CHAPTER 2
The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are on different levels as works of art -- The Lord of The Rings being much the more complex and profound of the two -- but from political and cultural perspectives the similarities are more striking than the differences. Each is a large work whose existence breaks the rules of commercial success, and whose backers took great risks with their investments in fields where failures far outnumber successes. Each, when it went into the world, was seen as being in opposition to the spirit of its times and was attacked with considerable hostility by progressive intellectuals. Each has been stupendously successful.
Each, starting from a humdrum environment, moves into a series of strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, settings where an apparently ordinary character, finding himself in exile, must fight armies and monsters as well as temptations to seize totalitarian power for himself, before finally being pitted against a supreme Enemy, a "destroyer who would devour all". In each, the initially ordinary central character grows to heroic stature as a result of consciously choosing to take a hard part, though this choiee is first made almost light-heartedly from longing for adventure and in ignorance of what the quest will really entail. Later, more than once, the choice to go on has to be made again, each time with fewer illusions and more grim determination.
With the help, at first, of an old guide possessed of great wisdom and (limited) magical powers as well as formidable fighting abilities in a crisis, and accompanied by good if comic assistants, each hero thus embarks on a mission which seems more hopeless as time goes on. But each guide, it turns out, has long watched the hero who, unknown to himself, is the repository of great and perilous hopes. Early in each story the guide dies fighting a superior enemy to buy time to allow the hero and his party to escape from an enemy fortress, but undergoes a kind of resurrection to return later as a transmogrified, more spiritual being.
Each hero becomes aware of "the bad news", which Frodo calls "terrible", and worse than anything he had imagined. There had always been dangers beyond the borders of the safe, mundane little worlds in which the respective heroes lived, like the barrow-wights in the sinister green burial-mounds beyond the Hobbit's Shire and the sand-people in the wastelands beyond Luke's uncle's farm. But at first the supreme Enemy had been only a far shadow. Then each hero finds that this supreme Enemy's malice, bad enough when perceived only as a distant generalised threat to the natural order of things, is also directed at him personally and individually. He cannot even hope that he may be too unimportant to be spared the personal attention of the Annihilator. But each hero also learns that forces and hopes for good are also focussed on him personally. In each case the supreme Enemy is robed in black, like Death.
In each tale a subsidiary enemy, deeply wicked but less powerful than the ultimate Enemy, and once himself a champion of the "good" side, has ambitions of overthrowing the ultimate Enemy. He offers uncorrupted champions of good the temptation of bringing peace and "order" if they will join him (Saruman offers Gandalf "knowledge, rule, order"; Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker, "With our combined strength we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the Galaxy"). But this temptation to exercise coercive power is rejected. The linguistic point is quite important here: it is not a "natural order" that is offered, but an "order" artificially imposed for Utopian ends.
Each hero meets a lonely wandering warrior who, after a period of initial mistrust, becomes a firm friend and leader of the forces of good in a climactic battle simultaneous with the hero's eventual confrontation with the supreme Enemy. The heroes are by that time partly outside the organised forces of the "good side": their personal confrontation with the enemy is of a different type.
In each tale the heroes and their friends have a series of adventures and tests. The mood and flavour change as the heroes grow in maturity and nobility and the conflict moves onto higher planes. The two tales begin small, close to home, with a single individual about whom little is known. They then move to take in a larger vision of great deeds and far wider existence. New lands are entered, and new complexities and depths behind the original issues are revealed. In the third part of each tale, the individual hero is again the centre, but he has grown in stature and his destiny is combined with the wider sweep of events.
The initial exile leads to eventual greatness. The central characters come to be aware not merely of the great political and military issues into which they have entered, but also of their own moral responsibilities. A major theme in each case is the contrast between the ordinariness of the heroes and the destinies to which they are called.
Each hero soon becomes aware that he is in a world in ruins. The society on Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet, is obviously decaying under the dead hand of the Empire, while in The Lord of The Rings the description of the young hobbits coming to Bree, the village nearest their little shire, where all seems well-ordered, prosperous, placid and contented, has a subtly chilling undertone:
Bree was the chief village of the Bree-land, a small inhabited region, like an island in the empty lands about ... Down the Road, where it swept to the right to go round the foot of the hill, there was a large inn. It had been built long ago when traffic on the roads had been far greater ... But the North Road was now seldom used: it was grass-grown, and the Bree-folk called it the Greenway.
The peace and contentment which the hobbits take for granted, and have even become bored with, come to be seen as a local and temporary accident. There is a gradual realisation that only the dwindling strength of old guardians still keeps these pockets of humdrum happiness in existence.
Both tales place value on physical competence. Their heroes are people who do things. However, they also take ideas seriously. Each hero -- and in this the tales are unlike much modern drama -- gradually becomes a better and "higher" person. In making a series of brave, difficult choices, each grows gradually in stature, responsibility and authority as well as moral sense, a process Tolkien described as ennoblement. The last and hardest temptation that each hero faces is to "do the right deed for the wrong reason" -- Frodo is tempted to end the realm of Sauron by claiming the Ring, Luke to defeat the Emperor and Darth Vader by using the dark side of the Force.
When at last each confronts the Enemy, he fails in the penultimate moment -- but makes it possible for one of the Enemy's own creatures, at least partially regenerated by the hero's efforts and example, to rebel. A general deliverance is brought about just as the last armies of "good", fighting against hopeless odds, seem about to be destroyed.
Each hero makes friends -- diverse in character and attitudes, some of them not human. The friends grow too, from immature adventurers into figures of responsibility and authority. Both heroes are physically maimed in their battles, and in the end they do not marry princesses (though their friends do). They end spiritually comforted but alone.
Each hero, in his wanderings, as well as gathering friends, encounters various secondary and subsidiary enemies and monsters, some of these being direct agents and subordinates of the ultimate Enemy, and some (Shelob and Jabba the Hutt) being allowed a degree of independence because of their usefulness and because their altogether "lower", physical, appetites (symbolised by their bloated bodies) pose no threat of competition to the ultimate Enemy's own spiritual appetites. On the spiritual plane the Enemy can tolerate no rivals.
The "good" sides are, in toto, quite powerful, but apparently hopelessly outmatched when pitted against the limitless power which the Enemies command. The "good" are just "strong enough to fail" and to indulge in fools' hopes. The "good" armies apparently accept military discipline and hierarchy voluntarily. The "bad" armies are disciplined by terror, with death the explicit punishment for mishaps and mistakes.
Both tales, while dealing with battles and wars against cruel enemies, generally avoid depictions of extreme brutality. Their outlook is ultimately optimistic -- but not in the socially progressive sense -- and they look to individual rather than social salvations. Their "happy endings" promise no everlasting Utopias.
Each work seems hard to translate into the medium of the other, but many of the situations are strikingly similar. The dive in Mos Eisely where Luke Skywalker and the robots meet Han Solo while an enemy circles and searches outside is not exactly like the Inn at Bree where Frodo and the other young Hobbits meet Strider, but there are similarities. The description of Gandalf's sacrificial battle with the Balrog in The Lord of The Rings would serve well for the similar battle in Star Wars:
His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out ... But Gandalf stood firm. "You cannot pass," he said ... "The dark fire shall not avail you ..."
From out of the shadow a red sword leapt gleaming.
Glamdring glimmered white in answer.
There was a ringing clash and a stab of white fire.
There are other similarities: both works are enjoyed by children and adults, though they are frequently described by hostile critics as being "childish". They can be judged by criteria appropriate to both juvenile and adult art. They are set in milieu which take for granted a conservative and traditionalist view of love and the family and of romantic and sexual relationships.
Both stories are set in societies where a religion exists that has some similarities to a Christless (14) Christianity but which is in decline and out of step with the temper of the times. Indeed the old religion seems only a vestige, while a new, evil demi-god, wielding supernatural power, seems to be growing towards god-like strength. Presumably if the religion that was once the common property of good people had remained a potent force a healthier state of society would have endured. In each tale an unhonoured, almost extinct, remnant of an ancient knightly order preserves a spiritual as well as a military heritage in wild and forgotten places.
Specifically religious issues are mentioned little, and doctrinal matters not at all, but in each story the struggle between good and evil causes the whole structure to be permeated with spiritual issues and questions. By the end of "Return of the Jedi" it becomes plain that the Star Wars trilogy is not merely profoundly religious, but that it is more centrally in the Western religious tradition than perhaps any other popular film that has ever been made. Certainly it is a far more religious film than any Hollywood Biblical epic.
In both stories some form of life after death, the immortality of the individual soul, and some form of final judgement are accepted. This gives the stories a mental atmosphere at once both classically "Western" and at odds with much of the atmosphere of modern secular society, art and culture.
Family heritages of honour and tradition are very important. On solemn and "perilous" occasions, in moments of great challenge or great portent, characters in The Lord of The Rings are addressed by patronymics, such as "Frodo Son of Drogo". It is a sort of stiffening of the spine, an injunction to "Remember who you are!", and to remember both individual and family honour. The individual is thus enriched by being connected to, and being the product of, the traditions and heroisms of the past. This applies not only to people with lineages of high nobility but also the middle-class Frodo and the working-class Sam Gamgee ("Samwise, Hamfast's son"). All can benefit from a remembrance of their ancestry for it enriches their own identity and reinforces the knowledge that their own lives have meaning and importance as part of something greater than themselves.
The fact of "ancientry" has its own significance. When, in Tolkien's posthumously-published Unfinished Tales, Aragorn retrieves the original and most splendid jewel of his household, the Elendilmir, from Isengard, he says of the later, imitation and inferior Elendilmir, which he has worn until then, that it is also a "thing of reverence" and beyond his worth, since "forty heads have worn it before".
However, it is not a matter of simply inheriting worth. It must in addition be earned:
Was du erebst von deinen Vatern
Erwirb es, um zu besitzen.
This sort of notion was not, apparently, prevalent, at least among what some have called "the chattering classes", at the time The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars were attracting millions. Tom Wolfe, writing of the 1970s, contrasted a Weltanschauung of feckless hedonism with more traditional views in the essay, "The Me Decade":
The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their personal assets in order to provide a better future for their children ... the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle ... the man who devotes his life to some struggle for his people that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime. People (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills ... are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children ... The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would soon be dead did not give you the licence to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.
While in these tales some characters rise to greatness from nothing, the nobility or even simple goodness of parents who have gone before in a sense define and reinforce the honour and good conduct of children. Early in the first Star Wars film, it is a solemn and portentous moment when Luke Skywalker is given his father's old light-sabre. In "The Empire Strikes Back", Luke is more horrified to learn that his father is or has turned into the evil Darth Vader than he is by Vader's hacking off his right hand. It is the only time Luke attempts to destroy himself. From then on the salvation of his father, at any risk to himself, gives a new dimension to the quest. Luke is reinforced in dark moments by the idea of the good and noble man his father must once have been. In "Return of the Jedi", Luke rejects the seductive blandishments of the evil Emperor with the words: "I am a Jedi, like my father before me". This emphasis on honour, the worth of the individual, and the individual's links with the past, is quite at variance with ideas of salvation by social engineering or the creation of a New Order. The integrity of the individual is aided by tradition and example. (In the modern world the opposition of collectivists to hereditary titles, even when such titles confer no privileges, is often because they reinforce a feeling of identity with something other than the State. They are glitches in social engineering). Of course, not all may have an immediate personal "ancestry" from which they can take inspiration. We know nothing of the background of many of the characters, and to suggest that such ancestry is necessary or sufficient for virtue would be snobbery of a particularly simplistic and false kind, completely at odds with, say, the Christian values behind Tolkien and with the idea of the individual's capacity for moral choice central to the Western epic. What is really being suggested is that some contact with the idea of virtuous tradition is important.
It is loading a lot on a couple of adventure stories to take this matter far, but while it seems the remembrance of a good father or other example is a good thing to have, those without it are not thereby excluded from virtue: indeed their ennoblement may be even more praiseworthy.
Ultimately both stories are concerned with the salvation of individual souls -- in the case of Star Wars in a rather surprising way.
Both stories are about the rejection of grandiose, totalitarian schemes of empire-building. They are anti-utopian, but the best form of political organisation they look towards seems to be a free association of diverse states.
Since Star Wars was made primarily for an American audience it had no need to spell out that the good republic recently usurped by the Emperor was a free-enterprise, commercial republic. That is in the background of American culture. Things like spaceships were private property, as was Uncle Olwen's farm. When Luke sells his land-speeder he complains: "Since the XP-38 came out, they just aren't in demand". There is still something left of a market economy. In a scene omitted from the film but published in The Art of Star Wars, Luke's friend Biggs says to him:
What good is all your uncle's work if it's taken over by the Empire? ... You know they're starting to nationalise commerce in the central systems [and] it won't be long before your uncle's merely a tenant.
Plainly the old republic was not collectivist or socialist. It is interesting that even without this information the implications and atmosphere of Star Wars were sufficiently plain for progressive and collectivist-minded intellectuals to give it a most hostile reception on its release.
Also, the Republic previously had a division of powers, presumably in a federal system. As Darth Vader makes clear at his first appearance when he seizes Princess Leia's ship, there was previously a senate that provided some checks and balances on central power. It is announced as a means of implementing totalitarian control that the regional governors are to be given direct powers. This, of course, is a common desire of social engineers who find that the political process frustrates grand designs (for example the Third Reich's Gauleiters -- "region leaders" -- to override the old German states, or in a milder way, the Whitlam government's attempt to bypass the federal system through the Australian Assistance Plan).
Though the rebels in these two tales have no belief in Utopia, they are still prepared to sacrifice their lives to overthrow tyranny and restore an order which, though intrinsically imperfect, is immeasurably less bad than that of the Enemy. This is not a conceit of romantic fiction, of course: it is no more than people have been prepared to do in fact for centuries. But it is opposed to the progressive and "liberalistic" slogan: "Nothing is worth dying for!"
Good characters in both tales accept death both by sacrificing their lives in battle for others (for example, Gandalf, Obi-Wan and various other fighters), and by old age at the end of long lives (for example, Aragorn, Yoda). Implicit here is a belief that earthly life is a preparation for death -- or rather for what lies beyond death. The evil characters, however, are circumscribed by a purely Earthly consciousness. They are at the last withered, hideous creatures clutching power at all costs, because this is the only form their desire for deathlessness can take.
The good people in both tales are led by aristocrats among others, but there are aristocrats on the evil side as well, and we hardly need to be told that aristocrats, like all other leaders, can be evil. The potential of power to corrupt is a major theme of both works. So is lack of power: some of the lesser villains (Gollum, Salacious Crumb) have been corrupted by their own littleness. Again, such notions are at odds with Utopian doctrines that see the solutions to human problems in better planning and the control of social systems.
In both tales the good uphold orders of hierarchy and some ritual splendour. They utilise science and/or magic (that is, power) but do not regard it as an end in itself. Institutionalised ugliness, drabness, and the exultation of perverted science are the province of the Enemy. While the Enemy has imposed brutal and arbitrary discipline on his own forces, the good people accept hierarchy -- but an organic hierarchy, one in which individuals can quite properly rise.
Good characters, wherever they come from, grow when they do noble deeds of their own initiative and volition. The young hobbits in The Lord of The Rings, and Han Solo and Lando Calrissian in Star Wars, grow from immature adventurers to responsible leaders, though their bravery does not diminish but increases with responsibility and their acceptance of a moral dimension to their actions. In The Lord of The Rings Merry takes the first step towards "ennoblement" when he goes to help Eowyn in the apparently hopeless fight against the Lord of the Nazgul. In Star Wars Han Solo begins the same journey when he turns back to help in the apparently hopeless attack on the first Death Star. Lando, in "The Empire Strikes Back", at last throws away everything he has built up to thwart Darth Vader rather than collaborate in the final betrayal of a friend.
The attitude to power and to politics and social organisation in these tales is also at odds with progressivism. It is taken for granted that a hierarchical structure which is accepted as legitimate rather than arbitrary, in which values depend on something more than the caprice of the rulers, is the only structure in which justice, and therefore freedom, are possible. As Shakespeare put it in Trolius and Cressida: "Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows!"
In both tales, the great Enemies, like twentieth-century totalitarians, make hierarchy dependent on their own power. Their own lieutenants, however terrifying they appear to those below, themselves lead the precarious lives of a Röhm, a Yagoda, a Yezhov or a Beria. In the evil empires not the state but society has withered. The tyrants will kill their own subordinates for failures not their fault, without pity, whereas the good people would regard the violent deaths of any of their subordinates as a tragedy. This is part of the difference between a just hierarchy and one ruled bv arbitrary terror.
A consequence of this is that the tyrants find themselves surrounded by sycophants, afraid to disagree with them or bring them bad news. Yet, as in the real world, this is not an immediately crippling handicap. The real problem for them is that Evil is smaller than Good in that Evil cannot understand Good in the way Good can understand Evil. This is far more a Christian than a dualistic or a "New Age" religious view.
The enemy vision in both cases turns naturally to the idea of "dethroning" a leader as soon as any rising subordinate has the power to do so, recapitulating the social arrangements of some animals such as wolves. In Star Wars the Emperor assumes Luke Skywalker can be corrupted by the temptations of the dark side, as he assumed Darth Vader is totally and irretrievably overcome by it (as does Vader himself, who says, when in "Return of the Jedi" Luke first asks him to remember his heritage and rebel against the Emperor: "It is too late for me, Son".) In The Lord of The Rings, Sauron never conceives that anyone else holding the Great Ring might try to destroy it, or do anything but trample down rivals to wield it. In both cases their failure to understand anyone having a goal beyond seizing power proves fatal to them.
Part of the heterogeneity, and the humanity, of the "good sides" in these tales is that the beings making them up have diverse interests, emphases and gifts. Even the non-human characters are recognisable as having certain individual human characteristics.
We see little of these aspects of the regimented forces on the enemies' sides, but some of them at least display courage and self-sacrifice. In "The Empire Strikes Back", Captain Nida of the destroyer Avenger, which loses the Millenium Falcon outside the asteroid belt, sacrifices himself to Darth Vader's wrath, assuming "full responsibility" apparently to protect his subordinates. Even an orc in "The Two Towers" returns to a foredoomed battle rather than forsake some "stout lads". It is a conservative and individualistic rather than a progressive or ideological collectivist belief that it is possible to be a good person fighting in a bad cause. (In The Last Battle C.S. Lewis made the point, on the religious aspect of this, that a good God will accept good things done in the name of an evil cause, not because Good and Evil are one but precisely because they are utterly apart.)
Star Wars' Emperor can hardly have built a star fleet of his own from nothing in a fairly short time, and presumably when gaining power he took over the Republic's existing fleet, as Caesar took over the legions, Hitler took over the Reichswehr and Lenin forced Czarist officers to serve the Soviets. One can imagine in Star Wars an old guard of republican officers in the Imperial Star Fleet (Admiral Ousel and Captain Nida -- both killed by Darth Vader for failure -- might well be among them), doing their duty with increasing reluctance, never trusted by the new regime, and doomed to liquidation as soon as their services can be replaced (one may wonder if Ousel deliberately bungled the star fleet's approach to the Hoth base to allow the rebels time to escape). In both tales (and again, as in real life) the power of the evil side depends on its abilities to put good qualities such as bravery and selflessness to evil uses.
In both stories women do little fighting, though some of the leaders on the "good" side are women. This is an integral part of the chivalrous tradition. In The Lord of The Rings (the question does not arise much explicitly one way or the other in Star Wars) the "good" side are chivalrous fighters. They spare the lives of their enemies if they can. This is in marked contrast to many sadistic books and films of the last decade or so, including a rash of war films in the 1960s and 1970s -- Shout at the Devil, Play Dirty, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone etc. which took an indulgent or approving attitude to torture or other terror practiced by the "right side" or scorned the idea of "civilised" (that is, chivalrous) war.
Tolkien's own general attitude to this is made plain in a letter written to his son on January 20, 1945:
I have just heard the news ... Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly: destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted ... Yet people gloat over the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children passing West, dying on the way. They seem to have no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat? We are supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted ... Well, well, you and I can do nothing about it. And that [should] be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly lie attached to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual government.
[emphasis added] (15)
In both tales the point is specifically made that the enemy armies are conscripted, and many of their members are, in a sense, victims too. At one point in The Lord of The Rings Sam contemplates the body of a dead enemy invader:
He was glad he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.
The "good" side may conscript, but one gets the impression in both tales that the armies of good are formed of men who have voluntarily chosen to submit to military discipline.
Again, it is an important part of the tradition of Western chivalry that the enemy be seen as something other than a collectively evil and guilty mass of sub-humans. A collectivist ideology, followed to its logical conclusion, makes the possible goodness or human worth of individual enemies practically a meaningless concept. (Even today, unless things have changed very recently, officially approved Soviet writings on the Second World War usually refer to German soldiers simply as "the Fascists", despite the fact that the German armies were made up overwhelmingly of conscripted workers.) To the ideological totalitarian, the defeated enemy must go to "the rubbish-heap of history" -- that is, die.
It is explicitly stated at the end of The Lord of The Rings and can be assumed at the end of Star Wars that, with the destruction of the Enemy, most of the personnel of the defeated armies were set free and also recovered liberty and dignity (as happened after World War II with the West German, Italian and Japanese populations). This is the Western and chivalrous (or liberal) as distinct from the ideological or totalitarian end. It is connected with Christianity, but does not necessarily imply some eschatology of universalism, apocatastasis or Pelagianism. Not all are necessarily "saved", though Tolkien did write that he saw everything in the Creation as being ultimately good.
ENDNOTES
14. This impression of a "pre-Christian" world is subtly reinforced by the fact that very few of the characters have Biblical names.
15. Humphrey Carpenter, (ed.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1981), page 111. (Hereafter referred to as Letters).
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