Christianity in Middle-earth
Christianity is a central theme in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional works about Middle-earth, but always a hidden one.
J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic from boyhood, and he described The Lord of the Rings in particular as a fundamentally religious and Catholic work. While he insisted it was not an allegory, it contains numerous themes from Christian theology. These include the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility over pride, and the activity of grace. A central theme is death and immortality, but Tolkien's attitudes to mercy and pity, resurrection, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, free will, justice, fellowship, authority and healing can also be detected. Divine providence appears indirectly as the will of the Valar, godlike immortals, expressed subtly enough to avoid compromising people's free will.
There is no single Christ-figure comparable to C. S. Lewis's Aslan in his Narnia books, but the characters of Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn exemplify the prophetic, priestly, and kingly aspects of Christ respectively.
Context: Catholicism
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He once described The Lord of the Rings to his friend, the English Jesuit Father Robert Murray, as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision." Many theological themes underlie the narrative, including the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility over pride, and the activity of grace, as seen with Frodo's pity toward Gollum. In addition the epic includes the themes of death and immortality, mercy and pity, resurrection, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, free will, justice, fellowship, authority and healing. Tolkien mentions the Lord's Prayer, especially the line "And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil" in connection with Frodo's struggles against the power of the One Ring. Tolkien said "Of course God is in The Lord of the Rings. The period was pre-Christian, but it was a monotheistic world", and when questioned who was the One God of Middle-earth, Tolkien replied "The one, of course! The book is about the world that God created – the actual world of this planet."The Bible and traditional Christian narrative also influenced The Silmarillion. The conflict between Melkor and Eru Ilúvatar parallels that between Satan and God. Further, The Silmarillion tells of the creation and fall of the Elves, as Genesis tells of the creation and fall of Man. As with all of Tolkien's works, The Silmarillion allows room for later Christian history, and one version of Tolkien's drafts even has Finrod, a character in The Silmarillion, speculating on the necessity of Eru Ilúvatar's eventual Incarnation to save Mankind.
A specifically Christian influence is the notion of the fall of man, which influenced the Ainulindalë, the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, and the fall of Númenor.
Role
Commentators, some of them Christian, have taken a wide range of positions on the role of Christianity in Tolkien's fiction, especially in The Lord of the Rings, including representations of Christ and angels in Tolkien's characters such as the wizards, the resurrection, the motifs of light, hope, and redemptive suffering, the apparent invisibility of Christianity in the novel, and not least the nature of evil, an ancient debate in Christian philosophy, that has led to lengthy scholarly argument about Tolkien's position in the book.Applicability, not allegory
Tolkien stated in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings that "it is neither allegorical nor topical... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations... I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers." Shippey comments that Tolkien certainly did sometimes write allegories, giving the example of Leaf by Niggle, and that there is meant to be some relationship between his fiction and fact. He notes, too, that Tolkien deliberately "approach to the edge of Christian reference" by placing the destruction of the Ring and the fall of Sauron on 25 March, the traditional Anglo-Saxon date of the crucifixion of Christ and of the annunciation, and of the last day of the Genesis creation. Other commentators have noted further echoes of Christian themes, including the presence of Christ figures, the resurrection, hope, and redemptive suffering.A Christian work?
Commentators disagree on whether The Lord of the Rings in particular is a Christian work.In favour is the scholar of theology and literature Ralph C. Wood with his 2003 book The Gospel According to Tolkien, which concludes "Christians are called to be hobbit-like servants of the King and his Kingdom. Frodo and Sam are first in the reign of Iluvatar because they are willing to be last and least among those who 'move the wheels of the world'".
An ambivalent position is taken by Paul Kocher, in his book Master of Middle-earth. He writes that "having made the times pre-Christian, has freed himself from the need to deal with them in a Christian context, which would be awkward if applied to elves, ents, dwarves, and the rest." On the other hand, Kocher notes that Elrond ascribes purpose to events including the summoning of the Free Peoples to his council; Elrond uses the words "purpose", "called", "ordered", and "believe", implying "some living will". Similarly, he comments, Gandalf firmly tells Denethor, the despairing Steward of Gondor, that suicide is forbidden and indeed is "heathen".
Against is Catherine Madsen, who found herself drawn to faith by the novel, "yet not particularly to the Christian faith". She notes that Tolkien wrote that "Myth and fairy-story, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth, but not explicit". She states that Tolkien clearly "did not intend his work to argue or illustrate or promulgate Christianity". In her view, Tolkien uses "Christian magic", not doctrine; she notes that Tolkien wrote that Middle-earth was "a monotheistic world of 'natural theology'". The "natural religion" of the book is, she argues, based on matters such as the Elves and their longing for the sea, creating a "religious feeling... curiously compatible with a secular cosmology". A world of religion without revelation, she writes, is necessarily ambiguous, and any triumph over evil also diminishes the good, so the world inevitably fades. Hence, what The Lord of the Rings offers is not a supernatural hope, but what Tolkien called "recovery", the reawakening of the senses, an unmediated attention to the present, as when Sam looks up into the night sky in Mordor, and is struck by the beauty of a star. To Madsen, this is "the most compelling thing about the book, and also the least Christian... available to anyone of any persuasion, and not contingent upon belief."
Appearances
Christ figures
to Christ, and Sam, who carried Frodo on the way to Mount Doom, to Simon of Cyrene, who carried Christ's cross to Golgotha. Church of St. John Nepomucen, Brenna
The philosopher Peter Kreeft, like Tolkien a Roman Catholic, observes that there is no one complete, concrete, visible Christ figure in The Lord of the Rings comparable to Aslan in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series. However, Kreeft and Jean Chausse have identified reflections of the figure of Jesus Christ in three protagonists of The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn. While Chausse found "facets of the personality of Jesus" in them, Kreeft wrote that "they exemplify the Old Testament threefold Messianic symbolism of prophet, priest, and king ".
Resurrection
Several commentators have seen Gandalf's passage through the Mines of Moria, dying to save his companions and returning as "Gandalf the White", as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ.Like Jesus who carried his cross for the sins of mankind, Frodo carried a burden of evil on behalf of the whole world. Frodo walks his "Via Dolorosa" to Mount Doom just like Jesus who made his way to Golgotha. As Frodo approaches the Cracks of Doom, the Ring becomes a crushing weight, just as the cross was for Jesus. Sam Gamgee, Frodo's servant, who carries Frodo up to Mount Doom, parallels Simon of Cyrene, who helps Jesus by carrying his cross to Golgotha. When Frodo accomplishes his mission, like Christ, he says "it is done". Just as Christ ascends to heaven, Frodo's life in Middle-earth comes to an end when he departs to the Undying Lands.
Light
A theme that runs throughout The Lord of the Rings but is especially clear in The Silmarillion is of light. The scholar of mythology and medieval literature Verlyn Flieger explains that Tolkien equates light with God and the ability to create. She cites Tolkien's poem Mythopoeia :of Gondor bearing the white tree, Nimloth the fair, descendant of Telperion, one of the Two Trees of Valinor that once lit the world
Flieger writes that by this, Tolkien meant that an author's ability to create fantasy fiction, or in his terms "subcreation", was derived from and could be seen as a small splinter of the Divine Light, the "single White" of the poem. Further, the whole of The Silmarillion can be seen as a working-out of this theme of Man splintering the original white light of creation "to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes" in the forms of light and dark elves, men good and bad, and dragons and other monsters. This creative light, she states, was for Tolkien equated with the Christian Λόγος, the Divine Word.
The light begins in The Silmarillion as a unity, and in accordance with the splintering of creation is divided into more and more fragments as the myth progresses. Middle-earth is peopled by the angelic Valar and lit by two great lamps; when these are destroyed by the fallen Vala Melkor, the world is fragmented, and the Valar retreat to Valinor, which is lit by The Two Trees. When these too are destroyed, their last fragment of light is made into the Silmarils, and a sapling too is rescued, leading to the White Tree of Numenor, the living symbol of the Kingdom of Gondor. Wars are fought over the Silmarils, and they are lost to the Earth, the Sea, and the Sky, the last of these, carried by Eärendil the Mariner, becoming the Morning Star. Some of the star's light is captured in Galadriel's Mirror, the magic fountain that allows her to see past, present, and future; and some of that light is, finally, trapped in the Phial of Galadriel, her parting gift to Frodo, the counterbalance to Sauron's evil and powerful Ring that he also carries. At each stage, the fragmentation increases and the power decreases. Thus the theme of light as Divine power, fragmented and refracted through the works of created beings, is central to the whole mythology.
Hope
The motif of hope is illustrated in Aragorn's successful handling of Saruman's seeing-stone or palantír. Aragorn is given the very name of "Hope", by which he is still affectionately called by his queen, Arwen, who at the hour of his death cries out "Estel, Estel!". Only Aragorn, as the heir of Isildur, can rightfully use the palantír, while Saruman and Denethor, who have both also made extensive use of palantírs, have fallen into despair or presumption. These latter traits have been identified as the two distinct sins "against the virtue of Hope".Redemptive suffering
The Christian theme of the redemptive and penitential nature of suffering is apparent in the dreadful ordeal of Sam and Frodo in Mordor. As another example, Boromir atones for his assault on Frodo by single-handedly but vainly defending Merry and Pippin from orcs, which illustrates also another significant Christian theme: immortality of the soul and the importance of good intention, especially at the point of death. This is clear from Gandalf's statement: "But he escaped in the end.... It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir's sake."Angels
The place of Christianity's angels is taken by the Ainur, who are divided into two orders of beings, the Valar and their servants the Maiar. The Valar are powerful, and behave much like the pagan gods of Greek mythology. Flieger calls their role in Middle-earth "eccentric" from a Christian point of view: they are lower than the One God, certainly, but unlike angels they are sub-creators, each with their own realm. So, for instance, Manwë is King of Arda, Ulmo is Lord of Waters, Mandos Judge of the Dead, and they were married. This positions them, as Tolkien stated, as demiurges, godlike figures in the Platonic scheme of things with the ability to shape the material world. As with the splintering of light, Flieger writes, the choice of the name "demiurge" implies subdivision, its original meaning including "to do by dividing".The Maiar, the lesser order, were immortals who, sent by the Valar, took mortal bodies to go into Middle-earth and influence events. They included the Wizards or Istari, such as Gandalf. Tolkien stated that they fitted the original Greek description "ἄγγελος" meaning messenger.