Isn’t it more likely that the orcs, who live in dire poverty, actually support Sauron because he represents the liberal forces of science and industrialisation, in the face of a brutally oppressive conservative social order? We’re left to take on trust from Gandalf, a manipulative spin doctor, and the Elves, immortal elitists who kill humans and hobbits for even entering their territory, when they say that the maker of the one ring is evil. A balanced telling might well have shown Smaug to be much more of a reforming force in the valley of Dale.Īnd of course Sauron doesn’t even get to appear on the page in The Lord of the Rings, at least not in any form more substantial than a huge burning eye, exactly the kind of treatment one would expect in a work of propaganda. Both books are one-sided recollections made the Baggins family, members of the landed gentry, in the Red Book of Westmarch – an unreliable historical source if ever there was one. In both cases this “victory” means the reassertion of a feudal social structure which had been disrupted by “evil”. Both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings turn on the “return of the king” to his rightful throne. Tolkien’s myths are profoundly conservative. Tolkien borrowed the Greek term “ mythpoesis” to describe the task of modern myth-making, and so the literary concept of mythopoeia was born. Change the myth, and you can change the world – as JRR Tolkien well knew when, alongside other writers including CS Lewis, he began to consider the possibility of creating new myths to help us better understand the modern world – or if not to understand it better, then to understand it differently. Myths are a lens through which we investigate the mysteries of the world around us. They’re both mythic ideas that point at an actual truth our mammalian minds aren’t equipped to grasp.

The multi-dimensional expansion of energy, space and time we call the Big Bang wasn’t literally a bang any more than God saying “Let there be light” was literally how the universe was created. But we’re still dependent on myths to actually comprehend the science. Science gives us far more accurate answers to our questions than ever before. Why is the sky blue? What’s this rocky stuff I’m standing on? Who are all these hairless chimps I’m surrounded by? The only way we don’t just keep babbling endless questions like hyperactive six-year-olds is by reducing the infinite complexities of existence to something more simple. The world can be a bafflingly complex place. To understand why takes a little consideration of what we really mean by the word “myth”.

Tolkien lord of the rings