It has been a rough month, this August. Not “Guns of August” 1914 rough. Or Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki August 1945 rough. But bad. 

Armed Neo-Nazis and equally armed Antifa Leninists clash in the streets. Cops follow orders and look on, twiddling thumbs. Thugs and vandals smash statues. They demand that the authorities rename our streets. And erase our history to reset us at Pol Pot’s Year Zero. … Veal-pale dweebs fresh out of their mothers’ basements chant “Jews will not replace us!” Professors pretend that we no longer have a legitimate legal government … so it’s time to punch people whom we disagree with in the face. …

It’s getting hot and sticky, here in the Weimar Republic.   

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Turn to Tolkien

So last night I decided to treat myself. The local Alamo Drafthouse revived the Extended Version of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. I managed to catch The Two Towers. It reminded me just how rich and gorgeous those movies are. Especially the extended cuts. Almost an hour of extra footage in each gives it much of the same richness and depth as you’ll get from reading the novels.

Such movies are just what we need right now. For a long list of reasons. For one, they’re a virtual crash course in moral and character virtues. Without ever being didactic, they reveal good behavior as beautiful and expose vice as ugly. They speak of courage and kindness. Self-sacrifice and forbearance. Endurance at the very brink of suicidal despair. That’s what the best art does.

Good Art that Polishes Goodness

We need that kind of art desperately. Our culture is very good at making slick propaganda for self-indulgence and fake social justice. We can also churn out, for “Christian” audiences, preachy tales that convince no one. But telling the whole truth about man without coming across like a sermon… . That’s hard. Tolkien accomplished it brilliantly. Jackson’s trilogy does him justice.

Tolkien’s movies strike the right note for right now. When the racial right is reducing Western humanism and Christian faith to pretexts for white privilege. Maybe passé ones we should drop, for naked, thuggish paganism. And the social justice left is agreeing with them. Both sides insist that those high achievements were always masks for white domination. They just differ on whether that is a good thing or not. Such a trivial dispute, compared to how much the two squalid factions have in common. Both the Alt-Right and Alt-Left think that culture finally amounts to a long race war. They just want different sides to win.

Tolkien reminds us that in zero-sum contests like that, nobody really wins. But you need to look past the surface imagery, which might be misleading.

Blonde Warriors on Horseback

Watch the scenes in The Two Towers that depict the Riders of Rohan. You could get the idea that Tolkien is some kind of Nordic supremacist. These magnificent blonde warriors are fighting a war of desperate self-defense. Their enemy? Dusky hordes of invaders, born evil. Whom do those black and brown intruders serve? A hidden, wizened overlord who long pretended to be an ally. I can already see the 4Chan commenters ready to insist that Saruman really represents … the Jews.

In 1938, Tolkien denounced the Nazis’ “wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

But anyone who knows Tolkien’s life and views would realize this is utterly wrong. Tolkien was stating almost exactly the opposite. He tapped into our natural desire to preserve our kinfolk and countrymen from destruction. He saw profound virtues in the cultures of “The North.” He especially loved the Anglo-Saxons. But he also saw the dark side, the deep despair that infuses pagan culture. He knew that the warrior’s code, alone, is hopeless. It needs the leaven of justice and mercy. And the fine folk of the North desperately needed that Semitic religion from the Mediterranean, Christianity.

I wrote about this in depth back in 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. So let me quote that article at length. I never dreamed how sadly relevant its subject matter might be, 16 years later.

From December 2001, “Tolkien, Hitler, and Nordic Heroism”

As a teenager, J.R.R. Tolkien neglected his Latin and Greek to study Norse. And Finnish. And Anglo-Saxon. Tolkien thrilled at studying medieval eddas and sagas, and mastering dusty grammars to decode half-forgotten tales. At Oxford, he made himself the university’s expert in Nordic literature, and won a prestigious chair which he’d hold for the next four decades.

What attracted Tolkien to these tales was their unique, heroic ethos. Written down by recently Christianized barbarians, stories such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight intertwined the old, pagan values of individualism, courage and promise-keeping with Biblical themes of self-sacrifice, defense of the helpless, and piety towards the One God. Thus were the warriors of the North civilized, and urged to restrain their swords by the codes of Hebrew prophets and Christian theologians. The grandsons of the Viking raiders began to bind themselves to the Ten Commandments and Augustine’s “just war” theory.

The North Stands for Freedom, Not Race Cults

Tolkien saw in this literature a great, unsung moment in the birth of the West. Like the Baron de Montesquieu, Tolkien saw as specifically “Nordic” the individualism and hatred for tyranny that pervades these sagas, which set medieval and modern man apart from the obedient subjects of Rome and Byzantium. …

This freeman’s spirit survived for centuries in the stubborn cantons of Switzerland, the “free cities” of the Holy Roman Empire, and the gentry of England; the privileges won by Anglo-Saxons from their kings formed the basis of English Common Law, and its great modern descendant — the U.S. Bill of Rights….

The work of Tolkien’s close friend C.S. Lewis also refers to “the North” as the source of individualism and resistance to unjust authority; in The Chronicles of Narnia, his heroes’ battle cry is “for Narnia and the North.” In Narnia, as in The Lord of the Rings, the heroes were based on medieval, Northern European knights, who fought for free societies based on tradition, custom, and courage — against slave armies recruited from southern climes, who carried scimitars, lived in the desert, and cringed before Oriental despots. …

Rejecting the Cross

It’s ironic that even as Tolkien wrote to immortalize the great synthesis of Northern heroism with Biblical morality, modern barbarians labored to reverse it. The proto-Nazi “Völkisch” movement, born in the blood and humiliation of Napoleon’s conquest of Germany, had for a century agitated against Judaeo-Christian “softness,” in favor of pagan ruthlessness. … Völkisch boosters of Nordic literature ignored its heroic individualism in favor of its residues of pagan tribalism, “deconstructing” the Judaeo-Christian elements as “inauthentic” overlays on the “pure” originals. The artistic pinnacle of this project appeared in Wagner’s grand operas, based on “pure” pagan sources. Its political apogee came with the victory of a Völkish-socialist demagogue in Germany.

Thus were the warriors of the North civilized, and urged to restrain their swords by the codes of Hebrew prophets and Christian theologians. The grandsons of the Viking raiders began to bind themselves to the Ten Commandments and Augustine’s “just war” theory.

While Adolf Hitler was careful at first to conceal his neo-pagan agenda, his followers were not. Heinrich Himmler created the SS explicitly as a pagan parody of the Society of Jesus. He conducted extensive research to try to rehabilitate medieval witchcraft, and held torchlit liturgies to Odin and other Norse gods.

Hitler’s ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, issued tracts denouncing the Gospels. Josef Goebbels aspired to wipe out “after the last Jew, the last priest.” Hitler’s ally, General Erich Ludendorff, called for the abolition of Christianity in Germany. By 1936, Hitler was suppressing Catholic trade unions, movements and schools, and forming amongst Protestants a militaristic “German Christian” church that would sanction the regime’s savage anti-Semitism. Hitler opined to Albert Speer that he wished Germany had been converted to Islam instead of Christianity, the better to suit it to ruthless warfare.

Fighting for the True North

As a fervent Catholic, a veteran of the Somme, and a genuine scholar of Nordic cultures, Tolkien was not blind to these events. In 1938, Tolkien denounced the Nazis’ “wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.” When German publishers Rütten and Loening wished to translate The Hobbit from English, they wrote him, inquiring whether his name was of “Aryan” origin. Tolkien drafted a reply that dripped scorn:

I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is, Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

As he would write his son, Michael, in 1941 (then a cadet training for the British army):

… I have in this War a burning private grudge — which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler… . Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble, northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor ever more early sanctified and Christianized.

We see in Tolkien’s life, opinions, and work an enduring rebuff to the totalitarian evils of his century. The moral key to The Lord of the Rings is the refusal of ruthlessness and the immutability of the moral law. The Ring is a mighty weapon of war — but profoundly tinged with evil. The Ring may not be used, even against the Dark Lord himself, lest its user be corrupted and become what he hates. Some means are so evil that no end can justify them. Some laws are so sacred that we must willingly die rather than violate them. We may never target the innocent in order to weaken the guilty. These lessons, which Tolkien drew from the Christian, heroic sagas of the North, should linger in our minds and restrain our passions — especially in time of war.

And, as I must add here in 2017, on the slippery slope that leads to civil war.