In a Hole in the Ground: Tolkien's Incarnational Imagination

Introduction

So, I am in a book club down in Pittsburgh called "The Pittsburgh Inklings" that meets once a month at a place called the Abbey in Lawrenceville (at least so far ... last night they had a band starting at 8 that, while actually quote good as a band, kind of hampered the last half hour of our discussion, which usually runs from 6:30 to 8:30, so the girl who started it on meetup is going to find out if there is music there the next night we meet and, if there is, either start earlier or meet elsewhere, but the place has become sort of a familiar feel and staple for us).

This post is from back in the summer, but copy-editing has been too busy in the intervening months to really give this subject a decent treatment here. I think it was in July that we read a book called A Hobbit,  a Wardrobe, and a Great War by a historian named Joseph Loconte who teaches at King's College in NYC. The book was all about  Tolkien and Lewis actually fighting in the First World War and the impact it had on their themes.

Their was a wealth of background, some of it very endearing. For example (just as an awesome example before I get to the main event), before Lewis and the Inklings, before the War, Tolkien had an earlier group of friends who called themselves "The Tea Club and Barrovian Society" (TCBS for short), "a semi-secret society of friends who first met in 1911 at King Edward's School, Birmingham" (p. 54), which  included Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson. I mention their names to give some context for what is possibly the most endearing fact I have ever read about Tolkien, at least as regards his academic career: "Before being sent off to the war, members of the TCBS held a 'council' meeting as Wiseman's house in London. ... They talked  late into the night, sharing with one another their deepest convictions and aspirations. ... Tolkien later said it was at this moment that he first became aware of the 'hopes and ambitions' that would propel him throughout his life" (pp. 54-55).

Without combing back through the book more thoroughly (I found that only because I had TCBS written in the margins), I cannot remember if Loconte made these connections himself (in other words, I would need to research more thoroughly what exactly Loconte said and what I thought of on my own), but the main thrust of this post, Tolkien's "incarnational" imagination, is my own. Because of the word "council," many might imagine the TCBS council as mainly the model for the council of Elrond. But what it puts me more in mind of (whether I got it from an offhand comment of Loconte or on my own, I definitely latched onto it on my own) is a model for the "council" at Crickhollow, where Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Freddy reveal to Frodo that they know full well at least most of what he is up to and at least three of them do not intend to be prevented from accompanying him (Freddy stays behind at the cottage to keep up appearances). Along with this discussion, there was much food and drink and Merry and Pippin splashing water all over the place singing in the bath. I'm sure that what was behind the deep comradery among the hobbits was Tolkien's own among his friends. And the wonderings of the various hobbits about how each other are faring when they separate was, I am sure, based on Tolkien's own wonderings about his friends (in fact, Loconte describes the heart-breaking detail of Tolkien having been relieved to catch up with one of his friends at one point, joyed to find he was alive, only to find out later that he died shortly thereafter ... I believe that only Tolkien and one other survived the war ... and I am pretty sure that Loconte is the one who noted that the wonderings of the hobbits reflect those of the members of the TCBS about each other in the war).

The Main Event (of this post): "In a Hole in the Ground."

 Locont'e also recounts many other details of that war that are the backdrop for elements in the Lord of the Rings, horrifying details of trench warfare, of stumbling over corpses, or even all but dead men, half buried in mud or torn apart, or decaying, while continual bombardment by enemy artillery made any orientation nearly impossible. As he brings out all to well, the knowledge of the technicalities of trench warfare and the experience of the real-world living in it feed directly into the Tolkien's descriptions of the battle at the fields of Pelennor before the walls of Minis Tirith and the march through the dead marshes in the Lord of the Rings. The vivid details of line-upon-line of trenches being dug in the fields and then filled with fire as the network of them advanced to just out of reach of the archers and catapults on the city walls and the horror of looking down into the dead faces in the marshes were more than mere conjectures or even thorough research on Tolkien's part. They were real memories from first-hand experience of the living hell.

And here is where the main element of this post comes in, in a connection Loconte makes that sent my mind wandering down these paths, just as the opening of the Hobbit, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," sent Tolkien's imagination on the journey "to find out what hobbits were like." Loconte writes, "We don't know why Tolkien wrote those enigmatic words. But we do know what Hobbits are like: from his own account, the character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering the dreary 'hole in the ground,' the front-line trench" (p. 75).

In fact, I would add that hole dwelling is not merely one fact among many about hobbits; it is the identifying fact about hobbits. I would need to check further, but I am pretty sure on this, so I will just go ahead and state it here: both when Merry and Pippin find that hobbits are not in Treebeard's old lists and when the ent informs them that he has put them in, when such a long list of races affords only a few brief details for each, the one that goes in foremost for hobbits is dwelling in holes. It should also be kept in mind that, even though Tolkien was forming some of the oldest Middle Earth tales that would become The Silmarillion as far back as WWI itself, the first published words that anybody in the wide world ever read from Middle Earth were "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The thing is, by all laws of psychology, a man who suffered that experience of trench warfare on the front line should be the last person who could ever follow that introductory line with this: "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." There is no way he should have been able to associate comfort with the words "in a hole in the ground," let alone have hole dwelling be such a key defining characteristic of the Middle-Earth race with whom he most identified his beloved life of enjoyment of pleasure in natural good things and hearty good people in the shires of England. So ... how does it happen that he is precisely the author who did that?

The Incarnational Imagination

 My answer to that question is that it is the impact of his faith in the Incarnation on his imagination. To understand what I am going to say, one has to know the words involved and understand them as levels. The word used in the title of the doctrine is carnes, which is the Latin word for "flesh" and translates the Greek word sarx. This is different than the word for "body," which is corpus in Latin and soma in Greek.

"Body" (corpus/soma) is a more holistic concept of what it means to exist in a body as an entire thing. It's much more philosophically or conceptually adaptable and variable. For instance, while the ancients would not use these exact categories, their basic concept of "body" was a "mode of relation": you relate to God through bodily acts of worship (grain offerings etc); you relate to your spouse through bodily conjugal acts; you relate to the rest of creation by tilling the ground or herding cattle. In fact, scholars sometimes ask the question of "whether the serpent got it right" in the garden, since the couple did not materially die in the day they ate of the fruit, and they (scholars) answer that the text/author, even on the literal level of the Hebraic concepts involved at the time of composition, did not see the serpent as getting it right because "death" was any lessening in the quality of four primary relationships: God, other humans, the rest of creation (nature), and self. So, they did die in the introduction of the trajectory of death into those relationships: they hid from God; they were alienated form themselves in the form of shame at their own nakedness; the ground would yield thistles and thorns and yield fruit only through toil; the woman would have enmity with the snake; and as far as human-human relationships in the form of the only two humans around at the time, spouses, "your desire shall be for your husband but he shall rule over you."

(Side note: This is not the same thing as the "spiritual death" that will be interpretted from the text in the Christian Christological reading; I believe that that reading is not only an accurate translation of the idea into Christian reading but also the fullness of the literal sense as the Word of God, with God as the divine and truest author, BUT I also believe that there is a point to exploring the concepts original to the text at the time of it human composition in human language, the original concepts from which the Christian reading is a translation [not only a translation, of course, but a fulfillment ... but that very concept means that the original was not full in the first place, and I believe that what it was lacking was the fully Christian idea of "spiritual"]. ... Plus, I have heard the mistaken placement of the "spiritual" reading at that original compositional level buttressed by a claim that, as far as I have been able to tell in a fair bit of actual experience in translating biblical Hebrew, is completely erroneous: the claim is made that the Hebrew idiom used for "you will surely die" literally means "die the death" [meaning "spiritual death]"; when in fact, the idiom, which is the infinitive plus a finite form of the same verb [mot tamut: "dying you will die"] is always used simply as a radicalization of surety ... "you will surely die.")

But, to get back on track here with my main point of how "body" is a more holistic, philosophically loadable and malleable term, this concept of "body" as "defined by relationality" is very different from the concept of body that arises with Renee Descartes and rules the modern period of philosophy, in which body is define merely as "matter," which he defined as "res extensa" ... body is defined solely by its extension in the three dimensions of the physical world. Two very different conceptions of "body" are possible because it is such a conceptual term (including things like the body as metaphor for political relations).

So we see that "body" (corpus/soma) is a very holistic, quasi-philosophical concept. "Flesh" (carnes/sarx), on the other hand is a very sensory experience thing. I find it best expressed in the term "squishiness" (I also like to call it "the green wobbly bit," but that works only for those who have read Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents). It's a deeper word psychologically, which is the point of this post: what makes it possible for Tolkien to transform the psychological hell of trench warfare into the comfort and goodness of hobbit holes. The tactile "squishiness," the "flesh" experience that Tolkien had of "a hole in the ground" was the squishiness of the torn and mud-covered corpse and the foul odor of dank water mixed with the acrid mechanical charring of mortar fire (and maybe worse, recalling the development of mustard and other nerve gasses in WWI) and rotting blood.

So, here is where the Incarnation fully comes in. I said that "flesh" is a deeper thing psychologically, and this is the "levels" part. The teaching of the Incarnation is that the second person of the Trinity descended into human personhood, and I am saying that the key point, at least for this post, is that he descended not just into "body," but all the way down into "flesh," all the way down to that "squishiest" and most psychological level, and redeemed it. The original event and traditional doctrine are not called the "In-corp-eration"; they are called the "In-carn-ation." John 1:14 does not say "and the Word became body (soma)"; it says "and the Word became flesh [sarx]."And I believe it was Tolkien's deep abiding faith in the Incarnation (and real experience of it n the Eucharist) that permeated his imagination and gave him the ability to transform the words "in a hole in the ground" from the hellish "flesh-experience" of death, decay, and utter sensory chaos and pain in the trenches of WWI into the key defining characteristic of the race that most represented what he so dearly loved in his homeland.


In one of his letters, Tolkien is well-known for saying a very deep thing: "Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament." I think it is also the one great thing that enabled his immense and beautiful imagination to redeem those natural relationships he so dearly loved in spite of the psychological hell of trench warfare by which he was so brutally assaulted. 

(Please see my post on Tolkien versus Shakespeare for more of my thoughts on Tolkien and Incarntational Imagination)