Lugging the Cross up Mt. Doom David Elliot Originally published in Issue XII of Vulgata, February, 2004.  If you haven't read The Lord of the Rings or seen the films, be warned that this article contains spoilers.

When Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings swept British polls in the 1990’s as the “greatest book of the twentieth century”, the reaction of the literary pundits was one of unbelief, derision, and scorn.  The Times Literary Supplement described the results of the poll as “horrifying”, The Nation denounced The Lord of the Rings as "juvenile trash", and The Guardian dismissed it as being “by any reckoning one of the worst books ever written.”  One didn't have to look hard to find the kind of sentiment amongst reviewers heard once before: "Leaves out of the elf-country, gah!"  Indeed, the news that a book about “a showdown between Good People and Goblins” had trounced all the sexed up, stream of consciousness stuff was received as an upset as unlikely as a Fifth Grader taking the Nobel Prize in Science or a tribe of Sub-Saharan Pygmies capturing New York.  Now what is puzzling here isn't that the critics got it wrong and the people got it right.  Critics are often like professional wine-tasters for whom the best French port isn't good enough, anyway.  What is really baffling here is that the people voted overwhelmingly for a book that reads like an indictment of their own culture.  This can be seen from the fact that while the Lord may be the most popular book of the twentieth century, it is probably the book which least flatters the prejudices of the twentieth century.  It pronounces no benedictions upon promiscuity or television or feminism or the beauty of being a vegetarian.  Albert Camus said that future historians describing modern man might find a single phrase sufficient: “He fornicated and read the newspapers.”  Tolkien saw such moral decadence as “Mordor in our midst” and instead offered a tale full of self-sacrificing heroes and courageous last-stands, visions of glory and rumours of angels, sword on sword, hand on harp, and the cosmic struggle between good and evil.  In short, he touted everything that stinks in the nostrils of morally liquidated, faddishly nihilistic, postmodernity.  The combination, you see, is very strange indeed.  After all, nobody likes to be told that they’re wrong, but Tolkien was brazen enough to tell modern man that he’s morally and aesthetically dead wrong - and yet this same society dotes on his books!

This perhaps this shouldn’t strike us as too paradoxical.  People with foolish beliefs are often better than their beliefs, and there is an attractive beauty and strength to Tolkien's mythology that strikes the palate like red beef and strong beer after the vapid fast food of secular culture.  The attraction modern man feels towards the Lord is best described in Tolkien’s own words, taken from a passage about how the Children of God were said to be fascinated by the sea:

“And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Iluvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

It is no secret that Tolkien was a devout Catholic and thoroughgoing supernaturalist for whom even the Middle Ages were in many respects "too modern".  But what is less generally understood is that his work isn't just a montage of lutes and goblins and mothballs in 600,000 words, but a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work" as he himself admitted, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."  This might seem a strange claim to make for a book that makes no mention of God, but Tolkien's answer to this was that the "religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."  This is conspicuous in several particular areas: the ethical dimension, in the struggle between good and evil, where the ring symbolizing sin is carried by Frodo to the heart of evil and is destroyed by the power of suffering love.  We see it symbolically, in such rich parallels in the Lord and the Christian tradition as the lembas and the Eucharist, Gandalf and the Resurrected Christ, and Galadriel and the Virgin Mary.  Liturgically, the personification of place, preoccupation with special objects, and veritable obsession with the questions of time and eternity, particularly in their relation to death and the afterlife, is an overriding theme of the Lord and one which is portrayed in a strong Christian light.

 Many critics have dismissed the Lord as a childish fable of simplistic morality.  But the ethical dimension of the Lord is anything but simplistic.  We see this especially in the final failure of Frodo at the end of the quest.  This is often glossed over, but it must be remembered that despite his goodness, courage, and perseverance, in the end Frodo fails and claims the Ring for his own.  It is then that the amazing and unexpected happens.  Gollum re-emerges, bites off Frodo’s finger and with it the Ring, dances on the edge of the volcano, and falls in, killing himself and destroying the Ring.  Frodo fails and yet, on the Field of Cormallen, he is hailed as a hero.  Why is this?  It has essentially to do with the high and terrible vocation of Frodo as the Ring-bearer and what it entails.  Frodo is not a warrior.  He is not especially wise.  He is the last person anybody would expect to be chosen for the most precipitous quest of all history.  Why not Gandalf or some mighty elf-lord?  Why a hobbit; the member of the one race nobody has even bothered to notice?  It is the theological vindication in fiction of Christ’s saying that “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last”, as well as of the beatitude “The meek shall inherit the earth.”  The quest is not won by the force of arms or the blaring of trumpets.  The many epic battles of the Lord are all tangential next to the quest of destroying the Ring.  And the Ring must be destroyed.  It’s nature is that of dominating the free wills of others, whether in intention good or evil, but this very abolition of free will is itself an intrinsic evil. The answer Tolkien gives, though, is not to counter the evil power with a good power.  Power has nothing to do with it at all.  The carrying of the Ring is a stripping away of power, a kenosis or “self-emptying” such as Christ undertook on the Cross.  Frodo’s vocation is a priestly self-sacrifice similar to Christ’s supreme sacrifice.  Christ destroys evil not by an army of zealots or by twelve legions of angels.  He destroys it by the power of suffering love, by laying down his life for his friends.  It is similar in the Lord.  Like Christ, Frodo is stripped, mocked, and whipped by his enemies.  Then there is the Ring, which gets heavier the closer Frodo and Sam get to Mordor.  It is their via dolorosa, with Frodo carrying the burden until Sam plays the part of Simon of Cyrene by carrying the Ring for a time.  So in the end it is not an army that defeats Sauron.  In fact, the army is just a distraction.  But just as Christ goes to the heart of evil and overcomes it with the power of love, Frodo journeys to the heart of Mordor and defeats Sauron by a self-giving in which he and Sam are bruised, bloodied, and spent.

And yet, by claiming the Ring, Frodo still fails.  How is he, then, a hero?  Perhaps this is where the Christian theme is strongest..  Gandalf already alluded to Gollum having some part to play in the War of the Ring, for good or ill.  In the end, Gollum saves the quest.  And why is this?  Because Frodo had pity on him, and did not kill him even when it seemed the prudent thing to do, with Sam pressuring for it.  Frodo is a hero in the end not because of his valour but because of his mercy, the seemingly senseless mercy he showed to Gollum that in the end led to the quest being a success.  “The pity of Bilbo will rule the fate of many” Gandalf told Frodo when in his rashness he wished Gollum dead.  But it was the pity of Frodo that saved the world.  Perhaps never before in fiction have the words of Christ: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” been so beautifully realized.  Frodo is not a hero because of his strength or self-sufficiency.  It is his act of mercy that makes good come out of even Gollum’s malice in the end.  It is a case in point of felix culpa - of God writing straight with our crooked lines.

If the Lord is so very Christian, it might be asked, then why is there no mention of God?  Tolkien’s answer to this was that the “religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”  We have seen this element in the story.  It must also be looked at in the symbolism.  First of all there is the Marian element.  Tolkien wrote of the Virgin Mary as “Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded.”  She was “the greatest influence in my life” he said.  Tolkien conceded that the figure of Galadriel was deeply indebted to Catholic imagery of Mary as Queen.  She is at once “tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring… worshipful” and yet is still “shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.”  Perhaps no character in fiction has so successfully combined the two semblances of the Virgin Mary as being at the same time the Divine Mother and Queen of Heaven, yet also a seemingly unspectacular little peasant woman you might not have even noticed in the street.  Galadriel also calls forth a chivalrous devotion similar to medieval Marian piety.  We see this especially in Gimli the Dwarf:

     “Gimli Gloin’s son, have you your axe ready?” (Eomer asked).
     “Nay, lord,” said Gimli, “but I can speedily fetch it, if there be need.”
     “You shall judge” said Eomer.  “For there are certain rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood that lie still between us.  And now I have seen her with my eyes.”
      “Well, lord,” said Gimli, “and what say you now?”
      “Alas!” said Eomer.  “I will not say that she is the fairest lady that lives.”
      “Then I must go for my axe,” said Gimli.

There are many other striking instances of thinly veiled Christian symbolism in the Lord.  One has to do with Tolkien’s fervent devotion to the Eucharist.  In a letter to his son he wrote that:

“That Church of which the Pope is the acknowledged head on earth has as chief claim that it is the one that has (and still does) ever defended the Blessed Sacrament, and given it most honour, and put it (as Christ plainly intended) in the prime place.”

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking… it felt as if something that grew in the ground… between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

“Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard
For your watch hath not been in vain
And the Black Gate is broken
And your King has passed through
And he is victorious.”

The final area to be considered in the Lord is the liturgical dimension.  This is present first of all in the spiritual quality imputed to matter itself: this tree is good or evil, this land is filled with memories of light or shadow.  The whole thing is quite in keeping with Tolkien’s character.  George Sayer tells of how Tolkien, before he would use a tape recorder, said the Our Father in Gothic “to cast out the devil that was sure to be in it since it was a machine.”  On another occasion he said of Ireland: “It is as if the earth there is cursed.  It exudes an evil that is held in check only by Christian practice.”  Tolkien had a vividly sacramental view of the world and saw it as a chessboard upon which the black and white pieces of good and evil angels vied for the souls of men.  The sacramental view of life is also seen in the Lord in the heavenly longing for the transcendent of which the liturgy itself is meant to be evocative.  It is seen especially in the magic that lies upon Lothlorien:

"Frodo stood for awhile lost in wonder.  It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world…  No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth.  On the land of Lorien there was no stain."