Tolkien's Cosmology

Sam McBride

Description

Demonstrating the unity of Tolkien's created world across Middle-earth's Ages An in-depth examination of the role of divine beings in Tolkien's work, Tolkien's Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth brings together Tolkien's many references to such beings and analyzes their involvement within his created world. Unlike many other commentators, Sam McBride asserts that a careful reading of the whole of the author's corpus shows a coherent, if sometimes contradictory, divine presence in the world.In The Silmarillion, an epic history of the First Age of Middle-earth, Tolkien describes the Ainur, angelic beings under the direction of Eru Ilvatar, the legendarium's god, as creators of physical reality. Some of these divine beings, the Valar and the Maiar, enter physical reality to oversee its development and prepare for the appearance of sentient life forms in Middle-earth: Elves and Humans, Dwarves, and eventually Hobbits. In the early stages of this history, the Valar and Maiar interact directly with Elves and Humans, opposing the work of evil beings led by Melkor.Yet Tolkien appears, at first glance, to have ignored this pantheon in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, set in the Third Age of Middle-earth. Tolkien's letters, however, suggest the cosmological structure continues. And representatives of the Valar and Maiar can be seen at work, such as Gandalf and Saruman. Tolkien also introduces hints that his divine beings continue to influence events invisibly, as with the prominence of luck in The Hobbit and fortuitous weather conditions in The Lord of the Rings.In the end, McBride argues, Tolkien's cosmology allows room for everything from poor decision-making to evil, suffering, and death, all part of a belief system that will make the final victory of Good much more powerful.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• Reino Unido
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Philosophy of religion
• English
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• Anglais
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781631014031
• Langue: English

Extrait

Tolkien’s Cosmology
olkien’s Cosmology
Divine Beings and Middle-earth
Sam McBride

The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2020 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-396-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Introduction: Seeking the Divine in Middle-earth
1 Tolkien’s Cosmogony and Pantheon
2 The Valar in the World
3 Divine Intervention in the Third Age: Visible Powers
4 Divine Intervention in the Third Age: Invisible Powers
5 The Problem of Evil in Arda
6 Death
7 Eucatastrophe, Estel, and the End of Arda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Seeking the Divine in Middle-earth
hortly after publishing The Two Towers, J. R. R. Tolkien admitted his annoyance at two strands of criticism by early reviewers: first that the book lacked religion, and second that it lacked female characters. The second of these two annoyances, and Tolkien’s assertion that an absence of female characters “does not matter,” prompted my analysis of Tolkien’s views on gender in my book with Candice Fredrick, Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. I now turn to the first of these annoyances, that critics found “no religion” 1 in The Two Towers. My book has its foundation in answering the following question: why should Tolkien feel annoyed by critics who find no religion in his tale?
This question begs another one: what prompted Tolkien to think The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings in general, does contain religion? If based solely on the evidence provided by the story itself, I agree with the early critics. The story portrays no religious characters: no priests, no prophets, no shamans. It includes no religious sites: no churches, no altars, no holy ground. Middle-earth’s residents show no religious practice: no rites or rituals, no sense of worship, no prayers (or at least nothing overtly identified as prayer). Flieger adds that Tolkien’s work “has no miracles, no holy hermits, no Grail, no didactic allegory.” 2 Even Tolkien admitted that few Hobbits engage in prayer or worship, and then only those with strong connections to Elves. 3 Indeed, a reading of Tolkien’s story suggests the author successfully created a world lacking religion; readers might agree with early critics, such as Moorman, that “Middle-earth … is the stark, basically pessimistic world of the [Norse] sagas in which God does not intervene in human conflicts.” 4
This doesn’t make the book purely naturalistic; in fact, authors such as Caldecott write of Tolkien as “one of the greatest spiritual writers of our time.” 5 Glimpses of a metaphysical reality do appear. Gandalf’s power comes from somewhere, and not apparently some vague force, ā la Star Wars. Elves who leave Middle-earth go somewhere, and across the sea seems to be someplace inaccessible to non-Elves; in addition, that journey appears one-way, with no return. These elements “show providential planning at work,” according to Ellwood. 6 Furthermore, evil appears obviously metaphysical in The Lord of the Rings. The Eye of Sauron is not a device or machinery, like the One Ring; instead, the Eye seems a metaphor (or perhaps metonymy) for a metaphysical power. Additionally, the story conveys a strong ethic: evil is clearly evil, and thus should be opposed. Sauron, the primary antagonist in the story, is obviously not the source and origin of evil, but only its current primary exponent, just as Gandalf is a representative of good.
A clearly developed ethics and hints of metaphysical reality suggest more than meets the eye in Middle-earth. Pearce asserts, “Those who fail to see the far-off gleam of evangelium in Tolkien’s work are those who are not looking for it.” 7 But an awareness of metaphysical cosmos, whether on the part of characters or readers, is not the same as basing behaviors on an awareness of the divine, which could serve as a simplified definition of religion. What Middle-earth lacks is “the machinery of orthodox piety,” as Urang describes it, 8 not a metaphysics. Brawley explains this state of affairs by suggesting the book offers “a connection to the numinous,” which in turn provides readers “the experience of the holy [but] without relying on traditional religious motifs.” 9 Similarly, Madsen finds in The Lord of the Rings “religious feeling … without ritual, revelation, doctrine, indeed without God.” 10 Religious effects, Brawley and Madsen insist, without actual religion.
One could speculate that Tolkien felt upset over the criticism of “no religion” in his book solely because the criticism implies that his book ought to contain religion. Yet why should readers expect religion to appear within the story? First, Tolkien firmly embraced Catholicism; it would be unsurprising if elements in The Lord of the Rings reflect the Catholic theology Tolkien loved and admired. Second, he formed a strong friendship with C. S. Lewis, the foremost Christian apologist of the twentieth century. Like Tolkien, Lewis created a fictional world (Narnia) with characteristics borrowed from mythology and medieval Europe; Lewis’s stories, however, contain enough Christian symbolism to verge on Christian allegory. Considering the extent to which the two men thought themselves like-minded, one might expect Tolkien’s work to parallel Lewis’s.
Furthermore, Tolkien’s nonfiction writings, including his scholarly essay “On Fairy-stories” (a foundational text for theorizing fantasy literature), openly embrace theism; Bossert argues that Tolkien followed the teachings of Pope Pius X that a scholar should not “divorce his academic persona from his religious persona.” 11 Tolkien himself acknowledges spiritual dimensions of his writing, finding even in Lembas a reference to the sacred Eucharist. Christianity, Tolkien told one correspondent, “can be deduced from my stories.” He added that he felt no compulsion to make his fiction fit with Christian orthodoxy, though at the same time he did intend a consonance between the two. 12 As Ring summarizes, “Middle-earth can best be interpreted on the basis of an underlying layer of Christian concepts … in Tolkien’s writing, the supposition of which is supported by his friendships and non-fiction works.” 13
Equally important, Tolkien relies on characteristics of epic literature in his story. He frequently alludes to characters and tales long past, suggesting an underlying mythology. To a first-time reader, this name-dropping may feel distracting, but it leaves an impression of a deeper, richer history behind the story. Of course, the presence of the divine forms a major element in epic literature and mythology. As a product of the British educational system, Tolkien knew well the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses, and as a specialist in ancient Scandinavian languages, he loved the Norse and Icelandic sagas. Thus, the apparent lack of religious elements in Tolkien’s story might surprise readers, since divine beings form an expected element of the genre. All these factors contributed to early critical surprise that The Lord of the Rings lacked a religious dimension.
Searching for Valasse
Despite the critics’ observations, Tolkien certainly felt that he did incorporate religious elements into The Lord of the Rings. The central conflict, Tolkien explained, concerns God’s right to honor from his creation. Though not an allegory, he added, the tale uses religious concepts and assumes a “natural theology” for its characters. 14 Many readers perceive traces of this “natural theology”; Dickerson notes the “strong sense in The Lord of the Rings and even in The Hobbit, that the Wise of Middle-earth—especially Gandalf and Elrond—have a faith in a power higher than themselves…. [T]here is both a seen and an unseen in Tolkien’s Middle-earth: both a material plane and a spiritual plane.” 15
To grasp the extent and characteristics of that “spiritual plane” with its “natural theology,” however, one must immerse oneself in the massive quantities of Middle-earth material Tolkien wrote besides The Lord of the Rings. These materials reveal the scope of Tolkien’s work as subcreator, as a writer who “dared to build / Gods and their houses out of dark and light.” 16 Tolkien believed the impulse to create imaginary worlds itself evidences metaphysical reality; humans create because they are made in the image of a creator. 17 Many of the writings that serve as a background to The Lord of the Rings are overtly religious; that is, they show the presence of the divine, valasse in Tolkien’s invented Quenya, 18 and the responses of created beings to divine beings. Exploring Tolkien’s legendarium will show the cosmological structure of Middle-earth, but also reveal moments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when the metaphysical impacts the physical.
The approach I embrace here, examining the totality of Tolkien’s Middle- earth-related writings in search of a coherent cosmology, differs from a productive strand of Tolkien criticism, that of tracing developments in Tolkien’s stories over the course of the fifty-five years he wrote them. Rateliff, for example, in The History of the Hobbit argues that the world of The Hobbit differs from the world of The Lord of the Rings. The One Ring, a mere magic ring in the earlier book, shows few signs of developing into an obsession for Bilbo or into an object that might lead to the downfall of the free world. Gandalf of the latter story is “ennobled” in contrast with “the wandering wizard who flits in and out” of The Hobbit. Blurring the distinction between the two books, Rateliff argues, may cause readers to “make assu