Is George R R Martin's Moral Vision Really More Complex Than Tolkien's?
Otherwise a decent article, it is marred by a passing reference by one of the writers to a common misconception about the world of Westeros created by George R. R. Martin: that it is somehow morally superior and more complex than Middle Earth, the touchstone by which all fantasy literature gets measured.
This tired old cliche keeps popping up again and again (it gets featured in a review of the fourth Martin book, A Feast for Crows, which gets splashed prominently on that book’s cover). It’s a misconception that seems fueled by Martin’s promotion of his own work; you can see hints of it in his Rolling Stone interview here. I want to argue, in the end, that comparing the two works to each other in terms of moral outlook is pretty futile, given the key differences between them. But first, some rejoinders.
Rejoinder One: If you think Tolkien’s moral view is simplistic, then you either have not read the books or you have a very low level of reading comprehension.
For whatever reason there is a pervading misconception of Lord of the Rings as only an epic clash between good and evil, with those lines clearly delineated. Perhaps, as my friend Nik suggested to me, this is due to most people’s exposure to the story coming from the film versions which, whatever their virtues, do a poor job capturing the complexity of Tolkien’s world. Perhaps people like to pretend they’ve read the books and have only skimmed the surface (I think Tolkien would have some sympathy for Jay-Z, who in the classic “Renegade” dropped this line – edited by me for content, and to run in the time allotted – which seems appropriate in this context: “[Dumb people] say that I’m foolish I only talk about jewels/ Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it?”). Or perhaps the people reading the books just don’t have any idea how themes and character development work in books.
Whatever the reason, Lord of the Rings is viewed as a work whose primary moral emphasis is this: there are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys need to stand up so things will turn out hunky-dory. That’s about as accurate a summation as a presidential bio that reads “William Jefferson Clinton, 42 President of the United States. Known for his abilities on the saxophone.”
At the heart of Tolkien’s work is not some primitive dividing line, but the chilling truth that within each person there lies great potential for both good and evil. Yes, it presupposes that good and evil are real things, distinct from each other. For some people I suppose, that’s enough to disqualify it as a serious work, but those people are primarily 8th Grade layabouts who sit in the back of the class raising their hands to say “But wasn’t Hitler just doing what he thought was right?” Tolkien’s treatment of good and evil is in fact nuanced. To take the most obvious of roughly one million examples, Gollum appears as a character whose good attributes have, over time, succumbed to the tendencies of greed within his heart. Nevertheless, he remains until the last moment a character for whom change is possible, and Gandalf insists that everyone treat him with pity and kindness. Even the big bads, like Saruman and Sauron, once possessed goodness within themselves; only lifetimes of corruption have distanced them from others. Likewise the good characters are not impossibly good – Boromir of course being an example.
In the same vein, the story (as it is actually told) does not have some smarmy happy ending where all gets put right. The actual ending is downright chilling: in “The Scouring of the Shire” (a chapter left unadapted in the movies), the hobbits must fight for their land, only to discover that not all can be put right again. Frodo himself learns this lesson in the most painful ways: he has been marked by evil, and will carry that with him for the rest of his days. Again and again the emphasis is not on impossible goodness wiping out indescribable evil, but of ordinary folk bearing the burdens of responsibility and choosing the good even when it seems futile.
Rejoinder Two: People mistake brutality for complexity.
One of the reasons people are so quick to label Martin’s world a morally complex one is because he unflinchingly tackles a number of “adult” topics. Savage violence! Rape! Consensual-but-still-disturbing sex! Martin has certainly shown a fascination with the more grisly aspects of human interaction, but depiction does not equal examination, and Martin for the most part shies away from ramifications of the events he puts on the page. It’s also, I think, a poor mark of where we are as a people that we measure maturity simply by graphic content. We certainly do not want to expose young children to people getting flayed alive, but just because a middle aged man can handle and digest that sort of content, does it mean that he is better off for it? True “maturity” in content comes with temperance, something about which Martin knows little. Put another way – you know who really enjoys boatloads of graphic violence and sex? Teenage boys, not exactly paragons of advanced development.
There’s also a strange “moral” logic at play in Martin’s universe. Because he is so obsessed with power dynamics, Martin lays out the world of Westeros a bit like a chessboard. Make the wrong move and your piece is doomed. There’s little of the spontaneity and, well, human freedom that marks actual life. Too much loyalty or sense of duty? Your days are numbered. Cunning and ruthless? You’ll live, at least till you meet a bigger, nastier fish. Martin does not even leave room for the possibility that good deeds done, even when they fail, could live on and have worth. In Westeros there is only power and weakness, life and death. The moral machinations of Martin’s world get as repetitive as his plot twists, or his use of language.
I want to stop myself here before I go too far down the rabbit hole of Martin-bashing, which is not my intent here. In fact, I have tremendous respect for his abilities as an author and especially as a world creator. What I do want to note is that, in the end, comparing his work to Tolkien’s, especially on a moral level, feels futile because of the essential differences between the two. I had a breakthrough about this mid-Twitter rant, thanks to my friend and interlocutor Tony, who brought up a quote from that Rolling Stone article which I think perfectly summarizes the divide between Martin and Tolkien (and, interestingly, how badly Martin misunderstands Tolkien). A simple quote, but profound: “What was Aragorn’s tax policy?”
That one question betrays one of Martin’s biases, a bias many of us, I think, share: if a work is not interested in political questions, it must not be complex. Martin, of course, loves politics: seen from a certain angle, his books are like the most interesting, bloodiest possible version of C-Span. But the mistake comes in when he (and others) assume that this must be the norm for a truly complex work.
The fact is that Lord of the Rings is apolitical, to a huge degree. I suspect there are several reasons for this. One has to do with Tolkien’s background as a scholar: the stories he pays tribute to in his building of Middle Earth, including Beowulf, pay little heed to the world of politics. Even set as they are in the courts of kings, these stories primarily focus on the advancement of story, especially the clearing away of monsters, so that society can thrive. It’s worth noting that Tolkien, the man who brought Beowulf back to respectability, argued in his great essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” that those who bemoaned the story’s lack of political detail completely missed the point of the tale.
The other important reason, though, is that Tolkien seems to agree with Nietzsche’s assertion in Twilight of the Idols that a fascination with politics can only come at the expense of culture. Tolkien is a cultural anthropologist par excellence, building nuance and depth into his depictions of the various races of Middle Earth. He loves the language and songs and stories and habits and beliefs that constitute each culture, and he has the wisdom to realize that fleshing out politics would only detract from these emphases. Indeed, the non-human races in Middle Earth themselves seem heavily apolitical, even quasi-anarchical. Both the elves and hobbits have societies arranged along lines of social, not political, agreement. Meanwhile he does not shy away from the implication that, for humans, political arrangement is a must (that is true also of the dwarves, who seem closer in their character to humans than the other races). That seems to be the point in the idea of one age passing away and another, the age of humans, taking its place. Gone forever is a world free of politics, where societies may concentrate on what makes life really worth living. This is part and parcel with Tolkien’s environmentalism, which privileges communion with nature at the expense of technological entanglement.
To Martin, however, this is a flaw in Tolkien’s writing, and he associates what he sees as “good leader = good people” mechanics in Tolkien (not actually accurate) with Medieval political philosophy (not even in the same neighborhood. Seriously, has he read even a scrap of Medieval political philosophy???). We tend to agree with Martin, living as we do in a society where increasingly the only bonds we have with our neighbor are imposed bonds of political structure, not natural bonds of culture. Therefore we associate politics (and its inevitable grime) with true maturity, with growing up and abandoning the things of youth. But maybe Tolkien points us to a better way, one forgotten and unwalkable by us, perhaps, but still haunting in its vision of what the world could be. That’s not immaturity or naivete – it’s true poetic vision.
