EMIGRATING
TO MIDDLE EARTH
It
has been many years since I first read Tolkien's trilogy.
Like many kids of that era – I guess it was around 1967
or so – I was so enraptured by the famous fantasy trilogy
that I read it through to the end in just a few sittings.
Stretched out in a green field overlooking a New England wood
ablaze with autumn – it looked like a scene out of Middle
Earth – I literally couldn't put it down. Tolkien's
"Middle Earth" – a self-contained parallel
universe, complete with its own geography, history, linguistics,
and
even music – was a far more amenable place than the
rather weird private academy in which my parents had enrolled
me.
TOLKIEN,
THE LIBERTARIAN
I
much
preferred a world of hobbits, elves, orcs, and dwarves to
the very real mental dwarves who ran the not-so-"progressive"
school I attended at the time. There are plenty of other "alternative" universes created
by fantasy and science fiction writers – Norman Peake's
Gormenghast
trilogy,
the works of Lord
Dunsany, etc. – but none affected me quite the way
Tolkien did. The story of the One Ring appealed to my libertarian
ideological orientation, strong even back then. For The Lord of the Rings is a parable of power
and its corrupting influence, a veritable dramatization of
Lord Acton's famous axiom that "power tends to corrupt
and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as he put it
in a letter to Mandell Creighton, bishop of London, sometime
in the nineteenth century.
GOOD
GUYS AND BAD
In
that same letter he also said, less famously: "Great
men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence
and not authority" – an observation that echoes
the way Tolkien's characters embody this theme of the inherent
evil of power. For just look at how he divides the bad guys
from the good: the latter are embodied in the hobbits, a kind
of Anglicized faun with hairy feet and a diminutive stature,
the happy inhabitants of a sylvan glade known as The
Shire.
GREATNESS
VERSUS GOODNESS
If
"great men" are almost always bad men, then ordinary
men, or the even more ordinary hobbits
– who love order, regularity, and have a bourgeois fear
of "adventures" or anything out of the ordinary
– are almost always good men (or hobbits, as it were).
None is more ordinary than the unlikely hero of Tolkien's
epic novel, Frodo
Baggins, who represents the race of Hobbits in all their
curious combination of bourgeois virtues, circa the turn of
the last century, such as steadfastness, love of nature, perseverance,
and a belief that people ought to be left to go about their
business and (most importantly) their pleasure.
Hobbits have breakfast, and then they have a second breakfast,
and a pre-lunch snack, and then a more formal luncheon, and
then – well, you get the picture. They enjoy their food,
their beautiful Shire, and life in general, and generally
represent the way the middle and even the lower classes viewed
the world until 1914 and the coming of the Great War.
ELVES
AND WIZARDS: GUARDIANS OF THE WEST
On
another level of Tolkien's multi-layered parable-epic, we
have the mysterious and much more austere Elves, the preservers
of an ancient knowledge, whose appearance and culture seem
more than human; that is, human in an idealized sense, Man as he might
have been or will be in some benevolent future. Together with
the few powerful wizards, who are human, they are the guardians
of the West and protectors of the world of Men. But not all
of them are as benevolent (and fumbling) as the chief of the
Good Guys, Gandalf.
While tall and rather imposing, as befits a wizard of such
legendary power, Gandalf is rather affable, and even ordinary
in many ways: for one thing, he has a sense of humor, and
he often visits the Shire, where he is right at home.
ORCS,
DWARVES, AND SWITZERLAND
The
bad guys, on the other hand, are a singularly humorless lot,
embodied in rival beings of an
entirely different order. The Orcs, who are really degenerated
Elves, are foul creatures, aligned with Sauron,
the Evil One: their chief emotion seems to be bloodlust. They
inhabit the Eastern regions of the Tolkienesque universe,
in and around Mordor, the epicenter of evil. The dwarves are
isolationists, whose underground world is a perfect setting
for their obsessive pursuit of accumulating gold and other
subterranean riches: they stand apart from the epic struggle,
kind of like Switzerland -- but threatened, like the rest
of Middle Earth, by the Dark Lord's growing influence.
TOLKIEN
A 'GREEN'?
Gandalf's
dark counterpart, Saruman,
is a good wizard gone bad, who sells out to Sauron and turns
his wizardly domain, Isengard,
into an industrial and military powerhouse. Saruman perverts
his powers to produce a bigger and more fearsome variety of
Orc, and tears up the formerly pastoral countryside to make
way for belching factories of evil that darken the sky over
a decimated moonscape. There is a scene in the movie, as Saruman
takes a tour of the new facilities, where he orders his misshapen
underlings to "pull up every tree," that perfectly
expresses the ideology of the bad guys.
Sauron,
Lord of Mordor, rules a volcanic land of utter desolation
where no natural form of life could possibly survive. But
rather than pushing some banal anti-industrialist, anti-capitalist,
"green" point of view, Tolkien was making here a
more profound insight: that evil is necessarily expansionist
and must project itself everywhere: everything, even the landscape,
is a mirror to it. The aesthetics of Mordor, and Isengard,
reflect the inner state of their rulers.
ONE
RING TO BIND THEM ALL
Sauron,
called the Dark Lord, is not just a symbol of evil, but a
convincing character who embodies everything Tolkien hated
about the modern world: it's love of power, it's lust for
domination, it's sheer damned ugliness. Sauron is an obsessive nutball,
whose love of power for its own sake is given physical form
in the Ring
of Power. Without going into all the details of Tolkien's
beautifully complex mythology, the rulers of Middle Earth
were each given rings of power, which contained within them
the sovereignty and uniqueness of each and every race. But
Sauron's love of power drove him to forge a super-ring, one
with the power to control the others. Professor Tolkien, a
linguist who taught at Oxford and was an expert on ancient
Nordic poetry, sprinkled his tomes with the ancient poetry
of Middle Earth, one of which told of Sauron's bid for
supreme power:
"One
Ring to rule them all,
One
Ring to find them,
One
Ring to bring them all
And
in the Darkness bind them."
ONE
RING TO FIND THEM
This
ring, cut off the hand of Sauron himself in a long ago battle
against the king of mythic Gondor,
is lost for centuries, and finally found by a dwarf named
Smeagol,
who promptly falls under its evil spell. For the ring enslaves
those who wear it, since it contains Sauron's essence –
the sort of megalomania that, for instance, might have come up with a phrase
such as "national greatness" to describe a school
of thought. To put on the Ring automatically puts one
in contact with Sauron, and, furthermore, attracts the attention
of creatures known as Ringwraiths
– the enslaved former kings of earth, whose lust for
power led them into the camp of Sauron. They pursue the One
Ring relentlessly, constantly seeking to reunite it with its
original owner and creator. For once Sauron gets his hands
on the ring, he will have absolute power over Middle Earth.
FRODO'S
DARK VISION
There
is a very effective scene in the movie, in which Frodo is
shown the consequences if the Fellowship of the Ring fails
in its quest to destroy the ring by flinging it into the fires
of Mordor.
In a magic mirror shown to him by the Elvish Queen, the Shire
is destroyed in a blitzkrieg of Orcs, who pillage and burn
it and drive the hobbits into pens, slaughtering and destroying
everyone and everything in their path. The Shire is decimated,
just as Saruman's Isengard was, not just industrialized but
uglified, and life is organized around more "scientific"
lines. It is a future world of fire and steel, where the gentle
hobbits – and everything beautiful and harmless –
have no place. It's forced "globalization" -- with a vengeance.
A
MOVIE REVIEW, OF SORTS
I
am not qualified to comment on the acting, or the particular
actors: having given up on the ability of American culture
to entertain or edify at an early age, I haven't been to the
movies since sometime in the 1970s. So when people tell me
that these people are well-known actors, I take their word
for it and move on. My only comment is that this ensemble
doubtless read and understood the trilogy, because all seem
to embody their characters to a remarkable degree. I especially
liked Sir
Ian McKellen, who brings the right mixture of majesty
and humanity to the role of Gandalf. Elijah
Wood as Frodo looks like a young hobbit, and for all his
ephebic good looks I have the feeling he'll be considerably
toughened by the end of the two remaining episodes.
BACK
AT MOVIES
Although
the story line is necessarily abbreviated – we are talking
here about an adaptation of a three volume work of some 400
closely printed pages each – the essential plot and the especially
telling details have all been included, at least so far. This
is a dramatization of the first volume, The
Fellowship of the Ring, to be followed by The
Two Towers and The Return of the King. For the first time
in many years I can't wait
to go to the movies again….
A
POWERFUL COUNTERFORCE
If
the next two installments live up to the promise of the first,
then The Lord of the
Rings is going to be a mighty cultural counterforce to
the American drive toward Empire, which, today, seems all
but inevitable. For the past decade or so, ever since the
end of the Cold War, the theoreticians of "national
greatness conservatism" (and their counterparts,
the advocates of "national greatness liberalism")
– represented by the Weekly
Standard and the New
Republic, respectively – have been telling us that
we ought to establish a world empire, or at least act the
part.
In
the wake of 9/11, we have born-again imperialists like Mark
Steyn, and the neoconservative cadre of writers who dominate
the pages of National Review, declaring that now is
the time to revive the theory and practice of colonialism,
British-style, as a model for American foreign policy. Like
Sauron, they pine for "one ring to rule them all"
– a "New World Order." The more the US asserts
its role as the world's chief and only superpower, the more
the city of Washington D.C., comes to resemble Mordor. Now
when the neoconservatives start blithering about what Bill
Kristol calls "benevolent
global hegemony" as the guiding principle of American
policy, I am reminded of Saruman, whose hubris was his undoing.
AGAINST
POWER
There
is one scene in the movie when the council of the good guys
is convened at Rivendell,
the ethereally gorgeous realm of the Elves, that underscores
the libertarian theme of the Tolkien trilogy. There is a debate,
between the heirs of Gondor – the Men – and the
Elves over whether to use the One Ring against Sauron, to
turn his own weapon on its creator. "But why shouldn't
we use Sauron's own power against him?" "No!"
cries Gandalf, who has been listening to the argument with
growing dismay. "You must never use it – you cannot
use it, or else you are lost." He goes on to explain,
essentially, that one cannot use evil means to achieve a supposedly
worthy end: the ends are the means. The One Ring is Sauron, for it is power – or, perhaps,
the love of power – and that
is what must be destroyed if Men – and Hobbits, and Elves,
and Dwarves – are to live in peace.
And
that about says it all, now doesn't it?
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