The Force That Through the Black Sword Drives Turambar OR Psycho(mis)diagnosing JRRT
The comment was offered, and readily agreed with, some two months back toward the top of this thread, that
Tolkien was driven to compose the tale of
The Children of Hurin because he suffered from a "severe and lifelong" case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that only his need for some catharsis to purge the dark things "festering" in his soul can explain a preoccupation with "such intense themes of tragedy and death", that the imagination which gave birth to
Arda and the Elder Days and
the Rings of Power was moved not by Sub-Creative impulse but instead by a compulsion to "escape the real world". However belatedly, I must disagree. The notion is distorted, distorting, dismissive, and facile; what follows will take some pains to refute it. (I hope no further pain may be caused in the process.)
That Tolkien's experience in World War I had a profound impact, both personal and authorial, on his later life is an unquestionable and well-established fact. John Garth's brilliant
Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003) lays out the matter most cogently -- and the class photograph on the inside of the dust-jacket alone is well worth the hardcover price, for you acquisitive bibliophiles. It's a looong way from what Garth recounts, however, to any credible diagnosis of PTSD, or "shell shock" as it was known at that time. George Carlin pointed out several years ago the difference between those two painfully honest and straightforward syllables and the far fuzzier and more indirect eight that we now employ to characterize the "syndrome". The condition itself, whatever length or number of words is used to describe it, was medically recognized in soldiers who'd seen service at the Battle of the Somme, and many were invalided home because of it; Lieutenant John Ronald Tolkien of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers wasn't one of them. What sent
him back to England on sick leave was trench fever, debilitating enough (and fortunately so, in retrospect) to pull him out of the forward lines, but brought on by filth and fleas and not by the terrors of combat. Beyond the general Hell which was the Western Front in 1916, there is no record that Tolkien was ever "horrifyingly traumatized" on the battlefield, and his medical disability was
not based on shell shock.
That Tolkien was
not moved to create Middle-earth by grief for the loss of his wife, an odd and anachronous notion that our dear Befuddled Barkeep puts forward multiple times, is confirmed by a cursory glance at the
calendar. His beloved Edith died in 1971, by which time Tolkien had abandoned all but the most desultory work on his legendarium. In fact (as is also widely known), the central story of that mythology, one
far more important to the larger narrative than is the tragedy of the Children of Hurin, derives its central character,
Luthien Tinuviel, from the sight that John Ronald had of his beautiful young wife dancing in a grove of flowering hemlock
trees, in 1917 when he was home on leave. His living love for her, and not lamentation for her death, was what made the tale of
Beren and
Luthien (the names beneath which John Ronald and Edith lie buried, side by side) the linchpin of the Great Tale of Arda.
That Tolkien's sorrow for the lost countryside of his childhood was
not what prompted either his initial interest in the story of
Turin or his return to the subject after completing
The Lord of the Rings seems almost as easy to establish. The depth of that sadness, and the anger it gave rise to, are -- like the influence of his experiences in the First World War -- well-attested to and beyond debate; they find expression in many forms throughout his body of work. I've suggested elsewhere, as have others, that much of our author's pleasure in the march of the
Ents upon
Isengard, beyond reclaiming the narrative opportunity that Shakespeare squandered so shamefully in
Macbeth, must have come from giving the trees he loved so well the chance to take their revenge on those who'd hacked and hewn them down so cruelly. From the burning sands of the Anfauglith to the
Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien decried the wrack and wretchedness wrought by the Machine upon the living earth. This is hardly a theme which resonates in
The Children of Hurin, however: even the fiery path of destruction that
Glaurung burns in his unswerving course toward Brethil is given no particularly powerful emphasis, and the defilement of Eithel Ivrin is but a sad grace-note to the thunderous strains of Turin's ruin.
One more stroke to hammer home the point, with perhaps less bludgeon and blunt force than
Morgoth's Grond upon the
helm of
Fingolfin, but with no less decisive result: Tolkien's first imaginative encounter with this tale, in the story of rash and hapless Kullervo in the Finnish folk-epic
The Kalevala, came while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford in 1912-1913, three years at least
before he went to war in France.
The penultimate comment in this over-dense post derives from John Garth, specifically the front flap of that dust-jacket aforementioned: "Tolkien used his mythic imagination
not to escape from reality (emphasis mine), but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day." To the seductive appeal of disillusionment, one might add the tendency that some indulge in, avoiding "such intense themes of tragedy and death" because they're "just too depressing".
The last word I'll leave to John Ronald, from the
Letters: "I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of
authors and
artists. They only detract attention from an author's works, and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest. But only one's Guardian Angel, or indeed
God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author's works. Not the author himself (though he knows more than any investigator), and certainly not so-called 'psychologists'."
