‘The Workhouse’ – Tolkien’s Purgatory

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Fordim

Quote:
I could not agree with you more, dm when you argue that “Leaf by Niggle” is about subcreation rather than salvation. The latter is too allegorical, and we all know how Tolkien felt about that, while the former is more applicable.


I am unconvinced that changing the subject matter to sub-creation makes the story any less allegorical. To my mind it is perhaps less high-flown, but no less allegorical. Could you elaborate?

Umm. . .I'm not sure. . .

I suppose what I meant was that I think the story is about subcreation (that is, artistic creation in general) rather than Christian notions of salvation (that is, a particular religion). So I am guilty, it seems, of a category shift as I praise how the story explores the idea of creativity (in general, not just Tolkien's specific forumlation of subcreation), and deny how it explores the idea of salvation (in particular as Catholic, not in general as a concept of grace).

*whew* That was a very difficult logical slip you caught me out on there Kuruharan.

That having been said, I don't think that it's entirely unjustified (what, me wrong?? ). Insofar as the story explores notions of salvation and grace I think that it would be hard not to see it doing so in terms that are clearly and specifically Christian (and thus, there's an allegorical trend here -- Workhouse=Purgatory, Niggle=Everyman, Tree=Grace, etc). If we look instead at the story as exploring the idea of art and creativity, I don't think there's this same emphasis on the particularity of any one belief system (and thus, there's a trend here more toward applicability as the reader is freer to connect things like the Workhouse and the Tree to ideas about art and imagination in the primary world).

I won't blame you at all if you don't find this a satisfactory response, for I'm not entirely sure that I do. But you asked for clarification and so I felt compelled to try and give some.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

I have found a direct reference to this topic in Tolkien's Letter 153! Here's what he says:

I tried to show allegorically how that [subcreation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my 'purgatorial' story Leaf by Niggle...

Three of the themes we've discussed on this thread show up in that quote - allegory (and he admits to it!! ); subcreation, which he names as a theme of the story; and purgatory, showing us that the Workhouse is indeed intended to represent that.


I've been paging through some of the secondary literature to find references as well. In Tolkien, Man and Myth, Joseph Pearce quotes Paul Kocher from Master of Middle Earth:

In the workhouse on the other side (an updated version of Dante's Purgatorio) Niggle is assigned hard labours aimed at correcting his sins and weaknesses.

Pearce goes on to say that

Priscilla Tolkien believed this story to be the 'most autobiographical' of all her father's work.
...Niggle's 'Tree' is clearly a euphemism for Tolkien's own sub-creation, principally The Lord of the Rings but also The Silmarillion on which he laboured all his life and which, like Niggle's Tree, would ultimately remain uncompleted at his death.

In his opinion, the story was written to put into practice what Tolkien preached in his essay 'On Fairy Stories'.


In J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, Tom Shippey also states that

...the 'Workhouse' ... is clearly purgatory.

and goes on to address the aspect of sub-creative Paradise. He calls it a 'eucatastrophe' that

Niggle's reward is to find his picture come true at the end of his journey, his 'sub-creation' accepted by the Creator...

There's more, but as it concerns the application to JRRT's real life, which we explored on the above-mentioned thread, I won't go into that any further here.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

I've been thinking about my personal reaction to this aspect of Tolkien's Leaf by Niggle. I agree with his ideas on a sub-creative Paradise, but since I'm not willing to accept the concept of purgatory, whether punitive or corrective, what sense does the story make to me? The allegory does not apply - but there's still applicability, of course!

I've decided that I can learn from applying the corrective element to my life before death. Becoming master of my time, finishing tasks, finding satisfaction in hard work/manual labor - all of these are things that would balance my life and correct lop-sided tendencies. Why wait until the afterlife to learn them?! Instead of rebelling against circumstances that force me to do unpleasant things, I could learn to accept them and see how they do me good. I could take time to think and listen for the voice of Grace in my life.

Tolkien's 'Workhouse' purgatory has a lot to teach me! Now, to stop just thinking about it and actually do it...

[mark12_30]

Becoming master of my time, finishing tasks, finding satisfaction in hard work/manual labor - all of these are things that would balance my life and correct lop-sided tendencies.

Oh, Esty. You would get practical on me? Master of my time! Finishing tasks!!

Grendel, and Grendel's mother, you say? To me they seem like The Final Dragon. (ref: Sam portion of my sig.)

What's the quote? Resolve will grow stronger as hope grows dimmer.... or something like that.

[davem]

I think this is one instance where alegory is vital for the story to work for people with a belief system different to the author's. Because its about a 'journey' to (or through) a 'workhouse', rather than being about death & Purgatory, the essential meaning of the story, the idea the author wants to communicate (which is the one Esty has pointed up, I think), is not dismissed by (or at the least 'unavailable' to) the non Catholic reader. Also, I can't help feeling that if the allegory had been more blatant then the sub-creation aspect of the story would have been lost.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

I’m continuing to ponder the applicability of Tolkien’s afterlife allegory. It seems especially significant to me that the purgatorial corrective is preceded by death. Now, literal death can’t be applicable to life, since it ends life, so it must apply to something else. The Biblical terminology of “dying to sin” comes to mind, or the psychological idea of letting something go. Don’t worry, I won’t begin publicly reflecting on what I need to give up in order to make way for corrective balance in my life, but I had an enlightening thought –

Tolkien meant (perhaps only sub-consciously) this story to be applicable to his life! It was not primarily an allegory for a literal purgatory, though that fit in with his Catholic doctrine. But he wrote Leaf by Niggle relatively early in his life, too early to make it merely an analogy to afterlife. Otherwise he would have been wishing to die in order to gain what he thought he needed, and I don’t think that was the case. He was feeling his lack in important areas of his life and wished for a corrective influence. For those who have read Tolkien’s biography, it isn’t difficult to recognize the similarities of his and Niggle’s character traits and what was needed to balance them.

So, what might he have felt he needed to give up, let go, die to, in order to gain the characteristics he felt were lacking? Niggle had to leave his unfinished painting, which was only completed (then as a reality) in the afterlife. Tolkien wrote this story during a creative crisis, being unable to finish The Lord of the Rings, Carpenter suggests in his biography. Did he think he would have to leave it uncompleted? Or did he realize that his perfectionism, like Niggle’s, stood in the way of completion?

I know that he didn’t appreciate amateur psychologists who try to analyze authors in order to compare them to their works, and that is not my intention. However, I feel that we can learn from understanding what he was trying to tell himself – and his readers – here.


PS - I read davem's post after writing mine - I think our thoughts are going in the same direction there.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Esty, Davem,

These are interesting ideas. I do have a question regarding this:

Tolkien wrote this story during a creative crisis, being unable to finish The Lord of the Rings, Carpenter suggests in his biography. Did he think he would have to leave it uncompleted? Or did he realize that his perfectionism, like Niggle’s, stood in the way of completion?

When we consider the "real life" events that led Tolkien to write Niggle, another question comes to mind. I wonder if he was thinking solely about the Lord of the Rings in terms of perfectionism and not finishing his work, or of the Legendarium as a whole. I know that sometimes when I am in a funk, I begin thinking about the immediate problem at hand (e.g., not finishing the particular project I am working on ---in JRRT's case LotR) and, before long, that problem becomes larger and larger in my head, until I am thinking about a much grander set of similar problems and my basic character "limitation" that has put me in this mess.

Is it possible that the author was ruminating on the entire Lgendarium in its unfinished state -- what he still regarded as the "true masterpiece" of his life -- or were his thoughts confined to the immediate book at hand? I could be reading events backwards into this: specifically, the fact that Tolkien would never finish the Silm, something he onviously could not have known. If he was only thinking of LotR, wasn't that a new way of viewing that work? Did he now realize on some level that it would be LotR which would be the central masteripiece he would leave rather than the older tales of the Legendarium?

Sorry about these vagaries, but does anyone have thoughts on this....