The gospel according to Tolkien

Markus Davidsen, a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, thought he'd write his dissertation about people who believe that the Jedi religion, made famous by Star Wars, is real.  But after he began his research, he seems to have decided that that was just too silly a topic to research, so he changed his mind.

And decided to research people who believe that the religious schema from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is real, instead.

Yes, we're talking Elves, and the whole Valar and Maiar thing from The Silmarillion.  And that there have been a series of massive cataclysms, including the one caused by Fëanor forging the Silmarils (a battle which "reshaped Middle-Earth"), and one that sank the continent of Númenor, not to mention the more famous Battle of Five Armies (from The Hobbit) and Battle of the Pelennor Fields (from The Return of the King).  All of which, mysteriously, have left no archaeological traces whatsoever.

But that's not all.  Many of these people think that they are Elves.  Or descended from the Valar.  And there are enough such folks that Davidsen was inundated with requests to participate in his research.  When asked how he found Latter-Day Elves, Davidsen responded, "Actually, they found me.  My graduation thesis on Jedis won a prize and that generated lots of publicity in Mare [the official newspaper of Leiden University] too.  As a result, those people got in touch with me: one group of Tolkien followers would put me in touch with another and it snowballed from there. The groups turned out to be quite diverse too, so I could compare them to each other."

[Image licensed through the Creative Commons Giorgio Minguzzi from Italy, Elf, Tolkien (5503256855), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Allow me to emphasize; these were not some folks playing role-playing games, a sort of Middle-Earth version of the Society for Creative Anachronism.  These people are serious.

And of course, what would a religion be without schisms and squabbling?  "There are those who swear that they themselves are descended from Elves and accordingly have Elvish genes," Davidsen says.  "That’s some claim, and taking it too far for the people who only claim to have Elvish souls and who dissociate themselves from that group."

Others, Davidsen says, go right to the top, worship-wise.  "Yet another group say they not remotely related to Elves, but that there is another world in which the Valar exist," he said.  "They use rituals to try and contact the Valar.  Some draw a circle on the ground, spiritually cleanse it and then evoke the Valar while others go on a kind of shamanic journey with their spirits travelling to another world."

Right.  Okay.  Because it's not like Tolkien made the whole thing up, or anything.

Davidsen, fortunately, agrees.  On the other hand, he says, "This kind of religion isn’t any dafter than other faiths, we’re just used to that particular madness.  We think it’s normal for Catholics to consume the flesh and blood of their God, but when the modern vampire movement says they draw powers from blood, we think they’re loonies.  It’s not really fair.  Buddhism dictates that some people have a Buddha nature, which is not essentially different from the Tolkien-esque idea of having an Elvish nature."

Which is spot-on, even if predictably I think it's all a lot of lunacy.  I tend to agree with Stephen F. Roberts, who said the following to a devout Christian: "I contend we are both atheists.  I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Now, understand, as religions go, Tolkienism (or whatever it's called) at least has one selling point; it's got a beautiful narrative.  If I was forced to choose a fictional world to live in, Middle-Earth would come near the top.  It's got a grandeur, a breadth of scope, like no other fantasy world I've ever read about, and (best of all) the good guys win.

Which is more than you can say for the world of, say, the Lovecraftian mythos.  There, you do everything you can to worship Yog-Sothoth, or whoever, and for your devotion you get your arms ripped off and your face melted.  That's one fictional religion I'm glad isn't real.

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Dragon slaying

If you needed further evidence that being in an administrative role does not necessarily mean you have any idea what you're talking about, witness the pronouncement by Head Teacher Graeme Whiting of Acorn School, a private school in Nailsworth, Gloucester, England, to wit:  children should not read fantasy literature because it will damage their "sensitive subconscious brains."  Instead of Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, Rowling, and McCaffrey, he said, students are better off reading classics such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, et al.

Here's his complete quote:

I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. 

Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world's 'must-haves', contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children... 

Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children! 

Children are innocent and pure at the same time, and don't need to be mistreated by cramming their imagination that lies deep within them, with inappropriate things.

Starting with the fact that this makes me want to shout "CITE YOUR SOURCES" in Mr. Whiting's face every other sentence, there are a few problems with this claim.

First, has he actually read any "classic literature?"

Let me give you an example.  My school is currently having a contest for both students and staff wherein if you read a hundred books in four years, you get your name painted on the library wall.  Of the hundred books, twenty of them have to be classics.  The result is that I am now in the middle of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.  Consider the following "inappropriate things" that I have so far discovered therein:

The characters are, one and all, horrible people.  Heathcliff, who I think we're supposed to relate to or at least empathize with, is a sadistic sociopath.  His thwarted lover Catherine is a whining, petulant, narcissistic shrew who goes on a hunger strike every time she doesn't get her way.  Edgar Linton (perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story, which isn't saying much) is a weak-willed milquetoast.  His sister Isabella appears to have no brains whatsoever.  Catherine's brother Hindley Earnshaw is a violent drunk, his son Hareton a swearing, sneering brat.  The servants are no better; Nelly Dean, the narrator through most of the book, meddles continuously with the result of making the already bad situation truly awful, and Joseph is a sullen religious nutter who speaks in a garbled patois that appears to be some bizarre hybrid between Yorkshire dialect and Esperanto.

"A romantic classic," the back cover says.  Really?  This romance for the ages starts with Heathcliff and Catherine falling madly in love with one another.  As a result, and because this makes total sense, Catherine decides to marry Edgar, then torments him for years as if this was his fault.  Heathcliff, however, evidently learns from Catherine's example that marrying someone you dislike out of spite is a great move.  Because he then follows suit, marries Edgar's sister Isabella, and on their honeymoon he is so angry at Isabella for not being Catherine that he hangs her dog.

Yes.  Her dog.  Heathcliff hangs her dog.

On their HONEYMOON.

Of course, being a romantic classic, one after the other of them come to bad ends.  So the entire story is 325 pages about really nasty people who are dying, just not nearly fast enough.

And Shakespeare?  What about the lovely, sensitive, and appropriate stories of King Lear and A Winter's Tale and (heaven forfend) Titus Andronicus?  The sex and violence is certainly not confined to the Bard of Avon, either.  Consider, for example, the Greek classics.  I actually really like Sophocles, and his plays are mostly about the cheering themes of incest, parricide, and damnation.

The second problem is not only does Mr. Whiting evidently not know the classics, he doesn't know much about fantasy literature, either.  So reading fantasy novels encourages "difficult behaviour" and results in "mental illness?"  I think you would have to go far to find a character that embodies loyalty more than Sam Gamgee, one that demonstrates the power of love in redemption more than Severus Snape, one that is a better role model for steadfastness and courage than Hazel from Watership Down, one that twists together yearning and loss and grief and beauty more heart-wrenchingly than Taran (from the sadly little-known five-volume Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander).  Those characters resonate precisely because they appeal to our higher selves, give us a sense that we can rise above our challenges and meet life head-on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now understand: I'm not saying that all fantasy literature is appropriate for all ages.  Game of Thrones, for example, is clearly targeted toward adults.  But to tar all fantasy literature with the same brush is idiotic.  And the claim that children are somehow damaged from reading A Wrinkle in Time is absurd.

However, despite my generally negative impression of Wuthering Heights, I think kids should read the classics, too.  I didn't read Shakespeare until I was a freshman in college, which I think is pitiful.  (And when I reluctantly started reading Othello in my freshman lit class, I was transfixed -- and couldn't believe what I'd been missing.)

Children (and adults) should read all kinds of books, from light entertainment to deep and thought-provoking literature that will still be with them years later.  The point is to enter a different world on the first page -- and to have your mind come out different when you reach the last one.

Good fantasy literature is transformative.  Far from "cramming [children's] imagination... with inappropriate things," the best of fantasy reaches levels that I can only describe as spiritual.  As C. S. Lewis put it, "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

Here's looking at you!

One of the most iconic images from the movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings is the Eye of Sauron, the flaming, all-seeing slit-pupilled eye at the pinnacle of Sauron's castle of Barad-Dûr.  The idea is terrifying; putting on the One Ring allows Sauron's eye to see you, wherever you might be.  You become invisible to everyone else, but uniquely visible to the Dark Lord and his servants.

So it's no wonder that the concept captivated the imagination.  And now, an artist in Russia is making a replica of the Eye of Sauron as part of an installation on the top of a 21-story building in Moscow.

Which has caused the powers-that-be of the Russian Orthodox Church to freak out.

"This is a demonic symbol," the Russian Orthodox Church’s head of public affairs, Vsevolod Chaplin, told Govorit Moskva radio station in an interview.  "Such a symbol of the triumph of evil is rising up over the city, becoming practically the highest object in the city.  Is that good or bad?  I’m afraid it’s more likely bad.  Just don’t be surprised later if something goes wrong with the city."

This is hilarious on several levels.

First of all, the installation, "practically the highest object in the city," is all of one meter tall.  Next to the way the Eye of Sauron was represented in the movie, this thing would be about as impressive as Mini-Me.  

Secondly, the Eye is going to be lit for seven hours.  That's it.  If lighting up a one-meter-tall art installation for seven hours is enough to cause the Triumph of Evil, maybe Evil deserves to win.

Third, I don't even see how the Eye of Sauron could be considered a symbol of evil's triumph.  Sauron was defeated, remember?  The One Ring got melted, and Barad-Dûr collapsed into a heap of rubble, taking the Unblinking Eye along with it.  So if anything, it should be a symbol of the fact that Evil doesn't always win.

But fourth, and most importantly; it seems to have escaped the higher-ups in the church that The Lord of the Rings is fiction.  I.e., it's not real.  Sauron never existed, and therefore by extension his Eye didn't either.  I know this is some pretty complex logic to expect them to follow, but even so.

You have to wonder how such superstition survives.  What kind of worldview do you have to espouse to believe that a rather underwhelming art installation representing a fictional character could cause god to curse a whole city?  This raises magical thinking to new heights.  Higher than 21 stories, even.

And I also wonder what the church leaders are going to try to do about it.  Pray, possibly, because there's nothing like fighting a non-existent threat with a useless solution.  The seven-hour lighting is supposed to happen tonight, and I hope we find out one way or the other.

What I think is likely is that the church will hold some kind of pray-in, the installation will be lit up on schedule and turned off on schedule, and nothing untoward will happen.  Then the church leaders will conclude that the pray-in deflected god's wrath, further reinforcing their view that they've understood the universe correctly.  Hallelujah!  God is so great!

Kind of makes you feel like what Frodo did was all for nothing, doesn't it?

The gospel according to J. R. R. Tolkien

Markus Davidsen, a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, thought he'd write his dissertation about people who believe that the Jedi religion, made famous by Star Wars, is real.  But after he began his research, he seems to have decided that that was just too silly a topic to research, so he changed his mind.

And decided to research people who believe that the religious schema from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is real, instead.

Yes, we're talking Elves, and the whole Valar and Maiar thing from The Silmarillion.  And that there have been a series of massive cataclysms, including the one caused by Fëanor forging the Silmarils (a battle which "reshaped Middle-Earth"), and one that sank the continent of Númenor, not to mention the more famous Battle of Five Armies (from The Hobbit) and Battle of the Pelennor Fields (from The Return of the King).  All of which, mysteriously, have left no archaeological traces whatsoever.

But that's not all.  Many of these people think that they are Elves.  Or descended from the Valar.  And there are enough such folks that Davidsen was inundated with requests to participate in his research.  When asked how he found Latter-Day Elves, Davidsen responded, "Actually, they found me.  My graduation thesis on Jedis won a prize and that generated lots of publicity, in Mare [the official newspaper of Leiden University] too.  As a result, those people got in touch with me: one group of Tolkien followers would put me in touch with another and it snowballed from there.  The groups turned out to be quite diverse too, so I could compare them to each other."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Allow me to emphasize; these were not some folks playing role-playing games, a sort of Middle-Earth version of the Society for Creative Anachronism.  These people are serious.

And of course, what would a religion be without schisms and squabbling?  "There are those who swear that they themselves are descended from Elves and accordingly have Elvish genes," Davidsen says.  "That’s some claim, and taking it too far for the people who only claim to have Elvish souls and who dissociate themselves from that group."

Others, Davidsen says, go right to the top, worship-wise.  "Yet another group say they not remotely related to Elves, but that there is another world in which the Valar exist," he said.  "They use rituals to try and contact the Valar.  Some draw a circle on the ground, spiritually cleanse it and then evoke the Valar while others go on a kind of shamanic journey with their spirits travelling to another world."

Right.  Okay.  Because it's not like Tolkien didn't make the whole thing up, or anything.

Davidsen, fortunately, agrees.  On the other hand, he says, "This kind of religion isn’t any dafter than other faiths, we’re just used to that particular madness.  We think it’s normal for Catholics to consume the flesh and blood of their God, but when the modern vampire movement says they draw powers from blood, we think they’re loonies.  It’s not really fair.  Buddhism dictates that some people have a Buddha nature, which is not essentially different from the Tolkien-esque idea of having an Elvish nature."

Which is spot-on, even if predictably I think it's all a lot of lunacy.  I tend to agree with Stephen F. Roberts:  "I contend we are both atheists.  I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Now, understand, as religions go, Tolkienism (or whatever it's called) at least has one selling point; it's got a beautiful narrative.  If I was forced to choose a fictional world to live in, Middle-Earth would come near the top.  It's got a grandeur, a breadth of scope, like no other fantasy world I've ever read about, and (best of all) the good guys win.

Which is more than you can say for the world of, say, the Lovecraftian mythos.  There, you do everything you can to worship Yog-Sothoth, or whoever, and for your devotion you get your arms ripped off and your face melted.  That's one fictional religion I'm glad isn't real.

J. R. R. Tolkien's History of the World

There are times I can almost believe in synchronicity.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a student of mine.  This particular student is an outspoken atheist, and had been in an argument with a friend over the veracity of the bible.  The friend had commented that the bible was a complex, interlocking belief system, with a consistent history, and was far too intricate to be fiction.

My student responded, "The Lord of the Rings is a complex, interlocking set of stories with a consistent history, and no one believes that The Lord of the Rings is true."  Which I thought was a pretty good response.

But then, quite by accident, just this morning I found out that no, there are people who believe that The Lord of the Rings is true.

The leader of this intrepid band of wingnuts is a fellow named Dirk vander Ploeg, and his website (here) is called "The Quest for Middle-Earth."  He has, in fact, written a book (available for $14.95, should you not have better uses for fifteen bucks, which in my opinion would include using it to start a fire), and he asks the following provocative question: what if J. R. R. Tolkien had secret knowledge of the Earth's early history, and used that knowledge in writing his books?

My initial response to this was, "What if C-A-T spelled 'dog'?"  But maybe I'm being a little hasty, here, to quote prominent historical figure Treebeard the Ent.  Let's look at vander Ploeg's line of reasoning:

1)  Tolkien, a professor of Old English and Anglo-Saxon linguistics, learned Finnish and studied the myths in the Kalevala extensively.

2)  Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and yet he peopled his universe in Lord of the Rings with various god-like figures.

3)  On the Island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago, scientists have found the bones of a small hominid that apparently coexisted with modern humans until about 12,000 years ago, or possibly later.  Named Homo floresiensis, these hominids have been nicknamed... Hobbits.

4)  There are some big eagle species in Southeast Asia.

5)  The Atlantis myth shares some of the same features as Tolkien's stories of the doomed island of Númenor.  Therefore, the Atlantis myth proves that the stories of Númenor are true.  And vice-versa.

This is about as far as I got with it, because my pre-frontal cortex was begging for mercy.  (Actually, the point where I quit was when he started talking about how the Eye of Sauron still existed in the form of the US government's network of spy satellites.)  But as a logical sequence, I think we have to admit that "Finnish + demigods + tiny hominids + big eagles + Atlantis = The Lord of the Rings is all true" is a pretty persuasive piece of reasoning.  It's right up there with "HAARP causes earthquakes" and "the Nazca lines are a UFO landing strip" in terms of logical validity.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'd think it was pretty cool if Aragorn and Gandalf and the rest had all existed.  (Well, maybe not Denethor.  He was kind of an asshole.  But most of the rest of 'em.)  It certainly has a grandeur that our own, real history lacks.  I mean, compare the Thirty Years' War with the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, for cryin' in the sink.  I bet no one in the Thirty Years' War ever did anything nearly as cool as standing up and saying, "I am not a man!" and stabbing a Nazgul right between the eyeballs. 

But unfortunately, truth matters.  This means, I'm afraid, that you history students will have to continue learning about the Thirty Years' War -- and The Lord of the Rings will have to remain where it is, in the "Fiction" section of the library.