After the One Ring is destroyed and the Eagles bear Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom, Sam wakes in a soft bed under a canopy of trees with a sweet scent in the air.

In wonder he asks aloud, “Where are we?” To his surprise, he is answered by Gandalf, whom he last saw plummeting to certain death into the depths of Khazad-dûm alongside the Balrog.

But instead of the familiar Gandalf the Grey, he is greeted by Gandalf “robed in white, his beard now gleaming like pure snow in the twinkling of the leafy sunlight” (The Return of the King, 246).1

Astonished and “between bewilderment and great joy,” Sam is struck speechless. But at last he gathers himself and says:

Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world? (Ibid.)

“A great Shadow has departed,” Gandalf says, and then laughs. The sound falls upon Sam’s ears “like the echo of all the joys he had ever known.”

But instead of laughing, Sam bursts into tears. He wept as he fled from Moria for the grief of losing Gandalf, and now he weeps again finding Gandalf alive and waiting for him as he wakes.

These tears clear the way for his own laughter “as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer.” For then Sam’s “tears ceased, and his laughter welled up” (246-7).

We see this same mixture of grief and love, tears and laughter a few pages later. The Host of the West (the victorious armies of Gondor, Rohan, and their allies) is gathered together on the Field of Cormallen. To celebrate the victory over Sauron and honor the Ringbearers Sam and Frodo, a minstrel sings the song of “Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.”

Hearing the name of the song that will be sung, Sam “laughed aloud for sheer delight, and he stood up and cried: ‘O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!’ And then he wept” (249).

He is not the only one to laugh and weep, for all the assembled host do as well:

And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness. (249-50).

Of course, everything sad has not really “come untrue” in this tale. Gandalf did in fact actually still die, and many other sorrows and hardships followed. But Providence worked these sad events into a glorious greater good: the defeat of Sauron. “A great Shadow has departed,” as Gandalf put it. And there is great joy and rejoicing in the aftermath.

In Gandalf’s resurrection, the passing of the Shadow with the fall of Sauron, and the conclusion to The Lord of the Rings we find echoes of another Fairy Story and the greatest “eucatastrophe,” or “sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears” (Letter 89) there ever was:

The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.
—Letter 89

As Gandalf fell in his battle to overcome the Balrog, so Jesus became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. As Gandalf was raised by the Eru Ilúvatar himself and sent back to complete his mission in a new and glorified body, so the Father raised Christ from the dead on the first Easter Sunday. As Gandalf revealed himself to Sam the gardener and shared the good news that he has returned and the Shadow has been defeated, so Jesus revealed himself to Mary Magdalene in the Garden (where she mistook him for a gardener) with the Good News of his return and triumph over Sin and Death.

As we ponder these echoes of the gospel story, we may ask along with Sam, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” The answer is yes and no. Everything sad will not be undone as if it never happened. The risen Christ still bore the scars of his crucifixion on his resurrected body. But everything sad will be redeemed, made new, and worked for the ultimate glory of God and good of his people.

In the Easter story, we see that the restoration and redemption of all things has already begun. The power of Sin and Death are broken. The way to God through Christ is open. The Love of God, displayed on the Cross, is available to all who would believe.

But though the process has begun, many sad things remain true. While their power is broken, we still struggle with the presence of Sin and Death. Despite the abundant joy to be found in this life, there is much sorrow that remains as well.

While we may not see the resolution or reconciliation of sad things being made new—worked “together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” as Romans 8:28 says—in our lifetimes, we trust that are sure to see it in the next.

For now we wait, commemorating Christ’s triumph and resurrection each Easter Sunday with our own mixture of joy and sorrow, tears and laughter, while we look forward to the day when Christ will wipe every tear from our eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

Is everything sad going to come untrue?

The one seated on the throne in heaven answers, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).

Happy Easter, friends. He is risen!

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Interested in More on LOTR and Easter? Here’s a few of my past newsletters on the connections:

📚 You can read more of my writing by reading my books! My latest is a collection of essays on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and more of Tolkien’s works (and their adaptations). You can also find it and more of my books on Amazon or Gumroad

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Today I’m sharing with you all a piece he wrote on the meaning, function, and significance of gardens in Tolkien’s Middle-earth that I found insightful and fascinating. Enjoy!

Also, reminder that today is the final day to enter my Tolkien Reading Day giveaway and get 25% off a paid subscription to Jokien with Tolkien forever! More details below. See you later this week for the latest round of Middle-earth Madness!

Gardens in Middle‑earth

What Tolkien Teaches Us About Tending a Broken World

by

I keep returning to an illustration I painted back in 2018: In the Garden of Bag End. Not because of artistic quality, but because it invites reflection on the place of gardens in Tolkien’s world.

The illustration shows the conversation between Gandalf and Frodo in the chapter “The Shadow of the Past” when the truth about the One Ring is revealed. But I wanted to approach it from a different angle that how it has been illustrated: view it from the sunlit garden outside, looking through the open window into the room where Gandalf and Frodo sit in shadow, while off to the side, Sam Gamgee is trimming the lawn, eavesdropping (though there ain’t no eaves at Bag End, and that’s a fact).

As I worked on the illustration, I found myself thinking about gardens in The Lord of the Rings. They appear in many places and they are never merely decorative. And it is no accident that Sam Gamgee, whom Tolkien singles out as the “chief hero,” is not just a servant in the usual sense, but a gardener.

I have always liked that about Sam.

I myself love gardening, although of the two gardens that I have been partially taking care of, one is a small inner courtyard garden, just a shady patch of lawn and a few bushes between tall houses. We are very grateful for such a peaceful patch of nature in the centre of Prague, but it is not exactly the place for any grand gardening ambitions. The other is the garden of our cottage in the mountains. Although it is much larger, we only stay there for a few weeks a year, so gardening is mostly limited to preventing it from being overrun by the surrounding wilderness.

But Tolkien himself was a passionate gardener. His letters show his love of nature, especially trees and plants. In his Letter 213 he wrote: “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands” which reflects his deep connection with gardens and simple, nature-based pleasures.

Hobbits and the love of “good tilled earth”

Already in The Hobbit we learn that Bilbo is very fond of flowers and he admires the gardens of Beorn. In the beginning of The Lord of the Rings Gandalf praises Bilbo’s garden and Bilbo confirms that he is very fond of it.1

It is striking that Bilbo and Frodo, clearly wealthy by hobbit standards, do not employ household servants. They keep their own pantries, cook their own meals, wash their own dishes and dust their own mantelpieces. But they do employ gardeners. We know Bilbo’s gardener was first Holman Greenhand, then Hamfast “The Gaffer” Gamgee, and finally Hamfast’s son Sam.

This tells us something about hobbit society. Gardening is not menial labour; it is a craft, a vocation, a point of pride. Tolkien says about the hobbits in the Prologue:

“They love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well‑ordered and well‑farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.”

We all know that hobbits like comfort and good meals, but they also value the steady work of tending and cultivating the land. A garden is a symbol of their ideal life: peaceful, fruitful, and lovingly maintained.

And this is recognised even outside the Shire. When Faramir meets Sam, he says with admiration: “Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour.”

Faramir perceives that the Shire has achieved something Gondor longs for: a life where peace is so deeply rooted that gardeners are among the most honoured of people.

Gardens beyond the Shire: guarded places of rest

Once the hobbits leave home, gardens appear again and again, mostly in moments of respite and recovery.

The House of Tom Bombadil is described as having both a kitchen-garden and a flower-garden. They add to the impression of a peaceful place where hobbits can relax in complete safety between terrifying adventures of the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs.

In Rivendell, gardens blend with impressive natural scenery to create the overall impression of this protected refuge:

“Sam led him along several passages and down many steps and out into a high garden above the steep bank of the river. He found his friends sitting in a porch on the side of the house looking east. Shadows had fallen in the valley below, but there was still a light on the faces of the mountains far above. The air was warm. The sound of running and falling water was loud, and the evening was filled with a faint scent of trees and flowers, as if summer still lingered in Elrond’s gardens.”

The Mirror of Galadriel stands in a garden enclosed by a high green hedge on the southern slopes of the hill of Caras Galadhon.

And indeed the whole of Lothlórien feels more like a vast, enchanted garden than a wild forest. In Letter 339 Tolkien writes: “Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved.” It looks like an idyllic place, the ideal state of nature that any gardener can only dream of: “No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.” It is cared for, maintained, and perfected by the elves and sustained by the power of Galadriel and her ring.

In Christian art, garden has often symbolised Paradise, the Garden of Eden. And Lothlórien seems very much like an earthly paradise.

But gardens in the Bible are also places of temptation. In the Garden of Eden, the first temptation led to humanity’s fall when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus faced the ultimate internal struggle while his disciples succumbed to the temptation of sleep.

And in Lothlórien, the characters must overcome their temptations: first, the members of the Fellowship when they are tested by Galadriel and then Galadriel herself when Frodo offers her the One Ring.

Among Galadriel’s gifts to the Fellowship there is also one garden-related gift for Sam, which will only come to fruition later in the story:

“For you little gardener and lover of trees,’ she said to Sam, ‘I have only a small gift.’ She put into his hand a little box of plain grey wood, unadorned save for a single silver rune upon the lid. ‘Here is set G for Galadriel,’ she said; ‘but also it may stand for garden in your tongue. In this box there is earth from my orchard, and such blessing as Galadriel has still to bestow is upon it. It will not keep you on your road, nor defend you against any peril; but if you keep it and see your home again at last, then perhaps it may reward you. Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there.’”

Ithilien, a fragrant land of herbs, flowers, resinous trees, and gentle slopes sheltered by mountains, is also called a garden in one of my favourite sentences of landscape description: “Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.” Although it is being invaded and damaged by the Enemy, it is still protected and it is a place where Frodo and Sam find a brief rest with Faramir.

Minas Tirith doesn’t have many gardens, as Legolas remarks when he visits the city: “They need more gardens, the houses are dead, and there is too little here that grows and is glad.“

The only large garden is about the Houses of Healing in the sixth circle of the city. It is here that Faramir and Éowyn recover from their physical and mental wounds, here they experience the fall of Sauron, and here they find consolation and love in each other. The garden becomes a symbol of renewed life after long darkness.

All these places share a common thread: they are enclosed, protected, and tended.

The very word garden comes from the idea of an enclosed space, something set apart from the wild, shaped by care and intention.2 In Middle‑earth, such gardens are most often places of rest, recovery and healing.

Even in The Silmarillion, we glimpse the Gardens of Lórien in Valinor, a place of rest and renewal even for the mightiest Valar. But it is telling that during the the long wars of the Eldar and Edain against Morgoth, doomed to long defeat, no gardens are mentioned.

Gardens and forests

Now, allow me to make a brief digression. There are some gardens mentioned in The Lord of the Rings that do not quite fit into this pattern.

When Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin how Ents lost their Entwives, he explains their difference:

“the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them). So the Entwives made gardens to live in. But we Ents went on wandering, and we only came to the gardens now and again. ... Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honoured them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted.”

The gardens of the Entwives are contrasted with the wild forests of the Ents. In Letter 163, Tolkien explains his idea of Ents and Entwives as “the difference of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ attitude to wild things, the difference between unpossessive love and gardening.”

Contrasting gardening with unpossessive love sounds harsh but I don’t think Tolkien meant to say that the ways of the Entwives were bad. The problem lay in the separation of these two approaches to nature and in their inability to coexist, so that in the end neither could flourish.

We see this tension reflected in the conflict between the hobbits of Buckland and the trees of the Old Forest. The usually peaceful gardening hobbits exacted violent revenge for the intrusion from the forest:

“In fact long ago [the trees] attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it. But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly.”

And in Sam’s case, his love of gardening is a path that the Ring tries to use to tempt him:

“at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.”

Fortunately, he has enough plain hobbit-sense to know that “the one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm.”

This shows that even the love of gardens must be rightly ordered; when it grows possessive or out of balance with wild nature, it can wound rather than heal.

After the fall of Sauron: the world as a garden restored

After the War of the Ring, the new peace is portrayed by expanding the garden imagery. When Gandalf and Aragorn ascend to a high hallow and survey the land, it is described as one vast garden:

“They saw the towers of the City far below them like white pencils touched by the sunlight, and all the Vale of Anduin was like a garden, and the Mountains of Shadow were veiled in a golden mist.”

Faramir’s wish for his future with Éowyn in the time of peace is to make a garden:

“if she will, then let us cross the River and in happier days let us dwell in fair Ithilien and there make a garden. All things will grow with joy there, if the White Lady comes.”

Even Isengard, once ravaged by Saruman, is remade by the Ents into a “garden filled with orchards and trees”.3

Whereas previously gardens were places of healing in the midst of a hostile world, now new gardens are becoming a sign that the world itself is healing.

But not everywhere is healed at once.

The Scouring of the Shire: Sam’s true vocation

When the hobbits return home, they find the Shire befouled. Trees cut down, holes dug up, gardens ruined.

Tolkien’s choice to make Sam a gardener, not a butler or valet, now reveals its full meaning. The War of the Ring does not end with the coronation of Aragorn. It ends with full restoration.

And Sam himself understands the task ahead:

“‘I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘And that’ll take a lot of time and work.’”

Sam’s work begins the moment the fighting stops. The labour of repair goes on apace, and Sam is kept very busy, overseeing the restoration of his old home in Bagshot Row: “The front of the new sandpit was all levelled and made into a large sheltered garden, and new holes were dug in the southward face, back into the Hill”. Even the grave of the fallen hobbits at Bywater is honoured with “a garden about it.”

But he is especially grieved by the loss of many trees, as he knows that they grow slowly and cannot be easily replaced.

“Then suddenly one day, for he had been too busy for weeks to give a thought to his adventures, he remembered the gift of Galadriel. He brought the box out and showed it to the other Travellers (for so they were now called by everyone), and asked their advice.
‘I wondered when you would think of it,’ said Frodo. ‘Open it!’
Inside it was filled with a grey dust, soft and fine, in the middle of which was a seed, like a small nut with a silver shale.”

Sam uses this gift wisely. He plants the mallorn tree from Galadriel in the Party Field at Bag End in place of the felled Party Tree. He scatters the blessed earth from Galadriel’s garden throughout the Shire. And he is rewarded for his work:

“Spring surpassed his wildest hopes. His trees began to sprout and grow, as if time was in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty. In the Party Field a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. It was indeed a mallorn, and it was the wonder of the neighbourhood.”

Galadriel herself praises Sam for his work: “I hear and see that you have used my gift well. The Shire shall now be more than ever blessed and beloved.”

This is the heart of Tolkien’s vision: evil destroys, but good restores. Victory is not enough; the world must be tended back to life.

And the importance of that role is shown in Frodo’s prophetic words to Sam on their journey to the Grey Havens:

“Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history;”

Why gardens matter

For Tolkien, the garden was more than just a place of refuge. It was a symbol of good, of growth and renewal that counteract the inexorable decay of the world.

Gardens in Middle‑earth are not decorative. They are moral spaces. And Samwise Gamgee, the humblest of the Fellowship, becomes the greatest gardener. He refused the temptation of a garden swollen to a realm and he is rewarded by his beloved Shire blossoming into a beautiful garden under his care. His gardening is not a background detail. It is the thematic key to the ending of The Lord of the Rings.

The world is saved by heroes, but it is healed by gardeners. And sometimes they can be the same people.

Perhaps that is why Tolkien’s gardens linger with us: they remind us that renewal is slow, humble work and that the hands willing to tend the world are as necessary as the hands that save it.

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Visions of Middle-earth

Exploring Middle-earth through art and reflections on lore, symbolism, and the creative process of an artist. Subscribe if you love beauty and enjoy stories behind the art and a deeper look into Tolkien's Legendarium.

By Matěj Čadil

📚 You can read more of my writing by reading my books! My latest is a collection of essays on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and more of Tolkien’s works (and their adaptations). You can also find it and more of my books on Amazon or Gumroad

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Over the past few months, I have had the pleasure of experiencing something I’ve been looking forward to for decades: reading the Hobbit with my children for the very first time.

In the leadup to Christmas, I saw a deal on the edition of The Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin and quickly snagged it. I felt that it might finally be time to embark on the latest of countless personal treks to and from the Lonely Mountain, only this time with my own Hobbits in tow. Christmas morning came and the boys opened their presents. To my delight (and also a bit of relief) The Hobbit was met with much excitement and eagerness, and we began to read it together that very night at bedtime.

In the interim (and then constantly between that day and now), the boys pored over the illustrations, soaking in the images and the promise of adventure they evoked.

Each night we journeyed a bit further with Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves. Along the journey, my boys met the Elves of Rivendell, encountered Trolls, Goblins, Spiders, and the Dragon, and watched Bilbo grow into a traveler, burglar, leader, and adventurer.

Just last week we finally came to the end of the tale, coming home with Bilbo to the Shire and completing their very first journey There and Back Again.

I wanted to take today’s newsletter to share some reflections on the experience: what were some of the highlights? Did I choose the right time to introduce the story to our boys? How did reading the story with my children as opposed to just on my own affect my own experience of the tale?

But while I’ll still be speaking without getting too detailed, I’d prefer to keep even these details behind a paywall to help protect my children’s privacy. Thanks for your understanding, friends.

To join hundreds of members of the Jokien with Tolkien Extended Edition and read the rest of this paid essay (plus over 50 posts in the archives of Extended Edition content), upgrade your subscription today for just $5 a month or $50 a year!

Subscribe now

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josh: Well, hello, Kaitlyn! Welcome. I’m so excited to have you in this issue of Jokien with Tolkien to focus on your new book. Can you introduce yourself? I’m sure some readers are already familiar with you and who you are, but there are also readers who won’t be. So tell us a little bit about yourself and the Tea with Tolkien community and anything you’d like to share about that.

Kaitlyn: Well, thank you for having me, too. This is really exciting and I’m super hyped to talk about all of this in the book! My name is Kaitlyn, as you stated, I am a huge Tolkien fan. I’m also a wife and a mom. And I’m pretty much a stay-at-home mom. Tea with Tolkien is what I do in my free time, and so to be able to have it grow in this way has just been insane.

But the Tea with Tolkien community is an online community founded on the idea that we love Tolkien and we want to carry the principles of Middle-earth into our own lives. So I say that we’re inspired by the works, the life, and the Catholic faith of J.R.R. Tolkien. And, of course, anyone’s welcome in our community, but those are the things that we love to talk about.

We mostly do a book club. I would say that’s the core of our community. We usually do a couple different big book clubs every year. But other than that, we’ve become a pretty tight-knit group that we all go through life together. So I have a Discord server, and that’s like the hub where everything happens. And we’re all just hanging out and doing life together.

I appreciate how you phrased it that it’s about the works, the life, and the faith of Tolkien and that those are the distinctives of your group. There are a lot of people out there who enjoy Tolkien and love Tolkien and appreciate different aspects. But those are the things you’re zeroing in on.

Yeah. And it’s great because as our community grows, there are so many people who join. And we all have different perspectives and different niche interests and levels of expertise about Tolkien. And we all bring that to the table. And I have learned so much from other people in my Discord. Like, one of my moderators is super, super knowledgeable about when Tolkien was changing his mind on different things. So we’ll be talking about something in the Silmarillion. And then he’s like, “Well, actually, in 19 blah-blah-blah he actually had this draft.” And so that adds so much depth. And it kind of is like that in every aspect.

Like I know a lot about Tolkien’s faith and his life to an extent. But then someone comes in who’s an expert in Norse mythology and they bring so much more. So, yeah, it’s really cool to be collaborative. And really, it is just a community. I’m the organizer of it, but it’s not about me.

Right, exactly. It’s not the Tea with Kaitlyn community. It’s Tea with Tolkien. And you’re setting the table. You’re inviting people to have that conversation about him.

Absolutely. Yeah, I like that way of putting it.

You’ve got a book releasing today called Into the Heart of Middle-earth! So congratulations on that. Can you tell us a little bit about the book? What’s the book about, if you were to distill it down into a core message?

Into the Heart of Middle-earth is a spiritual journey for the Tolkien fan who wants to dive deeper into the themes and virtues of The Lord of the Rings in order to carry those lessons into their own daily lives.

A lot of us want to memorize facts about Lord of the Rings or learn about the lore. But the way that I see it is, what’s the point if we aren’t taking that and then bringing it back into our own lives in some way?

Because I think Tolkien can really teach us so much. He has so much wisdom written into his stories. And so we want to be transformed in a way. I think all literature can be transformative. And Tolkien is the best. He can really change your life.

The book explores basic themes of The Lord of the Rings like fellowship, discernment, courage, light and high beauty. But then it also goes into some deeper topics like, what does it mean to be a Hobbit at heart? What does it look like to be a steward? How can hospitality be life-saving? How can I anchor myself in hope amidst darkness? And how can grief be transformative?

So you’re going through Tolkien’s stories and wrestling with your own self as you go and exploring how Middle-earth can change your own life.

I’ve read the book, and first of all, it’s fantastic! I really enjoyed reading it. And you pull in a lot of stuff from The Silmarillion and from Tolkien’s life and from his letters. And that could be overwhelming to somebody. Like, “Wow, this is too much.” But I didn’t feel that. In reading it, it was a very pleasant read. I wasn’t like, oh, I can’t keep track of all this. You were very good at bringing all that information but not overwhelming people.

And I appreciated, like you said, that focus on applicability. It’s great to learn all this, but what does it mean for me? And you intentionally gave space at the end of every chapter with the sections that are called “The Road Goes On, like with “A Walking Song.” Is that what kind of what you were tying into?

Yeah, and it’s like, you’re stepping out onto the road and you’re sitting down to read the book. But then I want you to get up and have some action and movement at the end of each chapter. I really wanted it to be like, you don’t just read the book, but you have these…it’s not necessarily a to-do list, but it’s something to get your thoughts going of, like, what can I do? How can I apply this? So these are little suggestions.

I’d love to hear how the book came to be. Could you share a little bit about how having your community and your own personal love of The Lord of the Rings translated into writing a book in general? And then why this book? Why not some other book?

Well, the concept of writing a book was very terrifying. And it was never something that I was seeking out because I’m so busy at all times. And so I kind of try to be very passive in my life with opportunities. I don’t necessarily seek things out. I’m almost like Bilbo just chilling. And then, you know, a wizard’s knocking on my door like, “Hey, do you want to write a book?”

And so really what it was, was an editor from Ave Maria Press, my publisher, emailed me and he was like, “Hey, do you want to write a book?” And I was like, well, you know, I probably shouldn’t say no. And then I worked with my editor to come up with like four different book ideas. And then he helped me narrow it down and find something that would be a great introduction to my community. Because I feel like my book is like the culmination of all my work from the last 9-10 years with Tea with Tolkien. And so it’s almost like something you can package and say, “Hey, do you want to get involved in Tea with Tolkien? Here’s this book.” And instead of having to comb through years and years of articles or videos on my website, it’s like kind of in this compact, easy to digest product. And so I love that it feels like my message and kind of what Tea with Tolkien stands for just like boiled down in a nice, happy little book.

It’s been crazy, though. Not something that I would have chosen to do. I never would have been like pitching publishers just because it’s a big commitment to write a book. But now that I’ve done it, obviously, I’m so happy that I did.

I see that alignment when you talk about the values of the community, like Tolkien’s life, Tolkien’s works and Tolkien’s faith and I admire your openness to those things. Like you said, you’re not necessarily seeking these things out, but if they come, if they knock on the door, it’s like, “Why, why would I say no? Why shouldn’t I say yes?”

Well, that’s really how it’s been with like everything with Tea with Tolkien and pretty much every opportunity I’ve gotten. I just try to keep my head down and do my work and kind of do what I feel like is my purpose. And then I get emails from people, like, even with like the Rings of Power stuff with Amazon, like, do you want to come and do this thing? And I’m like, well, I probably shouldn’t say no, because it seems like a good opportunity. And it’s the same with when I got to, I got to interview some of the actors on the red carpet. They asked me if I wanted to, and I actually said no. I was like, no, I’m too scared. I can’t do that. And then I’m like, no, like I should be brave. It really does feel like I’m like Bilbo and I’m, I don’t want to leave my house, but I kind of have to.

I just feel like this is what I’m meant to be doing, talking about Tolkien and sharing resources about Lord of the Rings, making it more approachable for people, because I feel like Tolkien’s changed my whole life and the way that I view the world. And I feel like he can for others too. So I feel like that’s like one of my life’s purposes, even though that seems a little dramatic, maybe.

I don’t think it’s dramatic at all! I think it’s wonderful.

And how many people search for something where they feel like that, you know, and you found it and you want to share it too, to be functioning as that, as like this guide. That’s kind of the role in the book that you play is you’re guiding people through like the story of The Lord of the Rings. I think you do a very good job of it both in the book and in the community in general too and I love that the book is an extension of all of that.

You spend the opening chapters of the book describing how to cultivate the Shire of your own heart before branching out into the outside world. Why is that so important to do before moving out?

Well, I mean, it almost reminds me of like when you’re on the airplane and they say like, if the life masks are coming down, put yours on first. In order to go out and help the world, you do need to do some work internally.

And I think, especially in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the Shire is this foundation for the story, for the characters, but also for the readers. Because as you’re immersed in all of this goodness and this beauty and kind of this quaint, simple life, you see that it’s nourishing, it’s beautiful, but it’s also something that’s in peril. Spending so much time in this at the beginning, as we do in The Lord of the Rings—and I kind of tried to mirror that same journey in my book—it strengthens us for the journey ahead because we have this foundation and so much goodness, but it also helps us understand what’s at risk and what you’re fighting for.

Because if you didn’t, if you weren’t familiar with the Shire in The Lord of the Rings, you wouldn’t really feel Frodo’s commitment to it and understand the gravity of what he’s having to let go of and how much he loves it. I really wanted to kind of follow a similar framework because it’s so foundational to the story.

What does being a Hobbit at heart entail in your view? And how does it connect with the journey that you’re guiding readers through in the rest of the book?

Being a Hobbit at heart is about honoring these things that make Hobbit life beautiful while also recognizing that sometimes in order to protect these things, it means giving them up.

Frodo had this deep love for the Shire and he knew he had to be willing to lose it in order to save it. And even after the Shire is saved, he still has this deep loss. And there are many, many ways that this can translate into our own lives.

It comes down to the fact that we need to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable for the sake of others. Bilbo is not wanting to go on an adventure because they make you late for dinner. Sometimes we have to be late for dinner and that’s just a part of living your life and kind of caring for others. And that’s such a huge part of life. We—especially, I think, in the US—we are so individualistic and we only really want to care about ourselves. We don’t even know our neighbors. And that is just not good. Society can’t exist in such a way for long. And it’s just so important for us to embrace this spirit of being a Hobbit at heart because there are people who need us and we have these special gifts. Each of us has our own special perspective or talent or way that we can contribute to society. And if we just serve only ourselves, that isn’t really going to end well.

That’s so important to be willing to be inconvenienced—or worse—for the sake of other people. Because like you said, we do have things to share things that people need just in general. And then the things that are particular about ourselves, the ways that we’re able to bless other people if we would just let that happen and be open to it.

Both Bilbo and Frodo are called to something outside of themselves, something greater than themselves. That’s just so tragic too, about Frodo and his sacrifice: he has that awareness before even leaving the Shire. He says it to Gandalf: “I should like to save the Shire…I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.” I don’t think I appreciated until more recently that he’s counting the cost and he’s willing to pay it partly because he has that foundation. And so how do we move in that direction?

And the thing that I find really striking too, with The Lord of the Rings is Frodo actually does, he does lose the Shire. Like you would think a lot of times in a story, someone thinks they’re going to have to sacrifice. It happens in movies all the time. Someone sacrifices their life, but, oh, they didn’t, they didn’t actually die. Frodo truly does lose the Shire. And even though he does get to go to the Blessed Realm later, that’s not what he wanted. He wanted his ordinary Hobbit life and he truly had to lose that. And so it’s really tragic, but it’s also so beautiful and very inspiring. He’s a great example for all of us.

I want to switch gears a little bit because we’ve talked about the story itself that you’re guiding people through and some of the things that you want them to pick up from it. But Tolkien’s life and faith are a focus of the community and they’re a focus of the book. Would you share some about what it means to you?

You’re a Catholic yourself and you’re able to identify with Tolkien in that way. I’ll just preface it by saying I am a Christian, but I’m not a Catholic. And so there’s ways that I appreciate Tolkien’s faith in general. But then there’s ways that I do feel not an outsider, but there’s a little bit more of a distance from me as a Protestant.

So if you could share about that for your own life? What is it like to be able to empathize with Tolkien, identify with him in that way?

Sure. That’s a great question. It’s not really something I thought about before, but I feel like I can almost see him as a mentor type of figure in a sense, because I’m a convert to Catholicism. I’ve been Catholic for like 12 years now. But before I became Catholic, I didn’t know a single Catholic. We didn’t have any Catholic friends. I went to a Protestant school. So everyone there was not Catholic.

And so Tolkien felt like the first Catholic person that I kind of quote unquote knew, because I felt like I had learned so much from him growing up as a teenager reading The Lord of the Rings. And when I learned that he was Catholic, I was like, wait a second. This is a guy I really respect. And I feel like he gets it. When I would read Tolkien, it was like the philosophy that was underlying the book made things click for me.

And so it was really because of that that I then started looking into Catholicism. So he’s almost like a Gandalf figure for me, where I’m following him along. And of course, it’s not like in a sense where he becomes an idol, but he’s always pointing me to the truth and the beauty and goodness.

And so for me, that has been super cool. And just so encouraging, especially when you get to more kind of things that Catholics do that Protestants don’t, like the Blessed Sacrament. He’s super big on that.

And so as I’m learning about that and kind of seeing echoes of it in like Lembas, for instance, it’s just been super cool and encouraging, really. I see him as almost like my patron saint, even though he’s not technically a saint.

As you were recently looking more into Tolkien’s faith for this book, and specifically the Catholic element, did it have an impact on your own faith?

Well, I learned a lot about some different saints. And there are some saints I hadn’t even heard of that Tolkien had written about.

He actually has a poem about St. Brendan the Navigator in The Notion Club Papers. I had never even heard of this guy. So I got to learn about him and his life. There’s a story about the voyages of St. Brendan in Ireland. And it’s more like a fantastical story, not necessarily realistic. But that was super cool.

And I also didn’t know that he had translated some portions of the book of Jonah and Job for the Jerusalem Bible. So seeing Tolkien bringing his own interests and gifts and talents, it was almost like a bridge between his literary life and his faith life with him using what he knows to kind of pour himself into that project.

And I thought that was really cool and inspiring because you can see him pursuing his passions to the fullest extent and doing everything he can in the same way as Frodo does or Bilbo. So I found that really inspiring.

Can you share something that you learned or appreciated anew about Tolkien himself, about Middle-earth, and about yourself in writing this book?

So for Tolkien, definitely learning about his faith and all of the different saints. I also didn’t realize quite how much reading he did just in general, but also related to religion. I found this book called Tolkien’s Library by Oronzo Cilli. And it had tons and tons. Like Tolkien was reading biographies of the saints. If he wasn’t writing, it seemed like he was reading. And so that was really cool to see all of these different stories that he’s read. I feel like it gave me another perspective into his life that I wasn’t aware of. Because I’ve read a lot of his letters. But getting to know the other things that he read was really cool.

About Middle-earth, I would say I think the biggest thing for me was reflecting on the theme of discernment in Galadriel’s character. And the way that Lothlórien is so pivotal in The Lord of the Rings. I kind of, and maybe this is just from watching the movies so many times, just took it for granted how everything goes down there.

But not only is Galadriel offering Frodo and Sam this choice to either turn back or to go into the road ahead that’s shrouded in darkness. She gives them the opportunity to choose between a path that is known, like a clear path—and that’s to go home—or they will have to choose a path that is in darkness, that they don’t know what they’re going to get into.

And in seeing that Galadriel is going through her own discernment in rejecting the Ring. It’s something that she had thought about for a long time. Tolkien says that when, I think this is in a letter, that when she did finally reject the Ring, it was like she had decided a long time ago that she was going to reject the Ring. But that moment of final rejection was pivotal for her. And so that was something I hadn’t thought about or appreciated it that much until I was writing about it.

I would say the biggest thing for myself was that I realized that I can still be a Hobbit at heart, even though I don’t bake sourdough bread and I don’t have any chickens.

Because I used to almost feel not like a fraud, but like I wasn’t doing a good job because I’m not like I’m not the perfect homemaker. You know, I don’t have that like cottagecore life. And so coming to the realization that it really is a way of living in your heart. It doesn’t really matter if you kill all of your houseplants. You’ll be a Hobbit at heart. So that was very freeing for me because this whole time I’m writing, and it occurred to me like three quarters of the way through the book. I was just feeling bad about myself the whole time. I was like, “I’m not good at any of this. Why am I writing this book?” And then I had a moment where I was like, “Oh, wait: like, yeah, none of that stuff matters.” It’s really a disposition of the heart.

Who better to write about it than in that case, you know, because you’ve really learned it and you’re putting it into practice!

Anything else about the book just in general that you want to share with us?

I’m just so excited for it to finally be out there because it’s been like a two-year-long process of writing and editing and to actually imagine people reading it is just the greatest gift. And I really hope people like it and get something out of it.

I really tried to be very open and welcoming to anyone, especially people who are not religious. My goal with the book is like, this is who I am. And then I want to share with you about who Tolkien is. But I want you to look into your own heart, into your own values. What do you hold dear? What do you feel like your purpose is? And I want to use Tolkien stories to guide you and help you along your own journey because you know who you are. And so I’m not trying to push anything onto anyone, but it’s more like, let’s do this together. And so that’s my goal. And I hope it translated well into the actual book.

I’m confident people who love The Lord of the Rings and want to know more about Tolkien are going to love it. You’re an amazing guide through it.

How do people get a copy of it?

You can go to my website, teawithtolkien.com/book. And I have all of the links like you can get it from: Amazon, my publishers, Ave Maria Press. I saw that it’s on the Barnes and Noble websites on bookshop.org. It should be on Blackwell’s website too. But yeah, so I have all of the links on my website just to make it easier for people.

But you can also just Google the book name and I’m sure it will come up.

Thank you so much, Kaitlyn, for sharing about your book. I really enjoyed it, and I admire it also. I think it’s a worthy effort and I want people to experience it and to go journey into the heart of Middle-earth together with you!

Thank you.

📚 You can read more of my writing by reading my books! My latest is a collection of essays on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and more of Tolkien’s works (and their adaptations). You can also find it and more of my books on Amazon or Gumroad

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Mae govannen, friends! Josh here with a guest post from Stuart D. Brooks. Stuart is a fantasy author close to finishing his first book—The Green-Roofed Tower—which is the first of a planned trilogy (You can read the prologue here).

He is a husband and father who loves to use the poetic language of myth to tell the true tale of the King at the center of the tapestry. Stuart is in love with the Beauty of God, and paints and sells art and merch too.

Today I’m sharing with you all a piece he wrote on The Power of Beauty in Tolkien’s Works. If you like it, you can read further thoughts in a series he is continuing on his Substack, .

The Power of Beauty in Tolkien’s Works

by Stuart D. Brooks

After Gandalf fell into the shadow and fire of Moria, the Fellowship was crestfallen.

“What hope do we have without you?” Aragorn mourned.

“We must do without hope.”

Miserable path—

They wept.

Gimli lamented aloud, “Long shall I journey ere I have joy again.”

It is an appropriate thing to say at such a time, but almost immediately something challenged his words.

You see, Gimli sees Durin’s Stone and recalls that Mirrormere is nearby. Despite his misery, even the thought of it sparkles in his eye.

He tells Frodo tale of the magnificent sight—of a lake clear as crystal, gems showing like stars within—or stars like gems? He gets excited about it, for a moment forgetting his grief.

“We cannot pass without turning aside for a moment to look at the wonder of the dale.”

So he and Frodo did. You should go with them:

Frodo followed slowly, drawn by the still blue water in spite of hurt and weariness; Sam came up behind.

They stooped over the dark water. At first they could see nothing. Then slowly they saw the forms of the encircling mountains mirrored in a profound blue, and the peaks were like plumes of white flame above them; beyond there was a space of sky. There like jewels sunk in the deep shone glinting stars, though sunlight was in the sky above. Of their own stooping, no shadow could be seen.

“O Kheled-zâram fair and wonderful!” the dwarf shouted upon seeing the glory.

Now, surely it did not heal the wound of Gandalf’s passing, but it did do something. We do not often think of it, but movement itself is tied to hope.

“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
—Blaise Pascal

All movement seeks happiness, even if unconsciously.

Someone who has dealt with depression will know what I mean. In the deepest despair, there is no movement, for it is a shadow of death. It is cold and still, like Inferno’s deepest ring, all except the endlessly winding wings. There, one only wishes they could want something. Before that lowest ring, one will still move toward what they think will save them. But without hope at all, one finds no reason to leave a bed or to attempt anything, but the smallest hope may stir us if we heed the call of life.

A hope for food, for a shower, the face of a friend, or the Sun on our face—like that voice always calling,

“Lazarus, Come Forth,”

raises back to life.

Despite Aragorn’s fitting word, hope is necessary in order for them to keep moving at all: even if it is a hope so small it is invisible to ourselves. For this dwarf, the desire for beauty moved his feet to step toward joy.

On a subconscious level, to “turn aside” is fundamentally bound to hope. Gimli turned aside after the hope of Beauty, and he found it.

This is the movement of hope and life.

The Fair Paths of Lórien

As the Fellowship continues on through the forest, Legolas and Aragorn express the gladness they feel that they will soon see the golden trees of Lothlórien.

Even as they draw near the Silverlode river, they already see preludes to the wonder of Lórien.

Day came pale from the East. As the light grew it filtered through the yellow leaves of the mallorn, and it seemed to the hobbits that the early sun of a cool summer’s morning was shining. Pale-blue sky peeped among the moving branches. Looking through an opening on the south side of the flet Frodo saw all the valley of the Silverlode lying like a sea of fallow gold tossing gently in the breeze.

But before they fully arrive, they have an interesting conversation with Haldir, the elf.

Merry confesses to him that he wonders whether he should have had the heart to leave the Shire at all.

Haldir replies, “Not even to see fair Lothlórien?”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

The encouragement that there is still beauty in the world is fundamentally a statement aimed at hope. It means there is something out there even perhaps worth leaving the Shire for.

It dawns on me then—hope, whether in The Lord of The Rings or here in this place, shines on us through beauty. The fact that beauty exists means that there is hope—that perhaps the future is not dark, but bright—perhaps very bright.

This is where the longing comes in. Like Gimli, suddenly struck with the longing for Mirrormere, we too are moved. Even the thought of distant beauty inspires a movement out of despondency and out infinitely into…

something else.

Tolkien’s good friend C.S. Lewis liked to refer to this longing by a German word, “sehnsucht.” He sometimes referred to it as “joy” since he could not find an English word fitting to the yearning. In a way, however, it hits it right on the head. Joy is the opposite of despondency, after all—and as in Dante’s Paradiso, the ascent into the infinite joy of God is a movement.

It begins when Christ descends as a seed into the tomb of our heart—and then sprouts forth—but the journey is an upward movement toward the Good and the Beautiful. For these are beams of his light, and they are of his source and substance. The movement of life and hope is to follow them home.

So, when Frodo lays eyes on Lórien’s splendor, something deeper, further reaches out from its Beauty.

“Out of it, it seemed to him that the power and light came that held all the land in sway.”

Now, if we ask “From where?” one answer does not suffice. But something about Lothlórien holds power and light over the land, and because of it, Frodo “longed suddenly to fly like a bird to rest in the green city.”

Frodo is drawn out of himself—to follow the Beauty to its heavenly abode.

But when they arrive and come to Galadriel and Celeborn, it is required of them once again to relive and retell the tragedy of Gandalf.

But Legolas says something unexpected.

“We almost forgot our grief for a time,

as we walked in gladness on the fair paths of Lórien.”

Tolkien cast seeds like this one all along these fair paths that we may know and understand the power of beauty—and then at their flowering know the light of Eärendil which calls the weary from Moria.

The Light of Estel

I think it is right to see the ascent from Moria to Lothlórien as something cosmic—to rise from what is a tomb, whatever Gimli says about it—from a haunt of goblins and the domain of a great fiery demon, on up to somewhere heavenly.

Lothlórien is a place where gifts are bestowed on a grief-shaken Fellowship. I think a good way to see Tolkien’s point in this ascent is to see what they came to find there ultimately.

Now, some of the gifts feel like they were given because they did not know what to get them.

“What does Legolas even like?”

“Ehh, well he likes bows and arrows, right?”

Pippin and Mary are given belts of silver leaves, and Boromir a belt of golden leaves. Perhaps this is because their fates were entwined, but honestly, I would be happy with either gift personally. Perhaps they were too.1

Gimli gets three strands of Galadriel’s hair, and he leaves with a surprising and profound devotion to her beauty.

Sam receives a box of good soil and a mallorn seed—for a tree of Lothlórien to plant in his place of choosing. This starts to get at the hope side of these gifts because at the end, Aragorn plants one new tree, and Sam another, echoing the great trees of Valinor which once filled Middle-Earth and gave it light (in the Silmarillion). It is a symbol of a new age and the pattern of a new unplanted beauty.

Aragorn is given a scabbard for Anduril—a permanent home for the sword of the King—and the Elessar gem, a green gem in the setting of a silver eagle. Aragorn is called Elessar by the elves as rightful King, and so it is a symbol of the hope of his return to the throne.

Galadriel herself is a most fair jewel, as the heart of the Beauty of Lothlórien. When Frodo finally comes to her, she gives to him the light of Eärendil.

But what is the light of Eärendil?

It is a long story, but so is Lord of the Rings. It is a good story.

Eärendil, who was Half-elven, once sailed into the heavens on a boat like a swan and placed there in the sky a Silmaril (a gem and the preserved but fading beauty and power of the trees of Valinor).

There, the Silmaril stays, as a star called “Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope.”

Yet the name Gil-Estel itself still has more to give. There is a word for simple hope in Sindarin (grey-elvish), which is called amdir. This is just good expectation.

Estel rather means “trust in Eru the Lord everlasting, that he is good, and that his works shall end in good.”

The phial Galadriel gave to Frodo was made with the light of this star Gil-Estel and the waters of her pool.

“It glittered as she moved it, and rays of white light sprang from her hand.”

Then she told him, “It will shine brighter when night is about you.”

Now, perhaps the light and power of the land was Galadriel’s own, and the ring by which she preserved Lothlórien—but could it have to do with this light—the light of Eärendil? We probably think that anything that can be held in one’s hand is of a limited power or consequence—that, because it is something wielded by us, it must be smaller than us. But this is a shining piece of the original glory—a divine light from above—the shining power of Eru himself.

This, I think may be the light and power Frodo felt in the place called Lórien—something which will later sustain and defend him in his darkest moment.

At the beginning of the fair paths of Lórien, they had to do without hope.

But the movement of the soul toward the inner heart of Beauty is movement of the heart toward hope—a light that shines when the night grows the darkest.

As the fellowship passes the peak of ascent, I believe they leave in swan-shaped boats for a reason.

If they have gone out past the peak of Lothlorien—like Eärendil, sailing on a swan into the heavens—like Dante off the peak into Paradiso—then whatever shadow of death they may pass through, their path is into a good and shining hope forever.

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Today he’s got the second of two pieces on ‘The Wisdom of Empathy in The Lord of the Rings’ that I’m sure you’ll find both interesting and inspiring.

Miss part 1? You can read it here:

The Wisdom of Empathy in ‘The Lord of the Rings’—Part 2

How Empathy underpins the virtue of Pity for the Wise of Middle-Earth

by Benjamin Wheaton

In the first part of this series, we looked at how, for J.R.R. Tolkien, the virtue of pity is dependent on the presence of empathy as its fuel. Empathy-fuelled pity is a characteristic of the Wise in Middle-Earth, most fully exemplified in Gandalf, but also shown by Galadriel and Aragorn. Empathy is not simply discerning what someone else is thinking, but feeling along with them and being moved emotionally. This then drives the action of pity, which causes one to act (or refrain from acting) in such a way as to disadvantage oneself. In The Lord of the Rings, such empathy-fuelled pity not only characterizes the Wise, it also results in both spiritual and temporal success. Those who show the ability to empathize with another are ennobled, and rewarded. The quest to destroy the Ring cannot be successful, as we will see, unless empathy is felt and pity is shown. In particular, the empathy shown for Gollum by various characters in The Lord of the Rings is central to the plot for two reasons: first, it directly results in the successful completion of the Quest; and second, it is a key aspect of the ennoblement of the wisest of the hobbits, namely Frodo.

The Empathy of Bilbo

Gollum is shown empathy first by Bilbo in The Hobbit, the motivation for his act of pity in the tunnels of the goblins:

He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering.1

This passage was written after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, as part of Tolkien’s revisions of The Hobbit to bring it in line with the later tale. And it is significant that this extensive description of Bilbo’s empathy, “a pity mixed with horror,” echoes the descriptions of the empathy that Gandalf, Frodo and (eventually) Sam have towards Gollum. Bilbo’s empathy is the first in the long chain that spares Gollum’s life, and results in the Ring’s successful destruction. It also leads to Bilbo’s eventual deliverance from the Ring, since it caused him to have pity on Gollum and so start his possession of it by an act of virtue.

The Empathy of Frodo

Gandalf’s sparing of Gollum out of pity, refusing to allow him to be put to death by the Elves of Mirkwood, has already been described. Part of this was motivated by Gandalf’s empathy for Gollum’s plight, though part too was the wizard’s feeling that Gollum had some role to play yet in the Ring’s story: “He may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron have foreseen,” he says at the Council of Elrond.2 But Frodo fails to grasp the wisdom of this at first: “Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.”3 It is therefore a key moment in the story when Frodo, finally seeing Gollum in the flesh, is able to empathize with him and thus to pity him: “If we kill him, we must kill him outright. But we can’t do that, not as things are. Poor wretch! He has done us no harm.” Frodo then recollects his conversation with Gandalf about Gollum, and responds at long last as Gandalf would have desired: “I will not touch the creature. For now that I see him, I do pity him.”4 Sam thinks this is foolishness, but Frodo recognizes something at this point that Sam does not: his empathy drives a sense of pity that has a value in itself, and true wisdom is taking into account the spiritual world and the rules governing it. As Tolkien writes,

At any point any prudent person would have told Frodo that Gollum would certainly betray him…To ‘pity’ him, to forbear to kill him, was a piece of folly, or a mystical belief in the ultimate value-in-itself of pity and generosity even if disastrous in the world of time. He did rob him and injure him in the end – but by a ‘grace,’ that last betrayal was at a precise juncture when the final evil deed was the most beneficial thing any one could have done for Frodo! By a situation created by his ‘forgiveness,’ he was saved himself, and relieved of his burden.5

Frodo was saved from his final succumbing to the power of the Ring by his wise act of empathizing with, and then pitying, Gollum—much as Bilbo escaped from the Ring’s power due to his act of empathy-fuelled pity.

The Empathy of Sam

Sam is most resistant to pitying Gollum, and struggles the most against having empathy for him. By no means does this mean that Sam doesn’t perceive part of what Gollum is thinking; when Gollum offers to lead them to Cirith Ungol rather than try to enter in at the Black Gate, Sam rightly guesses Gollum’s motives:

Sam’s guess was that the Sméagol and Gollum halves (or what in his own mind he called Slinker and Stinker) had made a truce and a temporary alliance: neither wanted the Enemy to get the Ring; both wished to keep Frodo from capture, and under their eye, as long as possible – at any rate as long as Stinker still had a chance of laying hands on his ‘Precious.’6

Yet something critical to empathy is lacking to Sam’s shrewd perception: an ability to feel with Gollum. And at the point of the story that Tolkien thought was perhaps the greatest tragedy in The Lord of the Rings, Gollum’s near-repentance spoiled by Sam’s harshness, this lack of empathy had dire consequences. We are given a vision of what that empathy should have looked like from the perspective of the narrator:

“For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.”7 Sam did not experience this empathetic vision, and so Gollum was irrevocably lost.

But Sam did eventually come to exercise the virtue of empathy, just when it was most necessary for the success of the quest. On Mount Doom, when he has Gollum at his mercy, at last he appreciates his plight and spares his life:

It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature, just and many times deserved; and also it seemed the only safe thing to do. But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched. He himself, though only for a little while, had borne the Ring, and now dimly he guessed the agony of Gollum’s shrivelled mind and body, enslaved to that Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again. But Sam had no words to express what he felt.8

Sam has not progressed as far as Frodo on the path of wisdom; the fact that he did not know how to put his feeling of pity into words is proof of that. Frodo, the friend and student of Gandalf, did know; but as for Sam, Tolkien wrote:

Sam was cocksure, and deep down a little conceited; but his conceit had been transformed by his devotion to Frodo…It prevented him from fully understanding the master that he loved, and from following him in his gradual education to the nobility of service to the unlovable and of perception of damaged good in the corrupt.9

Sam’s moment of empathy leading to pity thus comes too late for Gollum’s salvation, and is imperfectly perceived by Sam himself: “Sam had no words to express what he felt.” What Sam required before being able to empathize with Gollum was a taste of the same experience with the Ring’s power; a taste that is fairly inchoate: “dimly he guessed the agony of Gollum’s shrivelled mind.” Yet it still comes as a moment of moral growth—and of grace—that enables the quest to come to a successful conclusion.

Empathy as Mark of Moral Growth in Frodo

Sam is the only real “commoner” in The Lord of the Rings, and his dim grasp of empathy is just the start of his progress towards wisdom, as part of his association with the “great” of Middle-earth and their affairs. The other hobbits, Frodo in particular, are “aristocrats,” but an aristocracy of a “common” people, whose association with the “great,” Gandalf in particular, elevates them. The juxtaposition of the “common” with the “great” is one of the key themes of The Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien wrote:

This last great Tale [The Lord of the Rings] is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in ‘world politics’ of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great…a moral of the whole…is the obvious one that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.10

More to the point, common characters can develop into greatness in contact with the noble: “There are of course certain things and themes that move me specially. The inter-relations between the ‘noble’ and the ‘simple’ (or common, vulgar) for instance. The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving.”11 Empathy leading to pity characterizes the Wise, as we have seen; and a key element in the ennoblement of the wisest of the hobbits, Frodo, is mastering this virtue.

Though skeptical of Gandalf’s pity at the beginning of the story, Frodo learns to empathize with Gollum and show pity. This results in the successful completion of the Quest, but it also results in his being numbered among the Wise of Middle-Earth. He is greater than the other hobbits precisely because of his ability to empathize and show pity, a virtue that the others still lack in full. This becomes clear near the end of the book, when the Shire has been taken over by Saruman’s ruffians thanks to being invited in by Frodo’s relative Lotho Sackville-Baggins. After the hobbits have dealt with a small party of men trying to arrest them, it is Frodo who grasps what has really happened:

“Well, we’ve come back none too soon,” said Merry.

“Not a day too soon. Perhaps too late, at any rate to save Lotho,” said Frodo. “Miserable fool, but I am sorry for him.”

“Save Lotho? Whatever do you mean?” said Pippin. “Destroy him, I should say.”

“I don’t think you understand things, Pippin,” said Frodo. “Lotho never meant things to come to this pass. He has been a wicked fool, but he’s caught now. The ruffians are on top, gathering, robbing and bullying, and running things or ruining things as they like, in his name. And not in his name even for much longer. He’s a prisoner in Bag End now, I expect, and very frightened. We ought to try and rescue him.”12

Pippin cannot grasp what Lotho is feeling: all he can see is his crimes. But Frodo, with his greater wisdom and therefore greater ability to empathize, can pity him and desire to save him from his predicament.

The climactic revelation of Frodo’s wisdom is not, however, in his realization of Lotho’s plight, but in his sparing the life of Saruman. After the fallen wizard has gloated at the door of Bag End about the ruin he he wrought in the Shire, Frodo orders him to leave, much against the will of the other hobbits, who wish to kill him. Frodo can pity Saruman for his moral decay: when Saruman says, “I have already done much that you will find it hard to men or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries,” Frodo replies: “Well, if that is what you find pleasure in…I pity you.”13 And when Saruman tries to treacherously stab him, failing only because of Frodo’s mail coat, pity is still the order of the day:

“No, Sam!” said Frodo. “Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.”14

Frodo grasps Saruman’s thought, which leads him to pity. Thus he is now among the Wise, a fact which Saruman recognizes; and as one who used to be Wise, he should know: “Saruman rose to his feet, and stared at Frodo. There was a strange look in his eyes of mingled wonder and respect and hatred. ‘You have grown, Halfling,’ he said. ‘Yes, you have grown very much. You are wise, and cruel.’”15 From the hobbit who told Gandalf that Gollum deserved death, Frodo has grown into someone who strikes an angelic being like Saruman with awe – and his ability to empathize and thus show pity is at the core of this growth.

Conclusion

The fact that empathy characterizes the Wise does not mean that they are passive towards evil, or that they are unable to contradict those with whom they empathize. Gandalf empathizes with Gollum and pities him, but this does not prevent him from being harsh when the need arises: “I put the fear of fire on him, and wrung the true story out of him, bit by bit.”16 Gollum is also put in prison by Gandalf and Aragorn, who recognize the danger he poses: “I for one am glad that he is safely kept by the watchful Elves of Mirkwood. His malice is great and gives him a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered. He could work much mischief still, if he were free.”17 Aragorn empathizes with Éowyn, but this does not mean he marries her, or lets her go with him to the Paths of the Dead, but rather reminds her of her duty: “But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord’s return?”18 And Frodo, though he empathizes with Gollum and pities him like Gandalf, nonetheless also threatens to use the Ring to force Gollum to kill himself if he should try to betray them:

In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command.19

Empathy is but one of the virtues exercised by the Wise; among other things, they practice daring and bold initiative. Pity that springs from empathy does not entail minimizing someone’s wickedness, nor does it prevent bold action. But it still matters, and is still a risk taken by the person displaying it.

For Tolkien, empathy is the main requirement for pity, which both characterizes the wisest inhabitants of Middle Earth and drives the success of the Quest. It is a critical weapon in the arsenal of virtue that is deployed against Sauron by Gandalf and the forces of good. But why is this? Empathy makes the characters who experience it do things that are against their better judgment: letting Gollum live was, objectively speaking, a foolish act, and Tolkien says so: killing Gollum was, “the only safe thing to do,” as Sam admitted to himself before deciding to spare him on Mount Doom. Yet doing the right thing, even when our self-interest and mundane reason rebel, is precisely what the Wise do: and not because of mindless principle, but because what we see is not the deepest reality. God governs the world, both in its seen and unseen dimensions, its physical and spiritual arenas; and acting rightly is the only wise and prudent course of action in the spiritual world, which is at all times and in all places the more important realm. “Pity or Mercy…is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God,” as Tolkien wrote.20

How is a man to judge what to do? “As he ever has judged; good and ill have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part do discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”21 Gandalf, when he sacrificed himself in Moria to save his companions, was doing something foolish, seen in terms of the earthly realm. But not in the spiritual realm. As Tolkien wrote in a letter to a friend about Gandalf’s death in Moria:

In his condition it was for him a sacrifice to perish on the Bridge in defence of his companions…for all he could know at that moment he was the only person who could direct the resistant to Sauron sucessfully, and all his mission was vain. He was handing over to the Authority that ordained the Rules, and giving up personal hope of success. That I should say is what the Authority wished, as a set-off to Saruman…Gandalf sacrificed himself, was accepted, and enhanced, and returned.22

Gandalf, to act rightly, had to sacrifice himself: it was he who had led the Fellowship into Moria against the better judgement of Aragorn, and so it was his moral responsibility to get them out safely, regardless of the bigger picture of his own importance to the resistance to Sauron. By conforming to this wisdom, he was rewarded. So it is with empathy that leads to pity.

Empathy appears to weaken us, it is true; at least in the sense that it might lead us to fail to consult our own perceived interests and judgements and humble ourselves. But seen in true perspective it can never truly weaken us, because there is a God in heaven who governs all things in justice and righteousness. Our obedience to his commandments, of loving God and neighbour, is what he desires. And part of loving our neighbour is pitying them, which requires empathy. We should imitate God in this respect, because he himself shows empathy that leads to pity: “Yet he was merciful; he forgave their iniquities and did not destroy them. Time after time he restrained his anger and did not stir up his full wrath. He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return.”23 To the Denethors of this age who argue that empathy is gentleness, and that gentleness leads to death, we should respond with Faramir: “So be it.” And we can be confident we will be rewarded, because that is true wisdom.

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Today he’s got a piece for us on what it means to be numbered among the Wise in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and why empathy a key component to wisdom. This is part one of a two-part series: the second part will come next week. I’m excited to share this with you all, so I’ll go ahead and let you get to the good stuff!

Before we dive in, a quick note of thanks to everyone who completed the reader survey in the previous newsletter. Haven’t had a chance yet? You can complete the quick survey here: Jokien with Tolkien 2026 Reader Survey

The Wisdom of Empathy in ‘The Lord of the Rings’—Part 1

How Empathy underpins the virtue of Pity for the Wise of Middle-Earth

by Benjamin Wheaton

The Lord of the Rings is usually recognized as the foundation of modern fantasy literature, but it is also a great Christian moralistic text. In it, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a profound and sustained reflection on the inherent wisdom in acting virtuously, done not through lengthy discourses but in the bones of the story itself, through the decisions and actions of the characters and their results. In Tolkien’s universe, acting virtuously is true power and true wisdom. The noblest and wisest characters are so because of their virtue, because they discern what is good and choose to do it, and in so doing are rewarded by the hidden hand of Providence. “You chose amid doubts the path that seemed right: the choice was just, and it has been rewarded,” Gandalf says to Aragorn when they meet again in Rohan.1 Becoming great is to become wise, and the successful outcome of one’s actions is dependent upon acting wisely—which means virtuously.2

Pity is a vitally important virtue in the world of The Lord of the Rings: it is pity that enables Bilbo to escape the worst effects of his possession of the Ring, and pity that leads Frodo and Sam to spare Gollum’s life and so enable the successful completion of the quest. Pity is also a characteristic of the noblest and wisest characters. What is it, exactly, for Tolkien? In its most basic sense, pity is being moved emotionally by someone else’s negative condition. But for Tolkien, pity also inescapably results in action—or deliberate inaction: “Pity must restrain one from doing something immediately desirable and seemingly advantageous.”3 At the same time, Tolkien makes clear what kind of pity is truly virtuous, since like all virtues pity can go wrong. Virtuous pity, good pity, is almost always preceded by empathy: by feeling what the object of pity is feeling, and being moved by it. This is not the same as discerning someone else’s thoughts and feelings and scorning them, or sitting in judgment on them, or using this knowledge to manipulate them. Denethor the Steward of Gondor, who is characterized by neither pity nor empathy, is also described as a man possessing keen insight into the minds of others: “He can perceive, if he bends his will thither, much of what is passing in the minds of men,” Gandalf warns Pippin in Minas Tirith.4 Yet empathy is not merely perceiving someone else’s thoughts, but allowing yourself to be affected by another’s emotion, and to allow your actions to be affected in turn.

The pity resulting from empathy is what Tolkien refers to when he talks about the virtue of pity. In the remarkable text Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, written by Tolkien some time after he published The Lord of the Rings, this distinction between “good” pity and “bad” pity is made explicitly. The elven prince Finrod, in conversation with the human wise-woman Andreth about mortality, expresses it like this: “Yet pity is of two kinds: one is of kinship recognized, and is near to love; the other is of difference of fortune perceived, and is near to pride.”5 Recognizing one’s kinship with the object of pity requires empathy: without it, pity is not a virtue but a vice. Pity recognizes that we are all fallible and in need of mercy: “We are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents.”6 The humility that pity requires is also required for the empathy from which it springs—a humility that seems to result in folly, but in fact is necessary for good to triumph. In the first part of this essay, I will examine how empathy is a character trait in the wisest characters in The Lord of the Rings. In the second, I will explain how it is critical to the success of the quest to destroy the Ring.

Galadriel and Empathy

Let us start with the greatest of the elves, Galadriel. In the Unfinished Tales, she is described in this way: “From her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others, but judged them with mercy and understanding.”7 Galadriel demonstrates this empathy in The Lord of the Rings in her encounter with Gimli in Lothlórien. When her husband Celeborn implies that the Dwarves stirred up the Balrog for no good purpose beyond their own nostalgia, Galadriel gently rebukes him: “Do not repent of your welcome to the Dwarf. If our folk had been exiled long and far from Lothlórien, who of the Galadhrim, even Celeborn the Wise, would pass nigh and would not wish to look upon their ancient home, though it had become an abode of dragons?”8 Galadriel displays understanding for Gimli’s desire to see the ancestral home of his people, and affirms it as something that she and her husband would feel as well.

Then she adds something that is a direct echo of Gimli’s own words on two occasions. First, when he sees the landscape around Moria while the Fellowship is still west of the Mountains, he exclaims, “Dark is the water of Kheled-zâram…and cold are the springs of Kibil-nâla. My heart trembles at the thought that I may seen them soon;”9 and second, when in Moria itself he sings a song about it, one verse of which runs:10

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin’s Day.

Galadriel says to Gimli: “Dark is the water of Kheled-zâram, and cold are the springs of Kibil-nâla, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dûm in Elder Days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.”11 The implication is that Galadriel knows the song as well as Gimli, and appreciates its emotional force for the Dwarf. She then smiles at Gimli, and he perceives her empathy: “And the Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes; and it seemed to him the he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.” His response shows what empathy can achieve, seen from the perspective of its recipient: “Wonder came into his face, and then he smiled in answer.”12 His devotion to Galadriel springs from this moment, a devotion that also leads to his friendship with the elf Legolas—because of empathy shown by one of the wisest inhabitants of Middle-earth.

Aragorn and Empathy

Now we turn to Aragorn, the greatest man in Middle-earth. The greatest leader, with the greatest lineage and the strongest will: but also one of the Wise. Legolas considers Aragorn after his victory at Pelargir over the Corsairs, and states: “In that hour I looked on Aragorn and thought how great and terrible a Lord he might have become in the strength of his will, had he taken the Ring to himself.”13 Sauron recognizes this too, which is why after Aragorn shows himself to the Dark Lord in the Palantir he rushes to destroy Gondor, since he fears that Aragorn wields the Ring and knows he has the innate power to do so effectively. But Aragorn is also wise, and thus cannot be a tyrant: “But nobler is his spirit than the understanding of Sauron.”14 A core element in that nobility and wisdom is his capacity for empathy.

His treatment of Éowyn displays this. She falls in love with him and Aragorn cannot return that love—but he is still affected by her emotional state. When he rides to the Paths of the Dead, he refuses her request to ride with the Dúnedain and leaves her distraught: “Then he kissed her hand, and sprang into the saddle, and rode away, and did not look back; and only those who knew him well and were near to him saw the pain that he bore.”15 And at the Houses of Healing, he reveals the extent of his perception of her state of mind:

When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die? Her malady beings far back before this day, does it not, Éomer?16

Aragorn displays a greater understanding for Éowyn than even her brother Éomer, who views her unreturned love for Aragorn as the cause of her distress. Aragorn acknowledges this part, and states:

Few other griefs amid the ill chances of this world have more bitterness and shame for a man’s heart than to behold the love of a lady so fair and brave that cannot be returned. Sorrow and pity have followed me ever since I left her desperate in Dunharrow…and no fear upon that way was so present as the fear for what might befall her.17

He is affected by her grief, not scorning it, but sharing in it. Aragorn understands Éowyn, and allows himself to be affected by her mindset; thus, when she has been healed at the end by the love of Faramir, he says to her: “It heals my heart to see thee now in bliss.”18

Aragorn also shows empathy in how he deals with those under his leadership before the last battle at the Black Gate. The hideous landscape around the entrance to Mordor causes some of his soldiers to utterly lose their nerve, and renders them unable to continue. Rather than driving them on ruthlessly, as Sauron does with his soldiers (“Where there’s a whip there’s a will!”19), Aragorn instead pities them: “Aragorn looked at them, and there was pity in his eyes rather than wrath.”20 This pity is spurred by his empathy for their plight:

For these were young men from Rohan, from Westfold far away, or husbandmen from Lossarnach, and to them Mordor had been from childhood a name of evil, and yet unreal, a legend that had no part in their simple life; and now they walked like men in a hideous dream made true, and they understood not this war nor why fate should lead them to such a pass.21

Aragorn lets them depart if they wish, and this empathy-spurred pity of his causes some to overcome their fear and go on with him, and others to leave and try to seize a lesser fortress and so retain their honour. The soldiers with whom he empathizes are encouraged and healed, not shamed.

In his possession of this quality Aragorn shows he is an eager student of the wisest being in Middle-earth, Gandalf. In the “Tale of Aragorn and Arwen,” Tolkien writes: “He became a friend of Gandalf the Wise, from whom he gained much wisdom.”22 This friendship makes Aragorn more like Gandalf, as Frodo observes to Gandalf in Rivendell: “He reminds me often of you. I didn’t know that any of the Big People were like that.”23 Aragorn indeed resembles Gandalf in many things, from his ability to appreciate and associate on equal terms with the weakest beings in Middle-earth (his joking with Merry in the Houses of Healing is a good example), his being “quick at times to sharp speech and the rebuking of folly,” (“What do you fear that I should say: that I had a rascal of a rebel dwarf here that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?” he snaps at Gimli after looking in the Palantír24) and above all in his inner hope. “His face was sad and stern because of the doom that was laid on him, and yet hope dwelt ever in the depths of his heart, from which mirth would arise at times like a spring from the rock;”25 as it did in Gandalf, as Pippin saw in Minas Tirith: “In the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.”26 Gandalf is the teacher of Aragorn, who seeks to mold himself in the wizard’s image; and this includes the profound empathy that characterized Gandalf’s character.

Gandalf and Empathy

Gandalf’s empathy is displayed in many places, as a necessary part of his mission: “All worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care.”27 Worthy things like Fangorn forest: “Yes, I know him: the only wizard who really cares about trees;”28 like Bree and the Bree-folk: “ʽYou don’t know much even about them, if you think old Barliman is stupid,’ said Gandalf. ‘He is wise enough on his own ground. He thinks less than he talks, and slower; yet he can see though a brick wall in time (as they say in Bree);’”29 and like the Shire, and Hobbits: “Among the Wise I am the only one that goes in for hobbit-lore: an obscure branch of knowledge, but full of surprises. Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.”30 His care for these things entails knowing about them, and liking them; perceiving how they see the world, and feeling along with them. Thus Gandalf was “not proud, and sought neither power nor praise, and thus far and wide he was beloved among all those that were not themselves proud.”31

Gandalf’s empathy is clearly displayed as well in his understanding of Éowyn. He says to Éomer in the Houses of Healing:

My friend…you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him fall into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on…who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?32

His keen perception of Éowyn’s feelings, and his recognition of their measure of truth, is part of his generous and empathetic character—part of his wisdom. And he enables Éomer to realize more fully what Éowyn has suffered in the years leading up to the War of the Ring.

This ability to perceive what someone else is feeling, and to be moved by it, is of particular importance to Gandalf’s treatment of Gollum. People having empathy for Gollum is central to the success of the quest to destroy the Ring, as we will see, and it is Gandalf who participates in this process, and his wisdom in seeking to understand and be moved by Gollum’s feelings is vindicated. But it is also fully in character, something he would do even if Gollum had no connection to the Ring. In his discussion of the history of the Ring with Frodo in Bag End, Gandalf shows how he is pre-eminent in empathy among the Wise of Middle-earth. After he relates Gollum’s story of finding the Ring in the river to Frodo, the hobbit exclaims, “Gollum? Do you mean that this is the very Gollum-creature that Bilbo met? How loathsome!” To which the wizard responds: “I think it is a sad story…and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known.”33 Unlike Frodo, who has yet to learn empathy, Gandalf can be moved by Gollum’s plight.

And he also appreciates that Gollum is not yet wholly ruined: “He had proved tougher than even one of the Wise would have guessed – as a hobbit might…It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.”34 Gandalf can see that Gollum’s moral state is still conflicted. While acknowledging Gollum’s wickedness and how far he is from being “cured,” he does not give up hope. He also realizes that Gollum’s lust for the Ring and his hiding from the Sun in the depths of the Misty Mountains was itself a cause of suffering: “The thing was eating up his mind, of course, and the torment had become almost unbearable…He was altogether wretched. He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he hated everything, and the Ring most of all.”35 Gandalf, realizing the power of the Ring over Gollum, and realizing too Gollum’s diminished moral responsibility due to his being overcome by something too great for him, is able to perceive the painful effect this had on him and be moved by it. Thus when Frodo remarks, “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!...I do not feel any pity for Gollum,” Gandalf responds, “You have not seen him…In any case we did not kill him: he is very old and very wretched.”36 Gandalf can pity Gollum because he understands and empathizes with the psychological and moral torment he is enduring.

Yet for all that empathy, and the pity it fuels, is evidence of wisdom, its role in The Lord of the Rings is more important than merely an attribute of the Wise. In particular, the empathy shown for Gollum by various characters in The Lord of the Rings is central to the plot for two reasons: first, it directly results in the successful completion of the Quest; and second, it is a key aspect of the ennoblement of the wisest of the hobbits, namely Frodo. We will explore these in the second part.

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Today she’s got a fascinating piece for us on a concept found in both Tolkien’s Legendarium and C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy: the “Bent Way.” Intrigued? Read on!

Bridge from the Bent World

by

INTRODUCTION

Imagine that you are embarking on a long journey. Your quest will take you across winding rivers, through secretive forests, and over rugged mountains. You’ll encounter cities and cultures both familiar and foreign, and you’ll devote time, energy, and patience to your quest. Yet you will finish transformed—with both a wider view of the world and a more focused perspective of your place in it.

This imaginative journey is an apt metaphor for what it is like to read the seminal work of fiction by J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. One of the most brilliant and expansive works of mythology ever written, it is both sweeping and personal, sorrowful and exuberant, richly literary and still accessible. Wandering its copious pages is a journey, indeed—but an enriching and transformative one. This is because The Silmarillion is more than just a chronicle of Tolkien’s fictitious Middle-earth or a glimpse into his profound genius. It is a journey through truth itself, and how the ways that it is heeded—or ignored—shape our destiny. And in classic Tolkien style, The Silmarillion presents this dichotomy as a unique choice between the straight way, or the “bent” one.

This concept, while certainly creative, is not unique to The Silmarillion. It also appears in the writings of Lewis, particularly his Space Trilogy, and finds echoes of itself even in Scripture. Thus, a close examination of this concept will yield not only deeper textual understanding of these writings but also a practical approach for living out our own moments of decision.

THE BENT WAY IN TOLKIEN

To understand the concept of the “bent” path, it’s necessary to look at the Akallabêth of The Silmarillion, which tells of the tragic demise of the once wise and righteous kingdom of Númenor. Engulfed by the fear of death, the rulers of Númenor are bewitched by the evil power of Sauron, who persuades them that the heavenly rulers—the Valar—are keeping immortality from them by forbidding mankind to set foot in the Deathless Lands. Consumed by fear, inflated by pride, and bolstered by Sauron’s lies, the last Númenórean king, Ar-Pharazôn, summons a great fleet to besiege the Deathless Lands and obtain eternal life through violence.

Unsurprisingly, his plan fails. The cataclysmic justice dealt by Ilúvatar—the One—not only destroys Ar-Pharazôn and his army, but also changes the shape of the world so that Númenor drowns in an oceanic rift. His next step is to “cast back the Great Seas west of Middle-earth, and the Empty Lands east of it, and new lands and new seas were made; and the world was diminished, for Valinor and Eressëa were taken from it into the realm of hidden things.”

In other words, the natural and spiritual worlds have been torn apart. And this change is not only devastating; it’s also permanent. “Thus it was that great mariners among them would still search the empty seas, hoping to come upon the Isle of Meneltarma, and there to see a vision of things that were. But they found it not. And those that sailed far came only to the new lands, and found them like to the old lands, and subject to death. And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning; and they said, ‘All roads are now bent.’”

Thus, in Tolkien’s universe, the “bentness” of the Earth is not merely topographical but also moral and philosophical. Indeed, in one of the saddest lines of the tale, Tolkien comments, “And there is not now upon Earth any place abiding where the memory of a time without evil is preserved.” In other words, the world has been irrevocably warped. Access to the Deathless Lands—and more importantly, the spiritual powers who reside there—has been cut off. Men are now doomed to endlessly circle the results of their own folly, because the entire creation has taken on the shape of humanity’s sin.

THE BENT WAY IN LEWIS

The reference in The Silmarillion is the introduction to this concept of “bentness.” However, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend and colleague, also explored this concept in his Space Trilogy, most notably in Out of the Silent Planet, which he was writing during the decades when Tolkien was endlessly reworking the material that would later become The Silmarillion. Whether the two men inspired each other’s treatment of this topic remains unknown, but it certainly appears to have held significance for them both. Lewis, though, took the idea one step further, claiming that it’s not just the cosmos that is “bent” by sin—it’s also human nature itself.

For Lewis, the term “bent” is given first mention in Chapter Eleven of Out of the Silent Planet, when the hrossa—intelligent otter-like extraterrestrial creatures—discover that the space traveler Ransom has not come alone to their planet: “No, he had come with two others of his kind—bad men (‘bent’ men was the nearest hrossian equivalent) who tried to kill him.”

However, as the narrative progresses, we learn that “bent” is far more than a simplistic label applied to moral disconformity. It is a sickness of both deeds and heart—producing not only flawed actions, but a flawed way of inhabiting and interacting with the world. For instance, the hross Hyoi connects bentness to a stubborn negation of goodness, saying, “It is a bent hnau [creature] that would blacken the world.” This cynicism breeds a malevolent cowardice, as Ransom later avers, “Bent creatures are full of fears.”

Yet it’s not until Ransom meets the Oyarsa, or angelic ruler of the planet, that the concept is expounded to its fullest. The Oyarsa explains that humans are “bent” not of their own will, but by the designs of a great enemy—the ultimate Bent One himself. In language obviously meant to evoke the Biblical fall of Satan, he recounts planetary history to Ransom: “Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world—he was brighter and greater than I—and then we did not call it Thulcandra [the “silent planet”]. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent. That was before any life came on your world. Those were the Bent Years of which we still speak in the heavens, when he was not yet bound to Thulcandra but free like us. It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own….We did not leave him so at large for long. There was great war, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own world as Maleldil [Jesus] taught us. There doubtless he lies to this hour, and we know no more of that planet: it is silent.”

Thus, when Ransom’s evil captors are brought before the Oyarsa, he is easily able to recognize the proclivities of the old enemy within them. Yet he reacts with more grief than anger at their state: “I see now how the lord of the silent planet has bent you….A bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one.” It is no wonder that, filled with anguish at his new understanding of human nature as well as his firsthand observation of how it impacts this new world, Ransom cries out in despair, “We are all a bent race.”

A BENT RACE—THE PROBLEM

And so, the world is bent—both around us and inside us. Nothing is as it should be, on the macrocosmic or microcosmic scale. We can’t help but share Ransom’s broken sorrow, because we know his words are true: we are all a bent race. And in exploring this concept, Tolkien and Lewis were only taking literature where theology had already gone.

Scripture is replete with warnings regarding pursuing crooked or broken ways. “But as for those who turn aside to their crooked ways, The LORD will lead them away with those who practice injustice” (Psalm 125:5 NASB). Proverbs speaks of those “who abandon the right paths to walk in ways of darkness…whose paths are crooked, and whose ways are devious” (2:13a, 15 CSB). And Scripture agrees with Tolkien and Lewis that this is not a problem humans can fix on their own: “What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted” (Ecclesiastes 1:15 NASB). Yet like the wise and loving Oyarsa, God still mourns for His people: “They do not know the way of peace, and there is no justice in their tracks; they have made their paths crooked, whoever walks on them does not know peace” (Isaiah 59:8 NASB).

This association of internal corruption with “crookedness” or “bentness” can even be found in medieval Christian writings. While the definition of sin today has primarily narrowed to quantifiable evil actions, for earlier church leaders, as for Tolkien and Lewis, sin was more connected to internal disruption than external manifestation. Theologian Dr. Joel Muddamalle points out that humanity’s broken nature “connects to the concept that Martin Luther and John Calvin popularized in regard to the impact of sin upon our hearts. They used the Latin phrase, ‘homo incurvatus in se’, humanity curved in upon itself.”

This, then, is the curse under which we live. Writer Dave Benson sums up our condition: “There was a time…when all of humanity lived happily and flourished within the form given it by God. But we shut God out and spurned His love. With no definitions from outside, we turned inward and became the silent planet. Now we live in a time—let’s call it bent—when everything has missed its created purpose. It’s not that we’re as bad as we could be; rather, nothing is as good as it should be.”

And yet, as Tolkien and Lewis and theologians throughout history would be the first to assure us, there is still hope.

THE STRAIGHT ROAD—THE SOLUTION

Even in his grief and anger at the way humans destroy themselves, the Oyarsa reassures Ransom about the fate not only of our planet, but of our souls: “We think that Maleldil would not give [Earth] up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One [there].” And in words that hearken to Númenor’s claustrophobic terror of mortality, he sighs, “The weakest of my people do not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.” In other words, says the Oyarsa, there is another way to live—a way in which the terrible twist in human nature is finally straightened.

And Tolkien offers the same hope. The drowning of Númenor comes in the terrible final chapters of a book that has recounted great evil—not just from a single act of rebellion, but from the accumulated wickedness of “bent” people for millennia. Yet the book does not close on this dark note. Instead, it glimmers with hope that, in Tolkien’s style, is small, yet surpassingly bright: “Therefore the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible that passed through the air of breath and of flight (which were bent now as the world was bent), and traversed Ilmen which flesh unaided cannot endure, until it came to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, and maybe even beyond, to Valinor, where the Valar still dwell and watch the unfolding of the story of the world.”

In other words, all is not lost. The spiritual authorities who bore the brunt of mankind’s betrayal and rebellion have still left them one last way to come home. And indeed, the end of The Silmarillion sees Gandalf and the last of the Eldar sailing with Frodo and Bilbo along this road: “In the twilight of autumn [the ship] sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the Ancient West.” As the days of the Eldar upon Middle-earth end, Frodo, Bilbo, and later Sam—prototypes of obedience and righteousness—are invited to accompany them out of the “bent” world in a merciful act of grace.

THE HOPE FOR US

And this “straight road” is the truth and hope for us as well. In the desperate days of the prophet Isaiah, God makes a precious promise to His wayward people: “I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, and not forsake them” (Isaiah 42:16 NKJV). And thousands of years later, John the Baptist quotes this prophecy to show us its wondrous fulfillment—Jesus Himself (Luke 3:5).

Jesus solves the problem of our “bentness” in both Tolkien’s and Lewis’s usages of the word. He comes to a warped world and begins to make “all things new” (Revelation 21:5 NASB), promising to remake the cosmos in its original harmony. And even more importantly, he is bringing His Kingdom to our hearts. Indeed, Lewis considered this to be salvation in its most elemental form: “Each [person], if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not.”

So yes, Tolkien and Lewis were right. We do live on a silent planet, curved with our own curse. But there is a Straight Way—and He has a name. The God Who said, “I am the way” (John 14:6 NASB) has laid down Himself to be our bridge between this sad, sin-cursed earth and the glory of the deathless lands that await us. Let’s live in the duality of this powerful truth—recognizing our own “bentness,” but rejoicing that the Straight Road has already come.

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Today she’s got a piece for us on The Children of Húrin (which Extended Edition members of Jokien with Tolkien just read together! What great timing!) and how we can appreciate tragedy as a form of storytelling.

Nota Bene: Abby discusses key details from the plot and conclusion of The Children of Húrin and the endings of several other tragedies, both ancient and modern. So be forewarned that there are spoilers aplenty below (just in case you’ve been meaning to read The Children of Húrin but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

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Finding Mythology and Tragedy in Middle-earth

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The Children of Húrin is a novel-length expansion of Chapter 21, “Of Túrin Turambar,” in The Silmarillion, which was written and revised by J.R.R. Tolkien across decades of his life. The Children of Húrin was edited and published by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien, in 2007. It is a story about a man, Húrin, who is captured by the enemy, Morgoth, who curses him and forces to watch his bloodline self-destruct.

Húrin’s son, Túrin, endures many misfortunes and makes prideful choices which lead to bad ends. Túrin is separated from his family, leads a group of bandits, loses a princess, accidentally falls in love with his sister in a case of mistaken identity, and ultimately kills himself after his sister does so as well. It’s a sad story, with many fans of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings remarking on the dark tone compared to the hope found in the more popular trilogy.

I don’t often enjoy tragedies, but I was impressed while reading this story because of how much it feels like an old legend despite its fairly recent publication. I heard echoes of King Arthur, Greek mythology, and even Robin Hood in the text—but why?

One of the most fascinating things about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings in my opinion is that Tolkien didn’t set out to write a great story, he set out to create an entire world—and a world needs a history, language, and culture.1 Tolkien first crafted his mythology, later published as The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings flowed out of that. As part of The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin was created to be a legend that was passed down through generations of men over thousands of years until the third age, when The Lord of the Rings takes place.

If The Children of Húrin was intentionally written as a myth or legend, then it begins to make sense why it imitates the legends of our world.

Tolkien listed three of his inspirations for the tale in Letter 131: Kullervo in the Finnish national epic Kalevala, Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and Sigurd in the Norse Volsunga Saga. Some of the commonalities of these three legends include the presence of incest, the act of suicide due to regret or guilt, prophecies that come to pass due to the heroes’ attempts to avoid the prophecy, dragons, curses, and famous swords.

Now, I’ve never read Kalevala, Volsunga Saga, or Oedipus Rex, and yet The Children of Húrin still felt familiar. Why? I believe that I recognized many of these common elements from other old stories, whereas they are noticeably absent or changed in modern storytelling, thereby setting apart The Children of Húrin as distinct from other modern or postmodern literature.

The Downfall of Downfalls

We can draw comparisons from The Children of Húrin and its inspirations to many other stories throughout history; prophecies, curses, evil spells, and famous swords are common among mythologies in various cultures. Yet we continue to see a lot of these elements in stories from the last 100 years as well, especially in the fantasy genre—think of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, even The Lord of the Rings itself.2 So what feels different about the old legends?

The Children of Húrin is classified as a tragedy: a story in which a hero goes from good fortune to bad due to a combination of fate and his own flaws. The tragedy is a genre that began in Ancient Greece, defined by Aristotle in his Poetics, which had a notable resurgence in Shakespeare’s work. In fact, most of my familiarity with tragedies comes from Shakespeare (e.g., Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet) along with my more cursory knowledge of Greek mythology.

Túrin’s downfall is inevitable and inescapable. His “tragic flaw”, pride, leads him to make poor choices, yes. But in addition, it is the ever-present curse of Morgoth and the actions of Morgoth’s agent Glaurung the dragon which cement Túrin’s fate.

Part of why this type of storytelling feels so foreign and legend-like is because we have experienced a “downfall of downfalls”. Tragedies are rarely written today, at least not in the traditional sense. We still have stories with prophecies and curses, but the prophecies can be circumvented and the curses lifted. We much prefer a happy ending where the hero saves the day. If the hero must die, it’s the result of a sacrifice that will save millions, certainly not a suicide of despair and regret.

We still have stories that end in defeat rather than victory, but the unhappy ending is entirely avoidable and brought about by individual choices or societal flaws rather than fate. In fact, modern tragedies are often a social commentary and a criticism of systems and institutions rather than moralistic tales of individual flaws and punishment from the gods. Two good examples of this are Brave New World, which ends in a suicide after one of the protagonists despairs of the shallow, pleasure-seeking future society, and The Great Gatsby, which ends with several meaningless deaths as an illustration of the superficial, shallow world of the wealthy in the American 1920’s.

Modern tragedies leave us without answers as we ask the question: how did this happen? We have to confront the darkness in human nature without resorting to blaming fate or curses or supernatural evil. If this is what you are used to, then reading a classic tragedy like The Children of Húrin may leave you thinking, That wasn’t fair! It wasn’t his fault he was cursed! But Aristotle theorized that there is actually value in accepting tragic fates and knowing that the downfall was inevitable. We can mourn the loss of our hero, releasing negative emotions through catharsis as we do so.

However, it could be that many modern readers will struggle to achieve catharsis through tragedy due to our changed cultural context. We may focus on Túrin’s flaws and his poor choices, leading to blame and scorn. Or, we may become stuck on the notion of fate or a curse controlling his life and struggle to relate and empathize with Túrin.

Given this, we have to wonder: have we outgrown the use of classic tragedy in our modern world? Or is there still a place for tragic legends like The Children of Húrin today?

I believe Aristotle’s catharsis is a skill that we can and should still practice today. There is value in allowing ourselves to be moved to horror and pity in the safety of a fictional story, and in feeling and processing those emotions. We should weep for the children of Húrin and then return to our lives with new perspectives.

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Today she’s got a piece for us on Éowyn’s final fate in The Lord of the Rings and whether we should find her character arc ultimately satisfying or disappointing. Can’t wait for you to read it!

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Is Éowyn Alright?

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“They done my homegirl wrong!”

Thus read a comment section I recently happened across on social media, responding to the fate of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most empowered female characters, Éowyn of Rohan. Having slain the Witch King of Angmar and helped deliver victory in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, Rohan’s fiercest shieldmaiden ceases maiding her shield and follows the path of domestic normalcy, marrying Faramir of Gondor and giving peace a chance. A dud of a character arc, according to some.

If you’ve seen a Disney movie in the past fifteen years, you know it is no longer fashionable for a lady to need rescuing, nor to find contentment in marriage and motherhood. Of course, there are portions of society that still embrace a domestic vision of womanhood to the point of being almost violently pro-natal. But marriage rates are down, birth rates are down, and more females are pursuing careers once exclusively male.

For today’s women, Éowyn is a role model because she is a fighter who goes toe-to-toe with men and a rebel who will not bow to the wishes of others. For much of The Two Towers and The Return of the King, Tolkien seems to endorse this vision of female empowerment. Then he upends it completely, turning Éowyn into a pathetic creature who doubts herself and agrees to marry the first man she meets…or so some say. However, a deeper look at Tolkien’s world can help us understand Éowyn’s character arc better.

When we first meet Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings, she is a caretaker for her bewitched uncle, King Théoden. “Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings.”1 Clearly, this is no shrinking violet. In a conversation with Aragorn, she insists that while she must stay behind and keep watch over Edoras, she would rather join the warriors. In fact, she is desperate to find herself in dangerous circumstances.

‘Lord,’ she said, ‘if you must go, then let me ride in your following. For I am weary of skulking in the hills, and wish to face peril and battle.’

‘Your duty is with your people,’ he answered.

‘Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse?’2

Here we see that Éowyn is proud. While pride was a good characteristic in the pre-Christian societies of northern Europe (from which Tolkien drew considerable inspiration), it has a decidedly mixed reputation in Christianity. To take pride in one’s heritage may be noble, but pride also goes before a fall. Likewise, shieldmaidens existed only in pagan societies, whereas Christians had a special inclination toward caring for the vulnerable.

Éowyn’s character is further revealed in a later conversation with Aragorn. Again, he forbids her from joining the men on a dangerous quest, and again she takes exception. “All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.”3

Éowyn sees her situation as inherently patriarchal. The homes must be defended for the sake of the men. This is revealed by her sarcastic quote that once the men are dead, the women can be burned alive in the houses, because men will need them no more.

But what if Éowyn has misread the situation? What if riding off to almost certain death is not a privilege, but a burden? What if men ride into battle not to win glory, but to defend their homes? And what if they are defending those homes not for themselves alone, but also for the women and children?

If so, then Éowyn is privileged. She is not required to lay down her life unless all the men have laid down theirs. Perhaps on some level, Éowyn knows this and feels guilty that she is not taking on risk herself. Perhaps her grand claims about pursuing renown in battle obscure a sense of inadequacy. Or perhaps the situation does not neatly favor either males or females but requires different duties of both.

Of course, Éowyn’s desires do not arise in a vacuum. She has endured more suffering than her male counterparts realize, as Gandalf observes in a conversation with her brother Éomer, who blames her poor mood on lovesickness for Aragorn. (Typical man!)

‘My friend,’ said Gandalf, ‘you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.’4

In the Houses of Healing following her encounter with the Witch King, the true nature of Éowyn’s malady becomes clear. Her desire to die in battle is not, in fact, healthy. It arises from a kind of existential discontent within her. She is misaligned with nature, not because she wants to defend her loved ones in battle, but because she wants to die in battle. She is not thinking about her loved ones at all but about proving her value to herself and others—whereas in reality, her value is inherent. When she is awoken from illness, she cannot share her brother’s joy.

‘Great gladness it is to see you wake again to health and hope, so valiant a lady!’

‘To health?’ said Éowyn. ‘It may be so. At least while there is an empty saddle of some fallen Rider that I can fill, and there are deeds to do. But to hope? I do not know.’5

After slaying the lord of the Nazgûl and passing within an inch of death, Éowyn’s chief desire is to return to the field of blood. She seems almost disappointed to still be alive. This is not the mark of a well individual. She even claims that “it is not always good to be healed in body.”6 While dying in battle is necessary at times, such deaths are only accepted in the hope of healing for society. It is healing and not dying that ought to be pursued.

Only when she meets Faramir does her mindset begin to change, as seen in this passage from their first encounter.

‘But I do not desire healing,’ she said. ‘I wish to ride to war like my brother Éomer, or better like Théoden the king, for he died and has both honour and peace.’

‘It is too late, lady, to follow the Captains, even if you had the strength,’ said Faramir. ‘But death in battle may come to us all yet, willing or unwilling. You will be better prepared to face it in your own manner, if while there is still time you do as the Healer commanded. You and I, we must endure with patience the hours of waiting.’

She did not answer, but as he looked at her it seemed to him that something in her softened, as though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of Spring.7

Notice first the way Faramir speaks of death in battle: it is something to be avoided if possible and accepted only if necessary. See also how the change in Éowyn is described. She is thawing—coming into a personal spring. When she dashed off to battle, she was truly frozen in stasis, without purpose or validation. Only now, when she takes time to rest and reflect, does she begin to thaw and move outward toward others. Only now can she begin to desire healing, wholeness, and community. Later, Faramir tells her,

‘Once I pitied your sorrow. But now, were you sorrowless, without fear or any lack, were you the blissful Queen of Gondor, still I would love you. Éowyn, do you not love me?’

Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her.

‘I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,’ she said, ‘and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’8

Éowyn’s decision to cease being a shieldmaiden is empowered rather than disempowered. She is moving from darkness to light, death to life, slaying to healing. This is our true goal: not to contribute to the hurts of the world, but to heal them. War may sometimes be necessary, but it is never good. It can only end life, not create it.

Tolkien once wrote about Éowyn that “she was not herself ambitious in the true political sense. Though not a ‘dry nurse’ in temper, she was also not really a soldier or ‘amazon,’ but like many brave women was capable of great military gallantry at a crisis.”9 Which is to say, Éowyn is a complex character. She is not merely a housekeeper, nor merely a soldier. She has strength to wage war, but also to heal. Even as Aragorn is skilled both in battle and healing, so Éowyn uses the sword only to enable the coming of peace.

Therefore, Éowyn’s character arc does not end with her being stashed in a metaphorical closet. She is healed in body and mind so that she may provide healing to others. She becomes fully herself, freer than she ever was in battle. She is not bound to a single thing forever, but to whatever is necessary in the moment for the benefit of the world. I would argue this makes her a better role model for females than if she had simply found glory in battle.

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Reject Despair; Hope Without Guarantees

On the power of supernatural hope for a cynical age

Imagine you are in some group setting—cocktail party, kid’s birthday, church small group—and you are looking for easy on-ramps to conversation with the other people. Two options appear in your mind:

1. You could find something that you and the other person both dislike and can commiserate together.

2. You can find something that you and the other person are both excited about and/or grateful for.

As you search for topics of conversation—politics, the economy, media, your community, church, family—which option seems easier?

Maybe I’m a gloomy person (I don’t think I am), but I find it easier to complain than to rejoice, to marinate in what’s wrong and ignore what’s right—especially with others. I think it is because we swim in the waters of a fairly cynical culture. News stories of moral failures, abuse, sex scandals, grisly crimes, intractable global conflicts…all of it just leaves us feeling like “everything is awful.” Our culture is one that replaces aspiration and sincerity with irony (Ryan Reynolds winking at the camera) and despair (think of any prestige television show).

If something good happens, we tend to drill holes in the bottom of it preemptively. Watching the boat be sunk by the storm has happened too many times, so it’s just less painful to sink it ourselves: It won’t last, life is a disappointment.

Which is weird given how incredible our standard of living is. Were someone 150 years ago to hear the statistics about our life expectancy, childhood mortality rate, declining global hunger, human rights, median income, education, healthcare, entertainment, access to information and technology, etc. they would think that we must live in some golden, idyllic age.

Why are we so cynical? It is because hope is a spiritual virtue that is not dependent on material circumstances. And there is no better picture of that than J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

In The Land of Shadow

The Land of Shadow is treacherous, parched, and hellish. Ash, smoke, and thorns litter the landscape, along with roving bands of orcs and the lidless Eye, wreathed in flame, ever-scouring the God-forsaken realm. Uncertain where they are going or what to do, two diminutive hobbits stagger along, knowing only that they must journey to the mountain of fire.

There is no way to cleverly paint the full-orbed picture of despair that Tolkien crafts in Book Six of Return of the King. As you read about Frodo and Sam’s final descent into Mordor, there is a compound effect of the sheer hopelessness described that cannot be recreated without reading the story yourself. Each page hangs another rock around your neck, till you feel that you too are sinking under a burden.

But the bleakest part of this section of the story isn’t the scorched setting or even the seemingly impossible task, but it is the way in which Frodo has been hollowed out and de-humanized by the Ring, bent inward by its lust—to the point that he is nearly willing to forsake his dear Sam for it.1

The Ring’s power over Frodo grows the deeper he journeys into Mordor, multiplying with each step. By the time they arrive at the foot of Mount Doom, the weight is unbearable.

Frodo is a withered husk; silent and crumpled before Sam. They have run out of food, run out of water, run out of options.

Sam—who has up to this point been an unflagging source of hope and support for Frodo, who single-handedly stared down Shelob and rushed orc strongholds alone to rescue his friend—holds a debate with himself:

‘Well, come now, we’ve done better than you hoped,’ he said sturdily. ‘Began well anyway. I reckon we crossed half the distance before we stopped. One more day will do it.’ And then he paused.

‘Don’t be a fool, Sam Gamgee,’ came an answer in his own voice. ‘He won’t go another day like that, if he moves at all. And you can’t go on much longer giving him all the water and most of the food.’

‘I can go on a good way though, and I will.’

‘Where to?’

‘To the Mountain, of course.’

‘But what then, Sam Gamgee, what then? When you get there, what are you going to do? He won’t be able to do anything for himself.’

To his dismay Sam realized that he had not got an answer to this. He had no clear idea at all…

‘There you are!’ came the answer. ‘It’s all quite useless…You are the fool, going on hoping and toiling. You could have lain down and gone to sleep together days ago, if you hadn’t been so dogged. But you’ll die just the same, or worse. You might just as well lie down now and give it up. You’ll never get to the top anyway.’

‘I’ll get there, if I leave everything but my bones behind,’ said Sam. ‘And I’ll carry Mr. Frodo up myself, if it breaks my back and heart. So stop arguing!’2

The following day is the most punishing of them all, far worse than anything Sam ever thought he would be capable of bearing.3 Yet, Sam has an inner peace:

To his surprise he felt tired but lighter, and his head seemed clear again. No more debates disturbed his mind. He knew all the arguments of despair and would not listen to them. His will was set, and only death would break it.4

How do you do that?

Where does that kind of grit come from? To know “all the arguments of despair” but choose not to listen?

How can we be like Samwise?

The simple answer is: Hope.

One of the most cherished lessons I have learned from Tolkien is the power of Hope; supernatural Hope, to be more precise. Or, to use Tolkien’s words, “Hope without guarantees.”

A Hope that does not crater in the face of despair, that stands adamantine strong before all lost causes. A Hope that grants to Sam unforeseen strength to hoist his pitiful master upon his shoulders and carry him up the slopes of Mount Doom.

“Come, Mr. Frodo,” he cried. “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well. So up you get! Come on, Mr. Frodo dear! Sam will give you a ride.”5

Let the powers of Hell do their worst, let fire and the abyss pour forth their fury; call down meteors and stars, fling the very planets upon this tender branch, try to pulverize it into oblivion…and watch the planets themselves grind away into nothing as Samwise son of Hamfast, Hobbit of the Shire, step by step, defies despair.

Hope, as the Scriptures tell us, does not disappoint.6

Hope and The Long Defeat

Tolkien believed Hope to be a central theme in The Lord of the Rings.

Here I am only concerned with Death…and with Hope without guarantees.7

This “Hope without guarantees” is represented most evocatively by the realm of the elves who radiate the beauty of heaven like stars and light onto Middle-earth. It is a star—a window to heaven—which refreshes Sam with hope in Mordor.8 The very tokens and tools crafted by the elves, and carried by the heroes of the story, push away the choking fear and despair that Sauron creates, especially the phial of Galadriel. The phial contains a splinter of a star, which first emanated from one of the Two Trees of Valinor, the original source of all light in Middle-earth. In the tunnels of Shelob, it is this phial that pushes back the suffocating darkness (and the monster within) and gives Frodo and Sam hope.9

Yet, though the elves are the beachhead of Hope in Middle-earth, tragically, we learn that they are fading. Galadriel tells the Fellowship that for ages the elves have been fighting “the long defeat.” Evil has so marred this world that despite their genius, skill, and beauty, the elves know their fight is futile. Though immortal, time is not on their side. Slowly, they are losing.

In a letter, Tolkien reveals that this isn’t simply a piece of fantasy for his story, but what he believes to be the Christian perspective on history itself:

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.10

A contemporary of Tolkien, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, writes about the distinction between natural and supernatural Hope. All human beings are hope-shaped creatures, because we all are what Pieper calls “not yet” beings. A child wants to go on an adventure, a young wife wants a baby, the new author wants success—but not yet. We lean towards the future with expectation. This is what constitutes “natural hope”: the youthful assumption that, with time, what we expect will come to pass.

But there is a danger to natural hope. Sometimes our “not yet” never comes. So, Pieper explains, “Natural hope springs from man’s youthful power and dries up along with it.”11 As you get older, you begin to realize that life often disappoints you. It is not without reason that we associate optimism with naivety: You just haven’t lived long enough, kid.

Even the power of Galadriel’s phial has its limits. Once inside the opening in the side of Mount Doom, Sam stumbles in the pitch black:

At first he could see nothing. In his great need he drew out once more the phial of Galadriel, but it was pale and cold in his trembling hand and threw no light into that stifling dark. He was come to the heart of the realm of Sauron and the forges of his ancient might, greatest in Middle-earth; all other powers were here subdued.12

And there, in the heart of Sauron’s realm, Sam’s hope fails.

Frodo succumbs to the Ring, refuses to cast it into the fire, and betrays his beloved Sam, along with the rest of Middle-earth.

In a letter, Tolkien explains quite bleakly: “Frodo ‘failed’.” He goes on:

If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back.

…one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good.’13

See! you might say, That’s the point! Why hope when Evil can’t be beaten? Our culture of cynics is a culture that seems to agree with Tolkien’s premise. That’s why every TV show today is premised on anti-heroes and morally dubious plots. We don’t believe in good guys.

Gandalf—the preeminent voice of wisdom—himself is cautious in his words of hope:

I have spoken words of hope. But only of hope. Hope is not victory. War is upon us and all our friends…It fills me with great sorrow and great fear: for much shall be destroyed and all may be lost. I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still.14

It is man’s courage that makes the defeat long; but it is his weakness that makes the defeat certain.

So, Why Hope?

In the first installment in this series, I defined “worldly wisdom” as “trying to guarantee success by any means necessary.” If conscience blocks your path, cast it aside. “Worldly hope,” in tandem, is simply the expectation of the better future this shrewd calculation provides—hope with guarantees. It is the guarantee that the “not yet” that you are longing for will be achieved with mechanical certainty. This is the hope of Saruman,15 of Denethor,16 of Sauron himself.17

“Hope without guarantees,” on the other hand, is the expectation of a better future, even when the outcome is uncertain, even unlikely—even when your commitment to righteousness seems to negate that better future. It is the “fool’s hope” of doing the right thing—even when it costs you dearly—yet maintaining a youthful buoyancy, a spiritual litheness and vigor and expectancy, nonetheless.

It is supernatural Hope. Hope that is nourished from beyond the circle of this world; Hope that can be submerged by death and defeat, but erupt afterwards with Resurrection and Life. It is the Hope of Scripture: invisible yet invincible (Rom 5:5; 8:24).

The somber defeat of Frodo’s failure is a testimony to Tolkien’s realism and belief in human frailty. It is a rejection of “hope with guarantees.” But, the conclusion of the story is his hearty affirmation that God is not limited by our weakness—can even use the frailty and evil of man to achieve His own divine purposes.

Against all odds, Gollum is shown pity and has his life spared. It is a foolish thing to do, of course. Gollum will betray them if he is left to live. And betray them, he does. And yet, it is this act of faithful folly—sparing a sinner—that saves the world.18

Against all odds, Gollum is able to overpower Sam, find an invisible Frodo, and sever the Ring from him.

Against all odds, Gollum just so happens to lose his footing and fall, clutching his precious, into the fiery abyss.

Against all odds, in much weakness and betrayal—beyond any natural hope—Sauron’s kingdom is destroyed, and all of Middle-earth is saved.

Christians worship the God who can use Gollum’s and Judas’ and Peter’s to achieve His purposes. What man intends for evil, God intends for good. He is the God who can write the story with broken pencils. He builds His Church with the rubble of sinners and somehow makes it a temple. He marries a whore and somehow makes her chaste. He is the God who makes all things new.

So, we do not lose heart. We do not give up hope, even when all hope seems lost.

When we are surrounded by a culture hooked on despair, that tries to “see through” every good thing as just a thin sheet hiding a pile of trash, whose only medicine is satire and sarcasm when all seems lost…what do we do?

We reject naive optimism. We know that things may turn out far worse than we can imagine. History is a long defeat. We don’t confuse the “glimpses” of final victory with the final victory itself.

We reject despair. When you feel yourself slide into a mood of why bother? grab your heart by the scruff of neck—like Samwise—and say, “I will not listen to you.” We continue to perform our little acts of faithfulness in hope that God is capable of doing what we cannot.

We rejoice in hope. Not the natural hope of worldly wisdom: Supernatural hope. We trust that no matter what, God will never abandon us, will turn all things together for our good—even our defeat—and one day will return and remake this world into something far more beautiful and wonderful than we can possibly imagine. After the gloom of every Friday, the bright morning of Sunday awaits.

Final victory is coming.

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” - Rev 21:5

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Reject Despair; Die Well

Black is Mightier Still

The last city of man is in flames. A pillar of light alone in a sea of darkness.

Minas Tirith, the beacon of Gondor, has been the dike holding the forces of Mordor back from sweeping over the West.

If it falls, all of Middle-earth shall be lost.

But it has fallen. The black tide has risen and overrun the banks.

The strength of Numenór has faded as the power of Mordor has grown. Gondor has less than a tithe of Sauron’s strength, and none can stand before his deadliest weapon: the Nazgûl.

The dark, cloaked figures have the nightmare-like quality of crippling fear. With each cry: “even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war; but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.”1

The captain of the Ringwraiths approaches the gates of Minas Tirith and, “speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone,” he bursts them apart.

In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax…

‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’
…
‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’2

The only person willing to stand against this Satanic force is Gandalf the White, a small flame before a wave of darkness. He is outmatched.3 His threat, though authoritatively spoken, is “vain” to the Nazgûl.4 What are mere words in the face of Death itself?

Gandalf does not have the strength of arms to win. He stands as a tender shoot of courage before a machine of malice, compelled not by surety of victory but by a simple, childlike faith that evil must be resisted, even if one dies in the process.5

A Tale of Two Kings

Meanwhile, the steward of Gondor, Denethor, has taken a more realistic approach. Gifted with a shrewd mind, Denethor has perceived how dire their situation is. He has used his seeing-stone (palantír) to see beyond what any mortal man would be able to, and he sees that the force at their door is but the finger of Sauron’s outstretched arm, that more reinforcements are coming, and that any chance of victory is futile.

No help is coming, death is certain, his sons have perished, Gondor has fallen. All that remains is the final gasp of resistance before all is snuffed out.

Denethor represents the iron grip of despair: nothing will improve, nothing can stop it, nothing matters. Much earlier, Gandalf warns us all:

Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.6

Denethor simply believes that he does see the end beyond all doubt, and so despair is the only logical response.

But, he is wrong. He does not see the end.

Faramir lives. Aragorn is sailing in from the south. Rohan rides in from the north. And two hobbits are but a few days away from destroying the Ring and ending Sauron’s domain forever. Despite—or, rather, because of—his lofty mind and powerful technology,7 Denethor is certain none of this could be so, and thus succumbs to the blindness of rage and despair.

Despair always feeds on presumption.

But this doesn’t mean courage comes from ignorance.

Théoden, king of Rohan, rides to the fields of Pelennor. His people have just endured a harrowing battle at Helm’s Deep. Wearied though they are and few in men, they answer Gondor’s call for aid. But, as the exhausted forces march south, the cursed skies darken and a gloom of hopelessness settles upon the Rohirrim.

By the time they arrive, they find things far worse than they imagined:

The City was now nearer. A smell of burning was in the air and a very shadow of death. The horses were uneasy. But the king sat upon Snowmane, motionless, gazing upon the agony of Minas Tirith, as if stricken suddenly by anguish, or by dread. He seemed to shrink down, cowed by age. Merry himself felt as if a great weight of horror and doubt had settled on him. His heart beat slowly. Time seemed poised in uncertainty. They were too late! Too late was worse than never! Perhaps Théoden would quail, bow his old head, turn, slink away to hide in the hills.

Théoden had spent years under the spell of Saruman, Sauron’s puppet. Indolence and senility had set in prematurely as he lingered under Wormtongue’s influence. But like a tree shaking off heavy snow, new vigor and fury were granted to Théoden through the help of Gandalf. Yet, who could stand now against such impossible odds? Who could lead their men into such certain defeat, to throw oneself into the very teeth of Death? Théoden begins to crumple back under the weight of old age.

Then suddenly Merry felt it at last, beyond doubt: a change. Wind was in his face! Light was glimmering. Far, far away, in the South the clouds could be dimly seen as remote grey shapes, rolling up, drifting: morning lay beyond them.

But at that same moment there was a flash, as if lightning had sprung from the earth beneath the City. For a searing second it stood dazzling far off in black and white, its topmost tower like a glittering needle; and then as the darkness closed again there came rolling over the fields a great boom.

At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.

Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

There are many similarities between Denethor and Théoden.8 But the essential difference could not be more stark. Théoden categorically rejects the temptation to despair; Denethor embraces it. Both men die in the midst of the battle, yet their deaths stand opposed to each other: one dies heroically, selflessly, nobly; the other tragically, selfishly, arrogantly. Théoden is slain; Denethor slays himself. Théoden displays courage in the face of death, in defiance of death; Denethor displays cowardice through his acquiescence to death.

Tolkien makes it obvious for us: pride and despair are the twin serpents of cowardice. Whereas courage and hope are the wings of heroism.

Denethor dies a crazed, belligerent man, attempting to murder his son in the process, refusing to cede the tiniest modicum of power to others, even in his own death.9 His despair has poisoned him, twisted him, diminished him into an un-man.

Théoden dies a hero, valiantly riding to the rescue of mankind—of Gandalf himself10— and the destruction of evil, laying down his life for the sake of others. His fortitude and hope in the face of hopelessness expands him; he becomes more humane, even as he dies.

Courage, Courage For Our Friends…

The power of despair feeds on the intoxication of pride. Its twin vice is its inverse opposite: blind optimism. It is the implacably certain individual whose hubris elevates his estimation to the level of omniscience: there is no outcome or circumstance that I have not thought of—I see all. This may lead one to an unwarranted confidence, or unmitigated despair. And the more intelligent and technologically powerful the individual is, the more extreme these valleys and mountains will be.

Courage is antithetical to both despair and invincible optimism. Courage presumes that the danger is real—that one may really perish in the struggle. But it rejects the sluggish descent into nihilism. Nothing saps courage faster than despair. If the struggle is hopeless, why struggle at all? Why fight? Why not slip into the dark chasm yourself while you still have the choice?

Courage stands in the gap between the cocksure swagger and the depressant’s resignation. It is neither security, nor defeat. Gandalf has no promise that he will be rescued as he stands against the Nazgûl. Théoden has no guarantee that he will not be leading his army to a humiliating defeat. There are no certainties here.

Whoever in such a situation of unqualified seriousness, in the face of which any miles gloriosus (glorious soldier) falls mute and every heroic gesture becomes crippled, nonetheless advances toward the horror and does not allow himself to be prevented from doing the good, specifically for the sake of the good and thus finally for the sake of God, not out of ambition or out of fear of being taken for a coward: that person is truly courageous.11

Of course, this means that we must be prepared to die. It is not for no reason that Jesus described His Way as being inherently cruciform. We must die to ourselves, die to our passions, die to the world. We must do this now so that when we the decisive moment of risk presents itself—when we must stand before the wave, uncertain that we will remain afterwards—we look more like Gandalf and Théoden, and less like Denethor.

Remember, courage is not reserved only for heroic conquests like Tolkien’s legendarium. Courage is displayed in a thousand small moments of honesty, integrity, mercy, and love; when doing the right thing seems to lead down, not up; when resisting evil leads to the uncontrollable, uncertain risk; to a kind of death. There, in the shadow of death, is the only place courage resides.

How do we nourish such courage?

First, categorically and decisively reject despair. You do not see all ends—you are not God.

Second, die well. Denethor’s suicide is the culmination of a poor life. Pride and despair have shaped him. Théoden’s death, on the other hand, is the culmination of a life of courage, a life that knows that there are worse evils than dying, and greater goods than self-preservation.

We can die well by remembering that even if we perish—if we lose our job, if the conversation doesn’t end well, if we humiliate ourselves, if we sense our bodies weakening—Death is not the end. Christians are those who can die well because we have already died in our Savior. And as He rose, so too shall we. Our lives now are but the fleeting moments one experiences upon the front porch of some great, eternal palace, the first few sentences of a story that gets better with every page. This earthly life is not the whole of our home, our story, but only the beginning.

In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.12

Read Part 3 here:

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Marc is the teaching pastor of Quinault Baptist Church in Kennewick, WA, where he lives with his wife and three sons. He writes regularly on Substack at Et Cetera on all manner of issues, but particularly on virtue formation in the ordinary bits of life. He was first introduced to Tolkien in a college course in his undergrad and has been reading and re-reading and re-reading all things Tolkien ever since.

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Reject Despair; Embrace Folly

Part One of Tolkien's Guide to Defiant Joy

In a letter to an editor, J.R.R. Tolkien explained that while there are similarities one can draw between the gospels and his work, his work was far more limited in its scope:

The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write. Here I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees.¹

There are many other central themes to Tolkien’s writing: friendship,2 the blessing (and danger) of power,3 the distorting consequence of sin,4 and many more.

But Death and (uncertain) Hope are what Tolkien believed to be the two major themes of his entire corpus. Which is why most of Tolkien’s writing is suffused with a kind of melancholy.

Think of the final march of the Ents to Isengard; the dwindling Rohirrim driven back into Helm’s Deep; the exhausted forces of Gondor assaulting the Black Gate; and, above all, the despair of two hobbits, wandering like lost children in the Land of Shadow.

All of these tragic heroes are aware that they are entering a fight they cannot win, against an enemy they cannot beat, certain that they will most likely perish in the undertaking.

Outside there was a starless blackness as Gandalf, with Pippin beside him bearing a small torch, made his way to their lodging.

'Tell me,' he said, 'is there any hope? For Frodo, I mean; or at least mostly for Frodo.'

Gandalf put his hand on Pippin's head. 'There never was much hope,' he answered. 'Just a fool's hope, as I have been told.’5

With this kind of bleak perspective, why do so many readers return to Tolkien’s trilogy as a well of hope, beauty, and goodness? Why does it seem like lembas to stave off the nihilism of our day? Like the light of Galadriel to push back despair?

In The Hobbit, Bilbo and the dwarves are lost in the spider-infested Mirkwood. The forest is dark and the grey undergrowth is so dense and labyrinthine that the company begins to descend into a claustrophobic craze. So, Bilbo climbs a tree and pops his head above the green canopy to get a sense of where they are. His eyes are dazzled by the light. A gentle breeze rolls by and he inhales deeply, and finally he opens his eyes:

“He saw all round him a sea of dark green, ruffled here and there by the breeze; and there were everywhere hundreds of butterflies.”6

That’s what it feels like to read Tolkien: lost wanders emerging from the dark stuffy gloom into unexpected beauty, light, and direction. Our modern world is suffocatingly small. Stepping into Middle-earth is breaking through into the expansive grandeur of Ultimate Reality.

Today’s post is the first in a series on how Tolkien’s writing presents an imaginative blueprint for how Christians can walk the narrow path of Christ and categorically, decisively, and intentionally reject the despair they will inevitably feel.

The Folly of (Worldly) Wisdom

Another major theme in The Lord of the Rings is the self-destructive nature of evil. This is revealed in small ways, such as the constant in-fighting between orcs, and in much more serious ways, such as Gollum wrestling the Ring from Frodo. But the self-destructive nature of evil is revealed most incisively when it manifests itself in the limits of worldly wisdom.

By worldly wisdom I mean the way of thinking about the world devoid of God. It is both the materialism of the technologist and the calculations of the magician who have “seen through” the religious realm of morality and virtue as naive and unnecessary restrictions. The reason that Tolkien portrays both Isengard and Mordor as realms of industrial technology and dark magic is because the technologist and the magician are two sides of the same coin: those who want power to dominate others.

When Gandalf first realizes that Saruman is turning to ally himself with Sauron, portended by no longer being dressed in white but multi-colored robes, he flatly tells Saruman: “I liked white better.”

‘“White!” [Saruman] sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

‘“In which case it is no longer white,” said [Gandalf]. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

‘“You need not speak to me as to one of the fools that you take for friends,” said he. “I have not brought you hither to be instructed by you, but to give you a choice…
The Elder Days are gone. The Middle Days are passing. The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.”7

Saruman views morality (“white”) as the childish posture of simplicity that must be “overwritten” in order to gain power. Saruman has matured, evolved, progressed; he “knows what time it is.” He is prepared to see what Gandalf’s childlike scruples cannot:

And there is a kind of logic to Saruman’s position. Virtue is, in a sense, less effective than the moral ambiguity of Saruman. If morality is inherently limiting (thou shalt not), then immorality (or a-morality) opens up more options.

Gandalf’s virtue forbids him from allying with evil, compels him to oppose it absolutely. But Saruman points out that Gandalf’s resistance is doomed to failure—Gandalf himself is doubtful.8 But, Saruman continues, opposing Mordor absolutely is not the only option for the wizards. There could be the option to join Sauron outwardly, without abandoning their high, noble ends:

“We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”9

It is a lesser-of-two evils argument. Stick to your moral high-ground, Gandalf, and you and everyone else will be obliterated because you do not have the Power to win. But if you are willing to be more…flexible, then don’t you see how can actually do more good in the end? What good is your virtue if it kills you? Yes, we will have to stomach some undesirable things, but the lofty ends will justify the unsavory means.

“This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way.”10

Here, we see how Saruman defines both wisdom and hope. Gandalf believes that Saruman has “left the path of wisdom” by compromising. Saruman’s speech is his rebuttal: No, this is wisdom, this is hope. You aren’t strong enough to win. Your morals are only going to get you killed. My plan works.

It is simple math for Saruman.

And from the vantage of worldly wisdom, it makes sense.

Why stand against a force you cannot stop? Why risk death when you cannot see any path to victory?

But, of course, Saruman is wrong. Massively wrong. He is unaware of it, but he is on the brink of ruin. Joining forces with Mordor briefly catapults him into unparalleled power…only to fall into utter humiliation. The powerful and wise Saruman becomes an impotent, two-bit criminal who dies an ignoble death.

The snake devours its own tail. Evil destroys itself—even when it seems to offer more wisdom, more hope, more guaranteed success than the (seemingly) foolish path of virtue. Why? Because, there was one factor Saruman fails to take into account in his calculations: God.11

Why is evil self-destructive? Because this is God’s world. And when you cut against the grain of His design—even if it seems to be the shortest path to power, the most secure means of success—you sow the seeds of your own destruction. The path of worldly wisdom and hope is the path of foolishness and despair.

Sauron’s greatest folly in The Lord of the Rings is that he assumes that his enemies will wield the power of the Ring against him. Gandalf explains:

That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream…Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded: neither Ring nor bearer could long have eluded him.12

Sauron is wise, and therefore is a fool. He could not in “his darkest dreams” imagine someone freely choosing to deny the opportunity of Power, to destroy the most powerful piece of technology and magic in all of Middle-Earth. And thus, his worldly wisdom is his own undoing.

The Wisdom of (Faithful) Folly

If worldly wisdom, worldly hope—trying to guarantee success by any means necessary, casting virtue and God aside if need be—ultimately leads to folly, to destruction, then that means that the path of virtue, of faithfulness, will often look like folly, like hope without guarantees.

This is where Tolkien shines. It is precisely here—in the doom of the hero tasked with a tragic quest, standing against impossible odds, the whole world calling him a fool—that the distinctly Christian nature of the work reveals itself.

The hero’s path in Lord of the Rings is the path of faithful folly. It is the journey through the Mines of Moria (from μωρία, Greek for “folly” and mori, Latin for “to die”)13 where Gandalf—the most powerful of the Fellowship—sacrifices himself to save the others. It is the “the Paths of the Dead” where Aragorn—the one leader needed most— takes the perilous journey under the cursed mountain when all warn him otherwise. It is the “fool’s hope” of sending the One Ring into the very land of the Dark Lord who seeks it, not with a great army, or strong captains or elf-lords, but with the diminutive hobbits of the Shire.

And yet, because these characters perform these deeds in accord with virtue, because they cut with the grain of the universe, sing in harmony with the Song, their doomed tasks—against all explanation—succeed, even as it costs them dearly. They face the Balrog and slip into darkness. Yet, as we will see later, there is hope “beyond the circles of this world.” After Good Friday, there is an Easter Sunday.

When faithfulness leads you into what looks like folly to the world, to defeat, to loss, Tolkien gives us imaginative fuel to continue to walk that path without despair.

Too often, we succumb to despair because we feel like we cannot guarantee success in life, because ordinary faithfulness seems “not to work” or to put us more often in the crosshairs, rather than the seat of the powerful. And if we can’t see how faithfulness will produce the results we desire, we begin to lose hope and sink into despair. And I know of few more powerful acids to weaken the moral resolve of the faithful than despair.

If you come to believe that being faithful to your spouse, patient with your children, refusing to join in frenzy of greed in your workplace, or any other ordinary Christian virtue “won’t make any difference anyways,” then you’ll find your convictions beginning to weaken. Soon, the divorce, explosive anger, or dishonest practices will begin to feel inevitable. You’ll say: “I tried the path of faithfulness, and it didn’t work.”

But that’s Saruman’s line of thinking. That’s worldly wisdom, worldly hope. That’s forgetting that “Even the very wise cannot see all ends” and that “there are other forces at work in this world besides evil.”14 You do not know what your invisible and seemingly foolish acts of faithfulness will produce…nor can you anticipate the tragic cost of compromise.

The world may call Christians fools for insisting on our childlike commitment to virtue and our refusal to stain our hands with evil. And maybe we are. But if we are to be fools, let’s be faithful fools rather than worldly wise fools.

And while Tolkien’s work is fictional, it cuts to the heart of Ultimate Reality: the folly of the Cross (1 Cor 1:18-25).

“Despair, or folly?' said Gandalf. 'It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.'15

Read Part Two here:

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Marc Sims' substack on culture, theology, art, poetry, and literature.

By Marc Sims

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• Interested in writing a guest piece like the above? Check out my submission guidelines

📚 You can read more of my writing by reading my books! My latest is a collection of essays on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and more of Tolkien’s works (and their adaptations). You can also find it and more of my books on Amazon or Gumroad

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‘There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make. He did not want to go, indeed the whole idea was distasteful to him; but he could not get out of it. He knew he would have to start some time, but he did not hurry with his preparations’.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle”

What in our lives and our world is truly of value? How can we best spend our time on this earth? What is the real impact of a single act of kindness or creativity? And does heaven exist? If it does, what might it be like?

These are some of the questions that J.R.R. Tolkien addresses in his short story “Leaf by Niggle” (which you can find collected in Tales from the Perilous Realm). Using story and allegory, he illustrates the true value and impact of the creative process, the somewhat surprising connections that we share with our neighbors, and his beliefs about the journey of life, death, and what follows afterwards.

Tolkien and Allegory

Unlike his good friend and fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not a fan of allegory generally. Tolkien’s opinion on allegory was that it bordered on insulting to the reader for an author to force them to read their work in such a way that only a single interpretation was possible. Instead, he preferred a story so full of authenticity and correspondence to real life that the reader would find it easy to glean applications based on their own experiences.

In the foreword of the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien commented

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

But his general dislike for heavy-handed allegory did not stop him from writing his own better suited to his tastes.

He writes in Letter 131 on this nuanced view, explaining again his distaste for certain types of allegory but then describing what a ‘good’ allegory would look like:

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And of course, the more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.)

If an allegory must be made, Tolkien argues, better it arises naturally from a story that succeeds on a surface level and does not depend on a metaphorical interpretation to work. Interestingly, Tolkien also suggests that the better a story is, the more correlations it will have with real life, which will drive allegorical interpretations organically.

He fleshes out this idea in an earlier letter to his publisher (Letter 109) where he expounds on the relationship between story and allegory:

Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the rings seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.

Leaf by Niggle, Allegory by Tolkien

Tolkien’s attempt at a better deliberate allegory is “Leaf by Niggle,”1 a short story about a painter named Niggle who spends his life attempting to finish an immense painting of a colossal tree.

In “Leaf by Niggle” we find Tolkien channeling his experience writing The Lord of the Rings, illustrating his concepts about the creative process, and sharing his beliefs about heaven—portrayed as only a creative and artist such as himself could imagine—in an allegorical tale.

Does Tolkien’s allegory meet his own standards of success? Or does it fall victim to the inelegant and heavy-handed style of story-telling Tolkien himself aimed to avoid?

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What makes a human being change and shapes us into who we are? Is it our innate biology? Or is it the result of our own conscious choices? Is it nature? Or nurture?

In a letter replying to W.H. Auden's review of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien shares his view of human nature and provides his answers to many of the above questions by comparing a human being at once to a seed and to a gardener:

I do not feel that a journey in space is a useful comparison for understanding these processes. I think that comparison with a seed is more illuminating: a seed with its innate vitality and heredity, its capacity to grow and develop. A great part of the 'changes' in a man are no doubt unfoldings of the patterns hidden in the seed; though these are of course modified by the situation (geographical or climatic) into which it is thrown, and may be damaged by terrestrial accidents.

—Letter 183

Here Tolkien uses the comparison with a seed to illustrate how the changes human beings undergo unfold according to some innate 'programming,' though the results can be and are affected and shaped by their environment.

I'm reminded of Jesus' parable of the four soils, where the same seed is sown on a path, in rocky ground, in thorny areas, and in good soil. Similar instructions are carried in each seed, and all the seeds that are not snatched off the path begin to grow similarly. But the environment of the rocks and the thorns affects the development of those seeds: the seeds on the path are snatched away, the seeds in the rocky soil don’t develop solid roots, and the seeds in the thorns are chocked and wilt. Only the seeds sown in the good soil survive and thrive.

This view is not Tolkien's whole view of how people change, however. He continues, observing that in addition to a seed, a human being is also like a gardener.

But this comparison leaves out inevitably an important point. A man is not only a seed, developing in a defined pattern, well or ill according to its situation or its defects as an example of its species; a man is both a seed and in some degree also a gardener, for good or ill. I am impressed by the degree in which the development of 'character' can be a product of conscious intention, the will to modify innate tendencies in desired directions; in some cases the change can be great and permanent.

—Letter 183

In Tolkien’s view, we are not simply slaves to our ‘programming.’ Humans can exercise their free will, or “conscious intention” on their lives and effect real, significant changes—both positive and negative.

I find this to be a helpful view, personally. Whether because of our own natures or as the result of circumstances larger than our own all around us, I’ve seen firsthand how there are aspects of how we grow and change as human beings that we just don’t have much control over.

But that is—thankfully, blessedly—not the only set of forces at work in how our lives turn out.

We have a say, though it may seem like a small one at times, in how we act and who we become.

Tolkien’s legendarium is rife with examples of characters who, though they found themselves caught up in events much larger than themselves, make the conscious choice to be courageous, to sacrifice, to fight against the pull of self-preservation or the paralysis of fear.

Chief among those examples are Bilbo and Frodo, who were changed by their adventures into much different Hobbits than they were then when they set out but who also made conscious choices that shaped their own characters and fates.

Stopped dead in his tracks by fear during his descent into the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo chose to continue his mission into Smaug’s lair. It was the bravest thing he ever did.

With the fate of the Shire in the balance, Frodo chose to accept the quest to carry the Ring out of the Shire. Though he felt “very small, and very uprooted, and well – desperate,” he made the difficult choice to go on in spite of that fear.

So tend the garden of your life in hope. Yes, there are forces both within our hearts and without in the world that we cannot control. But that is not the end of the story. We have a part to play and a garden to tend.

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Tolkien Tidbits

Quick Tolkien or Tolkien-related items from the news or recent events

New Tolkien sculptures unveiled in Roos — East Riding News

A Lincolnshire artist has crafted two statues—one of a young J.R.R. Tolkien and another of his wife Edith dancing in front of him in the woods à la Beren and Luthien. These sculptures, both carved from a single piece of oak, were recently unveiled in the East Riding village of Roos. The Yorkshire town hopes highlighting the connections to Tolkien will increase tourism and interest in the area.

Can Lord of the Rings Bring Success to Washington Nationals? — Sports Illustrated

Eight members of the Washington Nationals are currently reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings for a team book club. The club started as a Bible study, branched out to some of C.S. Lewis’ works, and then made the natural jump to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The club has just recently started The Fellowship of the Ring.

‘LOTR: The Rings Of Power’ Adds Trio To Cast As Season 3 Starts Production — Deadline

“Andrew Richardson (Ponies) has been cast as a series regular and Zubin Varla (Andor) and Adam Young (Masters of the Air) as recurring in the upcoming third season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which recently began filming at the Amazon MGM Studios series’ new U.K. production home, Shepperton Studios.

British actors Richardson, Varla and Young — who all have extensive theater background — join previously announced new Season 3 cast additions, Stranger Things‘ Jamie Campbell Bower, who will be a series regular, and Eddie Marsan, who will recur.”

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📚 You can read more of my writing by reading my books! My latest is a collection of essays on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and more of Tolkien’s works (and their adaptations). You can find it and more of my books on Amazon or Gumroad

⚔️ If someone forwarded this email to you or you found it through social media or Google, I’d like to invite you to join 13,000+ subscribers in the Jokien with Tolkien community: Subscribe here and get a free gift just for joining!

🏹 Chosen as a Substack Featured Publication in 2023

🪓 Official merch available in the Jokien with Tolkien store

❌ All typos are precisely as intended

🔗 Links may be affiliate, which is a free-to-you way to support this newsletter where I earn a small commission on items you purchase

🗃️ Can’t wait till next week for more content? View the archive

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The hands of the king are the hands of a healer.

The first time I played Dungeons & Dragons, I created a character who—at least initially—may or may not have borne a striking resemblance to a certain Strider (including “in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes”). As I considered which spells my character ought to learn and whether the immediate needs of the party were healing spells or other types, the concept of a Ranger who heals reminded me of a particular passage from The Return of the King.

In the chapter “The Houses of Healing” in The Return of the King, Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry all lie close to death in the eponymous space. Gandalf has sent for Aragorn, explaining that “it is only in the coming of Aragorn that any hope remains for the sick that lie in the House. Thus spoke Ioreth, wise-woman of Gondor: “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.”¹

This Gondorian proverb quoted by Ioreth—“The hands of the king are the hands of a healer”—struck me, and as I considered it, I noticed a pattern that emerges as Aragorn heals Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry.

As the healer king approaches each of them, he does three things. He touches them, he calls their name, and he causes the room to be filled with the fragrance of kingsfoil. Not only do we see Aragorn prove his kingship via this sign; we also find our attention directed to another King whose touch, call, and Spirit heal his people.

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A common criticism (or occasionally praise) of Tolkien I have encountered repeatedly on the internet is that The Lord of the Rings is a story of capital-G Good versus capital-E Evil, with none of the "morally grey" ambiguity that characterizes much of modern fantasy. But such a criticism (or celebration) of Tolkien reveals a basic lack of familiarity with or understanding of Tolkien. For, as we will see, the depiction of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings is much more nuanced than one might assume.

It turns out this contention that The Lord of the Rings is a simple story of Good and Evil is not a new interpretation. Tolkien himself encountered this response to his work in some of the reviews of the book that appeared following its release, and he even went so far as to specifically respond to it and demonstrate why it is a faulty analysis of the tale. Tolkien addresses this critique in Letter 154:

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it...and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least, as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.

Tolkien here reiterates the criticism before responding to it: some saw Lord of the Rings as “simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil.” He then produces his proofs that this critique is wrong. He begins with Boromir, discusses the complex morality that drove the Elves, mentions how the Men of Gondor were similar to the Elves in a way, and then ends by listing more examples of morally complex characters from The Lord of the Rings: Saruman, Denethor, Boromir again, and even the Orcs.

There is so much to discuss here in Tolkien’s reply that’s fascinating! If you’re only familiar with the portrayal of the Elves in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, this description of them by Tolkien as “not wholly good or in the right” may be surprising (though the members of the “I finished The Silmarillion” club are not at all shocked).

The description of the Men of Gondor as “a withering people whose only ‘hallows’ were their tombs’ deserves an entire essay of its own!1

The nuances in the morality of the Orcs is also a tempting topic of exploration—especially with the [overblown, in my opinion] uproar over portions of the portrayal of orcs in the second season of The Rings of Power.

And the triumvirate of Saruman, Denethor, and Boromir would be intriguing to set against one another to compare and contrast.

But for today, I will content myself to focus on Boromir, whom Tolkien mentions twice here in his response.

Boromir is one of Tolkien’s tragic figures: a great captain of men, he follows a prophetic vision to Rivendell and joins the Fellowship in the quest to destroy the only weapon that might possibly be able to save the home and people that he loves.

As it gradually becomes clear that Frodo will not take the Ring to Gondor, Boromir begins to feel his best and perhaps only chance of saving his people slipping away. He attempts to persuade Frodo to come to Gondor and let him use the Ring (temporarily, of course), and then attempts to take it from the halfling by force when Frodo refuses.

Frodo slips away using the Ring. When Boromir realizes (with the assistance of a sharp blow to the head) what he has done, he is stricken with regret.

The Fellowship is soon beset by orcs, and Boromir is mortally wounded defending Merry and Pippen, who are captured after he falls.

Boromir speaks his final words to Aragorn:

‘They have gone: the Halflings: the Orcs have taken them. I think they are not dead. Orcs bound them.’ He paused and his eyes closed wearily. After a moment he spoke again.
‘Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.’2

At the moment of his death, Boromir is convinced he has failed, likely on multiple fronts. He has not saved his people: they are in fact weaker now that their great captain is slain. He has not brought them a great weapon against their Enemy. He has betrayed Frodo, attempting to take the Ring by force. He has given in to the tempting power of the Ring, being overcome by desire for it and the power that it promises. And lastly, he has failed to protect Merry and Pippin.

This last bit is especially important, as it was the last action Boromir attempted. Furthermore, it was more significant than just him defending his friends or fighting off Orcs. In protecting Merry and Pippin, Boromir was attempting to atone for his failure with Frodo.

Tolkien himself explicitly describes Boromir’s efforts to defend Merry and Pippin as an attempt at redemption:

"The book [Book II] ends with the death of Boromir fighting the Orcs in an effort to redeem himself for his fall – he had tried to take the Ring from Frodo by force. (Letter 131)

So of the many meanings of Boromir’s “I have failed,” this is perhaps one of the most crucial.

Is Boromir right, though? Has he failed totally? He failed with Frodo, yes. But has he failed completely? And was it too late for him to be redeemed?

In a tale where the Good is simply good and the Bad is nothing but bad, Boromir’s pronouncement that he had failed would have been right. He would have failed completely, and his failure would reveal he had never been good in the first place, transform him into an unrepentant and wholly evil character, or some other obvious, extreme outcome.

But The Lord of the Rings is not “a plain fight between Good and Evil” and Boromir is not totally defined by his failure.

Instead, we find a nuanced portrayal of a character who yearns to do what is right but who finds himself increasingly struggling to determine what that is.

Boromir’s failure is a tragic component of his story, yes. But Boromir’s failure is not the final word in his story.

In the trial and triumph of Boromir, Tolkien masterfully explores the perils and temptation of power alongside the possibility of sacrifice and love as pathways to redemption.

Yes, redemption! Tolkien depicts Boromir’s redemption in at least three primary places within the text of the story itself. Let’s look together at each of these three evidences of Boromir’s redemption and call three witnesses to the stand in Boromir’s defense: Aragorn, Faramir, and Gandalf.

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But though I treated the trilogy as a unit in my argument and tried to use reasons from all three books/films in my post, I must admit that there’s a bit of a problem with the argument at its root.

You see, The Fellowship of the Ring is a Christmas movie. And The Two Towers is arguably one as well (Gandalf doesn’t get his white beard and famous steed that bears him around the world until then, after all).

But The Return of the King, considered by itself, is not a Christmas movie.

There’s virtually no snow, no giving of gifts by elves, it takes place in March, not December, and so on and so forth.

But if it isn’t a Christmas movie, is it anything in particular?

Yes, indeed it is. You see..

The Return of the King is an EASTER movie.

That’s right, The Return of the King joins Easter Parade, The Passion of the Christ, the forthcoming sequel to The Passion, Hop, Peter Rabbit, and Ben-Hur as a veritable Easter flick.

Not sure you believe me? Here’s my 10 Reasons The Return of the King is an Easter movie.

10 Reasons The Return of the King is an Easter Movie

1 - The Extended Edition DVD Release Has Easter Eggs

Ok, so we’re starting with a fun one, but did you know that The Return of the King Extended Edition had several Easter Eggs (in the sense of a “hidden surprise” for fans) when it was released on DVD?

The full version of the first Easter Egg is on YouTube (and begins with Elijah Wood literally saying “Welcome to the Easter Egg!”), and explains and sets up the clip below, but the short version is Dominic Monaghan pranked Elijah Wood with a fake interview via satellite (so Elijah couldn’t see Dom) where he pretended to be a German interviewer. Which led to this memorable exchange concerning the wearing of wigs:

In the second Easter Egg, Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn ask Peter Jackson about making another Lord of the Rings movie in an unintentionally prescient sketch, considering The Hobbit trilogy was still years in the future at that point.

2 - Frodo and Sam going up Mount Doom parallels Jesus ascending Golgotha

Carrying a heavy burden and close to the end of their quest, our weary hero stumbles and is unable to rise. Suddenly, someone else steps in and helps carry their burden the rest of the way up the hill.

Quick: was I talking about Sam carrying Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom or Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry his cross up Golgotha?

Alright, alright, so there are lots of differences too. But there’s no denying that the climax of the story of Frodo and the Ring and Jesus and the cross have some close parallels. Their journey up the hill at the end of their quest is one, while another is reason #3.

3 - Similar cries from Frodo and Jesus

In John 19:28, Jesus cries out “It is finished!” from the cross just before his death. Remind you of anything?

4 - The destruction of the Ring occurs on March 25th, a date traditionally associated with the Crucifixion

Ok, we’ve had a silly/superficial reason and then a few reasons that you might classify as loose parallels, but here in #4 we have a stronger and more explicit parallel.

According to Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, the destruction of the Ring occurs on March 25th. What is the significance of this date, if any, for Tolkien?

Well there are several important connections with the traditional Church Calendar that March 25th most likely would have had for Tolkien, who was an observant Catholic.

March 25th is the date that the Feast of the Annunciation (celebrating the angel Gabriel visiting Mary) is celebrated in the Catholic Church, as well as the date that was traditionally considered to be the day of the creation of Adam, the passing of Israel through the Red Sea, and the immolation of Isaac. Busy (and significant) day!

But two more events were associated in antiquity with March 25th that have strong parallels with the destruction of the Ring and the Fall of Sauron: the Fall of Lucifer and the crucifixion of Christ!1

Now did Tolkien have all of these things in mind in fixing this date? Almost certainly not. But did he have at least the date of the Crucifixion consciously or unconsciously in his mind as he set the dates of the accomplishment of the quest to destroy the Ring?

Tolkien famously observed in Letter 142, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”

And in the Reader’s Companion to The Lord of the Rings we find this quote from Tolkien: “Dec. 25 (setting out) and March 25 (accomplishment of quest) were intentionally chosen by me.”

So if we combine Tolkien’s conscious and intentional choice of March 25th as the date of the destruction of the Ring with his awareness of the date as one the Church celebrated Good Friday on in history, I think we can safely conclude that he intended there to be a correspondence between the two, an echo of the greatest of all eucatastrophes in the eucatastrophe of The Lord of the Rings (more on that in a bit).

5 - An Earthquake follows both the Crucifixion and the destruction of Ring

The Gospel of Matthew records in chapter 28 verse 51 that after Jesus breathed his last, there was an earthquake that shook the city. And what do we see occur after the Ring is destroyed in The Lord of the Rings? An earthquake! In the book, the shaking is felt by Faramir and Éowyn in Minas Tirith. In the film, the earthquake causes the ground under Sauron’s army at the Black Gate to collapse right from under them.

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6 - The Dead leave their Tombs

Just one verse later in Matthew 28, the Gospel records that “tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. ⁵³ They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”

Hmm, an “army” of the dead coming out of their tombs? Sound familiar?

7 - The Power of Evil Is Defeated

With the destruction of the One Ring, Sauron is defeated once and for all. The great Enemy is destroyed!

Likewise, Easter is a celebration of the triumph of God in Christ over the power of sin and death. Sin is defeated! Death no longer has the final word.

8 - The Reunions that follow the destruction of the Ring parallel those that follow the Resurrection

In both the book and the movie, the reunions that follow the destruction of the Ring remind one of the reunions of Jesus with his followers.

In the book, the scene that comes to mind is Sam encountering Gandalf the White for the first time.

As I wrote in a short Easter reflection in 2023,

After the One Ring is destroyed and the Eagles bear Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom, Sam wakes and is greeted by Gandalf, whom he last saw plummeting to certain death into the depths of Khazad-dûm alongside the Balrog. But instead of the familiar Gandalf the Grey, he is greeted by Gandalf “robed in white, his beard now gleaming like pure snow in the twinkling of the leafy sunlight.”

Astonished and “between bewilderment and great joy,” he is struck speechless. But at last he gathers himself and says;

Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?

Days after the destruction of the Ring, gardener Sam Gamgee encounters Gandalf, who he assumed was dead but is now risen and transformed, while in the Gospel of John chapter 20 Mary Magdalene encounters the risen and transformed Jesus, whom she mistakes for a gardener.

While Gandalf’s resurrection happens before the destruction of the Ring, Frodo and Sam first encounter him as Gandalf the White in The Return of the King. And Gandalf’s resurrection is clearly an echo of Jesus’—he dies so that others may live, in his death he defeats a great enemy (though unlike Jesus it is not the ultimate enemy of death itself), and he is sent back to continue his work in a new body that is like and yet unlike his previous one. So his encounter with his previous followers parallels Jesus’ encounters with his disciples.

This scene does not exist in the film, but Frodo’s reunion with Gandalf and the rest of the Fellowship contains much of the same sense of astonishment, disbelief, and joy.

9 - The titular Return of the King echoes the return of another King

[youth pastor voice] let me tell you about another King who Returned…

Gandalf and Frodo are not the only types of Christ to be found in The Return of the King. There of course is the King himself, heir to a throne long dormant who heals his people, rescues them by walking the Paths of the Dead, and who fulfills ancient prophecies in claiming his rightful throne.

10 - The Return of the King is the eucatastrophe of the War of the Ring (and the story of The Lord of the Rings). Easter is the eucatastrophe of the life of Christ, or Incarnation

As the concluding chapter of the saga, The Return of the King contains the climax of the entire story of The Lord of the Rings.

And this is not just any climax, but one of the great examples of Tolkien’s concept of ‘eucatastrophe.’

In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien defines ‘eucatastrophe’ as “the “joy of the happy ending” or “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” in a fairy-story.

The destruction of the Ring and the fall of Sauron is the eucatastrophe of The Lord of the Rings. All seemed lost: our heroes on the edge of defeat both in Mount Doom (Gollum holding the ring in triumph) and at the Black Gate (the Host of the West surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered) when mercy triumphs! Gollum falls into the fires of Mount Doom and the Ring is destroyed! The pity of Bilbo—and Frodo—have indeed ruled the fate of many.

And the joy we feel reading or watching this happy ending of The Return of the King, the tears, the relief, the catharsis, these are all echoes of a deeper and truer joy.

In the Epilogue of “On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien says this about the eucatastrophe in the life of Christ: “The birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation.” According to Tolkien, Easter is the “sudden joyous turn” of Jesus’ life and of all history itself!

Read more of my thoughts on Easter and Eucatastrophe here:

For in The Return of the King, we find the echoes of Easter reverberating loudly and clearly for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Happy Easter to all you readers who will be celebrating this weekend. He is risen!

Do you agree with me? Anything I missed or failed to consider? Let me know in the comments!

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MaryAnn McKibben Dana is a writer, speaker, leadership coach, and mother of three young adults. She’s the author of three books, most recently Hope: A User’s Manual, with another on the way next year, and she writes weekly here on Substack at The Blue Room. She’s also an amateur improviser, an imperfect knitter, and an occasional ultramarathoner. Ask her about her Lord of the Rings tattoo!

End with the Gritty Middle

The Two Towers, Holy Friday, and the good worth fighting for

When I heard Peter Jackson’s The Lord of Rings trilogy would be re-released in theaters for a single weekend last June, I hurried online to get tickets. But there was a problem: I had a scheduling conflict on the original date of The Two Towers. This was especially galling because The Two Towers is my favorite of the three films.

As luck would have it, the theaters extended the run for another weekend, but this time I had conflicts in the opposite direction—free for the second installment, conflicts for one of the others. And that’s how I came to watch The Fellowship of the Ring, then The Return of the King the first weekend, and The Two Towers later that month as the “finale.”

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

For me, and for many of us who love this trilogy onscreen and on the page, the stories are a touchstone, full of quotes and scenes that speak to hope and perseverance despite everything. And yes, there’s something deeply satisfying about that final movie—the ultimate triumph of good over evil, despite what it costs some of our heroes. Return of the King provides a decisive conclusion—actually many conclusions, as fans of the films like to chuckle about. Jackson isn’t just ending a film, but a trilogy, and let’s just say he takes his time and does it right. There can be no doubt that this saga is over. This week, Christians around the world are preparing for the great feast of Easter, that glorious reminder that, as Frederich Buechner puts it, the worst thing is never the last thing. This very publication has connected Easter with Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe: the “sudden joyous turn in a fairy-story.”

But here in our world, when so much is not as it should be, what’s powerful to me is the gritty middle, when the work of wholeness still sits on our collective shoulders. There’s so much to do: people to protect and letters to write and community to be built and kids to care for and strangers to learn to trust, and ultimate victory still eludes us in many ways. The story of the resurrection, I’ve heard it said, isn’t really a conclusion but a new beginning… not an answer to a question, but a whole new set of questions: What does it mean to live as if new life is really real? For what, exactly, are we set free? How does the “already” of Easter nourish us for the “not yet” of our present challenges?

Those themes are present in Christ’s story even before we get to the empty tomb. In the hours before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, an unnamed woman comes and anoints his head with expensive oil. His disciples scoff at her extravagance; after all, the oil could have been sold and the proceeds used to help those in need. Jesus praises the woman for doing a beautiful thing for him and chastises the naysayers, saying, “you always have the poor with you . . . but you will not always have me.” The verse has vexed justice-­hearted people for centuries. But Jesus isn’t throwing up his hands and saying that poverty is inevitable, so what’s the point. He’s saying, “You’ll never not have work to do, so plan accordingly.”

Narratively, I see this dynamic as an example in medias res, Latin for “in the middle of things”: the idea that we’re dropped in the midst of a story already underway, in which definitive beginnings and endings are elusive. Consider the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, which opens immediately with an action scene in which imperial forces have boarded Princess Leia’s ship as she launches vital Death Star plans and two droids into an escape pod. Or The Sopranos’ famous cut to black in the series finale, so jarring to original audiences that many thought their televisions had malfunctioned.

In medias res is where we live our lives, and that’s what makes The Two Towers such a powerful volume of the story. Here’s where Sam utters his famous speech, those soaring words that ring out at the absolute bleakest point in the narrative.1 Sam reminds us that the great stories are full of ordinary people who could have given up but kept going, not because success was assured, or even likely, but because they believed the good was worth fighting for. Watching the trilogy last June and ending it with Sam’s words was galvanizing indeed—not so much a cliffhanger as a call to action while danger continues to lurk in too many places.

Even the score hints at in medias res. The piece that plays under Sam’s speech is called Samwise the Brave, and it’s a stirring accompaniment to his words. The orchestra soars… until the last forty-five seconds of the track, when the music dramatically charges tone to something menacing, something sinister on the prowl. This bit plays in the film underneath Gollum’s plot to lead Sam and Frodo into Shelob’s lair, which is where The Two Towers ends. This abrupt shift in the score raises the stakes for our heroes; Frodo and Sam have a renewed will and the courage to press on, but they don’t know what lies ahead.

Nowhere is the tenuousness of in medias res more evident than during the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Aragorn and Théoden have made the decision to ride out and meet the Uruk-hai, against whom the people of Rohan are hopelessly outmatched. They ride out “for death and glory” as the horn of Helm Hammerhand sounds “one last time.”

As Théoden and Aragorn ready the charge, Gimli says, “The sun is rising,” and the camera cuts to a slender window and a small shaft of light. And here’s where this near-perfect trilogy of films makes what I see as its one thematic misstep: we hear Gandalf’s voiceover, “Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth day, at dawn; look to the East.”

On the one hand, I understand the choice to share that voiceover, because you can’t count on the audience to remember Gandalf’s parting words as he rides out of Edoras. But what if those words were not top of mind for our warriors? Which option displays more courage: for our heroes to ride out, assured that the wizard will return with reinforcements in the nick of time… “precisely when he means to”? Or for them to bravely confront a seemingly unbeatable foe because it’s the right thing to do, even when they’re not feeling assured or hopeful of Gandalf’s return?2

As a pastor, I’ve often wished the congregations I serve could have an experience of collective amnesia on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. As we march through the drama of Holy Week, we always know that Sunday’s coming—that the eucatastrophe is secure. But what would it be like not to know this?

Having the end of the story firmly in mind can be a comfort. But with the outcome assured, with a confident voiceover echoing in our ears and our Easter bonnets and pastel neckties at the ready, we can hold the uncertainty of in medias res at arm’s length. It’s hard for us to put ourselves in the place of those first disciples, who abandoned, denied and then buried the leader of their movement without knowing another chapter was coming.

Imagine believing you’ll never see the teacher again.

Imagine wondering: Were we wrong this whole time?

And then having to make a decision: Will we carry on anyway?

As the world continues to yearn for justice, as we live in a meantime in which all is not yet right, I wonder sometimes whether focusing on a happy ending allows us to gloss over the work of what John Lewis called “good trouble,” even if our efforts don’t ultimately amount to much.

So this Easter, I’d like to encourage all of us to not skip to the eucatastrophe but instead “end with the middle.” Before rushing to the empty tomb, sit in the weight of Good Friday and consider the work that remains before us.

Like me ending my recent rewatch of The Lord of the Rings trilogy with The Two Towers, ending with the middle reminds us that the “good worth fighting for” means we do what’s right and true, here where we are… even if we aren’t sure whether Gandalf will appear over that ridge. Because the good in the world is worth fighting for whether we know how it will turn out or not.

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Appendices

• Just last week The Hollywood Reporter revealed as an aside in an article about the revival of Dire Wolves that Peter Jackson was the mystery bidder who purchased the prop of the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones for $1.49 million last year!

• Special thanks to Sharon C and Renee for becoming paid subscribers this month! If you too want to help support this newsletter get bonus content, consider upgrading today for just $5 a month or $40 a year!

• Interested in writing a guest piece like the above? Check out my submission guidelines.

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📚 You can read more of my writing by reading my books! My latest is a collection of essays on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and more of Tolkien’s works (and their adaptations). You can also find it and more of my books on Amazon or Gumroad

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Gandalf, Bilbo, and Bard are in a small pocket of calm in the midst of a battle. Gandalf tells Bard to send bowmen to a specific position and Bard replies that there are no more bowmen to send. The battle seems lost. Defeat is imminent, and as the battle continues to rage around them Bard begins to speak about the hopes he had for his people and their land. Hopes that all now appear null and void. Dreams that will seemingly never become reality.

Bilbo tells Bard not to despair, to which Bard asks, “What would you have us do?”

“Do?” replies Bilbo. “I’ll show you.”

He marches over to a clear spot in the ground, places an acorn in a hole, and covers it up.

“That’s a promise,” he tells them. “Underneath all that blood and dirt, there is a chance of new life. It may sound hopeless, it may sound foolish…but really what else can you do? When faced with death what can anyone do? You go on living.”

This scene is similar in some key ways to a scene in episode 6, “Udûn,” of Season 1 of Amazon’s The Rings of Power.

Before the battle between Adar’s forces and the people of the Southlands, Arondir explains to Bronwyn that it is an elven tradition to plant a seed of the alfirin flower before the beginning of a battle.^[1]2 Bronwyn responds, “New life, in defiance of death.” Arondir is holding more of the alfirin seeds, and after telling Bronwyn about the Valar Yavanna’s protection of all growing things and those who tend them, he paints a picture of a hopeful future for the two of them. “The rest we shall plant after the battle is over, in a new garden…you and I…and Theo (her son) …together.”

These apocryphal3 scenes are hardly the only example of this connection between the natural world and hope amidst despair to be found in Middle-earth.

Re-examining these narrative elements in the midst of my own grief in the months following the loss of my youngest brother in early 2022 was a comfort and an inspiration as I asked Bilbo’s question myself over and over again: when faced with death, what can anyone do? As Bilbo suggests, all we can do at times is go on living, moving forward one step at a time, one day at a time despite—or in defiance of—seeming hopelessness.

As I considered these scenes, it led me back to a significant moment from the conclusion of The Return of the King: Faramir and Éowyn in the Houses of healing. Reflecting on each of these three episodes as I continue my own journey of grieving my brother’s death, I’m encouraged to follow the examples in these scenes and plant new life in defiance of death.

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