All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter
Though last week’s article began talking about ancient tales of conflict, it didn’t deliver. Time to pick that thread up, beginning with an example of conflict taken from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Stories can deal with conflict in a different way than a reasoned investigation. Rational analyses require a distance and are suspicious of natural biases. Civilization knows the need for such investigations. Even when they are uncomfortably contentious, they are the mark of freedom, that we seek truth as a civilization even if that requires discomfort.
Yet analysis in the end can only tear things apart. The synthesis in which the pieces are put back together is itself suspect and becomes in its turn the subject of rigorous dissection. Endless dissection does not result in a living creation. We know that instinctively, and we know instinctively that the story is where we put everything together. And as Tolkien, the master storyteller tells us, there is a goal by which the story is judged — its evocation, even though passing, of a glimpse of that realized redemptive joy that is the heart of the contribution of Jerusalem to our civilization.
Not everyone commands high kingly power. True victory of good depends on all who support that just power.
In the story, Aragorn is the archetypical king in exile, a man of immense nobility and many gifts who must nonetheless start at the bottom, live with his gifts unknown, to give his own contribution — a sacrifice of self, the one thing that cannot be received as a gift. Through the mighty trials recounted in the narrative, along with those only alluded to in his past, he ultimately earns the great redemption: the downfall of Mordor and his ascent to his rightful place as the king of the West upon a throne at last restored.
This figure appears in many permutations in Western narratives. I grew up with one such story, written by a rabbi’s wife who was a scholar in her own right and had fashioned a gripping story for kids from the centuries-old Midrash. In this story relayed by the tradition along with the written texts, King Solomon had captured the King of the Demons and had forced him to assist in the building of the Temple. Wily and patient, the demon king played on King Solomon’s vanity until he got him to remove his magic ring (I had been set up for Tolkien long before I read him as a teenager). Then the demon picked up Solomon and threw him for many miles. He then made himself look like the king and assumed the throne. King Solomon, by contrast, had his royal clothes shredded by his bouncing and skidding after having been heaved, and he looked like a beggar. Most people who saw him laughed when he claimed to be king, thinking him mad. Only a simple yeoman saw the inner majesty of the beggared king, and eventually, that led to his restoration.
The need to recognize concealed majesty is a central theme for Tolkien. We must look deeply in ways that we don’t expect. For we are used to con men, seeming to be greater than they are. Gilbert’s lyric from the Mikado famously put it:
Things are seldom what they seem/ Skim milk masquerades as cream/ Highlows pass as patent leathers/ Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.
But that is looking down, exposing low life, asking us to be cautious. Tolkien aims in the opposite direction. Hiddenness can also conceal a reality that is far greater and better. Scripture speaks of God’s own hiddenness in many places, reminding us that the corruption of evil hides His face and that we must search it out. And if we don’t seek that, we will eventually lose heart, lose our edge, and fall prey to despair and incoherence.
Tolkien takes up his theme of hidden greatness in a rhyme that, in the story, is meant to help the characters and the readers to understand the true nature of the rough and homeless wanderer that Aragorn seems to be:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
Tolkien challenges us to understand that darkness serves not only to conceal evil intentions, but also to be the necessary passage that majesty and redemption must undertake to redeem all that is fallen in this world.
The connection to the righteous king’s emergence is made clear in the final four lines of the poem:
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
Before the redemption, with many trials still to be undergone, Aragorn is identified to those who will be his comrades in the overthrow of evil as the hidden king, worthy of sovereignty, and proving it by selfless dedication of the highest kind.
Later in the story, Aragorn talks about the nature of the sacrifice that must be borne by those who do not give up and abandon the world to evil. Many decent people do not know the true face of evil because they live in comfort and protection. They dream as all good people do of ever-increasing peace and comfort.
But their dreams, if not truly reflective of the reality of the Primary World, will lead to the Secondary World of their imaginings being unreal and indulgent. If unchecked, their imaginings tend towards maliciousness against those whose dedication to the good is clear-eyed and courageous, for they mistake dealing courageously with the hard truth, with evil itself. So it is with a poorly established Secondary World — it confuses us in relation with the Primary World, making us think that banishing the messenger cures the evil he reports. We act in anger, it is ineffectual, and a vicious cycle ensues until we clear our head of the warped Secondary World we created.
Later in the story, Aragorn reflects on how he is seen by those whose comfortable world he is fighting for yet are oblivious of his devotion.
Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. ‘Strider’ I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown.
Tolkien’s great story, growing naturally out of the ancient storytelling traditions of the West, and springing from the deep source of his own faith, helps us orient ourselves. The arguments and contempt that may surround us are simply part of the task of the work we do, if we are servants of the light and the truth that these stories at their best point us towards.
The stories of the West, with the Bible’s foremost among them, do not despair of engaging the world and seeing it revealed at last as God’s vision was at the beginning. We must not despair either. We look for a world free from fear, but we who wish to be unafraid and devoted wholeheartedly to the task must not begrudge the natural horror of evil that our devoted service has helped to shield them from.
We all live inside of a narrative. It is the most basic way we bring coherence to our lives, surrounded by so many facts and phenomena that we do not have the power to give full attention to all but a very small part of the vast universe we inhabit. We find purpose in the flow of the narrative, which tells us of how we find our orientation within the chaos and establish a life that is both vibrant with purpose and also coherent and settled in its commitment. We work towards wholeness, which is what the Hebrew word shalom means at root — a peace resulting from fulfillment.
Some choose slapdash narratives, capable of working up all kinds of unstable and violent emotion, but incompetent to make a fulfilled and peaceful life, let alone community or world.
Tolkien’s stories, on the other hand, connect us to the root of language and stories, in history and in their root in God. We need that more than ever in the day when God has been invoked in a savage and atavistic way, destructive of every story but its own violent, coercive, sorry tale.
Tolkien abstained from entering into thinly disguised religious polemic, as C.S. Lewis did. Lewis’ work is masterful, but Tolkien trusts that the story he tells transcends religious difference and offers a narrative in which all can find direction and what Tolkien described as “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart” that “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat … giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
Tolkien effectively breaks down the categorical wall that confines religion a narrow place, the province of specialists or the unfashionably devout. The narrative is religious in its uncliched sense, a narrative that casts a new light on the world through the story with characters who touch the depths of our souls where archetypes reside. The characters and story help us to better engage fully in our primary life, with renewed vision and heart.
Much of Tolkien’s life overlapped that of Churchill and the Lord of the Rings was largely written during that titanic struggle against evil. The portrayal of Aragorn as the king who will use martial power well but only for the highest and best of purposes rings true to what Churchill stood for and to which he rallied the West. The depth and power of the archetype is seen in its character being shared by Churchill, the Primary World hero, and Aragorn, a hero in the Secondary World of narrative. It is just as easily applicable to today.
Writing as World War II approached, trying with all his power of soul to awaken the West to its peril, Churchill knew, as critic Manfred Weidhorn put it, that he was a figure “easily derided.” That is one reason why the role of prophet is not hotly pursued — few are so deeply connected to the truth that they are willing to bear the inevitable ridicule. What made his position especially vulnerable to derision was that he never promoted war for war’s sake, as those devoted to a modern religion of power such as his enemies, or of today’s devotees who see in their old religious tradition something remarkable similar to what Hitler constructed out of Darwinism and Wagner. He called himself “a pacifist who is ready to fight for peace.”
For those people so bewitched by abstractions that they think the world entirely reducible to syllogisms and algorithms, that does seem self-contradictory. But in a world in which God creates both the light and the dark, both the good and the evil, as Isaiah said to the king of Iran in his day, this is the deepest sort of realism. It is the truth of this world we are in, where our task is given. We may not defect from the task God gives just because we prefer to be comfortable and untroubled. But we may only take up the battle in service of civilization — a life organized to settle the world and be civilian — peaceful, comfortable, and untroubled.
Weidhorn sums up Churchill’s thought:
His paradoxical point is that his critique is based on abhorrence of bloodshed. He implies that the issue is not between violence and lenity. Given the ironies of human nature, [the issue] is really between his long-range pacifism and the government’s pacific rhetoric and inept action, which will lead ultimately if unintentionally to severity and violence.
How much this shows itself true again in our long-muddled policies on Iran.
In Tolkien, Aragorn knows that while his fight is necessary, the victory requires more than he can deliver. At the risk of his life and of all his army’s, he must make time for Frodo’s quest to be fulfilled. Ultimately, as the prophet Zechariah puts it, we must know it is “not by power or by might but by My spirit.”
Not everyone commands high kingly power. True victory of good depends on all who support that just power, knowing that in their own dedication to the cause, they are in fact the body of that power without which true peace cannot be won, only empty phrases and lies masking the diminishment of all that civilization means. Even Frodo was humbled at the end. The final destruction of the evil realm came from evil imploding in the character of Smeagol, so devoured by power that in his very ecstasy at having at last by force regained the Ring he heedlessly fell into fire and only so, brought about the Ring’s destruction.
Genesis says, “This is the book of the story of man – in the day he was created, he was created in the image of God.” Our soul is created as a figure in the Book, to resonate with eternal things, with the archetypical story that drew us into our humanity. In this, we all can see our way forward, even in this very troubled world, confident in our purpose and constant in our task.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Tolkien and the Power of Fantasy
Sacred Limits and Free Institutions
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