NOTE: This essay appeared in the Summer 1996 issue of
Caelum et Terra,
a magazine, no longer published, in which I had a hand. References to then-current
events and conditions in my own life and that of my family are now
some years out of date. I have not read The Lord of the Rings since the
last reading described here. Perhaps when I do I will wish to revise the essay
but for now will let it stand as written.
—January 24, 2004
This piece is rather long to be read on the Web. I’ve added bookmarkable section
numbers intended to make it easier for the reader to break off reading and return
later.
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This is the story of my relationship with a book, J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is perhaps somewhat presumptuous of me
to write at such length in so subjective a manner, but my intention is to say something
about the richness of one of the great works of the Catholic imagination, and
of the way different aspects of it may show themselves to one at different
points in life. If you have never read The Lord of the Rings, you should
not read this essay, because it will spoil the story. You can only read a story
for the first time once, and while you may re-read it many times with pleasure
after you know how it all turns out, you should have, with this story
especially, the experience of reading it without that knowledge.
The Tolkien fad passed me by at its height in the mid-1960s.
Or rather I should say I passed it by, for I had chance enough to catch hold of
it, and refused. This was in 1966, my freshman year in college. My closest
friend, who lived in the room next to mine in the dormitory, was swept up even
to the point of having a map of Middle Earth on his wall. I found the map
intriguing: names such as Mordor and Wilderland rich and somehow already
familiar, like great poetry; the “elvish” (actually vaguely Celtic) script
evocative of something I could not name. Even the man’s name—J.R.R. Tolkien—had
an air of romance about it. But there was nonetheless a cutesy and cartoonish
quality about the map, and the fad itself had about it, or at least smelled to
me as if it had, a knowing Disneyish air of simulated play, of a coy game of
pretend in which the participants winked at each other while talking of Gandalf
and Frodo as if they were real.
The reputation of Tolkien’s work seemed to say that it was no
more than a superior fairy tale, and I had never been especially fond of fairy
tales. Then, too, the work itself was daunting: three volumes of The Lord of
the Rings, plus The Hobbit, which needed to be read first if one
were to do it properly. I couldn’t quite imagine so long a work not being
tedious. Nevertheless I did make a half-hearted try at The Hobbit. That
was perhaps a mistake, as The Hobbit is in fact best described as a
superior fairy tale, and is not free of the archness and slight condescension
which sometimes dog such stories when they are written in modern times by
people for whom the magic they are describing is a deliberate invention. As I recall I read no
more than a few pages, enough to make me think that it was, after all, only a
children’s story; in those opening pages there is little of the deep clear
wonder of the Ring trilogy:
…Gandalf came by. Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter
of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there
is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale.
That’s so, but from this description you’d expect those
tales to be merely charming and perhaps slightly amusing. You would not be at
all prepared for the Gandalf of the later books, Mithrandir as the elves call
him, who appears to the friends who had thought him dead “white, shining now as
if with some light kindled within, bent, laden with years, but holding a power
beyond the strength of kings,” the Gandalf who “has passed through fire and the
abyss” and who tells them
Naked I was sent back—for a brief time until my task is
done. And naked I lay upon the mountain-top. The tower behind was crumbled into
dust, the window gone; the ruined stair was choked with burned and broken
stone. I was alone, forgotten, without escape upon the hard horn of the world.There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over,
and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth. Faint to my ears came the
gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the
weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of over-burdened stone.
This is a world apart from
In a hole in the ground lived a
hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole….a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
I
had no inkling that entry into the hobbit-hole would take me to Gandalf’s
abyss, or to the mountain top, or to the holy wood of Lothlorien. I went no
further.
Another friend gave me a copy of The Tolkien Reader,
a collection of miscellaneous uncollected writings trotted out by Tolkien’s publisher
in an effort (I suppose) to keep the vogue going. In this I noted some poems, mostly light
if not silly, and a fairy-story-ish thing called (unpromisingly in my eyes)
“Farmer Giles of Ham.” I don’t remember noticing the great and wise
essay “On Fairy Stories” and its companion story, “Leaf by Niggle,” that
glorious study of work and redemption in which can be seen the struggle Tolkien
waged against his own sense that his labor was inadequate and futile. These two
treasures sat unread on my bookshelf for many years while I journeyed,
without the light they might have given me, to my own Mordor.
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It was not until 1973 or 1974 that I tried Tolkien again. I
was adrift in the backwash of the great crisis of the late ‘60s, and deeply
unhappy. I was moving in a vague and wandering way toward the Faith, but I
didn’t know that; I did know that I was struggling against the nihilism of the
times toward some sort of affirmation. I cannot recall now what prompted me to
take up The Hobbit again—I suppose it may have been the
recommendation of a trusted friend—or how it happened that I had several days
of mostly free time in which I was able to read much of the four volumes as one would
wish to read them for the first time: alone and with great stretches of
uninterrupted time.
I believe I had a little of my old reaction to the opening
pages of The Hobbit, but had determined to give Tolkien more of a chance
this time, and so pressed on. It was of course not long before I was caught up
in the tale, and I remember thinking, as the dwarves dangled from the trees
where they had been bound by the giant spiders of Mirkwood, that Tolkien
certainly knew how to tell a story.
And then I began The Lord of the Rings and understood
at last what all the fuss was about. When Gandalf revealed to Frodo the nature
and history of the Ring, the quaint and perhaps over-charming world of the
hobbits was abruptly revealed as a small corner of a great canvas on which was
painted an apocalyptic struggle stretching thousands of years into the past,
revealing something close to a paradise lost and a hell about to be born.
Clearly this was going to be a story full of complex and fascinating invention.
I don’t remember the rest of the experience very clearly: in memory I find only
a rush of wonder and excitement, and a sense when it was over that I had had a
glimpse of something far-off and magnificent, a heart-piercing and unattainable
glory. The great quest of the Ring had gripped me and kept me hanging avidly on
every turn of the plot, and the vast lore of Middle Earth which undergirds the
story was rich and fascinating, but I think it was the elves, or rather the
presence, mostly in the background, of elvish beauty which gave the story that
intangible air of longing which matched an unnameable longing in my own heart.
When I closed the last volume I was like Sam after the night spent feasting
with the elves in the woods of the Shire:
Sam could never describe in words, nor picture clearly to
himself, what he felt or thought that night, though it remained in his memory
as one of the chief events of his life. The nearest he ever got was to say:
‘Well, sir, if I could grow apples like that, I would call myself a gardener.
But it was the singing that went to my heart, if you know what I mean.
Perhaps this encounter was not one of the chief events of my
life, but it was certainly influential. I longed for the elves: the
supernatural beauty and richness that surrounded them, their communion with all
living things and their own gift for creation, their starlight walks and their
singing. It was some years later that I read Tolkien’s comment (in one of the
letters, I believe) that the elves are essentially unfallen men. What Tolkien
has done with them is a rare achievement: he has made goodness hauntingly
desirable. This is almost unheard of in modern literature, in which the good
are as often as not dull and a little stupid, and evil has all the glamour. I
don’t see how anyone can read the story and not wish to be an elf. Though not
untainted, they are closer to the pure source of things than we can ever be in
this life, and the delight they know is something of which we have only
intimations but for which we deeply long.
I told a friend who had, like me, avoided the books, that I
had finally read them. “Well,” he replied, “is it literature?” I think I
mumbled that it certainly was, but I hesitated because I was somehow astonished
and almost offended by the question, for the work seemed to me then, in those
first few days after its reading, outside all categories. This is not really
true, of course; what the work is outside of is the category of naturalistic
fiction, and it was those who read it with naturalistic expectations in mind of
whom Tolkien was no doubt speaking when he said of critics who “have found it
boring, absurd, or contemptible” that he had “no cause to complain, since I
have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing they evidently
prefer.” Even in my first enthusiasm I could see that in some literary ways the
work was a bit creaky: its humor sometimes strikes the cynical modern as
cornball, the portrayal of the friendship among the hobbits as sentimental, the
portraits of heroism as boyish and naïve. But none of this matters because the
work is illuminated by a pure and shining beauty unlike anything else I know of
in modern literature.
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My second reading of The
Lord of the Rings was in 1980. I had returned to Christianity a few years
earlier and was now in the process of becoming a Catholic. The fact that
Tolkien was a Catholic probably affected my decision to re-read him, but mainly
I simply wanted to experience the pleasure of reading the story again. I know
that I had promised myself after the first reading that I would read it again
now and then. And I had, over the previous few years, discovered Lewis and
Chesterton and been much pleased and influenced by them. I may have know of
Tolkien’s association with Lewis and been curious to see if I had missed some
Catholic theme in his work.
My Evangelical sister-in-law once told me that she had long
heard that The Lord of the Rings was
a Christian work, but that she was totally unable to find any evidence of that
fact in the story. And indeed there is none, not if you are looking for a
direct statement of doctrine or even the allegory and very plain, if not
heavy-handed, symbolism of Lewis’ Narnia
stories. Yet the Catholic faith is in Tolkien’s work as a soul is in a body,
animating it invisibly. “The Lord of the
Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work;
unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision,” said Tolkien in a
letter. “That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all
references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary
world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
Tolkien’s theory of art as being a sub-creation, a mimicking
in the finite mind of God’s work of creation (see “On Fairy Stories”), more or
less required this approach. Just as we find everywhere in the created world
the evidence of God’s creation but not himself, so Tolkien wished his
sub-creation to be permeated with the thought of its creator and yet not be a
direct and immediate “revelation,” so to speak, of his presence: not an
explicit statement of his belief, but the natural flowering of it. The removal
of any plain religious element was not, as it might be taken at first glance to
be, a Walker Percy-style strategy of indirect evangelization, but a necessity
for the integrity of the work. The presence of any explicit Christian reference
would have been a confusion of the two orders of creation: the primary order of
God, in which we are all invented characters, and the secondary order of the writer’s
work.
Anyway, I did certainly find, on this second reading, a
Christian theme. What struck me most, and what seemed to me at the time the
most clearly Catholic aspect of the story, was the centrality of the struggle
between good and evil. In the Third Age of Middle Earth, the setting of
The Lord of the Rings, evil and good are
not so mixed up as they are in our world, and as they later became in Middle
Earth. The lines are clear, and the mission is clear: the good are to do battle
with all the strength and with all the purity of purpose they can muster
against the evil. I remember writing to a friend at the time that this was the
great power of the tale: that I came away from it with a conviction that this
struggle was the essence of life, the only really important thing, that though
motives and actions are confused in external life, in our spiritual lives we
are waging a war in which the lines are as clearly drawn as those between
Sauron and the elves. And, as the elves make the good seem desirable, so the
war in The Lord of the Rings makes
the struggle for it seem desirable: the stakes become clear, evil becomes
recognizable for what it is, and the necessity for a total commitment to the
good becomes plain. For one of the most clearly Catholic elements in the story
is the law, understood and insisted upon by the wise when others do not see it,
that evil means may not be used for good ends. The whole drama of the Ring
rests upon this point; the Ring is immensely powerful but intrinsically evil,
and the temptation to try to use it for good is to be resisted at all costs.
This was, in some ways, I suppose, a convert’s reading: not erroneous by any
means, but certainly not exhaustive.
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In my next reading of the work my concern was to give it to
someone else. When my sons Will and John were something like nine and seven
years old I thought they might be ready for The
Hobbit, and I read it aloud to them. By this time I had entered the long
plateau of middle life, where the only milestones are the birth of children and
changes of employer and residence, but I think this was roughly 1988.
They were delighted by The
Hobbit and when they learned that there were three more books (though of
course only the one story) in the same setting and involving some of the same
characters they begged for me to read The
Lord of the Rings, too. I put them off for a little whole, thinking it
might be a little difficult for them, especially for the younger one. But they
badgered me until I gave in and agreed to try a chapter, at least.
The effect was everything I might have hoped for. They were
as enchanted as I had been on my first reading, and for many weeks we read
almost every night, often well past their supposed bedtime. They began to live
in Middle Earth as much as possible. They became evangelizers for Tolkien and
pressed their friends to read The Lord of
the Rings. And when their best friends did so and reacted very much as they
had done, getting together to play Hobbits, Elves, and Men became their great
delight. Will was Gandalf. John was Legolas. Their friends Jean and Dan were
Frodo and Gimli. The younger children who did not know the story were pressed
into service as various other characters when needed.
They didn’t get to do it as often as they would have liked,
because the friends lived a half-hour’s drive away and so the gatherings were
dependent on the convenience of the parents. My wife made them grey
elven-cloaks and wooden swords which they wore everywhere. I don’t know what
strangers thought of these children going about in dark capes and hood; I was
occasionally concerned that someone might think these the outfit of some weird
cult, or of the Ku Klux Klan (the hoods had sort of a point at the back, like a
monk’s cowl). It was an especially strange sight when they played in the nearby
cemetery: small cloaked figures dashing from one gravestone to another, waving
swords and calling out strange words.
This would no doubt have ended of itself in time, but
circumstances forced an end before anyone was ready when both families moved
away. Both husbands worked for the same company and were unhappy with their
jobs. Both wives wished to live somewhere else, nearer their childhood homes. We
decided on a long-considered move to the Gulf Coast when I had a chance to get
out of the high-pressure corporate world and work for a Catholic college. We
thought the other family would still be in reasonable visiting distance, only
to find that they were also moving—to Philadelphia. The fellowship was broken.
At the valedictory party Karen presented the four older children, those who had
read the story, with banners bearing their names in Elvish script, which hung
on Will and John’s walls for some years after.
I don’t recall much of my own reaction to this reading of The Lord of the Rings. I was far more
interested in the reaction of the children, and when they took to it so avidly
I had one of the pleasures dearest to a parent’s heart: that of bestowing a
gift which brings all the delight he had wished, and that not a purchased gift,
but something which is a kind of heirloom, a part of himself. Moreover, the
story is a kind of medicine against many of the ills of modernity: it is not
cynical or worldly-ironic; it is heroic, and at the same time homely. Like
certain other Catholic books of the twentieth century, it serves as a sort of
touchstone of sanity by picturing, on the one hand, the high beauty of the
elves as a pure (in both senses of the word) pleasure which can be, at least
momentarily, tasted, and on the other hand the simple sanity of hobbit village
life which, comically idealized as it may be, still strikes us as a vision of
what mundane life might be like at its best; it confirms our suspicion that a
village-based agricultural life has about it a fundamental sanity that is
mostly lost from our communities, for it is difficult to imagine an
idealization of the American commercial mall-and-subdivision culture which
would seem as fittingly human as does Tolkien’s idealization of the English
village. And of course there is the presence of industrialism in
The Lord of the Rings. Just as the Shire
is a miniature comic England, so the mills of the corrupt wizard Saruman and
the arch-evil Sauron are an exaggerated and darker factory system: huge and
hugely unpleasant engines of production in which sheer might is valued above
everything.
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A couple of years later came the time when it seemed that
Ellen, our third child, was old enough to enjoy the story itself (as distinct from
the games based on it), and so we started reading it aloud again. This was the
least satisfactory reading of all. We were not especially pleased with our new
home. The children had not found new friends. My first year or so in the new
job was thoroughly miserable; it seemed that I might have made one of the worst
mistakes of my life. The neighborhood was a little suburban island of three or
four blocks accessible only from a major highway, and felt isolated and bare. I
felt that we had done a wrong to the children by uprooting them and placing
them there. The two years that we lived there, from 1990 until 1992, seem in
retrospect sad, drained of pleasure, uneasy.
It seemed difficult this time to keep up the reading.
Whereas before I had sat on the floor in Will and John’s room and read to them
alone, with the rest of the family in another room, this time we tried to read
with everyone present. There were many distractions and interruptions. Our
fourth child, Clare, was only two or three years old. Ellen was, after all,
perhaps not quite ready, and somehow we couldn’t get our schedules together:
she was ready for sleep much earlier than the others, and frequently fell
asleep while we were reading. Will was impatient. John was distracted. I
remember no particular insight, and no great pleasure. Indeed I do not remember
it very clearly at all, nor, it seems to me, do the children.
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It is the spring of 1996. Four years ago we moved to our
present home in Fairhope, Alabama. This is Karen’s home town, and she had long
wanted to return. I have written here of Fairhope before; it is a small town on
the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, formerly an ordinary town with a great deal of
charm, perhaps a little too much for its own health, for it has attracted money
and many people, is now self-consciously charming, and is dominated by
well-to-do newcomers who have driven housing prices out of sight and turned
what was a working downtown into a boutique, while real business is carried out
on the strip outside of town or eight miles up Highway 98 at WalMart. But I
suppose automobile-driven development would have happened in any case, and a
boutique is better than decay. We were fortunate enough to find an inexpensive,
if small and shabby, house. We are in a patch of woods at the bottom of a hill
within walking distance of the bay. When Daniel Nichols visited us a couple of
years ago he described it as a hobbit hole; one reaches the house down a steep
hill and onto a narrow road through trees. We like it here.
Clare is eight and has been an eager and capable reader for
several years now. Last fall it seemed time to introduce her to
The Lord of the Rings. Our progress has
been slow, but pleasurable. I am reading only to the three ladies of the house,
Karen, Ellen, and Clare. The boys are sixteen and fourteen, shortly to be
seventeen and fifteen, and their attention is elsewhere now. Though they are
not uninterested in the book, they are often away from the house and busy with
their own interests. Will is eager to be off to music school; John has a very
active social life and spends his spare time trying to learn rock-and-roll
songs on the guitar. I had wondered if they now thought of the Tolkien books as
something for children, something they had left behind, but when I asked Will
if this was the case he answered “No!” with a distinct are-you-crazy tone. I
hope they will one day take up the story again, for my experience is that it
only grows more rich as I get older. And I hope that at least they will carry
with them something from it that will be a light and a secret strength to them,
though they may not even know they have it, in the dangerous path they must now
walk.
As for the rest of us, we stand now with Frodo, Sam, and
Gollum at the gates of Mordor, which are shut fast. If Ellen and Clare are not
quite as hungry for the story, not quite as caught up in it, as the boys were
on our first reading, still they are eager enough, and our only difficulty is
in finding quiet times for the reading, as the family is busier with outside
activities, and the children have more neighborhood friends, than was the case
when I read it to Will and John.
And for my part I don’t remember noticing before how
fundamentally sad the story is. My fiftieth year is not far away, and now,
below the intricate plot and the seemingly inexhaustible flow of imaginative
detail, behind the potent imagery of elves and their love of beauty, men and
their heroism, and hobbits with their love of simple things, I see in
The Lord of the Rings a meditation on
time, a melancholy reflection on the inevitable passing of every good thing and
the necessity of renunciation. Sauron is conquered and the threat of the Ring
is removed, but because of its connection with the other Rings of Power its
destruction means that all that is most beautiful in Middle Earth must fade
into commonness. The elves must dwindle and depart, leaving Middle Earth
forever. Men will rule the new age, and it will be a duller one; no longer will
the starlit forests be haunted by elf-song, and Lothlorien itself will become
an ordinary wood. And the elves themselves had to choose this end, to choose
between the evil of Sauron—in which they might have joined and so kept their
power, at least for a while—and the slow withering of everything they love. By
neither choice can they hold back the passage of the beautiful into time.
The world is changing is a motif
repeated throughout the story, and for the elves especially it is a sad one:
beautiful things are passing, and what will come after is lesser.
The quest of Frodo, on whose courage and pluck the fate of
the world has rested, succeeds, but at the last moment Frodo himself fails, and
would have kept the Ring from the fire, with who knows what evil consequences,
had the ravening madness of Gollum not removed the choice from him. And then
when it is all over Frodo cannot rest; troubled in body and mind, he cannot
resume his old life in the Shire and must join the elves and Gandalf in a
passage to the Blessed Realm, which he does indeed gain, but only at the cost
of renouncing everything else.
There is a brief scene, fairly early in the book, which now
leaps out at me as a sudden and almost brutal statement of this theme of loss,
and which strikes me as having far more importance than its brevity might suggest,
for it sums up the powerlessness of any character in the book against the flow
of time and the unforeseeable turnings of fate. When the Fellowship has its
sojourn in Lothlorien, Frodo comes upon Aragorn holding a flower and lost in
reverie. “Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,” he says to Frodo, “and here
my heart dwells ever.” They walk away, and it seems a casual end to a casual
conversation, until the swift knife-like stroke of the final sentence of the
chapter: “And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and
came there never again as living man.”
Such moments are nothing less than the basic fabric of
mortality, and though we may or may not hold (as Tolkien himself tended to
believe) that the world is growing steadily worse, we are all, as the
inscription on the Ring has it, “Mortal Men doomed to die.” As one grows older
one’s memory holds more and more moments of golden promise which have borne no
fruit, or at least not the fruit one had hoped, and to which one can never
return. I read The Lord of the Rings
in 1980 filled with the excitement of conversion and heard in it a romantic
call to arms against evil. Now my entry into the Church seems, most of the
time, another faded moment of promise and my attitude toward it (though, thank
God, not usually to the Faith itself) more like that expressed by Tolkien
himself in a letter written late in his life to one of his sons: “…the Church
which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap.” And I read The Lord of the Rings most conscious of
its elegiac temper.
And it strikes me now that perhaps the most Catholic element
of the story is its transmutation of a pagan Nordic sense of heavy destiny into
something more akin to the idea of providence. The characters refer frequently
to fate, to doom not only as downfall but also as unavoidable destiny. But one
gradually realizes that the fate which does indeed seem to guide events, subtly
and remotely, is not a blind force but a subtle yet powerful hand which somehow
enables the good to be rescued against all odds. This is most striking and
mysterious in the relationship of Frodo and Gollum: Frodo’s goodness is
salvaged in the end only because his kindness (and that of many others) to the
pathetic Gollum made it possible for the latter to live long enough to be
overtaken at last entirely by evil. This is a paradoxical outcome, as difficult
to fit into theological order as Judas’ role in the Gospel, and leaving
Gollum’s eternal destiny unknown but doubtful. Yet it strikes one as perfect
and inevitable.
As an ex-Protestant, I always hear first in the word “grace”
something like the traditional definition of “actual” rather than that of
“sanctifying” grace. I think of it first as God’s favor and assistance, perhaps
given in specific acts. The fate or providence depicted in
The Lord of the Rings may be seen as the continual work of actual
grace. And it strikes me that the living beauty which permeates it might be
thought of as the presence of sanctifying grace, God’s own life imparted to us.
It is not, perhaps, theologically correct to say that grace has been imparted
to a book, but the light which shines from it may reasonably be thought of as
an analogy of what may happen when sanctifying grace fills the human soul, and
it is surely not far-fetched to suppose that the book has this secondary grace
because its creator had primary grace from his own Creator. I called it in the
beginning a great work of the Catholic imagination. Let me rephrase that now in
terms used by C.S. Lewis in speaking of George Macdonald: it is a work of the
baptized imagination, and its presence
in my own life and that of many, many others, whether or not they have
recognized it as such, has most certainly been an actual grace.
I have often wondered how Tolkien’s work could have been so
popular in the 1960s and yet, apparently, had so little power to bring people
out of the darkness. But the end of that story has perhaps not yet come, and at
any rate will probably remain hidden from us. It is our place only to do what
is required. As T.S. Eliot—whose work at first glance seems entirely different
from Tolkien’s and which Tolkien, a man of decidedly narrow tastes, undoubtedly
disliked—says, in words which would not have been out of place in
The Lord of the Rings:
For us there is only the trying; the rest is
not our business.
Light On Dark Water 