trying out the idea that Tolkien was broken by the Great War and reforged by a trauma-spirit (what are they called in Worm again?) that led to a genius growing inside him, covered by a triple personality-shell of 1) being a perfect Catholic boy devoted to the Virgin Mary and Daily Eucharist, 2) being a harmless, old-fashioned don and 3) being a popular writer of simple romances. Fixing his personality on these things allowed an indeterminate None Of The Above genius to form – outstandingly powerful, effective and hard to grasp.
Slightly glib comparisons from the same era would be that this is the same mode in which Hitler’s genius was born, or more accurately like Major-General “Boney” Fuller, or that other British officer who had some sort of guardian angel type initiation and communed with dead soldiers a lot.
I have seen remarkably little exploring the idea of Tolkien as a magician, which since I started thinking about it this morning I find extraordinary and also not extraordinary. Middle Earth is an obvious locus for spooks of all kinds, from creepy trad caths to Led Zeppelin, but speculation about Who Is This Tolkien doesn’t go there.
I have been reading The Ring and the Cross, a collection of essays and I am afraid to say the state of Who Is This Tolkien discourse presented is not illuminating. There are essentially two parties represented in it: catholicoids who are trying to claim Tolkien as something between “the best of us” and “an inspired prophet”, and worldlings who are like “haha you guys are going a bit too far, I think, you know you can read a lot of things into this…”. The most provocative essay in the collection is “Pagan Tolkien” by Ronald Hutton who goes slightly one step beyond this defensive secular line and says that in the (small) corpus of Tolkien’s recorded thoughts about himself there is some sus stuff in there – a lot of biographical gaps people are papering over, a lot of an old man rewriting things that the young man wrote down, some deletions in letters, a little too much glibness in writing to people asking him to Explain Himself.
I think this is not extraordinary because if I am right to take Tolkien as a magus, then his ability to Keep Silent about doing so great a Work is another mark of his being puissant. The 20th century magi everyone has heard of are famous for being very bad at that part.
…
two and a half points i forgot to include:
a) In the Space Trilogy, Lewis pegs Tolkien as a magus right away. Like, literally. In that guileless “this lion… is Jesus….” way of his, Lewis says “you see this philologist? the one who ascends through the seven heavens, does battle with evil forces, returns marked, forms a White Lodge and summons planetary spirits to destroy a Black Lodge disguised as materialists? That’s my pal Tolkien that is!”
b) The Inklings, collectively, are not even trying to hide their New Aeon ooooh we are edgy stuff. The unreticent Lewis writes biographies and becomes a hero to born-again ex-wiccans, not entirely deservingly. That’s one way to hide. Tolkien’s is better because it hides the fact he has anything to hide (if he did have anything to hide)
b.5) one of the essayists finds striking Tolkien’s belief that the solar principle was extremely secondary, and the highest principle is “starlight”. idk why this tugged my sus rope, but it did.