GOOD FRIDAY

Tolkien, Lewis, and the Road to the Cross

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King; and “The Dream of the Rood” (anonymous)

THE events of Good Friday are so seminal, so foundational for a Christian understanding of all the things the world fears: weakness, helplessness, defeat, death. It is foundational, because in Christ God enters into all of these, from weakness and apparent defeat to death itself, and transforms them all so that his strength is made perfect in weakness, and death is swallowed up in victory.

That pattern and that transformation are central to the understanding of both Lewis and Tolkien; so it is natural that we find that pattern in their writings, more explicitly in Lewis’s account of Aslan’s suffering and death on the Stone Table, and more subtly in Tolkien’s account of the last part of the journey to Mount Doom.

The scourging of Jesus and his mocking by the soldiers, the pseudo-homage of the purple robe and crown of thorns, all these become, in Lewis’s “supposal”, in Aslan’s passion, the binding with cruelly tight cords, the shaving of his beautiful mane, his dismissal as just a cat, the mocking of the tormentors, and so on. Lewis wisely does not show a mode of death which is to be a parallel with crucifixion, but simply has the girls turn away at the last moment, and leaves the reader to imagine what has been done to him.

Likewise, Tolkien reimagines rather than simply reproduces the elements of the Passion as he understood them. As a practising Roman Catholic, Tolkien would have been familiar with the Stations of the Cross, the 14 traditional stopping places on Christ’s Via Dolorosa, his way of suffering. Three of these are about Jesus staggering and falling under the weight of the cross. We can see an echo of these in the way that the Ring, Frodo’s burden, grows heavier and heavier as he nears the Cracks of Doom.

Another Station of the Cross is the time when Simon of Cyrene carries Jesus’s cross for a while. As we have already seen, Sam Gamgee takes on that role when he carries Frodo himself.

Another one of the Stations, the tenth, is called “Christ is stripped of his garments,” and Tolkien would have learned to reflect on how this loosening, stripping away, of outer possessions was itself part of the kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ which begins at the incarnation.

We see this at the point when Sam and Frodo cast off both the orc armour and, crucially, the precious cooking gear that Sam has brought so far. This is not simply a practical lightening of the load: it is also a courageous admission that they don’t think they’ll be coming back, that the end of their journey will be self-sacrifice.

IN SOME ways, and paradoxically, the casting off of the useless weight of the armour is itself a kind of stripping for battle. Tolkien would have been familiar with the lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood in which the Passion is narrated by the cross itself, and the cross sees this stripping of Jesus not as an imposed humiliation but as a heroic preparation:

Then the young Hero — it was God Almighty —

Strong and steadfast, stripped himself for battle;

He climbed up on the high gallows, constant in his purpose,

Mounted it in the sight of many, mankind to ransom.

(Helen Gardner, The Dream of the Rood: An exercise in verse translation; Constable, 1970)

One measure of how effective the re-imagining of these great themes has been is that, when we ourselves return from these encounters in Narnia and Middle-earth to the actual accounts of the Passion in the Gospels and in Paul’s letters, our response is deepened; the freely accepted sufferings of Aslan and Frodo have actually given us a more imaginatively enriched and informed response to the real events of Good Friday.

Reflection

Read Mark 15.16-39.

Meet these events afresh this Good Friday. Imagine being there: put yourself in the shoes of the onlookers, the soldiers, the thieves on the cross.

Dr Julia Golding is a multi-award-winning novelist and director of the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, a small educational charity established to honour the life, work, and faith of the Inklings.

The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; priest, poet, writer, and singer-songwriter; and an expert on the Inklings.

Professor Simon Horobin is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, holding the position that C. S. Lewis held at the college, and has lectured and published widely on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His latest book is C. S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing).

This is an extract from Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten lands with the Inklings, published by Canterbury Press at £12.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.39); 978-1-78622-690-7.