Tolkien and Hobbits: Fighting for the Good Amid Darkness
“Above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell.”
—Sam’s song in Mordor, Return of the King, JRR Tolkien
On this day in 1892, philologist and writer JRR Tolkien was born. His epic The Lord of the Rings and its connected books are masterful classics of fantasy, complete with complex histories, languages, and geographies, but they are also moral tales that expose the sins and failures of modernity.
Tolkien fought in WWI and lived through the rise of Nazism, Communism, fascism, and modern jihad. He converted to Catholicism in an era when Judeo-Christian religion and morality were increasingly attacked and despised. He glorified the heritage of Western civilization as the West grew self-indulgent, corrupt, weak, and self-loathing. Tolkien beheld all the institutions and truths which he loved most foundering. And so his fantasies were not only entertaining literature, they were clarion calls to action — to heroism.
As the men of the West had to stand up to Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, so the West must now rise up with the virtues of the past and hope for the future against the Satanic ideologies of our day. As Tolkien’s purest hero Sam Gamgee urged Frodo while they strove to destroy the One Ring:
“We shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on…
Though here at journey’s end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell.”