The Ring and the Cross

FROM THEIR MASTERY OF Middle-earth geography to their occasional fluency in Elvish, fans of the "Lord of the Rings" books tend to be a pretty knowledgeable bunch. But many would be surprised to learn that J.R.R. Tolkien's great medievalist epic had a co-author: God. According to Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher at Boston College, Tolkien was under the divine spell when he composed his sprawling trilogy. "Of course it's inspired; it's got His fingerprints all over it," wrote Kreeft in an article on Tolkien and evil that was reprinted this spring in a special all-Tolkien issue of the Catholic-leaning Chesterton Review.

Kreeft isn't alone in his analysis. Though Tolkien's epic romance remains a lodestar for fantasy geeks worldwide, it has also been adopted by myriad Christian commentators. Books on Tolkien's religiosity are everywhere. For evangelical Protestants, there's "Finding God in 'The Lord of the Rings,'" written by two authors affiliated with the organization Focus on the Family. For Catholics, there's Hillsdale College historian Bradley Birzer's "J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth,'' which was just released to coincide with Peter Jackson's latest "Lord of the Rings" film, "The Two Towers."

When "The Lord of the Rings," a novel in three volumes, was first published in 1954-55, the Anglican poet W.H. Auden called it a "masterpiece," and even suggested that Tolkien had "succeeded where Milton failed" when it came to the question of reconciling free will with the notion of a God whose power is absolute. The current emphasis on Tolkien's religiosity has its more immediate origins in Joseph Pearce's 1999 book "Tolkien: Man and Myth," which underscores Tolkien's deeply Catholic views. Since Pearce's writing -- and, of course, the news that the "Lord of the Rings" books were coming to movie theaters -- the theological ferment has been considerable. In April of 2000, Christianity Today ranked Tolkien's epic among the top 10 Christian books of the 20th century; the first slot went to C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity," which might not even have been written had Tolkien not helped Lewis to find God in 1931. More religiously-infused books on Tolkien are on the way, including Kreeft's "The Philosophy of Tolkien" and Baylor University theology and literature professor Ralph Wood's "The Gospel According to 'The Lord of the Rings.'"

The ring and the cross How J.R.R. Tolkien became a Christian writer

By Chris Mooney, 12/29/2002

ROM THEIR MASTERY OF Middle-earth geography to their occasional fluency in Elvish, fans of the "Lord of the Rings'' books tend to be a pretty knowledgeable bunch. But many would be surprised to learn that J.R.R. Tolkien's great medievalist epic had a co-author: God. According to Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher at Boston College, Tolkien was under the divine spell when he composed his sprawling trilogy. "Of course it's inspired; it's got His fingerprints all over it,'' wrote Kreeft in an article on Tolkien and evil that was reprinted this spring in a special all-Tolkien issue of the Catholic-leaning Chesterton Review.

When "The Lord of the Rings,'' a novel in three volumes, was first published in 1954-55, the Anglican poet W.H. Auden called it a "masterpiece,'' and even suggested that Tolkien had "succeeded where Milton failed'' when it came to the question of reconciling free will with the notion of a God whose power is absolute. The current emphasis on Tolkien's religiosity has its more immediate origins in Joseph Pearce's 1999 book "Tolkien: Man and Myth,'' which underscores Tolkien's deeply Catholic views. Since Pearce's writing -- and, of course, the news that the "Lord of the Rings'' books were coming to movie theaters -- the theological ferment has been considerable. In April of 2000, Christianity Today ranked Tolkien's epic among the top 10 Christian books of the 20th century; the first slot went to C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity,'' which might not even have been written had Tolkien not helped Lewis to find God in 1931. More religiously-infused books on Tolkien are on the way, including Kreeft's "The Philosophy of Tolkien'' and Baylor University theology and literature professor Ralph Wood's "The Gospel According to 'The Lord of the Rings.'"

In the 1960s and early '70s, Tolkien was often associated with the counterculture -- in particular, with the Green movement. After all, he once wrote that "in all my works I take the part of the trees as against all their enemies.'' "Gandalf for President'' buttons were common, and Led Zeppelin lyrics abounded with Tolkien references -- consider "Ramble On,'' for example: "'Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair / but Gollum, and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her, yeah.'' (The less said about Leonard Nimoy's 1967 song-poem "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins,'' the better.) But Tolkien's Christian interpreters, many of them conservatives, have tried to wrest him away from hippies, tree-huggers, and other assorted left-wingers. Birzer, for example, wrote in the New Oxford Review last year that the new Christian interpretation makes it "impossible'' to see Tolkien as the poster boy for the "libertine drug culture'' of the '60s. Will the real J.R.R. Tolkien please stand up?

No one disputes that Tolkien's Catholicism influenced his writing. Indeed, he held his conservative Catholic views rather fiercely -- due in part to his conviction that his mother Mabel had been persecuted by her family for her conversion to Catholicism in 1900 (she died shortly afterward of diabetes). After serving on the Western Front in World War I, Tolkien returned to his studies of medieval literature; after becoming a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, he helped found an influential group of Christian philosopher-writers called "the Inklings,'' which included C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. In a 1953 letter Tolkien described "The Lord of the Rings'' as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work.''

But Tolkien's views -- on both religion and fiction -- were complex. In another letter, Tolkien outlined his aspiration to create a new mythology for England, describing the existing body of Arthurian legend as inadequate for the role because it "explicitly contains the Christian religion.'' (He added, "That seems to me fatal.'') References to real-world belief systems, Tolkien thought, would detract from the beguiling timelessness he hoped to convey. Tolkien's characters inhabit a pre-Christian version of our own world; they don't worship, carry on religious rituals, or talk about faith. Commentators have noted similarities between Tolkien's trilogy and Wagner's "Ring Cycle,' which also put Europe's pagan heritage in the service of national myth-making.

Some fundamentalist Christians -- the same folks who bash the "Harry Potter'' books -- have denounced the prevalence of magic in the "The Lord of the Rings.'' Tolkien's Christian champions, however, argue that the Oxford don -- like the Beowulf poet whose work he knew so well -- breathed his own devout sensibility into pagan tales and archetypes, thus creating what Birzer calls a "Christ-inspired and God-centered mythology.'' Indeed, some of Tolkien's Christian interpreters see three of the novel's main characters -- the wizard Gandalf, the hobbit Frodo, and the heroic human Aragorn -- as Christ figures. "Each offers his life for others, each passes through darkness and even a kind of death, to a kind of resurrection,'' writes Stratford Caldecott, a Catholic reader of Tolkien who is writing a book on the subject.

Christian Tolkienists also point to the central role of the virtue of pity -- a word Tolkien tends to capitalize -- in the book's plot. When the hobbit Bilbo Baggins first discovers the dark lord Sauron's lost Ring of Power (an event which occurs in Tolkien's 1937 children's book "The Hobbit''), he makes a conscious decision to spare the life of its previous owner, the wretched creature Gollum. In "The Lord of the Rings,'' Bilbo's heir Frodo and his companions continue to spare Gollum from death; these acts of mercy end up inadvertently saving the world. "'The pity of Bilbo will rule the fate of many' gradually becomes the motto of Tolkien's epic,'' writes Ralph Wood. "The unrestrained quality of mercy is what, I suggest, makes 'The Lord of the Rings' an enduring Christian classic despite its pagan setting.''

For more secular Tolkienists, though, this sort of talk rankles. "I don't see pity as exclusively Christian,'' notes University of Maryland English professor Verlyn Flieger, author of "Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World.'' Flieger doesn't consider the specifically Christian reading of Tolkien's novel to be entirely wrong-headed, but she does find it reductionist. Some critics further observe that the novel's characters tend to be deeply invested in their middle-earthly lives, rather than in any afterlife. Consider Gandalf's carpe-diem advice to Frodo: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.''

Also, where Christian Tolkienists see intimations of redemption in "The Lord of the Rings,'' their secularist rivals contend that Tolkien did not create a divine comedy. Take Frodo's parting words to Sam when Frodo leaves for the Grey Havens, a kind of overseas Elvish retirement home: "It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.'' For Peter Kreeft, this smacks of a Christ-like sacrifice. But the sacrifice and loss isn't suffered by Frodo alone; it's suffered by all the denizens of Middle-earth: In Tolkien's scheme, the destruction of the one ring necessitates the departure of the Elves from Middle-earth -- and with their parting, much that is beautiful and cherished disappears from the world forever. Evil, meanwhile, will doubtlessly reconstitute itself in yet another form. "That's a very Norse outlook: Even the winners lose,'' says Stephen Morillo, a Wabash College medieval historian who's teaching a course this January that covers Tolkien. 'That's really what lies behind the morality of 'The Lord of the Rings,' and that's just incompatible with a Christian interpretation.''

Tolkienian Christians have a marked tendency to gush about the books: "I have no doubt that Tolkien's great tale will be one of those we will hear told, or sung, by the golden fireside in that longed-for Kingdom,'' writes Caldecott. Some also want to use the popularity of "The Lord of the Rings'' to win converts. In a recent interview, David Mills, an editor of the conservative Christian magazine Touchstone, called Tolkien's work "stealth evangelization"; in regard to its appearance on the big screen, he suggests that Catholics "use the movie to raise questions for their unbelieving friends. . . help them begin to see that the great story depends upon its moral and spiritual depth, and then you can ask them where they find this morality and spirituality today. We know that the only place you find them in their full strength is the Catholic church, but your unbelieving friends don't know that yet.''

Of course, taking "The Lord of the Rings'' this way would turn it into something closer to C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia'' series, with its far more overt Christian exhortation. Tolkien and Lewis shared a distrust of the modern world, but they disagreed over the value of conveying direct religious messages through allegorical fiction. Tolkien disliked the Narnia books, and when it came to Lewis's popular apologetics, he snidely dubbed his friend "Everyman's theologian.''

Sure enough, today Tolkien retains his status as a big-church fantasist whose work inspires multiple interpretations, while Lewis tends to be more narrowly championed by conservative Christians. Speaking of the breadth of Tolkien's appeal, Bradley Birzer admits that "I think the beauty of Tolkien is that he's not explicitly Christian. I think I would be turned off if we had Jesus running around the story.'' Tolkien avoided that, but quite a few devout Christians are nevertheless claiming his story as their own. The question is whether this could be a turn-off to everybody else.

Chris Mooney is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.

Here's a Tolkien review from the Telegraph:

Take courage - things may not be as bad as they seem

By Tom Shippey

(Filed: 02/01/2003)

JR R Tolkien was not a professional author nor, for much of his life, even a much-published one. He had a certain success with The Hobbit in 1937, when he was 45 - enough for his publisher, Stanley Unwin, to ask for a sequel. But though Tolkien dutifully began to write one almost immediately, it was 17 years before the first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published, by which time Tolkien had almost reached retirement.

For much of his life he was haunted by the fear of never finishing anything - the theme of one of his few short stories, Leaf by Niggle. In The Notion Club Papers, not published until 20 years after his death, he imagines his own work as a manuscript discovered on a dusty shelf sometime far in the future, incomprehensible and anonymous.

Tolkien's fears have been proved false, but they were not unfounded. His work is now known to hundreds of millions of readers and viewers, but the non-professional nature of his writing still shows through.

An experienced professional author, writing to make a living and with a good sense of potential markets, would not have produced a 1,000-page romance with only vestigial love interests. Nor would he have added 100 pages of appendices about dates and scripts and languages. And he would have known not to stop the action dead with a 15,000-word account of a confused committee meeting, which is "The Council of Elrond".

Peter Jackson's first film had to take stern action to deal with that problem, and his second one has to deal equally sternly with Tolkien's decision - how Jackson must have torn his hair! - not to bother with the Ents' attack on Isengard, the stronghold of the corrupt wizard Saruman, but to have the junior hobbits Merry and Pippin report it in flashback.

At the end of one chapter, they are gazing down from the Ent Treebeard's shoulders on Saruman's valley, and then they disappear from the action until, 70 pages later, they turn up picnicking in the ruins. It was a dead certainty that Jackson could not allow his version of the story to go like that. It breaks a basic rule: "Show, don't tell."

But basic rules are made to be broken, at least by authors who are not writing for the market but for themselves. And if there is one thing that publishing history shows, it is that the market does not know what it wants - except novelty, which is by nature unpredictable. Again and again, great writers of fantasy have been loners, starting off without agents and against sensible advice. Tolkien was not a professional author. He was a driven one, and one ought to ask what drove him because, whatever it was, it draws other people too.

Things like missing out the sack of Isengard perhaps provide a clue. Tolkien dropped a big action scene, yes. What he got in exchange, and what he clearly wanted to get, was a major surprise, as one plot strand - Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, now mixed up with the Riders of Rohan - quite unexpectedly runs across the results of another - Merry and Pippin and Saruman and the Ents - although the day has already been saved for the first group by the marching wood at Helm's Deep in Rohan. None of the characters, as Tolkien wrote the story, really understands the whole of what is going on.

Not even Gandalf. In fact, the only thing they do know is that their fate will not, in the end, be determined by visible events but by a mostly invisible one: the stealthy crawl of three insignificant-looking characters into the lion's mouth of Mordor. The great ones and the heroes are continually trying to see what is happening elsewhere, through the palantirs and the Mirror of Galadriel and the Eye of Sauron. The attempt is repeatedly disastrous. Denethor commits suicide because of what he sees in his palantir, but he has read it wrong. As Gandalf says, "Even the wise cannot see all ends," and the really wise remember that.

The moral is the motto of the British redcoat: "Look to your front." Don't think about what other people are doing: you'll get it wrong and it's disheartening. Or, to quote Gandalf again - and Jackson picked out just these words to repeat in the first movie, varying the pronouns cunningly - "That [the future] is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Tolkien surely did not mean these words just for Frodo. They were a major part of his own conviction and a part of his own cure for the defeatism, the appeasement, the lack of will and the weary calculation of odds that he saw dogging the Western democracies as he was writing The Lord of the Rings and still after he had finished it. Tolkien's achievement, it may be, was to reintroduce a heroic world view, drawn from the ancient texts he taught as a professor, to a world gone ironic.

And this world view was put across not only by the obviously heroic figures such as Aragorn and Faramir and King Theoden, but by the hobbits - and, most of all, by the very structure of the story. In this story, all the characters find themselves, literally as well as figuratively, bewildered: their bearings lost, not sure what's for the best, but slogging on regardless. The most important ones, moreover, the hobbits Frodo and Sam, think they're on their own. All the time, their friends are risking everything to distract the Eye of Sauron from them, but they don't know that. They go on anyway.

The film version, adapted to the limited attention span of the modern viewer, can't handle all of this, but it handles a surprising amount. Tolkien himself, commenting on the first of several attempted film scripts back in 1957, remarked that he had no objection to people cutting things out, but he disliked compression, trying to jam everything into three hours. It loses the uncertainty, the false trails and the fog of war that link The Lord of the Rings and the battle of the Somme, where Tolkien fought with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Peter Jackson has inevitably built up the action scenes and straightened the tangled threads, but the message survives the change of medium. Courage is what you need after you've lost hope: things may not be as bad as they seem. Tolkien learnt that nearly 90 years ago, but it isn't obsolete yet.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.