‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black.’
In a letter recently received from Jon Cink of the Brize Norton 5, he told me he was reading The Lord of the Rings. He is not the first prisoner for Palestine to have done so. Juno has spoken of Lord of the Rings memes shared by Lottie Head of the Filton 24 whilst they were in prison, who also found respite in Tolkien’s fantasy world.
The gentle spread of interest in Tolkien’s tales offered both a source of comfort and a reflection on camaraderie. At first, the shared preoccupation with Middle-Earth surprised me. Then, on my second trip to London to spend time with a bailed Juno, we watched Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Return of the King.
It was far too long and we started it far too late for the viewing not to be interrupted by my falling asleep. But I felt I was beginning to understand the appeal. A few days later, I turned to Tolkien’s books as well.
The epic story of Frodo and his friends is, by now, no doubt familiar to most — maybe overly familiar, in the manner that happens to all things which become engrained in popular consciousness.
We know the story and think little of it. It loses all novelty; its reading unnecessary since it feels like it has already been read collectively in advance. The renowned film adaptations, in particular, turn Tolkien’s narratives into a post-modern myth. But it is always so satisfying to read something overly familiar and see everything in it left out by the collective summary held above us.
I last tried to read The Lord of the Rings when I was 10. Emphasis on ‘tried’. The Hobbit was read to me as a bedtime story and I loved it. When Peter Jackson’s trilogy was in cinemas at the turn of the millennium, I set about reading the books for myself. But I didn’t get far into them. They were slightly beyond my reading comprehension and I remember I found them too much of a slog. But this didn’t dissuade me from a love of his world. I found other ways into it, and began to collect the stories all the same. I tried other tales – The Silmarillion, for instance — and I remember finding a first edition of David Day’s A Tolkien Bestiary in a local bookshop. It was quite an expensive book to buy a kid, but I asked to be bought it for my birthday all the same. I treasured it. I lived in that book.
Probably finding something deeply romantic in the descriptions of hobbit-holes lined with mathom and copious historical manuscripts — found, tellingly, in the prologue to the Lord of the Rings, which I did not get beyond — I liked to collect things from an early age. Old coins and old books beyond my grasp were mystical things. They felt all the more magical for my lack of understanding them.
There is that famous interview with Derrida in his book-filled home — I can’t find it now — where he is asked if he’s read the hundreds or thousands of books that line the walls. He laughs, saying a library of books you’ve read isn’t much worth having. It is better to have a library of books that one wishes to read eventually, or books that will take a long time to understand. My childhood bookshelf was a bit like that. It was lined with many books that felt mystical and which I would not fully come to appreciate until adulthood.
Twenty-five years later, I suppose it is finally Tolkien’s turn. I did not expect to return to Middle-Earth amidst a quiet habit of writing prison letters and despairing at the world. I am reading it now in a new light, knowing it has been savoured by those in prison for trying to disrupt an evil all too real. I am treasuring something profound within it.
The Fellowship of the Ring, as they name themselves, set out from Rivendell with a common cause — to destroy the One Ring and disrupt the spread of a Great Evil.
Many things are required of each of them individually to reach their shared goal, so the Fellowship is soon fragmented, separated and disconnected. They each go on wild adventures, but whenever they cross paths, they are eager to hear news about the others.
No matter what new struggles and challenges arise, taking each of them further and further away from their comrades, they never lose sight of the fact that their struggles are interlinked. Every victory is shared, as is every loss. They all share one Road:
[Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to…”
When I think now about those prisoners still locked inside — Sam of the Filton 24 and the Brize Norton 5 — as well as those currently on bail, who no doubt have a few ‘non-association orders’ between them, I think of a Fellowship fragmented but always linked, walking the Road.
It doesn’t take much time after entering Tolkien’s world to find its new resonances unsurprising. Peter Thiel and his ilk have long had a thing for naming their capital ventures after Tolkien’s evils.
Most are now aware of Palantir, named after the “seeing stones” used for surveillance. There is also Sauron Systems — a home security company. Anduril Industries, another ‘defense’ firm, bucks the trend by naming itself after Aragorn’s sword — a rare tribute to a force for good. Other financial ventures, from investment firms to private banks, take their names from Tolkien’s treasure-stuffed mountains or Elven or Dwarven holds.
It is fitting that bands of dissenters and actionists would see the spread of Thiel’s fantastical dystopia and, by contrast, see themselves in the wanderers and little peoples who take seriously the question of what to do with the time given to them. During the Filton trial, much was made of a comment by one of the actionists, who made the comparison, in a scuffle with Elbit’s mercenaries, between the Resistance and the Empire in Star Wars. There’s something about the Lord of the Rings comparison that is more moving, however.
It is an epic fantasy, yes, but its heart lies in the surprising fortitude of an unsuspecting people, who are emboldened to take on a power that dwarfs them — pun not entirely intended, since hobbits are dwarfed even by dwarves. They are emboldened not so much by want but need. Those who would be expected to intervene are preoccupied by their own affairs, like the High Elves who see themselves above the world of Men. Indeed, oftentimes, it falls to those, like the hobbits, who seem to be most distant, most at peace in some other corner of the world, to act. They are more successful than those with power precisely because intervention is least expected of them.
Tolkien himself admitted that his novels were informed by his experiences during the First World War, but he did not see Middle-Earth as an allegory for war-torn Europe. His experiences find their way inside his novels simply because they were his own experiences, and it is human to re-narrate those events that are most resistant to narrativization. In this way, his stories are true myths, straddling multiple purposes, including an escape from horror, but also as a way of narrating horrors anew.
It reminds me of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on myth and trauma. I was reading them recently as I try to make final corrections to my doctoral thesis.
In his long critique of psychoanalysis in Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss compares the psychoanalyst to a shaman, noting how the ‘treatments’ practiced by both are a kind of storytelling or performance, where the aim is always an ‘abreaction’ — a term that “refers to the decisive moment in the treatment when the patient intensively relives the initial situation from which his disturbance stems, before he ultimately overcomes it.”
In various cultures, shamans were performers of injury, in often spectacular and violent fashion. They would do whatever was in their power to re-enact a traumatic experience as it was lived in front of the traumatised. Lévi-Strauss continues:
the shamanistic cure seems to be the exact counterpart to the psychoanalytic cure, but with an inversion of all the elements. Both cures aim at inducing an experience, and both succeed by recreating a myth which the patient has to live or relive. But in one case, the patient constructs an individual myth with elements drawn from his past; in the other case, the patient receives from the outside a social myth which does not correspond to a former personal state.
Story-telling has this function already. If a shaman rehearses the story of an injury acquired, whether mental or physical, in order to ‘cure’ the individual, myths in general serve to alleviate traumas more collective. But what’s most interesting in Lévi-Strauss (and later Lacan) is how difficult it is to separate myths from traumas themselves.
To experience a trauma is to feel like one is experiencing “a living myth“, Lévi-Strauss says.
By this we mean that the traumatizing power of any situation cannot result from its intrinsic features but must, rather, result from the capacity of certain events, appearing within an appropriate psychological, historical, and social context, to induce an emotional crystallization which is molded by a pre-existing structure.
The Lord of the Rings has served this function in multiple ways throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. It is long overdue a newly traumythic appraisal.
Others have noted how The Lord of the Rings holds a traumythic sway over the millennial imagination. There was a brief summation of the moment Tolkien-fever swept the West around Y2K on Vox last year. Recalling the theatrical release of Peter Jackson’s trilogy and the real-world events of 9/11 and the War on Terror, which happened concurrently, Constance Grady writes how the first film
had a special resonance with its audience because of the moment in which it came out: a mere three months after September 11, 2001. It met an American audience ready and eager to throw themselves into the story of an epic battle between good and evil — one that good was definitely going to win…
It’s a conflation that has all the hallmarks of American superficiality, inexplicably imagining itself as the hero, despite all evidence to the contrary. After all, the drama of The Lord of the Rings is found precisely in its uncertainty, resulting from the pervasive sense that good’s triumph over evil is far from assured. Grady continues:
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with its pacifist hobbit hero, is frequently read as an antiwar tract. But to an American audience that felt newly vulnerable and desperate for revenge, Jackson’s Fellowship felt like a perfect allegory for why a “war on terror” was not just desirable but in fact necessary.
Writing in the New York Times in 2002, film critic Karen Durbin ran through the “accidental echoes” between the Lord of the Rings films and the war on terror: “Evil or ‘Evildoers?’ Sauron or Saddam? And how many towers?”
It all smacks of a grimly propagandist desperation to hitch reality onto a myth far from appropriate to an American manufacture of consent.
Even the well-meaning counter-reading towards the end of Grady’s article feels like grasping for some sort of convenient sense-making, as if any other mythical narrative could have served the same ends. Tolkien’s narrative just so happened to be the one made cinematic at that moment. It is a point that Grady observes in closing, finding that the persistent Tolkien references in Y2K culture no longer resonate as they may have done previously to the desperate:
Looking back, [the uncanny echoes] betray how difficult it was for anyone in America to see the world through any lens outside of 9/11 at the time — and how seductive it was to imagine oneself as part of a grand conflict that was both ethical and morally pure.
Overall, Grady reaches for some ambiguous nuance. Americans interpreted The Lord of the Rings as a war of good versus evil, although nothing is ever so simple as that. This is a banal truth — one just as applicable to Lord of the Rings itself, never mind the War on Terror. Indeed, Tolkien’s epic is less about good versus evil than it is about those who crave power and those who are wary of it in all of its forms. One of the primary reasons why it is Frodo Baggins who must carry the One Ring is that Gandalf, well aware of his own power, does not trust himself with it. Such immense power has a corrupting influence on all who might possess it. Better to give it to a hobbit, otherwise ‘powerless’, who can resist its corrupting allure far longer than others.
I have a long way to go on my own journey across Middle-Earth. I am only 100 pages into the 1000-page single-volume epic. But there is a great deal in it that I am finding calming already.
It has been a strange experience, over the last 8 months, to try and situate myself alongside an ordeal that is not strictly my own. My partner has faced the brunt of state violence in the form of the British prison system. I have only wandered by their side, offering whatever support I can — a veritable Samwise Gamgee, steadfast in my devotion to another’s burden. I don’t wish that to sound aggrandizing, whether of myself or others, but the image is a helpful one.
It has been disorienting to leave many comforts and habits behind over the last few months. I do not expect to ever return to them. Life has new priorities, which could not have been imagined a year ago. Nevertheless, the role adopted has been largely sedentary. It has felt oddly administrative at times. It is easy to see oneself as somehow lesser, somehow subordinated, in this position.
But at the same time, I have never before felt so much purpose. A supportive role is not diminutive. It takes as much love and fortitude to reorient one’s life around another’s burden as it does to carry that burden in the first place.
The experiences are of entirely different orders. My experience is my own; it is barely comparable to theirs or anyone else’s. But I long to meet others who know what it is like on this side of the struggle. I wonder what their hearts are like. I wonder if they mirror mine.
The role I take on is one that feels true to myself: to love and support others in what feels true to them. It solidifies a place in a fellowship, no matter how disparate that fellowship may be, and allows for taking one’s place upon the Road.
I think often of Bruno Bosteels’ foreword to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy for Militants:
While ordinarily this category carries echoes of stomping army boots and the whole arsenal of modern weaponry, such vulgar military connotations need not be the most relevant here. Perhaps equally important is the popular etymology that links the old Latin miles to mill(ia)-ites or millia passuum euntes — that is, ‘mile-goers’. We could thus say that a militant, simply put, is somebody who not only talks the talk but also walks the walk, or who goes the full mile.
We are militant upon the Road. We are ‘mile-goers’, and no matter whether we are locked in cells or anxious and alienated at home, we must remember that we do not go alone.