M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural flowering and it was a time when the newly conscious nations of Europe, including England, were hungry for documents establishing their ancient heritage and, thus, legitimacy. Every nation wanted its Homer. The trade in forged religious relics had died with the Reformation, but a vigorous trade in national and literary relics took its place, and it is likely that the libraries of the gentry, whence the contents of the emptied-out monasteries landed, would also have been full of fabrications — many of them created by out-of-work former monks and scribes.

The Beowulf manuscript in the British Library is the sole source for the supposed Dark-Age story that everyone reads in English Lit, and its provenance can only be dated with any surety to right around 1700, the first time it actually is mentioned as part of the Cotton Library collection. The fire-damaged manuscript however bears the signature of a well-connected 16th-century Anglo-Saxonist Laurence Lowell, and is generally assumed to have passed through his hands sometime in the mid-1500s. If Lowell didn’t actually have a hand in creating the document, he may have acquired it via his employer, Sir William Cecil, when Lowell worked in his household tutoring Cecil’s ward, the young Edward de Vere (the later-famous Earl of Oxford, who in my view is the best candidate for the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays).

Not unconnected to certain players in the story of the Beowulf forgery (if it is that) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, also known as Bishop Ussher. He knew Cotton and used his library for his own research, and he also famously dated the creation of the world to 4004 BC, providing fuel for centuries of Creationist absurdity about the young age of the world. He’s the one who said that fossils were put in the rock to test our faith. It is really in the sphere of literature and history that we ought to be “creationists.” Documents may well be younger than they seem, essentially cultural fossils placed in the rock, made new to look old. More and more, despite initial misgivings, I am excited by the possibility that Beowulf is a far younger creation than anybody ever realized.

One of the reasons I always loved Beowulf and tried to get friends to actually read it is that aspects of it feel so weirdly modern. It has such wonderful aspects of sci-fi horror, for example: a resentful outcast monster lurking outside the light of the cheerful halls, preying on people at night, part of a race of creatures who have acid for blood. There’s a battle at the bottom of a lake. How cool is that? It doesn’t exactly feel like mythology, but like a novel. And then there’s the final dark episode with the dragon, which is totally classic. It’s a really dark and cool story, full of twists and turns and beautiful imagery of a misty, ancient Northern kingdom. This is why, despite Woody Allen’s quip that you should never take a class where they make you read Beowulf, readers are often drawn to the story and keep trying to make (invariably terrible) film versions of it.

The “acid for blood” thing has always stood out in my mind as particularly anachronistic for a story supposedly written down somewhere on either side of the year 1,000 and based on older oral tradition. Consider how vividly the poet describes it (this is from Seamus Heaney’s translation):

Meanwhile the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts …
its blade had melted
and the scrollwork on it burned, so scalding was the blood
of the poisonous fiend who had perished there.

Alien, anyone? I’m not a chemist, but this sounds like a description of nitric or sulfuric acid’s affect on iron. Those acids were discovered by the Arab alchemist Geber in the 8th century, though were not industrially produced and widely used in Britain until, well, the 16th century. I have a hard time imagining a Dark-Age Anglo-Saxon scop (poet) or even a 10th or 11th century scribe writing such a description. What kind of experience would someone in Britain at that time have with highly corrosive acids? I don’t think a writer necessarily needs to have seen or heard about a thing to be able to imagine it, but this is an awfully singular image that strikes me as out of place before the Renaissance. (I’d welcome hearing a dissenting view on that from someone more acquainted with the history of chemistry/industry.)

Even more anachronistic, to my mind, is the covert theme of Beowulf, which is melancholia. I’ve always felt that the Beowulf-poet was not just some bard reciting one of the favorite legends of his people, but an original creator of a poetic work about the sickness of his own soul. The monster that terrorizes the previously cheerful hall of Heorot reads like a model of clinical depression: He is an exile, condemned to lurk beyond the reach of the light spilling from the hall of men, forced to listen in bitterness to the sound of their harps, the clink of cups, and their laughter. Unable to join them because of his original guilt (he is one of the “sons of Cain”), he lives instead with his mother at the bottom of a murky, monster-filled lake.

Anyone who has suffered depression would recognize these images and identify with Grendel’s alienation from the cheerful happy people, the stocky, manly Beowulves of this world (and perhaps would even identify with the Freudian/Hitchcockian theme of unresolved bitter and dependent feelings toward a similarly alienated mother). Grendel is a brilliant portrait of the bitter self-exile of the depressed person. By contrast, Beowulf himself is nothing more than a comic-book caricature, a frat guy cum uber-hero. In describing this contrast between the noble hall of the cheerful heroes and the alienation of the monster, the Beowulf poet was describing his own painful alienation from his fellows. The poem was a poetic expression of that melancholy loneliness.

People have always experienced introverted sadness, but just as “clinical depression” is a cultural construct of our age, melancholia was a cultural construct of the Renaissance. It was in the 15th Century that this kind of socially alienated introversion began to be romanticized and explored as an aspect of genius by writers and philosophers and playwrights. To my knowledge, you don’t get sensitive, sympathetic portrayals of melancholics before this period; and while Grendel is not exactly a sympathetic portrayal, there is definitely something sad about him and his life. It is hard not to feel his pain as he runs off, sans arm, to die at home with his mother. It is this sympathetic aspect of his character that makes Grendel seem so modern, and so inviting to modern reimagining by writers like John Gardner.

There is the whole notion that J.R.R. Tolkien, entranced by the mysteries of Beowulf and its ancient idiom, wrote The Lord of the Rings to flesh out the ancient mythological world of the Anglo Saxons and, in the process, create a uniquely English myth. What if he wasn’t original? What if, in fact, that’s what the original 16th-century writer of Beowulf was himself doing? I’m reminded of the quote by Hegel: The mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries for the Egyptians themselves. There is an occult recursion in history, if you look carefully, and Tolkien’s relation to Beowulf seems like an example of that process.

Some of the pleasure of the “Beowulf-as-forgery” idea is admittedly simply the thrill of conspiracy, an unsolved mystery. (Finding out the truth will require carbon-dating the manuscript–perhaps after Harper and his friends gain sufficient legitimacy for their theory that the British Library could be persuaded to perform the necessary tests on this British national treasure.) But I also find that it actually adds to my pleasure in the text to read it through the lens of its being a possible product of the age of Shakespeare or Milton. I actually think it adds to the genius of the work to see its mysteries as being part of an atmosphere of pastness created imaginatively by a Renaissance writer, rather than simply a more or less faithful recording of a Dark Age legend.

I’m increasingly interested in Tolkien’s Catholicism. It is through his Letters that I first began to grasp the appeal of the notion of the Fall, which previously only ever seemed like the most stupid, harmful idea. Really, it’s just a way of describing our human tendency, the fact that we are less than what we would be, less than what we promise, and in our essence bound to disappoint ourselves. It depicts the inevitability of strife between our ideals and the world we actually end up creating.

We may impose or try to form ourselves with technology and techniques and raise ourselves, but there is a fundamental gravity, a weight pulling us to ourselves, to our “thrown” being. Gombrowicz would call this downward force “sub-culture” or “immaturity.” It is the realm of other things, distractions, minor obsessions, faults, secondary priorities, imps of the perverse, and what have you, that derail and deflect us, pull us down to another level. Despite the vastness of our hopes for ourselves, we end up ‘middling.’ (Tolkien loved middles, and saw redemption in them.)

It is easy to see ourselves as fallen. It is not so easy, at least without reminding ourselves, of the fallenness of others. When we look at other people’s lives, we see them as having chosen what they are and who they are. We see them as hard and definitive. They wear those clothes because they want to, we think; they work where they do because they must have wanted that more than anything else. We have no trouble blaming them for their mistakes, because they surely intended them. Yet when we look at our own lives, it is as through wholly different eyes. We see a random and haphazard and oftentimes ill-thought-out meandering of action and happenstance. The decisions we made we see as, more often than not, not our own, or not completely our own. We see how random and unchosen much of it is. The exceptions, those rare moments when we have felt like we have actually chosen our fate, stand out and make us feel proud. But they are the exceptions.

Why do we view ourselves through such different eyes? Why do we apply so sterner a metric to the lives of other people?

In a letter to Tolkien, Auden says he experiences life as a series of choices: “Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives.” That to me seems most enviable, most what I would aspire after, yet what seems so elusive that it may only come once in a blue moon (if ever) that one would actually feel one’s ability to choose among alternatives. Mostly don’t we just persist in life? Stay a course?Don’t our choices get buried under the weight of dead desire and necessity? Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!”?

Sartre or Freud would say that we are always choosing, and even our avoidance of choice is a choice.. But those are strenuous, basically Nietzschean philosophies, that belong in a sci-fi universe like Dune. I think, in reality, choice takes energy, and eventually everyone gets tired. To consciously live each moment as if it was a choice between alternatives, and that you always had it in you to make a choice (not just passively accept one), would be wonderful, but I don’t believe it can be done.It makes me distrust Auden, that maybe he is not so honest with himself.

Auden’s larger point was that such a sense of life—as choices—naturally produces the quest or journey as a literary form of expression. I think Tolkien’s point was that he produced a quest novel not out of some special sense of living life as choices (though that may be laudable) but from its being a tried and true way of stringing together the things that matter most to oneself. And, mainly, even more importantly, because a quest, however objectively small, takes you out of the passive condition. In effect, a quest makes you choose, makes you experience your life objectively.

So they are both saying the opposite—

Auden: Conscious living produces the Quest as its natural artistic form. Tolkien: The Quest produces the feeling of consciousness that most people, most of the time, lack. (Tolkien’s view is, as always, the more pragmatic and humane, and seems more right on.)

In his reply to the poet, Tolkien talked about people making themselves, his faith that some people do manage to create themselves. Yet the ordeal of Frodo, Sam and Golluum shows that this can only be achieved through other people. That’s the beauty and fascination of the story. It’s what Gombrowicz was always on about too, in his Diary: the redemptive possibility of people forming each other, even deliberately using other people who are unlike themselves (perhaps not too unlike, but just-right-unlike), to alter themselves in desired directions.To help them, in other words, choose themselves.

On the back cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of Dune, by Frank Herbert, is a review that sticks in my mind from my childhood: “I know nothing comparable to it except … the Lord of the Rings.” That ellipsis, I always imagined, was a dramatic pause.

Is Dune comparable to Tolkien’s masterpiece?

In the scale of the imagined world the author has created, and the endless dramatic and character possibilities, I suppose it is. And like Tolkien’s creation, Dune is a novel of ideas. Teenagers who read Herbert’s epic are enthusiastically devouring a philosophy. It happens to be a different philosophy from that of Tolkien, however, and one considerably less subtle. It is, in a word, Nietzcheanism.

The Nietzchean motto, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” imbues Dune. Rereading the book as an adult I was struck by how strenuous was its ethos. It is a picture of humans whose mental and physical skills have evolved to a diamond hardness, and who have found a congenial social structure in a sort of interplanetary Feudalism where the aristocratic few are well-insulated from the restless many. These future supermen are always on edge, always prepared, perfectly trained even down to their micro physiological processes. And it is all very tiring, exhausting to read about. You can barely get your breath.

The most emblematic image or moment in the novel—at least, the one that has always stood in my mind—is the Reverend Mother’s test of the young Paul with the Pain Box, right at the start of the book. He holds his hand in the box while she holds a poisoned needle at his neck; though the box creates a sensory illusion of terrific burning pain, the boy must master his impulse to withdraw his hand or she will prick him with the needle. “It kills only animals,” she explains of the poison (called “Gom Jabbar”)—the implication being that it is the true human who can master his body and therefore endure the pain, knowing that it is only an illusion. Anyone else, anyone who fails the test, is an “animal,” in the strenuous ethos of this hardened far future—or at least, in the strenuous ethos of the order of sisters that the Reverend Mother represents.

Paul, because he has been trained in mental and martial disciplines from earliest childhood—and also because he is genetically superior, a product of selective breeding through several millennia—is able to pass the test, and is therefore deemed truly human.

This image contains within it the Nietzchean ethos of the novel: to be human is to have mastery over oneself, to be skilled, to be patient, and through skill and patience to survive. The heroes of the book—Paul, his mother, the Fremen—know how to survive, and thereby defeat their enemies. Dune certainly contains its bad guys—paradigmatically the soft, hedonistic, ruthless homosexual Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The good guys are quietly patient, exemplified by the Fremen hoarding water in secret for centuries in order to alter their planet’s ecosystem; there is the poetic image of the solitary willow bending to the wind whose seeds produce a forest that breaks the wind.

So for Herbert, Good, if we can call it that, is an attitude to power, not unlike that found in an Eastern morality tale. Patience, self-mastery, skill, and in the end, ruthlessness. In Dune, the secret substance of the universe, permeating everything, is power. Humanity is a kind of mastery of this power, a knowledge of it and an ability to control it via submission. Like judo.

In the Lord of the Rings, the secret occult substance permeating everything is … humanity itself. There is a kind of undeveloped or nascent humanity in the trees, the stones, in the orcs, in everything. And the quality that brings out this humanity, that realizes and actualizes it, is … what? What is the quality possessed by the heroes? Pity? Mercy? Nobility? It is something like this. It has something to do with nobility and honor and pity. Non-judgement. Even the most evil beings, they are part of a memory of pain, they started as better creatures and were corrupted in long ages past.It is a chain of imperfection. Everything falls along a chain, not of perfection but of imperfection. It is, in other words, the Fall.

So the philosophical contrast between Herbert and Tolkien boils down to this: In Dune, even most humans aren’t human. Most humans are animals. In the Lord of the Rings, many animals are human. Even plants. There is humanity even in evil.

It is often said that Tolkien’s books are about death. I think Tolkien’s books are about the specter of death, and about states of un-death that can be lived in life if you are not on your guard, or if you have endured too much suffering. The books make a thought experiment about death through the device of a race of people who are immortal and long to be able to die in the same way that mortal men long to be immortal.

For such a dark story, it is strange how few characters actually die in it. It seems (at least) like Tolkien was afraid of letting a character die. Characters fade away. Or sail away. And they have been around for a long, long time, so it’s not like they really had births or childhoods either. It seems like he was afraid of defining things at the edges. He is reluctant to show death in its senselessness. He is reluctant to show an ending of things. He had trouble ending his book. His stories, they fade out rather than terminate.

The races of beings that populate Middle Earth also share this quality. They are hard to define, ambiguous at the boundaries. And because of his reluctance to define and delineate, Tolkien propogates new and intermediate forms that plug the conceptual gaps. For every two kinds of thing in his world, there can be found a third thing between them, some intermediate phase in creation. There’s always this blending, forms merging one into another.

In this way, Tolkien was like Nature. Nature also, if you look closely, produces these intermediate forms, these secondary and tertiary forms of things, different in very slight ways. Middle Earth oddly resembles the natural world, with its astonishing spectra of species. What S.J. Gould called (referring to the Burgess Shale), “wonderful life.”

So Tolkien’s books are really about life, as much as they are about death. They are about the way things blend into things, and people blend into each other.

The chain of persons–Frodo, Sam, Gollum (or rather, Gollum, Frodo, Sam) is the central, most touching manifestation of this. Interdependence is a kind of blending and overlapping. Frodo is a kind of intermediate figure, holding in suspension the opposite forces or archetypes represented by Sam and Gollum. T. writes (in his letters) that the small and the human requires the noble, lest it fall into the base, just as the noble requires the small and the human lest it veer into arrogance. Or something like that. Thus, between Gollum the fallen and Sam who refuses to countenance him, there is Frodo who binds them both to himself. This relationship among these three characters is the human core of the whole trilogy.

The reality of things is, one person cannot reach across the chasm, yet by linking hands they can. Sam cannot “touch” Gollum himself, both are morally repugnant to the other. Frodo’s courage is seeing past the ring-spell of belief that the quest is, like the ring, “his own.” Seeing that he needs these two others and that the three of them form a chain of redemption. Thus, Gollum, Frodo, and Sam form a human chain. Chain. Change. Redemption (as in ex-change).

We all introduce something to someone else. We all are a conduit, a tube, that carries a thing to another thing (and thus god back to god, god back to godself).

Is the elevator operating? Is the elevator working?