That Which Is Worth Remembering
As a part of a great book culling, I recently reread yellowed copies of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series before tossing them in a donation pile. Glancing at them on the table beside me, their cover art is incredible: peak kitsch. I might hang on to them. Like many young readers, The Lord of the Rings provided an early introduction to epic high fantasy. Other novels certainly reached me first. I’m reminded of Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But Tolkien’s work was one of the first books to reach me not through parents or schools or library reading lists, but my friends.
During middle school, a classmate in social studies came in every day clutching first The Hobbit and then The Fellowship of the Ring, followed by the remaining two books and finally The Silmarillion. He absolutely devoured these books. He talked about nothing else, if he bothered to talk to you at all. He read them during lectures. Perhaps that should have been a warning, but I wanted in. And I did (almost) the same thing, acquiring my own copies and running through the saga as quickly as my eyes could run across the page.
Not long after, Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring was released in theaters. In my mind, the films displaced the books as the canonical versions of Tolkien’s work. With so much other fantasy to discover, and the movies booming into a cultural mainstay, I felt no compulsion to return to the novels. But here, almost three decades later, I finally gave them a shot. And they still hit different.
For starters, as a critical reader, a writer, and (curiously) a language learner, it’s become painfully clear how much work exists behind the pages of Tolkien’s novels. I’ve often heard that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings series to provide a space to publish the various elvish languages he created. And that shows. As a language learner that instinctively scans new words for patterns in, for example, prefixes and suffixes--like GonDOR, MorDOR, and EriaDOR--I understood that Tolkien deftly tied these places together without drawing explicit connections. The elves refer to Gandalf the Grey as MITHRandir, the Grey Pilgrim, while the shirt of mail Thorin Oakenshield gives to Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, which is passed down to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Rings, is made of MITHRil, an elven word for the silver metal of dwarven smiths. This precise linguistic artistry is, I suspect, one of the reasons Tolkien’s work has lasted so long. It creates a kind of narrative rhyme scheme without needing to make blunt, obvious statements. It is decidedly not like other fantasy works that jam together random strings of consonants and vowels to form fantastical words; linguistics happened in LotR.
But Tolkien’s skill isn’t in simple wordplay; there is foresight, planning. Returning to our example, the mithr- in Mithrandir means gray in elvish; however, mithril is often described as silver, i.e. a grayish-white hue. And after Gandalf the Grey falls facing the balrog in Moria, he returns as Gandalf the White. I can’t say for sure if Tolkien intended this--this transition from gray to white--but given that he built whole languages, histories, etymologies, lineages, cultures, geographies, it’s not hard to imagine that this liminal usage was intentional.
And while Tolkien provides a masterclass in worldbuilding, that is not what my mind kept mulling over as I reread his works. My memory from childhood is that The Lord of the Rings saga is about the loss of the parochial idyll. Perhaps it was the Iowa in me. The hobbits, uprooted from their calm lives in the Shire, are forced to leave their comfortable holes and traverse dangerous roads to save Middle Earth from a threat utterly beyond their strength and ken. And they’re always looking back, back to the pastoral beauty and simple comforts of the Shire. Here, let me open a random page of The Fellowship of the Rings and see if I can find an example . . .
It took three tries. The first page I flipped to had Frodo arguing with Strider and the Prancing Pony’s innkeeper. The second page was before the hobbits left the Shire. But the third has Frodo singing a song about wanderers coursing through a dark wood. This passage follows: “[The hobbits] were depressed. A heavy weight was settling steadily on Frodo’s heart, and he regretted now with every step forward that he had ever thought of challenging the menace of the trees. He was, indeed, just about to stop and propose going back . . . when things took a new turn” (p. 147). There is this perpetual fog of homesickness, of longing glances backwards over shoulders, reluctant (hairy) feet dragging in the dirt. And while the hobbits shake this off as the moment requires, they are continually thinking about the Shire, Bag End, and their homes under hills.
My understanding is that this is commonly read as Tolkien’s lament for the loss of the quaint pastoral life once common to England’s golden fields and emerald leas. But what I discovered on this reread is that it’s so much larger than that. The longing expressed by most, if not all, of the characters in The Lord of the Rings is the loss not just of “home” but of a perfect past. This, curiously, lines up with two important ideas that I’ve bumped into recently: nostalgia and melancholy.
A traditional definition of nostalgia refers to a longing for a happier time, usually in the distant past (distant being exceedingly relative when it comes to the lives of elves). One often feels nostalgia for their carefree childhood, of summer vacations, and Christmas morning. Melancholy, on the other hand, is a weight of sadness that often lacks a specific, identifiable source. One feels sad if a loved one passes away, but if someone feels bad without a particular trigger, this might be considered melancholia.
The hobbits, our primary protagonists, feel neither of these: they’re homesick, they miss the Shire (and are usually acutely aware it is the Shire--the Shire of today--that they miss).
But in an academic sense, the terms nostalgia and melancholy often adopt more nuanced uses more readily applied to the other LotR characters and Middle Earth at large. Nostalgia, to start, is very often the foundation of reactionary political views. A reactionary idolizes (i.e. is nostalgic for) a previous political order and seeks a return to those glory days of yore. After overthrowing the Tsarist monarchy during the October Revolution of 1917, Russian Communists/Socialists faced a reactionary force in the form of the White Armies during the ensuing civil war. After a left-leaning coalition was elected to power in Spain in 1936, a handful of generals led a coup to overthrow the democratically-elected government, installing a military dictatorship with a heavy emphasis on Catholicism and a virile Spanish identity rooted in self-serving historical narratives. I have yet to hear a coherent answer to what time period the “Again” refers to in “Make America Great Again,” but inherent in that statement is a nostalgic yearning for a time long past.
In these examples, nostalgia is offered as the primary argument for political action: things are bad now, they were better in the past, let’s make the past happen again. Very often, this is a lie, intentionally told. The Tsarist regime was an absolute despotic monarchy. Workers, both in urban and rural areas, were no better off than feudal serfs. Pogroms took the lives of tens of thousands. Again, in America, I find it hard to identify a time where things were “great” for anyone not a rich, white male: the genocide of indigenous peoples, chattel slavery, misogyny, racism and xenophobia wrapped up with violence and exploitation. What is sold in reactionary rhetoric is not the past as fact, but an idealized and sanitized past that presents simple solutions to the problems of today, often by sacrificing convenient scapegoats in the form of marginalized groups: minorities, women, trans individuals, foreigners, and the lower classes. This is the Nazi’s Völkisch movement calling on supposed Ancient German beliefs that allowed for the violent exclusion and murder of millions of people deemed inferior based on pagan ideals.
To pick apart melancholy, I’m going to use Left-Wing Melancholy by Cornell professor Enzo Traverso. Traverso walks the reader through a history of the term, beginning with the Ancient Greek concept of, “a sickness engendered by an excess of ‘black bile’” (p. 39). In this way, melancholy was seen as an illness of the body, rooted in a physical affliction, an imbalance of humors. Over time, however, melancholy becomes a “disposition of the mind” (p. 42). And as expected, one of its first modern students is Sigmund Freud. Traverso quotes Freud’s essay titled Melancholy and Mourning: “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (p. 44). Mourning, perhaps more easily grasped, is the death of a loved one; it is a discrete process one undergoes after a loss. Melancholy, however, is “durable”, without obvious source or cure; people may even find pleasure in feelings of melancholic pain. (p. 44).
This is a crucial distinction. Freud posits that mourning is healthy--the mind healing--while melancholy is a condition that needs to be overcome. Traverso’s goal is to depathologize melancholy, to recognize that the pain melancholy exerts can be a driving force for change.
To provide a broader context, left-wing melancholy, defined by Traverso, might be understood as the defeat of the promises of communism; people no longer envision communist utopias (indeed, many dystopias like Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eight-Four stem from this political melancholy). There is no goal, no vision, no future; however, to surrender the ideals of communism would be to accept capitalism or fascism, an unthinkable betrayal (p. 45). Melancholy here is a liminal state where it feels like the past was a failure, but the future holds no promise either. Those on the left are stuck in a gray, despairing present.
I should stop here and say that I have radically oversimplified Traverso’s arguments. He goes on to discuss the work of Walter Benjamin, and other contemporary scholars, and I lack the reading and the wit to truly tackle his entire argument in the space and time allotted here. He’s intervening in a conversation about leftist politics and neoliberalism that leaps far beyond the bounds of this simple essay, but is nonetheless exceedingly important in understanding the failure of the left to stem the tide of the rising right.
What’s important here is that the future--a future whose roots are in the past--is exactly what reactionary nostalgia offers. Whatever their faults or fallacies, a reactionary paints a pretty picture, one based on (maliciously false) memories of a simpler, better time. It is seductive, beguiling, in its two pronged approach: the past was great (ergo no one need feel guilty about what happened there), so let us work toward a bright and shiny future (giving governments an excuse to commit heinous crimes in the name of an impossible vision).
And there is the problem. Nostalgia erases the pain. It glosses over the dark parts of the past. It’s a textbook being rewritten to replace the word “slave” with an unwilling “worker” or “migrant.” It is celebrating the foundational myths of Columbus or Thanksgiving without recognizing the genocide that made America possible. Nostalgia sweeps all of the nasty bits under the rug, hence there are no lessons to be learned, no pitfalls to avoid. It’s said history is the greatest teacher, but nostalgia ignores all the lessons and creates its own false narrative to formulate a vision of the future where those in power remain there through lies and deception; nothing is learned, only power is retained.
And here we turn back to LotR. The world itself is heaped in what I’d identify as nostalgia. Setting aside the hobbits, here’s a quick rundown of the Fellowship:
Aragon: the heir of Isildur, the Númenorian prince that reluctantly sets out to reclaim the throne of Gondor, renewing the alliance between Men, Elves, Dwarves (and even hobbits).
Boromir: son of the Steward of Gondor, also of Númenorian descent. Through Faramir, in The Two Towers, we learn that Boromir craves the throne for his line: “. . . it always displeased him that his father was not king. ‘How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?’ [Boromir] asked” (p. 328). But in the end, Boromir defers to Aragorn as the leader of the company, and likely Gondor, after the death of Gandalf, though Boromir dies before he can pledge his allegiance.
Gimli: the dwarf laments the loss of the great dwarven strongholds. Much of The Hobbit is Thorin and Company retaking one of these: Erebor in the Lonely Mountain. But the greatest settlement, Khazad-dûm in the Mountain of Moria, remains out of reach until Gandalf finally smites the balrog during the Fellowship’s flight from the mine toward the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. And though the mine is reclaimed, like Erebor, it never shines as brightly as it once did in Durin’s day (nerd reference).
Legolas: the elf prince of Mirkwood. Sam, having met another group of elves early in The Fellowship of the Ring, says of them: “They are quite different from what I expected--so old and young, and so gay and sad, as it were” (p. 117). It is hard to fathom the mind of a being who was approaching 3,000 years old at the time of the War of the Rings, but Legolas’ name means Greenleaf, and he has an affinity for forests and trees, eventually wandering Treebeard’s home, Fangorn Forest, with Gimli after the War of the Ring. Elves, I imagine, are perhaps beings of pure nostalgia. When chasing after the orcs that kidnapped Merry and Pippin, the narrator notes that Elves can do with little sleep, “if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world” (p. 37). Elves live in their dreams, dwelling in memories from countless lifetimes past.
Gandalf: the wizard. Another seemingly ageless being whose mind is unknowable. But as one of the catalysts of the events in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series, he certainly plays a major role in reestablishing a world order thought long dead.
I could go on. Elrond of Rivendell and Galadriel of Lothlorien seek to finally destroy the Dark Lord, only to then depart a decaying Middle Earth for the Undying Lands. Theoden King, leader of Rohan, reeling from his son’s death, recognizes the end of his line and pines for lost days: “Alas! . . . that these evil days should be mine, and should come in my old age instead of that peace which I have earned” (p. 143).
Even Sauron represents a form of nostalgia. His search for the ring is the quest to regain his former strength and glory. At the end of the Second Age, Sauron himself walked the fields of battle, slaying both Elendil the Tall and Gil-galad, only falling when Elendil’s son, Isildur, swings his father’s broken sword and cleaves the One Ring from Sauron’s hand. The Sauron of The Lord of the Rings series is a shadow of his former self, a necromancer in The Hobbit and a disembodied malevolence through The Lord of the Rings series.
And in truth, there is much to be nostalgic for in Middle Earth. Where once there was the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, the group sent to manage the most important task of the Third Age is two humans, one elf, one dwarf, four hobbits, and a wizard. Long ago, Middle Earth marshalled tens of thousands (likely hundreds of thousands) of warriors, the best Middle Earth could swing to destroy the One Ring is a baseball’s team worth of people. I’m being facetious here, but the literal loss of people is real. While Aragon’s ancestors ruled two kingdoms, Arnor and Gondor, now only Gondor remains, and even that is in ruins.
Additionally, Pippin asks a Gondor guard about Osgiliath: “It was a city . . . The chief city of Gondor, of which [Minas Tirith] was only a fortress” (p. 39). As Aragorn and the others leave Minas Tirith to challenge Sauron at the Black gates, one character says this: “Surely . . . this is the greatest jest in all the history of Gondor: that we should ride with seven thousands, scare as many as the vanguard of its army in the days of its power, to assail the mountains and the impenetrable gate of the Black Land! So might a child threaten a mail-clad knight with a bow of string and green willow!” (p. 174). Earlier, the narrator, through Pippin, notes that Minas Tirith, “was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there . . . Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footstep ran on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window” (p. 25). There are literally fewer people in Gondor than there had been at its zenith, to say nothing of the elves’ slow departure from Middle Earth for the Undying Lands. I’m reminded of that great nautical wit, Jack Sparrow, who once replied to the comment that the world used to be bigger by saying, “World’s still the same. There’s just less in it.”
So, here we come to the crux of the matter. I said above that nostalgia, particularly of the reactionary variety, is based on lies. The characters in LotR aren’t lying when they say the world was better. Many of them were there to see it. Yes, there was great evil, a darkness more powerful than even Sauron, but the First and Second Ages were times of magic and wonder and beauty and unity. But the world retains only a fraction of its former glory: the elves vanished, the dwarven strongholds fell, the strength of men falters.
This is a far cry from my previous assumption that the entire series was about protecting the pastoral ideals, or lamenting this loss. Given Tolkien’s well-documented Catholicism, LotR retains echoes of the Fall of Man, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. That which comes after paradise can only inevitably deteriorate. Glimmers of goodness or honor may shine through occasionally, but time erodes all majesty, scattering worthiness to the winds.
This trend is made far more obvious when Tolkien’s work is stacked against that of his contemporaries, specifically mid-20th century sci-fi writers. For them, the past was dark and barbarous and the future bright and beautiful. Alternatively, a lot of modern and contemporary sci-fi, specifically dystopian fiction, is a dirge for the loss of utopia, the left wing melancholy defined by Traverso. George Orwell’s novels, Nineteen Eight-Four and Animal Farm, are not condemnations of communism or socialism as many English teachers would have us believe. But after the rise of Stalin and his participation in the Spanish Civil War, documented in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell, a democratic socialist himself, provided critiques of the leftist movements and its failings through his famous works.
In this framing, Tolkien’s work is reactionary in the most reasonable sense of the word. By the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had already consumed much of the English countryside and corralled citizens into urban slums to toil in dangerous factories. He fought in World War I, survived to see World War II, and died in 1973, witness to the birth of a bipolar world order where nuclear annihilation threatened every living thing on the planet. It’s no wonder that writers of the mid-20th century sought to flee the present: Tolkien into a glorious past of knights and dragons, other sci-fi authors into a bright future where all of humanity’s ills could be ameliorated with the wave of a tricorder.
What’s curious about Middle Earth is that the nostalgia present in the characters is a nostalgia often reserved for losers, i.e., those that have lost a conflict. As near as I can tell, the forces of good are largely undefeated. Morgoth, Sauron’s more powerful boss, was cast into the void at the end of the First Age, and Sauron was defeated at the end of both the Second and Third Ages. The good guys won! Yes, there were plenty of defeats along the way: the decline of Arnor in the north, the corruption of the great kings into wraiths, the disappearance of the Entwives, among myriad other Middle Earth tragedies. But good always came out on top during those big battles. Why the decline? Why did victory not lead to an everlasting renaissance? Again, in my mind, Tolkien views this decline as inevitable: nothing that comes later can be better than before; nothing humans built could be better than Eden. Defeating evil only forestalls decay. In this debate, with reactionaries against futurists, it's hard for me to not side with the sci-fi authors and their shining futures. Anything else feels like hopelessness.
On the other hand, I’m not so naïve as to believe that the past is always worse than the future; time, evolution, are not straight lines leading toward perfection. Tolkien’s friend and fellow writer C.S. Lewis coined the phrase “chronological snobbery” to identify those that felt the past is inherently inferior to the present. But nor do I wish to reinstate a reactionary world order that seeks to establish an absolute monarchy or theocracy out of a misguided belief in some gilded version of a brutal, inequitable past. Sauron is defeated. Aragorn ascends to the throne of Gondor. George R.R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series addressed some of Tolkien’s plot holes and his rosy ending during a Q&A at Trinity College. Martin notes that The Return of the King ends with, “And Aragorn ruled wisely and well for 100 years or something . . . That’s easy to write that sentence. But I want to know: what was his tax policy? What did he do when famine struck the land? And what did he do with all those Orcs?”. Nostalgia, and the world that it creates, is incapable of providing an answer to these questions because the nostalgic ideal can never be realized. Leftist utopias have never happened; there is no evidence of their success. But the lie that the (often exceedingly inequitable) past worked, and can be remade, is dangerous because it provides its own proof of success. Nostalgia is a trap.
Melancholy, melancholy depathologized as prescribed by Traverso, is what the world needs. There were things in the past, some wonderful, some terrible. And yes, the future looks bleak. But we’re not going to move forward wearing rose-colored glasses. These are blinders, not only shielding us from a bloody past, but also keeping us from synthesizing a better future; nostalgia would have us continually attempt to recreate a failed past rather than risk a novel future. The Lord of the Ring series ends with Aragon’s coronation and he rules well, and his half-elven children likely rule well after him. Years, decades, centuries pass. The elves leave. The dwarves vanish into their mountains. The Dúnedain die out. The halls of Minas Tirith empty. The Shire fades. Middle Earth is a world of demons and angels that may one day see a Judgement Day, and what perhaps passes for god, Eru, likely reboots the whole thing. I don’t think our universe has a factory reset button. We, those alive now, are tasked with the heavy, nigh impossible, burden of making the world better. And we’re not going to get there through blind nostalgia and a fixation on a false past. The melancholy we feel at vanished utopias and an impossible future must be harnessed, synthesized, to light the way toward something else, hopefully something better. Anything else is surrender. Surrender to darkness. Surrender to despair. And surrender is the last thing we can do.
I hate to be cliché about this, but Tolkien put it best. Early in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo regrets that such an evil duty like the destruction of the One Ring should fall to him at such a dire moment:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” (p. 76).
We are living in such dark times. All that have lived or ever will live are living in dark times. All are asked to choose hope over despair, regardless if that comes in the form of a dark lord or neo-fascists. We must make a conscious choice to abandon the sweet, simple dreams of the past, to recognize the truth squeezed between wonder and horror, and find--or at least fight for--a way forward. Life is the struggle. Don your mithril. Sharpen Sting. Gather your fellowship. And fight on.
