How a good story sets the world to rights

Mythologies reflect our search for meaning in life writes David Quinn

The final part of the movie trilogy based on The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien comes to cinemas nationwide this week. The Hobbit is one of the best-selling books of all time. The Lord of the Rings, also by Tolkien, is the second only to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens in the fiction best-seller list. It has sold a staggering 150 million copies worldwide.

Peter Jackson is director of both The Lord of the Rings trilogy of films and The Hobbit trilogy. Not counting the latest instalment being released this week, the movies between them have made some €2.5 billion at the box office and they are regularly shown on television and will be for years to come.

What makes these feats of imagination by JRR Tolkien, a convert to Catholicism, so popular? Tolkien’s work has, in fact, been the subject of numerous interpretations. One is that they are basically anti-war tracts because Tolkien himself had fought in World War I and lost many of his friends to it.

Fables

Another is that they are environmentalist fables because the mythical Middle Earth, the setting for both Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit is almost a character in itself. The villains are those who would despoil it, for example Saruman, the good wizard turned evil who begins destroying a forest to feed his war machine.

Middle Earth is, in fact, bigger than any of the characters. Their job is chiefly to preserve it from those who would destroy it, honour its great history and add to it themselves.

Another interpretation is that The Lord of the Rings (more so than The Hobbit) is a Christian allegory. Frodo, for example, can be depicted as a Christ-like character who is prepared to sacrifice himself and to bear his cross (the One Ring) in order to save the world.

The wizard Gandalf is a prophet who tells the people what must be done, even what that is unpopular, and exhort them to action.

Noble Aragorn is the king to come. In Frodo, Gandalf and Aragon we have Priest, Prophet and King, all of which combine in Christ but are represented by three separate people in The Lord of the Rings.

However, Tolkien insisted that his books should not be read in an allegorical way. They were simply stories, stories he drew from ancient mythologies, including Norse mythologies.

Tolkien noticed that England did not have as well developed a mythology as say the Greeks or the Norsemen, so he wanted to write one for them.

This is why the Shire is so important in his stories. The Shire, where the Hobbits live, is a sort of English rural idyll. The worst vice in the Shire is probably gossip.

The Shire is very far from the centre of the action in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. When Bilbo seeks adventure, he must travel far from the Shire to find it. So must Frodo.

The Hobbits who live in the Shire are almost entirely ignorant of the world beyond their borders. Half the point of Tolkien’s stories is to keep them in this state of innocence. Gandalf and Aragorn and all the other great heroes of the books are doing their job properly if the inhabitants of the Shire never get to hear of Mordor or Sauron, the Dark Lord.

Unfortunately their innocence is shattered when the world does break in upon them towards the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s books also appeal because the heroes are often the unlikeliest people. Bilbo is an unlikely hero. So is Frodo. Humble Sam, Frodo’s gardener who follows his master right to the end, through every tribulation, is probably the unlikeliest hero of all.

Here it is very hard not to think of the Bible because they each of them is a ‘David’ against the many ‘Goliath’s’ they encounter along the way.

In fact, despite Tolkien’s resistance to people seeing his stories as an allegory, it is hard to read them as anything else because that is what mythologies are.

Every good mythology is epic in scale, pits good against evil and the characters conform to certain archetypes that are burrowed deep into the human psyche.

Mythologies are often manifestations of our search for meaning. In mythologies we seek that meaning through stories and this is why the many mythologies produced by the human race over many millennia share so many similarities.

In the end, our minds are ‘programmed’ to tell and receive certain kinds of stories, stories about heroes and villains and a struggle to overcome many obstacles along the way to final victory.

This is probably why many people find the fantasy stories of George RR Martin so difficult to deal with. Martin’s stories have been put on the screen in the form of hit TV series, Game of Thrones, some of which is filmed in Northern Ireland.

Heroes

In the Game of Thrones’ stories, Martin obstinately refuses to let heroes be heroes and villains be villains. Instead, heroes turn into villains and villains become heroes. Or the hero gets killed, often with great savagery, all of which is shown in gory detail to the viewer.

Martin defends his books claiming they are truer to history than other fantasy stories and that is true to the extent that history isn’t black or white and history is messy and has no neat endings where everyone lives happily ever after.

But we don’t expect our hero stories to be like that. In Saving Mr Banks, a story about Walt Disney’s eventually successful attempt to persuade the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, to film her book, Disney tells Travers that the whole purpose of telling a story is so that people can see the world being set right.

Lot of stories are not like that of course.

But most fantasy fiction is and most of the best loved stories are as well.

The Lord of the Rings is such a story, and so is The Hobbit, and they are particularly well told. This is why they have so many fans.

The story of Jesus is, of course, the ultimate story of how the world is set to rights, and that story has the great merit of being true as well.