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Kingship in the Work
of the Inklings
by Charles A. Coulombe
|
This article was originally presented at Mythcon XXII
in San Diego, California, on 26 July 1991. The Mythopoeic
Society, annual conveners of Mythcon, are dedicated to
the study of fantasy literature, particularly the works
of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. While
a good knowledge of the three authors (called the "Inklings")
and their works is helpful (obviously as regards citation
of various of their writings) it is not essential. What
is important to realize is that Tolkien (1892-1973), Lewis
(1898-1963), and Williams (1886- 1945) all have many American
fans of both their religious and fictional-fantasy work.
Thus the Inklings might serve to some degree as a means
of making monarchist ideas at least comprehensible to
the more literate denizens of the world's premier republic.
- An age of fable has ended. The
world has gotten old; skepticism is our wisdom.
We do not believe in the magic of pedigree,
and we expect the son not to take up his father's
role ... We have cancelled faith, the gold standard
of monarchy, as well as 'The Pleasure of His
Majesty," once the common currency.
- Charles Fenyvesi, Splendor in
Exile, pp. 276-7
|
As is well known, the religious ideals of J.R.R. Tolkien,
C.S.Lewis, and Charles Williams were extremely traditional;
Roman Catholic in the case of the first named, Anglo-Catholic
as regards the second two. Volumes have been written about
the effect of this sacramental religiosity on their fantasy
writings. Less touched upon have been their political
conceptions, specifically in regard to monarchy. But just
as their concept of Christianity was mediaeval (either
through conservative Catholicism or via the Anglican "Branch
Theory") so too was their ideal of governance.
In the course of their writings, each employed elements
of authentic Christian Sacral Kingship. Their kings are
neither the figureheads with which we are familiar in
everyday life nor the all-powerful despots the modern
mind conjures up when it thinks of the word "king'
Rather, they are mythic figures of romance, images, like
their prototypes of Arthur and Charlemagne, of Christ
the King. In all their activities, the Inklings' monarchs
conform to the mediaeval archetypes of king as quasi-priest,
as judge, as warlord, as fount of honour. We will examine
in some detail various of the monarchies which they describe,
and end with a consideration of their beliefs about the
role of the monarchy in the real world. It is the belief
of this writer that their political beliefs as expressed
in their writings, although vaguer in application than
their religious ideas, were nevertheless just as central
to the genesis of their work.
The first example we will look at are the Elvish Kings
in Tolkien's Silmarillion and Lord of The Rings. They
are particularly appropriate in approaching the mediaeval
idea of kingship. During the Middle Ages, the contradiction
between the sacred nature of the Crown per se, and the
sometimes objectionable activities of various individual
monarchs, prompted the evolution of the doctrine of "the
King's Two Bodies." The Body Political was the Crown
in the abstract: guarantor of justice, divine regent,
fount of honour. To this aspect of the King was due all
the emotion which we today call "patriotism".
The Crown in this sense was undying; hence the phrase
"the King is dead -- long live the King!" "The
life of the King is the health of the Land" was true
of the Body Political. In a word, the King in this sense
was a sort of human flag, in much the same way that the
surviving sovereigns of Spain, Scandinavia, the Low Countries,
Britain and the Dominions are.
The Body Natural was quite another matter. This was the
current incarnation, so to speak, of the Crown. It was
this aspect which performed the day-to-day actions of
the King. To oppose the Crown itself was trea son; but
if the wearer of that Crown acted outside or against the
law, it was the duty of the subject to join with others
to force him -- for his own as well as other's sakes --
back to the path of law, a la Magna Carta. The most basic
example of the Body Natural's imperfection, however, was
that it would die, to be replaced by another. The relationship
of the two bodies was most plainly put by the accessional
phrase just mentioned, but was clearly symbolised in the
Polish royal funeral rite. While the dead King lay in
state in Cracow cathedral, a visored knight representing
him outside would fall from his horse, breaking his lance.
At the same time, the old ruler's seal was broken. Thus
the death of the person and the survival of the Crown
was dramatised.
But there is no such distinction with Tolkien's Elvish
Kings. Whatever their period, the Vanyar's Ingwe, Thingol
of Doriath, Gil-Galad of Lindon, Galadriel of Lothlorien,
Thranduil of Mirkwood, and their colleagues were deathless.
In them, both bodies are united, for being immortal unless
killed, they are in fact as well as in aspiration the
very archetypes of their realms. They last as long as
their lands do, and when they die, their people's nationality
passes. As the ruin of the human Crown generally meant
the extinction or conquest of the nation, so the actual
death of Elvish monarchs generally means the same. So
it is that among them we may see the purely theoretical
aspects of sacred monarchy given full play.
Galadriel
of Lothlorien
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Firstly, as mediaeval theory held kingship to be of divine
origin, so it is among the Elves in the Silimarillion.
The first Elvish Kings are the leaders of the three kindreds
of the Eldar who respond to the Valar's summons. Of these,
the primacy of honour is given Ingwe, head of Vanyar.
After his arrival in Valinor, he is "ever held the
High King of all the Elves" (p.65). His position,
in other words, is analogous to that of the High King
of Ireland over the other kings of that island, or more
particularly that of the Holy Roman Emperor over all the
other Latin Christian monarchs.
As with these two real world sovereigns, Ingwe's High
Kingship is nominal, in the sense that it means little
in the day to day running of affairs outside his own circle.
But lack of "power", the ability to make things
happen, is not the same as lck of "authority",
the right to indicate what ought to happen. Just as the
Holy Roman Emperor and the Ard-Ri were more important
for what they were -- holders of supreme tem poral authority
-- than for what they actually did -- precious little
outside their own realms -- so too with Ingwe's. With
a pre-modern people, unused to having every detail of
life organised by a central state power, symbol is as
or more important than mere "reality". The Elves
were nothing if not pre-modern.
The Kings under Ingwe, like those of Munster, Ulster,
Connaught, and Leinster, in the one example, or those
of France, Naples, Poland, Scotland, etc., in the other,
carry on their reigns with little or no regular counsel
or approval given by their overlord; his primacy is strictly
of honour, though no less prized for that.
Since both of the King's Two Bodies are united in Elvish
Sovereigns, due to their relative immortality, it might
be wise to point out some of their actions in accordance
with the four archetypes of royal authority.
In Sacred Kingship, the King partakes of the priestly
mediating power. Among non-Christian rulers this is accomplished
either by maintaining that the monarch is divine himself,
or at least the son of a god (e.g. Ancient Egypt, the
Incas, the Dogons); head of the national cult and chief
priest (China and Japan); or a sort of regent for divine
authority (Ancient Israel and the Mesopota mian city-states).
Obviously these categories are not rigid, and tend to
blend in various cultures. Among Christians, however,
the pre-existence of an independent priestly hierarchy
in the Church put Christian Sacred Kingship into a development
of the last category. But while primarily divine vicars
in the temporal sphere, they were not entirely without
a demi-priestly character. Their coronations including
sacred anointing were likened to an eighth sacrament;
during the ceremony they wore the vestments of a deacon
or sub-deacon. In some countries they received clerical
privileges like drinking from the chalice at Mass or being
allowed to touch sacred objects; they were sometimes given
other ecclesiastical rights, such as canonries or liturgical
roles. For the Elvish kings, there was no need of such
symbolic acts. They were indeed the regents of the Valar,
this authority given them during the lifetimes of many
of their still-living subjects. Hence the elaborate ritual
necessary to show the fact of divine regency in human
courts is completely absent in Elvish ones.
The pre-eminent centre of royal authority in mediaeval
monarchs was judicial. In the Elvish ones, it is also.
Thingol of Doriath, Galadriel of Lorien, Thranduil of
Mirkwood, Thrgon of Gondolin and their kind, all exercised
this power continually. Like the mediaeval kings, this
was in large degree their major peace-time function: act
ing as the highest court in the land, an activity still
commemorated in Great Britain and the Commonwealth by
the Court of Queen's Bench. But just as law was considered
to be an independent living thing, discovered and interpreted,
but not created by the king, so too with the Elves, as
may be seen by Melian's rebukes of Thingol upon certain
of his judgements.
Almost as important a role for the medi aeval king was
as warlord. While standing armies were a creation of later
centuries, mediaeval kings maintained an escort of knights
and men-at-arms to defend their court and persons, as
with the Knights of the Round Table or Charlemagne's Paladins.
If they wished to carry on any greater cam paign than
defending their own castles, they were forced either to
mobilise their barons (often a dangerous move), hire mercenaries
(also perilous at times), or else some combination of
the two. In Beleriand, the succes sive High Kings of the
Noldor were forced in similiar fashion to summon the forces
of other Noldorin lords (and other kindreds of Elves also)
with sometimes disastrous results as at Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
But where (except for the tenantry being called on to
defend their homes) Mediaeval Europe reserved warfare
to the nobles and their retainers, a situation which subsisted
until the invention of conscription by the French revolution
aries, all able-bodied male Elves were expected to serve.
Given the demonic nature of the Morgothian opposition,
however, this might be likened to the Crusades, where
the services of peasants and townsmen were actively solicited,
although not drafted.
The last major archetype to be considered is that of the
king as fount of honour. Among European monarchies, the
granting of titles, hereditary and otherwise, and of fiefs
was complicated by human mortality (resulting in the various
ceremonies of hom age, entrees, and so forth), the immortal
Elvish rulers simply appointed individuals to offices,
needing to replace them only when death in battle (or
rarely) treason vacated them. While neither Medieval Christendom
nor the Elvish lands of Beleriand and the rest of Middle
Earth knew the modern state, the former did require, simply
because of human limitation and fatigue on the part of
the ruler, the Royal Household, whose four parts (Chamber,
Hall, Chapel, and Stable) eventually grew into the central
national administrations with which we are all familiar.
Since an Elvish King knew no such limitations, he needed
to delegate only simple functions, not decision making
or administrative ones.
Numenorean Kingship, both in the Land of the Star and
in exile was much more like that of Mediaeval Europe,
being, indeed, consciously modelled by its author on it.
Due to the humanity of the Dunedain, their kings perforce
were graced with the "Two Bodies". So durable
indeed was its Body Political that not even the treason
of Ar Pharazon and the inundation of Numenor could destroy
it. It passed to the nearest faithful branch, the Lords
of Andunie, and continued on the mainland.
Being pre-Christian (and Tolkien's letters reveal a certain
apprehension regarding his imaginary world's concordance
with Salvation History), the Dunedain Monarchy had no
equivalent to the Church. Nevertheless, the Kings of Numenor,
Arnor, and Gondor did have several demi-priestly tasks.
Like the Chinese Emperor's yearly sacrifice at Peking's
Temple of Heaven, the King of Numenor offered the first
fruits to Eru at the Meneltarma annually (Silmarillion,
p.329). The account in Unfinished Tales of Amon Anwar,
the burial place of Elendil, is such to make one wonder
if the King of Gondor did not perform a similiar rite
there; if he did, would not also his counterpart in Arnor
have done so, perhaps at the Barrow Downs? In addition
to this, the patronage of the Istari, particularly Gandalf,
who himself (as I have written elsewhere) functions as
a sort of Pope, is very reminiscent of the mediaeval kingdoms.
His coronation of Aragorn would seem to confirm this,
as in real life the primate of each country performed
this task; though the Pope himself crowned the Holy Roman
Emperor. The other semi- priestly power given mediaeval
monarchs was that of healing. While the power of the Kings
of France and England to cure scrofula (the King's Evil)
is well known, the abilites of their colleagues of Denmark
and Castile respectively to cure epilepsy or exorcise
demons is less renowned, as is the belief that the Holy
Roman Emperors had some con trol over weather (hence the
German idiom Kaiserwetter for a warm, sunny day). This
comes dramatically to the fore in The Return of the King,
when Aragorn proves the truth of the old Gondorian proverb,
"The hands of the King are the hands of a healer."
The Kings of the Dunedain also have an authority based
upon their role as supreme judges. Aragorn exercises this
power after his coronation, meting out judgements to nations
and individuals alike. But in doing so, he is bound by
custom and justice, as when he confirms the grant of their
land to the Rohirrim, and deprives Beregond of his position
in the Guard of the Citadel, sending him to be one of
Faramir's retainers instead.
As warlords, the Dunedain Kings and their Stewards act
exactly as their mediaeval equivalents did. This is brought
out most clearly in the gathering of troops from the outward
fiefs to defend Minas Tirith against Sauron's last attack.
But the "Tale of Years" could well be a fictionalisation
of any account of the military doings of a mediaeval monarchy.
Similiarly, the Numenorean Crown func tions in standard
manner as the fount of honour. All the trappings of a
mediaeval royal household are present — steward
and great officers of state, and so on. There is the feudal
organisation of the country, complete with fiefs and what
we would call today a very rudimentary infrastructure;
what little central government functions like road maintenance
and lower courts of justice exist, are farmed out to local
magnates and notables. The Prince of Dcl Amroth, cousin
of the steward and foremost nobleman in the realm, functions
much as did the Dukes of Burgundy in Capetian France.
While we are not given much detail about internal admin
istration of such fiefs in Gondor or Arnor, the Shire's
organisation -- an idealised mediaeval setting -- was
probably rather standard, with local government large
on ceremony and small in conduct of day-to day affairs.
Moving away from J.R.R. Tolkien to C.S.Lewis, we will
see how Narnian king ship fits into the framework we have
established. Unlike Tolkien's Middle Earth, where both
the three chiefs of the Eldar and Elros and his descendants
have their kingship bestowed upon them by the Valar, who,
after all are angels rather than deities, the Narnian
Monarchy is directly established by Asian, who, as is
well known, is simply Christ in that world. The repeated
description of Aslan throughout the Chronicles of Narnia
as the High King over all Kings in Narnia is very reminiscent
of the Mediaeval idea of the sovereign as the vicar or
regent of Christ the King. The oration AsIan gives monarchs-to-
be Frank and Helen (The Magician's Neph ew, pp. 123-4)
expresses very well the requirements of Christian Kingship
as expressed in so many mediaeval "manuals for princes
- My children ... you are to be
the first King and Queen of Narnia ... You shall
rule and name all these creatures, and do justice
among them, and protect them from their enemies
when enemies arise. And enemies will arise,
for there is an evil witch in this world...
Can you rule these creatures kindly and fairly,
remembering that they are not slaves like the
dumb beasts of the world you were born in but
Talking Beasts and free subjects?... And would
you bring up your children and grandchildren
to do the same? ... And you wouldn't have favourites
either among your own children and grandchil
dren or among the other creatures or let any
hold another under or use it hardly?
- And if enemies came against the
land (for enemies will arise) and there was
war, would you be the first in the charge and
the last in the retreat?... Then ... you will
have done all that aKingshoulddo. Your coronation
will be held presently. And you and your children
and grandchildren shall be blessed, and some
will be Kings of Narnia, and others will be
Kings of Archenland which lies yonder over the
southern mountains...
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This sums up the mediaeval conception of monarchy, and
the Narnian; on two subsequent occasions (as we are told
in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian)
Aslan renewed the Narnian Crown, first with the four children
and then with Caspian. The latter, incidentally, acted
just as mediaeval theologians etc. would wish him to,
when he set the Lone Islands to rights in Voyage Of The
Dawn Treader. Priest (or at least mediator between AsIan
and his subjects), judge, and warlord, the ideal king
of Narnia also summed up in himself the three major attributes
of Christian Sacred Monarchy.
Charles Williams dealt directly with Sacral Monarchy in
both Taliessin Through Logres and The Region Of The Summer
Stars. Here too, as one would expect, we see all the details
of mediaeval kingship reproduced: Arthur as priest, judge,
and warlord, and overmuch commentary on the obvious would
not be useful. But the mediaeval relation of earthly kingship
to divine authority subsists in Williams' modern novelistic
settings as well. While praying before the Grail in War
In Heaven, the Duke of the Northern Ridings is "aware
of a sense of the adoration of kings -- ".
All of the traditions of his Catholic recusant family,
loyal alike to Pope, Emperor, and King, "drew his
mind into a vivid consciousness of all the royal and sacerdotal
figures of the world adoring before this consecrated shrine.
'Jhesu, Rex et Sacerdos', he prayed..."
This is an important transition William makes. We no longer
live in the Middle Ages. To assist centralising monarchs
in taming the diffuse powers of their realms, Renaissance
and Reformation saw the four-fold Royal Household referred
to earlier transmute into the powerful administration
of the modern state. After 1789, most of these States
in Europe and the Americas saw fit to dispense with the
descendants of the sovereigns who had called them into
being. In the few nations of former Christendom retaining
monarchial heads of state, their roles became severely
attenuated. Control over national judiciaries passed from
their hands; as the technology of battle "progressed",
their warlordship became nomi nal. As the son of the last
Austrian Emperor, the Archduke Otto von Habsburg has said,
"Monarchy began to decline when Kings ceased to lead
their troops into battle". Increasingly, they became
sorts of "crowned ombudsmen", a fact alluded
to by Emperor Franz Josef of Austria when he defined his
Monarchy Canada — Winter 1991-92 role as "saving
my people from their politicians."
Since the world wars, even this role has passed to a great
degree, although flashes of it persist to this day; in
Great Britain and the Dominions who share her Queen, it
hap pened even earlier. But cojointly with this, the monarch's
quasi-priestly attribute, his role as fount of honour
and as living symbol of the nation has increased in importance.
As the Body Natural has lost importance, the Body Political
has in a sense gained. The Queen of Great Britain and
the Common wealth has little power, when compared with
her Tudor ancestors; but her Plantagenet predecessors
had little more than she does. It is merely the gathering
of power into the hands of the British bureaucracy and
cabinet that makes the Royal Prerogative look so insignificant.
But she yet wields the same authority that Mediaeval English
Kings did. The question we must answer then, is how the
Inklings looked upon this surviving authority in real
life, as opposed to mere historical or literary interest.
Before we answer this question, however, there is one
point covered by Williams in Shadows of Ecstasy which
ought to be touched upon. Mediaeval Sacral Monarchy was
the product of the mixing of pre Christian Sacred Kingship
with Sacramental Christianity. When that faith spread
beyond Mediaeval Christendom's borders, and came into
contact with non-European Sacred Kings, the same result
occurred. Pacific Christian Kings, as those of Hawaii,
Samoa, Tonga, Wallis and Futuna, and African ones like
the rulers of Kongo, Buganda, Burundi, Bunyoro, Barotse,
Swaziland, and Lesotho, all developed what were the obvious
beginnings of Christian
Sacral Monarchy. Less well known is that the same process
occurred with the Indian Caciques of Spanish America,
such as Mexi co's Princes of Tlaxcala, or Peru's Mar quesses
of Oropesa. These developments were all derailed by modernisation
and inde pendence, but the testimony they give to the
psychological resonance of most peoples with the concept
of the "Holy Crown" is important. One of the
yet enduring native monarchies which has been to a degree
Christianised is the Zulu, whose fictional ruler makes
an appearance in Shadows of Ecstasy, thus allowing Williams
to show that the "ecstasy" or charism of Kingship
tran scends national or racial lines in its ability to
touch the soul:
- For a few moments royalty -- a
dark alien royalty — had appeared
in the room, imposed upon all of them by the
mere intensity of the Zulu chieftain's own strength
and conviction. By virtue of that wide reading
which both she and her husband loved, she hadfelt
a shadow of it at times; in the superb lines
of Marlowe or Shakespeare, in the rolling titles
heard on ceremonial occasions at Church or in
local celebrations: "The King's Most Excellent
Majesty", "His Majesty the King-Emperor",
"The Government of His Britannic Majesty".
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Williams goes on a few sentences later to describe kingship
as "single bliss and sole felicity", and to
equate it with poetry.
That Williams was serious in his adherence to monarchy
in the world of fact is obvious from Alice Hadfield's
observation on page 21 of her Charles Williams:
- Though youthfully a very temporary
republican, he slowly created himself over the
years a synthesis in which all men and women
were equal and yet different within their hierarchies
of excellence and distinction, in which above
political equality everyone's distinctness was
embodied in the single person of the monarch,
as everyone 'spersonal equality and distinctness
were held in Christ. He retained his sense of
monarchy, hereditary in that it must have a
blood link with the long history of England,
visible to high and low, free from fashion,
choice or vote, apex of an administration free,
equal and yet hierarchical in public distinction.
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Lewis shared Williams' loyalty; when Merlin echoes the
revolutionary mentality, urging deposition of the powerless
Saxon king, because of that very powerlessness, in That
Hideous Strength, Ransome replies, "I have no wish
to overthrow him. He is the king. He was crowned and anointed
by the Archbishop. In the order of Logres, I may be Pendragon,
but in the order of Britain, I am the King's man".
Whether in Narnia or England, Lewis believed that allegiance
was owed the crowned of God, simply because it was right
and the natural order of things.
What then of Tolkien? He too shared the royalism of his
confreres. As Humphrey Carpenter put it in his biography
of J.R.R. Tolkien:
- Tolkien was, in modern jargon,
'right wing' in that he honoured his monarch
and his country and did not believe in the rule
of the people; but he opposed democracy simply
because he believed that in the end his fellow
men would not benefit from it. He once wrote:
"l am not a 'democrat', if only because
'humility' and equality are spiritual principles
corrupted by the attempt to mechanise and formalise
them, with the result that we get not universal
smallness and humility, but universal bigness
and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a Ring
of Power -- and then we get and are getting
slavery".
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It is difficult for Americans like ourselves to comprehend,
let alone sympathise with such views. The very birth of
our nation involved a rejection of kingship; since 1776
we have each ingested republicanism with our mother's
apple pie. As Fenyvesi, himself no monarchist, observes,
"Republican accountability requires a pursuit of
the rational. Citizens bow to the technician whose presumption
is efficiency and whose excuse is science. He knows all
about systems, and 'functional' is his highest praise".
But the royalism of the Inklings appeals as much or more
to hearts and souls as to heads. Their essentially religious
political orientation is particularly alien to us, given
our national dogma of separation of Church and State.
Nevertheless, it is important to realise that they did
not and do not stand alone. In their own time and place,
their ideas on monarchy were more or less shared by such
worthies as Belloc, Chesterton, Kipling, Machen, and of
course, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers. They in turn were
much inspired by the Young England movement of the 19th
Century, itself the British version of the counter revolutionary
wing of the Romantic Move ment, which had adherents in
every country in Europe.
Nor must it be supposed that this ideology is a thing
of the past. Despite the overthrow of most European monarchies
during the course of this century, royalist movements
and parties survive in every nation on the continent.
They became particularly vocal during the 1989 bicentennial
of the French Revolution, and surfaced with surprising
strength in Eastern Europe, and even in the Soviet Union,
in the period since then. Most astonishing of all, adherents
of the Imperial Family of Brazil mustered enough force
there to have a plebiscite on restoration scheduled for
1993. Above mere politics, however, the number of monarchists
— like Eugene Ionesco -- in the European artistic
world remains great.
Since the execution of Socrates for mono theism and monarchism,
the battle between republicanism and royalism, to which
the advent of Christianity offered a new and pervasive
twist, has gone on. In one century monarchies predominate,
in another repub lics. In an age consecrated no less than
that of Pericles' Athens to the downfall of kings, the
Inklings chose to be defenders of the Crown. It is well,
then, to conclude by giving C.S.Lewis the last word:
- Monarchy can easily be debunked,
but watch the faces, mark well the accents of
the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot
in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the
polyphony, the dance, can reach -- men to whom
pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than
an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality,
they cannot reach it. Where men are forbid den
to honour a king they honour mil lionaires,
athletes, or film stars instead: even famous
prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature,
like bodily nature, will be served: deny it
food and it will gobble poison. (quoted by Lady
Elizabeth Freeman, The Traditionalist's Anthology,
p. 161)
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