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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The sound of that drumbeat, along with the scent of New Age patchouli oil, held many Christians at bay when "The Lord of the Rings" enjoyed its first flush of success. The rise of scholarship into Tolkien's Christian leanings began to gather steam in the late 1970s and 1980s, helped considerably by the publication of Tolkien's letters, the 12-volume compilation of working papers called "The History of Middle-earth" and, above all, the posthumous 1977 publication of "The Silmarillion," the endlessly fussed-over private mythology that formed the backdrop to Middle-earth.
As Tom Shippey points out in "The Road to Middle-earth" and "J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century," "The Silmarillion" was designed as a "sub-creation" complementing Scripture -- Tolkien even includes a subtle link between the first appearance of men and the banishment from Eden. The lovely creation story in "The Silmarillion" has the universe sung into existence by the Ainur, a celestial choir formed by the supreme being Illuvatar. (C.S. Lewis, who read Tolkien's work in manuscript, liked this idea so much that he appropriated it for his "Chronicles of Narnia" series.) Just as Lucifer was the brightest of the archangels, so is Melkor -- the satanic figure of Tolkien's universe -- the most beautiful of the singers, and he incurs his fall by trying to make his voice the dominant one. Tolkien has Melkor's discordant notes incorporated by the other singers to form a more beautiful whole. Even the works of evil play a part in the creator's overall design -- a key doctrinal point for Tolkien's Christian advocates, who also point to the depiction of evil as a non-creative force. Throughout "The Lord of the Rings," we are reminded that the orcs and trolls rampaging around Middle-earth are distortions of other creatures, not separate creations in their own right.
Christian analysis now appears to be the dominant mode of writing about "The Lord of the Rings," and enthusiasts are ready to argue everything from the Eucharistic nature of lembas bread to the influence of Catholic liturgy on Tolkien's style. (Joseph Pearce's "Tolkien: A Celebration," offers a good sampling.) Last summer, Christianity Today devoted an entire issue to Tolkien, and a scan of scholarly literature shows plenty of academics arguing for Tolkien's place alongside overtly religious writers like Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Actually, Tolkien's clearest literary antecedents are William Morris, the Victorian socialist and author of medieval romances like "The Well at the End of the World," and Lord Dunsany, the Irish fantast whose 1905 debut, a private mythology called "The Gods of Pegana," could have served as a model for "The Silmarillion." But that's another doctoral thesis.
Nevertheless, "The Lord of the Rings" is viewed with suspicion by many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, even those who don't necessarily view the pope as the devil's doorman. The alert evangelicals at the ChildCare Action Project cite "The Two Towers" for no fewer than 17 "offenses to God," including "gaiaism" (walking, talking trees -- oh dear), "mockery of the Transformation" (Gandalf's second coming is a bit close to, well, the Second Coming) and "miraculous reverse aging" (presumably the spontaneous makeover Theoden undergoes once Saruman's possession is thrown off). There is also the sticky issue of showing a good wizard (Gandalf) pitted against a bad one (Saruman), when any good fundamentalist knows all sorcerers are bad news. For this reason the Harry Potter books also meet with fundamentalist disapproval, compounded by the fact that they show magical beings mingling with the quotidian world. "Though not as overtly and sympathetically occultic as the Harry Potter series," David W. Cloud warns on the Logos Resource Pages, "Tolkien's fantasies are unscriptural and present a very dangerous message."
Help for evangelicals and fundamentalists alike comes from Focus on the Family, James Dobson's Colorado-based activist group. "Finding God in the Lord of the Rings," written by Dobson associates Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware, offers homilies like "It is never so dark that we cannot sing," lifted from passages in Tolkien and linked (sometimes rather tenuously) to biblical scripture. The film version of "The Return of the King" gets unexpected bonus points from Plugged In, the group's entertainment Web site, because Arwen's decision to have a child with Aragorn at the cost of her own well-being carries an appropriately pro-life message. Part of this accommodation may stem from the ceaseless rear-guard action any strict religious sect must wage against the relentless advance of pop culture. But it doesn't raise Focus on the Family's standing with some of the sterner fundamentalists, who are already suspicious of the group's ecumenical approach to social issues. Reaching out to Catholics, Jews and even Muslims is not going to win favor with these folks, even if it's to deny civil rights to gay people.
Here is where the conservative drive to annex Middle-earth bogs down. Posterity has not preserved Tolkien's views on homosexuality, good, bad or indifferent. But it has given us enough of his other opinions to show that his conservatism was very much an old-fashioned, mind-one's-own-business sort. Even if he disliked gays, Tolkien would not have felt the need to burden others with his opinion. Nor would he have expected the government to go out of its way to deny them the right to marry. With his distaste for industrial society and views on stewardship of the land, Tolkien probably would have been dismissed as a tree-hugger by such deep thinkers as Rush Limbaugh. His preferred mode of government was the gentle anarchy of the Shire, where hobbits tended to their own affairs. Failing that, he told his son in a letter, he would settle for an ineffectual monarch whose interests were model trains or stamp collecting. The neoconservatives and their dreams of remaking the Middle East would surely have met with a great deal of skepticism from the bard of Middle-earth.
For that matter, the invasion of Iraq makes a poor match with the War of the Ring. It only works if we can imagine Gandalf as having cut business deals with Sauron back in the Second Age, even providing him with the seed cultures for breeding his legions of orcs. There is no question of imminent threat in "The Lord of the Rings" -- the armies of Mordor come looking for trouble. Had Gondor marshaled its troops only to find Mordor bare of weapons, and Barad-dur ready to crumble at a touch, then we might find parallels with George W. Bush's grand venture.
Looking back on Tolkien's life, we find his conservatism was rooted in a proper suspicion of power and the motives of those who seek to wield it. This suspicion infuses every line of "The Lord of the Rings," in which the good characters are defined by their wariness of power, while the bad are invariably eager to seize it. One of the many ways Jackson amplifies Tolkien's original comes in the portrayal of Aragorn, fated to become the king of reunited humanity, who spends much of the story resisting his destiny because he doesn't trust himself with such power. Saruman seems to think he can use the power of the Ring to work toward the greater good (a point made clearer in the book), but Gandalf is reluctant even to touch the ring, lest he fall prey to his own version of Saruman's delusions.
Contemporary conservatives, by contrast, are very much enamored of power -- indeed, it is hard to imagine any other way to define them. Certainly none of the qualities that used to typify conservatives -- fiscal prudence, limits on spending and checks against the spread of government power -- can be found in the Republican-run halls of power. All of which should make Gollum, the river-dwelling hobbit who becomes entranced by the Ring of Power and pays for it with his soul, an ominous metaphor. He never hesitates to exploit a wedge issue, be it Frodo's trust of Sam or the distribution of lembas bread, and is savage in combat until defeated, at which point he whines endlessly about how unfair it all is.
Will a similar fate await those who hold the Ring of Power in November? Call it allegory or call it applicability -- either way, many Ring devotees who predate the right's latter-day Tolkien fans would surely find that result more than satisfactory.
