The Metaphysical Man

If a stone sits atop a hill, it will either roll down or stay balanced there according to the immutable laws of physics. As the ground around it erodes slowly, the rock will eventually tilt and then tumble at the exact moment in which the gravitational pull on the mass of the rock becomes greater than the force of the earth holding it in place. There is of course no choice whatsoever on the part of the stone in the matter. The cause of the stone rolling down the hill, and the direction it takes is purely a function of natural law and, were we able to collect perfect data, and virtually infinite amounts, the exact moment of its fall and the course it would take down the hill could have been predicted years, or even ages before it happened. The end effect of the stone rolling down the hill is just a tiny link in a chain of causes and effects stretching back to the beginning of the earth and beyond. In fact the fate of the rock was set irrevocably in place from the very moment of material creation. The laws of physics determined the size shape and atomic mass of its elements millions of years ago and when it fell down the hill it was those same rigid, unchanging laws of physics which determined the precise moment and direction of its plummet. A person observing the rolling stone may not understand all the laws of physics causing it to move, nor have been able to keep track of the infinite variables involved in guiding its course, but this is irrelevant to the fact that the forces moving it are real and do not need his understanding to work. The causes and effects of its motion are fixed and will carry out their processes to their final end, understood by some human observer or not.

If a man sits atop a hill, will he walk down it or stay put according to the same such laws? Or will he walk down the hill in the direction which he chooses?

If the man is nothing more than the material he is made of then he, like the stone, MUST leave the hill in accordance with the laws of physics which control that material. Yes, the equation is infinitely more complex than the relatively simple one determining the direction of the rolling stone, but it is in the end a function of chemical certainty which way the man will walk down the hill. We may not understand all of the chemical processes of the brain, and its decision making process. We may not be able to track and compute the subtle chemical differences between the man who walks down the north side compared to the man who walks down the south side. We may not be able to discover the relationship between sight, sound, touch, or taste and the final decision of the subject, but, if the man is wholly material, our ignorance as to the causes are irrelevant to their certainty. The man’s perception of choice is only a natural effect of the chemical processes which cause it.

The scenario can be reduced to a simple logical syllogism: If all motion and interaction of all material in the universe is circumscribed by the laws of physics, and if the human being is entirely material in nature, then all the motions and interactions of human beings are circumscribed by the laws of physics. Humans have no free will and are absolute slaves to the despotic laws of physics.

But if there is something more to mankind than just the material they are made of…

For free will to exist we must carve out of the human being a vacuum in which it may reside. It cannot exist in our material. If it does exist it can only exist in the nonmaterial, "metaphysical" element of the human soul.
Here is an extremely simple example of purposeful human motion to further illustrate the point: my fingers moving across the keypad of the laptop in front of me. j - There it is. My index finger on my right hand extended slightly and pushed the 'J' key. Why? What is the ultimate original cause of it? The tendons in my finger tightened along the rigid but hinged bones of my finger and this caused the tip of my finger to move downward and out slightly thus depressing the J key of my computer. Well what caused the tendons to tighten? The muscles of my hand and forearm flexed. That motion was in turn caused by neuro-electro stimuli being applied by the nerves which end in those muscles. That small stimuli was coordinated in the Madula Oblongata of the brain so that the needed muscles would flex in the correct order and intensity in order to produce the exact motion needed. The individual stimuli propagated from various parts of the brain involved in fine motor skills, working together with those parts which are responsible for sight, proprial receptors, and hand eye coordination. This is as far back as modern medicine can track the chain of causes, so we continue in the abstract. The material, or chemical chain of causes and effects can only go back so far before reaching a point where the previous cause either lies outside of the human being, or we are forced to assume an uncaused cause within the human being. For those who assume the former the chain of material causes will eventually reach back, as with our rolling stone, to the origins of matter itself. This is the positivists ontology. This is the course of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Weinberg.

There is however that second assumption; that there is an uncaused cause within the individual which accounts for the ultimate propagation of the neuro-electro stimuli coming from my brain and making my fingers move. Just like Aristotle's unmoved mover argument for the existence of God, any purposeful movement can be traced backward to a metaphysical unmoved mover inside the human - which is the ultimate cause of my finger pushing the J key. The metaphysical action (thought) proceeds and creates the physical action (pushing the key). That unmoved mover of the individual is the “I”. I am the unmoved mover of my soul. I am the god of my choice. I am the ultimate cause in my life. I chose to push the J key, that is why my finger moved. This is the Romantic ontology. It is the course of Plato, Emerson, Henley, and Barfield.

Here is the real kicker in this. The chain of causes leading to the stone rolling down the hill also implies a metaphysical reality. The creation of matter, which to the true positivist is the ultimate origin of all subsequent causes, is explained by theoretical physicists as being the result of a "quantum flux." Far be it from me to attempt an explanation of what that is precisely but as Charles Schroeder has pointed out, the only way that a quantum flux can occur is to have the laws of physics in existence before there was matter to govern. In other words, the principles which govern the material interactions of our universe existed before there was material. So the metaphysical proceeded the physical (as it always does). And so to does the microcosm of the mind mirror the macrocosm of the universe, which is a very Medieval and yet profoundly modern thought.

Which ever version of the chain of causes we pick at this point in our ontological case study is only done on an arbitrary basis. We are at this time still only assuming one version over another without any real reason to do so. But when the question comes to a chain of effects entering from the outside, I think that one version becomes clearly preferable to the other. This is where the relevancy of Barfieldian epistemology really comes clear.

When light enters the eye it sets off a chain reaction of biochemical stimuli much like the one we were discussing above, only in the opposite direction. Instead of propagating in the brain and then exiting it to cause something to happen, this chain of neuro-electric pulses is running from the sensory organs into the brain. The first effect is that the rods and cones transform the light of the visible spectrum into neuro-elctric waves which are transmitted via the optic nerve to the sight centers of the brain. Again this is as far as we are able to ride modern medicine. From here the positivist says "and then we see," as if stating where the nerves lead to is the final bridging step from chemical reaction the phenomenon we call sight. There is no mediating step between the chemical reactions and the sensation humans call sight. I find this to be a great lacuna in the Positivist's epistemology.

Barfield, and many before him as well, said that from that point of chemical stimulation, the imaginative brain must then create a mental metaphor representing what the stimuli is indicating and it is these mental metaphors that we actually "see", or are the end effect which bridge the gap between chemical reactions and actual sight. This goes for all of the five senses in fact. The imaginative mind must create a mental metaphor for the stimulus coming from the ears and this mental metaphor is what we actually "hear" and ditto the senses of taste, smell and even touch. To the Romantic, or Barfieldian, there is no such thing as unmediated perception of any kind. It was with this mediating step, between the material chain of effects and the end effect of sight, which Barfield concerned most of his philosophical writing.

I, as you have probably guessed, believe that the Barfieldian epistemology is much more convincing. However, something is implied in it, though never stated, and I think it bears mentioning. If there is a mediating step between the neuro-electric chain of stimulus and sight, then there must be something to which it is being mediated. Mediation naturally implies a second entity. In fact, if everything we perceive is really a mental metaphor does this not imply that there is something else interpreting these metaphors.

I believe that the very act of perception is itself a powerful argument for the reality of a metaphysical element to the human being.  It is this very real nonmaterial entity which is the self, or I.  It is the originator of our purposeful actions; the fount of our character, thought, and decisions; and it will not dissipate when the flesh fails and molders away.




Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.


In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.


         --William Ernest Henley

Blood from our Soul

That which animates our earthen bodies is unique to the universe and can only manifest itself upon this earth through our material bodies.  We can let that  unique intelligence which was made with the same material as God retain itself and not flavor the earth with its precious ingredient, or we can let our soul bleed out over the earth and leave behind our scent for others to sense as they too pass through in their earthen vessles.  Slash your soul to pieces! Grind it, mutilate it, and let its essence run, glowing, upon the dust to bring it out all the more green and alive for others.  Bleed out thee, thy soul, upon the earth! Bleed out, and touch the fate of the material universe!

Romancing the Inklings

This was a paper I wrote for the Tolkien class I took with Dr. Taylor during the Spring of 2008.  I think it is a pretty good argument for placing the Inklings in the Romantic Tradition.


William Wordsworth, in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” recalling his past excursions into the wilds of Wales, wrote of those memories:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. (Wordsworth, 132).

The din of the cities he refers to here is the newly urbanized England created by the industrial revolution. The Romantic Poets of England wrote during a time when England turned from a primarily agricultural society to an industrial, urbanized society within a generation. The dehumanizing effects of factory labor, cramped unsanitary living conditions, and the prevailing empirical philosophies of the day, were great concerns to Wordsworth and his colleagues. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads he states, “For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and … reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor” (Wordsworth, 599). The empirical epistemology, that nothing can be known except through empirical evidence derived from the scientific method, was one of the elements of this newly mechanized world that annoyed Coleridge. In a letter to Thomas Poole written in 1797, he voiced this opinion about the Empiricists of his day; “They contemplate nothing but parts—and all parts are necessarily little—and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things…but when they looked at great things, all became a blank and they saw nothing” (Hill, 6). It was against this “despotism of the eye” that Coleridge and Wordsworth fought. Wordsworth turned to poetry, and Coleridge turned to theory as their preferred means of raining higher truths down upon what they saw as a dried and desperate humanity.

Tolkien and his Inkling friends faced a very similar circumstance nearly 150 years later. World War I had introduced Europe to mechanized weaponry, as well as new and devastating chemical weaponry. Man, through science, had developed an unprecedented ability to kill each other. The depravity that an “Enlightened” Europe had sunk to, deeply affected Tolkien and his Inkling friends, some of whom, including Tolkien himself, fought on the front lines and witnessed the deaths of friends firsthand. They lived in an academic culture that emphasized the “hard” sciences over their area of interests: literature and philology. As Weston, the ultimate positivist from Out of the Silent Planet says upon meeting Ransom, “I don’t care two-pence what school he was at nor on what unscientific foolery he is at present wasting money that ought to go to research” (Lewis, 15). Like the romantic poets before them, the Inklings felt a great loss as the wonders of nature and mankind were being reduced to a series of chemical or mathematical formulae. The similarity of the movements against which these two groups of writers were pushing would predictably align much of their thought. In fact, both Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien drew deeply upon the foundational concepts of the Romantic Poets in order to develop their own theories concerning literature and its function.

Coleridge, like Barfield, spent much of his energies theorizing on poetry, instead of actually writing poetry. One aspect of his poetic theory that had much influence on Tolkien was his attempt to separate the meanings of the words ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination.’ The word ‘imagination’ had heretofore been used simply as the image making center of the brain, that part which reproduces the sense-data after the sensation has been removed. It is only under Romanticist philosophy that it came to be understood as an analogue to the supreme creative act (Seeman, 76). It was very important to Coleridge, philosophically, to clearly separate the terms imagination and fancy. For him they described two different processes in the making and receiving of good poetry. He says in a letter to Richard Sharp, “Imagination, or the modifying Power in that highest sense of the word in which I have ventured so oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregating power—in that sense in which it is a dim Analogue of Creation” (Hill, 50). The fancy simply took two unlike elements and put them together in the mind. The imagination performs a much higher purpose. It not only combines, or aggregates, but modifies to make an entirely new form, which has a life of its own. The ability of the mind of man to create new form was a proof of the divine spark within mankind, “To develop the powers of the Creator is our proper employment—and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying delight…Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination” (Hill, 27). Coleridge saw the highest goal of poetry to be a co-creating experience in the mind of both poet and reader; not to make a world that “imitates the created world, but constitutes an equivalent creation of its own” (Abrams, 6). To Coleridge, Imagination was the very soul of poetry. He laments in a letter to William Godwin, “The Poet is dead in me—my imagination” (Hill, 36).

Although Wordsworth did not go to the pains of separating out the semantic differences between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination,’ he did have a similar view as to the function of the imagination. In “Tintern Abbey” he again relates the co-creative nature of the mind of man:

…Of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear, both what they half-create

And what they perceive” (Wordsworth, 134).

Eyes and ears don’t just receive pure data and feed it into a perfect recording system. They only half create the reality around him and his mind does the other half of the creating. This is the imagination which blends the sense data received and then fills it in with mood, meaning and memory to create the subjective reality in which we live. In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” he says, “I wished to draw attention to the truth, that the power of the human imagination is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as might appear miraculous” (611). For Wordsworth the imaginative mind even co-creates the character of the individual as well.

There are very obvious resonances between the Romantic view of imagination’s co-creative powers, and Tolkien’s Sub-creation. Tolkien, like Coleridge, takes time in “On Fairy-Stories” to define Fantasy as being distinct from Imagination, but disagrees with Coleridge’s technical definition of Imagination; “Imagination has often been held to be something higher than the mere image making, ascribed to the operations of Fancy” (Fairy, 68). Tolkien returns ‘imagination’ to its classical meaning, and then chooses another word to denote co-creative art: Fantasy. Tolkien does not use ‘fantasy’ in the same exact manner as Coleridge uses imagination, however. He states, “I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-Creative art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the image” (68). He is not simply swapping the meanings from one word to the other; the first part of this definition is much the same as Coleridge’s ‘imagination,’ but the second half is wholly Tolkien’s. Fantasy, in Tolkien’s hands, comes to mean not just the sub-creative act itself but “a distinct artistic mode” (Seeman, 76). In this new mode of high art, Tolkien is not only trying to achieve secondary belief, but is trying to do so “with images of things…which are indeed not to be found in our primary world” (Fairy, 69). The Romantic Poets sought to use natural imagery from the common world around them, expressed with such language as would engage the co-creative, imaginative mind of the reader, thus creating new form. Tolkien takes them a step further; he attempts to achieve this co-creative act, but in a world dissimilar to our own. Tolkien was the master of implementing his own theories into his works. Not only is sub-creation the invisible scaffold upon which The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were built, but he has provided ample examples of it within the texts themselves. A prime example of this is the experience that the hobbits have in the house of Tom Bombadil. As Tom relates to the hobbits the story of the Old Forrest, Tolkien never tells us the actual words that Tom uses, but only expresses the image created by his words; “Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks…wandering at last up on to the Downs” (LOTR, 130). Tom’s words create a living world in which the Old Forest and the hobbits are but a part. The words Tom says, act upon the imagination in Frodo’s mind which creates the world anew in Frodo’s mind and continues to grow until it encompasses the entirety of the creation of Middle Earth, “and still on and back Tom went singing out into ancient starlight” (131). Like Tom, Tolkien has expressed, in elements both strange and yet believable, a story which, with the cooperation of the reader, achieves true secondary belief so that a new and fresh reality is created in the mind. (See my post on Tom Bombadil below)

These musings concerning imagination, Fantasy, and Sub-creative art, spring from a larger question: what is the use of such art? Wordsworth used his preface to the Lyrical Ballads to make a “systematic defense of the theory, upon which the poems were written” (Wordsworth, 595) Speaking of poetry in general he says:

Its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals and receives them from the same tribunal. (605)

This powerful statement argues directly against the positivists of his day. Though the scientific method can reveal many truths, it is not the supreme arbiter of truth, for there is truth that lies wholly outside of the capacity of science to even comment on. Poetry can elucidate truth; truth that cannot be got at through the scientific method, but in fact flow into the extra sensitive mind of the poet through nature, and to the reader through the gift of the poets language, and the imagination of the reader. As he states, this truth is “operational,” meaning that the truths that come from poetry are of an ontological and axiological nature, not an empirical one. It is to these truths that Wordsworth is referring when he writes in “Tintern Abbey,”

Well pleased to recognize

In nature and the nature of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the Nurse

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being. (133)

It is not just the positivist cause and effect that is important to mankind, but the meaning of such effects. As Coleridge points out in a lecture given in 1795, “the noblest gift of Imagination is the power of discerning the Cause in the Effect” (Hill, 27). To give the surrounding world new meaning was the effect that good poetry could give mankind.

It was exactly on this concept of meaning that Barfield spent much of his time theorizing. He was a true disciple of the Romantic poets and saw his theories as the coming to fruition of what they started; as expressed in his book called Romanticism Comes of Age. He too saw that the prevailing theories of his day had led men into a desiccated understanding of poetry and language in general. He turned to the Romantic Poets, not his contemporaries, to better understand language. The linguists of his day held that language had in general moved from a primitive form in which each word referred to a simple, physical object or phenomena, toward increasingly complex meanings and metaphorical expressions. When Barfield read Shelley’s "In Defense of Poetry" he found that Shelley had observed the exact opposite trend; “In the infancy of society, every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry” (Barfield, 58). Barfield agreed with Shelley and went against the prevailing theories. He showed that all meaning is metaphorical and that a study of the history of poetics reveals that the oldest civilizations employed the most metaphorical language; “Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols” (Barfield, 92). It is not that words used in the infancy of mankind were used to mean more things—words simply meant more, because they encompassed both material and abstract, spiritual meanings at the same time. Modern Language has lost the ability to contain these large amalgamated meanings because it has been splitting and specializing for thousands of years, and now each word used today actually has less meaning (69). Because of this, Barfield believed that it was in the power of the poet to recreate meaning by joining words anew, that the future of language lay. This refreshing of meaning through poetry brings with it a rejuvenated perception of the world itself. Barfield quotes from Shelley’s poem “Asia,” “My soul is an enchanted boat/ Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float/ upon the silver waves of thy singing.” He says, “The image contains so much truth and beauty that henceforth the eyes with which I behold real boats and waves and swans, the ears with which in the right mood I listen to a song, are actually somewhat different (55).

The Lake poets saw this effect, of remaking the mundane in the readers mind so that the common world could take on rejuvenated life, as one of the noble ends to which poetry ought to aspire. As Coleridge writes in his magnum opus, Biograhia Literaria, “To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar” (Coleridge, 155). It is the unique ability of the poet to take ordinary things and, “throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (Wordsworth, 597).

As with his concepts of sub-creative art, Tolkien drew heavily upon this foundation laid by the Romantic tradition, and then added to it. In “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien states very clearly what he believed was the desired effect of his art. He says, “But fairy-stories offer also, in a peculiar degree of mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation” (Fairy, 67). Speaking of fantasy, Tolkien sounds very much like Coleridge when he says, “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker” (Fairy, 75). Tolkien’s thoughts on Recovery closely parallel those of Coleridge, but with another addition. He says, “We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue…we should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs and horses. This recovery, fairy-stories help us to make” (Fairy, 77). This part follows very near to the idea of Coleridge’s that good poetry ought to bring novelty back to life, but Tolkien adds to this concept a “regaining” facet; “Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a regaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘Seeing things as they are,’ though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are …meant to see them’” (77). So Tolkien not only finds a refreshing of form, but also a source of deeper truth with the regaining concept of Recovery.

There is a fantastic example of what Tolkien means by Recovery in The Lord of the Rings, in the chapter “Houses of the Healing,” Aragorn heals Faramir of the Black Breath using Athelas leaves. Athelas is, to all but Aragorn, a weed; and as the herb master says “it has no virtue.” Despite this, Aragorn, the master healer, takes the leaves and, “laid them on his hands and breathed on them, and then he crushed them, and straightway a living freshness filled the room” (865). The scent of the leaves brings to the minds of those present memories of the world when it was alive and young. Of course the remedy brings Faramir back from the brink of death. As soon as Faramir awakes he says, “My lord you called me. I come. What does the king command” (866)? Athelas is an analogue of what Tolkien sees as the value of Recovery in fantasy. When the world around us is seen constantly through a Positivist lens, it loses its magic, and may seem to be of no value. But in the hands of a master of fantasy, that black breath is blown away and a new and fresh world is perceived. As with Faramir, who sees the Stewardship for what it ought to be, the reader of fantasy done right can gain deeper meaning as the world around him is seen as it ought to be seen.

This concept of seeing things in the way they ought to be seen is also something that Barfield wrote about. He explains in Poetic Diction that through the use of new poetic metaphor, poets create new meaning in words. This creation, he explains, is “not some fantastic ‘creation out of nothing’, but the bringing farther into consciousness of something which already exists as unconscious life” (112). The relationship between words never brought together already exists, and it is the poet who discovers them and then brings them into the reader’s consciousness. In effect, the poet sees the relationship between words “as they ought to be seen” and in so doing brings new and greater meaning to words.

There is one last aspect of Romantic Poetry that ought to be covered when comparing it to the work of Tolkien and that is the use of nature in both of their works. Romantic poetry is so associated with nature scenes that it is often referred to as Nature poetry. The relationship between man and nature as a whole was a very important topic to the Romanticists who saw the fields of England being enclosed and cities springing up, bristling with factory towers huffing with coal driven steam engines. As previously shown, Wordsworth found in nature the “anchor” of his mortal Soul (133). Coleridge wrote in one of his notebooks, “In looking at the objects of nature…I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature” (Havens, 127). To Coleridge, man is part of a greater whole, and as such we have in our minds the veiled remembrance of the whole of nature. He theorized that good poetry should express a Natura naturans (nature naturing) and not a Natura naturata (nature natured). Nature was not something formed, but forming. Nature was something that was becoming, and man was co-participating in that becoming. Throughout Tolkien’s LOTR, nature plays a very active role. In the creation story, or Ainulindalë, Tolkien writes of the Ainur, “their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be with it forever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World” (Silmarillion, 10) Here it can be seen that Tolkien perceived Middle-earth as continually creating. The Valar are still creating the earth during the time frame that the story contained in LOTR is happening. As Micheal Havens points out, it is Coleridge’s Natura Naturans realized (Havens, 127).

One of the great benefits of being in nature was to achieve a sense of the sublime. The Romantic notion of the sublime was created by a dramatic (usually mountainous) landscape which overwhelmed the physical senses and forced the imagination to engage in order to comprehend it. In one of Coleridge’s famous notebooks he gave an example of what he thought created the sublime. He said that “A mountain in a cloudless sky, its summit hidden by clouds and seemingly blended with the sky, while mists and floating vapors encompass it, is sublime” (Sandner, 4). For Coleridge it was the inability of the eye to make out the entire object that created the sense of sublime. The mind, knowing that there is more to the scene than it can perceive must engage the imagination to fill in the parts of the story that the eye cannot. The sense that we are seeing only a portion of the whole and that the scene extends beyond our ability to see creates the sense of the sublime. It is this sense of the sublime that Tolkien alone has been able to create in the minds of his readers. The infiniteness of his creation can leave the mind reeling. The vastness of the lore and histories gives the impression that they have only just been touched upon by Tolkien. The story actually achieves the sense that it extends out in time, infinitely in both directions, and that we are only glimpsing a portion of the story that Tolkien brought to light. Tolkien tried to create a world that felt real, in order to accomplish his ideals for fantasy. To do this he created histories that are never fully explained and makes references to stories that are only vaguely filled in. While there is no evidence to show that Tolkien was aware that this incompleteness also created a Romantic feeling of sublime, it does nonetheless.

On March 26th, 1802 Wordsworth wrote these lines:

My Heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky

So was it when my life began

So it is now I am a man

So be it when I shall grow old

Or let me die! (Wordsworth, 246)

He wrote these lines to an audience whose concept of light had been shaped by Newton's prism. The magical beauty of the rainbow was being sheered away by the Empirical lens that people saw it through. He was fighting to give to his English readers renewed meaning that would make their “hearts leap up” the next time they saw one. More than one hundred years later, Barfield wrote:

That light observes—not light through Newton’s hole

(The force we see by when we are not blind)

But light inbreathed by man’s adoring soul (Reader, 31).

The fight is the same one. The Inklings were simply the new torch bearers, the bards of their generation, trying to illuminate a generation even more dried up by Positivism. Positivism has by and large won the day in this modern world, and to its credit has allowed for the invention of some very remarkable tools and comforts. But the one thing that Positivism cannot provide is the one thing that so many need today: meaning. The current generation has a world of data right at its fingertips, but is not able to take any personal meaning away from it. This is why the study of great poets and authors, like Wordsworth and Tolkien, is so important; today more than ever.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Newyork: Norton and Co., 1974.

Coleridge, S. T. “Biographia Literaria.”Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Donald Stauffer ed. New York: Random House, 1951.

Hill, John Spencer, ed. Imagination in Coleridge. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978.

Lewis, C.S. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Seeman, Chris. “Tolkien’s Revision of the Romantic Tradition.” Mythlore 21.2 (1996): 76.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Random House, 1966.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Bank of the Wye During a Tour.” The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Tom Bombadil as Metafantasy

I've recently been reading The Fellowship of the Ring to my son and we just got through the Tom Bombadil chapters.  I have written down some thoughts in regards to what Tolkien was doing with this character.  All quotes are from the Houghton Mifflin Fiftieth Anniversary One-Volume Edition (the difinitive text by the way)  ISBN 978-0-618-64015-7.  You can read Tolkien's famous lecture titled "On Fairy Stories" in The Tolkien Reader.

The hobbits’ journey through the Old Forest and Borrow Downs is a very odd portion of the book. It takes up forty pages and doesn’t seem to move the plot forward much, and Tom Bombadil never makes another appearance. (Note that Peter Jackson excised the entire section) It seems to be, if I may wax metaphoric, a burl on the trunk of the tree that Tolkien is creating. So, why is Tom Bombadil in the story?


I think that Tom Bombadil is the personification of Faerie Story itself, i.e. a meta-faerie story within the story. By comparing what Tolkien had to say about the origins and purpose of fairy stories to Tom Bombadil we can see that Tom embodies the true “Tolkienesque” model of a fairy story.

As to his origin he is called Eldest; for he is older than “the rivers and the trees” and was there to witness the very creation of middle earth. Tolkien says of the origins of fairy stories, “To ask what is the origin of story…is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.” So we see that Tolkien saw fairy stories as being participatory in the creation of the human conscience from the very first, just as Tom himself was. (For more information on this see my entry concerning the Epistemology of Owen Barfield)

Tom also personifies the purpose of fairy stories: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape and Consolation as explained in “On Fairy Stories.” Tolkien describes Fantasy as “both the sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression derived from the image.” Tom’s own words to the hobbits is a perfect example of this sub-creative quality. Almost never does Tolkien state what Tom actually says, but only expresses the image created by his words. Pgs 129-131 could be quoted from almost at random to show this but here is a prime cut, “Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks…wandering at last up on to the Downs” (130). Tom’s words create a context for the Old Forest in Frodo’s mind which eventually encompasses the entirety of the creation of Middle Earth, “and still on and back Tom went singing out into ancient starlight” (131).  Fot Tolkien, true fantasy was an art for adults, and it was only created when
the reader is forced back into their role as subcreator by the author of the fairy story.  The effect of Tom's singing on the hobbits is a perfect example of this relationship between author and reader.

He embodies the quality of Recovery in the refreshing of mind and body that the hobbits experience while under Tom’s roof. After one nights sleep Tom wakens the hobbits and, “they leaped up refreshed.” We also see this in the food they eat there, “The drink…seemed to be clear cold water but went to their hearts like wine and set free their voices.”

As for Escape, the hobbits literally escape into the Old Forest from the clutches of the Black Riders. There they find a world “more alive” and full of wonder. Upon leaving the presence of Tom Sam comments, “I reckon we may go a good deal further and see naught better, not queerer.” In the ultimate sense of the word escape, escape from death, Tom also provides examples. Tom saves them twice; once from Old Man Willow and also from the Barrow-Wight. Both of these events constitute a mini-eucatastrophy, as Pippin (inside of Old Man Willow) and the whole company (inside the Barrow) were completely beyond help and then are saved at the last moment by Tom.

Finally there is the consolation of Tom Bombadil. He whispers to them in their frightened sleep and puts their worried minds to sleep peacefully. He also brings them advice and direction after saving them from the Barrow-Wight, and thus provides them consolation about the course they should take in Gandalf’s absence.

Tom Bombadil is a metaphor created by Tolkien to express his own undersatinding of value of the the art he was producing.  Tom Bombadil is metafantasy.

Anniversary

Once a year, on our anniversary, I write my wife a poem.  I wrote another one this year and I thought I would post it.  Enjoy!

Darkly, darkly move my eyes,

Always up to see her smile.

Resonance in dim and bright,

Binds our hearts that little while.

Slowly, slowly move my hands.

Starlight’s happy gleam could not

Half so gently touch her face,

Tracing shades of passion wrought.

Closer, closer moves her mouth.

Whispered kisses drop their sound,

Falling incandescent down,

Lay there glowing on the ground.

Sweetly, sweetly moves our hymn,

Sacred, unvoiced strains of night

Rise above the Earth so dark,

Meets with smiling heaven’s light.