If the imaginative stories of fantasy and religion are similar, in that they involve human this. In the unsettled post-World War years, month's magazine and together at our conference: do children's story gave the reassurance of security, as stories of religious faith help us escape from the with the omnipotent nanny, Mary Poppins, or flight world or enable us to engage with it? from reality, as in the passage from a council estate to Tom’s Midnight Garden, set around the Paul Overend is the new magazine editor, taking over from splendid stately home. Both stories reflect an ideal David Boulton 3 SOF 52 / March 2002 Right: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Below: Bag End, Hobbiton and the Shire of Middle Earth DAVID BOULTON reflects on The Lord of the Rings, taking issue with Don Cupitt's warning that it's time to make a clean break with fantasy one for the I am not the most detached, objective commentator when it comes to writing about The Lord of the Rings. I was introduced to the world of Tolkien's Middle Earth in the fifties, when my Crusader bible-class leader was talking less about Jesus than about Frodo Baggins, Gandalf, Gollum and the Balrog. Intrigued, I made myself the proud owner of the first-edition set of three hardbacks - the ones with magical black and red maps on folded rice-paper. I was hooked on enchantment.
When I married, we made the Ring trilogy our first book at bedtime. It took a year to read, during which we live by stories. in stories. shared our bed with Aragorn and Arwen, or, on bad nights, with Shelob. Some years later, I was reading it again to our two daughters. I came back to it when the BBC's 26-part radio serial hit the air in the eighties, and now it's our book at bedtime again. So you might say I'm lost to the Dark Lord on his dark throne, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
It was with some apprehension that I went to see the first of the three films, The Fellowship of the Ring. It had long been worked over by my imagination, but now my imagination was to be worked over by Peter Jackson's.
Could his Black Riders match mine? Could Ian Holm be Bilbo, or Gandalf speak with Ian McKellen's voice?
Could his Rivendell be the heaven and his Mordor the hell that Tolkien 's text, maps and runes had made them for me?
The short answer is that Jackson succeeds brilliantly.
Indeed, the film version improves on the book in some e make sense of life through stories. Our values are embodied respects, such as its wise omission of the fey and folksy songs. And the New Zealand settings are magical - as the tourist industry has already noticed.
Only if you live on neither Middle Earth nor Planet Earth will you be ignorant of the story: the Dark Lord Sauron seeks the one ring that will enable him to spread his evil power over the whole world; the ring is lost, but Bilbo finds it and entrusts it to the keeping of his nephew Frodo; only if the ring can be thrown into the Crack of Doom, guarded by Sauron's apparatus: of evil, can its power be broken and the evil be conquered; and with his tiny fellowship of hobbits and friends, led by the wizard Gandalf, Frodo makes the epic journey against impossible odds to save the world from death and destruction.
The story has been interpreted as allegory, with the ring itself being seen as the symbol of every conceivable manifestation of evil, from the threat of Nazism to the march of modernity - which Tolkien, as a conservative Catholic, feared and loathed. In the late fifties my generation linked the ring with a contemporary symbol of evil: nuclear weapons. We marched to Aldermaston as to Mordor, merging two potent mythologies when we sang "Don't you hear the H-bomb's thunder Echo like the crack of doom...?" But Tolkien was insistent that his work was not an allegory, and particularly not a gloss on the Christian version of Good versus Evil. He acknowledged that Gandalf, who lays down his life for his friends, descends into the bottomless pit of Moria, then rises again, transfigured, has certain similarities to Christ, and he defended this as not inconsistent with Catholicism. But, he insisted, "I have not put in, or have cut out, practically SOF 52 / March 2002 SOF 52 / March 2002 religi ostalgic fo our appropria story telling. s understand the supernaturali st frameworks and stories of on to be fictions are not being ra lost past, but imaginative in tion of a rich heritage of require that Carmen keep her legs crossed?
The other objection is that the Ring is fantasy - and fantasy is whimsical, childish, escapist. To my surprise, Don Cupitt seemed to endorse this view in his Guardian "Face to Faith" column last month, when he dismissed the works of Tolkien, Lewis and Pullman as "crazy" because they "invoke all the old supernatural apparatus" and fail to appreciate that the old sacred and prescientific universe is a thing of the past. He argued that our affection for fantasy is no more than an expression of nostalgia for the supernatural, which our heads left behind when we grew up, but our hearts obstinately cling to. I look forward to hearing how Don defends this position at our conference on "Fantasy and Faith"!
What is surprising is that this view of fantasy seems to contradict everything Don has been telling us over the past few years. We live by stories. We make sense of life through stories. Our values are embodied in stories. The Gilgamesh epics, the Odyssey, the Hindu Mahabharata, the Hebrew story of the making of a people and the Christian one of the Word made flesh... These are our stories: these are our songs.
What is fantasy if not all references to anything like 'religion’...The religious element is absorbed into the story". He was content to leave moralistic preachy stuff to his friend CS Lewis. The Ring trilogy was an epic story, no more, no less. It was fantasy on a scale to rival that of Homer.
Those who can't abide the Ring usually ascribe their distaste to one of two reasons. The first simply finds the story reactionary, if not racist and sexist to boot.
The goodies are all white, the baddies all black.
Females are rarely seen or heard. When they are, their role is to look radiant, to sing Tolkien's soppiest songs, and stand by their man (or elf, or whatever): it is impossible to imagine any of them having sex! These objections seem to me trivial: rather like criticising Beowulf for having too much violence, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice for picking on Jews, or the Bible for its racist belief in a particular tribe as God's chosen people and sexist belief that a half of humanity is derived from the spare rib of the other. Certainly, these things are offensive. But please God it will never be the function of art to be politically /morally correct.
Would we have Don Giovanni a chaste monk, or mean to be human if not to imagine, to fantasise? Fantasy is art, and art is what makes us only a little lower than the angels (themselves a splendid product of fantasy!). My Shorter English Dictionary on Historical Principles gives a range of definitions of fantasy that fall into two types, narrow and broad. The narrow definitions emphasise illusion, caprice, whim, but the broader ones emphasise "imagination... the process, the faculty or the result of forming representations of things not actually present".
Ah, I hear, but the Lord of the Rings is only secondhand fantasy, a contrived epic, cobbled together from Norse sagas, Anglo-Saxon chronicles, Celtic dreams, and Wagnerian rehashes of these. Who is the Balrog if not Beowulf's Grendel, who Gandalf if not the archetypal saviour, or Frodo if not a miniature Siegfried with hairy toes? But of course Tolkien's epic is "contrived"! So too is every epic, every work of art and imagination. A committee calling itself Moses contrived the Pentateuch; another called David contrived the Psalms. Contriving is what it's all about! "Contrive: to make, create, imagine; to devise with ingenuity and cleverness; to bring to pass".
Fantasy, imagination, makebelieve, and poetry: they are of one family. And if theology too is poetry, it is part of the same kith and kin. Fantasies, like Tolkien's, play with hobbits, orcs, elves and dwarves: the poetry we call theology plays with gods and angels, devils and demons. Both conjure up imagined beings to play out human roles. Both it that eis continue to feel provide a language by which we can say something about the human condition, which cannot ligious view of the world? Eve Id eae and whose better on easily or adequately be said in plain everyday speech.
Fantasy and theology are both fictions. "Theology itself is a kind of fiction that creates imaginative variations on what history offers as real in order to bespeak the mystery beneath the real". So writes Peter Hodgson in Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot. The mystery beneath the real is approached by fictive theology "in terms of how redemptive transformations come about in 1 se care “clinging to. ordinary life". He reminds us that fiction derives from the Latin verb "fingere", to form, imagine or invent. It is in this vital sense that theology, art and fantasy are one: In Hodgson's words, they all "entail a shaping, construing, configuring of the real in imaginative as opposed to empirical-descriptive modalities. They 'make things up’, but they do so for purposes of illuminating reality, not escaping from it”.
Which is why it is so hard to see why Don commends the stories of theology, but warns us against the stories of fantasy. Such selectivity would seem to leave us with a somewhat impoverished mindscape: gods but no goblins, holy ghosts but no ringwraiths, angels but no hobbits - and the fancies of religions, but not those of Homer, Shakespeare, Asimov or Tolkien. The logic of Don's position is that we should make a "clean break" with all fantasy-fictions. I prefer his earlier view: that, provided we clearly understand that our fantasies ARE fictions, that the supernatural is itself a human fancy, the old stories siill have much to tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit.
No one reading the Ring books or seeing the film supposes their supernaturalist framework is anything but a fiction. Those of us who understand the supernaturalist frameworks and stories of religion to be fictions are not being nostalgic for a lost past, but imaginative in our appropriation of a rich heritage of story telling.
It would be absurdly simplistic to boil down Tolkien's rich epic to a one-paragraph sound-byte, but if I were to attempt a summary of what The Lord of the Rings says to me, I would note that there is no objective God in Middle Earth (or even above it), no Lord of Light to match the Dark Lord. Sauron is the only lord, and he is the evil one. The ring is Sauron's magic instrument, and there is no countervailing instrument for good. The fellowship cannot call to the heavens for salvation, for they are empty. Frodo and his little band stand alone, pitting only their weakness, innocence, common sense, decency (and the odd bit of fancy magic) against the mighty armies and monsters of Mordor. Despite his death and resurrection, Gandalf is no God. And it is the very weakness and innocence of Frodo that marks him out as far less likely than the clever Gandalf, the wise Elrond, the aristocratic Aragorn or the mighty Boromir to succumb to the temptation to wield the all-corrupting ring for his own purposes.
What has to be done to overcome evil (the lust for absolute power that the ring signifies) has to be done by mere mortals, led by an innocent who has no ambition for himself, and who does it because he must, not out of obedience to anyone or Anyone. Not by raising a mighty army to match the Dark Lord's swarming orcs, nor by yielding to the deadly temptation of using Sauron’s ring against him, but by fellowship, courage, simplicity, integrity. The fellowship knows it is on its own: no saviour from on high delivers. Tolkien claimed to have cut religion out of the trilogy, but the human spirit - God in every man, hobbit, elf and dwarf - is the final victor at the Crack of Doom.