Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss

Steps on the Developmental Journey

John Rosegrant

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781631014758
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

Tolkien's enchanted worldview as literary form and as psychological struggle

Focusing on the themes of enchantment and loss in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, this unique study incorporates elements of developmental psychology to explore both Tolkien's life and art, deepening our understanding of the interrelationship between his biography and writing.

As John Rosegrant relates, Tolkien's early years saw a good deal of trauma: the loss of both parents, serious illness, poverty, and battlefield action during World War I, including the loss of close friends. Yet he presents an enchanted worldview in the stories of Middle-earth, and that tension between enchantment and disenchantment—as it results from significant trauma and loss—lies at the very heart of Tolkien's creative endeavors.

In short, Tolkien's creative effort can be understood, especially from the perspective of his own psychological development, as a way to maintain a sense of enchantment in the face of great personal loss. Throughout our lives, at several stages we must surrender earlier forms of enchantment and develop more mature forms so that life does not become barren, drab, or dismal. As Rosegrant argues, Tolkien found ways to use his personal losses and struggles to address universal psychological issues in his art, giving his work great emotional sophistication and complexity.

Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss both deepens our understanding of Tolkien and helps us to recognize how Tolkien widens and enriches our understanding of life.

CHAPTER 1

Tolkien’s Dialogue between Enchantment and Loss

At the center of Tolkien’s enchanted edifice in The Lord of the Rings is the idea that the enchantment out of which this edifice is built must crumble. Or as Saruman gloats to the Elves: “you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine.”¹ This simultaneous creation and demolition of enchantment creates a deep psychological impact that I shall explore in this chapter: Tolkien reinstates enchantment to create feelings of wonder and relatedness, but simultaneously alerts the reader that this enchantment is at risk for loss. Tolkien never establishes that either enchantment or loss is “victorious,” instead leaving them in a conversation that maintains this fundamental uncertainty. As Verlyn Flieger has pointed out, it is in balancing tensions between opposites rather than resolving them that Tolkien’s greatness lies.²

I agree with previous writers who have recognized that loss is a primary content theme of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other writings, but I think this idea must be further contextualized. Senior described “the sustained and grieved sense of loss, of which death is but one form, that floods through the history of Middle-earth.”³ Hannon stated that “the many quick-moving scenes … are secondary to the sense the book conveys of things slipping into—or already become part of—an irrecoverable past.”⁴ Parker is close to my approach when he states, “Tolkien’s whole marvelous, intricate structure has been reared to be destroyed, that we may regret it.”⁵ But I am adding to these readings the idea that loss in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other works can only be understood by considering the way that it interacts with enchanting features: loss and enchantment intertwine in such a way that each undoes the other. Tolkien gave us enchanting works about disenchantment.

I use the term enchantment rather than related words such as magic or fantasy to align my analysis with Weber’s concept of the disenchantment of the world, described in the introduction. Patrick Curry discussed how Tolkien’s works create a reenchanted premodern universe saturated with meaning based on valuing communion and the natural world.⁶ I follow Curry in using Tolkien’s own words to define enchantment (although Tolkien did not specifically use the word enchantment in this context): “the primal desire at the heart of Faerie [is] the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.”⁷ Related to this is Tolkien’s definition of recovery, by which he meant “We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep and dogs, and horses—and wolves … recovery … is a regaining—regaining of a clear view.”⁸ And also related is Tolkien’s discussion of consolation, the highest consolation being that which gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”⁹ This description of consolation highlights my thesis by showing loss inherent even in what Tolkien describes as a deeply enchanting experience.

The dialogue between enchantment and loss in The Lord of the Rings is found both in its content, working within and extending the traditional fairy-tale genre and its magical idealized beings, and its style, using composition and word choice to heighten this dialogue. To begin with content, the perilous relationship between enchantment and loss is situated at the very heart of The Lord of the Rings in the immutable linkage between the One Ring of Power created by Sauron and the Three Rings created by the Elves. Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring is the common fairy tale and fantasy quest to destroy dark powers. What Tolkien uniquely and crucially adds is the twist that destroying the dark enchantment will also inevitably destroy good enchantment as well.

The reason Sauron created the One Ring was to control by sympathetic magic all rings of power, especially the three rings of the Elves. The Elves wish to preserve beautiful timeless enchantments and sublime natural environments, but they have invested much of their power in the three rings, and if the One Ring is destroyed, the three rings will lose their power and the Elves must depart or fade. In the frequent longing allusions in The Lord of the Rings to ancient days when Elves were stronger and fought in alliance with heroic men, and in the mournful scenes describing Elves passing over the Sea never to return, the reader is simultaneously confronted with enchantment and its loss. Are readers witnessing the power of enchantment? Or the power of loss?

The loss of Elvish enchantment that must ensue if the Ring is destroyed is mirrored by other losses threatening other enchantments in Tolkien’s writings. Frodo’s many torments as he strives to destroy the Ring have been thoroughly described by Anna Smol;¹⁰ these include his losing touch with ordinary experiences of enchantment, such as feelings of friendship, safety, and pleasure in food and nature.

Loss in the form of death always threatens in The Lord of the Rings, and even in the supposed children’s book The Hobbit in which three favorite characters are killed in war. Tolkien referred in his correspondence to “the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death,”¹¹ and stated that death and immortality are the main theme of The Lord of the Rings;¹² this statement should not be taken as definitive about what he considered the main theme, but it does indicate the importance of death to him. Tolkien wants readers to feel the loss, to grieve, when important characters die. Although there are many hopeful moments in the book, Tolkien often represents the importance of fighting to the death in a hopeless cause. And in addition to the grief and loss we feel about what we might call a normal death, Tolkien weaves in death as a direct challenge to enchantment in the tales of love between Elves and humans: When an Elf weds a human, the Elf must surrender her immortality; this is a shift toward ordinary life, as opposed to shifting toward enchantment if the human were to become immortal.

The Lord of the Rings is also pervaded by the loss or diminution of a comforting and beautiful natural world. Whether looking at fairy-tale nature—Bombadil’s shrinking domain, the fading of Lórien, the last march of the Ents—or more “ordinarily enchanted” nature such as the Shire under Sharkey’s men, the natural world is increasingly threatened with disenchantment.

Now I will turn from the central plot entanglement of enchantment and loss to explore how Tolkien mingled enchantment and loss stylistically. Verlyn Flieger has discussed the ways that Tolkien’s language usage reflects his belief that language and mythology are coeval; in using language this way, he creates an experience of otherness and imagined wonder.¹³ Tolkien imbued the already magical fairy-tale genre with a deeper sense of enchantment by employing various unusual forms—chanting, singing, Elvish language, archaic language and word order, and unconventional capitalization—even as he described events that demonstrate the world inevitably evolving toward the disenchanted Age of Men.

For a first example, discussed by Shippey, here is a brief conversation between Treebeard the Ent and Galadriel and her husband Celeborn speaking about the end of their time together in archaic English, which also includes a phrase of Elvish:¹⁴

Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. “It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!” he said. “It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.”

And Celeborn said, “I do not know, eldest.” But Galadriel said: “Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet again. Farewell!”¹⁵

In Shippey’s discussion he responds to a harsh critic of Tolkien who complained (among other things) about the cadence and pitch of this passage. Shippey notes that the critic may have been irritated by “the boldly untranslated fragment of Quenya, or the triple repetition of ‘feel … feel … smell,’ or the sudden change to less plain language in Galadriel’s speech” but decides that the main offense must have come from “by stock or by stone.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online tells us that Treebeard’s use of stock to mean stump is archaic or obsolete, and Shippey shows that Tolkien in using this phrase was deliberately echoing the medieval Pearl manuscript that Tolkien translated. Shippey concludes that “Tolkien was trying continually to extend the frontiers of style beyond the barbed wire of modern opinion.” I want to emphasize that all the extensions of style that Shippey identified—cadence, pitch, repetition, shifts between levels of formality of English and between English and Elvish—create an air of enchantment by taking the reader away from mundane expectable rhythms of life.

Cadence plays a similar role in this example from The Lord of the Rings as Sam expresses his grief about the departure of the Elves: “it was an old tradition that away over there stood the Grey Havens, from which at times elven-ships set sail, never to return. ‘They are sailing, sailing, sailing over the Sea, they are going into the West and leaving us,’ said Sam half chanting the words, shaking his head sadly and solemnly.”¹⁶ The reader experiences Sam as half chanting not only because of direct authorial comment but because the three repetitions of “sailing” emphasize the drawn-out cadence of the word, and the capital W suggests that West is spoken with extra emphasis. The enchanting nature of this passage is emphasized by its contrast with Ted Sandyman’s cynical response composed of short staccato syllables: “I don’t see what it matters to me or you. Let them sail!”

As a final example, here is the Elven Lady Galadriel lamenting in song both the fading of Lórien and her uncertainty whether she will be able to sail away:

O Lórien! The Winter comes, the bare and leafless Day;

The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away.

O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore

And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor.

But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,

What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea? (373)

The common nouns Winter, Day, River, Hither Shore, and Sea in this song are promoted to proper nouns, so to speak, by unusual capitalization. This capitalization creates an enchanted feeling in two ways: the words in question all have to do with the natural world and so emphasize a separation from ordinary humanness; and these aspects of the natural world for reasons that are mysterious carry special import. The Winter and Day that are coming stand outside the ordinary cycle of time; the River, Hither Shore, and Sea stand outside ordinary landscapes and traversing them would not be ordinary travel.

I will now shift from examining the dialogue between enchantment and loss in Tolkien’s work to exploring how this dialogue expresses an internal psychological struggle that is common in the modern Western world: the need to find new forms of enchantment in the face of the disenchantment identified by Weber. Let’s begin by taking a closer look at the experience of enchantment.

As I indicated in the introduction, enchantment is not easy to define, but drawing on Weber and Tolkien I approached its definition as a sense of wonder, meaningfulness, and connection to an Other, with the lack of precise boundaries to this definition in fact being intrinsic to the concept. All these qualities are best experienced in a state of mind that is situated intermediate between reality and unreality. Tolkien invoked this state of mind in the quote that I used earlier as his definition of enchantment (“the primal desire at the heart of Faërie [is] the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder”): the denizens of Faërie and the realm of Faërie itself are experienced both as having independent existence and as in a sense existing because of (“imagined” by) the believer.

This state of mind has been explicated by D. W. Winnicott as transitionality. Transitional space, transitional objects, and transitional phenomena are concepts that I will use frequently in this book to understand Tolkien’s literary and personal experiences of enchantment. Winnicott stated that in addition to the internal world and the external world, “the third part of the life of a human being … is an intermediate world of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate and yet interrelated.”¹⁷ In describing the developmental origin of the transitional object in infancy, Winnicott stated, “It comes from without from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within; it is not a hallucination.”¹⁸ And Winnicott clarifies that he is “studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion.”¹⁹

By “transitional” experience Winnicott means experience that is transitional between the experience of Me and the experience of Not-Me. His thesis is that it is psychologically important to have the capacity for experience that is neither entirely located in external, objective reality (the Not-me), nor entirely located in internal, private reality (Me), but instead integrates or blends the Not-me and the Me. The capacity for such transitional experience is important both in early development and later life because it helps to manage the anxiety of being a unitary individual in a multitudinous world, and because it helps create a rich and interesting life.

By formulating the elements of the magical worldview in this way— wonder, connectedness, and transitionality—it can be recognized as a way of being in the world that many people experience and value, at least at times. People who would scoff at the idea of magic as something that actually physically affects the material world may nevertheless find much of what is of value in life to be metaphorically enchanted. Patrick Curry gave as potential sources of such metaphorical or ordinary enchantments nature, love, ritual, art, sports, food, and learning.²⁰ People never find the loss of magic fully satisfying because much of the richness in life derives from interplay between aspects of magical thinking and realistic thinking. Winnicott noted that play and then broader cultural phenomena like art and religion are crucial for a fulfilling life.²¹ Loewald maintained that true maturity does not derive from relying only upon advanced forms of thought, but from being able to shift flexibly between advanced and early symbiotic forms.²² Rationality untempered by wonder, and wonder untempered by rationality, are both problematic.

Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories” defended fairy tales from charges of escapism by declaring that they deliver appropriate and necessary escape as though from prison. This is another way of describing the process of reenchantment. But Tolkien is actually doing something much more psychologically powerful than simply providing reenchantment: he is providing reenchantment while calling it into question; he is ...