Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien

Most of us have inconsistent attitudes to revenge, though we sometimes pretend otherwise. Asked in the abstract to evaluate revenge as a human activity, most of us would condemn it, and few of us would be as comfortable as Aristotle in saying that people "expect to return evil for evil—and if they cannot, feel that they have lost their liberty" (Aristotle V, v (1132b), 183). We do not, at any rate, expect to see revenge endorsed in respectable literary narratives, whatever the movies may get up to. When Odysseus, after regaining power in Ithaca, hangs his disloyal maidservants, and tortures to death the treacherous goatherd Melanthius, modern readers are shocked and repelled by this aspect of the "eucatastrophe"—and not merely because the vengeance seems disproportionate, especially in the case of the maids.

Yet many of us can imagine situations in which we would hesitate to condemn personal revenge, if it seemed just and proportionate—the killing of a sadistic concentration camp guard, for example, by a victim or a victim's survivor. And in the face of sufficiently dreadful crimes, the most liberal of us can suddenly see the point of vengeful wishes. After the deliberate shelling of civilian areas of Srebrenica during the 1990s war in Bosnia, Larry Hollingsworth, a United Nations humanitarian observer, addressing the international press corps, said, "My first thought was for the commander who gave the order to attack. I hope he burns in the hottest corner of hell. My second thought was for the soldiers who loaded the breeches and fired the guns. I hope their sleep is forever punctuated by the screams of the children."¹ At a more banal level, many believe that if A punches B, or wounds her self-respect with an insult or some other humiliating act, it is natural for B to feel an urge to retaliate, and that A is hardly in a position to complain if she does so.

In earlier times, moralists have disagreed over the value of such "natural" emotions, some deploring them as sinful, others seeing them as a necessary support, when moderated by reason, for the institutions of law and punishment. In the eighteenth century, Bishop Joseph Butler held that well-founded personal resentment was essentially the same, divinely implanted, passion as indignation against wickedness, being at root "a fellow-feeling, which each person has in behalf of the whole species, as well as of himself." While he carefully distinguished such resentment from "the dreadful vices of malice and revenge," he was uncomfortably aware of the ease with which the one could "run into" the other: unless "subservient . . . to the Common Good," resentment would, he warned, lead to "endless rage and confusion" (126-133). More recently, a number of writers have attempted, with varying degrees of plausibility and coherence, to overcome contemporary liberal inhibitions and rehabilitate revenge as an indispensable component of criminal justice.²

II

How did Tolkien come to terms with this complex theme? He had a special reason to be aware of the moral and narrative challenges it presented. His Christian faith commanded and celebrated forgiveness, and forgiveness is powerfully expressed at some key moments in his work, notably in Frodo's "Let us forgive him!" spoken of the departed Gollum on the slopes of Mount Doom (RK, VI, iv, 225). Forgiveness and vengefulness, though individuals at particular times may oscillate between them, are as principles morally and psychologically incompatible. But Tolkien also had a professional interest in legends from the pre-Christian North which take for granted the legitimacy, or at any rate centrality, of vengeance as a motive; and the cultures he presents in most of his work owe at least something to these models. He might criticise or renounce such pre-Christian values, but he could not suppose that they had no foundation in human emotions, or dismiss them as wholly incompatible with virtue.³

Tolkien was not essentially a theorist—his ideas are "in solution" (to quote Christopher Tolkien)⁴ in his imagined world—but he was a serious thinker, and some attempt can be made to analyse the thinking that...