Becca Tarnas | Journey To The Imaginal Realm: Archetypes In The Lord Of The Rings
Becca Tarnas is the author of Journey To The Imaginal Realm: A Reader's Guide To J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a PhD scholar of philosophy and religion, Becca guides us through the deep symbolic archive and wisdom of Tolkien's great works. In this episode we explore the source of human imagination, the Atlantis mystery in Middle-Earth, the parallels between Carl Jung and Tolkien, and the mechanism by which great stories are able to immerse us in an enchanted other-world.
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In this episode
Core themes
Sacred Numbers and the One Ring
Chance opens on the numbers packed into the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday and Frodo's coming of age at 33, and Becca argues nothing in Tolkien is accidental. Drawing on the Pythagorean lineage of Western archetypal astrology, she treats number as qualitative, tracing the three, seven, nine and one of the ring poem into the seven stars, seven stones, white tree and nine ships of Númenor. She reads the One Ring as a perverse inversion of sacred unity that tries to homogenize difference, while Chance contrasts it with the hero who individuates into a true one.
Atlantis and Tolkien's Great Wave Dream
Becca recounts the recurring dream Tolkien described from around age seven, a great wave drowning the land, which he later called his Atlantis haunting. She follows it through The Lost Road, the time travel story he began after a pact with C.S. Lewis, and The Notion Club Papers, where she says a storm foretold for 1987 was later matched by Christopher Tolkien to England's great storm that year. The dream finally settled into the drowning of Númenor behind Aragorn's lineage and Faramir's dream, and Chance takes the episode as a sign, in his view, that imagination can glimpse past and future.
Jung, Tolkien and Their Two Red Books
Becca's dissertation traces parallels between Carl Jung's Red Book, begun in 1913, and the legendarium Tolkien started in the same years, framed in his fiction as the Red Book of Westmarch, even though the two men never met. She points out that Jung wrote his Seven Sermons to the Dead in 1916, three years before Tolkien's first cosmogony. For her, synchronicities between the two that she says outside influence cannot explain opened the idea that imagination gives access to a real imaginal realm, neither physical nor made up but participatory, an idea she hears in Sufism, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.
Melkor's Discord and the Roots of Evil
Becca retells the Ainulindalë, where Ilúvatar gives the Ainur a theme to adorn in song, Melkor weaves in his own discordant theme, and a third, sorrowful theme folds that discord into the whole before the music becomes a vision of the world. In the myth, water still carries that first music, which is why, she suggests, the sea calls to us. She reads Melkor's secret shame and anger as the seed of Morgoth and Sauron, while Chance frames the secret fire as awareness itself and argues evil only twists what already exists, a scavenger rather than a source.
Imagination as Discovery, Not Invention
Working from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Becca separates the primary imagination, the divine creativity behind all perception, from the secondary imagination of the human artist and from mere fancy. Tolkien's essay On Fairy-Stories reframes this as sub-creation: images arise, art shapes them, and fantasy adds strangeness and wonder. She describes Tolkien less as a god of Middle-earth than a witness and translator, a devout Catholic who felt creative work carried creation forward. Chance adds that Ilúvatar simply sings what he sees, and Becca closes on art as surrender, gestated like a child rather than controlled, with enchantment lying beyond the creator.
Quotes
“The imagination is actually something that gives us access to a real place, the imaginal realm, that is not physical, it is not simply abstract, it is most definitely not made up.”
“Like all universal principles in our cosmos, the truth seems to be founded on paradox.”
“A fantasy for Tolkien isn't something that's made up. It's something that has organically emerged through one and actually been discovered, and then shaped and honed by the artist.”
“The reason we feel that longing at the edge of the sea, and that calling for the sea, is because we're remembering creation when we hear it.”
“The only thing that makes the shadow or the darkness frightening or threatening is that we don't know what it is.”
“Nothing in Tolkien's accidental. He has revised and edited and so carefully shaped the material coming through him.”
“It's not up to us to slay the dragon or defeat the Dark Lord. It's up to us to maintain the small acts of goodness and kindness and decency that we're capable of doing.”
“The enchantment lies in what is inherently beyond us. We as creators are actually along for the journey as much as everyone else in the story.”
Becca Tarnas is a PhD scholar of philosophy and religion and author of Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader's Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, exploring Tolkien's works through archetypal cosmology and depth psychology.
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