Finding God in the "Lord of the Rings"

By Jim Ware

as published in the December 2001 issue of Focus on the Family magazine. Reprinted with Permission

September, 1931
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, windy, at any rate. On the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, two tweed-jacketed, pipe-puffing professors go crunching down the gravel path known as Addison's Walk, under the deeper shadows of a grove of trees.

"Look!" says one of them, a tall, long-faced fellow with the furrowed brow and twinkling eyes of a sage . . . or wizard. He points to a large oak. "There it stands," he says, "its feet in the earth, its head among the stars. A majestic miracle of creation! And what do we call it? A tree." He laughs. "The word falls absurdly short of expressing the thing itself."

"Of course it does," responds the other, a round-faced, slightly balding, bespectacled man in his mid-30s. "Like any word, it's just a verbal invention—a symbol of our own poor devising."

"Exactly," says the first man. "And here's my point: Just as a word is an invention about an object or an idea, so a story can be an invention about Truth."

The other rubs his chin. "I've loved stories since I was a boy," he muses. "You know that, Tollers! Especially stories about heroism and sacrifice, death and resurrection—like the Norse myth of Balder. But when it comes to Christianity . . . well, that's another matter. I simply don't understand how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever He was) 2,000 years ago can help me here and now."

"But don't you see, Jack?" persists his friend. "The Christian story is the greatest story of them all. Because it's the Real Story. The historical event that fulfills the tales and shows us what they mean. The tree itself—not just a verbal invention."

Jack stops and turns. "Are you trying to tell me that in the story of Christ . . . all the other stories have somehow come true?"

A week and a half later, Jack—better known to most of us as C.S. Lewis, teacher, author, defender of the Christian faith, and creator of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia—writes to his friend Arthur Greeves: "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. My long night talk with Tolkien had a great deal to do with it."

June, 2001
A muggy, dusty afternoon at the local Renaissance Festival. I'm taking a break in the shade with my fellow festival musicians. Around us swirls a crowd of armored knights, brown-robed friars, gauzy-winged fairies, and white-whiskered wizards. It's the closest thing to the Middle Ages—or Middle-earth—that you're likely to find here at the beginning of the 21st century.

Tom, a fiddler in a feathered cap, asks what I've been up to. I tell him about the writing project I've taken on with my friend and collaborator, Kurt Bruner: a book of Christian reflections on The Lord of the Rings.

"The Lord of the Rings!" laughs Tom (who does not consider himself a believer). "Isn't that a pretty pagan book?"

December, 2001
New Line Cinema's big-screen version of The Fellowship of the Ring—part one of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and one of the most anticipated film events of the past several decades—hits the theaters after more than a year of hobbit-hype. Since January, fans have been visiting movie-related Web sites and waiting in line overnight just to see the trailer. So forget about Star Wars and Space Odyssey. In 2001, the place to be is Middle-earth.

And yet, hype or no hype, there are a few filmgoers who are still wondering what it's all about. Especially serious-minded Christians. Elves, dwarves, wizards, goblins, magic rings—haven't we been through this kind of thing before—recently? Isn't The Lord of the Rings just another romp through the occultic world of Harry Potter?

For answers, let's go back to Jack and "Tollers."

Invented stories (of Truth)
"Tollers" (a nickname used by some of his closest friends) was, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien himself: creator of Middle-earth and author of The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy trilogy hailed by some as "the book of the 20th century." And yes: It was Tolkien who helped Lewis take that final decisive step toward faith in Christ.

Their long night talk about symbols and verbal inventions was just the beginning. Through the years, Lewis and Tolkien were to spend long hours refining their ideas and incorporating them into their literary art. In part, they did this with the help of a group of like-minded Christian friends: The Inklings.

Lewis made no secret of his intentions. "Supposing," he once asked himself, reflecting on the nature of God, the sufferings of Christ, and other fundamental Christian truths, "that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency. . . ." This, he said, is exactly what he was trying to do in The Chronicles of Narnia.1

As for Tolkien, he would have been shocked and angered to hear Tom refer to his work as pagan. "The Lord of the Rings," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "is of course a fundamentally religious and Christian work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."

Humphrey Carpenter, author of Tolkien's authorized biography, takes this claim seriously. Tolkien's writings, he says, are "the work of a profoundly religious man." According to Carpenter, God is essential to everything that happens in The Lord of the Rings. Without Him, Middle-earth couldn't exist.

But be forewarned: Evidences of God's presence are not as obvious in Tolkien's work as in Lewis' more allegorical style of writing. They are there, however—firmly embedded in the tales he insisted on calling "inventions about Truth." In fact, if you know what to look for, you may find them popping up everywhere.

Lurking behind every character
First, The Lord of the Rings is actually a story of stories—a vast web of histories, legends, tales, and songs in which every character has a crucial role to play. As a Christian, Tolkien understood that we've been in a tale, too. Like the adventure of his hobbits, he saw the adventure of our lives as part of a story that begins "once upon a time" and moves toward its eventual "ever after"—a tale full of meaning and purpose, composed by the grandest Author of all.

Next, Gollum, the pitiful, wretched creature who discovered the great Ring—his "Precious"—and kept it for many years in dark places under the earth. So long did he possess and cherish the sinister talisman that he has become the possessed. That's because Tolkien's Ring is an image of the unwholesome, perverting power of evil and self-serving sin—a progressive, growing, encroaching power that starts small and ends big.

Middle-earth is full of battles and conflicts—images of the spiritual war in which we are engaged as Christians. We're not talking generic good vs. evil here. The evil in Tolkien's universe is personal. It takes shape as an Enemy who relentlessly hounds and pursues his prey with ill intent.

That's not the end of the story, of course. Because at its deepest level, The Lord of the Rings is also a tale about the sovereignty of God. The God whose love and power are so great that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him. The God who uses even the Enemy's wicked designs to bring about the ultimate fulfillment of His perfect plan. Within that plan, even Gollum has an indispensable part to play in the saving of Middle-earth.

Finally, take a close look at the members of the Fellowship of the Ring as they go trekking across the movie screen. Ask yourself which one looks the most like an epic hero. Is it the handsome, mysterious, swashbuckling Aragorn? Keen-sighted, swift-footed Legolas? Hard-fisted Gimli? Strong, dauntless Boromir? Wise and aged Gandalf? Each is a hero in his own way, of course. And yet not one of them is chosen to carry the perilous Ring into the heart of Mordor. Instead, it's a hobbit—a boyish-looking halfling—who bears the burden of the world to its final destination.

This idea—that God uses small hands to accomplish great deeds—could almost be called the heart and soul of The Lord of the Rings. It's Moses and Pharaoh, David and Goliath, Gideon and the Midianites all over again. But the mission of Frodo and Sam isn't just your typical underdog story. It's something much more. In a way, it's a desperately needed reminder that God's ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8)—that when the power of evil confronts us with overwhelming odds on its side, the answer is not to fight fire with fire, but to look for deliverance in unexpected places. Hope and salvation, Tolkien seems to say, often arise in small, unnoticed corners. Like a hobbit-hole in the Shire.

Or a manger in a Palestinian stable.

Looking . . .
A late night in the spring of the year. Lewis' sitting room is strewn with papers, books, and empty teacups. The other Inklings have gone. Jack yawns and stretches.

"Tollers," he says as Tolkien gets up to leave, "there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves."

Click here for a film review of "The Lord of the Rings" by Focus on the Family ministries.