75 - J.R.R. Tolkien & the Long Defeat

I'm working to build out my channel. But before we move forward, I want to thank all of my patrons. As I announced in the last episode and in a YouTube video, I have some exciting new courses coming up this year, and my patrons play a very significant role in allowing me to do that, because obviously these things

take a good bit of time to put together. And right now, if you invest in Mythic Mind with a Tier three annual patronage, then I'll give you access to all courses, including the upcoming courses that is a brief history of Ideas, Plato Stoicism until we have Faces and the Elder Scrolls, and Philosophy, and you'll also be able to access the current Lord of the Ring's course course and the past courses on the fiction and philosophy of C. S.

Lewis and life, Death and Meaning with Beaywulf and Boethius. And so that's six courses for about two hundred and fifty dollars, not to mention all the other things that come along with Mythic Mind patronage, including ad free and often early episodes, and some exclusive content, full range on the Discord server, and all sorts of stuff. So if you are interested in more than one of these courses as well as other Mythic Mind stuff, then this is

going to be the best deal possible. And I don't think that I'm going to maintain this deal forever simply because it is so economical on your side, and I need to make sure that long term, I'm earning enough where I can continue to invest in the time that to take to build these out, and so I can't really afford to run this deal forever, and so this is the time to act on it if you want

to take advantage of this. So if you're listening to this at some point in the future, then check the Patreon membership bonuses or reach out to me to confirm any deals that are happening at the time that you're listening. You can find me on Twitter at Andrew and Snyder, or you can email me at Mythic Mind podcast email

dot com. And of course, if you want to purchase a course or you want to sign on with as a patron, then you can go to Patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind and you can find that link in the show notes as well. But I will say that you shouldn't buy anything through the Patreon app because when you do so, Apple adds money onto it so that way they can take a cut. And so if you purchase anything at all through Patreon, then make sure that you're doing so through your browser and not through the

Patreon app. You can use the app to access material moving forward, but whenever you purchase anything, don't use the app for that. Now, before we get go in, I would like to thank by name all Tier three patrons and higher and so that's Mark, Aaron, Evy, Jamie Justin who just upgraded Mariah, Paul Tyler William and our newest

patrons Chas and Kyle. Kyle's currently in the talking course and he just purchased a Tier three annual patronage to access the upcoming courses that I announced, And so Kyle is making some really good decisions with his life, and you should be like Kyle. And of course many thanks to all of my Tier one and two patrons as well.

Contributions do not go unnoticed. And I'm glad that you're here, although you could get even more value if you can swing the investment to upgrade to Tier three year higher. Just saying all right, so now, without further ado, I give you j R. R. Tolkien and a long defeat. Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains, and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly, some samples or glimpses of

final victory. J. R. R. Tolkien in a letter to Amy Ronald fifteenth of December nineteen fifty six, Tolkien was enamored with the Northern Spirit, which did not fight for ultimate victory, but for the victory of the day. In the Norse Mythos, there is no hope for the final triumph of the life of man, or even most of the gods for that matter, As the great Apocalypse of Ragnarok,

claims the lives of both. This awareness of impending doom gives the Northern tales a unique flavor against their Southern counterparts. Tolkien rights, in the Monsters and the Critics his monumental essay on Beowulf, that the Southern gods are not the allies of men in their war against these or other monsters. The interests of the gods is in this or that man as part of their individual schemes, not as part of a great strategy that includes all good men as

the infantry a battle. In Norse. At any rate, the gods are within time doomed with their allies to death their battles with the monsters in the outer darkness, they gather heroes for the last defense. In the Norse understanding, gods and noble men fight together against the monsters against the chaos, not to win in the ultimate sense, but

because it is the valiant thing to do. Tolkien continues, the Northern gods, Kur said, have an exultant extravagance in their warfare, which makes them more like Titans than Olympians. Only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is chaos in unreason mythologically, the monsters, but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation, and in their war men are their chosen allies, able whin heroic to share in

this absolute resistance. Perfect because without hope, at least in this vision of the final defeat of the humane and of the divine made in its image, and into the essential hostility of the gods and heroes on the one hand and the monsters on the other. We may suppose that Pagan English in Norse imagination agreed. Now if there is no hope of ultimate victory, the what reason does the Northern hero have to fight on the side of the gods? Why fight an impossible fight? The answer is valiants.

The answer is justice, which is good for its own sake. The answer is that there is good in this world, and it is worth fighting for, even if it is only the good of to day. Again, in the Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien says, it is the strength that the Northern mythological imagination, that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the center, gave them victory but no honor, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will

and courage. So potent is it that, while the older Southern imagination has faded forever into literary ornament, the Northern has power, as it were, to revive the spirit even in our own times. It can work, even as it did for the godless Viking, without God's martial heroism as its own end. But we may remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly the wages of heroism is death. The story of Beowulf is to some degree one of futility.

In the end, Beowulf dies, and the Gayats whom he led and protected, would soon be conquered by its neighbors. It might be argued that Beowulf failed, but that surely is not what we are meant to get from the story. What we principally see is that Beowulf did what the Northern hero is expected and lauded for doing. He secured the life, the festivity, and the human good of the mead Halls against the encroaching winter for as long as he possibly could, as in a little circle of light

about their halls. Men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world in the offspring of the dark, which ends for all, even the kings and champions in defeat. Now our Beoa poet, himself a Christian, is surely telling us something about the futility of mortal life. Tolkien explains, Beowulf is not then the hero of an heroic lay. Precisely he has known mesh loyalties, nor halfless love. He is a man, and that, for

him and many is sufficient tragedy. The story of Beowulf is the story of all mortal heroes. They do heroic things, and then they die. Their death does not erase their heroism, but the heroism does make their death significant as they enter into the eternal realm of legend. Yet there is surely still a futility in this pagan hope, and our Christian poet of Beowulf was surely intentional about making this known, about making this experienced. Even if he did not explicitly

provide a solution in the poem. Tolkien, however, does identify that solution with his idea of the yucatastrophe. He explains idea of Youu catastrophe as follows in his essay on Fairy Stories The Consolation of Fairy Stories. The joy of the happy ending, or more correctly, of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn, For there is no true end

to any fairy tale. This joy, which is one of the things which fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist nor fugitive in its fairy tale or other world setting. It is a sudden and miraculous grace, never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the dis catastrophe of sorrow and failure, the possibility

of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies, in the face of much evidence, if you will, universal final defeat, and in so far as Euangelium giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world poignant as grief. Tolkien does not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, despite the many victories

that we may experience along the way. Even as the Gospel tells of Christ who suffered and died before entering his glory, so too we must meet with the terms of our mortality before the yu catastrophe of resurrection, And so too does Tolkien believe will be the affairs of world history. Things will become worse than the long run, until finally they become infinitely better with the unexpected that is unexpected except by faith and happy turn of redemption.

Although Tolkien knows this Christian hope, he recognizes that pagan futility is by no means erased with this revelation. He says again in The Monsters and the Critics, Beywuff's author is still concerned primarily with man on Earth, re handling in a new perspective an ancient theme that man, each man, and all men, in all their works shall die, a

theme no Christian need despise. This temporal defeat is real, but its reality is taken up by the yucatastrophe, and thus we may face death with finite futility because we have a glimpse of eternal goodness. Tolkien says that the tragedy of this great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to be finally important. It is no defeat, for the end of the world is part of the design of Metod, the arbiter, who is above the mortal world.

Beyond there appears to be a possibility of eternal victory or eternal defeat and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. So the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies of heathen imagination. Bailiff's poet, himself, being a Christian, does not despair of death. He does not object to demonstrating the role that death plays an ending

and even in wiping out finite pursuits. As a Christian, he finds this element of the Northern mythos entirely palatable and even correct. However, what the Christian poet brings to the table is the ultimate hope that even in the catastrophe of death, we can expect to find or at the very least, hope to find you catastrophe the happy term.

So our bao of poet is not, as talking points out, muddling up his Christian and pagan mythos, but he is rather bringing them together into something true, something that's truly Christian and profoundly powerful. A good way of thinking about this is to consider the Battle of Helm's Deep in the Two Towers. The men of Rohan, who are largely a stand in for the Anglo Saxons, stand against the monsters of chaos and darkness until the last free man

would inevitably fall. If this played out, then this would be a Northern story. However, Gandolf arriving with the morning light alongside the forces of nature rightly oriented, make it into a Christian story. We do not know where the road will take us in this life, but we can, as Tolkien says, despair of an event while maintaining belief

in the value of doomed resistance. There are many examples of the long defeat and the role of you catastrophe throughout Tolkien's writing, but we'll look at just a couple now from The Lord of the Rings. First, consider this statement of Gladiol concerning Caliborne. For the Lord of the Gallatin is accounted the wisest of the elves of Middle Earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings. He has dwelt in the West since the days of Dawn, and I had dwelt with him years uncounted for ere

the fall of nargothrind of Gondolin. I've passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat. So there you have it, talking directly working this idea of the long defeat into his narrative. And who better to recognize the reality the long defeat than his long lived elves. And if you have read through the Cimmarillian, then you likely are already very aware of how this theme plays out throughout the course of

his legendary. The glories of the elder days are ruins and stories in the Third Age, and they far outshine what the latter has to offer. Things fade, things get worse over time, but that is all the more reason for heroes to maintain valiance. As Rigorn says in the Two Towers, the Council of Gandolf was not founded on foregnoledge of safety for himself or for others. There are some things that is better to begin than to refuse,

even though the end may be dark. And now we end with a word from Gandolf in the Council of Elrond, it is not to spare, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity when all other courses have been weighed, Though as folly it may appear to those who cling to falsehope. When you go to the roots of the word philosophy, you find the love of wisdom, which unfortunately is not what you find at the roots

of all who call themselves philosophers. Now, how do we get here? What are the ideas that shape our world? And what can the old world tell us in response to the perennial questions of what it means to be human, what is our purpose? And what, if anything, ought we

aspire to? In a brief history of ideas, we will navigate major epics of thought and survey some of the most important figures in the Western canon, including Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Nietzsche, Sart and carecguard and of course we will consider even more names. But these are the thinkers that will supply our primary readings. Each week will include primary sources that will be provided as PDFs. Although these are all texts

that do belong in your personal library. You will be recommended some secondary text You'll be provided with some recorded presentations for you to watch at your leisure, ongoing discord chats, and weekly live meetings to discuss the readings. I've been teaching philosophy for many years, and I can say with confidence that you will leave this six week course with a better understanding of the foundation to Western thought than

most contemporary philosophy majors enrolled today. By going to patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind and checking out the shop, or you can gain access to all courses past present in any course that begins during the term of your

subscription by purchasing a Tier three annual subscription. So again, purchase a Tier three annual subscription, and I will give you a special code that gives you access to all courses that either have taken place or do start in this term, and I sincerely hope to see you there.