LOTR vs. Thomas Covenant

JRR Tolkien is often credited with creating the "fantasy" genre. I don't want to get into the debate over how true that is; for me, I'm satisfied that the claim is true enough, because so many fantasy novels since Tolkien have, in lesser or greater measure, borrowed from his variegated palette of themes, characters, and plot elements. For the purposes of this discussion, I actually want to focus more on the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, since I know it far more more intimately than I do the LOTR series. I've read and reread the Covenant series more times than I can count, and have been known to reread it several times in a single year. In fact, it's probably because I've concentrated so hard on Donaldson that I'm really not all that well-read in the genre as a whole.

[NB: Living in Korea as I am, I haven't touched the series for the past two years.]

The purpose of this essay isn't to compare the series' relative "merits" so much as to note parallels, highlight dissimilarities (huge ones, in my opinion), and investigate religious tropes-- many from Hinduism and Buddhism-- found in the Donaldson books. I'm going to have to assume you're familiar with both series, otherwise it'd take too long to write summaries that do them justice.

I tend to think that Donaldson's heavy borrowing from Tolkien was quite deliberate, because ultimately the First and Second Chronicles, if read in conjunction with Tolkien, turn out be a heavy-duty subversion of the latter. Thomas Covenant, the principal protagonist in the First Chronicles (and co-protag in the Second, along with Dr. Linden Avery, from whose point of view most of the Second Chronicles is told), is as many reviewers have described him: an anti-hero. If one of the requirements of the heroic myth (as Joseph Campbell lays out the "monomyth" paradigm) is that the hero bring back a "boon to his people," then Covenant, who belongs in "our" world, brings little to nothing back by the end of the sixth book. Any good he does devolves to the fantastic Land in which he finds himself.

In Donaldson's world, there's a Ringbearer-- the internally conflicted, often-bitter, often-cowardly Thomas Covenant, a leper who's about as far from that trouper Frodo as you can get. The ring itself is completely the opposite of the One Ring in Tolkien's world: it's a ring of white gold, which is the embodiment of "wild magic" in Donaldson's world-- the power-principle that forms the keystone of the Land's very existence. It represents empowerment, freedom at its most radical-- not enslavement and attachment, as does the One Ring for its corporeal bearers. Elves and dwarves from Tolkien have their analogues in the Woodhelvennin and Stonedownors-- who are human, but who represent two distinct traditions of magical and societal lore: woodcraft and stonecraft (did you know that "craft" is derived from a German word meaning "power"?). Tolkien's orcs are Donaldson's Cavewights; perhaps the "engineered" Uruk-hai are analogous to Donaldson's ur-viles (creatures described as "roynish" by Donaldson-- the only books in which I've seen that word). Minas Tirith is a template for Revelstone; the White Tree at Minas Tirith, symbol of Gondor, is reminiscent of the old Gilden tree in Revelstone's courtyard. Tolkien has Wargs; Donaldson has kresh.

The Land has its version of Sauron, and he lives on the edge of the map, too: this is Lord Foul (silly, cartoonish name, but Donaldson isn't afraid of name-related corniness: another baddie is named Drool Rockworm! Try that on for size!), also known by his title, the Despiser. As Covenant hears various creation myths and cosmologies, he learns that Foul is the son or brother of the Creator (in whose existence not everyone believes), perhaps working alongside the Creator as the Earth was formed, sowing it with evil. In some of those stories, the Creator struggles with Foul and imprisons him on the Earth, locked away inside the Arch of Time. But this creates a problem: the Creator cannot defeat Foul without reaching through, and thereby breaking, the Arch. This would undo creation, which despite its ills is still worth preserving. So the Creator, much like the machine world in The Matrix, has to send a champion, someone who is free to act in a destructive or beneficial manner, as he chooses. For this reason, Covenant, a man full of unresolved paradoxes, is chosen. His freedom is what keeps him from being a mere tool of the Creator.

Donaldson isn't writing about the passing of a previous age and the beginning of an Age of Men. His story, in contrast to Tolkien's, is intensely personal, and especially in the First Chronicles is almost always focused on the moral dimensions of Covenant's struggle within himself and with his surroundings. A question Covenant received on a piece of paper from an old beggar in ocher robes in the first novel, Lord Foul's Bane, haunts him constantly. It's the "fundamental question of ethics": how does one act in a situation if one is unconvinced of its reality?

[Side note: in a Comparative Ethics class, I gave a presentation on narrative ethics that made significant reference to the Covenant series, and to this question in particular. I derided the "fundamental question" as not very fundamental, because most of us don't go around questioning how real our surroundings are. Our prof, Dr. Barbieri, contradicted me, however, and suggested that the question was indeed fundamental to ethics, because it's the question of caring. When we care, it's because something is real to us and/or important to us-- that's what matters. Having thought about this since CompEthics, I think I'm inclined to agree with the prof. If, for example, I'm willing to think in terms of further starving the North Korean populace to reach a political goal, it could be argued that the citizens' suffering isn't real enough to me. That doesn't settle any ethical questions, but it does frame the ethical issues in a very affecting way, because now it's incumbent on me to explain in what way, and to what degree, I do in fact relate to the suffering of North Korean people. How real is X to you? Not a bad question to keep asking and re-asking.]

There are great dissimilarities, though, between Tolkien's and Donaldson's cast of characters. I don't know who, exactly, would match up with Donaldson's Waynhim, creatures who are the diametrical opposite of ur-viles. I also see no obvious parallels to the Bloodguard-- or to the Lords, for that matter. Donaldson's schema in the first trilogy is actually set up more like a chessboard: you have the Lords (the good guys) in Revelstone in the west (!) and the evil Lord Foul in the far eastern (!) reaches. The Giants of Donaldson's world are nothing like the wild, stone-throwing mountain giants in Tolkien (they have more in common, temperamentally, with Rowling's giants in the Harry Potter series), and while Sauron's Nazgul are somewhat analogous to the three noncorporeal Ravers who serve Lord Foul, one major difference is that Ravers can possess you. Plus, there're only three of them.

In Donaldson's world, we're exposed to a wide variety of creation myths. There are the myths known to the people of the Land, as explained above. In the Second Chronicles, we learn the story of the Worm of the World's End-- a very different creation myth (familiar to the Elohim) from the stories told in the Land. In this myth, a great worm that's been eating its way through the cosmos eats its fill, curls around itself and comes to rest. Its exposed surface is what eventually becomes the Earth. The dragon-like children of the Worm, called Nicor, roam the seas. Should anything rouse the Worm, the earth will come to an end. We learn that, in the Land, plenty of people are agnostic about the existence of a Creator. But all people, whatever their theological stance, swear the Oath of Peace and serve the Land (First Chronicles, obviously; in the Second Chronicles, the story begins with everything in ruins).

Both LOTR and the Covenant series are sensitive to the issue of karma-- action and its consequences. Both highlight the way that seemingly isolated events can have significant repercussions: compare, for example, Gollum's role in LOTR to the incident in Lord Foul's Bane where one of Covenant's friends, a Giant named Saltheart Foamfollower, chooses to give a healing balm to a fallen enemy instead of to a child named Pietten, who's been placed under a curse of sorts. Pietten, burdened with his curse, grows up to be a perverse and (literally!) bloodthirsty man.

One of the most wrenching examples of karma in Donaldson is Covenant's rape of the teenaged Lena at the beginning of the story. Lena gives birth to Elena, who is killed many years later, and whose spirit is enslaved by Lord Foul to act as a leader in the siege of Revelstone, Lord's Keep. Elena holds the Staff of Law, which is destroyed when her spirit attempts to use it against Covenant, and this in turn opens the door to the entire Second Chronicles: without a Staff of Law, a regenerated Lord Foul is able to wreak havoc on natural processes and create the Sunbane, whose only purpose is the slow and painful destruction of the Land and all living things.

Donaldson's habit of providing his characters with religiously or symbolically significant names is a religion student's dream. In some cases, the names have a direct bearing on a character's status; in others, they don't. One Waynhim, whom we meet in The Illearth War, is delivered to the Lords at Revelstone after having been tortured by Lord Foul. Its name is dukkha, the Pali term for suffering (the reality of which is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism). But the three Ravers, each of whom sports two or three names, aren't named in a way that reflects their character. Each has a Sanskrit name: turiya, samadhi, and moksha. The first two terms are descriptive of meditative states, while moksha, Sanskrit for "release" or "liberation," is a term found in Hinduism.

The Raver's other names seem to come from Judeo-Christian tradition.

turiya > Herem
moksha > Jehannum
samadhi > Sheol

Herem, a word I don't know, can apparently mean "destruction, jihad, or excommunication" according to this interesting online source on name meanings in Thomas Covenant.

Jehannum is a Latinized version of gehenna, the word Jesus uses to describe hell or an undying fire. Gehenna was the huge garbage dump outside the walled city of Jerusalem; it was always on fire, as people were constantly fueling it with garbage. It was a powerful metaphor for consumption, rejection, and expulsion... and of course, people today still tend to imagine some version of this field (or lake) of fire when they imagine hell.

Sheol is the Hebrew term for the land of the dead, often found in the Old Testament. Many also equate this with hell, which is perhaps justified in its later usage, but that's not the concept being referred to in the Old Testament.

Covenant meets the Elohim in the Second Chronicles, and any Bible scholar will tell you that "el" is a particle meaning "god" or "divinity." The Hebrew God is referred to as "Elohim" by certain Old Testament authors. In the Second Chronicles (btw, the Elohim are very briefly mentioned in the First Chronicles), the Elohim do seem rather godlike-- they're beings of pure Earthpower, nearly indestructible, and able to morph into any shape. As many beings in Buddhist cosmology do, they spend most of their time engaged in contemplation, though from the anguished, human point of view of our protagonists this appears to be little more than a divine version of self-absorption. The Elohim don't manifest a bodhisattva ethic.

Religious concepts are shot through the entire series. Earthpower, mentioned above, is almost exactly analogous to the Chinese conception of ch'i (which Koreans and Japanese call ki). Ch'i-gung (or kigong in Korean), is the discipline of manipulating ch'i/ki to one's purpose, and this is what the various loremasters, human and non-, do with Earthpower in its many manifestations. Elohim (like Findail the Appointed) can make themselves dense or misty, corresponding to older concepts of "light" and "turbid" ch'i. (NB: Not all Chinese conceptualized ch'i the same way!)

[NB: Ch'i/ki bears a lot of resemblance to the Hindu notion of prana, which can also be thought of as breath, or vital/cosmic energy (compare also w/the semantic field of Gk. pneuma-- breath, spirit). Given Donaldson's background, perhaps prana is what he was thinking of when he created Earthpower.]

A kind of Manichaean ethical dualism is obvious in Donaldson as well, as embodied by the Creator (the old beggar whom the protags meet in both Chronicles) and Lord Foul. But Covenant, self-conflicted and paradoxical, becomes despite his flaws the symbol of human freedom, because he realizes the only way out of his dilemma is to embrace the contradictions of his situation. In the end, Covenant defeats Lord Foul because the specific question of the Land's reality becomes intimately intertwined with Covenant's love for the Land. Covenant owns up to his own paradoxical nature.

Having spoken so loftily of the series, though, I will submit one complaint. Covenant's relationship to his white gold wedding ring is never made satisfactorily clear to me, and while I'm not uncomfortable with ambiguity these days, I've always felt that this was too important a question to deal with sloppily. Donaldson, I think, goofs it up in both Chronicles. Although Mhoram tells Covenant the vital secret, "You are the white gold," this is contradicted at several points. In the First Chronicles, it's contradicted by Covenant's lack of mastery of the ring, which seems to require another magical item to trigger it, no matter how much passionate rage Covenant is able to summon. If the ring is truly an expression of Covenant's will or nature, then by the end of the First Chronicles it should have been more easily accessible to him.

The Second Chronicles only makes the situation worse by introducing Linden Avery, who, as it turns out, is able to use Covenant's ring herself-- even while Covenant is wearing the ring. Donaldson does an excellent job of portraying a disillusioned Covenant who feels his messianic role has been usurped: he's no longer necessary. Unfortunately, Donaldson does this a little too convincingly: toward the end of the sixth book, White Gold Wielder, I too was sure that Covenant was mostly useless, little better than a plot device for the requisite defeat of Lord Foul (one reason why I don't like the Second Chronicles nearly as much).

The Covenant series also deals with the issue of fate and freedom in an interesting way: Covenant, who belongs to "our" world, enters the world of the Land and returns to "our" world in the same condition in which he entered it. So if, for example, he's been severely beaten before entering the Land, then by the time his adventure in the Land is over, he'll be back in his beaten-up state. Because of this, Covenant can't know whether his experience in the Land is real or a dream. The Second Chronicles makes this more urgent: Covenant, in order to save his wife from cultists, allows himself to be stabbed in the chest by one of them, and this is the condition in which he enters the Land for what turns out to be his final adventure. One of the most touching moments, again in White Gold Wielder, is when Covenant, while in the Land, sits down to shave off the beard he's grown so that, when he dies, his corpse in the Land will resemble his body in "our" world.

No actual resolution of the fate/freedom issue is reached, which is only appropriate since this is an old philosophical problem. LOTR also deals with this problem in its own way, I think, though it relates the fate/freedom question to the issue of one's duties and loyalties-- the burdens we bear because we must, because the times call for it. People have noted before that Tolkien's experience in World War I would have made him especially sensitive to such themes.

Another important religious concept in the Covenant series is that of Law, which I take to be a nearly-exact analogue to the Hindu notion of dharma. Dharma is a word with many, many translations in English; for our culture, dharma's "semantic field" is both wide-ranging and rather smeared. Dharma can be role, or law, or function, or truth, or simply the nature of things. Buddhists added the notion of "teaching" to this, but even their conception of dharma-as-teaching is firmly tied to the previous Hindu notion of dharma.

It's interesting that the smooth functioning of dharma, in Donaldson's cosmology, requires something like a Staff of Law-- a physical embodiment of dharma. For me, this doesn't sit too well, because it raises a host of theological questions, like "how did the world run before the Staff was made?" Or maybe the Staff is appropriate: Hindu tradition includes the image of a "cosmic tree," usually portrayed as upside-down, rooted in the sky and branching toward earth. Trees, of course, are archetypes and found in all sorts of religions-- in Donaldson, the first Staff of Law is crafted from the One Tree, and the Land was originally covered by the immense One Forest, before humanity came in with axe and flame.

The human communities portrayed in Donaldson also include hermitages (e.g., Waymeets... although these might actually be closer to French or Swiss gîtes, esp. in their use) and solitary practitioners-- the Unfettered, who can be regarded as a close parallel to the Hindu samnyassin, a forest ascetic, or to Buddhist monastics who, in the manner of Taoist sages, follow the dharma as hermits. The Creator, who's described as an old beggar with a bowl, wearing an ocher robe, is a Hindu monk, since ocher/saffron are monastic colors. The weaponless Bloodguard are almost comically East Asian in their stoic demeanor, their martial prowess, and their barely-checked passion-- they represent, in some ways, warrior monasticism. The Lords, who don't seem at all monastic (they often seem more like a police force, responding to the Land's needs as they arise), might actually be more at home in JK Rowling's world than in Tolkien's. I can imagine Lord Mhoram having a pleasant chat with Dumbledore, and sharing Hagrid's strange love and compassion for all living creatures, no matter how fierce and ugly.

Donaldson's cosmos is too theistic to suggest philosophical Taoism, and I tend to think that, since Donaldson lived with his father in India, Taoist concepts don't figure prominently in the First and Second Chronicles. But Donaldson's cosmos is truly cosmic-- unlike LOTR, where our concern is human-scale and focused primarily on the fate of the characters, the First and Second Chronicles are concerned with the fate of a whole universe, both in the macrocosmic sense (literally the whole of creation is at stake) and the microcosmic sense (Covenant's internal state). The reign of Sauron spreads blackness and misery over Middle Earth, but not in the sense that "the very bones of the Earth are groaning in protest"-- a sense we do get in reading Donaldson. It's creaturely misery that's important with Tolkien.* Donaldson's narrative is almost environmentalist at points: the characters who beg for Covenant's aid are motivated by their love of the Earth, not just its people. Covenant's actions, especially in the Second Chronicles, often put the entire Earth in jeopardy, and Covenant's fights with Lord Foul are, essentially, for the sake of the entire cosmos.

In the end, it's not wise to write Donaldson's series off as a Tolkien rip-off. True, Tolkien provided most of the tropes which Donaldson borrows and displays in his narrative. But what Donaldson does is craft a story that is in many ways completely different-- especially in terms of the interior reality of the protagonist-- from Tolkien's project.

If you've never read Donaldson's series before, I highly recommend it. Thomas Covenant is a leper-- that's the curse he brings with him from "our" world. Even when he's been cured of the disease itself by a magical balm, leprosy's effect on his mind and heart are what drive the story. You'll probably hate Covenant through most of the First Chronicles, but you may discover that your feelings change when Covenant finds himself.

That website I linked to previously says something provocative: Donaldson may be returning to the world of the Land with a third trilogy. The scoop:

It has been alleged on Usenet news (see Dejanews) that in [an] article in "Realms of Fantasy" by Robert Holdstock et al. Donaldson [has] said that the first trilogy is themed on conflict with the adversary, the second on victory through sacrifice and the third will(?) be about victory through acceptance.

I hope there's truth to the rumor. It's always neat to take a trip through the Land.

UPDATE: Another interesting Thomas Covenant link. By the way, we didn't even talk about the paradox inherent in Covenant's name: the first name evokes a doubter, while the last name evokes promise and commitment-- i.e., faithfulness. Very Paul Tillich, that: doubt should walk hand-in-hand with faith.

UPDATE 2: Here's a link that works (at least for now). The scoop is that Donaldson is indeed writing a new set of books... but it'll be four books, not three-- a tetralogy. Hmmm. In Korea, 4 is an unlucky number. Choice quote from the article: Stephen R. Donaldson, creator of the fantasy classic Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series, whose last volume appeared 20 years ago, will conclude it with a final four novels, in a deal just made with Putnam. The house's editorial director, Jennifer Hershey, bought North American rights to the new quartet from agent Howard Morhaim and will publish the first of them, The Runes of Earth, next fall, with a Berkley paperback to follow in 2005. The tantalizing phrase "movie rights" also appears in the article. Some online jockey suggested that the Covenant series would work well on the Sci-Fi Channel. I tend to agree. The problem with making a Covenant movie is that people will be too quick to do exactly what I've been talking about: dismiss it as a Tolkien rip-off, especially after the yeoman's work of Peter Jackson. A Sci-Fi Channel miniseries is, to my mind, the perfect format for Covenant, which is written very episodically.

So be on the lookout for The Runes of Earth. Let's hope Donaldson hasn't deteriorated like Larry Niven. His Ringworld Throne was unreadable-- almost as bad as fiction by Barbara Hambly.

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*I anticipate some resistance from the Air Marshal about this point, and am willing to grant that, if you view LOTR in the larger context offered by a work like The Silmarillion, Tolkien's project is just as cosmic-- if not more so, since Tolkien actually relates Middle Earth's predominant creation myth in exquisite detail. I still contend, though, that if we restrict our view only to the LOTR trilogy, what we get is a more anthropocentric (and therefore less cosmic) plot. LOTR's characters don't seem nearly as filled with Earth-love or Land-love as Donaldson's characters do.

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