The Nature of Evil: Lessons from The Lord of the Rings

Dr. Kenneth Hawley: Welcome back to the 17th annual Riding Carnival.
When chapel dismisses,
you'll be let out into the mall area.
Lunch is provided by Aramark.
A number of booths with riding challenges related to the Lord of the Rings are available there.
We hope you'll participate.
We hope you join in.
We hope you have a good afternoon together with us at this riding carnival featuring the Lord of the Rings.
For today's chapel, though, I want to talk about an idea that's very important to Tolkien,
very important to us,
and very important to our understanding of the story world of Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings.
In the story, one of the main points is,
what do we do with this great evil?
And one important question for us is, what is this great evil?
How does it work?
How might it
be destroyed?
And how are we to make our way in the world where such evil exists and where it's
not benign.
It has effect on us.
And so I want to look at the nature of evil,
and especially here
at the beginning at the idea of how evil is not just an internal struggle,
it's also an external
force.
It's something that we might all at various times and in different ways struggle with,
the
presence of evil in our lives, maybe the consequences of evil things that people have done to us,
maybe our own struggle and desire to do things that aren't good for us or good for others in our
lives.
The internal struggle is real,
but it's also an external force,
a very real presence in the
world,
and it has to be confronted.
It can't be ignored.
It can't be just walked away from.
It
needs to be dealt with directly by those who know what is good and love what is good.
We as Christians
know this through the Lord's Prayer,
that we are taught to pray,
lead us not into temptation.
Help us,
Lord, with the internal struggle against evil.
Those things in us that cause us to stray from you,
those things in us that cause us to harm others,
to take our way in the world in a selfish and controlling way,
to make whatever we want possible by any means possible.
That desire, that inclination is real in each of us in different ways,
and it manifests itself within us.
But it's also an external force,
for we're also taught to pray, but deliver us from evil.
We're praying to God to help us out of this struggle that we can't get ourselves out of.
We need to be delivered from evil.
Don't just empower us to defeat it by our own hand,
but by your hand, rescue us,
redeem us,
get us out of this mess.
Those two ideas, I think, were well understood,
of course, by Tolkien,
and they are infused throughout the story through the various characters and actions that they encounter through the course of the narrative.
I want us to think first,
though, about how the tempting and corrupting and all-consuming power of evil has its way with key characters in the story.
The first half of our little presentation today will deal with characters as they try to figure out what to do with the ring and how to manage it.
The last half will look at various evil characters and how they meet their end.
But first, the tempting,
corrupting, consuming power of evil.
It begins for us,
in terms of the narrative, with the backstory.
Where did this ring come from?
It started in this realm, in this day, with the battle against Sauron.
When Isildur came in possession of the ring at the end of the battle.
And he was meant to destroy it.
He was there with Elrond at Mount Doom.
So the place where this story will ultimately end, it could have ended here.
Way back then,
if Isildur had not been tempted with this internal struggle to possess the ring for himself,
to use it for his own ends,
even if he meant to use it for his people,
the power of the ring was so great that it would be more than that,
different from that.
It wouldn't just be something that would liberate his people or free them or protect them.
It would ruin him, and by means of ruining him, ruin them.
And Elrond was unsuccessful.
Isildur wanted to claim it for himself.
And as he held the ring and wanted to possess it for himself,
he could not resist.
The internal struggle was too great.
He failed,
and he possessed the ring and held it for a time, but that time didn't last.
It betrayed Isildur and fell to the bottom of the river as he fled in battle.
And then years later,
many years later,
it was picked up again,
this time by Deagle.
Deagle picked up the ring from the bottom of the river floor,
but it wasn't just Deagle there.
there was also his cousin Smeagol.
Smeagol, who would later be known by the name Gollum.
And Gollum loved the ring so much.
On this day, it happened to be his birthday.
And speaking of selfishness,
Gollum,
at this time Smeagol,
believed that because it was his birthday, he deserved the ring,
that it should be his,
that it ought by rights to belong to him.
And that's how everyone who encountered the ring seemed to treat it.
This is something that should belong to me.
And he began to call it precious.
It was precious to him.
And in terms of his ordered affections,
he loved it more than he loved anything or anyone.
And he would do anything to get it and anything to keep it, even killing his friend Deagle,
strangling him,
murdering him.
Like Cain and Abel,
this impulse to kill and destroy,
it's at the beginning of this story too.
And this destructive power of the ring caused this character,
this person,
Smeagol,
to become
different from himself.
He was no longer the same little happy friend that liked to fish.
He became the one that lived alone,
that no one wanted to be with.
And it gave him unnatural long life.
It preserved his life, but in a thinning out way,
not in any kind of infusion of life.
It was just stretched out.
And he lost,
he says, even the knowledge of the taste of bread.
Forgot what bread was.
Forgot even his own name.
And throughout the course of the narrative,
we find that he becomes almost a different version of himself,
torn between who it is to be Schmigel and who it is to be Gollum,
who desires the ring above all things.
But the ring seems to have a will of its own.
In this moment, it abandoned Gollum and fell to the floor of the caves where he lived.
And one day,
an unlikely character picked it up,
Bilbo,
a hobbit from the Shire.
And because he began to desire it, he did whatever it took to keep it.
in this case,
tricking Gollum out of it.
And he took it for himself,
and it gave him a natural long life.
And on his 111th birthday,
he decided that it should go to his nephew Frodo.
But he struggled with this, struggled to give it up, struggled to hand it over,
kept forgetting that he hadn't given it to him yet.
And in one moment,
later in the narrative,
we're shown a version of Bilbo
that doesn't even seem to be Bilbo anymore.
Later in the story,
when Frodo will encounter Bilbo,
Bilbo asks about the ring, and Frodo holds back and doesn't want to give it to him.
And this is the response.
It's a little bizarre,
a little frightening,
a little bit of CGI.
But what we get is this character who is now aging as he ought to have aged without the ring,
and he is controlled by this unnatural desire to possess it.
In the novel, it says that in this moment,
Frodo wished to strike him.
It was even affecting Frodo.
He wanted to protect the ring for himself.
Bilbo could hardly stand to be without it,
and it was still controlling him those many years later.
But at one point, Frodo,
earlier in the story,
when he had first received it from Bilbo,
it had not yet had power over him.
It hadn't had any effect on him.
He was immediately ready to just hand it off to Gandalf.
But Gandalf wouldn't have it.
And you would think, if this were a great evil ring,
maybe you should give it to the greatest,
powerful,
good person you know.
But Gandalf said, no, I won't take it.
In fact, in the film,
he won't even touch it.
He drops it and has it dropped into an envelope that he doesn't touch.
He knows that it would make him fearsome.
He knows that it would take whatever is in him and magnify it,
even those parts of him that are imperfect,
and he would not have it.
He resisted.
He shows the power to resist the draw of the ring.
Frodo later will do the same thing with Galadriel,
the most beautiful,
good, powerful person he knows,
and he thinks maybe she should have it.
And she actually undergoes what she calls a test,
and she passes the test.
For in this moment, she imagines the kind of great, powerful, sorceress and evil queen,
the powerful queen she would be, a terrible queen, she says.
And she says, no, I don't want that.
I will just retire to the West with my people, and I don't want the power of the ring.
She resisted.
Boromir, however,
struggles with it.
He is in the line of Isildur.
He thinks his people need the ring back.
They once held it.
Now they have a chance to hold it again.
And if they could wield it, they could beat back the power of evil.
They could free their people.
And he sees it as a positive,
powerful good.
But he doesn't see that it's starting to have power over him.
He wonders why all this trouble over such a little thing.
But it's having great power over him.
It's not a little thing.
And in fact, at one moment, he struggles with Frodo, even fights him for it.
And in this moment, he's struggling over it the same way that Schmeagel and Deagel fought over it.
But thankfully, at this moment,
no great violence occurs.
But Frodo escapes.
Boromir realizes he'd gone too far.
And before he passes,
Boromir lays down his life to protect Frodo and his friends.
And he, in a way,
regains his honor here in the end,
defending them with his life and deciding that he should not have done what he had done.
He kind of comes to a point of repentance and redemption by laying down his life to protect them.
At that moment, though, Frodo had become so suspicious of all those who would draw near him.
They only want the ring.
He even began to suspect Aragorn,
who promised him he would have gone to the very end with him,
if only he were needed.
But he knows that Frodo must now go on his own, and so he does.
At this moment in the story, though,
many miles later, he meets Faramir.
Faramir is Boromir's brother,
the younger brother,
who was never really honored,
never really understood or appreciated.
But Faramir was good,
and though he was tempted to take it back to his father so that he might prove his worth to Lord Denethor,
Faramir actually decides to yield the ring back to Frodo and allow Frodo to go on the quest to destroy the ring.
Faramir also passes this test in a way that Boromir didn't.
There was a purity and a goodness to Faramir that though he had not the greatness and the glory of Boromir in battle,
he had it within his heart, and his internal struggle was won in the battle with the ring.
Later,
another who is very good, Samwise Gamgee.
He takes the ring for a moment when he believes Frodo has been killed,
But when he realizes Frodo is a liar and they're saved from the orcs,
he is ready to return the ring.
He has one moment where he imagines what it would be like to wield the ring.
But good Sam only imagines the best garden he could possibly have.
He doesn't imagine real power.
He doesn't imagine exploiting anyone.
But he yields the ring back to Frodo.
And they make their way forward.
But Sam,
though he couldn't carry the ring, we know he carries Frodo all the way up to the mountain in the end.
He does what he must to help his friend achieve this great conquest to destroy the ring.
And yet,
Frodo,
we would imagine Frodo,
good old Frodo, he could do this,
but by this time,
the ring has had its way with Frodo.
He desires it.
He wishes it.
He even says at this moment, the ring is mine,
and he desires to take it for himself.
He doesn't realize,
though, that Gollum is right behind him.
He's been stalking him all this time,
and he wants the ring back,
and he fights him for it and takes it all the way down to the fires of Mount Doom,
Where it seems,
in a strange way,
evil has been its own destruction.
The power of the ring inside Gollum made him desire it so much that he fought over it,
and in the fighting,
in the conflict,
as they wrestled over it, he fell to his death
and to the destruction and annihilation of the ring.
Its evil is finally destroyed because it so consumed Gollum that he couldn't not have it.
And one last act of taking means the final destruction of the ring,
And it is annihilated in those fires where it was born.
But there's also the nature of evil as it comes to the poisonous and self-destructive and nothingness of evil.
That seems strange.
How can it be both poisonous and nothing?
As Tolkien depicts evil, he suggests that its poisonous influence is great.
And it leads to the devolution of those who are overwhelmed by it.
It also leads to their dissolution.
They become less than they used to be.
They become less substantial,
less powerful.
Their bodies even seem to waste away,
and evil is self-destructive,
as we saw with Gollum destroying it with his desire.
But ultimately,
in four different passages I want to show you,
Tolkien depicts evil as eventually becoming nothing.
We start with their journey across Mordor.
We can see that the poisonous effect of evil is great over the land over which it rules.
It destroys everything that is good,
including the nature that would have otherwise flourished.
It is also the source behind the orcs, those who in one of Tolkien's depictions used to be elves.
In other versions of it, he describes them as men who've been corrupted.
But they are corruptions.
They are devolution,
evidence of devolution, that they have become less than the creatures they were meant to be,
and now they are evil and awful.
The other characters like this are the Uruk-hai,
and they are actually fashioned by Saruman as a kind of anti-version of creation,
a kind of bizarro version of someone who could bring something to life.
This Frankensteinian creature of violence is only bred to do violence in the name of evil,
and they are made to do it.
This is all by Saruman,
who himself was supposed to be a great wizard like Gandalf.
He was of the same order, but he was corrupted by evil.
He had this palantir.
The palantir allowed him communication with Sauron,
and Sauron infected him and continually over the years
made him more and more bent to the will of Sauron,
not to the will of the good and the Valar.
He also corrupted those who worked with him.
Wormtongue is one of those who served him.
Wormtongue was his servant, but often in his service,
his job was to corrupt.
His job was to poison,
and he poisoned the mind of King Denethor.
Sorry, not Denethor, Theron.
And Theoden was so overwhelmed by what Wormtongue and Saruman was doing to him
that even he, the great king Theoden, wasn't himself anymore.
He had no valor.
He had no glory.
He didn't even hold his sword anymore.
And he had become wasted away because of the influence of evil.
It took Gandalf the White to come and draw him out like poison from the wound, he says,
to rescue and redeem him so that he is himself again.
And he is now freed. He has been delivered from evil.
And then he can rule.
But first,
Saruman must be dealt with.
But like the ring,
evil is its own destruction.
He had so mistreated Wormtongue that Wormtongue in the novel lashes out
and later in the story slashes Saruman's throat.
In the film version, though, it comes sooner,
and he stabs him in the back.
And Saruman in the film version falls forward and dies a very bodily death.
He's impaled on the works below.
This is not how it reads in the novel.
It sort of misses the point that I think Tolkien was trying to make here in the story.
about the nothingness of evil.
Around the body of Saruman, a gray mist gathered,
and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire,
as a pale shrouded figure, it loomed over the hill,
and for a moment it wavered,
looking to the west,
but out of the west came a cold wind,
and it bent away,
and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.
Frodo looked down at the body with pity and horror,
For as he looked, it seemed that long years of death were suddenly revealed in it,
and it shrank,
and the shriveled face became rags of skin upon a hideous skull.
That's a very different kind of death,
and it will seem familiar when we get to death of the witch king of Angmar.
But this is how evil things are destroyed.
They become less than what they ever were before,
and they go away to nothing.
Another moment in this story is when, as Frodo is having to be confronted by the witch king,
he is at one point realizing that the witch king,
visible while Frodo wears the ring,
has enough substantial life to hold a sword and to pierce the chest of our Frodo.
And it's enough also to be stabbed in the face by Aramir when he dies.
And when the witch king dies,
he shrivels up, just like Saruman did.
And in the story, it says, the sword broke, sparkling into many shards.
The crown rolled away with a clang.
Eowyn fell forward upon her fallen foe, but lo,
the mantle and hauberk were empty.
Shapeless, they lay now on the ground,
torn and tumbled,
and a cry went up into the shuddering air
and faded to a shrill wailing,
passing with the wind.
A voice,
bodiless and thin, that died and was swallowed up and was never heard again in that age of this world.
It's nothingness.
It's silence.
It's dissolution.
That's how he depicts the destruction of evil.
Lord Denethor is another kind of evil.
He's been corrupted also by a palantir, which he held in communication with Saruman.
And in his corruption,
he came to not love his second son.
He favored Boromir.
He mistreated Faramir, even sent Faramir to certain death in battle.
And when Faramir was so wounded that he seemed to be dead,
Denethor, believing him dead,
was ready to light himself on fire and Faramir,
that they would both perish in immolation.
but in this moment,
thankfully,
Gandalf was there. They rescue young Faramir,
but Denethor dies in
the fire,
and as is described in the story,
Denethor leaped upon the table,
and standing there wreathed
in fire and smoke, he took up the staff of his stewardship that lay at his feet and broke it on
his knee.
Casting the pieces into the blaze, he bowed and laid himself on the table,
clasping the
palantir with both hands upon his breast, holding that symbol and that locus and source of evil
that he had depended on, that had changed him so much, he holds it in his last moments.
And Denethor gave a great cry and afterwards spoke no more,
nor was ever seen again by mortal men.
This disappearance is just the way of evil things.
Eventually they will be destroyed.
The last thing to be destroyed in the story here is the Tower of Sauron.
As he is defeated by the destruction of the ring,
it falls.
And the impact is immediate and absolute.
As is described in the story,
all the evil is destroyed as those who are good remain.
They are the faithful remnant.
And as those captains gazed south to the land of Mordor,
it seemed to them that black against the pall of cloud,
there rose a huge shape of shadow,
impenetrable, lightning crown, filling all the sky.
Enormous, it reared above the world and stretched out towards them a vast,
threatening hand,
terrible but impotent.
It had no power,
for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it,
and it was all blown away and passed,
and then a hush fell.
Once more,
so much smoke and shadow and wind and nothing and silence.
This is the way of evil.
Eventually,
it will pass.
All great shadows and darkness must pass.
This is the way of evil,
for this is the way of good.
It will triumph over evil.
The nature of evil in J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is that it is destructible and it will be destroyed.
For us who know it, for those of us who choose to face it,
we must realize that it can't be ignored.
Whether it's within us or outside of us, whether it's an internal struggle or an external force,
evil cannot be ignored.
It must be confronted by those who know that all that is good is worth all that it costs.
For our lives, for the lives of those we love,
and for the people and place in which we live,
our future rests in the hope of light triumphing over darkness,
of life overcoming and swallowing up death.
By the power of the resurrection,
the resurrection and the life of Jesus Christ,
the light of the world,
the true word of God speaks about evil
by telling the truth about himself.
As we follow him,
we seek what is good,
we love what is true,
and we walk in the light as he is in the light.
We hope today that you enjoy the rest of the writing carnival.
You are dismissed.
Amen.