Fantasy As a Roundabout Road to Truth

Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, the king returnedViggo Mortensen as Aragorn 

I didn’t do entire justice in Monday’s post to the Tolkien essay of my son Toby. In correcting that here, I also open up a more complicated vision of fantasy in general, as well as Tolkien’s fantasy specifically.

I was wondering if Tolkien had retreated into fantasy as a refuge from the horrors he had experienced in World War I. I was also worried that Tolkien’s fantasy failed to challenge the just war premise (“we’re good, they’re evil”). Maybe it even bought into the propaganda that started this pointless war and kept it going.

But Toby points out to me that Tolkien is not as unreflective on this issue as I feared. His thoughtfulness can be seen is in the histories that various hobbits are trying to write about the war. Toby notes that Tolkien claims the book we are reading is a collaborative effort passed from Bilbo to Frodo to Sam—and that Bilbo’s accuracy is repeatedly questioned, especially by Gandalf: “Though he did not say so to Bilbo, he also thought it important, and disturbing, to find that the good hobbit had not told the truth from the first: quite contrary to his habit.”

Toby notes that hobbit histories in general, not only Bilbo’s, are suspect: “They liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.”

In other words, Toby says, if we think that the Orcs, despite having individual wills and codes of conduct, are completely evil, then we only have the hobbits’ word for it. Hobbits apparently don’t look for nuance any more than Englishmen marching off to fight the great war.

Toby points out that Tolkien further emphasizes the unreliability of the “history” we are reading when he lists all the titles of the manuscript that Frodo passes on to Sam:

The title page had many titles on it, crossed out one after another, so:

My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What happened After.

Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends. What we did in the War of the Ring.

Here Bilbo’s hand ended and Frodo had written:

The Downfall
Of the
Lord of the Rings
And the
Return of the King

(as seen by the Little People; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.)

Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell.

Toby says that Tolkien clearly wants the reader noticing the process of production by which the story came to be.

Why is this important? Because even while he spins his fantasy, Tolkien senses that something is wrong with the spinning. He has built into his story a warning about the way we create fantasies to justify ourselves. It’s not a major theme in the book but it does serve to give Lord of the Rings a sober coloring (to quote Wordsworth). In that way, Toby notes, Tolkien really is a modernist since the modernists were very suspicious of absolute claims of wrong or right.

If Lord of the Rings were just the wish fulfillment fantasy of a war veteran trying to justify what he had been through, then it would be like the movie Rambo II, where Reagan America got to imagine winning the Vietnam War. (“Do we get to win this time?” Stallone asks upon being asked to rescue some Missing in Action soldiers.) Or rather, where Americans got to indulge the fantasy that America would have won the war if it hadn’t been hamstrung by weak-willed politicians and an over-reliance on technology. Rather than being an examination of the war, such a Lord of the Rings would have been an escape.

Toby tells me that there are a number of such shallow fantasies written today, books like the Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms series. The Lord of the Rings, however, is of a different order.

Here is another complex conversation that Toby finds Tolkien having with World I. During the war there was a myth of deserters from both sides who lived in the area between the lines, coming out at night to scavenge off the dead. These figures, who everyone believed in even though they probably did not exist, would have worked both as warning against desertion and a forbidden fantasy to in fact desert. In other words, the myth captured the ambivalence of soldiers towards the war they were fighting. These figures show up in Lord of the Rings as the army of the dead, the oath breakers, that Aragorn leads to the defense of Gondor.

Aragorn is the true king, and when he “returns,” he puts the dead to rest.  These symbols of haunted memory can cease to disturb the living and Tolkien can imagine returning to wholeness, to an England that has not been shattered by modern warfare. But the image of this dead army is so disturbing that one feels that one can’t return to the world as it was before. In fact, as Toby points out, magic has left Middle-earth by the end of the book and we are left with sorting out the mess that history has made of the Shire.

In her response to yesterday’s post, Barbara says that she was drawn to the Arthurian novel Mists of Avalon (by Marion Zimmer Bradley) because it allowed her to articulate the oppressiveness of partriarchal institutions in fantasy when doing so was hard in real life. Fantasy’s power partly lies in this indirect approach to reality. Perhaps Tolkien could not dismiss what he had been through, perhaps could not articulate his doubts directly (“three years of hell and for what?!”), but he found a way, through fantasy, to revisit issues that were excruciatingly painful. Revisit the ideals and revisit the doubts. Truly amazing, when you think about it.

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