The Tale We’ve fallen into
Why we never outgrow The Lord of the Rings

By Sarah Arthur

You wouldn’t know I just turned thirty. I should be exhibiting some signs of maturity, some indication that I’ve put all the frivolities of youth in the past. But no, I pumped myself with caffeine and stayed up to watch the midnight premiere of The Return of the King last December like all the other Tolkien geeks.

Do we ever outgrow our need for fantasy and fairy tale? I don’t think so. And it’s not just about the desire to be entertained. If that were the case, a good pro basketball game every now and then would do the trick for me. No, I think there are profound spiritual reasons why, even as young adults (and older ones, too!), we’re drawn to stories.

G. K. Chesterton once said, “The babe in the cradle knows about the dragon; he needs the stories to know about Saint George.” The quote refers to the old English legend in which Saint George slays the dragon. Chesterton is saying, in essence, that from birth our imaginations naturally give concrete shape to nameless fears. We experience the terror of the dark and give it personality in the form of monsters in the closet. Nobody has to teach us about those monsters; our imaginations invent them without outside help.

Where we need help is in hearing reassurance that the monsters can be conquered. We need to hear that dark is vanquished by light in the end; the dragon can be slain.

If we’re honest, we never grow out of those fears. Nor do we grow out of our need for stories. We leave the cradle and are thrust into the big, bad world of young adulthood where every nameless fear is alive and well—and we find ourselves needing the stories more than ever. And not just the same fairy tales and Disney adventures that we grew up with, but the grown-up versions, in which darkness is conquered only through tremendous sacrifice and in which nothing will ever be the same again—because that’s the way life really is.

I believe that’s why so many of my generation are drawn to The Lord of the Rings. By the time we hit 18, we’re jaded. We’ve been raised on relativism (“what’s right for you is not necessarily right for me”), but have found it to be glaringly insufficient to explain the presence of the dragon. I mean, if the dragon isn’t really evil, just sort of evil to some people but not to others, then why is it laying waste the land? Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it? We want some brave saint to stand up and say, “This is evil!” and ride forth to save the day.

Hungering for heroes
In The Lord of the Rings we have just such a story. Tolkien dares to call evil, evil and good, good. He sends his brave saints out to face the dragons, the spiders, the Orcs, the Balrogs, and the Ringwraiths of our nameless fears. He creates a fantastical world that is both beautiful and fallen, like our world; and which is inhabited by heroes who are tempted, like we are. We read his story or watch the films and come away saying, “If evil can be conquered in the world of the imagination, then, by George [!], it can be conquered in this world.”

But Tolkien knew that the process of conquering evil in the real world is not clear-cut with a Disney-fied happy ending. He was a man who had lost both of his parents as a young child and then served in World War I; all of his closest friends except one were killed. Even his Catholic faith taught him that there’s no triumph over sin and death without the Cross.

In fact, Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will find it” (Mark 8:34-35). The choice to follow Christ and to do good is not easy, nor is the lifelong journey of faith a sappy story when it’s all said and done. Like Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir, Éowyn, and Elrond – we will lose much before we gain anything. We will walk a long, dark, narrow road that seems more akin to tragedy than comedy.

Fathoming the truth

Perhaps the clearest discussion of this principle comes at the end of The Two Towers, when Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are just about to cross over the border into Mordor. Peter Jackson gives us glimpses of this conversation spread between two different scenes: “It’s like in the great stories…the ones that really mattered…Folk had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t,” Sam says; and then later Frodo adds: “Frodo wouldn’t have gotten far without Sam.” 

But some of the best lines from the book are missing in the film, so I recommend you grab a copy and look up Book IV, Chapter 8: The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, and find the part about half-way through the chapter which begins, “In a dark crevice between two great piers of rock they sat down....” The next few pages are worth reading, not only for their subtle irony (an author is having his characters wonder what sort of tale they’ve “landed in”), but for their profound spiritual truths.

Let’s take a look at some of those.

1. If we had known how tough this journey would be at times, we might not have started on it in the first place. Chesterton again: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

2. We don’t go out looking for the adventure: the adventure comes looking for us. God says, “I want you to set out on the journey of faith. Are you game?”

3. We have lots of opportunities to turn back. Every time we make a choice, we’re choosing to either give up on this faith thing, or to stick it out.

4. We stick it out because we recognize that we’re in a story that matters. It will all be worth it in the end, and what we’ve done for the sake of Christ and the gospel will never be forgotten.

5. Our story is a mixture of tragedy and comedy, and it’s hard to tell that things will turn out for the good when we’re in the middle of the tragic parts. As Sam says, “I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” We wonder this often in our Christian experience.

6. We’re part of an on-going story that’s bigger than us. We’re just one chapter in the whole huge tale, the story of God’s interactions with humankind throughout time and history. We’re surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) who have gone before us, who are cheering us on.

7. We all have a part to play in that story: we can choose to be heroes or villains; we can choose comedy or tragedy; we can choose the winning or the losing side. Sam calls out to Gollum, “Would you like to be the hero?” but receives no answer.

At every age in life, we need the stories in order to know that the dragons of our nameless fears can be conquered. But we also need the stories in order to know that we, ourselves, can be like Saint George: we can be like Sam, Faramir, Aragorn, and Éowyn. That’s the kind of tale we long for, the kind we want to have “fallen into.”

That’s why we stood in line at midnight last December—not as babes in cradles, but as saints and heroes. Dragons, beware!

Sarah Arthur is the author of Walking with Frodo: A Devotional Journey through The Lord of the Rings (Tyndale/Thirsty 2003). She is a freelance writer, editor, and speaker with the United Methodist Publishing House, among other writing adventures. Her book, Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Journey through The Hobbit, will be released in January 2005. Reprinted from MethodX.net (http://www.methodx.net). Copyright 2003 by The Upper Room. Used by permission.