Echoes of Eden by Jerram Barrs

Author:Jerram Barrs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

Echoes of Eden in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme. . . .

I would that I might with the minstrels sing

and stir the unseen with a throbbing string. . . .

I would with the beleaguered fools be told,

that keep an inner fastness where their gold,

impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring

to mint an image blurred of distant king,

or in fantastic banners wave the sheen

heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

So read several lines toward the end of Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia, which he wrote for C. S. Lewis after their late-night conversation that led to Lewis’s coming to faith in Christ. In these nine brief lines Tolkien sets out his longing for his own career as a writer. He intends to write legends or myths, for he regards this form of storytelling as blessed, as a means used by God to make known his truth about our world and our human condition. He desires that he might write stories with poems and songs that will have something of the power of the minstrels in a medieval hall when they played their music and sang the tales of their people’s heroes and their epic adventures. We can think here of the example of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Tolkien hopes to produce this kind of work with its powerful storytelling and its poetic and musical qualities.

He also desires to “stir the unseen” with the music of his words. By this expression Tolkien is communicating his eagerness to be able to write about the unseen world, the world of God and of his angels, and of the demons in opposition to him. Yet he expresses that he wishes to present this unseen world not directly, but indirectly, so that the great goodness and the terrible evil of that unseen world are revealed to the reader without an explicit account of the supernatural world being set down, and at a time before the coming of Christ.

In this, Tolkien plans for his work to be similar to the labors of the poet of Beowulf. That great Anglo-Saxon writer was a Christian, but he set his story in the time before the coming of Christianity to Beowulf’s people. There are hints of the glory of creation, and there is the longing for redemption. But there is no explicit reference to redemption; rather there is a very powerful sense of the age-long battle against the forces of evil, represented in Beowulf by the monster Grendel, by Grendel’s mother, and also by the dragon. In the story of Beowulf there is no final victory against evil, but there is heroism, courage, and the readiness to sacrifice all in the battle with the forces of darkness. Courage and self-sacrifice are, in Beowulf, hints or promises of the ultimate victory of faith through the coming of Christ into the world, the one who will accomplish the utter defeat of the Devil and all the hosts of darkness.

Like the Beowulf poet, Tolkien plans to set his stories in a time before the coming of Christ into this world.

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