CONCLUSION

The Return of the King

The last soldier to die in the Great War was an American, twenty-three-year-old Henry Gunther, a private with the American Expeditionary Force in France. He was killed at 10:59 a.m., November 11, 1918, one minute before the Armistice went into effect.

Gunther’s squad, part of the 79th Infantry Division, encountered a roadblock of German machine guns near the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers. Against the orders of his sergeant, he charged the guns with his bayonet. German soldiers, aware of the Armistice, tried to wave him off. But Gunther kept coming and was gunned down; he died instantly. His divisional record states: “Almost as he fell, the gunfire died away and an appalling silence prevailed.”¹

Despite the jubilation, the celebrations, the parties and parades marking the end of the First World War, a brutal silence fell over much of the world. It was the stillness of souls anguished and bewildered by the carnage of war. Poet Thomas Hardy, writing upon the signing of the Armistice, undoubtedly spoke for many:

And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”2

Like other young writers of their generation, Tolkien and Lewis sought to make sense of a conflict that claimed so much in blood and treasure and delivered so little to the cause of human happiness. “The Great War was a process by which all the great powers, victors and vanquished alike, transformed themselves from bastions of prosperity into sinkholes of poverty and debt,” writes G. J. Meyer in A World Undone. “Financially as in so many other ways, the war was a road to ruin.”³ To some extent, Tolkien and Lewis were swept along this ruinous road: the realization that the prewar beliefs in mankind’s inevitable progression, in the creation of something like heaven on earth, were cruelly mistaken.

Indeed, the Will to Power remained a permanent feature of the human predicament. The struggle between Good and Evil would not be resolved within human history. What, then, was the basis for hope?

WHEN HOPE VANISHES

There are moments in their stories, it must be said, when hope is virtually extinguished. In The Last Battle, Shift the Ape, a servant of Rishda Tarkaan, and the Calormenes have conquered Narnia. By creating “Tashlan,” a confusion of Aslan with the demon Tash, they threaten to deceive even the most loyal followers of the lion. Truth is rendered a useless weapon against their falsehood. As biographer Walter Hooper explains, this is not the wickedness we expect in an adventure story, but rather “a new and dreadful dimension where ordinary courage seems helpless.”4

Dreadful indeed. As he lay dying after defending Narnia, Roonwit the Centaur delivers this message: “. . . remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.”⁵ Lewis is insistent on this point—that despite all our effort and sacrifice, even to the point of death, we cannot prevent a final defeat. The present world, always in the grip of Darkness, can never evolve into an earthly paradise. Rather, it will draw to a sudden and violent close: “an extinguisher popped on the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain run down on the play.”⁶

Tolkien likewise declines to offer a sweet and easy resolution to humanity’s struggle with evil. Writing again to his son Christopher during the Second World War, he lamented “the appalling destruction and misery” of war. “There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour.”⁷ The bitter realism of The Lord of the Rings is what makes the book so irresistibly relevant to our own situation. Not unlike Tolkien’s postwar generation, we tend to be cynical about the ideals of an earlier time and the panaceas offered for our modern problems.

When Tolkien’s characters are nearly broken by grief, by fear of losing all they hold dear, we cannot help but grieve with them. Think of the exchange between Éowyn and Faramir as they recover from their wounds in battle and wait with deep anxiety while the war for Middle-earth rages. As they look east, they see a “vast mountain of darkness” rising up and seemingly ready to engulf the whole world. “Then you think that the Darkness is coming?” says Éowyn. “Darkness Unescapable?”8

By the end of his quest, Frodo the Ring-bearer has given up the thought of survival. He has resigned himself to a final defeat: one of the brutal facts about the world as we find it. “Hope fails. An end comes,” he tells Sam. “We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.”⁹

For all the accusations of “medieval escapism,” Tolkien comes closer to capturing the tragedy of the human condition than any postmodern cynic. At the climax of his journey, at the fires of Mount Doom, despite all his courage and strength, Frodo fails in his quest: he chooses not to destroy the Ring, but instead succumbs to its power and places it once again on his finger. “But one must face the fact,” Tolkien wrote, “the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good.’ ”¹⁰

Here is where Tolkien and Lewis depart most radically from the spirit of the age. Our modern tales of heroism—the gallery of superheroes, super cops, and super spies—offer a protagonist who invariably saves the day by his (or her) natural intelligence and strength of will, usually with lots of firepower at hand. The idea that the hero would need outside help—from a supernatural deity, for example—strikes many as a cheat. It robs human beings of their “dignity” and diminishes “the human spirit.” In the Star Wars franchise, the nebulous “Force” that aids Luke Skywalker in his struggle against Lord Vader even now seems quaint, out of date. We prefer Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, the brooding, obsessive figure who overcomes his demons to rescue Gotham more or less on his own. (Even Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler, Alfred, disappears for most of the movie.)

The heroic ideal in the works of Tolkien and Lewis, however, is qualified in a much more profound way. The hero cannot, by his own efforts, prevail in the struggle against evil. The forces arrayed against him, as well as the weakness within him, make victory impossible. The tragic nature of his quest begins to dawn on him, to oppress him, until the moment when failure seems inevitable.

The mythic dimension of their stories now reaches its zenith: like the best fairy tales, they provide the consolation of the happy ending, “the sudden joyous turn” toward rescue and redemption. It is the reversal of a catastrophe, what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe, a decisive act of Grace that promises to overcome our guilt, restore what has been lost, and set things right.11

Frodo fails in his quest. And yet his quest is accomplished, not by him, but by the most unlikely of creatures: Gollum. “His malice is great and gives him a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered,” says Gandalf. “But he may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron have foreseen.”¹² The wizard’s prophecy is fulfilled. Frodo’s defeat—our defeat—is overturned by a Power stronger than our weakness. Tolkien identified this Power as “that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named.”¹³ So it is that Gollum, driven by his lust to dominate, bites off Frodo’s finger that bears the Ring, only to slip and plunge to his death in the fire. The Ring is destroyed, not by Frodo or by the Fellowship, but by “a sudden and miraculous grace.”¹⁴

In the Narnia series, this act of Grace first appears in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Edmund’s betrayal of Aslan and his siblings has come at a great cost. “You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey,” sneers the White Witch, “and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill.” But Aslan intervenes. He offers his own life for Edmund’s, allowing himself to be killed upon the Stone Table with the Stone Knife. Yet death cannot hold him, and the Lion returns to life and defeats the White Witch and all her forces. This is the “Deep Magic” that was put into the world by the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea: that when a willing victim, free of guilt, exchanges his life for that of a traitor, then “Death itself would start working backwards.”15

The crowning moment of Grace occurs in The Last Battle, as King Tirian, the children, and a faithful remnant of Narnians fight their way to the entrance of the Stable: the last battle of the last King of Narnia. We are led to believe that inside the Stable is certain death, the stronghold of an all-powerful evil. “I feel in my bones,” says Poggin, “that we shall all, one by one, pass through that dark door before morning. I can think of a hundred deaths I would rather have died.”¹⁶ As the company is forced inside its doors, all hope seems lost.

Here again comes the “joyous turn.” The great Lion has invaded the Stable, cast out the demon Tash, and turned the Stable into a portal to Aslan’s Country. The children watch as Narnia is destroyed and a new world, nearly more beautiful than their hearts can bear, is called into being. “All the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door.”¹⁷ Lucy captures the simple yet powerful symbolism of the Stable: in the Christian story, it is the birthplace of the Messiah, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, of Jesus the Christ. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”¹⁸

These epic tales of heroism and sacrifice are strangely familiar to us because we have heard them, or rumors of them, before. They are the stories of men and women overcome by evil, yet loved and redeemed by Grace. They are tales “held together by a central myth that manages to partake of all the myths of all the heroes of the past.”19 As manifestations of eucatastrophe, they point us toward that essential myth that Tolkien and Lewis once debated into the early morning hours at Oxford, the Myth that became Fact.

OUR INCONSOLABLE SECRET

Only after all the fighting is done, when the bravest have fallen in battle, when the war against evil has been fought to its bitter end—only after all this—does the Myth as Fact complete the human story. Only then can joy, “joy beyond the walls of the world,” become our permanent possession.²⁰ There is no shortcut to the Land of Peace, no primrose path to the Mansions of the Blessed. First come tears and suffering in Mordor, heartless violence at Stable Hill—and horror and death at Golgotha.

Perhaps this is why the eucatastrophe is always mixed with grief: the knowledge of the sorrows endured in the struggle against evil lingers on in the human heart. “And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all the men were hushed.” And the minstrel sang to them, and he kept singing, “until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, over-flowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”²¹

The mingling of grief and joy, so descriptive of our mortal lives, is a recurring theme in the Bible. It is the experience of the Jews in the days of Ezra the prophet: the knowledge of the presence of God after many years of spiritual famine. Returning from bitter years of war and captivity, they begin to rebuild the temple of the Lord—their house of worship that had been destroyed by Israel’s enemies, initiating a long descent into slavery and exile. “And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid,” wrote the prophet. “But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while many others shouted for joy.”22

The conclusion of the Great War brought its own mix of celebration and sadness. The soldiers of this war had lived through endless days of mud, stench, slaughter, and death. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the history of the world; it shook the very foundations of civilized life.

“The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought,” wrote Winston Churchill. “All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them.”²³ Promises of swift victory were replaced by plans for a final “breakthrough” assault, which always ended in stalemate. It was a war that some feared might go on forever. “Whenever one side produced an implement of destruction that promised to tip the scales,” writes G. J. Meyer, “the other came up with a way to preserve the deadlock.”²⁴

No wonder one newspaper called the Armistice “the greatest day in the history of the world.”²⁵ There was rejoicing on that day, amid the oceans of sorrow.

Yet no full and final consolation could be found in the peace that followed. No war could end war for all time, or transform the nations into a brotherhood of man. “It was a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his diary.26 T. S. Eliot saw the postwar world as a wasteland of human weariness. “I think we are in rats’ alley,” he wrote, “where the dead men lost their bones.”²⁷ Erich Remarque predicted a generation of men “broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.” Civilian life, he said, would bring no comfort to the survivors: “We will not be able to find our way any more.”²⁸

BEHOLD THE KING

After returning to England from the front, Tolkien and Lewis might easily have joined the ranks of the rootless and disbelieving. Instead, they became convinced there was only one truth, one singular event, that could help the weary and brokenhearted find their way home: the Return of the King.

This King is stronger than “that Hideous Strength” that roams Narnia and Middle-earth looking for victims to devour. He is the archetype of the heroic, in every culture and in every age. He is the source of all goodness and courage, the desire of the nations. He comes to restore “the long-lost days of freedom.”²⁹ This King alone knows the way to that Blessed Realm that lies beyond the Sea. “The light ahead was growing stronger,” wrote Lewis in The Last Battle. “Lucy saw that a great series of many-colored cliffs led up in front of them like a giant’s staircase. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty.”³⁰

This King comes with power and beauty, as the voice of conscience and the source of consolation, as the Lion and the Lamb. Here, perhaps, is the lingering influence of George MacDonald. “Loving-kindness beamed from every line of his face,” he wrote of the noble knight in Phantastes. Even so, the knight’s face grew “stern and determined, all but fierce,” as his eyes “burned on like a holy sacrifice, uplift on a granite rock.”31 What Lewis discovered and came to embrace in MacDonald’s vision was the “union of tenderness and severity.”³²

No character in all of Lewis’s fiction embodies this blending of virtues more convincingly than Aslan. In The Silver Chair, Jill finds herself torn between fear and desire when the Lion appears and blocks her path to a stream of life-giving water:

“Are you thirsty?” said the Lion.

“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.

“Then drink,” said the Lion. . . .

“Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?”

“I make no promise,” said the Lion.

“Do you eat girls?” she said.

“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it. . . .

“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.³³

In his youthful atheism, Lewis didn’t recognize these qualities as belonging to the central figure of Christianity: Jesus the Christ. But his own careful reading of the gospels helped change his mind. “Nowhere else outside the New Testament,” he wrote, “have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.”34

Tolkien achieves much the same effect with Aragorn, the chief epic hero of The Lord of the Rings. He is a man of great courage, determination, and humility. Aragorn carries several names, all rich in meaning. He first appears as Strider, a dark and mysterious traveler. As a child he was called Estel, a name meaning “hope,” and a frequent theme throughout. In the House of Healing he names himself Envinyatur, or “Renewer.” He is later called Lord of the Western Lands and King of the West. His true stature is revealed only after Sauron is defeated and he finally assumes his throne:

But when Aragorn arose all that beheld him gazed in silence, for it seemed to them that he was revealed to them now for the first time. Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near; ancient of days he seemed and yet in the flower of manhood; and wisdom sat upon his brow, and strength and healing were in his hands, and a light was about him. And then Faramir cried: “Behold the King!”³⁵

In the end, the creators of Narnia and Middle-earth offer a vision of human life that is at once terrifying and sublime. They insist that every soul is caught up in an epic story of sacrifice and courage and clashing armies: the Return of the King. It is the day when every heart will be laid bare. We will know, with inexpressible joy or unspeakable sorrow, whether we have chosen Light or Darkness. “For the day of the LORD is near,” wrote the prophet, “in the valley of decision.”³⁶ Hence comes a warning, as well as a blessing: to deny the King, to turn away in grief or rage, means endless ruin. But to behold him—to be counted among his Beloved—is to pass into life everlasting.

“Is everything sad going to come untrue?” asks Sam.37 Here we find, beyond all imagination, the deepest source of hope for the human story. For when the King is revealed, “there will be no more night.”³⁸ The Shadow will finally and forever be lifted from the earth. The Great War will be won.

This King, who brings strength and healing in his hands, will make everything sad come untrue.