Tolkien and the Ethical Function of "Escape" Literature

Author(s): LIONEL BASNEY

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , Winter, 1980, Vol. 13, No. 2
(Winter, 1980), pp. 23-36
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24777180

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Tolkien and the Ethical Function
of "Escape" Literature

LIONEL BASNEY

It has recently been argued that certain literary genres are not susceptible of
ethical criticism—that to Restoration comedy, for instance, ethical com
mentary is irrelevant, because Etherege, Congreve and others are pro
pounding no ethical lessons, but merely reflecting an actual social world
where proper behavior meant the pursuit of money and sex.1 In one sense
this is a useful protest against the habit of judging a work for lacking what it
plainly avoids—Congreve was not composing fables. But insofar as writing
"imitates" experience—insofar as it makes a model of or for experience—
we are justified in trying to describe the implications of this model in ethical
terms. Perhaps we ought not applaud or condemn Mirabell; he is not an
assertion but a postulate. Mirabell himself, however, uses the word "virtue";
it is part of his mental equipment, a brake on his dramatic action, part of
the model of experience which informs him. We can, therefore, offer at least
a description of this notion, and suggest what possibilities of action are
afforded Mirabell by "virtue" as Congreve intended us to understand it.
Further, there are judgments we can make about this ethical model—not of
good and bad but of completeness or incompleteness, consistency or incon
sistency, simplicity or complexity.
To the criticism of other genres these questions are more important. The
ethical stance of modern fantasy constitutes part of the evidence for defining
and evaluating the genre. Indeed the charge that fantasy is a form of "escape"

Mosaic XIII/2
0027-1276/80/010023-14$01.50 0 Mosaic

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24 Lionel Basney

is largely an ethical charge. We do in fact expect literature not just to enter

tain but to instruct. Though dulce et utile does not often appear in modern
criticism, we expect literature to reflect in some terms or tactics the implica
tions of human belief and action—not, perhaps, to teach what we ought to
choose and do but to reveal to us some sense of the nature of choosing and
doing. Fiction which fails us here may still attract us by technique or
excitement; but fantasy, in particular, which fails us here is likely to be left
to the nursery or the movies.
Most recent criticism of The Lord of the Rings assumes its right to be read
and discussed in sophisticated terms, but the issue of its ethical content
played a central role in the discussion during which this right was established.
Tolkien's most famous American detractor, Edmund Wilson, put his skepti
cism in the language of wide-eyed childish naïveté—"Oo, Those Awful
Ores !"2 Patricia Meyer Spacks found it necessary to defend Tolkien's ethical
seriousness as a way of recommending his work.3 Nor, curiously, has the
establishment of Tolkien's status resolved this debate. Auden, Edmund
Fuller and Clyde S. Kilby have praised Tolkien's "exalted ethical compass."4
Walter Scheps, on the contrary, insists that Tolkien's is a "fairy-tale morality,"
completely inapplicable to actual living;5 and C. N. Manlove, granting Tolkien's
intention to make a series of ethical points, flatly denies that he has suc
ceeded, and flatly contradicts Auden's praise of his moral realism.6 Manlove's
comments are particularly useful in view of my opening remarks, as they
seem to depend less than other comments on a priori descriptions of ethical
experience. Instead they criticize the internal inconsistency of Tolkien's
ethical model—the insufficiency of his moral portraits to what his world and
story demand.
For reasons to be given later, I concur with Manlove and others that
Tolkien's ethical vision is not "profoundly realistic" or particularly subtle.
In Middle-earth, as Randel Helms says, "all experience is the realization of
proverbial truth."7 But to criticize the limitations of Tolkien's vision may be
to neglect a more important fact: that, choosing his genre,Tolkien chose an
ethical purpose "natural" to that genre. Thus to judge Tolkien's ethics as
"true" or "untrue," "good" or "bad," is as irrelevant to his achievement as
such judgments are irrelevant to Restoration comedy. In both cases, the
intention is to construct not a "realistic" ethics but a model of ethical
behavior that can serve a definable social purpose. The model's primary
reference is not to actual behavior; rather it is to a cultural "project" that
requires the work in hand to make certain ethical perspectives clear. Modern
fantasy provides for a definable kind of ethical meaning.
Tolkien's ethical vision must be understood in terms of this cultural pro
ject. Setting aside questions of "truth" and "applicability," it is clear that
Tolkien's crucial modification of moral issues is to simplify them—to omit
"complexities, complications, subtleties"8 in favor of choices determined by
established character, by vaguely adduced modes of causality, and by a
contextual morality built into the cosmology of Middle-earth. This simplifi

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 Ethics and "Escape "Literature 25

cation serves purposes beyond itself. "Internally" to the story, it helps to

constitute the kind of suspense Tolkien's plot demands. More importantly,
perhaps, it allows Tolkien to make Middle-earth a model of ethical possi
bilities in a literary culture whose dominant attitude makes positive moral
action seem impossible or absurd.
To describe the image of moral truth in Middle-earth as "simple" is not
to deny that it may be vivid and moving, as at times it certainly is. But its
simplicity does move it distinctly away from moral life as it is lived by the
readers of fantasy. Whether critics should praise or blame Tolkien for this—
whether this should be grounds for critical evaluation of his work—seems to
me less important than to understand its intentions and cultural uses.
Tolkien's ethical vision is not "real" or complex. Nevertheless it succeeds, in
its own terms, within the demands of its genre. Thus it points toward the
special ethical functions of fantasy in our cultural situation. To illuminate
this may also help to explain fantasy's literary mode of working, its popular
ity, and its value as a datum for the sociologist as well as for the student of
literature.
Cultural "project" is a term used by Lucien Goldmann for the questions,
or anxieties, that a literary culture recognizes, and the answers, or methods
for answering, that it generates for confronting them.9 However we describe
our cultural project—the meaning of "modernity," the encounter with radi
cal secularity, the challenges of utter technological competence (or disaster)
—its presence in ethical discourse has had marked effects. For the profes
sional philosopher, linguistic analysis has moved ethics away from issues of
standards and value—what a man ought to do, why he ought to do it—
toward exacting debate over uses of language. R.M. Hare, the Oxford
philosopher, reserves the term "ethics" for "Questions about the meaning of
moral words, " while noting that some would use "more guarded terms, 'the
logic of ethics', 'metaethics'...and so on."10 W.D. Hudson defines "moral
philosophy" in almost the same way : "How is [ moral language ] like, and how
unlike, language used for other purposes...In his first major work Hare
stressed the urgency of ethical discussion: we cannot avoid it because "we
cannot get out of being men...."12 Nevertheless, recent professional dis
cussion often seems, as G.J. Warnock writes, "remarkably barren," largely
because its formulations "have seemed deliberately to hold that, on [tradi
tional moral issues], there is nothing whatever that can usefully be said.
There seems to have occurred an extraordinary narrowing of the field... ."13
Of course popular ethical discussion—that not carried on by professional
philosophers as philosophers but by laymen, journalists, authors of popular
advice columns—ignores none of the traditional moral issues, and often
declares, stridently, that its solutions are new and unprecedentedly effec
tive. Here the problem is not poverty but vague and confusing riches. The
variety and indeterminacy of ethical speculation bewilder many who, not
being philosophers, have only to cope with the actual variations of opinion
among their acquaintance: ethics derived haphazardly from systems of

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26 Lionel Basney

thought not meant as moral systems (psychoanalysis); ethics derived, tor

tuously perhaps, from the denial of ethics (Sartre); ethics that comprise
romantic revolts against the status quo, whether political or philosophical
(Camus); ethics that comprise revolt against specific political and economic
structures; the Rotarian ethics of positive thinking, loosely derived from
debased Christianity; and so on.
The frustration generated by this phase of our cultural project rises not
just from the variety of possible positions. Different temperaments find con
genial creeds in different forms of affirmation and denial. Frustration does
arise, I think, from the sense that ethical discussion as we conduct it—either
in the dessicate analysis of moral philosophy, or in the mutually exclusive
languages of popular speculation—will not, or cannot, guide the course of
social phenomena. As ethics have become more remote and difficult (or
more vacuous), the need for ethics has become more acute. Issues pertaining
to the morality of scientific research, for instance, press on our attention
more urgently because we sense that the research will go on, with its incalcu
lable results, whatever ethical discussion makes of genetic engineering or
biological warfare. Ethical discussion seems disjunct from the world of
action. Ours is not a world to be good in—we cannot decide what being
good means, much less how to be good in the dilemmas we face. It is,
perhaps, surprising, but surely not inexplicable, to hear Hannah Arendt
declare that goodness can have no social vocation at all.14 It cannot be
made active; for the modern world it remains in a sense esthetic, wasting
its fragrance in the desert air. It is incense, not energy.
The separation of ethics from the world of action appears to have a his
torical root in the notorious philosophical problem often called the "ought/
is" problem. It stems from David Hume's observation, in A Treatise of
Human Nature (1739), that moral standards cannot be derived from des
criptions of fact. Modern philosophers such as Hare have pointed out that
this does not in fact separate the "natural" from the "ethical" in any absolute
sense—that the only thing Hume denies is that the natural can ever logically
entail the ethical.15 One cannot be forced, with the force of syllogism, to
accept an ethical conclusion from an observed fact. But what is the effect
of "no ought from is" on a mind unprepared to take logical entailment as
strictly as Hume, Hare, or G. E. Moore? Its effect, I think, is clearly to drain
the experiential world of ethical meaning. The world in which men act, the
texture of their reacting and choosing, is bled of its sense of value, of ethical
immanence. As a result, the acting individual ceases to think his decisions,
however conscientious, ethically significant. To "be meaningful" is not
necessarily to entail meaning logically but to give the sense of meaningful
ness. A world which gives no such sense is "absurd"; even faddish uses of
this faddish word reveal the degree to which ethical futility has entered our
cultural discourse. Inevitably it has become part of the climate of modern
writing, an aspect of that cultural "nudity" which Malcolm Bradbury has
described as the Social Context of Modern English Literature.16

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 Ethics and "Escape "Literature 27

Tolkien's simplified ethics is a response to this situation. Not that Tolkien

takes up the issue of ethical absurdity in The Lord of the Rings; his simplifi
cation insures that this option, among others, will not occur. But Tolkien's
genre is itself a response. Modern fantasy offers, among other things, a
vehicle for imagining worlds full of ethical value. It is not the only vehicle
for this, of course; writers who draw inspiration from Marxist-historical
traditions—for instance Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn—offer another. (It is signi
ficant that Orwell's departure from Marxism sent him to fable and fantasy,
Animal Farm and 1984.) Nor does all modern fantasy support visions of
ethical possibility. The stories of Ionesco or John Barth are set in fantastic
worlds; but the values here are at best parodie—no values at all, in short,
but rather the absence of value wittily stated in an echoing antechamber
to fiction.
What the mode of The Lord of the Rings offers is a fictional world in
which ethical meaning is of the essence, from which it is inalienable—a
world steeped in moral values, a moral world. This is not the same as the
assertion of specific moral standards, though Tolkien's are in practice fairly
clear and traditional ones. Again it appears that evaluating his specific ethi
cal ideas is beside the point. Middle-earth asserts the possibility of ethical
action that initiates ethical results. The inherent morality of this created
world necessarily gives the language in which the world is described, and
the story in which it is embodied, their own moral weight. Within this
world ethics is objective; as in a Victorian detective story, good or evil
makes a man, or a landscape, look good or evil. Because ethics have objec
tive reference, it is possible to prescribe, and proscribe, actions. Finally,
the ethics of Middle-earth are urgent, because they are embodied in a story
of crisis and apocalypse.
The primary ethical function of this mode of fantasy, in other words, is
not really ethical at all, but meta-ethical. Though in his story Tolkien does
offer specific codes of behavior, these codes are not the real ethical object
of Middle-earth. Its crucial object is to assert the general possibility of
ethics, of ethical action, in an imaginative world specifically designed to
display them.

W. H. Auden described The Lord of the Rings as an archetypal quest

story, and other more recent critics have compared it with other similar
tales, with Beowulf, with works by Homer and Ariosto.17 Auden's characteri
zation rested on the psychological meanings of the quest. But the same
characterization may be made in ethical terms. The Lord of the Rings tells
a tale of action. It is an adventure story, built on the rhythm of pursuit,
flight, rest, escape and fulfillment, and leading in brilliantly planned stages
to a final catastrophe—or, as Tolkien says, eucatastrophe.18 Adventure
stories succeed or fail by the excitement of their adventures—by the imagina

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28 Lionel Basney

tive vividness of the hero's plight, by the solidity of the dangers he faces,
by the vitality of his actions. It might seem that the imaginative realization
of setting and danger is subordinate to that of the hero's action; they seem
to be context, the hero's response essence. If the hero's actions do not
interest us, the story fails. In fact, to the imaginative success of the hero's
actions the realization of context is essential, because it is the context which
allows action to seem significant. The most gallant hero is ridiculous in a
hall of cardboard dragons. With a real dragon to fight, Sir Gallant would
still be ridiculous in a novel by Evelyn Waugh, because here all forms of
gallantry are by definition ridiculous. Convincing fictional action depends,
that is, on the possibility of significant action; the absence of this possibility
results, naturally and inevitably, in the absence of plot. (Again, a writer like
John Barth would be appropriate evidence.)
An adventure story does not require belief, however temporary, in the
possibility of ethical action. In most such stories—Westerns, spy thrillers,
pulp science fiction, tales of "sword-and-sorcery," historical romance—
heroic action draws its vitality from conventionalized assent. The white hat
represents "good," not in any lively ethical form, but merely because it
always does; it is a gimmick. To appropriate Tolkien's own discussion, we
do in fact read a Western with suspended disbelief; we can give it no form
of belief at all. Tolkien's more serious fantasy bids for belief, "secondary
belief" in the laws and atmosphere of Middle-earth. Here the meaningful
ness of Frodo's actions is to be guaranteed not by a white hat but by Tolkien's
success in creating a world in which journeying to Mordor, sparing Gollum,
renouncing the Ring, and so on, strike us as significant, and as ethically
significant. We are impressed by them, not just because we agree that they
are what such a hero will do, but because Middle-earth is so conditioned
that to enter it in imaginative sympathy is to see Frodo's actions as what he
ought to do.
Tolkien bids for this fresh, ethical response to the action of The Lord of
the Rings in a variety of ways. One way is, of course, by not presenting us with
a conventional hero—but rather with Frodo—"a three-foot-high bundle of
timidity with furry feet," as Randel Helms puts it. Helms goes on to suggest
that Frodo represents "a profound criticism and revaluation of the meaning
of heroic behavior."19 But Frodo, however unexpected, is not by himself
adequate to the task of changing the meaning of "hero." He needs a world
in which to come to seem heroic, a true "criticism" of "heroic behavior,"
not simply a Sancho Panza mockery of it. Indeed Tolkien's fantasy provides
an especially clear example of world-building as a context for tale-spinning,
because the world extends beyond the tale into the appendices detailing the
history, topography, languages, cultures, and mythology of Middle-earth.
Those who protest that these are extraneous have missed a crucial dimension
of Tolkien's imaginative enterprise.20 The "static" portrayal of a world—the
endless genealogies of carefully named kings, the patiently worked-out
chronologies and declensions—joins with Tolkien's topographical descrip

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 Ethics and "Escape"Literature 29

tion to increase our sense of the meaning of Frodo's adventures.

It might be argued that constructing a context to make action significant
is the prerogative of all fiction, and not of fantasy alone: as Leo Hickey
writes, "fiction is reality which carries its own clues" to interpreting
events.21 One of the most fruitful results of recent structuralist commentary
on narrative has been the concept of vraisemblance, the criterion of truth
or probability we require of every narrative in order to understand it.22
This criterion enables us to judge the nature of a fictional action: if it
is vraisemblable, probable in terms of the fictional world which surrounds
it, we accept it as "real"; if it is not, we reject it as "unreal," as an artistic
mistake, a blameable deus ex machina, an irony, or we change the criterion of
the story to allow for the unprecedented and the inexplicable. Vraisemblance
is partly the result of narrative details and construction, and thus of the
writer's skill. But for many narratives, perhaps for most, it is also the
result of an appeal from the fictional world to the real world, or to
beliefs about the real world. An ideology enters fiction as a criterion of
the vraisemblable; what is thought true in experience enters fiction as
the probable, the imaginatively believable. Similarly, a cultural imperative
or cultural need becomes, in fiction, a form of vraisemblance. If the need
is for assurance that ethical action is possible, the genre that responds
will take as a constitutive requirement the provision of opportunities for
(fictive) ethical action. A probable or "interesting" action will be an
ethical one. A suitable or "real" setting will be one which reveals the
ethical character of its inhabitant.
"Realistic" fiction occurs when dominant cultural beliefs and fictional
vraisemblance may be seen as virtually identical; the same criteria are seen
to apply to Pip in the street and Pip in the story. Modern fantasy's relation
to social convention is more complex, partially because it responds not to a
belief but to a cultural need for belief. We wish to be reassured of the exis
tence of something which we doubt exists. Fantasy must thus modify our
actual sense of the real and the important in order to fulfill its cultural
purpose. It stretches our notions of the vraisemblable in two ways: in a
phenomenal sense they are extended beyond what is normal experience—
Martians, Ents, and murder by exotic poisons are all examples—but in an
ethical sense they are contracted beyond what is normal: fantasy offers a
simplified image of moral experience. In other words, the eidos of fantasy
includes all sorts of equipment not catalogued in any actual culture; its
ethos, in contrast, excludes feelings, conditions, and choices always avail
able in actual ethical dilemmas. And the two modifications, as Helms has
noted, seem to occur consistently enough to be useful in defining fantasy
as a literary mode.23
In Tolkien's case, of course, this definition cannot be quite so pure. The
eidos of Middle-earth includes many things not normally encountered in
the street—goblins, talking animals, looking-glasses that prophesy—which
are nevertheless relatively familiar to us via fairy-tales in general. But this

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30 Lionel Basney

familiarity actually clarifies the cooperation of eidos and ethos in Middle

earth. We can go beyond Helms's observation to observe that Tolkien's
extension of the fantastic eidos causes the contraction of its ethos. A
prophetic glass ball, by definition, simplifies the primary problem of moral
knowledge by giving its user special powers. It would be wrong to suggest
that knowledge gained in this manner is no longer susceptible of moral
judgment, or that the entire problem of knowledge ceases to be a moral
issue. But the stage-property of the glass ball emphasizes certain aspects
of the problem at the expense of others; in so doing it simplifies, as well
as clarifies, the problem. Like any metaphor, the glass ball embodies
certain facts about its tenor and suppresses others; unlike a poetic
metaphor, this selective realization determines action, in the two senses
of making certain actions possible and making them meaningful.
Middle-earth is, then, an ethical model admitting certain kinds of
action to significance. Literarily speaking, it can be so because its criteria
of vraisemblance simplify, and externalize, certain ethical values. The
eidos of this fantasy—magical mirrors, inhuman races of intelligent beings,
trees and mountains of varying degrees of consciousness—creates
an ethos in which action can be read as significant in the ways Tolkien
chooses.

Many critics have discussed the ethics of The Lord of the Rings, but
their treatments can be summarized in two categories: those who suggest
that Tolkien's ethics are Christian, or pagan in the tradition of the Beowulf
story, and those, alternatively, who look for a more abstract definition
of the ethical issues involved, in terms of "nature," "freedom," or life
against death.24 Both efforts at definition are useful. But it ought to be
noted as a first step that Middle-earth contains a number of overlapping
ethical matrices of varying generality, and that, if the underlying values
are finally simple, the reader encounters these values in a variety of forms
and circumstances.
As for the paganism or Christianity of Middle-earth, it must be said that
neither alternative suffices to cover Tolkien's clear intentions. The pagan
"tone" of the adventures—Tolkien's deliberate use of the matter of northern
mythologies—suggests heroic endeavor in a tragic mode, action against
finally overwhelming evils whose triumph can only be postponed. The
dragon, as Tolkien says, will always come again. The generalized pagan tone
is realized in certain of Middle-earth's cultures, such as that of Rohan,
whose codes of behavior center upon shame, or social censure, rather
than guilt, or the censure of God or of conscience.25 Similarly, the Judaeo
Christian commandments have at best an ambiguous force in Middle-earth.
"Thou shalt not kill" is no more applicable here than in any heroic poem.
Frodo's mercy on Gollum, stemming from Gandalf's advice about the diffi

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 Ethics and "Escape"Literature 31

culty of deciding who deserves death for his sins,26 is still an innovation
in the common texture of virtuous violence leading to reputation. "Thou
shalt not steal" rings strangely in a world in which the Bagginses are heroes.
After all, the Ring is not Frodo's, or Bilbo's, or Gollum's; Gollum calls
Bilbo a thief, originally, and so he is, in a wider sense than Gollum intended.
Again, the commandment's force is deferred by Gandalf s explanation that
Frodo was meant to have the Ring (1,65). "Thou shalt not commit adultery"
does not apply at all in a world where women and marriage hardly exist.
On the other hand, in "On Fairy-Stories" Tolkien specifically compares
the eucatastrophe of fantasy with that of the Gospel (pp. 71-72), and,
as is well known, identified Gandalf with an angel. Gandalf's doctrine
of hidden causality, which teaches that certain events were intended in
ways the cultural languages of Middle-earth cannot express, suggests a
doctrine of Providence instead of fate. The conversion of apparent chance
into hidden causality—"postulat(ing]," as Tzvetan Todorov writes, "a
necessary relation of all the facts among themselves"—implies, if not God,
then "the pattern of history which the Christian tradition has ascribed
to the providence of God."27 Finally, certain crucial actions, such as Frodo's
mercy to Gollum, do indeed suggest an ethic of guilt and mercy instead
of honor and shame.
Neither a pagan ethic, nor a Christian one, will by itself explain the orien
tation of Middle-earth; both are relevant. That one ethic should seem more
relevant than the other at one point in the story indicates Tolkien's second
ethical matrix: the explicit values of honor, wealth, comfort, and fidelity
maintained and celebrated by the races of Middle-earth themselves. The
elves nurture romance and memory, the hobbits homey order and comfort,
the men honor, the dwarves magnificence, the Ents natural fruitfulness, and
so on. These ideals inform the languages of judgment the different races use.
To Gandalf, Saruman's mind is subtle and interesting even after its corrup
tion; to Treebeard, Saruman is bad, and this means untreelike, un-"natural,"
a mind " 'of metal and wheels' " (II, 76). (Critics have not always been careful
enough to note that such judgments are determined by racial languages.)
Again, ethics change as functions of cultural et hoi even among men and
man-like beings. Rohan is an Anglo-Saxon shame-culture; Aragorn implicitly
recognizes this when he eulogizes Theoden as a man who "'kept his oaths'"
(III, 145). But hobbits do not act from motives of honor. The Shire runs on
"the Rules" (1,18), conventions of social tidiness raised to the status of law; it
is a "district of well-ordered business" (1,14), and the image of this "hobbit
sense" of caution and proportion persists in hobbit minds to the gates of
Mordor.
The variety of racial and cultural values in Middle-earth, however, is
simplified by the fact that we encounter them in a moment of crisis. The
War of the Ring cuts across the mutual isolation of races and cultures to
confront all the beings of Middle-earth with a single preoccupation. The
ethical simplification—for Sauron or against—actually animates the cul

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32 Lionel Basney

tural complexity of Tolkien's world by forcing customs and attitudes to

modify, and so to declare themselves. The Shire's tidiness is disturbed; the
Rohirrim must learn what oaths are for; the dwarves and elves in their respec
tive representatives in the Fellowship must cross ancient racial taboos to
join a common effort. Dormant virtues and commitments are brought to
light; minds change; loyalties are broken and fulfilled.
Indeed the ethical effect of the presence of the Ring seems to supersede
whatever ethical meaning the Ring inherently possesses. Clearly the Ring
represents power. But critics such as Robley Evans who try to refine this
further, and see the Ring as the lust for power, power to bring about chaos,
or even as "fate," risk mistaking an effect for a cause.28 To see Gollum as
"succumbing]... to the desire for power" embodied in the Ring is surely to
misread that pathetic and disturbing study in damnation.29 If the Ring repre
sents power it is in a sense ethically neutral, and corrupts its owners because
the ability to achieve cannot be separated from the corrupt ends men want
to achieve. The Ring, therefore, ought to be defined in terms of its ethical
function rather than of its ethical content. It brings values to light and into
play.
But have these values any common referent? Are the ethoi of specific
cultures united in any way beyond the immediate practical crisis of opposi
tion to Sauron? Aragorn confronts Eomer, as he says, with '"the doom of
choice,"' and continues: '"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear;
nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men' "
(II, 36,41). In what do ultimate "good" and "ill" consist?
They constitute, in fact, the third and most basic ethical matrix of Middle
earth, in which Tolkien's simplification of moral experience becomes most
striking. The key to understanding the values of this level is Tolkien's
refusal of allegory as a literary mode (1,7). This is, in effect, to deny altogether
the use of ethical language in this level of reference. Unlike their cognates
in actual language, "good" and "ill" in Middle-earth have no noumenal impli
cations, or any meanings at all that transcend the concrete experience of
"good" and "ill." The deepest values of Middle-earth are not finally dis
tinguishable from the descriptive details which surround and inform the
narrative. These values, in other words, are images, and the most compre
hensive images of Middle-earth are also its deepest values.
In terms of literary history, Tolkien's mode is less like allegory than it is
like the "poetic of correspondence" which, according to J. A. Mazzeo, lay
behind metaphysical poetry : "God created a world full of metaphors, analo
gies, and conceits, and so far from being ornamentation, they are the law by
which creation was effected. God wrote the book of nature in metaphor,
and so it should be read."30 We may paraphrase this, "Tolkien wrote the book
of Middle-earth in metaphor." We can only read this world by explicating
the metaphoric patterns which inhabit the story. Instead of conceits, the
metaphors here are those basic image-values which Middle-earth shares
with the real world, but simplified and purified: light and dark, hot and cold,

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 Ethics and "Escape"Literature 33

live and dead, mountain and valley, home and quest, earth and sea, growth
and decay, words and silence, dream and waking, free and bound, mystery
and revelation. Tolkien himself asserted in "On Fairy-Stories": "It was in
fairy stories that I first divined the potency of words, and the wonder of
things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire;
bread and wine" (p. 59). Imported into the fairy world, these common
experiences take on special color and importance. They form the materials
of Middle-earth, and the materials of its meaning: the terms in which
characters interpret their experiences.
This is, in essence, another phase of Middle-earth's vraisemblance. The
story constitutes what Scott Buchanan called an "analogical matrix," re
phrased by Mark Schorer as a "whole habit of value association," for its
events to take place within.31 Hare has written that in actual moral discourse
"we seem to be able to learn the use of ["good"] without being taught what
in a particular class of objects entitles us to apply it to a member of that
class."32 In Middle-earth, the definition of good does not need to be taught.
Good is just that—visible, simple good. In choosing the good, a Tolkien
character is also choosing the beautiful, the honest, the free, the natural, not
as remote possible consequences, but as contained in, as constituting, the
concrete fact of goodness before him. He is choosing the beauty of Galadriel
and rejecting the ugliness of the ore. Theoden does fulfill the ethos of his
culture when he keeps his oaths to Gondor. But what frees him from ethical
paralysis to keep the oaths is not the custom of oath-keeping but a vision
of the world, of the green plains of Rohan, a concrete embodiment of good
(II, 120).
These implicit values of Middle-earth provide, so to speak, immediate
reinforcement for the good, immediate evidence of moral action. But of
course they must be integrated into the characters' experience in order to
have their proper effect in the story. They have their guardians in Middle
earth, for instance Treebeard and the elves. But it is significant that Tree
beard denies he has a "side" in the War (II, 75); that Bombadil, master of
forest and water, has no part in the War at all; that even Galadriel describes
her role not as choosing or acting, but as knowing (1,372). The closer cultural
or racial ethoi come to the implicit values of this world the more detached
and passive they seem apropos the affair of the Ring.
The one exception, and it is a crucial one, is the "elvish" quality about
Gondor and its representatives, especially Aragorn. Frodo and Aragorn are
the two heroes of the War, and of the two, Aragorn would seem the natural
mediator of Middle-earth's values to us, its human readers. It has been noted,
however, that when Aragorn dominates, the story seems to leave its readers'
sympathies behind.33 The ethos of Gondor contains a contradiction: these
are men, and yet men too fantastic to represent for us a human ethical situa
tion. We simply cannot feel that in the presence of Aragorn, or Denethor,
we are in the presence of people; this remains true however powerfully
these characters symbolize certain essential moral qualities. The result is

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34 Lionel Basney

that Aragorn cannot be used to mediate to us the experience of Middle

earth's goodness. He is too remote, too full of kingliness and rhetoric.
Though human, he is less a vehicle for Tolkien's fundamental moral vision
than is Treebeard, the Ent.
It may be that Aragorn does not act in the trilogy at all, in the sense that
Elrond and Galadriel do not act, though their isolation is more obvious. The
"action" of these characters is really the gesture of a pre-established ethical
identity. Aragorn seems most accessible at moments of apparent dilemma—
after the Fords of Bruinen, for instance, when he must decide to pursue
Frodo or the ores. Even here, however, he decides in favor of a choice that
someone else has already made—Frodo's choice to go to Mordor alone—
which takes the form of a "doom," something fixed, a status quo. Later, as
King Elessar, he may have, as Deborah C. Rogers says, the significance of
collective humanity, may become a symbol of Kantian moral universaliz
ability.34 But in this role, toward which he has been moving throughout the
story, he cannot hold our sympathy, only our wonder.
Finally, then, the hobbit mediates Tolkien's moral vision to us. Critics
such as Evans and Scheps have stressed the hobbit's strangeness, his differ
ence from humanity.35 But this ignores the actual reading experience of The
Lord of the Rings. Humans do not have furry feet and do not live in burrows.
But after these details have been disposed of in the book's first chapters,
the hobbits become, in effect, human voices and human eyes responding to
the non-human, and preter-human, realities around them. They are paro
chial, non-heroic, childlike; but this is only to say that they offer a pastoral
perspective. Again it is a simplified perspective which renders the values of
Middle-earth concrete to our imagination. Roger Sale has demonstrated
how the hobbits represent Tolkien's mediation of vision; seeing through
their eyes we see the world originally and freshly.36 But they are necessary
also because they see things according to scale—bring the lofty and complex
to scale, not debasing it, but making proper ordinary-human use of it. Their
simplification increases our sympathy rather than alienating it.
The Lord of the Rings is a long book, and by virtue of Tolkien's remark
able inventiveness it provides a plenitude of actions and modes of fictive
experience. But the fundamental ethical vision of this world remains simple
amidst the variety. Simplicity is, in fact, the requirement of renewed ethical
vision as modern fantasy offers it. From the malign and incredible complica
tions of modern society we turn to the fresh, primary-color reassurances of
Middle-earth; the sense of relief is ethical as well as emotional, appears on
the level of belief and thought. The effect of this simplification may seem
malign in itself, in modes of fantasy easier to mistake for models of social
reality—detective stories, or spy thrillers—so that Colin Watson sees a vein
of fascism running through British literature of these types.37 Tolkien's world
remains reassuring, I think, because the reality it transforms is chiefly natural
and conventional. The innocence of mountains and trees, the innocent
remoteness of kings and magic mirrors, allow Tolkien to present a simplified
ethical vision which works as a refuge for a culture in ethical confusion.

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 Ethics and "Escape"Literature 35

NOTES
1/ See Harriet Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama (Oxford,
1972).
2/ Wilson, The Bit Between My Teeth (New York, 1965), pp. 326 ff.
3/ Spacks, "Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings" in Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil
D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame and London, 1968), pp. 81,99.
4/ Auden, "The Quest Hero," in Tolkien and the Critics, pp. 40-61 ; Edmund Fuller, "The Lord
of the Hobbits: J. R. R. Tolkien," in Tolkien and the Critics, pp. 17-39; Kilby, "Meaning in
The Lord of the Rings," in Shadows of Imagination, ed. Mark R. Hillegas (Carbondale and
London, 1969), pp. 70-80.
5/ Scheps, "The Fairy-tale Morality of The Lord of the Rings," in A Tolkien Compass, ed.
Jared Lobdell (La Salle, 1975), pp. 43-56.
6/ Manlove, Modern Fantasy (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 175-90.
7/ Helms, Tolkien's World (Boston, 1974), p. 79; see also Fuller, p. 60.
8/ Burton Raffel, "The Lord of the Rings as Literature," in Tolkien and the Critics, p. 223.
9/ Goldman, The Human Sciences & Philosophy, trans. Hayden V. White and Robert
Anchor (London, 1969).
10/ Hare, "Ethics," in Essays on the Moral Concepts (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), pp. 39-40.
11/ Hudson, Modern Moral Philosophy (Garden City, 1970), p. 1.
12/ Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952), p. 142.
13/ Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London and New York, 1967), pp. 1-2.
14/ Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), pp. 73-78.
15/ Hare, "Ethics," pp. 43-44.
16/ Bradbury, Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford, 1971), p. 176.
17/ Auden, "The Quest Hero."
18/ Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," Tree and Leaf (Boston, 1965), p. 68.
19/ Helms, p. 61.
20/ See William Ready, The Tolkien Relation (Chicago, 1978), pp. 6,44,83.
21/ Hickey, "The Particular and the General in Fiction," Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 30 (1972), 330.
22/ I rely here especially on the account given by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics
(Ithaca, 1975), pp. 138-60, et passim.
23/ Helms, p. 78.
24/ See, for varying viewpoints, the essays by Edmund Fuller, Gunnar Urang, Hugh Kennan
and Roger Sale in Tolkien and the Critics.
25/ Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, revised edition (Boston, 1965), I, 69. Further references
are identified in the text.

26/ See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 17-18.
27/ Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland and London, 1973), p. 110;
Gunnar Urang, "Tolkien's Fantasy; The Phenomenology of Hope," in Shadows of Imagina
tion, p. 107.
28/ Evans,/. R. R. Tolkien (New York, 1972), pp. 50-52, et passim.
29/ Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill, "The Corruption of Power," in A Tolkien Compass, p. 60.
30/ Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York, 1964), p. 54.
31/ Schorer, The World We Imagine (New York, 1968), pp. 24-25.
32/ Hare, The Language of Morals, p. 97.
33/ Daniel Hughes, "Pieties and Giant Forms in The Lord of the Rings f in Shadows of Imagina
tion, p. 92.

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36 Lionel Basney

34/ Rogers, "Everyclod and Everyhero : The Image of Man in Tolkien," in A Tolkien Compass,
p. 76.
35/ Evans, p. 101; Scheps, p. 55.
36/ Sale, "Tolkien and Frodo Baggins," in Tolkien and the Critics, p. 265; see also Hughes, and
David M. Miller, "Hobbits: Common Lens for Heroic Experience," Tolkien Journal 11
Orcrist 3 (1969), 11-15.
37/ Watson, Snobbery with Violence (New York, 1972).

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