A paragon of their kind.
By: Eric J W Orlowski
Tags: Heroes, Literature, Tolkien, Anthropology, Sociology

I suspect much of my fascination with heroes stems from my deep-seated love for Tolkien’s legendarium and how his writing made heroes. There is much to say on the topic in general, far too much to discuss here (as is my usual cop-out), as his work features heroes a-plenty. They are an inalienable part of the works’ thematic richness: making flesh, so to speak, the core theme of good fighting evil. Evil has its villains, and within such a framing, the good need their heroes. One of my favourite heroic scenes in both the movies and novels is the arrival of the Rohirrim to lift the siege of Minas Tirith. It is a remarkable moment, both narratively, but also for its heroic aesthetics. It is truly a stand-out piece, and in Peter Jackson’s masterful movie adaptations, the whole segment has an otherworldly feel to it; the sense of a divine intervention [1] manifest through near-absurd levels of heroism, and gosh-darn it, if it doesn’t get me every time!

“Arise, arise!” Théoden, king of Rohan, begins his pre-battle speech; his men eventually chant “death!” in response. “Death” the host chants, and death they bring, as they merge into one entity, a singular collective of 10,000 riders: 60,000 legs barrelling down the gentle slopes of Pelennor Fields. A flash flood of death and destruction, momentum and cohesion maintained by rage and a burning hatred for their enemies and the darkness they bring. The whole scene is deliciously epic.

The text is littered with heroic tropes — the pre-battle speech (the logistics of which I still question), or as my father once noted: “this chanting for death just shows the power of mass psychology”. Buzzkill, certainly, but not wrong. Nonetheless, I think this misses the point. The scene is a narrative constructed and filled with culturally and socially coded ideals to signal the heroicness of the actions themselves. Hero stories are hero stories because they are treated as such. In a blunt sense, heroes are always constructed by narratives; arguably not meant to be accurate, but rather meant to show the transcendental nature of the action or actor(s). As a result, the actors ascend to impossible heights with expectations that cannot be realistically maintained in reality; or perhaps more accurately, that cannot be maintained by the merely human. Instead, their heroic transcendence is maintained by ideology, not by their material existence, and Tolkien, in his text, perhaps inadvertently, makes an important distinction: it is not Théoden-king that has arrived with 10,000 riders: rather Rohan had come at last.

What do I mean by this? A hero is transcendental by definition, a symbolic paragon of their kind; an individual or group of individuals who have done something that so perfectly aligns with overarching cultural values and morals that through these actions they transcend their mere humanity and, in effect, become part of the cultural Big Other. However, human is still only human, and such transcendence into the overhanging moral structure is, practically speaking, impossible. It is always a product of narrative: it is always a story; an inspirational tale; a noble lie.

There are a surprising number of commonalities between the heroic figure and what’s been called The King’s Two Bodies. In the European monarchical traditional, there has at times existed a clear distinction between a monarch’s corporeal body — the blood-and-flesh, breathing, eating, shitting, imperfect human body — and his body politic: the transcendental body, the perfect body, the body imbued with divine might, the body chosen by God. The symbolic division between the individual and the power they hold is just as clear in the present with, for example, the different connotations between Boris Johnson-the-man and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, or indeed Joe Biden-the-man and the President of the United States of America. Such a leader-follower dynamic seeks to establish a sense of divine kinship, a sense of relatedness to the leader in question by invoking the Nation, a belief, or other ideological constructs. The leader-figure becomes, in effect, a material embodiment of the dominant cultural-ideological environment; a figure imbued with charismatic power which, following Max Weber, is an inspirational individual that people want to follow without promise of reciprocity.

Nonetheless, the tension between the body that shits, and the body blessed by God cannot be ignored. A hero is not the same as a leader, of course. The hero is a paragon, the embodiment of the moral-cultural framework that defines them. However, both leader-figured and the hero-figure are maintained by the existence a second body. This creates a Two-Body Problem. Heroes invariably suffer from a tension that arises between their transcendental heroic self and their excremental human self, and this is a tension that cannot be reconciled effectively. The only course of action is to ignore the tension, as is often done: ignoring a historical individual and instead embrace the mythic figure. The individual subject must be destroyed and replaced by the mythic figure.

Winston Churchill wrote that “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” a statement which, by and large, turned out to be true. The Churchillian figure is now a trope, and the heroic figure in modern British society par excellence. Nonetheless, even with Churchill’s considerable success, his human self has not been fully exorcised. Criticism against his rampant racism, his colonial policies, and his (lack of) action during the Bengal Famine still exist in public discourse, and become points of contestation, as they painfully highlight the tension between the historical and the mythic figure. If the ol’ British Bulldog was such a remarkably heroic figure, a shining beacon, he cannot be shown to have filth on his underbelly. Even here the Two-Body Problem remains, and short of complete destruction of the historical record (challenging in its own right), it cannot be circumvented — and this is not to mention the implications for a heroic figure that is still live (ritualistic hero-murder might be a somewhat charged suggestion…).

That being said, the destruction of the individual subject can also be read as more metaphorical than literal. The most obvious way of destroying the individual subject is by placing the subject within a collective: to celebrate heroic acts carried out by a group, over those specifically made by an individual. Folding the individual into a collective, which may include any number of otherwise questionable individuals, shifts the focus away from how these individuals may or may not have behaved in the rest of their lives, and instead emphasises the actions of the group, allowing the heroic actions to speak for themselves. The group, as a collective entity, also ceases to exist eventually, insofar as it cannot be maintained indefinitely, and thus circumvents the Two-Body Problem.

The Rohirrim’s chant before their charge at the gates of Minas Tirith was, in a way, correct. “Death,” they chanted; literally and figuratively, did they bring death with them, that is to say, the destruction of the individual in favour of a collective cohesion that they created during their change, just as much as the literal death of crushed Orc-skulls underhoof. Théoden may have been their king, but the charge was not carried out by him. The Charge of the Rohirrim, as a collective, brings to the fore the body politic of the peopleof Rohan: their courage, their sacrifice, their loyalty, theirheroism. Much can be gleaned from this approach to heroism and commemoration — in short: deeds not men! — for without Rohan’s collective heroism, Minas Tirith would have surely fallen.

… As long as they don’t raise a goddamned statue of Théoden.

Selected Bibliography

Michelutti, Lucia. 2013. “We are all Chávez:” Charisma as an embodied experience.

Yurchak, Alexei. 2015. The Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty.