Tolkien’s Clash of Civilizations

December 18, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Tolkien’s Clash of Civilizations
Two Towers’s eerie relevance.

f you think about it, making the connection between the obliterated Twin Towers and The Two Towers is a dime-store synchronicity. The World Trade Center was a morally neutral symbol of commercial dynamism (though Tolkien himself would have taken a darker view of those towers). In contrast, the towers of the film's title are twin projections of unambiguous evil. Still, the comparison is irresistible — even director Peter Jackson says he gets an "eerie" feeling thinking about it — because audiences see Jackson's first-rate film versions of the Tolkien books, and immediately grasp the relevance the stories have for our convulsive times.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy explores the nature of individual heroism in the midst of an epic clash of civilizations, one that pits freedom-loving peoples of the West against merciless totalitarians from the East. As the hobbits Frodo and Sam make their way through the bleak and hostile land of Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power, which would bring about the enslavement of the world if it fell into the hands of the Dark Lord Sauron, their companions in the West rally a coalition of tribes to wage war against Sauron's minions living among them.

Some Western peoples of Middle Earth, for reasons of bourgeois comfort, selfishness, or cynical despair, want no part of the coming war, and think mistakenly that they can avoid trouble if they simply lay low. It falls to the good wizard Gandalf, the ascendant king Aragorn, and their followers to convince the West to stand fast and fight for its freedom and way of life. As many of us do when we read stories of the hideous weapons that could be in the hands of terrorists, we know how Frodo feels when he tells Gandalf that he wishes he had not been born into such a time as this.

The old prophet-wizard counsels Frodo to turn away from such futile and self-defeating conjecture, because no man can choose the times in which he lives. Says Gandalf, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

The Lord of the Rings is about how men, including the humblest of men, choose to act in the face of moral urgency and engulfing peril. It is about the power of humility, the wisdom of mercy, the glory of self-sacrificial valor, the false glamour of evil, the workings of grace, and above all, the necessity of faith. Put more plainly, LOTR screenwriter Phillippa Boyans tells NRO, it's about goodness — an idea that leaves many moderns skeptical and confused.

"We come from a generation that has never had that question put to us," she said in an interview. "It was put to the generation of World War I. It was put to the generation of World War II. 'What are you prepared to do?' 'Are you going to hold on?' 'Are you going to keep going?' 'Do you have to live?' 'Is this a world worth fighting for?' All of this is in there."

In The Two Towers, when a weary Frodo begins to lose faith in his ability to succeed on his mission, and in the prospects for the West's survival, we hear an echo of our own sophisticated cynics and cultural pessimists, who despair of defending our civilization from its enemies because they do not believe we have anything worth defending.

"There are things that people hold onto to keep them going," says his faithful servant Sam Gamgee.

"That there is some good in this world, and that's worth fighting for," Sam replies.

That looks banal on the printed page, but the line has great force in the film. Sam is a simple man, but he knows a few things well, and his chief virtue is loyalty. He doesn't trouble himself with the big picture; all he knows is that his homeland and its people are worth defending against those who would destroy them. That is enough; indeed, it is more than many more intelligent men and women of our day know. It is the wisdom of the common man, the kind of English infantrymen Tolkien knew in the trenches of the Great War. The Hun is still at our borders, which still must be defended.

When Saruman masses his troops in The Two Towers, before the Battle of Helm's Deep, it is tempting to look upon the battalions of Orc-slaves ready to slaughter the men of the West at the command of the Sauron's wizard servant Saruman, and think of the fanatical slaves of Islamism, under the command of mad mullahs. And there would be some truth to that. But as Russell Kirk observed, you cannot pin Tolkien down to any specific historical allegory. "His three volumes are a picture of the perpetual struggle between good and evil; his concern is the corrupting intoxication of power." Tolkien believed in good and evil, but also held with Solzhenitsyn, and traditional Christianity, that "the line between good and evil runs straight through every human heart."

This is why it is a mistake to view The Lord of the Rings films as merely inspirational movies into which we can neatly read self-congratulatory, pro-Western messages in a time of war. Bradley J. Birzer, author of the recently published J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth, asserts that Tolkien's message included "a call to defend all that was best in the long history of Western civilization." But Birzer reminds us that for Tolkien, "Evil does not always come in the form of war or totalitarian terror. Tolkien saw in the impersonal, machine-driven capitalism of the twentieth century, and especially its handmaiden, the democratic bureaucracies of the Western world, a form of soft tyranny almost as oppressive as fascism or communism."

The orthodox Catholic Tolkien saw pride, and the all-consuming craving for power it fosters when unchecked, as the root of human evil. In LOTR, Sauron and his servant Saruman desire to gather all power unto themselves so they can subjugate the natural world and every living creature within it, rather than seek to find their rightful place as reverent stewards of an ordered creation. They were slaves of their desire for raw power, which was symbolized by the Ring. With perfect power comes total enslavement, Tolkien teaches; this is why not even those who think they would use the Ring to do good are lying to themselves.

I want to be careful when I say this, but it seems clear to me that Tolkien would have looked upon the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as symbols of a form of tyranny to which prosperous and free Western man is susceptible. Of course, there can be no doubt that he would have seen the attack upon them as monstrous, and would have backed some kind of military response to combat the Islamic barbarians. Whatever the contemporary West's sins, there is plenty of good in this world we have made for ourselves, and there is no question that it's worth fighting for.

That said, Tolkien does not let us off the hook easy. We will be judged by how we use the power we accumulated, by what we have done with the time that was given us. Are we an arrogant and materialistic people? Do we restrain ourselves in accordance with principles of justice, mercy, decency, and reverence for life, or do we seek knowledge and riches for the sake of imposing our will on things that ought to be left undefiled? Will we tolerate the intolerable rather than limit our freedom of choice? Is our seemingly unstoppable march to globalization unwisely concentrating power in the hands of the few? Do we see the natural world as merely ours for the taking and selling?

These are the kinds of questions Tolkien's great narrative puts to both the serious reader, and despite the surfeit of action, to the viewer of the films. Both the author and his cinematic interpreter inspire the LOTR audiences to stand firm in defense of our civilization, despite its flaws, without rewarding them with a sense of unearned triumphalism. There is far too much at stake for that: only the souls of individuals, and the soul of Western civilization. Prof. Birzer quotes Tolkien writing that Gandalf was wholly dedicated to "the defence of the West against the Shadow," and the same is true for Tolkien. We are fortunate to have these books, and now these films, in the present moment, to give us hope and a reason to dig in for the long fight ahead.

And yet, even as the shadow cast by Islamofascist minarets is the most immediate source of this present darkness across our civilization, it is by no means the only one.

The metaphor of a line through each human heart is biblical in origin and has been used so often by so many authors over the centuries that no single writer can claim credit for it.

I'M calling it blurred. I believe Tolkien would agree.

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart."
I believe the rest of the quote is"...and who is willing to cut out a piece of his own heart?

As Somebody said, once: "And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than thy whole body be cast into hell."

As Somebody said, once:

Perzactly!

That is the unspoken answer that I expect that Alexey had in mind, when he said what he said.

Good on you, AG.

The metaphor of a line through each human heart is biblical in origin

Really?

Just grabbed the Strong's Concordance. Looked up "heart." Cannot find references to any line through it. There is a lot about hard, wicked, evil uncircumsized heart, as well as letting it not be troubled.

Nothing about a line, though.

(Not a flame. I am enjoying all the Tolkien discussion on line today.)

The sentiment is so pervasive throughout Christian (and Judeo) biblical teaching (at the heart of it, one might say), that, the absence of the exact phrase in Strong's concordance notwithstanding, Solzenitsyn certainly can't claim to have come up with it.

If memory serves, Augustine, Aquinas and Pascal all wrote the on same theme.

bump...to read later...

I was suprised that our PBS affiliate ran a biography of Tolkein last night...

...must be trying to lure back viewers after airing that recruiting video for Islam
"Muhammad, Legacy of A Prophet".

What a load of crap this is. They were office space, nothing more, built tall so that they could fit more square footage in a place where real estate is precious, and, like any building designed by any architect, made with an eye to appearance. If Tolkien would have looked on them as symbols of tyranny, then Tolkien's would have read too much into them. I think the authore is the one making a few leaps of logic.

Frankly they were ugly, staid slabs of modernist crap.

As such they did represent the leveling sterility of rapcious capitalism - something Tolkien cared little for.

Obviously this does not justify in any sense whatsoever vile acts of terrorism like 9/11. There's no question whose "side" we are on or should be on or whose side Tolkien would immediately identify himself with.

It's just a warning to us to be aware of the corrosive elements in our own culture - as Dreher points out.

The thing with the trees was cartoonish; they needed to think about that one a bit more.

I agree with that. I expected to see a forest.

There were some variations from the book that I didn't think were necessary, too. . . like Fararamir's character which was more noble in the book than on the screen.

They were office space, nothing more...

I beg to differ. Muslim extremists didn't give up their lives for the cause of destroying some office space, or even the people who worked in those offices. They took out the towers in order to assault what the towers stood for.

If someone comes on here and says they are a Tolkien Ph.D, and they believe that Tolkien would have thought the WTC was a Symbol of Tyranny, then I will have to revise my view of Tolkien downward.

In order to get an idea of what Tolkien would have thought of the World Trade Center towers, you might read That Hideous Strength, the third novel in C.S. Lewis's Perelandra trilogy. Lewis and Tolkien were colleagues and friends, and shared a strong suspicion of technology, industrialization, and bureaucracy.

I suspect that Tolkien might have seen the United States in 2003 as being something like Numenor--a strong and fundamentally good nation of men and women, but lately given to cultural excesses, not the least of which is pride. The ruins that we see in both Jackson films were left by a civilization that--technology aside--might have been very much like our own.

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