One of the ideas of JRR Tolkien that seems to have influence far beyond the scope of his works, is that of the Northern idea of courage without hope. "Northern", especially in terms of the Norse culture of Scandinavia (including Iceland), and also the broader Germanic culture, including Anglo-Saxon England.
It seems that the Northern style of paganism was one without ultimate hope, because only the greatest heroes could look forward to a continuation of martial life beyond death; but (in the Scandinavian religion) even these, and the gods themselves, were destined to be defeated and annihilated in the final battle of Ragnarok.
The quality that Tolkien, and others, admire about Northern courage, is that such Men would continue to strive and to fight, despite that they accepted the certainty of defeat.
This kind of bleak, stoic, attitude of courage without hope, is one that is often advocated as suitable for modern Men; since our culture is also one without ultimate hope.
Indeed moderns are without even the proximate possibility of a temporary persistence of life beyond death; as warriors training for that final, doomed-to-fail, battle.
Something similar might be asserted for the Hebrews of the Old Testament, who seem to have believed themselves all to be destined to a (literally) nightmarish post-mortal existence as demented ghosts in Sheol; yet who were apparently capable of extreme fortitude and striving.
But I regard the conceptualization of courage without hope to be a modern, anachronistic, and fundamentally untrue characterization of the attitude of ancient Men. I regard the conceptualization as flawed by failing to take into account that ancient Men were much more groupish in their consciousness, much less individual.
Ancient Men were not alienated, did not experience themselves as cut-off from other people, the natural world, and the world of spirits and gods.
On the contrary, they seem to have experienced life as spontaneously immersed in the consciousness of these other Beings. Their awareness, and their actual perceptions, included other Men, animals, plants, spirits and gods - and the dead were, at times, directly experienced as being present and active.
My understanding is that this spontaneously immersive and diffusely-aware consciousness, this connectedness to other including spirits and the dead, meant that ancient Men could not be without hope in the way that modern Men routinely are.
We Moderns are spontaneously alienated from "the world" from our adolescence; and we are kept in this state of genuine hope-less-ness through adult life by both implicit and explicit metaphysical assumptions of our culture.
We Moderns are not just alone in a dead universe, we mostly believe that our consciousness is a mere by-product of brain functioning; we are taught that the only communication is via signals, symbols, words and images; all of which are distorted, manipulative, and prone to misinterpretation -- so we can rely on nothing to be true.
We are even taught that our inner subjectivity, our stream of thinking, is cut-off from our own minds and bodies; as well as isolated from every-body and every-thing else -- so our self-awareness and -experience is trapped and helpless, a mere prisoner inside the brain-box.
Our culture both asserts, and has these assumptions built-into public discourse - mass media, official communications, laws, rules and regulations; that the universe happened without overall purpose or meaning, that the material is the only reality, that there are no gods or spirits; and that human life is a merely contingent product of prior material causes.
We are said to be no more than a "random" combination of genes, developing in an accidental environment, and bounded by a death which entails complete destruction of body and mind.
Thus modern Man is hope-less, disconnected, and alone in an utterly futile universe that lacks purpose and where values are merely temporary expedients; conventions made-up to motivate people duing their brief existences and to make society possible.
Therefore, ancient Men were never hope-less in the way that is normal for modern Man. Their courage was, indeed, rooted in a spontaneous, unconscious and inevitable sense of connectedness to a purposive and meaningful reality - innate assumptions that were far more powerful than even the most nihilistic religious conceptualizations.
In modern Men, as we see all around us; hopelessness leads inexorably to cowardice; because there is no reason at all for Men to be courageous in the nihilistic world of Western Culture.
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