If so, does it make the work more or less enjoyable for you?
For that matter, do you even grant that the book* has Christian subtext?
I’ll link to this essay to help y’all prime your points.
Suggested by a PM from the marvelous Oy!.
*Yes, I wrote book, not books. The Middle-Earth trilogy is Hobbit-LoTR-Silmarillion, not Fellowship-Towers-King, and anyone who says otherwise is a filthy Etruscan. And certainly I don’t mean the movies. Peter Jackson is dead to me ever since his sadistically boring adaptation of The Lovely Bones and I mention his name only to have an excuse to spit.
Nope, definitely not in the way that Narnia does. No cite, but if it’s there, I don’t think it was intentional on his part. Didn’t he specifically deny Gandalf = Jesus that the movie seems to play up? I also seem to recall that one of the few things Tolkien copped to was that lembas was based upon the Host.
Wasn’t LotR comprised of 6 books or something like that?
One true god, has a plan, creates lesser celestials to help him implement it, some rebel (wanting to impose their own twist on things), with a major baddie “banished”, all the while mortals caught in the crossfire.
Nothing exactly makes that “Christian”, I guess, which is about being redeemed (or salvation offered) by Jesus, but still. I am not a church goer, so there’s my trap door.
I’ve said before that I prefer Silmarillion to LotR (though of course it’s much harder going), but I mentioned the latter rather than the former in the thread title on purpose. It’s easy to read LotR without seeing the subjtext, but not Sil.
Athena has asked that I forbear from pointless murders this week so I will pretend I didn’t read that.
There are commonalities to all myths, and since Tolkien is drawing from extant myths, it should be no surprise that there would be some superficial resemblances. I don’t see anything more than superficial in LotR, but I haven’t read the Silmarillion.
Only so much as the tribes and languages of Britannia (Gaelic, french, and Germanic) influenced Christianity. I think you operate out of the wrong temporality if you think the essence of LOTR is strictly Christian, or if you think these themes are strictly Christian… if antything it has more to do with Greek Myths than Christian Myths.
I never really did see a Christian subtext in Tolkien’s legendarium. A proto-monotheistic subtext, yes, with Eru as the single deity, but not Christian. Gandalf is not a Christ-analogue. He’s not the only servant sent to M-E (there were 5 Istari), and he’s not worshipped by anyone, nor does he even hint that the way to Eru is through him. And this is all in isolation…when you stand him side-by-side with Aslan, it’s even clearer that Tolkien didn’t mean him as a Christ-analogue as Lewis meant Aslan.
There ARE sections that seem to act as windows to the concept of God the Father, I’ll admit, but the idea of God as a protector/guide/loving-father isn’t explicitly Christian.
And no, I don’t see any strong christian subtext in LOTR. My overly-christian mother once tried to claim that Frodo was a christ figure, but that really doesn’t fit.
I saw it, but only because I was looking for it. And I was only looking for it because I had in my college days written a paper on C.S. Lewis, so I knew of Tolkien’s Catholicism and his relationship with Lewis and the other Inklings before I ever picked up The Hobbit. If you go expecting to find religious subtext you can usually find it even if unintended by the author.
FWIW I don’t think Tolkien was intentionally writing a Christian mythology; but because his faith was part of his identity it would be hard for it not to be reflected in his writing.
There’s almost no mention of religion in LOTR itself.
The Silmarillion’s creation myth borrows somewhat from Christian stories, particularly with Melkor=Lucifer, but the Valar themselves always reminded me of Greek mythology.
Manwe is Zeus, Ulmo is Poseidon, Mandos is Hades, Aule is Hephaestus, etc.
I don’t buy that there’s all that much Xtian subtext. I think the stuff like Aragorn healing people is a mythic trope borrowed, not code for Xtianity.
The good/evil dichotomy is Christian-like, but the other stuff is just drawing on a variety of myth tropes (some Xtian, some pagan) & mixing it with a war story, isn’t it?
It’s obviously not an explicit Christian story (since it’s set thousands of years before Christ would have been born), but after I read the Silmarilion I was of the understanding that Eru is specifically the God of Abraham, Melkor was Lucifer, Manwe was Michael, Mandos was Asrael, and so forth.
Bingo. In fact, as I said to Skald in the rant he is pleased to note in his OP, one of the reasons I so liked the LotR was because it managed to portray a set of societies almost entirely devoid of religions, apart from the Rohirric (Rohirrish?) ancestor honoring. Yes, the Elves went on to the Blessed Lands, but that was history, not religion. Plenty of morality, but you don’t need religion to have morals.
It was only upon watching the special features of the cinematic Things Which Shall Not Be Named that I found out that Tolkien was a devoted Catholic, and subsequently started hanging out in board threads about Tolkien and actually reading the Silmarrilion and stuff like that. And frankly, I was stunned. And disappointed.
To me, the destruction of the Ring is inherent in the Ring’s own evil, malice, and spite. It must serve its bearer, but it does so like The Monkey’s Paw. Except when worn by Sauron, it does its best to spite its bearer. It slips off at the worst possible time, for example, for Isildur (escaping a battle), for Gollum (slipping off in the caverns for Bilbo to find), for Bilbo (trying to escape from the goblins when he first finds it), or slips on at the worst time, like for Frodo in the Prancing Pony. Bilbo notices that it changes size, or at least seems to. It corrupts its bearers. It meddles with their senses. In fact, it’s a nasty bit of work.
Now, Gollum swears to obey the Master of the Ring, whom he acknowledges to be Frodo. Not only that, but Frodo, very definitely speaking as the Master of the Ring, tells him that if he does not obey, he shall be cast into the fire. Insofar as the Ring can think, what a hoot it must have had when Gollum seized the Ring next to a convenient pit of Fire! What a perfect way to spite its non-Sauron bearers! Except, oops. That particular bit of fire, not so great for the Ring. But that’s the way Evil works - it grabs the short term advantage, not looking at the long run or the big picture. Or at least so I thought Tolkien was saying. I still have trouble believing he wasn’t saying that, because it works so neatly.
But apparently Tolkien thought it was Grace. Grace, the unmerited, un-looked-for stroke of good fortune: the eucatastrophe. Also quite well describable as Caprice. A Whim, if you will, of the all-powerful. Apparently Tolkien found the idea of salvation through caprice, aka Grace, quite comforting. (It’s a little weird, btw, because Tolkien was a Catholic in a very much non-Protestant sense, and yet salvation by Grace rather than good works was one of the distinguishing characteristics separating the early Protestants from the Catholics. Not that Catholics didn’t have the idea of Grace, but they also thought good works were a factor. The Protestants were the ones saying that Grace alone was both necessary and sufficient.)
Anyway, my point here is that Tolkien apparently wrote a devoutly Catholic book and concealed it well enough that I missed it for close to 40 years (and would have missed it for the rest of my life if I hadn’t been told about it). Admittedly, I do not go looking for deep meaning and am rarely hit over the head by it unless it’s as in-your-face as Narnia. And I really would have been happier had I never found out. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the religious aspect had been overt. I can enjoy fantasy involving religious beliefs very much. It’s that I thought Middle-Earth was religion-free, and then it turns out it was every bit as Christian as Narnia that pisses me off.
I’m agreeing with so many people in this thread that I can’t do individual acknowledgements. In LOTR it’s so vague that you only have to see it if you’re determined to do so. The Silmarillion I didn’t bother to finish after the stuff about celestial harmonies and the weird, unnecessary, redundant notes provided by the evil guy. It was just too biblical to swallow.
But still not as bad as the first Narnia book with the Deus ex Jesus dropped in like a rotten meatball.
Yes, but I was an adult when I read it for the first time (I tried at 13 but got bogged down in TTT). By then I already knew about Tolkien’s beliefs. But I would certainly not call Gandalf a stand-in for Jesus. :dubious: And I wouldn’t say that LOTR is a direct allegory or anything; it’s just that there’s an atmosphere that reflects the author.
I’m not actually too bright about these things and did not ‘get’ the Narnia books until college, when someone pointed it out to me. My excuse is that I’d been reading them regularly since I was 6 or so and familiarity probably blinded me. Yep, that’s it.
It’s possible to argue that LOTR promotes Christian values, such as pity and self-sacrifice, as mentioned in the article, but it has no connection to Christian beliefs. In many ways it’s the opposite - where the supernatural and divine fail, the mortal succeed. And not even the mortal who is more touched by the supernatural, as it should be remembered that Frodo failed at the last, and it was only through “luck*” that Smeagol destroyed the ring. Sam, the lowliest and most humble mortal, was the only one that stayed true till the end.**
*Probably intended to be divine providence, but if so it’s in a way that is far more consistent with a pagan than Christian god.
**This part could be considered as a reflection on the Sermon on the Mount, if one were reaching.
