Given its prescience about modern-day terrorism, Tolkien’s vision offers at least three lessons for present-day America. 1. All-Seeing Is Not All-Knowing The most salient fact about Tolkien is not that he was a fantasist, but that he was Catholic: His Christian beliefs drove him out of realism and into a world of orcs, ents, and Dark Lords. That’s why The Lord of the Rings has been dismissed, as Edmund Wilson put it soon after the book’s publication in 1954, as “a children’s book which has some how got out of hand.” Yet the world he created allowed Tolkien to address problems that conventional realism had seemingly abandoned. The most important of them was the distinction between omnipotence and omniscience. In Orwell’s work (as well as that of other dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin) those two terms are nearly synonymous: The Thought Police always know what Winston Smith is up to. But for a believer like Tolkien, only God can know everything. And in Sauron, Tolkien is able to imagine a figure of godlike power and seemingly infinite resources, but crippling interpretive fallibility.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 01:50:53 +0000