Good Friday is a sad time. Easter Sunday is a joyous time. In some church traditions, it even becomes such a joyous time that steps are taken to tone it down. For example, in fifteenth-century Bavaria, a tradition arose called Risus Paschalis, where pastors would add jokes to their Easter sermons (“The Spirit of Easter” 482). Concerns over the jokes becoming too much—too racy, too bizarre, sometimes lampooning the clergy—led the authorities to put a stop to all this (Coxon). At its best though, this tradition had a clear point: the humor highlighted that the Easter story has a humorous side. There is a joke in it.
What is the great Easter joke? The joke Jesus played on Satan. The New Testament states that because Jesus died and rose again, he holds the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18). Through death, he destroyed the devil’s power over death (Hebrews 2:14). Furthermore, he descended into the lower regions (Ephesians 4:19), and preached to imprisoned spirits (1 Peter 3:18-22). The Apostle’s Creed synthesizes these elements to present an intriguing image: Jesus was crucified and buried, he descended into Hell, and on the third day he rose again.
The idea of Jesus descending into Hell and claiming victory over Satan is traditionally called the Harrowing of Hell.1 Medieval mystery plays (notably the Wakefield Pageant of the Harrowing of Hell) often portray this event as a shocking twist.2 Jesus enters Hell, Satan and his demons boast at their victory… and then Jesus begins to break down Hell’s doors. When Satan argues that he represents the law, Jesus responds that his death has fulfilled the law’s requirements.
Thus, what Satan assumed to be his great victory turned out to be his great defeat. Jesus tricks the devil and becomes the savior in a way the devil could not predict. He pranks the devil. Easter is not just a great tragedy; as Frederick Buechner observes in Telling the Truth, it is also a great comedy.
Buechner is far from the only Christian writer to appreciate the shocking twist that Easter describes. J.R.R. Tolkien particularly seems to have appreciated its mix of comedy and tragedy. Robert Steed observes that given Tolkien’s “academic background as a medievalist and philologist as well as his profound identification with Catholicism, [he] no doubt was well aware of the variety of medieval Harrowing of Hell accounts” (6). Steed considers four particular occasions where Tolkien employs the narrative motif in his stories, including the Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. On a broader scale,3 one could argue that the Lord of the Rings’ broad story arc resembles the narrative in some interesting ways, both in its comedy and its drama.
We don’t typically think of the Lord of the Rings as comedy. Certainly, it’s not a satire like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Some elements are particularly serious. Holly Ordway has noted how Tolkien consistently shows suffering as tragic, in contrast to contemporaries like E.R. Eddison who viewed suffering as potentially dark comedy (Tolkien’s Modern Reading, 214). However, in a sense, Tolkien’s whole Lord of the Rings narrative is built around a great joke. It is the same kind of joke as the Harrowing of Hell narrative: a Christlike figure saves the world in the least expected way.
Hobbits are often comic figures. Bilbo gets his dwarf friends in trouble with trolls, and dark comedy ensues as the trolls debate how to eat the dwarves. Later in the story, Bilbo presents a plan for negotiating with Thorin Oakenshield to Bard and the Elvenking. The two seasoned warriors look with surprise at this humorous image: “a hobbit in elvish armour, partly wrapped in an old blanket” (The Hobbit 271). Later, in The Two Towers, Riders of Rohan laugh when Aragorn asks if they have seen halflings. In short, the hobbits seem more like comic relief characters than heroic types. And yet, as Gandalf notes, “you can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch” (Lord of the Rings 61).
Frodo is totally unprepared when he discovers the ring’s true nature, but he gets it to Rivendell. Once the ring is there, in the hands of more qualified heroes fitting an epic narrative, it appears the problem is out of Frodo’s hands. Surely the council will find some way to destroy the ring… or, as Boromir suggests, use it as a weapon. The answer is more complex: they must do the one thing Sauron would never expect. Someone must take the ring to the depths of Mordor, to the hellish place it was forged, and destroy it. They must trick Sauron, betting on the fact that he would never expect them to do such a thing.
But who will take it? Bilbo found the ring in the first place. Aragorn is the rightful owner as Isildur’s heir. But no. Frodo takes it.
“‘I will take the ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way’” (Lord of the Rings 264).
Even as Frodo sets out with capable warriors around him, the mission seems bizarre. Elves and dwarves on the same team? Pippin coming along when Elrond explicitly calls that a bad idea? How will this work?
At the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, we find it does not work. Like Judas with a dash of Peter’s bravado-turned-selfishness, Boromir betrays his friend. He tries to take the ring for himself. The fellowship is broken. Like Jesus in Gethsemane, Frodo learns the hard way that no one else can drink his cup for him.
Jesus has moments of tragedy (weeping over Jerusalem) and comedy (answering the religious leaders’ snarky questions with snarky answers) throughout his week in Jerusalem, nearing his destination. Frodo has his share of both as he nears his destination. The Two Towers is filled with incidental comedy—for example, Gollum and Sam bickering like an old married couple as they help Frodo reach Mordor. The tragedy comes from the constant obstacles—the marshes, Shelob’s lair, Gollum leaving them—reminding Frodo that the road is long and will not get easier no matter how far he travels.
Ultimately, Frodo does get into Mordor. He is promptly captured. Jean Chausse highlights several moments resembling Christ’s journey in Frodo’s Mordor experiences. Like the Roman guards who beat Jesus and stripped him of his clothing, the orcs carry Frodo to a tower and take his mithril coat (Chausse 31). Unlike the Roman guards who divided Christ’s clothing by casting lots, the orcs can’t come up with an equitable solution to who gets the mithril coat, and many kill each other. Sam takes advantage of the fight’s aftermath to get into the tower and free Frodo.4 However, the humiliating ordeal is not over: Frodo still has the long walk up the hill to his destiny. Like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross, Sam sometimes has to carry Frodo as they walk to Mount Doom (Chausse 32).
Then as Frodo descends into the depths, the unexpected happens. The ring is destroyed. The magic laws Sauron used to conserve his power become his undoing. A trickery that Sauron was too big and powerful to comprehend breaks his hold over Middle-Earth.5
Like the trick Jesus played on Satan, Frodo’s trick is built on things Sauron cannot comprehend. He knows lust. He knows power. Generosity, pity, and mercy are outside his understanding, as is the idea of letting power go. Frodo chooses a Christlike self-emptying, letting go of the ring’s power and taking it to where it can be destroyed. When Frodo falters at the end, the Christlike mercy he chose earlier comes back to save him. He pitied Gollum and let him live… and in the end, it is Gollum who destroys the ring.
All this is not to say that Lord of the Rings is an allegory. Allegories have a one-to-one correspondence with religious ideas that must be rigidly followed (as in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress). Lord of the Rings isn’t even a semi-allegory (fiction narrative with small moments that function like allegories) which may be the best term for what C.S. Lewis does with the death of Aslan in the first Narnia book. Tolkien stated in his 1953 letter to Father Robert Murray that he removed explicit religious references from Lord of the Rings as he revised it. However, he also called it “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 172). Subtly, perhaps without explicitly thinking about it at the time, Tolkien weaved a fantasy epic built on a fundamentally Christian idea: the way to defeat evil may be counter-intuitive. The savior tricks the enemy, and the enemy is left holding the bag in the greatest joke ever told.
ENDNOTES
- I want to thank Dan Hamilton for his insights into the Harrowing of Hell narrative, presented at “Aslan in Hell? A Harrowing Story,” hosted by Inkling Folk Fellowship. Information about his books, including original fantasy novels and edited collections of George MacDonald’s work, can be found on his Goodreads profile.
- I want to thank Dr. Parker Gordon (Philosophy, University of St. Andrews) for his insights on medieval English pageants, presented at “Pageant Fever and All That: The Lighter Side of British Fancy-dress ‘History,’” hosted by Inkling Folk Fellowship. His doctoral thesis, Twentieth-Century Pageants: Word, Music, and Drama in Inter-War Britain, can be read at the St. Andrews Research Repository.
- For another discussion of broad Easter motifs in Tolkien’s work, see James Lynch’s essay “The Literary Banquet and the Eucharistic Feast: Tradition in Tolkien.”
- Steed reads this subplot, from Gollum leading Frodo into a tunnel to Sam rescuing him from Cirith Ungol, as a story that “manifests the Harrowing of Hell motif” (8).
- Nathaniel Birzer reads Easter motifs throughout the next scenes in Return of the King, after the ring has been destroyed and Frodo and Sam join their friends on the Field of Cormallen. Referencing the moment in the Harrowing of Hell narrative where Jesus breaks Hell’s gates, Birzer notes how the Eagle heralding the Black Gate’s destruction and the King of Gondor’s arrival particularly provides an Easter motif: “In this cry of the herald eagle again the Joy of Easter soars, for the messenger’s announcement, in speaking of the gates that the King has broken and passed through, reflects the Harrowing of Hell and the joy of that great triumph, all while affirming that the King shall return to his City to dwell with his people forever.”
Works Cited
Birzer, Nathaniel. “Tolkien’s Easter Joy in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” The Imaginative Conservative, April 16, 2022. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2022/04/tolkien-easter-joy-lord-rings-nathaniel-birzer.html.
Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. Harper Collins, 1977.
Chausse, Jean. “Icons of Christ in ‘The Lord of The Rings.’” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, no. 39, 2001, pp. 30–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45320597.
Coxon, Seb. “Easter laughter: Controversial medieval history of religious jokes.” The Jerusalem Post, April 16, 2022. https://www.jpost.com/christianworld/article-704332.
Gordon, Parker. “Pageant Fever and All That: The Lighter Side of British Fancy-dress ‘History,’” Inkling Folk Fellowship, March 11, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/events/370849591310842/.
Hamilton, Dan. “Aslan in Hell? A Harrowing Story.” Inkling Folk Fellowship, April 15, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/events/465214178727271/.
Lynch, James. “The Literary Banquet and the Eucharistic Feast: Tradition in Tolkien.” Mythlore Vol. 5, No. 2, 1978, pp. 13-14. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol5/iss2/4.
Ordway, Holly. Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. Word on Fire, 2021.
Steed, Robert. “The Harrowing of Hell Motif in Tolkien’s Legendarium.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, no. 58, 2017, pp. 6–9. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48614866.
“The Spirit of Easter.” The Lotus Magazine, vol. 5, no. 7, 1914, pp. 473–82. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20543569.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Del Rey, 1986.
—. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
—. The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Photo Credit: Unsplash/Ergo Zakki