Tolkien, Tocqueville, and reckoning with death
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Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) and JRR Tolkien (1892-1973)
A few weeks ago I ran across a line from Alexis de Tocqueville that I had copied down—and preserved forever—as a Facebook status. The line comes from a passage in Democracy in America, his monumental book of observations on the political culture of the still young United States, about the delicate interplay of religion and self-interest among Americans:
“However hard one may try to prove that virtue is useful, it will always be difficult to make a man live well if he will not face death.”
This line resonated with me because, at the time, I was finishing my first front-to-back reading of The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s history of the First Age of Middle Earth. In addition to the stories of Middle Earth’s creation and fall, Tolkien tells the story of the human kingdom of Númenor and its rise and fall in the Second Age. The account of the rise and destruction of this kingdom comes from The Silmarillion’s penultimate section, Akallabêth, “The Downfallen.”
Here Tolkien describes the beginning of the Númenóreans turn toward evil:
Thus the bliss of Westernesse became diminished; but still its might and splendour increased. For the kings and their people had not yet abandoned wisdom, and if they loved the Valar no longer at least they still feared them. They did not dare openly to break the Ban or to sail beyond the limits that had been appointed. Eastwards still they steered their tall ships. But the fear of death grew ever darker upon them, and they delayed it by all means that they could; and they began to build great houses for the dead, while their wise men laboured unceasingly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at least of the prolonging of Men’s days. Yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of Men, and they filled all the land with silent tombs in which the thought of death was enshrined in the darkness. But those that lived turned the more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more goods and more riches; and after the days of Tar-Ancalimon the offering of the first fruits to Eru was neglected, and men went seldom any more to the Hallow upon the heights of Meneltarma in the midst of the land.
Note, first, that Númenor’s “bliss” decreased while “its might and splendour increased.” Whatever evil is about to appear in Númenor is not the result of poverty or material want. Neither is it the result of ignorance, for they “had not yet abandoned wisdom” and their skills, while falling short of defeating death, are sufficient to stop the natural decay of flesh.
Rather than reckoning with death, which is one of the most important purposes of traditional religion and one of the necessary starting points of many philosophies, the Númenóreans try to first to defeat it, then to smother their fear of it, and finally they embrace it. “The desire to escape death,” Tolkien wrote in one of his letters, “produced a cult of the dead.” While the most obvious signs of this obsession were the “tombs and memorials” on which “they lavished wealth and art,” the cult was also made manifest in libertinism and consumption and the abandonment of religion. Not only do they fill the land with tombs, but they exalt the captive Sauron as an adviser, build him a temple to Morgoth, and turn to maritime kidnapping both to fill their coffers with wealth and to keep the human sacrifices burning in Sauron’s temple. Finally, seized with resentment of the immortals away west of them in the Undying Lands, they defy “the Ban” mentioned above and sail there with the goal of a violent takeover. They are instantly defeated and Númenor is sunk beneath the ocean in a cataclysm that reshapes the entire planet.
Reading this the same day that I rediscovered that quotation from Tocqueville was striking—it’s hard to imagine a more powerful or vivid illustration of the consequences of the refusal to face death. It’s also hard not to think of where we are in the present.
Technology has prolonged our lives to an unprecedented degree and, true to the Númenórean vision, there are those who promise the defeat of death, and soon. Simultaneously we live in an age of cultural malaise, discontent, and wild and irresponsible consumption and waste. Tolkien’s description of the people of Númenor turning “more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more good and more riches,” is apt, as are his descriptions of the suspicion and jealousy these spawn, and which Sauron takes advantage of. Sauron “denie[d] the existence of God,” Tolkien writes in a letter, “saying that the One is a mere invention [and that] The Ban is only a lying device of fear to restrain the Kings of Men from seizing everlasting life.” Our politics revolves more and more around questions of who has what and in what quantities, an obsessive materialism bound closely with envy and resentment, and questions of truth, morality, and the transcendent are treated as mere power plays in a game of oppression—the original Satanic lie. Finally, the rampant worship of death, the sacrifice of others to get us what we want, is as befitting of Morgoth as anything.
The fear of death, paradoxically, turns us toward it. We end by taking as many with us as we can.
In “Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality,” an article published almost twenty years ago, Anna Mathie notes that “immortality, or the lure of it, seems to turn members of all these races [men, elves, dwarves] in on themselves.” Those that pursue immortality end where the Númenóreans did—where I think we are—in a hunt for glory or pleasure, and those that achieve immortality become inert, lost in memory and self-regard. Barrenness marks both.
What to make of this?
Mathie argues that facing the fact of our eventual death and accepting rather than railing against it is what transforms death from a curse into a gift. The hobbits show this most clearly. In contrast to men or the elves, they hardly seem to think much less worry about death, this lack of desire for immortality being one of the reasons Bilbo and Frodo can resist the power of the ring for so long. The fact of death thus accepted, they get down to the plain business of living. While it’s the Númenóreans who take such pains to preserve flesh, it’s the hobbits who strike us as most fleshly and fully embodied precisely because they have accepted that this incarnate state is not forever, nor is it meant to be. Being willing to lose their lives, they find them.
Accepting death frees us to live. Accepting our mortality orients us otherward—it turns us inside out—first toward those immediately around us, then to past and future generations—whose value we perceive too, since they have or will share our fate. And, hopefully, looking at death as a reality to be reckoned with rather than ignored, fled from, or conquered will also force us to look beyond this world to another.
In a culture that shows all the marks of a Númenórean fear of death and its perverse turn toward destruction, this outward, mortal focus, a willingness to live with our limits, a willingness to face death as the prerequisite to virtue, fruitfulness, and goodness, is something we desperately need.
