J. R. R. Tolkien’s Work Transcends ‘Wokeness’

‘A fter the annihilating traumas of the last century, it’s merely perverse to ascribe greatness to this airy but strangely simplified mock Teutonic never-never land, where races and species intermingle at will and great battles are fought but there is never any remotely convincing treatment of those fundamental human concerns through which all societies ultimately define themselves — religion, philosophy, politics, and the conduct of sexual relations,” Andrew Rissik wrote in the year 2000 in the Guardian. Rissik was by no means alone in his criticism of what was then being recognized as the most popular book of the 20th century. Others made similar comments, all aghast at the primacy of place that The Lord of the Rings had won. Germaine Greer thought the trilogy reactionary against the 20th century, as it ignored “politics, wars, the black movement, and [the] sexual revolution.” “Tolkien–that’s for children, isn’t it? Or the adult slow,” Susan Jeffreys wrote in the London Times. “It just shows the folly of these polls, the folly of teaching people to read.”

Jump forward two decades, and the once venerable Tolkien Society of the United Kingdom — established in 1969 with J. R. R. Tolkien as its perennial president and Tolkien’s only daughter, Priscilla Tolkien, as vice president — really wants to undo the harsh words of Rissik, Greer, and Jeffreys. How? By talking a lot about the most pressing concerns of the modern and woke Left — diversity, inclusivity, and, above all, sexuality.

As the Tolkien Society website describes its upcoming annual conference, “Tolkien and Diversity”:

While interest in the topic of diversity has steadily grown within Tolkien research, it is now receiving more critical attention than ever before. Spurred by recent interpretations of Tolkien’s creations and the cast list of the upcoming Amazon show The Lord of the Rings, it is crucial we discuss the theme of diversity in relation to Tolkien. How do adaptations of Tolkien’s works (from film and art to music) open a discourse on diversity within Tolkien’s works and his place within modern society? Beyond his secondary-world, diversity further encompasses Tolkien’s readership and how his texts exist within the primary world. Who is reading Tolkien? How is he understood around the globe? How may these new readings enrich current perspectives on Tolkien?

Discussions, as listed at the website, include: “Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings”; “Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”; “The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism”; “The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack’”; “Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!”; and, most enigmatic, “‘Something Mighty Queer’: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien.”

While I have yet to read the papers and know only the titles for reference — some of which are so obscure and obtuse that I remain in a state of some confusion — let’s, for a moment, consider “Pardoning Saruman? The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In what way is Saruman, an incarnate Maia angel, sent by the Valar to do good in Middle-earth (Saruman really fails at this), queer? Is he in love with himself? True, with his immense ego, he might very well have been. Is he in love with Orthanc? Perhaps, but there is nothing in the text to support this. Is he in love with Radagast the Brown? No, he considers him a fool. Is he in love with Gandalf the Grey? No, he’s jealous of Gandalf and had been from their first arrival in Middle-earth. Is he in love with his bred Orcs? Wow, this would be twisted. Is he in love with Wormtongue? If so, nothing will come of it, for the lecherous Wormtongue has a leering and creepy gaze only for Eowyn. And, so, I remain baffled by all of this. Nothing about a queer Saruman seems to make sense.

Given the language as well as the ideas expressed (even if confusedly so), what is the 2021 Tolkien Society conference really hoping to uncover?

Over at the Federalist, John Daniel Davidson convincingly notes: “The only reason to torture Tolkien’s work like this is not to understand it more deeply but to tear it down. And why would modern scholars want to do that? Because everything that Tolkien was, and everything he wrote, is an affront to the modern secular scholar’s understanding of the world, reality, and the meaning and purpose of life.” One could say the same thing about most of academia, however. There is something rapacious in the paper titles that just screams seduction of the innocent. The timing of the conference is telling as well; the Tolkien Society waited a full year after Christopher Tolkien’s death to announce and arrange “Tolkien and Diversity.”

Still, aside from simply being woke and employing outrageous jargon, the Tolkien Society is anticipating a successful Amazon.com series. It’s trying to get in front of the series and influence it. Indeed, the statement goes so far as to claim the society’s own conference is “critical.” This, I would guess, is the real reason it wants so desperately to reinterpret Tolkien. Some of this, of course, is Tolkien’s own fault, as he had very consciously and willfully sold the movie rights to his world long ago. By so doing, he made a considerable profit, but he also sold out his (or the estate’s) control. Just as Peter Jackson rearranged and rewrote huge parts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, so, too, will Amazon.com in its television series. If the rumors are true, the show will depict a rather sexualized Middle-earth, having been influenced by Game of Thrones.

What would Tolkien (1892–1973) make of all of this? He was, after all, so conservative and so Roman Catholic as to seem reactionary. Born in South Africa to English parents, Tolkien lost his father when he was a small boy, and his mother succumbed to disease when he was twelve. A family friend, Father Francis Morgan, then cared for Tolkien until 1916, when Tolkien married. After serving bravely during World War I, Tolkien took a job with the Oxford English Dictionary, started a family, and taught first at the University of Leeds, and, then, Pembroke College, Oxford, and Merton College, Oxford. Though he did not publish The Hobbit — his first novel — until 1937, he had been developing his rather massive mythology since around 1913. That mythology — the history of Middle-earth — took up all of Tolkien’s adult life as well as the adult life of his youngest son, Christopher. And, despite two generations of Tolkiens building the mythology, certain Tolkien writings still remain unseen and unpublished. The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion are really just manifestations of the whole mythology. It was a massive undertaking, resulting in a legendarium rivaling the great mythologies of Homer, Virgil, and Dante.

Contrary to what the woke crowd might contend (or pretend), all of Tolkien’s mythology was rooted in his deep and abiding Christian faith. He considered his mother a Catholic martyr, he always carried with him his rosary, and he had a strong and somewhat mystical devotion to both the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin Mary. In December 1953, he wrote to a close priest friend: “I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” While much of the Catholicism exists in the very structure of Tolkien’s mythology, it sometimes is revealed blatantly. In Tolkien’s first Elvish dictionary, written while he was serving the trenches of World War I, vocabulary words such as “evangelist,” “missionary,” “monk,” the three persons of the Most Blessed Trinity, and “holy” appear frequently. In The Lord of the Rings specifically, as Tolkien himself noted in interviews and correspondence, the lembas — the waybread of the Elves — is the Eucharist; Aragorn is a representation of a Christian king; and when Gandalf fights the balrog in Moria, the wizard announces himself to the fiery demon as a servant of the “Secret Fire.” The “Secret Fire,” Tolkien told Clyde Kilby, is one of the names of the Holy Spirit.

It was not only in Tolkien’s mythology that he revealed so openly his Christianity. In one of his most famous academic addresses, given at the University of St. Andrews in 1939, Tolkien told his audience that the only true myth was the Christ story, and that all other myths — to be good and true — must reflect it.

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creature, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable euchatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the euchatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.

To reject this understanding, Tolkien concluded, “leads either to sadness or to wrath.”

Being Catholic gave Tolkien great energy and great strength, but it also gave him a rather Augustinian view of the world and of history. “Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic,” Tolkien explained in December 1956, “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.”

In the 1960s, Tolkien tried to write a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, “The New Shadow,” setting the story some 100 years after the War of the Ring. He stopped it rather quickly, though, as it became too depressing:

Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage.

While I don’t fully know or understand the motives of the Tolkien Society and the intent of its annual conference, it seems to me that in our gloriously decadent 21st-century society, the authors at that conference will be playing Orc, proving, yet again, Tolkien’s own convictions about the Long Defeat. Still, with all of their sexual obsessions, the participants of the Tolkien Society conference might very well prove Rissik, Jeffreys, and Greer wrong. So, at least there’s some good to come out of the conference. Indeed, as we consider the enduring value of Tolkien’s work, we might wonder what else both his critics and his misinterpreters are wrong about.