Ch 1 - The great symphony of creation
There is room for development and alteration. There is also room for choice-and thus for the tragedy and inconsolable grief that are endemic to mortal life. But usually it is a universe that features a mighty possibility of growth and change-all prompted by free acts of the will (p12)
Capable of great & moral good means being equally capable of terrible & evil acts.
A pagan sense of doom-the notion that the world's outcome is unalterably bent toward final destruction-resounds like I dread drum beat throughout The Lord of The Rings (p15)
In watching TLOR, the ever present sense of doom & death kept me on the edge of hope and despair, wondering who would rescue the Hobbits while at the same time wondering how they could keep going.
A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. - Other Essays
Thorin Oakenshield bids farewell to Bilbo by saying "I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed". - The Hobbit
CS Lewis rightly noted that a "profound melancholy" pervades the whole of Tolkien's book, even if the sadness service to enhance the joy. Haldir the Elf voices this paradox touchingly: "the world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater" - LOTR 1, p363
Job 5:7 & Isaiah 40:6-7 are strikingly melancholy as is most of Ecclesiastes.
Legolas recognizes this, too. "Alas for us all! And for all that walk the world in these after-days. For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream… The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long, long stream. Yet beneath the sun all things must wear to an end at last" - LOTR 1, p395,405
The fact that life is shadowed by death does not make it evil. On the contrary, the omnipresence of death renders life immensely precious, even if it can never be the summum bonum, or highest good, (p20 GATT)
The essential goodness of the natural order
Frodo and Samwise Gamgee get a glimpse of the original, unmarred goodness of creation when he and the rest of the company enter Lothlorian. Sam says, "I am inside a song" and Frodo says, "I'm lost in wonder". (p20 GATT).
It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear-cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured forever. He saw no color but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for the summer or for spring. No blemish of sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lorien there was no stain. (LOTR 1.365)
Conversely, The Dead Marshes are filled with the dead who fell to Sauron and can be seen in the water. Beyond the marshes lies Mordor, the cruel realm of Sauron-"here nothing lived, not even a leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and gray, as of the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth, fire blasted and poison stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light… The sun was up, walking on clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled."
LOTR 2.239
Tolkien scoffed at his books being somewhat escapist, noting "the notion that motor cars are more alive than centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more real then horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!" GATTp21
Psalm 148:7-8 captures the wonder of "make believe", as opposed to the reality of life and work.
Tolkien Loves "Slowness"
The Ents are an example of that. It is noted, even the Hobbits were too quick for the Ents:
"one felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples the very deep Lake. I don't know but it felt as if something that grew in the ground-asleep you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root tip and leaf tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly woken up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years. (2.66-67, GATT p27)
Good Magic and Evil Sorcery
Only in the work of those who are good is there providential assurance that the world is morally ordered, and only there lies a way beyond the despair that is likely to be prompted by the hard realities of both human and natural realms. GATTp28
Magic and divination were common practices in the ancient world in the Bible displays a good deal of both. Deuteronomy 18:9-12
Ephesians 3:10; 6:12
Tolkien notes that magic is never an art but always a technique for manipulation: "it's desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills" (Other Essays 143)
Descartes famously said the aim of modern science is to render us "masters and possessors of nature"
Churchhill said this about modern sciences attempts: "a dark age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted but the lights a perverted science".
As Tolkien continues to write in LOTR, Treebeard the Ent reports that Saruman becomes obsessed with power and acquires "a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment" (2.76)
Even Saruman's fortress at Isengard is a prison house of mechanical power "a graveyard of unquiet dead. For the ground trembled. The shafts ran down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, storehouses, armories, smithies and great furnaces. Iron wheels revolved endlessly and hammers thudded. At night plumes of vapor steamed from the vents, lit from beneath with red light or blue or venomous green." (2.160)
Further, GATT writes, "Tolkien was careful to point out that the use of a thing whether for good or ill, determines its worth, not the thing itself".
Simply put, larger things do not have more value in God's economy.
