Tolkien, Philosopher of War

Though I have been thinking about Tolkien—sometimes deeply, sometimes romantically, sometimes in a scholarly way—since The Silmarillion first appeared in September 1977, just as I turned age ten, I have rarely encountered a revolutionary read of the man. That is, few secondary sources exist that have almost completely rewired my understanding of the man. Most secondary sources comfortably evolve the perspective, one book at a time, one idea at a time.

Enter Tolkien, Philosopher of War. I must admit, my mind and soul are in something not short of a tizzy: I loved this book. For me, reading it was akin to listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or Genesis’s Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or Yes’s Close to the Edge. There’s the duration, and then there’s the afterglow when the mind can’t quite escape the glories of the music, even though the needle has completed side two. Yes, that’s how I feel with Tolkien, Philosopher of War. Though I’ve turned the last page, the memory lingers.

Admittedly, I hesitated to dive into the book. Despite the glowing blurbs on the back of the book, by two men I respect immensely, I was unsure about looking at Tolkien as a “post-liberal,” as the author presents it. Not that I have anything against post-liberals—after all, Patrick Deneen has been a close friend for more than two decades—I was just really skeptical that Tolkien could fit into such a neat or even relatively new lens or category. But the author, Graham James McAleer, has at least convinced me that such an argument is possible and necessary to tackle, whether one comes to the same conclusion or not.

Argument aside for the moment, McAleer has succeeded in doing several things very well. First, he has really taken into account a vast amount of secondary scholarship on Tolkien. Over the past twenty years, that scholarship has grown immensely and, to be certain, unevenly and unwieldily. An excellent researcher and top-notch reader, McAleer has admirably synthesized the available secondary material—no small feat.

Second, McAleer has bridged the gap between two radically diverse strands of scholarship. One strand, which one might call strictly academic, has presented a very secular view of Tolkien. It does not deny his profound Catholicism but simply sidesteps it and presents arguments from a generally secular viewpoint. The second, competing strand has started with Tolkien’s Catholicism and worked from there. That is, everything emerges from the man’s faith. The first work to bridge the gap effectively was the excellent book by Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading (2021, Word on Fire Academic). The second success, I would argue, is McAleer’s Tolkien, Philosopher of War. While mostly focusing on philosophy—and especially political and aesthetic thought—McAleer also superbly roots his arguments in Tolkien’s faith.

Third, as should be obvious from the two points above, McAleer is a success when it comes to writing style (brilliant), research (brilliant), and argumentation (brilliant). If you’ve not noticed, that’s a lot of brilliance. And, let me note here, it’s not just the secondary literature that McAleer has ably grasped, but the entire corpus of Tolkien, though he gives pride of place to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales. Generally, McAleer ignores Tolkien’s vast number of mythological translations and explorations that have little to do with Middle-earth. He also leaves alone, for the most part, the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth. Such omissions are not a problem, as McAleer really does deal expertly with the central Middle-earth texts.

Fourth, though I’m still not at the author’s argument, it must be noted that McAleer does a great job of throwing in nuggets of wisdom throughout the book. Indeed, I’ve not seen that so well done since Russell Kirk published his 1974 magnum opus, Roots of American Order (Open Court Publishing). In that book and in this one, the authors gleefully cover the brilliant meta view of the argument, while sneaking in profound thoughts at the ends of paragraphs and in other relatively obscure passages of the book. You want to read this book as a delight and not just for argument. Such tidbits appear as “Middle-earth has its share of magnificent cities, but, interestingly, in The Lord of the Rings they are mostly marked by decay” (p. 97). Or this one: “If wars can be just, presumably this is because not everything can be forgiven” (p. 171). Or this: “The Orcs move herdlike, exhibiting little personality, more akin to a swarm than discrete persons exhibiting self-mastery” (p. 185). Last but not least: “Tolkien is a monarchist because he appreciates that there is no moral order without the restraint of establishment” (p. 205).

Now, to argument. Generally, Tolkien scholars who follow the more “Catholic as fundamental” train of thought have lumped Tolkien in with a number of Christian humanists, such as theologian Romano Guardini; philosopher Jacques Maritain; historian Etienne Gilson; novelist Willa Cather; theorist Russell Kirk; and Tolkien’s closest friend, literary critic C. S. Lewis, and in a historical line with Saint Paul, Petrarch, Erasmus, Thomas More, and Edmund Burke.

McAleer, too, centers Tolkien around a group of thinkers, but he chooses Hungarian and Chestertonian Aurel Kolnai; Austrian philosopher of history Eric Voegelin; the controversial German (and sometime Nazi) Carl Schmitt; teacher of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Erich Przywara; and German philosopher Max Scheler, all of whom the author labels “Central European Tories.” From Great Britain, he includes three famous Catholics, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as the Scot Sir Halford MacKinder. McAleer labels Tolkien their “fellow traveler.” It should be noted that McAleer spends a significant amount of time comparing Tolkien’s thought to Voegelin’s thought as well as to that of the influential English historian and philosopher Christopher Dawson.

As the title of the book suggests, McAleer is most interested in understanding Tolkien’s views of war. And profound they are, the author convincingly argues. Indeed, they are so profound, they are inseparable from his understanding of beauty. “Tolkien, Philosopher of War contends that Tolkien thought civilization and war matters of aesthetics, that vanity provokes war and that what strives against vanity, in the very prosecution of war, is a better accounting of beauty” (p. xii). Though this is the gist of the book, McAleer goes into great depth, and this theme permeates every aspect of the book. Indeed, some of the very best sections of McAleer’s work deal with Morgoth’s rebellion against Iluvatar, the Elves against Morgoth, and the Fellowship of the Ring and allies against Sauron. In each, there is a central understanding of beauty, as Morgoth fights God’s order, the Elves create the Silmarils and war against Morgoth, and Sauron creates the one ring—a deadly cold beauty. None of this is accidental for McAleer or, convincingly, for Tolkien.

In this struggle of war and beauty, McAleer notes, we moderns (and Tolkien was very much a modern) get to choose between a Tory understanding, for lack of a better term, of justice—to give each person his or her due—and the Gnostic desire to destroy and escape creation. Following Ordway, McAleer stresses, time and again, that Tolkien was not, as some scholars (including yours truly) have suggested, hoping for a return to the Middle Ages, but rather and importantly fiercely fighting against Gnostic fate and a Gnostic apocalypse. For what it’s worth, both Ordway and McAleer have convinced me of my previous error in focusing too strictly on Tolkien’s quirky relationship to modernity.

One of the great joys of getting to the end of a book—though a joy mixed with immense sorrow if the book has been brilliant, as this one was—is to see exactly how an author serves as artist and sums up his or her work. It was with great joy and sorrow that I reached the end of Tolkien, Philosopher of War. Here’s the gorgeous conclusion—which tells you all you need to know about the greatness of this volume:

This revelation is intimated by Arwen’s battle standard and, more forcefully, by the grave of a different king. The great Rohan king, Helm, who preserved the Rohirrim in Helm’s Deep at a moment of crisis, is laid in a barrow: “Ever after the white simbelmynë grew there most thickly, so that the mound seemed to be snow clad.” Przywara remarks that great Christian art merely garlands the spiritual insight of popular and clumsy religious folk art. Great art should not be misunderstood; it cannot adequately approximate dignity and God’s dignity is found in “the way in which village children decorate a rustic shrine with wreaths of wildflowers.” The graves of the kings of Rohan—who were never afflicted with the vanity of the far more sophisticated Numenoreans— are bearers of wildflowers. “‘Look!’ said Gandalf. ‘How fair are the bright eyes in the grass! Evermind they are called, simbelmynë in this land of Men, for they blossom in all the season of the year and grow where dead men rest. Behold! We are come to the great barrows where the sires of Theoden sleep.’” Of all of Tolkien’s images, it is perhaps the rustic barrows of the sires of Theoden that most compensates for modernity’s fracturing fascination with apocalyptism. The graves of the warrior monarchs of the Rohirrim graced by natural gardens convey a people’s settled order in harmony with the imperatives of a cosmos exceeding their ken. In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth (Psalm 72).

To this, I can only add … amen.