The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings

By Fleming Rutledge

J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has long been acknowledged as the gold standard for fantasy fiction, and the recent Oscar-winning movie trilogy has brought forth a whole new generation of fans. Many Tolkien enthusiasts, however, are not aware of the profoundly religious dimension of the great Ring saga.

In The Battle for Middle-earth Fleming Rutledge employs a distinctive technique to uncover the theological currents that lie just under the surface of Tolkien's epic tale. Rutledge believes that the best way to understand this powerful "deep narrative" is to examine the story as it unfolds, preserving some of its original dramatic tension. This deep narrative has not previously been sufficiently analyzed or celebrated. Writing as an enthusiastic but careful reader, Rutledge draws on Tolkien's extensive correspondence to show how biblical and liturgical motifs shape the action. At the heart of the plot lies a rare glimpse of what human freedom really means within the Divine Plan of God. The Battle for Middle-earth surely will, as Rutledge hopes, "give pleasure to those who may already have detected the presence of the sub-narrative, and insight to those who may have missed it on first reading."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 4, 2004
• ISBN: 9781467423625

Fleming Rutledge

 Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest, a best-selling author, and a widely recognized preacher whose published sermon collections have received acclaim across denominational lines. Her other books include Help My Unbelief, Three Hours: Sermons for Good Friday, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, and The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, which won Christianity Today's 2017 Book of the Year Award.

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Introduction

A Narrative Strategy

This commentary on The Lord of the Rings differs from others in that it is organized according to J. R. R. Tolkien’s unfolding plot. Instead of identifying various themes and then analyzing them, I have chosen to be guided by Tolkien’s own professed trust in the revelatory power of narrative. This power is well known to all who have responded to Tolkien’s exceptional skill as a storyteller; it is part of the mystique of the beloved tale. In my discussion, I wanted to hold on to Tolkien’s narrative momentum, because it seemed to me that something of fundamental importance was being conveyed precisely through that momentum.

This strategy dawned on me, I like to think, because I came upon Tolkien with virtually no presuppositions. Somehow I missed the Tolkien-mania of the 1960s. Late in that decade, I acquired a handsome three-volume set of The Lord of the Rings through the Book-of-the-Month Club, but it sat unread on my bookshelf for thirty-five years. I therefore came to the book later in life and with almost no prior information about it; I had no idea what a hobbit was, and the name Gandalf meant nothing to me. In spite of this ignorance, or quite possibly because of it, my first reading convinced me that I had seen something theological in the plot that was unique to Tolkien, and the second reading confirmed it. I had a hunch that I had uncovered something in the book that had not yet been sufficiently celebrated.

I am a Tolkien amateur, in both the highest and lowest senses of that word. That is to say, I am a lover (ama-teur) of Tolkien’s story, but I am not a Tolkien scholar or expert. I made a deliberate decision not to read much of the secondary literature or spend hours on the websites. In areas of fine expertise, therefore, I defer to others. Nonetheless, because I have come to the work almost entirely without expectations, I am presumptuous enough to believe that my delayed, untaught encounter with the Ring saga—combined with my knowledge of Scripture, theology, and the Church—has afforded an opportune glimpse into Tolkien’s deepest intimations.

Every appreciative reader of The Lord of the Rings will remember a mounting sense of excitement as the story progresses. To be sure, this would be true for readers of any well-made plot, but my intention is to emphasize the difference between Tolkien’s story and others. I became aware that as I read, my excitement was operating on two levels. On the surface, there was the keen suspense being built up by the unfolding events themselves, but my sense of intense involvement was beyond the usual, and this alerted me to the possibility that under the surface of the plot there was a parallel narrative with an even more powerful impact of its own. I began to make a few notes based on the hunch that this parallel narrative might actually exist. The further I read, the more convinced I became. As I approached the revelatory moment in the fires of Mount Doom, I felt the usual pleasurable anxiety that the reader of a good story always feels as a climax approaches, but at the same time I was conscious of another level of almost metaphysical anxiety related to the supreme importance of the issues being obliquely addressed. By the time I had finished, I was certain of the existence of a theological basso profundo (deep bass) in this Ring Cycle, and I thought I might be able to identify this in a way that differed in certain respects from commonly held views.¹

As I began to organize my notes into a commentary, I found that my sense of mounting involvement had not lessened. I became convinced that Tolkien’s theological hints and suggestions are best disclosed by the forward thrust of the tale precisely in the order that it is told. Tolkien himself wrote in quite strong terms of the logic of the story; obviously this was important to him.² I was struck by this logic as I read, and I hope to show that the cumulative effect of Tolkien’s veiled substructure is intended to strike the reader with a considerable impact.

This treatment, therefore, can be called a theological narrative. It is a narrative of sorts because it follows the order of Tolkien’s plot, and it is theo-logical (theos, God) because it seeks specifically to identify the allusions to a transcendent agency that Tolkien has placed along the way. Indeed, I am convinced that we can speak of a deep narrative underneath Tolkien’s surface narrative. As we go along, my purpose will be to draw out the deep narrative and show how it operates.

Moreover, I particularly wanted to honor the story form because of Tolkien’s own profound faith in story as a vehicle of truth, especially when other forms have failed. In a letter to his son Christopher, he wrote:

[C. S.] Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay … showing of what great value the ‘story-value’ was, as mental nourishment—the whole Christian story (NT especially). It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value … they [the ‘fainthearted’] do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story, while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth, is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis [faithful person] is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth.³

Tolkien identifies two types of readers here: the first is the fidelis, the self-identified Christian believer. The fidelis will be attracted by the deep theological narrative as a matter of course. However, it is the so-called fainthearted reader that interested Tolkien most. The word is oddly chosen and could be misleading, for by faintheartedness he does not mean to emphasize timidity or weakness. He is referring to the person who has no theistic faith, or has lost what faith he or she had. Tolkien hoped to reach this group of readers—a much larger group than the fideles—with the sheer majesty and grandeur of the story. It was for their sake, especially, that he disguised his theological design. He did not want overt, heavy-handed references to Christian themes interfering with the sheer enjoyment that he wished for his readers. His book was written to amuse (in the highest sense)—to be readable, as he wrote to an editor; it should excite, please, and even on occasion move.⁴ This in itself was sufficient reason to write the epic tale. Many readers will respond with enthusiasm and appreciation even if they pay no conscious attention to the deep narrative.

For those who want to discover the further implications of the exciting story, however, there are great rewards. I hope that this commentary will give pleasure to those who may have already detected the presence of the sub-narrative, and insight to those who may have missed it on first reading. I propose to trace the movement of the theological under-plot and show how it can be followed with eagerness throughout the saga as the work progresses. In particular, I hope to show how, like the surface narrative, the deep narrative gathers momentum as it goes along, unleashing tremendous force at the climax.

God as Active Subject

This treatment of Tolkien’s great story is about God first of all. Then it is about (in no particular order) Providence, history, demonic forces, archangels, bondage and liberation, justice and mercy, failure and restoration, friendship and sacrifice, sanctification and glorification, divine election and human freedom. The Lord of the Rings is like the Bible in its narrative structure, for the Bible is above all a narrative—a narrative of God’s mighty acts of deliverance recalling the words of the virgin Mary after the angel came to her: [God] has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree (Luke 1:52).

In this book, therefore, we will not be scouring The Lord of the Rings for literary patterns or mythological archetypes. There will not be much information about how Tolkien came to write the book or how it developed. The material will not be analyzed according to virtues, themes, motifs, characters, languages, people-groups, or any other subcategory.⁵ The interested reader can readily find other commentaries to fill in these areas of information. My purpose is different. I am interested in the movement of the plot and, above all, the way in which the active agency of God is suggested, indeed assumed, throughout. In his supplementary writings and in his letters, Tolkien calls God Eru, The One, or Ilúvatar, Father of All. In his own words, this One intrudes the finger of God into the plot at various identifiable points. It is this One whom Tolkien calls The Writer of the Story, quoting with obvious approval the words of a reviewer who referred to that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named.⁶

Many books about The Lord of the Rings have been published. Do we need another one? I am hopeful that this analysis offers something a little different. I do not think Tolkien’s deep underlying narrative has as yet been sufficiently analyzed. Moreover, I have talked to many readers who have loved the glamour of the story and have a sense that it is somehow religious, but do not seem to be aware of its profoundly God-centered nature. It is customary to speak of Frodo’s quest, but this may be the wrong word.⁷ I propose that it would be more accurate theologically to call it Frodo’s mission (from the Latin missio, to send). Tolkien understands God in the biblical sense, not as the object of the human quest or journey, not as the goal of human moral striving or human religious activity, but as the active subject, calling and sending, independent of the creation but always engaged in redemptive activity on its behalf. Tolkien wanted to show his readers how that unseen but ever-present activity manifests itself in earthly life. In particular, I believe Tolkien has given us a rare glimpse of what human freedom within God’s Divine Plan really means.⁸ For me, the analyzing of this subtext has been a form of worship.

Tolkien’s Nonreligious Theology

Tolkien himself wrote, "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work. In a letter, he explicitly states that the book is about God, and His sole right to divine honour."⁹ Yet the world of the saga is a pre-Christian world. Indeed, it is a curiously nonreligious world. This is quite deliberate on Tolkien’s part. A number of passages in his letters suggest that one reason for this suppression of all things religious is to ensure the separation of the worship of the One from the worship of the natural, created world, for, as he wrote, the universe is not worshipful.¹⁰ He apparently wanted to exclude any suggestion of pantheism or earth-religion. In this respect his work has very little in common with the so-called Celtic spirituality currently experiencing a renascence.¹¹

When people wrote him letters asking about the lack of religion in Middle-earth, Tolkien responded generously with more of his reasoning. He said, for instance, that the faithful Númenóreans were monotheists, like the Jews, only more so.¹² This only more so apparently refers to their having no building or temple because God could not be captured or held in that way—an idea which, for that matter, appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. The absence of religious rituals also signifies the Númenóreans’ refusal to worship any ‘creature.’¹³ This needs to be emphasized, because Tolkien’s famous love of the natural world has sometimes led readers to think of Tolkien as a type of pantheist, quite misunderstanding his orthodox Judeo-Christian view of God. At no point does Tolkien ever fail to maintain a strict separation between the Creator and the creation, a separation well expressed by Søren Kierkegaard’s phrase infinite qualitative distinction. Indeed, this monotheistic Hebraic outlook is quite marked in Tolkien, comparable to the Old Testament prophets’ strictures against nature-worship and fertility rituals.¹⁴

Tolkien insisted that The Lord of the Rings takes place in our actual world, not a fantasy land. He was unhappy that many readers thought Middle-earth was another planet; it is my own mother-earth, he wrote.¹⁵ It is a long-ago world, however.

The Fall of Man is in the past and off stage; the Redemption of Man [by Jesus Christ] is in the far future. We are in a time when the One God, Eru, is known to exist by the wise,¹⁶ but is not approachable save by or through the Valar, though he is still remembered in (unspoken) prayer by those of Númenórean descent.¹⁷

When I first read The Lord of the Rings I thought of the Númenóreans as literally northern, and therefore at that time beyond the geographical reach of the faith as revealed to the Hebrew people far to the south. Later I discovered Tolkien’s references to the Jews in his letters, showing how biblical history and geography informs his conception of an ostensibly pre-Christian era. Nevertheless we can best absorb his atmosphere if we think of a Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon world. The Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf offers the most obvious parallel for Anglophones. Those who have read the northern myths about Odin, Thor, Fricka, Balder, and Loki will also get the picture. The Finnish Kalevala was a primary inspiration for Tolkien, as well as works in Old Icelandic and Old Norse, but he particularly wanted to write an English epic; he designated the Shire as England, and more specifically as the West Midlands. The location in time is long before the coming of Christianity, where Yule is celebrated as the winter solstice but is given no religious significance. And yet, through symbolism and suggestion, Tolkien is telling a Christian story. He is unequivocal about this in his letters, referring to the New Testament repeatedly with no sense of disjuncture or contradiction.¹⁸

There is no explicit talk of any transcendent dimension in Tolkien’s world. With the exceptions of the standing silence observed in Gondor and the occasional invocation of Elbereth! Gilthoniel! there are no prayers, sacrifices, temples, totems, idols, propitiatory rites, or any of the other religious phenomena found in early human societies. Tolkien stated repeatedly in his letters that he designed this absence precisely in order to evoke a presence.¹⁹ The Ring saga contains a powerful undercurrent of transcendent meaning. This undercurrent can be interpreted in varying ways, and not all of these will be theological. I choose the term theological rather than spiritual because, as will become apparent, I am arguing for one particular interpretation, a truly theological (God-centered) one.²⁰ Others will want to take a more anthropological (human-centered, or creature-centered) approach. I make no secret of my preference. Tolkien designed the story so that the attentive reader would discern the workings of an active transcendent agency. When that happens, something emerges that is even more compelling than a story of creaturely growth and spiritual development. The human growth and development that form such a gripping part of the plot would not be possible without the unseen but often obliquely identified intrusion of the finger of God.

Tolkien knew that many readers would strongly resist his convictions about divine agency. We are programmed to believe that we cannot have both divine agency and human freedom. This resistance is one of the most important factors motivating Tolkien’s omission of explicit references to God. He made them implicit. The religious element, he wrote to a Jesuit friend, is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.²¹ This particular letter, among others, has reinforced my belief that we cannot be drawn fully into the symbolism unless we are immersed in the story. He writes, moreover, that his hints are perceptible only to the most attentive.²² This is true, but it is perhaps misleading. The deep narrative that I think I have detected is not arcane. It does not run parallel to the action yet separate from it like some gnostic secret available only to the initiated. It is right there, just under the surface, for all to see who will. Tolkien wrote, I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories).²³ Special expertise, then, is not required, only a little extra help in deducing. There is no reader who cannot be among the most attentive. It is those readers who are addressed in this commentary.

Tolkien’s Letters

After I had completed the first draft of this book, I read all of Tolkien’s collected letters (and also Humphrey Carpenter’s biography). I did not want to read them any sooner because I did not want to be influenced too much. It was a great pleasure to learn that Tolkien was an exceptionally prolific and gifted correspondent. The letters are distinguished by their charm, warmth, and generosity. He was touchingly conscientious about answering fan mail—especially, Carpenter notes, if a letter was from a child or elderly person.²⁴ His strong, often eccentric opinions are entertainingly evident. More important for our purposes here, however, is the extensive commentary on his own work that he was willing to undertake. I was deeply gratified to learn that a good deal of what I had already written about The Lord of the Rings was confirmed by what Tolkien had to say in his letters. This encouraged me to think that I was on the right track. I therefore made numerous additions to my manuscript, largely in this Introduction and in the footnotes, but it was not necessary to make any significant emendations.

More than most authors have been willing to do, Tolkien made extraordinary attempts to explain his personages and his story, sometimes at considerable length. As one reads the letters over the decades, one can see Tolkien working out aspects of his mythology—with regard to the Valar and Gandalf, for instance—that he did not complete to his satisfaction in the book.²⁵ Moreover, he seems to say certain things in his letters at one period—the late 1950s, say—and then take another tack in the 1960s. To some correspondents he emphasizes one theme, to others, another. He took all the questions that people asked so seriously that occasionally he seems to get a bit tangled in his responses; there are times when the reader of the letters may feel that he might better have left the story to speak for itself.²⁶ Tolkien was not a metaphysician; he was a storyteller of prodigious gifts. Nevertheless the letters taken as a whole speak powerfully of the coherence of his many themes.

There is one particular passage in the letters that expresses his deepest concerns while at the same time revealing much of his strategy. Tolkien believed in what Christian tradition has called original sin, and the following sentence is a superb description of it:

A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable human wickedness.…

This is followed by another sentence which explains much of what Tolkien is expressing through his story:

And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible beauties of word or deed.²⁷

Clearly, Tolkien wants to celebrate these visible beauties of word and deed in his tale, and he has created many such moments for the reader to identify and savor. It is significant, however, that these instances are more hidden and much less clearly discerned. This explains why there is so much reticence in the story, why Tolkien uses so much indirection and allusiveness to show the workings of the transcendent realm. He wants the reader to understand how mysterious and disguised this working is, how it is apprehended by faith and not by sight.

Careful readers of Tolkien’s letters may note that my analysis will occasionally seem to be at odds with the author’s intent, especially in the matter of free will. He refers to free will a number of times in his letters. It is my view that Tolkien underestimates the consistency of his own narrative. Not even Aragorn, he specifically writes, could have withstood the presence of Sauron, by choice or otherwise²⁸—and in the story itself, Gandalf says several times that not even he could safely handle the Ring. Tolkien repeatedly indicates in his letters that the power of evil is too great to be resisted by incarnate creatures without divine aid.²⁹ This is confirmed over and over dozens of times throughout the story. It is therefore my contention that he has illustrated the dilemma of the bound will much more powerfully than he himself realized. This will be demonstrated many times throughout the retelling of the story. Other Catholic writers like Graham Greene, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor are remarkably similar in emphasizing the action of grace upon the bound or impotent will, so much so that they seem more Protestant than most Protestants. We will have ample opportunity to see how this works as we go along.

There are many things that I have seen in the book—some of the biblical and liturgical references, for example—that are not explicitly mentioned in the collected Letters. Does this mean that Tolkien had not thought of these references, did not intend them, or was concealing them (in light of his own expressed view that not too much should be spelled out)? Am I straining too hard to find these correspondences? I am convinced that this is not the case. For instance, when I read the episode after the Battle of the Pelennor when Aragorn’s touch heals Merry, I thought there was a hint of Jesus’ raising the daughter of Jairus. I later discovered from one of Tolkien’s letters that this biblical text was important to him.³⁰ The biblical references in his correspondence are so knowing and so easily tossed off—as they would be when someone knows a subject thoroughly and expects the reader to know it too—that they imply lifelong familiarity. If there are places here and there where I have seen something that Tolkien was not consciously aware of, it is nevertheless the case that he was so steeped in the Scriptures, the Christian tradition, and the liturgy that these influences suffuse the work at almost every point.³¹

Literary works have a way of expanding beyond their author’s original vision and intention. I have tried to err on the side of respecting Tolkien’s intentions, taking great care with his letters, and I have been scrupulous in recording alternative interpretations and possible objections. It is my sense of the matter, however, that The Lord of the Rings has layers and depths that even Tolkien himself did not entirely perceive—and he would be the first to say that the real Writer of the Story was at work in these depths.³² If I have misjudged at points, the reader can decide. Still, I am confident that Tolkien himself would be pleased with some of the theological implications that I see, as he was when people wrote him about such things.³³ An analogy occurs to me. Tolkien did his own illustrations for The Hobbit, and they have a certain interest, but his letters reveal that he knew he was no great shakes as an illustrator. Some of the professional illustrators who later worked on the book drew out the visual drama in ways that he himself had not been able to do, and he liked some of their work very much.³⁴ Similarly, then, he seems to have responded favorably when readers saw theological meaning in his work even if he had not been entirely conscious of it himself.

War or Anti-war? Good vs. Evil?

At the time of publication of this commentary, the United States of America enjoys a degree of military supremacy and might never seen before in the world. Combined with this fact is a mood of increasing bellicosity among many Americans, encouraged by a new doctrine of preemptive war. The near cause of this new mood and new doctrine was the aftermath of the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The release of a wildly successful movie with spectacular battle scenes a year later, remarkably entitled The Two Towers, seemed to give support to the nation’s martial mood. Viggo Mortensen, the actor who plays Aragorn, was so disturbed by this interpretation of the movie that he wrote a preface to the picture book prepared to accompany the movie. Here is some of what he wrote:

The second installment of The Lord of the Rings comes to theatres in a world that is no more secure than the one in which the first was released last year.… It would seem from even a cursory reading of world history that there is no new horror under the sun, that we will perhaps always have to contend with destructive impulses in ourselves and others.… The most enlightened beings in Middle-Earth are conscious of the ubiquity of good and evil in neighbors, strangers, adversaries, and most important, themselves. There can be little future in adopting a permanent policy of an eye for an eye. If we were all regularly to put into effect such an inflexible approach, we would all soon be blind, as Gandhi pointed out.³⁵

Mortensen has well understood some of the principal themes of Tolkien’s tale. It is human nature to want to divide up the world into Good and Evil, always with ourselves and our own group on the Good side. It was one of Tolkien’s principal aims to show that, in reality, such a line cannot be drawn, because good people can be and are capable of evil under certain circumstances. Václav Havel of the Czech Republic, hero of the Velvet Revolution, wrote that during the period of Communist rule it was often impossible to distinguish between those who had collaborated and those who had not; the line, he said, did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us’, but through each person.³⁶

It is therefore one of the chief arguments of this analysis-in-theform-of-a-narrative that The Lord of the Rings is not about Good vs. Evil, and understanding it that way is in fact a failure to understand.³⁷ Some readers may have noticed that I did not include good and evil in my list at the beginning of this Introduction. That was deliberate. Tolkien himself resisted those categories, and forcing the story into them does serious damage to the subtlety and complexity of his conception. It requires considerable vigilance on the readers’ part to keep this in mind. To give just one example of the way the book and movie are being widely misinterpreted, an article in The New York Times at the time when the third movie, The Return of the King, was about to win eleven Academy Awards stated that The triumph of good over evil is the main theme of the story.³⁸ Well, yes and no. If the main themes of this present analysis were to be distilled into a few words, I suppose I would say two things:

It is primarily about the unseen Providence of God operating for good through human (and angelic) agents—especially the little ones that no one else has noticed.

Secondarily it is about the universal propensity of human beings (and angels) to fall into evil unless they are aided by power from that unseen but ever-present Person.³⁹

Tolkien was not a pacifist; he fought in the infamous trenches of the Somme in the first World War, and his son Christopher was in the R.A.F. in the second. But no one reading his letters could take The Lord of the Rings as a rationale for going to war except in the farthest extremity. To his son, in January 1945, he wrote these words, which sum up a good deal of what he poured into his mighty tale:

I have just heard the news.… Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly: destruction of what should be (and indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted.⁴⁰

At the time of V-E Day he wrote:

It all seems rather a mockery to me, for the War is not over.… But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost,⁴¹ and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint!⁴²

In these two brief excerpts from the letters we find much of what has gone into the tale of the Ring, and much of what makes it biblical: the primary emphasis on compassion; the tragic sense of the besotted human condition; the sense that all sides are to blame, not just theirs; the renunciation of self-righteousness and gloating; the necessity of taking action under extreme pressure; the conviction that all of life is an ongoing battle; the certainty that the Shadow will always gather strength and return; the determination to persevere. We find all of this in the story, front and center. And we find something more: the overarching presence of the unseen hosts of heaven, flashing through the work in brief strokes of unforgettable brilliance. These are the moments that lodge in the reader’s mind: they are glimpses of celestial triumph that ring through our senses like the silver trumpets that Pippin heard in the air over Minas Tirith at the rising of the sun.

Practical Notes to the Reader

It is assumed that anyone reading this book will have read The Lord of the Rings first. Familiarity with the names, geography, and history of Middle-earth is assumed, but to help readers whose memory may need a bit of priming I have added a good many reminders in the footnotes.

Some portions of the book receive more attention here than others. For instance, readers may wish for a fuller account of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. However, that would have added greatly to the length of this book without enlarging our theological theme in any essential way. (Even Tolkien himself agreed that it was incidental to the main story.)⁴³ There is hardly a page in The Lord of the Rings that does not have some degree of theological suggestion, but I have concentrated on the scenes that advance our understanding of Tolkien’s hints and allusions in significant ways.

Footnotes

Let the reader not be daunted by the footnotes! They can be skipped entirely without missing anything in the main narration. They are there for four reasons:

Most important, they are there to impart supplementary information without interrupting the primary analysis.

They remind the reader of details about Tolkien’s world that might have been forgotten.

They include comments on Peter Jackson’s three-part film.

They annotate references in the letters.

Division into Six Books

The Lord of the Rings has been erroneously called a trilogy for so long that it is probably no use protesting, but Tolkien disliked the term. It was important to him that it be regarded as a single continuous story. The arbitrary division into three volumes was made by the publisher in order to reduce costs. Tolkien’s own arrangement divides the work neatly into six Books, and that is the way I am dividing this commentary. He gave titles to each of the six, but they were never used. I have restored Tolkien’s original titles as the headings for the six chapters in this commentary.

Spelling and Names of Places, People, and Creatures

In my own text I have used standard American spelling, but I have preferred to use English forms—labour, defence, traveller, fibre—when quoting directly from Tolkien.

As every lover of Tolkien knows, almost everybody and everything in The Lord of the Rings has two, three, four, or more names.⁴⁴ Take the Witch-king, for instance; he is called the King of Angmar, the Lord of Minas Morgul, the Wraith-king, and the Black King. Elbereth has at least seven names or appellations. Rivendell is called Imladris often enough for us to require learning both names. Treebeard is also Fangorn, the forest that bears his name (or vice versa). Mithrandir is used almost as commonly in dialogue about the great wizard as is Gandalf. A principal reason for this variety is that each of the various people-groups has names in its own language: Sindarin, Westron, Khuzdul, Quenya, Black Speech, and so forth. Since Tolkien got so much enjoyment out of devising these names, I see no reason why we should not play around with them too, and I have done so. At the very least the reader might want to remember that Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul (Tower of Guard and Tower of Sorcery) had more auspicious names before the Shadow began to grow again—Minas Anor and Minas Ithil—Tower of the [Setting] Sun and Tower of the [Rising] Moon.

Capitalization

I have not been able to figure out any rhyme or reason with regard to Tolkien’s use of capitals. Hobbits or hobbits? Elves or elves? King or king? Orcs or orcs? Men or men? Tolkien himself was not consistent in most cases. Man and Men are almost always capitalized, however, as a way of distinguishing them from Elves and also to indicate the human race as an entity designated for special status. In this case I will be doing the same. I have no rule about Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Orcs so I trust the reader will not be confused by my inconsistency.⁴⁵

I will often be capitalizing Power, Sin, and Death, also Flesh and Spirit, for the same reason that Tolkien capitalizes Necromancer and Enemy: to ascribe all due weight to their status as active, aggressive cosmic agents. Tolkien was well aware of the Principalities and Powers in the New Testament, and he specifically refers to them that way, with capitals.⁴⁶

Evil Not Capitalized

I do not capitalize evil, however—even though Tolkien does so in his letters—for two reasons. First, it is never identified specifically by the apostle Paul in the New Testament as a Power alongside Sin and Death (and the Law), or as a realm like those of the Flesh and the Spirit. Second, for reasons that will be stated at length, I am trying to avoid giving personified Evil a separate existence over against Good.

To summarize the argument thus far, the popular tendency to characterize The Lord of the Rings in terms of a battle of Good vs. Evil has been a mistake of serious proportions. Radical evil is indeed personified in Sauron, but Tolkien is emphatically clear that after Sauron, evil will never again be embodied in one single person, unless it be before the great End foretold in Scripture. Instead, evil will take shape as half-evils, and defective-goods, and the twilights of doubt as to sides.⁴⁷ It is of the utmost importance that this be understood, because it will then become clear that the book cannot be simplistically applied to present-day situations and used to justify self-righteous crusades against this or that crudely defined evil person or group. In a note of particular importance, Tolkien wrote, In my story I do not deal with Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing.… I do not think that at any rate any rational being is wholly evil.⁴⁸

The Appendices

Tolkien labored mightily over his fascinating appendices (found at the end of Book VI), and I have made much use of them. Vital information regarding the languages, dates, places, dynasties, and primeval history (and some future history as well) are found there. Tolkien’s grasp of what did and did not belong in the main narrative was impeccable; in a sense, the appendices are like the footnotes in this commentary. The one exception to this is the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A, which is part of the essential story. Tolkien did not include it in the main text because, he said, The Lord of the Rings is hobbito-centric, primarily focused on the ennoblement of the humble, small people.⁴⁹ The ending of the story of Aragorn and Arwen is almost unbearably sad, as Tolkien himself realized.

Acknowledgments

The lions’ share of thanks and praise goes to my editor at Eerdmans, Jennifer Hoffman. I have lived in dread of the Tolkien fans’ well-known mastery of every minute detail of the saga, but Jenny can match wits with the best of them. She combed every syllable of the manuscript, checked every reference, looked up every footnote and Scripture verse, made sage suggestions about interpretation, and in every way was a tremendous collaborator. I am very thankful for her devotion to this project.

Three other Elf-friends read the entire manuscript and offered very helpful comments from their various perspectives—Tim Boomer, Pennie Curry, and Tom Luxon. If I did not take every one of their suggestions, that is my fault, not theirs. I have been greatly encouraged by their enthusiasm and engagement.

To Jon Pott, editor-in-chief at Eerdmans, I extend my gratitude because, for reasons best left unwritten, without his tenacity, patience, and skill this book would never have been published.

Summary

The writing of this book of commentary and analysis has given me intense pleasure. The sweep and momentum of the story bore me along from beginning to end as though Gwaihir the Eagle were under me. My fondest wish is that some lovers of Tolkien’s mighty epic will find themselves thus carried along as well, so that the joy and sorrow of the tale will resonate with renewed power in some deep place of the soul.

I believe, moreover, that this is a tale for our time. Since the seemingly clear-cut triumphs of World War II, the Shadow has been growing again, and it is not so easy to tell who is friend and who is enemy; there are twilights of doubt as to sides. I am not referring to the difficulty of identifying terrorists; I am speaking of the need to examine ourselves. Wise, generous leadership is in short supply; self-righteousness abounds; the gap between the great and the small widens; there are few calls for sacrifice. The United States has been shocked out of its naïve complacency about its own virtue by photographs of torture carried out by ordinary Americans. Never has there been a greater need for understanding and clemency—two prominent Tolkienian themes. The lust for the Power that Dominates has bored into America like Sauron into the very core of Minas Tirith. These things can be said about any people at any period in history, but it is our calling and our responsibility to pay attention to their pertinence in our own. In other words, we are called to repentance—another Tolkienian motif.

But we are also called to hope. (The more one lists Tolkien’s themes, the more themes there are to list.) During the dark decades of apartheid, the cruel state-sponsored system of racial oppression in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called himself a prisoner of hope (Zechariah 9:12). One hallmark of responsible hope is honoring those Númenóreans among us, those people in our world who, in spite of their imperfection and—yes—sin, nevertheless, like Tutu and Nelson Mandela, embody the noblest and highest among us. In the presence of such people, the finger of God has intruded into History. But if The Lord of the Rings teaches us anything at all, it is that we do not look for signs of hope chiefly among the Great and Wise, but among those of low degree who may at any time become those whom God has chosen to shame the strong.

In a letter, Tolkien used a haunting phrase of Galadriel’s to explain that he did not expect History to be anything other than a long defeat. Wars are never won, and the Shadow will always grow again. In this respect there is a profound melancholy throughout his tale. There is an unsleeping Enemy bent on our destruction, and Tolkien’s epic narrative conveys the biblical message that human nature left to itself is incapable of effective resistance. But, as the Ring saga so wonderfully shows us, we are not left to ourselves. The Writer of the Story takes an active part in history, and, as Tolkien has said, the stories, myths, and legends that are based in this knowledge and grounded in this promise are capable of offering the reader an unforgettable and transforming vision of the ultimate Victory that is yet to come.⁵⁰

1. These commonly held views were particularly apparent in some of the review-capsules of the Peter Jackson movie in newspapers and magazines. These reviewers praised the movie for preserving Tolkien’s moral lessons and timeless truths (no postmoderns need apply). This, it seemed to me, was a singularly wooden-headed way of interpreting the great saga. Tolkien wrote a narrative precisely in order to avoid the timeless truths approach. He says this over and over. For example, he wrote that "‘Moral didacticism’ is the exact opposite of my procedure in The Lord of the Rings. I neither preach nor teach" (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; first published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, 1981], p. 414).

2. Letters, p. 330.

3. Letters, p. 109. I have changed the punctuation very slightly for the sake of clarity.

4. Letters, pp. 232–33.

5. When this commentary was in the process of revision, I read for the first time Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth and discovered this unflattering passage about Tolkien’s professional admirers: "The end-product of book after book, meanwhile, is a scheme: The Lord of the Rings reduced to ‘archetypes,’ related to solemn trudging plots of ‘departure and return,’ ‘initiation, donor and trial,’ hutching out banalities like ‘for every good there is a corresponding evil’. This is precisely the trap that I, being an amateur rather than a professional admirer, have tried to avoid—though to be sure I could never meet Shippey’s criteria, being one of those people writing about [Tolkien] who could not tell Old English from Old Norse" (The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003], p. 334). On the other hand, I can say at least this much for the study in hand: I have designed this commentary in direct refutation of the critical assessment which Professor Shippey identifies as the one critical statement entirely and absolutely wrong. He refers to the opinion of Mark Roberts, who wrote that The Lord of the Rings was not "moulded by some vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être (p. 174). Shippey’s resounding rejoinder could well serve as an epigraph for this commentary: Had Professor Roberts searched high and low for a work in which world-view and narrative were identical, he could not have found a clearer example [than The Lord of the Rings]" (p. 334). Amen.

6. Letters, pp. 204, 235, 252 (emphasis added).

7. Admittedly I am on shaky ground here since Tolkien’s characters occasionally use the term quest. But quest generally means seeking after some object or goal, which does not seem precisely to fit the situation here. Tolkien is using the term quest more in the medieval romantic sense of a chivalrous adventure, not in a specifically spiritual sense. More of this later.

8. Tolkien uses various expressions to convey this idea: the Divine Plan, The Pattern, the Whole Story (Letters, pp. 194, 121, 107).

9. Letters, pp. 172, 243.

10. Letters, p. 400. He also wrote, The One (the Teller [of the Story]) does not inhabit any part of Eä [the created universe] (Letters, p. 283).

11. In his letters Tolkien refers to a certain lack of affinity with Celtic languages and culture (Letters, pp. 26, 219, 227). In any case, specialists inform us that the current vogue for everything Celtic owes more to romantic nineteenth-century reconstructions than to the eclectic influences that actually formed early Insular culture. If we are to understand Tolkien we need to remember that he was unreservedly Anglo-Saxon in his enthusiasms and deepest commitments.

12. Letters, pp. 193–94n, 204. Significantly, he also refers to the Númenóreans as Egyptian in their love of massive monuments, but Hebraic in theology (Letters, p. 281).

13. Letters, pp. 155–56, 194n, 205, 206. It is the Black Númenóreans who constructed altars to the demonic Sauron.

14. Tolkien is listed in the Jerusalem Bible as a principal contributor, which embarrassed him. He was originally assigned several Old Testament books to translate, but in the end, overwhelmed with other demands, he managed only Jonah (Letters, p. 378). In any case, he has a distinct affinity for the Old Testament as well as the New. He seems especially drawn to Genesis, with its story of the Fall of Man, and also the Great Flood, which he explicitly connects with the drowning of Númenor, likening Elendil to Noah (Letters, p. 156).

15. Letters, p. 283.

16. Generally speaking, the Wise (usually capitalized by Tolkien) refers to the Istari (the five wizards) and the chief Eldar (Galadriel, Elrond, Cirdan the Shipwright)—the members of the White Council.

17. Letters, p. 387.

18. Academically trained biblical scholars would say that he feels no need to make a hermeneutical transfer. One of my own deepest convictions, as a preacher and storyteller, is that the biblical story is a seamless fabric needing much less hermeneutical transfer than the schools of divinity sometimes seem to require.

19. Letters, pp. 121, 172, 193–94, 201, 204, 206, 387, etc.

20. In his letters, Tolkien uses the word theological in a deliberate way. For instance, he says that the Númenóreans received theological teaching from the Elves (Letters, p. 279). The Eldar and the Númenóreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person in abomination (p. 243).

21. Letters, p. 172. Sometimes in his letters Tolkien would become annoyed and say that there is no symbolism in the saga at all. But, as this quotation shows, such statements cannot be taken literally. He was just trying to squelch the absurdities. In one letter, for example, he objected to a reader’s notion that Sauron was supposed to be Stalin (Letters, p. 307)! In another he protested, To ask if the Orcs are Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs (p. 262).

22. Letters, p. 201.

23. Letters, p. 288.

24. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 240.

25. In particular, after publication, he admitted that he was not satisfied with his account of Gandalf’s return from death. He kept tinkering with it in his mind and in the letters.

26. For example, he engages in some speculation about what if Gollum had not attacked Frodo in the Sammath Naur (Letters, pp. 330–31).

27. Letters, p. 80.

28. Letters, p. 332.

29. Letters, pp. 202, 204, 251–52, 325–27. By far the greatest evidence of this, however, is in the story, not the letters.

30. Letters, p. 100.

31. The one thing he did not have in his storehouse was Protestant preaching. In one of his letters he complains about the Catholic homilies that he hears: As for sermons! They are bad, aren’t they? (Letters, p. 75).

32. After I wrote this I was pleased to discover a letter in which Tolkien wrote that, although a lot of the critical interpretations seemed merely amusing, even he himself could see some things in the story "post scriptum" that he had not seen before (Letters, pp. 211–12). He also admits that he is sometimes puzzled by his own book (p. 278).

33. Letters, p. 288.

34. Letters, pp. 133, 186. (Admittedly he hated the work of some others.)

35. Introduction by Viggo Mortensen to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers—Visual Companion by Jude Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

36. Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, The Truth about Dictatorship, The New York Review of Books, February 19, 1998, pp. 36–37. The resistance leader and former Solidarity spokesman Adam Michnik, in Poland, took much the same position after 1989.

37. Not only did Tolkien not like the good/evil dichotomy, he did not like light/darkness either, for the same reasons. See Letters, pp. 121, 197, 243–44, 262.

38. Katie Zezima, Frodo’s Quest Inspires a Search for Allegory, The New York Times, February 21, 2004. There’s that misleading word quest again—and anyone really familiar with Tolkien will avoid the word allegory.

39. There are many other ways of identifying the main themes, and Tolkien was not always consistent—depending on his mood and the person he was writing to. A provisional description of the book that he offers in a letter about Allegory and Story rings especially true in our own time; he says his book can be interpreted as

Reviews for The Battle for Middle-earth

[skybalon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is easily the best book I didn't bother to finish. The author is an expert in both Christian Theology and Tolkien. It comes through on every page. And that's also the reason I couldn't finish this. It's just too much for me.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rutledge writes not an academic but a theological study of Tolkien's timeless saga, and it is rich with insight. Her best work comes when she analyzes some of the thorniest parts of the books, notably the Mt. Doom scene. I left with new appreciation for the series, but especially for the Power that works within me.

[amishtechie-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is well know the JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were friends and attended the same church. The Christian World View embedded within LOTR is clearly and eloquently detailed by Rutledge. A Reference for any true-believer who loves the LOTR.

[wisdomlore · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is interesting, but has no index. This makes it hard to look anything up or look back at anything.