Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God

Appendix to Chapter 6: Tolkien and Chesterton on Northernness and Nihilism

237 s Tolkien and Chesterton on Northernness and Nihilism Appendix to Chapter 6 J. R. R. Tolkien objected vehemently to Chesterton’s account of ancient pagan Northernness in The Ballad of the White Horse as having a nihilistic character: “The brilliant smash and glitter of words and phrases (when they come off, and are not mere loud colours) cannot disguise the fact that GKC knew nothing whatever about the ‘North,’ heathen or Christian.”1 Far from believing in nothing, the pagans of the antique North lived by a high code of virtue built on loyalty and courage. In his celebrated essay on Beowulf, Tolkien argues that this seventh-century (perhaps ninth-century?) Anglo-Saxon poem was composed by a Christian, probably a monk, who poetically recounted the pagan legend of Beowulf’s long battle with Grendel—a struggle wherein, while the dragon is killed, so is Beowulf. This nameless Christian author sought faithfully to preserve the brutality and sternness of the pagan life-world figured in the ancient Danish legend. Thus does the anonymous writer describe bloody battles and extol fierce loyalties, even as he shows that both men and events are overruled by the inexorable power of Fate, whose lowering clouds overshadow everything. At the final battle of Ragnarøk, the entire cosmos will be destroyed, and even the gods will die, as everything returns to “Chaos and Unreason .” Even so, the cosmology of the ancient North is more linear than circular, and thus surprisingly analogous to Christian mythography. Chesterton had misgivings about the circle as a theological metaphor, since almost all of the pagan religions envision the motions of time 238 Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God s repeating themselves endlessly. The cosmology of the Nordic and Teutonic peoples, by contrast, understands time as having an inexorable end, even if (in contrast to Christian linearity) the end is annihilating.2 For Tolkien, this was yet further reason for admiring the heroes of the mythic Northern narratives. Indeed, he extols their “doomed resistance ” against inevitable defeat and death. The dragons of the deep were made all the more ghastly because the manly Nordic warriors believed that the demonic powers could assume actual form, and thus that “the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies.” The heathen heroism of the Anglo-Saxons thus remains pertinent, Tolkien insists, not only to Darwinians haunted by the seeming unguided randomness of the universe but also to Christians convinced of its ultimately providential order. Their “creed of unyielding will,” their “absolute resistance is [made] perfect because [it was] without hope,” their belief “that man, each and all men, and all their works shall die”—such bravery and valor among the Northmen were, for Tolkien, “a theme no Christian need despise.”3 That Chesterton possessed no careful historical knowledge of the primeval world of the North does not undermine the poem’s immense moral and spiritual strength. In his Prefatory Note to The Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton deliberately disclaims any pretense to historical accuracy: All of [the poem] that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that KingArthur may be a legend; that is, in the sense that he may possibly be a lie. But King Alfred is a legend in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him. The cult of Alfred was a popular cult, from the darkness of the ninth century to the deepening twilight of the twentieth. It is wholly as a popular legend that I deal with him here. . . . Alfred has come down to us in the best way (that is by national legends) solely for the same reason as Arthur and Roland and the other giants of that darkness, because he fought for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism. (BWH, Prefatory Note, xxxiii, xxxv) This is no small point. A great deal of modern agonizing over von Ranke’s insistence that historians must render “what really happened” s Appendix to Chapter 6 239 might have been avoided by heeding Chesterton’s insistence that it is not only impossible but also unnecessary to make a strict separation of legend and history. The two often meet and fuse in ways that enrich both. In laying out the manner of...