Re: 'Das Rheingold' DVD



I believe Tolkien said that the only thing his Ring had in
common with Wagner's was that they both were round


Can we find Tolkien's Ring in the real world?

Stratford Caldecott


The writer JRR Tolkien has been called an "environmentalist" ahead of
his time, and it was partly the love of nature shining through his
writing that helped to make him a cult figure in the 1960s. The
hippies recognised in the obscure Oxford don who had written The Lord
of the Rings a prophet after their own heart. He had created a myth,
not just for England (as he had originally intended) but for the whole
modern world, as it seeks to recover something that had almost been
lost to our civilisation: a sense of respect for the living whole to
which we belong.

In his letters, Tolkien refers to the "tragedy and despair" of modern
reliance on technology. In the novel, this tragedy is vividly
illustrated in many ways, not least by the corrupted wizard Saruman,
with his "mind of metal and wheels". In the modern world, with its
ecological disasters and its factory farms, we have seen the
devastating and dehumanising effects of Saruman's purely pragmatic
approach to nature. The English Romantic movement, from Blake and
Coleridge to the Inklings, believed there must be an alternative. At
the end of his wonderful essay The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis writes
of a "regenerate science" of the future that "would not do even to
minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man
himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of
the parts it would remember the whole".

For modern science, as for black magic, the goal is power over the
forces of nature. But the "magician's bargain" tells us the price of
such power: our own souls. For, says Lewis, the conquest of nature
turns out to be our conquest by nature, that is to say by our own
desires or those of others; and the Master becomes, in the end, a
puppet.

Tolkien explores two different types of technology, two different
understandings of science, through the contrast in his story between
the Elves and the Enemy: the goal of the former is Art, whereas the
aim of the latter is "domination and tyrannous re-forming of
Creation". The science (or "magic") of the Elves has not been
separated from art as it is in our day; indeed, it is a form of art.
The devices of the Elves are benign. They work with the grain of
nature, not against it.

The science of the Enemy, in Tolkien's world, is very different. It
issues from a mentality of control. The desire for power, he writes,
"leads to the Machine": by which he means the use of our talents or
devices to bulldoze other wills. The Ring of Power, the "One Ring to
bring them all and in the darkness bind them", is a symbol or example
of this kind of technology: the ultimate Machine.

And so the Ring - which in The Return of the King is cast back into
the Fire - is still with us. The task of unmaking it remains as a
quest for us to undertake, if we have the courage for it. We must form
a new Fellowship, and take the path that the Evil One will least
expect: the path of foolishness and humility.

Tolkien always insisted that his fantasy was not an allegory. Mordor
was not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia (or Saddam's Iraq). "To ask if
the orcs 'are' communists is to me as sensible as asking if communists
are orcs," he once wrote. But at the same time he did not deny that
the story was "applicable" to contemporary affairs, indeed he affirmed
this. It is applicable not merely in providing a parable to illustrate
the danger of the machine, but in showing the reasons for that danger:
sloth and stupidity, pride, greed, folly and lust for power, all
exemplified in the various races of Middle-earth.

Against these vices he set courage and courtesy, kindness and
humility, generosity and wisdom, in those same hearts. There is a
universal moral law, but it is not the law of a tyrant. It is the law
that makes it possible for us to be free. These are lessons and
instincts that Tolkien learned from his Catholic upbringing. He
attended daily Mass, and the worldview of Christianity underlies
everything he wrote.

What he could see so clearly, but which the mentality of our age so
often fails to recognise, is that in making devices like the Ring to
increase our domination of our enemies and of nature, we inevitably
make ourselves weaker by becoming dependent on the devices themselves.
They magnify our power but also externalise it, so that we ourselves
wither by their use. When they are destroyed, that weakness is
exposed. Thus Sauron, when the Ring is destroyed, literally blows away
on the wind.

The search for worldly control - power over nature and over others,
which is to say "technological" and "psychological" power - is in the
end self-defeating. The only true power is spiritual, and is exercised
primarily over oneself. Aragorn, who becomes King Elessar, illustrates
Tolkien's understanding of true authority. The ruler who first rules
himself is also able genuinely to represent his people. He is not a
man isolated and alone, but a man loved and supported by others. If he
does not impose his own will upon others, thereby dissipating it, the
will of his subordinates will flourish and support him. In the long
run, a society built on respect and mutual support is always going to
be stronger than a pseudo-society built on fear and self-interest.

Tolkien was always conscious of the temptation that besets the
righteous: to employ an evil means in a good cause. This was how the
great had fallen, how Denethor and his son Boromir were deceived, how
Gandalf and Galadriel might easily have fallen, and how we ourselves
can still fall. Aragorn triumphs over this temptation. Evil must not
be done for the sake of the good. This has many important
implications, in
Middle England and the Middle East as much as in Middle-earth. Even
the orcs, who appear utterly evil and "must be fought with the utmost
severity", Tolkien writes in one of his notebooks, "must not be dealt
with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be
tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the
homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy,
they must be granted it, even at a cost".

The world Tolkien describes is our own, though he does so in the mode
of fantasy, and the story he tells us is one that continues in our own
day. The world of nature and the soul of man are still under attack.
We too need the King to take his throne, in his "great stone castle
away down south". For then we can go back to our own polluted
landscape, with its mean brick houses and its small-minded officials,
its devastated orchards and missing avenues of trees. We can return
there endowed with the authority of servants and friends of the King,
to commence our own task, the task which awaits us at home: the
scouring of the Shire.

The above article were orignally published in the 26th December 2003
issue of The Catholic Herald.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: On the Ainur
    ... directed specifically to the situation where the One Ring was ... *destruction* of the transferred power. ... Sauron retained that ability as long as the Ring existed and no-one ... but the truly significant weakening of Sauron's ...
    (rec.arts.books.tolkien)
  • Re: Sauron vs Morgoth (Re: A far higher order ??)
    ... Because his *personal* power was diminished from dispersing it into the ... His real control was through the Morgoth ... and that of Sauron were quite different. ... Say rather that all of *Arda* was 'Morgoth's Ring'. ...
    (rec.arts.books.tolkien)
  • Re: On the Ainur
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    (rec.arts.books.tolkien)
  • Re: The One Ring -- pure evil or just really, really evil?
    ... absolute power corrupts absolutely. ... What made the Ring ... >We know that Sauron himself did not start off being evil (I think Elrond ... Tolkien says that no one is beyond redemption, so I guess we have to ...
    (rec.arts.books.tolkien)
  • Re: Sauron vs Morgoth (Re: A far higher order ??)
    ... Morgoth was simply into blind destruction. ... Say rather that all of *Arda* was 'Morgoth's Ring'. ... Power is relative and Sauron, even with his Ring, was still of an order ...
    (rec.arts.books.tolkien)