Tolkien and the World That Could Have Been

Temple of Poseidon,Sounion

Tolkien spent much time immersed in the consciousness of ancient humans, via the texts that they wrote. The Icelandic sagas, Beowulf, the Old Testament (Tolkien was an advisor for the New Jerusalem version of the Catholic scriptures). 'The mists of time’ mark the transition from original participation to idolatry, using Barfield's terms for the stages of human consciousness of the last ten thousand years or so. 

Original participation didn’t only obtain in that far distant time, but it did fully characterize that time. As it turns out, I think the attempt to transport oneself back to that time is very likely to induce a subtle but profound metamorphosis of perception that is in itself a glimmer of that world. Reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is one exercise that will likely bring about that metamorphosis. Even sketching out the chronology, from our present time, back to the beginnings of the First Age of Middle Earth, will begin to break the hard packed soil of our chrono-centrism. 

Let me just say, too, that in the end, it’s not necessarily the mere quantity of years, but the reaching of the mists of time, wherever we may personally encounter them, and then passing through, that is the essential thing. So we begin with the present day, even the present moment, and we walk ourselves back to the 1960’s, when personal computers and mobile phones and the Space Shuttle and high-interest mortgages and digital photography didn’t exist. The internal combustion engine was still imagined to be the bedrock of human civilization. 

Then we step back another one hundred years, when that bedrock didn’t even exist, though the steam engine did. There were still empires and dynasties, political and culutural. There were still unexplored areas of the globe. Not all of Antarctica nor Africa had been fully charted according to the standards of the day. 

 We move further back, to the advent and golden age of the mechanical clock, before any kind of motorized transportation, when horse and wheel and ship and boat were the measures of speed. Great civilizations had and did exist, but they were great according to different scales. Great ships sailed the oceans, but only so far, and only so many. Still, there was learning, there were books, there were scribes of various sorts in many human cultures. 

 We look further back, through years and years and years of only small – and not necessarily incremental or cumulative – technological change, within a matrix of experiential continuity. Towns and cities may have come and gone in the course of thousands of years, but their mode of living hardly differed from what flourished a hundred or five hundred years before. There were still human-authored texts, and of course humans were speaking to one another through this whole time – in African cities and forests, on Pacific islands, in the mountains of the South American continent. 

 It's right about here – or ‘then’ – that I personally encounter ‘the mists of time’. There is a distinct and profound and growing gap between what I’ve read from these humans, and what I’ve seen of the external remains of those humans – their bones, their pottery, the remains of walls of their cities. The stones at Mycenae and Tyrns, the traces of Anasazi in southwest North America. 

I begin to lose track of what these people were like from the inside – I can no longer keep the interior view and the exterior view synchronized. The interior view - the Upanishads, the Iliad and Odyssey - no longer jive with the ruins, the dry, dusty, broken pottery, and heat of the day on the Plains of Lesithi. Then, there, at that extreme, I read that the people of that far distant place and time themselves looked back to a far distant place and time. They themselves looked back and reached a 'mists of time' through which they couldn't see. 

 The hobbits of Hobbiton lived thousands of years before our present time, yet they seem modern by comparison to the elves and dwarves. But the elves and dwarves look back to an even deeper time, a time before there were sun and moon. Christopher Tolkien emphasized, in the introduction to The Children of Hurin, that the story takes place 'in the Elder Days, the First Age of the world, in a time unimaginably remote....Some six and a half thousand years before the Council of Elrond was held in Rivendell, Turin was born in Dorlomin." 

Now we're prepared to see the world bathed in the light of original participation.