III. The Call of R'hllor
Zeus has led us on to know,
The helmsman lays it down as law
That we must suffer, suffer unto truth. v
It has been remarked that Lord of the Rings is not without its pagan elements as well.
Certainly the Ring itself bears resemblance to to Germanic myth as presented in Wagner's Ring
Cycle. The "one ring to rule them all" poem may even have been drawn from the wedding band
of a medieval Welsh Prince, Llewellen the Great. One doesn't have to look hard to find other
elements of Norse, Celtic, and Saxon mythology. The very idea of Elves is entirely un-Biblical. vi
And if I wish to say that Frodo Baggins is a Suffering Servant, then why not Jon Snow?
Surely a man who labors ceaselessly for the good of all humanity, who does his duty while other
men spit in his face, who dies and is ressurrected, surely he qualifies?
And if we were to find him in Lord of the Rings, he might. But it's not merely the
individual plot lines of Tolkein's work that are Christian, it's the worldview of all the individual
characters, the moral universe they inhabit, and how that universe resolves itself according to
their actions. Middle-Earth has the eucatastrophe; Westeros does not.
The word is one of Tolkein's rare Greek neologisms, a portmanteau of the word for
"good" with the word for "downturning", which in literary criticism means the unraveling or
resolving of the plot. Tolkein's eucatastrophe is the destruction of Sauron by the casting of the
One Ring into the fires that made it. This is a reversal of the fate of the story; Sauron, although
briefly checked in front of Minas Tirith, has the manpower to crush the army led by Aragorn
until the Ring is destroyed. Then the Nazgul and the orcs and even Sauron himself are cast down.
The spiritual goodness of the heroes defeats the Great Enemy vii . Thus, a "good downturning".
In pagan tragedy, catastrophe refer to the unraveling of the hero's persona, the peripeteia
of his status and self-understanding. The hero of Oedipus Rex undergoes such, moving from
honored king and hero of the people, to a benighted exile and curse of the world. At the end,
Oedipus takes on the punishment of the gods, to save one last time the city he has ruled. And he
does this because of his crimes, which he and his birth parents and his adopted parents did
everything possible to avoid.
When Oedipus was in utero, the seer said the boy would grow up to murder his father and
marry his mother. In casting him aside, his birth parents made sure that the boy would grow up
not knowing who they were, which is the only way the crime becomes possible.
Oedipus learns this. Oedipus suffers this. There is no escape for him. He takes the blame
and leaves the city. The gods have willed it so, for reasons of their own.
And this brings us to Martin, and the world he has built, and the gods and heroes that
populate it.
George R.R. Martin, no less a fan of Tolkein than many of us, refers to his published
supplementary material as "The GRRMarillion". There are several such works, but the most
comprehensive is The World of Ice and Fire. Purporting to be a world history composed by a