The Mixed Heritage of Tolkien's Myth
Part Three: How Tech and Art birthed the "Myth in the Machine"
This is not your usual history of the future. It’s firmly rooted in looking far into the past before there was a history, to a prehistory and a periphery as the author J.R.R. Tolkien imagined it during the chaos of two world wars: harried by chariots of mechanized warfare, worshipping the sun and the moon as hell rained down from artillery, the mayhem of gods, the fall of empires, crucibles of the rocket and code breaking, the only gentle escape, the stars. In those shadows, in that fiery ruin by a lamp light or lightning, a soldier devised a world outside of time, a history of catastrophe reimagined into a higher moral victory.
Nearly forty years after surviving the Battle of the Somme and ten years after the horrors of the Second World War, the full scope of Tolkien’s anti-war vision would unfold. It called back to an imagined past where redemption from technologically enhanced evil was still possible, where his Bilbo Baggins would sing as he walked in the pages of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, that “the Road goes ever on and on.”
Twenty years after that, as if mining the same higher ground, the German art-pop group Kraftwerk would sing, “farhen, farhen, farhen auf der Autobahn” — “drive, drive, drive on the Autobahn.” Their electronic keyboards and sound designs also redeemed the road less traveled, taking the pain of the past and opening the door to a wider horizon. Both reshaped our worlds. Both altered the question of time.
How did they do it? They placed the incongruous where previously they did not fit, in recognition that the old world had died. For Tolkien, this meant placing Victorian bygones in the medieval world, so that the contrast of Hobbits talking about tea time and smoking pipe-weed made fairy tales and Old Norse sagas seem more vibrant and more urgent, and “stodgy” England more modern and more heroic, than ever conceived. This myth was a magic mirror that reflected civilization’s darkest and brightest psychologies, reframing free will.
After the Second World War, Germany’s cities were mostly rubble. Growing up in a country that had perpetrated the Holocaust and lost its soul to Hitler, Kraftwerk in many ways had little room to maneuver. They inherited the myths of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll from America. They also inherited German folk music and Richard Wagner, both soiled by associations with nationalistic Nazism. For Kraftwerk, electronic music offered a way out and a way forward, utterly fantastic, and otherworldly. They placed it in the soft pop warmth of nostalgia, taking the Autobahn, a Nazi public works, and transforming it into freedom.
And common to both, is music. For language is music. Tolkien’s was an “art-language” as he described it, his Elvish and his Dwarvish, his Rohirric and his Hobbitish — all mixed together with his Old English sensibilities, when words rolled off the tongue, pushing against the Latinization of French and the Roman Catholic, retaining a tension going back to the Christianization of the British Isles and the 1066 conquest of England by William and his Normans. In fact, as he tells it, Middle-earth and Tolkien’s whole mythic universe is conceived by the Song of the Ainur: the Ainulindalë — the music of the gods.
The medieval scholar Jane Chance identifies this aesthetic angle of Tolkien’s obsession with language as key to unlocking the mysterious power of his fiction. Sometime in 1931, he wrote mysteriously about his obsession with language in an essay and lecture that his son Christopher Tolkien later retitled, “A Secret Vice.” Deconstructing the essay, Chance argues that Tolkien cast himself allegorically as a fellow soldier heading off to war, “this queer creature,” who “cheered himself and comforted himself in the tedium and squalors of ‘training under canvas,’” a “little man” who was likely “blown to bits in the very moment of deciding upon some ravishing method of indicating the subjunctive.”
In her 2016 book, Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature,” Chance meticulously traces Tolkien’s sense of alienation from time and place. Part of her cartography includes a key correspondence with the acclaimed and august poet W.H. Auden, one of his former students and great defenders. He wrote Auden in 1955, remarking that “it is I suppose impossible to write any ‘story’ that is not allegorical in proportion as it ‘comes to life’; since each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life.”
Critically, in “A Secret Vice,” he charted his own tale and garments back to his Elvish art-languages, which he described as “peculiarly mine” and maybe as “too free,” “over-pretty, to be phonetically and semantically sentimental,” the expression of which involves “the pain of giving away myself.”
To me, this sounds exactly like the art of music, and indeed the actual sound of music, not just the content of lyrics or its allegorical semantics — i.e. words with meaning. In fact, there is a “universal truth and everlasting life” to the sounds and the look of Tolkien’s languages and names in themselves, regardless of their full translation to what they mean in English or our own relational memories. This is incredibly similar to the artistic value of instrumental music, from drums in a ghost dance to Wagner’s mythic chords to the motorik melodies and groove of Kraftwerk’s 1974 global hit, ‘Autobahn,’ which also benefited from its floating dissociation from what had come before.
While Tolkien worked in the modes and archetypes of the literature and mythologies of the Middle Ages — the confluence of various European cultures and languages and events following the fall of the Roman Empire — the placement of his “too free” and “sentimental” sounds transformed his constructions into what is today known as Fantasy with a capital “F.”
That is, he dislodged us from the everyday, from the known course, from accepted history. It was not revisionist, but it was revolutionary. Here, was the beginning of modern mythology, shaped into something more dreamlike, more psychic, more profoundly personal and universal all at the same time. Here it was asked, in the shadow and destruction of two world wars, can we escape the past? Can we outrun or redeem the cycles of deprivation and hatred amid amnesia?
“Frodo Lives!” was the American graffiti that popped up across the United States in the 1960s, on New York subway cars and freight trains, during the tumults of the Vietnam War and the hippie counterculture movement, the expansive Lord of the Rings resonating with ‘60s counter-culture and psychedelia. At its core though, it embodied compassion and peace and courage to do what was right. In a word — heroic. That’s why it worked.
It was an energy that resonated with a generation in the middle of epic change. Tolkien’s influence on bands like Led Zeppelin is well known, his characters and sentiments finding their way onto songs like ‘Ramble On,’ ‘Misty Mountain Hop,’ ‘The Battle of Evermore,’ and ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.’ Black Sabbath’s ‘The Wizard’ was a direct ode to Gandalf. The Canadian progressive rock band Rush, a generation later, channeled Tolkien with ‘Rivendell.’ The London nightclub that helped launch Pink Floyd was called Middle-Earth. His influence on filmmakers like George Lucas and Ridley Scott was also profound, if more clothed in their own garments of time and place.
A lot was cresting in the mid-1970s after the tumult of the ‘60s. Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, once declared that only Frank Herbert’s desert sci-fi book Dune (1965) came close to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings — still one of Clarke’s favorite books up until his death — in its power, depth and scale. The Beatles even tried to recruit Kubrick to make Tolkien’s masterpiece into a film starring Paul McCartney as Frodo Baggins, George Harrison as Gandalf, Ringo Starr as Sam Gamgee, and John Lennon as Gollum.
2001 hugely influenced Lucas, who after his 1973 coming-of-age film American Graffiti — about 1960s Modesto, California — got the chance to jump the world into hyperspace with 1978’s Star Wars. It was also the time of NASA, nuclear power, the nuclear arms race, and the consumer electronics wave.
Synthesizers were de rigueur for a time in 1970s rock music: first as expensive machines that gave prog rock super bands like Yes and Pink Floyd a Space Age head-trip soundscape, that transported listeners to “other worlds,” taking rock music to ever more extravagant heights. At the same time, a new generation of German musicians, who grew up in a country divided at the end of World War II into West and East partitions, sought a new headspace to reconnect with a sense of solidarity and curiosity, opening up new possibilities.
Formed in 1970 by Düsseldorf musicians Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk took the strains of Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and combined it with a deep fascination with machines. While there were other great German bands like Tangerine Dream, Can, Neu! and so on — vast in their variety and talent — Kraftwerk are the ones who cracked the code, starting a fire that would blaze across the Atlantic and help give birth to hip hop, house and techno music, all revolutionary forms of music based on soul and the blues.
Turning the key to the ignition, Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ was a trip for the mind. While Jimi Hendrix and James Brown had also greatly influenced Kraftwerk and their peers, along with free jazz and Davis’ landmark albums like Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew, it was the synthesizer and the use of sound effects — the car engine rumbling awake and onto the road — that instantly set it apart. The year before, the Memphis soul of Stax Records had perhaps foreshadowed the shift with the roaring riffs of Steve Cropper’s electric guitar. Lucas’ American Graffiti with its cars drag-racing in Modesto to the sound of Booker T. & the M.G.’s ‘Green Onions,’ is a signature moment in cinema.
After Lucas had captured his own teen years through the lens of leaving Modesto, and hence his Tatooine, that heartfelt homage to 1950s and 1960s Americana gave way to a far different reimagining of the American fairy tale, one universal in its expanse both in terms of time and space. The opening line “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away” from Star Wars may be the most inspired ten words in all of myth the last 50 years. It is a glorious contradiction in one punch. Lucas took medieval archetypes and injected them into a whiz bang Space Age techno universe, the magical and technological made one and the same.
Against this backdrop of intuitive myth-making was a civil rights movement, which had culminated in major legislation in the late 1960s, including the lesser known Love vs. Virginia ruling in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which secured the right for mixed couples to mate and marry across the country. Like Tolkien and Kraftwerk, Lucas was creating a wider universe, an escape into a fantasy where this new consciousness, still emerging in the real world, could take full flight on the page, in the airwaves, and on the silver screen.
Some critics called it “escapism,” laying the full charge against Tolkien early on. Today, they call it blockbuster entertainment, so total, it goes far beyond anything Wagner could have ever imagined when he dreamed up his operatic mega-verse of the so-called Gesamtkuntswerk, or “total artwork.”
But the Big Bang of Myth didn’t make the full jump to hyperspace until we had cyberspace. The vertiginous spin of post-WWII pop culture created a massive tidal wave that we’re navigating in ever deeper and bigger currents. Right as that flood of myths surged on film and paper, computers formed the infrastructure for an alternate “universe,” presaged in many ways by the video game arcades of the 1980s. There was an explosion of techno art and immersion in those arcades, from 8-bit graphic games like Space Invaders, Galaga and Centipede, to vector graphics games like Tempest and the 1983 Star Wars rail shooter, which was exhilarating in its dogfights and trench runs. Atari, Inc. created that latter classic, as it led the charge into the home along with personal computing.
At Marvel Comics, ever the magpie factory of American dreams, the myth of the American Dream had continued its most implausible mutations. Long derided for decades as empty-headed juvenilia, the low brow reputation of superhero graphic arts belied a more substantive exchange. The artwork itself, all hand drawn, was almost superhuman in its experimentation and volume. Marvel started its Silver Age peak in 1961 when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee launched The Fantastic Four, while D.C. Comics followed suit, including its 1980s breakthroughs with Swamp Thing, The Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.
Tolkien’s Sauron even got his own “cameo” in the Marvel Universe with the pterodactyl villain, Karl Lykos, a twisted scientist who loved the Lord of the Rings and named himself after the Dark Lord. He’s a bizarro amalgamation of cultural streams, from dinosaurs to demons, who fits right into Marvel’s free jazz pop of mutant mythology: the legendary run of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s highly influential Uncanny X-Men series went from the late 1970s into the ‘80s.
I remember being on the floor of my cousin Tripp’s room, who was an avid comic collector, and reading the Uncanny X-Men issues #114 and #115, with its backstory on Lykos and images of him reading Tolkien’s masterpiece, the character taking inspiration for his name before becoming an evil pterodactyl man. Being a half Japanese and half European descent kid, with family friends from across the ethnic spectrum, characters like Storm, Nightcrawler, and Lykos, resonated instinctively with me, as the question of identity morphed into a permanent interior-exterior ambience.
I spent my early years in Memphis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My overriding experience was comic books, posters, TV and movies, all filled with ever more real dreamscapes — from 1978’s Superman: The Movie to 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back to 1983’s WarGames, Marvel’s Spider-Man and TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons, and last but not least, the Atari 2600, playing games like Maze Craze and Adventure, and watching my brother John save the world from nuclear armageddon as he won Missile Command: its flashing 8-bit explosions of color blowing my mind.
The transition from the analog to the digital world was slow and long. I was anywhere from three to seven years old at the time, and I remember it all vividly, including my brothers collecting Dragon magazine, watching anime series like Speed Racer and Star Blazers, and John hanging his Lord of the Rings calendar art by the Brothers Hildebrandt on his walls. We were mainly listening to Styx, Kansas, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Rush — lots of Rush and their landmark Moving Pictures album in 1981, supercharged with synthesizers, and Van Halen’s 1984, also riddled with brilliant synthesizer work — one of the late Eddie Van Halen’s less celebrated but no less important contributions to music.
“Drive, drive, drive on the Autobahn” — for me, it began early on. When I saw Tron in 1982, with its immersive dive into the Machine, the film made perfect sense to me; my father was a systems designer, with IBM terminals and magnetic tape machines running in the garage, including an Ohio Scientific Challenger III computer rack-mounted with memory drives. It was the size of a refrigerator. And yet it had a fraction of the processing power of today’s most basic mobile digital device, far smaller even than an iPod Nano (also now defunct).
That in itself is not unlike the shrinking of Zeus and Hera and Freya and Thor from larger-than-life gods and ghosts projected by our prehistoric minds onto the dark night beyond campfires, down to children’s stories of insect-like fairies and comic book superheroes who live among us. The more advanced we have become, the more our past has shrunk, and yet it looms larger and more powerful than before. One might say it’s an optical illusion: rationalism and reality seem to vanish the more we drone on about it.
I was six when I saw Blade Runner too, in the movie theater with my dad and my brothers. It was incredibly dark, and I was scared through much of it. Still, it made an indelible impression, and because it starred Han Solo — Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard — I was able to journey through. Both Tron and Blade Runner greatly influenced the cyberpunk author William Gibson as he conceived a dark near future with his groundbreaking Neuromancer. Blade Runner’s electronic score by Vangelis evoked an endless landscape of bleak yet exquisite romance, while Wendy Carlos’ Tron’s score did the same, except within a computer world.
Growing up, because of my father, I was around computers more than most kids, especially in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. So when my cousin Tripp bought me Meco’s space disco remixes of John Williams’ Empire Strikes Back score for my birthday, complete with sound effects like the marching of AT-ATs, it was perfect, a cyber kid’s dream music. This was not long after the dizzying rise and fall of the Bee Gees with their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The akabeko cow logo of RSO Records, which published both, is still burned into my psyche.
When my brothers handed me Neuromancer many years later, its dense surrealist trip through cyberspace was an altered mythic dimension that I easily welcomed into my head. Dystopian at its core, Neuromancer imagined a future where bytes threatened to devour everything. The digital cultural clash was coming. Disco of course, had met its “Disco Sucks!” death in 1979 at the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Out of those ashes, however, would emerge house music. Then Detroit took the world headlong into a Gibsonian matrix.
Detroit Techno is blues in the matrix, a melancholy electronic soul music that envisioned freedom from mental slavery in the sparkling bytes and beats of pure tonality. The Black musicians Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May wrote the sonic blueprint that would inspire generations of electronica and EDM artists around the world, taking the ideas pioneered by Kraftwerk into overdrive, influencing everyone from Underworld to DJ Shadow to Billie Eilish.
When I was growing up, this digital migration was the domain of the nerd, or the “geek” as first adopters of tech became more fondly called in the new millennium. At the same time that I was perusing X-Men and Spider-Man comics, computer games like Zork were building out sophisticated text-only adventures, where text commands like “hit the troll with the Elvish sword” were the order of the day.
By the 1980s, the market for bored kids and teens was immense, awash in multimedia fantasies from Gamma World to Ultima to Karateka, and into the ‘90s and 2000s, with the advent of Doom, console games like Halo, and PC games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends.
Tolkien talked about the Machine for a reason. He framed the Machine in contrast to Magic, which was also technical in nature, especially when we talk about Elves, who crafted the Silmarils, the Palantíri (the Seeing Stones) and the first Rings of Power. For example, he famously decried the combustion engine, but late in life he was fascinated with the dictaphone. The critical difference was the intent and the attraction of these beautiful “things,” and their effects. Why and how they were designed, even sometimes with the best of intentions, often determined how dangerous they might become, as well as their cost to society.
When it came to the One Ring, and the story of The Lord of the Rings, however, he was making a specific statement by arguing that some technologies are conceived and corrupted by greed and avarice — the heart of Sauron. It wasn’t just that the “ring to rule them all,” which he associated with what he called the “Machine,” was all-powerful. It had physical effects — invisibility — but it was profoundly psychological too. Central to his concept of corruption, was the power of deceit. It is perhaps so obvious that many people miss it. That’s the meta brilliance of his design. Invisibility is cool, yes, but in Tolkien’s mythology, invisibility and altered perception can also erode moral codes. Trolls, as we know, bask in anonymity.
Liars riddle his stories and are often the architects of Middle-earth’s greatest calamities and falls, especially self-delusion. Disinformation is the currency of Saruman and his toady Gríma Wormtongue. Boromir and Denethor are undone by their temptations and distortions of ego and fear. Sauron is nothing but a blazing eye of lies, constantly tricking and fooling anyone he can, from his deception as Lord of Gifts, to his exploitative manipulations of Gollum, Shelob, and in fact everyone in his charge — misled and miserable under his leadership.
Ten years after he wrote Auden about how “each of us is an allegory,” Tolkien wrote in the Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 that his tale was best not treated that way. In other words, what he meant was for each of us to find and apply the most humane and supple stories to our own embodied allegory and lives. And yet he did not mean that such freedom absolved anyone from a basic grounding in reason and decency — otherwise free will would wither in the face of mendacity. Tolkien advocated for universal applicability to empower his readers over his own designs, where anyone, in any time, in any culture, could apply his myth to their lives, to help them move from shadow into enlightenment, from hate to compassion, with a fantasy that was more disconnected from place but more reconnected to a deeper common human destiny, i.e. Myth.
Just as storytellers program with words, so do computer engineers program machines with code, and those machines in turn shape who we are in ever faster algorithms and allegories. What matters is the full measure of the journey and our own peculiar humanity. Where is the heart amid the madness? For the Medium is the Message, and the Myth is the Dream. No matter the many ministrations of the Machine, the mysteries of human nature are always there for us to beware, and to explore into infinity.