Not winning but participating

Frodo and Gandalf — All We Have to Decide Is. . .?

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Battle of Maldon

YOU wouldn’t be alone in pondering that we reside at a moment when things appear to be within the balance, perhaps tipping within the incorrect direction. Many of us find ourselves echoing Frodo’s plea: “I wish it needn’t have happened in my time.” Frodo has just discovered the very bad news that he’s in possession of the last word weapon and prize of the enemy — the Ring. Gandalf’s answer could be very sensible and resonates with so lots of us. He advises acceptance as we will’t change what’s given our generation, saying, “So do all who live to see such times. But that just isn’t for them to make your mind up.” He goes on, “All we’ve got to make your mind up is what to do with the time that’s given us.”

Not many remember past that to the following sentence, but he says, “Already . . . our time is starting to look black.” He doesn’t tell Frodo, “Don’t worry, you’ll get your completely happy ending”; he’s attempting to help his friend face inconceivable odds with resilience and courage.

ALMOST every generation — some very particularly — have felt they were living in dark times. The rapid pace of change, pandemics resembling Covid-19, the impact of the changing climate, war and the rumours of war: these are familiar and stressful prospects.

One of the best fears of a parent is our country going to war and adult children being sent off to fight — something many moms and dads world wide are facing now. It once might need seemed far off; now it doesn’t feel unimaginable. It can be great to have a delete button to eliminate such threats, but that doesn’t lie in our power.

WHAT can we do? This is where Tolkien may also help. He faced not less than two occasions when the skies turned black — the First World War and the Second World War Two — for himself after which for his sons. He wrote this sentence within the late Thirties as he saw countries gearing up for war against the forces of Nazism. Having passed through the Somme, the bloodiest battle for British troops within the First World War, he knew such times couldn’t be wished away, regardless of how hard you tried.

What he offers in response is a Stoic philosophy with a Christian twist. It is the way you fight the battle, not whether you win. As Galadriel later tells Frodo, she and Celeborn have been fighting “the long defeat”, not expecting victory but prepared to diminish and go into the West. Here Tolkien is nodding to the concept of Ragnarök, the top times, from his favourite Norse myths. In this final battle, the purpose just isn’t being on the winning side, but on the precise side. You fight alongside gods and men, not on the giants’ team.

Or, as one in every of Tolkien’s favourite Anglo-Saxon poems, The Battle of Maldon, puts it, in Tolkien’s own translation that he was working on at the moment: “Each mind shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, each our spirit greater as our strength lessens!” (The Battle of Maldon along with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, edited by Peter Grybauskas, HarperCollins, 2003).

BUT before we leave ourselves in grim Stoic acceptance, allow us to remember the Christian twist of eucatastrophe — the sudden joyous reversal. It is there in Gandalf’s words: the time that’s “given” to Frodo. He hints that there’s one other hand behind events, giving us the moment. With this hope, you’ll be able to hope for the most effective.

Gandalf later muses that, though the encounter of Frodo with Gollum seems bad news: “Let us keep in mind that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he doesn’t intend. It might be so, sometimes.” It proves to be true. And Elrond offers an empowering notion: “Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they have to, while the eyes of the good are elsewhere.”

Reflection

As we gear up for spiritual battle in our present day, what sort of warrior should we be?

Be merciful, have pity, be courageous — these are the teachings of The Lord of the Rings. When unsure, follow those values, and also you win even for those who lose.

In the sunshine of that, what do you’ve to make your mind up to do with the time you’ve been given? What can your “small hands” do to vary things for the higher?

Read Hebrews 12.1-2.

Julia Golding is a multi-award-winning novelist and director of the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, a small educational charity established to honour the life, work, and faith of the Inklings.

Malcolm Guite is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; priest, poet, author, and singer-songwriter; and an authority on the Inklings, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.

Professor Simon Horobin is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, holding the position that C. S. Lewis held at the school, and has lectured and published widely on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His latest book is C. S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing).

This is an extract from Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten lands with the Inklings, published by Canterbury Press at £12.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.39); 978-1-78622-690-7.