Our Violent Shadow of Tolkien

How Tolkien's abandoned sequel predicted the rise of grimdark fantasy.

Photo by Reiseuhu on Unsplash

Once upon a time there was a fantastical antediluvian epic about a world with three ages: an age of angels and their pre-edenic fall, an age of a sort of utopian garden and the fall of man, and the struggling of man before the coming of a flood or a crashing tower. I’m referring, of course, both to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible, not The Lord of the Rings.

In that antediluvian or pre-Babel world, much more good comes of long livers, of angels, and even of men who tarry, parlay, and do either pilgrimage or battle with them. In the wake of such a world, what is left but what some in the film analysis and others in the analysis of the psychopath call “the Mark of Cain”?¹ What is left but an incredibly tumultuous era of violence, of men — severed from the fountain of youth — who kill precisely because they are the sorts of creatures who die, who kill ironically in order to preserve themselves and so sever the very thing that makes them human: communion with other humans?

Have you ever met someone who detonated a relationship, an organization, a work of art, or a business simply out of misguided self preservation?

Tolkien understood this theme as he said in a few of his letters:

The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.

Letters # 186

But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!

Letters # 203

But I might say that if the tale is 'about' anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about 'power'. Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the 'escapes': serial longevity and hoarding memory.

Letters # 211

I could cite similar thinking in his commentary for some time, but that should give us a solid launching point. And so we humans tend to kill in order to last a little longer than our neighbor, the precise person who gives life any longevity and meaning in the first place. It’s a great irony that in our desperation to outlast Death, we herald him in with pitchforks and torches. Dominion and power being only one manifestation of this, but the most addictive of the set. I am, of course, using power here in the limited nihilistic sense and not the old sense of the ability to make something new out of something old — art is true power, treating people as pawns is not.

And so when the third age ended — much as it ended with a flood in both Gilgamesh and the Bible — Tolkien set down to write a fourth age, a new shadow. When you have so much goodness, so much magic, so many epic heroes, so much kenotic self-emptying as in Frodo, and that bounty leaves the world, what remains?

I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing.

Letter 256, (dated 13 May 1964)

Eight years later, fifteen months before his death, he said:

I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)

Letter 338, (dated 6 June 1972)

I doubt, knowing what we know of Tolkien’s genre fluidity and the modern audiences propensity to be chameleon readers (consider Sanderson’s fans), that it would have been “not worth doing.” It would have been different. It may not have, perhaps, been like the Silmarillion — the one bestselling fantasy book that few ever actually read, cover to cover. Let alone reread.

However, Tolkien’s fourth age would have been incredibly dark. Men tire of goodness. Men grow restless. Men become revolutionary populists as Gondorian boys caught up in some addiction playing at Orcs and doing damage to the refugees housed there, completely caught up in the occult under the guise of good old religious boys. This sounds, of course, almost identical to what he saw in World War II. And elsewhere…

In any case, Tolkien’s assessment of the causal chain following Aragorn’s death rings true to me.

For if you rid a world such as that of its magic, miracles, angels, elves, rings, virtues, and everything else that enchanted it — if you properly disenchant and demythologize the world — then its boys get the wrong impression about what made an epic an epic. What made history historic. If history is merely the recitation of one violent conflict after another, then it isn’t much of a story, is it? Let alone a moral philosophy. You could, in a way, draw a clean line from Tolkien’s work through Lewis’s philosophy of moral, empathetic education towards the fantasy that followed:

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

— Lewis, Abolition of Man: Men without Chests, 12.

Is it any wonder then — properly disenchanted, rid of empathy, and full of the violent mark of Cain — what followed in the fantasy genre?

For a time, we subsisted on the fumes of Tolkien. We had the Robert Jordans and Tad Williams and Terry Brooks as well as Feist, Salvatore, Weis/Hickman, Eddings. These annoyed folks like George R.R. Martin, who said:

As I said, I read a lot of different things, not just science fiction/fantasy. One of the things I read a lot of is history and historical fiction. I’m a big fan of historical fiction. I did read fantasy as well. As I read that, I sort of had a problem with a lot of the fantasy I was reading, because it seemed to me that the middle ages or some version of the quasi middle ages was the preferred setting of a vast majority of the fantasy novels that I was reading by Tolkien imitators and other fantasists, yet they were getting it all wrong. It was a sort of Disneyland middle ages, where they had castles and princesses and all that. The trappings of a class system, but they didn’t seem to understand what a class system actually meant.²

Now I disagree in many ways with Martin. He got some things very right about the Middle Ages. He got many — I would argue more — things very wrong. Consider how the medieval peasant was smarter than you or how alchemists generally started and proliferated witch burnings against papal bulls in the modern era, not the medieval, or the work of the Benedictines among the poor during the War of the Roses. Da Vinci happened to be painting in that era as well, you know.

And did you realize that it was illegal to be at war, almost worldwide, for 7 months out of the year? If you want to know why, meet me in the comments…

In any case, Martin’s version is much, much bleaker than the reality of things. Our nihilism came later in the modern era, in an era of men without chests who tried to design society-wide solutions or, through fascism, misdirect oligarchic oppression upon some Other.

Post-Tolkien.

In a Post-Tolkien world, you end up with the precise project that Glen Cook, George R. R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, Richard K. Morgan, Paul Kearney, Mark Lawrence^, and Anna Smith Spark have popularized. Grimdark. Don’t get me wrong, I love Westeros the world and certain redemptive arcs moved me to tears, particularly Martin’s philosophy of “earned tropes.” And don’t get me wrong, as stylists and narrators many of them offer a bounty. That in mind, Adam Roberts called grimdark an “anti-Tolkien” approach to fantasy:³

…the standard way of referring to fantasies that turn their backs on the more uplifting, Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then 'really' was

Yet even Roberts admits grimdark misimagines history, that it’s really conveying the modern moment of our world as a "cynical, disillusioned, ultraviolent place.” As you can see above from Tolkien’s own letters, it is not anti-Tolkien. In fact, it’s something contained within the very fold of Tolkien’s ages as Christopher published within The People of Middle Earth. Tolkien stared into that abyss and that abyss stared back and he closed the door on writing it.

His successors did not.

What remains to be seen is if any post-nihilistic, metamodern author can see beyond our fourth age’s violent shadow, beyond the cynicism of a mechanized disenchanted and demythologized world of mere collective mythologies into the sincerity of the very bliss of being that yet pierces through the darkness. A sort of fifth age beyond the fourth that Tolkien prophesied as a logical next-step in the wake of his own work that he considered “not worth doing.”

If it wasn’t worth doing, it was not because Tolkien’s deft hand would have failed at reinventing the genre. Rather it was because the very philosophy undergirding such bleakness would have rung false, in the end. For even the children of Hurin while being genocidally eradicated from the face of Middle Earth say that day shall come again. There’s a bleakness there that no nihilist could ever properly achieve, one that in the fathomless deep held resurrection and basic ontology in mind as an unshakeable, uneroding and unending seabed.

Indeed day shall come again in fantasy. I don’t mean romantasy, though that’s great. Nor do I mean mere cozy fantasies like Legends and Lattes or The Spellshop, which are also great. I mean something more. Something writ deep on a philosophical level and writ large on the scale of epic fantasy. For though we now peril in the valley of the shadow of death in this vale of tears, though we languish in our own solipsistic violent shadow of Tolkien (within our bleak fictional escapism and amid our broken nonfictional systemic evils), tomorrow’s writers who do not drink the kool-aid of our technocratic security state nor of its propagandistic hatred will reimagine virtue injected into this valley of dry bones.

When they do, they will ensure day shall come again in fantasy.

When they do, it will not be a mere Thomas Kinkaid painting that disavows, for instance, the tsunami that struck Indonesia or the moral failure of Vietnam or the propaganda of the internet.

Rather, it will be an earned sincerity that struggles towards a proper meta narrative of whatever is true and good and beautiful. Common good in the teeth of the shadow with or without the help of longævi and angels. Once that happens, the age of men will no longer tire of goodness and death will no longer be feared, but embraced as a temporal friend until the rules of entropy will be finally rewritten and unmade as the Cambridge chair of physics, John Polkinghorne, once prophesied. Yes, the language of Babel was scrambled, but one day poets will have flames upon their heads. Yes, the flood came, but the rainbow rises in our hearts.

Of course, such a vision will take empathy, wisdom, and courage. How rare is it to find all three behind a single byline on today’s bookshelves?

1. J. Reid Meloy, ed., The Mark of Cain: Psychoanalytic Insight and the Psychopath, 1st edition (Hoboken: Routledge, 2001).

2. “The Sound of Young America: George R. R. Martin, Author of a Song of Ice and Fire Series | Maximum Fun,” accessed January 29, 2025, https://maximumfun.org/episodes/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/george-r-r-martin-author-song-ice-and-fire-series-interview-sound-young-america/.

3. Roberts, Adam (2014). Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Hachette UK. p. 42.