IT SUCKS BEING AN ORC

LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE COSMIC WAR

There is a Mazda Roadster with the number plate MORDOR. There is an old Honda Prelude with the plate SAURON. I am amused. Apart from being a bit of a statement, don’t they realize that Sauron was the bad guy? That Mordor is a death dealing wasteland? That they are not edgy and transgressive at all, they might as well have number plates like COMPLETE SHITGIBBON or NEEDS VIAGRA. But I am also aware that Tolkien is much referred to by our new right wing overlords the tech billionaires. Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir, possibly without irony. Anduril is a US defense tech company specializing in autonomous systems. These are not nice people. Some of them definitely think they are fighting the Cosmic War. How come they love Tolkien as much as I do? Are they morally confused? Should I be worried about them?

When I was young I read “The Lord of the Rings” about every two years. I was a conservative young’un, and an Anglophile. I also liked Arthurian mythos and Robert Anton Wilson and HP Lovecraft. In Tolkien I found deep nostalgia and luminous beauty. Middle Earth is our deep past: today, the Elves have become a matter of rural folklore and Hobbits almost invisible, but in the deep past there was glory. The end bits, where the main characters leave Middle Earth and go into the West, were almost too much for me. The glory of the past was just that, the glory of the past, for the characters of LOTR. They too sought deep nostalgia and even more luminous beauty. Glory is always in the past.

Then I didn’t read it for decades, and when I dipped into it again, I only read the bits I liked. Sometimes just the bits with action. Sometimes the poetry, but not always. Not the sad bits. About five years ago I read it all, and this time I marked a couple of new things. Tolkien lived in an age where social class was still carefully delineated: Sam calls Frodo “master” and sleeps at the foot of his bed. I also noticed that they did shitloads of walking. They would be like, it’s only ten miles to Weathertop or wherever. I felt weary just reading it, and definitely in need of a hot bath and a soft bed at some rustic inn.

Now I have read it again, this time guided by Genny Harrison and her work on lessons we can draw from Tolkien about social and political collapse. Also, I have considered the book from an animist perspective. For Tolkien it is not just the Ents, but the trees that are alive, and the birds are sentient sometimes too. Middle Earth is alive. One of his skills is being able to dig under the human things to sense this living of the land.

I so felt for the Orcs. It is not their fault they are Orcs. They just got made somehow by the Enemy and they are roundly exploited, living in squalor and never getting any breaks. They are what you get when you have an authoritarian state: cynical, capable of only temporary loyalties, out for fun while there is fun still to be had. They are the foot soldiers of any losing army, the ones who know the war is always going badly regardless of the constant propaganda. The are also the exhausted low paid workers doing the double shift. Tolkien may have known soldiers who talked like the Orcs, but they were also the steel workers in Birmingham factories. When you have terminal stage capitalism, you get Orcs.

More seriously, I asked myself if the LOTR story was part of the Story of the Cosmic War. It is a pretty pervasive Story and many of its iterations are not strictly religious. Some of those who appropriate Tolkien’s ideas and names are definitely Cosmic War types, Christian nationalists for example. LOTR is fiction and open to many interpretations. It is really good literature in that regard.

What is the Cosmic War? It is a very old and large Story. It is a war between absolute good, (God and his angels) and absolute evil (Satan, Iblis, Angra Mainyu) It is a war that is eternal, and it will end only with a final battle where evil will be vanquished and there will be paradise for the righteous, (or for everybody in some readings). It is fought in three places: the heavenly realm, the material world, and the human heart. We humans have an important role and make moral choices about what side we are on. Worldly events, such as geopolitics, are subsumed into the Cosmic War; it is how the Divine works in history.

In LOTR, the characters make vital moral choices, and history is affected by those choices. They are subject to temptations and weaknesses of personality. The enemy is irredeemably evil. Sauron is an ancient evil, the servant of an even more ancient and powerful evil. He works not only in the material world, but through corruption and the weakening of the heart. He twists desires. He messes with people’s heads and lies to them. He is a Satanic figure, but there is nothing about him that could be considered stylish, or edgy, or cool. He has no interesting back story. He’s just bad. This is the Cosmic War. Or not.

Arrayed against Sauron is not ultimate good, but a mixed crew of failing peoples. The main political forces are the Elves and Men. The Elves have become too otherworldly, too preoccupied with themselves and their glorious past. They used to have more dealings with other “races” but now they remain aloof and just protect what they have. They mourn for loss. They can’t quite come to grips with the situation. They are a people of the past. Men are the people of the future, but they also are in a state of collapse. The powerful Men of Numenor might have been the model of nobility and grace, but they were very flawed. They became hungry for power. Some of them served Sauron and a few became utterly under his sway. At the time the book is set, they have diminished in power and in life span, and few are as “high” as the old kings of the West.

As the Company travels, they pass through many lands that were once occupied by the Men of the West, or the Elves, but have been abandoned. Wars were lost. States failed. People left. The greatest state that is still extant, Gondor, is also failing due to population collapse and lack of political will. There is a lot more talk about the glorious past. The glorious past stuff in LOTR is attractive to the far right, who want to return to some approximation of the Medieval period or Christendom or pastoral paradise, but if you look at the story through the lens of collapse and systems failure, you see it as despair. The current age of Elves and Wizards and the Men of the West is ending. All of civilization may in fact fall to Mordor. The threat is genuinely existential. Even if Sauron is defeated, and there is a new age, it will still be the end of much that is good and beautiful. It will be an age of the small and the ordinary. Either way, those who are currently great, will lose.

Of course, the true heroes of the story are small and ordinary, the Hobbits. They are not perfect people either. They often don’t get the assignment, but their hearts are good and sturdy and they are blessed. There may be greater power at work here that even Wizards don’t understand. Frodo and Sam are guided in their purpose even when they are not up to the task. They grow into their purpose even as the systems around them are strained.

Lord of the Rings is not about the Cosmic War. It does have an ultimately evil antagonist, and it does take place on all three planes. It is about moral choices all along the way. But its good people are not ultimately good. Because this is a story about true moral choices, some of the good people fail or fall short or make mistakes. They are let down also by systems failure even among the best of them. The outcome is not inevitable. Sauron nearly wins. Victory is hugely costly because it results in the end of the age. Victory also comes at the cost of individual and environmental trauma. The book’s best characters are damaged by the war. So, we don’t have a Cosmic War figure like Jesus or Zarathustra, who is perfectly good and essentially does the cosmic ass kicking. We just have a bunch of awesome people doing their very best in the midst of collapse.

Now, that sounds familiar.

Further: Genny Harrison has a Substack about LOTR and other topics. For an animist perspective, Josh Schrei’s “The Emerald Podcast” mentions Tolkien a fair bit.

The video is for the Orcs! It is my favourite Motorhead track, “Get Back in Line”, which I think is about the eternal grunt, the foot soldier who know it’s all for nothing.