AUTHOR OF 'THE RINGS'

...AUTHOR OF 'THE RINGS' Tolkien's Catholic journey Andrew Krivah In 1958, J. R. R. Tolkien was approached by Forrest Ackerman and an American film company to consider a screen adaptation of his novel, The Lord of the Rings...

...But by a 'grace,'" Tolkien wrote later of Frodo's "apostasy," "that last betrayal was at a precise juncture when the final evil deed was the most beneficial thing any one could have done for Frodo...

...One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, / One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them...

...Mere change as such," Tolkien wrote, again to Michael Straight, "is not represented as 'evil': it is the unfolding of the story and to refuse this is of course against the design of God...

...By cosmological I mean, literally, "the order" of a universe...

...Zimmerman envisioned an animated production of The Lord of the Rings, and recast the story as a simplistic, childish fantasy...

...He is two persons on a single journey...

...one can only accept the outcome...

...All the characters are more properly created in and bound to a world that is cosmologically-not allegorically-informed by the Catholicism that Tolkien says "nourished me and taught me all the little that I know...

...At the heart of the tale, however, there remains the journey: classical in its design, and Christian in its unfolding...

...The answer becomes not knowing, but hoping...

...They are works in which conflict presses a hero onto an urgent path...

...I can't be [the Fellowship's] ring bearer...

...Considering Tolkien's insistence that we not lose sight of the fact that the odyssey of the ring bearers is the heart of the tale, The Lord of the Rings is at its core a story driven by the classical motif and Christian tradition of the journey, the completion of which brings a character or characters to a change of heart, and to a deeper understanding of God's salvific activity in the world...

...Hobbits are diminutive, good-natured, simple folk, who first made their appearance in Tolkien's 1937 novel, The Hob-bit...

...That is to say, while several histories separate the world in which men and elves fought ores and uruk-hai from the world in which Tolkien lost many of his best friends in the trenches of World War I, all share a common creator who ordered the universe according to the Good...

...And therein lies the shift to a journey of the heart: free will can be either salvific or destructive, depending on the direction in which one's heart is turned...

...For the ring symbolizes the very opposite of "the ennoblement of the humble...

...It was Augustine who said that God would rather we be lost than take away the gift of free will...

...For all he could know at that moment," tive, fate is always larger than any individual...

...He explained in his letter to Michael Straight: "The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write...

...Luke, Augustine's Confessions, and Dante's Divine Comedy...

...In the Christian journey narrative, however, free will, God's greatest gift, displaces the fate of the ancients and gives humans more power over their personal destinies...

...Who of all the wise could have foreseen it...

...No one in The Lord of the Rings knows "the way...

...In the end, there is salvation, both for Middle-earth in its battle against Sauron, and for Frodo, whose quest to destroy the ring is complete...

...Frodo is left a victor who can "never enjoy victory," as Tolkien explains...

...Here the journey loses neither its emphasis on conflict nor its sense of urgency and departure, but the path-either of return, or no return- leads through a spiritual as well as a geographical landscape...

...Yes, that was the name...

...Frodo, having chosen, sets out to find the way, which becomes more properly a constant discernment of "ways...

...The need to journey, the need to set out and return, or to set out and begin anew, becomes one of the great bridges between classical and Christian literature, a bridge a Catholic writer in the 1930s might have found useful as he looked back to the outcome of the First World War, and the gathering clouds of what would become the Second...

...For Dante in the Divine Comedy, the poet is the man lost midway in life in the tangled forests of sin, his hope nearly "abandoned," except for the guide who leads him through the tortures of hell so that he may redirect his vision to the beauties of paradise...

...One cannot miss the relationship of The Lord of the Rings to narratives that cast those who are destined to make history-altering journeys headlong into their fate...

...When Frodo runs away from the Fellowship in an attempt to face the danger alone, Sam cannot be shaken...

...From the tradition of the Christian narrative, The Lord of the Rings absorbs the elements of the journey of the heart...

...It involves, Tolkien wrote in a 1956 letter to Michael Straight, editor of the New Republic, "the history and development of the individual (something out of which he can get good, ultimate good, for himself, or fail to do so), and the history of the world (which depends on his action for its own sake...

...Gollum is unlike anything anyone has ever seen or wants to become, and yet he mirrors what it means to bear the ring for any amount of time, something all in the ring's path both hate and desire: to become a slave under the deception of its power...

...In the epilogue of Tolkien's story, there is still much destruction from which the earth will never recover, giving perhaps a glimpse of Tolkien's sense of our world after the slaughter of the last century's two wars...

...Placed in the sacrificial position toward which he has journeyed throughout the story, Frodo fails to throw the ring into the Cracks of Mount Doom, a victim finally of the ring's "lure to power...

...This archetypal narrative form allows one to take "an earlier matter," Tolkien wrote, and put it to new use...

...I can't help it," Sam says to himself...

...I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well," Sam says...

...It is not possible to separate Sam from Frodo, just as the longing for home can never really be separated from the journey...

...Frodo...

...There are no codes to be unlocked that reveal a corresponding narrative...

...In a lost past, a god-like being named Sauron, "a lieutenant of the Prime Dark Lord," fashioned a ring that held the power to draw together all the races of the earth and rule them under a yoke of slavery...

...In all of this, the one aspect of Tolkien interest that has received the most attention since the publication of The Lord of the Rings is religion...

...Dismissing the method of allegory that his friend and colleague, C. S. Lewis, undertook in the Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien worked to cut out "practically all references to anything like 'religion,' to cults or practices, in the imaginary world" of Middle-earth...

...As Gollum, he is bent on getting back the one ring that the hobbit took from him, his "precious," simply because it is the ring that has possessed him for so long...

...The story of Luke's Gospel is Jesus' journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, the journey from birth to death and from crucifixion to Resurrection...

...The storyline became nothing more than flat scenes of magic, "screams, and rather meaningless slashings...

...Suggestive though they are, the wizard Gan-dalf's return from the dead is not a "resurrection," the elf Lady Galadriel is not the Virgin Mary...

...Tolkien did not set out to be an apologist...

...Yet, where it failed most, Tolkien insisted, was in Zimmerman's lack of desire-or perhaps inability-"to represent the heart of the tale: the journey of the ring bearers...

...As a storyteller, Tolkien always resists the confines of allegory...

...Tolkien still fashioned his classical and Christian journey narrative into a story in which the "hero"-such as he is- acts ultimately for the "'salvation' of the world," and in doing so achieves his own salvation...

...But Tolkien needed the money, so he agreed to look at Morton Grady Zimmerman's movie synopsis...

...On a variety of levels, this informs the religious landscape of The Lord of the Rings...

...Lost in the battles for Middle-earth that ensued, the ring found its way to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, his home in the Shire, and from there to his nephew, Frodo...

...Tolkien was a philologist, and he wrote that it was word forms and origins that appealed to his heart as well as his head...

...Andrew Krivak is a writer living in Cambridge, England...

...He leaves them behind grief-stricken and certain that they have set out in vain...

...Nearly a million Web sites are dedicated to Tolkien and his mythic world...

...It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them...

...Here I must warn anyone who does not know the ending of the story to skip this paragraph...

...Gandalf dies battling a mysterious Balrog, defending from certain death the briefly intact Fellowship journeying with Frodo and the ring...

...Then there is Gollum, who was once called Smeagol, the character from whom Bilbo Baggins first received the ring in The Hobbit...

...Eru Iluvatar, the name given to the "immensely remote" "One" by those who understood his presence during the time of Middle-earth, is the same God, in Tolkien's fictive sweep of time, of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses...

...In a classical journey narrawho believes that he or she does is doomed to fail...

...His journey has meant that he must, with Bilbo, travel to the West with the immortal elves, leaving forever Middle-earth, for their original home in the hobbits' Shire is no longer a place to which they can return to live out their days in peace...

...The primary journey then makes clear the way for others who, out of their own free will, act to assist Frodo, and in this way find burdens and journeys of their own...

...Tolkien often went to great lengths- especially in his letters-to explain how the novel "is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work...

...Nothing remains as it was...

...Tolkien wrote a long, scathing letter to Ackerman, dismissing the "careless" and "reckless" film treatment for showing "no evident signs of any appreciation of what [the book] is all about...

...The structure of the narrative is driven not by adherence to a pattern, Tolkien insisted, but by "hobbito-centric" acts-a thwarting of the wise and powerful-making it "primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble...

...Yet, as Smeagol, a spark of Gollum's former self, he is another person searching for an unlikely glimpse of a world in which there are mercy and hope, both traits he comes to recognize in Frodo...

...My place is by Mr...

...And in fact Frodo cannot complete his journey without Sam...

...This falls to the unlikely yet seemingly destined ring bearer, Frodo, along with his dutiful gardener, Samwise Gamgee...

...I have been too deeply hurt," Frodo says...

...But where the Rings trilogy remains ultimately a religious work-the current movie as well as the book-is on the ground of Middle-earth, and in the characters who travel across it...

...He is the only ring bearer who does not fall into temptation, and the only ring bearer who is allowed to return home...

...Consider, for instance, the Gospel of St...

...His death, though, becomes a transformation of his person from Gandalf the Grey to Gandalf the White, a being whose power has increased because he has sacrificed and passed from death to life...

...Tolkien wasn't convinced that Hollywood would understand the complexity of his story about a mythological time when humans shared the earth with hobbits, elves, and dwarves, and how the fate of these races would come down to the success or failure of a journey to destroy a ring that gave limitless power to its bearer...

...Environment, character, mood, time-frame-these and other elements were "entirely rewritten...

...When Sam, uncertain whether Frodo is dead in the lair of the spider Shelob, must decide whether to continue as the new ring bearer, or fight to the end for his master, Sam chooses the latter...

...The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Greek tragedies, Beowulf...

...This month's release of The Return of the King, the final chapter in Jackson's version of the Rings trilogy, will raise the movie The Lord of the Rings to the cinematic and cultural equivalent of Star Wars and The Godfather...

...His desire and destiny is both to resist and assist the ring bearers...

...It is the temptation of power that, in the end, knows only how to destroy...

...That becomes the final phase of the journey, the section Tolkien called "Many Partings...

...Yet, because he has listened throughout to the counsel of Gandalf "not to strike without need," Frodo's pity for Gollum, and Gollum's jealousy of Sam's loyalty to Frodo, has meant that Gollum remains alive and determined to have the ring...

...All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us...

...For, beneath the phan-tasmagorical history, characters, and language that make up The Lord of the Rings, the story itself is nothing short of an epic journey narrative, in which a single path must be taken at great personal cost for the sake of a greater good...

...In the Confessions, Augustine's journey becomes the path of the heart that is "restless until it rests in God...

...Although a twentieth-century British novel that rose out of the innovative literary landscape of postwar Europe, The Lord of the Rings is influenced more by ancient and medieval texts- Homer, Virgil, and Celtic and Anglo-Saxon mythologies-than by modern English literature...

...It is fascinating stuff and required reading if you're a die-hard Tolkien fan...

...Several characters in The Lord of the Rings act Christ-like, but Middle-earth is a pre-Christ age...

...But the outcome is a salvific victory achieved by an essentially evil desire...

...The hero must, then, either journey to return to the place he left, as did Odysseus, or reestablish, after a decisive battle, a new home in a new age, like Aeneas...

...Even Sam, who wanted only to see home again, sees it through the eyes of a hobbit who has seen the world...

...This is the hour of the Shire-folk," the elf king Elrond proclaims, giving voice to Tolkien's hobbito-centrism, "when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the great...

...Yet, this does not happen without the potential for destruction remaining bound up in this final, greatest act...

...While there is a religious element to The Lord of the Rings, it is "absorbed," he wrote, "in the story and the symbolism," leaving the imaginary characters and lands to stand or fall on their own...

...The burden-what Tolkien understood as "suffering and endurance beyond the normal"-becomes too much for Frodo...

...So Frodo must see that the journey rises not out of a destiny but out of a desire to act freely according to what is given, even though, as he says, "I do not know the way...

...The ring has come to him, and it may very well have meant, by a will of its own, to do just that...

...As a result, a new industry of critical studies churns out book after book in the disciplines of philosophy, ethics, linguistics, environmentalism, and technology, just to name a few, each poring over the vast literary territory Tolkien mapped as a writer...

...Most of this cosmology Tolkien worked out in The Silmar-illion, an explanatory prequel that he wrote after The Lord of the Rings...

...The wizard Gandalf is determined to help, yet he finds that he has been called to a journey within the journey, for a purpose he does not understand until he submits to its greater authority...

...And it has seemingly fallen to the gentle hobbits because it is a time in which mercy must replace wrath, and the lowly rise to the powerful...

...Here I am only concerned with death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of man, and with hope without guarantees...

...Since the 2001 release of director Peter Jackson's unar-guably successful film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, interest in Tolkien has broadened beyond the cult status he enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s...

...What makes The Lord of the Rings religious without being about religion is Tolkien's realigning of the classical and the Christian journey in a way that is constantly shifting the focus from the story's design and purpose to the unfolding of characters' decisions and actions, then back again...

...Gandalf's power then becomes the power to summon strength in others, those whose burden it becomes to do physical battle for Middle-earth...

...I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me...

...It is plain that we were meant to go together," Frodo realizes...

...These are the "large scale" works that Tolkien admitted he wanted The Lord of the Rings to emulate...

...Frodo's burden-both the ring and the journey-is not fated so much as it is chosen...

...When Frodo expresses his wish to Gandalf that the war over the ring "need not have happened in my time," Gandalf, a being Tolkien describes as an "angelic" power incarnate on the physical plane who is sent to train, advise, and instruct those threatened by Sauron, reminds Frodo that such a wish is not his to exercise...

...Sam and Frodo agree never to speak of what occurred that final moment on Mount Doom...

...For those unfamiliar with The Lord of the Rings, the key characters and conflict can be laid out simply enough...

...Samwise Gamgee's journey is to become the unquestioning companion of Frodo, in spite of the fact that Sam epitomizes a hobbit's love for staying at home...

...Smeagol might have once loved Frodo for his mercy, but it is Gollum now who bites off the finger on which Frodo has placed the ring, then falls into the fires of Mount Doom clutching his "precious" to the end...

...By a situation created by his 'forgiveness,' he was saved himself...

...One of the persistent questions in The Lord of the Rings is how does one know the way...

...Still, he gave up his "personal hope of success" for the life of the others, seeing that it had to be done at the moment...

...unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision," he wrote to Robert Murray, SJ, in 1953...

...Tolkien took his models, as writers often do, "from such 'life' as I know...

...Anyone Tolkien wrote of Gandalf, "he was the only person who could direct the resistance to Sauron successfully...

...Jackson has proved that Tolkien's vision of a "Middle-earth"- this earth, but during a time between the history of creation and the history humans have recorded-can be brought to life on screen as well as the page...

...I was Gandalf," he tells the remaining, hobbitless members of the now broken Fellowship- the man Aragorn, Legolas the elf, and Gimli the dwarf- when they reunite in The Two Towers, not to journey but to do battle as warriors...

...Yet, with the exhausted and nearly lifeless Frodo weighing no more than "a hobbit-child pig-a-back," Sam, does become the ring bearer, carrying Frodo to the final stage of his task...

...It is Gollum who takes his last chance to seize the ring at the moment of Frodo's downfall...

...When it is discovered that Sauron knows where the ring is and that he has sent his armies to reclaim it, the task becomes to journey to a land called Mordor and destroy the ring in the Cracks of Mount Doom, where it was fashioned...