Thomas J. Farrell
University of Minnesota Duluth
Abstract: In my wide-ranging, and at times deeply personal, “Probe: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fantasy Novel, The Lord of the Rings, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought,” I succinctly highlight the philologist and literary critic Thomas A. Shippey’s 2000 book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. To help contextualize certain matters, I draw extensively on the publications of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University.
In my various recent OEN articles (some of which are listed, with links, in the “References” at the end of the present essay), I have been dwelling on the distinction that the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) makes in his book Symbols of Transformation, translated by R. F. C. Hull, second edition (1967; orig. ed., 1912) in the chapter “Two Kinds of Thinking” (pp. 7-33). The two kinds of thinking are (1) fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking, and (2) directed thinking involving logic.
Jung himself engaged extensively in what her terms fantasy thinking in his dangerous self-experimentation using what he came to refer to as active imagination. Joan Chodorow has collected Jung’s various writings about active imagination together in the book Jung on Active Imagination (1997).
You see, the practice of active imagination is dangerous because it invites unconscious contents into one’s ego-consciousness – and unconsciousness contents can overwhelm and overthrow ego-consciousness, resulting in a psychotic break. Jung understood this. To help safeguard himself from possibly being overwhelmed by unconscious contents in his psyche, he devised a twofold way to proceed to process the unconscious contents that he was experiencing in his psyche: (1) he wrote out highly circumstantial reports of the unconscious contents that he was experiencing in his psyche in his black books; and then (2) he made works of art and drawings of the unconscious contents that he was experiencing in his psyche in his Red Book. Consequently, Jung is one of the most unique and distinctive men to have ever lived.
In 2009, W. W. Norton and Company published Jung’s Red Book: Liber Novus (Latin for New Book) as an oversized art book, edited by Soneu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
In 2020, W. W. Norton and company published the seven-volume set of books titled Jung’s Black Books: 1913-1932: Notebooks of Transformation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, and translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri.
The lengthy formation of Jesuits begins with the two-year Jesuit novitiate. During the first year of the two-year Jesuit novitiate, Jesuit novices make a 30-day retreat in silence (except for the daily conferences with the retreat director) following the famous Spiritual Exercises (1992) of the Spanish mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order.
Now, Jesuit formation aims to produce in Jesuits what Jung refers to as psychological transformation. Jesuit formation begins with the two-year Jesuit novitiate. The two-year Jesuit novitiate is, in effect, an initiation process.
Now, in my various recent OEN articles in which I have discussed Jung’s idea of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking in connection with the fantasy skits in mom-son porn videos on the internet and in DVDs, I have also discussed the thought of the later Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in psychology and religion, University of Chicago, 1975) of the Chicago Theological Seminary about the eight archetypes of maturity in the human psyche and their accompanying sixteen “shadow” forms.
In my judgment, President Donald Trump and his many male MAGA supporters are unfortunately manifesting certain “shadow” forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity.
Now, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s 1992a book The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche, the authors refer to J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1955 fantasy novel titled The Return of the King (p. 7) – the third volume in Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
The three volumes of Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Return of the King are titled Volume I: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), Volume II: The Two Towers (1954), and Volume III: The Return of the King (1955).
Now, it may indeed be the case that Tolkien had learned how to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in his psyche by the time he wrote his famous three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
But the crucial question is, “Will reading the Return of the King, or viewing the film version, help men learn how to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in their psyches? Or is there a readiness factor involved in when men are able to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in their psyches?”
Now, in addition, in their 1992 book The King Within, Moore and Gillette tell us that Jung “believed that the Libido is a generalized life force that expresses itself through imaginal and spiritual impulses, as well as through sexuality” (p. 35; their capitalization of the term Libido).
As I have explained in some of my recent OEN articles, I experienced feeling mildly euphoric for about ten weeks in the fall of 2024. But I stopped feeling mildly euphoric before the presidential election on November 5, 2024. Yes, in 20/20 hindsight, I today can see that my ten-week experience of feeling mildly euphoric involved my psyche being flooded with libido, making me feel intensely sexual during the ten weeks that I felt mildly euphoric.
Now, after Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president of the United States in November 2024, I felt deeply concerned about the future of our American experiment in representative democracy. My concern about the future of our American experiment in representative democracy has only grown and intensified after the inauguration of President Trump in January 2025.
In Moore and Gillette’s 1992 book The King Within, they say that “whenever we project our King [archetype] onto a politician [e.g., Donald Trump] (or anyone else), we can feel disempowered. . . . What is truly amazing of course is what we can do, once we access and utilize our King [archetype] energy. The spiritual systems of the world are designed to bring their worshipers in touch with this empowering energy [in their psyches], whether their leaders know it or not, because the energy has such a virtuous effect of those who access it. Note that ‘virtue’ has the Latin root vis, meaning strength or power. The King’s virtue is empowering. Hence Jesus of Nazareth, at least in part, makes an excellent paradigm of the King energy in the individuating male psyche. Hence also the enduring appeal of Ignatius of Loyola’s exercises. They provide their practitioners one kind of initiation into the mysteries of the King [archetype in the human psyche]” (pp. 104-105; their italics).
Incidentally, in 2007, Moore and Gillette published a revised and expanded second edition of their 1992 book The Kind Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (Exploration Press). In it, in a discussion note, we learn that “The material for chapter twelve [titled “Structural Diagnosis: Understanding the current Archetypal Structure of Your personality” [pp. 205-253] is adapted with permission from Robert Moore’s unpublished manuscript, Structural Psychoanalysis and Integrative Psychotherapy: A Neo-Jungian Paradigm. When published, this monograph will include examples of the various personality configurations in both male and female personalities in the context of the comprehensive psychoanalytic theory underlying the discussion in this book” (pp. 277-278). But Robert Moore’s unpublished manuscript was never published.
Speaking of books that were never published, on page vii under the heading “Other Books by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette,” we learn that “text editions” are forthcoming of their other 1992b book, The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight [Archetype] in the Male Psyche, and of their two 1993 books, The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman [Archetype] in the Male Psyche and The Lover Within: Accessing the Lover [Archetype] in the Male Psyche.
In any event, Robert Moore thought that the King archetypes in the human psyche was the most difficult of the four masculine archetypes of maturity for men to learn how to access the optimal and positive form of, and the Text Edition of Robert Moore and Douglass Gillette’s 1992a book The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche was published in 2007 by Exploration Press.
Now, for further information about Ong’s life, see my award-winning book Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies; The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000, pp. 33-53). My book received the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association in June 2001.
In my book, I explain that Ong pursued graduate studies in philosophy and English at Saint Louis University as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation. At that time, the young Canadian convert to Catholicism Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) was teaching English at Saint Louis University while he continued to work on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. At that time, McLuhan was fresh from his studies in English with F. R. Leavis (1895-1978) and I. A. Richards (1893-1979) at Cambridge University.
About that time, young Ong published the article “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism’” in the journal Modern Schoolman (Saint Louis University) (1943). Ong puts the term New Criticism in quotation marks because in 1943 the term was still a novelty. As Ong points out, there was no Old Criticism – which heightened the novelty of the term New Criticism.
However, the term New Criticism stuck, and subsequently the New Criticism became predominant in English Departments in the English-speaking world.
The St. Louis-born poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot (1886-1965) and the American literary critic Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) also contributed mightily to the rise of the New Criticism to predominance in English departments.
The New Critics Eliot, Leavis, Richards, and Brooks also tended to favor literary modernism – as exemplified in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land (1922) and in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).
Now, Ong published the essay “The Vernacular Matrix of the New Criticism” in The Critical Matrix, edited by Paul R. Sullivan (1961, pp. 3-35). Ong then reprinted his essay in his book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Studies and Essays (1962, pp. 177-205).
Subsequently, Ong published “From Rhetorical Culture to New Criticism: The Poem as a Closed Field” in the book The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work, edited by Lewis P. Simpson (1976, pp. 150-167). Ong reprinted it, slightly revised, as “The Poem as Closed Field: The Once New Criticism and the Nature of Literature” in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pp. 213-229.
In Ong’s 1977 book Interfaces of the Word, he also published his wonderful essay “Voice and the Opening of closed systems” (pp. 305-341). Yes, in it, Ong uses systems terminology – which most literary critics and literary historians do not use. I see Ong is this essay, as well as in the great body of his mature work from the early 1950s onward, as posing his version of postmodernism.
Now, Ong published the review-article “Only Through Time” about T. S. Eliot’s 1965 book To Criticize the Critic, in Poetry (July 1966).
Ong published an untitled review of the book T. S. Eliot: The Dialectical Structure of His Theory of Poetry by Fei-Pai Lu, in American Literature (January 1967).
Ong published the article “T. S. Eliot and Today’s Ecumenism” in Religion and Literature (Summer 1989). It is reprinted in volume two of Ong’s Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1992b).
Now, Ong published an untitled review of the book The Ulysses Theme: A Study in adaptability of a Traditional Hero by W. B. Stanford, in The Classical Bulletin (April 1956).
Ong also published an untitled review of Joyce and Aquinas by William T. Noon, S.J., in The New Scholasticism (October 1957).
Now, Ong’s massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason – as in the Age of Reason. In it, Ong traces the history of the formal study of logic from Aristotle down to the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) – and beyond.
The English Renaissance poet John Milton (1666-1674) studied Ramist logic in Latin as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. Later in his life, Milton wrote a textbook in logic in Latin based on Ramus’ work. Still later in Milton’s life, he published his textbook in logic in Latin in 1672. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger translated Milton’s Latin textbook in logic in volume eight of Yale’s Complete Prose Works of John Milton: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (1982, pp. 139-407) – with a magnificent “Introduction” by Ong (pp. 144-207).
Ong’s magnificent “Introduction” is reprinted in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1999, pp. 111-142).
In any event, in Ong’s massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, he works with the contrast of aural versus visual cognitive processing in our Western cultural history (for specific pages references, see the “Index” [p. 396]).
I have discussed Ong’s media ecology thought in his massively researched 1958 book in my somewhat lengthy OEN article “Walter J. Ong’s Philosophical Thought” (dated September 20, 2020).
Now, in my judgment, it is patently obvious that what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associate thinking involves what Ong refers to as oral-aural cognitive processing, on the one hand, and on the other, that what Jung refers to as directed thinking involving logic involves what Ong refers to as visual cognitive processing.
Because Ong was deeply familiar with Jung’s work, the question arises, “Why didn’t Ong ever explicitly advert to Jung’s account of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking?”
Now, Ong was quick to champion the classicist and philologist Eric A. Havelock’s landmark book Preface to Plato (1963) – a book that Ong never tired of outing. In Havelock’s 1963 book Preface to Plato, he characterizes primary oral thinking as imagistic – a term that clearly connects with Jung’s use of the term images as characteristic of fantasy thinking.
Ong’s perceptive review of Havelock’s 1963 book is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 309-312).
Now, Havelock’s bent as a philologist is most clearly expressed in his 1978 book The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (Harvard University Press).
Now, above I raised the question, “Why didn’t Ong ever explicitly advert to Jung’s account of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking?”
Now, Ong’s taste in literature is most clearly expressed in his essays in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture.
Now, to begin to formulate a possible answer to my question about Ong, I found it convenient to turn to the British philologist and literary critic Thomas A. Shippey’s book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000).
In Shippey’s 2003 “Preface to the Revised and Expanded Third Edition” of his earlier book The Road to Middle-earth (pp. xv-xviii; orig. ed., 1982), he uses the linguists’ terms diachronically to characterize his view of Tolkien in his earlier book and the term synchronically to characterize his book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (pp. xvi-xvii).
Now, the first chapter of Shippey’s book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century was excerpted in The New York Times as “‘J. R. R. Tolkien’” (dated November 13, 2001).
More recently in The New York Times, Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings has been discussed, for example, (1) by guest op-ed writer Michael D. C. Drout in his op-ed commentary titled “Please Don’t Make a Tolkien Cinematic Universe” (dated September 1, 2022).
(2) by television reviewer Jennifer Vineyard in her article titled “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Reviews Are In: Amazon’s expensive fantasy saga finally debuts on Thursday night. What do the critics think? Read on.” (dated September 1, 2022).
(3) by Rome correspondent Jason Horowitz in his article titled “Hobbitts and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential new Leader: Giorgia Meloni, the nationalist politician who is the front-runner to become prime minister, sees The Lord of the Rings as not just a series of novels, but also as a sacred text” (dated September 21, 2022).
(4) by columnist Ross Douthat in his column titled “The Subtlety of J. R. R. Tolkien” (dated September 8, 2023).
(5) by columnist David French in his column titled “The Lord of the Rings Is Not the Far Right’s Playground” (dated August 1, 2024).
(6) by columnist Jamelle Bouie in his column titled “If The Lord of the Rings Is a Cautionary Tale, It was Lost on JD Vance” (dated August 3, 2024).
Now, by all accounts, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a devout orthodox Roman Catholic. And Shippey’s extensive discussion of evil in his book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century shows that Tolkien had an orthodox understanding of evil, based on the thought of Boethius. (For specific pages references, see the “Index” entries for Boethius [p. 338], Catholicism [p, 338], Christianity [p. 338] and evil [p. 339].)
Boethius (c.480-524 CE) was a philosopher of the early Middle Ages. For further information about him, see the Wikipedia entry “Boethius”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boethius
Now, on the inside back flap of the dust cover of the American edition of Shippey’s book, we are told, “Shippey [born on September 9, 1943; Ph.D., Queen’s College, Cambridge, 1970] currently holds the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University in Missouri.” Since Shippey’s book was published in 2000, he has retired and now resides once again in England.
Ah, but there are no references in Shippey’s 2000 book to Ong’s signature work regarding orality and literacy. In Shippey’s 2000 book, he does briefly discuss what he refers to the “preliterate ancestry” of certain works in our Western cultural history, including “the extensive epics of Homer, and Virgil, and the Histories of Livy, and Beowulf, and even accounts of the Old Testament” (p. 234).
In Shippey’s following discussion of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on Beowulf, Shippey quotes Tolkien as saying, “‘Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets that Virgil knew, and only used in the making of a new thing!’” (p. 235).
Yes, there was an oral tradition behind Beowulf, but the text of Beowulf that has come down to us was written by a literate Christian missionary.
For further discussion, see the American Jesuit literary scholar Maurice B. McNamee’s book Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (1960, pp. 86-117). In three different discussion notes at the end of his essay, McNamee refers to Tolkien’s “admirable essay” “‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’” (pp. 112n.21, 114n.25, and 117n.72).
Now, in my widely read OEN article “Some Reflections of the Work of C. G. Jung and Walter J. Ong” (dated December 28, 2024), I briefly discuss the self-described conservative Catholic convert columnist Ross Douthat’s column “We Need a Great American Fantasy” (dated December 20, 2024) in The New York Times.
Now, Ross Douthat mentions the British philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955).
As everyone knows, Tolkien’s three volumes of the fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings were turned into a trilogy of epic fantasy adventure films, released 2001-2003 – about the time when Shippey’s book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century had been published in 2000. If Shippey were to publish a 25th anniversary edition of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, he almost certainly would want to add a discussion of the trilogy of epic fantasy adventure films based on Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
According to the Wikipedia entry titled “The Lord of the Rings (film series),” total budget for the three films in English was $281 million dollars. The total box office for the three films in English was $2.964 BILLION DOLLARS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(film_series)
Now, I have no idea how the total box office for those three films in English compares to the total box office for any other films or film series. However, I am impressed by the figure of $2.964 billion dollars.
Of course, the three films obviously feature images, just as the ubiquitous mom-son porn videos on the internet do – as I have discussed in my OEN article “On Interpreting the Ubiquitous Mom-Son Porn on the Internet” (dated December 19, 2024).
As a result of the images in the three films in the epic fantasy adventure trilogy The Lord of the rings, the three films involve the viewers in engaging in what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking.
As a matter of fact, the three films in the trilogy of epic fantasy adventure films also feature music – a feature not found in mom-son fantasy skits on the internet.
Now, the most efficient way for me to give you an overview of Shippey’s book is to tell you its contents:
Half-title page (p. i).
Title page (p. ii).
Copyright page (p. iii).
List of Contents (p. v).
Acknowledgments (p. vi).
“Foreword: Author of the Century” (pp. vii-xxxv).
Chapter I: “The Hobbitt [1937]: Re-Inventing Middle-Earth” (pp. 1-49).
Chapter II: “The Lord of the Rings (1) [1954]: Mapping Out a Plot” (pp. 50-111).
Chapter III: “The Lord of the Rings (2) [1954]: Concepts of Evil” (pp. 112-160).
Chapter IV: “The Lord of the Rings (3) [1955]: The Mythic Dimension” (pp. 161-225).
Chapter V: “The Silmarillion [19??]: The Work of the heart” (pp. 226-263).
Chapter VI: “Shorter Works: Doubts, Fears, Autobiographies” (pp. 264-304).
“Afterword: The Followers and the Critics” (pp. 305-328).
“List of References” (pp. 329-336).
“Index” (pp. 337-347).
For my purposes in the present essay, I am most interested in Shippey’s “Foreword: Author of the Century” and his “Afterword: The Followers and the Critics.” But I also want to commend Shippey for his discussion (A) of contrasts and parallels in Chapter II: “The Lord of the Rings (1),” and (B) of concepts of evil in Chapter III, and (C) of heroic fantasy in Chapter IV: “The Lord of the Rings (3)” (esp. pp. 221-225).
In Shippey’s “Foreword: Author of the Century,” after the subheading “Fantasy and the fantastic” (p. vii), he says, “However, when it comes time to look back at the [twentieth] century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of the present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursala Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended” (p. vii).
Subsequently, Shippey says that “many of the originators of the late twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell)” (p. viii). Subsequently, Shippey says that “it is possible to see Tolkien as one of a group of ‘traumatized authors’” (pp. xxix-xxx; also see p. xxxi).
By constructing this list of traumatized authors, Shippey seems to imply that Tolkien is also a traumatized author who is attempting to work through his traumatization in World War I through writing his three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
Yes, many men and women who saw action in wars were traumatized by their experiences. My Dad (1916-2007) saw action in World War II. In my judgment, he was traumatized by his experiences in war.
In any event, Shippey does not claim to have seen action in war himself. So I commend him for his empathy for those who have seen action in war and for recognizing that seeing action in war is traumatizing – even if it does not involve symptoms of PTSD.
Also on p. xxxi, Shippey says, “Nevertheless, although his [Tolkien’s] concern and the concern of the authors I mention is not with the private and the personal (the themes of the ‘modernist’ novel), but with the public and the political, it should be obvious that to all but the sheltered classes of this [twentieth] century, the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political” (his italics; for Shippey’s extended discussion of literary modernism, see pp. 312-318).
Yes, it is definitely true that “the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political,” as Shippey notes.
Of course, it may be true that “the sheltered classes” may not have been traumatized by World War I or by World War II or by the Korean War or by the Vietnam War – or by more recent wars.
Disclosure: Because I received draft deferments, I was drafted into serving in the Vietnam War. And, as I have noted, Walter Ong was not drafted into serving in World War II. As a result, both of us, are among “the sheltered classes” – just as the famous modernist authors T. S. Eliot and James Joyce were. End of disclosure.
Now, Shippey also says that “Tolkien, as a philologist, and also as an infantry veteran, was deeply conscious of the strong continuity between the heroic world and the modern world” (p. xxvii).
In addition, Shippey says that “Tolkien did not invent heroic fantasy” (p. xix; his italics). But Shippey describes The Lord of the Rings [as] heroic fantasy” (p. xviii).
Now, in Shippey’s Chapter II: “The Lord of the Rings (1),” he devotes one subsection to “Cultural parallels: The Riders of the Mark” (pp. 90-97) and another subsection to “Cultural contrasts: Rohan and Gondor” (pp. 98-102).
Now, in Shippey’s Chapter III: “The Lord of the Rings (2): Concepts of Evil,” he says, “I have argued that the work’s ‘controlling vision of things’] Shippey is here quoting Mark Roberts wording in 1956] is in fact a double vision, between the opinions I label ‘Boethian’ and ‘Manichaean’; and that both opinions are presented at one time or another with equal force” (p. 157).
Concerning Mark Roberts’ 1956 article, Shippey also says, “In this post-modern world, it is of course hard to conceive of any ‘understanding of reality’ which will not be denied by someone or other, but Professor Roberts spoke from a simpler critical era; he was clearly trying to write Tolkien off in the language and from the perspective of the then-dominant F. R. Leavis – and indeed it is true that The Lord of the Rings, like the rest of modern fantasy [literature], would never fit into the neat succession of Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’” (p. 156).
More broadly, what Shippey here refers to as “a simple critical era” refers to the era of the New Criticism and of the new Critics such as Leavis and I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and T. S. Eliot, mentioned above. And what Shippey here refers to as “this post-modern world” refers to the critical era represented by the French philosophers Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Even though the era of the New Criticism has given way to the era of postmodernism in Departments of English, Shippey does not report any uptick of interest in Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings among postmodernists in Departments of English. (I might add parenthetically that I cannot report any uptick in interest in Ong’s mature work from the early 1950s onward among postmodernists in Departments of English.)
Now, in Shippey’s Chapter IV: “The Lord of the Rings (3),” he returns to the topic of heroic fantasy and works out an extensive discussion of it by using the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye’s influential 1957 book Anatomy of Criticism as a touchstone to guide his detailed discussion of Tolkien’s various styles in the three volumes of his fantasy novel (pp. 221-225). Shippey’s conclusion is worth quoting here in its entirety:
“Tolkien could bring a modern style into Middle-earth: Smaug talks for it, for one, and so does Saruman. But he knew the implications of style, and of language, better and more professionally than almost anyone in the world. The flexibility of his many styles and languages; the resonance of the highest levels of these; the ability to reach out towards universal and mythic meaning, while remaining embedded in story: these are the powerful and largely unsuspected reasons for the continuing appeal of The Lord of the Rings” (p. 225).
Now, In Shippey’s “Foreword: Author of the Century,” he describes his various adversaries in the academic world as “the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy” (p. xvii).
Ah, but was Ong one of the “despisers of fantasy”? If he was, he did not explicitly say he was in any of his 400 or so publications.
So far as I know, Ong did not mention Tolkien in any of his publications.
But Ong does explicitly mention certain modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. (For specific page references to Shippey’s mention of modernism, see the “Index” [p. 343].)
In any event, in Shippey’s “Afterword: The Followers and the Critics,” he also discusses Tolkien’s critics.
Now, for a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong’s 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh’s “Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006” in the anthology Language, Culture, and identity: The Legacy: of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (2011, pp. 185-245).
In any event, on the same page in Shippey’s book where he refers to “the despisers of fantasy,” he also says, “Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while” (p. xvii).
Now, in Shippey’s book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey discusses fantasy extensively (for specific page references, see the entry for Fantasy genre in the “Index” pp. 339-340]).
However, just as Ong did not ever explicitly advert to Jung’s account of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking, so too Shippey does not advert explicitly in his book to Jung’s account of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking. However, I have no reason to think that Shippey was ever as interested in Jung’s work as Ong was. For this reason, Shippey’s failure to mention Jung’s account of fantasy thinking is understandable.
Now, in some of my recent OEN articles, I have used Jung’s account of fantasy thinking as involving images and associative thinking to discuss the emergence of incest-themed fantasy skits in porn videos on the internet and in DVDs. In short, thanks to the ready availability of porn on the internet today, what Jung describes as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking may be far more common today that it ever has been previously in our Western cultural history.
Now a final word is in order here about Ong. In his most accessible and most widely read book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), he discusses what he refers to there as the inward turn of consciousness (pp. 178-179).
But to capture adequately here the import of Ong’s basic valuation of the inward turn of consciousness (which is also characteristic of literary modernism), I want to quote Ong’s succinct summary in his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (pp. 10-11) of the Jungian psychoanalyst Eric Neumann’s Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R. F. C. Hull (1954; orig. German ed., 1949):
“The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, as well as by other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche’s imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., “married” within one’s psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche’s overman] – or, more properly, personalism – of modern man [sic]).”
Ong also sums up Neumann’s Jungian account of the stages of consciousness in his (Ong’s) book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (1981, pp. 18-19; but also see the “Index” for further references to Neumann [p. 228]), the published version of Ong’s 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
As you can see, Ong values personalism, He characterized his own work as phenomenological and personalist in cast. I honored both of those two characterizations in the subtitle of my award-winning book Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000), mentioned above.
But no inward turn of consciousness = no twentieth-century personalism.
No inward turn of consciousness – no literary modernism.
Now, I see Neumann’s stage (8) of the eight stages of consciousness, which Ong describes as “the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism – or, more properly, personalism – modern [men and women]” as involving men and women who learn how to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in their psyches – in Robert Moore’s terminology.
As I noted above, in Moore and Gillette’s 1992a book The King within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche, they note in passing that Tolkien’s 1955 fantasy novel The Return of the King is a popular contemporary work built around the theme of a liberating king’s return (p. 7). As I also noted above, Tolkien himself, in the very process of writing his fantasy trilogy, may indeed have learned how to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in his psyche.
For a biography of Tolkien, see Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien (1977).
For Tolkien’s letters, see Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien (1981).
But also see the lengthy Wikipedia entry “J. R. R. Tolkien.”
Now, in the case of Ong, he may have learned how to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in his psyche in the early 1950s when he experienced the big breakthrough insight that he expressed in his mature work from the early 1950s onward.
Now, according to Shippey, Tolkien does not represent the inward turn of consciousness. Shippey says, “In the cultures Tolkien admired, introspection was not admired. He was aware of it, in a way his ancient models were not, but he did not develop it” (p. 315).
Ah, but this brings us to the bigger picture that Ong’s media ecology account of our Western cultural history offers us. In the last quotation from Shippey, we can now rename “the [ancient and medieval] cultures Tolkien admired” as residually oral forms of what Ong refers to as primary oral cultures. Contrary to what Shippey asserts that the cultures that Tolkien admired did not admire introspection, ancient and medieval Western culture contained clear elements of admiration for introspection, and in print culture introspection received more emphasis than it had previously in our Western cultural history.
Now, what Ong himself refers to as the inward turn of consciousness emerged historically in our Western cultural history in ancient and medieval manuscript cultures and expanded enormously in our modern print culture that emerged after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
However, according to Ong, our contemporary Western culture is currently undergoing the deep change that he refers to as secondary orality – or as secondary oral culture.
For Ong, our contemporary secondary oral culture is characterized by the communications media that accentuate sound (such as television, telephone, radio, tape-recording devices, movies with soundtracks, and the like).
Clearly the three epic fantasy adventure films in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, mentioned above, are part of our contemporary secondary oral culture.
For Ong, secondary oral culture is different from primary oral culture before phonetic alphabetic literacy developed in ancient Hebrew culture and in ancient Greek culture – and our contemporary secondary oral culture is also different from residual forms of primary oral culture in ancient and medieval times in our Western cultural history.
Concerning ancient Hebrew culture and the emergence of phonetic alphabetic literacy, see my article “Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible” in Explorations in Media Ecology (2012).
Concerning ancient Greek culture and the emergence of phonetic alphabetic literacy, see the classicist Eric A. Havelock’s landmark 1963 book Preface to Plato, mentioned above.
Now, for a classified bibliography of studies in various languages of medieval residual forms of primary oral cultures in our Western cultural history, see Marco Mostert’s ambitious 2012 book A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication.
Now, taking various hints from Ong, I have written about secondary orality in my essay “Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today” in the well-organized anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong’s Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (1991, pp. 194-209).
Ah, but does secondary oral culture bode well for the inward turn of consciousness? This remains to be seen.
Does our contemporary secondary oral culture bode well for Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)? I do not have a crystal ball. I cannot foresee the future. But the critical mass of television owners in the United States emerged around 1960. Since then, Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings has sold well, and the three epic fantasy adventure films based on The Lord of the Rings were remarkably popular. In addition, on television, the fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011-2019) emerged as the most popular television series ever. On the internet, mom-son fantasy skits in mom-son porn videos are ubiquitous. It appears that fantasy is extremely popular. In effect, this popularity also means that what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking is extremely popular.
As I have noted before, the MILF pornstar Cory Chase (born on February 25, 1981; started in porn in 2011 at the age of 28), who stars as the mom in many, many mom-son fantasy skits in porn videos on the internet and in DVDs, has claimed, in a video interview online, that the incest theme in porn videos on the internet and in DVDs emerged after incest was a featured part of the highly popular television series Game of Thrones.
Now, I do not know for sure how the term “modernism” emerged as the way to refer to certain types of contemporary literature that emerged in our Western cultural history after World War I (July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918).
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) saw action in World War I. According to Shippey (p. x), Tolkien “served as an infantry subaltern on the Somme from July to October 1916.” The famous battle of the Somme started on July 1, 1916, and ended on November 18, 1916.
In any event, in the English language, two of the most famous practitioners of literary modernism after World War I were T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and James Joyce (1882-1941) – and Shippey discusses each of them extensively (for specific page references, see the respective “Index” entry for each man [pp. 339 and 341]).
Now, both T. S. Eliot’s famous modernist poem The Waste Land and James Joyce’s famous modernist novel Ulysses were published in 1922. In 2022, I published a number of OEN articles about both Eliot’s modernist poem and Joyce’s modernist novel.
See, for example, my widely read OEN article “Have You Read James Joyce’s Novel Ulysses?” (dated March 2, 2022),
But also see my OEN article “Understanding T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land” (dated October 22, 2022).
Now, neither T. S. Eliot nor James Joyce saw action in World War I.
Walter Ong did not see action in World War II (September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945) because he was deferred from military duty due to his being in the Jesuit order – which he entered in September 1935.
As I mentioned above, I did not see action in the Vietnam War.
In conclusion, in the present essay, I have engaged in associative thinking to honor Jung’s conceptualization of fantasy thinking as involving images and associative thinking. From the various associations I have listed here as Ong’s various publications, I have to conclude that he favored modernist literary works. However, I cannot conclude from this that Ong would be one of Shippey’s despisers of fantasy – because I cannot imagine Ong feeling so strongly about fantasy literature as to despise it.
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