The Christian message in Lord of the Rings touched me in ways that the Christian message in Narnia didn’t and couldn’t, and it wasn’t just because its subtlety and complexity, it was because of its humanity.
Narnia says – a huge divine lion that is Jesus will sacrifice itself for you. Lord of the Rings says – ordinary people will be called on to sacrifice themselves for one another, ordinary people who are no better or worse than you, in fact you might be the one who is called. Aslan walks to his death, but he’s superhuman, he’s above suffering. Meanwhile Frodo’s suffering is visceral and human and small and sad and increasingly uncomfortable to watch, which makes him a much better Christ figure. (And of course he isn’t exactly meant to be a Christ figure, he’s the everyman, he’s your neighbour, he’s a WW1 soldier, he’s just a little guy who has to take on unthinkable suffering to save the world, which probably brings us back around to Christ, but a very human version of Christ.)
In Narnia, divine providence and intervention tends to come in the form of a huge divine Jesus lion. In Lord of the Rings, providence manifests as a new-found ability, within you, to make the right choice or to shoulder the difficult task. It manifests as a fortunate coincidence that is nevertheless built on your own, and other people’s, previous actions. And when you are entirely lost, providence manifests as another small and fallible human being physically picking you up. Yes, there are eagles, but the eagles come after salvation, not before.
And then there are C.S. Lewis’ attitudes to death. He may have changed his mind in his later writings, I don’t know, but I read The Last Battle as a teen, and remained blazingly angry about its attitude to death for about a decade, until I read Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, put two and two together, and from that point, I just felt hollow. On some level, Lewis genuinely believed it is good for a good person to die, even to die young, because then there’s no more risk of them doing a sin and becoming bad. I simply cannot accept a worldview where three young people dying in a train crash is actually good because they are going to heaven.
Whereas Tolkien’s capable of acknowledging that death and grief and loss are painful, and he makes the point that we should accept mortality not because it’s good, but because the futile struggle against death will cost us all the valuable things we could have been doing with our lives. The Silmarillion and other posthumously published writings (Atrabeth) really engage with themes of mortality and immortality, and how immortal elves are led astray by their wish to avoid change just like mortal men are led astray by their wish to avoid death. And nowhere in his writings does Tolkien resolve the Fate of Men by saying that of course they go to heaven when they die. There is no answer, no easy solution, no faith offering perfect solace, nothing to defang the moral and spiritual quandary. Mortal Men in Tolkien’s world have to live good, noble lives, and have to die good, noble deaths without any certainty of what happens after death. Tolkien has faith in God, but Tolkien’s characters have to make their choices without threat of divine punishment or hope of divine reward, which is the only way to write coherently about morality. Or people. Or anything.
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