How fantasy can enrich reality

GOOD FRIDAY

Tolkien, Lewis, and the Road to the Cross

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King; and “The Dream of the Rood” (anonymous)

THE events of Good Friday are so seminal, so foundational for a Christian understanding of all of the things the world fears: weakness, helplessness, defeat, death. It is foundational, because in Christ God enters into all of those, from weakness and apparent defeat to death itself, and transforms all of them in order that his strength is made perfect in weakness, and death is swallowed up in victory.

That pattern and that transformation are central to the understanding of each Lewis and Tolkien; so it’s natural that we discover that pattern of their writings, more explicitly in Lewis’s account of Aslan’s suffering and death on the Stone Table, and more subtly in Tolkien’s account of the last a part of the journey to Mount Doom.

The scourging of Jesus and his mocking by the soldiers, the pseudo-homage of the purple robe and crown of thorns, all these turn into, in Lewis’s “supposal”, in Aslan’s passion, the binding with cruelly tight cords, the shaving of his beautiful mane, his dismissal as only a cat, the mocking of the tormentors, and so forth. Lewis properly doesn’t show a mode of death which is to be a parallel with crucifixion, but simply has the ladies turn away on the last moment, and leaves the reader to assume what has been done to him.

Likewise, Tolkien reimagines reasonably than simply reproduces the weather of the Passion as he understood them. As a practising Roman Catholic, Tolkien would have been accustomed to the Stations of the Cross, the 14 traditional stopping places on Christ’s Via Dolorosa, his way of suffering. Three of those are about Jesus staggering and falling under the load of the cross. We can see an echo of those in the best way that the Ring, Frodo’s burden, grows heavier and heavier as he nears the Cracks of Doom.

Another Station of the Cross is the time when Simon of Cyrene carries Jesus’s cross for some time. As we now have already seen, Sam Gamgee takes on that role when he carries Frodo himself.

Another considered one of the Stations, the tenth, is named “Christ is stripped of his garments,” and Tolkien would have learned to reflect on how this loosening, stripping away, of outer possessions was itself a part of the kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ which begins on the incarnation.

We see this at the purpose when Sam and Frodo solid off each the orc armour and, crucially, the dear cooking gear that Sam has brought thus far. This just isn’t simply a practical lightening of the load: it’s also a courageous admission that they don’t think they’ll be coming back, that the tip of their journey might be self-sacrifice.

IN SOME ways, and paradoxically, the casting off of the useless weight of the armour is itself a sort of stripping for battle. Tolkien would have been accustomed to the lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood during which the Passion is narrated by the cross itself, and the cross sees this stripping of Jesus not as an imposed humiliation but as a heroic preparation:

Then the young Hero — it was God Almighty —

Strong and steadfast, stripped himself for battle;

He climbed up on the high gallows, constant in his purpose,

Mounted it within the sight of many, mankind to ransom.

(Helen Gardner, The Dream of the Rood: An exercise in verse translation; Constable, 1970)

One measure of how effective the re-imagining of those great themes has been is that, once we ourselves return from these encounters in Narnia and Middle-earth to the actual accounts of the Passion within the Gospels and in Paul’s letters, our response is deepened; the freely accepted sufferings of Aslan and Frodo have actually given us a more imaginatively enriched and informed response to the true events of Good Friday.

Reflection

Read Mark 15.16-39.

Meet these events afresh this Good Friday. Imagine being there: put yourself within the shoes of the onlookers, the soldiers, the thieves on the cross.

Dr 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.

The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; priest, poet, author, and singer-songwriter; and an authority on the Inklings.

Professor Simon Horobin is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, holding the position that C. S. Lewis held at the faculty, 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.