SOURCE: Ready, William. “Man for Tolkien.” In The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry, pp. 115-31. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1968.

[In the following essay, Ready examines Tolkien's thoughts on human nature as they appear in The Lord of the Rings.]

Man is hard to handle. A free agent, often he rejects what he thinks of as the Good, let alone good wizards like Gandalf—good men. For as long as Man lives Nature and all beyond relate to him. But there is something in Man, divine and diabolic, that rejects this. When his malign desire embraces Nature, it is to subdue it and harness it to his will. When his good desire woos it, it is often to escape his manhood and be subject within it, to pull Nature over him like a blanket. The body's chemistry, land, sea, sun and sky are all related this way or that. What is eternal in Man's mind contains this record, but it overlords it with a vain and brave attempt, encompassing catastrophe, to break free of the tutelage that is built within, the Authority, to relate or not to relate as the will moves—not as his memory relates—not to share in love but to control or to cower. Man leaps from ice floe to ice floe, from hummock to tussock, to avoid facing the record and living by it. He rejects the surrender of his will, and his rejection is the cause of much of his woe, and the world's woe. Yet without this free will of his he would not be. This is what makes him a man: the dearest and the most dangerous of creatures. Tolkien knows it too well for comfort.

Man's ego requires that he bestride, control, realize the human condition, but that Man will not do, for long, anyway. If he does, the herd destroys him. Tolkien spells out this in his tale. There is the joy and thrill of it, the reason, whether they know it consciously or not, that the young of this generation embrace him. Never before has Man been so ashamed of his record; he cowers from it. And the young, seeking challenge, looking for the rock, probing their elders more and more to discover it, find only mush, are given pablum to grow fat and sassy on when they seek a stone to hold on to, to climb up from.

The dragons and these “Awful Orcs” that so offended Edmund Wilson in his derisory yet salutary review in The Nation seem but a bored don's blunder to many critics. But always in heroic legend the heroes have been dragon-slayers. Dragons are no idle fancy; they are a potent force that man's imagination has created out of his past. Man's image of himself changes with each generation. Tolkien makes the symbol of the dragon stand for Evil, for Evil does not change with the style; it always retains cognizance, even becomes horribly real, as, for example, when fire-belching tanks lurch over the dirty ground of battle amid flashes, screams and howls overhead toward the resolute few glum heroes of the Infantry, men with weapons in their hands and nothing else, save within, to stop the squealing, treading, clanking, baleful progress of the armor.

Tolkien relates the dragons to monsters of the present without writing a word about these days, about the vast glowering and mindless creature that moves in on Man at Man's bidding, in time of peace and reconstruction, to deliver him from labor, devours the earth, though it comes at first only when Man allows or calls. Man is eased of his burden, impressed by the size, the work that this force can perform. Although the work began when Man assembled this force, the Machine passes beyond Man's recall, replacing the old forms of living with the new. Human actions are now conditioned by the Machine. Things are not done, because the Machines don't like them. Demolition of the past comes easy with the power of this assembled force. Out of the dust of the ruins a modern Sauron, who begins as a Man and becomes a Board of Control, can conjure up visions of Man's future where there is no bloody sweat, no tears; all will be accomplished for Man's appetite with the lift of a finger, the blink of an eye, but at the cost of the deliverance of his future to the Board, computer-oriented Board, clean and shining Board, powerful beyond-all-the-measures-of-ordinary-Man Board. If Sauron has his way, there will be only one Board, and it's mustering, not in the shady cover of Mirkwood, but in carpeted, unbugged or bugged conference rooms, the gleaming glass walls of which look out over the City, down on the World. All that is required of Man is that he deliver his Fate into this calculation in return for a Machine-turned future comfort, and that he keep in cadence with the beat of the program devised and analyzed by some of the shine and some of the dark in his nature—that is all. The very creation of Man as a part of Nature is computed to a pattern that will permit a programmed development of the earth and beyond, by the Board.

Man's very seed will be tapped, analyzed and bottled for the correct ingredients needed for this time or that before it will be permitted to fertilize. Abortion will replace the Blessed Event, Euthanasia the Consolation. Environmental patterns, devised by programmers, correlated with words and sounds, will make poetry, music to dance to, in patterns better than any created by Man in the days when he danced for joy, for birth, for resurrection. The cruel punishment meted out to Prometheus, the fall of the son of Daedalus, the fell project of Pygmalion, all will be seen as mere fantasy, fit subjects for comedy. A fair lady to love will be made by a Higgins out of raw human stuff, not as a satire, but as a process to be lauded. There will be a musical comedy on the Crucifixion, as there are already flesh peddlers of the Old Testament.

Tolkien regards this future somberly; he sees it coming, which is why he is a conservative. Conservatives are disliked not for the right reasons, political, but for the wrong reasons, moral. Tolkien is sharp, and the bite in his writing shows how sharp he can be. When a fellow Oxford don exulted that now Oxford city was becoming alive, relating to progress, the High blocked and fumed with the traffic of Machines, Tolkien asked him how much more alive these cars were than the horse-drawn vehicles that had preceded them. And for most men, cars are more alive than living things. They polish them more than they ever curried horses, feed, scent and sink into them, make fancy women out of them, and killers, too.

Yet Tolkien is no dreamer with straw in his hair, no Endymion wandering around the Sacred Town babbling of brooks where once the wild thyme grew that now are muddied and greased over. Essentially he is a man of the traditional way, an apostle of rather addled common sense who sees Man for what he is and longs for him to put forth in all his staggering and vaulting majesty as the Son of God.

This yearning of Man to relate completely goes back to infancy and prenatal existence. The womb is the haven, flinching from the challenge life throws. Many a Man wants to return to it, and all Nature can be Mother. To be one with Nature and be Man too is unnatural, however much desired when the going gets tough, and the times call for sons of bitches. It is just as unnatural for Man to find a solution to his problems by handing himself over to the care of wise, Welfare-State Saruman, on the Board, who will curdle when he is not obeyed, or to Board member Sauron, who calls on the worst in Man, the nearest the surface and the most responsive, wherein lies the greatest danger of all: final self-destruction. Gandalf therefore is Tolkien's happiest subcreation, for, much against his will, many times, Gandalf backs away from taking over Man's fate, from joining the Board; instead, he poses the eternal dilemma, like Dante to the dreamer on the brim of Hell. He merely offers testimony and advice, shows the way on his great horse Shadowfax—a horse, to show how Tolkien can write,

that might have been foaled in the morning of the world. The horses of the Nine cannot vie with him, tireless, swift as the flowing wind. … By day his coat glistens like silver; and by night it is like a shade, and he passes unseen. Light is his footfall! Never before had any man mounted him, but I took and tamed him. …

Gandalf still talks sense as a wisp of a wizard, foot-sore, old and gray, or shining with his white sort of wisdom. Gandalf knew the unique make-up of Man, he was one himself, in a way, as was Saruman his master and Sauron the evil one of the Gabala, but his shrewdness and learning made wisdom in him, argued him into love—in many ways the only sort of love is that arrived at through the mind's cognition—whereas the romantic nature of his master desired Man's soul for a diadem and Sauron wanted it as the industrial diamond that would permit his gyrating of the world.

Tolkien, through his Trilogy, shows the great value that all Nature and supernature sets upon Man. All, save Man himself, know Man's great value and worth. Poor Faust found out the real price, as did Dan'l Webster, in Stephen Benét's great tale. The Devil would give almost anything, save his own soul, to deny salvation, to get Man into his hands, and the comic irony is that Man will go to the Devil for the treading of a chick, for some tenderloin time, not knowing the price that he commands.

Man, in his womb-like yearning for a haven always closed, which has served only to launch him, not to anchor, seeks ever for a warmth and light that Tolkien shows is not in this world; it cannot be given by other parts of Nature and can only be fleetingly revealed, as a token of what is to come. Tolkien is Token. Kinfolk die and are part of it. Their way in life is the only guide to their final destination. The Cosmos is involved in Man and in his struggle to get beyond his body or stay with it. Occasionally Man sees a light; some are gifted to see over the wall into Death's world before they die and to pass back the news. Now and then Man thinks all things are visible and tangible and grasps at it all, falling through an error that often was a generous and loving search into another pitfall of Evil, waving a panacea as he falls.

The exaltation of all Nature and the Universe has been the theme of the Jesuit priest and scientist, Teilhard de Chardin. His writing has exercised an attraction both within and without his Church for those seeking an answer and a solace denied them by more traditional and orthodox theological writing. It has aroused grave suspicion and caveats from Authority, thereby undoubtedly increasing its attraction. And his theology is attractive and desirable, for it responds to modern Man's dilemma. It cushions the Cross, almost substituting a mindless Joy for Love, and makes One with Nature. His theme is the very opposite of Tolkien's, which above all is traditional, stern and unrelenting in its vigorous portrayal of Man as a being born for trouble as surely as sparks fly upward. But, as with C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, readers sense a likeness between Teilhard de Chardin and Tolkien, and they are wrong again. Teilhard, that dubious Jesuit, hymns the Universe:

Always from the very first it was the world, greater than all the elements which make up the world, that I was in love with, and never before was there anyone before whom I could in honesty bow down.

His lyrical book of devotion, The Divine Milieu, like hot cakes grasped and devoured by the spiritually hungry, fearful and insecure, is dedicated “For those who love the world.”

This is altogether at odds with the unromantic, unblinking philosophy that Jacques Maritain has distilled from the Greek and the Latin, from his own creed, which fits Tolkien's Trilogy as a sword its scabbard.

Lewis, Williams and their kind, even Teilhard de Chardin, have more in common with Chesterton than ever Tolkien had, although he shared the same Church as G.K.C. There is something basically jolly about Chesterton, and Lewis and his like needed it, mirrored it, so as to whistle past the graveyard. Charles Williams always had in mind that happy land beyond his life. He saw Heaven through the wonders he conjured up on earth.

Never does Tolkien relent in all the sweep of his story into anything romantic or joyful—there is only jollity in the Hobbits—for he realizes that Chestertonian light and cheer are phantasmagoria, and that the Truth, rough and bitter as it may be, can afford the only real solace, the only real aid to Man in his trouble. Chesterton saw this too, as he fleetingly shows here and there in The Ballad of the White Horse, but, a journalist as well as a genius, he had to produce for editors and public, so he served up prose and poetry as if it were foaming brown ale and swallowed his own bitter brew behind the bar. All other relations, save the one that Tolkien delivers, fail at the edge of the grave, although they dance at weddings. Once Tolkien's message—no new one, but the old belief that Man dislikes and in the end rejects—is realized, it is not too hard to bear, even cherish; Man has his dignity. But neither is it easy, although it has its own sardonic humor, a soldier's kind. It is because Tolkien only reaffirms, so beguilingly and exhilaratingly, the old tenet of his race that he insists this work is that of subcreation, not creation. Were Tolkien's tenet of his own creation, as Teilhard de Chardin's message is of his, it would be diminished in significance, a new and fledgling belief, not an ancient-rooted truth revealed again for this time and age.

Tolkien accomplishes this in his tale of this relation so vigorously and gives such enjoyment to the reader with his legendary story of it that, because his story is heard even when it is read, the words sound like an organ in full bellow, working through a light voluntary air to the entire majesty of a symphony, with the grave calm and measured consolation of a recessional.

The entire action of the Trilogy is vivid and continued. The words run ahead of the tale as if they were running footmen bearing burning links into the growing dark of the story. The great art of Story is to tell the reader what is happening not only on the surface, but below and above also and, above all, what is to come, what may be ahead around the turn of a page. Every ploy of literary merit Tolkien can handle he uses to enthrall the reader. The great size of the book needs a heroic resolve even to start, so Tolkien makes it easy, thereby losing some readers but gaining many more, by his Hobbit larking. Possibly Tolkien could never have carried it through but for his domestic stability, any more than he can finish the fourth part of it, the addendum, The Silmarillion, without it, despite learning, craft, listeners and friends, and most of them are new, as the old pass on and he grows old. Moreover, he could never have conceived it alone had he not seen the collapsing of his world, built on his ancient premises.

Tolkien could no more blink this heroic theme, once he had taken up his pen to the task of it, than falter in his creed, and that's been tried and tested. In the end The Hobbit turned out to be not for children, as he had meant it to be, but the hook of his own device that pulled him into the deep of The Lord of the Rings. The great theme of his work he found before him majestically expressed in the words of old that came before his English and produced it. He Englished the beat of the Norse. Courage and its exercise are the only reward, the prosecution of courage that may give a bit more time of light before the dark comes down again, maybe forever. Man is called to the side of Good in his tales, not by a promise of victory, not for a reward in the Hereafter, whatever that may be, but because that is Man's reason for being, to go down battling for the idea of Man, the only piece of Creation not bound by the forces of Nature alone. Time and time again he gives his people and their company a chance to cop out, but with every decision to go on they become stronger in resolution as the strength of their bodies drains. They enrage the corps of the Evil Host of Sauron. Good is seen as a positive, and the use of it, like the use of love, only makes it stronger, as the neglect of it makes it harder to come by. One great advantage unknown to Frodo and his fellowship is that they can see something of the other side, they can understand something of Evil, having tasted it and enjoyed the taint and taste of corruption, furtively, guiltily—as who has not? But the Enemy cannot see their side, cannot conceive what it is to be good. The Enemy has lost the Good, forever: this is a part of their corruption that works against Sauron and his ilk and saves the wretch Gollum for a time, for he still remembers furtively the Good. It is a blessing little realized: that the Bad always underestimate the Good. This works most of the time, too, but mostly in the End, when the Bad put on the pressure.

Friends can be as welcome as good news. It is better to be befriended than to be rich or blooming. Tolkien is conscious of this; it runs all through his tale. From their homes in the Shire he calls his Hobbits, from their warm beds and loving arms—more than that for faithful Sam and more to come for Merry and for Pippin. Friendship is the protection that cannot be bought with anything but the giving of it. Chaos, greed and unreason may win every daily round, the Good may lose, even forever. But for all that, there is an exultant belief that defeat is no reason even to consider surrender when there are still friends. Tolkien, from the well of his learning, from his knowledge of the Norse, fashions a story that honors Man by throwing away the carrot, showing Man he is no donkey, but a lord, able to make his own way even if it ends up in the knacker's yard, able to struggle to death against the rest of the world to the very end—to an end worth fighting for. This is Tolkien's great contribution to those who read his Trilogy. The Ring, the final one, is a terrible instrument of Evil. The struggle for its destruction is the lot of Man, a purpose more worthy than all the promises of carrots, pies in the sky. These are bribes, often well-intended, fit for children and those who grow up only to be old, for those weakened by adversity and environment. These the dying will not forgive, when they need true consolation, realizing that they have been propped through days with lies. Only the Truth brings real compassion and dignity to die with; it cannot be denied.

There is in Tolkien, as there was in the beginning of his kind of Story, in the lands of the North, long before Christ hit them, always good company. That is what Man now lacks, save in primitive societies such as in the Aran Isles. Man does not know it, for he is gelded of it by the world and given sex instead. If there is no friendship, only sex, there is no marriage, only a temporary convenience that should not be bound in sacramental ties. A vow cannot be broken; habit can. And concupiscence, pleasant and devouring as it can be, is the reverse of a contract, because promises are made to be kept, and so is marriage, for better or for worse: there's the nub and rub of it. The lesson of Narcissus is lost: he has become just a pretty boy who looked at himself. Men need their own company, need to match their minds, like minds. C. S. Lewis waxed lyrical over it: “No sound delights me more than Man's laughter.” And in his preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams he is brimming with a wholly natural affection for men such as Williams. And, embarrassing as this might be, Lewis had a point that is lost in this Mom society.

The Inklings found pleasure in their own company. It guarded them and made them ready, through their reading and writings and the conclusions drawn from them, facing thereby some of the blows of their fates that would have finished them had they been alone. And they were all smitten; no Ivory Tower is Oxford, any more than any other place.

The best way one of Tolkien's creations can act is to be a Man. Don Tolkien defends the dignity of being human. The Victorians made do with the antics of animals dressed up in dolls' clothing, speaking quaintly in human kind—there is a touch of this in The Hobbit—before Tolkien came into his prime. The older fantasies cheered men with falsehood and heresies, lulled them with dreams of their own thumb-sucking thinking, until Tolkien revealed a harder, sterner, yet more ancient truth that Man can bear, once he gets the gist of it.

Tolkien will shift uneasily from this version of his motive. The last man to ask motive of is an artist, always; it's not even fair. The interpretation given to his work in one report, following an interview and some accounts of hipster gatherings, where Tolkien's characters, Gandalf and Frodo especially, had been raised on high, in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and in student sit-ins in the University of Chicago, gives a psychedelic twist, a long-haired, uncombed look to his work. “More than a campus craze, it's like a drug dream,” the New York Times had it, and the Hobbits are pinned to print as inventions of a bored Oxford don, as a benevolent, furry-footed, half-pint people “who have taken the rising generation by storm.”

Magic in Tolkien is never mumbo jumbo, kid stuff, a knotted-sheet rope for escape artists. When the earth heaves open or the sky cleaves, Heaven or Hell may be braking through. Heaven is not to be hoped for as coming here, it is not even realized, only sensed as what comes after. When Bilbo and Frodo sailed away to the Grey Havens, in the gentle rain there came a fragrance of sweet flowers, the sound of singing over the water. There, as in a dream, not in this world, Frodo saw the curtain of the rain rolled back and white shores rise bordering a far-away country of green, Hy-Brasil of Erin, maybe, and the sun came up, the sun that was the old glory, not just a ball of molten mass, a source of nuclear power.