"I am the Elder King: Melkor, first and mightiest of the Valar, who was before the world, and made it. The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death."
—Morgoth to Húrin, The Children of Húrin, pg. 64
Earlier today I ended up getting into a debate about people who criticized Tolkien, in which I decided that, although I personally had no gripes with Tolkien and thought his books were very well-written, I still needed to defend George R. R. Martin and, by extension, Michael Moorcock from being called “coomers.” Tolkien might be the first modern fantasy series, and I’ve said positive things about it a few times before on this very blog, but when you finish your Tolkien, what are you supposed to read? Dragonlance? The Sword of Shannara? Belgariad? Forgotten Realms? Even if authors don’t all know literary criticism, I’m taking George R. R. Martin and Michael Moorcock, who actually write enjoyable things, over generic Tolkien ripoffs that often very clearly miss the point of Tolkien way worse than either of those two authors’ criticisms do any day. After all, their criticisms just seem to amount to “we want to write things based on history (George R. R. Martin) or mythology (Michael Moorcock) that aren’t necessarily so family-friendly or simple to understand,” and I don’t begrudge that.
This conversation caused me to start thinking about Tolkien off and on for hours later, which made me start to remember I actually have a bunch of criticisms of Tolkien too despite them being completely different than Martin’s or Moorcock’s. One, even if Tolkien wasn’t trying to recreate theology in Lord of the Rings, death certainly wasn’t supposed to be a gift to humanity and I don’t see how that idea even makes sense in-universe. If you’re going by the Bible, which Tolkien explicitly said he didn’t do, death was a curse. The wage of sin is death, it’s not a blessing from God. Two, what does death as a gift even entail? Sure, the elves were often portrayed as quite tortured due to their lifespans that had lasted for thousands of years at that point, but the humans didn’t exactly blink out of existence. There was however the ghost army, so Tolkien seems to mean that the gift for humans is to become a ghost. So when elves need a break from planet Earth they go to Valinor, and humans don’t get a break, they just turn into ghosts and go to the ghost realm, which is apparently a better fate than being a Valar or whatever. I’m not really seeing any of it. Additionally, the only reason the elven kings didn’t take their rings is because Sauron didn’t have anything to promise them. The elven kings aren’t any better than the human ones according to moral luck theory. If the elven kings were mortal too, they would’ve taken their rings. Of course, lots of people have basically analyzed the Noldor elves as just being evil so that’s nothing new. The idea of Skyrim and all these other modern series making the high elves into basically Nazis is actually pretty traditional for Tolkien and not at all a corruption if by the high elves you mean the long-lost Noldor elves and not the ones you meet at the Council of Elrond in actual Tolkien.
Then I remembered that the whole idea of Morgoth/Melkor corrupting the entire Middle-Earth (aka the material world, not merely planet Earth) into his “ring” was actually criticized as being very Gnostic when Lord of the Rings was released. This actually started to make all of what seems like the gaping plot holes in Lord of the Rings make sense. For example, the fact that basically nothing anyone did ever moved the plot forward. Gandalf could summon giant eagles all along, but he didn’t, the Fellowship of the Ring just waited for them to show up toward the end. Frodo didn’t throw the ring into Mount Doom, he was about to get corrupted by it himself, but Gollum grabbed it from him at the end and then just fell into Mount Doom.
Every character has remarkably little agency when you think about it, it’s not just that there’s a deus ex machina or two deus ex machinae as that basically the entire story of Lord of the Rings is essentially a story of things happening to people, not a story of people doing things. “But, the world is fallen and the heart is utterly wicked! No one can do anything but be saved by the grace of God!” you might think. That would be Gnosticism, not what’s portrayed in traditional Christianity. Aside from Jesus saving people, plenty of other people took actions in the Bible and they were portrayed positively. Plenty of Old Testament figures performed miracles and did things for other people and to other people, and so did plenty of New Testament figures other than Jesus. It makes me think of those Bible Heroes graphic novels you always see at places like Hobby Lobby and Mardel. The Bible certainly disagrees that everyone should strive to be a self-interested hobbit who just wants second breakfast and takes no interest in the affairs going on around them, and it also disagrees that taking action ultimately leads to your damnation because your ego will automatically swell up or whatever and you’ll be corrupted.
The original criticism of Tolkien that spawned this discussion was Alan Moore’s and Alan Moore’s was admittedly shallow. I don’t like his worldview very much myself because the whole point of Watchmen was to try to say that there are no heroes, there are only a bunch of fascists who think they’re heroes. Of course, basically everyone who liked Watchmen missed that point in favor of liking mostly Rorschach but also sometimes Doctor Manhattan, Adrian Veidt, or the Comedian, so Watchmen wasn’t all that well-written. George R. R. Martin and Michael Moorcock I think have much better grounds to criticize Tolkien on because the grounds they criticize Tolkien on are essentially that they think Tolkien’s world is interesting but they don’t idealize it as something they want in reality and they want to make something significantly different in terms of their art. George R. R. Martin and Michael Moorcock and definitely in some sense “more liberal” than Tolkien and not creating remotely idealized worlds and this is I think the reason many Tolkien fans conflict with them, because many Tolkien fans do want to live in Tolkien’s universe, they don’t like that people take it as inspiration to make these dystopian worlds.
However, if you’re like me, you already see Tolkien as pretty much a dystopian world anyway. I mean, come on, it’s at a medieval level of technology despite having some ancient and even some Victorian-looking influences. People can’t have smelled good, the food must have been bad British food at best even the hobbits wanted to eat it all the time, there were wars all the time, people were basically poor, and there wasn’t even all that much magic to make up for it. The most magical thing that happens is someone gets a ring that makes them transparent (but doesn’t hide them well enough that their footprints etc. aren’t obviously visible) and telepathically connects them to the demonic dictator (you’d think maybe it could telepathically hide people from others’ perceptions, but alas, the demonic dictator didn’t think that would be a good idea or maybe didn’t know how,) the second most magical thing that happens is they ride a bunch of giant birds, and it falls off steeply from there. Half the magical items like the palantír orbs are corrupt and the mithril shirt just stops them from getting stabbed in the chest with big pointy metal sticks. Worse, almost all of the “magic” things that happen in Tolkien are things that are replicated much more frequently in the modern age by technology and modern technology also does things that magic in Tolkien can’t.
Additionally, the entire reason Middle Earth is at a low technology level seems to very directly be the result of the fact that no one takes any actions pretty much ever because everyone is a Gnostic. If anyone ever needed any evidence that real Christianity gave us modern science and Gnosticism gave us the Middle Ages I think this definitely counts. And yes, there was definitely good science pre-Christianity with Aristotle etc. in my opinion so it’s not all directly Christianity, but if anything set it back it was Gnosticism, not Christianity. I know there are certain Gnostics, some of whom are on Substack, who want to have a Gnostic version of science specifically but guess what? It’s not happening. Pagan science, sure, since there was already pagan science, but not Gnostic science. Seeing as Gnosticism seems like it’s what most people equate to Christianity, of course the spread of Christianity would mostly be corrupted to Gnosticism and lead to the Dark Ages, even though that’s a perversion, real Christianity generally favors Aristotle over Plato even though it’s not like Aristotle and Plato were sworn enemies and most of the really harmful aspects of Gnosticism didn’t come from Plato either.
Forget all the talk of the Protestant work ethic and people challenging that and saying it’s the Catholic work ethic, it should probably be the Aristotelean work ethic. I see lots of issues in both Catholicism and Protestantism, but lots of Catholics are chill and did a lot of science like literally discovering the Big Bang theory, and lots of Protestants are chill and aren’t begging for Dominionism. Speaking of the connections between Dominionism and Gnosticism, did you know Islam adopted a lot of Gnostic scriptures? So both Dominionism and all the Caliphate stuff are probably exactly the same: Gnosticism in action. If you don’t like Islamic extremism or comparable Christian fundamentalism, don’t go off and identify yourself as a Gnostic, as if that were a protest against the perceived flaws of major world religions rather than their source.
I think my own personal experience with Tolkien has been shaded a lot by the fact I’ve had nearly nothing but negative experiences with Dungeons and Dragons and grown to rather dislike generic fantasy writing as a result, but I’ve also come to see the flaws with generic fantasy writing as being inherent to it. There is a link between Tolkien and generic awful fantasy writing, but the link isn’t what any of the critics had said it is, the link is Gnosticism. The Tolkien type of world is what Gnostics want to live in, except people like Ed Greenwood who don’t self-identify as Catholic are much hornier about it and don’t have any problem with having “the gods” instead of “the Valar, which are more like angels because I’m supposed to be Catholic, despite all these descriptions of them creating the world and receiving worship.” Tolkien was much more sophisticated because he was a university professor, but there is a real link between Tolkien’s world and these awful trash fantasy series that isn’t solely based on a misrepresentation of Tolkien after all.
I still think the real Christianity gave us the modern world and that’s a good thing. I don’t like talking politics much but I will self-identify as really just a classical liberal because that shouldn’t be too contentious. That’s to say, I believe in progress, especially technological, scientific, and economic, progress, even if I don’t believe in all this Marxist stuff that gets identified as “liberal” in the US due to the fact that the US was founded on liberal values so lots of leftists (most of which are luckily not out-and-out commies) call themselves “liberal” as, depending on your perspective, either a metaphor or a euphemism, since lots of classical liberals are calling themselves “conservative” since that’s conservative for the US, even if it’s not really socially or economically conservative at all and would just be called liberalism in Europe. All that should be pretty obvious now so I might as well say it. If you’re looking at pop culture, the best representatives of Christianity in popular culture are mostly various superheroes, Harry Potter, and Star Wars among some other things… Oh no, I just listed the most popular things and the things that people get mad at, the horror. It’s still true, though. All those are generally stories about people choosing to be nice (though not the extremist interpretation that I think is inaccurate, where people have to be doormats, or be poor, etc.) and people rising from the dead, things like that. Those also tend to be really heavy on the intellectualism. Superheroes are mostly scientists or sometimes philosophers, Harry Potter is literally going to a wizard school to study and there are more professors than just the one you see in for example X-Men. Definitely love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.
(Yes, I praised Britain before. I still have criticisms of America for trying to be too much like Europe. As
put it, there are actual good things about European culture, they’re just not what the American so-called elites are interested in emulating. Note: This article is entirely my own opinions and is not representative of the opinions of Sasha V or anyone else who is mentioned in it.)