Robert Dobie "The Fantasy of JRR Tolkien"

Q&A with Robert Dobie

Robert J. Dobie is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at LaSalle University, and author of Thinking through Revelation: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages and Logos and Revelation: Ibn ‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics. 

Tolkien is of course an icon for a wide cross-section of readers, scholars and movie and television series viewers. Can you talk a little about where your interest in Tolkien came from and how you found the proper ‘entry point’ to the scholarly tack you are taking in this book?

I had a good friend in elementary school whom I admired as, in both my opinion and that of my peers, the smartest kid in the school.  I remember that he would constantly talk about this book called “The Lord of the Rings” by some brilliant Oxford don by the name of “J.R.R. Tolkien” (the initials seemed really impressive to me at the time); indeed, this friend was so into The Lord of the Rings that he had named his family’s dog “Gandalf”!  So, one day, while at my local mall, I picked up from a bookstall a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to see what all the fuss was about.  I brought it home to read and, as I recount in my book’s preface, I was immediately entranced.

One must remember that, at that time (the late 1970s), Tolkien was not the household name and pop-culture phenomenon that he is today.  He and his work were certainly well-known, but only among a rather fringe and peculiar group of freaks and misfits; thus, to hang out with them felt at the time like belonging to a very select society attuned somehow to the secrets of existence.  There is a scene in the fourth season of the television show, “Stranger Things,” that struck me as capturing that time perfectly: as the close circle of friends from Hawkins, ID, set out to confront and destroy the evil demon, Vecna, Eddie, their D&D game master, gives them a rousing speech in which he compares their quest to going into the teeth of Morder to destroy the One Ring.  Steve, the “normie” of the group, looks puzzled and after the speech asks another teen, “What’s Morder?”  A question that would not have to be asked today!

But, as I recount in my preface, my interest in Tolkien faded into the background as I went away to college, entered graduate school, and embarked on an academic career in philosophy.  My love of Tolkien and Middle-earth, however, was always there slumbering under the ashes and the release of Peter Jackson’s trilogy of film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings in the early ‘00s only provided the spark to reignite that fire.  Shortly after the movies came out, I decided to take advantage of my position as a college professor and offer a course on philosophical themes in Tolkien.  In teaching that course, I started to become familiar with a lot of material ancillary to Tolkien’s major works, such as his letters and posthumously published works (most importantly, The Silmarillion), and with the secondary, scholarly literature on Tolkien.  And as I taught this course over the years the outline of a thesis or argument, which I thought original to Tolkien studies, began to emerge.  Thus, the idea for this book was born.    

You note how this book “reveals the marvelous philosophical and theological riches that underlie Tolkien’s fantasy…” Can you go into a bit of depth on that and offers readers a few simple examples?

One of the things I emphasize in my book is that Tolkien was not a philosopher – nor should he have been!  Otherwise, why go through all the trouble to create a whole mythical world when you could have conveyed your ideas in a neat and tidy philosophical treatise?  Rather, Tolkien wanted to create something that pointed to truths that went deeper than any human philosophy.

This fact did not lessen my interest in Tolkien but only increased it: after all, the philosophers that in my teaching and research I had come to admire the most were those who realize that the end of philosophy is to go beyond philosophy.  Plato and Pascal come immediately to mind: while neither philosopher is second to none in the rigor of his arguments, each is acutely aware that the highest (or deepest) truths cannot be expressed by such arguments – hence the reason why many of Plato’s dialogues end in myths or why many of Pascal’s thoughts argue that reason can only be perfected by revelation.  Even Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest masters of rational argumentation that has ever lived, had an experience towards the end of his life that he claimed made it seem that all that he had written beforehand “was like straw.”  For these philosophers, philosophy is almost a preparation for reason to go beyond itself.  And this, for Tolkien, is what good stories do particularly well.

Crucial to the function of stories, Tolkien insists, is that of recovery: getting us to see the world with “fresh eyes,” so to speak, without that routine inattention that trite familiarity breeds.  I saw this as converging perfectly with a way of doing philosophy called phenomenology.  Phenomenology was a 20th century school of philosophy that shifted philosophical analysis from an examination of concepts in abstraction from our experience to an analysis of our concepts as arising from and embedded in our experience.  One can see immediately how story, myth, and fiction, can be of great interest to phenomenologists, since good and sophisticated myths and stories can show how philosophical concepts arise and play out in “lived experience” (a phrase unfortunately now much abused and bastardized in current academic and political discourse).  Thus, myth and story can train us to “see” the world not as we wish or want to see it but for what it truly is.  And for Tolkien, what the world “truly is” is much more beautiful, wonderful, and meaningful than what we moderns (and post-moderns) “think” it is.  In turn, this new way of seeing the world converges perfectly with the goals of philosophers like Plato, Pascal, and Aquinas mentioned above: to go beyond philosophy through showing howphilosophy can be lived out in a story.

As examples, I would point to Tolkien’s treatment of language, time, and eternity, and to the idea of a providential ordering of the world.  Regarding language, Tolkien’s fiction shows us how it is not just something that we “layer onto” a brute, dumb, and non-linguistic “reality,” but rather that language is “woven into” the very fabric of existence itself, by showing how language has great power within the context of Middle-earth.  Regarding time and eternity, Tolkien’s Middle-earth is full of places and creatures with quite different modes of temporality, allowing us to see that what we understand as “time” is only one mode and perhaps a derivative, even corrupted, mode at that of temporality, giving us perhaps a glimpse of how authentic time is rooted in eternity.  Finally, Tolkien’s work gives us reasons for hope, insofar as it allows us nihilistic post-moderns to recover a sense that reality may be – or even must be! – providentially ordered to what is good and, ultimately, to a joyous “happy ending.” 

What do you hope Tolkien scholars and philosophers will get out of this book?

To recover a sense of the world as creation, of course!  I do not say this to be facetious: One of the tragedies of our contemporary era is a loss of the world as the beautiful, meaningful, and intelligible creation of a loving Creator despite all the evil in it.  Like many other philosophers, I think we as a civilization took a seriously wrong (if in some ways, fruitful) turn with Descartes, made only worse by Kant.  Both philosophers separated consciousness from the world and, in separating consciousness from the world, emptied the world of any inherent meaning or value, reducing it to impersonal and meaningless mechanism, while locating all meaning and value in human consciousness alone.  This has led to a debilitating secular nihilism in Western culture that has only gotten worse with the passing centuries (I am currently writing a new book in this very problem).  Nietzsche recognized this problem; he, however, only confirmed and deepened this Cartesian-Kantian turn by asserting that meaning is purely the product of a thoroughly subjective, if creative, Will to Power “imposing” meaning onto a fundamentally meaningless, indifferent, and dark universe.

What Tolkien’s fantasy and mythmaking do is put consciousness and the world back together again in a way that is not only true to our experience, but even more convincing than all the philosophies put together of the last 400 years.  His fantasy is like a lens that corrects a vision distorted by centuries of bad philosophy.

What was the most surprising or enlightening insight you found about Tolkien during your research for this book?

The new and surprising things that I learned while researching and writing this book are probably too numerous to count!  But I can mention two or three things of note:

One was the depth of Tolkien’s Catholic faith. Holly Ordway’s book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, was really informative in this respect.  I had, of course, already known that Tolkien was Catholic and that his faith was important to him, but I did not know how important it was – which was very important indeed.  So impressive was learning of Tolkien’s total commitment to his faith that it has deepened my own Catholic faith.

I also learned that Tolkien’s major published works, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, were only the tip of a proverbial iceberg: they sit upon a vast mountain of stories, linguistic writings, chronologies, annuals, sketches, maps, notes and much other material unpublished during his lifetime.  Middle-earth did not, like Athena, spring fully formed from the head of Tolkien, but gradually, almost organically, out of a soil of originally disconnected stories over a long period of several decades.  There were also many false starts and abandoned projects.  Tolkien’s work was truly the work of a lifetime. 

One final thing to note: in tracing the many drafts of The Lord of the Rings, we can see that, at many points, Tolkien was developing a character or a plot line that, in retrospect, would have ruined the story.  And yet, he would, often at the last minute, change the draft to the text that we all know and love.  One might say that a sort of providential hand was at work in the very composition of The Lord of the Rings!

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