Channels, Spring 2019

Channels • 2019 • Volume 3 • Number 2 Page 17 The Long Defeat—Glimpses of Final Victory: The Years of the Locust Evan Lanning History and Government “. . . together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat . . . . For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be. But this I will say to you: your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring “In the bitter and increasingly exacting conflict which lies before us we are resolved to keep nothing back, and not to be outstripped by any in service to the common cause. Let the great cities of Warsaw, of Prague, of Vienna, banish despair even in the midst of their agony. Their liberation is sure. The day will come when the joybells will ring again throughout Europe, and when victorious nations, masters not only of their foes, but of themselves, will plan and build in justice, in tradition, and in freedom, a house of many mansions where there will be room for all.” “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” —Winston S. Churchill “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet, notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War Introduction ohn Ronald Reuel (J.R.R.) Tolkien, a veteran of the First World War and a prolific author of fantasy, once wrote of the “long defeat”, a summation of his philosophy of history. His notions of good and evil, right and wrong, and fighting for dignity, truth, and justice, even if all seemed hopeless – indeed, fighting in spite of the assured outcome – surface many times throughout his beloved epic The Lord of the Rings. This lofty and honorable ideal is clearly identified in the words of Galadriel, the immortal and wise Elf and Lady of Light over Lothlórien. Referring to her marriage with Celeborn, she says, “He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted; for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the J