Return of the King countdown: final day

Frodo went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

—The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, “The Grey Havens”

Although Rotk is garnering rave reviews on all fronts, some critics are not wholly pleased with the unusually long dénouement. But Jackson could hardly have done otherwise: after all, his source material devoted some hundred pages to events following the downfall of Sauron.

Tolkien—as briefly discussed yesterday—had a strong distaste for allegory. Yet he was not opposed to what he called “applicability,” and took pains to defend his work against charges of mere escapism. So what, then, are the “applications” that we find in the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings?

Most obvious, of course, is the happy ending. In his essay “On Fairy Stories” (found in this collection), Tolkien argues that if an author is successful in generating Secondary Belief—if the work has an internal coherence so complete that the reader wants to believe in the reality of the world described therein—then the happy ending or “eucatastrophe” can echo the True Myth of Christian story.

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?” The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.” That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the “eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.

In the real world the Story has not ended: the world is still marred, and we wait in hope of the Parousia. So it is in Tolkien's masterwork—the Fellowship is broken, and the Elves must depart; the King has returned, yet the works of Men so often “fail of their promise.” Indeed one might reasonably conclude that the main theme of The Lord of the Rings is loss. But Tolkien says more: when we have done all that we are able (or have even failed at that) there remains, as always, grace.