Tolkien, icons, and reality
Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Tolkien is very much in my thoughts at the moment, partly because I’m in the middle of writing a couple of chapters about Tolkien and the liturgy for my PhD and partly because my eldest daughter and I are currently enjoying the audiobook of The Lord of the Rings. So here’s a passage we listened to the other day. It comes from the beginning of Book V when Pippin is watching and listening as Gandalf and Denethor cross swords:
[Denethor] turned his dark eyes on Gandalf, and now Pippin saw a likeness between the two, and he felt the strain between them, almost as if he saw a line of smouldering fire, drawn from eye to eye, that might suddenly burst into flame.
Denethor looked indeed much more like a great wizard than Gandalf did, more kingly, beautiful, and powerful; and older. Yet by a sense other than sight Pippin perceived that Gandalf had the greater power and the deeper wisdom, and a majesty that was veiled. And he was older, far older.
Now this passage - and others like it - must seem very strange to anyone raised in the realist tradition that flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries because, as Ian Watt argued in The Rise of the Novel, modern realism “begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses: it has its origins in Descartes and Locke”.
So is this passage from The Lord of the Rings realistic? Did Pippin see a line of smouldering fire or not? And what was the “sense other than sight” that enabled him to perceive the truth about Gandalf?
The answer to the first question is that it is indeed realistic, though not in a way that Descartes or Locke might have recognised. For Tolkien, whose philosophy was derived more from Aquinas than from the 17th century, realism was much richer than Cartesian reductionism allowed. This is important to remember when we read The Lord of the Rings because the hobbits, the focalisers of the narrative, only have an inkling of the truth and not even Gandalf sees the whole of reality. With them, we need to look through the surface reality which the narrative often presents to a deeper reality that usually lies hidden, though we might get glimpses of it every now and again, as Pippin does in Minas Tirith.
A useful way of making sense of Tolkien’s approach, I think, is to step away from fiction altogether and consider icons. Here’s a fascinating explanation of what icons are from The Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts:
Icons depict the physical world seen not just with the physical senses but with the eyes of the purified heart, a world transfigured by Christ. The abstract style of icons aims to suggest this reality, and to help awaken viewers’ spiritual senses so that they can see this for themselves. They are thus not naturalistic, but they are realistic since they affirm invisible as well as visible realities.
Pippin, purged by experience, sees Denethor and Gandalf with the eyes of his purified heart. Tolkien’s style of writing, while not abstract, also helps awaken readers’ spiritual senses so they can see the reality of a world transfigured by Christ. Tolkien was not a naturalistic novelist like George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, but he was a supremely realistic writer, not least because he affirmed invisible as well as visible realities. He was truly iconic.