The Long Defeat
The best efforts of Tolkien's elves are mostly doomed to failure. It's a struggle more hopeful than it sounds.
I am a person who lives with defeat. It is not about me, it is about the things I have written about - those have been smashed over many times. Should we shut up because nothing is happening? No. We have to keep doing what we do.
- Arundhati Roy
Rise up; the realm of love renews
The battle it was born to lose
- Geoffrey Hill
The Long Defeat is a phrase that appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of The Lord of the Rings. When a depleted and tired Fellowship arrive in the elven kingdom of Lothlórien, they meet the Lady Galadriel. Galadriel is one of the elves who saw the light from the Two Trees before the sun or moon were made. This is an incredibly important distinction among the elves, and also makes Galadriel one of the oldest people left in Middle-earth.
Introducing her husband, Galadriel says that;
“together, through ages of the world, we have fought the long defeat.”
The Long Defeat encompasses the struggle of the elves in Middle-earth. Although we regard that fictional or secondary world as enchanted, elves of Galadriel’s age have watched it fade through many generations. They know that the struggle against decay and death is not one that it is ultimately possible for them to win.
They struggle anyway, and Galadriel’s home of Lothlórien represents one of the last enclaves of beauty that calls to mind the memory of the unspoilt beauty of the Blessed Realm itself. The Long Defeat of the elves gives them a distinctly melancholic perspective on the world that Lord Elrond communicates, when he claims to ‘have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.’
In Letter 195, Tolkien diagnoses this perspective as both Christian and distinctly Roman Catholic. The Long Defeat ultimately animates the heart of The Lord of the Rings. Knowing that using the Ring to defeat Sauron will result in themselves becoming corrupted reflections of the Dark Lord, the forces of good set out on an inverted quest; not to find something, but to lose it. Michael N. Stanton describes it as a story in which ‘Evil struggles to gain power; Good to relinquish it’.
In the BBC’s 2003 ‘Big Read’ poll, the UK voted The Lord of the Rings its ‘best-loved book’. I wish we acted like it. Endurance, long-suffering and the relinquishing of power are not popular contemporary virtues.
In sharp contrast to Tolkien’s witness, the metric for participation in anything these days tends to be success. Most activism encourages participation with the assurance that you as an individual can make a difference. Whether recycling your waste or driving or flying less is deemed really necessary or not is based on whether that small action will effectively slow climate breakdown or not, rather than whether it is more objectively a good thing to do.
Christianity in the West also expresses itself very differently to Tolkien’s melancholic strain of Roman Catholicism. Evangelical Protestantism markets an extremely positivist brand of religion which shares a great deal with self-help culture, encouraging you to sign up and claim the victory of Christ in every aspect of your own life, from your friendships to your physical health to your search for meaningful work.
Many of the Church’s more powerful and vocal limbs eagerly anticipate the assured revival of Christianity as an accepted and dominant force in national life before the imminent return of Christ. Catholic and Orthodox spheres aren’t exempt in this respect either, and there you can easily find chronically online trad bros calling for the conquest of the Holy Land or Constantinople by force of arms.
There are similarities here to what the cornered philosopher Walter Benjamin recognised in the historical materialism of his own time. Benjamin lamented a philosophy fixated on winning a game of chess, convinced that the eventual triumph of the masses was scientifically assured.
By way of contrast, the greatest and most orthodox expression of Christianity, both historically and amongst the global majority today is martyrdom.
In martyrdom we witness the image of our God, who we believe took human form and became obedient to death; ‘even death on a cross’. It is the concrete expression of the belief that there are some things worse than dying, and a denial that death itself represents an ultimate or final defeat.
One of the finest artistic meditations on martyrdom can be found in Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life, which depicts the life and witness of St Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska during the Second World War.
At every turn, Franz is told by his fellow Austrian villagers, his religious leaders and his captors that his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler is meaningless for the reason that it will achieve nothing.
So much of the way we attribute value in the modern world is based on this kind of utilitarian outlook. Will this input achieve the desired outcome? Will I win the game of chess? To borrow the dialectic of artist David Jones, martyrdom is the opposite of this - it is gratuitous.
Franz’s act of conscience is gratuitous in the extreme. It isolates his family from his village, creates tension between his wife and mother, condemns his children to grow up without a father and disinherits them from his military pension. His name is left off the St Radegund war memorial. His refusal to take the oath doesn’t shorten the war, change the Nazis’ philosophy or prevent the Holocaust. His accusers were right. On strictly material terms, Franz Jägerstätter loses.
And yet, like Malick, we cannot help ourselves in recognising something more than material in Franz’s life; an image or a sign worth beholding.
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot’s words from Middlemarch serve as a coda to the film and a lens for the saint’s life. It is perhaps history’s unhistoric acts, its failures and defeats that contribute to the good of the world as much as the more occasional triumphs of good over evil.
Whether the knowledge of this was of comfort to Jägerstätter in prison is difficult to say. Fighting a Long Defeat is hard and often lonely work.
GK Chesterton explores this precarity in the first chapter of The Ballad of the White Horse. A harried and defeated King Alfred whose ‘failure fills the land’ asks of the Mother of God whether he will finally be successful in his war against the Danes.
Like the Fellowship of the Ring gathered at Elrond’s council or in the realm of Galadriel, Alfred finds that;
Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
To no good man is told.
Alfred defeats Guthrum, but even in this victory foresees a return of nihilistic paganism at some point in the future. (There was some foresight on Chesterton’s part here. The publication of the Ballad in 1911 immediately preceded the First World War, the emergence of Nazism as a political philosophy and the development of the atomic bomb.)
It would be a mistake to believe that because I spend a lot of time thinking about the Long Defeat I am much good at fighting it. Practically, one of the best pictures of the Long Defeat is weeding, one that Chesterton makes reference to in The Ballad of the White Horse. I hate weeding, mostly because you are never finished doing it. The weeds always win.
In a similar sense bringing children into the world is emblematic of the Long Defeat. They will probably be the cause of more harm than good. They will eventually die and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. Nevertheless, their existence, the enormous amount of labour required in raising and nurturing them and the terrible possibility of outliving them is somehow worth it. This wager seems an increasingly radical one; that modern folk are understandably less inclined to risk making.
I don’t really understand how to neatly wrap up thoughts on the Long Defeat. Instead, here is another, more recent example of seeing it fought well.The 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary feature was given to No Other Land, a film which follows Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, as he documents and resists the forced displacement of his people from Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the occupied West Bank.
During the film, Basel befriends Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist about his age. They form an unlikely friendship despite the enormous differences in their lived experience. Halfway through the film, the two are sitting in Basel’s car. Yuval is excited because an article he has written about the violent displacements in Masafer Yatta has been viewed thousands of times.
Basel warns Yuval that he needs to understand that to practice solidarity with his people, Yuval must accept that he is a ‘loser’. His article won’t change anything. Basel tells Yuval not to expect things to change quickly, and advises him to be patient.
Basel recognises from experience and from the line of intergenerational activists whose work he has inherited that there is an importance to fighting this fight without the assurance, belief or even the hope that it will end in victory.
There is something essential, Basel urges, in acknowledging that their efforts will likely end in failure. In doing so, they recognise that the purpose of their struggle isn’t the certainty of success.
No Other Land is itself a wonderful image of this; a remarkable, miraculous film that against the odds exists in a world in which it feels like it shouldn’t have been allowed to. It hasn’t tipped the scales in favour of Basel or his people. They made the film anyway.
I would like my work to participate in something of the same tradition or spirit. I want it to be for the growing good of the world. Little books and prints are unlikely to achieve this in any material, utilitarian way. I want to make them anyway.
This is good medicine for us, my friend. I like how this gratuity of the long defeat seems to only really emerge in the form of story- lived and or sung- mostly hidden. The idea of the nobody. I think too of Nicholas Black Elk, as presented in Neidhardt’s Black Elk Speaks- an example of the long defeat the First Nations are facing here in the US.