THE ONE STORY:

The Battle of The Pelennor Fields, the passing of Sauron and the demise of his Dark Tower Barad-dur, and the Crowning of the King all joyously acclaim this defeat, this wondrous triumph of good over evil which is none other than the Eucatastrophic Joy of Easter. With the miraculous appearance of the Rohirrim in the hour of Gondor's despair, appearing with the cock's crowing and the coming of the dawn (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 829), Tolkien first hints at this Easter Joy, for "morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them" (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 838).

Yet though these glimpses of joy appear throughout this final volume of the story, particularly with Aragorn's works of healing in Minas Tirith, it is not truly until the Ring is destroyed and the hosts of the West gather in the Field of Cormallen that Tolkien unveils the Easter Joy thathis story contemplates, starting, fittingly, with Sam saying "Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 951). So the mystery of Death's defeat first truly appears, for something miraculous has happened to the world, something that has made the sadness of Death untrue. This feeling of wonder and joy continues to well up in Sam, so that Gandalf's laughter "fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears", and so that he "feel[s] like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!" (Tolkien Lord of the Rings 952). Indeed, how else can we respond to the mystery of Death's Defeat than first with tears, then with joy? Here with Sam, then, is the first true tiding of Easter Joy.

Yet it is far from the last. As Gandalf informs Sam and Frodo, "in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King. He has tended you, and now he awaits you. You shall eat and drink with him" (952). The date of March 25 is, in several very old Catholic traditions dating back to even before St. Augustine's time, the exact date of Christ's Crucifixion; it is also the date of his conception, the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Tolkien's choice of this date for the defeat of Sauron is far from coincidental, as T.A. Shippey has already argued, somewhat contemptuously, in his Road to Middle-Earth (Shippey, Road to Middle-Earth 151-2). Shippey dismissively states that Tolkien used the date to turn the 'eucatastrophe' of his story into a "forerunner or 'type' of the greater one of Christian myth" (Shippey, Road to Middle-Earth 152). While strictly true, it is a far cry from the whole truth. Tolkien's use of the date is not some artificial mechanism by which he links his tale to the Christian myth to come, but a deliberate placement of his tale in history, and not just history, but salvation history, making his story not an allegory for the Resurrection but a moment in time and myth which prefigures that highest joy, by participating in and reflecting upon that same grief and joy, which is the Death and Resurrection.

Tweet   @brothersjudd