Hell in Earth

"I look for you in heathered moor, the desert and the ocean floor

How low does one heart go?

Looking for your fingerprints I find them in coincidence

And make my faith to grow"

 

Suzanne Vega - Penitent

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"But above this gate, and behind it even to the mountains, he piled the thunderous towers of Thangorodrim; and these were made of the ash and slag of his subterranean furnaces, and the vast refuse of his tunnelings. Before the gates of Angband filth and desolation spread southward for many miles. There lay the wide plain of Bladorion. But after the coming of the sun rich grass grew there, and while Angband was besieged and its gates shut, there were green things even among the pits and broken rocks before the doors of hell."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - Quenta Silmarillion (1938?-39?)

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"Thus it can be said that in 'The Silmarillion' there is no 'religion', because the Divine is present and has not been 'displaced'; but with the physical removal of the Divine from the World Made Round a religion arose (as it had arisen in Numenor under the teachings of Thu [a.k.a. Sauron] concerning Morgoth, the banished and absent God), and the dead were despatched, for religious reasons, in burial ships on the shores of the Great Sea."

 

Christopher Tolkien - 1987 commentary on his father's first draft of The Fall of Numenor (1936?-37?)

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Continuing my perusal of The History of Middle-Earth on and off this past year, I'm nearing the focus shift from First Age plots (Beren and Luthien, Turin Turambar, etc.) to The Lord of the Rings, after the success of which the author grew reticent to ever publish his earlier stories for fear they would kill the looming sense of mystery, trivialize the glorious past defining Frodo&co.'s world.

 

Leafing through these old drafts though made me realize one reason the Land of Murder and its precursor, Hang-banned, still impress the reader with their presence more than similar realms of eee-veeeel fantasied by Tolkien's copycats. They have a presence. Important plot point: you can backpack to Mount Doom!

To illustrate that, let's utilize one of the aforementioned copycats. Actually, since Wrath of the Righteous is an adaptation of Pathfinder, itself a spin-off of D&D, itself largely inspired by Tolkien(tm), this would be a copycatcubed but let's not wrangle over scientific jargon here.

While Wrath's writing and atmosphere don't exactly overflow with talent or inspiration, I do like the Worldwound itself (presumably described in detail by the tabletop campaign setting) for its sheer scale. Taking up half the playable area, a Hell On Earth the size of a country really conveys that overwhelming menace which a simple magic portal cannot, no matter how many skulls and green flames you slap on it.

And, loathe as I am to admit any debt to the company which more than any other has ruined online games (and a fair proportion of offline ones by extension) Blizzard Entertainment in its early years also grasped this space-filling impact of physical presence. Albeit positioning its labyrinthine highway to Hell vertically, the first Diablo game never failed to remind you you're pacing atop the legions of the damned even among the peaceful, melancholy grisaille of Tristram.

 

Still, demonslaying yarns like this ultimately place a magic portal at the bottom of the maze, at the center of the rifts and that boils the whole story down to the logical imperative of closing the gateway of evilosity, after which, no matter how powerful the devils are they'll be powerless to reach our world. Makes for a nice climax, but at the expense of sustained tension. Which brings us back to Tolkien.

 

In early drafts Angband (the second fortress of Sauron's old boss Melkor/Morgoth, for the unsilmarillionitiated) was not merely a euphemistic "hell of iron" in some obscure Sindarin translation but referred to literally as Hell in the main body of the text. Just as Melko himself read in early drafts like a direct copy of Milton's brooding, decadently noble prince of darkness, Angband simply took fifteen years longer to lose its literal interpretation as hell... but not its significance as such. And it was located in Middle-Earth, vaguely north-west of the Shire's future location. Forget Mordor; you could backpack to literal hell. (And, presumably, back again.)

I find two aspects of this interesting.

1) What if the limits of evil were geographic?

Remove the designation of super-supernatural, flatten the multiverse back down to a universe, and position infernal might contiguously (albeit superlatively) with more mundane magic. You might say that takes some of the excitement out of it, but it's basically the world in which religious believers already live 24/7, imagining they've witnessed a miracle every time their local priest does a thumb trick or somesuch. And, while I'll gladly condemn their abject stupidity, one certainly can't fault the faithful's enthusiasm. Would Hell itself be less or more impressive if it were situated in our own world istead of another dimension?

What if Hell were in Chicago... say, West of Ashland along the Eisenhower maybe?

As the elvish saga goes, they crossed the Helcaraxe from the garden-of-probably-Eden, kicked Morgoth's ass and locked him in his stronghold. For four hundred years. For four centuries the ersatz devil lurked just beyond the gates of Angband. What if the "gates of hell" were neither hyperbole nor allegory but a literal set of doors you drive past on your way to work, and The Devil could invade as easily as unlocking his deadbolt? You really would need eternal vigilance. Cultures living near the perimeter where grass wilts from mere proximity to malice would by necessity be shaped by their vigil, markedly different from more peaceful lands. They would get less opportunity, less room to develop naturally.

 

To a small extent you do encounter situations like this in fantasy stories, but they're rarely taken to their logical conclusions. Would there be a worldwide, pan-species draft for wardens of evil? (See: Dragon Age: Origins and the Wardens) Or would farther cultures simply take advantage of nearer ones' lack of alternatives, like Western Europe letting the Eastern half suffer every Asiatic invasion? (See: DA:O and the dwarves (come to think of it, that game did pretty good on this topic)) And, if the devil is truly immortal and would simply escape and set up shop somewhere else if defeated, would the guardian cultures put much effort into beating back the armies of evil or focus merely on containment? How would they handle contamination? Would customs agents wave evil-detecting wands at every port town to detect orcish contraband? Would they need to import protective amulets? And if they were getting subsidized by the entire rest of the world, would they never want the siege to end, in order to maintain their revenue stream?

Minas Tirith's militarism was defined by this sort of never-ending struggle: a city of captains and guards, passworded gates, hilltop beacons, concentric defensibility all hammered home its plot relevance as bastion against the darkness. The elvish enclaves of the first age equally so, as each seems defined by natural defenses or concealment be it caves, encircling mountains or impenetrable forests plus confounding enchantment. But Tolkien's copycats too often rattle off grandiose locations (e.g. the Worldwound) then forget to think through the sociological ramifications implied, settling for generic medievalism and towns which, aside from maybe a garden fence, seem to have put no more thought into defending against THE EMBODIMENTS OF CHAOTIC EVIL SET LOOSE UPON THE WORLD than they would against a dozen half-starved kobolds.

2) Would the devil then still be a religious figure?

This has been a constant point of contention in RPG lore at least since I started looking into the genre from around Y2K, and I still remember the quizzical tilt of my head when I found myself walking up to Vivec himself to ask him what it's like being a god. Faith, cult, religion would not carry the same meaning in a universe of verifiable supernatural beings, where you can sit down for a mug of ale with Thor at your local tavern. Atheism would be an untenable viewpoint in such a world (and for how ridiculous it sounds, I refer you to your companion Is0bel's comments in Shadowrun: Hong Kong) but neither would unshakeable blind belief be required except for absent gods. As his son so wryly noted, it's a bit ironic for J.R.R. Tolkien the practicing Christian to have cobbled together a world in which, for much of history, the only religion in the usual sense of the word was Numenor's Satanism. (Or maybe it was a carefully weighed reinterpretation of antediluvian decadence; either way, the distinction stands.)

Faith is necessary to prop up the unprovable, misinterpreted and illusory. A congregation praying at a stained-glass window depicting an angel exhibits faith, but if the same angel were to burst through that window, it would remove the need for belief. So how can you reconcile both religious faith and extant, pinchable deities in the same universe?

Make the gods lying and/or incompetent bastards, elusive to the point of frustration or simply misinterpreted by their believers.

If their existence is not in question their deeds and influence (and possibly even identity) must be. The problem with most of these fantasy worlds is the absolute certainty with which lore books declare deity X created relic Y in year Z. Let there be ambivalence! Let there be confusion! Torment: Tides of Numenera actually provides many fine examples, as the hapless inhabitants of a world suffused with Clarkian sufficiently advanced technology are constantly founding one cargo cult after another around heroes, monsters or places, disagreeing not on the observable existence of these but on their respective sway upon reality. If you seal an evil in a can, people will worship the can, but a reliable, certain god would rob them of the chance to supply their own certainty. Faith, as an un undisprovable declaration of self-importance by proxy, cannot survive independent verification.

 

For a brilliant example of the greater fantasy world dramatic potential of unverifiable divine intervention, see Durance's dilemma in Pillars of Eternity 1 (the one worth playing.)