Northern Courage

Carry not the weight of history

How many of us have been seduced by this passage from Spengler?

We are born in this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue. To hold on like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who died because they forgot to relieve him when Vesuvius erupted. That is greatness; that is what it means to be a thoroughbred. This honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from Man.¹

And yet there is something faintly horrifying in these lines, a grotesque superimposition of an exquisite virtue - noble steadfastness in the face of death - and the madness of an ignoble vice - nihilistic despair.

Is there not an echo in Spengler’s centurion of Denethor, Tolkien’s Steward of Gondor, who, perceiving the irresistible strength of his foe and the end of the age of men, resolves to share the flames of death with his mortally wounded son? 

The Denethor of the books is not crass and squalid, as he was elsewhere portrayed. Tolkien writes him as a character of rare nobility and refinement, to the end. 

He is not as other men of this time… by some chance the blood of Westernesse runs nearly true in him, as it does in his other son, Faramir, and yet did not in Boromir. He has long sight. He can perceive, if he bends his will thither, much of what is passing in the minds of men, even of those that dwell far off.²

Indeed, it was this interplay of farsightedness and strength of will that allowed him to resist direct corruption by Sauron, as was Saruman’s fate. 

Denethor remained steadfast in his rejection of Sauron, but was made to believe that his defeat was inevitable, and so fell into despair. The reasons for this difference were no doubt that in the first place Denethor was a man of great strength of will and maintained the integrity of his personality until the final blow of the (apparently) mortal wound of his only surviving son.³

What was Denethor’s flaw, his central sin, that led to his eventual madness and suicidal fury? 

A lack of hope. A belief that his powerful perception of reality and the future to come was complete, that he could see every path of history and found them wanting; that there was no force that could redeem the corruption of men. 

Again, the parallels to Spengler - a man of tremendous vision and yet of catastrophic pessimism - are clear. 

Every creation succumbs to decay; every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. All around us we sense traces of lost courses of history that ended in some great doom. All around us the ruins of the past works of dead cultures lie before our eyes. The hubris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to cast down the divine powers to mankind, brings with it its own fall….

All the great cultures are just so many defeats. Whole races remain, inwardly destroyed and broken, fallen into barrenness and spiritual decay, as corpses on the field. The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet — it will be fought out to the bitter end.⁴

These two qualities of Spengler - vision and pessimism - are inextricably bound together. Spengler’s masterwork, his total theory of history, reveals to him that there is no salvation to be found in it. The past echoes into the future, and he knows what is to come: decline and fall.

And we, human beings of the twentieth century, go downhill seeing. Our regard for history, our faculty of writing history, is a revealing sign that our path lies downward. Only at the peaks of the high cultures, just as they are passing over into Civilisations, does this gift of penetrating recognition come to them for a moment.⁵

In this world, hope is only delusion, cowardice. 

Time cannot be stopped; there is absolutely no way back, no wise renunciation to be made. Only dreamers believe in ways out. Optimism is cowardice.⁶ 

Surprisingly, perhaps, this understanding was shared by Tolkien, who meditated both in his work and in his life on his conviction: “I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'...”⁷

There are deep parallels between Tolkien’s world-building, in which ‘the decline and fall of Middle Earth’ is a perpetual and inescapable force, and Spengler’s magnum opus, Der Untergang des Abendlandes - The Fall of the West. 

By the time of the events of The Lord of The Rings, the era of the greatest of men and Eldar is past. “The Blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten.” Galadriel directly references Tolkien’s conviction of the ‘long defeat’, confirming its place in their world as in ours:

For the Lord of the Galadrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings. He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted; for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.⁸

But in the face of this irresistible force, Tolkien’s greatest heroes (and indeed Spengler himself) demonstrate a virtue that underpins the author’s central philosophy: the quality that he called ‘Northern Courage’. 

One of the most potent elements in that fusion is the Northern courage: the theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early Northern literature. This is not a military judgment... I refer rather to the central position the creed of unyielding will holds in the North.⁹

Tolkien perceived in the great cultures of Northern Europe an unshakeable commitment to fight, and to fight well, to the bitter end - even when defeat was certain. For him, this was exemplified by the gods of Norse mythology, who knew they would die in the final battle, Ragnarök, but nonetheless they went to fight, despite the prophecy that sun would become black, the earth would sink into the sea, the stars vanish, scalding steam would rise, and flames would touch the heavens.

The Northern Gods have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason – mythologically, the monsters – but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.¹⁰

But Tolkien was not a pagan, and for him this brilliant, beautiful idea was incomplete. He believed in a path to adopt this virtue without falling into madness and despair. To complete our earlier quotation:

Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.¹¹  

This world is fallen, and there is no salvation within it. Spengler’s diagnosis is correct: an apocalypse must come. But his failure is that his vision is limited to those powers within this world; not those that made it, that underpin it, and that will continue after it has fallen. 

Spengler attributes the creation of our civilizational greatness only to the virtues of Faustian Man, not to He who gives man his virtues. Thus, in his estimation, that which is worth preserving must die with those men. It is a failure born of the error of materialism; his acceptance of ‘defeat’ in this life implies that ‘victory’ in this world was ever possible - it was not. 

Spengler was a man of immense will, embodying a profound but incomplete Northern Courage. Tolkien recognized this limitation. His great project was to tether this virtue to the transcendent: to bring Northern Courage to its completion, to give meaning to the ultimate sacrifice by endowing it with consequence, by revealing that our creator bears witness to our heroism. 

The notion of divine witness is subtly present in Lord of the Rings. 

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.¹²

Northern Courage is brought to its completion with the concept of ‘estel’: a naive but profound hope found in the hearts of Tolkien’s heroes. Estel is a trust that “is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruchin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves.”¹³ It is a reflection of the Christian belief that the Cross has been present “from before the foundation of the world.”¹⁴

It is this hope that completes Northern Courage. Its presence divides Denethor, Steward of Gondor, and his holy reflection, Theoden, King of Rohan. 

Theoden embraces death not with despair, but with joy. He does not accept death, he desires it, longs for it: its call sings in his blood, and his final redemption comes as he answers that call.   

Theoden extols death in his final cry to the Rohirrim before he charges the Pelennor Fields, going to his doom and salvation:

Forth, and fear not darkness. Arise! Arise, riders of Theoden! Spears shall be shaken! Shields shall be splintered! A sword day. A red day. ‘Ere the sun rises!

Ride now! Ride now! Ride! Ride for ruin, and the world ending! 

Death! Death! Death!¹⁵

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann

1. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

2. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

3. J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.). Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth

4. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

8. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

9. J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

10. J. R. R. Tolkien, quoting W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages

11. Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

12. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

13. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Estel_(philosophical_concept)

14. https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2014/07/15/tolkiens-long-defeat/

15. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)