The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy

by Gregory Bassham

  But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned into a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue. (RK, p. 225)

  Sam and Frodo’s strength of character is the source of their authenticity as pilgrims.

  Our contemporary concept of “hero” is rooted in the conflicts described in Greek literature, battles between great divinities and god-like humans. It emerged out of our primordial desire for immortality, along with an emergent need for divinity and unity. Despite our affluence and technological advances, the need for extraordinary creatures and events still exists. So why are Sam and Frodo so ordinary? In Plato’s Symposium, his great dialogue on love, Diotima teaches that profound ideas emerge from one small intellectual spark. Tolkien teaches us the same lesson. The humblest creatures, as small as children, are capable of extraordinary feats.

  Now, more than ever, we are realizing that we need ordinary people to be extraordinary. Perhaps Tina Turner’s lament in Thunderdome is correct—“We don’t need another hero.” We need people to be all too human and frail. We need Sam and Frodo to be ordinary, not heroic. Tolkien’s reluctant pilgrims show us that when ordinary people bind themselves to the good, life can become extraordinary.

  _____________________

  1 Quoted in Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (Forest City: IDG Books Worldwide, 1999), p. 320.

  2 See John S. Dunne, “Myth and Culture in Theology and Literature: A Conversation with John S. Dunne, C.S.C.,” Religion and Literature 25.2 (Summer 1993), p. 83.

  3 Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 50.

  4 Discourse on the Method, in Selected Philosophical Writings, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 24–25.

  5 Ibid.

  6 The endowment of new titles and the changing of names is a sign of pilgrims making progress in journey tales. In the Eastern tale, Monkey, the main character acquires a new name along each stage of his journey toward Buddhahood. He begins as “Handsome Monkey King,” then he is named by the Patriarch Subodhi, “Aware of Vacuity.” And finally he becomes “Buddha Victorious in Strife.”

  7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), p. 121.

  8 Heidegger, “The Quest for Being,” reprinted in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 257.

  9 Dunne, “Myth and Culture in Theology and Literature,” p. 83.

  10 Other great texts—both Western and non-Western—that contain journey motifs include The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, The Song of Roland, Tristan, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

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  Happy Endings and Religious Hope: The Lord of the Rings as an Epic Fairy Tale

  JOHN J. DAVENPORT

  On the surface, it seems possible to read Tolkien’s tale of hobbits, wizards, and warriors simply as an entertaining adventure. Others regard the work as a Christian allegory. I will argue instead that Tolkien conceived his masterpiece as an epic fairy tale with a kind of religious significance. In particular, Tolkien wanted his story to have a special form of “happy ending” that suggests or echoes the Western religious promise that our struggles to overcome evil are not meaningless, that there will be final justice and a healing of this world. To show this, I will look at Tolkien’s theory of the fairy tale and his Arthurian romance model for the happy ending in The Lord of the Rings.

  Religion and Myth

  There has been a long debate among critics about whether The Lord of the Rings is fundamentally a religious work. Unlike C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s book is an epic that involves no obvious Christian allegory and few clear parallels to stories in the Jewish Torah or Christian New Testament. Thus Patricia Spacks writes that for the moral and theological scheme in the work “there are no explicit supernatural sanctions: The Lord of the Rings is by no means a Christian work.”1 Indeed many of the symbols, characters, and plot lines in Tolkien’s works are closer to sources in Northern European mythology, such as stories of the gods in the Norse Eddas, the Finnish Kalevala, the Icelandic sagas, and heroic epics such as the Germanic Lay of the Nibelung and the Old English Beowulf, on which Professor Tolkien was a leading expert in his time.2 And as Spacks correctly points out, in his famous lecture on Beowulf, Tolkien highlights differences between the Christian vision of salvation in an afterlife and the Norse vision of honor won in the heroic struggle to endure against chaos, despite the inevitability of our death: “northern mythology takes a darker view. Its characteristic struggle between man and monster must end ultimately, within Time, in man’s defeat.”3

  Moreover, as many critics have recognized, a poignant note of sadness pervades much of Tolkien’s work: the motifs of decline, irreversible loss, and the withdrawal of past glory are present throughout The Lord of the Rings. We find this not only in the passing of the High Elves, the diminished greatness of Gondor, and the loss of the entwives, but also in reflections on the great struggle at issue in the book. Even after the astounding triumph at Helm’s Deep, Théoden, the aged king of the horse-folk of Rohan, still recognizes a reason for sadness:

  “For however the fortune of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?”

  “It may,” said Gandalf. “The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been. But to such days we are doomed.” (TT, pp. 168-69)

  Yet as Spacks also notes, Tolkien’s world shares many similarities with the Christian one, including “the possibility of grace.”4 Tolkien’s Silmarillion, his unfinished prequel to The Lord of the Rings, begins with a single supreme God, Ilúvatar, creating from nothing the Ainur, immortal beings similar to archangels and angels in the traditional Christian hierarchy. With their participation, Ilúvatar then creates the physical world, Eä, and all its creatures in a cosmic symphony of divine music. The strife between good and evil begins in this creation story with the fall of the highest of the Ainur, Melkor (who is renamed Morgoth, paralleling Lucifer-Satan), who discovers that the discord he sows into the primordial music in the end only flows into the higher harmony foreseen by Ilúvatar. In the finale of this symphony of creation, “in one chord, deeper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of Ilúvatar, the Music ceased” (S, p. 17). Here, more clearly than anywhere else in his works, Tolkien gives his world the promise of an ultimate redemption, or what theologians call an eschatological end or final judgment and perfection of the world. This promise is echoed at places in The Lord of the Rings, for example in Gandalf’s memorable response to Denethor after the Steward of Gondor tells the wizard that he has no right to control the affairs of Gondor:

  “. . . the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?” (RK, p. 16)

  The implication is clear enough: just as the Stewards of Gondor are supposed to hold their realm in trust for the lost Númenórean King, should he ever return, so the rightful Owner of the world has entrusted Middle-earth to the care of Gandalf and his fellow wizards (and less directly to the care of the Valar, Ilúvatar’s archangelic regents), until He comes to this world Himself.

  But this Owner, Ilúvatar, is barely referenced in
The Lord of the Rings. Even in The Silmarillion, in which the Valar are initially active, Ilúvatar is remote. By the time we reach the Third Age, even the Valar are only vaguely suggested as a power in the Uttermost West beyond the Sea, who sent the wizards to help in the resistance against Sauron. So God and the archangels play virtually no direct role in The Lord of the Rings, which focuses on the struggles of mortal beings. In this way, Tolkien’s masterpiece is similar to classics of Old English poetry, which focus on our immanent world of time, with all its transitoriness, loss, and courage in the face of mortality. It is not surprising, therefore, that we do not find Tolkien’s characters praying to God, or encountering divine figures, or having religious experiences like those recorded in the lives of many saints. As Tolkien explained to his American publisher, the book is set in “a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology.’ The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. . . . The ‘Third Age’ was not a Christian world” (L, p. 220). Thus if a work of literature counts as “religious” only if it examines the nature of God, defends belief in God, or focuses on practices of worship, then The Lord of the Rings is not a religious work.

  Magic, Fairy Tale Endings, and Eschatology

  Nevertheless, The Lord of the Rings remains a religious work in quite a different sense. If, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard thought, the essence of religious faith lies in embracing the promise of a salvation that we cannot achieve by our own good work alone—a salvation possible only by divine miracle—then Tolkien’s work comes closer to this essentially religious attitude than other superficially “religious” works. Tolkien reveals his purpose in an essay titled “On Fairy-stories,”5 which explains the deeper idea behind the familiar happy endings we find in classic fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. In this remarkable essay, Tolkien argues that in their highest form, fairy tales are not, as we have come to think of them, just simplified nursery or old wives stories full of diminutive sprites invented to entertain very young children, but rather a form of serious literary art in which nature appears as a “Perilous Realm,” the world of “Faërie.” Genuine fairy-stories in this high mode include, for example, the original Greek tale of Perseus and the Gorgon, The Juniper Tree, and the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.6 The central function of magic in such stories is not to perform tricks or spells, but to satisfy “certain primordial human desires,” including the desire “to survey the depths of space and time,” “to hold communion with other living things,” and most importantly, “the realisation, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.”7

  Thus, Tolkien argues, it is essential to the genuine fairy tale that its magic be presented as true in the secondary world of the story, not explained away as a mere dream, illusion, or product of advanced technology. However, this is not because the magic of Faërie directly represents the divine power of the God who creates the cosmos. As Tolkien explains, the supernatural may play a role in fairy-stories: “Something really ‘higher’ is occasionally glimpsed in mythology: Divinity, the right to power (as distinct from its possession), the due of worship . . .”8 But unlike cosmogonic myths of creation, tales of Faërie are not primarily concerned with the Divine or “supernatural.” Rather, “fairy-stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.” The “essential face of Faërie,” says Tolkien, “is the middle one, the Magical.”9

  In other words, what primarily distinguishes tales of Faërie is a certain kind of magic, one that has nothing to do with the alchemist’s transmutations, or sorcerer’s apprentice tricks, or spells in a Dungeons and Dragons game. The sort of perilous magic native to the world of Faërie, represented in Tolkien’s world by High Elves, wizards, dragons, and ents, reveals a face of Nature that is hidden in our ordinary reality. It expresses a living force or spirit in all things, which it is our heart’s desire to encounter, and also to employ in creating new reality: “Uncorrupted, it does not seek delusion nor bewitchment and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves.”10 This good will to creative power Tolkien calls “the central desire and aspiration of human Fantasy.”11 In The Lord of the Rings, we see this desire for good power personified in Gandalf, and to a lesser extent in Galadriel, who both nevertheless refuse the chance to use the Ring’s power to dominate and rob others of their freedom.

  But the magic essential to tales of Faërie is not only an expression of the hidden side of nature, its inner glory and living beauty, and of the natural and good human desire to share in this wonder through “sub-creation.” For this magic also responds to the innate human desires for what Tolkien calls Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. For Tolkien, Recovery and Escape refer to renewed appreciation of life and the value of nature, and an escape from the alienating delusions of an artificial, mechanized, and increasingly ugly consumerist society. These goals help explain why The Lord of the Rings focuses on the comfort and beauty of the Shire and its inhabitants, in contrast not only to Mordor, but also to the ruined Isengard with its hellish underworld of grinding engines.

  Finally, we come to Consolation. By this, Tolkien does not mean comforting words, but an answer to the question of whether our efforts, hardships, and suffering have any point, any final significance (the sort of answer Boethius sought in his classic, The Consolation of Philosophy). The kind of happy ending that marks genuine fairy stories, in which there is a miraculous reprieve in the midst of impending disaster, hints at an answer to this ultimate question. Tolkien calls the consolation provided by this unique kind of happy ending a “eucatastrophe,” or joyous salvation within apparent catastrophe.

  Tolkien proposes the term “eucatastrophe” because, he says, we don’t have a word expressing the opposite of “tragedy.” He conceives tragedy as the true form and highest function of drama, and eucatastrophe as the true form and highest function of fairy-tale.

  The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly, of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’ or ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace, never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will), universal final defeat, and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.12

  Tolkien chooses the term “eucatastrophe” to emphasize that the sudden “turning” or unexpected deliverance at the end of a true tale of Faërie must be experienced not as an achievement of triumphant revenge, but rather as a divine gift. The joy produced by such a happy ending requires a surprise, a deliverance that no human effort could have made possible. In a letter to his son, Christopher, Tolkien uses the example of a boy dying of tubercular peritonitis who was taken to the Grotto at Lourdes, but not cured. However, on the train ride home, as he passed within sight of the Grotto again, he was healed. Tolkien writes that this story, “with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped-for happy ending,” gave him that peculiar emotion which comes from eucatastrophe, because it is a “sudden glimpse of the truth . . . a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us” (L, pp. 100–01).

  The poignant emotion Tolkien finds in this moment in a good fairy tale requires a tragic recognition of the evil and imperfection of our world, or even a Norse-like resignation to the fact that we cannot overcome it by our own power; yet the tale rises above this grief in a humanly impossible reprieve that is only made possible by divine grace (“by virtue of the absurd,” as Kierkegaard would say). In this sens
e, Tolkien says, “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.”13 The resurrection appears as the eucatastrophe of the Gospel story because it is the ultimate reprieve when all appears to be lost. But the eucatastrophic joy of the resurrection involves an eschatological message which is more direct than the hope implied in fairy-tale eucatastrophes. For Christians, the resurrection is the beginning of a new reality that promises eternal life with God in a world to come. In fairy-tale eucatastrophes, such eschatological hope is only indirectly hinted at.

  Thus, as Tolkien sees it, the special kind of happy ending we find only in true tales of Faërie gets its power precisely from its veiled eschatological significance: it hints that there is an eternal source of hope beyond all darkness and despair. More simply put, the eucatastrophic turn in the fairy story is a sign or echo of the eschaton, an indirect reference to divine judgment and the coming of a new Kingdom. And the magical appearance of Nature in such tales also intimates something unexpected, namely, that the natural world as we know it is destined for a divine transformation, destined to become part of a new heaven and a new earth.

  A good example to explain the notion of eucatastrophe is the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien studied closely and used in creating Frodo. Its central figure, the gigantic Green Knight who challenges Arthur’s court, exemplifies what Tolkien called the “essential face” of Faërie, the magical toward nature. As a descendant of the “green man” nature spirit in Celtic mythology, he is a manifestation of a power within living things that cannot be possessed, appropriated, or controlled by human beings, but which nevertheless can act in reciprocity with us. He cannot be killed by natural human power, but he can make perilous bargains.

  In brief summary, the story goes as follows.14 At the New Year’s feast in Camelot, the Green Knight comes to dare any of King Arthur’s knights to strike him a blow on the neck with his axe, as long as that knight will agree to suffer a similar blow at the Green Chapel one year hence. But when Gawain takes up this challenge, and cuts off the Green Knight’s head, the latter picks up his severed head and tells Gawain that he’ll see him in a year to complete the bargain! Two days before the appointed tryst, Gawain comes in distress to the house of Sir Bertilak (who is the Green Knight in disguise), and there enters into another perilous bargain: while his host is off hunting, Gawain will stay with his lady in the house, and he and his host will exchange whatever prizes they won at the end of the day. Sir Bertilak’s wife (a Green Lady in disguise) then tries to seduce Gawain, testing his honor. With great difficulty Gawain resists the lady’s advances, but on the morning before his doom, he accepts her girdle offered as a token of affection—both out of courtesy and because she tells him that its magic power can save him from the axe. He does not pass the girdle to his host, as their bargain required. Later, when the Green Knight comes with terrifying fury to the chapel, Gawain accepts his doom (the resignation that must precede a eucatastrophe). But the Green Knight does not kill Gawain: his first two axe-strokes stop at Gawain’s skin, and the third cuts him just enough to cause a permanent scar, as punishment for keeping the girdle. This mark of mortality, similar to Achilles’s heel, is the flaw which signals his humanity, his difference from the divine. As Tolkien wrote, “His ‘perfection’ is made more human and credible, and therefore more appreciable as genuine nobility, by the small flaw.”15