"The Other Power then took over" - Thoughts on the significance of Time, Plot Planning, and "The Writer of the Story" in The Lord of the Rings
“In Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of march when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King.”
- The Lord of the Rings
Last school year at our homeschool co-op, I had the privilege of teaching a year-long high school class on the Lord of the Rings. In addition to LotR, we read Beowulf, some Old English poems including the Wanderer and the Seafarer, and several poems and short stories by Tolkien. I didn’t use any study guides or curriculums; I spent the summer studying and reading, mapping out our course, choosing features I wanted to point out, and then during the school year, I read essays and commentaries each the week so that I could help the students see the overall vision of Tolkien as well as notice the patterns and details he placed throughout. It ended up being an incredible year for me, both as a self-educator teaching myself how to study a subject so as to be able to teach it, and as a teacher, leading my students through Tolkien’s story. I felt like a tour guide in a cathedral – notice here, the detail of construction, and how this scroll work here recalls to mind the flourish over there. The tour guide always knows (or should know) much more about the building than he could share in one tour, and it is his job to not only inform the visitors of facts but with those facts, to awaken a sense of wonder and awe at the building and its architect(s). What I wasn’t expecting was how much wonder and awe was stirred up in me. I could not get over the epic size and unity of the story and attention to minute detail that Tolkien managed to accomplish at the same time. One thing that still astounds me is Tolkien’s meticulous mapping of Time and the characters’ place in time. He knew where all his characters were and when, even when their movements are never mentioned in the story itself. Lord of the Rings itself was an incredible structural achievement. I doubt if it would be the epic work it is without that strong architectural design supporting and undergirding every sentence, every word.
The whole timeline of the Lord of the Rings spans years, decades; several decades if you include Bilbo’s story, and centuries/millennia if you go back to the Silmarillion. But the quest of LotR is accomplished within a 9 month span. This 9 months is significant. Tom Shippey explains why:
“…The date Gandalf so carefully gives for the fall of Sauron [is] ‘the twenty-fifth of March’. In Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, 25 March is the date of the Crucifixion; also of the Annunciation (nine months before Christmas); also the last day of Creation.” The Road to Middle-Earth
In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey goes into a bit more detail:
“No one any longer celebrates the twenty-fifth of March, and Tolkien’s point is accordingly missed, as I think he intended. He inserted it only as a kind of signature, a personal mark of piety. However, as he knew perfectly well, in old English tradition, 25th March is the date of the Crucifixion, of the first Good Friday. As Good Friday is celebrated on a different day each year, Easter being a mobile date defined by phases of the moon, the connection has been lost… When the Julian calendar gave way to the Gregorian in 1752, there was an eleven-day discrepancy between them, so that the 25th of March jumped to being the 6th of April. …
”25th of March remains a date deeply embedded in the Christian calendar. In old tradition, again, it is the date of the Annunciation and the conception of Christ – naturally, nine months exactly before Christmas, 25th December. It is also the date of the Fall of Adam and Eve, the felix culpa whose disastrous effects the Annunciation and the Crucifixion were to annul or repair. One might note that in the Calendar of dates which Tolkien so carefully wrote out in Appendix B, December 25th is the day on which the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell. The main action of The Lord of the Rings takes place, then, in the mythic space between Christmas, Christ’s birth, and the crucifixion, Christ’s death.”
Shippey goes on to say that this doesn’t mean we are meant to see Frodo as a type of Christ, unless “he is so only in a technical sense which has been almost entirely forgotten, and in which the differences are more important than similarities.” What connects Frodo to being a type of Christ, Shippey says, is that “he and Sam…have a ‘eucatastrophic’” dimension to them. I agree, and I think there is another layer to this as well. First, a definition.
What is ‘eucatastrophe’?
In a letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien writes,
‘I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane (for which see the essay) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorry, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is ONLY a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. …In the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Ananke of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.”
Remember that Tolkien is writing “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story.”1 In this body of legend, the eucatastrophe of Frodo happens, in the Third Age of Middle-Earth before the “age of men.” In his letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes,
“[In] the Sixth and Last book…we reach the brink of the First, and the whole plan fails. The Ring conquers. Frodo cannot bear to destroy it. He renounces the Quest, and claims the Ring and puts it on his finger.” (emphasis Tolkien’s)
But then “Gollum comes up, and wrestles on the brink for mastery with Frodo.” He bites off the Ring but falls into the abyss, and so “the Ring is after all unmade – and even the treachery of Gollum has served its end (as Gandalf foretold).” In another letter, Tolkien writes that the failure of Frodo, “following the logic of the plot, was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere "‘fairy-story’ ending in which the hero is indomitable. It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves. In this case the cause (not the ‘hero’) was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted.”
He goes on to say that “Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), ‘that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named’ (as one critic has said).” (emphasis mine)
We see here that Frodo was never intended to be the Savior of Middle-Earth except in the very human way of making himself available, remaining faithful (as long as his strength held out) and giving of himself to his utmost. His eucatastrophe is a shadow and type of the True Eucatastrophe of Christ’s death and resurrection, and this is supported by the fact that it very deliberately happens in the “mythic space” between December 25th and March 25th. Though Shippey says that Tolkien never intended it to be noticed, that Tolkien so intentionally draws attention to it in Gandalf’s comment and in the list of important dates in Appendix B means that it was not accidental, especially when we take into account the meticulous planning that went into the work.
“Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?”
With this meticulous planning in mind, I want to highlight something that Tolkien says several times in his letters. My favorite of Tolkien’s expressions happens in letter 328, a draft to Carol Batten-Phelps:
“The Lord of the Rings was written slowly and with great care for detail, & finally emerged as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight, as it were, on a brief episode in history, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space. Very well: that may explain to some extent why it ‘feels’ like history; why it was accepted for publication’ and why it has proved readable for a large number of very different kinds of people. But it does not fully explain what has actually happened. Looking back on the wholly unexpected things that have followed its publication – beginning at once with the appearance of Vol. I – I feel as if an ever darkening sky over our present world had been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the Horns of Hope had been heard again, as Pippin heard them suddenly at the absolute nadir of the fortunes of the West. But How? and Why?
“I think I can now guess what Gandalf would reply. A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten (though I believe he was well-known). He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. He brought one or two reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen he pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly he said: ‘Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?’
“Pure Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly , or to ask what he meant. I think I said: ‘No, I don’t suppose so any longer.’ I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the imperfections of ‘chosen instruments’, and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose. …if sanctity inhabits [a man’s] work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him but through him. And [you] would [not] perceive it in these terms unless it were with you too…
Of course The L.R. does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world…”
I quote the letter at length because Tolkien’s whole attitude – both as the meticulous planner and time plotter of this huge story and as the author of a work he is astounded to see has come to mean more to “a large number of very different people” – is exactly what a Christian’s attitude to be towards any work they set their hand to, and definitely in storytelling. We should approach our creative work, our daily mundane work, our vocational work with an attitude that marries “Whatever you do, do with all your might,”2 with “A man plans his way but the Lord directs his steps.”3 We could modify the verse to say, a man plans his story (in all its plot points and invented languages mostly for his own amusement) but the Lord directs its influence.
On this March 25th, the Gondorian New Year and the Old English Church Calendar feasts of both the Annunciation and the Crucifixion, I’m thinking about faithfulness both in small things and grand undertakings, whether or not we are “successful” in our eyes or in the eyes of the world. Not only the fictional faithfulness of Frodo and Sam and all the members of the Fellowship, but in these old Church feasts, the faithfulness of Gabriel, of Joseph, of Mary, and of our Lord Jesus Himself over and above all. We are not called to be “successful” in what we do, just faithful. And if we are faithful, even imperfectly so, we could, to rephrase Tolkien, cause “a situation [to be] produced” through which Mercy accomplishes what we never could. In our faithfulness, even if it is a stumbling faithfulness, we could open a door through which “The Other Power then [could take] over… ‘that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named’.” We could be a vessel for God’s mercy to pour through, even if we fail in what we set out to do; even if as a vessel we are cracked - Mercy can trickle through the cracks.
There is so much encouragement in this, no matter where we are in life. As parents or children, as homeschooling moms or college professors, in cleaning our toilets or preparing to set off on a life of missions work - when we decrease, He can increase and all kinds of good things can come of it that we could never have planned or foreseen.
Next year, I get to walk through my Lord of the Rings class again with a new group of students, and I am looking forward to adding this detail of Tolkien’s story (both LotR and his story as the author) to the list of things to notice and admire as we walk through Middle-earth together.
“Don’t laugh! But once upon a time…I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the ear, the lesser drawing on splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.”
From a letter to Milton Waldman
Colossians 3:23
Proverbs 16:9
see also Proverbs 16:1, “The preparations of the heart belong to man, But the answer of the tongue is from the LORD.”
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