B. U. G. S.

Yes, the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is a repeat of the Niebelungenlied.

Tolkien was a scholar of Indoeuropean beliefs, and much of what he says in LOTR is a repeat of what Wagner describes in his opera.

What a surprise! One student of Indoeuropean history says what another student of Indoeuropan beliefs said.

Gosh! Wow!

Wagner, bless his soul, was a dedicated devotee of Indoeuropean ideas. But when it came to those ideas he was a romantic idiot.

Wagner said Odin gave an eye for love of Freya.

Odin gave his eye to have more KNOWLEDGE. That makes Odin unique among all the gods of every other relgiion. All the other gods already knew everything already or they were after Wisdom.

They considred mere knowledge, merely knowing more factual information, to be the kind of thing a peasant would worry about.

Nobody notices this but me.

What impresses most people is a premise of the Nieberlungen and of LOTR that is totally astonishing to those of us who were raised in the Old Testament tradition.

We have been taught that if anybody has absolute power it means they are absolutely right. Jehovah has absolute power and if you don’t like what he says he will show he is right by damning you forever into eternal despair and agony.

You can’t get righter than that.

Decades ago when I first read LOTR I kept waiting for some hero to take the All Powerful Ring and turn it to Goodness. I was astonished when the final triumph was the destruction of this Ultimate Power.

When I first read LOTR I kept waiting for the Humble Frodo and the Humble Sam to somehow turn the Ultimate Power to good, the good that it had always been at heart.

After all, I had always been taught that Total Power was the same thing as Total Good.

But Tolkien got the Indoeuropean mentality exactly right. To our ancestors, total power meant total evil.

Our ancestors were burned alive for believing that. Nobody worries about them. The only persecution anybody is concerned about is discrimination against the Jews, who were allowed to practice their religion.

Our ancestors are a bunch of ashes. Who worries about ashes?

Tolkien did.

Tolkien spent his whole life trying to perfect the Silmarillion and to get it exactly right. He was a good Catholic, but he never believed the Old Testament premise that the bully is always right, the idea that if Jehovah is all powerful he must be all good.

Lord Acton, another traditional Catholic, coined the phrase, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

LOTR and the Niebelungenlied are total contradictions of Judeo-Christianity. But I believe they are reaffirmations of the teaching of Christ.

If they aren’t, then I’ll go with the Odinists.