The relevance of The Lord of the Rings: “A once and future myth”.
Peter Veugelaers

I suppose remembrances of the first moments of screenings of the highly anticipated film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring two years ago is far gone under the weight of the frenetic media jubilation over The Return of the King’s historical clean sweep victory at the 2004 Academy Awards. Unless you are a committed fan replaying highlights on DVD, oblivious to Oscar hoopla and engrossed in fairy tale (the world of Oscar is probably doubted, however,as living in the real world).

The prologue to the trilogy, beautifully filmed and crafted, is memorable in visual and visceral storytelling and immortal voice over:

“Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for mortal men doomed to die
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to finds them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.”

This sets the tone for the inherent psychology in the novel and film’s text. In the Rt Rev. David Moxon’s booklet A Once and Future Myth: An Applied Theology of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings he describes how the characters and incidents throughout Tolkien’s book explores the effects of power on characters strong and weak, good and evil, great and humble as originally articulated in the chapter on the corruption of power by Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill in the book A Tolkien Compass.

In A Tolkien Compass Deborah C. Rogers expresses the scenario in her essay Everyclod and Everyhero: The Image of Man in Tolkien. “The first thing to be said of the human race, in Tolkien’s portrait, is that it is capable of any act: treachery, warcraft, gentleness, domesticity, adventurousness or poetry.”

In his chapter on the psychology of The Lord of the Rings Rev. Moxon quotes Perkins and Hill, taking us deeper into the mind of the story: “If one takes its thematic qualities seriously, it specifically seems to be a study in power, especially in the evil that accompanies the desire for power. What does the possibility of unlimited power do to the one who desires it, even to the one who desires it for good ends? And the answer is unequivocal: the desire for power corrupts.”

And Moxon says later: “The whole story looks to a future in which the moral choices and ambiguities present in us can be illumined by scared light or enfolded in the shadows of malice and oppression.”

And Richard Purtill in Lords of the Elves and Edils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: “The Constant temptation of all the characters is to give in, give up the struggle and cooperate with the Dark Lord. Against this the virtues characteristic of the heroes of the story are courage, will and endurance, and loyalty and love.”

The Return of the King won 11 Academy Awards, the third film to accomplish such a feat, to rapturous applause in Hollywood and New Zealand yet the beginnings of The Lord of the Rings arose from more austere origins during the turbulence of wartime.

J.R.R. Tolkien found inspiration for the entire spectrum of his mythology from a line of an Anglo-Saxon medieval writing. He had a great love for Beowulf, says New Zealand Anglican Bishop, Rev. David Moxon. Tolkien wrote of the experience after encountering the line, “Hail Erendel, brightest of Angels/above the middle earth sent unto humankind”.

“I felt a curious thrill,” Tolkien said, “as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.” (Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977)

Rev. Moxon recounts what Tolkien said in his lecture on Fairy Stories, which uncannily seems to link his epiphany and pleasure from the Beowulf line with what he intended as an author for his readers:

“It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the udissected bones of the plot, that really count …

“It is indeed easier to unravel a single thread – an incident, a name, a motive – than to trace the history of any picture defined by many threads. For with the picture in the tapestry a new element has come in: the picture is greater than, and not explained by, the sum of the component threads.”

In his A Once and Future Myth Rev. Moxon says Tolkien was probably influenced by many sources for his The Lord of the Rings currently in vogue as interpreted by Oscar-winning screenwriters Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh.

According to Rev. Moxon, Peter Jackson - “a sensitive and totally dedicated film producer” – is faithful and accurate in interpreting the Tolkien classic. He credits the screenwriters as either consciously or unconsciously keeping faith with Tolkien’s Christian faith in their work.

Typical of this in Director Peter Jackson’s vision is Gandalf the Grey’s untimely disappearance in the first film, seemingly slayed by the dragon Balrog. Gandalf’s return in The Two Towers is in a kind of resurrection/transfiguration light, which includes the words ‘I was sent back’. Bishop Moxon asks, sent back by whom?

“Although Tolkien doesn't refer to God in The Lord of the Rings, the world from which Middle-earth comes has Eru, known as Ilavatur, as the Creator, whose imprint is invisibly present everywhere. The obvious answer to who it was that sent Gandalf back, is ‘God’.

“If Peter Jackson had wanted to depart from the Christian imagery and Gospel echoes of the book he could have left references like this out, but he didn’t. Because the film is essentially true to the story these embedded signs have largely been carried into the movie, whether or not the director was always aware of it.”

The text of The Lord of the Rings described some of the spiritual echoes or images which reflect Gospel truth, in more detail – in poems, songs, long conversations and detailed descriptions. Nevertheless, says the bishop, the movie tries to keep faith with them. “If you know the book well you can see the way in which Peter, Fran and Philippa were striving to be true to the author in principle.”

The Bishop explains that Tolkien’s stories were built almost entirely upon his early experience of ancient legend. He quotes from David Day’s examination of Tolkien’s influences in Tolkien’s Ring (1994) where Norse myth, Arthurian legends, the impact of Charlemagne in creating the Holy Roman Empire, Celtic and Saxon myths, German romance, Greek and Roman myths, Wagner’s epic The Ring of the Nibelung, and Biblical legends are all diffused into elements of his own epic novella journey.

The Biblical images and principles are not explicit, but the principles of the Gospel seem implicit in many places, writes Moxon. “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Christian work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in revision,” wrote Tolkien to a friend. Rev. Moxon writes in his booklet that we have some choice over the balance of (the) impulses in our hearts and minds. In Christ, he writes, these impulses are called to integrate, balance, and create an outward compassion and justice.

Tolkien, a scholar and teacher of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, believed that in creating a secondary world in a myth using images and principles that are consonant with Christian faith, he was recording one aspect of the imagination of God: “the essence of the story came through Tolkien, from the limitless possibilities of the mind of God,” writes Moxon.

He continues: “Tolkien believed it was a specifically Christian venture to write such a story. Tolkien saw God as the Great Storyteller, the author behind all life, entering the story of the earth in Jesus of Nazareth … For both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis everything points to the reality of God: reason, morality, and the deepest desires of our hearts.”

Rev. Moxon, who has lectured on the spirituality inherent in The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, is confident that today’s blockbuster films by Director Peter Jackson serve as the Gospel’s Trojan horse.

It’s not escapism he’s advocating, but believes the fantasy world can be used to create a better reality “in the mind’s eye, in the heart, so that on their return from the story, the reader is inspired to be more heroic, or to see the beauty in ordinary everyday things and their special-ness.

“This is to see in a new way the imaginative potential of the world. This happens particularly well if the fairy story is believable and has details and places that make it seem to have a tangible relationship with the world in which we live.”

He says that many Christians without always knowing exactly why intuitively recognise aspects of their faith in some parts of the story and “many non-Christians are drawn to the inherent goodness of the values of the story which come from Biblical Christianity, whether they recognise this or not.

“I have found when showing clips of the movie to teenagers for example, or giving public lectures on the spirituality inherent in the story, hundreds of people come, genuinely fascinated and deeply influenced by the way in which the story speaks to their own story.”

When Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert said in his review of The Return of the King that the film was silly and emotionally lightweight without any relevance to contemporary concerns the Bishop challenged his remarks. “There is nothing silly or emotionally lightweight about this approach in text or film, to when Roger Ebert implies that a real masterpiece, by comparison, was Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

“Apocalypse Now was an important film, but it lacks the durable hope and the suffering love that can go on subtlety transforming our existence at the level of the spirit where everything begins and ends.

“Apocalypse Now co-opted and applied a religious word to paint a story of the macabre consequences of war, which Tolkien was personally only too familiar with himself.

“However, in Tolkien’s work, without co-opting religious language at all, we see the vindication of a light that the world cannot overcome, which Coppola’s story does not describe or believe.”
Moxon adds another layer to the hyperbole of Middle-earth as “simply an old fashioned word for the world we are living in, as imagined and surrounded by the ocean at a different stage of imagination.

“Tolkien knew that many people would simply take the story at the level of a dramatic tale, but he also believed that by enjoying, remembering and reflecting on the story, the moral and spiritual principles it contained would subtlety influence the reader’s character,” Moxon said in an interview.

Shades of September 11 are reflected for the contemporary American audience. American presidential elections this year raise the questions of national security and international relations exacerbated by the Middle East, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, terrorism and Afghanistan. On the other hand, some would say the forces of anti-humanity are in the Capatalist American Empire. Rev. Moxon: “At first glance, The Lord of the Rings may appear to be somewhat militarist and chauvinist to contemporary eyes, but a deeper mores sensitive encounter with the story reveals that the author was intending to describe a world striving to live above the hate that produces war and the prejudice that diminishes fullness of life.

“For example contemporary people often feel small today because we are confronted with overwhelming issues and challenges and threats from nay part of the world or from within our own lives. This is the predicament of the hobbits.”

The forces of evil, says Moxon, “appear so powerful in The Lord of the Rings, that there seems to be no immediate means of challenging them.” The answer in Rings is not to retaliate in military might, but by long suffering and grace.

“The forces of materialism, oppression and darkness are overcome through weakness and longsuffering, where a death defying vision and a hope against hope are vindicated by the movement of grace in the world, as represented by Gandalf, Galadriel, Arwen, Treebeard and the eagles.

“The great strength of the story comes from the loyalty of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring to each other even when this is costly and uncertain.

“We see that the quality of mercy, from the Sermon on the Mount, is made the moral fulcrum of the story when Bilbo’s example of sparing Gollum helps Frodo with Gandalf’s help to treat him with mercy and kindness.

“This act of compassion seems to be senseless and fruitless in the story but turns out to provide the unpredicted means of the destruction of the evil ring of power.

“This stresses a further Tolkien Gospel echo that evil tends to turn in on itself and implode because it does not come from God and is a distortion of something that was originally good.”

Given evil’s tremendous advantages in The Lord of the Rings Patricia Meyer Spacks is quoted by Moxon as explaining that evil can be defeated, and then only temporarily, by turning its own devices against it (Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien).

Moxon: “Tolkien saw that there is always a power for good, for healing and for redemption that shines on the world, even behind a thunderstorm, because darkness does not finally hold sway: it tends to destroy itself: malice defeats itself in the end by its very nature; an eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.

“In the end, unexpected healing and liberation in the final stages of crisis are the ways of God. This is what Tolkien meant by eucatastrophe, while not denying the widespread reality of death and the existence of tragedy in life.

“Healing and liberation are not magical or sentimental: they sometimes come through long, painful journeys and sometimes are only consumed beyond the grave.”

The power of the story of The Lord of the Rings, says Rev. Moxon, is of relevance in the complex and fraught world that most of us live in, because it addresses the issue of living in the face of ever increasing powers. In A Tolkien Compass, Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill explain:

“Since the early thirties, when Tolkien began writing, we have witnessed the rise to power of great and terrible forces. Today we are hearing demands from every side, ever more shrill and imperative, with scarcely a voice raised to question the value of power, to point out its dangers to the power-wielder himself, to warn of its temptations.

Yet what Tolkien is saying about power is not just advice for our times. It draws on a familiarity with the wisdom of centuries of literature and history and is relevant to any age, and (as he shows through a great variety of characters) to any sort of man. And he says it clearly and without compromise: beware of power. The desire for power corrupts.”

Peter Veugelaers is a Wellington reporter for Challenge Weekly newspaper, an interdenominational Christian newspaper in New Zealand, and has been published in regional and international publications. He has reviewed films for almost eight years, and lives in Lower Hutt, sister city to Tempe, Arizona. He's also worked in evangelism, and over the last year has been going to the gym regularly to get results.

Peter has provided the folowing information for those of us unable to find "A Once and Future Myth" in their own bookstores:

Booklet: A Once and Future Myth
Contact: Ben, Anglican Resource Centre, PO Box 12002, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: resource@wn.ang.org.nz
Bulk buying available. In second reprint run.