[Child of the 7th Age]

To belabour a point I first may a while ago on this thread, I think that it is entirely appropriate to see the confrontation between the Nazgûl and the Fellowship as a confrontation between those who wish to defend the right of the Free Peoples to maintain their own sense of truth(s) against the false imposition of a totalitarian Truth by the forces of Mordor.

If that paragraph makes it look as though I am equating capital-T Truth with the project of Sauron – well, yes, I am. But please bear with me davem, Mark 12_30, Lyta, Child and H-I as I am not calling you Nazgûl (although I bet you’d all look totally cool in black)

Fordim --

Ahem! That's the second time, you've hinted at a certain kinship I may have with the Nazgûl. As I read your posts, I feel a strong compulsion to go down to the Shire and dig up an RPG where I can fly around and instill terror in folk's heart!

I am, however, puzzled why I ended up with the MIB. Not that I can't appreciate a dark hooded cloak as well as the next fellow. I can't speak for anyone else lumped together in that group, but I thought I had clarified my position in my last two posts.

As far as "Truth" goes (with a capital 'T'), I have strong feelings that flow naturally out of my own personal experiences as well as my background as an historian. My preference is that we completely discard the term "Truth" in these discussions because I think it leads to a dead-end. I do not personally doubt that there is a core of Truth at the center of existence. But my own view would be similar to that expressed in Helen's last post. That Truth so transcends our personal experience that, whatever we may feel we think or know, can only be a partial and flawed approximation of what actually exists. We see through a glass darkly, and it would be presumptious of me to judge anyone or ask them to conform to my own opinions.

As I said before, if I want to talk about how I personally perceive that which transcends the corporeal or visible world, I would far rather employ the symbol and image that Tolkien used in his own writings -- that of Light. Light is both a reality and a perception. Unlike "Truth", there is no suggestion of a single, unvarying standard. By its very nature, light changes and shifts. There is an interplay of brightness and shadow. To me that is a closer approximation of how we individually perceive what lies beyond, and it is a response closer to Tolkien's own, at least what he has delineated for us in LotR. I am not comfortable with a monolithic "Truth" by which we judge everyone and everything a lá Sauron

In all his writings, Tolkien stresses the flawed nature of Man: the fact that the best we can hope for at this point in time is a "long defeat", with only an occasional, temporary victory. Even with his strong Catholic beliefs, I have little doubt that JRRT would say that it is simply impossible for Man, as flawed as he is, to see or understand the Truth in all its complexity. Whatever we see is a tiny piece of the whole and, since we are all looking from varying perspectives and backgrounds, it is no wonder that we all sense and describe something different.

Like Saucepan Man, I sometimes shudder at what humanity has managed to do historically all in the name of Truth: group after group coming forward and claiming to hold the ultimate solution and imposing that on others: religious, political, racial, you name it.... I think Tolkien was equally suspicious of any kind of moral, spiritual, or political coercion. The Shire, perhaps his ideal statement of community, is a laissez-faire enterprise where the mayor's most onerous duty is presiding at banquets. His Hobbit heroes, especially Bilbo and Frodo, are delightful non-conformists who would hardly fit into a regimented state. His good Kings of Gondor and Rohan did little more than act as military leaders and moral examples. Tolkien once described himself as an anarchist, albeit not the kind with a bomb. He would have objected to our faceless government bureaucracies as being another manifestation of the spirit of Sauroman, determined to bludgeon us into obedience and conformity.

Fordim - I do agree that at the heart of Sauron's evil lay his desire to compel others to accept his own personal view of things. Subjegation and domination, the extinction of the individual personality, were simply a way to implement that "Truth". Even his lust for Power presumed that there was an end goal or product that must be achieved at any cost.

Tolkien, the devout Catholic who personally paid homage to Truth, was also the great champion of diversity and the freedom of the individual to act with as few constraints as possible. Middle-earth is filled with a diversity of peoples, all with different ideas and cultures, and the author takes delight in each. There is no one universal pattern that his characters must emulate to achieve goodness. Each one in the Fellowship has a different path to follow. It is only Sauron and his ilk who insisst on an unwavering "Truth" (with a big T), a final solution that everyone is expected to bow down in front of. Sauron's insistence on "Truth" is not only an affront to all the free peoples of Middle-earth, but more critically an affront to Illuvatar who remains the final and only guardian of Truth, the only one who truly understands all the strains of the Music.

What Tolkien seems to be hinting at is that we should all be wary of anyone who proposes to understand Truth, especially all the Sarumans who are floating around in our modern world and who want to force their own Truths down our throats, since true knowledge of the Music can lie only with Eru. Gandalf alludes to a similar thing when he explains how the Ring would corrupt his own good intentions. In a desire to serve Truth, he would put his own perceptions ahead of others and even of Illuvatar's own plan, and that would lead to disaster.

So, let's be careful. "Truth" can be a dangerous, dangerous thing, a fact that JRRT recognized, since it can easily be turned into an instrument for coercion and the substitution of our own will for that of God's. In the end, we are flawed creatures who can understand only a few fleeting notes of the Music of creation.