This week is Holy Week for Western Christians. It begins with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, includes the Last Supper and Christ’s agony in the garden on Thursday evening, his trial, execution and burial on Friday and his Resurrection at dawn on Sunday morning. It is a time when all the Old Tales suddenly align. It isn’t an overstatement to say it represents the very centre of reality.
It’s hard to know where to begin to reflect on Holy Week within Tolkien’s work. The Incarnation; the appearance of God in human form in the person of Jesus was central to Tolkien’s understanding of what made Fairy Stories function. He described the greatest moment of a tale to be the eucatastrophe; the ‘good disaster’, when the sudden and unexpected turn from despair to deliverance brings a joy beyond the walls of this world.
Tolkien recognised two great eucatastrophes in history. In On Fairy-Stories he writes “The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”
Wherever we see the eucatastrophe operate within Tolkien’s world, we can recognise the foreboding, uncertainty, forsaken-ness and eventual joy of Holy Week.
The latest issue of Plough featured two excellent essays, one on the history of how Christians have understood suffering, the second about The Dream of the Rood, one of my famous Anglo-Saxon poems about a man who dreams of a talking tree.
In the first essay, historian Tom Holland explained that pagans found the idea of Christ’s passion particularly unpalatable. Suffering was not a noble thing to endure, and crucifixion in particular was an especially humiliating and scandalous way to die, to the extent that the Romans who invented it didn’t really talk about it all that much. One of the most famous Christian images, Christ on the cross, wasn’t one that early Christians depicted.
One of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion after the conversion of Constantine is a carved ivory from the early 5th Century that is in the British Museum. Jesus is absolutely shredded, an athlete wearing the loincloth of an Olympic victor. His expression is calm and stoic, a tradition that continues in the Eastern church to the present day.
Eleanor Parker writing on The Dream of the Rood gives a similar insight into how the pagans of Northern Europe came to terms with the suffering Christ. The talking tree, which later turns out to be the very Cross Jesus is crucified on, describes Jesus willingly climbing the tree to do supernatural battle with Death. It reframes his execution as something heroic, not dissimilar to the adventures of someone like Beowulf.
Emily and I were recently watching an episode of Cosmonaut Variety Hour, a pop-culture series on YouTube, because they were reviewing the Lord of the Rings films. Marcus, the show’s presenter, talked about the first time he’d gone to see The Two Towers in the cinema; the film opening with a flashback to Gandalf’s fall from the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm in Fellowship.
The stories begin to diverge. Instead of following Frodo and Aragorn et al. like we did in the first film, the camera falls with Gandalf. As he descends he catches his sword Glamdring, which is making this whistling sound as it falls through the air and begins his fight with the Balrog which will take them from the depths of Moria to its highest peak.
Marcus describes this as the moment he was absolutely sold on The Lord of the Rings. He remembered being sat in the cinema and thinking it was just the coolest thing ever that Gandalf hadn’t really given up or been beaten by the Balrog. He’d chosen to enter into a one-on-one duel to the death with it.
This detail had always been lost on me - I’m grateful for having been made to read the books first, but it did mean that scene clearly never impacted in quite the same way when I already knew what happened to Gandalf.
As I read about The Dream of the Rood, it occurred to me that the duality (and the trickery) of Gandalf’s sacrifice on the bridge represents something really similar to the Anglo-Saxon presentation of the crucifixion. Christ seems to have lost, to have sacrificed himself, but in hindsight (or through the perspective of the Cross itself) we see him readying for a great spiritual battle.
The Harrowing of Hell is an Old English term for what Jesus was doing in between his death on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday. Like Gandalf, Christ embarks on a long descent into the world of the dead (or the ‘lower parts of the earth’, according to the letter to the Ephesians), freeing the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world.
Despite being mentioned in some of the earliest Christian creeds, the Harrowing of Hell is certainly a less well-known story in modern, Protestant Christianity. However, it remains a central part of Orthodox theology and was an incredibly popular image in Old English poems - both Cædmon and Cynewulf wrote about it.
Cynewulf wrote the poem which includes the “Hail Eärendil” line Tolkien loved so much, and as a professor of Old English it makes sense that he would incorporate the Harrowing of Hell so prominently in his work.
People are always descending into the lower parts of the earth in Tolkien’s writing and always emerge transformed. It is where Beren and Lúthien capture the Silmaril, Bilbo his Ring and where Aragorn summons the Army of the Dead.
The makers of the Lord of the Rings films are clearly very aware of this. As well as the framing of Gandalf’s descent, which had such an impact on Marcus from Cosmonaut, they arrange Gandalf’s body in the shape of a cross as he falls in Fellowship. Before Frodo enters Cirith Ungol, Gollum tells him it is “the only way”, a parallel with Christ’s struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, as he seems to ask God if there is an alternative to the suffering before him.
All of these examples are applicable to Holy Week without being analogous; none of these characters are a stand-in for Christ. They are all pagans. Tolkien himself said religion only appeared absent from The Lord of the Rings because it had been “absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
These still point us to the great Eucatastrophe and ultimately reflect Tolkien’s Old Hope - the fool’s hope - that there might actually be a release from bondage and an escape from Death. That “we are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”
I hope you all have a very blessed Holy Weekend, whether you are of the Old Hope or not. Enjoy a break from the demands of work; rejoice in the new life breaking out around us. Wes þu hal!