Tolkien or Nietzsche, Philology and Nihilism Peter M. Candler, Jr. Baylor University __________________ He who wants to partake of all good things must know how to be small at times. 1 __________________ Perhaps it is best to begin with a kind of Tolkienian confession: I am no scholar of J.R.R. Tolkien and am not at all learned in the secondary literature on his works. I am moreover a hack when it comes to either Thomas Aquinas or Friedrich Nietzsche, the two figures at whose intersection I will try to place Tolkien and his work. Since I am more or less ignorant of the criticism on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, or any of the numerous opuscula of his, I must warn you that everything I say in what follows may have already been said, by one much more able and eloquent than me. If such is the case, then I beseech you to an exercise of the characteristically Hobbitic virtue of pity… The Origins of an Allusion There seems to be no evidence that J.R.R. Tolkien ever read Friedrich Nietzsche; in fact, as commentators are often somewhat tickled to point out (and something like a myth 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. R.J. Hollingdale [Texts in German Philosophy] (Cambridge: CUP 1986) “The Wanderer and His Shadow” ¤51, p. 323. which Tolkien himself played no small part in constructing 2), it seems that Tolkien read very little from his own century, with the sole exceptions being the works of his fellow convivators in the Eagle and Child. It is perhaps no accident that Tolkien’s reading seemed to comport with his drinking—a not entirely bad policy, I might add. I might even suggest that there’s something basically very religious about beer, and that this explains in part why the works of Tolkien bear a certain theologic-ity born of friendships nurtured in the public-house, but that is a story for another day. On the other hand there is Nietzsche, the notorious teetotaler who said that “ coffee spreads darkness”, the ascetic troglodyte ever in search of pure air, the anti-Christ who once bemoaned “how much beer there is in the German intellect!”3 It is hard to imagine, however, that the name of the Hermit of Sils Maria was never invoked during those sessions in St. Giles’ Street. As David Thatcher has shown, Nietzsche’s presence began to be mildly felt in England, particularly in the arts, by the turn of the century. The distinction of being the first English writer to have encountered Nietzsche, according to tradition, belongs to the poet and dramatist John Davidson, who discovered him as early as 1891, four years before the first English translation of one of Nietzsche’s works (The Case of Wagner, 1895). 4 From Davidson the influence of Nietzsche spread through Havelock Ellis, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and others. By the early 1910’s, his following was growing steadily, but not without some show of resistance. In any event, it is clear that Nietzsche was far from unknown to 2 See the beginning of the essay, “ Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, as well as Letter 294, to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 8 February 1967, in Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1981), p. 377: “I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention.” See also Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (New York: Houghton Mifflin 2003), p. 6. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, “What the Germans Lack”, Twilight of the Idols, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin 1990), p. 72. Regarding beverages of a different cask, I am entirely in sympathy with David Hart’s suggestion that “a theological answer to Nietzsche could be developed entirely in terms of the typology of wine.” See The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B Eerdmans 2003), p. 108f. There may be more than just bombast to Nietzsche’s claim that “To believe that wine exhilarates I should have to be a Christian—believing what for me is an absurdity.” Ecce Homo, in Walter Kaufmann, ed., The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library 1992), p. 694. 4 David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 1890-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), p. 64. the cultured English (though his introduction into the university curricula, particularly at Oxford, may have been much slower in coming, given the entrenched suspicion of ‘novelty’ (if not of German philologists5) there—a source of great consternation to the new English Nietzscheans, no doubt). What, if any, manner of direct experience Tolkien had with Nietzsche, it is impossible to say. It is, however, difficult to believe that his influence was not felt in some indirect way. It is well-nigh impossible that a man of Tolkien ’s learning, his situation in Oxford for forty-three years, from 1925 to 1968, would never have encountered his ideas in some form or another. Neither the rarefied air of high table in Merton College nor the smoke-filled ether of the Eagle and Child could have long remained impervious even to the slightest hint of the “smell” of the “divine decomposition.” 6 In 1913, just two years after the last of Nietzsche’s un-translated works, Ecce Homo, made its appearance in English, Charles Sareola wrote that “A searching estimate of Nietzsche in English still remains to be written. And there is only one man that could write it, and that man is Gilbert K. Chesterton.” 7 Of course Chesterton never wrote such a “searching estimate”, but had written of him, largely negatively, if somewhat superficially, already in Heretics, published in 1905, thus making Chesterton’s one of the earliest English responses to Nietzsche, however inadequate his treatment may have been, at least at that early stage. 8 One might be justified in inferring then a kind of 5 “ Tolkien wrote in 1924, ‘“Philology” is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things that the late war was fought to end’…When I first read this I took it to be a joke. However, just three years before the British Board of Education had printed a Report in The Teaching of English in England which declared, among much else, that philology ought not to be taught to undergraduates, that it was a ‘German-made’ science and…that by contributing to German arrogance it had led in a direct way to the outbreak of World War I.” Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth, p. 9. 6 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1974), ¤125, p. 181, the famous “death of God” passage. 7 Charles Sareola, “Nietzsche”, Everyman (May 16, 1913), p. 136. Quoted in Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, p. 207. 8 Much of Chesterton’s interpretation of Nietzsche focuses on the theory of the †bermensch. For example, as he says of George Bernard Shaw: “He has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things” (G.K. Chesterton, Heretics [The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton; 1] (San Francisco: Ignatius 1986), p. 68). See also, in the context of H.G. Wells, p. 80: “Nietzsche summed up all that is interesting in the Superman idea when he said, ‘Man is a thing which has to be surpassed.’ But the very word ‘surpass’ implies the existence of a standard common to us and the thing surpassing us. If the Superman is more manly than men are, of course they will ultimately deify him, even if they happen to kill him first. But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless monstrosity. Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will never make men think a man their superior. Giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.” Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him; but in that case, why not call him the Saint? But if he is merely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for all the strength we have. It we are weaker than he, that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own. But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern hero-worship and celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the Superman. That he may be something more than man, we must be something less. Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. But the old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more human than humanity itself. Nietzsche’s Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw’s sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, “He who has never hoped can never despair.” The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, “Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?” A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.