Transcript
[0:05] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author and I also run the activities of the Centre and today I've been joined by Jacob Rennaker, a friend of our Centre who is an expert on Tolkien but also works for a great game maker. So he's got a sort of practical realization of fantasy worlds in board game style as well under his belt but we are taking on a massive theme today and it's one we're both really excited about which is evil.
[0:48] Here we go you know excited about evil i don't know that that doesn't come across us that's maybe fascinated by evil uh what we mean though let's is it's absolutely fascinating seeing how writers tackle the nature of evil in their works and we're going to start off by using the great Terry Pratchett phrase which is he writes that dark lord should be rationed so you may have come across more than one book of a dark lord in it you know we allow tolkien as one of the first but since then there has been this cliche of a dark lord of some sort in a tower or some kind of fortress who's usually at the sort of bottom right hand side of the map that cliche and we want to sort of explore the idea of who are the the baddies or the dark forces in fantasy and what other solutions people have come up to, you know, rather than just doing yet more Dark Lords.
[1:59] So it's a big subject. And we're going to start by breaking up the nature of evil into different groups because.
[2:08] How you conceptualize evil depends a lot on where you are coming from in your world. And we thought we would start with those writers who have a clear religious slash moral stance on evil. That's where they're setting their boundaries. And rather than rush directly to Tolkien, which is tempting,
[2:32] I thought we would start with a different inkling. And we'll start with C.S. Lewis, thinking in particular of the Narnia stories and his space, or heavens, we should say, the Ransom trilogy.
[2:49] So when I'm looking at C.S. Lewis and his version of evil, Jacob, I think that he really frames it with the idea of the Christian fall. All it's very important again and again in his work that the characters are in some form of innocence and then they go bad but they can be redeemed so you get that in the story of the in the space trilogy because that's the we are the fallen planet and there is a sort of, desire to protect other planets from us in particularly in perilandra which is the one set on venus but of course you get it in the founding of narnia in the magician's nephew and in the story of um edmund who in a way is a sort of semi-innocent.
[3:51] Who is tempted and falls and is redeemed so i see evil as part of a full narrative when it comes to lewis does that make sense to you yeah yeah absolutely and you definitely see him in conversation with the his academic works at the time right so uh his uh the discarded image image, his series of lectures that was collected on the medieval worldview, which is suffused with that very narrative about God, creation, fall, redemption, the Cosmic Trilogy, the Ransom Trilogy set in the heavens, right? Not space because that's cold, and the heavens are warm and suffused with life from.
[4:45] The medieval and lewis's point of view so yeah that i think you definitely definitely see him dealing with evil uh in that from outlet that medieval uh framework and i think you you also see that i think in uh in narnia as well with the white witch um and her kind of i don't know an obsession with cold right so it's so dante is not strictly medieval but lewis draws on dante to, illustrate uh medieval frameworks uh often and right so satan uh the lowest circle of uh dante's hell is not fire but it is ice right uh it's it's frozen it's cold it's kind of like cessation of action uh and that's what the white witch essentially is right it's preserving It's kind of the stasis, an absence of movement, an absence of both physical movement and internal movement, right? So Lewis is seeing the heavens and the cosmos as reflecting what's happening internally in humanity themselves. themselves, like the movement of the planets.
[6:00] This is why Discarded Image is such a great, it's a great read, is that for understanding medieval view as well as Lewis and what he's working with, that the movements of the heavens, like physical movement mirrors the kind of like internal movement that we experience in our own ability to...
[6:20] Change right to be uh to be moved and affected by in lewis's term by god or by other by other forces by other individuals so it's really this kind of like isolationist it's it's very internal right uh cold it both charn right charn is kind of the air cold world that's the ed because there's no movement right life has the movement has stopped life has stopped um so yeah so so i think yeah you're absolutely right that fall and evil as being that that if god is the creator of the world uh and the universe and cosmos and sets it in motion then the opposition to that is a cessation of motion right for putting putting things to a stop um and that seems to be the kind of modus operandi for the white witch uh of jadis right in uh in narnia and i think you see some of that in the cosmic trilogy as well as the silent right the silent planet earth is the silent planet in that it's been cut off from communication uh from the rest of the the heavens or the heavenly bodies so isolation old kind of a cessation of movement uh and life So,
[7:41] using this image of not a Dark Lord.
[7:45] We're thinking here about people who are maybe penning their own fantasy novels.
[7:50] He's used not just a white witch, he's used this ice, this bright white, red and white, you know, the drop of blood, the pink of the.
[8:04] Turkish Delight, the sort of snow white and blood red, using the fairy tale sort of colours, to sum that up, getting away from the idea that evil has to be dark or black, that sort of cliché as well. Which I think is a really interesting point. I hadn't thought of it quite in that way. I'm sure there are whole university courses on the nature of evil and C.S. Lewis's thought, So we can't possibly do enough justice to it. But just briefly before we move on, I think the other obvious place where C.S. Lewis is creatively thinking about evil is the screw tape letters.
[8:46] Listeners out there will be shouting screw tape letters if I hadn't mentioned it, because that's all about how you tempt a human to fall. All uh that and it's what he's doing is flipping it and telling the story from the point of view of the devils who are charged with this task so he that's why i think it still fits with this idea that for him it's the process of your decisions um so are you are you moving towards the devil or the evil side or are you moving towards the good and the worst thing is to sort of get stuck, on the the wrong side of this i mean do you think for example do you think that the white witch could repent could be saved could be redeemed.
[9:38] That is that is the that is the that is the question because you do have for as much as Lewis does track with our human characters, the ability to not just steer into evil based on their choices, but to be redeemed. Even Divine, so in the Cosmic Trilogy.
[10:03] Weston and Divine are these humans, but their choices kind of have led them to be co-opted by the you know kind of rebellious heavenly entity that's kind of isolated earth um even you have within the perilandra you know ransom who's our protagonist who's you know supposed to be trying to prevent this fall from happening parallel fall from happening on uh on venus um he keeps you know trying holding out the opportunity for weston to change, but ultimately he doesn't, and he transforms into some ugly creature. So it becomes irrevocable at some point. But in Narnia...
[10:51] You really don't have any sort of multidimensionality of the White Witch.
[10:57] She's already at the point where we pick up the story. If there was decisions, the path of decisions have essentially become walled off to the point where she cannot change. And I think that's reinforced by the creatures that she's surrounded with. So he has these kind of creatures. You have your werewolves. You have creatures that seem to be... I was about to say, that's not what Woos is. Or a Woses, they get a bad press too. So they almost, yeah, the way that Lewis is treating those, they almost seem to be categorically their species who are evil. So those, there's no sort of nuance to the character. In the animal kingdom, they're divided or the animal, if these kind of mythological creatures are considered animals, they're kind of divided into on the side of.
[11:47] Aslan and then on the other side. And there aren't kind of there don't seem to be creatures that kind of bridge the two there and jada seems to be there and i don't know if because jadas is kind of described in language uh evocative of uh giants right uh having having giant blood and if lewis is drawing on uh biblical right his kind of like religious background and religious tradition surrounding the genesis account that these that that some of the fallen angels are intermingling with humanity and it's resulting in a race of giants.
[12:26] Then in that sense, you would see Jadis as a different species, isn't quite human and might be genetically predisposed to evil. But he doesn't even touch that there. No. it is and of course it's fantasy so you can do what you like but it does pose a interesting theological question as a result which is uh are some creatures condemned to be bad um we'll return to that theme in a bit so let's move on to another inkling i feel there's a lot more to be said about c.s lewis but that's we've already come up with um ice and white and red and
[13:10] a white witch as an alternative to Dark Lords. Charles Williams, who's one of the most bizarre and challenging and interesting of the Inklings, he has a different take on evil.
[13:27] He's quite a difficult writer to plumb, partly because his theology is right out there. He's, Uh, yeah, I won't even try. And we've, we've, we've done podcasts. Look them up. Defies description. Yeah. He's, he's, he's complicated. I'll rest it there. But anyway, um, if we look at what he writes in his novels, I think the, one of the threads that do go through his many interesting novels is the idea that it is our choices that make us, take us towards heaven or hell, basically. He's very centred on us as having freedom to make these choices.
[14:14] I'm thinking particularly of All Hallows' Eve, which is in a kind of, not exactly purgatory, but he posits a sort of liminal space between life and death. And two of the characters are dead. You don't at first realise it. They've died in the Blitz. and they're in touch with the world of the blitz so one character can see her husband for example and she's with another character who is making sort of selfish choices bad choices and you can see them being pulled in different directions almost literally being pulled like there's a sense of one going one way one going the other and there i that so that is one very strong um message in that way and there's also um i think it's called the marriage of heaven and not marriage of heaven hell that's william blake uh the battle for heaven or something it's called so he keeps coming back to this idea that war in heaven there we go war in heaven uh he keeps coming back to this idea of we are choosing we either give in to it is a sense you succumb to to evil or you resist with your choices so that sees evil not as an entity outside us not as a.
[15:36] More of a force, I suppose we would say, a hellish force. He's not, it's probably a Charles William book somewhere which does bring in the devil and that kind of thing. But as I'm thinking about how I remember his novels, I feel that it's very much a human agency reaction to evil. I don't know, have you read much Charles Williams?
[15:57] Yeah, yeah, I have. And there's definitely, yeah, that you're right, that it is difficult to describe or pin down. Is it's not easily uh you can't lay it over lewis and tolkien precisely and and i think yeah the sense that i get just kind of like broadly speaking is exactly what you said that there's so much has depended on human agency and and free will to choose your trajectory but there are real forces that are pulling and so for for williams there's definitely the acknowledgement that there are real supernatural evils yeah that exist and that like permeate the world in some sense you don't necessarily have that in in tolkien they're kind of depicted as individuals right embodied individuals but for williams there's more of yeah like you were saying like it's kind of like a a force uh that is quick battles it's very star wars actually now come come to think you know the force the force is with you in one way or another right yeah and so going to our favorite well maybe our joint favorite inkling uh tolkien i think.
[17:10] So we see this has had much scholarly ink spilt about it but obviously he is approaching it from a Catholic background, but that's mixed with a love for the Norse sagas. So then you've got a kind of pagan worldview and Ragnarok and all those kinds of things, and you get a very interesting mix up of those elements. Do you want to say a little bit how you see the nature of evil working in Tolkien in the broadest senses that comes up with Dark Lords, basically how the dark lords what's the origin of our dark lord right dark lords right yeah so this is yeah so yeah definitely so from at least you know we're talking creation right uh the ina lindalay in the samarillian our creation story the song of creation is really where you see kind of the introduction of something that could be considered evil and uh that's uh with melkor as one of the Ainur, these heavenly hosts that are created by Eru.
[18:24] And charged essentially with creating, well actually given, they're not charged with it, but at that point they're just kind of given the ability to, sing uh and you know to to to act and they choose to do that in singing and it's conducted by by eru uh but the melkor is one who's not playing his his kind of evil turn is that he doesn't want to play with others he wants to make he doesn't want to he doesn't see this as a collaboration uh this you know intermingling of voices and the creation of the world he doesn't see that as collaboration uh he definitely wants his uh to impose his will and he wants to kind of carve out his own corner or have an ability to create that is said to exist with within this kind of god figure only so it's definitely like possession and kind of imposition of an individual will on others so at least from middle earth um uh perspective from the right or you know.
[19:31] Tolkien's legendarium the initial evil turn is kind of a focus on oneself and bending others to your own will uh and to your own end so that's and that's not.
[19:48] And we are told that it's not something that is in the.
[19:55] Working in completely independent and outside of.
[19:58] The system that this uh eru iluvitar has.
[20:01] Created for this you know existence itself um but it functions within that and there's this really fascinating phrase uh that uh that comes up uh that eru when he's responding to uh melkor uh morgoth right who becomes our first real dark dark lord um when after he's you know has been pushing against he's rebelling he's he's causing discord chord in the song and uh eru this god figure says and thou melchor shall see that no theme may be played that has not its uttermost source in me nor can any alter the music in my despite for he that attempted this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful which he himself hath not imagined so it's all kind of circumscribed by good right so this this this god character is good and evil exists but it only exists within this larger framework of good that ultimately will redirect uh weave that evil that suffering into a greater tapestry that will actually in in these words will actually create something more wonderful uh and tolkien seems yeah it has a few different ways of treating like does is evil ultimately for our good and.
[21:30] And you have a few different viewpoints within the Silmarillion there. But yeah, I'll pause for a while. I want to hear your thoughts on foundational evil. I think it is okay to be not entirely settled about this because we're talking about the problem of pain, to go back to C.S. Lewis, and the problem of why bad things happen to good people And the vice versa of that is why bad people succeed. You know, it's on the face of it, the world isn't fair.
[22:08] So if you have suffered awfully in your life in a way that seems entirely nothing, you did cause this. And that happens to so many people, you know, an illness or the death of someone they love or whatever it is. Then of course it does not seem as though the theme being woven, is fair which is why you can see is it the Manichean idea that there's kind of like two forces battling it out as if.
[22:42] The you know god and the devil but more like more like job it's happening and they're fighting over us um and they're almost it's not safely held within one is that am i if i got that right yeah yeah yeah i might sometimes i'm not the theologian no no you're right you're absolutely right yeah um and that's one way of looking at it but that's not the silmarillion idea the The idea is probably more in tune with his own understanding of his Catholic faith, which is when you put in the perspective of a loving Father God and a sense of an eternal life where your tears will be wiped away, the new Jerusalem, the new creation, that is the sort of, it'll all be, all will be well and all manner of things should be well, to borrow from Julian of Norwich. Which is very hard in the lived experience of the bad times, but is also a comfort.
[23:45] So there's, but you don't necessarily have to be completely sorted about it because I think the questions are so profound that nobody has come up.
[23:54] And if you come up with an answer, it comes, it feels too simplistic. Yeah, it's too glib. Yeah, I was reading that Tom Shippey sort of set up this sort of, many strands of evil sort of argument um and he also brings up the boethian one which is boethius was a oh was he about fourth century something like that um theologian who talks about evil as an absence i've heard i've certainly heard that in a religious sense that hell is where god is not And you can see elements of that in what the effect of evil on characters in Tolkien's world is to suck out all that's loving, all that's good. It's... The worst fate is to be left with just yourself. It's to be stripped away on the ash heaps of Mordor. So you could see that, I think.
[24:57] Also a strand in his thinking. Yeah, it's fascinating. There seems to be kind of a disagreement even within the Ainur, within the kind of archangel demigods, demigods like semi-gods uh there that when uh feanor uh is you know challenging challenging the einor uh and they're asking for the light from the silmarils to help restore uh valinor uh to bring the light back into the world since that's the only place where the light exists and he says no it's mine right i'm not giving it up uh and as the gods or as you know the einor are kind of processing this and responding to that um manway says uh says this uh it says even as eros spoke to us shall beauty not before conceived be brought into arda and evil yet be good to have been so so so manway is saying like yeah so even even if terrible things we we all recognize that what's going to happen here with fan are.
[26:03] Is not good that this is going to cause you know pain and suffering but in the end isn't it going to be good uh which is that that you know kind of the augustinian that's this kind of like christian uh view but then mandos who's a representative of kind of like fate and just kind of like cold, objective observation in response to manway saying and evil uh and evil yet be good to have been then Mando says, and yet remain evil. So Mando says that lived experience where he's saying, here is, it is an actual experience. It still sucks.
[26:41] It still sucks. Exactly. In Tolkien's own life, right? So you have these, and this is something that Shippey kind of points out, is this, you have the kind of theological, theoretical view that you get in the pews at church, and then Tolkien, the soldier, who's in the day-to-day actual lived experience of war and how horrific that is and that seems the easier to wrap your head around to opposing forces because how could possibly a loving God allow this death destruction carnage pain suffering to happen and so he's kind of torn between those two between good so evil as an absence of good and versus evil is like an active force and And you see that, I think, illustrated well in the, like, ringwraiths themselves, right? So, like you're saying, like, their shadow, their, like, their humanity is stripped away. So, they're the absence of humans. But at the same time, they're, like, an active force that can wield blades and inflict, like, actual physical damage on individuals. So you kind of have in the ringwraiths both just kind of like the absence of evil, but then how evil or the absence of good, complete absence of good, but then acting as like an active force that's thwarting, that's, you know, impending, you know, imposing its own will upon people.
[28:05] The people who are fighting against it and and ultimately with all of that evil either absence and evil is active the thread that runs throughout is there that the the good right the elves humans um dwarves everyone who is on the side of of light is still even though they're on the side of light they're fighting the long defeat right so evil has such a foothold and right so the the word melkor by by virtue of uh of his you know kind of you know his dissonance in creation that there's something within creation itself within arda itself that makes it corruptible there's something of evil there and then it's left for individuals to then that's when it kind of moves internally that each individual then chooses right so you have your boromir uh is kind of like warring over that impulse. I think that would be explained by this idea of like Ardammard and that in existence itself, the world itself has become Morgoth's ring, to use Tolkien's term, right? So the ring itself, it could just sit there unless you use it for evil. It contains within it the possibility of corruption, but that depends upon an individual and how they choose to act on it. Yeah, so it has no effect on Tom Bombadil.
[29:27] So actually, maybe, this is going to be radical thought here, maybe we should stop saying that Tolkien's evil principles are dark lords. I know that by the time we reach Lord of the Rings, we are talking about Sauron as a dark lord. It's kind of how he's termed. But actually, he isn't a lord. He's not like a person. That stage of his existence finished he is now an eye a sort of principle and eve of evil which is a red like cat like eye not a dark lord anymore at all um and evil is actually worming its way through the hearts of people so you've got saruman the white saruman of many colors he is evil you've got denethor and his white tower um and the ringwraiths when you see them in the shadow world are ghost like white and pale. So in fact, perhaps we should push back on this idea and say.
[30:27] And I've just thought, of course, in the fall of Sauron himself, he actually starts off as a sort of beautiful. Yeah, yeah. Annatar, our giver of gifts, who's described as being like absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. Which is why the Numenoreans take him in was because he was so fair. Yeah. He's all those hair shampoo adverts, you know, just so beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, I don't know. But so let's actually rewrite this and say Tolkien isn't about evil being dark lords at all. Evil is something which I'd much prefer your idea of Middle-earth being Morgoth's ring, that idea that evil is coming down to choices again, again isn't it what you give into so there is some agency for humans we aren't and hobbits and elves and dwarves and yeah um so we aren't swept away by evil and powerless we are actively collaborating with it we are either a collaborator or we're not right so this is where we get on the we've touched on this before in another podcast so it gets a bit tricky when you've got creatures who appear to be.
[31:54] Like whole races of evil creatures. So orcs, for example.
[32:01] Even though we get to hear them chatting away about their sort of industrial relations in those rather wonderful bits in where Sam and Frodo are walking through Mordor. I love all those bits where they're all grumbling about their work conditions.
[32:18] But they do basically get hunted to extinction. That's the goal there. So what about the idea that some creatures and we can move beyond talking here are just born bad, one example of this would be the first terminator film where the terminator turns up as a kind of assassin and it's kind of we're bad you know this is we are made to be bad and we are bad Is that actually evil? Because they have no choice about being bad.
[33:18] Exists in some ways in their in their personality which is affected by, what they know so um uh she has an article it's great it's called sanity and the metaphysics of responsibility so she argues that those people who don't have who have bad upbringings they can't they're like incapable of making strong moral judgments because they don't have the frameworks works they don't have the values with which to say this is evil or this is good so it requires, a certain amount of accountability.
[33:52] And so are people with, right, so again, like mental illness, people who are experiencing forms of psychosis, are they truly evil or are they impaired or are they morally impaired? And I can see that being used as kind of a way to reframe evil as being morally impaired. But, uh, and, and I think that's, I think that's a cheap, like a cheap way of, of, of poking a hole in, uh, you know, what somebody doing is doing is evil, but from a real kind of in that lived experience sense, what you do is dependent upon what you know and what you can see and what you can perceive. And so but if somebody can't perceive that good so if you're an orc for instance and you're born into a world of darkness you're well you're born you're hatched or.
[34:47] Yeah you're pulled out of some gooey something that peter jackson uh depicted right so however you're created um if if you're brought into that just like complete darkness uh what what more do you know um you have that in uh uh not an inkling but inkling adjacent with george mcdonald with the um uh day boy and night girl all right this uh right um uh kind of two people uh individuals one who only lives during the day and one who only lives during the night and therefore they have this, uh.
[35:28] You know, an impossibility in a sense of conceiving what exists outside of their own framework. And I think you have that in some ways in a, a silver chair with Lewis, right? You have a whole world where people are living, dying without seeing the sun
[35:47] in any, uh, right. In any sense. And so they're acting the, the way that you have the dwarves and other characters there it's very different he treats them differently but with Lewis he gives even those creatures the ability to turn a bit once they learn or to show that they're they're not meant for the world above that their natural state is actually deeper in the earth and there's like where there's like almost a different framework of our way of being of thinking and being so it's almost like that there are like different I don't know spheres of evil and that you can act it so with what you know within that sphere is dependent on you know what will determine whether or not you can say that what this person's act is it truly evil or not because that sphere of understanding that framework might.
[36:49] Exist outside of a completely different sphere. But if we're writing stories within a particular framework, they have to say, this is evil because this is the framework that we're working within. And sometimes that'll be challenged a little bit, but in order to craft this narrative, with a satisfying character arc, story arcs, challenges, and resolutions, it has to exist within a single framework or a single kind of moral sphere. And that's where evil kind of comes up there but at the practical lived uh day-to-day what is an individual's evil that's clearly philosophically speaking a lot more complicated i mean i suppose the thought experiment is it'd i wonder if anyone else talking this is if if an orc is rescued as a young orc from somewhere bearing in mind in some versions of this orcs are spoiled elves and raised in.
[37:46] Rivendell or Lothlorien, would that creature become a moral creature or would it revert to being evil?
[37:59] We don't actually have to expect Tolkien to have solved everything about being evil. It may be just enough in his world that he thought, well, these are my enemy soldiers. They fulfill this function in my book, so I don't want to push it too far here. But there is one area which I think you're sort of hinting at here about different frames and what you understand, because W.H. Auden, the poet who was one of the first very positive reviewers of The Lord of the Rings, and also there's a really interesting letter that Tolkien writes to Auden about how he came. It's one of the places where we know the story that Tolkien told himself about writing the book. If you see what I mean, because it may not be true. I know that when people ask me, how did you write that book? Sometimes you can't remember. You know, you make it up. Anyway, Auden, who also is a philosopher, he says, good can imagine evil, but evil cannot imagine good. Good. Thank you for listening to part one of our investigation of evil in fantasy. And we'll be picking up next week, moving from Orden to the world of Harry Potter, and then out boldly going where no one has gone before into the space evil in Star Wars and Star Trek, and even Doctor Who. Thank you very much for listening.
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