“Evening-Lands”: Spenglerian Tropes in Lord of the Rings

Charles Huttar, in “Tolkien, Epic Traditions, and Golden Age Myths,” observes that the sense of diminution or fading is an omnipresent mood in The Lord of the Rings. Like the lone traveler at the feet of Ozymandias, the reader glimpses ruins and fragments of previous civilizations of unimaginably ancient greatness, together with the undeniable evidence that even the grandest of civilizations eventually weakens and falls. This sense of civilization’s “impermanence and inevitable diminution,” Huttar remarks, is “so pervasive in Tolkien’s world as to be one of its defining qualities” (8). As the hobbits traverse Middle-earth and encounter the relics of past greatness, they experience at the same time a feeling of awe and of profound loss, glimpsing a fading away that transcends merely physical erosion and speaks to the collective loss of learning, wisdom, and spirit as civilizations decline and eventually dissolve:

Even in its latter days the city of Minas Tirith has a grandeur beyond anything the hobbits have known, yet they learn that the guards’ helmets of mithril are “heirlooms from the glory of old days” [RK, V, i, 25]. No modern sword could have slain the Nazgul as did Merry’s ancient blade [RK, V, vi, 119–20], and his Dwarf companion acknowledges that “in metal-work we cannot rival our fathers, many of whose secrets are lost” [FR, II, i, 241–42]. In masonry, the oldest work is recognized as the best [RK, V, ix, 149]. Although in Gondor, medical practice is remarkably advanced, yet “all lore was in those latter days fallen from its fullness of old” [RK, V, viii, 136].

(Huttar 98)¹

This pervasive sense of decline is identified in Tolkien’s epic with the idea of inherent and unavoidable error, of hamartia on a civilizational level. Each civilization in The Lord of the Rings is seen to contain the seeds of its own decline in the very qualities that define it and made it great. The wealth and splendor of the Dwarves’ civilization was based on mithril, “but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep,” as Gandalf recounts (FR, II, iv, 331). Even the Elves cannot escape this internal historical logic: their efforts to prevent decay while still living in the “mortal historical Middle-earth” leads to them becoming “embalmers,” as Tolkien remarked in a letter to a reviewer (Letters 197). Unable to “stop its change and history, stop its growth,” they become nostalgic and melancholic. Likewise, Tolkien continued, the efforts of the people of Gondor to arrest the inexorable changes of time and history lead them to become “a withering people” (Letters 197).

In this aspect of the book, Tolkien illustrates a cyclical view of history and civilization, a working out in literature of a morphological conception of history, one that analogizes civilization to a plant that takes seed in a specific environment, grows to maturity in the full realization of its potential, and then withers and fades to an eventual dissolution. In wishing for an end to Gondor’s long decline and the return of its ancient grandeur, Faramir tells Frodo, “I would see the White Tree in flower again in the courts of the kings,” a remark that perfectly marries the mythology of the White Tree with an organic conception of civilization and history (TT, IV, v, 280). In this essay, I want to draw attention to the resemblances between the view of history and civilization evident in The Lord of the Rings and the cyclical and morphological theory of history and civilization expounded in Oswald Spengler’s hugely influential work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (literally “The Going-Under of the Evening-Lands” but more commonly translated into English as The Decline of the West).² Furthermore, I want to locate the novel within the framework of a mood of anti-imperialist nationalism that was emerging at the close of the 19th century and was concerned with emphasizing the importance of attending to cultural vitality at home rather than imperial adventuring abroad. I argue that, as...