The One Ring.net has a link to a roundtable discussion on the spiritual dimensions to the Lord of the Rings movies. As usual, the Christians fall all over each other in their rush to justify their illogical, fairy tale beliefs. Tolkien was a devout Catholic - and although he initially resisted it, his own conservative religious upbringing did seep into his story - but does that mean that the entire saga is meant to be viewed as a representation, or worse, an endorsement of Christianity?
I'm going to criticize the article in general here... the actual full-length discussion shows several different opinions, but I'm painting them all with the same brush. And, yeah, here there be movie spoilers. Interesting that you can still have spoilers for a book that's half a century old.
When a story covers such a broad and timeless theme as "good vs. evil," you can construe it to be allegorical to just about anything. But remember that "good" and "evil" are relative! Just because the good guys wear white and are human and beautiful, the Christians immediately want to play the role of the Fellowship. I could very easily present a case that Sauron represents the force of religion in the world, with Sauron's all-seeing eye likened to the all-seeing God. The simplistic and warlike Orcs are his most devoted followers, just as religion tends to attract the disenfranchised, the poor, and the stupid. Their march across Middle Earth, recruiting some peoples and destroying others, is exactly how Christians see their role in the world: either you're part of their belief system and headed to eternal salvation, or you're not and must therefore be converted or subverted. Sauron is called the Great Deceiver, and what greater deception is there than to offer an everlasting paradise with no proof, arbitrary guidelines, and no straight answers? The Free Peoples represent free thinkers, philosophers, artists... who see their ideas and thoughts unfairly challenged by the restrictive dogma of centuries past.
The Sauron-as-Religion metaphor would likely fail under close readings (particularly of The Simarillion) but we're supposed to be mostly talking about the watered down movies here. And anyway, the point is that you can read into it whatever you want, because it reduces down to Us Vs. Them. But these guys, with their formal degrees in myths and lies, end up being too easily seduced by Tolkien's own creation myth.
They point to Gandalf's line about Aragorn's kingdom being "blessed" (as if there's only one way to use that word, in a Christian sense.) Or his comforting words on the afterlife to Pippin as they await the enemy armies. One posting says that Aragorn's statue of his dead mother (from the Fellowship EE) is "quite clearly the Virgin Mary" (it's a woman in a hood, for fuck's sake) and that Gandalf's "secret fire" remark refers to the Holy Spirit. (He attributes that explanation directly to Tolkien, but neglects to mention that Gandalf could have just been talking about Narya, his fucking ring of fire that he kept fucking secret.) Then there's a very tiresome debate on the entire cast as Christ. Frodo is Christ. Aragorn is Christ. Boromir is Christ. Gandalf is Christ. Just about anybody who either A) lives through a terrible ordeal or B) dies through a terrible ordeal, gets to be Christ.
They also complain about the alterations to the Cracks of Doom scene. In the book, Gollum pretty much trips over the edge and dies. In the movie, Frodo pushes him over. You know why Peter Jackson made this change? Because it's goddamn stupid that nimble, acrobatic Gollum would fucking dance his ass over a cliff. That may play in the intellectual and intimate arena of the book, where the author has had pages upon pages to delineate his style and pace in your own imagination, but in a movie where we actually get to *see* it, it would have been asinine.
The most vital piece that they all overlook is that Tolkien wrote a story where theology makes sense. That's why it's easy to construe The Lord of the Rings as having overt religious messages. This is a world where there is a God (Iluvatar) and his creations of grace and power (Angels, via the Maiar and the Elves, even the descendants of Numenor) actually do intercede on the common peoples' behalf, instead of never showing up, leaving us to the evangelists and Bible-thumpers and door-to-door preachers. There is a universal acceptance and knowledge of how Iluvatar and his pals created the races of Middle Earth, and how Melkor and Sauron sought their own power through domination.
This is probably how Professor Tolkien wished Catholicism could be, at once inspiring and logical. Perhaps he felt - as many do - that religion was not providing answers, but instead adding a confusing layer of pseudo-philosophy overtop an already complex world. But he was far too conservative to reject it, so in his story he would simply fix it. (Interestingly, the one race almost completely free of ritual and religion is the one that Tolkien himself most identified with: the Hobbits.) But in the real world, it doesn't wash. Religion may be inspiring - to those who feel they need it - but it certainly isn't logical. At the end of the day, LOTR is a fantasy. Just like the Bible. One is just far better written.
