Classical tragedy's influence on Tolkien's First Age narratives

The Role of Tragedy within the First Age of Tolkien’s Legendarium Mythology
Introduction
At the age of 3, J.R.R. Tolkien lost his father to rheumatic fever. At the age of 12, he lost his mother, and the two Tolkien boys (J.R.R. and his young brother) became orphans—wards of a priest of the Catholic Church, to which their mother had converted in 1900, four years before her birth. Tolkien openly considered his mother to be a martyr—for in Protestant England in those days, one did not convert to the Roman Catholic Church easily or without a struggle (Garth). Indeed, the widow had endured scathing rebukes from her own Protestant family—but, for her, the faith was what mattered most, and her boys were raised in it (Pearce). In England, the faith had its own history of sacrifice and tragedy: the English Catholic martyrs under the time of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth were world-renowned, perhaps none more than St. Thomas More, whose memory inspired the Oscar-winning drama A Man for All Seasons. Thus, from the earliest age, Tolkien would have been informed and influenced by tragedy. His own education in the Church, under Fr. Francis, and at King Edward’s School would have added to that learning, as well: steeped in the classics from an early age, Tolkien was, by the time he began writing the Silmarillion, well-versed in tragedy (Carpenter).
The objective of this paper shall be to analyze and compare the tragic characters and elements from the First Age of Tolkien’s Legendarium (The Exile of Noldor, The Tragedy of the Children of Hurin, and The Fall of Gondolin) to classic tragedies with which Tolkien would have been familiar (Oedipus Rex, Prometheus Bound, The Iliad) for the purpose of discerning which of the latter could have influenced the development of the former. The specific research questions this paper poses are: How does Tolkien use classical tragedies of antiquity with pagan origins to demonstrate discernible Christian themes in his own works in the First Age of his Legendarium? How does tragedy illuminate themes within Tolkien's works that validate Christian morality? This paper will first proceed with an examination of the First Age of Tolkien’s Legendarium, then with an examination of the classical works he studied, and finally with an assessment of how the tragic history at the heart of his own Catholic upbringing combined with the classical pagan tales to infuse his own works with a tragic but Christian perspective.
The First Age of Tolkien’s Legendarium
The Exile of Noldor
The tale of the exile of the second clan of the Elves, known as the Wise, the Exile of Noldor hinges upon the oath made by Feanor to recover the Silmarils stolen by Melkor in Middle-earth. To get there Feanor required the ships of the Teleri: the Teleri refused permission. An act of kinslaying followed, committed by the Noldor in retaliation for the refusal on the part of the Teleri to allow the use of their ships to the Noldor. The judgment brought down from the Valar was a harsh one—and those Noldor who did not wish to be part of any further rebellion returned to Valinor and were acquitted of any wrongdoing. Those who wished to proceed in their rebellion chose to leave Valnior and head to Middle-earth with Feanor. The Valar closed their land to the departing Noldor, thus denying them the possibility of return.
However, after many long ages, the exile was overturned, thanks in no small part to the role that Galadriel played in the War of the Ring (related in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). Though Galadriel had been part of the original rebellion, she was forgiven, having merited redemption and a return to the Blessed Realm.
The Tragedy of the Children of Hurin
The tale of the tragedy of Hurin’s children is rooted in the tale of Morgoth, a fallen Vala, whose sole desire is to wreak havoc upon the world. Morgoth is malice personified and the object of his ire in this story is Hurin, upon whose children Morgoth places a case. Turin, son of Hurin, feels the effects of the curse completely: his life is one moment of glory followed by a fall, one after another after another. Though his pride and various human failings can easily be identified as the reason for his fall, the presence of Morgoth is the more apparent cause: it is Morgoth who poisons that which should be good. He is the source of evil in Tolkien’s world and thus draws likely comparison to Satan in the Christian true-myth. Turin’s father is imprisoned and tortured by Morgoth and ultimately his children or cursed by the Dark Lord. Turin himself grows up among the Elves, much like an Oedipus character, taken from his parents and raised not knowing his true identity.
Writing to a publisher at HarperCollins, Tolkien described his inspiration for the tale: “There is the Children of Húrin, the tragic tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Níniel—of which Túrin is the hero: a figure that might be said (by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo” (Tolkien Letter No. 131). Elizabeth Hand, in her review of the Children of Hurin, compared it to the tragedies of classical literature, stating that it was “a bleak, darkly beautiful tale" which "possesses the mythic resonance and grim sense of inexorable fate.”
The Fall of Gondolin
The Fall of Gondolin tells the tale of the city of the Elves—a secret city that was marvelous to behold: a true wonder in the realm of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s story describes how the city was founded and describes the men who came to live there under Tuor. The same Dark Lord is present as in the Children of Hurin: the evil foe Morgoth is there, like an ever-present Satan, skulking about the perimeter, trying to find his way in to destroy that which is beautiful and good. What is at the heart of this story? Not a curse, so much as a betrayal: the king’s nephew betrays the city to the Morgoth in a repetition of true-myth’s narrative of the betrayal of Christ into the hands of the Pharisees who were plotting his death by Christ’s own disciple Judas. Judas sold out the Christ. The king’s nephew sold out the secret city to the Dark Lord.
There is in the Fall of Gondolin a reflection, too, of the fall of Troy, as depicted by Homer in the Iliad. Troy is lost when the Greeks hide themselves within the Trojan Horse, and the Trojans eager to win back the affection of Athena, displeased at the Trojans allowing her statue to be carried off by the Greeks, bring the Horse inside only to guarantee their own slaughter and destruction. The tragedy of the fallen city of Troy is an obvious point of inspiration in the Fall of Gondolin—but so too would have been the sight and personal experience of seeing the fall of European cities to the enemy during WWI.
The Classical Tragedies
Oedipus Rex
Written by Sophocles, the tragedy of Oedipus told the story of the son of the Theban king Laius and Jocasta, who grew up not knowing his true identity because he had been sent away as a child when his parents learned from the oracle that he would be the cause of their destruction: however, the sympathy of a shepherd who discovered the abandoned Oedipus, led to the boy’s being raised up to a man, unknown to his parents. He was strong and wise and evidently of royal lineage—and yet he had no knowledge of it. He wandered from his adopted father’s home and met his real father Laius at a crossroads, where the two—not knowing one another—quarreled and Oedipus killed Laius and went on with his own business. He later won renown for solving the riddle of the Sphinx, a monster that had terrorized Thebes, and in return, he was made the king of Thebes and given the widow of Laius to marry—Jocasta, his own mother. Thebes was afflicted by the gods because the city never solved the murder of Laius. Oedipus vowed to get to the bottom of it, not realizing that he had killed his father. Eventually the truth is made know: Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus blinds himself and is led into exile by his children.
Of all the tales in the Legendarium, it is the tale of Turin that most clearly reflects the sufferings of Oedipus—though their stories are very different. They are similar in that the identities of the heroes are unknown to themselves and to others. They are similar in that there appears to be a dark fate, a curse hanging over them that prohibits them from finding happiness. In the tale of Oedipus, however, the moral is that the will of the gods should be respected—not mocked. In the tale of Turin, the moral appears to be that man is not in this world alone but rather that there is an evil force that hates him and wants to destroy him and man must take stock of it.
Prometheus Bound
In this tale by Aeschylus, Prometheus is chained to a mountain for disobeying Zeus and giving the gift of fire and the arts to mankind. Prometheus rejects Zeus’s antipathy towards man and refuses to tell Zeus what the leader of the gods wants to know regarding a possible insurrection against his power. Zeus strikes Prometheus with a thunderbolt, sending him into an abyss of darkness.
The tale reflects the stubbornness of Prometheus, who refuses to budge to the will of Zeus, just like the Noldor refused to budge or relent in the refusal of the Teleri. There is in both stories a sense that history is shaped by beings and groups whose wills are in conflict with one another and this conflict leads to tragic courses of events.
Hector, Achilles and the Fall of Troy in The Iliad
Hector and Achilles are the two main tragic heroes in Homer’s Iliad: Hector is the Achilles-version of the Trojans and Achilles is the Hector-version of the Greeks. They are comparable in courage, valor and strength—but in their duel, triggered by Hector’s killing of Achilles’ dear friend, Achilles slays Hector and then drags his corpse from the back of his chariot around the city of Troy in a display of disrespect that shocks the Trojans and causes Priam to come out to beg back the body of his dead son. Achilles is eventually moved enough to permit it, and his own death is not too far off, when his one vulnerable spot (his heel) is pierced by the arrow of Paris. The death of Achilles, however, does not save Troy, which is burned to the ground by the Greeks. The tragedy in all this is that none of it had to happen: the war started because Paris was “given” by the goddesses Helen, wife of Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, king of the Greeks. The tragic stories in the Iliad serve as some of the groundwork for Tolkien’s own epic depiction of Middle-earth and the tragic narratives spun into its history.
How the Christian “True-Myth” and the Pagan Classics Influenced Tolkien’s Legendarium
As Charles Pearce notes in his biography of Tolkien, the author once described to the unbelieving (at the time) C.S. Lewis the religion of Christianity as a “true-myth”—a story that was like a legend in its epic and grand scope but unlike a legend in the fact that it was true. Tolkien’s belief in the “true-myth” informed his writing to a great extent, and one can see in The Exile of Noldor the same story of exile that began with the Fall of Lucifer and the bad angels, and the subsequent Fall of Man described in the Book of Genesis. There are similar themes: the land being closed off to those who choose rebellion, the ultimate redemption through the exercise of one’s will for the Good, the return to the Promised Land—i.e., the Blessed Realm or Paradise.
In the Tragedy of the Children of Hurin, one sees a reflection of the lives of the cursed children of Oedipus—Antigone and Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices. Oedipus, having killed his father and married his mother (unbeknownst to himself), incestuously produced these four children and was driven from Thebes when the revelation became clear to all. While their sufferings are different in origin from the children of Hurin, the curse placed upon them is not: their lives are spent in gloom and suffering. Turin, son of Hurin, is in many ways more like Oedipus than like the latter’s children. Oedipus was the son of Laius and Jocasta and it was foretold to them that Oedipus would one day grow to murder the father—and so the child was cursed, just the same as was Turin, who could never maintain any degree of success in his own life. Oedipus faced many challenges and defeated and Sphinx, thus liberating the Thebans from the tyranny of the monster—for which they made him king. By that point Oedipus had already killed Laius in a fit of road rage (the event is only alluded to in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but it is the act upon which hinges the whole of the action of the play). He marries Jocasta his mother, unaware all this time of his real identity. When the revelation is made know Oedipus blinds himself, Jocasta hangs herself—and thus it can be seen that Tolkien grounds his myth of Hurin in the ancient pagan myth of Oedipus, for Hurin’s wife-sister kills herself when she learns of the truth of her relationship with her brother-husband, and Hurin kills himself.
The Christian orientation in the tragedy (or curse) of Hurin is that Hurin could have been one of Middle-earth’s greatest heroes, but he was held back or limited by the curse of Morgoth, placed on him when his father Turin was captured. From the Christian perspective, Hurin represents the fallen state of mankind—man touched by the curse of sin (Hurin is constantly succumbing to pride, envy, wrath, etc., all of which causes him to lose whatever status he has earned after a particular episode of heroism—whether slaying a dragon or killing an orc). In this sense, he is like fallen man in the Old Testament, in need of saving from himself. Morgoth represents the evil of Satan, creeping into man’s soul and poisoning it, corrupting it, preventing it from achieving the glory intended for it. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, there is no good explanation for why the gods would place such a similar curse upon Oedipus. Some speculate that Laius was cursed because of inappropriate actions he committed towards the child of his host Pelops when in Pisa (Rist). However, in the Old Testament, it is clear that the curse of exile and the loss of control of the desires, the exaggerated state of the ego, and so on, are all caused by man’s giving in to the temptations of the devil and thus positioning himself against God, Who gave him life. The curse is fitting and appropriate from the Christian perspective, and in Tolkien’s myth of Hurin, the curse placed on Turin’s children by Morgoth reflects a kind of Satanic (purely evil) action by one who hates all that is good seeks only to destroy what God has made (which is essentially the ambition of the fallen Lucifer in the Christian true-myth).
Christopher Tolkien notes in his introduction to the tale that “Morgoth is not ‘invoking’ evil or calamity on Húrin and his children, he is not ‘calling on’ a higher power to be the agent: for he, ‘Master of the fates of Arda’ as he named himself to Húrin, intends to bring about the ruin of his enemy by the force of his own gigantic will. Thus he ‘designs’ the future of those whom he hates…” (18). What Morgoth wanted was for Hurin to see the world through the eyes of malice and hatred that Morgoth had in his own head (Tolkien). It is in this respect that Morgoth is much like Milton’s Satan, a character Tolkien would have known well as a result of his own literary education. Milton’s Satan spends much of Paradise Lost attempting to win the sympathies of the reader and to get the reader to see the world through his own eyes, to see with the eyes of hatred and malice, as Christopher Tolkien puts it in his introduction to his father’s story, originally titled as Christopher points out “The Curse off Morgoth” rather than the Tragedy of the Children of Hurin. The original title suggests, moreover, that J.R.R. Tolkien was more influenced by the idea of an evil entity forcing its will upon a lesser entity and thus altering the course of life and of future generations—which is basically the tale of fallen man in the Old Testament. The tale of Turin is the same tale—the tale of an individual afflicted by a curse that constricts him and prevents him from having happiness. It is a tale that explains to some degree (at least within the terms of Middle-earth lore) why there is such evil and misery in the world. For J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, that explanation is right there in the will of Morgoth: a being that seeks only to assert its own will on the will of others—a Luciferian being to be sure.
The Greeks could not have envisioned such an evil that operates out of such malice. They would not have understood the “motiveless malignity” of Shakespeare’s Iago, as Coleridge called it (Bradley 228). The fact that Morgoth is a fallen Vala only makes the connection to the true-myth of the fall of Lucifer (a fallen angel) all the more apparent. Morgoth is “a power unleashed to work evil” and Lucifer could be similarly described (Tolkien 19). In the Greek mythologies, there is nothing quite comparable. The gods and never goddesses generally do not act out of malice: they may have their favorites among men and they may have their jealousies—all of which is apparent in Homer’s Iliad—but none of them have a “motiveless malignity” like that demonstrated by some of the greatest villains in Christian and post-Christian ages of literary history. Shakespeare’s Iago hates the Moor, just as Morgoth hates Hurin: there is no reason for it other than the same reason Lucifer hates God—he does not wish to serve and he will spend his eternity attempting to overthrow the order that God has designed, obstructing the will of God, and subverting the good that God intends. But, of course, the story of the true-myth of Christian is best understood by the proverb that God writes straight with crooked lines. In other words, God allows evil to exist because he can bring some good from it. Satan may work to oppose God at every step of the way, but at every step of the way God uses Satan’s opposition to bring about a greater good (Adams). The idea of evil attacking innocence is common in both Old and New Testaments and in the martyrology of Christianity. The Slaughter of the Innocents marked the first instances of death wrought by the Incarnation (Matthew 2:16-18). Christ’s own death upon the cross would seem a horrendous evil—and He even predicted it would scandalize some. Tolkien, seeing his own mother’s sacrifice in converting to Catholicism and then exhausting herself mentally, emotionally and socially to see her sons raised in the faith, would have understood this sacrifice intimately. He would have connected all suffering in all tales to the suffering of Christ—as for him the Incarnation would have marked the centermost point, the pivotal point, all-important point, in human history. Christ’s birth, death and resurrection were the realities of the life, the most important points of the true-myth taught to him by Fr. Francis and by his mother.
Moreover, his fighting in WWI and the loss of a number of his dear childhood friends, the members of his Tea Club and Barrovian Society, impressed this point upon him further. He saw how suffering was visited upon the innocent in so many ways, and only the Christian true-myth allowed him to make any sense of it. The stories of the fallen in The Iliad did not bring the kind of closure or promise or hope that the story of the Resurrection and Redemption of mankind did in the Christian true-myth. Tolkien believed in that myth—though reality, experience, and the classics of the pagan world showed him that suffering existed regardless and that the suffering of the innocent, the death of loved ones, the trials and tribulations of the spirit and the flesh, the stunted and oppressed lives of the cursed—they were all just as real. Hector’s loss of life, and the abuse of his corpse by Achilles was tragic for Priam and for Troy as Hector was the city’s main defender. The death of Achilles was tragic for his mother, for it was foreseen by her and yet there was nothing she could do to prevent it. The inevitable deaths of Tolkien’s friends in the war could just have easily have been foreseen—so many young men fighting in the Battle of the Somme and other battles—they were bound to die and there was nothing anyone could have done to save them.
Tolkien had experienced these realities throughout the whole of his childhood and all the more so during his adolescence and young adulthood. It was in the barracks during WWI that he conceived the plot for The Fall of Gondolin and thus began writing the tale in 1917 (BBC). He likely drew obvious inspiration from the war—the loss or betrayal of one city to an enemy combatant, the main them of the Fall of Gondolin. Tolkien was constantly writing poems and letters to his friends also serving (and dying) in the war. His friends shared his faith and sensed his depression (a feeling most apparent in The Fall of Gondolin) and tried to comfort him with words written in return, such as these, penned to Tolkien by his friend G.B. Smitth: “I do pray for you at all time and in all places and may you survive, and we survive the fiery trial of these events without loss of our powers or our determination. So shall all things be for good. Meanwhile trust God and keep your powder dry, and be assured that to three other men you are more than their own selves” (Garth 145). This letter indicates just how beloved Tolkien was to his fellow Tea Club and Barrovian Society members: they viewed him as their leader, and this sense of being their leader was another source of inspiration for his writing as well. It was a tragic sense because he could very well see that in spite of all his best efforts there was very little he could do to save them: the war would take them away just as death had taken away his mother and his father in his youth. Yet, in spite of all these tragedies, Tolkien found the gift of life in the Church, in the faith, in the true-myth that inspired him to keep going, to find something meaningful in so many tragedy and affliction.
Thus, his tales in the First Age of the Legendarium reflect a Christian sense of hope. This is apparent, too, in the Fall of Gondolin: even in the destruction of Gondolin, there is the flight to the Havens of Sirion, the wedding between Tuor and Idril and a description of the childhood days of Earendril. Of course, Tolkien was constantly revising his tales, and as he grew older and experience drifted into the background to be replaced by new experiences (his own marriage and the birth of his own children), his own career as a professor, and his own new friendships with men like C.S. Lewis, which prompted long discussions on the questions of faith and religion, his works took on new meaning for him and so they were revised and edited and altered.