Middle-earth: It's a Jung World

According to psychologist Timothy R. O'Neill's 1979 book The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth is rife with symbolism. There is an intricate web of symbols in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Tolkien's several other books, O'Neill writes. They evoke the theme of Self-realization.

In the theory of the human mind advanced by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the Self archetype is a crucial component. Among the several archetypes in the collective unconscious, the Self is preeminent. To employ an Olympics metaphor, the realization of the hidden Self is the Jungian gold medal in the event of Life.

The Self is a King whose return is sorely needed. As the "potential controlling and organizing force of the personality" (p. 179), the Self starts out like Strider/Aragorn does in LOTR: without a throne. The conscious ego which seems to be the center of the personality is only a steward, à la the stewards of Gondor.

The ego-steward, however, is out of touch with the deep-seated forces of the unconscious. Left to their own devices, these deep-buried potencies can "inflate" into the conscious ego and, in combination with the ego which has become their puppet, rule the psyche in the way that Sauron as Dark Lord of Mordor did the wizard Saruman, and (were it not for the heroism of Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring) nearly did all of Middle-earth.


In particular, the most worrisome potency in the unconscious depths is the Shadow. This archetypal nucleus serves to cluster together the attitudes and attributes we don't dare admit into everyday consciousness, and certainly not into the facade we put up for other people's benefit, the one which Jung called the Persona. The traits we deprecate in ourselves and others often stem from urges we have inherited from our evolutionary forebears. If animals do it and humans aren't supposed to do it, it is held in the unconscious Shadow.

Frodo's Shadow is personified as Gollum, aka Sméagol. Once an ordinary Hobbit like Frodo, Sméagol chanced upon the long-lost Ring that Frodo now inherits as LOTR begins. The Ring's inscription

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

has the coda

... in the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.

The Ring is emblematic of the power of the unconscious, for good or for ill. Those who merely covet its power to inflate the ego — the lust for which power has long since caused Sméagol to degenerate into the craven Gollum — wind up being destroyed by the Ring.

Yet the Ring, in its circular and golden perfection, is also a symbol of the Self in its ability to confer wholeness on the psyche, bringing all erstwhile oppositions into harmonious counterpoise. When Frodo destroys the One Ring in the Cracks of Doom, he "depotentiates" the destructive power of the Ring. Its health-conferring power remains, however, personified by the return of King Aragorn, crowned as Elessar to rule over the incipient Fourth Age of Middle-earth. (Elessar means "Elf-stone"; precious stones, jewels, and crystals, in their symmetry and perfection, serve Tolkien as symbols of the Self.)


O'Neill's is a lovely interpretation of Tolkienesque fantasy — to those of us who are inclined to believe in things Jungian, that is.

There aren't all that many of us these days. It is an interesting, and sad, commentary on the extent to which Jung's once well-received ideas have been declared radioactive by intellectual leaders of today and sealed off in watertight subterranean vessels of thought, that despite the massive popularity of the recent Lord of the Rings films, O'Neill's excellent 1979 book has not been reprinted by its publisher.

The basis of Jungian thought is that we, all of us, have certain inbuilt predispositions to response and belief. Jung called them "archetypes"; O'Neill relabels them "affect-images." O'Neill says in his glossary, under "affect-image":

A more contemporary name for the archetype; affect refers to the emotional domain of behavior, hence the term suggests the self-personification of an emotional complex. (p. 169)

A "complex," in turn, is "a cluster of thoughts, emotions and predispositions, which cluster together and share energy because of similarity" (p. 171).

At the center of each complex in the psyche is a particular archetype or affect-image, the source of the cluster's energy or numen. Jung called that energy "numen" to emphasize that it can seem to us an act of "divine will or divine power" (p. 176) when an archetypal complex emerges symbolically from the unconscious and becomes a source of conscious conviction and overt enthusiasm. Such irresistible powers are, indeed, the ones we are in the habit of calling "numinous."

So archetypes or affect-images are inbuilt numinous powers that predispose us to believe in certain things and respond in certain ways. They typically cloak themselves in symbols, in the way that God appeared to Moses behind a burning bush. There can be symbols within symbols: Jung called God or Yahweh — bush-covered or not — a symbol of the Self.


The things we believe in as a result of archetypal affect-images exerting influence over our conscious minds via symbols tend to be the symbols themselves, not the underlying archetypes: the Self-hiding Yahweh, not the hidden Self.

Most of the symbols we believe in — including, Jung thought, God as an incompletely specified symbol of the Self — tend to lead us down a garden path to "one-sidedness," unfortunately. O'Neill defines this as:

Over-emphasis on conscious pursuits, to the exclusion of unconscious creative promptings, which amounts to a denial of the non-conscious personal and collective personality, [that] produces a ... state of imbalance ... [which is] associated with disorder in Jungian theory. (p. 177)

Self-realization, per Jung, is the ultimate remedy to one-sidedness. It is achieved by a long, winding process of "individuation," the arduous task of becoming the unique individual one was "meant to be" — so-called because we usually start from a position of ceding too much power to the conscious Persona, the mask representing a collective, cultural, social idea of how we ought to behave, rather than the individual, personal imperatives of how we really are.


There is one other key potency in the unconscious mind. It is to me the most mysterious of all: the Anima.

The Anima is personified in Lord of the Rings by, among others, Galadriel, the royal Elf-lady who co-rules the forest realm of Lothlórien along with her husband, Lord Celeborn. In the early stages of Frodo's journey toward Mordor and the Cracks of Doom, Galadriel serves him as a sort of "spirit-guide" (p. 104), giving Frodo a look into her mirror that "reveals past and future" (p. 132).

Galadriel gives Frodo, as a talisman, a phial of light — a "beacon of consciousness" (p. 134) — which he will later use to good advantage "against the suffocating gloom" of the bloated arachnid Shelob, who tries to devour Frodo. (The female Shelob represents the Anima in its negative aspect.)

The light itself is symbolic of the male principle, but the vessel containing it is "associated with the female aspects of the [male] psyche, and reveals the transcending and guiding nature of the Lady of the Forest" (p. 132). In the male psyche, then, the Anima is the locus of the image of ideal femininity.

There is a parallel structure in the depths of the female psyche: the Animus. The Animus, in the depths of a woman's psyche, is the ideal image of masculinity.

So men have an Anima, and women have an Animus, and in both sexes the Anima/us is the gateway to the Self. We need to address our hidden Anima or Animus before Self-realization can happen.

When Frodo confers, late one night, with Galadriel, and looks into her magic mirror, he is addressing his Anima. Galadriel's "vision is long." As her mirror shows past and future to Frodo, she "peers into the unconscious with her all-seeing eyes" (p. 132). Here, "past and future" is symbolic of knowledge of the forgotten, unrevealed unconscious. When we have that, we are well on our way to Self-realization.


The Self-realization wrought by the sacrifice Frodo will eventually make at the Cracks of Doom is, alas, not to be his own.

Frodo and Sam make their way to the fiery mountain where the One Ring was forged, knowing that the only way to depotentiate (in Jungian terms) the negative aspect of its shadowy power and (in Tolkien's terms) to thwart Sauron is to return the Ring to whence it came. It must be consumed by the fire that made it.

As Tolkien relates the events, Frodo has to be helped by Sam even to get close to the Cracks of Doom, despite his erstwhile resolve. Then, at the last instant, he balks at throwing the Ring away ... as up pops Gollum, the personification of Frodo's own Shadow. Gollum tries to seize the Ring for himself before it ceases to exist. As Gollum and Frodo struggle, Frodo puts the Ring on his finger so as to disappear from view. Gollum proceeds to bite Frodo's finger off, and in so doing Gollum loses his balance and falls into the fire along with the Ring he has so haplessly claimed.

Symbolically, what has happened is that Frodo's Shadow, personified as Gollum, has perished along with the Ring symbolizing, potentially, the health-bringing, psyche-balancing, redeeming aspect of his own interior Self. In Jungian Self-realization, the Shadow is revealed to the ego and brought into balance with the other forces of the psyche; it is not destroyed or made to vanish. Accordingly, with Gollum gone, gone too is any hope for Frodo's own personal Self-realization.

This is why Frodo must depart for the Western Isles at the end of Lord of the Rings, along with Gandalf and the superannuated Elven folk. He must leave his beloved Shire behind. His sacrifice has made it possible for Middle-earth as a whole to find the peace and balance of Self-realization, under Aragorn's rule in the Fourth Age. Ironically, though, Frodo, though he is Middle-earth and the Shire's savior figure, must as a result of his heroism forever forego all hope of personal individuation.


We can respond to Tolkien's fantasy tales in Lord of the Rings and his other books as ripping good yarns, nothing else. We don't have to believe in the actual existence of Middle-earth, Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, wizards, magical incantations associated with rings, or any of the other counterfactual paraphernalia of the stories.

Yet Tolkien has charmed three-generations-and-counting with his renderings of what Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious. I do not count myself among the most susceptible, by any means. I never read or idolized Tolkien in my youth, the way some of my contemporaries did. I remember sitting in a theater in late 2001, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, watching The Fellowship of the Ring. Next to me — our late-arriving group had had to split up into individual seats, owing to the vast popularity of the film — was a young woman, a stranger. She treated the scene where a dying Boromir admits that Aragorn, whose leadership he has resisted, is "My Captain, my King" as a three-hankie affair. In Jungian terms that I know now but didn't then, her archetypes were being "constellated." Translation: her buttons were being pushed, bigtime.

Jung mapped the deep parts of the soul where the buttons are situated. These are the very parts of the soul that Tolkien mined for his Ring trilogy and other Middle-earth tales. It's as simple as that.