Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bradley J. Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College. The author or editor of four other books, he has written and taught extensively on the American experience. Birzer also serves as chairman of the board of academic advisors for the Center for the American Idea in Houston and as a nonresident fellow for the McConnell Center, University of Louisville. He and his family live in Michigan.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth

Understanding Middle-earthBy Bradley J. Blazer

ISI Books

Copyright © 2007 Bradley J. Blazer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932236-20-0

Introduction

To enter faerie-that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation-is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence. One arrives in faerie only by invitation and, even then, only at one's peril. The truths to be found within faerie are greater than those that can be obtained through mere human understanding; and one finds within faerie that even the greatest works of man are as nothing compared with the majesty of creation. To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien firmly believed.

The last story Tolkien published prior to his death, "Smith of Wootton Major," follows a normal but charitably inclined man who has been graced with the ability to make extraordinarily beautiful things while metal smithing. Smith, as he is known, discovered the gift of grace on his tenth birthday, when the dawn engulfed him and "passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world." Like the earth at the end of Eliot's "Wasteland," Tolkien's Smith had been baptized, and through this gift he receives an invitation to faerie. While visiting that world, he discovers that in it he is the least of beings. Its beauty, however, entices him, and he spends entire days "looking only at one tree or one flower." The depth of each thing astounds him. "Wonders and mysteries," many of them terrifying in their overwhelming beauty and truth, abound in faerie, Smith discovers, and he dwells on such wonders even when he is no longer in faerie. Nevertheless, some encounters terrify him:

He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eye. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.

And yet, despite the fact that he portrayed the man Smith in prostration before such grand visions, the rest of the story reveals that it was not Tolkien's intention to denigrate Smith's importance, but only to emphasize his place-and therefore the place of humanity in general -in the economy of creation. The English Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that "[h]e not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed." Likewise, Tolkien shows in "Smith of Wootton Major" that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to fully become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.

For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. In an essay describing the greatness of the medieval poem, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Tolkien wrote:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it received part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories-of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale, and not a thinly disguised moral allegory).

Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. As Chesterton wrote, "[B]eauty and terror are very real things," but they are also "related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul."

Certainly myth, of which faerie is one kind, holds an estranged place in the modern world, as Tolkien well knew. But, he believed, so much the worse for the modern world. Indeed, myth might just be the thing needed to save the modern world from itself, as Tolkien suggested in his famous poem, "Mythopoeia," which echoes the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time. It is not they that have forgot the Night, or bid us flee to organized delight, in lotus-isles of economic bliss forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss (and counterfeit at that, machine-produced, bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology. Myth can emphasize the beauty of God's creation as well as the sacramental nature of life. "Our time, sick nigh unto death of utilitarianism and literalness, cries out for myth and parable," American novelist and political philosopher Russell Kirk explained. "Great myths are not merely susceptible of rational interpretation: they are truth, transcendent truth." Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society.

In his inimitable way, Chesterton once wrote that

imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does not know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. "It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad," Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy. Communities "share symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order," political theorist Donald Lutz explains. "The shared meaning and a shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people." The man "who has no sympathy with myths," Chesterton concluded, "has no sympathy with men." One cannot, it seems, separate men from their myths.

...