The Nazis & a Mytholgy for England

[davem]

My feeling, based on the material Garth has published in Tolkien & the Great War, is that Tolkien's purpose in trying to create a Mythology for England was, as I said, 'moral regeneration'. England had lost its identity, its moral values; society was on a very slippery downward slope. His inspiration was Lonrot - the Kalevala had reawakened the Finns; their country, which had been a 'shuttlecock' between the superpowers Sweden & Russia for centuries, had found a new identity through that work & the anniversary of its publication is still a national holiday. I think Tolkien took this as an example of what mythology could do for a nation. He decided that a mythology for England, which fused Christianity with that 'noble northern spirit' which he so loved, could do that job for his own country.

The point is that, far from being simply the 'subcreation of a secondary world in the mind', which bore no relation to the primary world, when he began his intention was that it would have a very powerful & direct impact on the primary world - of course he tries different ways to link it to the primary, but the intent is there all through the twenties & into the thirties. Flieger has shown in a recent essay that one of the ways he tries to link it to the English is by having English characters linked 'psychically' to the past (as in Lost Road & Notion Club Papers) - the past of Middle earth would be seen to be alive in the English people of today.

But then something changes. He no longer wishes his mythology to impact in any way on the primary world. He wants it to be taken as a story of a secondary world only, & he will deny as vociferously as he can any suggestion of a relationship with the primary.

I accept that mythology had been misused in the past, & that Tolkien would have been perfectly aware of that, but it had never been so misused as it had by the Nazis. Tolkien blames the Nazis specifically for making the noble northern spirit 'forever accursed' - meaning what? - that although in the past similar misuse of mythological symbols had occurred, something qualitatively different had occured this time? I suspect that's it.

We can't underestimate the effect on a man like Tolkien, with his deep love of northerness, of what the Nazis had done. That 'noble northern spirit' had been 'Ruined, perverted, misapplied, & made forever accursed'.

Tolkien had seen the extremes of what national mythologies could lead to - liberation & regeneration for Finland, moral depravity & the Holocaust for Germany. I think he became frightened not that he would fail in his dream of creating a mythology for England, but that he would succeed, & that dream would translate from the secondary world into the primary world as a nightmare.

As to what's unpublished - well, we don't have his diaries, & the only letters Christopher Tolkien has allowed to be published are the ones that relate directly to Middle earth. Lets speculate on a 'nightmare scenario' some letters from the early thirties, where, before the horrors of Nazism have appeared, or at least been made known - Tolkien sees Germany arising from the depression, inspired by the nordic myths & fired by the noble northern spirit, & makes some positive comments. Of course, as soon as the truth about Nazism comes out he rejects it all immediately, but if such letters, or diary passages, existed, one could understand CRT not wanting them to appear.

I certainly wouldn't deny the impact of WW1 on Tolkien, but he comes out of that war with a desire to give his country its own mythology, in order to inspire its moral regeneration & make it a great nation once again (as, ironically, did Hitler). It was WW2 which confronted him with the reality of how terrible the downside of national mythologies could be.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

An interesting thread topic indeed! I do not have the requisite knowledge of works such as the HoME (which I have yet to read. . .*chagrin*) but I could not help myself from responding to this discussion, even if at something of a tangent.

Obviously, no work of art or artist is so easily understood in terms of straightforward cause and effect: I don’t think there’s any way to know or discover a line or point at which LotR can be divided into pre- and post-war. That having been said, there are some very tantalising notions being bandied about here. And there’s the old adage that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” to remember. In one of history’s great ironies, post-war German and Jewish artists both faced the same problem: how can one maintain faith in art (an essentially humanist endeavour) in the face of the mechanised inhumanity of the Holocaust? The profound impact of the War on all who went through it cannot be overstated.

Still, I agree with those who point to WW1 as the more definitive crisis in Tolkien’s own life. I fully understand and take to heart the terrible depredations done by Nazism to the northern myths cherished by Tolkien, but I think it is wrong to see this as anything other than part of a long road he’d been on (with most of his generation) for several decades. The War to End Wars, the dawning recognition among Englishmen of the essentially totalitarian and despotic nature of their Empire, the breakdown of communal faith, class revolution and consciousness, mechanisation, industrialisation, urbanisation – all of these stresses had been operative for a long time, and resulted in what we now rather inaccurately call the Modernist Crisis. This crisis resulted in, broadly speaking, two kinds of artistic reaction. There were the High Modernists like Joyce, Eliot and Woolf who sought to explore or reflect the meaningless they felt in their lives and world in an art that was radically experimental. Where meaning failed, Art and Aesthetics would prevail. For writers like Tolkien, Waugh and Greene, however, who steadfastly (and at times shrilly) maintained their faith against the stresses of their society, art was not something to substitute for meaning, but a vehicle whereby they could embody their faith and render it concrete for others.

I’ve always thought that in both cases the results were the same – as soon as one places all of one’s faith in art, then the art can never stop or cease, because that would be the death of faith. In this respect, I’ve always thought it fair to compare Tolkien’s writing to James Joyce’s. Each of them had a brilliant and early success in which they did something that no-one had done before: for Joyce it was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for Tolkien The Hobbit. They then each went on to write a more elaborate and mature ‘sequel’ that came to surpass the original achievement and become, in effect, created worlds all of their own – the Dublin of Ulysses is no less fully realised a sub-creation than the Middle-Earth of LotR. But having written their great works, neither one of them could cease. Each had invested so much of themselves and of their faith into their art, that for each of them, their art had become their new faith. So Joyce took his radical experimentation further and further, trying to give his faith the greatest expression possible, and the result is the almost unreadable Finnegan’s Wake. Tolkien did the same, and the result was the vast repository of his later writings only dimly captured in Christopher Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

Both Joyce and Tolkien tried to ‘fix’ a broken world and faith through their arts – but the only way they could do this was to create an art so vast that one could fit the world into it. For Joyce, he tried to cram every detail of Dublin into his works, to the point where the narratives simply fall apart beneath the weight. For Tolkien, he tried to so fully realise his secondary world that it became an end to itself in neglect of the primary world. For both of them, their art become and end to itself, which is both their great strength and weakness as writers.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem ,

Another long reply! Sorry....

I agree with much of what you say. Tolkien told us he had intended to create a "mythology for England" and he certainly drew on the example of Elias Lönnrat and Finland. Garth provided the 'missing piece' in the puzzle by showing us how Tolkien "inherited" the TCBS mantle of using writing to prompt a "moral regeneration".

About two years ago (perhaps before you came?), we had a wide-ranging but disjointed discussion of the English elements reflected in Tolkien's Middle-earth (Victorian, medieval and otherwise) and the issue of whether the author was attempting to create a "mythology for England". The discussion was spread out over several threads and by pm, and addressed a range of topics: class relations, the characterization of Bilbo, the nature of the Shire and its relation to faerie, as well as how the "myth of England" underlay the Legendarium via place names, narrators, etc. I defended the idea that the desire to create such a myth for England was central to Tolkien right from the beginning and took several hard knocks from others who regarded the motivation as more linguistic, or who thought I was pressing too hard.

Before I read Shippey and Garth, even before the Letters and Silm were published, I could sense some of this as I read Hobbit and LotR (although I had no idea about moral regeneration or TCBS.). Strangely enough, this undertone sent me chasing back into medieval history and lit, and I have since learned that I was not the only one to do this. In that sense, I think Shippey is absolutely right about Tolkien:

He did not think he was entirely making it up. He was 'reconstructing', he was harmonizing contradictions in his source-texts, sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits) but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination: and for this he had a very great deal of admittedly scattered evidence.

The part I find harder to answer is this.... Did Tolkien ever actually give up this belief in reconstructing what was already there--in effect the recapturing of a myth for England? Is Sea Bell or even Leaf by Niggle an admission of failure in that regard? Did he simply settle for inventing an independent fantasy world that had no real basis in reality? And how do we understand his later attempt to incorporate "theological and scientific thinking" into the Legendarium itself?

You are absolutely right to ask what impact the Nazi abuse of the Nordic myths had on his own thinking and writing, especially in relation to what Garth has shown. I haven't heard this issue seriously discussed before and it is worth a lot of thought. But I don't think we have enough evidence to come up with an answer.

Like Aiwendil, I am cautious. I don't think Tolkien ever totally gave up the "dream" of myth creation, even if the Nazi experience might have made him more cautious about the possible end results. To me, myth still lies at the heart of the Silm. I would take the author's flip assertion in the Milton Waldman letter of 1951-- the point where he mocks his myth creation with the exclamation "Absurd"-- as more indicative of the kind of humility that marked the man rather than an actual repudiation of myth creation itself.

I also think you have to be very careful about the chronology of all this in building any case. For example, you cite Shippey's study (don't think I saw this -- where is it?) in which he shows how English characters are psychically linked to the past vis a vis the Lost Road and The Notion Club papers as an instance of Tolkien trying to link things to an actual past. The Lost Road does come from the pre-Nazi era, but The Notion Club papers weren't done till 1945, which is after the Nazi regime had been exposed. Why would he do this if the Nazi example had caused him to shy away from myth building as too "dangerous" and capable of abuse. You also mention the first and second forewards of LotR (the contrast) as evidence of a shift, but both of these came some time after the war itself.

As to what's unpublished - well, we don't have his diaries, & the only letters Christopher Tolkien has allowed to be published are the ones that relate directly to Middle earth. Lets speculate on a 'nightmare scenario' some letters from the early thirties, where, before the horrors of Nazism have appeared, or at least been made known - Tolkien sees Germany arising from the depression, inspired by the nordic myths & fired by the noble northern spirit, & makes some positive comments. Of course, as soon as the truth about Nazism comes out he rejects it all immediately, but if such letters, or diary passages, existed, one could understand CRT not wanting them to appear

This would be a sobering thing and lend support to your views. However, we have so very little from the 1920s and 1930s that we can only speculate.

That draft letter to Carole Batten-Phelps from 1971 has always struck me--the one where the prominent visitor asked: "Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?" Then Tolkien responded, "No, I don't suppose so any longer." This can be interpreted so many ways. It can be tied in with the theological tones that underlie the later Legendarium, but it can also be seen as a validation of the point that Shippey raised: that an imaginative realm of myth existed, which Tolkien felt he was tapping into. Somehow, I don't think that myth disappeared, even if it changed in form and content. The Nazi experience undoubtedly disheartened him, and I think you are right in stating that it should be looked at more seriously. Yet it was not, to my mind, at least not without more evidence, the dominant factor that you've suggested.

Thanks for this thread. It has gotten me thinking.

*************************

Fordim -

Sorry! I am so long-winded that we cross posted. I think your last paragraph has much to say.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Child

For example, you cite Shippey's study (don't think I saw this -- where is it?) in which he shows how English characters are psychically linked to the past vis a vis the Lost Road and The Notion Club papers as an instance of Tolkien trying to link things to an actual past.

It wasn't Shippey, it was Verlyn Flieger. The essay is 'Do the Atlantis story & abandon Eriol Saga' in vol 1 of Tolkien Studies (just published). Her thesis is that Tolkien was experimenting with the idea of linking the past to the present by having a pair of characters, in some form of 'father/son' relationship, linking back through time, through known history, & back through mythic pre-history to Middle earth. The Eriol saga depended on written transmission of the mythic past via the Golden Book, whereas in the time travel stories the link is psychic, passing downd through some kind of dna/reincarnatory transmission - a point I tried to introduce into the discussion on the Fog on the Barrow Downs chapter, where Merry awakens with intense memories of being killed by the men of Carn Dum. So, the past is in a sense inherited, providing a living connection with what had been. The past is accessible through dream & memory to English people - perhaps explainin g Tolkien's own sense of not having created the mythology, but rather 'discovered' it.

I have to say that this idea of the effect of WW2 on Tolkien was inspired, as I mentioned in the Barrow Downs chapter which first sparked off my PM debate with Aiwendil, is an essay in Tolkien the Medievalist by Christine Chism: Middle earth, the Middle Ages, & the Aryan Nation: Myth & History in WWII.

The Lord of the Rings is a tale of the renunciation of mythology & the willed return to history. The Ring - that wierdly empty, wierdly powerful object around which the narrative assembles itself - interrogates the imaginative capacity for world creation itself. Middle earth unfolds, grows more intricate, more peopled, more culturally diverse, more deep as we wander through it, but it blooms forth only in the shadow of its own imminent destruction. The loss of the Ring consignes Middle earth to the joys & depridations of history - & this consignment to history is costly. It is no accident that the loss of the Ring maims Frodo forever & disenchants Middle earth - it is also, possibly, no accident that the Lord of the Rings is the last long narrative that the author completed. And, finally, I argue, it is no accident that teh writing of this renunciatory narrative occuoies dark night after dark night, during a time when Germany was mobilising & recasting heroic "'Germanic' ideals" to articulate & impose its own terrifying new world.

(She goes on to note)
However, I think that Tolkien's construction of Englishness in his characterisation of the Shire is to be distinguished from Hitler's Nordic nationalism, chiefly by its self-positioning as always already tiny, precarious & half lost. It emerges in teh shadow of a destruction so inexorable that nothing could recover it - neither a triumphant political, cultural, & military nationalist program (which would destroy it further as Saruman shows) nor a past-sanctifying politics of heritage. The Red Book that Frodo bequeaths to Sam ends in blank pages open to subsequent narration. We are continually reminded that the Shire is a part of Middle earth & that the parochialism of Hobbits is both delusory & idiotic. An open-bordered country, an open-ended history book, & a need to open the minds of parochail inhabitants to the larger world they inhabit - all offer interesting resistances to traditional nationalisms.

Christine Chism

In letter 234 Tolkien writes:

I did not foresee that before the tale was published we should enter a dark age in which the technique of torture & disruption of personality would rival that of Mordor & the Ring & present us with the practical problems of hinest men of good will broken down into apostates & traitors.

I do take on board Fordim's points

Originally Posted by Fordim

The War to End Wars, the dawning recognition among Englishmen of the essentially totalitarian and despotic nature of their Empire, the breakdown of communal faith, class revolution and consciousness, mechanisation, industrialisation, urbanisation – all of these stresses had been operative for a long time, and resulted in what we now rather inaccurately call the Modernist Crisis.

Yet, as I said, Tolkien's desire to create a mythology for England grew out of this situation, & was Tolkien's attempt to provide a 'cure' for it. His 'mythology' was to be the antidote to all those things, & would help to make England once more what (he believed) it had been. Thirty years later, its simply a long story with, 'in the intention of the author' 'no inner meaning or message. It is neither allegorical nor topical. So, out of the horrors of WW1 Tolkien arises inspired to change the world (or at least his own small part of it. Out of the horrors of WW2 he arises 'inspired' by a very different desire:

The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, & at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.

So something had happened. And we're left with three possibilities - One: it was simply a matter of Tolkien growing older, & renouncing the ambitions held by his younger self as simply 'youthful folly'. Two: it was the rise of Nazism & the horror & destruction it produced. Three: it was a combination of both those options. I lean to option two, if pushed, but I don't reject out of hand option three. Option one simply doesn't work for me.

Again

Originally Posted by Child

I don't think Tolkien ever totally gave up the "dream" of myth creation, even if the Nazi experience might have made him more cautious about the possible end results. To me, myth still lies at the heart of the Silm.

I agree, but the issue is what he intended that myth to do, what effect he intended it to have. Initially he intended it to change England & the English, & he wanted it to do that from the last days of WW1 when he began The Book of Lost Tales. By the time he had completed LotR he no longer wanted it to do that (if we can believe what he tells us in the Foreword to LotR). Its not a question of whether he ever gave up myth creation, which he never did, its about what he was creating the myth for, what he wanted it to do, & why his desire changed between beginning BoLT & completing LotR.

I think what's needed is a sequel to Tolkien & the Great War: Tolkien & the Second World War. John Garth is suppposed to be attending Oxonmoot again this year (he was there last year reading excerpts from his book) - I may suggest it to him if I get a chance.