The new year is here…
As the year turns, I find myself thinking about what we carry forward and what truly matters.
The grand sweep of The Lord of the Rings enthralled me in high school. I had read it two or three times by the time I reached university. It was the ultimate epic for me; the bittersweet story of the cost of victory over evil, the journey of life wrapped in metaphor, allusions, and fantasy. A vast, unlimited world of the imagination. I was bewitched by literature.
I arrived at university with scholarships and a head filled with phantasms. I was at one of the best universities in the world, staying in a beautiful residence on a beautiful quadrangle, with library and class a minute from my bed. Food was provided in a hall where the flag that draped Queen Victoria’s coffin looked down upon me daily. Previously sheltered, I was exposed to students from vastly different backgrounds. It was an age where the old was being tossed aside. It was all new to me.
I had more than everything I had ever dreamed. I now know I also had a sickness that forbade me concentrating on anything for more than a minute. One day a reference to Nietzsche would send me down a rabbit hole, the next day a reference in Herodotus would send me to tomes like Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar. In hindsight, I am due animadversions.
Yet, in another way, it was an awakening. An awakening to something more important than scholarship: Kindness. Humility. Our weakness – that can become our strength.
It’s not something I recognized at the time. Then I was more interested in fictional techniques, parties, new ideas and dancing. The realization came from a professor who was nearly retired, an elderly professor with some ailments. He often could not make class. He taught renaissance poetry.
One day I met him stumbling across the quadrangle. I forget the question I had, but his answer included the comment, “the ending of the Lord of the Rings is profoundly Christian,” and I replied, “is it?” He looked at me as though I had never thought at all.
He gave me his book – autographed – on Chapman. Of course, I was in ecstasy over Keats – “Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold” – I loved Chapman’s translation of Homer. So, a professor who gave me a book about my heroes was very special to me. My memory is fresh.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
Take the quiz and find out.
And it is only now I get it. Frodo is kind and forgiving. He doesn’t kill Gollum. He pities Gollum. But Frodo is human. Evil is stronger than he is. The ring claims Frodo. Evil is stronger than we all are. On the Cracks of Doom, we see that the human will is not infinite. The Übermensch is merely a vapour. We understand. As good as he is, Frodo is overwhelmed.
Yet good wins. But it is not hard work and effort that brings victory. It was kindness – or rather mercy. Not only did Frodo not kill Gollum, neither did Bilbo or Gandalf. And Gollum toppled into the fire, unredeemed. It was mercy and kindness – freely given – that eventually allowed good to triumph. And mercy and kindness knows not if, or when, it will be repaid. You need humility to realize the place of kindness. We do not know all things. It is a form of restraint to practice humility. And remember, Frodo is scarred in the process. Although the burden is more than he can handle, he strives, he wins – proving that the struggle and pain was worth it.
I’ll never forget Prof. Millar Maclure.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
