Released in 1996, the documentary J.R.R.T.: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien excels in the quality of the testimonies provided by those interviewed. Among the family members who participated in the filming, the figure of his youngest son, Christopher Tolkien (1924–2020), stood out. In a reflective tone, and with a seriousness that indicated his understanding of the importance of his mission as the “official” interpreter of his father’s work, he made a statement that instantly caught my attention: “The supreme machine … is the One Ring.”
Aware of the potentially explosive content of his own words, Christopher spoke about the surprise he expected his statement to cause, due to the fact that, for most readers and viewers, the One Ring can only be imagined as magical in nature. The idea of an association between magic and machinery (i.e., mechanics) might provoke perplexity. However, it is necessary to understand the entire context of Christopher Tolkien’s statement. For that purpose, I provide his comments on the true meaning of the One Ring:
The modern world meant for him essentially the machine. And, once again, this was a word that he tended, he tried to enlarge. So that when he speaks of the machine and he, more than once, expressly said that it was one of the underlying themes for him in The Lord of the Rings was the machine. But we should think of something rather more than what the word machine naturally suggests to us—trains, motorcars, airplanes. He used it very compendiously to mean–almost you might say—an alternative solution to the development to the innate and inherent powers and talents of human beings. The machine means … for him the wrong solution. The attempt to actualize our desires—like our desire to fly. It means coercion, domination. For him the great enemy (is the) coercion of other minds and other wills–this is tyranny. But he also saw the characteristic activity of the modern world as the coercion, the tyrannous Reformation of the Earth, our place. That is really why he hated machines … of course—it’s perfectly true—he hated the internal combustion engine for perfectly good practical reasons. I mean noise, congestion, destruction of cities—and many people would greatly agree with him now.
And, of course, in his secondary world, the machine is—as he would say—mythologized in the mythological mode because he is dealing entirely in the representation of his perception of the primary world in the secondary world form—a world like a Middle Earth—and I think it is undoubtedly true that in this large sense of the word ‘machine,’ the supreme machine in the mythological terms is the ring, is the One Ring. This, of course, may seem extraordinary because many people would feel like saying ‘I’m sure the ring is the most magic thing of all.’ To which he would say magic is very close to the machine, Magic is coercion, the coercion of the world, the attempt by apparatus to transform the world. And, indeed, the elves–as he again said, and in saying all this I am largely drawing on what he himself said and putting in my way … the ultimate aim of the elves is art and not power. Whereas men have taken the solution of power represented by the machine. The ring is the ultimate machine because it was made for coercion, made by Sauron to coerce, and that is why the only solution to the problem of the ring was its destruction.
Throughout the years, I have sought to identify possible sources of J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of magic without finding anything significant. Some passages in his letters indicate his awareness of the distinction, dating back to late antiquity, between “mageia” (Μαγεία in Greek) and “goeteia” (Γοητεία in Greek), which he discusses in a letter from 1954 to Naomi Mitchison. Apart from this, the author of The Lord of the Rings does not seem to be familiar with the works of any of the classical theorists of magic, from Hermes Trismegistus to Martin Anton Delrio, S.J. (1551–1608) and Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1535–1615). He does not even mention contemporary authors like the erudite Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) or the famous Dame Frances Amelia Yates (1899–1981). However, the absence of academic references or other sources that could have contributed to the development of his conception regarding magic only serves to demonstrate how profound the ‘revelations’ (i.e., ‘inspirations’) of an authentic writer and poet can be. The connection between machinery/mechanics and magic is one of the most remarkable insights I have ever encountered in a literary work.
Christopher Tolkien’s words in the documentary are fully supported by certain passages from his father’s correspondence, such as this passage from a letter to Milton Waldman, likely written in 1951:
The sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator—especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents—or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our most obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized. (emphasis added)
Again, we encounter the intuition of the similarity between mechanics/machinery and magic. This is a precise intuition pointing to the underlying desire for power in both cases.
It is significant that Tolkien’s understanding of the relationship between ‘magic’ and ‘machine’ is usually ignored today. Furthermore, it must be plainly said that all of the mechanical ‘arts’ that led to the creation of engines and machines belong to the realm of what the Middle Ages and the Renaissance called ‘natural magic.’ Seeking to conceal their interests—which sometimes even extended to divination or demonic magic, and exceeded the lawful boundaries accepted by Christian theologians and secular leaders—some thinkers created new languages intended to disguise the magical and alchemical sources of their ‘science.’ Their identities may be a surprise: René Descartes (1596–1650), interested in achieving immortality; Robert Boyle (1627–1691), interested in communicating with the angelic world; Isaac Newton (1642–1727), interested in transmuting base metals into gold. And the list could go on.
At the root of such ‘occultist’ pursuits is always a thirst for power and immediacy, described by Tolkien as seeking “speed, reduction of labor, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect.” It is precisely this thirst for power, in the form of an unrestrained desire to dominate nature, which permeates all the sciences of the modern world, something that Tolkien viewed with great concern.
Such a worldview is not unique to the imagination of a fantasy literature writer. Numerous high-caliber scholars, historians of science and ideas, have highlighted the close relationship between magic and mechanics in their studies. One such scholar was the American historian Lynn Thorndike. In a massive eight-volume monograph, History of Magic and Experimental Science, published between 1923 and 1958, he systematically revealed the historical connections between magic and the modern mechanical and experimental sciences. Following in Thorndike’s footsteps, the most significant contribution in this direction comes from the Renaissance historian Frances Amelia Yates. Her monographs, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) have established elements of continuity between magic and the sciences of the modern world.
In recent decades, scholars like Paolo Rossi, George MacDonald Ross, and Alan Macfarlane have continued to explore the influences of magic and occultism on the development of modern sciences. All of them have shown that the pioneers of today’s sciences were, in fact, the last magicians of the hermetic and occultist paradigm of the Renaissance. For example, in the case of the establishment of the mechanistic paradigm developed especially by René Descartes (1596–1650), the shift from magic to science unfolded under the influence of an unrestrained desire for power over nature, as well as over society. One scholar who has extensively discussed this in his works is John Henry.
In a monograph entitled Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government, and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science (2002), Henry emphasizes that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was by no means the ‘philosopher of industrial science,’ commonly presented in today’s science manuals and popular science books, but rather a genuine magician. Delving into the subject, Henry makes a statement that has ramifications for the concept of the One Ring understood as a machine/mechanism:
Throughout the Middle Ages the design and use of machinery was regarded as part of the province of the natural magician. The reasoning behind this was no more profound than that, because machines worked by hidden and not obvious means, they were occult objects. Machinery was always associated with magic.
This remarkable quote provides an opportunity to establish a connection between the history of the relationship between magic and science and Christopher Tolkien’s assertion that Sauron’s ring in The Lord of the Rings is the supreme machine.
With literary ideas shaped by the myths and legends of the ancient Nordic cultures, as well as those of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, Tolkien, out of his love for the values of the glorious medieval times, developed a mindset similar to medieval thinkers. This ‘forma mentis’ allowed him to perceive the subtle relationships between magic and science. All accounts of his vision, as well as some excerpts from his letters, show us that the Oxford writer always regarded machines and mechanisms with unwavering suspicion and deep concern.
Very probably, the most significant reason for this concern was the direct involvement of the author in the first war in which the ‘progenies’ of science—the machines— made a decisive contribution in the death of millions of people. Subsequently, the outbreak of the Second World War and the use of weapons of mass destruction increased Tolkien’s skepticism towards the ‘grand achievements of science.’ The imagined universe presented to his readers contains a complete response to the overwhelming challenges faced by modern man. The rural simplicity of hobbit life, or the passion for the fine arts of the noble elves, represent different aspects of the author’s vision of how we might escape the grip of a world dominated by engines and machines.
Today, with the omnipresence of digitization created by computers, mobile phones and other ‘smart’ electronic devices—which have given rise to new forms of cyber addiction—we should seriously consider the symbolic warning that identifies the tempting ring with “the supreme machine.” All that remains is to answer the question of what it could mean to neutralize the One Ring—“the supreme machine.”
