J.R.R. Tolkien Archives - Rest and Trust

September 1, 2023September 21, 2023

What is a Name According to the Inklings? A Label or A Portal into Being?

What is a name according to the Inklings?

When Frodo stabs a Ringwraith at Weathertop with his sword and cries out in Elvish, “O Elbereth Gilthoniel!” he doesn’t know what he is doing. Later, Aragorn explains what happened at that moment,

More deadly to him [the Witch-king] was the name of Elbereth.

But why is the name of Elbereth (Varda) so deadly to the Witch-king? Isn’t it just a sound?

It turns out, it’s not. In our divided consciousness, we tend to separate the name from its bearer. We do so subconsciously because modern consciousness perceives everything in fragments. We think that the name is merely a sound, and the thing it denotes is a physical object that exists separately from its name. But that’s not what we find in the Inklings.

In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Elvish languages seem to represent the one proper language, or “language as it should be.” It is the primal proto-language not yet divided by the curse of Babel. It proceeds from the consciousness that perceives the world as a Whole, and in it, words are always one with what they name. In fact, words contain what they name as in a “house.”

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke of words as “the house of being,” not labels or tags on things. He said,

For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.

So, what is a name according to the Inklings? It is a portal that ushers the invocator into the invisible realm concealed behind the sound.

For the Inklings, the name and the named are one. The named one is IN the name. The Lord of the Rings was written from a different consciousness than ours as Tolkien himself seems to indicate – it was the consciousness of participation, not separation. Tolkien said,

I have long ceased to invent… I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.

For a participated consciousness, there is no difference between the name of a thing and the thing itself. The thing exists in its name. That’s why words always effect what they name. The name is not a denotation; it’s an invocation. That’s why Elbereth was really there at Frodo’s call. There is no other explanation for Frodo’s survival – if Varda wasn’t there, Frodo would have been consumed by the Darkness. But she was there fully present in her name.

What was the theology of St. Gregory Palamas?

Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox monk of the 13th century, came up with curious teachings about uncreated divine energies present, as it were, in the invocation of the divine name.

For him, the Name was not merely an empty sound or a denotation but a living symbol that ushered the invocator into the power behind the sound shape. The true name has the potency to awaken, revitalize, and reveal meaning.

Incidentally, Tolkien’s Middle-earth started with a name when the author came across the name of Earendel in an old Anglo-Saxon poem. Reading the first few lines of the poem produced in him “a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words.”

An early 20th-century Russian theologian Pavel Florensky (the founder of Onomatodoxia) was keenly aware of the power of words to engage the invocator into sacramental communion with Logos. According to Florensky, true words do not just communicate; they change. The message is not just information; it is transformation.

At the dawn of the Soviet era, in post-revolution Russia, one of the ways the new regime sought to “create the new Soviet man” was by changing the language and vocabulary.

They literally changed the grammar, spelling, syntax, morphology, and vocabulary of the Russian language to expel certain words and supplant them with a new vocabulary introduced by Bolshevik party ideologists. A whole body of abbreviations and contractions was enforced which, according to Florensky, sounded more “like a splinter in the tongue.”

This practice was, in his vernacular, “linguistic deformity,” the “mangling of words through deliberate disfigurement.” The maimed lexicon of the Soviet machine had its purpose – reducing reality to something less than it is to obtain control.

Who are our modern-day language-makers? They are not poets, monks, or myth-makers. They are technology gurus and people with divided consciousness. So, our language gets inundated with technogenic expressions like “He can really push my buttons,” as if we were devices.

All reductionism is ultimately aimed at gaining control. For example, when we “name names,” we reduce a person to a caricatured controllable state. It is a will to dominate.

Just as Mordor’s black speech by its very sound summoned the reality of domination and oppression, so the reductive language of our day brings with it a less-than-human lifestyle.

The purpose of fragmented language is quite deducible from its effect – the loss of wonder. The ancient Lethe was wonderful; “water resources” are not. They are manageable, to be sure, if that’s what is desired. And often that’s exactly what is desired.

The world has shrunk in our contracted language. Most of it we can’t see because our consciousness often sets limits to our perceptions. We don’t see the giant behind the world. The world doesn’t loom large for us. To reverse the curse, we need to reverse the language. How do you do it?

C.S. Lewis said,

“And if true verse but lift the curse, they (words) feel in dreams their native Sun.”

The art of naming, the art of coining true metaphors, will do the trick.

As we find proper words, our speech will regain its fiery Pentecostal power. The curse will be lifted, and we will tremble at the sound. We will wake up.

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023

Death by AI: The Fundamental Flaw of AI According to Goethe

What is the fundamental flaw of AI?

Recently, someone sent me AI-generated art and said, “How cool is that?” I looked at it, showed it to my wife, and we both said, “It looks kind of dead.”

It’s so mathematically perfect that there’s no life in it.

I immediately imagined myself seeing that picture in an art gallery hanging next to Monet. No comparison.

No doubt, AI-generated art is okay in the sense that it looks like art. But it’s not properly art. Because art is not created mathematically. It’s created inspirationally. It has a soul.

AI-generated “art” may look perfect, but it’s dead because it’s soulless. It cannot have a soul because no one inspired it.

It takes inspiration to have a soul. AI-generated content may read fine, even perfect, but is it food for the soul?

I experimented with ChatGPT, asking it to create a short story based on Russian folklore. It came out fine, readable, passable, recognizable characters that I knew from my childhood, but it was drab and meaningless.

But why? What is the fundamental flaw of AI?

The answer is deeply philosophical and spiritual – not technical or mathematical.

According to Martin Buber, there are two ways of relating to the world. One is called “I-It,” and the other “I-Thou.”

The “I-It” model is seeing the world as separate from myself. It’s literally “I” and “It.” There’s no connection. I am a subject, and the world is an object out there.

I can only observe it from the outside, gather data about it, measure it, and conceptualize it.

In the “I-It” pattern, we believe we only know something when we have studied it externally by amassing data about it. If I gather all the data about the Sun, I know what the Sun is. If I gather all the data about that person, I know what that person is.

But do I really know that person by collecting data about them? No. I have only created a mental concept of that person based on the data collected and mistaken that concept for reality.

April 26, 2023June 5, 2023

The Effect of the “Distant Forest” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle – Whispers Amplified by Imagination

As I got off the phone with an old friend this morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being under some spell.

He had shared a video with me from 12 years ago when we were much younger, my daughter was 10, and my son was 6.

We had a picnic around a fire, cooking hotdogs, chatting, and enjoying a warm summer evening in Siberia.

As I watched my daughter’s cute chubby face chewing on the hotdog and my son’s frantic hopping and jumping over the fire, I teared up.

“This is Paradise,” I thought. “Why didn’t I see it then?”

“Paradise,” echoed my friend on the other side of the conversation.

“Hmm…,” I thought to myself after I hung up. “Why is it that we tend to see an experience as ordinary when we are in the middle of it? And when there’s some distance between us – whether it’s time or geography – it transforms into something else.

Why didn’t I see all that before? It was an ordinary evening. Yes, I enjoyed it very much, but now I almost see it as a doorway into some inexplicable magic. A picture of another world.

Is my memory playing a trick on me, so am I imagining something that wasn’t there?

Or maybe it’s the other way around – my memory shows me something that was there, but I was too close to it to see it for what it is.

“You can’t recognize a person’s face when you are too close to it,” said the Russian poet Sergey Esenin.

But how do I know that my memory is not deceiving me?

Owen Barfield said in his poem The Tower:

But many times, the secret-breathing world
Whispers to thee, yet whispers with a voice
Which memory shall warehouse as a shout.

This world is breathing secrets, but we often don’t hear its whispers until something amplifies them for us into a shout.

Our memory is that shout that amplifies the whispers that we didn’t hear.

But what are those secrets that we tend to overlook because we are too close to reality to recognize its face?

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023

The Magic of Lothlórien – How Tolkien Used Vertical Speech to Allure us into the Silence Around Words

The magic of Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings is a fine example of how the Inklings use the power of vertical speech.

Quoting Max Picard from The Worlds of Silence, Peter Kreeft said that in modern writing, words have lost their vertical static quality:

The architecture of the Hebrew language is vertical. Each word sinks down vertically, column-wise, into the sentence. In language today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentence has become dynamic; every word in every sentence speeds on quickly to the next … each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front of it than to the silence.

In modern writing, words are used primarily as communication tools. People use words to get their message across. This type of speech is message-driven, not meaning-driven.

You look for words just to move the reader along as quickly as possible from one word to the next horizontally. Words are whips to get the reader going.

The Inklings use words vertically, not horizontally.

For them, each word is alive. Each word speaks through a particular sound shape – and needs to be heard.

When you “hear” the word’s speech, the curtain of the world is drawn for a second or two and you see… what the words dimly point to.

The Inklings use words to allure the reader to the silence around the words – not to get the message across. As Treebeard said:

You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.

To use words vertically means to find words that make the reader spellbound for a second or two. Preferably longer.

The right words are inspired by Mercury himself – they descend from heaven like fire and become “proper names” in the mouth of the herald.

Like a piercing line of poetry, they make you stop breathing the air of the world and plunge into a meditative reverie as you breathe in the fragrance from beyond the walls of the world.

Tolkien’s description of the magic of Lothlórien is a case in point.

How does Tolkien describe Lothlórien?

Just like Tom Bombadil, Lothlórien could easily have been left out of the plot. Linearly speaking, nothing “happened” there except that the fellowship felt the magic of Lothlórien and got some rest.

Technically, the chapter about Lothlórien is just as extraneous as the chapter on Tom Bombadil.

But it’s a fine example of vertical speech that introduces the reader to the perilous realm of Faerie.

The effect of entering the realm of the Lady is such that all the company feels the presence of some inexplicable magic.

For some, it is a delight. For some, it is torment.

Tolkien seems to suggest that the whole land was Galadriel’s mirror – not just the stone mirror itself. As the fellowship walked through the enchanted wood, they saw their secret thoughts and desires revealed as if in a mirror.

Some liked it; some hated it. But they couldn’t hide from it.

They stepped into a land of the Last Judgement unfolding 24/7.

January 30, 2023January 30, 2023

The Great Dance in C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield

When I first read C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra years ago, I was a bit confused at the end. Especially, when I got to the part about the Great Dance, in which “there seems no centre because it is all centre.”

As Ransom was listening to the Eldils delivering long speeches about the nature of the Great Dance, I thought these speeches sounded more like doxologies than explanations – as if the speakers didn’t care about making anything clear but rather were weaving songs of praise out of thin air.

And then, Ransom actually SAW their speech turn into SIGHT. The speeches of the Eldils became The Great Dance before his eyes:

“He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties.”
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

What a strange ending, I thought. But somehow, at least in Ransom’s mind, it was a fitting resolution to the plot.

December 6, 2022March 17, 2023

Why Did Arda Become Round, or How Was Sauron Made by the One Ring?

Why did Arda become round? Originally, it was flat. It was made round only after the fall of Numenor.

Its roundness was its curse. The consequence of leaving the “Straight Way.”

Thus in after days, what by the voyages of ships, what by lore and starcraft, the kings of Men knew that the world was indeed made round…

Is there any significance in this roundness?

Deceived by Sauron, the Numenorians craved immortality. They rejected the strange gifts of Iluvatar given to Men – the gifts of mortality – the ability to leave the Circles of the world through letting go.

The Númenóreans began to murmur, at first in their hearts, and then in open words, against the doom of Men…

Why did Arda become round?

The downfall of Numenor led to the reshaping of Arda. Around the year 3319 of the Second Age, the world was changed. It became round. A circle. A ring.

Like a ring, the world became closed upon itself. Thus ended Men’s desperate search for immortality. It ended in creating bad infinity, the non-stop repetition of the same, a rat race of life, never coming to the destination.

People were still trying to find the Straight Way to the Blessed Realm but soon found that all roads were now bent. There was no longer a Straight Way to the blessed realm geographically. All roads were going in circles.

Their great mariners would still search for the Isle of Meneltarma because many believed that from the summit of the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, one could still see a glimpse of the Deathless shores.

But they found it not. And those that sailed far came only to the new lands, and found them like to the old lands, and subject to death. And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle… and they said: ‘All roads are now bent.’

With bad infinity, no matter where you go, you come to where you started – to the old lands, subject to death. It is the curse of the Ring.

November 12, 2022April 8, 2023

Why Does Melkor Crave the Flame Imperishable but Cannot Find It?

Why does Melkor crave the Flame Imperishable?

Before aught else was made, Iluvatar sent the Secret Fire to burn at the heart of the world, and the vision of the world came alive (Ea).

The Secret Fire gave Being to the vision of the Ainur, and Iluvatar set this Being amid the Void – as light shining in the darkness.

Melkor is ever seeking after the Secret Fire (Flame Imperishable) but cannot find it because it is with Iluvatar.

But why is he seeking Light if he is so bent on perpetuating Darkness?

It is said:

He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness. Yet he found not the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar.

The reason he craved the Secret Fire is that he wanted to bring into Being things of his own imagining but could not.

When you stray from the Music – the thought of Iluvatar – you cannot sub-create.

You can only mutilate what’s already been created.

Sub-creation is the province of those who are in tune with The Tune.

Melkor deems himself God and wants to create Being.

But, having become the prisoner of the “imagining of his own mind,” he cannot create – he can only distort what’s already there.

His desire to create Being burns hot in him, but all he sees around him is Void.

The emptiness of the Void makes him impatient.

Every heartless villain can feel their own emptiness. They are keenly aware that all their attempts at creating Being end up creating more emptiness.

They grow “impatient of this emptiness” – it burns them from inside – and they want to assuage it with Light.

Wherever they go, they look for the Light but cannot find it because it is with Iluvatar.

Like Ungoliant, Melkor craves and hates Light at the same time.

Thence she had crept towards the light of the Blessed Realm; for she hungered for light and hated it.

And:

The Eldar knew not whence she came; but some have said that in ages long before she descended from the darkness that lies about Arda, when Melkor first looked down in envy upon the Kingdom of Manwë…
Continue reading “Why Does Melkor Crave the Flame Imperishable but Cannot Find It?”

November 7, 2022May 1, 2023

From Image to Imagination – Transcending Modern-Day Idolatry in Owen Barfield’s Fairy-Tale The Silver Trumpet

In his 1925 fairy-tale The Silver Trumpet, Owen Barfield expressed mythically what he would later expound philosophically in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry:

The life of the image should be none other than the life of imagination.

In other words, without imagination images are dead. Imagination is their lifeblood. Their substance. Their content.

When we look at the phenomena and confuse their appearance for what they represent, we take life out of them. The images are lost. They have been turned into idols by our refusal to see through them.

The moment I say: “The appearance of the tree equals the tree,” I am making an assumption that there’s nothing else to the tree than meets the eye. This mental concept is no more than an assumption (I don’t really know if the appearance of a tree equals a tree).

But I choose to see the tree through a non-participatory lens. In doing so, I refuse to go from an image to imagination.

I refuse to transcend the images with imagination (properly speaking, with faith as the ability to see the invisible). I refuse to go beyond the symbol to what it symbolizes. I take a sign for the thing it points to.

In The Silver Trumpet, this curious relationship between an image and imagination is captured in the relationship between Prince Courtesy and Princess Violet.

October 18, 2022April 11, 2023

Who is Tulkas? The “Expecto Patronum” of Tolkien’s Universe to Fight Off the “Darkness of Unlight”

Who is Tulkas in The Silmarillion? What is the symbolism behind this myth?

C.S. Lewis once defined a good myth like this:

The narrative is more of a net whereby we catch something else.

The story itself may be quite ordinary – a sculptor carved a lady out of a block of stone, and it became alive (Pygmalion and Galatea).

Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, and her mother Demeter prevented all plants from growing until Hades was commanded to let her go for some months out of the year.

There’s nothing extraordinary in the story itself. Yet, we feel there’s something behind it.

Elizabeth Browning put it like this:

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

It’s how we choose to look at the common bushes that determines whether we see them burning.

According to G.K. Chesterton, such is the function of our imagination:

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

And such is the function of mythopoetry – a genre that allows us to look at ordinary things through the eyes of Faerie and discover a world of extraordinary meanings behind them.

The key to entering Faerie is inside each and every one.

In Owen Barfield’s philosophy, this change of lens happens when a person allows their state of consciousness to be shifted by a line of poetry. And then they follow the call ringing through “this verse that lifts the curse” and enters the perilous realm of Faerie.

The cosmogonic myths of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion are of the same nature – they are an invitation to enter through the door of the external story and into the invisible realm behind the story, which is the land of Meaning.

One such myth is the myth of Tulkas the Valiant.

How did Tulkas beat Melkor?

Greatest in strength and deeds of prowess is Tulkas, who is surnamed Astaldo, the Valiant. He came last to Arda, to aid the Valar in the first battles with Melkor. He delights in wrestling and in contests of strength… he is tireless. His hair and beard are golden, and his flesh ruddy.

Who is Tulkas? Why did he come to Arda last to aid the Valar in their battles with Melkor? And most importantly, why was Melkor so afraid of him?

So came Tulkas the Strong, whose anger passes like a mighty wind, scattering cloud and darkness before it; and Melkor fled before his wrath and his laughter, and forsook Arda, and there was peace for a long age.

Of all the Valar, Melkor hated Tulkas the most.

There’s a spiritual and mythical significance to this. Tulkas is hated with bitter hatred because he represents the laughter of Iluvatar in the Great Music.

September 27, 2022April 3, 2023

How Owen Barfield Saved The Appearance Of Princess Violetta In The Silver Trumpet

Once upon a time there were two little Princesses whose names were Violetta and Gambetta; and they lived in Mountainy Castle. They were twins, and they were so like each other that when Violetta came in from a walk with her feet wet, Gambetta was sometimes told to go and change her stockings…
The Silver Trumpet

So opens The Silver Trumpet, a fairy-tale written by Owen Barfield in 1925. It was his first published book and the first fantasy book ever published by the Inklings. According to the author himself, he felt that in all his books he was “saying the same thing over and over again.” But what is this “one thing” he was saying over and over again? And how did he say it in The Silver Trumpet?

The Silver Trumpet is a mythical depiction of what Owen Barfield would later unfold in his other works and, in some way, a prelude to what seems to be the overall message of the Inklings — the world is God’s music clad in matter. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield points out that we live in the world of unsaved images — images that have been taken literally and turned into idols.

The images (or appearances) we observe around us are so much “like” the things they represent that we have a hard time distinguishing between them. We take a representation for the reality behind it. For us, the image and the thing it represents look alike, almost indistinguishable — like the two little princesses, Violetta and Gambetta, who were so like each other that even the Queen had a hard time distinguishing them.

The Queen used to be so fussed and worried by the confusion that, what with one thing and another, she persuaded the King to appoint a special Lord to distinguish between them [the princesses]. And he was called the Lord High Teller of the Other from Which.

The Lord High Teller of the Other from Which was the only one who noticed the difference between the two princesses. But it was not in their appearances but in what transpired through the appearances.

Moreover, he “knew a thing or two about the magic power of names,” and so he found a way to tell the two princesses apart — by changing their names. By calling them Violet and Gamboy he brought out into the light of day what was otherwise invisible — the princesses were “as different inside as a Church and a Booking Office.”

In Barfield’s mind, the two little princesses who were almost identical in appearance represent the confusion of the modern mind about observable phenomena. We tend to equate appearances with the reality they point to. This anthroposophical dilemma Owen Barfield would later explore in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.