Posts Tagged → Lord of the Rings

A distant, glorious echo: Tolkien and typology

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien boldy declares his dislike of allegory and notes that, whatever critics and readers have suggested, the novel is most certainly not an allegory. Nonetheless, Christian readers have insisted on finding parallels to Christian theology throughout his works, to the extent that they commonly consider various characters—Gandalf in particular—to be explicitly Christ-figures.

Orthanc, illustrated by Alan Lee

The Tower of Orthanc, illustrated by Alan Lee

Given Tolkien’s adamant rejection of any sort of allegorical reading of his text, we surely cannot admit of an accidental allegory; such a thing would not make sense. More, when we hold The Lord of the Rings up against works that are explicitly allegorical—C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, for example—we note that there is a real and even profound difference between the two in character and tone. We should therefore grant that Tolkien is not to be argued with here and move on.1

Still, Christian ideas keep popping up in his works: the death and resurrection of Gandalf, the unambiguously demonic evil that the heroes oppose in its various incarnations of Sauron or the Balrog, the king returning to claim his throne after a long stewardship, the long-awaited marriage of that triumphant king to a radiant bride, and so forth. While these do not have the sorts of explicit allegorical turns that characterize, for example, Lewis’ explicit identification of Aslan with Jesus, clearly there is something going on here. What is more, Tolkien himself would freely admit it.

The answer is simple enough. What many readers have mistaken for allegory is typology instead. Continue reading →

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What’s Wrong with the Hobbits? Jackson’s Malformed Moral Universe

Jeffrey Weiss thinks that Peter Jackson doesn’t understand the moral universe of J.R.R. Tolkien.  That’s a thesis that I wholeheartedly endorse.  But not quite in the same way that Weiss does, or at least not with the same bit of evidence.

For instance, Weiss contends that Jackson turns Frodo into a hero at the end of his quest to destroy the ring:

In the movie, after Gollum bites off his finger, Frodo heroically launches himself at Gollum and hurls them both over the side. Gollum falls with the Ring into the lava but Frodo is barely saved by Sam.

I’ll grant that Jackson’s version is more exciting, in the same way that loading Ophelia with a suicide vest and having her blast herself to smithereens center-stage would liven up a production of Hamlet. But that wouldn’t be Shakespeare.

Here’s the key for Tolkein that Jackson ignores: Frodo fails in his quest but the quest succeeds. Jackson, however, has Frodo win.

To put it in Tolkien’s Christian framework, salvation in the book could not be achieved even by the most heroic efforts of men (or hobbits). To a secularist, Gollum’s fall might be read as an accident. To Tolkien, it was always providential, an act of grace.

It’s true that Jackson alters the story and that the alterations suggest he misses Tolkien’s point.  But Jackson’s changes are wrong in a different and more subtle way that Weiss suggests.

In point of fact, Jackson doesn’t seem to interpret Frodo’s final charge as “heroic” at all.  (You can watch the final scene here).  Frodo’s face is quite clearly still set on attaining the Ring and when he accosts Smeagol he goes straight for trying to wrest it back.  Nor is it at all fair to say Frodo “hurls them both over the side.”  They both go over, but again that’s a side-effect of Frodo’s struggle to get back what he’d lost.  Even to the very last, as the Ring sits on top of the lava, Frodo looks longingly at it and feels the temptation of it one final time.  Sam even has to say, “Don’t you let go.  Don’t let go” before he hoists him up.

frodo ring

Contra Weiss, then, Frodo clearly doesn’t “win” here.   At all.  But Jackson still misses Tolkien’s vision, albeit in a more subtle way:  Frodo’s failure isn’t quite absolute, but is intermixed with resisting the Ring’s calling one final time.

Yet that difference also misrepresents Tolkien’s moral universe by obscuring the “providence” at work in Gollum’s fall.  Despite the Ring’s inevitable destruction, Jackson allows a final act of resistance to its allures.  Frodo feels every bit of the temptation and, with the voice of exhortation from a friend, turns away from it.  (He is perhaps too literally “white knuckling” his resistance to temptation.)

Of course, Tolkien does have characters who are able to resist the Ring’s power.  Most prominently, Tom Bombadil seems to be wholly uninterested in the Ring due to what we might describe as a moral immaturity.

And then there’s Faramir, who avoids the Ring’s temptations because of his own moral purity and prudence.  It is Faramir, if anywhere, where Jackson’s failure to grasp Tolkien’s moral world is the clearest.  In his most significant departure from the plot of the books, Faramir actually tries to take the Ring and then rather than sending them on their way with gifts takes them with him to Gondor, where they only narrowly escape.

That is a question that I suspect Jackson has no plausible answer for, especially given his inability to understand Faramir’s “purity of heart.”  Which is to say, the one character that Tolkien presents as having the moral fiber to resist the Ring Jackson portrays as grasping after it.  But while Tolkien destroys the Ring without giving Frodo the chance to resist it one more time, Jackson provides the false consolation that at the end Frodo had enough goodness in him to not follow Gollum to his doom.  Whether Frodo would have actually had the internal resources “not let go” in a parallel-Tolkien-universe is to me something of an open question.  He failed to resist it once:  why should we believe that as long as the Ring exists and he can see it, he wouldn’t go after it even to his own destruction?

Tolkien’s universe has much starker moral lines than Jackson’s story—and the difference matters.  In the movies, we cling to goodness with our fingernails.  Only at the last second do we somehow, presumably from within ourselves, find the strength to overcome our previous bad decisions and do the right thing.  But the books are a world where goodness holds us and overcomes our failures.  It is a world where we stand in need of grace—but where grace also transforms us and makes possible a genuine moral purity.

Ray Bradbury, J.R. R. Tolkien, and the Benefits of Nostalgia

In an excellent piece on Ray Bradbury’s nostalgia, Andy Rau tosses off this fascinating but undeveloped parenthetical: “Of the various Christian fantasists of the 20th century, I think only J.R.R. Tolkien matches Bradbury’s sad but determined nostalgia for what we’ve left behind or cannot attain.”

Rau’s analysis of Bradbury is full of wisdom, and I encourage you to click through and read it. But don’t do so expecting him to unpack that connection between Tolkien and Bradbury. For that, dear reader, stick with me.

Though Tolkien was a British, Catholic, Oxford professor and Bradbury was an American, vaguely Buddhist, self-educated writer, there are deep affinities between the two, affinities which should make both writers essential imaginative resources for the sort of people who read a site called Mere Orthodoxy.

The “sad but determined nostalgia” that Rau identifies in both Tolkien and Bradbury is perhaps the most important emotional resonance of their work. Tolkien and Bradbury are masters of a certain longing for the past, a desire for a history which we feel ourselves to be alienated from. This longing is one of the most powerful anxieties created by modernity, especially in those of us who are of a traditionalist or conservative stripe: a persistent sense of being cut off from a more authentic, holistic tradition.

Tolkien's Cover Designs for the First Edition ...

Tolkien’s Cover Designs for the First Edition of The Lord of the Rings (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of this emotion, of course, is simply a golden-age nostalgia experienced by people in every age, the feeling that our forebears were heroes and we a diminished people. Some of it is appropriate critique of modernity’s excesses. But the middle ground between the false idealization of the first impulse and the discursive critique of the second is made up of raw longing for a different world, an unease with the world as it is.

Tolkien articulated this discomfort with throbbing beauty in the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings; he expressed it more directly when in a letter he described his spiritual position as a soldier fighting “the long defeat.”

Bradbury’s work is concerned with an American version of this longing, one less heroic and more childlike, but beautiful nonetheless: read his de facto epigraph, published in the New Yorker not long before his death, and try not to be moved by his longing-but-joyful memorialization of his childhood. In Dandelion Wine, an autobiographical novel drawing on the same memories of boyhood in Illinois, he describes his work this way: “the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.”

Like Tolkien, Bradbury feels both the green spaces of his boyhood and their ultimate loss and destruction as present realities. Cynics and progressives may dismiss such a response as golden-age thinking, but anyone who feels affection for their past knows the emotion at some level and can find value in its literary expression.

Those of us with conservative or traditionalist leanings are uniquely poised to appreciate this sort of literary expression, for like Tolkien and Bradbury our beliefs are premised on the essential (if not thoroughgoing) goodness of the past, rather than its essential evil. From this perspective, literature that calls up our desire for that past schools us in the virtue of fidelity to that past, and love for it. Like Tolkien, for Bradbury our love what has gone before disciplines and chastens our hope for the future. He is thus an essential imaginative resource for all of us who would do the same.