Filologia y nihilismo

Tolkien or Nietzsche, Philology and Nihilism

Marqués Martínez, Jorge
Universitat Jaume I, EA0906

He who wants to partake of all good things must know how to be small at times. 1

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Perhaps it is best to begin with a kind of Tolkienian confession: I am no scholar of J.R.R. Tolkien and am not at all learned in the secondary literature on his works. I am moreover ahack when it comes to either Thomas Aquinas or Friedrich Nietzsche, the two figures at whose intersection I will try to place Tolkien and his work. Since I am more or less ignorant of the criticism on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, or any of the numerous opuscula of his, I must warn you that everything I say in what follows may have already been said, by one much more able and eloquentthan me. If such is the case, then I beseech you to an exercise of the characteristically Hobbitic virtue of pity…

The Origins of an Allusion

There seems to be no evidence that J.R.R. Tolkien ever read Friedrich Nietzsche; in fact, as commentators are often somewhat tickled to point out (and something like a myth which Tolkien himself played no small part in constructing 2), it seems thatTolkien read very little from his own century, with the sole exceptions being the works of his fellow convivators in the Eagle and Child. It is perhaps no accident that Tolkien’s reading seemed to comport with his drinking—a not entirely bad policy, I might add. I might even suggest that there’s something basically very religious about beer, and that this explains in part why the works of Tolkienbear a certain theologic-ity born of friendships nurtured in the public-house, but that is a story for another day. On the other hand there is Nietzsche, the notorious teetotaler who said that “ coffee spreads darkness”, the ascetic troglodyte ever in search of pure air, the anti-Christ who once bemoaned “how much beer there is in the German intellect!”3
It is hard to imagine, however, that thename of the Hermit of Sils Maria was never invoked during those sessions in St. Giles’ Street. As David Thatcher has shown, Nietzsche’s presence began to be mildly felt in England, particularly in the arts, by the turn of the century. The distinction of being the first English writer to have encountered Nietzsche, according to tradition, belongs to the poet and dramatist John Davidson, whodiscovered him as early as 1891, four years before the first English translation of one of Nietzsche’s works (The Case of Wagner, 1895). 4 From Davidson the influence of Nietzsche spread through Havelock Ellis, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and others. By the early 1910’s, his following was growing steadily, but not without some show of resistance. In any event, it is clear that Nietzschewas far from unknown to the cultured English (though his introduction into the university curricula, particularly at Oxford, may have been much slower in coming, given the entrenched suspicion of ‘novelty’ (if not of German philologists5) there—a source of great consternation to the new English Nietzscheans, no doubt).
What, if any, manner of direct experience Tolkien had with Nietzsche, it isimpossible to say. It is, however, difficult to believe that his influence was not felt in some indirect way. It is well-nigh impossible that a man of Tolkien ’s learning, his situation in Oxford for forty-three years, from 1925 to 1968, would never have encountered his ideas in some form or another. Neither the rarefied air of high table in Merton College nor the smoke-filled ether of theEagle and Child could have long remained impervious even to the slightest hint of the “smell” of the “divine decomposition.” 6
In 1913, just two years after the last of Nietzsche’s un-translated works, Ecce Homo, made its appearance in English, Charles Sareola wrote that “A searching estimate of Nietzsche in English still remains to be written. And there is only one man that could write it, and...