Intimations of Evil/Models of Good.
Teaching Young People How to Respond.
Wizards and Witches in Popular Novels.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”
J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books.
Ursula Leguin’s “Earthsea Trilogy.”
Burton Weltman
“Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen”
The Witch in Into the Woods.
The Question of Evil. Coming of Age with Wickedness in the World.
The slaughter of the innocents. Torture. Plagues. Famines. Sadism. Prejudice. Evil in the world abounds and surrounds us. Why? It is a question that has plagued theologians, philosophers and everyday people since ancient times. How, for example, can a supposedly all-powerful and all-good God allow so much evil in the world? And how is it that evildoers prosper, doing unto others as they would not have others do unto them, while the virtuous suffer. If, as some religionists say, things will even out in an afterlife, what’s the point in the first place?
And what is the nature of evil? Is it a principle inherent in the universe or merely a lack of good? Is it a presence or an absence? An inevitability or an unfortunate possibility? A one-by-one occurrence or a mass infestation? In the end, how can you explain, let alone justify, the suffering of little children? And what, if anything, can we do about it?
Children, if they are fortunate, are oblivious to evil for much of their early childhood. Especially if they live in First World countries in relatively safe and prosperous environments. But there comes a time when evil invades even the sheltered worlds of advantaged children, and the existence of evil frequently, then, comes as a shock to these young people. Thereafter, coping with evil becomes an ongoing part of their lives.
In my case, that time occurred at the relatively young age of five years old. I am Jewish. My best friend, who lived across the alley from me, was Catholic. He and I were sharing holidays. He had come to my house for Hannukah and I was having dinner at his house for Christmas. His grandparents were there and his grandmother was bemoaning that black people (she used the “N” word) were moving into the neighborhood. My parents were civil rights activists so I knew that what she was saying was not good and I wondered if I should say something.
But then she added to her bigotry by telling us that “There is only one thing worse than having a “N word” living next door to you and that is having a Jew.” A very loud silence followed her words. I looked down at my plate but could see my friend’s mother gesturing toward her mother. I was crushed. I did not know what to say or do. So, I did nothing. Stilted small talk ensued and I went home shortly thereafter.
To this day, exactly seventy-five years later (I am typing this on Christmas day 2024), I am shocked at what my friend’s grandmother said and ashamed that I did not respond to her. Just sat there silent and then left. I never told my parents. And the events of that day still haunt me, as you can see by the fact that I am still writing about them. Thanks to my friend’s grandmother, I was confronted with a troubling new question, the question of evil, that I have been trying to answer ever since. It is a question that eventually confronts and confounds most young people.
Personal evil, social evil, natural evil, metaphysical evil – evil comes in many forms. You can’t avoid it. Dealing with evil is something young people are forced to learn about, and it is something they learn about from many sources. Their parents, friends, school, stories they read, games they play, movies they see. Some things they learn from these various sources are healthy and helpful, others destructive and harmful. And that is itself one of the evils of the world.
It is important that young people know about and be able to choose productive ways of dealing with evil. Literature plays an important part in teaching them ways of responding to evil, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. This essay deals with ways in which evil and responding to evil are portrayed in three popular series of books about wizards and wizardry: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy.[1]
The books present three different models of dealing with evil. To make a long story short, evil is addressed primarily through war in The Lord of the Rings, containment in the Harry Potter books, and reconstruction in the Earthsea trilogy. The differences are significant as are the messages conveyed to readers. How this is so is the subject of this essay.
Something wicked this way comes. Living with witches and wizards.
The world can be a baffling place. And scary. Especially to young people who are just trying to figure things out. And for whom those in control can seem like wizards doing magical things. Inexplicable and bewildering things. It is no surprise, then, that stories, movies and games that feature wizards and magical creatures, superpowers and superheroes, are very popular among young people. The stories resonate with their hopes, fears and ambitions.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s Harry Potter books and LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy are three popular series of stories that feature wizards and wizardry. Aimed primarily at young readers, each of these series deals with wizards and wizardry gone wrong, and with the heroic efforts of young people to make things come out right.
The books share many similarities that help explain their popularity. They are essentially bildungsroman featuring young people, or child-like hobbits, as heroes who mature and develop extraordinary powers through facing up to evil. The books are action-packed, with the good guys struggling with their ignorance and immaturity but ultimately beating the bad guys.
In each of the books, it is ego and lust for power that underpins the evil and that makes good people do evil. Power corrupts and the hero of each story eschews power, Frodo the ring, Harry the philosopher’s stone and elder wand, Ged the power of the dark side. And each of the heroes learns that he needs the help of others, and gets that help.
Each of the heroes has a teacher who emphasizes caring for people and things as the key to a good life. Gandalf correctly predicts that Frodo’s pity for the piteous Gollum would be critical for the success of Frodo’s task. Dumbledore repeatedly preaches that love is the greatest magic. And Ged’s teachers stress the importance of caring for people and the balance of the universe. Each of the series of books lays claim to promoting a humane world view.
The heroes in all three are immigrants dealing with prejudice against outsiders. Frodo an immigrant to the big peoples’ world from Hobbit land. Harry an immigrant to the magic world from muggle land. And Ged an immigrant to wizard world from an outland area. Overcoming and undermining prejudice is a theme of all three of the series.
And, underlying the storm and stress of their plots, the books are moral and political treatises on good and evil, providing examples of what to do and not to do in dealing with wrongdoers. It is in this that they differ. The ways in which authors set up their fictional worlds and the ways in their heroes define and face evil invariably reflect the authors’ political orientations. Tolkien was politically conservative and ardently Christian. Rowling is politically liberal and ardently feminist. LeGuin was politically radical and ardently anarchist.
While none of their books is overtly political, they significantly diverge in how they portray the bad guys, the good guys, the problems faced by the good guys, and the ways they deal with wrongdoers. War, a more conservative solution to the problem of evil, is the main way in The Lord of the Rings. Containment, a liberal response, is the main way in the Harry Potter books. Reconstruction, a more radical reaction, is the main way in the Earthsea books. Politics underlie the moral of each story.
In sum, the books provide readers with different models of dealing with evil and, in turn, teach young people different ways of facing the world. Whether you think their influence is for the better or for the worse depends on what you think of what they teach their readers.
Evil in Three Worlds: Infested, Infected, Self-Inflicted.
The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books, and the Earthsea trilogy are dense books, filled with many different kinds of characters, many of them other than human, and with many different approaches to good and evil. Although each contains a variety of approaches to defining and dealing with evil, each emphasizes one way over the others which becomes the main message readers are likely to take from the books.
In The Lord of the Rings, evil is embedded in the world and the world is infested with orcs. Orcs are ugly, vicious, cannibalistic, humanoid creatures with human intelligence but inhuman proclivities. They serve their master Sauron, a supremely wicked wizard who seeks to wreck the world and enslave everyone in it. Faced with such opponents, the good guys in the books – hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves, and ents – seem to have no choice but to fight, defeat, and exterminate their foes. It is a world of war to the bitter end.
Death to the wicked wizard Sauron and genocide of the orcs is the goal of the heroes. The orcs are completely dehumanized in the books. Although they have human-like intelligence and even feelings, the orcs are portrayed as vermin by the narrator and treated like vermin by the books’ heroes. Two of them, Gimli the dwarf and Legolas the elf, even engage in a contest to see who can kill the most orcs. Exterminating bad guys is the main method of dealing with evil in The Lord of the Rings.
In the Harry Potter books, the world is infected with evil from a wicked wizard, Voldemort, whose contagion dangerously spreads. Harry and the good wizards and witches must deal with Voldemort and his wicked wizardly colleagues, so-called Death Eaters, whom Voldemort controls through corrupt inducements, death threats, and imperius curses, a kind of hypnotism. Voldemort’s goal is personal immortality and dictatorial control of the world. Voldemort and his closest supporters relish torturing and killing muggles, their name for non-magical humans, and they murder wizards who oppose them.
Faced with such opponents the good wizards fight back, albeit mostly with non-violent means. They try to limit the general knowledge of evil curses, teach humility and self-control to young wizards, and incarcerate Death Eaters. The Ministry of Magic, the wizards’ government, and Hogwarts, the wizarding school, have as their main goals limiting the unnecessary use of magic and keeping secret the existence of the magical community. It is a serious crime to use magic in the presence of muggles. And an underlying theme in all of the courses in magic at Hogwarts is the need to control the use of magic. The goal of the magical community is seemingly, thus, to quarantine evil wizards in the wizards’ prison and contain evil wizardry through education.
In the course of the books, it becomes clear that the most powerful antidote to evil wizardry is love and self-sacrifice for others. Harry’s mother dies to try to save him from Voldemort and effectively makes Harry immune to Voldemort’s killing curse. Harry later is willing to die to save his colleagues from Voldemort, and his willingness to die for them makes them immune to Voldemort’s killing curses.
In the end, Voldemort is killed when one of his own killing curses rebounds away from Harry and hits him. With Voldemort’s death, all of the holds that he had over people are ended and the world seemingly goes back to normal, albeit a normality that requires eternal vigilance to ensure that magic does not get misused. Containing evil is a long-term, full-time business.
In the Earthsea books, wizards and wizardry are a normal part of everyday life, as they were in Lord of the Rings, only even more so. There are commonplace witches and wizards who can perform mundane medical spells, mending spells and other low-level magic in their peasant villages. There are also great mages who can control the weather and even deal with the dead. The main purpose of the great mages is to help keep a proper balance of all things in the world, but to intervene only when it is absolutely necessary.
Ged, the hero of the books, is an ambitious young wizard with great natural, or supernatural, abilities who comes from an undistinguished background. He is anxious to overcome his lowly antecedents and become highly regarded. His pride leads him to perform an overly difficult and dangerous spell and he unwittingly unleashes into the living world an evil spirit from the world of the dead. Ged goes on a desperate and dangerous voyage tracking down the spirit and returning it to the realm of the dead. And in the end, it turns out to be a reflection of himself. It is Ged’s evil self that he must put back into its proper place to restore balance to the world.
Thereafter, Ged rises in the wizarding community to be the head mage and be considered the greatest wizard of his time. But there is another evil spirit extant in the world that is draining the magical powers of the good wizards. Ged leaves home again in a desperate search for the source of this disaster. He finds that it is a wizard whom he had previously defeated and defanged, but who had studied the dark magical arts and come back incredibly powerful. After much trial and tribulation, Ged defeats this wizard but it takes all of his magical powers and he is left as a shell of his former self. In the end, he retires to a quiet nonmagical life in a little village.
The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books and the Earthsea books portray the problem of evil and the solution in different ways. In The Lord of the Rings, the wrongdoers are portrayed as evil incarnate and the main way in which that evil is thwarted is through a direct attack against the enemy. After the first book in the series, almost all of the action involves fighting and killing.
In the Harry Potter books, the wrongdoers are evil but also foolish. Voldemort never understands the power and importance of love and this is a key to his downfall. Each of the books also involves some sort of mystery and trickery that has to be uncovered, solved, and resolved. The main way in which evil is thwarted in these books is through quarantining it – for example, putting the Death Eaters in prison – and overwhelming it with a wealth of good sense and humane caring. Containing evil and educating for good are the main purposes, respectively, of the Ministry of Magic and the Hogwarts School.
In the Earthsea books, unleashing the evil spirit in the first book of the series is a consequence of the overweening pride of the main character Ged. Pride is also a main problem with other characters that runs through the books. The primary way that evil is thwarted is through self-reflection and reconstruction, putting your own evil genie back into the bottle and taking the other’s evil with you. Destructive pride and constructive humility are the main themes.
Attacking, quarantining, reconstructing are the three models of dealing with evil portrayed in the books. These methods reflect, in turn, the modes in which their stories are told.
Modes of Storytelling: Melodrama, Comedy, Tragedy.
Authors create worlds and then, if the authors are meticulous, the events in their stories occur within the frameworks and the possibilities of those worlds. And we readers follow along. We get pulled into an author’s world and accept the events of the story and the choices and actions of the characters as logical within that world. A violent world generates violent choices. A chaotic world generates foolish choices. A fallen world, a world noir, generates dark choices. The setup of the world is, thereby, a key to the movement and message of a story.
The “In the beginning,” the backstory of a narrative, largely determines where it will go. The backstory, in turn, generally reflects the dramatic form of the book. Stories can take various shapes and forms. Three of the most common forms are melodrama, comedy and tragedy. Each of these dramatic forms conveys a different message as to how to deal with evil wrongdoers.[2] And we can see this in The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books and the Earthsea trilogy.
Melodrama can be defined as a story of battle between good people and evil people, with the forces of good confronting and attempting to eradicate the forces of evil. Antipathy is generally a motivating force. Melodrama is a narrative form that deals in extremes of emotion and action, and is based on an absolutist view of morality[3] In a melodrama, the problem in the story is created by the evil actions of evil people. These are people who cannot be trusted and have to be eliminated. Since there can be no compromise with evil or evil people, melodrama portrays a world in which problems almost always must be settled by war or conflict of some sort.[4]
Melodrama is the predominant story form in our society and the form in which most people seem instinctively to react to adversity. “Who is doing this to me and how can I defeat them” is the first reaction of most people to a problem. This melodramatic reaction has been programmed into us by evolutionary processes. It is “an aggression drive inherited [by man] from his anthropoid ancestors.”[5] It leaves us “hardwired to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and to behave inhumanely toward ‘them’ at the slightest provocation.”[6]
Melodrama is essentially the story form of the “fright, then fight or flight” reaction of our piglet-like precursors who had to make their way in a world of giant carnivores. Although it was a successful survival strategy for helpless mini-mammals, a kneejerk reaction of “victory or death” can lead to unnecessary violence and disastrous wars when dealing with the complex problems of the complicated world of modern humans.[7]
Comedy can be defined as a story of wisdom versus folly, wise people versus foolish people.[8] In comedy, the problem is created by “the intervention of fools,” that is, by someone acting badly out of stupidity or ignorance.[9] It is a narrative form that promotes education as the solution to problems, as the wise try to teach the fools or at least restrain them from foolishness.[10] Sympathy is an underlying motivation in comedy. When we think people are acting foolishly, our reactions are typically either to correct them or to constrain them so that they can do no further harm.
Comedy reflects a hierarchical world in which knowledgeable people are expected to control stupid and ignorant people, educating them in proper behavior and belief when that is possible, and tricking, controlling or excluding them when that is not. Comedy involves conflicts and struggles but the action generally stays peaceful or is, at least, not fatal. If, however, a fool refuses instruction and rejects containment, comedy can descend into violent struggle and metamorphose into melodrama. A comedy may have a happy or unhappy ending depending on whether the fools learn their lesson.
Tragedy can be defined as a story of too much of a good thing becoming bad. Tragedy, in this definition, describes characters who pursue a too narrowly prescribed good too far until it turns on itself, becomes bad and precipitates a potential disaster. The characters’ “tragic flaw” is pride in insisting on their own narrow perspectives and failing to see things in a broader context, for example failing to recognize that one person’s good may be someone else’s bad and that an individual’s good ultimately depends on the good of all.[11]
Tragedy is a story of hubris versus humility, the failure of the tragic characters “to recognize their personal limits,” and to reconcile contradictions within themselves, within their society and between themselves and their society.[12] Tragedy deals with the good intentions that can pave the way to hell.[13] The moral of the story is usually to seek negotiation and inclusion as the way to avoid the conflict and calamity that befall tragic figures. Empathy is an underlying theme in tragedy, and the goal is for the tragic hero and the audience to recognize the narrowness of the hero’s perspective. This recognition could enable a reconstruction of the situation so that all could peacefully co-exist.[14]
The Moral of Choosing a Mode of Storytelling: Melodrama, Comedy or Tragedy.
Different modes of storytelling convey different moral messages, and the differences between melodrama, comedy and tragedy are significant. If people see the world primarily in melodramatic terms, they will tend to see social problems as the result of the evil actions of evil people, to see enemies all around, and to see war or coercion of some sort as the solution.
If people see the world in comic terms, they will tend to see social problems as the result of foolish people and see education and/or containment as the solution. If people see the world in tragic terms, they will tend to see social problems as the result of competing goods and competing good intentions, and to see negotiation as the solution. In sum, the dramatic form in which people tell a story will largely determine their moral reactions and their corrective actions.
In deciding which dramatic form to use in dealing with a social problem and telling the story of that problem, my preference is to choose the tragic form whenever and to the greatest extent possible because it is the most peaceful approach and the one in which ordinary people can most actively engage. The tragic mode asks you to put yourself in the shoes of other people, broaden your perspective to include theirs and negotiate a compromise solution to your differences. That is my first choice.
To the extent the facts of my situation or story do not fit into a tragic mold, my preference is to choose the comic form as a potentially peaceful way of resolving a problem. In comedy, you see your side as wise and the other as foolish, and you set your side up to instruct the fools, contain them or constrain their foolishness. This strategy can lead to conflict if the other side does not see itself as foolish, and resents and resists your efforts. Properly done, however, the comic mode has the potential for a peaceful and mutually satisfactory resolution of differences.
Finally, to the extent the facts do not fit either the tragic or comic modes, I reluctantly approach a situation in melodramatic terms. Melodrama is for me the form of last resort because it portrays a world in which differences can be settled only by fighting. The more you tell stories using the melodramatic mode, the more you are telling your audience that conflicts can only be resolved through war.
Tragedy first, comedy as a fallback, melodrama as a last resort. That is the way that I think we should approach telling our stories. Unfortunately, most storytellers in our present-day society take an opposite approach. Hence, for example, the overwhelming volume of literature, movies and video games that feature fighting, murder, and war, and that thereby promote a melodramatic view of the world. The melodramatic reaction is programmed into us and is, thus, a very human reaction. But it is most often not a helpful reaction. It is important, therefore, to try to get past that kneejerk reaction. Thinking more slowly and deliberately is usually a better way to go.
Facing a Morally Challenging Situation: Third Time is a Charm.
We humans are a story-telling species and we are quick to turn even the slightest information into a narrative with a moral to the story. Feelings of approval and disapproval run through almost all of our thinking. Feelings of neutrality are pretty much possible only for things about which we don’t care. The stream of consciousness that churns through our minds can be characterized as a stream of judgments as we gather information and construct stories that explain to us what we are experiencing.
And we tend to be quick thinkers and quick to conclusions. This was an advantage to our puny primate ancestors who were trying to survive in a world full of predators that wanted to eat them and of prey that they wanted to eat. Quick reactions could be the difference between eating and being eaten. Fright and then either fight or flight was, in particular, a saving reaction for our ancestors and a main reason we exist today.
But that was then and this is now. After millions of years of development as primitive primates, humans as we know ourselves emerged around three hundred thousand years ago. And we emerged with the reflex reactions of our predecessors still hard-wired in us. That is not a good thing when we are faced with situations and problems more complex than those faced by our ancestors. Confronted with a new situation, our first reaction is almost invariably a gut reaction of disapproval or approval. “Yuck” or “Yay.” But first reactions are almost invariably overreactions. Whether it be love or hate at first sight, it is likely to be a one-sided misperception which, if acted upon, could lead to misadventure. Second looks are almost always necessary and proper.[15]
If we resist acting on that first impulse and delve into the particulars of the situation, we will often revise our reaction, going from “Yuck” to “Yay” or “Yay” to “Yuck.” On this second look, we are likely to begin to understand the rationale behind the problem and sympathize with the participants. But that is also likely to be an underreaction so that a third look at the situation is generally in order.
And when we delve into the reasons for our contradictory impulses, we will often come up with a mixed conclusion, partially “Yuck” and partially “Yay.” If we are lazy, this mixed conclusion could be just a wishy-washy compromise. But if we are intellectually rigorous, it could be a dialectical conclusion that points to a workable solution to our problem.
This three-step method is akin to a maxim known to teachers that it takes at least three iterations of a lesson before it will register with most students. If something is important for students to understand and remember, it should be covered at least three times, albeit in three different ways, coming at it from different angles so as to deal with different aspects of the problem and maintain students’ interest.
The method will also lead students through their “Yuck” and “Yay” reactions to a problem, and help them to achieve a balanced view of the subject. In this respect, the method is a way of working your way from a melodramatic kneejerk overreaction through a comic underreaction before settling on what could be considered a realistic tragic response to a problem. It can also be a way of moving from antipathy though sympathy to empathy, the last being the most humane approach to almost anything.
Modes and Morals of Storytelling in Practice: Illegal Immigrants.
How you deal with a situation depends in large part on how you see its backstory. You ask how did the situation arise, and how and why did it become a problem? Likewise, the way you deal with a group of people depends on how you see their backstory. Who are these people. and how and why did they become a problem?
Take, for example, the present-day problem of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States from Central America. A large number of Central Americans are leaving their homelands in search of work and a better life in the United States. The number is so large that it has overwhelmed the immigration authorities. It is a genuine problem. But how you define the problem and envision a solution depends on how you see the immigrants. And how you see the immigrants depends in large part on what you see as their backstory.
To many Americans, the immigrants are an invading horde of rapists, killers, thieves and ne’re-do-wells? To listen to Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters, you would think the immigrants are a sinister mob of orcs straight out of the The Lord of the Rings. The situation is, in their minds, a melodrama and the immigrants pose a clear and present danger to decent people. Trump has repeatedly called it “an invasion,” thereby invoking a war metaphor. He proposes to deport all of the illegal immigrants, some eleven million or more, and send the military to the border to stop more from coming. It is a war at all costs. A war to the end.
To other, more pragmatic Americans, the immigrants are seen as poor people who are responding to the demand in the United States for farm workers, construction hands, care-givers and other low-wage workers. Almost all of the immigrants – legal and illegal – find ready employment, and become hardworking, taxpaying inhabitants of the country. They commit crimes at a lower rate than American citizens. Sympathy, rather than antipathy, would seem an appropriate response in the best interests of all. The immigrants are a necessity for our economy and it would seem foolish to reject them. A wiser solution, and a resolution to what could be characterized as a dark comedy (not in the “Ha, ha” sense but as dealing with anti-immigrant foolishness), would be to develop better procedures for welcoming them.
To other still more farsighted Americans, the underlying problem is that people are being pushed from their home countries by a lack of employment opportunities. They want work and are a potential asset to either the United States or their country of origin if only there are jobs for them. There is plenty of work that needs to be done in their homelands. It is largely a matter of financing the work. If people have work there, they won’t need to come here.
The problem, in this view, has arisen from the fact that American companies, backed by the American government, have been exploiting Central American countries and their workers for many decades. This exploitation has produced big profits for the companies, which makes their shareholders happy, and cheap goods for consumers, which makes them happy. Most Americans have never given the situation a second thought and have assumed that it could go on forever without any consequences. The immigration problem, however, is one of the consequences.
The best resolution to the situation, in this view, would seemingly be for Americans to take responsibility for the problem, and undertake responsibility for developing industry and creating decent jobs in Central America. The only long-term way to solve the immigrant problem is to solve the immigrants’ problem, and that means building up their home countries so they won’t feel the need to come to the United States.
These are just three of the ways in which the immigrant problem can be seen as melodrama, comedy and tragedy. The point is that the way you envision a solution to the immigration problem is largely a function of the way in which you envision the situation and the immigrants. The mode in which you tell the story of the problem is a key to your proposed solution. As we can see in The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books,and the Earthsea trilogy.
The Moral of the Stories: Frodo, Harry Potter, Ged.
Each of the three series of books –The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books,and the Earthsea trilogy– incorporates various approaches to dealing with evil. Each series includes elements of melodrama, comedy and tragedy, and attitudes of antipathy, sympathy and empathy. Each describes heroes reacting sometimes reflexively, sometimes reflectively and sometimes dialectically, and each depicts problems being resolved through a mix of war, containment and reconstruction. But each of the authors also puts greater emphasis on some approaches over others. And, as a result, the moral of their stories is different.
The Lord of the Rings is essentially a melodrama about war and the impossibility of staying aloof from the conflict. The setup and the characterizations make war look like the only solution to the problems in the story. The story opens with a lovely and loving picture of the idyllic life of hobbits in their out-of-the-way shire. Hobbits are a peaceful species of diminutive humanoids who live withdrawn from the larger world of big people and who are largely unknown outside their land. Hobbits have almost no government or police force and no army. They are a sedentary folk, and their community is essentially anarchistic and almost utopian.
Hobbits want nothing more than to be left alone to eat, smoke and generally vegetate. They are, nonetheless, despite themselves, drawn into a world war of good guys – including humans, elves, dwarves, and ents – against the evil wizard Sauron and his dominion of evil orcs, ghouls, trolls, wolves and other beastly creatures. Hobbits are the least and least likely creatures to be involved in a world war. The message of the story is that nobody is immune or safe from the reach of evil. You must join the fight or die.
Hobbits are seemingly the least likely creatures to be the key to success in a war against Sauron. But Frodo, the hobbit hero of the story, has come into possession of the ultimate ring of power. It is a ring that would make Sauron all but unbeatable if he got it, but it would lead to his demise if it were destroyed. Frodo, who is not a warrior, is, nonetheless, fated to be the one who must destroy the ring in a fiery pit in Sauron’s own back yard before Sauron can get it.
Most of other characters in The Lord of the Rings serve as side stories for readers and diversions for Sauron to keep him from focusing on Frodo in his journey to destroy the ring. And most of the action of these other characters consists of fighting, one giant battle and slaughter of orcs after another. But Frodo is the main actor as he suffers one cruel hardship after another en route to the fiery pit. In end, the ring is destroyed and that results in the destruction of Sauron and his hosts of minions.
The Lord of the Rings is a melodrama in which kneejerk “yuck” reactions are portrayed as the right response to evil. Intuition and sixth-sense sensitivity play a big role in the drama. The good guys can sense the presence of bad guys. There are magical crystal balls with which wizards can read each other’s thoughts. And Sauron has a gigantic eye which enables him to see far and wide and into people’s minds. The drama is largely a battle of intuitionists and intuitions.
Tolkien was politically and religiously conservative. The idea of evil being all around and needing to battle it head on would fit with his ideological background. Then, too, he was writing the books during World War II when evil was literally all around. Sauron is a Hitler figure. Orcs are like Nazi black shirts. Other than Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, no one nowhere felt safe from World War II. Everyone everywhere felt threatened by the war. And complete victory in that war seemed the only answer to Nazism. It is understandable that Tolkien would set his story in such a situation. But what about its continuing effect on young people today?
Tellingly, after Sauron is defeated and the hobbits return to their shire, Frodo’s comrades go armed and in military attire to throw out bad guys who had taken over and were wrecking the place. After brief battles, they succeed in routing the usurpers, but the impression is left that things will never again be as peaceful as before. Even after Sauron’s fall, fighting was necessary to beat off new miscreants. Evil had touched the whole world and would linger thereafter.
The Harry Potter books are essentially comic in their setup and action. There is plenty of evil, but it is foolishness that sets it loose and that provides the problems which Harry and his comrades must solve. Harry is, for example, mistaken in thinking until the end of the series that Professor Snape is on the side of evil, albeit he surely is nasty. In each of the books, Harry has kneejerk reactions that turn out to be foolish. That Snape wants to kill him and is trying to get the sorcerer’s stone. That Tom Riddle will help him deal with the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. That Voldemort was holding Sirius hostage in the Department of Mysteries. Second thoughts are necessary to remedy the problems created by kneejerk first reactions.
A major piece of foolishness on the part of Dumbledore, who is otherwise almost omniscient and omnicompetent, underlies the backstory for the whole series. He has known all along that Voldemort is Tom Riddle but seemingly tells no one, so that it is not until later in the books that most others learn this fact. Things could have gone very differently if everyone had known this. That piece of foolishness is compounded by Dumbledore’s trying on a cursed ring that he has found. The effect of the curse is the operative cause of his death, which is almost a fatal blow to the anti-Voldemort movement. Foolishness abounds and surrounds us in these books.
The books are also comedic in the sympathy which we are expected to have even for some of Voldemort’s supporters. Those, like Stan Shunpike, who have been subject to an Imperius Curse, cannot be blamed for their actions. Even Voldemort elicits some sympathy from Dumbledore, Harry and the reader for the way in which Tom Riddle was abandoned and stigmatized as a child. As a descendent of Slytherin, Tom may have had some genetic predisposition toward evil, but not every one of Slytherin’s descendants became demonic as Tom did, so the predisposition could seemingly be contained, controlled and perhaps even overcome with good. Tom Riddle need not have become Voldemort. Which can be seen as the comedic moral of the story.
The Earthsea trilogy is essentially tragic at its core, a series of examples of pride going before a all. Ged and the other good characters exemplify empathy for each other and for different peoples and species. Ged even comes to understand dragons who are generally unfathomable and unintelligible to humans. The goal espoused by the books is to foster connections among creatures and cooperation where possible, or at least peaceful coexistence. This can be achieved through a concern for maintaining balance in the universe. Balance requires humility toward things that can be shattered by egoism and pride. A lesson that Ged learns the hard way.
When Ged first realizes his powers as a wizard, he chafes at the restrictions that his mentors place on him. He reasons that if he is a wizard, he should be able and allowed to do whatever he wants. That whatever mistakes he might make, he could remedy. But he is fatally wrong. His pride leads him to perform actions that unleash evil from the land of the dead and his mentor loses his own life in defeating the shadow and restoring the balance of things.
In the Earthsea trilogy, evil is the absence of good and not a feature of the universe, as it is in The Lord of the Rings. If evil is a substantive thing, then almost inevitably you will have to attack it as was done in The Lord of the Rings. And those who do bad things can become stereotyped as bad people and dehumanized, as they are in The Lord of the Rings. Witness Tolkien’s orcs for example. Diversity in Tolkien’s universe becomes questionable as many of the dangerous are different and, so, difference can come to seem dangerous.
But if evil is not substantive and is the absence of good, evil can be dealt with by overwhelming the bad with good. And people who do bad things can be seen as having within themselves the potential for good. We can be seen as all one people despite our differences and even because of our differences. And we can achieve diversity that consists of differences among people who share a basic common humanity. We can, thereby, promote tolerance for the tolerant along with intolerance for the intolerant. Which is a key theme of the Earthsea books.
The Moral of this Essay: Give Peace a Chance.
In the present-day era of instant communication from all over the world, almost anything that happens anywhere can be immediately known almost everywhere. And in an era of mass media sensationalism, in which bad news is almost the only news that gets broadcast, it can easily come to feel as though bad guys are doing bad things everywhere and all the time, as though we are surrounded by evil. In that context, melodrama can seem the appropriate response to problems in the world. Trust no one. Shoot first and ask questions later. Get them before they get us. Especially in response to a terrorist attack.
But the fact of the matter is that for every terrorist who does horrible things, there are tens of millions of people doing good things. That is why I think that it is better whenever possible to get past the kneejerk fight-or-flight reaction to a problem, take a deep breath, and then give the problem a second and third thought. Approach the situation first as tragedy, then as comedy if tragedy won’t work, and finally melodrama only as a last resort. And our literature for young people should reflect that approach. Evil is inevitable. But modeling peaceful ways of dealing with evil can help teach young people not to overreact to problems and not to escalate into major conflicts problems that could be peacefully resolved.
As to the lessons that I learned from the Christmas dinner at my friend’s house, I came to the paradoxical conclusion that my best defense against bigotry was to lead with my chin. It is essentially a comic strategy. Not “Ha, ha” comedy, but an attempt to treat bigotry as foolishness rather than wickedness. To try to make sure that people know who and what I am before they get a chance to insult me, so maybe they won’t. I try to make sure, for example, that, depending on the situation, people know that I am Jewish, liberal, a fan of Dickens, a teetotaler, an old-time Brooklyn Dodger fan, and whatever else might be relevant.
The premise of this policy is an assumption that people can be decent even if they are bigoted. That most people won’t deliberately insult someone even if they are prejudiced against them. It is a practice of preemptive openness and deliberate naivety. I assume that people are decent unless and until they show me otherwise. I am aware that most people are likely to be prejudiced against many of the things that I represent. So, the idea is to give their good hearts a chance to preempt any bigoted comments they might be tempted to make if they did not know that I might be offended.
In this case, I believe that my friend’s grandmother was generally a kind-hearted person. I think if she had known beforehand that I was Jewish, she wouldn’t have said what she did. Maybe if I had early on mentioned my friend’s having attended our Hannukah celebration, a hurtful and embarrassing situation could have been avoided. And a step toward accepting diversity and peaceful coexistence might have been taken.
That is probably too much to expect of a five-year-old. It is, however, a strategy of preemptive disclosure and assumptive good will that I remember reading about in a story for young people sometime later. I can’t remember much of the story but I remember the lesson. It is an example of the way in which stories can influence a reader beyond the person’s memories, and it is a reason why it is important to understand the messages that stories convey to readers. Despite not remembering much of whence it came to me, the strategy of leading with my chin is one that I have found useful and have tried to practice ever since.
BW 1/25
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. 1954-1955.
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter series. Scholastic, Inc., New York: 1997-2997.
Ursula LeGuin. Earthsea trilogy. Parnassus Press, Berkeley, CA. 1968. Atheneum Books, NY. 1971-1972.
[2] Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
[3] Goodman. 1954, Pp.127-149.
[4] Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, P.34.
[5] Konrad Lorenz. On Aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. 1966, P.49.
[6] David Sloane Wilson. Evolution of Everyone. New York: Delacorte Press. 2007, Pp. 285
[7] Jared Diamond. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. New York:
Harper Perennial. 1993. Pp.220-221, 276-310; also Wilson 2007, Pp,51-57
[8] Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Hill and Wang. NY. 1961, P.59.
[9] Burke. 1961, 41.
[10] Goodman 1954, 82-100.
[11] Goodman 1954, Pp. 35, 172.
[12] Burke 1961, P.37.
[13] Aristotle 1961, Pp.61, 81-83. Burke, 1961, P.39.
[14] Aristotle 1961, Pp.84-86
[15] Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
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