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Lord of the Rings: Christian Myth at Work
By Ali Asadullah 26/12/2001
"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." - J.R.R. Tolkein
A people are known by the stories they tell; and when comes the time those stories cease to be told, so disappear those unfortunate people. This is one of those simple yet harsh truths of humanity - societal preservation rests on the tip of the writer's pen. It is thus that the Holy Qur'an is such a miracle, because it issues forth from the pen (metaphorically speaking of course), of the only being worthy of worship, Allah (swt). And his promise in the Qur'an to preserve his book free from tampering and change for all time insures that Islam and the Muslim people will not be forgotten.
Muslims' cousins in faith, the Christians, feel much the same about the Bible. However, in addition to the Bible, various writers have gone to great lengths to perpetuate religious storytelling in both conventional and non-conventional manners. Two of the most prolific writers of the 20th century to contribute to the non-traditional propagation of Christian theology were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein.
Tolkein and Lewis, writing from the 1930s onwards, were contemporaries of one another and influenced one another a great deal. Lewis was unabashedly Christian and in later years wrote at some length about doctrinal and theological matters. He is, however, better known for his career as a fiction writer, the most notable of his books being the
Chronicles of Narnia series that includes the children's favorite, The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe.
In these fanciful, mythical tales, Lewis sought to create a messianic narrative that paralleled the Christian stories that so shaped his personal life.
Tolkein's works were never quite so obvious in their Christian myth-making. For this reason, the meanings of his books have been construed in any number of fashions by people looking to find some self-reflective truth in his writings. However, to minimize the role of Christianity in Tolkein, would be to misunderstand the central and core themes of his books.
Now that his Lord of the Rings trilogy has finally made it to the silver screen, Tolkein's themes are about to be accessed by a broader audience than he may have ever envisioned. Therefore, it is important to reiterate the religious basis of his work.
Many Muslims who have either heard of The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings will look at the latest effort to retell Tolkein's stories as nothing more than a cheap tool to advocate Sehr (sorcery and magic) - practices that are absolutely forbidden by Islam. But this knee-jerk aversion will no doubt be rooted in personal reactions to that other recent mythical movie release,
Harry Potter. However to equate Tolkein with J.K. Rowling would be like saying that Handel's
Messiah and Jingle Bells were of equal caliber, meaning, quality and intent.
Whereas Rowling wrote to entertain her son, Tolkein wrote to seriously comment on the human condition. Whereas Rowling was a struggling, single mother trying to simply survive, Tolkein was an Oxford graduate and professor who fought on the Western Front in World War I, lived through World War II and used all of these cataclysmic experiences to shape his work.
Now this is not to say that mothers are any less capable of being insightful writers, it is simply to point out that Tolkein and Rowling came from strikingly disparate backgrounds that influenced their work in a range of important ways. Additionally, it should be noted that from a Muslim perspective, both are just as capable of spreading
Kufr (disbelief in Islamic monotheism), and when placed in the wrong hands, books by both authors can indeed do that.
In fact, Tolkein has been credited as one of the main influences in contemporary interest in the indigenous religious practices of pre-Christian Europeans. It can be argued that without Tolkein, the 1980s craze over the role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons would never have come about. Even Rowling's success with her
Harry Potter series would not have been possible without Tolkein as her cultural antecedent.
But again, to understand Tolkein, one must return to his Christian roots. While at Oxford, he and C.S. Lewis would discuss at great length and critique each other's writing. They were also both members of a literary group that performed the same kinds of evaluations from the same Christian foundation. So at every step of the way, Tolkein had a Christian perspective guiding his writing. This is abundantly apparent in his finished works and even comes through in the recent movie release of
The Fellowship of the Ring.
In the film, as in the book, the story picks up in a small village of diminutive creatures called Hobbits. They inhabit a world called Middle Earth with other beings such as elves, humans, dwarves, goblins and a host of other creatures. The crux of the story is that a Hobbit by the name of Frodo has been chosen to destroy a magical ring of untold power before it falls into the evil clutches of its maker, the dark lord Sauron. Sauron's minions chase after Frodo and his band of eight companions, a rag-tag bunch comprising all the major races of the Middle Earth.
The critical issue facing this "fellowship" of travelers is that the ring, though very powerful, can never be controlled by the one who wears it. Those who try become obsessed with its power and inevitably fail in bringing their good intentions to fruition.
It is a story crafted for people facing the realities of modern warfare. It asks the very practical questions: If you had a weapon of ultimate strength, would you use it? And if you did, would it ultimately lead to the ruin of humankind?
The United States has asked and continues to ask itself these questions. The atomic bomb seemed such a useful tool in 1945; yet it led to 50 years of a Cold War in which M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) brought all of humanity to fear common annihilation. And even today the United States continues to fail the "Tolkein test", using depleted uranium weapons, 15,000 pound "daisy-cutter" bombs, economic sanctions and other weapons of mass destruction that seem expedient military solutions on the surface, but ultimately whittle away at the moral core of the nation.
Tolkein addressed all of this in the wake of "The War to End All Wars" and after seeing millions march to their deaths. And so he created a messianic myth in which the meek (the Hobbits) would save the world, and mankind would redeem itself through the pure heart of one man chosen to lead and resurrect the morals and values that had long been forgotten. This was the essence of Tolkein, and these themes can still be very powerful.
Unfortunately, because of the focus on magic and sorcery, Tolkein's books and the new movie adaptation cannot be recommended outright. However, as an intellectual study of how Christianity adapted to the 20th century and how the West tells its stories and thus strives to preserve itself, Tolkein can be an important learning tool.
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