The War of The Rings: Richard Wagner and J.R.R. Tolkien
Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung is a masterpiece of modern art and is perhaps the greatest triumph of the artistic spirit since 1800. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is also considered a masterwork of literature and was voted the UK’s “best loved novel” during the 2003 BBC Big Read. Both stories draw from Norse mythology, with Wagner infusing German folklore and myth into his and Tolkien bringing an invisible Catholicism and English pastoralism into his drama. Tolkien’s work has proven financially successfully, spawning a series of films, cartoons and live action, while Wagner’s operatic drama continues to be a stable of opera in London and the United States almost 150 years after its scandalous and failed premier in Bavaria despite the consistent mocking of the composer’s original intentions.
The similarities between the two stories have been a point of focus, especially when Peter Jackson decided to adapt Tolkien’s stories to the big screen. After all, both have a malevolent ring at the heart of the story. There, however, the stories radically diverge and such nauseating debates over how Tolkien “stole” from Wagner distract us from the obvious that Tolkien himself noted, “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.” As a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and connoisseur of Nordic mythology, it is undeniably the case—as Tolkien’s own scribblings and writings testify—that he drew from the same source material as Wagner; despite similar source material, the Iceland Edda, the two moved to tell radically different stories.
Tolkien’s work is a story of virtue and the right exercise of power, along with containing the professor’s deep and ancient conservatism grounded in attachment to land and the Neoplatonic ideal of finding home in the divine order implanted into nature. Tolkien’s tale of hobbits, men, a dwarf, elf, and wizard marching off to destroy the ring is dominated by song and marching. Our protagonists, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee especially, march and march and march. Landscape and marching run replete throughout the Lord of the Rings and add a picturesque vibrancy to the narrative, “The shadows of the trees were long and thing on the grass, as they started off again…Twilight was about them as they crept back to the lane. The west wind was sighing in the branches. Leaves were whispering. Soon the road began to fall gently but steadily into the dusk.”
For all the criticism directed by Tolkien lovers to Peter Jackson, the one thing that Jackson can be rightly critiqued about is how he diminished Saruman’s central place as, perhaps, chief villain of the book. Saruman, the wisest and most powerful of the wizards, falls for the temptation of power the ring and Sauron represent. He destroys the forest, the world of life, around his tower and unleashes the monstrous machines of war he created. While Isengard is eventually overrun, Saruman then takes flight while our heroes defend Minas Tirith and sneak their way into Mordor—conquering the Shire and implementing his acidic ideology of industrialization there before being overthrown, and killed, by Frodo, Sam, and the rest of the Shire hobbits in their return to their long-desired homes. Industrialization is the great enemy of the Lord of the Rings, Saruman, Sauron, and others are mere agents of the spirit that builds “dark satanic mills.”
Another one of the truly edifying aspects of Tolkien’s work is how sacrifice carries the burden of the ring to its destruction. Sacrifice, the very Catholic Tolkien is implying throughout the story, is the great salvific force. More than a return of the king, important as that may be, sacrifice is what truly wins the day against the forces of evil.
Jackson’s films do a commendable job in showing the extent of Sam’s affection for Frodo and the sacrifices he endures to see their quest complete. However, the film’s depiction of Sam pale in comparison to Tolkien’s Samwise who is the undisputed hero of the novels. Tolkien himself said in a letter to the real-life inspiration for Sam, “I can only say, for your comfort I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee’ of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic.”
Throughout the Lord of the Rings we see Samwise carrying the burden of dutiful friendship, including the ring, to the fires of Mount Doom. Without Sam, Frodo and the ring would have never made it to its destination. As Tolkien gracefully and poetically writes, “In that hour of trial it was [Sam’s] love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him.” Sam’s nature is equally revealed in his concern for Bill the Pony; Plutarch said that the mark of any person is how they treat animals, and here too Samwise Gamgee is the fullest halfling that ever lived.
Tolkien’s work includes three identifiable love subplots, the love between Aragorn and Arwen; Sam and Rosie; Eowyn for Aragorn. Eowyn’s is the most powerful, in part, because her love for Aragorn is unrequited—though Aragorn does not, cannot, love Eowyn back, she still loves Aragorn through his tribulations and trials (not to mention that it is the most faintly visible in the books save for Sam’s marriage with Rosie at the conclusion of the Return of the King). The love dimension to the Lord of the Rings, however, is somewhat weak if only because love is not the central theme in Tolkien’s work. The sacrifices of Sam, the destruction of the world by Saruman’s industrializing ideology for the end of mass war, and the virtue of perseverance are the main themes that carry the Lord of the Rings from the Shire to the fires of Mount Doom and back again. Love is bound up in these themes and struggles but not the central focus of Tolkien’s work; the greatest love that moves the work is the sacrificial friendship of Sam for Frodo—something that lacks the eroticism common to much romantic plots in fantasy-fiction. (I should note, however, the centrality of eros and the libido dominandi is much more visible in the Legendarium and the great tales of Middle Earth in the First Age, especially in detailing the fall of Gondolin.)
One of the more peculiar aspects to Tolkien’s receptivity is how American-style libertarians, so-called, have attached themselves to the supposed anti-power message of the work. The problem is Tolkien is not presenting an anti-power theme in his work. Power is not something intrinsically evil, rather, power must be exercised within proper bounds and through proper authority. It is a very Catholic and hierarchal outlook. The Stewards of Gondor, Denethor II in particular, are incapable of overcoming the march of evil not because they are evil themselves—Denethor is a much more sympathetic if not tragic figure in the book (contrary to the film adaption)—or because they the lack power to confront evil, but because they are mere caretakers of the throne and not the true representative of legitimate power and authority. The true heir of Isildur must reunite what was broken by his failures long ago. No caretaker can undo this.
Bleeding through the pages of the Lord of the Rings is a very Catholic understanding of political philosophy: legitimacy. Aragorn is not simply the incarnate Christ of the story (truthfully, Aragorn as Christ is an overstated interpretation), he is, more truly and representatively, the Jacobite legitimist to the throne. Tolkien, the most conservative literary figure of the 20th century, was a Jacobite in yearning and heart. This is reflected in Aragorn since it is only Aragorn, the true heir of Isildur, who can wield the power of Gondor—and of men more generally—to fruitful use and a good outcome. Nowhere is Tolkien condemning power as such; rather, he is condemning the illegitimate exercise of power and revealing the corrosive and corrupting current that the illegitimate use of power brings.
Moreover, the general arc of the Lord of the Rings is an eschatological drama given a fantasy makeover. Part of the allure of the Lord of the Rings is in its tapping into the psychology of good vs. evil and a final conflagration with a happy ending at the end of it all. The Lord of the Rings is a crypto-millenarian tale where the wrongs of history and mankind are redeemed, and a beautiful serenity is manifested which represents the “heaven” we all desire.
Richard Wagner, by contrast, “was an artist with an agenda, and this agenda was nothing less than the redemption of mankind,” as my former teacher Roger Scruton has said. Wagner’s Ring cycle doesn’t tell a new story. A sublime naturalistic garden setting, heroic adventure, slaying a dragon, betrayal, fratricide, and the fall of man from primordial grace, all have long traditions going back millennia before Wagner took the stage. How Wagner tells the story, however, was new.
Wagner’s manifestation of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, best represented through the composer’s use of leitmotifs, constitute the new side of Wagner’s drama. The poetry, singing, and music all come together to tell the story, but the music takes center stage and tells the story in of itself. Wagner’s influence has been felt ever since, especially in Hollywood, where the leitmotif has become a staple of the music of John Williams most notably among Hollywood score composers.
The Ring of the Nibelung is a far different story than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings because Wagner’s Ring is a dramatic Hegelian and quasi-Feuerbachian drama about the origins and development of love and how love—not how legitimate power—defeats evil. Wagner taps into the heart of the human condition in a way that Tolkien’s work never did, though Tolkien wasn’t interested in tapping into that heart of love and lust, the sacred and profane, death and redemption in the way that Wagner was.
One cannot understand, let alone appreciate, Wagner without some of the intellectual currents he swam in. The philosophers that most came to influence Wagner and his worldview were Ludwig Feuerbach, Georg W.F. Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Feuerbach and Hegel were the most influential in Wagner’s composition of the Ring. Feuerbach asserted the then scandalous thesis that the gods were the representation of human imagination and desire. This is most evidently seen in the construction of various gods and their roles in the Ring cycle, Wotan the manifested god of rationality and thought, Erda the representation of intuition, and Loge—the most Feuerbachian god—is the human conscience in its rationalizing form, the proverbial devil on the shoulder egging one on. Hegel’s philosophy of consciousness was also influential on Wagner.
From Hegel, Wagner took the belief that the development of consciousness led to the realization of love; Hegel may have promoted his philosophy of moral consciousness as moving to the realization of a moral community while Wagner embraced it for more individualistic ends, but the general framework of understanding through struggle is deeply intertwined in the drama. Then there was the passion of Wagner’s youthful political days, when liberalism and socialistic nationalism spread like wildfire across Europe and Wagner’s participation in the 1848 revolution forced him to flee. Das Rheingold and Die Walküre capture this political dream of a unified and egalitarian Germany throwing off the remains of the dead corpse of the Holy Roman Empire while retaining its ancient and noble roots and growing them forward into the new horizons offered by modernity.
Wagner famously stopped his composition after Die Walküre and wouldn’t return to it for some time. He changed his attitudes and no longer came to believe in political solutions to life’s eminent questions and problems in the process. Thus the drama shifts, so the story goes, from a prospective political drama to that most mesmerizing love epic put to stage.
Das Rheingold opens with the sublime serenity of the Rhine and the Rhine-daughters sensually playing in the river. Alberich, the ugly dwarf and brute of a man, appears on the scene. He is captured by the illusory beauty and perfection of the Rhine-daughters. The Rhine-daughters mock and taunt him; enraged, and now intent on rape, Alberich wades into the river to seize the Rhine-daughters. Wrestling with the Rhine-daughters, Alberich is suddenly seized by the treasure sitting at the bottom of the riverbed. Woglinde and Wellgunde, the irresponsible Rhine-daughters, inform Alberich of the treasure and how it can be forged into a ring and give the wearer immeasurable power but will forsake love in the process (the leitmotif of renunciation plays at this moment). Alberich struggles with the Rhine-daughters, no longer intending to rape them, but to seize the treasure. He succeeds, and much to Flosshilde’s dismay at her sister’s irresponsibility, makes off with the treasure.
Back in the realm of the gods, Wotan is paranoid about the forthcoming day of Judgement. He constructs Valhalla to stave off the downfall of the gods. There are other factors at play. Fricke, his wife, wants Valhalla to be complete so that they can once again share a warm bed together. Fasolt and Fafner, the two Giant brothers enlisted in the construction of Valhalla, demand payment for their services. Wotan impresses Freia, the goddess of beauty and love, as a sort of down payment to the Giants. Unsure of how to pay the Giants and free Freia, Loge appears and informs Wotan of a great treasure that he can use to pay off the Giants. Loge famously tells Wotan the sophism that stealing from a thief isn’t stealing. Convinced by Loge’s rationalizing sophistry, Wotan departs for the subterranean hell that the Nibelung dwell in, tricks Alberich, and steals the Tarnhelm, ring, and the rest of the treasure from him. Alberich curses the ring, and the leitmotif of the curse is heard for the first time. The drama of love, lust, power, deceit, treachery, and sacrifice has begun.
What makes the Ring such a powerful drama is how it juxtaposes love and power. Through the leitmotifs of the curse and renunciation, the audience hears the ominous reality that the ring bears. Those who come into its possession must forsake love. So when Wotan uses it to pay off Fafner and Fasolt, the curse leitmotif plays as the brothers bicker and Fafner bludgeons Fasolt to death. The love the brothers shared, which Fafner tragically tells Siegfried before he dies, evaporated in the moment that he “won” the ring. Between Wagner and Tolkien, anti-statist libertarians ought to love Wagner more—for Wagner’s condemnation of politics and power is what the drama entails.
The Ring cycle, as I’ve previously written: “is…a tale of sacrificial love and how sacrificial love is the only true form of love that provides meaning, redemption, and salvation to the mortal humans consecrated to returning to the dust from which they came.” The movement to love begins with primordial eros, as seen in Das Rheingold and Alberich’s lusts to satisfy his sexual urge through the rape of the Rhine-daughters. Primordial eros is shown, in the prelude (or Act 1) of the Ring, to be insufficient for the fullness of love and a cause of downfall, abuse, and tyranny.
Die Walküre carries forward this unfolding drama of love to reveal the limits of love through the sexual act. Erotic desire necessarily consummates itself in the sexual act, which is what this part of the play deals with. While the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, will consummate their love for each other through sexual intercourse—thus committing the crime of incest that Fricke will mandate Wotan to uphold by the act’s conclusion—their love goes beyond mere sex.
There are three stirring, loving, moments in Die Walküre. The first is when the exhausted warrior, Siegmund, arrives at the home of Sieglinde and her bastard husband, Hunding. Sieglinde shows compassion to the exhausted warrior with a feminine charm and mystique not seen since Rebecca helped Abraham’s servant in Genesis. As the Sieglinde and Siegmund lock eyes with each other and Sieglinde nurses the exhausted Siegmund to health, the love leitmotif—the most beautiful and important leitmotif that will metamorphosize into Redemption through Love leitmotif—sounds. The first instance of the love leitmotif is absent of sex. What Wagner reveals, here, is that compassion is an essential aspect of love (but not the ultimate expression of love).
The second moving episode in Die Walküre is the face-to-face confession of Wotan to Brünnhilde, the heroine of the drama. In this face-to-face encounter, one that mirrors in many respects the face-to-face encounter of Siegmund and Sieglinde, we learn that trust is an essential component of love. Without trust, Wagner informs us in this moving movement, there can be no love. (As we learn tragically in Götterdämmerung.)
The third act of love in Die Walküre is that most tragically sacred scene when Brünnhilde announces the forthcoming death of Siegmund to him and Sieglinde. The twins cry in each other’s arms. Overwhelmed by the scene of human love before her, Brünnhilde disobeys Wotan’s order and throws her lot in with the mortal humans. Empathy, here, is another essential aspect of love. Moreover, empathy is something conscious—a consciousness that arose in Brünnhilde from the face-to-face confession she had with Wotan. Through that confession she learned empathy, and in learning empathy, she came to display the strongest manifestation of empathetic love through an unconditional love for Siegmund and Sieglinde because of the love they had for each other.
As we know, Wotan intervenes during the battle between Siegmund and Hunding and the prospective hero whom Wotan hoped to seize the ring and return it to the Rhine-daughters, thus freeing the world (and most importantly, him) from its curse, is mercilessly slain. Brünnhilde flees with Sieglinde and informs her that she is pregnant with a child, Siegfried. She implores her to stay alive for the sake of the boy. Here, the first of only two instances of the infamous Redemption through Love leitmotif sublimely rings forth. Though Siegmund is dead, and Sieglinde will die in childbirth, their love lives on in Siegfried.
Siegfried is the most Hegelian act of the operatic drama and is an act advanced by a series of awakenings. However, the quest that really drives Siegfried to slay Fafner and claim the ring is the need for companionship. Not only is Siegfried an act filled with awakenings of consciousness, it is an act advanced by loneliness. Wagner is informing us that love requires the Other (just as it did in Die Walküre).
Wagner inverts the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic with the relationship between Siegfried and Mime. Both are alienated from each other. Simultaneously, Mime is at once master and slave to Siegfried as Siegfried is master and slave to Mime.
But Mime cannot be the companion to Siegfried that the young boy longs for. Mime, meanwhile, is never going to be the father to Siegfried because he merely intends to use Siegfried as a tool to seize the ring for himself. The five major characters of the drama are all alone, or often isolated and alienated from the other. Wotan travels alone as a Wanderer. Mime, while he has escaped his tyrannical brother, is lost in his own conniving plots to win the ring—and the world—for himself. Siegfried desperately sounds his horn and ventures across the wilderness in search for a companion. Though he learns from the animals he meets, they cannot provide the spiritual need for a companion. Brünnhilde is entombed on top of a mountain, having been stripped of her divinity and put to sleep there by Wotan for her disobedience (the leitmotif of renunciation played when Wotan kissed her goodbye and put the spell of sleep over her). Fafner, in dragon form, is also alone—having killed his brother and now haphazardly sleeps over his treasure until slain by Siegfried.
Having come into the possession of the ring, though unconscious of its power, Siegfried runs off to the mountaintop where he overcomes Wotan in a brief struggle and finds Brünnhilde. Is she the companion he has long desired after? Yes and no. When his kiss resurrects Brünnhilde, to which she says to him, “O Siegfried, Siegfried! Conquering light! I have loved you always,” the young hero has learned fear from a woman. Siegfried had desired a warrior companion to adventure in the forest with. Here, however, the metaphysical wholeness of humanity is complete through the union of the masculine with the feminine in marriage. Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the ring as a token of their love. Love goes beyond companionship. The highest reality of companionship is in marriage.
Götterdämmerung is the antithesis to Siegfried. Where Siegfried is a movement of awakenings leading to companionship resulting in marriage, Götterdämmerung is a movement of betrayals leading to murder. In the culminating act of the drama, Wagner juxtaposes the problem of mere marriage for us. Gunther is a bachelor and needs a wife, Hagen tells him, because without a wife he cannot come into possession of the full power of the Gibichung realm. Hagen also plays on the need for love by Gutrune to help hatch his plot to win the ring for himself and prove that he is his father’s son. (Hagen is the son of Alberich.)
Gunther’s need for marriage is purely utilitarian, it is political. Gunther does not seek love but a wife merely for political ends. Gunther may be a nice, and gullible, figure, but Wagner’s use and eventual disposal of Gunther reveals the limits of marriage without trust, forgiveness, and sacrifice. To make a long story short, Hagen manipulates biological and political needs to break the marriage bond between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, murder Siegfried, and kill Gunther. Just as he is about to triumph, ready to take the ring from the dead hand of Siegfried, he is startled by the hand’s sudden movement and the entry of Brünnhilde onto the scene. Now fully aware of all that has transpired, and that her abduction by Siegfried—the most monumental betrayal in Götterdämmerung—was not on his own accord but through being drugged and manipulated by Hagen.
In this moment we see the fruition of love in a forgiving and sacrificial marriage. Brünnhilde forgives Siegfried and orders a pyre to be built on the banks of the Rhine. She takes the ring and informs the Rhine-daughters to take the ring after she is dead. Brünnhilde then rides into the fire, immolating herself, singing, Siegfried! Siegfried! Sieh! Selig grüßst dich dein Weib! “Siegfried, Siegfried! Look! Your wife comes to greet you in bliss.” Brünnhilde’s act of sacrifice is the highest expression of her love. The Rhine overflows, Valhalla is consumed in fire, and the world is renewed with the new revelation that sacrificial love redeems the world.
Wagner’s play is not apolitical or anti-political. It is intensely political. We see the politics of Valhalla in Das Rheingold. We see the politics of the Gibichungs in Götterdämmerung. We see the use of force, of power, through the various attempts to seize the ring by the characters of the drama. Politics, power—the ring—will not save us, Wagner informs the audience by the drama’s end. Only love, more specifically, sacrificial love in marriage, can sanctify and heal the world of the wounds forced onto it by politics and the desire for power.
Brünnhilde is the heroine of the opera because all of her actions, done with full knowledge of what she will lose, are free choices of love. In siding with Siegmund and Sieglinde, she chose love instead of power. In deciding to stay with Siegfried instead of returning the ring to the Rhine-daughters and freeing Wotan and the gods from their trance, she chose love instead of power. In this she renounced her own divinity (a form of power) for love and became consecrated to mortality—a prerequisite for love. At the end of play, having forgiven Siegfried and renouncing the ring and immolating herself to join Siegfried in eternal bliss, she chose love instead of power. In her final action we see forgiveness and sacrifice as the highest expressions of love—and through the whole of the drama, we see the Hegelian movement of love and how an earlier aspect of insufficient love is still carried forward until it reaches its fulfillment in the forgiving and sacrificial love of Brünnhilde.
Love, not power, heals and redeems the world. That is something that separates Wagner and Tolkien. Wagner renounces power, and therefore politics, altogether as a medium of redemption. Bryan Magee explained this metamorphosis not as liberal Wagner becoming conservative Wagner but Wagner’s “movement…from politics to metaphysics.”
Power and politics, which go together and feed of one another, only bring misery and death as we witnessed in the final act of the drama. In fact, Hagen, in choosing politics and power—which the ring represents as he crafted it for such a purpose—chooses his own destruction when he infamous leaps to his inevitable death screaming out, Zurück vom Ring! (“Get away from the Ring!”) Hagen’s destructive lust for the ring stands in stark contrast to Lady Galadriel who rejects Frodo’s offer of the ring and “pass[es] the test.”
Tolkien, while no Machiavellian, still sees power and politics—“legitimate” power and politics, an important qualifier to be sure—as a healing and redemptive force intimately bound up with the world of love and desire. Moreover, Tolkien implies legitimate power and politics allows love to fully mature and flourish. The purpose of legitimate politics is to help foster the possibility of love and not power in of itself as witnessed through the fall of Saruman.
According to Tolkien, politics and love are not mutually exclusive as Wagner’s opera dramatically portrays for us. After all, Sam marries Rosie only after the legitimate king is returned to the throne (and Saruman overthrown from the Shire) and love permeates Middle Earth because of it and a renewed world takes shape under that stewardship of legitimacy. In Tolkien we find a triune waltz with goodness, love, and politics—Wagner, by contrast, ultimately drops politics from the waltz and leaves us with the frightening prospect that goodness and love can only be manifested through the renunciation of politics which ultimately leaves us powerless but consecrated to mortality through love itself. For as Brünnhilde rides into the flames to consummate her love for Siegfried, the Redemption through Love leitmotif plays for the second and final time with the infamous falling 7th now more moving than the first time it thundered from Brünnhilde’s voice because love is the ultimate manifestation of will.
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