Return of the King countdown: two days

At the outset of this mini-series, I promised no heavy spoilers. Well, here's one anyway: the good guys win.

To see how they win, go see the movie. Or better yet: read the book.

And before the Sun had fallen far from the noon out of the East there came a great Eagle flying, and he bore tidings beyond hope from the Lords of the West, crying:

Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,
for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,
and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

—The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, “The Steward and the King”

Tolkien was no fan of allegory, even though he considered The Lord of the Rings a profoundly Catholic work. There isn't necessarily a contradiction between those two poles. It does, however, make for some interesting tensions.

Take the Downfall of Sauron, of which the poem quoted above tells a part. Tom Shippey comments:

“[S]ing and rejoice” echoes Psalm 33, “Rejoice in the Lord”, while the whole of the poem is strongly reminiscent of Psalm 24. … “Who is the king of glory?” asks the Psalm, and one traditional answer is Christ, crucified but not yet ascended, come to the city of Hell to rescue from it those especially virtuous pre-Christians, Moses and Isaiah and the patriarchs and prophets. Of course, the eagle's song is not about that. When it says “the Black Gate is broken” it means the Morannon, a place in Middle-earth described in [The Two Towers]; when it says “your King shall come again”, it means Aragorn. Yet the first statement could easily apply to Death and Hell (Matthew xvi, 18, “and the gates of hell shall not prevail”), the second to Christ and the Second Coming. …

Approach to the edge of Christian reference was here deliberate, as one can tell from the date Gandalf so carefully gives for the fall of Sauron, “the twenty-fifth of March”. In Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, 25 March is the date of the Crucifixion; also of the Annunciation (nine months before Christmas); also of the last day of Creation. By mentioning the date Tolkien was presenting his “eucatastrophe” as a forerunner or “type” of the greater one of Christian myth.

Myth, I hasten to add, in the non-pejorative sense employed by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis (see: Tolkien's essay On Fairy Stories).

So does this count as allegory? I report, you decide—but if so, then it is a rather subtle one. Certainly no one from a non-liturgical Protestant background (such as mine) is likely to catch the whole of Tolkien's intent.

But now you have some idea of the reasoning behind the “bookends” in the right column of this page: an excerpt from the poem is in the lower panel, and my transliteration into the Tengwar is in the upper. The reference to the King is, for the purposes of this site, explicitly Christian in motivation; while the reference to “the West” serves to irk multiculturalists.

UPDATE: I was sorta joking about the multi-cultis. But then the NYT immediately demonstrates why Tolkien could have held such low regard for allegory:

“King,” which opens round the country tomorrow, features more prognostication and exposition than its predecessors. Yet despite all of the setups required, Mr. Jackson maintains tension. In “Towers,” the director and his fellow screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, secured a spiritual fidelity to the novel. In “King” they manage that and far more; the last third is especially condensed, and Aragon's role in the last battle is fleshed out. But the Tolkien search for purity is central to their “King,” too. And the movie isn't as exclusionary as the books' implicit Christian forcefulness, which made Middle Earth a re-creation of the Crusades. (Emphasis added.)

Oh really.

"And the movie isn't as exclusionary as the books' implicit Christian forcefulness, which made Middle Earth a re-creation of the Crusades."

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one befuddled by that line in the review (maybe befuddled isn't quite the right word--"exclusionary," "implicit Christian forcefulness," "Middle Earth a re-creation of the Crusades." oh, please! Give me a break).