Christian Viewpoint: 'Fear nothing! Have peace until the morning! Heed no nightly noises!'

“Fear nothing! For tonight you are under the roof of Tom Bombadil," Frodo and his hobbit friends are told. Rereading Lord of the Rings, a present from my wife, I’ve just finished the first volume, writes columnist John Dempster.

How full it is of lovely things! The warmth of the author’s prose, the descriptions of nature, the places of safety where the travellers find shelter on their journeys.

“Fear nothing! Have peace until the morning! Heed no nightly noises!” they are told at Tom’s house. Later, they reach Rivendell, another haven: “Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.”

What we take from any story depends on what we bring to it. My faith was awakened by JRR Tolkien’s work because the loveliness of Lord of the Rings pointed me to the loveliness of God. In God’s care we can, ultimately, “heed no nightly noises,” despite the fact that the darkness which stalks the pages of the novel reflects a real evil.

Read more: Christian Viewpoint: 'We come perplexed, struggling with doubts'

And when Tolkien tells us that Bombadil and Goldberry, daughter of the river work together to make a meal and that “in some fashion they seemed to weave a single dance, neither hindering the other,” I think of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in their intricate dance of creation.

I’m not surprised to see these things in the book. Tolkien was a Christian, and his imagination was fuelled by the faith which shaped all his living.

I wonder: is the Bible just another story in which the loveliness of God is to be glimpsed? Tolkien thought not: he believed that all loveliness in stories, myths and legends reflects the one great loveliness of God who was embodied in the Jesus we read of in the Gospels. Jesus is not simply another symbol, pointing to a loveliness “out there”: in Jesus the loveliness came among us.

I opened Lord of the Rings with some doubt. Would it have anything to say to me 50 years after my first reading?

We may approach the Gospels hesitantly – perhaps we’ve been wounded badly in the past by the way the Bible has been used. But as we re-engage with it, we may find our imagination awakened, a loveliness reaching out to us.

We may ask “Who are you, master?’ as Frodo asks Tom Bombadil in wonder. And the answer may come in the words of Tom’s reply: “Don’t you know my name yet?”

And if we have made of God an enemy, we may find as Gimli did in Lothlórien while Galadriel spoke words in the listener’s own language: “It seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.”

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