LOTR: Foreword to the 2nd Edition Pt 4

Sensing the Trace of the Fugitive Gods

Baldr the Beautiful

We conclude our annotation of Tolkien’s Foreword to the 2nd Edition (1966) of The Lord of the Rings with Tolkien’s final attempt (it appears) to rescue his mythology from childish roots, counter culture fans, and source-seeking intellectuals. Up to this point in the foreword, Tolkien distanced LOTR from its assumed prequel, The Hobbit, and connected it to his larger pure myth The Silmarillion. Tolkien had hoped to get ‘The Silmarillion’ published as early as 1937 and again in 1951 when he ‘completed’ writing LOTR. Now, in 1966, Tolkien was possibly paving the way once agian for its publication.

After reminding everyone that the WW2 was far worse than the War of the Ring, a devestating indictment of our own ‘Age’, he turns toward the conclusion. Tolkien makes a final play for the power of fairy-story over modern literature.

“Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestation, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability with allegory; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

This is a dense and confounding paragraph that have and continue to fill volumes of work trying to understand. While I’m interested in the meaning and implications surrounding Tolkien’s favoring of ‘history', a few words should be dedicated to ‘allegory’ and his dislike of it. We might concede and agree with Tolkien and say there are no intentional allegories in LOTR and then turn around and say but there are many unintentional allegories. This would be a betrayal of his work. Seaching for and privlidging what he neither intended nor would agree with is to miss the depth and richness of its purpose. Another way to think about this is found in his wildly influential paper, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936), and Tolkien’s critique of over-anaylizers and deconstructors (scholars, literary critics, and now ‘fans’) who are akin to a people who come upon an ancient tower:

“So they pushed the tower over with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones.” (BMC)

This very intentional allegory is meant to describe the very modern job of breaking a thing to find its meaning. Tolkien especially loathed the psychological deconstruction of a text by modern literary critics. The applicable truth of this reproach is echoed by Gandalf as he recounts before the Council of Elrond the betrayal of Saruman the White:

“For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” ‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered. ‘ “ I liked white better,” I said. ‘ “White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” ‘ “In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” (FOTR 272)

The same spirits are at work in the text. When Tolkien says “domination of the author” he means to equate it with a dark magic . . . the magic of Saruman . . . the magic of Sauron. It’s a magic that wishes to “dominate” (forcing meaning into the story) and “break” (prying a meaning out of the story) rather than a magic that reveals and sets free (Letters #75, 131, 155). Now, that cetainly sounds malevolent and of course not all attempts to force meaning are born from sauronic intent . . . but according to Tolkien, it has left the path of wisdom. What then is “the freedom of the reader”?

Tolkien strangely contrasts what seems to be the creative act of an author or scholar with what might, on the surface, seem to be the licentious ‘freedom of the reader’. To make sense of this we should clearly state that when Tolkien says ‘freedom’ he is not referring to a personal imagination un-moored from tradition or higher authority in the postmodern sense. Here, freedom is better understood as literally Liberalis. It is the freedom attained by the soul at leisure (in the Aristotelian sense) contemplating the mysteries of Being. Such a habit (state?) is necessary to sense the applicability of pure myth . . . to sense the applicability of the dying-and-rising of Osiris, Dionysus, Persephone . . . to sense something profound and true in the death of Baldr the beautiful by the mistletoe tipped arrow . . . to sense the truth in the struggle against the power of the One Ring.

In mythopoeia we are invited to sense the trace of the fugitive gods. In mythopoeia we are shown the path to escape the embalming efforts of the Modern world which ultimately reduces all things, all reality, to a inanimate mosquito in amber. This call and our longing is the mythopoeic passion that plays out in the pages of The Lord of the Rings to which we will turn.

The road goes ever on . . .