By S.A. McCarthy

The Christmas season brings with it a sense of magic and wonder: the days grow shorter and the nights colder, stars stand out cool and clear in a midnight sky that children hope will soon be charted by flying reindeer and a sleigh laden with toys, the lights winding round trees and hanging from rooftops seem like candles lit by a winter warlock. The stories with which we populate the season also have some sense of the magical and otherworldly: tales of generosity, quiet sacrifice, and thoughtful gift-giving find their home in a world full of ghosts of Christmas past and present, a saintly toymaker who slides down chimneys, and a winter wonderland peopled by elves. Yet one of the best-beloved stories of magic and elves is rarely associated with Christmas. It should be.

In a letter to his friend, Jesuit priest Robert Murray, the British author J.R.R. Tolkien emphasized the Christian themes enlivening his best-known literary work. “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision,” Tolkien wrote. He added that “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

To many readers, that “religious element” is both subtle and familiar. The wizard Gandalf’s self-sacrifice on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm and subsequent resurrection echo Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and resurrection three days later, the burden of the Ring carried by Frodo reminds us both of Christ’s labors beneath the weight of the cross and the weight of sin which we all carry, Aragorn’s healing hands tending to the wounded after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields are evocative of the “Divine Physician,” and his return to the throne of Gondor calls to mind Christ’s anticipated second coming. But careful examination reveals that the Christian truth Tolkien hoped to embody in his literary classic runs much more deeply than a handful of clever allusions or parallels, and in fact courses throughout the three-volume legend like blood through veins. “The Lord of the Rings” even incorporates Christmas!

Frodo, of course, learns of the evil of the Ring from Gandalf before setting out from the peaceful Shire, but it is not until reaching the Elf-lord Elrond’s home of Rivendell that Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, and leaders of the free peoples of Middle-earth learn that the only way to destroy the Ring and forever rob the Dark Lord Sauron of his greatest weapon is to carry the Ring into Sauron’s stronghold in Mordor and hurl the golden band into the forge in which it was built, in the mountain Orodruin. The quest on which Frodo and his companions, the Fellowship, embark proves to be more than a simple good-versus-evil narrative.

Some have suggested that Sauron’s Ring is modeled on the atomic bomb, although Tolkien repeatedly refuted the claim in his letters, professing his disdain for “direct allegory” and preferring that his stories be read as mythology, evoking eternal truths and timeless virtues rather than the woes and worries of the present moment. The One Ring does not represent a nuclear weapon, nor, as some have suggested, does it represent power or the pursuit of power. After all, one of the chief heroes of “The Lord of the Rings,” Aragorn, spends the entirety of the book seeking to reclaim the throne of Gondor. Rather, the Ring most clearly represents sin, as the literary scholar Joseph Pearce has suggested.

A particularly poignant piece of evidence for this postulation comes in the form of Tom Bombadil, a strange, somewhat silly figure who makes an appearance early in “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Bombadil speaks or sings in iambic pentameter, tends to the Old Forest, and seems to have authority over beasts and even the trees, ordering Old Man Willow to release the Hobbits Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took when the gnarled tree attempts to drag them into the ground with its roots. The presence of a rhyming, bearded man who skips and sings about his bright blue jacket and yellow boots in a medieval, mythological war epic has struck many as out of place, with most radio and film adaptations of Tolkien’s work excluding his appearance as nonessential.

But Bombadil actually points to the real significance of the Ring for readers. Pearce argues that Bombadil is representative of man in a state of preternatural grace — in short, Adam before the Fall. Therefore, when Bombadil takes the Ring from Frodo and puts it on his finger, the Hobbits are astounded that he does not disappear. Without the stain of Original Sin and the resulting concupiscence or attraction to sin, the Ring, itself representative of sin, holds no sway over Bombadil. In fact, the inverse proves true: while the Ring ordinarily makes its wearer disappear, Bombadil blithely flings the Ring into the air and makes it disappear, evincing mastery of his unfallen nature.

Therefore, when the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell on its mission to destroy the Ring and rid Middle-earth of Sauron’s malignant influence forever, the quest is a quest to destroy the power of sin. It is no accident, then, that the date on which Frodo and his companions begin their journey is December 25, recognized around our world as Christmas Day. Christ came into this world, God became man, on a mission to free us from the power of sin, to end the dominion of Satan. The Archangel Gabriel tells Joseph as much when he encourages the carpenter to take Mary as his wife: “And she shall bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus. For he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).

In other words, Christ was not born and then later tasked with bringing down evil, but came into this world specifically for that purpose. Tolkien consciously chose the date of Christ’s birth as the date when the Fellowship would begin its journey to achieve the same in Middle-earth. Just as Christ knew that He would suffer death in order to free us from sin, Frodo knew that he would likely die on his journey to Mordor, if he ever made it there, and his companions knew that they risked death also. Some of them did die. Boromir gave his life defending the younger Hobbits. While Frodo did not quite die, he was left “broken” by his wounds and the crushing weight of the Ring.

“Frodo was sent or willed by what (in this story) may be called Providence to his task, the ‘saving’ of the Shire and incidentally of the world. He was (in the event) the one person that could have done it (Gandalf chose him, and was right),” Tolkien wrote in a 1956 letter. “To the attentive reader (who I hope exists, and will continue to exist) it should be clear when his [Frodo’s] dark times came upon him and he was conscious of being wounded by knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden, it was not only nightmare memories of past horrors that afflicted him, but also unreasoning self-reproach: he saw himself and all that he had done and all that had been done to him as a broken failure.”

To bring everything full circle, Tolkien has the Ring destroyed on March 25, which the Catholic Church traditionally believed to be the date of Christ’s crucifixion, when the power of sin was destroyed once and for all. “Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24). Many readers consider “The Lord of the Rings” to be a brilliant fantasy tale full of heroic virtue and Christian symbolism; while it is that, it is also much more. Tolkien’s mythology is steeped in his Christian faith, lending meaning and significance to everything from dates and names to the power and meaning of sacrifice and redemption in Middle-earth, which is one of the many reasons that “The Lord of the Rings” has proved an enduring classic, rising far above the likes of the juvenile “Harry Potter” books or the morally degenerate “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

So this year, instead of watching yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” or Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” maybe try sitting down with Tolkien’s classic and seeking out the deep Christian meaning coursing through the veins of his legendary story. Dads especially may want to start a new holiday tradition: reading “The Lord of the Rings” aloud to the family. If you start reading on December 25, you may finish all three volumes by March 25, even with a busy holiday schedule!

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.