Theologian. Tolkien scholar. PhD on The Lord of the Rings and Post-Christianity from the University of Glasgow. Dad. He/him. All views my own.
Blog: queerandback.substack.com
Contact: t.emanuel.1(at)research.gla.ac.uk
Tom Emanuel
I'd put it even more strongly in fact - a central theme of LOTR is that the world as it is *must* pass away, sad though that is, in order to give room for the new to come and the humble to be exalted. Galadriel & Gandalf must go *so that* Aragorn and the hobbits may come into their place.
And a good part of the reason Denethor is Like This is 1. he wasn't King and resented it 2. He thought he could handle the Palantir and instead was twisted by Sauron's propaganda.
I find LotR's vision of reality—one in which all things must pass and no fairy-story happy ending can paper over grief—truer to life than almost any version of Christianity I know. That a primary-world religion feels less true than a work of secondary-world fiction should give believers pause.
In my thesis I write that LotR might well be a greater influence on my faith than the Bible. I believed in Middle-earth long before I believed in Christianity, and I never would have converted as an adult had it not been for Tolkien teaching me what it meant to live inside a Great Tale.
Interviewing LotR fans, I was deeply moved by how it passes l'ador vador (from generation to generation). Friends lend their dog-eared copies to their friends. Parents read it aloud to their children. It's more than a book: it's a myth that connects us to the people we love, the people who love us.
My father was raised Catholic in the days before Vatican II. He also read The Lord of the Rings in paperback in 1965 when he was 15 years old. He didn't feel impelled to pass on his birth religion, but he made damned sure that I read LotR as soon as I was old enough to understand it (10).
And Tolkien is such a great writer, he can make you cry at the echo of the Music in "the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth," even if you never read the Ainulindalë.
What makes LotR hit like a Howitzer shell to the gut is not the reader's knowledge of the background mythology. It's their knowledge that it is gone forever. As Douglass Parker wrote in 1957, "Tolkien’s whole marvelous, intricate structure has been reared to be destroyed, that we may regret it."
In which Denethor articulates the platform of the modern Republican Party: either freeze history or burn it to ashes.
Tolkien is no progressive in disguise, but he knows that whether you like the changes it has wrought or not, you cannot arrest the passage of time.
A conservative may be someone who stands athwart history yelling "Stop!" but Tolkien is too stubbornly realistic to entertain such an empty fantasy.
Suzannah Rowntree
Tom Emanuel
Tolkien is no progressive in disguise, but he knows that whether you like the changes it has wrought or not, you cannot arrest the passage of time.
A conservative may be someone who stands athwart history yelling "Stop!" but Tolkien is too stubbornly realistic to entertain such an empty fantasy.
