The Mixed Heritage of Tolkien's Myth
Part Two: How Tolkien saved the "northern spirit" from Wagner
First conceived in 1917, J.R.R. Tolkien’s first tale of mixed heritage, Beren and Lúthien, went through several permutations over the course of Tolkien’s life (read more about how it flipped medieval archetypes and modern expectations about female heroism here). It was part of his first collection of myths, a manuscript he titled The Book of Lost Tales. From the very beginning, a nostalgia for a higher and more magical age was part of his narrative vision, and yet he transformed his original inspirations into far more supple orientations.
Perceiving nostalgia in another “northern spirit” artist, the electronic music pioneer Brian Eno once described the music orientation of German electro-pop giants Kraftwerk as “nostalgic for the future.” By contrast, Tolkien’s literature, his hymn, his “music,” was a clairvoyance that looked through the past and into the timeless. There is a correlation between the two post-World War II projects, both informed by the ardent melancholic grit that has long defined Northern Europe, both of them seeking redemption from the past.
At their core is joy glazed and frosted with shadow and longing. From garden gnomes to chocolate-covered marzipan, the “North” is not without its cheer or its kitsch. Tolkien’s hobbits are in their own way incredibly kitsch — idealized fairies of the farm. But there is also something else there, something dark.
No, the mission was to reclaim a hardier ethic and sensitive spirit back from the evils of Adolf Hitler and what Tolkien called the Machine. Kraftwerk’s nostalgia for the future was about re-envisioning an outlook that was tolerant, self-critical, optimistic, and yes, ironically kitsch. Tolkien, who came from an older generation and had survived the trenches of the Great War, only to pray for his sons as they defended England during World War II, made a principled fairy tale cri de couer.*
As the medievalist and scholar Jane Chance recently proclaimed in her 2016 book, Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature,” there is now a rich amount of detail and posthumous output to more clearly indicate that Tolkien himself felt like an outsider for most or all of his life, and that Middle-earth, and his invention of languages was indeed the music that he created to recast his reality in a more inspiring interface. As much as he loved England, he found in the “northern spirit” a refuge and a furnace for ideas that went far beyond the native.
“An outlier, Tolkien queers modernity by means of the medieval,” she writes. “His work is interconnected in terms of his borrowing from medieval literary proto-types and paradigms, his inheritance of Victorian culture and the kind of stereo-types its culture perpetuated, his own scholarship, and his creation of a queer — non-normative — mythology based on privileging of the marginal.”
This is why it is critically important to place more recent attempts to associate Tolkien with the works of 19th century composer Richard Wagner in proper context. Because the allegation goes that Tolkien must have been greatly influenced by the German opera visionary, who was known for grandiose hallucinations of nordic hegemony as well as antisemitism.
Wagner was Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, and his music and multi-sensory Ring cycle became one of the great artistic backdrops to Nazi Germany. Many Wagner fans have tried very hard to rehabilitate Wagner’s reputation following the great horrors of WWII and the Holocaust. No doubt, there are countless opera fans who listen past his darker obsessions, and are able to enjoy his works on aesthetics alone.
The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross is a great admirer of Wagner, though he is greatly troubled by Wagner’s warped nationalism. In September of last year, he released his third book, Wagnerism, which is a vast undertaking that takes great pains to sublimate Wagner and his impact on other 20th century artists from his adoption by the Nazis. Clearly Wagner was able to make compelling and beautiful music. But over time he became in fact, sadly, consciously and enthusiastically bigoted. Ross attempts to extract this rot from the tree.
In his article from 2003, The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs. Tolkien, Ross plays up the idea that Wagner greatly influenced Tolkien. He writes that The Lord of the Rings “dwells in the shadow of Wagner’s even more monumental ‘Ring of the Nibelung.’ J. R. R. Tolkien’s fans have long maintained a certain conspiracy of silence concerning Wagner, but there is no point in denying his influence, not when characters deliver lines like ‘Ride to ruin and the world’s ending!’—Brünnhilde condensed to seven words.”
This is not Ross’s most level journalism, because there is in fact no conspiracy (most Tolkien fans don’t even know who Wagner is or his work), and also because Tolkien never talked about Wagner, except to say his Ring story came from a far different angle. Besides, Brünnhilde existed hundreds of years before Wagner in countless Medieval texts and ballads; Tolkien sat at the same ring of mythic fire.
“Admit it, J.R.R., you used to run around brandishing a walking stick and singing ‘Nothung! Nothung!’ like every other besotted Oxford lad,” Ross jests. This is a little bit of pique. But Ross is not alone. As the scholar Edward Haymes argues, on both sides, similarities between Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings demonstrate that “J.R.R.” was a closet Wagnerian. His skillful arguments are compelling, especially around the similarities between how the Ring is “discovered” in a cave, and its all-consuming destructive power.
In his detailed lecture The Two Rings, about the parallels between the two artists, Haymer alleges that Tolkien rejected the association with Wagner because he was so indebted to Wagner, but also because he perhaps rejected Wagner’s politics. C.S. Lewis was a huge Wagner fan, and apparently there is a story that Tolkien once attended a Wagner opera with him in London. And according to Lewis’ brother Warnie, they once did a reading of The Valkyrie in German.
Even so, this doesn’t mean Tolkien was big on Wagner. Even if he was “influenced” by him, Tolkien was always very much about striking his own path. You can see this in his general attitudes about Shakespeare, for example. To him, Shakespeare should be acted, not read like literature. Therefore, he was resistant to Shakespeare as a model for great novel writing. Tolkien was also very open that he was greatly influenced by the Eddas, the Völsunga Saga and the Nibelungenlied, which all feature the great mythic valkyrie Brunhild. In fact, he readily admitted that he took influences from many places, including the Finnish Kalevala, the frontier stories of James Fenimore Cooper, William Morris, Beowulf, Homer, Japanese paintings and so on.
We must not forget that just because Lewis loved Wagner, for example, does not mean Tolkien had the same enthusiasm. If he did, I believe we would know much more about it. In fact, his exposure to Wagner may have been very much because Lewis foisted Wagner on him. Tolkien did not like all of Lewis’ preoccupations, and famously found The Chronicles of Narnia to be too overtly Christian for his tastes. Tolkien’s sensibilities were more subtle than Wagner’s, and more principled, when you look at this debate in terms of thematics.
Even so, Haymes makes a strong case that Gollum and his murder of Déagol for the One Ring was taken from Wagner’s rendering of Fafner murdering his brother Fasolt for the Ring. This could be. The ring seems to fit. But it is just as likely that Tolkien was inspired by Cain and Abel in Genesis. Perhaps so was Wagner. In fact, many of the sleight of hand comparisons Haymes and Ross make between Tolkien and Wagner can still find their ultimate sources in biblical undertones and Old Norse sagas. Except for the activities cited around Lewis, Haymes has no other evidence, and in the end acknowledges that Tolkien could have devised his own Rings design. Ross on the other hand, makes no seriously compelling arguments.
Renée Vink committed a whole erudite book in 2012 to the topic, with Wagner and Tolkien: Mythmakers. It is an excellent read as she charts all of the various nuances of Tolkien’s intersection with Wagner. Coincidentally, that same year, Christopher MacLachlan put out a similar book, Tolkien and Wagner: The Ring and Der Ring. Put out by the same publisher, these accountings were triggered by the publication of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in 2009 by Christopher Tolkien, which collected two of his father’s verse interpretations of the original Old Norse stories of the Völsungs and the Nifelungs, found in the Old Norse mythic Elder Edda and the Poetic Edda. Vink’s book in particular breaks down the controversy surrounding the Tolkien camp’s refusal of Wagner with an admirably even hand.
This flirtation became fantasy in director Dome Karukoski’s 2019 biopic film, Tolkien. It portrays a young Tolkien and his future wife Edith Bratt going to see Wagner on a date. They are unable to get tickets, so the two sneak in behind the stage, dress up in costume, and find the fire of myth and romance to the sounds of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The film marks this tryst as a major turning point. It’s a nice dramatic twist.
“Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,” Tolkien once wrote emphatically. To which Ross retorts, “The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas.” But is that actually true? What does this possible sophistry hinge on and where does this sense of “must” come from?
Personally, I still don’t buy it. And here’s why. It is likely very true Tolkien was steeped in Wagner. Vink makes a strong case, but she doesn’t overplay the tune like Ross. An admirer of both Tolkien and Wagner’s music, she notes that every European artist of the era was influenced by Wagner to some degree. So to say he was influenced by Wagner is not saying much.
On the allegation that Tolkien took elements from Wagner’s own mythification of Old Norse legends, again it is also feasible, but it must be taken in the context that Tolkien was just as much inspired, or far more inspired, by the original texts that fed Wagner’s imagination. That, as Vink writes, “given his passion for the genuine article, for the ancient texts themselves in the form in which they had been handed down to posterity, it is doubtful whether he would have revised his judgement if he had been aware of it.”
In fact, what I think we can be sure of, is that Tolkien crafted his mythology as a corrective to Wagner’s melodramatic, lusty and operatic vision of the North. “Both ‘The New Lay of the Völsungs’ and The Lord of the Rings can to a certain extent be considered products of his engagement with Wagner’s work,” Vink writes. “Yet in all probability this influence was negative rather than positive, and to call Tolkien an imitator or an epigone would be missing the point.”
Details mattered to Tolkien, and while he took names from the Völuspá in the Eddas for Gandalf and the dwarves in The Hobbit, and modeled characters after Odín (Wotan), Andvari and others, it does not mean he was then crafting his story like a stenographer. In the same way he transformed those names and characters, yes, his imagination may very well have been evoked by seeing a Wagner opera, or listening to Lewis enthuse about the composer’s works. Perhaps Edith, his Lúthien, a gifted pianist, even played Wagner in their home.
But the idea that when it comes to rings of power, that there is “nothing quite like it in the old sagas,” which Ross and Haymer profess, is not entirely accurate. The Norse god Odín wore the magical ring, Draupnir. Rings were riddled throughout Viking and Anglo-Saxon cultures — common finds in archeology. Ross forgets or does not know about Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent (or World Serpent), who wraps his body around the world like a ring, a common image in Viking jewelry. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians also used a similar motif — the ouroboros. And let’s not forget that starting in his childhood, Tolkien was fascinated by dragons, which drew him headlong into the legend of Sigurd. In fact, Ross and Haymer overlook Andvaranaut, the ring that curses its wearers and leads to patricide.
In 1936, the German publisher Rütten & Loening in Berlin, which had been stripped of its original Jewish owners and all of its Jewish staff, contacted Tolkien about translating and releasing a German version of The Hobbit for its market. They asked if Tolkien’s surname was of pure “Aryan” extraction.
Tolkien wrote a reply declining to grant such proof, as well as any license to publish his book in Nazi Germany: “I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”
In this light, it is no wonder why Tolkien, even if he took some ideas, even big ideas from Wagner, would craft his own Rings mythology as a rejection of sorts, or an alternative to The Ring of the Nibelungs. We must remember that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings during and after the Second World War, deep in thought over the horrors of nearly four decades of merciless destruction.
It helps to put ourselves back in that moment of sheer terror. In June, 1941, Tolkien sent an impassioned letter to his second son, Michael Tolkien, who was awarded a George Medal for his defense of England in the Battle of Britain as an anti-aircraft gunner, and who was later stationed in France and Germany:
“I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler … Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
Tolkien, as much as he loved England, was also not enamored of the British Empire, as he expressed to his youngest son in various letters. “I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust,” he wrote to Christoper in May, 1945.
Of course, Tolkien was not perfect. Nor was Wagner all evil. When it comes to art, sometimes it’s hard to decipher. Take Tolkien’s approximation of Middle-earth’s more “exotic” encounters with peoples and cultures outside his more European-inspired locus, derived it seems in part from the history of the Dark Ages. The Lord of the Rings includes the Easterlings and the Haradrim, who ally with the armies of Mordor. Perhaps more regrettably, Peter Jackson’s films explicitly depict the elephant-riding Haradrim as vaguely Indian or Middle Eastern.
There is also an air of the Christian Crusades about the wartime proceedings in The Return of the King as well. The historian Amin Maalouf’s essential book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes deconstructs how the West’s cultural memory since the Crusades lacks candor. He does not touch on Tolkien in any way, but his exhaustive chronicle of the Franks’ invasion of the Middle East makes an important case against lingering notions of Western superiority, even the semantics of “crusades” being self-righteous.
Even so, Tolkien never used the term crusades. And he never justified conquest against any lands South or East of Minas Tirith, and instead implicitly criticized such campaigns by depicting the “Black Númenóreans” as imperialist raiders and enslavers. One might also point to the history of Hannibal’s campaign — the Carthaginian general’s sailing from North Africa to Europe and the march of his elephant-riding troops through the Alps and down toward Rome in the second century B.C. Or Tolkien might point to the Moorish invasions of Spain, or the great terror of the “Mongol Hordes” led by Genghis Khan across Eurasia.
And yet, while Tolkien clearly drew on some of that background to color his mythology in questionable ways, he was still careful to not so dehumanize such allusions to past cultural clashes. One of the most memorable scenes in The Lord of the Rings happens when Sam encounters a Haradrim soldier who dies before his very eyes: “It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”
If we want to dig deeper still for the true sentiments in Tolkien’s heart, we can return again to his biography. He was born in what is now South Africa. His first memories are from there, though he left when he was three and never returned after his father died of rheumatic fever. Even though it was far in his past, and belonged to a “golden age” when both his parents were alive, he held a lifelong yearning to revisit his birthland. He also disapproved greatly of Apartheid.
It’s hard to know all of the subtle influences on Tolkien, but I like to think that one of them, even if he could not remember, was of African fellowship, since it persisted as part of family legend. When Tolkien was a baby, a native boy named Isaak, employed by his father, found him so fascinating that without asking, he took the little white child with him back to his village, to show him with pride to his mother and his neighbors. They kept baby Tolkien safely overnight and then the next morning brought him back to Tolkien’s parents, who were most relieved. It seems that Isaak was not punished, for later in life he named his own son Isaak Mister Tolkien Victor.**
Yet what was Tolkien really nostalgic for? Primarily he was nostalgic for an open intellectual atmosphere, from which reason and understanding could emerge. He felt this passionately throughout his career at Oxford in terms of the serious study of Anglo-Saxon language and history, watching it fall into a kind of pre-requisite ghetto for Lit majors. At his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford in 1959, he said that “I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.”
As Chance proclaims, Tolkien was mistreated as an outsider most of his life. He was a fantasist when it was verboten among academics. He practiced Catholicism in a predominantly Protestant nation. He was of German descent and carried a “foreign” surname during two great wars with Germany.
“Intolerance for difference—alterity—threatens community and leads, as Tolkien reveals, to war and devastation,” writes Chance. Wagner never got this, and never embraced the outsider. For him, only some should inherit the sky and earth. He didn’t get the tragic effects of intolerance. Tolkien, ever curious, did.
*Things are not necessarily black and white when it comes to Tolkien’s politics or his shifting views in more complex contexts. For example, he apparently voiced support for Francisco Franco’s fascist Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. But he also expressed this view after he was told by a friend who had reported on the conflict that Catholic nuns, priests and monks were murdered by Communist death squads. He also had no illusions about Joseph Stalin, who was granted leniency by many Western intellectuals, including opportunistically by Ernest Hemingway. Tolkien referred to Stalin as “that bloodthirsty old murderer.”
**As Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter recounts: “in Bank House there was tolerance, most notably over the extraordinary behavior of Isaak who one day stole little John Ronald Reuel and took him to his kraal where he showed off with pride the novelty of a white baby. It upset everybody and caused a great turmoil, but Isaak was not dismissed, and in gratitude to his employer he named his own son ‘Isaak Mister Tolkien Victor.’” Of course, one can also read a colonial hegemonic power structure in this story. Still, at least compassion seems the stronger when it comes to the Tolkien family itself.