The Great Tower of Elfland
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The Great Tower of Elfland

The Mythopoeic Worldview of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald

Zachary A. Rhone

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The Great Tower of Elfland

The Mythopoeic Worldview of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald

Zachary A. Rhone

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About This Book

Beginning in the mid-1950s, scholars proposed that the Inklings were a unified group centered on fantasy, imagination, and Christianity.

Scholars and a few Inklings themselves supported the premise until 1978, when Humphrey Carpenter wrote the first major biography of the group, disputing a unified worldview. Carpenter dedicated an entire chapter to decry any theological or literary unity in the group, arguing disagreement in areas of Christian belief, literary criticism, views of myth, and writing style. Since Carpenter's The Inklings, many analyses of the Inklings—and even their predecessors—have continued to show disunity rather than unity in the group.

This text overturns the misapplication of a divided worldview among two Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and their forerunners, G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Analyzing their literary, scholarly, and interpersonal texts, The Great Tower of Elfland clarifies the unities of their thinking through five general categories: literature and language, humanism, philosophy of the personal journey, philosophy of history and civilization, and their Christian mythopoeia. After responding to scholarly arguments that diffuse worldviews, this text introduces some of the literary and interpersonal exchanges among the authors to demonstrate their relationships before examining the popular and lesser-known writings of each to clarify their literary and linguistic theoretical orientations.

Rhone analyzes the Renaissance-like Christian humanism of these authors, their belief that humans should care for animals and nature, and their assertion of fallen humanity. Next, he takes readers through Tolkien's, Lewis's, Chesterton's, and MacDonald's perspectives of the human journey, analyzing literary motifs of pathways in their texts, roads used to demonstrate their perceptions of free will, fate, and the accompanying discipleship of companions along the way. After noting the individual human journey, Rhone articulates the group's vantages on humanity through civilization and barbarism, myth and science, and even political opinions. Finally, The Great Tower of Elfland recontextualizes the perspectives of MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien in lieu of their Christian mythopoeia, the point on which their unity hinges.

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1

Language and Literature

One of the initial and perhaps most general unities shared among Mac-Donald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien is their broad but overall unified perspective on language and literature. Because language and literature are the media through which humanism, existence, civilization, and all other aspects of life are discussed, it is important that we begin at the broadest level. The challenge, of course, is bringing the breadth to a unified point. As this chapter progresses, each point is intended to tie these authors’ perspectives back to a simple but essential understanding of the universe: that something is behind, above, or further up and further in (to use McDonald and Lewis’s metaphor) than what is initially present. This concept contains the following tenets: language, though simply used to communicate, signifies something or someone behind it and its creation; the best literature hints at truth beyond mere story; and the critic’s every move should be to open oneself up to truth and seek it out. For these authors, there is always something behind the obvious, something to be discovered, pursued, contemplated. We will begin, then, with language, the building block of communication, which enables us to reach that truth.
THE AMBIGUITY OF LANGUAGE: FALLIBLE BUT POWERFUL
MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien are concerned with both the fallibility and the power of language. Linguists have repeatedly argued whether the signifier and signified are unified or they are arbitrarily assigned. In the former, each of these authors posit an original unification of signifier and signified, a Structuralist move that Jacques Derrida resists in his theory of arche-writing with its repeated “movement of the sign-function linking a content to an expression” (60); in the latter, the power of language is utilized by separating signifier and signified by having the signifier refer to a different signified or, perhaps, as Derrida suggests, by having no true signified but only a series of signifiers. The power, of course, comes from the one who assigns meaning: the God who created language or the politician who declares the meaning of a certain constitutional right.
MacDonald’s most obvious concern for the separating power of language appears in his understanding of Christian biblical scripture. GMD believes in the fallibility of biblical authors who could misrepresent Christ’s words (Reis 33). In a letter to a woman who asked if GMD had any of his “old faith” left, MacDonald responded firmly: “But the common theory of the inspiration of the words, instead of the breathing of God’s truth into the hearts and souls of those who wrote it, and who then did their best with it, is degrading and evil; and they who hold it are in danger of worshipping the letter instead of living in the Spirit, of being idolaters of the Bible instead of disciples of Jesus” (qtd. in Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and His Wife 373). For MacDonald, truth lies in the origination of language, and such origination cannot be reached completely by human authors or interpreters. He argued that Christ, of course, did not speak in Greek, and the translations made from it—as well as the Hebrew—add an additional accent to skew meaning (Unspoken Sermons 434). He writes in his Unspoken Sermons that, even if we are unable to interpret a passage of scripture clearly, “we cannot thus refuse the spirit and the truth of it, for those we could not have seen without being in the condition to recognize them as the mind of Christ” (46). Only when one reaches Heaven would she know how near she was to understanding the truth behind the words of scripture (434). Although GMD believes in the fallibility of language, he also believes in the infallibility of the truth behind language in scripture. Words only reach their full meaning when they are given directly from God; humanity’s use of language is flawed because humans are flawed, “So the words of God cannot mean just the same as the words of man” (48). Thus, while human language may be flawed, in the way Derrida suggests, MacDonald hints at a true language of the divine which is perfect in its unity of signifier and signified. As he claims in “The Imagination,” words are “born of the spirit and not of the flesh, born of the imagination and not of the understanding, and is henceforth submitted to new laws of growth and modification” (8). That is, they were pure before human corruption.
Nonetheless, MacDonald did not give up hope on words. His concerns about scriptural interpretation and refusal of orthodox doctrine in the late nineteenth century caused this minister to be deposed from his first and only church pulpit. Richard L. Reis argues that the most significant moment of MacDonald’s life was his loss of a pulpit after being called into Christian ministry: “he felt that he had to find another medium through which to disseminate his essentially religious message, and he chose literature as that medium” (10). MacDonald’s prolific literary pursuits may have elevated him to a high status in Victorian England and abroad, but as his son, Greville MacDonald, records, he was and is repeatedly dismissed by many readers for his preaching—though he felt he was serving a higher calling (375).1 GMD sought to take the reader back to unity by stressing truth in his literature, no doubt, Reis notes, as a means of conveying what he felt divinely inspired to share (33). He did not want people to “word-worship” or to be “oppressed by words” (435) but desired that people understand words “for their full meaning” (48): that is, for the signified truth behind them. He desired to use language, corrupted by common use and misuse, in a poetic form that would bring words nearer to their original, pure, and distinctive meaning that was present in the imagination of God (“The Imagination” 8–9). There, he believes, humanity can find truth and meaning behind and beyond everyday use of language, “for if there be any truth in this region of things acknowledged at all 
 The work of the Higher must be discovered by the search of the Lower in degree which is yet similar in kind” (10–11).
Chesterton, likewise, worked “toward the redemption and restoration of language,” according to Milbank, “since the greater the disjunction between conventional speech and the thing or idea itself, the more extreme the paradox and, most crucially, the larger the opening for analogical relation” (90). His use of paradox to understand truth often played on illogical assumptions or plurasignation. In The Ball and the Cross, GKC narrates, “Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. 
 But those who see and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that paradox is a thing that belongs 
 to all vivid and violent practical crises of human living” (45). Paradox applies to the practical as much as to the linguistic. Indeed, words have, as MacDonald believed, lost sense in the original meaning, and sometimes those meanings can only be restored by understanding contradiction and paradox in their common human meaning. In Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross, Turnbull, an atheist, charges MacIan, a fierce Christian, with seeming “unable to understand the ordinary use of human language” (79). Although Turnbull does not clearly state what is intended by the ordinary use of human language, the intent is clear when his opponent, MacIan, argues, “Why shouldn’t we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn’t any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word?” (89–90). Clearly, a problem exists in the ordinary use of human language. As MacIan exemplifies in his argument within the story, there is no innate problem with the signifier bloodshed, as it signifies killing someone whether for war or as a just penalty; the problem occurs when the signified, killing someone, is under the signifier murder, which is unjust bloodshed (89, 92). Chesterton asserts that the simplicity of the ordinary use of human language—such as not specifying the kind of bloodshed—discourages reason and critical thought, and, as a result, meaning is lost (Orthodoxy 117–18). According to Milbank, “Like the symbolists, Chesterton sees language itself as material, and a poem as an object. The difference lies in the fact that he also sees language, like his revolutionary poet [Wilde], as an event” (89).
When the event occurs, then, the listener is placed in a position of interpretation. Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, posits that language, though dynamic in signification, bears an underlying structure that is static. GKC comments on the inadequacy of language to convey meaning when he discusses the relationship between taxes and pig. Whereas some word associations do not seem correct, associating taxes with pig fits for some unknown, underlying reason—perhaps that taxes are made by pigs (66). These associations, for Chesterton, hint at an underlying signification beneath flawed human language; meaning, language’s signifiers may go awry, but the signifieds do, in fact, exist beneath the surface, and listeners must do their best to understand the signified despite the fallibility of human language.
In line with GMD and GKC’s understanding of language, Michael Ward highlights Lewis’s view: “From one perspective, he has the highest possible view: language is a metaphysical reality with a transcendent origin. From another point of view, he sees that it is, in this sublunary world, subject to severe constraints” (151). Like MacDonald’s expressed concern for the speaker—also observable in Chesterton’s dichotomy of MacIan and Turnbull—Lewis understands how language is affected, depending on the speaker’s spiritual state (143). In Mere Christianity, Lewis challenges the literalist readers of biblical scripture, noting that scriptural imagery of Heaven, such as harps, gold, and crowns, were intended to suggest the ecstasy, splendor, and preciousness of Heaven; otherwise, “People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs” (114). Lewis believes that such literalist readings of language lead to misappropriation of symbol and meaning, of signifier and signified. In The Screwtape Letters, for instance, the demon adviser, Uncle Screwtape, advises his nephew, Wormwood, about the literalist value of language. These demons desire for humans to locate God in a certain part of the bedroom or within a certain sacred object; in this way, humans pray to the location or object—the human-made thing—instead of God as He is: “Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be” (196–97). In other words, viewing human language as an end in itself—as a clear conveyance of truth—is misguided. The individual needs to understand not only the difference between signifier and signified but also the truth that may be behind or above the sign. As GKC and GMD suggest, looking beyond the sign begins with understanding the speaker, as Lewis notes in The Screwtape Letters,2 and, accordingly, understanding the context.3 Lewis found that, through careful attention to words and context, one could arrive at a better understanding of truth. For that reason, he found poetry “to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual” (qtd. in Ward 151).
Tolkien, the most philological of the four, thrived on the ambiguities in language. The problematic nature of word and meaning led Tolkien through history and across languages to discover how words changed in meaning and form. As Ruth S. Noel asserts, a linguist is able to reconstruct culture because it is so integral to culture (3). Shippey recalls how Tolkien, however, had a particular interest in ambiguous words called “asterisk words,” often Old English, without referents or with reconstructed forms and used rarely (sometimes only once) (The Road 20, 243).4 For example, the word elf Tolkien drew from Old English ĂŠlf, Old High German alp, and, equivalently, Gothic albs—an asterisk word (57). Many of the names in Middle-earth are drafted from such mystery words, and the variations in meaning from one language or stage to another encouraged Tolkien’s creative drive. Tolkien, for example, used the asterisk Germanic verb smugan, “to squeeze through a hole,” and its Old English correlate smĂ©ogan (from a spell “wiĂ° smĂ©ogan wyrme, against the penetrating worm”), meaning “to inquire into” or, adjectivally, “subtle, crafty” (89). This asterisk word provided two villains for Tolkien: Smaug and SmĂ©agol. It may be helpful to note that Tolkien’s reapplication of linguistic mysteries did not add to confusion in language; on the contrary, Tolkien applied the words in ways that preserved what he believed to be the meaning of the asterisk word.
Like Lewis, Tolkien alludes to belief in the idea of a true language in which each signifier and signified are bound to one another (106, 114). Perhaps, for this reason, Tolkien suggests that phonetics have certain aesthetic properties that elicit effect, meaning, or even history—a science known as Lautphonetik (113–14). Such belief in a true language—a language like that described by MacDonald, Chesterton, and Lewis—echoes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where creating languages was the basis for his fiction. Languages were not brought into the story for the purpose of the story; rather, the stories were made for purposes of languages (Tolkien, Letters 219). Hence, language begins in the heavenly realm with Eru IlĂșvatar, the God of Middle-earth, and his Ainur, or angelic lords, who sing the world into idea until, at once, it comes into existence with the utterance of the copula by IlĂșvatar: “EĂ€, the World that Is” (Silmarillion 20). Then, from the time the elves are born and onward, separation occurs in people, geography, and language, among other categories. Language, here, has a transcendent origin that becomes less unified as the world evolves and divides.
LITERARY PERSPECTIVE: MYTH AND FAIRY-STORY
Thus, in Tolkien’s fictional world and in our Primary World, language, history, and, in effect, story are inexplicably joined at a root. Understanding how language connects with story is the next step in realizing the unified worldview of these authors. As Tolkien, in his “Valedictory Address,” claims, language and literature are two heads of the same creature (230, 233). Lewis even points out in “The Empty Universe” that many theories have wrongly attempted to reduce all study that is not of a scientific discipline to being the offshoot of misleading signifiers in language (82). The nearest these authors get to such a theory is that something exists behind valuable literature in the way that something exists behind flawed human language. In the same way that true meaning exists beneath the surface of flawed human language—something in relation with the divine—these authors believe good literature also reaches to something beneath the surface: to deep truths. These truths are present in the literature they appreciated and, accordingly, created. Tolkien quotes Lewis in a 1955 letter to one of his fans: “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious” (Letters 209). Their words echo MacDonald’s 1893 “The Fantastic Imagination,” in which he claims, “I will but say some things helpful to the reading, in right-minded fashion, of such fairytales as I would wish to write, or care to read” (5).
And so they wrote what they read, sometimes including elements of what they read because deeper truths were present. Elizabeth Baird Hardy, for instance, believes Lewis’s Jadis is a model of Spenser’s Duessa (26); however, given Mr. Beaver’s assertion that Jadis is a descendant of Lilith, I believe Lewis’s source is more likely MacDonald’s Lilith. Jadis’s cold, pale beauty and child-snatching of Edmund matches the same deathly beauty and kidnapping of MacDonald’s antagonist. Whether Duessa or Lilith, Lewis observed a deep truth inherent in the character he chose to adapt, a truth which Jung picks up on in his Theory of Archetypes. Robert A. Collins asserts that MacDonald’s “archetypal figures” lead to the same conclusions as Jung some decades later, particularly the Shadow persona (8). Likewise, Flieger notes Tolkien’s borrowing from Jung, particularly in “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers,” for the collective unconscious and dream-memory passed from one generation of characters to successive others (Green Suns and FaĂ«rie 90). While accepted theories like Jung’s Theory of Archetypes seek to probe beneath the surface of the human psyche for truth, these authors reach some of the same truths by delving into the depths of literature.
In this example, we observe that truth is passed ancestrally from Duessa and Lilith to Jadis like they are genetically passed through Jung’s archetypes. In the same way, MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien believed truths evident in history are rediscovered and at times even made clearer in literature. It is no wonder that Tolkien found the blend of history and myth “irresistible” in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (Letters 33). In Tolkien’s Letters, he discusses his adaptation of the Old English and Old Norse Miðgarðr as occurring at some point in the history of this universe, despite the geographical differences (220). Tolkien and Lewis’s interest in history and myth is in agreement with myth-scholar Claude Levi-Strauss when he notes that “the simple opposition between mythology and history which we are accustomed to make—is not at all a clear-cut one, and that there is a...

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