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 PrintableVersion Letter from AmericaRinging the changesThe final instalment of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings opened in America on my birthday. I have long been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkein's fantasy about Hobbits and Sauron and the 'ring of power'. I even remember telling a Cambridge don during my interview at Cambridge that Tolkein was one of the foremost literary geniuses of our age. He was a bit bemused by this ('fanciful' I seem to remember was his judgement of Tolkein's work) but I stand by my assessment. As a story, The Lord of the Rings is without parallel in modern literature, at least in the way it tackles the great themes of good and evil, suffering, heroism and adventure. Nothing in The Lord of the Rings is real; much of it is true. I confess, then, to mild disappointment with Jackson's final foray in The Return of the King (or as our local cinema listed it Lord of the Rings 3). The Lord of the Rings captivated many Americans. In some places movie theatres showed back-to-back viewings of all three instalments, culminating in the just past midnight first playing of The Return of the King. That takes some stamina, especially as they were running the extra length uncut versions, each coming in at a heavyweight four plus hours. With an hour between shows, that amounts to 14 hours in a movie theatre. Tickets to even this entertainment marathon were hard to come by. GrippedAmericans were gripped by The Lord of the Rings. Christians here view it as a triumph for the worldview submerged beneath the story, so strong in moral themes, to have received such popular acclaim. Churlish as it might appear then, it is nonetheless still true that Jackson left out some of the best bits (perhaps they are on the extended DVD), emphasised the gore, and had such a long good-bye scene at the end that I (a fan, remember) was almost bored. Even thus bowdlerized, Rings 3 kicked like a mule. Why? I think there are three reasons why this other-worldly vision of a tweedy Oxbridge academic, has been successful in modern America: * It has magic in it. People are into the supernatural at present. The Lord of the Rings is full of mystique, magic, the supernatural, and, of course, the fantastical. * It has a message in it. Without ever being preachy, and never losing the plot, The Lord of the Rings conveys a message. Its message is predominantly a message of what Christians would call 'providence'. In The Lord of the Rings good triumphs over evil, not in a mechanistic kind of way but still with clear elements of 'destiny' intertwined. In some ways it's like the book of Esther in the Bible. The name of God is never mentioned, but the hand of providence writes the story. * It has art. Like C.S. Lewis, Tolkein understood the value of imagination to the Christian cause. Jackson has wonderfully brought to life much of the imaginative world of Middle Earth. The pure aesthetic pleasure of the artistic achievement is married to a world view that is implicitly moral. But fan as I am, and much as I enjoyed Jackson's versions despite their minor failings, and much as I would like to see The Lord of the Rings get an Oscar, I do not want to claim too much for the vision of Middle Earth. It is a moral story. It is even deeply Christian in its morality. But there is no gospel. A great starter for discussion, but for the proclamation of the gospel we'll need to look to other places. Josh Moody,
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