Again and again we are made aware of all that once was and shall never be again or never again till the world is renewed. In that story, Thorin redeemed himself from his obstinacy toward Bilbo by dying valiantly in the Battle of Five Armies. In The Lord of the Rings , by contrast, no one is required to die in order to destroy the dark lord and his evil ring, or even to perish in the final struggle against him.
In the end, the only true horror is a soul that goes into the fire, and even that serves the designs of Providence. That Tolkien avoided a climactic sacrificial death in The Lord of the Rings is not due to some failure on his part to appreciate the dramatic merits of such a device, but because in this ending he was doing something different.
Some victories come only at the cost of some final sacrifice or loss, but this, Tolkien believed, is not the deepest truth about the conflict of good and evil, and the "final victory" over evil of which legends can offer only "samples or glimpses" turns on no such loss.
Indeed, the element of hope is so strong that Samwise can even wonder aloud, "Is everything sad going to come untrue? Here in Middle-earth there is still hard work to be done, future shadows to be fought, and, somewhere in the unspecified future, redemption still to be accomplished by the one whose saving work is only remotely echoed in the great deeds of Frodo and Gandalf and Aragorn. Each also undergoes a kind of sacrificial "death" and rebirth. The priestly role belongs to Frodo, who bears a burden of terrible evil on behalf of the whole world, like Christ carrying his cross.
As Christ descended into the grave, Frodo journeys into Mordor, the Land of Death, and there suffers a deathlike state in the lair of the giant spider Shelob before awakening to complete his task. Gandalf is the prophet, revealing hidden knowledge, working wonders, teaching others the way. Evoking the saving death and resurrection of Christ, Gandalf does battle with the powers of hell to save his friends, sacrificing himself and descending into the nether regions before being triumphantly reborn in greater power and glory as Gandalf the White.
Finally, there is Aragorn, the crownless destined to be king. Besides being a messianic king of prophecy, Aragorn also dimly reflects the saving work of Christ by walking the Paths of the Dead and offering peace to the spirits there imprisoned, anticipating in a way the Harrowing of Hell. The oath-breaking spirits Aragorn encounters on the Paths of the Dead, who cannot rest in peace until they expiate their treason, suggest a kind of purgatorial state.
Tolkien himself explicitly acknowledged this connection, observing in a letter to a friend, "I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary. The actual relationship is more subtle: In imagining a glorious and immortal Queen of a paradisiacal realm, and in depicting the devotion of others to her, Tolkien could hardly help drawing on the actual devotion in his religious tradition to a glorified Queen of a divine realm.
Had he been, for instance, a Southern Baptist, or a Dutch Calvinist, doubtless Galadriel either would never have existed at all, or would at any rate have been an entirely different figure. Louis de Montford or St. Maximillian Kolbe to the Queen of Heaven, and through Gimli the reader, even the non-Catholic or non-Christian reader, has a kind of window into the world of such devotion.
Galadriel is not the only elven Queen with Marian associations. Note the themes common to these lines and those that follow the singer as wanderer in a remote land; the far-off Queen as a source of light and guidance; the repeated association of the Queen with starlight and the sea :.
Gollum was consumed by it, Bilbo begins to suffer its deleterious effects, Gandalf and Galadriel refuse even to touch it, Boromir succumbs to its attraction, and even Frodo battles its allure all the way to Mount Doom before finally falling under its spell. Frodo may be a type of Christ, but only a type, and all types ultimately fall short of the reality.
Side by side with this depiction of the allure of evil is an acknowledgment of the possibility of conversion and redemption.
Boromir, on the other hand, genuinely repents of his moment of weakness, and is redeemed, not only by an act of reparation that costs him his life, but also by making confession of his wrongdoing to another. Why does Frodo eventually succumb to the power of the Ring? Tolkien and C. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of Nelson Books, June , Joseph Loconte focuses on the horrors Lewis and Tolkien experienced at the front and how what they witnessed on the battlefield is reflected in themes of their epic sagas of Middle-Earth and Narnia--among them that war is to be avoided if possible, and never glorified.
Wolfe Oxford University Press, July , collects essays by theologians. Most were originally delivered as speeches to the C. Lewis Society and rescued from its archives of moldering tapes. Reminiscences by those who knew him--a cousin, his priest, a former student, his biographer, fellow Inklings, and other friends--remember his incisive mind but also his warmth, generosity, enduring Christian faith, and unassuming manner.
It is also of greatest service to your own thought. The Millions. More from pw. The Best Books of PW Picks: Books of the Week. New Pub Dates for Forthcoming Books: Its intolerance of religion made it worse than even fascism, which would potentially protect the Catholic Church. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
But democracy was no golden alternative. He saw it as farce that would only end in mob rule and slavery. My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy.
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