A Wizard of Earthsea: The real battle is moral or internal

In today's Guardian David Mitchell writes on one of literature’s most fully formed fantasy worlds, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin:

'From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name. “All my acts have their echo in it,” says Ged of his shadow; “it is my creature.” The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called “individuation”, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: “In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the ‘axis of evil’ is within them.”'

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Wizzard - Angel Fingers.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

'Joseph Pearce, who himself has written articles and chapters on the political significance of Tolkien’s work, testified in his book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, “If much has been written on the religious significance of The Lord of the Rings, less has been written on its political significance—and the little that has been written is often erroneous in its conclusions and ignorant of Tolkien’s intentions…. Much more work is needed in this area, not least because Tolkien stated, implicitly at least, that the political significance of the work was second only to the religious in its importance.”

Several books ably explore how Tolkien’s Catholic faith informed his fiction. None until now have centered on how his passion for liberty and limited government also shaped his work, or how this passion grew directly from his theological vision of man and creation.'

The Hobbit Party, by Jonathan Witt and Jay Wesley Richards, fills this void by examining Tolkien’s exploration of totalitarian power and rings of power.

Witt and Wesley Richards write, in a post at The Imaginative Conservative, that:

'Tolkien’s ring is also used to sound a warning against any grand political plan that depends on unchecked power to get things done. The novel is about many other things, of course, but it is no overstatement to say the temptation posed by the ring conveys the novel’s central political theme—that, as Lord Acton put it, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So dangerous do the wise leaders among the free peoples of Middle-Earth consider this ring of power that they determine to risk everything in a desperate gambit to destroy the ring rather than using it against their enemy, the evil Sauron ... Tolkien, through faith in the transcendent God, understood the source of true sublimity. He also understood the source of the thirst for power for power’s sake: the desire to make of oneself a god in the place of God.'

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Howard Shore - Minas Morgul.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The last film in The Hobbit trilogy is by far the best because it shares the elegiac mythic qualities of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After watching the first film in the trilogy, I criticised Peter Jackson for his decision to tell the story of The Hobbit as a prelude to The Lord of the Rings rather than as a story in its own right. That decision gave an uncertain quality to the first film with the film makers unsure as to whether to emphasise the lighter nature of The Hobbit itself or to continue the mythic feel of The Lord of the Rings. In this final film, there is no such uncertainty and the elegiac nature of the film fits the content closely with its theme of the seductions of wealth and power.

As Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian:

'Peter Jackson has pulled it off. He has successfully concluded his outrageously steroidal inflation of Tolkien’s Hobbit into a triple-decker Middle Earth saga equivalent to the Rings trilogy, and made it something terrifically exciting and spectacular, genial and rousing, with all the cheerful spirit of Saturday morning pictures. And if poor, bemused little Bilbo Baggins now looks a bit lost on this newly enlarged action-fantasy canvas – well, he raises his game as well, leavening the mix with some unexpectedly engaging and likable drama. The Battle of the Five Armies is at least as weighty as The Return of the King. It packs a huge chain-mailed punch and lands a resounding mythic stonk. But it’s less conceited, more accessible and it makes do with just the one ending.'

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Billy Boyd - The Last Goodbye.

Fantasy vs Reality: Lewis and Tolkien vs Reed and Wain

'At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.' (C. S. Lewis)

'The heart of a lyric for me has always been anchored in an experienced reality, whether it be Avedon's photo of Warhol's bullet-scarred chest or the sociopathic attitudes recorded in "Kicks" or "Street Hassle." So in answer to the question I am most often asked, "Are these incidents real?" Yes, he said, Yes Yes Yes' (Lou Reed)

I've been reflecting on the differences between so-called 'fantasy' and so-called 'reality' having watched The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug yesterday and while looking forward to the BBC4 tribute to Lou Reed tonight. Lou Reed, at his best, was trying to write the Great American Novel through music and, in line with above quote, might well have agreed with John Wain that the "writer's task ... was to lay bare the human heart." Reed achieved this end supremely with his desolatingly emotional song cycle Berlin.

Richard Purtill has an excellent discussion of this issue in the Introduction to his Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien:

'In his [Tolkien's] view, fantasy has three purposes: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. By Recovery, he means a "regaining of a clear view . . . 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them'". Familiarity has dulled our sense of the wonder and mystery of things; fantasy restores it ...

By Escape, Tolkien means nothing especially original. We must define Escape as the turning of our thoughts and affections away from what is around us to something else--the past, the future, a secondary world. Tolkien's originality lies in defending Escape when so many have deprecated it. His reasons are several. First, the modern world is preeminently something desirable to escape from ...

A deeper reason for Escape, however, is the human longing to flee from our limitations. First is the hardness of life even at its best; but beyond this is our isolation from each other and from the living world around us. Finally, the great limit, Death, is something that men have tried to escape from in many fashions.

Here Tolkien's discussion of Escape merges into a discussion of the third use of fantasy. Consolation is secondarily the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires, such as the desire really to communicate with species other than our own. But primarily it centers on the happy ending, the "eucata-strophe", the "sudden joyous 'turn'". This Consolation arises from the denial of "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".'  

Does The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug enable us to experience these three purposes of fantasy? Probably not. Its focus is mainly on escape. Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review, describes the film as 'a cheerfully exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture ... something to set alongside the Indiana Jones films.' That it works in this way is, in part, because Peter Jackson focuses primarily on telling the story of The Hobbit rather than, as was the case with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, also giving equal time to telling the story of The Hobbit as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It is in the whole arc of the story (and in the story's significance as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings), however, that we come closest to Tolkien's understanding of the purposes of fantasy. As an enjoyable and gripping film in its own right, though, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug works because it sticks with the 'huge propulsive energy' of its humorous and exciting source story and whooshes 'the heroes onwards towards their great goal' rather than engaging more widely in the significance of fantasy and the setting of The Hobbit in Tolkien's wider canon.

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Lou Reed - Berlin.

CS Lewis and the Inklings

Malcolm Guite writes that:

"As part of the commemorations for CS Lewis's 'Jubilee' year the Canadian Broadcasting Company have commissioned two in depth programmes on CS Lewis and the Inklings for their Flagship 'Ideas' series. I was happy to be involved with Frank Faulk in this endeavour and did an extensive interview with him which has been used in both programmes. I was impressed by the research he has done for this programme and the range of people he has speaking on it. Two good results of that research are first that he is not content with second hand cliches about Lewis but goes out of his way to scotch falsehoods, and secondly that he gives due weight to the neglected 'other inklings' beyond Lewis and Tolkien, and particularly gives the much-neglected Owen Barfield who is allowed at last to come into hi own. Finally, Faulk has, in my view rightly, identified Imagination, and the truth of Imagination as the key to the whole 'Inklings endeavour. Here is my post on the first programme. Here us what CBC say to introduce the second program on their website:

C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams were the core of the legendary literary group The Inklings at Oxford University. They were united by a love of myth and the belief that it is through the imagination that reality is illuminated. In Part 2 of this series,  producer Frank Faulk looks at C.S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, and his deep friendship with Tolkien, Barfield and Williams. Together Lewis and his three friends would forge a radical critique of modernity's reductionist, mechanistic and materialistic understanding of reality. It is a critique that today remains more relevant than ever.

And here is the link to both the first and second programmes:

Lewis and the Inklings Part one;

Lewis and the Inklings Part two."

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Mark Olson and the Creekdippers - Ben Jonson's Creek.

Sarehole Mill

Sarehole Mill was a childhood haunt of J.R.R. Tolkien. Born in South Africa in 1892, his family moved to Birmingham in 1896 and lived close to the mill for four years. Tolkien and his brother spent many hours playing around the mill. This and other local settings such as the Moseley Bog provided inspiration for 'Hobbitton' and 'The Shire' in his books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien contributed to the restoration of the Mill in the 1960s. Sarehole Mill is part of the Tolkien Trail, which follows the childhood footsteps of the author and the places that influenced his writing. Download the Tolkien Trail leaflet (PDF).

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Far Over The Misty Mountains Cold.

The Hobbit: An Unnecessary Inflation

In The Lord of the Rings films, there is a fine balance struck between the seriousness (within the context of the fictional world created) of the unfolding narrative and the particular responses and stories (often incorporating humour) of the main characters. The main focus is on a state-of-the-universe narrative but the potential portentousness of this big story is leavened and humanised by the humour and humility of the central characters and the parts they play within this meta-narrative.  

The Hobbit was originally written by J.R.R. Tolkien as a children's story complete in it's own right and it only later became a prelude to The Lord of the Rings. Having reached The Hobbit by the opposite route seems to have meant that Peter Jackson is unable to tell the earlier story in its own right and for what it is in and of itself. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first of a three part series which can only tell this the slighter of Tolkien's originally published tales of Middle Earth at this length because of the decision to also tell the story as an explicit prelude to The Lord of the Rings.

This has two implications. First, that The Hobbit films will only make sense to those who already know The Lord of the Rings films as the additional material doesn't progress the story which is actually told in The Hobbit but does fit that story into the bigger story of The Lord of the Rings. Second, the balance between seriousness and humour/humanity found in The Lord of the Rings films is lost here because of the decision to tell both the story of The Hobbit and the story of The Hobbit as a prelude to The Lord of the Rings. The story told in The Hobbit is a lighter, slighter tale which is well told in this film with humour (except when Radagast's distraction of a hunting party of Orcs is turned into the equivalent of a Benny Hill-style sketch) but this is then set against the seriousness of the storyline which explains how the events of The Hobbit fit into the state-of-this-universe narrative that is The Lord of the Rings. Instead of the leavening of seriousness with humour and humanity that is found in The Lord of the Rings films here we get a jarring shuttling back and forth between these two separated styles and stories.

This results, I think, from a lack of trust on the part of the makers in the ability of the story of The Hobbit to communicate in its own right and its own form. Jackson, essentially, does not trust that the seriousness of the tale and its links to The Lord of the Rings would emerge simply by dramatising the tale as told by Tolkien. In the story, as told by Tolkien, these aspects emerges from the lighter, humourous form of the story. It is the reverse of what is achieved in The Lord of the Rings films and it is ironic that Jackson having found for himself a balance between seriousness and humour for The Lord of the Rings films (as this balance is not in the book as written by Tolkien) has then been unable to trust the reverse balance which is naturally found in the original tale as told by Tolkien.

There is much to enjoy in the film and I'll be there with the many who will see all three over the next 18 months and then will watch all three all over again on DVD but, on a first viewing at least, my view is that the story would have been better told by reflecting and respecting the lighter, slighter nature of its form instead of this attempt to inflate it with the expansiveness and seriousness of The Lord of the Rings.

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Howard Shore - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Tragedy and euchatastrophe

I was gripped by Antigone at the National Theatre tonight but that may have had more to do with the strength of Sophocles' play than the strengths of this particular production. King Creon and his advisers are depicted here more as managers and bureaucrats than as the military dictators that Sophocles would seem to have created. That may be a comment on the way in which military might is commonly exercised today, as the initial recreation of the US Government's viewing of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in the opening scene of this production would seem to imply. While that is theoretically a genuinely scary perception (Assad rather than Gadaffi, for example), here the look and feel of the office set and costumes meant that the petty bureaucratic tyrannies of a David Brent were also in view and may have underminded to some extent the forces Sophocles unleashes through the play.

I was left wondering from where those forces arose. On one level, Creon makes an ill-advised decision which he then feels obligated to enforce as to back down would undermine his authority which he assumes, as King, is and must be absolute. Sophocles would then seem to be critiquing absolutist approaches to power and advocating greater responsiveness from those with power to those who are governed. Yet the same stubborn insistence in following through an initial decision that is criticised in Creon also characterises Antigone's actions and these are presented, within this production at least, as fairly unambiguously heroic. The difference then would seem to be, in part, that one stubbornly follows the wrong course of action while the other stubbornly follows the right course of action. Yet that, by itself, is relatively banal.

The greater sense of tragedy comes partly from the sense that it is the combination of both the wrong and right stubbornnesses that create the inevitability of the tragedy and also the sense that this inevitability is either the judgement of the Gods on Creon, as prophesied by Creon, or an outworking of the curse on the family, the doom which befalls three generations across the Theban plays. This latter sense of Sophocles' tragic conception sits least easily with the contemporary managerial setting of this production and may well be what creates the greatest sense of disjunction between events and setting.

Before seeing this production, I had had a conversation in which a literature lecturer spoke of contrasting Greek tragedy with Biblical narratives. The latter, because they have 'happy' endings are seen as comedic narrative structures rather than as tragedies. This is despite in some cases using essentially the same plot elements. The contrast is instructive. The story of Daniel and the Lion's Den, for example, begins in essentially the same manner as Antigone in that a King enacts a law which is then deliberately broken leading the King to feel compelled to put to death the one who is the lawbreaker. In the biblical version of the story, however, God supernaturally saves the lawbreaker whereas, in Sophocles' version, the gods punish Creon through the deaths of all those he loves. Similarly, the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, in the confrontation between David and the prophet Nathan, parallels the confrontation between Creon and Tiresias in Antigone. The difference is that David repents of his wrong actions as a result of Nathan's intervention whereas Creon resists Tiresias until the point as which his attempt to redress the situation is too late. In the David and Bathsheba story, David does not escape the (still severe) consequences of his actions because of his repentance but does avoid the total meltdown that Creon experiences and which leaves him with nothing and as nothing. The biblical narratives consistently uncover hope in despair which is why they are, as J.R.R. Tolkien phrased it, eucatastrophes rather than tragedies.

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Sixteen HorsePower - I Seen What I Saw.

The Inklings, Fantasists or Prophets?

The first in a series of five talks which will explore how the group of writers who clustered around C. S. Lewis in the middle of the last century were forging a vision that is vital for us in the 21st Century can be found by clicking here.

The series entitled The Inklings, Fantasists or Prophets? is being given by poet, singer-songwriter, priest, chaplain, teacher and author, Malcolm Guite.

My 'There were giants in those days' series of posts may provide an interesting supplement to Malcom's lecture series and can be found by clicking here, here, here, and here.

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Annie Lennox - Into The West.

Harry Potter and true myth

Three quarters of our family recently watched Part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and we are now working our way through the films together from the beginning, noticing more of the clues planted in the early stories which point towards the series end as we do so. Like so many others, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the shared experiences of books, films and dvds from bedtime stories through books passed around to be read one after the other and shared cinema visits followed by shared evenings in with the dvds.

For me, it has all been another demonstration of the power of story; one that has connected with my experiences as a child reading The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (also The Books of Earthsea and The Chronicles of Prydain). These are stories which enable us to experience and live in other worlds; through the imagination of the author married to our own, such series enable us to inhabit the story over a sustained period of time. That that is so despite there being real weaknesses to each series - Narnia sails too close to allegory; the action in The Lord of the Rings gets bogged down in the marshy detail of Middle Earth; and J. K. Rowling has a rather flat writing style - speaks volumes about the power of story itself and the skill with which C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Rowling weave their plots and realise their characters.

I was wondering what happens next for those of us who have lived in the Potterverse (with the exception of Pottermore) as the books and films have overlapped, in contrast to Narnia and The Lord of the Rings where the films have enabled later in life to revisit the books. There is a real sense now in which living in that story will stop with the release of the final dvd. This brought my thinking to the contrast between living imaginatively in an fictional story and living in a story which encompasses and explains our everyday existence. The Greatest Story Ever Told is such a story and this reminded me of the distinction that Lewis and Tolkien made between myth and true myth:

"Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."

"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies." Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

"In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology," wrote Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, "Tolkien had laid bare the center of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion." It is also the creed at the heart of all his other work. His short novel, Tree and Leaf, is essentially an allegory on the concept of true myth, and his poem, "Mythopoeia," is an exposition in verse of the same concept.

Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their "mythopoeia" to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.

Such a revelation changed Lewis' whole conception of Christianity, precipitating his conversion."

Something similar also applies, it seems to me, to the story told within the Bible; a story which is true to life itself and within which one can truly live. This, it seems to me, has been one of the major insights from the writings of Tom Wright where he describes the story of the Bible as a five act play (containing the first four acts in full i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus) within which we can understand ourselves to be actors improvising our part on basis of what has gone before and the hints we have of how the play will end:

"The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to."

Wright concludes that he is proposing "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

The story told in and through the Bible is therefore true myth because it is viable to live real (as opposed to imaginary) lives within it. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, this story is understood "as we are in engaged in the same struggle that we see in scripture"; that "is the struggle to understand and deal with the events of our time in the faith that God creates purpose, sustains all that is and will bring all to its proper end."

To accept the story of the Bible as true myth conversion is required because, to quote Newbigin again, "Western culture is outside of the believing community where the authority of the bible is accepted":

"Here a paradigm shift is required whereby the current framework of thought of the culture can be radically understood from the viewpoint of the new (in this case Christian) framework of thought but which cannot be arrived at from any process of thinking within the current framework."

Having said that, it may be that the experience of living imaginatively within the story of a fictional series can provide a parallel enabling some understanding of the way in which the story of the Bible functions as true myth.

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Regina Spektor - The Call.

There were giants in those days (1)

It is said that, ‘Of the making of lists there is no end’ and, as it hasn’t done any harm to Nick Hornby’s career, I shall begin with three lists myself. Lists that group together a number of the significant British-based artists in the first half of the twentieth-century.

List one includes C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Lewis is the link person within this group: he, Tolkien and Williams met weekly in Oxford from 1939 to 1945 through the meetings of The Inklings; Sayers corresponded and met with both Lewis and Williams; Lewis and Sayers both developed a role as ‘popular theologians’; while Lewis, Sayers and Tolkien each contributed essays to what became the posthumous volume, Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

The second list or grouping revolves around T. S. Eliot and includes Christopher Fry, David Jones, Sayers and Williams: Eliot published and wrote introductions to the work of Jones and Williams; Eliot, Sayers and Williams shared a common love of, and wrote on, the work of Dante; Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams all wrote drama for the Canterbury Festival; Eliot, Fry and Williams were part of the Verse Drama movement; while, Jones and Williams shared a love of the Arthurian legends – Jones critiquing Williams’ work in The Arthurian Torso.

The final list or group has Eric Gill at its centre and includes, Desmond Chute, Philip Hagreen, Edward Johnston, Jones and Hilary Pepler. Gill, later followed by Johnston and Pepler, moved to Ditchling, Surrey in 1907 and this move led directly to the formation by Chute, Gill and Pepler of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in 1920. The Guild was a community of artists and craftspeople living, working and worshipping as Dominican Tertiaries. Jones joined the community in 1921 and then, in 1924, moved with Gill and Hagreen to Caldey in Wales as part of an attempt to establish a similar Guild there.

The links that I have briefly outlined are sufficient to establish that we have here three distinct groups – formed around Eliot, Gill and Lewis – plus a significant amount of overlap and linkage in personnel, ideas and forms between the groups – with Jones, Sayers and Williams emerging as the principal individuals linking the three groups.

Within their own time some of these groupings and links were recognised. Kenneth Pickering has noted that Sayers “was particularly conscious that she was one of a group of Christian writers who were under attack from both radical Christian and agnostic critics”. She wrote of indignation being “reserved for a small group of Anglicans, such as Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis … and, of course, T. S. Eliot …”.

George Bell, as Dean of Canterbury and then as Bishop of Chichester, initiated the Canterbury Festival where, as we have heard, plays by Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams, among others, were commissioned and performed. Bell also held several conferences on art and the church and again Eliot, Sayers and Williams were involved.

Accordingly, A. N. Wilson, in his biography of Lewis, suggests that there were giants in the Church of England in those days and cites Eliot, Lewis, and Sayers as examples.

However, it was not only in the Anglican Church that artistic giants existed. The group gathered around Gill, together with Tolkien, were all part of the Roman Catholic Church and there too a similar pattern can be seen. Kathleen Raine, for example, has stated that Gill and Jones were part of “a remarkable flowering of Catholic culture”.

Finally, the links between this group and the Anglican grouping have been noted by Gregory Wolfe who includes Eliot, Gill and Jones in his list of Religious Humanists from this period.

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King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King.