An acquaintance posted something on Facebook this week about his dissatisfaction with Amazon’s expensive new addition to the Tolkien-verse, Rings of Power. While he could appreciate, in an abstract way, the quality of the production, it seemed to be missing a certain je ne sais quoi that he found in Tolkien’s narrative and world building. He struggled to put his finger on it, but pointed to a sense of transcendence found in the original that was missing in the series.
I have often noticed this dissonance in Hollywood productions. When I was young, The Blair Witch Project became a sleeper sensation. Filmed on a shoestring budget in the Maryland woods not far from my Virginia home, BWP was pitched as a deeply scary and unsettling horror film. I went to the movies with my friends one night, eager to be scared out of my wits, and was distinctly underwhelmed. The movie was full of atmospherics and jerky camera tricks, but the anemic mythos behind the the story— the Blair Witch is never described, merely alluded to with voodooesque stick figures hanging from trees and unconvincing snippets of supposed Native legend— was an obvious pastiche of folkloric fragments that didn’t hang together.
Tolkien created a deep, resonant, sticky mythos because he was immersed in what C.S. Lewis called “True Myth,” that of his Roman Catholic Christianity. Lewis, as a classics professor, was a great lover of the old Greco-Roman and Nordic myths. He experienced a dramatic conversion to Christianity because he recognized in the story of Christ the same themes he found in the old myths he loved: the dying god, sacrificed and brought to life. He believed that in the Jesus story, the event had really happened, fulfilling the promise of the old pagan myths; this is what he meant by True Myth.
Lewis meant no slight to pagan mythology with that term. He continued to love and study it all his life. At the same time, I can’t help but think that he missed another way in which myth can be true, a way that illuminates why contemporary storytelling often falls so flat. Story is the primary way humans have always made sense of and understood our place and purpose in the world, and a culture’s mythology is essentially a record of that process. Myths are full of weird characters and events that baffle and perplex us; the lesson is not always evident, and yet they strike a deep resonant chord within us, they invite us to delve deeper, to meditate and chew and digest their meaning.
Baba Yaga, a crone figure from Slavic mythology, has become popular with young women today; I recently purchased a hand-poured Baba Yaga candle at a hip witchy shop in the NorCal forest town of Sebastopol. Popularized by the Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Baba Yaga is neither an evil witch nor a fairy godmother. A sly, trickstery old woman who lives in a forest hut perched on chicken legs, she is something completely alien and other; a personification of a deep woods wilderness, perhaps, but also something recognizable within ourselves. In a world in which the recognizable choices for women are hot sex goddess, depressed victim, or hyper-competent girl boss, Baba Yaga whispers to us that we can be something more, something weirder and wilder and untamed by human civilization.
In the story, the young heroine, Vasilisa, mistreated by her stepmother, must go into the woods and allow Baba Yaga to put her through her paces. After passing the old crone’s impossible tests, Vasilisa finds the strength to confront her evil stepmother. In this way, Baba Yaga can be seen as a resource present within Vasilisa and within all of us: a fierce animal wisdom that exists outside the bounds of the rational, ordered world. If we cannot live in the realm of Baba Yaga all the time (and Vasalisa cannot, nor does she want to), we can visit when we are in need of her strength and wisdom, and bring it back to our mundane existence.
This is what transcendence is: contact with the wider world of reality, possibility, and understanding that exists beyond the limitations of time and gravity that constrain the physical. We sense it in deep wilderness untouched by human hands and in the stars that dance in their endless circle overhead each night. That is why the loss of wild places and the dark sky that allows us to see the cosmic lights is so devastating. We are losing access to the Deep Truth that grounds our souls and spirits, allowing them to be integrated into our bodies.
True myth is true because it is a cultural, historical record of both the day to day struggles our ancestors faced and the transcendent wisdom that allowed them to give those struggles purpose and meaning. The stories are told and retold, changing shape and form with each passing generation in the same way that DNA splits, mutates, combines and recombines. The fact that they have been metabolized in the lives of real people makes them more, not less true.
The gospels too are a record of a people who struggled to make sense of shattering loss and transcendent insight. Whether or not one believes in a literal bodily resurrection of Christ, the story clearly speaks a deep truth that strikes the resonant chord; a truth that can only be understood by taking the story into our bodies and letting it ferment, bubble, expand, and alchemize. Like bread. Like wine.
So many of the stories being told in today’s pop culture marketplace are being told not as the alchemical fruit born of deep experience, but as manufactured products designed to capitalize on certain trends or capture a demographic audience segment. That’s not to say there is no room for creativity and transcendence, but it does incentivize a lot of assembly-line mediocrity. Even when the stories are imbued with deeper meaning, it’s often didactic, narrowing in toward a specific lesson rather than expanding into a deeper ocean of meaning.
This is one reason why Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, for all its richness and depth, never attained the massive cultural significance of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis lays out a point-by-point allegory designed to communicate the ultimate truth of Christianity. His own scholarship concerned a world rooted in Plato’s idealized forms and notions of the absolute. Lewis, for all his talk of “further on and further up” in The Last Battle, has trouble seeing past the gospel story as a historical endpoint; the thing that will allow us to finally arrive at perfection.
Tolkien was a philologist, a linguist who studies the history of language as it pertains to culture and myth. He was immersed in the winding paths that words and stories and beliefs take as the people who carry them migrate, diverge, converge, and interact with the landscape around them. While he is no less convinced of the truth of Christianity, for him it is not the end but the center point from which story and history unspool and grow outward; he alludes to and riffs and circles around the gospel narratives, but never outright declares them. It’s why people have been able to interpret his stories in a variety of ways: as an allegory for nuclear power, communism, or industrialism; it’s why he can be embraced and metabolized by every one from trad-Caths to hippies.
I will confess to not getting more than two and a half episodes into Rings of Power. I was struggling this morning to articulate why when I opened up my inbox to find Charles Eisenstein’s thoughts on the matter. He specifically names the way in which Galadriel, a powerful Elf-Queen in the original, has become a flattened stereotype of badass sword-wielding go-girl female power, the only kind of power women can obtain when our sole model for power is essentially masculine:
This depiction of Galadriel both is, and is not, true to the original Tolkien character. Tolkien portrays her as extremely powerful, marveled at, feared and revered. It is she who maintains the ancient magical realm of Lothlorien, she who leveled Sauron’s second fortress of Dol Goldur. Yet there is no hint that she possesses any martial skill. Neither her power nor her status have anything to do with her ability to wield a sword. That is not how she defends her realm.
While war drives much of the drama in the Tolkien books and especially the film adaptations, it is not always force of arms that decides their great events. Sauron’s armies, for example, are an instrument and expression of his will; when the one ring is destroyed and Sauron perishes, his armies panic and flee, unable to fight. Their crushing advantage in numbers turns to dust. But the greatest power of all in the original Tolkien work is the power of song. In the mythology of The Silmarillion, a pantheon of major and minor deities sings the world into existence. The first dark lord, Morgoth, starts his rebellion against God by introducing discord into the melody. Thousands of years later, the heroic couple Beren and Luthien overcome him in what seems to be a battle of song: Luthien’s song puts him to sleep, whereupon Beren wrests a jewel from his iron crown. It is presumably by song that Galadriel levels Dol Goldur…
A sword-slinging warrior woman can certainly be a great character, but that has never been Galadriel’s beat (it’s Eowyn’s). In the original LOTR, Galadriel is something almost akin to a goddess, beautiful and powerful beyond measure, but also clearly not human and not quite safe for humans. Tolkien modeled her on the old Anglo-Saxon notion of Aelf, otherworldly yet very real beings who brought blessings and curses, beings that were present in the natural world yet somehow beyond it. Tolkien says of the young Galadriel:
From her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others, but judged them with mercy and understanding, and she withheld her goodwill from none save only Fëanor. In him she perceived a darkness that she hated and feared, though she did not perceive that the shadow of the same evil had fallen upon the minds of all the Noldor, and upon her own.
By the Frodo’s time Galadriel, much, much older and presumably wiser, seems to be aware that she too possesses some of that potential for evil, in the electrifying scene where she is tempted by the power of the ring:
“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.
This is a Galadriel who has been to visit the Baba Yaga, who knows the capacity for her own power and the limits she will choose to set on it. The Galadriel of Rings, in contrast, is obsessed with vengeance and stamping out evil, certain that her power is right; instead of unraveling and reweaving the fabric of existence with song, she severs it in two with a sword. She is no longer deeply perceptive and compassionate, but judgmental and reactionary. This thoroughly modern Galadriel no doubt hits Amazon’s target for aligning with current pop culture trends. But she has lost her taste of transcendence.
Perhaps I am not giving the show a chance and the writers of Rings of Power are playing a longer game; perhaps Galadriel will learn and grow and become a more well-rounded character. It is true that she is not fully fleshed out in the books, even if she hints at a deeper well of complexity.
The Chronicles of Narnia ended with everyone dying and going to heaven (or hell, for the baddies). The Lord of the Rings ends with our heroes returning from their epic quest having experienced despondent depths and transcendent heights that they can barely speak of, much less understand. When the hobbits return to the shire, it is a relief to revel in the simple pleasures and comforts of home, but there is also a knowledge that there was a beauty in their shattering experience that can never be recaptured. They turn their minds to the long, mundane work of rebuilding their country feeling the tension between nostalgic longing and embodied relief. It’s true that Frodo eventually sails to the West, but it feels more like a capitulation, surrendering to a much-needed rest rather than the ecstatic eschatological fulfillment of Narnia.
In the end, the original Lord of the Rings is what most of us will reach for, time and time again. We know it contains the belly-filling, stick-to-the-ribs mythic wisdom that will provide sustenance for the journey.
Make Galadriel Aelf Again
A rich and rewarding morning read, thank you. Watching the recent Rings series, though momentarily entertaining, is ultimately ‘meh’ and thoroughly unmemorable for exactly the reasons you and Charles delineate. As we sit in longing for deeper, more complex, thought-provoking and soul-stirring characters from our contemporary storytellers (or story re-tellers), it is satisfying to land on your lovely writing. 🙏🏼
I love your definition of “true myth” and completely agree! There is indeed a deeper truth that our beings either salute or reject.
My analysis these days is less about content and more about connection. Do I feel a deep connection to the artist/writer/lyricist?
On that note, I found it interesting this morning that Bec was the only one who commented before me! I feel both of you!