Visions Of Inconceivable Pasts: JRR Tolkein
Mild mannered, slim, rather shy you might (correctly) guess. Tolkien and his brother had been tragically orphaned by the loss of both parents by the time he was 12 and then raised in extreme poverty.
His real father-figure was a truly saintly, devoted Catholic priest. A promising academic career was cut short by World War I and Tolkien served through the worst of it in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
By the time he was 24 years old he would always recall, virtually all his childhood friends were dead. After such a nightmarish start, a happy marriage, four loving children on whom he
doted, close lifelong friends and a quiet but brilliant academic career in the dim, dusty recesses of Anglo-Saxon literature must have seemed like paradise.
But Tolkien was no stranger to the looming new horrors of the 20 th century world. He –rightly – recognized as did so many of his intellectual generation in Britain the abominable evil and terrifying dangers that had emerged with the birth of Communism in the Soviet Union and Nazism in Hitler’s Germany.
British cultural historian Dominic Sandbrook in an exceptionally insightful and understanding chapter on Tolkien in his book “The Great British Dream Factory” notes that far from being a man out of touch with his own time and era, Tolkien understood it only too well.
“We often think of Tolkien as a man out of time,” Sandbrook writes, “a tweedy throwback holed up with his Old Norse sagas. But in his bleak view of the omnipresence of evil and the horrors of war, he was actually thoroughly modern.
Whenever he opened the newspaper, glanced at a literary periodical or talked to his Oxford colleagues at High Table, Tolkien would have heard the same refrain.” Tolkien was the last thing in the world from being a head in the clouds, impractical intellectual: The Somme had seen to that. But he was convinced that his own beloved country needed its own great myth to combat the dark infernal passions exploding out of Moscow and Berlin.
And so in 1937 he began work on his enormous masterpiece – “The Lord of the Rings.” It was not published till long after the ashes of World War II were cold and Hitler’s few charred skull remains were taken as trophies for Stalin to gloat over in the Kremlin.
What became a three volume work of nearly 1,200 pages only finally appeared in 1954 and 1955. Neither Tolkien nor his publishers had any high expectations for it. Britain was in the early days of its liberal, post-imperial funk.
The United States was setting the style and aspirations for a new, materialist, skeptical and hedonistic high tech world. The Space Race was about to start. Who on earth could possibly care about a densely plotted story filled with mind-numbing background and spurious scholarship about an entirely fictional fairy tale world?
Quite a lot of people, it turned out. To date “the Lord of the Rings” has sold more than 150 million copies. It is one the best-selling works of literature of all time. Tolkien’s vision and the epic scale of his world were so great that for generations even animated movies failed to do justice to it.
Finally at the beginning of the 21st century, a moviemaking genius, Sir Peter Jackson mastered the most advanced CGI techniques and with an actor of extraordinary talent, Andy Sirkis, miming the goblin-type fallen hobbit character Gollum, a three part movie trilogy generated billions of dollars in profit worldwide and made Tolkien more globally revered and passionately read than ever.
But why?
At a conscious level, Tolkien did not believe he was writing history. He always referred to the raw material of his magnum opus as myth: He was also unambiguous and clear that he set the events of his Middle Earth epic adventure thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands of years in the epic past.
As a devout, serious Catholic Christian all his life Tolkien revered his Bible but he was not a set-in-stone Biblical fundamentalist of the Archbishop Ussher variety. Not for him a limited human experience on Earth of only 6,000 years.
Sometime in the incredibly distant past – it did not really matter exactly when – the world was very different from the one we know today. It was a world of magic and wonder, but also of primeval monsters, dark forces and evil, twisted deformed humanoid races determined to annihilate Humanity and any meaningful moral code associated with it.
Against these incredible dangers, Tolkien could only set his ideal Englishmen: Not the race of arrogant, amazingly adaptive, ruthless and ingenious Odysseus’s who had first mapped the unknown world and then subdued it over the previous 350 years, but the kind of ordinary men he had come to know and love in his British Army service on the Western Front – small, undersized, cheerful, resilient fellows who loved to steal food and cook simple meals for themselves where they told endless tall tales about their amusingly nonexistent heroic achievements – until they rose up and saved the entire human race: Hobbits.
Tolkien’s Hobbits were lovable little fellows, around three to four feet tall. Yet even here, his prophetic vision of the past did not lead him astray: Tolkien died in 1973, full of years and honor. In 2003, 30 years after his passing, the fossils of Homo Floresiensis, an extinct species in the genus Homo were discovered at Liang Bua on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The individuals stood just over one meter, or three feet, three inches, tall. They were of course immediately labeled by the world’s media as “Hobbits.”
However, Tolkien’s vision took him far, far further than that.
In the previous chapters of my book ‘the Titans of Dawn”, I explored the memories, mythologies and claimed histories of the ancient classical and Hebrew, and Mesopotamian peoples. I looked in great detail at the far too neglected treasures of the histories and cultural traditions of the Native North American peoples and at the enormous treasure trove of megalithic ruins, sunken cities and lost remains bizarrely located up to two miles high in the world’s great mountain chains.
I also noted the unanimous testimony of the ancient peoples about giant God Kings who came from the sky with extraordinary power, benevolence and skills but who, for mysterious reasons, seemed to morally and spiritually deteriorate dramatically and, eventually, gave birth to a depraved race of monstrous cannibals dominated by their endless cravings for raw meat, preferably human in origin.
I also deployed irrefutable evidence from around the world that, contrary to the truly mythical fantasies of Charles Lyell, the father of uniformitarian theory in geology (even though he was never a trained or professional geologist), and Lyell’s adoring disciple Charles Darwin, human beings strikingly similar to ourselves lived in times of the giant flora and fauna of the Pleistocene.
Far from hunting megafauna to death as Desert University of Arizona Professor Paul S. Martin and his followers have fancily claimed in their Overkill Hypothesis (fiercely repudiated by the late, great Native American scholar Vine Deloria, Jr.), the ancient peoples, especially in North America lived in understandable terror of these colossal creatures.
We can now go further yet. For it is my conclusion that the world JRR Tolkien created in “The Lord of the Rings” was in very large part his recreation of the state of our terrestrial landmasses in the era immediately before that of recorded history.
In terms of literal time, I estimate it (with room for large margins of error) to be between four thousand to six thousand years ago. In terms of the stratigraphic layers of recorded human civilization, it would have been before the era of the Chalcolithic. In terms of the most influential framework of the primeval past in the Western World, the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, it would have been between the time of the Universal Deluge that covered the Earth and the time of the fall of the Tower of Babel.
This period of time, I maintain, must have lasted at least one thousand years and possibly two thousand years or more. It was a world of beauty and horror, the world that dungeons and dragons’ novelists and illustrators always feel drawn back to. In particular, it was also the world of the enormously influential author Robert E. Howard, creator of the still popular Conan the Barbarian.
In terms of ancient Hebrew myth, touched upon frustratingly briefly in the Book of Genesis, it was a world of highly dangerous predator animals when human hunters and kill-warriors became the apex of society – a status they had never enjoyed before during the long, sunlit golden age of the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age.
It was also, as we shall see, the age when the cannibal descendants of the original God-Kings ruled most of the Old World as well as the New, when their enormous physical strength, magnetic, bulging frightfully huge eyes and mental powers could throw the far more numerous ordinary human beings who were our ancestors into mindless terror.
These creatures lived when they could on tall mountains, preferably two miles above sea level and above the snow line. And when they had to dwell in our human societies, they did so living in high towers, and temples on top of enormous pyramids or ziggurats.
There, as Julian Jaynes documented in his work “The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, they were fed enormous quantities of meat and sweet desserts: No doubt with their servant priests terrified that if these supplies of food fell short, they would demand human sacrifices to devour.
In some extraordinary corners of the world, the domination of these God Kings lasted many thousands of years longer. That is the reality behind the Paiute nation’s traditions of the great battle around Humboldt Lake in Nevada where a tribe of these frightful monsters was finally exterminated.
Catalina Island may well have been their last and latest surface toehold on the main North American content. As we have seen, some of them may remain as predators to this day, living underground in cave systems by daylight and coming out still at night or on cloudy days to seize unwary campers and travelers in remote spots and national parks. The documentation by David Paulides in his 4-1-1 books is too consistent, solid and credible to continue to be shamefully ignored.
However, across the civilized, much more intensely populated areas of the Old World, liberation from the rule of these monsters came early. It is associated with the Tower of Babel myth in the Book of Genesis.
The early Church Fathers recognized clearly that this account was meant to be literal history and was also an event of epochal and global scale. The Classical Greek and Roman authors were convinced of the same thing. The great Altar at Pergamum now in the Dahlem Museum Complex in Berlin was a testimony to this very event. Far from symbolizing submission to demons it was, like the great works of art of Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy, an artistic expression of genius to celebrate the liberation of the human race from a long, dark past of ignorance, enslavement and terror.
Tolkien instinctively understood this too: It is no surprise that the middle book of his great “Rings” trilogy is entitled “The Two Towers.” It was only through the destruction of those towers, Tolkien wrote, that the monstrous plot to first enslave and then exterminate Humanity could be foiled.
And Tolkien, who spent the cream of his youth seeing indescribable horror and suffering himself in the great futile struggles of the British, French and German armies on the Western Front in World War I, understood the dynamics and terrors of battle and war well.
Tolkien entered the Battle of the Somme as a young 24-year-old signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers. Dominic Sandbrook writes succinctly of what he experienced next.
“This was not a war as it had been portrayed in the adventure stories he had loved as a boy; this was carnage on an industrial scale… What he experienced there was a chaotic, muddy nightmare. Tolkien himself might easily have been killed: in the three and a half months he spent on the Somme, his battalion lost almost 600 men… Among the dead were no fewer than 243 boys from his old school and 141 from his Oxford college…
The sense of loss haunted him for the rest of his life.” “By 1918,” Tolkien himself wrote more than 20 years later, “all but one of my close friends were dead.”
Even at the end of World War II, when the Nazis had been crushed and a rearmed and morally revived West was standing up to the Soviet communist threat across Europe and Asia, Tolkien felt no sense or spark of renewed optimism.
He was convinced, Sandbrook observes that the West had only triumphed over hideous modernistic evil by adopting the weapons, technologies and even epistemologies of evil itself. The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki confirmed these fears.
In his World War II letters to his son Christopher, then serving himself in Britain’s Royal Air Force, Tolkien “Again and again… warned that, by adopting the methods of modern industrialized warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil.” “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” Tolkien wrote to his son in one 1944 letter, “And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you well know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.’”
After the first atomic bombs were dropped to annihilate the two Japanese cities, Tolkien became more convinced than ever that the arrogance of human scientists that he had caricatured as Saruman, the corrupted wizard, could only lead to global catastrophe.
“(T)he utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world,” he wrote. It was a moral vision that J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, and Edward Teller, the visionary godfather and driving force behind the even more frightful hydrogen bomb, or thermonuclear (at first simply called “the Super”) would have done well to share.
More than 75 years later, looking out over a world filled with perpetual high technology industrialized war and programs in all the major superpowers dedicated to even transforming humanity itself into species of cyborgs, augmented and genetically enhanced super-soldiers all directed by sinister, developing Artificial Intelligence constructs whose own evolution and potential capabilities are little understood or anticipated, who can doubt for a moment that Tolkien was right?
In despairing of the future, Tolkien threw himself more passionately than ever into retrieving the lessons and vivid colors of a past before history that he intuited with extraordinary power.
“More than, he believed that medievalism, myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme had only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this shattered, bleeding world, he must look backwards to the great legends of the North.” (Sandbrook)
Despite his close ties and loving relationships with his mother, his wife and his daughter, Tolkien is very poor with female characters. Jackson had to effectively invent his main female protagonists and heroines in the movie version of the Rings cycle – And though the issue is obviously one of continuing contention, with Tolkien purists assailing this adaptation, there are those of us who maintain that Tolkien’s work is far the better and richer for it.
But the climax of the great epic of the “Rings” cycle is very clear: It is the war to death between the armies of the Horse Lords of Rohan, the last great human kingdom of Middle Earth, and the monstrous race of barbaric, gigantic Orcs.
For Tolkien, the identity of the Orcs was always clear: They were a barbarous male mutant race bred purely for torture, destruction and slaughter, by Sauron, dark Lord of Mordor and his human ally the Wizard Saruman, Lord of Isengard, an idyllic peaceful land of greenery and forests which Saruman transforms into another dark, industrialized hellhole. (Tolkien was also inspired and horrified by the growth of the city of Birmingham in the English Midlands).
Isengard was meant to be modern Germany, a land of peace, gentleness, great scholarship and magnificent classical music through the 18th and early 19th century until the enormous industrialization of the later-19th century made it the Empire of Blood and Iron that terrified and ravaged Europe for 75 years through three awful wars from 1870 to 1945.
And for Tolkien, Mordor was even worse – It was the Soviet Union: What happened to the poor peoples of Russia and its empire when Lenin and Stalin got their hands on them.
Tolkien therefore explicitly meant the Lord of the Rings to be an inspirational epic, a modern Iliad or Beowolf, an epic heroic poem to commemorate and inspire the English people in their hours of greatest suffering and greatest triumph. He succeeded brilliantly. But he also did far more.
He reached back in time through his poetic vision to recapture a vision of the past in the millennia before history that had been consigned to the attics and basements of the human experience and left there to rot.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is also a tale of the great world war that the human species fought to overthrow the rule of terror of the depraved and monstrous progeny of the God-Kings. No wonder therefore it has achieved such enormous and lasting popularity and has had such a deep resonance in popular culture.
Tolkien was a modern “Prophet of the Ancient Past.” His imaginative vision pierced deep into the darkest and deepest memories of the human experience in an age on Earth vastly different from anything we conceive of today.
Far from being a ridiculous, irrelevant old fogey, his amazing scholarship, vast life experience and wisdom and sheer intuitive power offer unparalleled warnings as our governments, pundits and scientists continue their mad rush of the Gadarene Swine to immolate the entire human race.
The above is an excerpt from Martin Sieff’s unpublished work ‘The Titans of Dawn’
Header image: slashfilm.com
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“In terms of ancient Hebrew myth”
Human eating titans are real though are they?
Nothing more than hero worship.
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