The final installment of The Hobbit hit the theaters this month and it is masterful. Of course, its kind of hard to mess up the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. If you let his words just resonate from the page, then you’ll be good. Peter Jackson has really created far more than just The Hobbit but really the first three volumes of his own History of the Ring of Power. He admitted as much in some of the material you can view about the movie, and when I saw the movie, it was while watching all three Hobbit movies together….so, before the third movie (the one we had come to see), The Battle of the Five Armies, PJ came on screen to thank us for coming to the special viewing and he acknowledged that in the near-future, many of us would attempt to watch all six movies (three Hobbit movies plus three Lord of the Rings movies).
I have been in love with Middle Earth since I first read LOTR and The Hobbit back in the middle 1970s as a boy of 12 or 13. Every time I read it, and I’ve probably read both books about two dozen times or so, I feel a deep wistfulness. I can’t really place it fully, only to say that if ever there was a way to go live in a fictional world, I would head to Middle Earth immediately. So, as I left the theater, I was again sad and slightly melancholy. PJ and New Line had even played this angle in their advertising, asking fans to come watch “One Last Time.” When you close the end of LOTR, and Sam says sadly to Rosie “Well, I’m back” there is some finality that the world has changed. You know as the reader, you must put the book down.
But there is more; I think it comes from the unabashed Christianity of Professor Tolkien. He says as much in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” Tolkien explains from where he intends his tales to draw their power — from the emotional reservoir of the Christian gospel. The “primary world” story of the Son of God himself, taking full humanity at Christmas, living flawlessly in our fallen world, sacrificing himself to rescue us on Good Friday from God’s just wrath, and rising again victorious on Easter as the living Lord of the Universe — here is the Story for which God made the human heart and the Story from which all good stories derive their power. For Tolkien, he hoped that his fairy stories, his fictional world of Middle Earth, would cast “a far-off gleam . . . of evangelium in the real world” to the reader, pointing him or her towards the True Source of Good.
Writer David Mathis said it this way, “Tolkien believed that God made humanity for the Great Joy purchased by and provided in the Good News of Jesus, and that the joy we experience from good fantasy tales streams its power from the real world, the Primary Reality, created by God and culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. In this way, Tolkien thought that all good stories meet with God’s gospel-shaped imprint on his creatures.”
As we are now two days from Christmas, my prayer for you is that you deeply consider the coming of the Great Joy of Jesus. And, if you don’t think you can honestly accept that prima facie, then go watch the last installment of the Hobbit movies. Better, pick up the books…read deeply with joy as I have and let the understory take you see that “far-off gleam…of evangelium.” God is calling and wants you to join Him on this grand adventure.