In this KosmosOnline Podcast, Jeanne Hoffman talks with Brad Birzer about themes of liberty in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Dr. Birzer is a professor of history and director of the Hillsdale College Program of American Studies and he also blogs at BradleyBirzer.com.
JH. Welcome to this Kosmos online podcast! I’m Jeanne Hoffman. Today I’m talking about liberty and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien with Brad Birzer, and Dr. Birzer is a professor of history and director of the Hillsdale College Program of American Studies and he also blogs at BradleyBirzer.com. Welcome Dr. Birzer, thanks for joining us again!
BB. Hi Jeanne, thanks, it’s my pleasure! I’m very glad to be here.
JH. From talks previously with you, I know that you are a huge fan of Tolkien’s work. A lot of it can be tied to issues of liberty. He wrote often of his “cordial dislike of allegory” and with this in mind, how can readers, especially liberty-minded readers relate his stories to the real world?
BB. Yeah, that’s a great question Jeanne. I have liked Tolkien for a very long time. In fact, I first encountered Tolkien back in the late 70’s when I was about 10. I had two older brothers who had been very interested in Tolkien and there was a bit of a Tolkien revival at that time, so it was kind of nice to be introduced to that. But Tolkien has always, even when I was a young kid and didn’t quite understand issues of liberty, I was always taken with the struggle of good and evil in Tolkien’s works, and of course good is always identified with the free peoples.
Tolkien makes no bones about this as he’s writing that the free peoples are the peoples of the west. These are the people who are defending their home, and typically their homes themselves are relatively free of government. So if you look at the Shire for example in The Lord of the Rings, the Shire is governed only by a few sheriffs and the sheriffs are only distinguished because they have a feather in their caps, and when the law needs to be enforced, they always mention, well there’s a king somewhere, but of course there is no king and there hadn’t been a king in a thousand years in the beginning of the story. So there’s a tradition that somewhere there’s a king, and he matters, but he doesn’t matter on a day to day basis.
So it’s a pretty free society, and I think that was kind of Tolkien’s image of a happy, idyllic England, what a free society would have looked like in England. In this kind of republican mold, Tolkien definitely did not like allegory. In fact this was one of the great dividing points between himself and his best friend, C.S. Lewis. They argued about this quite a bit, and Tolkien had very little respect for the Narnia tales. He thought that Lewis was probably a little bit blasphemous in his own presentation of Aslan in those. He also thought that the allegorical element was over the top and really that there was no art to it at all.
I’m not sure how deeply you want me to get into this, Jeanne, and I can talk about Tolkien a lot so please stop me, but Tolkien was very concerned with the idea that art should have many, many layers to it, that if it was just mere allegory it would be nothing more than propaganda, and propaganda to Tolkien was a huge insult to the complexity of an individual because propaganda plays to the lowest aspect of who we are, not to our reason, but to our passions, and that things were just far more complicated than that. And so in the essays that he would write on the meaning of art and on the meaning of “fairy”, which in his time was synonymous with myth, and just the idea of poetry, art always had to be read at many levels and not just at one.
So to get back to your original question, Jeanne, to say that there are issues of freedom is not to say that it is allegorical. I think that as Tolkien, as any person would, and of course he is an extremely educated, extremely intelligent, like off the charts crazy intelligent type of person, that as he’s writing his own experience a Tolkienianness will come into his writing, he said that was really applicability as opposed to allegory. Allegory was saying “this is that”, one equals one, whereas in art or applicability, you can take a figure, and I’ll give an example here, Jeanne, of say Gandalf, the great of course wizard, one of the wise, in his stories, it’s pretty clear that Tolkien drew upon both Norse mythology and Judaic-Christian thought to develop the character of Gandalf. He had all the features of Odin, the king of the Norse Gods, but he also has a deeply angelic aspect to him as well that would fit very nicely in Judeo-Christian scriptures. And there’s more than that as well, there’s also just Gandalf and there’s just Tolkien in Gandalf, so I think he can be read at a lot of different levels and not as a one to one. And those issues of liberty are the same. They’re there, they’re important, it’s clear that those who are evil are those who try and dominate the free will of others.
JH. Now that last thing you just said, I’ve noticed many characters in Tolkien’s works try to seek power and control over others and meet their downfall as a result of that, so I was actually wondering if that was just a way of creating a story arc, or if Tolkien was trying to say something deeper about authority.
BB. I think he was. He was very suspicious about authority. He has this great essay that he gave and it’s called “English and Welsh” that he gave to all of the Oxford community, it was a speech that he gave because he was being honored and in this speech he says that the first thing that governments will always try to do is make uniform the language and dumb the language down and the reason is the bureaucratic mind always has to narrow complexity, the bureaucratic mind hates complexity, and so Tolkien made several arguments, he never would have used the term “libertarian” and in fact I’ve never seen him label himself anything. His wife, Edith, used to refer to them as being members of the conservative party in England, but he never really called himself that either.
At one point, as you and I have talked about before, Jeanne, he called himself a philosophical anarchist. But he was very concerned with what governments would do, especially bureaucracies, because he thought they were incapable of nuance, and for Tolkien humanity is so unbelievably complex, not only as a whole, but for each individual person, that the government’s purpose was really, and this was not a good purpose, it’s purpose and what it was most effective at was mechanizing us, was making us less than what nature made us to be, and so government by its very nature because of its bureaucratic mechanism does little more than actually degrade us. It has to by its very nature, it has to destroy our very nature. So he was skeptical about that, he was skeptical about government and certainly about authority. I don’t think he would have been as against cultural authorities as he was against bureaucratic and governmental authorities, maybe that’s a different topic, but he was very respectful for authority that he respected, but government was certainly not one of those authorities.
JH. I think one of the most interesting characters in Lord of the Rings is Golem because the ring of power seems to be what has corrupted him, in a way. Is that a statement on the consequence of an obsession with power or am I reading too much into the ring there?
BB. No, I don’t think you are at all. It’s pretty clear that the ring is power. I think it’s more than that. I don’t think it can be read simply as power, I think from a philosophical standpoint it’s power, it’s clearly Plato’s Ring of Gyges, and Tolkien is playing on that old myth of, what happens if you’re given ultimate power, and that story of course of Gyges resonates throughout the whole of Western traditions, so you get Cicero as somewhat of a stoic arguing that a good man need not fear power because he would always use power wisely.
Tolkien’s response to that is no, no, no, anybody, even the best of persons, will become corrupt by that power, and so that ring does symbolize power, I think for Tolkien, a deeply religious man, it also symbolizes sin, but those two things are connected, sin and power. The more sinful, or flawed a person is if you want to put it in more secular terms, the more that power will probably corrupt, not only the person, but those around the person as well, so he is very concerned with that. Everybody in the story, with the exception really of Aragorn, is tempted by the ring in the novel. Aragorn seems to know he will be tempted so he just stays away from it so it’s not as though he’s free from temptation, it’s just that he recognizes that’s going to happen. Gandalf of course talks a lot about how the ring would get to him because of his mercy and love and pity and would use those things against him so he might use the ring for good at first by helping others, but soon he would be dominating them and would no longer be helping them even if it seems so at the surface.
My favorite of all the characters in dealing with the ring is Sam because if you remember, when Sam is the lord of the ring for just a moment, Sam is so humble, he’s such a loyal guy, it just defines him, he is the personification of loyalty, that when he thinks about the ring, his dream is that with the ring he could make the whole world a garden, just basically Eden, this paradise, and then he says as this perfect kind of English farmer, “Nah, that’d be too much for any farmer to handle.” And so he’s no longer tempted, but even there, there’s that power and I think it’s a great comment, Jeanne, on that even the best of us, and of course I’m not willing to say who’s best and who’s not, but even the most well-intentioned person will go wrong once they accept that kind of power, it will slowly eat away at them. Golem is a great example. We never see him good, but clearly we see him go from kind of neutral to extremely evil then to conflicted, he sees a little goodness and hope in Frodo, but then ultimately he succumbs and falls to his death.
JH. Literally.
BB. Yeah.
JH. So who do you think is the real hero of Lord of the Rings?
BB. Well for me it’s Sam and I assume that’s going to be different for every person who reads it. Frodo is great. But in the sense of story, and as you know Jeanne I’m an historian, not a Lit professor, but in the sense of story, I think Frodo is too linear. From the very beginning, he makes his choice. He doesn’t want to do it, but he’s going to take the ring, and we follow him, and he’s interesting, but I think he becomes less interesting as a character as time goes on, simply because his choice is made at the very beginning. Sam has to keep choosing, and every time he has to choose, he always chooses to do what’s right and what’s loyal. And in the end of course, he doesn’t have to go across the sea to be healed.
There’s the chapter Tolkien wrote that didn’t get published because one of his friends, and I assume it was C.S. Lewis, but I don’t know that for sure, sorry you can probably hear my cat meowing, actually my cat’s name is Galadriel, so it fits with this podcast, but his friends made fun of this chapter and said it was too sappy and he couldn’t include it. You can find it in the collective works of Tolkien in what’s called “The History of Middle Earth”, it’s in one of the later volumes, I think its volume IX, there are 12 volumes overall, but I think its volume 9, where he includes this chapter and it’s really a beautiful chapter. It takes place 20 years after the war of the Rains, Sam has been mayor of the Shire multiple times over that 20 years, and he’s talking to this huge number of children that he has, and as Tolkien describes it, the children look at Sam as once Shire children looked at Gandalf, he’s taken on that much of a stature of one of the wise. When we see Sam at the beginning, he is a bumbling fool, and he’s talking about walking trees and so forth at the very beginning of the Lord of the Rings and everyone thinks he’s insane. So he really develops as a character and I like him. A lot.
I think Aragorn is presented as the perfect king in the sense of, as people who love liberty, as libertarians, as classical liberals, how we would want our rulers to behave. He’s restrained, he does his duty, he’s dignified. But he’s definitely restrained as king, and we see that in his policy with the Shire. So yeah, there are great themes there. But I love Sam.
JH. Do these qualities of the heroes in Lord of the Rings tend to be the same qualities that heroes in other works by Tolkien have?
BB. They do to a lesser extent. The Silmarillion, which was published 4 years after Tolkien’s death, The Silmarillion is written at a much higher level in the sense that not only is the style higher than that in Lord of the Rings, although I love Lord of the Rings, I think 500 years from now, people will equate Tolkien in our way that we equate Homer with the Greeks or Virgil with the Romans or Dante with the Medievals, Tolkien has created that great of a myth that at last people will remember it, but in how he is approaching this, Jeanne, he is clearly trying to write at different levels.
So The Silmarillion has heroism, but it’s a really dark heroism because he’s talking about the Gods and how the Gods war with one another and even the beings that aren’t Gods, the elves, are still almost angelic in the sense of what they can do. So the heroism is there, and it’s Northern European in the best sense heroism, both Pagan and Christian I think, maybe a blending of the two, kind of like Beowulf, but yeah that heroism is there, but it’s not as drawn out or explained as it is in Lord of the Rings in his other works.
JH. Now before you mentioned that the only label Tolkien really ever put on himself was philosophical anarchist.
BB. Yes.
JH. Did this seem to influence Lord of the Rings at all, or was he just a philosophical anarchist who wrote Lord of the Rings?
BB. Yeah, he’s funny about that. Let me explain it this way, Jeanne. Anyone who met Tolkien said he was the nicest guy they ever met, and of course it was during his day that women were finally admitted to Oxford, and the women loved Tolkien because he treated them as equals, it’s very interesting. So there is no one that I have ever encountered who knew Tolkien and didn’t just think he was the nicest guy. But in his letters it’s hard to read him sometimes. I mean they’re great letters, but it’s hard to read them because he’s so opinionated and sometimes you wonder if he is just in a mood and other times you wonder if he really believes them. So that letter where he talks about being a philosophical anarchist, it’s hilarious because he is writing to his son and he’s talking about what…this is during World War II, he’s talking about what the postwar world might look like and he is very worried that the world will essentially be divided, he’s right about this, he’s worried that the world will be the end of the old world and the beginning of this kind of dual world between the Americans and the communists and everyone else will just kind of get lost in between.
So he doesn’t see this as a philosophical issue as much as he sees it as a cultural issue and he’s worried about what will happen to the smaller countries, and he hates empire, absolutely hates empire. He talks about that a number of times. But it’s in this letter where he talks about being a philosophical anarchist that he says yes, I am an anarchist philosophically understood, I don’t mean that I support whiskered men who throw bombs. So he’s not talking about the kind of anarchists of the late 19th century. But he then goes on to say, I would allow a person to use the term ‘state’ once and after that I would execute him. Obviously he doesn’t mean that literally, but he’s making a point.
All the inklings, and really all the members of his literary group, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, just a number of incredible figures who are part of this literary group, they were all deeply distrustful of government, and I think its worth remembering, Jeanne, that Tolkien himself, born in 1892, this is a man who was an officer during World War I, he was a lieutenant and he served with one of the regiments that was probably, I won’t say more devastated, but let’s just say in the trenches, it was brutalized, and he lost two of his three best friends during the war, so this had a huge influence on him, a really huge impact, that I think is really only seen, and this is what C.S. Lewis said, that if you read the approaches of Frodo, Sam and Golem when they’re crossing the dead marshes, that description there which is just stunning that Tolkien writes, Lewis says that no one could have written that who had not been in World War I, and I think that really shaped Tolkien. Not only what happened in World War I, that kind of mechanized death that he saw there and what states could do, but afterwards, the rise of communism and fascism, these were horrifying things to a very civilized man and culture like England’s at the time, civilized man like Tolkien, I think these were just stunning, and World War II only seemed to be a replay of World War I, but now even worse, he’s not the one fighting, his sons are fighting. So this is a pretty hard thing for him. I don’t know how we’re doing on time, Jeanne, I was wondering if I could just read that passage that’s in The Two Towers.
JH. Oh sure!
BB. I consider this one of the great passages of any piece of literature in the 20th century. This is from the passage of the marshes in The Two Towers.
“As dreadful as the dead marshes had been, and the arid moors of the no man’s land, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the mirror of dead faces, some hagrid phantom of green spring would come, but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here, nothing lived. Not even the leprous growth that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were chalked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and gray as if the mountains had vomited their filth, the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire blasted and poisoned-stained stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows slowly revealed in the reluctant light.”
That’s just a stunning and disturbing passage and I think anyone who saw World War I or the Holocaust camps or the gulags, I think probably that same description could have been written, and Tolkien in that one paragraph captures so much of the horror of the 20th century and really the fight between socialisms, between national socialism ultimately and international socialism, fascism and communism. So yeah, I think he understood that well. And I think his tale, although it’s timeless, is responding in some ways to the horrors of that time. He himself says, come on there’s no Hitler, there’s no Stalin my story and of course he’s right about that. But there’s also evil in the story and that evil attempts to crush freedom and will, and that’s what he’s denouncing. Whether it appears in the guise of a Julius Caesar or of a Josef Stalin it’s there. It’s in many ways sadly timeless, this evil.
JH. It appears that Tolkien’s work is disproportionately popular among classical liberals. Do you think this is true, and why do you think it is?
BB. I think classical liberals just have good taste. No, I mean it somewhat seriously, but there would be very few classical liberals who would not be well read and Tolkien is going to be popular in part because classical liberals are well read, but also because he fits with their world view and he would be very comfortable I think in a classical liberal setting, in a setting of classical liberal academics. This is a man, I think it should be remembered, that even though he would have been anti- what most of his own fellows in academia would have been during his own lifetime, Tolkien in his religion and cultural and philosophical believes, he never ever pulled punches in public.
If he believed something, he stated it, and he did it time and time again, not only to his students, but also to his fellow academics. I think he’s just a great figure in terms of, not only what he writes, but also the kind of example that he gives us as people who really want to defend liberty. He’s very good. He always stood up, he was in a cultural minority, he always stood for what he believed, and he was fierce about it, both in his writing and in his lectures. I had the chance, Jeanne, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Sir Martin Gilbert, he’s been the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, and he’s affiliated with, he’s good friends with Larry Arnn, the president here at the college, and I got to have lunch with him a few years ago, I don’t know him well at all, but I got to have lunch when he was teaching here a few years ago, unfortunately he’s too ill now to travel back to Hillsdale, but he’s an Englishman and he taught at Murten College, at Tolkien’s college and they knew each other, and they used to sit together when Sir Martin was a very young man and Tolkien was at the very end of his career. Sir Martin is a very great storyteller, he told these wonderful stories. Sir Martin’s Jewish and Tolkien was catholic, and because of that they were both minorities and they were not allowed to sit at the upper end of the table in the academic hall at Murten College in the 1950’s.
JH. Oh wow.
BB. Isn’t that amazing? So he, the catholic, and Sir Martin, Jewish, sat together because they were basically segregated down at one end even though Tolkien was probably the most prominent professor of English in his day. Sir Martin was just a young man then. And Sir Martin said, of course they were allies and they loved it. They loved the fact that they could be their own persons and kind of stand up against that authority. That tells you something as well, that they kind of reveled in that.
JH. I know that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is really popular, but are there any lesser known works that promote liberty that listeners should know about to check out?
BB. By Tolkien? Certainly The Silmarillion does as well, and then there are tales within unfinished tales that would, but really I think Lord of the Rings is the most important one if you’re dealing strictly with Tolkien. Of course within science fiction and fantasy there are all kinds of stories, Lewis’s That Hideous Strength which are profound books in terms of understanding liberty, I think some of the best. So it was a great moment there in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s where science fiction and fantasy writers were really promoting cultural power over political power, really privileging essentially communities and individuals over governments. It was just a great moment. And that’s never totally gone away. Science fiction still has a strong libertarian streak in it, but I’m not sure it’s quite at its hay day, it’s not where it was certainly in the 1940’s and 50’s. So there are a lot of great works that I would recommend. But of Tolkien’s, if you’re really looking for those issues, the most important is Lord of the Rings, especially at the end of the Lord of the Rings with the chapter, the Scouring of the Shire, which could explain what happened in 1989 against the communists, this beautiful kind of moment where the hobbits reclaim the Shire after it’s been taken over by a quasi-fascist or quasi-communist government, so great moment.
JH. So thank you so much for joining us to talk with us!
BB. Oh, my pleasure Jeanne! I always love working with you and with IHS.
JH. And we love having you on here and love working with you in general with our seminars and everything else.
BB. Great, thanks!
JH. Thank you. And for more interviews with leading scholars visit kosmosonline.org, connecting the network of liberty advancing academics, and this is Jeanne Hoffman, signing off./strong>