Tolkien, Barfield, Violence, and the Evolution of Consciousness (revised)
“The vagaries of confusion and savagery in the tribes in which anthropology finds participation most conspicuously surviving to-day, though they may well not be very reliable guides to its ancient quality among other peoples who have long since abandoned it, do nevertheless remind us of the sins of commission in thought, feeling and action of which original participation is capable.” P. 57, Saving the Appearances
"What will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation...the other name for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art and in religion, is, after all - paganism." Saving the Appearances
JRR Tolkien was immersed in the texts and languages of northern European sagas. He read and studied these from his early years throughout his life. It wasn’t merely scholarly activity either, but imaginative, creative and heartfelt. See for instance his inspired hunt for the original meaning of the Old English word for Ehthiopians, Sigelhearwan, as he disentangles history and experience, and explores the mental and emotional landscape from which the word arose.
Read the Silmarillion, too, to see how much of that world literally springs from his analyses of and meditations on single words and phrases. He was clearly engaged with the minds and souls of the authors of these various texts, and hence of the worlds in which they lived.
This is very similar to the way that Owen Barfield approached language and history and texts, as we see exhibited in History in English Words, and philosophically justified in Poetic Diction. Barfield wrote about a felt change of consciousness as a result of reading certain texts, and when this is attended to mentally in a sensitive way, one is convinced that the resulting consciousness is very different than one’s usual consciousness.
This is very similar to the way that Owen Barfield approached language and history and texts, as we see exhibited in History in English Words, and philosophically justified in Poetic Diction. Barfield wrote about a felt change of consciousness as a result of reading certain texts, and when this is attended to mentally in a sensitive way, one is convinced that the resulting consciousness is very different than one’s usual consciousness.
He then claimed that, in such a reading, such an understanding, of ancient texts, the reader experiences, even if to some small degree, the world of the author. That is the consciousness that one inhabits when caught up in such a text in such a way. By the way, this doesn’t imply that the reader understands the meaning of the text exactly and at every point as the author intended.
Not only did Tolkien conduct his own reading and study with such sensitivity and attention, as Barfield says is essential to experiencing, in a sustained way, the results of the felt change of consciousness. Tolkien also adopted a basic and profound conclusion of Barfield’s own studies, namely, that the older the text in question, the more one encounters concrete meaning – or semantic unity.
Not only did Tolkien conduct his own reading and study with such sensitivity and attention, as Barfield says is essential to experiencing, in a sustained way, the results of the felt change of consciousness. Tolkien also adopted a basic and profound conclusion of Barfield’s own studies, namely, that the older the text in question, the more one encounters concrete meaning – or semantic unity.
This means that much that is for us today expressed by two or more different words was expressed with one word or phrase long ago, a word or phrase in which much meaning was implicit that would later precipitate out as separate, different words. Further,
“mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities.”
We know for a fact that CS Lewis recounted to Barfield,
“You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, a propos of something quite different, that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook, and he was always just about to say something in a lecture when your concept stopped him in time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said, ‘that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”
With this imaginative, scholarly, and profoundly Barfieldian approach, Tolkien encountered and experienced the ancient world of northern European paganism – that is, of original participation.
So Tolkien spent much of his long and productive life looking into the world of original participation. Some of that work he exhibited in his scholarly work – as in the essays on Sigelhearwan, on Beowulf, on fairy stories. Of course, he also expended much energy, time, emotion, and imagination on his works of fiction, including the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
“mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities.”
We know for a fact that CS Lewis recounted to Barfield,
“You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, a propos of something quite different, that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook, and he was always just about to say something in a lecture when your concept stopped him in time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said, ‘that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”
With this imaginative, scholarly, and profoundly Barfieldian approach, Tolkien encountered and experienced the ancient world of northern European paganism – that is, of original participation.
So Tolkien spent much of his long and productive life looking into the world of original participation. Some of that work he exhibited in his scholarly work – as in the essays on Sigelhearwan, on Beowulf, on fairy stories. Of course, he also expended much energy, time, emotion, and imagination on his works of fiction, including the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
I think that in all of this work, he encountered and explicated the ancient mind, the pagan mind, and its correlative, the pagan world. Further, I think that, as CS Lewis once noted, Tolkien ‘had been inside language’. As Verlyn Flieger put it in her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World:
“He had been inside the word, had experienced its power and had seen with its perception…one of Tolkien’s Oxford students…recalled saying to him once, apropos his work: ‘You broke the veil, didn’t you, and passed through?’ and she adds that he ‘readily admitted ‘ having done so.”
We have then two masters of imagination, analysis, and scholarly learning, who delved into the texts of the pagan world – the world of original participation. It is rather startling, then, to note that their depictions of that world – and we assume that they were both seeing the same world – are so very different, with particular regard to something that is so prominent a feature of the extant pagan texts, namely, personal violence.
When we do pierce the veil, through Tolkien’s fiction, of the pagan world, what do we see? Astonishingly, this: Even in the most ancient parts of the story, there is already remembrance of some pre-existing break.
“He had been inside the word, had experienced its power and had seen with its perception…one of Tolkien’s Oxford students…recalled saying to him once, apropos his work: ‘You broke the veil, didn’t you, and passed through?’ and she adds that he ‘readily admitted ‘ having done so.”
We have then two masters of imagination, analysis, and scholarly learning, who delved into the texts of the pagan world – the world of original participation. It is rather startling, then, to note that their depictions of that world – and we assume that they were both seeing the same world – are so very different, with particular regard to something that is so prominent a feature of the extant pagan texts, namely, personal violence.
When we do pierce the veil, through Tolkien’s fiction, of the pagan world, what do we see? Astonishingly, this: Even in the most ancient parts of the story, there is already remembrance of some pre-existing break.
“Thus began the Days of the Bliss of Valinor; and thus began also the Count of Time.
But as the ages drew on to the hour appointed by Iluvatar for the coming of the Firstborn, Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars that Varda had wrought in the ages forgotten of her labours in Ea.”
But as the ages drew on to the hour appointed by Iluvatar for the coming of the Firstborn, Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars that Varda had wrought in the ages forgotten of her labours in Ea.”
– “Of the Beginning of Days”
And even before this, Melkor has already wreaked havoc, “so that the first designs of the Valar were never after restored.”
Tolkien broke through those veils, and found sadness, and treachery, almost from the very beginning.
Just recently a friend was describing to me her trip to Washington, D.C., for the interment of a decorated Navy veteran, celebrated in solemnity with full honors. She described the profound martial atmosphere - an air that Tolkien himself was intimately familiar with, and which is almost the very atmosphere of Middle Earth.
And even before this, Melkor has already wreaked havoc, “so that the first designs of the Valar were never after restored.”
Tolkien broke through those veils, and found sadness, and treachery, almost from the very beginning.
Just recently a friend was describing to me her trip to Washington, D.C., for the interment of a decorated Navy veteran, celebrated in solemnity with full honors. She described the profound martial atmosphere - an air that Tolkien himself was intimately familiar with, and which is almost the very atmosphere of Middle Earth.
She then told me a story of a chaplain who had been recently visiting several dying men, individually, unrelated to one another, except that they were veterans of World War II. This pastor was hearing stories of these men, in their dying breaths, of the sadness and terror and brutality - and tragedy - of their experience in that war. Not honor and glory and righteousness, but bare violence and fear.
In that context I mentioned to my friend a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It's a collection of work by Rene Girard. He also has peered through the mists of time, and what he sees is what he calls the founding violence of human religion - the violence, and violent acts, that are in fact the basis of human religion, and by extension, human culture, from the beginning. There Girard states:
“…the myth represents an event that actually occurred, a lynching that really took place…that neither Levi-Strauss nor any other interpreters of mythology have succeeded in recognizing because it is represented from the perspective of the murderers themselves.” P. 113, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Why didn’t Barfield see that? Why is there scant mention of that violence, when in fact Barfield claimed that what he was showing the reader is human consciousness beyond those veils? I think it was for two reasons at least: first, Barfield’s admitted goal, which is borne out in his work, was to convince his reader of the evolution of human consciousness. He did go to some extent to depict and characterize earlier modes of consciousness and their correlative worlds, but he did that primarily through philosophical texts.
In that context I mentioned to my friend a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It's a collection of work by Rene Girard. He also has peered through the mists of time, and what he sees is what he calls the founding violence of human religion - the violence, and violent acts, that are in fact the basis of human religion, and by extension, human culture, from the beginning. There Girard states:
“…the myth represents an event that actually occurred, a lynching that really took place…that neither Levi-Strauss nor any other interpreters of mythology have succeeded in recognizing because it is represented from the perspective of the murderers themselves.” P. 113, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Why didn’t Barfield see that? Why is there scant mention of that violence, when in fact Barfield claimed that what he was showing the reader is human consciousness beyond those veils? I think it was for two reasons at least: first, Barfield’s admitted goal, which is borne out in his work, was to convince his reader of the evolution of human consciousness. He did go to some extent to depict and characterize earlier modes of consciousness and their correlative worlds, but he did that primarily through philosophical texts.
That was his material, but the point was to demonstrate that ancient humankind had a qualitatively different consciousness than the consciousness of today. He wasn’t comparing the early to the late for a moral evaluation – one wasn’t better, or worse, than the other – one more violent than the other. He does mention that there are advantages of one over the other. But he glosses over the brutality and violence of the ancient pagan world as “sins of commission in thought, feeling and action.”
The other reason I think personal violence is hardly found in Barfield’s work is because it’s the physical realm that I’m speaking of – murder, rape, brutal justice. Barfield’s focus is more toward the spiritual realm, and the violence done there – which doesn’t even appear to us as violence. Ahriman and Lucifer may be spooky, and certainly oppose human evolution when one or the other dominates, but they certainly don’t strike one as violent, or as motives for physical violence.
Why is it that Tolkien did see this, and which is in fact a profound and substantive thread throughout his work, whereas it certainly isn’t in Barfield’s work? Tolkien was keen to this feature of the world of original participation because it was, in part, his motive for reaching with his imagination into the pagan texts: to understand personal tragedy.
The other reason I think personal violence is hardly found in Barfield’s work is because it’s the physical realm that I’m speaking of – murder, rape, brutal justice. Barfield’s focus is more toward the spiritual realm, and the violence done there – which doesn’t even appear to us as violence. Ahriman and Lucifer may be spooky, and certainly oppose human evolution when one or the other dominates, but they certainly don’t strike one as violent, or as motives for physical violence.
Why is it that Tolkien did see this, and which is in fact a profound and substantive thread throughout his work, whereas it certainly isn’t in Barfield’s work? Tolkien was keen to this feature of the world of original participation because it was, in part, his motive for reaching with his imagination into the pagan texts: to understand personal tragedy.
As a scholar, he was attempting to understand tragic texts – to learn the language of those texts, and to understand the mind and heart of the culture that produced them. It was then through his close, and heartfelt, study of those texts, and the exertion of his imagination in that direction, that Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkien invented his languages, mostly in order to convey the stories of human violence and betrayal that he wanted to tell.
