publication in 1954 or even that of The Hobbit
in 1937. We have to go back as far as the First World War and the appalling
suffering of the Somme - Tolkien's closest friends falling all
around him - to find the genesis of his mythology and the first written
fragments of his Legendarium.
The distant ages alluded to in The
Lord of the Rings, therefore, were given life many
years before the book was completed, but remained concealed from the public
until after Tolkien's death in 1973 and the publication - thanks to the
good offices of his son, Christopher - of The Silmarillion four
years later. It is important to remember, however, that The Silmarillion
is, in many respects, a mere summary of an enormous number of pieces - historical,
philosophical, linguistic, etc - which have only become available since
the publication of The History of Middle Earth between 1983 and 1996, a
monumental body of work, which highlights magnificently the linguistic fidelity
and skill of Christopher Tolkien.
*******
J.R.R. Tolkien worked independently of
great contemporaries, such as Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumezil, who sought,
like him, to revive and rekindle the study and appreciation of mythology. His
voice joins with theirs, however, in the way he opens up and unveils the
cosmic, fashioning a world that astonishes the reader with its scale, immensity
and chronological flair.
This emphasis on time - time's
elasticity in particular - superbly analysed by Verlyn Flieger (the
finest, along with Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce, of Tolkien's English-speaking
critics) reveals the extent to which Tolkien can be heard articulating the
pre-occupations of his own epoch, fully deserving thereby the accolade of
'author of the century' given him by British readers in 1996. There are many
levels and riches yet to be explored in his oeuvre, however. Taken in
its totality, the confidence in life that Tolkien's writing displays and the simple
joy it elicits - illuminating hearts and minds worldwide - will ensure
that Tolkien remains, for decades to come, an 'author of the century', for the
twenty-first as much, if not more, than for the twentieth.
Tolkien conceived and wrote his epic in
the context of a Europe devastated by two world wars that stripped the
continent of political agency and transferred power to the USA in the West and
the Soviet Union in the East. The exceptional character of these two nations - America and
Russia - was already clear to nineteenth century thinkers like
Tocqueville and Chateaubriand, and it is in these countries that Tolkien's work
has been most rapturously received - to the point of excess at times - in the USA
during the 1960s and in Russia since the fall of Communism. Clearly, the Legendarium
responds to a deep and genuine religious need -
particularly acute, perhaps, among those who have been deprived of an authentic
spiritual life by political materialism in its various guises. Rather than the
'mythology of England' Tolkien intitially set out to create, therefore, it is
to the contemporary world as a whole - fragmented, dissipated and corroded by
the acid waters of globalisation - where his clarion call of faith and hope
carries its significance today.
This trumpet blast, as we have seen, has
its origins in a blend of European traditions. Tolkien is unique among writers
in fashioning such a remarkable synthesis: the indigenous mythologies of
Northern Europe on the one hand and the transcendent message of the Gospel on
the other, proclaimed to the four corners of the earth. 'Tolkien's world,' as
the French critic Pierre Jourde remarks, 'is orientated towards a vast
synthesis of all the key constituents of Western spirituality.’
Writing at the end of a decade of
revolutionary tumult and spiritual aridity, Chateaubriand brought the perennial
religious and artistic witness of France - a witness made Christian by the Baptism
of Clovis in 496 - to a young, spiritually-hungry audience
with his Genius of Christianity (1802). The youth of our
era have a similar need for an alternative vision to the technocratic mesh that
hems them in. Tolkien offers them the mythical treasures of Northen Europe, lit
from within by his Christian faith. But where Chateaubriand rekindled the
sacred flame among a people still deeply wedded to the Christianity of their
fathers, Tolkien addresses a public divested of faith, yet compelled
nonetheless to find reasons to live and to reconnect with the wellspring of
their individual and collective being.
We should keep in mind, however, that
Tolkien was neither a theologian nor a philosopher, despite his work touching
on areas relevant to both theology and philosophy - death and
immortality, for example, as well as the nature of time and space, the
transmission of thought, ultimate ends and the mystery of evil. Tolkien was a
poet and an artist, and when it comes to connecting with the hearts and minds
of men and women, it is often the word and touch of a poet that carries more
weight than the academic discourse of philosophers or theologians.
*******
Tolkien is widely (and rightly)
considered as one of the great twentieth-century Christian authors, despite his
creating a secondary world free from any explicit reference to Christianity.
The Incarnation of the Creator into His creation is hinted at - nothing
more than that - throughout the Legendarium as the
'great hope' of men. But the leading values in Tolkien's world are clearly and
unambiguously freighted with a Christian spirit - the focus on humility, for instance, and
the decisive role given to the humble. The more politically active characters
learn to consciously refuse the temptation of power over the souls of others.
This rejection of the 'will to power', whether in the service of good or evil,
is one of the principal themes in The Lord of the Rings,
ruling out definitively any Nietzschean reading of the text.
Tolkien, we can safely say, is a
Christian writer addressing a society which is no longer Christian. He is also
a Medievalist and a philologist - an enthusiast for texts often regarded
today as unreadable unless translated into a modern language and accompanied by
a wealth of annotations. As both storyteller and academic, Tolkien's role
appears to be that of a 'linkman' - a bridge-builder between tradition and
modernity - facilitating the transmission of Europe's primordial
heritage to contemporary conditions. This heritage belongs to those Europeans
who have recognised, guarded and preserved the immeasurable worth of their
native mythologies. These have in no way have been rendered obsolete by the
Christian revelation. On the contrary, the light shone on them by the mystery of the
Incarnation has exalted and raised them to a higher level.
It is a highly dynamic synthesis. In The
Lord of the Rings, for instance, Tolkien presents the reader with a
pivotal moment in the history of the Legendarium - the end of
the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth. Middle Earth's rich and textured
history inspires profound nostalgic sentiments throughout, yet opens out
finally, like a flower, onto a future charged with limitless hope, the promise
of the Incarnation and the coming of the Creator into His creation, prophecied
long before in the dialogue of Finrod and Andreth.
The mythological and Christian motifs in
Tolkien's work do not appear at the same stage or time, though they do form a
continuity. The mythic elements, symbolised by the stars and their Queen,
Varda, take precedence in the early phases of the Legendarium, where the
narrative focus is on preparing the world ready for the Children of Iluvatar.
They slip into the background when the 'Sun of Justice' comes, born at the
winter solstice and triumphant by his death on the cross (March 25th according
the the Medieval tradition - also Tolkien's date for the fall of
Barad-Dur). The light of the sun, though infinitely brighter than that of the
stars, does not cancel them out, however, but surrounds and includes them in an
all-embracing light without shadow. Christ came to accomplish, not abolish, the
Law of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, but He came also to perfect and integrate
the partial truths contained in the many and varied mythologies of antiquity.
The multi-layered symbolism of Romanesque and Medieval Christianity bears
eloquent witness to this.
A key paradox, as alluded to above, is
that Tolkien created this synthesis of traditions for the benefit of a world
that is now largely both de-mythologised and de-Christianised - a world
that has turned its back on Golgotha and Olympus. In the midst of this
deeply anti-traditional milieu, a world undergoing a perpetual crisis of
values, we observe - to the fury of certain literary critics - the
unfolding of a remarkable phenomenon: a Christian author's novel, imbued with
Christian values, universally acclaimed by readers who, though they may no
longer practice the faith, remain marked by the cultural legacy and imprint of
Christianity. While the twentieth century was without doubt the century par
excellence of atheism and unbelief, it was also that of the most severe
anti-Christian persecutions since Diocletian. The return to the source that
Tolkien offers contemporary readers, therefore, is by no means a passive
retreat towards an idealised paganism. Here again, Tolkien shows himself as a
profoundly anti-Nietzschean figure. In Tolkien's Legendarium, as we have
seen, power lies at the behest of those who refuse the will to power - a reversal
of Nietzsche's moral deconstruction. Not that Tolkien argued against the use of
force per se, but that he rejected force when it prioritises
power over love.
*******
Tolkien's Medieval points of reference
have little in common (even when King Arthur is referred to) with the
French-inspired body of legends known collectively as the 'Matter of Britain'.
He believed that Arthur was a Briton rather than an Englishman, and his dream
of chiselling out a mythology for England led him to follow his inspiration, in
harmony with his childhood reading, in the mythologies of Northern Europe - Germanic,
Scandinavian and Finnish. Among these Nordic classics, it is worth highlighting
in passing the influence of the Finnish Kalevala, a text which Tolkien
refers to on more than one occasion in his letters as the 'germ' of his
earliest mythological writings.
Tolkien occasionally evokes, in his Legendarium,
a certain high, otherworldly beauty that many associate with
the Celtic mindset and its influence on North-Western Europe. We need to bear
in mind, however, that this was a beauty rarely found in authentic ancient
Celtic culture. This beauty, for Tolkien, is an ideal - see, for
example, his depiction of Lothlorien in The Fellowship of the Ring.
This is an element which comes across
clearly in Father Louis Bouyer's account of his friendship with Tolkien. Father
Bouyer, who was directly inspired by Chretien de Troyes in his novel Prelude
á l'Apoclaypse (written under
the pseudonym, Louis Lambert), is undoubtedly more attracted, as a writer, than
was Tolkien to this Celtic influence - this 'genius of place' - to the
forest of Paimpot first of all, (which Father Gillard, rector of Trehorenteuc,
helped him discover), but principally to the town of Glastonbuy, its
distinctive conical hill - known as the Tor - and the
nearby Wearyall Hill, where, according to legend, Joseph of Arimathea planted
his staff in the ground on arrival in England. The following morning, the story
says, the staff had taken root and grown into a miraculous thorn tree. In his Les
lieux magiques de la légende du Graal, during a fascinating discussion on Arthurian
iconography, Bouyer highlights the new role given to this mythopoeic faculty by
the Christian revelation - to prepare for and anticipate the
ultimate hope - the transfiguration of all things –
while perpetuating the imperishable character of the ancient myths,
repositories of mankind's earliest intuitions concerning human and cosmic life:
These myths, however
provisionary and imperfect their understanding may be, give voice nonetheless
to a certain dawning consciousness -
a watching and a waiting and an uncertain, semi-aware kind of love - which the Bible brings into the light of
day and the Gospel responds to - uniquely - by the definitive act of the Creator God
entering into and transforming the stream of history.
Tolkien, along with Bouyer, is at pains
to emphasise that this revelation was not sent from God to uproot man from
hearth and home, terrain rich in myth and mystery for many millennia prior to
the Incarnation. On the contrary, it came to open up new perspectives and
depths, revealing, through a mythopoeic understanding, unknown and unsuspected
angles of vision in the great, pre-Christian mythologies.
The lack of any explicit reference to
Christianity in Tolkien's oeuvre only serves to make plain the deep and
abiding Christian themes underpinning his mythology. The discreet workings of
Providence lie at the heart of his work, together with the turning away from a
deceptive worldly immortality in favour of the eternal life suggested by the
theme of a new Great Music to come at the consummation of the age. Many readers
have responded sensitively to this message quietly and unobtrusively diffused
throughout his work. This extract from a letter to the author quoted by Iréne
Fernandez in her study highlights this very well: 'You have created a world
where a kind of faith seems everywhere present, without one being able to
recognise the source ... like a light emanating from an invisible lamp.'
*******
It is thanks to his notion of
sub-creation, elaborated in his essay On Fairy Stories that Tolkien
achieves such a stunning synthesis between the mythological backdrop which
forms the substance of his Legendarium and the salt of the Christian
faith which animates it, gives it form and orientates it towards the great hope
of the Second Coming. In making clear the secondary nature of his artistic
creation vis-a-vis the Divine creation, the author escapes the
Promethean temptation of substituting man for God. At the same time, in
presenting his oeuvre as a 'creation', Tolkien pays homage to the
pre-eminent dignity of the sons of Adam, as shown in Genesis in Adam's
naming of the creatures. Sub-creation bears witness to man's dependence on God,
but also to the fact that Adam was created in 'the image and likeness' of God.
As Verlyn Flieger explains, the Divine Word, the instrument of creation,
corresponds (on an earthly level) to our human words, which, in this fallen
world, turn so often into mere verbiage. They can also instigate, however, a
path of return towards unity and co-operation with God, whether through art - especially
its highest 'Elven' form, which Tolkien calls 'enchantment' - or through
prayer.
Humphrey Carpenter, in his biography,
refers to Tolkien as a 'conservative of the old school' - not a
defender of plutocratic or technocratic interests, but a champion of
traditional social structures, where everyone, great or small, occupies their
place in the social order in harmony and rapport with the cosmic order. One can
understand perfectly, therefore, the virulence of Tolkien's 1941 judgement on
the Nazis who, far from exalting traditional values, profoundly perverted them
and contributed thereby to rendering traditional thought highly suspect to
succeeding generations:
I have in this war a
burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for
ruining, perverting, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit,
a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present
in its true light.
Tolkien's unabashed hostility toward mass
phenomena and twentieth-century totalitarianism, be it Communist or National
Socialist, is especially clear in his description of the servitude imposed on
the inhabitants of the Shire in the chapter towards the end of The Lord of
the Rings called The Scouring of the Shire. Sharky's band of
brigands remind us of the Soviet political of the 1920s and 30s - by the terror
they inspire, certainly - but above all by the heavy pretension,
at once solemn and ridiculous, of an administrative jargon captured perfectly
here by Tolkien's ironic pen: 'You're arrested for Gate-breaking and Tearing up
of Rules and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in
Shire-buildings without Leave and Bribing Guards with Food.'
Tolkien's aversion to industrial society
does not, however, lead him to become a partisan of a political ecology severed
from its traditional roots. He is no 'hippy'; no counter-cultural leftist.
Tolkien's critique of the modern world is not founded on a call to subversion,
but rather on an invitation to rediscover the path of tradition, stemming from
the dual European heritage of Christianity and mythology. Because of this,
Tolkien is able, for example, to lionise chivalry and warrior virtues, while
expressing compassion towards all beings through the theme of victory born out
of weakness, the weakness which gives witness to the all-powerful Divinity
continually at work in the world. What is also remarkable in Tolkien is his
profound respect for the liberty of each and every person and his categorical
refusal to allow the manipulations of propaganda to browbeat his heroes.
Finally, and most importantly of all, what particularly animates his oeuvre
is a simple and joyous love of creation. As Elrond remarks in reference to the
three rings of the Elves: 'Those who made them desired neither power, nor
domination, nor riches. They sought understanding instead, and the ability to
heal and create, so that all things might be held and preserved without stain.'
There are the values - evident not
only in Tolkien's writings but also in his life, as seen in his letters and in his
love for his four children - which we believe can have a positive
influence on young people in the current context of a world at the end of its
cycle, sinking in nihilism. In the mid-1960s, at the time of the Uranus/Pluto
conjunction, the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Tse Tung in China
engendered the ferocious Red Guards, infamous for their extreme brutality and
by the irrepairable damage caused to some of China's most ancient monuments.
Their goal was to destroy all traces of traditional society, and this is how
thousands of sculptures and temples (Buddhist mainly) came to be destroyed. The
Great Wall of China no less was flattened in part and the Imperial Palace
itself in Beijing was only saved due to the direct intervention of Chou En Lai.
The Cultural Revolution, moreover, revealed
a horrific will to suppress - through a refusal of identification - all
possibility of pity towards its victims. They were stripped of human dignity
and treated like animals. Several millions were exterminated. The Red Guards
had a network in every school, factory and administrative centre. They seized,
they interrogated, they tortured without remorse, installing a climate of
terror and picking houses at random to find compromising proofs of deviance. At
the same time, professors and intellectuals were sent into the countryside to
be 're-educated' by manual labour. A sizeable minority of the urban youth
suffered the same fate during the decade that followed.
Today, as this Uranus/Pluto phase
reappears, the jihadists of Daesh, Al-Quaida and others present the same
explosive cocktail, blending ideological fanaticism with existential
frustration. These 'knights of the void', masked and clad in black, these
unconscious disciples of a terrible Divinity, fascinate and bewitch all over
the world, especially in the decaying heart of old Europe, a continent divested
of her grandeur and undermined from within by numerous debilitating
subcultures, her youth tormented by an emptiness of soul, easy prey for this
culture of death, and going so far as to invoke, with a deadly insouciance,
demonic powers who do not fail to respond to their appeal. This was the case,
tragically, in Paris on November 13th 2015 at the Bataclan, when the killers
began their massacre at the moment the American group The Eagles of Death
Metal started their song Kiss the Devil:
Who'll kiss the Devil? Who'll love his
song?
I will love the Devil and his song. I
meet the Devil, and this is his song.
A few weeks earlier,
in a Bucharest nightclub on Friday October 30th 2015, around fifty young people
- boys and girls - perished. There, it was the metal group Goodbye
to Gravity with their
song The Day we Die:
We're not numbers, we're free, we're so
free,
And the day we give in is the day we die.
This all calls to mind Tolkien's
unfinished story The New Shadow, set a century after the fall of Sauron,
where we see the youth of Gondor practicing dark arts in secret societies,
perversely fascinated by the brutality and barbarism of the Orcs. Though it is
true that in the general downward drift of 'cyclical descent' moments of traditional
renewal are possible - the reign of Elessar, for example - these
temporary restorations are inherently fragile and always in danger of
disintegration from within. Battle must constantly be joined, therefore,
against our tendency to slide into ever more subtle, ever more sinister forms
of barbarity and nihilism.
Tolkien is by no means alone in
suggesting to us a path of ascent towards the true Light. We think, for
instance, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had the courage (his weakness being
his strength) not only to confront the all-powerful Soviet bureaucracy, but
also to dig down to the very roots of Communist evil in The Red Wheel,
his masterful study of the origins and development of the Russian Revolution.
We could also consider the noble figure
of Eugenio Corti, author of The Red Horse, as well as the more discreet
stance taken by Ernst Wiechart who, in his two novels, one set on the eve of
the First World War (Les Enfants Jéronime) and the other at the end of
the Second World War (Missa Sine Nomine), shows himself a worthy witness
to the savagery of his epoch and also as a true poet of the forest, sharing
with Tolkien a deep love for trees, plants, woodland and all kinds of greenery.
The great difference, of course, is that
these writers (except for Solzhenitsyn in his non-fiction) exported the turmoil
of their times through the essentially nineteenth-century medium of the
European realistic novel. Tolkien's Legendarium, by way of contrast, is
rooted in a secondary universe of immense vitality and imaginative power - its
atmosphere saturated with the marvellous in every page, every paragraph, every
line and every word.
Charles Ridoux
Amfroipret
December 10th 2015
