No Ragnarök, No Armageddon: Pagan and Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings

Authors

Matthew Thompson-HandellFollow

Abstract

Critical responses to The Lord of the Rings from its publication up to 1981 (the year in which The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien was first published) often considered pagan and Christian elements in the work. To the extent that pagan and Christian views were opposed to each other, such opposition is grounded to a greater extent in the ambiguity present in The Lord of the Rings (at least in terms of its theology or world-view), than in any contradiction in the work. The distinction between ambiguity and contradiction is important, especially in the context of the significance of contradiction in Verlyn Flieger’s keystone analogy in “The Arch and the Keystone” (2019). This analogy does not therefore fit the pagan-Christian dynamic so well as her earlier view in “But What Did He Really Mean?” (2014) which highlights the ambiguity and indeterminacy in The Lord of the Rings.

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