In the twentieth century special circumstances or “accidents of history” made Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as a re-creation of the ring quest, not only relevant and meaningful but to some degree prophetic. That is not to say that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory of our time. Tolkien rightly rejected the allegorical view as too narrow for his tale. He especially abhorred questions of the “Are Orcs Nazis or Communists?” kind. Tolkien’s purpose was both more specific and more universal.
He once wrote: “I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory,’ but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gives us an adventure in the form of a ring quest with a simple human moral truth at its center. However, the nature of that adventure and that moral position were undeniably “applicable” to the most dramatic conflicts of the twentieth century.
Although Tolkien did not intend to mimic the events of his time, he did acknowledge when he began writing The Lord of the Rings in 1937 that something of the impending conflict with Nazi Germany was discernible in the dark atmosphere of its composition. Furthermore, as the bulk of the book was written through the dark years of World War II, there were aspects of the real war that were inevitably comparable to his “War of the Ring.”
It is interesting to note Tolkien’s own comments on this in his wartime letters to his son, Christopher, stationed with the British forces in South Africa. He sent chapters in serial form to Christopher as he wrote them, along with personal letters with constant references to Hobbits, Orcs, and Rings, as similes for individuals and issues relating to actual events in the conflict with Germany.
“Well, there you are: a hobbit among the Uruk-hai,” Tolkien wrote. “Keep your hobbitry in heart and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them.” However, this did not mean that real events in the war shaped Tolkien’s invented war. His “War of the Ring” was about ideals, not political realities. It essentially revolved around a human moral crisis, which he perceived in the real war, but not just in the enemy.
In one letter to Christopher, Tolkien wrote: “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear-cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side …”
Clearly, Tolkien’s war had its own direction to follow, which had no parallels in the war with Germany. This is not to say that Tolkien was neutral in his view of Hitler and Nazi Germany—far from it. In 1941, he wrote to another son, Michael, who was at the time an officer cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
“I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal. … Anyway, I have in this war a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler. Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified.”
Indeed, one might even perceive that this “grudge” against Hitler might have had something to do with Tolkien’s ambitions in writing a new version of the ring quest. In the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner recognized the absolute centrality of the ring quest in the vast mythological themes of European and especially Germanic peoples. He consciously seized upon the ring as a symbol of the German identity, heritage, and state. In the twentieth century, the music of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung became so closely allied with the Nazi Party and the rise of the Third Reich that they became synonymous in the popular mind. During World War II, the grand themes and traditions of the ring quest were usurped (or, as Tolkien saw it, ruined, perverted, and misapplied) by the German state with which Tolkien’s nation was at war.
On one level, The Lord of the Rings is certainly an attempt by Tolkien to reclaim the ring as a symbol of “that noble northern spirit,” which had fallen into such disrepute in Germany. With some justification, Tolkien blamed Wagner and his heirs for the dimming of the “true light.” Although Wagner’s genius was indisputable, his politics were repugnant. The great musician’s family and heirs were not innocent dupes of the Nazi Party. Wagner’s ideological stance may to some degree be evaluated by the fact that he chose to dedicate his collected works to Arthur de Gobineau, the father of Aryan racialist theory—a theory that Tolkien correctly rejected as being as intellectually ridiculous as it was morally repellent.
To Tolkien’s credit, he saw from the beginning the nature of the Nazi obsession with Wagner’s Ring Cycle. What appealed to the Nazis in the ring quest was an idealization of the pursuit of power for its own sake. Tolkien appreciated the ring quest tradition on many levels, but having already lived through one World War, he understood the nature of the curse of the “ring of power” as well as any man could. He believed that even for the good man the pursuit of power was in itself an evil that would enslave the human spirit and soul. And, in the Third Reich, there were not many “good men” to start with.
There can be little doubt that part of Tolkien’s deeply felt motivation in writing The Lord of the Rings was a desire to set the record straight by reclaiming the ring quest tradition, and presenting the “noble northern spirit” of Europe in its “true light.” Just as Tolkien chose on minor points to “challenge” Shakespeare’s use of myth and history in Macbeth (1605), so on a much grander scale he “challenged” Wagner’s use of myth and history in his Ring Cycle operas by writing The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien understood the deep moral crisis at the center of the ring quest as Wagner perceived it. He saw the devastation that the Iron Age mentality of the ring quest had wreaked in the world, and chose to reshape the ring quest fundamentally for the twentieth century. He did this by turning the quest on its head. The ring of power was “unmade” by reversing the spell. The hero of the quest does not seize the ring but destroys it by dropping it into the inferno where it was made.
In 1937, Tolkien began to forge his “One Ring” imaginatively as a symbol for an absolute power that morally and physically contaminated all who touched it. He could not even have guessed how soon history would catch up with his dark vision and make his tale appear almost prophetic. He certainly could not have imagined how the scientists of the real world would soon create something that was every bit as powerful, evil, and contaminating as the “One Ring” of Sauron the Dark Lord.
Although The Lord of the Rings was largely written during the war years, it was not published until 1954, and, by this time, the atomic bomb had seized the popular imagination. The public was less likely to equate Sauron with Hitler than the One Ring with the Bomb. It was difficult for many to believe that the idea of the One Ring was not inspired by the Bomb. Surely, some suggested, no place could look more like a nuclear testing ground than the ash-laden land of Mordor?
There is no doubt that Tolkien was very much against the atomic bomb. On August 9, 1945, he wrote to Christopher: “The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world!”
Still, Tolkien was at pains to point out that the One Ring was fully formed long before he had any idea of the activities of atomic scientists. In a letter written in 1956, he found it necessary to state: “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination).” However, he had to acknowledge that in a larger sense the message or moral of his novel certainly did not exclude atomic power.
Indeed, Tolkien’s views on nuclear weapons would not have been at all out of place at any CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, begun in the UK in 1957) or Ban the Bomb meeting or protest march.
“Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose [bombs]. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation.
“When you say Atomic power is ‘here to stay’ you remind me that Chesterton said that whenever he heard that, he knew that whatever it referred to would soon be replaced, and thought pitifully shabby and old-fashioned. So-called ‘atomic’ power is rather bigger than anything he was thinking of (I have heard it of trams, gaslight, steam-trains). But it surely is clear that there will have to be some ‘abnegation’ in its use, a deliberate refusal to do some of the things it is possible to do with it, or nothing will stay!”
Even retrospectively, however, it still seems very unlikely that such a self-confessed “old fogey” of an Anglo-Saxon professor, writing about a remote imaginary world filled with an impossibly obscure invented mythology, could suddenly find a huge American campus cult following in the middle of the radical, politically charged 1960s. Tolkien was nobody’s idea of a radical campus professor, so what was it in his writing that was suddenly so relevant to the lives and politics of the youth culture of the 1960s, catapulting him into the category of one of the most popular authors of the century?
The answer was that Tolkien’s approach to the ancient grand theme of the ring quest was as unconventional and inventive as his unlikely heroes, the Hobbits. In fact, The Lord of the Rings proved to be the perfect student counterculture book. It was full of action and adventure, but it appeared ultimately to hold an anti-establishment, pacifist message. Frodo Baggins might not have been exactly a Hobbit Gandhi, but he did reject the temptations of worldly power to an almost saintly degree. The student antiwar and ban the bomb movements of the sixties found an empathetic antihero in the Hobbit’s humble values, as did the back-to-the-land hippy dropout culture. Tolkien could not have touched more bases with the youth culture of the sixties if he had commissioned a market survey.
If Tolkien was ambiguous about the “meaning” of his tale, there is no doubt that the parallels between the One Ring and the Bomb were not missed by activists in the late sixties and early seventies. One need only read Robert Hunter’s The Greenpeace Chronicles to see how closely allied the counterculture was with Tolkien’s world. Greenpeace came into being in 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, as an ecological guerrilla organization that attempted to stop American nuclear testing on Amchitka Island in Alaska. To this end, it chartered its first ship and attempted to prevent the bomb from being exploded by sailing into the test area.
Writing about this maiden Greenpeace voyage, Hunter tells how they had arrived at a point where even the stout hearts of his shipmates saw their task as rather comically hopeless. “There was something superbly comical about it: here we were, eight green-clad amateur seamen, on our way to confront the deadliest fire of the age, like Hobbits bearing the ring toward the volcano of Mordor.”
It was a comparison that carried them a long way. Like exhausted Hobbits, they persevered. If Hobbits could overcome the forces of Sauron, why couldn’t a ragtag handful of hippies overthrow the US military-industrial complex? At one point the valves and pistons of the old engine of their rather battered vessel required such coaxing and constant care on their long voyage along the north Pacific Coast that the activists dubbed themselves the “Fellowship of the Piston Rings.”
In Tolkien’s tale, when the One Ring is finally destroyed, the subsequent volcanic eruption closely resembles a nuclear explosion—but an explosion that destroys only the evil forces of the Ring Lord. One might also see in that explosive “unmaking” of the One Ring the reversal of the traditional ring quest in a moral sense as well. That Iron Age mentality of “might equals right,” which made the ring quest for power so important, ends with the nuclear age—when possession of such power entails only mutual destruction.
It was Albert Einstein who warned the world: “The unleashing power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking … we need an essentially new way of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
Tolkien’s reversal of the ring quest demonstrates this “new way of thinking.” Its version of the quest represents a desire to change power structures. Tolkien saw the results of the pursuit of pure power in two wars, and rejected it. In his private mythic world, he understood a human truth that modern technology has brought home to mankind with a terrible vengeance in the form of the nuclear bomb. If ever there was a manifestation of the ultimate power of the One Ring, the Bomb was it. The “Cold War” was the result of the grudging admission that power of the kind represented by nuclear weapons was ultimately selfdestructive.
Tolkien also displayed this “new way of thinking” in his inspired choice of heroes. One must not forget the importance of his Hobbits; it would do no good to change the nature of the quest without changing the nature of the hero. Not only did Tolkien turn the ring quest on its head; he also reversed many of the characteristics usually expected of the quest hero. He wrote:
“The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves) … They are entirely without non-human powers, but are represented as being more in touch with ‘nature’, and abnormally, for humans, free from ambition or greed of wealth. They are made small partly to exhibit the pettiness of man, plain unimaginative parochial man … and mostly to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’”
Ultimately, the greatest strength of Tolkien’s Hobbits in their epic struggle against all odds is their basic human decency. It is their essential humanity, their simple but pure human spirits, which allowed them to triumph in the end. And it is this human element, combined with the grandeur and pomp of a magnificently conceived mythic world that has been the key to Tolkien’s continued popularity.
Characteristically, however, Frodo Baggins the Hobbit actually does live up to the classic “hero” image at the time of the ultimate test. At the last moment, on the edge of the Crack of Doom, the Hobbit’s resolve fails and he refuses to destroy the One Ring. Virtuous though Frodo is, it is not the strength of his will that allows the One Ring to be destroyed and Middle-earth to be saved, it is Frodo’s unprovoked and almost foolish charity toward an undeserving enemy. Out of a sense of mercy, the Hobbit allows the treacherous Gollum to live. Reason should tell Frodo that Gollum will betray him again, but the Hobbit chooses to obey his heart. In the end, the One Ring is destroyed exactly because Frodo takes pity on his enemy, and Gollum survives long enough to betray him again. On the edge of the Crack of Doom, Gollum wrestles with the Hobbit. Finally, he overcomes the weakened Frodo. He viciously bites off the Hobbit’s ring finger. Then, seizing the One Ring, Gollum topples backward into the fiery abyss. The One Ring is destroyed.
In Frodo the Hobbit, Tolkien found a twentieth-century Everyman who has, and will continue to have in the twenty-first century, universal appeal to people of any time and any place. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the Hobbit teaches us that “attempting to conquer Sauron with the ring” is no longer the goal of the quest. In the end, it is not the power of the mind, nor the strength of the body, but the instincts of the human heart that save the world. It is the simple human capacity for mercy that finally allows evil to be overthrown.
