Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not aware when I did so that Amazon was planning a new series focusing on Galadriel in the Second Age. I was not aware that Queen Elizabeth would die, and England would once again have a king. So both events present an opportunity to reflect a little about my reading LOTR, with an aside to the Parzival or Grail story, in the light of what's really going on in our obsessive fantasies concerning royalty and nobility.
I first read Tolkien's trilogy when I was in high school, and the last time I read it was in the late 90s to my elementary-school-age son. But I haven't thought much about the trilogy or the Tolkien legendarium since, and I have to say that I have been strangely moved in this most recent reading of it in ways that I was not in earlier readings. There are depths in this story that I missed before, and it's clearer to me now why this "fantasy" has such cultural resonance.
I think that what I have found moving in Tolkien's saga relates what in some fictional literature, i.e., some works of the imagination that enable us to transcend the everyday world in such a way as to see it in a broader, potentially more liberating context. That's not something I experience in my watching of, for instance, Game of Thrones, which I gave up on in Season Two because I found it to be an oppressively small, vulgar, predictable world, despite its fantastical elements and its overwrought attempts to titillate and shock. It's fantasy, but it's not escape in the way, as we'll see below, Tolkien thought about it.
I'll come back to that, but first a thought experiment. Whether or not you believe in angels, let's "fantasize" what it might be like to have an angelic consciousness. If we could look at the world with the non-judgmental dispassionate eyes of an angel, what would we see? By dispassionate, I don't mean unconcerned, I mean without fear and desire. And I don't mean by it without feeling, but rather I mean with a deep compassion for the suffering of humans who are so ignorant about what is best for them. By non-judgmental I don't mean non-discriminating but rather hope without expectation. Angels, in my imagination of them, hope that humans will make the right choices but have no expectation that they will, and are rather surprised when they do. When it happens they rejoice.
In my fantasy picture of angels I see them as having the long view, as beings who don't have politics, as beings who see the people in one faction being driven by passions as foolish and ignorant as the passions of any other faction. In fact, such a being has no interest in any kind of group mind, or moral systems or principles but only in the individual and his or her choices in a particular moment to do what is called for in that moment.
And dispassionate does not mean that angels don't suffer, because their own destinies, as I imagine them, are deeply intertwined with human choices. I think of their invovlvement in human affairs as rather like the court of the Fisher King in the Parzival story. Parzival first meets the ailing Fisher King, and the whole court is gathered there because there is a chance that Parzival might ask the key question, and if he does, the King will be healed.
Because this is a fairy story, everybody in the court has what I've been describing as angelic consciousness. Everybody understands what's at stake except Parzival. But nobody can tell Parzival what to do. He has to know from within his own resources what he must do, and because he has not yet developed those resources, he cannot do what the situation requires of him. It's not that he lacks good will; it's that he's too ignorant, too naive, too immature--and so he fails, and the King goes on suffering. It's a remarkable scene and a remarkable metaphor that captures both the significance of human choices and how hard it is for humans to know what the right ones are. And how others--even angelic beings--suffer from human failures.
It's such a beautiful scene, too, because when you first read it, you wonder how can so much depend on the choice of such a bumpkin, someone so green, so ignorant, so naive? Because by thinking so we are brought into an encounter with our own greenness, ignorance, and naïveté. We are given a parable of what is at stake in our own lives and how all the hosts of heaven are silent witnesses to whether we will be able to become capable of knowing what is called for. And so the point of the story is not that Parzival should just do the right thing--they could have just told him what it was--but that he must become the kind of person who knows what the right thing is and then find the will to do it.
So back to The Fellowship of the Ring: I was reminded of this scene from the Parzival story when reading the scene about the Council of Elrond in Rivendell when it is decided that the Ring must be destroyed. While everyone is arguing about who should or should not be the ring bearer, the wisest in the group, Elrond and Gandalf, know who alone can do it, but they, like the court of the Fisher King, must wait without importunity to see if he knows what to do and has the courage to do it. Unlike Parzival, Frodo can and does.
He must find from within his own interior resources the ability to choose freely to step forward, to do what is called for. He must choose it, and so much depends on his choice, and he does. And both the book and the film do a good job of establishing what a significant and unexpected moment this is. No one would have expected this of a halfling bumpkin like Frodo, but something in him rises to the occasion and he accepts the burden of the Ring and the all-but-impossible quest to destroy it. No one would have blamed him if he chose not to, and yet so much depended on his ability to understand that this task was his and his alone.
Parzival, unlike Frodo, fails. But he fails from ignorance not lack of courage. His confrontation shortly after with Cundrie, a being rather like one of the Greek Furies or Erinyes, who rips him up and down, left and right for being such an ignorant dolt. He becomes aware of what was at stake and how he failed, and aware also that the moment has passed, that it's not possible for him to easily correct it--but that his life mission is now to find a way to correct it. It's this idea of mission or quest that Parzival shares with Frodo, and it's only in fairy or fantasy stories that the true nature of this mission can be imagined and explored.
This is his moment when Parzival loses his innocence, when he realizes the consequences of his failure, and is wracked with remorse. How could he have been so stupid? And yet he was, and so we all are. This is the "Fall". This is his waking up to the human condition, to his ignorance. He was always 'fallen', but now he knows it, and that's an important first step. It's the movement from Kierkegaard's Aesthetic to the Ethical. He realizes now that he has a task, a mission and that he must commit his life to it.
Those who remain imprisoned in the Aesthetic continue to stumble ignorantly through life, and they do so until they are confronted with their own ignorance and stupidity, and come to feel an urgent need to undertake a quest to find a remedy. To be in despair is to be in ignorance of the need to undertake this quest. And so his quest to find the Grail Castle begins in earnest. This is the real moment of choice, as was Frodo's choice in Rivendell to find his way to Mt. Orodruin, but undertaking the quest is also to undertake a path fraught with dangers, seductions, dead-ends, and other obstacles one must overcome. But the first step is to choose to undertake the quest, which first requires that one become a person who is capable of making the right choice--not because someone tells you that this is the right choice, but because deep down you know it to be.
The point is, then, that in matters of the spirit, whether we are sophisticated atheists or religious true believers, we are all alike. Regardless of our bloodline or cultural inheritance, we are all bumpkins until we awake to our need to undertake the lifelong quest for the Grail. In Tolkien's moral world there is no magisterium or rabbinate, but there are the wise and the foolish. There are those--Elves, Men, Dwarves, and even Hobbits--who were seduced or fooled by Melkor or later Sauron, and there are those who resist. Feanor in the First Age fails, Ar-Pharazon fails in the Second Age--and the in Third Age Smeagol fails. Bilbo is sorely tested, but resists. Saruman fails and refuses to repent, Boromir fails and repents, but Faramir resists; Galadriel is sorely tempted but resists and passes the test, and Denethor fails and refuses repentance.
There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and to pass the test requires not just that you do the right thing, but that you have developed an interior capacity to know when you are bullshitting yourself. Gandalf and Aragorn seem never to be tempted because they are exemplars in their different ways of characters who are fully formed. They are incapable of bullshitting themselves. They have well developed capacities for moral cognition; they have simply to discern and act. There is never a question whether they will have the courage and will to act, only whether they will know what the right thing to do is, and they usually do. They are all prodigies of the Ethical in their resoluteness in that once a choice or promise has been made to be unwavering in fulfilling it no matter the price, no matter how hopeless, no matter how compelling the reasons might be to justify quitting. This is true nobility of spirit. And this is why The Lord of the Ring has such broad cultural resonance--it provides for the culture what the culture longs for but can no longer find in its most prominent personalities: true nobility of spirit.
Aragorn, like Parzival, has blood nobility that is hidden from the world, and both spend years wandering in obscurity before finally reaching the symbolic culmination of their quests when their inner, now fully achieved nobility is finally recognized in their coronation. Having nobility in the blood is not what makes you noble; rather it's a potential (in all of us) that is achieved only after a lifetime of wandering, learning, and having been tested. How many people today imagine the trajectory of their lives in that way? I think they should, and maybe that requires taking fairy stories more seriously.
These are old-fashioned virtues only rarely celebrated in contemporary film and fiction. The noblest contemporary protagonists are motivated by a willingness to sacrifice themselves out of loyalty to friends, family, a cause, but there is rarely a character that is motivated by a feeling for this quest to realize his or her inner nobility. The contemporary aesthetic requires that interesting characters be driven by unconscious compulsions of one kind or another, and the character arc focuses on a deconstruction of what might appear at first glance noble in the protagonists but revealed in fact to be Daddy or Mommy issues or insecurities, need for control, vengeance, or just garden-variety egoism.
That's fine so far as it goes because it's generally true about all of us--it's like Parzival's awakening encounter with Cundrie, but it is a wasted moment unless it becomes the first step on the quest. So while there's an implied sense in modern storytelling that there is a right and a wrong choice that confronts the protagonist, there's very little sense about what the stakes are for advancing or regressing the larger story arc of a human life. There's little sense that choices have consequences, not just in the immediate context, but in the larger one that is everyone's life quest story. There's little sense that making the right or the wrong decision is a test, a step in a much longer quest story that has a goal or telos.
Maybe that's not the job of "realistic" fiction, but maybe that's why we need fairy stories. They are fantasies, but not necessarily escapist. Tolkien was quite aware that "escapism" was a criticism that was directed toward his stories, and he rejected it completely. R.J. Reilly addresses this in his Romantic Religion--
Tolkien will not admit that Escape is a bad thing. The word, he thinks, has fallen into disrepute because its users too often confuse "the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."
Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.
Thus Escape from Hitler's Reich is not desertion, it is really rebellion, a refusal to be identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks, this is often the nature of Escape. A man may refuse to write about the world in which he lives not out of cowardice (which is the usual accusation) but because to write about it is in a sense to accept it. (pp. 206-07)
That is, to accept it as the only possible reality, which is to adopt an attitude of complacency and despair. And that's why Game of Thrones isn't escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. It's just a fantastical representation of the jail we all live in and assumes there is no escape from. And the point I'm trying to make here is that escape in this healthy sense is only a possibility for those who can "imagine" and be inspired by a life that exists as a possibility outside the prison walls.
We remain imprisoned so long as we accept the prison as the only reality and the life within it as the only thing that can be legitimately discussed. Game of Thrones's most fantastical elements are horrors like dragons and white walkers. There are horrors like that too in Tolkien, but there is also Lorien and Rivendell and the Undying Lands in the true West. Fantasy for the modern sensibility passes sophisticated critical scrutiny so long as it is horrifying, but it goes too far when it strives to represent liberation as beauty and nobility of spirit. Then it becomes escapist in the most pejorative sense.
The age of blood nobility has faded by the end of the Third Age in Middle Earth, and it is given a temporary stay with the return of Isildur's heir to the throne in Gondor, but the story is really about this other kind of nobility that is born from within--the kind that Frodo, the suffering servant, exemplifies. He is the true hero of the story, and all the other more obvious exemplars of blood nobility--Galadriel, Mithrandir, Aragorn, Faramir--recognize this. Their time is over; the time for another kind of nobility is nigh in the Fourth Age, one that no longer comes with the blood, but is achieved. This is Tolkien's foundational metaphor in his remarkable twilight-of-the-gods saga. After the passing of the elves to the West, the time of blood nobility wanes, and thereafter true nobility of spirit is something one must quest for.
So now in England we have the passing of a noble of the blood--a blood line that traces back over a thousand years according to some sources, and now her heir. And what do we have really? A very ordinary woman and a very ordinary man onto whom the world has projected its longing for another kind of nobility, a nobility of the spirit. Many commentators have pointed out that Elizabeth was shrewd enough to keep her mouth shut and to play the role in such a way that the fantasy or mystique could be maintained, but that's all it was, really. An escapist illusion, but not escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. She seems to have been a nice enough old girl, but an exemplar of true nobility of spirit? I don't think so. And now Charles?
And why this week has there been nothing on the news except this story of the passing of the queen and the return of a king? Because the world longs to be inspired by a manifestation of true nobility of spirit. And because such nobility is nowhere to be found in our public figures, we cannot control our need to fetishize certain personalities that have the trappings of nobility while they haven't the substance of it. For that we must look elsewhere--to fictional characters, the Frodos, Aragorns, and Parzivals, the unpretentious folk who are more than the world perceives them to be--and more than they themselves perceive themselves to be--but who undertake the quest to become what the angels hope for them to become and rejoice when they do.