Where are all the guns?
Meditation on a meme
Not long ago, a friend shared this meme on Facebook:
“Haha!” Everyone said. Meanwhile, this got me thinking: where are all the guns in Tolkien? And where are the guns in fantasy more broadly?
A lot of you are going to say that Tolkien based his work on medieval Europe, to which I’d have several replies, choose your favorite:
- Sauron, rings of power, hobbits
- It’s actually not all medieval Europe, Middle Earth is a patchwork of historical periods and influences
- There were guns in medieval Europe, and there were absolutely guns in medieval China, which medieval Europeans would have known about, never mind people from Tolkien’s period
My feeling is that there are no guns in the arsenals of Middle Earth because Tolkien just didn’t like guns. As one friend pointed out, there are great reasons for this. Guns often suck. As a veteran of World War I, Tolkien had possibly seen firsthand the horrors that guns could perform in modern war. But Middle Earth is not a pacifist realm. Aragorn’s sword gets a lot of attention, and as anyone who’s read the books knows, I am absolutely not speaking euphemistically. Several key moments in the story turn on battles lost or won, during which we’re supposed to cheer for a particular side. The heroes of the fellowship offer Frodo their weapons, in a gesture of symbolic and significant fealty. (From the other side, one could argue that Tolkien’s focus on a non-martial and unlikely hero, Frodo, is intended to contradict norms around masculine power. This is also true, but does it undermine my point? Are Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli still presented as heroes? I think so. Not necessarily “heroes” as in “good guys” but heroes in an archetypal way) Bows, arrows and swords are not a cleaner way to die; just a more distant one, chronologically.
Writing when he did, Tolkien (and later generations of Western fantasy writers) was also influenced by a category of notions I think of as “chivalric ideals.” (The concept of chivalric romance is a defined one in literature, and it’s closely linked with the evolution of mythology and Western fantasy; I remember reading an essay by David Eddings years ago that essentially made this point from an author’s perspective.) In these chivalric stories, familiar to all of us from places like Arthurian legend, heroic knights-errant roam the countryside, rescuing damsels and dueling villains.
The reality, of course, is that these knights were less heroic protectors and more single-man marauding armies, licensed to do whatever they wanted because they carried big swords and reinforced feudal authority. Even the stories of the time don’t gild the lily: there’s an enormous amount of rape and random violence in these tales. A lot of it is directed against women, but they’re by no means the only target. I remember reading Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady in school (a story told in Chaucer, but potentially predating that). In this tale, a knight rapes a woman. He’s told he will be forgiven, but only if he can answer a question: what do women most desire? He answers the challenge and ends up married to a beautiful lady. I remember when we read this in high school English class. My English teacher, perhaps in despair that none of her students had yet caught on, asked: “Don’t any of you think it’s weird that he rapes a woman and gets everything he wanted?”
Huh. Now that you mention it.
The stories of King Arthur’s court were famously burnished and mythologized in a very specific way in medieval England: reinforcing norms of whiteness, Christianity and patriarchy. The chivalric idea of the hero, then, is closely related to a feudal ideal of who gets to hold authority. What does any of this have to do with guns? If guns are distasteful, then why are swords less so? Warrior-price Legolas draws on a dangerous notion: that there are some forms of violence that are somehow associated with nobility. That social status excuses and even necessarily structures violence in society.
This is an idea that recurs in fantasy literature to the modern day. Recently, I read two fantasy novels that expressed this trope in interesting ways. Both are set in universes in which guns exist alongside other forms of weaponry. Both are far-future post-apocalyptic scenarios in which guns appear as dangerous historical artifacts, left over from a prior period of enormous destruction. In these books, guns are synonymous with wanton mayhem. I’m referring, of course, to the Locked Tomb trilogy and the Markswoman duology. I enjoyed both of these series, and both brought valuable diversity to the field. They treated guns in remarkably similar ways. They also did the same with swords.
In the Locked Tomb trilogy, beloved of many readers, Gideon the Ninth (narrator of book one) and Harrow the Ninth (narrator of book two) wield swords. Gideon, in fact, bears the title “cavalier,” a word that arises out of the Latin for “horseman.” Gideon’s role is to serve and protect the heir of the Ninth House, a symbolic title that nonetheless is pinned to a martial reality. She’s gotta be good with a rapier. She fights duels on behalf of her House. Meanwhile, in book two, Harrow is harried by a dream-villain who wields an endless array of guns. When one misfires, she tosses it over her shoulder and pulls another. For much of the story, this villain remains faceless and nameless, a terror that prowls in the dark. She’s finally defeated when one of the characters summons — very literally — the ghost of the greatest swordsman in history to battle her. “Why am I speaking in meter?” the ghost asks, bewildered, in one of the novel’s best lines. I think we all know why he’s speaking in meter, and also why he’s the savior. Knights, is why.
In Markswoman, the guns have achieved sentience (to be fair, so have the swords, sorta). Guns call to potential wielders, whispering mental songs of seductive urgency. The heroine is a markswoman, an elite assassin who takes down her enemies using a blade forged from telepathic metal (the aforementioned sword). In her final battle, she confronts a villain who has succumbed to the call of the guns so thoroughly that they’ve fused to his arms and taken over his mind. Man and material, merged inseparably. And yet, as her quest to banish guns from her world unfolds, I asked in my review of that book what made guns evil, and swords good? To suggest that it’s because they kill differently is to perpetrate a dangerous fallacy. They don’t. Before the invention of guns, there were only swords and other weapons. And people still killed each other indiscriminately and at scale.
To suggest that it’s because their wielders behave differently starts to address the question, but doesn’t entirely. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are on the right side because Tolkien decided they are. (In a world rife with retellings, I don’t think anyone but the most intrepid fanfiction author has attempted to redo the Lord of the Rings from the perspective of Sauron’s blazing eyeball, so successfully did Tolkien dehumanize his enemy.) If there had never been knights, we would not accept these heroic characters so blithely. You’ll say, but Anika, no one has guns in the Lord of the Rings, not even the bad guys. Yes, this is true, but then why does Aragorn’s sword get its own kingly backstory? The sword is doing work in this story, my friends. It is telling us stuff without telling us stuff directly.
In closing, I’ll say this: I’m not arguing that violence is bad; because no one of sense can really disagree. What I am saying, however, is that weapons perform specific symbolic functions in literature, and they perform especially specific symbolic functions in the fantasy genre particularly. It is worth understanding and examining what weapons signal, and why, and what ideals and archetypes are involved in that signaling.
