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Sometimes I think about the Lord of the Rings, and how many people see it as a triumph of good over evil. When I can't read it - books or films - as anything other than elegiac tragedy.
Another generation's loss of innocence in a series of wars that have gone on from time out of mind. Sauron is the lesser evil, smaller than Morgoth: the heroes who oppose him as lesser in their ways than the heroes of old.
All things pass away: Tolkien's legendarium circles around this central truth. All things pass away, and war is terrible. But more terrible yet is surrendering to despair or to darkness. And yet in the end some griefs remain inevitable, for the world will change.
The whole mythos is so inflected with loss and grief - and valiant stands, desperate bravery, weakness and greatness and foolhardy choices made from selfishness or self-sacrifice, depending, but above all that sense of loss and grief - that every triumph is fleeting, and costly.
Valuable, yes, but temporary.
I'm not a Tolkien scholar. But I am a historian. And Tolkien's mythology is long and deep, and knows that the passage of time changes everything, which is true. (And something many fantasy novels forget.)
I'm not a Tolkien scholar. But I am a historian. And Tolkien's mythology is long and deep, and knows that the passage of time changes everything, which is true. (And something many fantasy novels forget.)
I'm not an Anglo-Saxonist with a religious bent, born when Victoria reigned, who lived through two World Wars, so I'm not inclined to see change and loss through the ages as *decline* from a place of grace, but that doesn't alter the grief that suffuses Tolkien's work.
In a way, it's fascinating to see that recast as solely an epochal struggle between good and evil - which it is, yes. But not a simple one. The consequences of that struggle are always loss, just as giving in is its own grief.
Triumph, but only for a while. Triumph, but only at a cost.
Anyway. I should either be sleeping or working, not pondering.
Anyway. I should either be sleeping or working, not pondering.
...And this is the part where I say "Come find me on Patreon, I talk about history books there!" https://www.patreon.com/hawkwing_lb And sometimes at Substack. (Both Patreon and Substack suck for different reasons.)
Haven't had this many retweets in a while and honestly it's weirding me out a bit.
