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Posted on 11/06/2003 7:47:49 AM PST by Pyro7480
Divine Mercy in the Lord of the Rings
by Joseph Pearce
The Return of the King, the final part of Peter Jackson's blockbuster film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, will be let loose on an expectant nation this December. During the coming months, it will be watched by millions of movie-goers throughout the world, most of whom will be unaware that they are watching a film version of a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.
The work's author, J.R.R. Tolkien, was a lifelong devout Catholic who poured his Catholic heart into the writing of the myth that is now captivating a new generation, half a century after its first publication. Tolkien insisted that the fact that he as "a Christian, which can be deduced from my stories, and in fact a Roman Catholic," was the most important and "really significant" element in his work. Indeed, it's not difficult to discover the manifestation of Divine Mercy in The Lord of the Rings.
In this epic tale of good and evil, the great Ring of power must be destroyed otherwise it will be used by the Dark Lord Sauron to enslave all of Middle Earth. The hobbit Bilbo and then his nephew Frodo come into possession of the Ring from Gollum - a hobbit who has been reduced to a crazed and pitiable shadow of his former self through long exposure to the Ring.
With his trusty servant Sam, Frodo accepts the daunting mission of destroying the Ring by returning to the fire of Mount Doom, where it was forged by the Dark Lord. On their quest to reach Mount Doom in the heart of the evil land of Mordor, Frodo and Sam's steps are dogged by Gollum, who willing to do anything to regain possession of the Ring himself.
The issue then becomes do Frodo and Sam take matters into their on hands by killing Gollum, or do they show him mercy even though he poses a threat to them at points on their arduous journey?
Knowing his treacherous intent, Frodo had wished that Gollum has been killed: "What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature when he had a chance!"
"Pity?" replied Gandalf, the wise wizard. "It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy." Gandalf believes Gollum is mystically bound up with the fate of the Ring. "My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least." (Caution: Spoilers ahead for those who haven't read the book yet!)
These words are recalled later by Frodo when he, too, has the chance to kill Gollum. Like Bilbo, Frodo also chooses the path of mercy over vengeance, and, like Bilbo, his charitable choice comes to "rule the fate of many." At the climatic moment on Mount Doom, Frodo finds that he cannot, at the very last, cast the Ring into the fire. On the very brink of success, he finds himself on the verge of final,and fatal, failure.
It is at this crucial moment that Frodo and Middle Earth itself are saved by Gollum who rushes forward and bites the Ring from Frodo's finger before falling into the abyss, destroying himself and the Ring in the process.
The scene is not only a triumph of divine providence over fate, it is the triumph of Divine Mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated. According to Tolkien himself, Frodo has been saved "because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He, and the Cause, were saved - by mercy: by the supreme value and efficacy of pity and forgiveness and injury" (from Tolkien's Letters).
In the Church, the greatest manifestation of Divine Mercy is, of course, the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. At its deepest, Tolkien's myth serves as a reflection of this archetypal mercy. The journey of Frodo and Sam is emblematic of the Christian's imitation of Christ in carrying the cross.
Tolkien makes the parallel even more explicitly. "I should say," he wrote, explaining the final climatic moments on Mount Doom when the Ring is finally unmade, "that within the mode of the story [it] exemplifies (an aspect of) the familiar words: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive [those who] trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.'"
Furthermore, Tolkien makes the Christian dimension even more unmistakable in the fact that the climatic destruction of the Ring - and in consequence the destruction of the Dark Lord who had forged it - occurred on "the twenty-fifth of March." That's believed to be the date Christ was crucified. It is also, of course, the Feast of the Annunciation, the celebration of the absolute center of all history as the moment when God Himself became incarnate as man.
As a Catholic, Tolkien knew March 25 was the date in which God had "unmade" Original Sin, which, like the Ring, has brought humanity under the sway of the Shadow. If the Ring, which is unmade at the culmination of Tolkien's Quest, is the "one ring to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them," the Fall was the "One Sin to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them." On the twenty-fifth of March the One Sin, like the One Ring, has been "unmade," destroying the power of the Dark Lord.
It is very comforting in the midst of these dark days that the most popular book of the twentieth century, and the most popular movie of the new century, draw their power and their glory from the light of the Gospel.
Joseph Pearce is Writer in Residence at Ave Maria University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and author of Tolkien: Man and Myth (Ignatius Press).
Every day in the calendar is a feast of something or other. So no matter what date Tolkien chose, you could have made the same argument. As to March 25th, the destruction of the ring has nothing in common with the angelic annunciation of a message. They are events that are not categorically similar.
According to Professor Jane Chance, an "expert" on Tolkien, ...
Tolkien distinguished between the primary world, which is the world of pain, suffering, turbulence that we live in day-to-day, in which we have finite lives. But he talks about fairy tales as a creation of a secondary world, in which the reader finds escape, consolation, and recovery, where the colors are brighter, as he says, where you are sick and are always healed. It's the recovery of Paradise, if that's what you want to call it. We all long for a secondary world. But he would see the Bible as truth in the primary world.
He would never identify his secondary world as real—the Grey Havens, for instance, as Heaven. He never used Christian terminology to describe his world, because it would be a violation of the secondary-world construction to introduce the primary world into it.
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As though she will be able to make Catholic distinctions.
"Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, close to being Tridentine in his conservative Catholicism."
My suspicions confirmed immediately. This statement demonstrates a simple ignorance. Tolkien lived virtually his entire life prior to Vatican II, certainly all the years that were spent writing the trilogy occurred before Vatican II, so there was no "Tridentine" or "conservative" Catholicism at the time. A Catholic in the early 1950's would have found these labels meaningless.
This much I can agree with. Tolkien was creating an alternate reality, and he wanted that reality to exist on its own. Therefore he avoided like the plague anything that smelled of "allegory." He was desperately afraid of being interpreted as a simple allegory like "Animal Farm," when his intention was entirely different.
So when Catholics, like Joseph Pearce and those on this forum, attempt to discover all kinds of hidden Christian symbolism, they are violating the nature of his work, as well as searching for something that doesn't exist.
You bring up an interesting point. Tolkien was a great admirer of northern European folklore, in particular Beowulf. The anonymous author of Beowulf wrote the epic poem at the time Christianity was slowly spreading throughout England. It is almost certain that this author was a Christian himself. He used the poem to sanctify the best of the old pagan ways. This sanctification is in the tradition of St. Augustine's argument that Christianity could be compatible with a post-Roman world. Clement of Alexandria also argued along these line when hed said that the pre-Christian paganism of the Greco-Roman world was a "prepatory teaching for those who [would] later embrace the faith."
Just because something is pagan doesn't automatically mean it is evil.
You are right that Tolkien despised allegory, but when Pearce and Birzer use Tolkien's own words about his creation, aren't they being faithful to his work, and discovering something that is ACTUALLY in the story??
It would be too far afield to get into Beowulf on this thread, but the fact is that the epic is an uneasy amalgamation of Christian and pagan elements. As the story progresses, the author seems to drop the Christian elements along the way and revert to a raw barbarism. As an epic poem it is wonderful, but as an attempt to "baptize paganism," it is a mixed bag at best. Nor would it make sense for Tolkien to try to repeat the process some 1400 years later. It may not have been his intention, but the result of his work has been to resurrect paganism, not baptize it.
No, no. The whole point is that this alleged symbolism does not actually exist in the story. One has to read it in from the outside. The world created by Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings does not present the reader with any supreme being or afterlife, or any reality at all existing on a supernatural plane of existence.
You cannot separate the two. You do not have to read the Silmarillion to understand the Lord of the Rings. But, by doing so, you get a clearer picture of Tolkien's intent.
It is hardly an ad hominem argument to point out that you don't understand something.
These could just as easily be Hindu or Zoroastrian symbols.
Only in the sense that Hinduism and Zorastrianism are perversions of the truth of the Gospel.
However, as Birzer points out, "[d]espite his disappointment with what he viewed as the liberalization of the Church, Tolkien remained a loyal and practicing Catholic." In a post on another thread, I stated that traditionalist Catholics should emulate Tolkien's example in remaining a loyal and practicing Catholic. The preceding excerpt from Birzers' book, along with the rest of the passage it's taken from, is what inspired me finally to start attending the Traditional Latin Mass. I think it is a shame that you can't see the tremendous benefit of Tolkien's "sub-Creation." Speaking of Tolkien's example, I think he demonstrated his merciful attitude and loyalty to Jesus Christ and His Church when he said:
"The only cure for the sagging of fainting faith is Communion. I can recommend this as an exercise: make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn--open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a Mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding the Five Thousand after which Our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.)"
This is speculation that, once again, does NOT exist in the trilogy. Compare for example, the Silmarillion, in which the ultimate outcome is the ironic realization that the entire struggle of the elves against Morgoth which had occupied the narrative was a futile struggle doomed to failure, because Morgoth was a Valar and could never be defeated by elves or men. There is similar speculation about the nature of Tom Bombadillo, but ultimately there is no clear answer because the story never tells you who or what he is. Were Saruman and Radagast and Sauron also Maia? The story doesn't say so.
Nor were that the case, would it make the stories any more "Christian." A satanic allegory would certainly include angels and fallen angels.
Granted. And somewhere in my files I have a quote from Tolkien where he says that he did not intend LOTR as a "Christian" work, but because he is a Christian, that is reflected in his work.
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