Tolkien & the Great War

[davem]

Just a quick note to make everyone aware of this amazing new biography of Tolkien & his service in WW1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...53890-3795826.

This period is covered in Carpenter's biography, but he only gives it 25 pages, whereas Garth gives it over 300.

I heard Garth talking about & reading from this at Oxonmoot (the Tolkien Society's gathering in Oxford) this September, & had been looking forward to reading this, but i was truly amazed by the work.

Garth has written a vital, serious biography, having had access to Tolkien's private papers, letters & diaries, & the advice of Christopher Tolkien. We get a real insight, not only into life on the Somme battlefield, but into the developing Legendarium. The stories of the TCBS members - Tolkien's three best friends, GB Smith, RQ Gilson & Christopher Wiseman, two of whom, Gilson & Smith, were killed during the battle.

What's fascinating is how Garth shows that without his time in the war we's probably never have had Middle Earth. It shaped his imaginative world, & in many ways the story of ME is a mythologising of that experience, as profound as his Catholicism & his love of Myth & Fairy Story. The way the languages develop under the influence of War is a totally new insight, where Qenya even has words which refer to the sound of gunfire & to the Germans. We see how the Fall of Gondolin is almost a mythologised account of the Somme battle he witnessed first hand.

But what comes across most strongly is the way the horror & loss was what gave the world Middle Earth, & that without it we would not have had the gift we have recieved.

[Bêthberry]

Thanks for posting a very significant link, davem.

Interestingly, I have just made a comparison between Tolkien's war experience and that of War poets such as Owen and Sassoon, on the Dumbing Down the Books thread, which has developed into a discussion of why Tolkien employed archaic language forms, particularly in RotK.

I suggested that Tolkien's experience in the war was one of the factors which made it difficult for him to create a contemporary heroic style. Like the War Poets, he too saw the vanity of the old heroic appeals, but that his love of the old warrior epics drove him to using an archaic style, setting the heroism off, distancing it. Squatter has posted a rebuttal, to which I hope to have time to reply later today. Perhaps you would have something to contribute to such a discussion?

Regards,
Bethberry

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem,

Thanks for the tip. The publication of this book had been postponed once or twice before so I'm really glad to see this is out. It still isn't listed on the U.S. Amazon.com. (I just checked.)

Sounds like this book will be one of those rare "can't miss" studies in the same class as Shippey, Flieger, and Carpenter.

Trotting off to spend some money....

Child

[ November 10, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]

[Finwe]

Any good biography of Tolkien is definitely a must-read! Not many people can get access to his private papers, and this one seems to be especially good.

[davem]

Bethberry, I would like to contribute, but for some reason, this computer I'm using (at work) is blocking me from accessing that thread.

I think you're right in what you say - unfortunatley, at the moment I can't read it so I'm going on what you've just said here.

I don't think its so much a case of tolkien 'allegorising' WW1, more a case of him mythologising his experiences. So we have 'tanks' at the destruction of Gondolin - as Garth says its almost like the way their described is tanks seen through 'enchanted eyes'. But there's also, in the Black Breath a kind of mythologising of the poison gas which struck down so many of his comrades - except there was no Aragorn to draw them back. In the morgul knife wound, where the blade breaks off & festers in the wound, do we see an echo of the shrapnel wound which killed his friend GB Smith, who died from gas gangrene, after the wound became infected? (no Elvish medicine to save him)
Or how about in the flying Dragons, & especially the Nazgul on their Fell Beasts - are we seeing another mythologising of the aircraft, appearing in war for the first time.

In the TCBS we have four idealistic young men, who, like the Elves of Tolkien's first conception, who come into the west to teach men 'songs & holiness', who want to bring the world back from what they percieved to be athiesm & decadence & corruption.

Its not that Tolkien is allegorising the war, as I said. But what we see throughout his life is the loss of beauty & peace, & its replacement by war & ugliness & destruction - from the rural beauty of Sarehole, to the noise & ugliness of Industrial Birmingham with the loss of his mother; from the beauty & peace of undergraduate life in medieval Oxford, & his visits to Edith in the 'fading' town of Warwick (Kortirion among the trees) to the horror of the Somme - & I hadn't, in my ignorance really understood how horrible till I read this book.

What Garth's book shows is how deeply this time affected Tolkien creative work, which before the war was the dreaming of a young man, with poems like Goblin Feet, about a beautiful fairyland 'over the hills & faraway', to the magnificent creation he later constructed.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

davem, thanks for bringing that book to our attention. It sounds like one I definitely want to read. I very much like your use of the word mythologizing as a contrast to allegorising and your comparative description of modern wartime elements turned mythological beasts.

[davem]

Estelyn, there's a link to a review through ToRN.

I don't want to push the one-to-one correlations too far, so I think mythologising is better than allegorising. I think with Tolkien we have a young man who did see 'through enchanted eyes' - his childhood, his religion - 'bells & smells' & the Latin Mass, the myths & fairy tales he loved - all these things lead him to see, experience & think about the world in mythic terms. Those years up to, during & after the war shaped his vision. I think now that a great deal of his Legendarium is those years seen through enchanted eyes - perhaps much more than any of us realised.

[Mister Underhill]

davem, your mentioning of Dragons and winged Nazgûl steeds reminded me of Letter 100, partially quoted here:

...it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you [Christopher], my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, 'for the liberation of the Shire'.

[Bêthberry]

Greetings davem,

What Garth's book shows is how deeply this time affected Tolkien creative work, which before the war was the dreaming of a young man, with poems like Goblin Feet, about a beautiful fairyland 'over the hills & faraway', to the magnificent creation he later constructed.

This seems to me to tap into what Tolkien wrote in his wonderful essay, "On Fairy-Stories", that fantasy is not a realm for children only. He wrote:

A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.

Bêthberry

[davem]

Bethberry

This a point made by Garth. Without WW1, for all its horrors, we wouldn't have had Middle Earth. Which is strange, to say the least.
Certainly, after reading this book I'm sure that without the horrors of the Somme the Middle Earth we know & love would never have come into being.

Something occured to me recently - about the way Frodo was meant, as Gandalf put it, to have the Ring. So, isn't Gandalf saying that Illuvatar intended Frodo's suffering, & ultimate destruction - because He must have known that that would be the result of Frodo undertaking the Quest.

And could it be that God intended Tolkien to go through what he did - I suppose Tolkien would have agreed that God was in control of his destiny - he even seems to imply that it was not God's will that his friends should survive the war - but this is another way of saying God intended their suffering & death. Lewis says something similar - 'Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a sleeping world... God uses suffering to make us let go of our hold on the toys of this world...' But what God, in Tolkien's view, intends for himself & his friends (&, by extension, for his own mother), & what Illuvatar intends for Frodo, is difficult to relate to our modern Christian ideas of a 'loving God'. Perhaps the war gave Tolkien a deeper, mystical, understanding of God. Tolkien's God, both within & outside of ME, seems to be one who will, in the 'right' circumstances intend our suffering, even to the death - for Frodo there is no happy ending, not in this world - he suffers until he dies. Yet Tolkien doesn't fall into taking the easy option - like Pullman, & dismissing God as either bad or mad, & proposing that everything will be wonderful if we just get rid of Him. Tolkien confronts us with a God who takes as well as gives, who destroys (even those who love him) as well as creates.

I think I've gone completely off subject here! (still for some reason, can't get over to the dumbing down thread!!)

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem,

Does this book say anything about the poem "Sea-bell" in relation to the War?

I remember a thread where we had a discussion about the earlier version of this poem (the one called Looney), and many of us sensed that it reflected the experiences of those returning from World War I -- how young men went home but were totally unable to communicate the bizarre experiences they had had, feeling totally shut off and isolated from those around them.

Child

[davem]

Child

It doesn't go into depth on Sea Bell/Looney, but the general point you make is one that has been pointed by others -Flieger, Shippey.
I think Frodo's statement about there being no going back reflects the same feeling Tolkien must have felt about coming back to Oxford, with so many of his generation of students lost - they had a far higher death rate, even than the rank & file, as they tended to become oficers, who lead from the front.

[Bêthberry]

davem,

I suppose Tolkien would have agreed that God was in control of his destiny - he even seems to imply that it was not God's will that his friends should survive the war - but this is another way of saying God intended their suffering & death. Lewis says something similar - 'Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a sleeping world... God uses suffering to make us let go of our hold on the toys of this world...' But what God, in Tolkien's view, intends for himself & his friends (&, by extension, for his own mother), & what Illuvatar intends for Frodo, is difficult to relate to our modern Christian ideas of a 'loving God'. Perhaps the war gave Tolkien a deeper, mystical, understanding of God. Tolkien's God, both within & outside of ME, seems to be one who will, in the 'right' circumstances intend our suffering, even to the death - for Frodo there is no happy ending, not in this world - he suffers until he dies.

Tough love? No, that's really a light-hearted joke which does not do justice to the point here.

I am not Catholic but I think that this idea of suffering as a way to prepare one for heaven is a central feature of Catholicism, and likely would be germane to Tolkien's view, I would think. Is the corollary also valid, though, that those who suffer the most are those who are the least willing to give up the world? Did Sam suffer less than Frodo? He certainly was able to live a satisfied life in Middle-earth for some time.

[davem]

As Tolkien says, by the end, Frodo felt like a 'broken failure'. He'd 'failed' in the three things he set out to achieve - to destroy the Ring, to save Gollum, & most importantly, to save the Shire - not that he (or anyone else) was capable of achieving those things, but it still broke him. This is why i feel the Scouring of the Shire is so essential to the story - Its what finally breaks Frodo. Its the final 'failure'. After giving everything he was capable of giving, the Shire is still devastated. God (or Tolkien) takes everything from Frodo.

Sam has his family, his life. Maybe most importantly, he set out only to help Frodo, or die in the attempt. Frodo wanted to save the world. Sam set himself an achievable goal, Frodo set himself an impossible one. What else wass there for Frodo - as Tolkien has said, Frodo expected to die in achieving the Quest. Not only didn't he achieve it, he didn't die, either. A broken failure, who couldn't live, but couldn't die, either. And what kind of existence could he have had in the Undying Lands, after Bilbo dies? A Hobbit among the immortals, lost & alone, for all the love he may have been shown by Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel. He truly belonged with his own, in the Shire, walking in the woods & fields. But he is born to undertake the Quest which will destroy him. THhere's a 'mystery' there, which I'm convinced has grown out of seeing WW1 'through enchanted eyes'. Tolkien has an understanding of God's will & intentions which is deeper & profounder than most of us are capable of.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem,

You have so beautifully summarized the reasons why Frodo felt like a "broken failure" that there is nothing I can add.

But there is one point you mention that I wonder about:

And what kind of existence could he have had in the Undying Lands, after Bilbo dies? A Hobbit among the immortals, lost & alone, for all the love he may have been shown by Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel. He truly belonged with his own, in the Shire, walking in the woods & fields. But he is born to undertake the Quest which will destroy him. THhere's a 'mystery' there, which I'm convinced has grown out of seeing WW1 'through enchanted eyes'. Tolkien has an understanding of God's will & intentions which is deeper & profounder than most of us are capable of.

It is the little piece in italics where I have a question. Unless I misunderstand you, you seem to be saying that this was Frodo's doom, and there was simply no hope of changing it. Your statement implies that there would be no healing for Frodo in the lands to the West. Perhaps this is true, but I do not think even Tolkien was certain of that fact.

Why would JRRT have shared with us that lyrical vision in Tom Bombadil's house, and then repeated it in the final page of the book if the author was certain that Frodo would be lost and alone with no possibility of relief?

... the grey rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise"

It's interesting. In the earlier drafts of the story, there is a very different ending. Frodo takes an active part in the Scouring and the inhabitants of the Shire honor him. Yet, even in this ending, Tolkien could not bring himself to have the hobbit remain in the Shire. In HoMe (sorry, but I don't have the page handy), there's a reference to the fact that Frodo (still named Bingo at this point) withdrew to a little hut on the edge of Hobbiton and eventually chooses to go overseas because he has been changed to the point that he can no longer remain in the Shire -- not because he needed healing but because he no longer fit in.

In the final version of the work, Frodo changed in two ways. First, of course, there were the terrible internal wounds that brought him torment. But secondly, the Elven light in his face had been growing, and the capacity to look at Gollum with mercy. Both sides of Frodo grew in the latter portion of the story: that which was attracted to the lure of the Ring; and that which Gandalf described while Frodo lay injured in Rivendell:

He is not half through yet , and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can see. He may become like a glass filled with clear light for eyes to see that can.

This is clearly a reference to the phial of Galadriel, and implies a possible destiny beyond that of the doom of the Ring. I'm therefore not totally convinced that Frodo would be lost and alone in the West.

My feeling is that Tolkien himself really wasn't sure what would happen to his hobbit. Sometimes I almost sense that two sides of Tolkien were in conflict here.
As the lover of ancient northern myths, there is an innate pessimism that suggests Frodo was indeed doomed. And the author's experiences in the war could not help but reinforce that.

And yet there is a glimmering of something else here. To Tolkien, the worst "sin" in the world among good men was despair. And I can not conceive of him sending Frodo off to the West with only the possibility of that. Perhaps, his Catholic or religious side at least wanted to suggest the possibility of hope and healing for Frodo. This was in no way a certainty, yet neither do I think that the portrait of a heartsick and lonely Frodo was the only possible outcome.

There is another point from which one might infer the possibility of healing. In the earliest drafts, Tolkien added the words about Sam eventually coming across the Seas but put them in brackets -- the usual way to indicate he wasn't sure if a line should be in or out. In later drafts, the brackets were removed. Why would Tolkien imply that Sam was to come later to Tol Erresea if the only option for Frodo was a gloomy one? Sending Sam over in these circumstances doesn't seem to make sense; there has to be some hope of healing if Sam's visit to the West is to mean anything.

Perhaps, ultimately, Tolkien saw Frodo's destiny not too different from his own. JRRT was a man often weighted down with sadness; his childhood and years in the war were a hard legacy to bear. Yet part of him reached out beyond that to a hope he say encapsulated in the tenets of his religious faith. The doubts were there (the Letters make that clear), but so was the hope. Pehaps that is how he wanted us to envision that final sailing to the West.

Child

[davem]

Child,

Ok, but what do we mean (or, specifically, what did Tolkien mean) by 'healing'?

Are we talking physical healing alone, mental healing or spiritual healing, or all three?

I know that somewhere Tolkien says something about Frodo having been 'broken' by a burden too great for him to carry, & made into something greater.

In other words, 'Frodo Baggins', hobbit of the Shire, is destroyed by the Quest - in effect, what he had 'hoped' for - to die in achieving the Quest - had come about. The person who comes back to the Shire is someone else altogether - Saruman tells him he has grown. I suppose the question is, 'who' is being healed in the Undying Lands? If Frodo is no longer what he was, what has he become, & what form of healing will be necessary for this new Frodo to be made whole. The sense I get from the book, is that Frodo is not going over sea with the expectation of being healed - I'm not even sure he even has any hope of it. I think (whatever occurs when he gets there) he is going principally because he cannot stay in ME any longer - he's running from not running to.

It is, perhaps, another example of 'hope without guarantees' - though how much hope Frodo has is the question. Thinking about it, I almost get the sense that he is so broken, hurt, confused, that he is almost running blindly into the West, because he can't think of anything else to do. Frodo is completely destroyed by the Quest, but he's still sentient, which makes it more horrible. The old security of life in the Shire must have made no sense anymore - probably nothing made any more sense. 'Who' is left, the person who comes back to the Shire, is maybe a question only someone who had seen the horror & loss of war could answer. Tolkien moves Frodo 'off stage' - maybe he felt unable to deal with the result of Frodo's suffering, or maybe he was admitting that it isn't possible to deal with that level of suffering.

Can we really speculate on what becomes of Frodo in the West? What would a 'healed' Frodo be like? What he had been before the Quest? But then what kind of person would he have been? & would the 'healing' he recieved be the healing he had wished for? He had grown, but what he had grown into was something he had had no say in, something forced on him. He was made into something other, different, maybe from a spiritual perspective, a 'better' person, but is it what he would have wanted? Is Illuvatar using such terrible suffering to 'force' Frodo to grow, & is that necessary - the only way that we can grow spiritually?

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem,

There is much that I could respond to in your post. But most of that will have to wait for later as I am racing out the door. However, there was one comment you made that I could not resist responding to:

Is Illuvatar using such terrible suffering to 'force' Frodo to grow, & is that necessary - the only way that we can grow spiritually?

There are two ways of viewing this problem. The first, and more legitimate way, is to consider the entire question of Illuvatar's role within the context of Middle-earth as Tolkien has depicted it for us. The second would be to answer your question in the context of how I actually feel about the whole role of suffering and the divine. Now, most of us are probably loathe to admit it, but I suspect that our answer even on the first score is going to be influenced by how we feel about this issue on a personal level.

First, regarding Middle-earth, I would say that Tolkien has depicted Eru in such a way that it is not possible for him to have used suffering to force Frodo to grow spiritually. The God of Middle-earth is far too distant a figure to take this kind of active role; he did not intervene in the personal lives of individual folk. Time and again, in the Letters and elsewhere, Tolkien emphasizes how distant from the world Eru is. Other than the Elves, few folk even know of His existence or the story of the music of creation. Eru is not shown interfering in the affairs of Arda as the Valar did.

Yes, there are a few exceptions in the Legendarium.....the cataclysmic destruction of Numenor and reshaping of the world, Manwe taking counsel with Eru when the decision is made to return Beren to Middle-earth. And there is the much quoted phrase in LotR where Gandalf says of Frodo that "you have been chosen". We are not told who did the choosing but most of us (including me) jump to the conclusion that it was Eru. The other obvious possibilities would be the element of providence in the final disposal of the Ring and the scene where Gandalf is taken to Eru after the destruction of his body and is then sent back to Arda again. Even the latter is not obvious from the book itself, but Tolkien has addressed this point in his letters.

If, out of the whole Legendarium, we can scrape up so few instances of 'interference', why would Eru suddenly fix his attention on one small hobbit with the explicit purpose of having him achieve spiritual growth through suffering? Yes, it is possible that, seeing the general problem with the Ring, he would have chosen Bilbo and Frodo as the best agents to bring about its destruction. But the motivation for that would be the all-encompassing problem of Sauron, not to lay down a path of suffering that Frodo must follow to achieve some spiritual goal.

Also let's not forget Bilbo. Gandalf in UT says clearly that he too was chosen. Yet he did not suffer in the same way as Frodo, and one senses that, although he grew and matured, he did not attain the level of insight that Frodo did. But this fact stemmed as much from personality differences as the varying degree of suffering to which the two hobbits were exposed.

It's a trickier thing when you begin discussing this question in terms of our own world. I'm sure you can get many answers, but my personal response would be no. Suffering is just too hideous for that. Most of us, at some point in our lives, experience some kind of personal cataclysm that forces us to stretch ourselves. Either we learn to surmount it, or we cave in and spiritually die. That's just the way life is, whether we like it or not. But let's not romanticize suffering. I worked for ten years with the parents of babies who died from crib death. For every parent I worked with who gained spiritual growth and insight, there were others who totally fell apart, destroying not just their own life but the lives of their surviving innocent children.

As the Bible aptly puts it, the rain fall on the just and the unjust. There are people who manage to surmount the suffering they are given and turn it into something positive, but too often the effect is exactly the opposite.

To me the miracle is this: that even in the worst circumstances, such as those which Frodo faced, some stubborn people (or hobbits) don't cave in but struggle on. Frodo did grow spiritually in some sense and, whatever else may be said about his transformation, he had enough inside himself to get the Ring to Mount Doom despite the suffering that he faced. Realistically, that is the most that anyone could have expected.

Nor is suffering the only way to grow. The best example of this in LotR is Sam. Sam's growth in LotR came not from suffering but from service. Fortunately, for most of us our own path will be closer to that of Sam than Frodo. Very few of us will be asked to give our all as Frodo did, but we will have a chance to live from day to day and do what we can to make things better for those around us. Tolkien himself says that Sam is the more typical hobbit of the two. There is a certain basic goodness in the Shire that stems not from suffering but those day-to-day good things. And the author makes it clear that, without the goodness of the Shire behind them, the hobbits could not have gone on in their quest. So there is more than one source of spiritual growth or strength, and the gentle goodness of daily life, as exhibited in the Shire, is surely one aspect of that.

[tinewelt]

what a wonderful thread. I just wanted to chime in with a huge thank you to all the people on this site, and especially the wight himself. It is an honor to be a member of such a wonderful site with wonderful people.. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

~Namarie~

A! Elbereth Gilthoniel! silivren penna miriel o menel aglar elenath, Gilthoniel, A! Elbereth!

We still remember, we who dwell in this far land beneath the trees , The starlight on the Western Seas.

[mark12_30]

Davem wrote:

This is why i feel the Scouring of the Shire is so essential to the story - Its what finally breaks Frodo. Its the final 'failure'. After giving everything he was capable of giving, the Shire is still devastated. ... Sam has his family, his life. Maybe most importantly, he set out only to help Frodo, or die in the attempt. Frodo wanted to save the world. Sam set himself an achievable goal, Frodo set himself an impossible one. ... And what kind of existence could he have had in the Undying Lands, after Bilbo dies? A Hobbit among the immortals, lost & alone, for all the love he may have been shown by Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel.

Davem,

THe reflection of Frodo's brokenness in the brokenness of the Shire (and its need for scouring) is fascinating.

I think that aligning Frodo's brokenness with that of the Shire indicates that the West will indeed heal Frodo.

If the Shire's devastation reflects the devastation in the soul of Frodo-- and I think it does-- then Frodo arrives home to see outside of himself what has happened inside of himself. And it shakes him, or rather, it reveals how he has already been ravaged by the quest.

But Sam took the box of soil from Galadriel, and grain by grain, replanted the Shire. Frodo saw the beginnings of the healing of the Shire. And it was an essentially an Elvish healing, albeit one requiring Hobbitish cooperation. One could say that the hand of Samwise administered the healing of Galadriel... ("laying on of hands"-- transferring a power not owned by the hands themselves? hmmmm....)

"Spring surpassed his (Sam's) wildest hopes." Frodo saw that the year of 1420 was one of the best in living memory. And not only agriculturally; the Smials were rebuilt, and the mills and ugly sheds were torn down, and with the bricks, "many a poor hobbit's hole was made snugger and drier." The Shire (and especially Hobbiton) was healed, with a rich supernatural air about it; although much had been lost, much was gained, and it was New but still the Same Old Shire, both at once. It even had a Mallorn tree.

I see that as Tolkien's deepest promise to Frodo. His healing could not come at the hands of Sam, and for that we all grieve, but the promise of elvish healing is certainly vividly portrayed.

Indeed, I find myself wondering if that in itself did not convince him to sail. No, I realize there were many contributing factors... but to see the elvish healing worked on the Shire itself, and to touch his white jewel and remember what Arwen, Elrond, and Galadriel herself ("Maybe thou shalt find Valinor; maybe even thou shalt find it; farewell!") had to resonate within him as he felt the internal devastation left by the quest. Galadriel had provided Sam the means to heal the Shire, and she (and her healing) had proven correct and faithful. If she recommended Valinor to him, and Arwen gave him the means to go, and Elrond discussed it with him as well, I can see him deciding that he needed, not to be healed IN the Shire, but that he needed to be healed LIKE the Shire.

And considering the Shire in the long run, that is a very hopeful thing.

Thanks, Davem.

Dear, dear Sharon, here we go around again. I have to smile. Destiny, doom, divine intervention.... You and I seem to take the same passages and interpret them in a diametrically opposing manner.

(I meant to address this particular issue in the Philosophy thread, but the thread ran on before I got to it. Feh.)

Anyway, back to our polar opposition. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
In letter 192, there is this section:

Frodo deserved all honor because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined oint, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), 'that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named' (as one critic has said).

Catholically speaking, this Person is Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent; in Him all things hold together; in Him we live, and move, and have our being. Whether we name him or not He is never absent. He may be remote in terms of the awareness of the common man (or hobbit or elf) but he is not remote in terms of action. Tolkien calls him The Writer of the Story, in this letter and in 191.

When Tolkien says in letter 181:

There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World, and only directly accessible to the Valar or Rulers. ... But the One retains all ultimate authority, and (or so it seems as viewed in serial time) reserves the right to intride the finger of God into the story: that is to produce realities which could not be deduced even from a complete knowledge of the previous past, but which being real become part of the effective past for all subsequent time (a possible definition of a 'miracle'.) According to the fable Elves and Men were the first of these intrusions...
There is no 'embodiment' of the Creator anywhere in this story or mythology... the Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write.

(Italics "infinitely" are Tolkien's, not mine.)

All right. So where are we going?

Sharon, my point is this. The way I interpret all this, when Tolkien says that Iluvatar is "remote", what he means-- again, Catholically speaking-- is simply that Jesus doesn't show up in the flesh. Don't look for Jesus in Gandalf or Strider or Frodo; he's not there. Catholically speaking, Eru hasn't been incarnated. Hence (Catholically speaking) He hasn't yet redeemed us; and so He is remote in the sense that he is unapproachable by us acting on our own merit. However, in the Catholic sense, spiritually, Eru is NOT remote-- he can't be-- in terms of Omnipresence, and omnipotence. He is everywhere, all-powerful, and therefore, in Him we live and move and have our being; in Him all things hold together. (Including us.)

"....sustaining all things by the Word of His Power."

In that sense, He intervenes all the time. We normally do not notice it, but He can't stop being Omnipresent or Omnipotent or Omniscient.

Hence, Tolkien quotes the critic with approval: "that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named". Tolkien clarifies this: "The Other Power, the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself)..." I do not interpret the phrase "Writer of the Story" to mean that he is uninvolved, lightly involved, or "remote" in terms of participation. I interpret "Writer of the Story" to mean that He is very involved indeed.

Quite a study in contrast, aren't we, Sharon? (I can hear Lush chuckling now.)

Much love, --Helen

[ November 13, 2003: Message edited by: mark12_30 ]

[mark12_30]

postscript for Davem...

Can we really speculate on what becomes of Frodo in the West? What would a 'healed' Frodo be like? What he had been before the Quest? But then what kind of person would he have been? & would the 'healing' he recieved be the healing he had wished for? He had grown, but what he had grown into was something he had had no say in, something forced on him. He was made into something other, different, maybe from a spiritual perspective, a 'better' person, but is it what he would have wanted?

Going out on a limb here. First let me say that biblically, I personally do not believe (at all) in purgatory. I see no scriptural support for it whatsoever.

However, it is clear that Tolkien believed in it, and it is clear in his letters that he believed Frodo was going to both a purgatory and a reward. (I find this hard to imagine! ...but, to continue...) Hence if we are going to look for some indication of what TOlkien thought would happen to Frodo, I think we should look at TOlkien's other writings, specifically Leaf By Niggle.

Niggle went to a purgatory, and there, found healing, hope, and wholeness, not to mention enlightenment. (Seen in that light, Tolkien's "purgatory" looks like part of heaven. And indeed, he seems to think along those lines, if he thinks of sending Frodo to Tol Eressea is a "purgatory"?)

So... food for thought. Can we guess what Frodo would have become once he was healed? In TOlkien's view, we can consider Niggle. Peace, revelation, hope, and a confidence that The Undiscovered Country is the place to be...

(A side note: I find some similarity between TOlkine's view of purgatory and George MacDonald's view of the Long Sleep. Interesting; I think that despite seriously missing out on scriptural continuity, they both nonetheless discern God's heart long-term for his children.)

[davem]

A few years back BBC radio did a production of Shadowlands by William Nicholson, the story of the relationship between CS Lewis & Joy Gresham. It started with these lines

'If God loves us, why does he allow us to suffer so much? War, Pestilence, famine. Now, last night, as you know, a No1 bus drove into a column of young Royal Marine Cadets in Chatham & killed 23 of them. They were 10 year old boys, marching & singing on their way to a boxing match. The road was unlit, the driver didn't see them. It was a terrible accident. No-one was to blame. Except Him. Now, where was He? Why didn't He stop it? What possible point can there be to such a tragedy? Isn't God supposed to be 'good', Isn't he supposed to love us?

Now that's the nub of the matter. Love. What do we mean by 'love'? I think I'm right in saying that by 'love' most of us mean either kindness, or being 'in love'. But when we say God 'loves' us, I don't think we mean God is 'in love' with us, do we? Not sitting by the telephone, writing us letters - 'I love you madly, God' (kisses & hugs!). No.

Perhaps we mean a 'kind' God. Kindness is the desire to see others happy. Not happy in this way, or that, but just 'happy'. Not so much a 'father' in Heaven, as a 'grandfather' in Heaven! Now, what I'm going to say next may come as a bit of a shock. I don't think God necessarilly wants us to be 'happy'. I think he wants us to be 'loveable' - worthy of love, able to be loved by Him. We don't start off all that loveable, if we're honest.

What makes someone hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called 'selfishness'? Selfish people are hard to love, because so little love comes out of them. God creates us free - free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness, & wake us up to the presence of others in the world. And that mechanism is called 'suffering'. To put it another way, Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Why must it be pain? Why can't he wake us gently, with violins, or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that All is Well. The most dangerous illusion of them all is the illusion that All is Well. Self sufficiency is the enemy of Salvation. If you are self sufficient you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you will not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.

God loves us, so He makes us the gift of suffering. Through suffering we release our hold on the toys of this world, & know that our true good lies in another world. We're like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. The suffering in the world is not the failure of God's love for us. It is that love in action. For, believe me, this world, which seems so substantial, is no more than the Shadowlands. Real life has not begun yet.'


Perhaps that's relevant here.