Robert Tindall On The Shamanic Perspective Of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit

Robert Tindall on ‘The Shamanic Odyssey Homer, Tolkien, & Visionary Experience’

The Hobbit film being one of my favorites of 2012. I have to ask you how J.R.R. Tolkien fits into all of this from a shamanistic perspective?

RT: Tolkien has been a great inspiration to me ever since I was a boy. The cosmovision of The Lord of the Rings made more sense to me than anything else in the barren Reagan-era culture I grew up in the 1980s, and during my studies of medieval literature in the university I found myself following in Tolkien’s footsteps academically as well. What I came to learn that Tolkien’s express purpose was to re-inject the vitality of the pre-Christian oral tradition back into the enervated Western imagination. He termed his endeavor “mythopoeic,” and some of his earliest writings are clear evocations of the primal mind of our ancestors. Given that my purpose was to revitalize the cosmovision of the Odyssey, I found myself enlisting the old master’s support.

When it came time for me to write a sort of apologia for shamanic states of consciousness as valid ways of truth seeking, I found myself involved in a deep reading of Tolkien’s last literary will and testament: Smith of Wootton Major. This novella is almost entirely neglected, and yet Tolkien set aside work on his treasured Silmarillion to compose it. I believe the story is about the nature of the creative/shamanic consciousness as Tolkien experienced it, and is his attempt to pass on the fay-star to future generations.

I think Tolkien has been cast in the mold of a brilliant academic with a marvelous, far-ranging imagination, yet a man of essentially Cartesian rationality. I disagree. I think there’s more to Tolkien’s creative experience than is recognized.

I have yet to see the film version of The Hobbit, by the way, but I think Peter Jackson’s film versions of Tolkien’s works are gross distortions of Tolkien’s mythopoeic vision.

Of course, Tolkien dreaded the day “the Americans” would get a hold of his work, but had accepted in advance our inevitable and general incomprehension of his work. I’ve been turning the issue of the film adaptations of Tolkien over in my mind for some time — I noted in Jackson’s TLotRs a perverse tendency to degrade mature masculine wisdom: Elrond, Gandalf, Faramir, Treebeard, Theoden, even Denethor, all of those mature figures who knew to what cosmic order they belonged and served heroically are treated as panicky, wavering, even cowardly in the film versions. Meanwhile, the perky wisdom of Hobbits with their New Age blather take front stage. As a boy, growing up in the general masculine corruption of the Reagan-era, Tolkien’s work was medicine. Here in TLotR were examples of men with integrity, whose masculine power and wisdom nurtured and supported life on Earth! Little of that archetypal power transferred to the films.

Can you rewrite Shakespeare? No. Tolkien should, in my mind, remain similarly inviolate. But, of course, we’ve already crossed that line. The question now is: Will the memory of the films die away and Tolkien’s vision remain preserved and uncorrupted into future generations? Or have “the Americans” committed commodicide, death by transformation into a commodity, upon it?

It’s worth quoting Walter Benjamin here, considering the issue of film in his classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

…their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically: “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films… all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions… await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.” Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

Certainly, Tolkien’s work is now threatened with liquidation, unless we start reading the stories to our children before they go to bed!

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http://www.examiner.com/article/robert-tindall-on-the-shamanic-odyssey-homer-tolkien-visionary-experience?cid=db_articles