The Return of the Ring

Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work". Mr Pearce highlights some of the Catholic themes on the re-release of the films.

From Crisis

By Joseph Pearce

With the re-release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, it’s a good time to revisit the Christian themes that pervaded J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing.

The Lord of the Rings returns to movie theaters this weekend and is proving as popular as ever. The re-release of the three Peter Jackson-produced films to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of the first of the three films, The Fellowship of Ring, has generated $5 million in domestic presales, with roughly 407,000 tickets sold. 

For those old enough to remember, the release of the films a quarter of a century ago was more than merely a landmark event in the history of cinema; it was also living and unassailable proof that J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic, which had first been published half a century earlier, was as popular and powerful as ever. 

Twenty-five years ago, as the author of the recently published book Tolkien: Man and Myth, I received invitations to speak all over the country on The Lord of the Rings, benefiting from the wave of enthusiasm that accompanied the release of the films. Audiences were not always comfortable with what they heard because I emphasized Tolkien’s own judgment, and his own words, that “The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” The students at Ivy League schools, such as Harvard and Princeton, were bemused and not always amused to hear of the connection between the power of the Ring and the power of sin, and several students at Columbia University staged a walkout when they realized that Tolkien’s classic had layers of meaning that challenged their relativist worldviews.

As for those layers of meaning, they are revealed by Tolkien’s subtle use of the liturgical calendar to “baptize” his work with Christian significance. The Ring is destroyed on March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation. Imagine student audiences, unfamiliar with Catholic doctrine, being told that the Annunciation was the feast of the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, and was therefore more important than Christmas because life begins at conception, not at birth. Imagine the student reaction when they were told that March 25th is also, according to tradition, the historical date of the Crucifixion. Clearly, Tolkien chose this particular date for the destruction of the Ring for a reason, connecting it in some way with both the Incarnation and the crucifixion.

But what exactly is the connection?

It is to be found in connecting the Ring’s destruction with what is destroyed by Christ in His life, death, and Resurrection. Christ destroys the power of sin through His death on the Cross on March 25th. The Ring is, therefore, synonymous with sin itself in some way. The Ring is “the One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.” Original Sin is the One Sin to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. The power of the One Ring and the power of the One Sin are both destroyed on March 25th.

Once the Ring-Sin synonym is understood, The Lord of the Rings springs to life theologically. The putting on of the Ring is the act of sin, which severs us from the good world that God made, making us invisible. While we are wearing the Ring, we are in the realm of the Dark Lord, who can now see us more clearly and exert his power over us. Eventually, if we wear the Ring habitually, we become miserable, shrunken wrecks, mere shadows of the good person we were made to be. The horrific truth is that sin gollumizes us!  

Imagine the student who loves The Lord of the Rings listening to this. Might he hear the horrific truth and see himself in the mirror as Gollum, or at least as one who is gollumizing himself? Tolkien wrote that fairy stories hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves. Sometimes we might not like what we see, but seeing it is good for us.

But there’s more.

If the wearing of the Ring is the act of sin, the bearing of the Ring without wearing it is choosing to bear the burden of sin without sinning. The Ring bearer is, therefore, a cross bearer. This is why Frodo Baggins is, in some subtle sense, a Christ figure. And this is why Tolkien, returning to the liturgical calendar, has Frodo leaving Rivendell at the beginning of the quest on Christmas Day and arriving at Mount Doom (Golgotha) on Good Friday. Frodo’s journey is analogous, literarily and liturgically, to the life of Christ, from His birth to His death.

Imagine, once again, the impact of this understanding of The Lord of the Rings on young audiences who had no idea that their favorite book or their favorite film was “fundamentally religious and Catholic” as Tolkien had insisted. 

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,” wrote Tolkien’s great friend C.S. Lewis of his own experience, as a young atheist, reading George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton. What was true for Lewis reading MacDonald and Chesterton is true for millions of young men and women reading The Lord of the Rings. We can only hope and pray that the rerelease of the films will lead many people to discover—or rediscover—the fundamentally Catholic book.