JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

Andvari's ring vs Sauron's ring

A happy coincidence: Yesterday morning saw the arrival of the latest episode of The Rest is History, in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk through Tolkien’s life and work. This was the morning after I read my two older kids the story of the cursed ring and the tragedy of Sirgurð and Brynhild in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen.

So I was primed to think about magic rings. (Not that it takes much.) Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion is excellent and thought-provoking, especially as they point out the ways in which Tolkien was essentially modern. Tolkien came of age among the World War I generation, and Holland and Sandbrook point out some interesting resonances of his work with that of more obviously modern writers like Eliot and Joyce, with whom Tolkien shares some surprising interests, sympathies, concerns, and suspicions—not least his suspicion of technology. That suspicion permeates Tolkien’s work but he articulates the dangerous allure of technology most fully and clearly as the Ring, and thanks to Green the original was already on my mind from the night before. That’s Andvaranaut, the cursed ring of the dwarf Andvari.

In the Volsunga saga, Regin relates a story to the hero Sigurð regarding the origins of the treasure guarded by the dragon Fáfnir. Having unwittingly killed Ótr, one of the three sons of Hreiðmar, the god Loki agrees to pay Hreiðmar for the killing and funds the repayment by stealing it from Andvari. He captures Andvari and will only ransom him for his entire hoard. Here’s the key moment in Jackson Crawford’s translation:

Loki saw all the gold that Andvari owned. And after he had taken all of it, Andvari still had one single ring, and Loki took that from him as well. The dwarf then hid inside a stone and said that this ring and the gold would cause the death of everyone who owned it.

In Reginsmál, a poem in the Poetic Edda, Andvari utters this in verse:

This gold
that Gust used to own
will cause the death
of two brothers,
and cause grief
for eight kings.
No one will enjoy
my treasure.

True to Andvari’s curse, the ring immediately works its baleful magic upon Loki, Óðin, and Hreiðmar and goes on to cause, in Green’s phrase, “ruin and sorrow” for many more.

This may be the original inspiration for Sauron’s One Ring, but, as I noted recently, Tolkien was annoyed by suggestions that his ring was merely the sum of his inspirations. (Per Tom Shippey, “People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases.’”) These passages highlight the key difference.

Both rings work evil: Andvari’s ring because it is cursed and Sauron’s ring because of what it is—what it was designed and made to do. It is an instrument, a technology designed to achieve certain ends. And like any technology, its relationship with its users is not one-way. As all technologies subtly warp their users’ needs and preferences to conform to what the technologies can provide, Tolkien brilliantly depicts the way the ring foreshortens and limits the options of those who use it, so that they only begin by using it and end up desiring it. As he wrote in 1944 regarding the methods used even by the Allies during World War II: “[w]e are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.”

Technologies are not neutral. The danger of technologies to all who use them rather than the danger of a curse—this insight is both the most modern thing about Tolkien and among the greatest lessons he can still teach us.

You can read some related thoughts—on the possibility of using Twitter for good—from back in the spring here, and here’s an excellent essay on Tolkien by Sandbrook at UnHerd. Here’s a seven-minute summary from Crawford of the whole complicated Andvari incident. And Roger Lancelyn Green is, for my money, the most underappreciated Inkling and his Myths of the Norsemen has been the ideal bedtime read for my seven- and five-year old. Do check it out.

Tolkien and true tradition

Jackson Crawford’s video on The Hammer and the Cross yesterday morning got me leafing back through my Tom Shippey, and having recently reread the Nibelungenlied got me looking for it in the index of The Road to Middle Earth. The most interesting reference to the poem in this particular book came in an appendix, “Tolkien’s Sources: The True Tradition.”

Shippey begins with a caveat:

Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else.

This is exactly right. Understanding the sources, inspirations, and influences behind a work of literature can be instructive, but the Quellenforschung too easily turns from an inquiry into the past of a living specimen to the dismemberment of a corpse. The once-living creature—not to mention its creator—is often lost from sight in the process.

Before turning to the sources, inspirations, and influences of Tolkien’s work, Shippey elaborates upon the difference in Tolkien’s attitude toward the use of sources for modern retellings and the way he used them for that work:

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic, which is why I use the phrase ‘true tradition’. Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of ‘the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring’, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

This is a remarkably insightful passage, and helped give me the language for something I’ve felt within myself for many years: that same irritation with modern reinterpretations that “get something important not quite right,” that are “failures of tone and spirit.” This might as well be the thesis statement, for example, of my review of The Green Knight a year ago, and it also helps me understand why despite my love for Tolkien I’ve hardly ever liked any other fantasy fiction I’ve read. The few I have—The Lord of the Rings, The Prydain Chronicles—are animated by at least something of a discernible “true tradition.” The ones I have not—A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time—have the trappings but not the tradition, the form but not the spirit. If only Tolkien could see the use his work has been put to, now.

Devotion to a true tradition demands hard work and a lifetime of dedication, but it’s worth it. Food for thought.

If you want to dive into some of Tolkien’s true tradition, the version of the Nibelungenlied I just reread is the verse translation of Burton Raffel. I also recently read the prose translation of William Whobrey, which was quite good and included excellent scholarly apparatus. And the two translations of the Elder or Poetic Edda, also mentioned by Shippey above, that I have most enjoyed are those by Carolyne Larrington and the aforementioned Jackson Crawford. These are good places to start in the tradition that informed Tolkien.

I posted a meditation on the perversion of virtue in the Nibelungenlied two weeks ago here. And as it happens, I wrote something about misleading “surface similarities” just yesterday.

Difficult art and striving upward

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I recently read about the collapse of “cultural aspiration,” the desire of people to seek out, encounter, and enjoy the excellent in literature, music, art, architecture—you name it. Sooner or later I’m going to write at length about that essay and some of my thoughts on what has brought about this collapse. But part of it is surely resentment, the envy endemic to populism.*

Two items I’ve been reflecting on re. that essay and this cultural trend:

Item one—this blog post on “accessibility” in literature. The key passage:

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand—repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

Item two—from Letter 215 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, an incomplete draft of a letter on children’s books and aiming higher than one’s station, so to speak, in one’s reading:

We all need literature that is above our measure—though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time. But the energy of youth is usually greater. Youth needs then less than adulthood or Age what is down to its (supposed) measure. . . . Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life. But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in the right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Charges of “elitism” have always seemed, to me, to be a Trojan horse for becoming complacent. It begins by assuring yourself that failing to measure up to the standards of snobs is okay and ends with denying that there is any qualitative difference between the bad and the excellent. And so people who could enjoy the best are not only happy but congratulate themselves for staying put and reveling in the mediocre (or worse).

A final note: All my favorite books I have discovered either by 1) intentionally finding something reputed as good and stretching myself to understand it or 2) taking the recommendations of good friends who have already done #1.

Food for thought.

*Cf. CS Lewis in his essay “Democratic Education”: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you,’ is the hotbed of Fascism.”

In the House of Tom Bombadil

Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings has questions about Tom Bombadil. What is he doing in the middle of Frodo’s journey to Rivendell? What does Frodo’s interlude at Tom’s house mean? What’s with the yellow boots and all the singing? But there’s one question, right there in The Lord of the Rings, with which CR Wiley begins his new book In the House of Tom Bombadil:

The hobbits sat down gladly in low rush-seated chairs, while Goldberry busied herself about the table; and their eyes followed her, for the slender grace of her movement filled them with quiet delight. From somewhere behind the house came the sound of singing. Every now and again they caught, among many a derry dol and a merry dol and a ring a ding dillo the repeated words:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

‘Fair lady!’ said Frodo again after a while. ‘Tell me, if my asking does not seem foolish, who is Tom Bombadil?’

‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling.

This is a characteristic passage of Bombadilana: charming and upbeat, with a dreamlike half-detachment from that which goes before and comes after it, and—like Goldberry’s answer to the crucial question—both straightforward and enigmatic. No wonder Frodo feels a mite foolish, and no wonder some people get bent out of shape about Tom.

Since Wiley and, in the book’s warm and spirited introduction, Bradley Birzer both share some of their personal histories with Tom Bombadil, let me do the same by way of confession. I may be the only person who has ever read The Lord of the Rings who doesn’t have much of an opinion on Tom. What is he doing there? Well, it’s an episodic adventure, so why shouldn’t he be there? What does he mean? The same thing any character in such an adventure “means,” I reckon. Next question.

Having simply accepted Tom as part of the story, it has never occurred to me to ask some of the questions some people do about him.

Wiley does not tackle all of them, but starting with Frodo’s question for Goldberry proves wise. By looking into who Tom is, he shows us what he’s doing in this story. Wiley begins by gently disposing of a handful of the more popular theories about Tom’s past or identity (that Tom is a Maia gone native, or even the incarnation of Eru Ilúvatar himself, etc.), then turns to the few chapters where he appears, the handful of later allusions and references back to him—including one by Gandalf that is considerably more significant than I ever thought—and a few sources outside the novel, especially Tolkien’s letters. This last source proves particularly helpful, since Tolkien himself, in his gnomic way, insisted that Tom is important to the story, but not precisely how. This is especially telling, as Wiley notes that Tolkien, a slow-working, minutely precise writer, would throw away large passages if he found them unsatisfactory or if he felt them narrative dead-ends, and yet Tom and his hosting of Frodo and company remain.

So in a series of short topical chapters, Wiley examines what we see and hear of Tom through the hobbits and his creator, focusing especially on what Tom does in his limited time in the story. He looks at Tom’s use of song and language, his role as “master,” his household, his relationship with Goldberry, and the grim incident with the barrow wight. Along the way, Wiley brings in some especially insightful comparisons with other key characters, like Saruman, who pursues a mechanical or technical mastery alien to Tom, and he concludes with a beautifully written and genuinely moving meditation on what Tom means for the future of Middle Earth—restoration.

Wiley does not pretend to have “solved” the mystery of Tom Bombadil—“if Tolkien meant for Bombadil to be an enigma,” he writes, “who am I to try to clear things up?”—but he does present a compelling argument that Tom’s presence is an important thematic counterpoint to the later darkness of the story, a vision of unspoiled, unfallen dominion over creation that treats the world as an end rather than a means, and of the delight and divine restfulness that comes with that dominion.

In the House of Tom Bombadil is a brisk, easy read, but rich and thought-provoking. I breezed through it in two sittings, relishing the insight it brought to a character I had taken for granted and not thought deeply about, and I look forward to revisiting it soon. I highly recommend it to anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings and wondered about Tom, but especially to anyone who has wondered what goodness is supposed to look like in the middle of a fallen world.

2020 in books: fiction

As I mentioned in my previous post, I read a lot last year, and a whole lot of it was good. It was hard to narrow things down for the usual year-in-review lists that I’ve done since starting this blog. You can see everything I read in 2020 here. What I’ve selected for inclusion in this post are a few favorites, that is, “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.”

So without further ado, I present my:

Top ten fiction reads of 2020

One additional note: any books I listened to, whether on Audible or Hoopla, are marked with an asterisk, as I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake the feeling that audiobooks are a form of cheating. That said, most of these I read the good old-fashioned way.

Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard—Aging airline stewardess Jackie Burke, who has made an occasional bonus by smuggling cash out of Jamaica for Miami gangster Ordell Robbie, finds herself caught in the middle of a sting operation. Cooperate with the feds and she will be killed by Ordell. Cooperate with Ordell to mislead the feds and she will go to prison for a long time. Throw in a local bail bondsman who gets involved, a wildcard ex-con who doesn’t have any scruples about murdering people, and a wonderfully rendered Miami setting, and you have one of Leonard’s most intricate and engaging crime stories. My favorite of Leonard’s crime novels remains Freaky Deaky, but Rum Punch now runs a very close second.

Brave Ollie Possum, by Ethan Nicolle—A really fun and inventive kids’ novel from the creator of Axe Cop. Brave Ollie Possum is the story of Ollie, a boy who is afraid of almost everything, and the nightlong journey he takes after an ogre masquerading as a children’s phobia counselor turns him into a possum. Full of bizarre situations, gross-out humor, and the right kind of danger and scares, this novel is hilarious throughout and even surprisingly moving. Nicolle’s numerous illustrations are an extra dash of fun. I read this with my wife as our bedtime read for a few weeks and we got a kick out of it. Looking forward to sharing it with the kids.

The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London—A lesser known late work of Jack London’s in which a virulent disease breaks out and rips through the population of the world, killing almost everyone and throwing human society—what there is left of it—back into tribal hunter-gatherer conditions. The novel begins in San Francisco and follows James Smith, the narrator, as he tries to avoid the plague, holes up with other survivors only for the disease to infiltrate even their ranks, and flees into the wilderness, where he lives alone until, hesitantly, reconnecting with other people. The story’s frame narrative involves Smith recounting these events to his grandsons, half-savage children growing up in the ruins of our world. The Scarlet Plague is a quick, shocking story that reads like the template for every epidemic or zombie apocalypse story since, and I was really captivated by its energetic writing and thoroughly imagined epidemic scenario—especially since I read this right at the beginning of our coronavirus woes. You can read The Scarlet Plague for free at Project Gutenberg here or in this inexpensive Dover edition.

HMS Ulysses,* by Alistair MacLean—My first big audiobook “read” for the year was Alistair MacLean’s debut novel. HMS Ulysses takes place during World War II aboard a Royal Navy ship. The Ulysses’s mission is to escort an Arctic convoy around the North Cape of Norway to carry Lend-Lease materiel to Russia. This is an unenviable task owing to the long Arctic night, the sub-zero temperatures, and the constant danger from U-boats and land-based Luftwaffe aircraft. Furthermore, the crew of the Ulysses have come near mutiny at the prospect of another Arctic escort mission, and it’s up to the captain and officers to hold the ship together and get the merchant vessels under their charge safely to port. This is the novel that established MacLean’s reputation, and its one-thing-after-another series of reversals, surprises, and catastrophes—culminating in a powerfully moving final act—agonizingly conveys the stress and difficulty of this often forgotten theatre of the war. I listened to Jonathan Oliver’s audiobook reading of HMS Ulysses via Hoopla.

Campusland, by Scott Johnston—A scathing satire of higher ed, campus politics, woke activism, and an entire culture shaped by social media, Campusland is set in an Ivy League university suspiciously similar to Johnston’s own alma mater. An English professor of humble origins looking for tenure, a posh New York society girl upset to be out of the influencer loop for anything as silly as education, and a host of other administrators, activists, journalists, donors, and deans of diversity and inclusion collide when a false rape accusation, a daily act of performative protest, and a media storm turn the campus into a quagmire of status jockeying disguised as concern for safety. Some of Johnston’s targets are pretty low-hanging fruit, but the novel is carefully plotted, doesn’t pull its punches, and really nails a lot of what is wrong with an academy more concerned about “justice” than education and truth and not even aware of how easily its system can be gamed. It’s also very, very funny.

Mr. Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard—Part Western, part crime novel, with the best parts of each. Mr Majestyk follows a typically Elmore Leonard hero—taciturn, principled, impossible to break, and with a few surprises up his sleeve—as organized crime tries to move in on his Arizona melon farm. Fast-paced and economic storytelling, some really nasty bad guys, and a great climactic confrontation make this one of the best of Leonard’s novels that I’ve read yet.

Vindolanda, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Perhaps my favorite discovery of the year, Vindolanda is the first in a novel series by historian Adrian Goldsworthy set in Roman Britain at the end of the first century AD. Romanized Briton Flavius Ferox is an unpopular man because of his interest in pursuing the truth, which makes him the ideal investigator for a series of brutal murders along the small forts lining Hadrian’s Wall. Part drama, part action thriller, part mystery, Vindolanda is exciting and well-written, peopled by interesting and well-realized characters from many walks of life, and full of authentic historical detail and a wonderfully rich vision of the polyglot, multiethnic edges of the Roman Empire and the army that guarded it. A great look at Roman Britain and a thrilling adventure all its own. Interestingly, Goldsworthy holds the distinction of having books on both my fiction and non-fiction lists for 2020.

Greenmantle,* by John Buchan—The second of Buchan’s novels to feature South African adventurer Richard Hannay (after the classic spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps), Greenmantle takes place during World War I and follows Hannay on a mission into Germany and across Europe to the Middle East, where the Germans are cooking up serious mischief. It’s Hannay and his team’s mission to find out what they’re up to. What I most enjoyed about Greenmantle was its well-realized and realistic World War I setting; the team of colorful characters paired with Hannay, especially a dyspeptic American genius and an old Boer comrade; the minutiae and fieldcraft of World War I-era spy work; Hannay’s travels across the breadth of Europe, which include more than one near miss with his German pursuers; and its dramatic conclusion. Buchan’s premonitions about the political dangers of radical Islam add a startling layer of prescience to the plot—startling because this novel was written and published during the war, well before the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the French and British mandates in the Middle East, and all that flowed from that. But read this novel for the adventure—it’s excellent.

Favorites of the year

I’m not going to cheat like I did with my non-fiction and declare two winners, turning the top ten into a top eleven, but I will declare a tie for first place between two books:

The Silmarillion, by JRR Tolkien

Somehow I, a fan and admirer of Tolkien since high school, had made it to the age of thirty-six without reading The Silmarillion all the way through. This was the year I finally fixed that.

How to summarize The Silmarillion, and what to say about it that hasn’t already been said? It’s richly imagined, dense with detail, and heavily freighted with Tolkien’s insight into human nature—even when he is not, strictly speaking, writing about humans. His understanding of the tragedy of our fallen condition infuses every page, giving each story—from the creation of Middle-Earth and the rise of Melkor to the tragic story of Túrin Turambar and the cataclysmic fall of Númenor—a beauty and poignancy that other authors labor for entire books to achieve. Tolkien also excels at one of the most difficult tasks a writer can undertake—to make goodness not only believable and appealing.

I was overwhelmed by The Silmarillion, which really is so rich that it will take multiple complete readings to begin grasping it to its fullest. But after years of dipping into it here and there, I’m glad I finally read the thing through, as it was meant to be. I’ll be revisiting it soon, hopefully after another long expected reading of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

If you’re interested, a powerful and unsettling passage from Akallabêth, late in the book, led to one of my most read and commented upon blog posts this year. You can read that here.

Old House of Fear, by Russell Kirk

An American industrial magnate of Scottish extraction calls a young lawyer, a veteran of World War II and former student at a Scottish university, to his office with a special mission—travel to the most remote islands off the coast of Scotland, to a rocky islet called Carnglass, and pay a visit to Lady McAskival, the elderly heiress who has isolated herself in the ancestral home there, the Old House of Fear. Upon reaching her and gaining an audience, the lawyer must negotiate the sale of the island and its estate to the industrialist, a distant relation of Lady McAskival. Simple enough, right?

But Hugh Logan, the lawyer, discovers that this errand will be much more involved and far more dangerous than he could have expected. Even on the journey out, as he attempts to find passage to this isolated and dangerous island, he is accosted and waylaid by mysterious strangers, and the fisherman who know the waters around Carnglass seem to want nothing to do with him. When he finally arrives in near deadly weather he discovers that armed men patrol the island. Intruders disappear. And as Logan probes and investigates, it becomes clear that a Dr. Jackman, a purported mystic, has Lady McAskival in his power and is using the island for his own ends. Logan becomes his prisoner, but not before meeting the beautiful Mary McAskival, a spritely young girl who knows the island—and especially the house—inside and out and becomes one of Logan’s only allies in this seemingly hopeless situation.

Russell Kirk was a great lover of the gothic—brooding and atmospheric tales of desolate, out of the way places, buried secrets, long histories, ineradicable memories, and the ever lurking uncanny. Old House of Fear is one of the best evocations of the gothic mood I’ve come across. I loved every moment of it. Especially powerful is a scene in which Mary leads Logan out of the house through a series of hidden passageways, down from the early modern mansion through its medieval understructure, and from there into darker and gloomier and more primitive Norse and Celtic foundations until they emerge onto the windswept shore through a cave, having descended not only through the guts of the house but through a thousand years or more of its history. Awesome.

But Old House of Fear isn’t just a masterpiece of atmosphere, its story also pits upright and honorable characters, characters rooted not only in principles but in place and tradition, against utterly pragmatic ideologues willing to use guile, cruelty, and violence to achieve their ends. Logan, a veteran of the Pacific Theatre in World War II, is no stranger to violence and brute force, but that he will not bend to the level of his enemies offers the reader a dramatic and thrilling illustration of ancient virtue against modern utilitarianism.

Even to describe this theme is to make Old House of Fear sound boring and didactic. It isn’t. Read it for the adventure, for the atmosphere, for the eerie old castle and the sweeping romance—in both senses of the word. The themes, perfectly attuned to Kirk’s traditionalist conservatism, are there just as the Old House of Fear’s subterranean foundations are there—almost invisible, but supporting an incredible structure above them and offering a way of escape.

Honorable mentions

Here are five books—four novels and a collection of stories—that didn’t break into my top ten for the year but that I enjoyed enough to mention. All of them are worth reading.

Tishomingo Blues, by Elmore Leonard—World champion high diver Dennis Lenahan witnesses a mob hit from the top of his eighty-foot diving platform and finds himself slowly drawn into the shady internal politics of the Mississippi casino where he works, the local Civil War reenacting community, and a brewing rivalry between the local “Dixie Mafia” and a Detroit mob looking to expand. Another compulsively readable Leonard crime novel with some great characters, and the reenacting angle was particularly enjoyable.

Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson—A work of apocalyptic fiction, dystopia, sci-fi, and theological fantasy, Lord of the World is a wildly imaginative but prophetic novel published in 1907. Set primarily in Britain in the early 21st century, a time in which religion has been excised from public life, weak and compromised progressive strains of Christianity have died away leaving only a Catholic remnant, and massive empires governed by atheistic secularist regimes exercise total control over the world. Benson tracks a handful of characters—an functionary of the British government, his wife, an increasingly lonely priest on the run from the state—through the rise of a mysterious figure from America who resolves the world’s simmering political conflicts and, as a reward, accepts greater and greater power and higher and higher honors.

Though written before the Bolshevik Revolution, the League of Nations and the UN, the era of industrial genocide, mass aerial warfare, widespread sentimental but unforgiving worship of progress and “humanity,” and the possibility of one-world government through a charismatic politician accorded semi-divine status, and the atomic bomb, Benson prefigures all of these, creating a thoroughly believable speculative world—a world that’s only become more believable in the 113 years since the novel’s publication—with a chillingly plausible Antichrist and the only convincing buildup to Armageddon that I’ve encountered in fiction.

I read this after Jack Butler’s enthusiastic endorsement in this excellent article and, to be sure, Lord of the World is well worth your while, but be aware that it’s written in a florid and sometimes difficult late-Victorian style. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg here or in this inexpensive edition from Dover.

Ride, Sally, Ride, by Douglas Wilson—One night in the near future, clean-cut Christian college student Ace Hartwick is asked by his neighbor to keep his “wife”—actually a sex robot—company while he runs an errand. Ace crushes the robot in a trash compactor and, after an ambitious progressive prosecutor takes an interest in the case, finds himself charged with murder. What follows is a satirical romp through an only slightly exaggerated version of our culture’s confusion about personhood, identity, gender roles, and the proper role of the state. It’s enjoyable, funny, and goes down easy (I read it in three days), but doesn’t have quite the nasty bite that I wish it had. Wilson acknowledges a debt to Wodehouse in his fiction; if he mixed in a little Waugh his satire would really sting.

Trail of the Apache and Other Stories, by Elmore Leonard—A solid collection of some of Leonard’s early Western fiction, including his first published story from the December 1951 issue of Argosy. Goodreads review with some discussion of the individual stories here.

Where Eagles Dare,* by Alistair MacLean—This story has an interesting history. It began as a treatment for the film, then MacLean himself wrote the novelization of the screenplay. So the novel Where Eagles Dare is almost identical to the film Where Eagles Dare, but with the third person roller coaster ride of false leads and plot twists characteristic of MacLean’s zanier espionage thrillers. I listened to this via Hoopla as read by Jonathan Oliver. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Classics

As in my non-fiction reading list, this year I reread a few books that don’t feel like simple “fiction” but deserve their own section. They’ve been around longer than anything else on this list—I figure they’ve earned it. In this case, it’s two epic poems:

The Nibelungenlied with the Klage, trans. William Whobrey—A good prose translation of the great work of medieval German epic and chivalric poetry. The Nibelungenlied is a German chivalric retelling of the much older Germanic legend of Siegfried (the Old Norse version of the story, about Sigurd, is the Volsungsaga, and of course Wagner would retell it in operatic form as the Ring cycle.) Its plot is much too convoluted to summarize here, but it entails multiple overlapping acts of deception and betrayal, coldblooded murder, and bloody, bloody revenge. It’s great—a favorite of mine since college.

Whobrey includes another shorter work, the Klage (“lament”), in this edition, noting that in all complete manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied the Klage is included as a companion piece. The Klage picks up directly after the sudden conclusion of the Nibelungenlied and ties up a lot of loose ends. Goodreads review here.

The Odyssey, by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles—Homer needs no introduction. I reread the Odyssey to prepare for the latest series of the Core Curriculum Podcast, which is going right now. I enjoyed the reread and the discussions I got to have on the five episodes I participated in. Look it up, subscribe, and listen in!

The Charles Portis farewell tour

Charles Portis has long been one of my favorite novelists. I discovered him, like I suspect a lot of people have, through True Grit, which I read in grad school. Over the next couple of years I eagerly read through his other four novels as well as the short stories, journalism, travel writing, short memoir, and play collected in Escape Velocity. I started rereading his work last year, beginning with True Grit and his secret society/conspiracy spoof Masters of Atlantis.

That was as far as I’d gotten when I learned he died, in February, aged 86. I commemorated him on the blog here. I recommend reading that to learn what it is about his writing that I and others love so much.

So, like my project to read as many Roger Scruton books as I could this year (more on that later), as an act of piety and gratitude I finished reading through Portis’s novels, which I’ve given their own section separate from this year’s other rereads. The three I finished the “farewell tour” with were:

Norwood*

Portis’s debut introduces us to Texan Norwood Pratt, who is enlisted by a shady car salesman to drive a car—and a girl—to New York for him. It does not go well, but Norwood bounces from one adventure to another along with a cast of oddballs and verbose con artists and showmen. It’s hard to explain as there’s no plot to speak of, really, but that’s not the point. The characters, the situations, the vividly observed details of life in the country, the big city, and everything in between, and Norwood’s naïve drive—to become a country singer, to recover some cash lent to a buddy when he was in the Marine Corps, to give that car salesman some payback—make this novel a hoot from beginning to end.

For this reread I listened to the audiobook narrated by Barrett Whitener (whose performance of A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to). Goodreads review and reflections here.

The Dog of the South

When Arkansan bore Ray Midge’s wife Norma runs off to Mexico with her first husband, he traces their movements via his credit card bills. Finally, temporarily abandoning the passivity with which he has mostly approached his life, he decides to track them down—if not to get Norma back, at least to recover his car. Ray falls in with an assortment of odd characters along the way, including Dr Reo Symes, a devotee of an otherwise forgotten self-help book and an opinionated old cuss.

Like Norwood and True Grit, this is a picaresque journey through strange lands with even stranger characters. Like Norwood, there isn’t a ton of plot to get in the way of the characters, settings, and especially Ray’s hilarious narration—full of wry asides, historical trivia, and deadpan irony. Portis said he set out to create narrator who was a total bore but still entertaining and he succeeded.

The Dog of the South is some people’s favorite Portis novel. It’s not mine, but it’s a good one to start with to get a feel for all the things that make Portis’s fiction unique.

Gringos

The order of my favorite Portis novels keeps shuffling, and I think Gringos is currently number two (after True Grit). Gringos follows American expatriate Jimmy Burns, who is whiling away his life in the Yucatan alternately giving guided tours of Mayan sites and trafficking in the odd illicit antiquity. His mild and unhurried life is complicated by two women—one a local busybody who decides to make reforming Jimmy her project, and the other a young girl who appears with a band of sketchy hippies one day and turns out to be a runaway. Then Jimmy learns that her parents are looking for her, desperate to get her back.

Jimmy, in his way, investigates and finds that the hippies’ leader has, Manson-style, formed his own cult, and like a lot of other weirdos has fixated on the Mayan temples as sites of immense spiritual power. But it also becomes clear to Jimmy that the stakes are much higher than drug abuse and petty criminality, and the stage is slowly set for a confrontation with the hippies.

Gringos has the strongest narrative drive of any of Portis’s novels, second only to True Grit, and I think that’s one reason I enjoy it so much. As in all of his books, the colorful cast of conmen, talkative layabouts, and cranks, as well as the vividly realized settings and the rapidly escalating absurdity of the situations, make Gringos a joy to read. And it goes without saying that it’s dang funny.

Rereads

As I mentioned in the non-fiction year-in-review, I’ve been trying to develop the discipline of rereading. Too often I have panicked at the thought of how many books I haven’t read and put off revisiting an old favorite. This year I managed to reread—or, via Hoopla or Audible, revisit—quite a few good novels. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Shiloh, by Shelby Foote*

• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by CS Lewis

• Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis

• Moonraker, by Ian Fleming*

• Perelandra, by CS Lewis

• Diamonds are Forever, by Ian Fleming*

• That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

• From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming*

• The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis*

• The Black Flower, by Howard Bahr*

• Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton

• Last Stand at Saber River, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins

• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King

• Dr. No, by Ian Fleming*

I reread CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy for the first time in perhaps thirteen years for a series of podcast episodes on City of Man. Check those out here, here, here, and here. I’ve been listening back through Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels in their most recent audio recordings via Audible. The performances are excellent, and include readers like Bill Nighy, Damien Lewis, and Toby Stephens. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, Goldfinger, as narrated by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville.

Conclusion

That’s it for my favorite non-fiction and fiction reads from the past year! But there’s still more to come. Stay tuned for two more year-in-review posts covering my favorite movies of the year—a short list, given the circumstances—and my tour through a dozen of the late Sir Roger Scruton’s books. Thanks for reading!

Benign shabbiness

Apropos of yesterday’s post, several days after I had dug up that line from Tocqueville and read the Akallabêth, I ran across the following from the late Sir Roger Scruton. In reflecting on old age and especially the widespread anxiety of becoming senile and being neglected, Scruton reflects on the various modern responses to those problems, from the nursing home to euthanasia to manias for health and wellness. As he often does, he finds the root of these problems in a flawed view of humanity and whimsically suggests an alternative ordered to the truth.

From “Dying in Time,” collected in Confessions of a Heretic:

Courage therefore is the sine qua non of any attempt to deal with the threat of senility—courage to face the truth, and to live fully in the face of it. With courage a person can go about living in another way . . . This other way is not the way of the welfare culture in which we are all immersed. It does not involve the constant search for comforts or the obsessive pursuit of health. On the contrary, it is a way of benign shabbiness and self-neglect, of risky enjoyments and bold adventures. It involves constant exercise—but not of the body. Rather, exercise of the person, through relationships with others, through sacrifice, through the search for opportunities to be involved and exposed. Such, at least, is my intuition. The life of benign shabbiness is not a life of excess. Of course you should drink, smoke, eat fatty foods—but not to the point of gluttony. . . . The risks you take should not damage your will or your relationships, but only your chances of survival. Officious doctors and health fascists will assail you, telling you to correct your diet, to take better forms of exercise, to drink more water and less wine. If you pursue a life of risk-taking and defiance the thought-police will track you down, and your life style will be held up to ridicule and contempt. It is not that anyone intends you to live beyond your time. Rather, to use Adam Smith’s famous image, the old people’s gulag arises by an invisible hand from a false conception of human life—a conception that does not see death as a part of life, and timely death as the fruit of it.

An altogether English vision, unfussy and without vanity, with plenty of room for eccentricity. It reminded me—and here’s the almost purely subjective Tolkien connection—of the sheer enjoyment of life typical of hobbits. “Benign shabbiness” perfectly describes them, with their gardens and larders and tobacco and six meals a day and evenings at the Green Dragon. And not a surgeon general’s warning to be found.

“The main point, it seems to me,” Scruton says in conclusion, “is to maintain a life of active risk and affection . . . remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”

Tolkien, Tocqueville, and reckoning with death

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) and JRR Tolkien (1892-1973)

A few weeks ago I ran across a line from Alexis de Tocqueville that I had copied down—and preserved forever—as a Facebook status. The line comes from a passage in Democracy in America, his monumental book of observations on the political culture of the still young United States, about the delicate interplay of religion and self-interest among Americans:

“However hard one may try to prove that virtue is useful, it will always be difficult to make a man live well if he will not face death.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

This line resonated with me because, at the time, I was finishing my first front-to-back reading of The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s history of the First Age of Middle Earth. In addition to the stories of Middle Earth’s creation and fall, Tolkien tells the story of the human kingdom of Númenor and its rise and fall in the Second Age. The account of the rise and destruction of this kingdom comes from The Silmarillion’s penultimate section, Akallabêth, “The Downfallen.”

Here Tolkien describes the beginning of the Númenóreans turn toward evil:

Thus the bliss of Westernesse became diminished; but still its might and splendour increased. For the kings and their people had not yet abandoned wisdom, and if they loved the Valar no longer at least they still feared them. They did not dare openly to break the Ban or to sail beyond the limits that had been appointed. Eastwards still they steered their tall ships. But the fear of death grew ever darker upon them, and they delayed it by all means that they could; and they began to build great houses for the dead, while their wise men laboured unceasingly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at least of the prolonging of Men’s days. Yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of Men, and they filled all the land with silent tombs in which the thought of death was enshrined in the darkness. But those that lived turned the more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more goods and more riches; and after the days of Tar-Ancalimon the offering of the first fruits to Eru was neglected, and men went seldom any more to the Hallow upon the heights of Meneltarma in the midst of the land.

Note, first, that Númenor’s “bliss” decreased while “its might and splendour increased.” Whatever evil is about to appear in Númenor is not the result of poverty or material want. Neither is it the result of ignorance, for they “had not yet abandoned wisdom” and their skills, while falling short of defeating death, are sufficient to stop the natural decay of flesh.

Rather than reckoning with death, which is one of the most important purposes of traditional religion and one of the necessary starting points of many philosophies, the Númenóreans try to first to defeat it, then to smother their fear of it, and finally they embrace it. “The desire to escape death,” Tolkien wrote in one of his letters, “produced a cult of the dead.” While the most obvious signs of this obsession were the “tombs and memorials” on which “they lavished wealth and art,” the cult was also made manifest in libertinism and consumption and the abandonment of religion. Not only do they fill the land with tombs, but they exalt the captive Sauron as an adviser, build him a temple to Morgoth, and turn to maritime kidnapping both to fill their coffers with wealth and to keep the human sacrifices burning in Sauron’s temple. Finally, seized with resentment of the immortals away west of them in the Undying Lands, they defy “the Ban” mentioned above and sail there with the goal of a violent takeover. They are instantly defeated and Númenor is sunk beneath the ocean in a cataclysm that reshapes the entire planet.

Reading this the same day that I rediscovered that quotation from Tocqueville was striking—it’s hard to imagine a more powerful or vivid illustration of the consequences of the refusal to face death. It’s also hard not to think of where we are in the present.

Technology has prolonged our lives to an unprecedented degree and, true to the Númenórean vision, there are those who promise the defeat of death, and soon. Simultaneously we live in an age of cultural malaise, discontent, and wild and irresponsible consumption and waste. Tolkien’s description of the people of Númenor turning “more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more good and more riches,” is apt, as are his descriptions of the suspicion and jealousy these spawn, and which Sauron takes advantage of. Sauron “denie[d] the existence of God,” Tolkien writes in a letter, “saying that the One is a mere invention [and that] The Ban is only a lying device of fear to restrain the Kings of Men from seizing everlasting life.” Our politics revolves more and more around questions of who has what and in what quantities, an obsessive materialism bound closely with envy and resentment, and questions of truth, morality, and the transcendent are treated as mere power plays in a game of oppression—the original Satanic lie. Finally, the rampant worship of death, the sacrifice of others to get us what we want, is as befitting of Morgoth as anything.

The fear of death, paradoxically, turns us toward it. We end by taking as many with us as we can.

In “Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality,” an article published almost twenty years ago, Anna Mathie notes that “immortality, or the lure of it, seems to turn members of all these races [men, elves, dwarves] in on themselves.” Those that pursue immortality end where the Númenóreans did—where I think we are—in a hunt for glory or pleasure, and those that achieve immortality become inert, lost in memory and self-regard. Barrenness marks both.

What to make of this?

Mathie argues that facing the fact of our eventual death and accepting rather than railing against it is what transforms death from a curse into a gift. The hobbits show this most clearly. In contrast to men or the elves, they hardly seem to think much less worry about death, this lack of desire for immortality being one of the reasons Bilbo and Frodo can resist the power of the ring for so long. The fact of death thus accepted, they get down to the plain business of living. While it’s the Númenóreans who take such pains to preserve flesh, it’s the hobbits who strike us as most fleshly and fully embodied precisely because they have accepted that this incarnate state is not forever, nor is it meant to be. Being willing to lose their lives, they find them.

Accepting death frees us to live. Accepting our mortality orients us otherward—it turns us inside out—first toward those immediately around us, then to past and future generations—whose value we perceive too, since they have or will share our fate. And, hopefully, looking at death as a reality to be reckoned with rather than ignored, fled from, or conquered will also force us to look beyond this world to another.

In a culture that shows all the marks of a Númenórean fear of death and its perverse turn toward destruction, this outward, mortal focus, a willingness to live with our limits, a willingness to face death as the prerequisite to virtue, fruitfulness, and goodness, is something we desperately need.

Tolkien

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Nicholas Hoult as JRR Tolkien in Tolkien (2019)

Last weekend I finally got the chance to see Tolkien, a film I’d been looking forward to with guarded optimism. The film tells the story of young JRR Tolkien, focusing primarily on his youth, education, and experiences during the First World War.

When the film begins, young Ronald (the first R in his famous initials) and his younger brother Hilary are living in an idyllic English countryside with their mother, a widow. Ronald and Hilary return from a woodland romp in which they pretend to be knights to find their mother in earnest conversation with Fr. Francis Morgan. Their life, already difficult owing to a move from Africa, where Ronald was born, to England and the death of the boys’ father, is about to become more difficult yet. They move from the countryside to industrial Birmingham, where the boys’ mother shortly dies. Fr. Francis, now their guardian, sends them to school, where the homeschooled boys are awkward but brilliant.

In this stretch of the story the film finds its two themes in two forms of love—friendship and courtship. First, Ronald is at first mildly antagonized by and then invited to join a group of precocious fellow schoolboys. Four in number, they leave the grounds to have tea in the back tearoom of a local store, where they disrupt the stuff middle-aged usual crowd with their enthusiastic discussions of mythology and art. Ronald gives their fellowship a joyfully clumsy nickname, the Tea Club, Barrovian Society or TCBS. Second, Ronald meets Edith Bratt, a fellow orphan and boarder at the home where he and Hilary share a room. He is immediately smitten. The film follows these two relationships—Ronald and the TCBS, Ronald and Edith—for the rest of its running time, through tragedy in the first case and into joy in the other.

A view of Middle Earth

The film’s strongest asset is its visual splendor. Well-used landscape shots of the English countryside or the Oxford skyline or the Western Front evoke the love and loathing Tolkien felt for these places and suggest their atmospheric influence on his work, especially the most extreme of Middle Earth’s locations—the Shire in the countryside of his boyhood, Mordor in the smokestacks of Birmingham and the cratered moonscape of the Somme. This is a good-looking movie, and fantasy elements incorporated into the nightmarish, hallucinatory battle scenes—ringwraiths and dragons and even Sauron himself—work better than they should on the strength of their eeriness.

The war scenes themselves are outstanding, depicting the twenty-four-hour hell of the Somme authentically, with muck and grime and standing water in a no-man’s-land full of tree stumps and shell holes. Tolkien captures a thimbleful of the horror of the Western Front and shows Ronald’s dark, helpless place in it.

The film also has some truly inspired moments. My favorite depicted the news of England’s declaration of war on Germany in 1914. As Ronald’s fellow Oxford students flood the quad and cheer the arrival of a great adventure, Ronald sits quietly on a bench reading one of the great passages of Old English literature to his mentor, Professor Wright. It’s the speech of Byrhtwold in The Battle of Maldon:

Thought must be the harder, heart be the keener,
mind must be the greater, while our strength lessens.

The acting is fine but not outstanding, for reasons I’ll talk about shortly. Nicholas Hoult is fine as Ronald. As I worried, he’s too pretty, too billboard handsome to convince me he’s Tolkien. He did well enough with the material given him but I never believed he was the character. The same goes for Lily Collins as Edith, who performs better than Hoult in an even more underwritten part. The standout in the cast is Sir Derek Jacobi as Wright, in a very small part that only pops into the latter third or so of the film. Jacobi imbues Wright with such intelligence, affability, and goodness that it immediately underscores how far short the other cast members fall.

Where it went wrong

I think the writing, from a screenplay by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, is to blame. Most of the parts are underwritten or simply clumsily written. The actors do their best but the script simply isn’t well-formed or deep enough to tell the story well, and is too cliche-bound to tell the more complicated—and more interesting—truth.

A meeting of the T.C.B.S. in Tolkien (2019)

The TCBS is a case in point. The young actors portraying the four depicted members can never take their characters beyond schoolboy stereotypes—the quiet one, the boisterous one, the nerdy one, the sensitive one—because the script never digs deeply enough for us to become invested in their friendships. We know the boys like each other simply because they spend most of their time declaiming poetry to each other. The one exception is Geoffrey Bache Smith (Anthony Boyle), a younger member whom the filmmakers depict mooning forlornly over Ronald, breathily commiserating about forbidden love after Roland is forced to cease communication with Edith. It’s a bizarre inclusion that adds nothing to the poignancy of Smith’s later death on the battlefield. It’s an example of the way modern film can’t seem to handle male friendship without sexualizing it. That it is so badly performed only draws attention to it.

But the weakest part of the film by far is the love story, which is a shame because, as I wrote in the spring, what I find most compelling and romantic about Ronald and Edith’s story is how much it breaks the mold of forbidden romance cliches. The real Ronald and Edith were forbidden to communicate by Fr. Francis—because Ronald’s grades had started slipping and because Edith was not a Catholic, about which more below—and Ronald and Edith obeyed. Edith got engaged to someone else. Ronald pined away until the evening of his twenty-first birthday, when he sat and wrote a letter to her proposing marriage.

The film hews to the facts in the broadest possible outline but everywhere you can feel the screenwriter massaging the details to fit the standard Hollywood mold. Ronald and Edith’s romance is communicated primarily through cuteness and smiles and twee sequences of whimsy, as when they cannot get seats for Wagner’s Ring and dance around in the prop department instead. Tolkien fell in love with a sharp, talented, and seriously religious and principled woman, but all the movie can give us are luminous smiles. Ronald responds to his forced breakup with Edith by getting drunk and staggering around the quad and lashing out at an old friend, then he steals a bus—something that actually happened, but not the way it’s depicted here. When at last he is old enough to pursue Edith, the couple is depicted as reuniting just before Ronald and the other members of the TCBS ship out to the Western Front. In reality, Ronald and Edith were already married by then. And Fr. Francis, an enormous influence in Tolkien’s early life and a man about whom Tolkien had nothing negative to say, is reduced by the screenplay to the role of an obstacle. In his extremely limited screentime he comes across as an out of touch fuddy-duddy, and Ronald lights into him for daring to dictate rules about his love life when he is celibate, a 21st-century zinger if ever there was one.

Finally, the film only makes token gestures toward the religious dimension of Tolkien’s life. One would be forgiven for not knowing that Fr. Francis was a Catholic priest, a serious omission given the level of anti-Catholicism in England at the time. That Tolkien’s mother lived in such miserable conditions because her own family had cut her off after converting to Catholicism is left out, as is the serious religiosity of the TCBS, which Tolkien regarded as the force that bound its (much more than four) members. And the difficulty of Edith’s conversion from her serious and devout Anglicanism to Catholicism also gets not a mention. I expected it, but it’s still disappointing.

In conclusion

I’ve had a lot to say about Tolkien’s flaws but I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I just can’t recommend it, first for all of the reasons I’ve outlined above, and second because I simply don’t know what someone who didn’t already know a lot about Tolkien would get out of the movie. That moment between Ronald and Professor Wright reading The Battle of Maldon as England goes to its most destructive war blew me away because I’ve read The Battle of Maldon dozens of times. Would the average viewer feel the power of that scene as I did without knowing that thousand-year old poem? I doubt it.

By the same token, someone who doesn’t know Tolkien’s life story will get only a standard Hollywood melodrama about friendships that end in the tragedy of war and a love that overcomes obstacles thrown in its way. The details and specifics of these remarkable real people have been sanded away in favor of cliches. The result is a nice-looking film with underwritten parts that proceeds as if on autopilot.

Middle Earth still awaits its Tolkien movie.

What have I done with my life?

Every once in a while you run across someone whose towering achievements put your life into some unwelcome perspective. (Real doses of humility are always unwelcome. I reckon they have to be to be effective.) Here’s one such famous moment from Plutarch’s Life of Caesar:

[W]e are told again that, in Spain, when he was at leisure and was reading from the history of Alexander, he was lost in thought for a long time, and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. “Do you not think,” said he, “it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?”

At my age all both Alexander and Caesar had accomplished some amazing things, and one of them had already died after having conquered much of the known world. Touché. And this story is doubly poignant for all of us, of course, because the man weeping over his failures is a man we remember now for his incredible military and political genius and long-lasting achievements. In the latter regard he outstripped even the man whose memory had brought him to tears.

I get something of that perspective when I read about people like Tolkien, one of my heroes—a polyglot creative genius who led a life of the kind of quiet, studious virtue really mature people only hope to attain.

But now consider one of Tolkien’s mentors. Here’s a passage from The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip & Carol Zaleski:

Oxford Philologist joseph wright (1855-1930)

Joseph Wright would play a significant role in the growth of Ronald’s [JRR Tolkien’s] intellect, not only through his celebrated Gothic grammar but as Ronald’s instructor, friend, and mentor at Oxford. . . . Wright’s is one of the great Cinderella stories in the annals of English philology. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a charwoman and a miner who drank himself to death, he went on to work in Blake’s dark Satanic mills at the age of seven, changing bobbins on spinning frames and, in his spare time, selling horse manure. A lifetime of illiteracy and drudgery beckoned, but . . . Wright resisted fate, in his case successfully. When he was fifteen, a fellow mill worker taught him to read and write, using the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress for texts. Wright followed up by teaching himself Latin, French, and German through grammars purchased from his paltry income. Then he added Welsh, Greek, Lithuanian, Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, Old Bulgarian, and Old High German to his repertoire, acquiring a doctorate in the process at Heidelberg University. At thirty-three, he published his Middle High German Primer and later edited the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary. He became . . . England’s leading philologist, and was named professor of comparative philology at Oxford. In his breathtaking ability to master new languages, “Old Joe,”as Tolkien referred to him, served as an inspiring professional model; in his moral goodness, fortitude, and kindness, combined with his rough Yorkshire ways, he was a prototype for Tolkien’s Hobbits.

Consider this in light of the odds against Wright’s achieving anything and your admiration and shame can only deepen. Men like Wright leave the rest of us with no excuses.

And since I already touched on it, I think the cases of Wright and Tolkien should offer even more powerful and convicting examples than Caesar and Alexander because Wright and Tolkien were good men. After all, one of Plutarch’s reasons for including the anecdote quoted above was to demonstrate Caesar’s destructive ambition. The desirability of goodness over notoriety is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last few years, and which I’ve written about here before.

Food for thought. How well are we using our lives?