Today, we are delighted to share an essay by Graham McAleer, discussing his new book Tolkien, Philosopher of War. Graham McAleer is also a Lay member of the Judicial Ethics Committee of the State of Maryland, as well as a regular contributor to the magazine Law & Liberty. For further discussion on the topic, listen to Graham McAleer on The Chasing Leviathan Podcast!
Tolkien’s legendarium is driven by shiny, shimmering things. The Hobbit is about getting back a treasure trove and not the least, the Arkenstone. The threat at the heart of The Lord of the Rings is the allure of Sauron’s ring. The Silmarillion is about a disastrous oath taken by the Elves once Melkor has pinched the silmarils, the jewels encasing beams of light from the two trees originally illuminating Middle-earth.
The theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz argues that war always involves trophies. Tolkien, Philosopher of War argues that Tolkien dramatized Clausewitz’s point because he thought war a function of aesthetics, and especially vanity. The legendarium, I argue, is a contest between two rival aesthetics.
Tolkien’s pastoralism is not escapism but strategic. Tolkien’s contemporary, the British geopolitical thinker, Sir Halford Mackinder argued that the great forests of Europe blocked the westward expansion of the Mongol cavalry. The cavalry could flow unimpeded across the steppe. A comparable point is made by Clausewitz who argues that the highly cultivated farmlands of the west of Europe makes military maneuvers especially tricky. It is notable that the lands of Mordor are barren, purposely, so they can offer no resistance to the ever probing and domineering Eye of Sauron. By contrast, the heroes of the West include Treebeard, Shepherd of the Trees, and Sam, Bilbo’s gardener.
Forests, farms, and gardens are not only strategic, they have a moral charge, as well. As Tolkien explains, a plant exhibits a complexity far exceeding human creativity. For this reason, gardening is a practice in humility: the gardener ponders combinations of the colors, movement, scents, volume of plants. Gardening is also an exercise in patience: the seasons and cycles of plants have their say in the creation of a garden. Combining these elements, Tolkien thinks of gardening as an obedience to things higher. This moral charge is why the Shire is worth defending.
There is a reason neither Sauron nor Saruman tend gardens and there is a reason that in the earliest warfare of The Silmarillion, Melkor and his untrustworthy spider, Ungoliant, attack the trees that illuminate Middle-earth and slay them. Melkor rebels against God because he cannot tolerate deferring to anyone or anything. In moral theology, vanity is not just about adornment but, as a moral sin, it is a case of vaunting the self while belittling others. You see this structure in the Triumphs of the Romans, with the conquering general feted at the head of the column and bringing up the rear were the slaves and booty. As a function of vanity, war assaults dignity, aiming as it does to bring others down, bringing them to heal, as the saying goes. The “Black Speech of Mordor” is so aversive to the ears because it is an aggressive aesthetics assaulting dignity.
What role does vanity play in politics? To tease this out, I place Tolkien alongside Catholic political theorists who were his contemporaries. I think this helps show that big structural themes are at play in Tolkien’s art.
Tolkien, Philosopher of War starts with an interpretation of the Númenórean rebellion against the gods. Tolkien believed all great stories involved humans breaking a ban. He cited The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter where Peter was warned by his mother not to go into the garden of Farmer MacGregor because Peter’s father was captured there and “put in a pie” by Mrs. MacGregor. Of course, Peter goes into the garden regardless, loses his clothes, and ends the evening sick, missing out on a tasty treat of blackberries. In The Silmarillion, the logic is the same but the events far more catastrophic. The Númenóreans amass a great armada and assail the lands of the gods. This breaks a ban that no approach to those lands is permitted. For this disobedience, they are punished with an apocalypse.
Why assail the gods? The Númenóreans chafe under a cosmic limitation. Not only is some part of Middle-earth forbidden them but they are also puzzled by why they must die. They are a great and mighty people, and it strikes them as astonishing that they do not get to live forever. They chafe under the lot assigned them by God and believe (falsely) that the Undying Lands of the gods will secure them immortality.
I argue that the story-arc of the Númenóreans is a way for Tolkien to think about Gnosticism, and its promise of human perfection upon escape from cosmic limitation. Gnosticism was the dominant mode of the philosophy of history in Tolkien’s times. It remains powerful today in progressive liberalism and what Pope Francis dubs technoscience. In the twentieth century it played a huge role in the amped up politics of both communism and fascism. An illustration I offer is the Futurist art movement. In true gnostic form, its activism hoped to replace the cosmos. Taking inspiration from war and military technologies, and glorying in speed and artifice, Futurists fantasized about replacing the moon with massive search lights. In this fantasy, everything, even light, would be of human creation. No less an authority than Mussolini states that fascism would have been impossible without the Futurist art movement.
By contrast, Tolkien’s legendarium is, as he frequently says, “cosmogonical,” and this is why Arwen’s battle standard depicts a tree under a canopy of stars. Tolkien is as interested as the Futurist in adornment but for him the cosmos is nature perfected by grace: God “ordereth all things graciously” (Wisd. 8: 1).