Creation and corruption in Middle-earth

Part of the answer is found in Tolkien’s other great chronicle of Middle-earth, The Silmarillion, which recounts the larger mythic context of Middle-earth, beginning (notwithstanding his antipathy for allegory) with a magnificent allegorical retelling of the Creation and the Fall according to Genesis 1-3.

Here Tolkien does name the creator-God of Middle-earth, Eru ("the One," also called Ilúvatar, "All-Father"), as well as the mighty spirit Melkor, who rebelled against Eru and went into darkness. We also learn that Sauron, maker of the One Ring, is himself an agent of this Melkor. Tolkien thus establishes a direct relationship between the theistic, even Judeo-Christian cosmology of The Silmarillion and the war for the One Ring recounted in The Lord of the Rings.

In the latter work itself there is no mention of Eru, nor is there any explicitly religious component to the characters’ behavior. Even so, Tolkien’s Catholic Christian worldview not only stands behind the saga of the Ringin its prehistory, but surrounds and suffuses it in its overarching themes and imaginative structures.

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But it was Tolkien’s deeply held Catholic faith that most profoundly shaped his work. Though he rightly insisted The Lord of the Rings is not an allegorical work, the fact is that Tolkien thought, imagined, and wrote as a Catholic, and his work bears the clear signs of his faith, as he fully intended it should.

"The Shadow mocks, it cannot make"

The Judeo-Christian conception of creation and the fall, and of the preeminence of good over evil, is an important theme not only in The Silmarillion but also in The Lord of the Rings, where we find evil in Middle-earth depicted as a corruption and distortion of prior and fundamental goodness. In particular, just as Melkor and Sauron are fallen Ainur or angelic beings, the evil creatures and races of Middle-earth are always corrupted or distorted versions of the good ones.

For example, there are the trolls, "bred in mockery" of the tree-like Ents; the orcs, corrupted or misbred descendants of the Elves; and the fearsome Nazgûl or Black Riders, wraiths of human kings. Likewise, the evil wizard Saruman is a fallen Istari, and even Gollum is a withered hobbit.

The underlying principle is illuminated in a key exchange between Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins, as they travel through the dark land of Mordor "where Shadows lie," on a mission to destroy the evil Ring. When Sam wonders if the evil orcs eat and drink food and water like ordinary creatures, or if perhaps they live on poison and foul air, Frodo replies:

"No, they eat and drink, Sam. The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures. Foul waters and foul meats they’ll take, if they can get no better, but not poison."

There is no possibility here <…> of a dualistic interpretation of good and evil as equal and opposite forces, yin and yang, twin sides of one coin. In Tolkien’s vision, goodness is primordial, evil derivative; and, whatever tragedies and horrors may be visited upon this world, they shall not have the final word.

This sense of eschatological hope becomes exceptionally clear in one memorable passage during the journey through Mordor, in which Sam has a kind of epiphany:

The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

Mere "defiance" of evil is a natural or pagan virtue (the evil giants will win in the end, said the Norse warriors, but we go to die with the gods). But hope, in Christian thought, is a theological virtue, and it is this eschatological hope that fills Sam’s heart.

"Something else at work"

This sense of hope in Middle-earth is also rooted in an undefined but definite awareness of Providence. The name of Eru may not be spoken in The Lord of the Rings, but his will is evident from the outset, when Gandalf explains to Frodo the significance of the evil Ring being discovered by his uncle Bilbo, a humble hobbit. In that seemingly chance occurence, Gandalf says,"…there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought."

Gandalf can "put it no plainer," of course, because in this story Tolkien wishes to avoid explicit entanglement with religious doctrine. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is clear.

The hand of Providence is seen at various points throughout the drama of the story, but nowhere more clearly than in the climactic scene at Mount Doom, where two central characters struggling with evil both succumb, yet in the conflict of their evil wills not evil but good is served.

In the hands of another writer, such an ending might be seen as coincidental, ironic, absurdist, or even deus ex machina. As written by Tolkien, however, it is the inevitable result of the collision between the inexorable designs of Providence and the limitations of his fallen cast of characters. It is here that Tolkien most emphatically rejects an allegorizing interpretation: Frodo may be a Christ-like figure in many ways, but he is not, like Lewis’s lion Aslan, an allegorical representation of Christ himself. Where Christ triumphed, Frodo fails, yet the designs of Providence are still served.

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Date: 2015-12-24; view: 666