Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 4-21-2010 J. R. R. Tolkien, War, and Nationalism Amanda J. Johnston Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Johnston, Amanda J., "J. R. R. Tolkien, War, and Nationalism." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2010. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/54 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM by AMANDA J. JOHNSTON Under the Direction of Dr. Margaret Mills Harper ABSTRACT Tolkien may not have intentionally created his fictive nations to mirror real nations, but his world certainly bears the scars of his experiences of war. The World Wars heightened his fear of losing everything that he loved about his local culture through literal obliteration or assimilation into another culture in the event of England‘s losing. Tolkien saw the nation as a social construct that potentially could minimize losses, if not wholly protect local culture from the forces that threatened to destroy it. Yet he also perceived the nation‘s limitations in its ability to protect culture. A nation could grow too large for itself, becoming obsessed with consuming other nations. For Tolkien, national property-amassing leads to a loss of the cultural identity that nationhood aims to preserve. When the forces threatening individual nations become overwhelming, those nations often need to join forces to prevent being taken over by other, more powerful countries. An examination of Tolkien‘s fiction and numerous other sources, including essays and personal letters, suggests that he felt that separate nations should co-exist without imposing on one another, and that the nation taking over others would lose its own identity, whether gradually or suddenly. Despite Tolkien‘s efforts to distance himself from what he felt modernity represented, his fiction (whether consciously or not) grapples with the mid-twentieth century ideological conflicts surrounding the nation. The resulting sense of loss and powerlessness underlies much of Tolkien‘s fiction and leads him to a concept of the nation as an imperfect protector of culture, tempered by its need to rely on other nations. INDEX WORDS: Tolkien, Nationalism, World War I, World War II, National identity, National memory, Internationalism, Individualism, Modernism J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM by AMANDA J. JOHNSTON A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2010 Copyright by Amanda J. Johnston 2010 J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM by AMANDA J. JOHNSTON Committee Chair: Dr. Margaret Mills Harper Committee: Dr. Randy Malamud Dr. Scott Lightsey Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of a number of people, and I owe all of them my sincerest appreciation. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Meg Harper for serving as the chair of my dissertation committee. Her guidance and patience throughout this process have encouraged me to persevere in writing my dissertation despite the challenges of balancing writing and working in a full-time professional position. Her insights have been invaluable in helping me to hone my ideas. I am deeply grateful to my other committee members, Dr. Randy Malamud and Dr. Scott Lightsey, for their patience and helpful editing suggestions. I greatly appreciate my committee‘s enthusiasm for my project and their flexibility with my long-distance writing arrangement. I also want to offer special thanks to John Johnston and Seth Southall for their skillful and generous computer support services, and to the staff at the Trinity University Coates Library for their gracious assistance in locating and checking out sources. I am extremely grateful to my boss, Cristina Ariza, for encouraging me and allowing me periodic time off to work on my dissertation. Finally, I am indebted to my mom, Craig McCoy, and Alexa Johnston for their emotional and financial support, without which I would not have been able to take on such an extensive project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv 1. J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM: INTRODUCTION 1 2. BORDERS AND LAND OWNERSHIP 18 2.1 Introduction 18 2.2 Maps, Gates, and the Natural Order of Things: The Shire and the Wild 20 2.3 War, National Defense, and Fear of Strangers: Bree 28 2.4 National Defense and Myth: Rivendell 34 2.5 Alliances, Morality, and Land Ownership: Moria 38 2.6 Land Ownership and Destruction: Mordor 43 2.7 Conclusion: A Gateless Bree and Mordor? 48 3. NATIONAL MEMORY AND MYTH 53 3.1 Introduction 53 3.2 National Record-Keeping and Preservation of Cultural Artifacts 54 3.3 National Memory and the Atlantis Tradition 63 3.4 National Memory and Collective Guilt 72 3.5 Conclusion: National Memory Loss 79 4. WAR AND INTERNATIONALISM 85 4.1 Introduction 85 4.2 Internationalism and Alliances 87 4.3 Cultural Exchanges and Vanishing Borders 95 4.4 The Breakdown of Internationalism 103 4.5 Conclusion: Internationalism and Mass Culture 111 v 5. INDIVIDUALISM AND NATIONALISM 114 5.1 Introduction 114 5.2 Against Individualism: Denethor 116 5.3 Individualism as Service to Nation: Háma and Beregond 121 5.4 Individualism, Self-Sacrifice, and Rights: The Hobbits 128 5.5 Individualism versus Service to Nation: Niggle 134 5.6 Conclusion: Individual Dependence on Nation and Tom Bombadil 141 6. CONCLUSION 144 WORKS CITED 151 vi J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM: INTRODUCTION In a 1951 letter to friend Milton Waldman, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote of his disappointment with early English mythology: I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. (Silmarillion xi-xii) Twice in this passage, Tolkien labels his country poor because of its lack of its own distinctive mythology. He wrote fiction partly to fill this void he found in English legends. As numerous scholars have mentioned, early in his writing career, Tolkien‘s intent was to ―make a body of more or less connected legend . which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‗air‘‖ (xii). Tolkien admits that by the time of his writing this letter (1951), he had relinquished this lofty aim, to the extent that he finds it laughable (xii). Tolkien later asserted that he had written the Lord of the Rings only for his own enjoyment, without much thought about reception (Letters 211). Possibly, he dismissed his early ambition because he felt that he had failed, or simply because he was a private man and averse to forcing his personal views on others. Regardless of the changes in his ultimate goal as a writer, Tolkien‘s concern about English identity as expressed in (and formed through) myth permeates all of his work. National identity, particularly English national identity, is a complicated issue and raises a host of difficulties, from defining ―nation‖ in general to the problematic history of England and 1 nationalism. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson admits, ―[n]ation, nationality, nationalism – all have proven notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyse‖ (3). He defines the nation as a type of ―imagined community,‖ though he takes pains to separate the ―nation‖ from the ―state,‖ which he sees as an official entity that does not necessarily reflect a country whose inhabitants viewed themselves as a unified whole. The ―nation,‖ on the other hand, is so perceived as a unified whole (41-2). Ania Loomba observes in Colonialism/ Postcolonialism that nations have historically defined themselves in exclusionary terms, typically through race, though occasionally nations have defined themselves as multiracial (118-19). For Tolkien, the term ―nation‖ simply suggests a shared language and land ownership (Silmarillion xi-xii). ―Nationalism‖ reflects pride in one‘s national identity and as Loomba points out, often leads to or provides an excuse for imperialism (187-89). In ―Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,‖ Terry Eagleton adds, ―[t]hose of us who happen to be British, yet who object to what has been done historically to other peoples in our name, would far prefer a situation in which we could take being British for granted and think about something more interesting for a change‖ (26). Tolkien likewise wanted to be free of the British Empire and its atrocities, but he also hoped that through myth he could find a uniquely English identity to celebrate. Tolkien‘s interest in myth and national identity preceded the two World Wars, but their arrival necessarily influenced the formation of his mythology. As Janet Brennan Croft notes in War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien even worked on his languages while stationed in France during the First World War (15). In fact, he wrote to his son, Christopher, in 1944 that he had worked on the languages ―by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire‖ (Letters 78).