Tolkien and the Nordic Tragic Sense: A Dialogue with Peter Wessel Zapffe

That is how I came to read Tolkien beside another Norwegian: Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899 – 1990), philosopher, mountaineer, and solitary pessimist. Zapffe described human consciousness as an evolutionary catastrophe. “A species had been armed too heavily — its weapon was intelligence. It was a fatal thrust. Nature had overreached itself.” (The Last Messiah, 1933)¹  Later he adds: “Man has been given more consciousness than he can bear.” The tragedy, for him, lay in awareness itself.

To survive, Zapffe argued, we must suppress what we know. He identified four primary defenses: isolation (shutting out disturbing thoughts), anchoring (binding ourselves to belief or routine), distraction (filling life with activity), and sublimation (transforming despair into art or thought). None of them heal the wound; they only let us go on walking.

Zapffe’s work, written in Norwegian — Den sidste Messias (1933) and Om det tragiske (1941) — was not translated into English until decades after Tolkien’s death. Tolkien never read him. Yet reading them together feels natural. Both were shaped by northern weather; both saw consciousness as a wound; both turned to creation — one to philosophy, one to myth — to make that wound bearable.

The Weight of Awareness

Tolkien’s world is framed by faith. His mythology assumes purpose, divine music, and a final harmony beyond time. Yet within that frame he places beings who suffer not from sin but from knowing too much. Among all his creations, the Elves stand closest to Zapffe’s condition.

They are immortal within the life of the world; memory for them is permanent. They do not die — but they cannot forget.  In Morgoth’s Ring, Finrod tells the mortal woman Andreth that the Elves “do not die till the world dies, but neither do they escape from it.” (Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 1993)²  Their sorrow is geological: they experience time not as a stream but as an accumulation of loss. Every age of beauty becomes a weight they carry. Finrod’s words are almost Zapffean: awareness, stretched beyond its natural span, turns joy into tragedy.

The same condition defines Fëanor, whose brilliance becomes destruction. His need to capture the light of the Two Trees in the Silmarils is the act of a consciousness that cannot accept fading. Tolkien writes that he “was of fiery spirit and burned as a flame.” (The Silmarillion, 1977)³  He burns to the end, consumed by his own creative fire — a figure of over-evolved genius not unlike Zapffe’s tragic human.

The Doom of Mandos, which follows Fëanor’s rebellion, gives this tragedy its voice: “Tears unnumbered ye shall shed.” The Valar fence Valinor against the rebels, and no redemption follows. This is the tone that runs beneath The Silmarillion: the awareness that even the blessed can fall, and that knowledge and loss are inseparable.

Tolkien’s Framework: Sub-creation and the Long Defeat

In 1939 Tolkien defined what he called sub-creation — the act by which humans, made in the image of a Creator, echo divine creativity through art. “We make by the law in which we’re made,” he wrote (On Fairy-Stories, 1939)⁴. The creative impulse, for him, was participation, not pride. Yet sub-creation carries risk: to imitate God is to encounter limits, and refusing those limits — the will to possess one’s creation — leads to fall.

In that sense, Tolkien’s sub-creation parallels Zapffe’s sublimation. Both see art as the transformation of suffering. The difference lies in metaphysics. For Zapffe, sublimation is a defense — the noblest way to endure the absurd. For Tolkien, it is a sacrament: a glimpse of the goodness underlying a marred world.

They meet in what Tolkien called the long defeat. In 1956 he wrote: “Actually I am a Christian … so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains … glimpses of final victory.” (Letters, #195)⁵  Both men saw history as decline; both sought meaning in the act of endurance.

The Four Defenses in Arda

Testing Zapffe’s four defenses within Tolkien’s legendarium reveals how each fails or transforms.

Isolation. For mortals, isolation means turning away from thought; for immortals, it’s impossible. The Elves cannot forget. Even in Valinor, memory follows them. Their songs remember what their hearts would rather not. Isolation in Tolkien’s world is not salvation but damnation — the fate of Morgoth, who walls himself in pride until he knows nothing but his own will.

Anchoring. Zapffe saw anchoring in faith, custom, or ideology — structures that make life bearable. Tolkien fills The Silmarillion with failed anchors: the Elves in Valinor, Men in Númenor, Dwarves in craft, Hobbits in the Shire. Each anchor breaks. Valinor’s perfection breeds rebellion; Númenor’s religion curdles into tyranny; even the Shire must be scoured to recover its innocence. Anchoring is necessary but fragile. Only humility — accepting limits — can make it hold.

Distraction. For Zapffe, distraction is the daily defense — the busyness that fills the void. Tolkien’s mortals practice it instinctively: Hobbits with their meals and pipe-weed, Men with their kingdoms. But his Elves cannot be distracted. Their consciousness is too continuous. Even their art — the weaving of light and sound — is remembrance disguised as making.

Sublimation. Here Tolkien and Zapffe meet directly. Fëanor’s Silmarils, Lúthien’s song, Galadriel’s lament — all are acts of sublimation, transmuting sorrow into beauty. Tolkien himself, building Middle-earth from the ruins of language and war, performs the same alchemy. Zapffe’s artist sublimates to endure meaninglessness; Tolkien’s artist sublimates to reveal meaning. Both acknowledge the wound; one calls it incurable, the other redeemable.

The Northern Inheritance

Tolkien once wrote that the northern myths moved him most deeply — not because they were hopeful but because they faced despair without flinching. In Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936) he praised that “Northern courage”: the heroism of those who fight on “under the shadow of certain defeat.”⁶

Zapffe inherits that same courage. His philosophy, stripped of metaphysics, is the modern form of that defiance. To live lucidly in a meaningless universe is his heroism. Tolkien transforms the same impulse into faith: courage is noble not because it wins but because it witnesses.

Zapffe stands at the edge of the abyss and says, There is nothing. Tolkien stands beside him and says, There is something beyond, though we cannot see it. Both refuse easy consolation; both insist on clarity. The difference is whether the light beyond the sea is illusion or promise.

The Doom of Mandos and the Absence of Redemption

The tragedy of the Noldor — their rebellion, exile, and fading — shows Tolkien at his most severe. Mandos’s words are law; no prayer revokes them. Their exile mirrors humanity’s fall, yet it is not moral corruption that condemns them but awareness. They sought to hold light in their hands and could not bear its passing.

In The Silmarillion, redemption is hinted but never shown. The Valar’s forgiveness at the end of the First Age restores peace but not innocence. The long defeat continues. Zapffe would have recognised this: tragedy without reconciliation. Tolkien departs from him only in the smallest degree — the word almost. Even in Mandos there is pity.

The Fading of the Elves

The slow fading of the Elves is Tolkien’s most haunting image. As the Ages pass, they become shadows of themselves, their beauty too refined for a coarsening world. “The sea calls us home,” says Galadriel; the world no longer suits them. This is Zapffe’s Last Messiah transposed into myth: consciousness retreating from a world it can no longer bear.

Yet Tolkien transforms despair into dignity. Zapffe’s Messiah urges humanity to end its line and let consciousness die; Tolkien’s Elves depart to preserve grace. Their leaving makes room for Men — the race for whom mortality is a gift. “Death was the gift of Ilúvatar to Men,” says the Athrabeth; only through death can they escape the circles of the world. Zapffe would call that denial. Tolkien calls it grace.

Sub-creation as Theological Sublimation

If Zapffe’s sublimation is the artist’s stoic rebellion, Tolkien’s is participation in renewal. Yet in practice they look the same: both write to endure. Tolkien’s mythology is an act of sublimation — a vast structure built from sorrow, language, and loss. The death of his parents, the trenches of the Somme, the fading of languages, the erosion of meaning in modernity — all feed into his sub-creation.

He takes the unbearable knowledge of mortality and turns it into story. Zapffe sublimates to survive consciousness; Tolkien sublimates to sanctify it.

Faith Framing the Abyss

“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall,” Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman (Letters, #131)⁷. For him, the fall is the condition of narrative — the gap between what is and what should be. Zapffe would agree but strip away theology: consciousness itself is the fall.

Tolkien’s mythology admits the full gravity of that insight: exile, fading, the sense that beauty always costs more than it gives. Yet he keeps a door open. Hope, for Tolkien, is not optimism; it is endurance with meaning. In that, he stands shoulder to shoulder with Zapffe — facing the same darkness, but turning toward a different horizon.

A Northern Reflection

When I walk along the coast near Risør in the low winter sun, I sometimes think of them both: Tolkien, the Oxford philologist who dreamed of northern light, and Zapffe, the Norwegian mountaineer who stared straight into it. Each faced the same question: what does consciousness do when it outgrows comfort? Zapffe answered with philosophy; Tolkien answered with story.

In The Silmarillion, that answer becomes music — Eru’s theme, first harmonious, then marred, then woven into a greater harmony that includes the dissonance. Zapffe would call that illusion. Tolkien would call it truth glimpsed through sorrow.

Standing here, I don’t feel the need to choose. The light is cold and clear; the world is fading beautifully. To love it still — to sing while it fades — may be the most northern act of all.

Notes and Further Reading

1. Zapffe, Peter Wessel. Den sidste Messias (“The Last Messiah,” 1933); English trans. Gisle R. Tangenes, Philosophy Now 45 (2003).
2. Tolkien, J. R. R. Morgoth’s Ring, ed. C. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 315–322.
3. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Silmarillion, ed. C. Tolkien (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977).
4. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 54.
5. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. H. Carpenter (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), Letter #195.
6. Tolkien, J. R. R. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (Oxford, 1936), p. 20–21.
7. Tolkien, Letter #131 (to Milton Waldman, c. 1951).
8. Zapffe, Peter Wessel. Om det tragiske (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1941).
9. Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent State University Press, 1997).
10. Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982).