Justifying Wars in Tolkien’s Mythology

[Lhunithiliel]

The following is the excellent work of Eriol the Mariner ;) :) - his interpretation on the same topic - "War in Tolkien's works"
I am more than pleased to submit it to everybody's attention! :)
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Justifying Wars in Tolkien’s Mythology

Our esteemed Guild-Mistress asked me to write an essay about “War”, as part of a long-standing harassment campaign to get me more involved with Guild activities. I asked her: “War? What can I write about war? I am not a military historian, and my opinions on the many battles of Arda would be close to useless. I would say something like ‘stupid Gwindor!’, or ‘stupid Ulfang!’ – not too enlightening for our fellow guild-members.” Perhaps, I said, I could write something about how I think that wars are justifiable in Arda, even though I am completely opposed to wars in our world. “Fine!”, she said – and here I am.

So, this essay is a product of my personal opinions about war and killing in general, and therefore I think I should explain them briefly before the essay proper. It won’t take too much time, they are simply: I am against it. Against war, and against killing in general. In all cases. With no exceptions. I don’t agree with the vaunted distinction between “murder” and “killing” that people use to justify the death penalty and war; to me, “Thou shalt not kill” covers all of that. I know that my position is extreme, and probably Tolkien would not agree with it; but even so, Tolkien abhorred war, as I will show in the following quotes, and much of the argument I will develop applies to what I view as “the Tolkien position” about war -- as well as to my own.

Letter 61

How stupid everything is!, and war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)2 when x=normal human crassitude (and that’s bad enough)

Letter 64

The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists) – not of course that it has not been and will be necessary to face it in an evil world.

The problem is this, then – how can Tolkien glorify war and warriors in his myth while abhorring war? An easy answer is that Tolkien was doing the business of a writer, writing about a story in which wars actually occurred; and that he could not but glorify war in that setting, or else he would be condemning the “good guys”. That Aragorn and Éowyn and Faramir (and Fingolfin and Fingon and Húrin as well) demand a sympathetic view of war. In effect, this easy answer says that Tolkien is to be counted among the “poets” quoted in Letter 64; that he was showing what is fundamentally a false (glorified) image of war for literary effect.

I don’t dispute that this is part of the answer, but I don’t think it tells the whole story. I don’t think Tolkien viewed his wars as something despicable and stupid; he saw an essential difference between his mythological wars and the “real life” wars. A strong hint to that effect is his inability to write a sequel to LotR – an inability that seems to be grounded in moral scruples, perhaps:

Letter 256

I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its Discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing.

Letter 338

I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King’s Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and ‘orc-cults’ among adolescents).


tbc

[Lhunithiliel]

in continuation.......

Even though the reason Tolkien gives is “lack of interest”, i.e., the stories would not be good enough to be written, I think we can legitimately ask “why?”. Why would these stories not be interesting? Many authors have written books with similar plots, and they have been successful or not according to their quality. Could Tolkien have written a good book with this plot? We’ll never know. But certainly there is no intrinsic flaw in the plot. What is it that was missing? Why did Tolkien dismiss the Fourth Age so summarily? There are hints of it in his essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (and here I thank Walter for sharing that essay with me), and also in Letter 183:

Letter 183

The feats of arms in (say) Arthurian Romance, or romances attached to great centre of imagination, do not need to ‘fit into a politically purposive pattern’*. So it was in the earlier Arthurian traditions. Or at least this thread of primitive but powerful imagination was na important element in them. As also in Beowulf. Auerbach should approve of Beowulf, for in it an author tried to fit a deed of ‘errantry’ into a complex political field: the English traditions of the international relations of Denmark, Gotland, and Sweden in ancient days. But that is not the strength of the story, rather its weakness. Beowulf’s personal objects in his journey to Denmark are precisely those of a later Knight: his own renown, and above that the glory of his lord and king; but all the time we glimpse something deeper. Grendel is an enemy who has attacked the centre of the realm, and brought into the royal hall the outer darkness, so that only in daylight can the king sit upon the throne. This is something quite different and more horrible than a ‘political’ invasion of equals – men of another similar realm, such as Ingeld’s later assault upon Heorot.

The overthrow of Grendel makes a good wonder-tale, because he is too strong and dangerous for any man to defeat, but it is a victory in which all men can rejoice because he was a monster, hostile to all men and to all humane fellowship and joy. Compared with him even the long politically hostile Danes and Geats were Friends, on the same side.



*Not unless ‘political’ is narrowed (or enlarged), so that we are considering imaginatively only one centre or fortress of order and Grace surrounded by enemies: the untilled woods and mountains, hostile and barbarous men, wild beasts and monsters, and the Unknown. The defence of the realm may then indeed become symbolic of the human situation

And from a later part of Letter 183:

Letter 183

In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit.

And so we see the main stimulus behind Tolkien’s wars, or “feats of arms” as he put it – the monstrous opponent. His Fourth Age story was not interesting because of the lack of such an opponent, for the first time in the story of Arda. It would be Tolkien’s entry in the “complex political field”, as he called the international relations between Denmark, Gotland and Sweden as alluded to in Letter 183. And Tolkien thought this was the weakness of Beowulf; his real interest is clearly shown in the footnote (*) that I quoted from Letter 183, it is “the defence of the realm as symbolical of the human situation”. And therefore War, in Tolkien’s mythology, is not at all the same thing as war in the real world. Let me quote a definition of War (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I found online – the link will be provided at the end of the essay):

One apt definition of war is this: war is an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities.

War, in Arda, is never between “political communities”. Of course Mordor was a political community, strictly speaking; it had population, taxation, slaves, servants and aristocracy. But the real meaning of Sauron (and Mordor) is, as Tolkien said, “as near an approach to the wholly evil will as possible.” Sauron was a monster; Mordor was a monster. And in that sense this war is “symbolic of the human situation”, and so are all other wars in Arda that Tolkien described in detail. We have many examples of wars NOT described in detail; most important are Gondor’s wars against the Haradrim and Easterlings in the Third Age. Still, we (or at least I :) ) get the impression that a Ringwraith, or a Black Numenórean at least, was behind the hostilities in most cases. Or it could be seen as such. In any event, the description (or lack thereof) of these wars gives them a “clean” status, we don’t see (and we don’t think about) the casualties.

In fact the only conflict which is purely “political” and not “symbolic” (in the sense used in Letter 183) is the Kin-strife in Gondor. And I think Tolkien would have the same difficulty that he showed with his Fourth Age story if he tried to write the full story behind the Kin-strife. For Castamir was NOT a monster; a misguided, cruel, arrogant Dúnadan, perhaps, but almost certainly he was not evil; as seen from the fact that many people supported him. A civil war usually has no evil x good aspect – it is more likely a less evil x more evil affair. There was no “glamour” in that story, just as there was no glamour in the Fourth Age story; if Tolkien wrote them in detail, he would certainly condemn those wars, as scathingly as he did in the letters to Christopher Tolkien (the first letters quoted in this essay), as stupid and wasteful and crass.

And this, I think, is the full solution to the question asked in the beginning, about Tolkien’s inherent dislike of war and the apparently contradictory glorification of warriors and war in Arda. The warriors in Arda are never fighting against “political communities” – they are fighting the monsters, the enemies of mankind (and elvenkind, of course; but “mankind” is a convenient generic term ;) ). This is why Tolkien can describe Húrin slaying 70 Trolls as a great feat of arms, which of course it is, and not recoil at horror at the thought of the slaughter of 70 human beings, or 70 generic sentient beings; a major corollary of the “monster principle” is that the enemies are irredeemably evil. There is no hope of redeeming Morgoth, or Sauron – and this trickles down to the orcs. It is worthy of note that slaughter is NEVER approved when it concerns the “redeemable races” – witness Aragorn’s pardon and release of the Easterlings and Haradrim at the Black Gate, and the mercy shown to the Dunlendings.

Luckily, even a “hard-core pacifist” like me (think of me as more pacifist than Frodo :) ) can agree with the principle of spiritual warfare, of a battle against evil forces. Even I would take up a sword (clumsily) to fight against Sauron.

Whoa! I wrote a lot, and all the time I have this feeling that I am just stating the obvious. Oh well, the obvious must be stated in some occasions.

I hope you enjoyed it, fellow guild-members.

:)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/#4