Tolkien's Epic Genius: The Ring, Force, and Redemption
by Stuart Busenitz
Feast of St Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome; Holy Monday in East
Anno Domini 2020, April 13
TOLKIEN'S HEROIC
hobbits are celebrated and honored both by the powerful and mighty within the tale and by serious critics and casual readers outside the text. Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, and Aragorn all pause to acknowledge the goodness, truth, and beauty exemplified by Frodo, Sam, and their companions. Amidst the clash of good and evil, light and darkness, beauty and horror, the hobbits shine brighter and resist longer than the seemingly more powerful agents of good. Their virtue is constructed on generations of sacramental living wherein the simple pleasures and beauty of life are enjoyed in their proper portion and order resulting in a formidable buffer between the allure of absolute force presented in the possession of the one ring.
The magnetism of the one ring does not impact Frodo and his kinsman in the same manner as the ancient and powerful. For Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn, and Boromir, the ring presents a terrible temptation to enact their construct of goodness with sheer force and coercion, while the hobbits seem to be almost impervious to this enticement. Even when Sam is faced with a direct temptation from the ring, he envisions transforming the dark lands of Mordor into green gardens (cf. The Return of the King, Houghton Mifflin, 1955, p. 177). The simple goodness imbedded in Sam’s hobbit sense displays a reality rooted in sacramental living. Through his understanding of goodness in its proper order, Sam is able to resist the allure of the ring, thereby enabling him to enact his dream on a smaller scale when he helps restore the Shire with Galadriel’s gift. The smallness of hobbits, both in stature and power, allows them to navigate through the perils of darkest temptations that the mighty dare not tread. The humility grown in sacramental living—wherein the eating of simple food and excellent beer is more to be wished than the ambition of an emperor—allows darkness, ugliness, and evil to engulf its own destruction.
The contrast between Frodo and Gollum illustrates this point beautifully. Gollum is reduced by the ring’s power because he is attracted to the “shortcuts” to goodness. Gollum is able to steal and kill for his own gain using the power of the ring resulting in a life in cold, damp, darkness. Desiring life, Gollum receives prolonged life wherein the force of the ring reduces him to a pathetic material thing with a will so corrupted that the penetration of the slightest light causes him to writhe in anguish.
In her essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” Simone Weil defines force as “that x
that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing” (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 6). She goes on to clarify that force can create a thing out of a human body before death: “He is alive; he has a soul; and yet—he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this—a thing that has a soul…It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done” (ibid., p. 7). Gollum reflects this assertion most poignantly. Instead of sheer force destroying in a single blow, the force of the ring reduces Gollum over a long period of time resulting in a more tragic thing
than Weil’s description of Hector’s death (ibid.). In contrast, Frodo not only resists the absolute force of the ring, but he sees and attempts to redeem the miniscule part of Gollum’s true nature. Frodo’s humility, forged in simple hobbit living and tempered by bearing the ring’s burden, enables him to see beyond Gollum’s thingness. Frodo sees Sméagol and attempts to nurture the only real aspect left within the ancient and shriveled thing left by the force of the ring.
Unfortunately not all ends in bliss. The force of the ring is enabled to destroy itself, but not without leaving its scar. Frodo and Sam’s sacramental hobbit virtue enables them to enter the heart of Mount Doom, but Frodo’s will succumbs. Even within his failure, Frodo’s smallness, humility, and weakness—he gave sting to Sam—allows evil to envelope itself. Had Frodo been a mighty warrior like Aragorn or a demigod like Gandalf (or to a lesser degree, Galadriel) Gollum’s attempts to wrench the ring would have been futile. Frodo’s lack of sheer physical force enables the wiry Gollum to forcefully take the ring. This forceful action enacts Frodo’s curse resulting in Gollum destroying himself, the ring, and Sauron.
While many readers see Frodo’s failure as disappointing, Tolkien understood what Weil says about the scars of force (ibid. p. 28). The Lord of the Rings
has been falsely accused as escapist, but Tolkien’s reflection of the Greek epic’s struggle between destiny and the human soul is displayed clearly in Frodo’s permanently broken soul. Tolkien accurately displays the effects of misfortune on Frodo’s soul. While Sam redeems the Shire and marries Rosie, Frodo’s wounds never heal. His soul is marred. As Weil says, “Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, but it cannot spare him the wound” (ibid. p. 29). Ironically, while Weil pondered if the epic genius of the Iliad
would be rediscovered, Tolkien was in the process of writing a novel that would reflect both the genius of the Iliad
and the power of the Gospel.
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
In Memory of Warren Farha, 1955-2026
An Ode to St. Brendan the Voyager
