Tolkien as Music and the Biblical Mode

I've been trying to work on an essay on Tolkien and what I am calling "the biblical mode." I have an outline and a bunch of stuff tucked in it, but it may be a while before there is a written product because there is a lot of stuff tucked in there ... it may be the only thing I have ever written that I felt really meant something, and it contains a lot of different things I have written on in posts here, including comparisons of same elements in Lewis, Potter, and others. The material below just came to me recently, but it will be the epilogue for that essay (the appendix will be my post on Tolkien and incarnational literature called "In a Hole in the Ground").

So, right off the bat I have to clarify the topic and content here, because we often use the same language or words for a variety of types of projects. This is not going to be examining any actual music or musical elements used on the page in the works of Tolkien. This is a different kind of project altogether, so I thought I would say that out front to save frustration if somebody found this looking for research or writing on elements of music in the actual content of the works, like ryhtmanalysis  of the poerty or instruments mentioned, This project is relating aspects of music in general metaphorized to narrative in general and proposing background sources for those in Tolkien.

It should be pretty brief from here on out. My dad, in addition to teaching math and computer programing at the college level and doing programming much of his adult life, was also a sort of country mystic at times, and he loved music, particularly singing and playing old timey and Gospel. And I wasn't there when he said what I will tell here, but two friends to whom he was talking when he said it related it to me. He said that he thought that, in music, rhythm relates to the body, harmony relates to the mind, and melody relates to the soul.

So, I started thinking about this in terms of what elements go into Tolkien's storytelling and which of those three base elements they would be if we think of Tolkien's narratives as music. I think there are three background sources for Tolkien (roughly for the Inklings, but Lewis and Williams have classics sources that play much more for them than they do for Tolkien and Tolkien has English sources that don't play as much for Williams and Lewis; they all probably knew all the stuff but gravitated to different parts more strongly, but that's another matter). In this musical schema of "melody = soul; harmony = mind; and rhythm = body," I think that in Tolkien: rhythm/body = the biblical mode (which is why this would be an epilogue to that larger essay ... and this one will probably take the longest to unpack when this is written in full); harmony/mind = the pagan mythological material like the old Norse myths; and melody/soul = the Arthurian material and Chaucer, because those are more wrapped up in characters (and I just ordered Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, and I never really thought about it, but Bree and the Council of Elrond have, in certain ways, very Canterbury Tales settings, with different travelers telling different tales and singing different songs for each other).

So, that's the basic idea for now.

Looking at Tolkien's narratives as music and his background literary influences as those three elements:

Rhythm/Body = Biblical Mode (underlying structure [typological fulfillment])
Harmony/Mind = Pagan Myth (relations of power players [harmony = relations of musical tones])
Melody/Soul = Arthurian and Chaucer (character arcs [melody is a movement with a progression from a beginning to a resolution])

NOTE: This type of project of interweaving elements, and particularly personalist elements like body, mind, and soul, of course very much resembles my readings of, say, the seven-element chiastic structure of the original Harry Potter series as containing three "body" layers: skeletal (structure), muscular (themes), and surface (characterization); I don't have clear ideas worked out at all on it, but it feels to me like the resemblance I feel like I see between the two triads is like the way Greek thought saw the four-elements cosmology and the four-humors anthropology as two out-workings of the four contraries. And of course, it has not escaped my attention that all of these are in triads, which, being as all these are about the human but some about the physicality of humans (three body layers in chiasm) and others about the psychiatry of humans (the three things moved in hearing music, a psycho-sensate experience), this system resembles Augustine's psychological models of humanity as the image of the Trinity and Bonaventure's focus on triads in material reality as vestiges of the Trinity.

I'm not sure on it yet, but I think that epilogue on musical elements and sources may be what I am able to put in the "in common with Lewis and Williams" category because it is structured and has symmetries etc., where as the sort of raw singularity the Incarnation drive I talk about in the "In a Hole in the Ground" essay to be used for the appendix is more like the uniqueness of singularities you find in Tolkien, his organic-ness.

A day Later (after the last addendum):
I'm just updating it here rather than making new posts,
One thing I have to say is that this gets a bit esoteric, which isn't necessarily bad. Owen Barfield and Rudolph Steiner were seminal thinkers, and the latter on a pretty large stage, especially with followers of Goethe, who was pretty seminal himself. But, anyway, my own personal take on legitimate esoteric reading takes what is implicit and draws it out, abstracting it and attenuating it not to claim that that is the whole picture, but to see it's logic, which must be done in viewing it as a whole unto itself, so that one can then think about how that logic interacts with others in a whole, how it is shaped by them and shapes them in return. Some of these could be tangential, while some of them could be at the core of the nature of the thing, just not as visible, and yet other could be so far inward that they are "beyond" in an inner sense, part of some inner world that inhabits our normal one and connects with it in ways we don't imagine (I have always like James Camreron's treatment of the idea of super-terrestrials in his film Abyss, putting the aliens in the deep sea, which is usually symbolic of chaos in ancient cultures, and in that film gets paired with the deep of the dark place into which the wife descends and the husband pulls her back [don't want to put spoilers ... but, man, that scene in the submerisible punches you in the gut and then rips your heart from your chest, kicks it around street for a bit in the grit and broken glass and slams it back into your chest still beating] and then she has to talk to him about on the mic as he descends into the trench to defuse the agent of overwhelming chaos [after the connected agent of "ordered" chaos, the military man played so well by Michael Bien, has been crush falling into that abyss], the nuclear warhead, and meets the extra-terrestrials in the sub-terrestrial world ... while breathing liquid that the tech compared to the water of birth; "your body will adjust; we all did it for nine months" ... brilliant melding of human-character drama [Harris and Mastrantonio are brilliant, and the line by the character "One Night" putting her hand over the mic and saying, "no, Lindsey . . . talk to him" give me chills every time] with the mythopoeic ... it was what Shakespeare could have been, mixing the mythopoeic with the dramatic in a more technically modern version of that same kind of Tolkien did for his Old-English-based more-organic mythopoesis and dramatic character elements ... with a bit of sci-fi and Heidegger's Abground tossed in [and note: int he Essay on Fairy Stories, Tolkien credits science fiction as a modern genre that might actually resemble the "narrative art" of fairy stories] ... can't praise the film Abyss highly enough, and as this started with comments about my dad, a funny story: I can't stand flipping through channels, but he always did it, and one night I said "hey, wait, go back, I like that movie a lot, let's watch that," and it was Abyss, and the whole way through I kept saying, "Dad, I OWN this film on VHS and have watched it numerous times, I like it that much ... that scene is not in it," and he would say, "don't know what to tell you, there it is" ... turns out there's a four-hour version, which they were running on late night TV, but the typical capitalists who did the VHS thought only the theatrical version would sell ... so when a DVD came out that had both, I of course got it).

Anyway, this triadic reading may be a bit esoteric but it may also be esoteric in a meaningful and apropos way too. The three elements may move from inner to outer. This is most evident in the seven-element chiasm of HP as a triad of triads, the bone, muscle, and face of the human person, in that order, from inner to outer. But the triad of music can do so too. Rhythm is most evident in the movement of the skeletal structure (the most inner) in the form of a human being dancing (I recently proofread an interesting book on abstract animation, which is part of where I get some of my ideas here on abstraction as part of isolating elements to see how they work so that we can better understand how they work in the whole, so the point of abstract art not always having been to take you out into the abstraction and leave you there [to quote a friend years ago on why he liked the Dead but not Fish: "the Dead took you out there, but they brought you back; Fish just takes you out there and leaves you out there"], so when Len Lye made his scratch films in which he attached needles to his hands to make scratches on film reel as he danced to music, not holding them in his hand such that his intentional thought was part of it, but rather only the movements of his bodily substructure as translated through his limbs, not of his mind as translated through consciously intentional movements of his hand, the point can be to then reincorporate what is learned into artistic ways of working with full-figural imagery in animation, although, admittedly, many take you out there and leave you out there; so, in addition to Aristotle and Aquinas on abstraction, I must also credit Andrew Johnston in his forthcoming Pulses of Abstraction). And in music, melody is the whole effect we encounter on the surface: rhythm and harmonic relations set in motion and connecting with that in the person that moves, and that movement is what we really identify as human ... we never would "get" skeletal and muscular structure if we didn't at first "get" seeing it in motion in  people we know living, and that movement comes from the animating principle, the soul ... we would tend to think of the soul as the most interior because it's the most "invisible" on a material level, but the soul may also be that mystical thing that it is outer because it is so far inner (and just as, in the ancient world, the idea of body was not defined, at its core, by extension in three dimensions, but rather as a way of relating [to God through cultic acts, to creation by tilling the soil, to others by bodily acts, like spouses relating through the conjugal act], perhaps here the body is that through which the so far inner relations to the outer, and not just "body," but also "flesh").

It is crucial to this way of thinking that, unless we do vivisection (and we see what Lewis thought of that in the prison of the giant named Spirit of the Age in Pilgrim's Regress), we never encounter skeleton and muscle except though not just the surface, but the surface as animated by the soul. And we seldom encounter harmony outside of melody, and even a chord on a piano or guitar is not interesting until incorporated into a melodic progression. In drumming, we do encounter rhythm in isolation, but the best drumming involves changes in pitch that sometime almost resemble melody ... I once went to the Brazil festival in "Little Brazil" near Rockefeller plaza and they had Forro drummers ... amazing sounds ... the two things I have heard elsewhere that approach it are the Forro drummers in Paul Simon's "Obvious Child" and Rusted Root's drum jams in the days of their shows at the (now gone) club Graffiti in Pittsburgh that became "Drum Trip" on the When I Woke album)

Anyway, in this progression, body is the most inner because it is the most basic, then mind is about the ability to realize a static comprehension of relations, but it is the soul that makes us able to realize those things in the experience of the appearance in motion, our soul recognizing firs the soul in the other and then cognizing the elements with which it works. So, body is inmost and basic, and then mind, and then soul as the so-inner-it-is-outer; rhythm is the most basic, then static harmony, then moving melody that animates those together (to use that analogy of modern bands and the "bringing you back" that my friend said the Dead did and Fish does not, Blues Traveler said, "the hook brings you back," and a hook is that basic small catchy melody that you keep reprising throughout a song); the bones are the most inner, then the muscles, then the appearance in motion that reveals them to others.

So what of the Trinity, of which I am saying all this is either image or vestige? What of this whose relation to the other triads I am suggesting might be analogous to one of the very vestiges of it we see, meaning the Geek thought that the four-elements cosmology (outer) and the four-humors anthropology (outer)  are both applications of the four contraries (inner) ... how does that relate to the Trinity? (and this is probably the most esoteric part of this whole thought experiment.) How does the Trinitarian principle reflected in those other triads itself have movement from inner to outer? The Father is like existence itself, and the Son, as the first other than the Father and in relation to the Father, is the principle of plurality and relation. But what of the Spirit that is itself the relation between the two. In Catholic/Christian theology, Scripture is the written record of the Incarnation and it is the Incarnation that reveals the Father and the Trinity, but it is the inspiration by the Spirit that brings about the making of that record and animates the moving life of sacraments and interpretation by which we encounter the Trinity. If the Spirit is the love between the Father and Son in the immanent Trinity and is also the animator of the Church and inspiritor of Scripture in the economic Trinity, then it is, like the soul, so inner it is outer [I am aware that in doing this, I need to be clear on the differences between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, but for here I can simply note that need].

As a last interesting note, this triadic inner to outer is also the way I used to describe for my students in OT the the Hebrew Canon, The TaNaK, the Torah (Law), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvum (Writings). The actual arrangement of books differs in places from the Septuagint/Christian canon: Ruth and Esther, along with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and 1-2 Chronicles, are all in the third section, the Writings.  The Torah is the core story of the people from creation of land to being on the verge of entering into the land (Gordan Wenham has an interesting book called Story as Torah and a classic article on sanctuary [tabernacle and temple] imagery in the Gen 2 account of Paradise). Then, once in the land, that core identity of a people expands into nationhood as a kingdom among other kingdoms and empires, which is always revealed by and sometimes also done by the prophets, the king makers and king breakers who respond to and bring the Davar Adonai, the Word of the LORD. After the fall of the kingdoms, the people enter a new kind of relation with the larger world, like the Persian and Greek empires, and this is recorded not only in books that recount events and histories, but also in works that interact with the understanding that larger world employs, like the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, and the Psalter that structures the liturgical lives of those peoples in that ongoing present world. And that is a relation to the whole world, but as with the inner that is so inner it is outer, the whole canon of the TaNaK begins (the most inner because it is the beginning of the Torah) with the relation not only to the whole human world, but the whole created world, to "till and to keep" it. (I would also note that the relation to the larger world now involves a diasporic tenet of having the land in absentia, living in diaspora and awaiting the entry into the true land and nation in the next world, not like Nietzsche's emphasis on father lands here and now  [and if you read The Antichrist ... it reads like a manifesto for the Third Reich], which is why hundreds of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews marched in protest against the creation of the nation-state of Israel in the 1940s in Brooklyn with signs that said "no homeland without a Messiah" ... God constituted the nation of Israel among the other nations by appointing a king through his prophet [originally "the Messiah" was simply the present anointed Davidic-line king on the throne in Jerusalem; even David, before the promise of the dynasty in 2 Sam 7, called Saul "the LORD's anointed," literally the passive participle meshioch from the verb meshach, "to anoint"), not the United Nations ... and while I can't presume to speak for Judaism today, because there are descendants of the Shoah who see the state of Israel as an important symbolic reparation for the Shoah and I am not such a descendant and able to speak for that experience, I do find a certain kinship in the fact that I don't want Donald Trump or the GOP telling me what it means for me to be Christian any more than those Jewish marchers in the 1940s wanted the UN telling them what it means to be Jewish).

I do need to admit here how I conceive what I have just written in this addendum. Just as it is esoteric, it is also admittedly experimental. I'm not necessarily saying it all works and must be so; I am a bit like Nicholas Cage at the beginning of National Treasure trying on different cypher interpretations of the writing from the pipe.