(Above: Icon of St. Alfred the Great of Anglo-Saxon England)

A paper given at “A Flame Imperishable: The Christian Legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien, Sept. 15, 7533 [Sept. 28, 2024 on the civil calendar], co-hosted by the Albert M. Wolters Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University ,and the Andrew Fuller Centre for Baptist Studies, in Ancaster, Ontario. Glory to God!

The problem of kingship in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s masterpiece and the apotheosis of all his backstories, parallels the problem of kingship in the Bible. God tells Israel of the problems they will have with the kingship they want. They will have tyranny for getting the worldly protection they seek like other nations, along often with the idolatry of the backsliding and ultimately destroyed kingdoms of Judah and Israel of the north.

Yet across later Christian tradition, as Israel became fully realized in the Church, kingship became the norm in terms of forms of secular government, with the alternative not being the Old Testament rule by Judges in what has been called a theocracy, but the perceived potential mob tyranny of a kingless republic and revolution. In this, the Puritan Commonwealth arguably did not end well, especially if you are of Irish background. But to Tolkien, the project of the British Empire was also suspect, the Protestant kingship of England wrapped in effect in apostasy. (That today seems suggested in another way by the fate of the mainline Church of England and the transition arguably to a more extra-Christian perennialist view of religion in the constitutionally limited royal family.) Tolkien was no Puritan or Anglican of course, but a Catholic. In his own lifetime, amid the toppling of the major unconstitutional Christian kingships of Europe after World War I, he supported General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, who later would reinstitute the Spanish monarchy.

Still, in The Lord of the Rings kings did not do too well overall until the end. The old northern Kingdom of Arnor had fallen into a kingless place of the occult, and the lesser kings of the north had become the undead Barrow-wights of the Barrow-downs. The line of kings in Gondor had faltered and been replaced by a line of Stewards. Hubris and lust for power marked the decadence of kingship, but also perhaps what Faramir noted of the Numenorean aristocratic elite, that they sought to extend their own lives rather than care about children. This should sound familiar to us, living amid what Tolkien’s contemporary Oswald Spengler called The Decline of the West.

Even the Rohirrim, representing the vigorous hope of the barbarians coming to the rescue of civilization that Tolkien saw in the legacy of the Anglo-Saxon culture that he loved, endure long years of the deadened rule of King Théoden, before he is released from the hypnotism of Grima Wormtongue, the agent for Saruman, who himself has become the agent of Sauron. Not only Kings but Wizards like Saruman are subject to corruption in Tolkien’s Legendarium, and even the equivalent of angels like Sauron and his master Melkor, reminders of the fall of Lucifer in Christian teaching.

There are some standout places in Middle-earth that have the equivalent of righteous kingships. These are mainly Elvish places. Rivendell, ruled by Elrond like a king. Lothlórien ruled by Galadriel like a queen. But there is a third, the strange case of the Shire, yet its name offers a clue. Downstream from the old capital of the northern kingdom of Arnor, the Shire still bears as its name an indication that it is part of some larger government. We are told that while the kingdom is missing, the king’s law continues in the Shire as if it is still in force, observed by the Hobbit inhabitants with a minimum of government. In this the Shire exemplifies Tolkien’s own political philosophy, which he characterized in letters as unconstitutional monarchy combined with anarchism. In other words, Tolkien prefers a lack of the modern developing global administrative state, which writers such as Eric Voegelin identified with the gnostic heresy, others with Leviathan, and the Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls The Machine. This might for believing Christians of our age even be identified with a growing spirit of Anti-Christ and preparation for the latter’s global rule, a system of combined economy, state, and culture, denying the Incarnation, the capacity for which today C.S. Lewis in his The Abolition of Man called technocracy. The impending prophesied rule of the Anti-Christ is negative demonic kingship, at odds with our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, but as such for believers doomed to defeat.

Tolkien as a man who came of age amid the horrors of combat in World War I, and whose fantasy history seems to have been in part a coming to terms with those horrors, was writing for latter days in which actual Christian kingship had disappeared and had seemed to many to have failed, while believers even more keenly anticipated the coming again of Christ. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, as the end of the Scriptures say. In this context, Tolkien again expressed a kind of nostalgia for an anarchism ruled by an unconstitutional monarch, presumably one like Aragorn, who would grant a certain autonomy to different peoples and lands, but whose law of the king would be maintained in the hearts of the people as in the Shire, after it was rescued from corruption. For Aragorn’s rule, like the government of the Shire, is an imperfect type of Christ’s rule, and the Return of the King as a title resonates theologically and eschatologically.

All this is imperfect, however, because of the fallen nature of the world in Tolkien’s Christian frame. The exemplary lands with quasi-functioning kingships are lands in the case of Rivendell and Lothlórien where the Rings of the Elves protect and empower such rule. Yet when the One Ring is destroyed, so will fade that protection and presumably those realms. This simplifies the link between earthly kingship, even on Middle-earth, which of course is an ancient name and ancient fantasy history for our earth, and the fallenness of things and Men, to whom belong the Fourth Age. I would argue that the Shire herself is most likely protected by the third Elvish Ring, safe-kept by Gandalf but arguably losing its signal while he was with the Balrog and Sharkey-Saruman took the Shire.

Meanwhile the Dunedain, of whom Aragorn functions as leader, are the descendants of the old rulers of the Kingdom of the North, the Rangers of the North, who did not fall prey to the lust for power and treasure that consumed those haunting the Barrow-downs. There are rangers of the South, too, led by Faramir in Ithilien, the dissheveled Garden of Gondor right on the border of Mordor. Both groups of Rangers are like guerilla fighters, and reminiscent of legends like the Texas Rangers, literally ranging across an area to defend a landscape. Faramir later returns with Eowyn to Ithilien after the defeat of Sauron, to help revive the Garden of Gondor with the soil and seeds gifted by Galadriel, which did not fade with the loss of the Elvish Rings. That job of gardener, as with Sam Gamgee arguably the real hero of the book, seems connected symbolically to kingly qualities in Tolkien’s storytelling. Tending the garden of a region, a community, the fallen world, is the kind of cultivating mandated in Genesis and related to the dominion or sovereignty given by God. That sovereignty is a freedom in the old sense of generosity, rather than self-assertion, of self-emptying in Christ. Those are the kingly qualities for which Aragorn too stands, albeit in a transcendent way. The King James Version translates a verse from Psalm 50 as “uphold me with Thy free spirit,” while other translations use the term “with Thy sovereignty.”

Faramir, head of the Southern Rangers and heir of the Gondor stewardship superseded by Aragorn’s rule, was said by Tolkien to be his favorite character, the scholar-warrior. Faramir famously said “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

With this, Faramir rejects the use of the One Ring as a potential help in the war against Sauron, unlike his brother Boromir, who dies in a struggle related to the attempt to use it as a weapon for good. In that, Faramir examplies a quality of Christian kingship that goes back to Byzantine Christian civilization, namely the standard of necessary war rather than just war. Part of today’s globalization seems bound up with the idea of an atheistic sense of just war, an alliance of good versus evil. But St. Basil the Great in the fourth century cautioned Byzantine Christians to be discerning about the fallenness of human endeavors. He wrote that those soldiers who killed an enemy, even in a legal and justifiable war, should do penance for three years by refraining from the Eucharist. For killing remained a sin even in such an apparently sanctioned situation. The idea of necessary war relates to this, seeing war as a necessary evil, not righteous or just, but still necessary and right. This also sheds some light on the question of kingship today at least as it may apply to the role of believers in an era without Orthodox Christian kings.

University of Ottawa Prof. Paul Robinson contrasted the “just war” doctrine of the West with key aspects of “necessary war,” as found in the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin’s 1925 book On the Resistance to Evil by Force, in which Ilyin in effect had justified in Christian terms the fight against Communism in the bloody Russian Civil War. Ilyin argued against Tolstoyan pacifism, which he said among pre-revolutionary Russian elites helped pave the way for the Communist takeover with its ensuing mass murders and cultural genocides. The issue of worldly war reflects the issue of kingship for Christians, since the two were so releated.

For a war to be “necessary,” according to Ilyin: There must be “real evil,” not only suffering, but evil human will expressed in external deeds; such externalized evil human will must be recognized on a deep level as a prerequisite for fighting it; those fighting it need a “genuine love of good” and a repentant attitude in realizing the sinfulness of war on all sides; and its fighters need a “strong will” that is not indifferent to evil. Force he argued also becomes necessary only when other measures such as psychological coercion fail. (The latter point doesn’t mean that force is a last resort, as in Western “just war” doctrine, only that it becomes needed after it is realized that any alternative deemed practical is gone.) This parallels the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s philosophy of a common guilt for sin, which needs to be claimed through repentance, is personal, and cannot be resolved simply through abstract legal views and processes. In that sense, there is larger complicity for the parricide of Fyodor Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, for example.

To Ilyin, likewise, the spiritual causes of evil must be recognized within human souls. Fighting the external manifestations while leaving the roots intact will not lead to success, and there are unintended consequences and collateral damage in addressing merely the external. God and faith are integral factors in calculating a necessary war and repenting for it. All of this paradoxically makes for an approach to war that is perhaps both more extremely skeptical and more likely in select cases.

The necessary war doctrine in my view had its basis in pre-scholastic Christian cultures, which were familiar to Tolkien, despite his Edwardian Catholic background, because of his study and love for literatures of the British Isles prior to the Norman Conquest. In that cultural environment, there was also a sense of rulers having a kind of contract with God. A surviving Byzantine mural in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople typifies this by showing the Mother of God bestowing crowns to the kings of the day.

Besides his words on necessary war, St. Basil the Great also had words on natural law that indicate something about the qualities of kingship known from those early Christian cultures that fascinated Tolkien, and their sense of necessary war. Basil suggested that natural law is the spark of God’s love in the human heart. This is different from a legalistic sense of rule or any Old Testament type of theocracy or even a legal-heavy sensibility of the divine right of kings as found in later Christian Europe.

Scripture has a term for such kingly quality in our latter days, katechon in Greek, from First Timothy, related I think to this sense of natural law. It means a withholder, a protector, or restrainer, as understood today sometimes controversially as a ruler or country holding back the spirit of Anti-Christ to permit more time as it were for more souls to be saved. I think this too is reflected, though perhaps unintentionally, in Tolkien’s writing. While opposed to Nazism and Communism, Tolkien was also opposed to globalizing secular liberal capitalism, and critical of the centralizing tendencies of what he called “Winston and his gang,” in reference to England’s storied leadership during World War II. Just so he was skeptical about American capitalism, whose apotheosis for him may have been Walt Disney, whom he criticized for commercializing myth and dumbing it down for children. Catholic distributism and subsidiarity could help explain some of Tolkien’s sensibilities, along with his focus on Late Antique and Early Medieval Christian cultures. One message about kingship as referenced in Revelation, believers being made kings and priests unto God, may engage well with Sam Gamgee as a hero of The Lord of the Rings, suggesting that each believer in these latter days can have a role as katechon, nurturing and protecting the spark in effect, especially for the vulnerable.

A final example of kingship in Christian tradition as applicable to modern times may be seen in martyrdom. In Christian history, those kings considered holy were martyrs for the faith, witnesses unto death, or especially self-sacrificing and protecting of the vulnerable faithful in life. Martyrs received crowns. Even in the tradition of marriage, we see in the Orthodox Christian wedding rite for example crowns that are held over the bride and groom symbolizing crowns of martyrdom within marriage. The royal weddings at the end of The Lord of the Rings can be read as symbolically related, as in Arwen’s sacrifice of her Elvish un-mortality.

I think three principles attributed to the Orthodox Christian American convert Father Seraphim Rose in the 1970s also bear relevance to Tolkien’s idea of kingship. They suggest the role of the reader in receiving Tolkien’s book, in experiencing a typology of how we can be made kings and priests to God in emptying ourselves in Christ, and in loving our neighbor more than ourselves, in line with Christ’s New Commandment, and how the ultimate King is Christ. These three principles of kingliness of believers are:

1. That we are pilgrims on Earth and whatever we possess here in worldliness will pass.
2. That Christianity is not academic, of the head, but lived in an embodied way.
3. That, despite but also because of the fallenness of the world, if we do not find Christ here on Middle-earth, in the Creation He gave us and into which He came, we will not find him in the hereafter. So our lives here, the openness of our hearts to grace and the cultivation of the gardens of our life, do matter.

These suggest to us how the crowns of martyrdoms of believers provide qualities of Christian kingship in these latter days, relating to Creation in a transfigured sense imbued with the uncreated energies of God, and the steps of purification, illumination, and theoria in our salvation. This is exhibited in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov when Alyosha falls to the earth and waters it with his tears. Then feeling the intercession for him of his reposed spiritual father Elder Zosima, he rises a fighter for truth, energized by illumination. For the Israel fulfilled from the New Testament is the Orthodox Church, and we are sworn to protect her and those vulnerable to the spirit of Anti-Christ that would seek to overwhelm Orthodoxy and harm the oppressed in cultures hostile to Orthodoxy, most notably in the gnostic techno-totalitarian cacophany whose dungeons are the global West’s post-human digital simulacra.

As Ilyin’s fellow exiled Russian philosopher S.L. Frank put it, for the Orthodox Christian, freedom is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ. That freedom is the calling to spiritual struggle of the believer who is made a king and priest unto God, in the vision given to to the Evangelist John in Revelation. That kingship involves the experience of Creation as the gift of God, the natural as the spark of God within our hearts, as St. Basil the Great put it, and unseen or spiritual warfare to preserve the otherworldly natural of what the Wise Thief saw as the “hidden God” on the Cross, labeled the “King of the Jews” by Pontius Pilate. What we may call Christian ecopoetics, or the shaping (poiesis) of home (oikos) in our faith, can inform our duty to support the katechon or restraining force on our Middle-earth today. The latter can help provide time and space, hopefully for ourselves and other lost sheep, to repent and to find salvation in the Church as the fulfilled Kingdom of Israel, the Body of Christ, and the opening up to us of the Kingdom of God, in His will being done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Tolkien wasn’t Orthodox. But he knew from his studies a lot about early Christian kingship, and its hidden applicability as a rallying standard against the Machine.