The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings (review)

A revised and expanded version of the author's Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, published in England in 2003, this self-described search for "Tolkien's secret fire" finds it in the author's devout Catholicism.

The first 113 pages develop Caldecott's interpretation of the familiar fact that Tolkien was a religious man who subsumed his faith in his fiction. He cites, as seemingly every writer on the topic does, Tolkien's famous December, 1953, letter to family friend Fr. Robert Murray, S.J.:

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first but consciously in the revision . . . the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism".

(48)

Few thoughtful readers will disagree that Tolkien was a devoted Catholic; the relative importance of his Catholicism in his creative scheme is, however, debatable. Many other elements are incorporated in the making of Middle-earth; faith is but one.

Caldecott's style mingles personality with scholarship: "I sometimes think of the Inklings (not to mention the 'Coalbiters'!) when I read the description of Elrond's 'Hall of Fire' in Rivendell, for it is there they would have been most at home" (11). Such authorial intrusion may seem more like casual conversation than cogent criticism to some readers. After a while, Caldecott's use of "I" to introduce his views seems both redundant—who else could it be?—and distracting, rather like Tolkien's own authorial intrusions in The Hobbit, wisely excised from The Lord of the Rings.

Similarly, some passages seem to veer from criticism into moralizing, such as this judgment of Niggle: "Many of us have delusions of self-importance, and by contrast view the needs of others as less weighty than our own" (25). True enough, but examination of conscience is not the same as examination of the text.

Therein lies the problem with books of this sort. The reader perforce has two subjects to weigh and balance: literary scholarship and theological interpretation. Chapter one's further examination of "Leaf by Niggle" illustrates this dilemma. When Caldecott describes Niggle's time in the Workhouse as "a bit of a joke against the popular notion of 'time in purgatory,' which as a well-informed Catholic he knew to be false" (26), some Catholic readers may disagree even as non-Catholics are left in the dark.

Caldecott continues: "There follows an examination of his [Niggle's] conscience by the Holy Trinity (three mysterious Voices overheard in the dark)" (26). But there are only two Voices in the text. Such an error early in the book cannot help but prompt a misgiving: caveat lector.

In the second chapter, Caldecott declares that "Frodo emerges as a very 'Christian' type of hero. . . . He allows himself to be humiliated and crucified. He refuses earthly respect and glory for the sake of something much greater; not merely his own integrity, but the will of the Father in heaven" (33).

But Frodo fails his last temptation. The Ring is destroyed not by Frodo's willing act but by Gollum's fatal deed. Caldecott says: "Thus in the end it is not Frodo who saves Middle-earth at all, though he bore the Ring to the Mountain, nor Gollum, who took the Ring into the Fire. It can only be God himself, working through the love and freedom of his creatures, using even our mistakes and the designs of the Enemy (as The Silmarillion hints he will do) to bring about our good. The scene is a triumph of providence over fate, but also a triumph of mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated" (36). This interpretation is simply too forgiving of Frodo, whose will fails him. "I do not choose now to do what I came to do" is, after all, what he says at...