Tolkien And Purgatory

Someone asked me about yesterday's post - that the Lord of the Rings could be used as an evangelical tool. They asked me how. Well, there are many great Christian virtues displayed, and the central theme of the little one being at the heart of it all is Christ's teaching on the least being the greatest (I also see St Therese's Little Way in the adventure of the hobbits).

But there are excellent examples of how Tolkien's work can be used to reveal Catholic teaching and one concerns purgatory. It is the third volume, The Return of the King, Aragorn needs assistance and he turns to the souls of treacherous soldiers who now haunt what is called the "Paths of the Dead". These soldiers had sworn allegiance to the King of Gondor to come to assist it in war, however when the need was greatest these men fled and took refuge in the mountains, safe (or so they thought). They died, but their souls could not rest - they had sinned, they had a debt to repay for their cowardice and treachery and they could not enter into their rest until the debt was paid and atoned for.

And so Aragorn arrives, he is the true King of Gondor and holds them to their oath, they now go to the aid of Gondor and when the city is saved, they are finally released from their oath, they have repaid the debt, atoned for their treachery and they can now enter their rest. That, as you can see, is a wonderful exposition of purgatory, it is the place where we repay the debt our "treachery" (sin) to the King (God) has caused. And so the discussion can begin!

It's All Over

I remember the first few minutes of watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring movie. A fan of Tolkien's work, I was interested to see if Peter Jackson could pull it off. In those first few moments I thought to myself: "He might actually be able to do it" and as far as I am concerned, for the most part, he did. Last Friday evening as the credits began to roll on the third Hobbit movie I said to myself, "It's all over". What an adventure it has been.

While the LOTR movies were greeted with acclaim, the same could not be said for three Hobbit movies which even some of the most devoted fans saw as Jackson trying to cash in on his original success. To be honest, I would not be so harsh, I genuinely think that Jackson just wanted to linger a little bit longer in Middle Earth and to include in the movies additional material, much of it taken from the Appendices of the LOTR, which will lay the foundation for what will happen later. And, overall, I think he has done a good job doing that. 

Yes, The Hobbit is a short novel, a tale which is much simpler that the epic which follows, but we must remember that while the tale is focused, there is a lot more going on in Middle Earth as Bilbo and his dwarf friends reclaim the dwarf kingdom under the mountain. I think what Jackson wants to do is to set The Hobbit against the bigger picture; as we will discover when Frodo begins his adventures, Bilbo's story did not take part in isolation. The hobbits for all their hopes, cannot exist apart and untouched by what is happening in the world. That said, one of the major criticism I have of the original trilogy is Jackson's idyllic preservation of the Shire at the end of the wars: Tolkien was at pains to show that even the peaceful Shire fell under the shadow as Saruman and his minions invade it, Jackson falls down there - the Shire cannot, and didn't, exist apart and untouched by what was happening in the world.

The two movie trilogies have opened up Tolkien's world, and values, to a whole new generation and that is a good thing, and I am delighted for that. We live in the age of the image, and many people no longer read, Jackson may well have brought people back to the books and that is a good thing, not only because it encourages people to read, but because it brings them face to face with Tolkien's vision, and it is a very Catholic vision. The LOTR is one of the great works of the Christian imagination and Christian literature and it could well be seen as a great instrument for evangelisation. 

These books are not mere fantasy unlike the genre which has grown up after them; when you compare them with the brutal and immoral world of Game of Thrones, for example, you see an altogether different spirit at work, Other works in the genre deal with good and evil but under the strain of original sin, devoid of grace, but the world and adventures in the LOTR present the bigger picture, the great battle, and there is grace, and it is at work in flawed creatures who are raised up through their struggles. When you read the LOTR you are aware of the presence of great hope even in what seem to be hopeless situations (see Gandalf's talk with Pippin as Minas Tirith seems to be about to fall). It is a work worth reading, studying and discussing.  

So thanks to Peter Jackson for his work, but while the filming is over, the works remain and I hope future generations will be as fascinated with Tolkien's work and teaching as previous generations. And I hope the Church, and her catechists, will realise just how important Tolkien's work is for the work of evangelisation.

UPDATE: The Thirsty Gargoyle has an excellent review of the Hobbit movies, it is well worth reading. His central argument: for all the wonderful stuff, Peter Jackson doesn't get Tolkien. I think he has a point.

Sometimes....

Sometimes the easiest answer is not always the most obvious....

No Gong For Ron

This story is all over the Internet.  As the 1961 papers of the Nobel Prize committee have been released, they reveal that the committee turned down the nomination of J.R.R. Tolkien for the Nobel Prize for Literature: he had been nominated by C.S. Lewis.

The committee did not consider the writer worthy of the prize because they considered his prose bad and his work "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality".  So in plain language: he can't write nor can he tell a good story, so no prize. 

Well, posterity has proved the committee wrong on one of those points - he was an excellent storyteller - his prose may not be consistently perfect, but his ability to create new worlds and enchant the imagination is unparalleled.

I have little time for the Nobel Prizes - a number of rewards in recent years reveal that the committee favours a particular agenda and usually picks its laureates in the light of that agenda - hence they gave Barack Obama the Peace Prize just after he was elected - for doing nothing. 

Blessed John Paul II had been nominated for the Peace Prize many times for his role in bringing down communism and his work for human rights and dignity, but one of the members of the committee said in an interview, which I heard, that they will never give John Paul the prize, not until he changes the Church's teaching on contraception and sexual ethics.  There's objectivity for you.  Needless to say the Blessed Pontiff was not so easily bought.

I imagine the committee have since repented of giving the Peace Prize to Blessed Mother Teresa: her acceptance speech pleading for the lives of the unborn in the face of the culture of death must have put them out.

As regard their attitude to Tolkien, it is not unusual. Academia has tended to look down its nose at him and would not consider his work to be literature in any shape or form.  Yet The Lord of the Rings saga is one of the most enduring works in the English language, and though, perhaps, not in the same league in terms of literary merit as Shakespeare and Dante, his work ranks alongside them in terms of readership, popularity and its legacy.

That said, here is something which I have just come across - a movie based on the appendix of The Lord of the Rings, made in 2008.  It is set in the Third Age and tells the story of the rise of Sauron and the birth of Aragorn, Born of Hope.  It is on the net and available there for free.  I am embedding the movie in this post, so if you have time you can watch it - I have not seen all of it myself, but I hope I will get time later.  So something to tide us over until The Hobbit (Part 1) comes out at Christmas.