The Lord of the Rings and the Moral Imagination

On a cold night in December of 2001, my fifth-grade son Will and I drove the hour from our home in Jacksonville, NC to Wilmington to see the premier of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first of three movies made from JRR Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. The film was fantastic and even though we didn’t get home until 4:00am the next morning (I’m pretty sure I fell asleep several times on the way back), it was an evening that neither of us will ever forget. When the other two films in the series were released over the next two years—”The Two Towers” in 2002 and “The Return of the King” in 2003—we made it a point to be in the audience at their premiers, too.

Will’s interest in The Lord of the Rings had begun a couple of years earlier as a third-grader, when I asked him what book he’d like for me to read to him. We read most nights before he went to bed and had recently finished one book. He turned the question back to me. “What do you think we should read?”

I was quick to answer: “The Lord of the Rings.”

“What’s it about?” he asked.

I said, “A creature called a hobbit walks a long way through a place called Middle-earth and throws a magic ring into a volcano.”

“Cool,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Pubs, swords, magicians, battles, walking trees, flying pterodactyls that demons ride on, evil creatures called orcs that cut off people’s heads and throw them over city walls, a king who wins back his kingdom and elves that sail into the sunrise and live forever. Stuff like that.”

“Let’s do it,” he said.

It took a year to read all three volumes, and we finally got through the last one toward the end of the school year. After taking a break for the summer we got back to reading as he began fourth grade. “What do you want to read now that we’ve finished all three books in The Lord of the Rings?” I asked him. He didn’t hesitate. “Let’s read them again,” he said. “Let’s do it,” I said. So through the school year we read the series through a second time, finishing it in the fall of his fifth-grade year, just in time for the release of “The Fellowship of the Ring” movie and our midnight adventure.

I knew Will would love the books because I had long loved them. I was in the sixth grade when I first discovered The Lord of the Rings and still have vivid memories of lying in my upper bunk at night while my brother slept in the bunk below and reading through the series just as Will and I read through them thirty-five years later. The characters, events and story lines impressed themselves on my mind and heart in the same way.

Later, I wrote my high school senior paper on Rohan, the kingdom of horse lords that in a spectacular cavalry charge deliver Minas Tirith from the armies of Mordor. By the way , the Ride of the Rohirrim—as Tolkien calls the charge in his books—is based on real history and follows almost exactly the Polish calvary charge in 1683 at the battle of the Gates of Vienna that lifted the Ottoman siege and saved Western Europe from being conquered by Islam.

When I went off to college and later to seminary, I took along my tattered paper-back copies of all three books and would often read sections or even the entire series. Today, all three books are on my Kindle, and I’m re-reading them yet again. I’ve lost count how many times this makes, but the characters never grow stale and the story never grows old:

• The courage of Frodo, the unassuming hobbit who agrees to carry the ring of power to the evil empire of Mordor and cast it into a volcano in order to destroy it.

• The power and wisdom of Gandalf, Frodo’s magician mentor who was killed in defense of his friends but later returns to life.

• The whimsical Tom Bombadil, a nature sprite but with a mysterious depth, who serves no narrative purpose except that the books would be less without him. “The Fellowship of the Ring” film leaves Bombadil out, a decision that I’m still angry about.

• The other-wordly beauty and mystery of the elves, especially revealed in their queen Galadriel.

• The tragic figure of Gollum, a hobbit-like figure ruined by evil who yet plays a critical role in the final victory.

• The return of King Aragorn and the restoration of order to a chaotic world.

• The battles scenes so filled with drama and bravery that you feel as if you’re there. Helm’s Deep. Minas Tirith and the Battle of the Pelennor. And the last battle where when it seems that all is lost until Frodo destroys the ring and with it the armies that its power sustained.

• The final scene of Frodo sailing into the the elven heaven.

But the real accomplishment of The Lord of the Rings for me as a child and as an adult is the world that Tolkien creates. It’s a mythic world, of course, filled with forces and figures not at all like my own world. Yet, it’s a world that I recognize because it reflects the same moral struggles as my world. It has the same vices of betrayal, lying, hate, misuse of power and murder. It has the same virtues of honor, courage, loyalty, honesty and love. And it calls me and everyone else who visits it to the same choices faced by the figures in the books. The books’ real appeal—for me and for uncounted numbers of others in the sixty years since it was published—is to the moral imagination.

Classical philosophy has three transcendental values that are vital for understanding the moral imagination. First described by the ancient Greek philosophers and later developed by Christian theologians, the three transcendentals are the True, the Good and the Beautiful. The True is that which defines reality; the Good is that which fulfills its purpose; and the Beautiful is that which is lovely. The three are called “transcendental” because they’re over and above all lesser virtues and gather to themselves the best of human ideals. Christian theology takes the definition further because it understands that the three transcendentals are a reflection of God’s image in the human soul, as the Bible says in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image.” We intuitively recognize those things that are true, good and beautiful because the divine image within us leads us to them.

Tolkien, a devout Catholic, built his literary world on a moral order that’s in turn based on the enduring truths of the Christian faith. That’s why, I think, his vision is so compelling and his story so engaging. At heart, The Lord of the Rings deals with the timeless choices between good and evil, grace and redemption, hope and despair. In other words, the very themes that inform our own moral imaginations.

Not everyone believes that The Lord of the Rings is suitable for children. Some say it’s too violent. Others think it’s too scary. And then there are those who believe it has too strong a focus on darkness and evil and could tilt a child’s interest toward the demonic. I don’t think that’s the case at all. In fact, I believe the opposite is true and The Lord of the Rings and other children’s books like it are much more important than we think for doing one thing that’s critically important in the mind and heart of children. They teach children how to be good adults.

In his book, Story: The Art of Literature, CS Lewis (a close friend to Tolkien during their Oxford days), writes in the essay, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” (you can read the whole essay here) that:

“Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense…. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.”

Will is grown now. He’s a devout believer, a husband, a dad, an Army officer. An accomplished man in every respect—in fact, he’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known (full disclosure: I think the same of his sister). He’s also introducing his own children to The Lord of the Rings, not because of some blind imitation of his own upbringing so much as his experience with how it helped form his own moral imagination and instilled within him a sense of wonder, beauty and truth. I wouldn’t presume to speak for him but it seems to me that he’s learned how many of the most important things in life can be gained from the story of Frodo and the ring of power.

That’s a truth not just for children but for all of us.