One final point to make about the The Lord of the Rings. The book is sometimes decried as a glorification of holy war, even a sort of romanticized version of the Crusades. This politically correct interpretation is not entirely false, but is much too crude. There is indeed a strange meeting of the epic/heroic and a more modern, in fact rather Christian, sort of value system predicated around modesty, humility and self-sacrifice. Others have noted that the Quest of the Ring is basically an attempt to destroy a “weapon of mass destruction.” The vaguely Jesus-like Gandalf is in fact a divine being incarnated in human form who dies to save others and is resurrected in time. Foreshadowings of inevitability blow like a disquieting wind with ever-growing strength through the books.

But it is not destiny but divinity that pushes through every crack of the work. It is not the case that characters of already foreordained fate merely move from place to place as they were intended–it is more that they are required to do all that they can, and some benevolent power brings things about when their grasp is not quite sufficient.

Nor are contemporary parallels lacking in the books. Tolkien weakly disavowed them by claiming that history in his time did not at all turn out like the War of the Rings, but I think that they are more wishful re-imaginings of how events should have turned out. In The Hobbit a World War I-like battle, where several basically good groups nearly come to blows because of greed, is narrowly averted by an invasion of more evil foes which brings them to their senses and unites them. In The Lord of the Rings a rivalry between two powers equally bad, like the Soviet Union and Germany in World War II (while the gods of the mighty lands of the West across the sea look on from afar, like America at the beginning of the war, refusing to intervene directly), and is only subsumed by a third force (England?) whose goal is not to wrest control over power but rather to destroy it. Above all perhaps Tolkien took from the conflict the impression that, come victory or defeat, the power and glory of the Old World, Middle-Earth, was destined to largely disappear. Perhaps any true reconciliation of the martial and the peaceful virtues such as we see here depends on a moral clarity with which we are not blessed on this earth, where the good and the evil can not readily be distinguished by their species or origin. But nonetheless we must try for one. For the message is: power must be wielded within certain boundaries to protect freedom and happiness, but as little as possible, for it corrupts, and it cannot be wielded for its own sake.