A Phuulish Fellow

phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/cosmic-horror-and-tolkien

January 3, 2017

Daniel Stride's Blog

Cosmic Horror and Tolkien

This is one of those topics that has been nagging at the back of my mind for a while. It’s a
strange thing to nag too, since at face value the worldviews of H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R.
Tolkien could not have been more opposed. One was an atheistic (and racist) believer in
man’s inevitable destruction at the hands of an uncaring cosmos, the other a theistic (and
anti-racist) believer in the cosmos’ inevitable destruction at the hands of uncaring man.
Yes, I’m being cheeky there, but let’s run with it.

Yet, scratching around in the undergrowth of Tolkien’s stories, one finds certain scenes
and concepts that evoke Cosmic Horror: the terrifying sense that malign and alien things
exist outside our knowledge, things that would drive puny humans mad if we could but
comprehend a fraction of that which surrounds us. Cosmic Horror – of which Lovecraft’s
stories are the most famous literary exemplar – attacks the notion that scientific advances
will grant us control of our universe. Rather, we cannot hope to understand (let alone
control) the cosmos; the best humans can hope for is to stay out the way and hope we
don’t get stomped on like bugs.

The only evidence that Tolkien read Lovecraft is a 1964 letter to L. Sprague de Camp,
where he expresses a broadly negative view of the stories contained in the latter’s Swords
& Sorcery anthology (an anthology that included The Doom That Came to Sarnath).

We have no idea if Tolkien read any Lovecraft earlier than that, let alone during the
writing of The Lord of the Rings. Yet, while Tolkien (probably) did not engage with the
other man’s work directly, we do know that he read the likes of Lord Dunsany, who was a
major influence on Lovecraft. In a 1967 interview with de Camp, Tolkien also indicated
that he “rather liked” Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, Howard being one of Lovecraft’s
writing circle.

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Then there is Tolkien’s deep love for
Norse mythology, with its dark and
apocalyptic vision; Lovecraft’s
famous essay on Supernatural
Horror in Literature opines that “the
Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas
thunder with cosmic horror, and
shake with the stark fear of Ymir and
his shapeless spawn…” In short,
Tolkien and Lovecraft were likely
drawing from similar literary wells,
even if their respective worldviews
meant the end results were destined
to be very different.

Turning now to the actual examples

of Tolkienian Cosmic Horror, the
best and most obvious example is the Balrog of
Moria, Durin’s Bane. The Dwarves “dug too deep”,
and in doing so awakened an ancient monster that
had lain sleeping at the roots of the world – with
predictable consequences.

This is classic Cosmic Horror: for all the glory and

riches of the great Dwarven Kingdom, they were
really just (bearded) rats running around the walls,
living on borrowed time so long as the Balrog slept.
That their destruction was rooted in greed and
hubris is also appropriate – just as Lovecraft
implicitly attacks the hubris of twentieth century humanity and its faith in ever-advancing
science, so Tolkien’s dwarves are brought low by their own supposed strength, their skill
in mining and mastery of the deep places of the world.

Interestingly, when the Balrog shows up to confront the Fellowship, it is implied that the
“alarm” (so to speak) is the stone Peregrin Took drops down the well. Curiosity is a big
motivator for Pippin, so he drops the stone to see what will happen. Thus the Balrog is
again awoken by someone “digging too deep” in Moria – in this case, someone showing
interest in something best left alone, which parallels Lovecraft perfectly. Trying to
understand the world in a Cosmic Horror story generally leads to death or insanity, and
while Pippin survives in this case, it is only because of Gandalf’s sacrifice.

While the Balrog is the “best” example, Moria generally is riddled with Cosmic Horror
tropes. Consider the Book of Mazarbul, as read by Gandalf:

They have taken the bridge and the second hall. We have barred the gates, but cannot hold
them for long. The ground shakes. Drums… drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow
lurks in the dark. We cannot get out… They are coming.

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Now consider the ending of Lovecraft’s Dagon (1919), which is
another first-person account of a doomed narrator:

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense

slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that
hand! The window! The window!

Apocalyptic logs (as TV Tropes calls them) were not invented by

Lovecraft, but as seen above, he makes common use of them in
his stories. Since victory is impossible against entities such as
these, we need some way of preserving a record of the final
moments… and in both Tolkien and Lovecraft, the details are left to the reader’s
imagination. For the purposes of the dwarves, Durin’s Bane is a horror on par with Dagon
or Cthulhu.

But surely, you say, Balrogs aren’t true Cosmic Horror? The Eldar fought them in the First
Age, and Legolas recognises the creature immediately: they are hardly alien to Arda (we
know who and what they are), and they can be killed. True, but they are alien to the
experiences of both the dwarves of Moria and to our hobbit protagonists: remember that
the Balrog lay buried for a good five millennia, which is a long time even for dwarves.

In any case, there are more alien creatures than the Balrog out there. Recall Gandalf the
White’s comment about the roots of the world:

“Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things.
Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will
bring no report to darken the light of day.“

Lovecraft would be proud. Whatever these Nameless Things are, neither Gandalf nor
Sauron (immortal angelic beings predating the existence of the universe) know them.
They clearly predate the coming of the Ainur to Arda, the only interpretation in which
“older than Sauron” makes sense. They are, in a way, the original inhabitants of the
planet, and seemingly stand in stark contradiction to the Melkor’s Rebellion/War in
Heaven narrative.

These aren’t servants of Sauron or Melkor; they lie outside all rules and conventions, are
neither good nor evil; they simply are. In this case, I would (purely speculatively) cite
the Gylfaginning from Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth century Prose Edda:

Three roots of the tree uphold it and stand exceeding broad: one is among the Æsir; another
among the Rime-Giants, in that place where aforetime was the Yawning Void; the third
stands over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nídhöggr gnaws the root from
below.

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Tolkien knew this text very well. Here we have a monstrous dragon (Nídhöggr) gnawing
away at the literal roots of the world – a dragon whose origin is never explained, and who
apparently survives Ragnarök, judging by the final stanza of Völuspá:

Þar kemr inn dimmi dreki fljúgandi,

naðr fránn, neðan frá Niðafjöllum;
berr sér í fjöðrum, – flýgr völl yfir, –
Niðhöggr nái. Nú mun hon sökkvask.

From below the dragon | dark comes forth,

Nithhogg flying | from Nithafjoll;
The bodies of men on | his wings he bears,
The serpent bright: | but now must I sink.

Surviving Ragnarök essentially means that this dragon will survive both the destruction of
the world and the Doom of the Gods. Like Tolkien’s Nameless Things, Nídhöggr is a sort
of cosmic entity outside the standard framework. Moreover, the Prose Edda has one root
of Yggdrasil (the Cosmic Ash Tree) ending up with the gods, one with the giants, and one
with Nídhöggr – one “good”, one “bad”, and one “other”. Tolkien is arguably setting up a
similar trichotomy, between the Valar (good), Melkor and Sauron (bad), and the
Nameless Things (other).

Nor are the Nameless Things the only such example in Tolkien. There is the Watcher in
the Water, for example; the strange, many-tentacled thing outside Moria’s Western Gate
– Lovecraft was famous for his tentacled monstrosities. Caradhras also has more than a
hint of the eldritch going on:

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 ‘We cannot go further tonight,’ said Boromir. `Let those call it the wind who will; there are
fell voices on the air; and these stones are aimed at us.’

‘I do call it the wind,’ said Aragorn. ‘But that does not make what you say untrue. There are
many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two
legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been
in this world longer than he.’

‘Caradhras was called the Cruel, and had an ill name, said Gimli, `long years ago, when
rumour of Sauron had not been heard in these lands.’

Note Aragorn’s comment about things “not in league with Sauron” that have been in the
world “longer than he” – an echo of Gandalf’s description of the Nameless Things.

Ungoliant does temporarily throw her

lot in with the more conventional bad
guys, but a shadow (appropriately
enough) hangs over her origins. She
can be defined as a Maia if we apply
the term as a catch-all for spirits before
the world, and it is likely that Tolkien
was moving in just such a direction,
but even in the later work, the text
expresses doubt in a way that it never
does for Sauron and the Balrogs. In
Tolkien’s earlier work she is indeed
“something else” – a
Gnomish/Noldorin word-list has her
as literally “the Primeval Night”
personified.

A less intimidating analogy is Tom

Bombadil:

“Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my

words, my friends: Tom was here
before the river and the trees; Tom
remembers the first raindrop and the
first acorn. He made paths before the
Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves
and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the
seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark
Lord came from Outside.”

The Dark Lord Tom refers to isn’t Sauron – it’s Melkor. Tom, like the Nameless Things,
predates the Ainur in Arda. He’s a cosmically alien creature who manages to escape
standard definitions. He can even wear the Ring without effect, in a setting where the

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Ring’s lure is otherwise treated as universal.

Curiously, even The Hobbit has an odd tinge of Cosmic Horror:

“Some of these caves, too, go back in their beginnings to ages before the goblins, who only
widened them and joined them up with passages, and the original owners are still there in
odd corners, slinking and nosing about.”

Admittedly, this quote is used in the context of Gollum, before he acquired his more
elaborate backstory – Gollum is more something out of Poe and Shakespeare than
Lovecraft. But taking the quote more generally, as with the Nameless Things, there is a
sense that there are any number of odd little creatures and cosmological exceptions
floating around, dating back before the reckoning of Elves and Men (and hobbits). While
the goblins/orcs never have their “dug too deep” moment (they fear the Balrog, but we
never see it attacking them), this quote does evoke the sense that they too are mere “rats
in the walls” – the true owners of those caves are altogether darker and more mysterious.

I mentioned earlier that while it is unlikely that Tolkien had encountered Lovecraft at the
time he wrote The Lord of the Rings, he and Lovecraft likely shared some overlap in their
reading material. One potential candidate for a joint literary ancestor is William Hope
Hodgson, author of The House on the Borderland and The Night Land.

We certainly know Lovecraft read him (as per the Supernatural Horror in Literature
essay). It is possible that Tolkien encountered his works at some point too, since both
geography (Hodgson published his books in Britain, rather than in American pulp
magazines) and chronology fit better than with other Cosmic Horror authors. Hodgson’s
two cited works appeared in 1908 and 1912, which gives Tolkien a good three decade
reading window.

Taking The Night Land, we encounter

a far-future Earth doomed to
darkness after the Sun has perished.
Surviving humanity lives in a giant
pyramid (the Great Redoubt),
surrounded by eldritch inter-
dimensional horrors. One day, our
surviving humans hear a message
from outside, asking for aid…

All well and good, but what does this

have to do with Tolkien? Simple:
there are a couple of elements in
Hodgson that strongly resemble
elements in The Lord of the Rings. For example, there are the Watchers: strange entities
that encircle the Great Redoubt, never moving (save a bit closer over the millennia) but

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always watchful and always waiting. Our protagonist must sneak past them to investigate
the mysterious aid message. There is, in short, at least a passing resemblance to the Silent
Watchers of the Tower of Cirith Ungol, which Sam must creep past to rescue Frodo.

An even better example is Hodgson’s House of Silence, a mysterious and (literally) soul-
destroying edifice that is simply evil unto itself. It exerts a strange psychic lure on its
prospective victims:

… Aschoff of the Nine-Hundredth-City began again to run towards the House of Silence;
and all they that were with him, did follow faithfully, and ceased not to run.

And they came presently to the low Hill whereon was that horrid House; and they went up
swiftly–and they were two hundred and fifty, and wholesome of heart, and innocent; save for
a natural waywardness of spirit.

And they came to the great open doorway that “hath been open since the Beginning,” and
through which the cold steadfast light and the inscrutable silence of Evil “hath made for
ever a silence that may be felt in all the Land.” And the great, uncased windows gave out
the silence and the light–aye, the utter silence of an unholy desolation.

And Aschoff ran in through the great doorway of silence, and they that followed. And they
nevermore came out or were seen by any human.

Suffice to say that our protagonist has to creep past this place, not once but twice:

And in the eleventh hour, we did go creeping from bush unto bush, and did be as shadows
that went in the mixt greyness and odd shinings of that Land. And the grim and dreadful
House did be now unto our right, and did loom huge and utter silent above us in the night.

And the lights of the House did shine steadfast and deathless with a noiseless shining, as
that they shone out of the quiet of some drear and unnatural Eternity. And there did a
seeming of Unholiness to brood in the air, and a sense of all and deathly Knowledge; so
that, surely, our hiding did seem but a futile thing unto our spirits; for it was to us as that we
did be watched quiet and alway by a Power, as we slipt gentle from bush unto bush.

There are obvious similarities to Frodo, Sam, and Gollum creeping past Minas Morgul.
Just as Hodgson’s House of Silence shines with an unnatural light, and evokes a unique
and unholy supernatural dread, so does Tolkien’s Tower of Dark Sorcery.

All was dark about it, earth and sky, but it was lit with light. Not the imprisoned moonlight
welling through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and
radiant in the hollow of the hills. Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse
was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-
light, a light that illuminated nothing.

Both places represent a distortion in the natural order of life and death. The House of
Silence seemingly destroys one’s very soul, whereas Minas Morgul is the Dead City – the
home of madness and wraiths. In the case of the latter, our protagonists must also get

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past it, evading the fearsome, watchful
gaze of whatever lurks within – and just
like Hodgson’s Naani, so Frodo is
particularly vulnerable to its power. In
fact, Frodo (under the Ring’s influence)
running up to the gleaming bridge is
also very reminiscent of Aschoffinthe
above quoted section, though the
former is lucky enough to have
someone there to stop him.

Perhaps I am stretching things. Perhaps

Tolkien never read or heard of
Hodgson. After all, he is far less
prominent an author than Lord
Dunsany, or even Arthur Machen. Even
so, that leaves us with Tolkien
independently constructing story
elements that are also present in a
seminal work of Cosmic Horror. Which
in turn ties into this essay’s general
point that, notwithstanding Tolkien’s
fundamental belief in a benign cosmos,
there are elements of overlap – if not with Lovecraft himself then at least with those who
influenced Lovecraft. However subtle and camouflaged by the generalised sense of
supernatural fading, Cosmic Horror is still a “thing” in Middle-earth in a way it never is in
Narnia.

6 thoughts on “Cosmic Horror and Tolkien”

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1. Greetings from Vanishing Rural America! So far as I have discovered, there’s no
documentation for Tolkien having read Hodgson; but his close friend C. S. Lewis
had. It may be that Lewis recommended Hodgson to Tolkien.

Lewis was more knowledgeable about modern fantasy, weird fiction, and sf than (I
think) many readers realize. Here are a few facts. (1) After his death in 1963, an
inventory of his library was made. It is available online. It is remarkable how much
overlap there was between Lewis’s library and the releases in Ballantine’s Adult
Fantasy Series of 1969-1974. (2) Lewis certainly read American sf mags. He said so
himself. It is virtually certain that his fantasy The Great Divorce was influenced by
Lovecraft-Circle-member Donald Wandrei’s “Colossus” in the Jan. 1934 issue of
Astounding, and, in an article shortly to appear in the Bulletin of the New York C. S.
Lewis Society, I argue for the possibility that Lewis read, and was influenced by,
Lovecraft’s At the Mountain of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time” as
published in 1936 issues of that magazine. If nothing else, Lewis’s library inventory
lists August Derleth’s 1948 anthology Strange Ports of Call, which reprints At the
Mountains of Madness. (3) Lewis’s American wife was involved with Fletcher Pratt’s
circle when she lived int he States. Pratt, of course, was author of The Well of the
Unicorn and The Blue Star, and (with de Camp) of the Harold Shea tales, etc. After
she moved to England, she hung out with the London sf scene before she succeeded
in marrying Lewis. She knew Arthur C. Clarke and John Christopher (the author of
the famous tripods trilogy, etc.). Christopher wrote a very warm account of visiting
her (her name was Joy) and Lewis at their home in Oxford, published in the British
magazine Encounter. This article is available online. I think it is likely that one of
the things that helped to bring Lewis and Joy together was a fondness for sf and
fantasy. That copy of Strange Ports in Lewis’s library might have originally been in
Joy’s library before they married. (She died before he did, btw.) I suspect that an
Arkham House book — Bloch’s Opener of the Way — in Lewis;s library had been
Joy’s also.

Lewis was so knowledgeable about the subject that I wrote a piece called
“‘Supernatural Horror in Literature” by C. S. Lewis” for Pierre Comtois’s ‘zine
Fungi., in which I survey Lewis’s reading in the genre(s) Lewis had read a lot of
Algernon Blackwood, for example — and of course Blackwood was also one of
Lovecraft’s favorites.

And this brings us back to Tolkien. I have written (for Tolkien Studies) about
possible trace of Blackwood’s “Wendigo” in Tolkien. For the Tolkien newsletter
Beyond Bree I’ve also suggested that Tolkien’s conception of Gollum was influenced
by the haunter — specifically the drawing by James McBryde of the haunter — in M.
R. James’s “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook.” Documentation for Tolkien having read
James is provided in the extended edition of Tolkien’s On Fairy-Stories.

Dale Nelson
extollager@gmail.com

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Reply ↓

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Thanks for that! I had no idea about Lewis being that well-read in the area. As
you say, it’s possible that Tolkien could have come to Hodgson via Lewis’
recommendation.

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It seems reasonable to guess that Lewis told Tolkien about quite a bit of
his reading in the fantasy-weird fiction-sf area (and vice versa). Lewis
was a an enthusiastic reader. Get hold of a book by Lewis called On
Stories and you can see him at it in things like his essay on science
fiction, etc.

He had a little of the fanboy in him. For example, he fired off a letter to
Mervyn Peake after reading Titus Groan, and to John Buchan after
reading — not The Thirty-Nine Steps, not some other Richard Hannay
book, etc. — but Buchan’s novel of a cult in old Scotland, Witch Wood.

I write a column for the New York C. S. Lewis Society on Lewis’s reading,
and a number of the selections have been genre works. Here are the first
two paragraphs of my column on Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse. Notice the
Tolkien element!

—–Looking back at this novel, Aldiss remembered being “adrift in

Oxford in the 1960s” and getting to know C. S. Lewis. Faber and Faber
published Hothouse in 1962 and Aldiss gave Lewis a copy. Aldiss reports
that Lewis liked it so much that he bought a copy for J. R. R. Tolkien,
who sent Aldiss an appreciative letter after he read it, and a second letter
after he reread it, in which he said he enjoyed his second reading even
more than the first.
Not troubling himself with scientific plausibility, Aldiss imagines a
remote future in which earth has stopped rotating, presenting always the
same side to the sun. Beneath perpetual sunshine, a banyan tree has
spread until it covers almost the entire extent of land, so far as we see
can tell in the early pages. The tree’s mid-level is inhabited by diminutive
descendants of humanity who struggle for survival against mutated and
often sentient plants that are capable of motion. The sun is the
“indifferent begetter of all this carnage.” Vast spider-like creatures have
connected the earth to the moon and traverse a vast bridge of webs. This
hothouse world possesses strange beauty and horror.——-

Leweis buying Aldiss’s novel for Tolkien! What’d I tell you? Fanboy!

Lewis relished Eric Frank Russell’s pulpish Sinister Barrier, by the way. I
wrote about that one too.

Dale Nelson
extollager@gmail.com

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 2. Aldiss paid full tribute to Lovecraft and Hodgson in “Billion Year Spree” (1975).
What goes around comes around!

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Reply ↓
3. Hi Phuul. I don’t think you mention Hodgson’s take on the “apocalyptic log”, said by
Brian Aldiss to be the inspiration of Lovecraft’s in ‘Damon’. From ‘The House on the
Borderland’, 1908:

“There are steps on the stairs; strange padding steps, that come up and nearer….
Jesus, be merciful to me … There is something fumbling at the door-handle. O God,
help me now! Jesus — The door is opening — slowly. Somethi—”

There is a yet earlier “apocalyptic log”, which doesn’t seem to be in the TV Tropes
page or discussion, which happened in real life. It’s Nate Champion in the Johnson
County War, Wyoming 1892…

“Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hail. I heard them splitting
wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break
when night comes, if alive. Shooting again. It’s not night yet. The house is all fired.
Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again. Nathan D.Champion”

https://www.hmdb.org/Marker.asp?Marker=91502

One would like to know if Hodgson (or Lovecraft or Tolkien for that matter) had
heard of Nate Champion

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4. Pingback: Dracones et Bellum: Tolkien and the Serpents (a reply to Joseph Loconte)
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