J. R. R. Tolkien as Magister:

Lessons Plucked from the Web of Story,

Sap Sucked from the Tree of Tales

Introduction

In one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s better known stories not included in The Lord of the Rings, a little man called Niggle tries for a very long time to paint a tree. That tree has been read by many as a transparent stand-in or allegory, not merely for The Lord of the Rings itself, but for the whole of Tolkien’s life-work, sometimes referred to as the legendarium and encompassing, along with his now world-renowned trilogy, the Silmarillion, and enormous numbers of related stories and sketches of stories, poems, genealogies, and etymological investigations into wholly invented languages – small wonder, though, that scholars have made this connection, as Tolkien practically announced it himself with the publication of his essay “On Fairy Stories” alongside the story in question, in 1964. ’Tis a massive tree, indeed, and true to his own keen foresight, Tolkien failed ever to finish it, even as Niggle failed to finish his.

… at least, initially. For Niggle is given an extraordinary second chance – unlooked for, unimagined, certainly never hoped for during his commonplace and uneventful life. At the other end of the hackneyed yet for all that still haunting “dark tunnel,” Niggle discovers a land in which his tree has taken root and grown beyond and better than his wildest dreams and far surpassing his fairly meager artistic skill. But as the tree and its surrounding landscape remain mysteriously not quite perfect, Niggle experiences not only elation at the coming to life of his arboreal fantasy, but what amounts to an invitation, a bidding, to continue his work. In the years to come, long after Niggle has moved on to even bigger and better things, the land of his tree becomes a “very useful” place – a place of “holiday” and “refreshment,” “splendid for convalescence,” and crowning all these praises, “for many…the best introduction to the Mountains.”

As for Tolkien, his tree, too, fared much better than he glumly imagined it might upon his original penning of “Leaf by Niggle” – in his case, even in his own lifetime. And since his death, Tolkien’s tree has grown to near vertiginous heights, its canopy achieved incomparable breadth and density, its fruit’s seeds germinated and sprouted whole new forests – but everyone knows that story.

There is now, indeed, little doubt that Tolkien was a great and grand story-teller. But Tolkien also was, and is, with equal indubitability, a great teacher: He held back-to-back named Chairs as Professor at Oxford for a total of thirty-five years – a fact sometimes neglected, if ever known by the average hobbit-lover. In that capacity, he gave hundreds of open lectures, taught graduate students, and published at least one “field-defining”¹ academic paper, his essay on Beowulf, entitled “The Monsters and the Critics.” He also “graded many, many exams,” in part simply to meet his family’s financial needs between two World Wars and beyond. Tales of hobbits, elves and wizards were the stuff of what was to his own mind his always woefully limited “spare” time. Yet even in these literary ventures – the leaves? Who knows? Perhaps, too, the bark and branches, of his assiduously tended tree, growing steadily, year after year out of its well-tilled, richly fertilized soil – in these whimsical and often fantastic forays, I say, Tolkien reveals himself gently, quietly, to be a formidable magister – Master, and Teacher, of many important, and some of the most important things. These are what I want to talk to you about tonight.

According to Thomas Aquinas, only God himself actually “endows the human mind with light.” The “true teacher,” however, “co-operates with” that light, “the light of reason, by supplying external help to it to reach the perfection of knowledge.” (De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1, ad 9). This external help, in the form of words, whether “heard or seen in writing” (q. 11, a. 1, ad 11), when born of “the perfect activity of knowledge in the teacher” (q. 11, a. 2, Resp. par. 3), is efficacious in causing knowledge (q. 11, a. 1, ad 11). The same process applies more or less identically in matters of wisdom: active in the teacher, wisdom is capable of perfecting or further actualizing the understanding of the pupil. Out of the vast store of his active knowledge and wisdom, Tolkien has taught and continues to teach readers through his written words; here are some of the lessons: the use of fairy stories (recovery, escape, consolation and eucatastrophe); “sub-creation” as a window onto love of neighbor; the gradual dissolution of logos at the root of moral evil; eucatastrophe (again!), superlatively elevated to Christian eucatastrophe; and the vital example of the Ents in our quest for human thriving.

The Use of Fairy Stories

In his truly magisterial essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien teaches that fairy stories have several uses. For the sake of time, we will leave the first of these, “fantasy,” to the side, and focus on the last three, which Tolkien understands as somehow closely intertwined. These are recovery, escape, and consolation.

According to Tolkien, good fairy stories help us to recover something we have lost. Recovery, he says, “is a re-gaining … of a clear view” – a “return and renewal” to “‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’ – as things apart from ourselves” (57). Tolkien claims that fairy stories, or fantasy, somehow offers a corrective to our jadedness, the “triteness” bred of over-familiarity and possessiveness towards all and everyone we encounter in our daily lives. We need to see them anew, and mysteriously, meeting “the centaur and the dragon” can [re-]open our eyes to “sheep, and dogs, and horses – and wolves” (57 – not to mention learning to see blue, yellow and red by looking again at green), and so also these same fancies, or fantasies, can re-open our eyes to our human neighbors, our spouses, children, enemies and friends. Thus, the gifted “story-maker” enables us to encounter the ordinary elements of the world anew: “… the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine” (59).

Conceding that “fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery,” Tolkien nevertheless proceeds to make a truly outrageous claim: whatever other means may exist, the chief of these is humility, the foundational Christian virtue and in many ways the summit of the Christian life. Like humility, according to Tolkien, “Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like caged-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you” (58-59).

As for Escape, Tolkien’s treatment is thoroughly entertaining, though not, for all that, unserious. He points out that what has taken on an almost wholly disparaging connotation in literary-critical circles is in its root sense “very practical, and may even be heroic” (60). The basic point here is that there may well be – often is – good reason for literary “escape”: from physical, emotional or spiritual oppression – including importantly the aesthetic oppression of ugliness (63-65) – but also from ideology, from economic and political theory and praxis, from bureaucratic and technocratic totalitarianism. Thus, Tolkien argues, “There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal-combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death” (65).

Consolation is essentially Escape’s other half, “a kind of satisfaction” of one or another primal human desire. The connection seems to be that [imagined] escape from some natural human limitations becomes a consolation. “And lastly,” Tolkien says, beginning the gradual crescendo to the magnificent conclusion of his essay, “there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death” (67). Yet this escape always proves ephemeral and misleading and fairy-stories consistently warn against it! More sound and sane, and according to Tolkien “far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending” (68).

Here Tolkien mounts one last intriguing pair of contrasts, proposing that “Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function” while “the eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function” (68, my emphasis). And what in the hell is eucatastrophe?! It is

the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’…. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance [possibly think of Augustine, Conf., 8, 3 here?]; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (68).

It makes us cry! (69) Let us leave these uses of the fairy story at that, for the moment: to eucatastrophe we shall return.

Sub-Creation as a Window onto Love of Neighbor

A second tapping of the tree yields one of Tolkien’s most distinctive and fertile ideas, that of sub-creation. This extraordinarily trenchant insight into the process of poiesis or literary making, combined with the closely related notions of Primary and Secondary Worlds, make up a concoction much too potent to try to get down whole this evening, but we might distill a single application – one that might even surprise the teacher himself, though I will maintain its derivation from his original theoretical doctrine to be a matter of strict logic. 

“The incarnate mind, the tongue and the tale are in our world coeval,” says Tolkien (1965, pp. 21-22). By the same power, then, whereby man names things and conceives [other] words to describe them, he invents stories, almost in the same motion. “New form is made,” he declares, “Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator” (Tolkien, 1965, p.22). The suggestion here, in no uncertain terms, seems to be that in telling stories, human makers bring into being things, however elusive, through their deployment of “mere” words. But what is to be done with such mysterious, shimmering things? In his ensuing explanation of the doctrine of sub-creation, Tolkien invokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous phrase, “willing suspension of disbelief,” as a working description of what he, Tolkien, refers to as literary belief (as cited by Tolkien, 1965, pp. 36-37). However, Tolkien immediately disputes the adequacy of Coleridge’s description. “When the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce” this sort of belief, says Tolkien (1965),

what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside^2. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (p. 37)

Well! The curious “distillation” I would like to propose hinges simply upon the commonplace intuition that everyone has a story to tell, or better, in terms more comprehensive and especially amenable to the post-modern climate, everyone is always about the business of telling his or her own story. We are, then, perforce the hearers or even “readers” of our neighbors’ stories. My contention here is that Tolkien’s notion of sub-creation, with its correlates of Primary and Secondary Worlds and Primary and Secondary Belief, can be deployed in service of moral psychology, particularly in light of categories ready to hand in Christian moral philosophy and theology. The basic contours of the requisite analogy are these: the author of fiction, and especially of fantasy, “makes a Secondary World,” one possessed, Tolkien (1965) later elaborates, of “the inner consistency of reality” (p. 46, 47, 48); the human person narrates his story, always intent (more or less consciously) on persuading others that his version of reality bears at the very least the mark of inner consistency. “If only you would enter into my world,” he seems to say to me, “you would find what I relate there to be true.” And so I find myself invited to “read” a life-story in progress, one replete with its own laws and its own dragons; I am beckoned, tempted, cajoled, by the Other-as-Author, temporarily to let go my hold on the primary world – the real world, albeit only knowable to me through my own perceptions – in order to enter into the perspective and, limitedly, the experience of the Other.

Now someone may object that the Christian call or command to love is more comprehensive than a call for sympathy. This call may be harder or easier, depending on whether the neighbor with whom I am confronted is a stranger or kindred, my enemy or my friend. And surely the Objector is right: the Gospel is unqualified and uncompromising in its demand. And yet, it seems equally indisputable that if only I were able – nay, were I so habituated as – to “read” my neighbor as I do a great book, to let go my hold on the primary world, or at least of my own secondary version just enough to see “from within” the inner consistency of reality of the other before me, friend or foe, without, mind you permanently losing my footing in Primary Reality itself…. It seems that such richly imaginative engagement of the other with whom I am confronted would conduce, in time and with practice, not so much to sympathy, but to love of the author-other capable with my permission of drawing me into his enthralling story, however beautiful, or sad, or even terrifying. I might even learn to love my enemy, as the Gospel commands, were I only able to enter deeply enough into his moving story.

The Gradual Dissolution of Logos at the Root of Moral Evil

Of course, my enemy is not necessarily evil…right? Tolkien thought a great deal about evil – as a veteran of one of the cruelest battles of the First World War, the Battle of the Somme, in which several of his closest friends died around him when he was only in his mid-twenties. And one of the greatest lessons he has to teach in his fiction concerns his profound and profoundly Christian understanding of evil. Tolkien’s account of evil is enormously rich and complicated, but I believe one of its central tenets to be explicable in terms of the relation between moral evil, or sin, and logos, or what we might call simply meaning, if we understand the latter term to comprehend both uncreated – that is, divine – and created, or human, expressions. In brief, we might say that evil corrupts logos, or meaning (but only the created variety), in the process of, or better, in service to, whatever nefarious business it is currently about. To illustrate this lesson, I would like simply to recall a handful of the most important villains who contribute to the plot of The Lord of the Rings, with a comment or two to bring out the point.

First, we should consider Grima Wormtongue, the long-trusted, but treasonous advisor to Theoden, King of Rohan. Grima abuses language in one of the most basic ways it can be abused: by lying. But as his nickname indicates, he does this subtly, through flattery, insinuations, massaging of strategically selected facts in insidious directions, by all these means gradually worming his black, self-serving designs into the noble but naïve heart of the king – to the end of great and nearly catastrophic ills for all concerned. To curb these evils, Gandalf’s first act is to strike Grima dumb for the duration of a critical confrontation: his lies must not be allowed a hearing for a time, if Theoden is to be cured of a disease become so advanced that false words have established virtually beyond refutation a false vision of reality in Theoden’s heart and mind. And as you know, if you have read the tale, Gandalf is just in time.

Next, we ought to consider Grima’s boss behind the scenes, the wizard Saruman – once the White, lately self-styled “of Many Colors.” Immediately prior to their last momentous confrontation, Gandalf warns his companions – and perhaps also us, his readers – to beware Saruman’s voice. Gandalf’s old colleague turned nemesis takes the abuse of language to a new and far more sinister level: letting literal signification be, more or less, he employs what amounts to demonic power to work mischief directly, as it were, on the vulnerable psyches of lesser listeners, through and around the edges of words – almost in spite, that is, of verbal signs. Tolkien writes:

Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves… (TT, 564).

Notice how the language of Tolkien’s description evokes music, or at least, musicality, at the same time demoting Saruman’s words to near gratuitous status. But music is still logos – according to some philosophers, the purist expression of reason achieved by man. But Saruman’s verbal music, like Satan/(Lucifer)/Melkor’s long before, near the dawn of creation, seeks to wrest from Nature, or, more deeply still, from the Maker of Nature, rule on his own terms. The attempt to do this entails grave distortion to the creature’s own true song. The spell is broken by the true, free, impassioned speech of others – first Gimli, then Eomer, then magnificently by Theoden, and finally, definitively, by Gandalf. As for Saruman, the damage he has wrought on himself by so long tuning his voice to his own, and, though he never fully acknowledges it, to Sauron’s discordant themes, is ultimately irreparable.

We come now to Gollum, once many ages ago named Smeagol. In Gollum, centuries-long possession of the Ring, by which he has become almost totally possessed, has worked a bizarre deterioration of sensible speech, to the point of virtual incoherence. Tolkien tells us that Gollum’s mind has become diseased, permanently confused by all but his consuming lust for the Ring, and with the normal functioning of his mind has gone linguistic aptitude as well. It seems, as you may recall from some of the most memorable scenes in Jackson’s films – in this case, at least, fair renditions of the original text – that the Ring has become so substantial in Gollum’s incessantly brooding imagination that he engages it as its own, distinct internal subject – generating the sort of confusion we would expect, when one becomes to oneself two: As Gollum never completely relinquishes ancient memories of his true identity, his grammar reflects his psychic turmoil by sometimes amusing, always pathetic solecisms: “We hates it forever,” he says in The Hobbit of Bilbo Baggins, upon the latter’s escape from his clutches, Ring and all. Gollum makes up words, too (“crunchable”?); he hisses like a serpent and whines like a dog. Often he sinks beneath even the merely bestial, producing from the abyss of his self-pity a guttural mockery of meaning, “gollum,” that with utter tragic irony becomes his nickname – in fact, a kind of nameless placeholder for the person he once was. Gollum’s wickedness ends with his own life, his final, horrifying, ecstatic cry epitomizing his maimed speech and the dissolution of all personal relationship, which is, after all, the foundation of linguistic meaning: “O my Precious” – signification turned in upon itself in radical self-consumption, reminiscent of Melkor’s great sometime ally, then rival, Ungoliant’s self-devouring.

The last major villain on LoTR’s main stage, so to speak, and the most formidable of all, is Sauron himself: the Lord of the Rings, who, after long years of preparation, now wages all-out war, in a last, desperate quest to become sole lord and master of Middle-earth. In Sauron, the challenge to Logos reaches its most acute intensity, in the bi-forms of cacophony and silence; not silence, however, as a caesura between meaningful verbal sounds – words, uttered by voices in acts of personal communication: rather, silence as the violent privation of sound, most especially of speech – as the muting, stifling, asphyxiating of both speech and all who would yet dare to speak meaning into the drear world Sauron aspires to manufacture in his own image. When Sauron does speak, if at all, it is inside the heads of those to whom he addresses his intentions, upon whom he bends his suffocating malevolence, sucking reason and life out of them as he strives to overthrow all other created wills. As for his chief ministers, the Nazgûl or Ringwraiths, they shriek or scream death and the unmaking of reason; as for orcs, even their order is chaos, bedlam. Sauron would have a Word-less world, whether clamoring or lifeless – meaningless, emptied of all interpersonal communication, dead to love as much as to reason. When the Ring is at last destroyed, following upon “a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise,” Sauron, already reduced to “a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky,” literally evaporates into appalling silence: “a vast, threatening hand, terrible but impotent,” blown away on the wind, after which falls a hush.

Of Morgoth/Melkor himself, we shall scrupulously decline here to speak.

Eucatastrophe

For my penultimate lesson, I want to revisit that strange term already mentioned in the context of Tolkien’s doctrine of “Consolation” as one of the chief uses of the fairy story. As we said there, Tolkien defines his neologism as “the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’…. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur….” At the end of “On Fairy Stories he adds an epilogue on this peculiar eucatastrophic joy, in which he begins by reflecting [again] on the desires of the human story-teller. “Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it” (70). Consequently Tolkien argues: “the peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (70-71, my emphasis). And now our teacher makes another astonishing proposal: whereas for “the artist” a satisfactory answer to the question, “Is it true?” may be “yes: it is true in that world,” the eucatastrophe opens a vista onto something greater: “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world” (ibid. – cf. also the quotation below from Letter no. 89).

“I would venture to say” – Tolkien says – “that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories…. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.” (71-72, my emphasis).

In a letter to his son Christopher a few years later (1944), Tolkien reiterates this theme and summarizes it in a lapidary formulation of his Christian anthropology: “Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.” Note that, according to Tolkien, man is, in his very nature as man, a story-teller! “The theological intuition here” is “that God himself is the great Artist and Story-teller, and since God saw fit to make man in his own image, it must needs follow that man, too, shall be a maker, an artist, and a maker of stories.”³ The redemptive moving story to which Tolkien alludes, then, is, of course, the Gospel: “But since the author of [this “moving story”] is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê (Greek: ανάγκη, ‘necessity, constraint’) of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us” (Letters, no. 89, pp. 100-101, my emphasis in bold)!!!

Of the redemption of both story-telling man and his stories, Tolkien muses finally: “It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be ‘primarily’ true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed” (72 – cf. ST, I, 1, 10!!). He continues:

“The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the ‘turn’ in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is pre-eminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men – and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.” (ibid.).

And so, the Gospel is the one true fairy-story, which has redeemed and is able to save us story-tellers, if only we can stop and rest, and really listen.

The Vital Example of the Ents in Our Quest for Human Thriving

The last word I have to say, as anyone will have guessed, concerns the Ents – not Peter Jackson’s pathetic simulacra, but the real things that lived and walked in Middle Earth until the end of the Third Age. I am not an Ent – that supposition beggars credulity, albeit on only inductive grounds, as there have been no sightings of Treebeard or any other of the Onodrim since the beginning of the Fourth Age, now many eons ago. However, my great affection for the Ents, and my admiration for their linguistic breadth and depth, not to mention the pace with which they stride through life, encourages me in the periodic wistful conceit that I might be somewhat Entish, perhaps through some far far distant ancestry…. Alas, I fear my forebears were never so high and noble as the shepherds of the trees. But be that as it may…. Now if your only knowledge of Ents comes from Peter Jackson, you know even less of the Entwives (certainly not what they look like), and what I have to say here at the last pertains to them as well. If you happen to have had the better fortune to have read the right parts of The Lord of the Rings itself, you may recall that the Ents and the Entwives had long ago suffered a sort of falling out. Treebeard tells the “strange and sad story” to Merry and Pippin, and it is worth hearing at least some of it in his own words:

When the world was young, and the woods were wide and wild, the Ents and the Entwives…walked together and they housed together. But our hearts did not go on growing in the same way: the Ents gave their love to things that they met in the world, and the Entwives gave their thought to other things, for the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path; and they learned of the Elves and spoke with the Trees. But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees, and to the meads in the sunshine beyond the feet of the forests; and they saw the sloe in the thicket, and the wild apple and the cherry blossoming in spring, and the green herbs in the waterlands in summer, and the seeding grasses in the autumn fields. They did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them. The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them). So the Entwives made gardens to live in. But we Ents went on wandering, and we only came to the gardens now and again. Then when the Darkness came in the North, the Entwives crossed the Great River, and made new gardens, and tilled new fields, and we saw them more seldom. After the Darkness was overthrown the land of the Entwives blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honoured them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now (TT, 464-465).

It should be said that, in the wake of later events, we have some grounds for not taking Treebeard to be an entirely reliable narrator, and so we may wonder whether the account you have just heard could be colored with old resentments: doubtless one might find, if one searched long enough the annals of Middle Earth, a more sympathetic interpretation of the Entwives’ horticultural motives. Nevertheless, there are a few significant elements open to some degree of tentative external verification: there is, first, the alleged discovery, learning, and honoring of their crafts by men. Second, and more tenuous still, there are the existing Brown Lands – an argument from near silence for their gardening prowess. There is, finally, ample evidence in his own testimony of Treebeard’s fundamental good will towards the Entwives, with whom he and his fellow Ents long to be reunited some day.

Now, perhaps you’ve heard about Tolkien’s decrying of allegory. Well, to be more precise, Tolkien doubted the validity of allegory as the conscious authorial intention for a good story, but he ultimately conceded that really good stories lent themselves to allegorical reading. As I am inclined to defend The Lord of the Rings as the best of good stories, I want to observe a likeness, approaching maybe a very loose allegorical alignment, between the strange, sad story of the Ents and their long lost Entwives on the one hand, and the relation of the liberal to the servile arts on the other – here, where I believe there remains some modicum of devotion to the former, whatever the concessions we must increasingly make to the latter. It’s a stretch, no doubt, and the parallel fails at various important points, but the Entish impulse to communicate with all living things, countered by the Entwives’ desire to domesticate them, the Ents’ passionate love of the wild along with their own untamedness, juxtaposed with the Entwives’ craving of order, prosperity and peace – these dichotomies, but at the same time also some mysterious mutual recognition and longing for reunion (for the Entwives, it turns out, yearn, too, for reconciliation and renewed companionship with their long estranged mates) – all these elements of this one of Tolkien’s many many strange, sad stories, seem to me to conjure some vague resemblance to our cultural landscape today, particularly with respect to a classical notion of theoria, on the one hand – for Aristotle, and Josef Pieper, just thinking – the realm of philosophy, theology, language and literature – in short, of the liberal arts – and the undeniably indispensable sphere of the practical – of medicine, architecture, law and all the many other servile arts – on the other. There can be no question of trying to defenestrate the practical – to shut down our medical and law schools or our engineering programs. But without all those utterly useless activities – without philosophy and theology and poetry, without music and drama and the blowing of elaborate smoke rings for the sheer pleasure of blowing them – and without the genuine leisure in which to engage in all these useless human enterprises, our day-to-day, nine-to-five, quotidian existence will continue to brown and wither and die. Josef Pieper insists that true leisure has its genesis in worship: that in the end, our human-only associations, even when they appear open to more than mere economic exchange, will never be enough to generate the true inner serenity – the at-oneness with oneself and the world and God indicative of genuine leisure. To get this useless thing we cannot do without, we need an even less useful thing – to borrow a trick of speech from Sam Gamgee, we desperately need the uselessest of all things, friendship with God. This is St. Thomas’s definition of charity. It is the love of God for his own sake, which grounds all other loves, all knowledge and all art, liberal or otherwise.

So, then, do you see why we can’t live without fairy stories, or must you be enchanted further, in order to see what I see?

To conclude very briefly: While no one really questions that Tolkien was a great story-teller, I have mounted tonight for your consideration, the in some ways matter-of-fact, in some ways perhaps less obvious claim that he was also, and is, a great teacher. If only we might deign to sit at his feet, as little children, the things we could learn…!

Footnotes

1. Shippey, Author of the Century, 265.

2. Without, ordinarily, collapsing the primary into the secondary world and so falling into (pathological) delusion: see, e.g., Tolkien, 1965, pp. 48, 52.

3. Lefler, “Tolkien’s Sub-Creation and Secondary Worlds: Implications for a Robust Moral Psychology,” Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 4: Iss. 2, Article 1. Available at: http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol4/iss2/1.