Giscard and his fellowship : a dwarf's eye view of our quest for a constitutional treaty

Abstract

The justification of the reference to Tolkien in the title of my talk is not just acknowledgement of a friendship from which I benefited a lot fifty years ago at Oxford; it is also that Tolkien's imaginary history has quite a few prophetic touches. Middle-Earth is the actual name by which Anglo-Saxons called Continental Europe. The Anglo-Saxons had devised the name from the term used to denote the dwelling-place of mortals as opposed to gods. Among the symptoms of the mortality of the Middle-Earthians or Continental Europeans there were, of course their never ending clannish quarrels; but there were also such facts as that the Kingdom of Gondor had been governed for a thousand years by bureaucrats; indeed Tolkien's story is set in motion when the need begins to be urgently felt for an authentic spiritual leader able to provide another style of governance.