At one point I had started memorizing the Lay of Leithian (the epic poem Tolkien wrote about Beren and Luthien) – working on the first version (published in Lays of Beleriand), as it covered more of the story. It was a fun thing to do – Tolkien really was a good poet – especially as I kept running into places where Tolkien had quite simply screwed up (lines that didn’t scan, couplets missing one of their lines, rhymes that didn’t quite work) and kept finding ways to improve that. I got as far as the fourth canto, at which point I hit a brick wall, because it became glaringly clear at that point – and in rereading the rest of the story – that Beren in fact has no heroic qualities whatsoever, he’s a blowhard who fails at everything he does, every stage of the story is Beren saying “I’m the man, you stay safe little lady”, getting in trouble, and then Luthien steps in at the last moment and rescues him – this happens repeatedly. Beren is the most ineffective and simply impotent “hero” I have ever seen presented to a reader of fantasy, and the story itself is as radically feminist as any university activist could wish.

It makes you start wondering why exactly Luthien would have fallen in love with him. Reading between the lines of their first meeting, the conclusion I came to was that Beren lost control of himself, raped her, and this most sheltered princess of them all got a permanent crush on the bad boy.

In this light, Thingol’s attitude toward Beren is not only understandable, it is laudable and good, and as defenders of civilization we should prefer to see him simply execute the thuggish barbarian and lay down the law in his household. The “reason”, within Tolkien’s universe, that this can’t happen is that Beren is the ancestor of Earendel, who is “needed” to go beg the Valar to come help Morgoth. Why exactly the Valar couldn’t be perfectly aware of what Morgoth was up to and take action on their own initiative was something that I never could figure out.

The Silmarillion – and the rest of Tolkien’s work – is to me more interesting for how it has informed the mythological structures we are creating for ourselves today, and how the common understandings of those myths have changed from Tolkien’s intentions. For example, Tolkien deliberately modeled his dwarves on Jews: a clannish, reclusive, gold-loving people with a strange and incomprehensible language, who everybody hates but are just misunderstood. Today, though, everybody knows that dwarves are Scotsmen: clannish, gold-loving drunkards with a genius for machinery and battle and a strong burr of an accent, who everybody loves – a radical departure from Tolkien’s intent, but a concept that is much more palatable to the public. Another example would be Malekith, the dark elf antagonist in the last Thor movie. I saw that name and thought “that’s gotta be borrowed from Tolkien somewhere”. Well, no: it’s borrowed from Warhammer Fantasy, which takes the forms and appearances of Tolkien’s universe and places them in the cosmology of H.P. Lovecraft – as radical a departure from Christianity as one could imagine.

All this to say that while Tolkien gave us images and ideas and concepts, they have not remained the ones he intended, and their present form may not at all be ones of which he would have approved – although I will claim that in many cases they are objectively better as mythological contexts for the human experience, given our increasing understanding of the mechanics of the universe.

We can see the Chaos Gods at work ever more clearly: Khorne in Ukraine and the Mideast, Nurgle in West Africa and among the Western pozzed, Slaanesh in San Francisco, most universities, and sharing Silicon Valley with Tzeentch, who in turn maintains complete dominion over DC. These are symbols of what must be opposed – opposition in which modern society has lost the will to engage, in part because it refuses to clearly identify its enemies.