Frodo's Journey: Discover the Hidden Meaning of The Lord of the Rings

by Joseph Pearce

For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be.

Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.

For a Christian—and let’s not forget that Tolkien was a lifelong practicing Catholic—the world is a prison. In the words of the Salve Regina, one of the most popular Catholic prayers, the world is “a vale of tears” and its inhabitants, the “poor banished children of Eve,” are exiles awaiting their true home in heaven. For the Christian, the world is a valley of death, a land of shadows, or the shadowlands. The light that vanquishes the shadows is not of this world but has its source in our true home beyond it. One of the purposes of fairy stories is, therefore, to enable us to evade the shadows and catch a fleeting glimpse of the beauty and freedom that awaits us beyond the prison walls.

Another face of fairy stories is “the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.” The fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “may be used as a Mirour de l’Omme,” as something that shows us ourselves.12 It is this aspect of fairy stories, a major feature of Tolkien’s own fairy story, that displays most obviously and potently the allegorical dimension. In reading The Lord of the Rings, we are seeing a mirror of man; we are seeing ourselves, our neighbors, and the world in which we live reflected back to us in charming and sometimes alarming ways.

He placed at the very top of this scale the fact that he was “a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic.”1 Concerning the specifically Catholic dimension, he cited with apparent approval a critic who had seen the invocations to Elbereth and the characterization of Galadriel as “clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary.” He also referred to another critic who had seen lembas, the Elvish waybread, as signifying viaticum and the Eucharist. Commenting on the astuteness of these critics, Tolkien conceded that “far greater things may color the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story.”2

In the same letter, immediately after the discussion of the paramount importance of his own Christianity in the “scale of significance,” Tolkien described himself as being a hobbit, thereby establishing an applicable link between the diminutive heroes in his epic and the world and people beyond the epic:

For Tolkien, a deeply committed Christian, man is not simply homo sapiens, a label for humanity that was only invented in the early nineteenth century and has since become synonymous with what might be termed “Darwinian man”—man as simply a “naked ape,” the most intelligent of the primates. Countering such a view, Christianity sees man as a creature made in the image of God in a manner that distinguishes him radically from the rest of the animals. To reiterate Tolkien’s words, “[T]here is a part of man which is not ‘Nature’” and is, therefore, “wholly unsatisfied by it.”4 A better name for man is that given to him by the Greeks. The Greeks called man anthropos, which means “he who turns upward.” Unlike the other animals, which are governed by instinct and unable to do so, man looks up at the heavens, seeking a purpose and meaning beyond the mere creature comforts of everyday life.

Another understanding of man reflected back to us from Middle-earth is homo viator, the traveling man, the man on the journey of life, the man whose purpose is to get home by taking the adventure life throws at him. The archetypal homo viator in Western culture is perhaps Odysseus, but in Christian terms, the archetype is the medieval Everyman, who gets to heaven through his good works and the help of the Christian sacraments. For the Christian, every man is homo viator, whose sole purpose (and soul’s purpose) is to travel through the adventure of life with the goal of getting to heaven, his ultimate and only true home, facing many perils and temptations along the way.

The enemy of homo viator is homo superbus (proud man), who refuses the self-sacrifice that the adventure of life demands and seeks to build a home for himself within his “self.” Such a man becomes addicted to the sins that bind him, shriveling and shrinking to the pathetic size of his gollumized self. The drama of life revolves around this battle within each of us, between the homo viator we are called to be, and the homo superbus we are tempted to become. This drama is mirrored in Middle-earth in the struggles between selflessness and selfishness within the hearts of hobbits and men.

Probably dating from the early eighth century, making it contemporaneous with the lives of Saints Boniface and Bede, Beowulf is a wonderful and wonder-filled narrative animated by the rich Christian spirit of the culture from which it sprang, brimming over with allegorical potency and evangelical zeal. It also conveys a deep awareness of classical antiquity, drawing deep inspirational draughts from Virgil’s Aeneid, highlighting the Saxon poet’s awareness of his place within an unbroken cultural continuum.

Clearly Tolkien knew Beowulf well, perhaps better than anyone else of his generation, and there is no denying its seminal and definitive influence on his own work. The most obvious and inescapable parallels are those between the dragon episode in Beowulf and the similar episode in The Hobbit. The Anglo-Saxon epic, however, left its inspirational fingerprints on The Lord of the Rings in a more subtle way.

Beowulf is divided into three sections in which the eponymous hero fights three different monsters. In the first two sections, as Beowulf confronts and ultimately defeats Grendel and then Grendel’s mother, the work is primarily a narrative in which the theological dimension is subsumed parabolically, especially in the recurring motif that human will and strength is insufficient, in the absence of divine assistance, to defeat the power of evil. This is presumably an orthodox riposte to the heresy of Pelagianism,3 which plagued Saxon England and is a major preoccupation of Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, probably written around the same time as Beowulf.

The dragon section of Beowulf commences with the theft of “a gem-studded goblet”5 from the dragon’s hoard, an act that gains the thief nothing but provokes the destructive wrath of the dragon. Beowulf takes eleven comrades with him as he goes to meet the dragon in combat, plus the thief, “the one who had started all this strife” and who “was now added as a thirteenth to their number.” Unlike the eleven who had accompanied their lord willingly, the thief was “press-ganged and compelled” to go with them, acting as their unwilling guide to the dragon’s den.

Continuing the allusive parallels, this time with Christ’s Agony in the Garden, we are told that, on the eve of battle, Beowulf is “sad at heart, unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.” Later, as battle is about to commence, Beowulf’s appointed followers, “that hand-picked troop,” “broke ranks and ran for their lives”—all except one, Wiglaf, who emerges as the signifier of St. John, the only one of Christ’s apostles who remained at His side during the Crucifixion. Wiglaf reprimands his comrades for their cowardice in deserting their lord, reminding them that Beowulf had “picked us out from the army deliberately, honored us and judged us fit for this action.”

Prior to his death, Beowulf instructs Wiglaf to order his men to build a burial mound in remembrance of him. After his death, ten shamefaced warriors emerge from the woods, indicating that the thief was not among them. At the epic’s conclusion, there are once again twelve warriors riding ceremoniously around the burial mound, which had been duly constructed in accordance with Beowulf’s command, indicating that the traitor had been replaced by a new member, reminiscent of the appointment of St. Matthias to replace Judas as the twelfth apostle.

For the Christian, and the Beowulf poet was indubitably Christian, all acts of genuine love involve the laying down of our lives for another. Furthermore, all those who genuinely love in this way are ipso facto figures of Christ, from whom all genuine love flows and toward whom all genuine love points. In true life as in true literature, all those who live and love like Christ are Christlike and can be said to be figures of Christ. Christ is the archetype of which all virtuous men, in fact and in fiction, are types. The Beowulf poet shows this through the use of numerical clues. Tolkien does something very similar in his work, emulating the work of his Anglo-Saxon mentor.

Tolkien supplies a clue to the deepest meaning of The Lord of the Rings with regard to the specific date of the destruction of the Ring. The Ring is destroyed on March 25, the most significant and important date on the Christian calendar. This is the feast of the Annunciation, the date the Word is made flesh, when God becomes man. It is also the historic date of the Crucifixion, a fact that is all too often forgotten by modern Christians because Good Friday is celebrated as a moveable feast that falls on a different date each year.

Let’s recall at this juncture that Tolkien is both a Catholic and an eminent medievalist. He would have known of the symbolic significance of March 25, and his ascribing of this particular date as the day the Ring is destroyed has palpable and indeed seismic consequences with regard to the deepest moral and theological meanings of The Lord of the Rings.

Because Original Sin and the One Ring are both destroyed on the same theologically charged date, they become inextricably interwoven so that the Ring is symbolically synonymous with Sin itself. Original Sin is, after all, the One Sin to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

On one level, the Ring has now taken on the function of the dragon sickness in The Hobbit. If we become too attached to our possessions we will become possessed by them, or, as Christ tells us, where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.

Recalling Tolkien’s signification of the Ring as synonymous with sin, it can be seen that the act of using the Ring is synonymous with the act of sinning. Putting the Ring on is putting sin on. The effect of sin is to cause the sinner to fade from the good world of light and love that God has made, becoming invisible in this world while becoming more visible to “the eye of the Dark Power” that rules the sins and ultimately the sinner. As Gandalf will tell Frodo after the hobbit is almost killed by the Ringwraiths while wearing the Ring, “[Y]ou were in gravest peril while you wore the Ring, for then you were half in the wraith-world yourself, and they might have seized you. You could see them, and they could see you.”

The one who becomes addicted to the power of the Ring (sin) will ultimately exile himself from the world of light and life, condemning himself to permanent invisibility in the land of shadow.

After it abandoned Gollum, it was stumbled and fumbled upon by Bilbo Baggins, “the most unlikely person imaginable.” “Behind that,” Gandalf tells Frodo, “there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”6 It is grimly ironic that Gandalf’s words, which are among the most important in the whole story, are usually overlooked by those who refuse to see the “fundamentally religious” aspect of Tolkien’s masterpiece. It’s as if this crucial passage has slipped from the minds of the critics as deftly and magically as the Ring has slipped from the fingers of Isildur and Gollum. In their blindness, willful or otherwise, the critics have betrayed Tolkien’s text as surely as the Ring has betrayed its possessors.

Bilbo being meant to find the Ring and Frodo being meant to have it is “an encouraging thought” because the “something else” is a benign supernatural power that has its own plans for the Ring “beyond any design of the Ring-maker.” The “something else” is obviously God and that which is meant by God to happen is clearly providence. It is this scarcely concealed presence of God, made manifest in His providence, which makes The Lord of the Rings a “fundamentally religious” work. What makes it a specifically Catholic work is the relationship between providence and free will.

Speaking of Gollum, Frodo says that it was “a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance.” “Pity?” Gandalf replies. “It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy; not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.”8

Here we see the interplay of providence and free will illustrated clearly. Pity and mercy, both accentuated by Tolkien through the use of uppercase letters, are moral choices made freely by Bilbo. The positive consequence of his virtuous choice is to be “well rewarded” by the protection such virtue provides from the evil power of the Ring. The fact that the virtuous act is rewarded suggests the presence of one who rewards the virtuous with protection from evil.

The fact is that Tom Bombadil is an enigma, a puzzling riddle who continues to baffle and confuse readers and those critics who endeavor to explain him. Tolkien describes him as an intentional enigma. He is, therefore, meant to be a mystery. He is nonetheless an important character who we ignore at our peril.

On the few occasions that Tolkien mentions Bombadil in his letters, he is seemingly as elusive and evasive as Tom himself. Referring to him as an “allegory” (another example of Tolkien’s confession of the allegorical aspect of his work), he describes Tom as “an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture.”

There can be no real doubt that Tom is both honest and honorable. There is no need to doubt his word. He is, therefore, the Eldest. He is older than the immortal elves, the rivers and the trees—he is even older than the weather itself, remembering the first ever raindrop. Is he, or He, God? Superficially, he might seem to have shades of the Divine, but his voice is too passive and detached to be an active agent. God was not only here before the rivers and the trees; He made the rivers and the trees. God does not merely remember the first raindrop; He sent it. He didn’t merely make paths before the big people or merely observe the little people arriving; He made all people, big or small, elves, men, and hobbits, sending them into the world and not simply watching them arrive.

Perhaps what is most intriguing is his declaration that he “knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.” Here is a clear affirmation that he is prelapsarian, that he existed before the Fall. He predates not only the arrival of the other creatures but also the arrival of evil. A Christian can hardly fail to read these lines about an age of innocence, free of sin and corruption, before the arrival of a Dark Lord from Outside, without visions of the Garden of Eden springing to mind. This is accentuated when we recall Tolkien’s allegorical reading of Tom Bombadil as exemplifying the purity of scientia (knowledge), which is always transcendentally good and therefore untainted by evil, as distinct from the tainting of pure science that the empowerment of man through the application of technology necessitates.

The clue is in the prelapsarian nature of Tom. He is the Eldest, who was around before sin and evil entered the world from outside, but it seems that evil, after its arrival, had not affected him. Unlike everything else in the Fallen and therefore broken cosmos, Tom is neither Fallen nor broken. He is quite literally free from sin. He is not subject to it. It has no power over him. Although Tolkien has not yet provided the textual clue that the date of the Ring’s destruction provides, we are already being given distinct and definite clues that the Ring is symbolically synonymous with sin.

Telling the hobbits that clothes “are but little loss,” he adds that they should cast off the ragged remnants of their clothing and run naked on the grass. Such an appeal to public nudity seems odd, perhaps scandalous, and is certainly open to misunderstanding in our post-Freudian, sex-obsessed culture. So what is one to make of this latest enigmatic twist in Tom’s perplexing personality? Is there something weird about him in a very unpleasant sense? Again, we needn’t worry. We know from the weaving of Tolkien’s tale that Tom is not only honest and honorable but also innocent and wise. Indeed, the depth of his character is discovered in this very Chestertonian combination of wisdom and innocence. Tom encourages the hobbits to run naked in the fields not because he’s guilty of perversion but because he’s utterly innocent and immune to the harmful effects of concupiscence. Lust has no more power over Tom than the Ring does, and he would no doubt laugh at an erotic image as heartily, merrily, and innocently as he had laughed at the Ring itself.

The final clue that Tom and Goldberry are in some sense emblematic of the unfallen Adam and Eve is given in Tom’s naming of the hobbits’ ponies. The ponies had not been given any such names by Merry, to whom they belonged, “but they answered to the new names that Tom had given them for the rest of their lives.” The connection once again to the book of Genesis and the power that God gave Adam to name the beasts is all too obvious: “And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name.”7

After all the clues are found and all the riddles answered, we can at last see, perhaps, that the naked truth about Tom Bombadil is that he reminds us that there is a power beyond that of the Ring and beyond that of the Dark Lord who made it. He is a glimpse of the innocence that is beyond the power of sin, the hope that is beyond the power of despair, and the light that is beyond the power of darkness.

Any quest to discover the deepest meaning of The Lord of the Rings must tackle the thorny subject of death and immortality, which Tolkien insisted was the “real theme” of the work, a theme that was “much more permanent and difficult” than any allegory of power within the story. This places The Lord of the Rings beyond the realm of mere politics and raises it onto the higher ground of philosophy and theology. At its highest level, Tolkien’s epic serves as a memento mori, a reminder of death, which, in Christian terms, should always lead to a meditation on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.

It is for this reason that Tolkien and Galadriel can both talk about the “long defeat” of history. For Tolkien, as a Christian, history cannot be anything but a long defeat because man is a fallen creature in a fallen cosmos. In such a cosmos, death is woven into the very fabric of everything, from the mortality of men to the entropic death of the energy system of the cosmos itself. More importantly, on the spiritual plane, death is present in the corrosive and corrupting effect of evil, as made manifest in sin, so that history is characterized by an endless battle between virtue and vice in which vice can never be finally conquered but always returns, fungus-like, to blight the lives of men.8 It is only through the eyes of faith that the all too rare “glimpses of final victory” can be discerned, and even then it is in the knowledge that such a victory is only possible at the end of time.

For men, the end of time comes at the end of their relatively short time on earth, at which point, following death, the final victory may be theirs. For elves, however, doomed to deathlessness, the long defeat is seemingly interminable, causing Galadriel to lament that she and her husband, “together through ages of the world . . . have fought the long defeat.”9 Earlier, Elrond recalled the many battles over many centuries that he had fought, experiencing “many defeats, and many fruitless victories.”10 Speaking of the victory of the Last Alliance, he conceded that “it did not achieve its end. . . . Sauron was diminished, but not destroyed. His Ring was lost but not unmade. The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed; for they were made with the power of the Ring, and while it remains they will endure.”

It is thus that those who are cursed with deathlessness view with envy the gift of death, and thus that Tolkien, through the medium of fairy story, provokes in his readers a profound meditation on the “permanent and difficult” theme of death and immortality. Most important is the crucial difference that emerges between immortality and eternal life. The former is being imprisoned in time and space and unable ever to get home; the latter is the escape from the long defeat into either the final victory of heaven or the final defeat of hell.

One of the key elements of The Lord of the Rings is the struggle between objective morality, what might be termed the battle between good and evil, and the alluring charm of relativism. It is encapsulated most graphically in Gandalf’s account at the Council of Elrond of his encounter with Saruman.

Clearly this exchange is not merely about aesthetics. It’s not about individual preferences regarding the color of the clothes we like to wear. It’s about the much more fundamental question of good and evil and their ultimate meaning. For Gandalf, white is the unity of all light, signifying the unity of all goodness. By contrast, black is the absence of all light, signifying evil.

Gandalf’s view is that of Tolkien’s own Christian moral perspective, following the teaching of St. Augustine, that evil has no substantial existence in itself (because God does not create evil things) but is merely the absence of the light of goodness. It is for this reason that Sauron is the Dark Lord and for this reason that the Dark Lord’s domain, Mordor, means “Black Land” or “Land of Shadow” in Elvish.

Considering Tolkien’s use of breaking the unity of white light into the “many colors” of the spectrum as a symbol for relativism, it is indeed ironic that today’s radical relativists, in the branding and brandishing of their self-adulating and self-justifying “Pride,” have adopted the rainbow as their symbol.

In many respects, Boromir’s struggle is most applicable to our own struggle with pride and its relativism because he is the character in The Lord of the Rings who is seemingly most meant to represent us. He is, after all, the only man in the Fellowship of the Ring. There are four hobbits, one wizard, one king, one elf, one dwarf—and one man. Because he is clearly the representative of humanity within the story itself, he is also, by applicable extension, our representative. This is a somewhat sobering realization because Boromir is the traitor who succumbs to the power of the Ring, seeking to take it by force from Frodo. Humanity, it seems, is the problem. And yet Boromir’s motives are not devoid of noble intention. His homeland is about to be invaded by an “evil empire,” far worse than the Soviet empire to which Ronald Reagan applied that label.

The problem is that nothing ever justifies abandoning objective morality in favor of relativism. It is never licit to use evil means for a good end. The moment that we do so, we are no longer fighting against evil but are becoming evil.

Boromir shows contrition for his sin a few moments after he has committed it. Having cursed Frodo and all hobbits “to death and darkness,” he catches his foot on a stone and falls headlong to the ground, “as if his own curse had struck him down,” and then, weeping, rises to his feet and begs Frodo to return, lamenting the “madness” that had overtaken him.6 Shortly afterward, in an act of love which, in the words of Christ, there is no greater, he lays down his life for his friends, becoming mortally wounded in his efforts to defend the hobbits. After Aragorn discovers Boromir, pierced with many arrows and surrounded by dead orcs, he takes on the symbolic role of priest, in persona Christi, who hears the fallen warrior’s confession. Boromir’s words contain all three prerequisites for a good and holy confession: “I tried to take the Ring from Frodo [confession]. I am sorry [contrition]. I have paid [satisfaction].” Aragorn’s reply to Boromir’s final words fulfills the role of Christ, acting through the ordained ministry of the priest, in absolving the penitent of his sin. After Boromir laments his failure, Aragorn takes his hand, kisses his brow and responds with words of comfort and absolution: “No! You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!”7

Because Faramir’s words dovetail so well with the earlier words of Boromir, serving as their antidote, and since Tolkien has connected the two in our minds by making them brothers, it is clear that Faramir is being presented as Boromir’s alter ego. As such, he is also a representative of humanity—Everyman’s other self, so to speak. Whereas Boromir’s pride had blinded him to the folly of using evil to defeat evil, Faramir’s humility sees that there can never be a bona fide reason to employ evil means for an ostensibly good end. This is summed up in his earlier declaration that he “would not snare even an orc with a falsehood.”9 Faramir is so much a servant of the morally objective good that he would not tell even the smallest lie to the Devil himself.

That pathetic figure reflecting the readers back to themselves very uncomfortably is Gollum. Seldom or perhaps never in the field of human literature has the human soul in a state of addiction to sin been portrayed with such psychological realism and spiritual brilliance. Oscar Wilde tried something similar in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the portrait of Dorian Gray’s soul is dumb and speaks only through the screaming silence of its cruel and sadistic ugliness. Gollum is, however, a fully embodied image of the sin addict’s soul. He brings to life with monstrous vigor the words of Christ that everyone who sins is a slave to sin10 and the teaching of St. Paul about the slavery of sin.

It is, therefore, in the characters of Faramir, Boromir, and Gollum that Tolkien presents to us the three faces of Everyman. In Faramir we see the face of the saint (paradisal man), in Boromir we see the face of the repentant sinner (purgatorial man), and in Gollum we see the face of the unrepentant sinner, enslaved to his vice (infernal man). Putting it another way, we are being shown the saint, the sinner who is trying to be a saint, and the sinner who is trying to be a sinner. These three faces of man—along with the face of the man on the journey of life (homo viator), which we see in Frodo’s carrying of his cross and Sam’s faithful discipleship—illustrate the hall of mirrors with which, in multifarious ways, this most realistic of fantasies shows us ourselves.

In a letter written in 1958, Tolkien discussed the significance of his “taste in languages,” which was “obviously a large ingredient in The Lord of the Rings.”1 In the same letter, he quoted with evident approval a correspondent who had seen a connection between lembas, the Elvish waybread, and viaticum, which is the term used in the Catholic Church for the Eucharistic host administered to the dying. This connection is accentuated by the linguistic link between the two words. Viaticum essentially means waybread, from the Latin via, meaning “way,” and from the fact that the thing being given “for the way” is bread. It is sacramental bread to nourish the soul on its journey from this life to everlasting life. Lembas is synonymous linguistically with viaticum because in Sindarin, one of Tolkien’s invented Elvish languages, it literally means “way-bread” or “journey-bread.” In Quenya, another of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, lembas means “life-bread” or “bread of life.” Linguistically, therefore, lembas is identified as being both viaticum (way-bread) and the Eucharistic host (bread of life), which is why Tolkien agreed with a correspondent who had seen it as “a derivation from the Eucharist.”2

A Catholic reading about this “magical” or miraculous power of the Elvish waybread might well be reminded of those saints who had apparently lived on nothing but the Eucharist for long periods. Indeed, Blessed Alexandrina da Costa seemingly lived on the Eucharist alone for many years prior to her death on October 13, 1955, a week before the final part of The Lord of the Rings was published. This medically impossible phenomenon, which was unfolding throughout the whole period of Tolkien’s writing of The Lord of the Rings, was monitored by skeptical scientists who attested to its inexplicable nature.