Part Three: Lord of the Rings by Douglas Wilson

I wanted to express the two previous posts before I shared this one. We need to understand Tolkein's biography. We need to understand what motivated him from which his writings came. "J.R.R. Tolkien had an objection, which he shared with C.S. Lewis, to those people who tried to understand works of literature as mere extension of the author's biography. While this is reasonable, we cannot simply dismiss the outline of someone's life as irrelevant to the work they do. ... ... in Africa, when he was first beginning to walk, he was bitten by a tarantula and ran terrified to a nurse who sucked out the poison. He said this left him with no particular fear of spiders, but perhaps it left him with a peculiar awareness of them. It ought to have ... Tolkien and his brother were once chased out of a field by a farmer they called the "Black Ogre," who was displeased at their picking of his mushrooms. A nearby inventor of cotton-wool dressing was named Dr. Gamgee, and so cotton wool was called gamgee. ... ... Tolkien grew up without a father, but under the influence of a gracious, cultivated mother. The small family was not wealthy, but his mother knew Latin, French, and German, and was artistic in her gifts. Tolkien, as we all know by now, was brilliant, and had the kind of upbringing which could frequently leave him alone with his own thoughts—including in his case, invented languages. He loved the sounds of words. ... ... Tolkien made his acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon—a language which combines in a strange way the familial and the remote, both characteristics of Tolkien's writing. ... ... 'There was a custom at King Edward's of holding a debate entirely in Latin, but that was almost too easy for Tolkien, and in one debate when taking the role of Greek Ambassador to the Senate he spoke entirely in Greek. On another occasion he astonished his schoolfellows when, in the character of a barbarian envoy, he broke into fluent Gothic; and on a third occasion he spoke in Anglo-Saxon.' ... ... in the First World War ... Tolkien saw ... the Mordor of modernity. ... Tolkien never forgot what he called the 'animal horror' of trench warfare. The modern age clanks, grinds, and devours. ... ... It was at Oxford that he met C.S. Lewis. The two men were wary of one another at first. Lewis wrote in his journal, 'No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.' ... ... England had no mythology, unlike the Scandinavian nations, and unlike the Mediterranean nations. Tolkien's avowed aim was to write one. But 'inventing' for him was more a matter of 'finding out.' 'Is all this true?' he was once asked. 'One hopes,' he replied. According to Tolkien, the writer does not bring things into existence; he finds. When he finds, he assembles. But as a sub-creator, under God, he never creates ex nihilo.' ..." But now, as we focus on the epic Lord of the Rings.... "... The whole point of magic is the manipulation of matter in order to acquire power, which is the lust that makes magicians and other assorted alchemists do what they do. But the world of The Lord of the Rings is the reverse of this—if anything, the good guys represent a photo-negative of this kind of magic. The ring of power is the ultimate symbol of magic in the traditional sense, and the whole point of the book is to destroy it, resisting all temptations to use it. ... ... Some Christians are troubled by the apparent absence of God. Part of the problem that Tolkien had with the Arthurian stories is that they were explicitly set within the Christian era, and this made the "remoteness" which he wanted for dramatic reasons impossible. The long-ago-ness and far-away-ness would not have been long enough ago, or far enough away. But God was not excluded because of any embarrassment. At the ultimate level in the mythology (in the Silmarillion), God necessarily fills the place that only He can fill—and His name is Illuvatar. He is the only Creator. And this is why, as one said, that God is nowhere mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, but everywhere present—although Faramir does say grace once. ... ... Mankind is represented in a realistic and complex way, and clearly bears the imago Dei. Recall that Elves "represent really Men with greatly enhanced aesthetic and creative faculties, great beauty and longer life, and nobility—the Elder Children" (Letters, p. 176.). They are biologically one with men, which is why they can and do intermarry with men. And this means that Orcs are corruptions of Elves (Letters, pp. 178, 191, 287), representations of man's potential for sin. Tolkien goes so far as to say that many men "to be met today" are as horribly corrupted as the Orcs are (p. 190). The hobbits are also men. "The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race" (Letters, p. 158). This is why they can dwell with the Big Folk at Bree. For Tolkien, they represent the sturdy heroism of ordinary men. The only "children" of middle earth who are not men in some way are the dwarves. ... ... No virtue (or fault) is ever found in a transitive verb. We do not know if someone is virtuous simply because they "love." What do they love? Or that they are wicked if they "hate." What do they hate? When literature like The Lord of the Rings is criticized, it is often attacked for being "escapist." This means we should ask a question. What is being escaped from? As Tolkien once put it, the people who are so concerned about escapism do have a name—we call them jailers. "