Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland invites listeners on a journey into the world ofThe Lord of the Rings. Not as an expert, but as a fellow traveler, Derek reflects on his first deep reading of Tolkien’s epic and the way Middle Earth reshapes how we think about power, mercy, and hope.
Tolkien built a world with its own languages, history, and moral imagination. And unlike fast-paced modern storytelling, this is a story meant to be walked slowly. As Derek explores the parallels between Middle Earth and stories like Star Wars. He highlights a familiar pattern which Joseph Campell described as “The Hero’s Journey”, the story of the unlikely hero drawn into a larger conflict.
At the center of the story is the Ring, a symbol of power that promises control but ultimately enslaves. Tolkien shows that no one is immune to its influence, not even the wise or the good. And yet, woven through the story is a surprising theme: mercy. Acts of pity, especially toward Gollum, become essential to the story’s resolution. In the end, evil is not overcome by strength or heroism alone, but through a mysterious interplay of mercy, weakness, and grace.
Derek reflects on how Tolkien’s story echoes deeply Christian themes: the danger of power, the strength of humility, and the quiet, often unseen work of grace. Even in failure, the story is not over. Middle Earth becomes more than a fictional world. It becomes a lens through which we can better understand our own.
Themes Explored in This Episode
The Hero’s Journey and Tolkien’s unique twist on it
Middle-earth as a fully developed world with language and history
The contrast between Frodo and characters like Luke Skywalker
The corrupting nature of power
Mercy as a force that shapes the outcome of the story
The role of weakness and failure in redemption
The connection between Tolkien’s storytelling and Christian theology
Resources Mentioned
In Deep Geek YouTube Channel:
Books Mentioned
The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers – J.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King – J.R. Tolkien
Hero with a Thousand Faces – Jospeh Campbell
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Transcript
Welcome back.
Welcome to another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and we are in the season of Easter.
We are experiencing resurrection, joy, and life and power.
And so I
I wanted to do something fun on this episode.
I want to take you on a magical journey.
I’m going to invite you to join me on a trip to Middle-earth.
And we’ll get there in just a moment, but before we get started, make sure you subscribe to Peaceable and Kind.
wherever you are listening to this podcast.
And if you do enjoy the work that we’re doing here, if you like this episode or a previous episode, if you would share that with friends, I’d appreciate it.
and leave us a rating or a review that helps other people discover good Christian content like this.
Now if you’re ready, let’s take our trip
So you may have heard on previous episodes that I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time.
earlier this year actually started on the first Sunday of Advent at the very end of November last year.
So I read all through the month of December and January and February, and I finished at the beginning of March.
And I enjoyed it so much that I just want to take one episode here to give you just a taste.
of Lord of the Rings and this magical world that Tolkien created called Metal-Earth.
And maybe you have seen the films.
I saw the movies when they came out a long time ago.
I did re-watch The Fellowship of the Ring before I started the books.
But I would invite you, if you are up for it, to jump in and take a slow read of the Lord of the Rings
It is a trilogy of books, but honestly, there’s there each volume, which has a title, has two books within it.
It’s actually six books recorded in three volumes.
And it’s like 1200 pages.
Someone told me that if you wanted to start The Lord of the Rings, I mean if you’re gonna read an epic tale that’s over a thousand pages.
Read the first hundred pages, and if you don’t like it, stop reading.
It won’t get any better.
But if you enjoyed that first 100 pages, keep going, which is what I did.
And I enjoyed it.
And I was also told, and this is helpful advice if you do want to read the books, that the first book or the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, is really the easiest to read.
The story gets much more complex as you keep going through the second book or second volume, the two towers, and then Return to the King, the last volume in the series
And so I’d like for you to think of this episode as not a lecture, but a journey.
We are traveling together.
And I just want to introduce you to this world that Tolkien has created.
I want to give you just a brief overview.
of Middle earth, some of the characters, and I’m gonna go ahead and warn you there are spoilers.
I wanna talk about the very end of Frodo’s journey, which is not
the end of the series itself, but with Sam and Frodo and Mount Doom.
I wanna that’s towards the the very end, but it’s not the last thing that happens
As you’ll understand, this is a highly complex story and a very complex world.
And so I want to be clear also, I am not a Tolkien expert.
I mean, I’ve just read Lord of the Rings for the first time, and now I’m reading
Uh, The Hobbit, which I read in middle school.
I’m rereading The Hobbit, which is the prequel to the Lord of the Rings story.
Um, I’ve really been sucked into Middle-earth.
So I’m no expert.
There are lots of experts out there.
Um, I would highly recommend uh in Deep Geek.
on YouTube, um, I’ll leave a link to Robert’s um YouTube channel in the show notes
But Indeep Geek does a fantastic job of going into the details
of Middle-earth and in all of the nuance.
At the time of this recording, Indeep Geek has 194 videos on YouTube.
just dedicated to Lord of the Rings.
So there are more uh experts um than just in Deep Geek, but that’s one that I’ve really enjoyed.
Often I would finish a chapter
And then I would search up some aspect of the chapter and watch an entire video after it
And my reading of The Lord of the Rings was a slow read.
And that’s hard for some people.
It’s hard for me because other books start loading up in the queue and
You know, I want to read other books, plus, you know, I watch uh series, different series is on TV.
And so there’s other things I want to do.
So it’s difficult, but it is worth it.
taking a slow read.
I mean I took three months.
Um I could have read it faster, but I was only reading
15 to 20 pages a day.
I could have read more, but I wanted that slow read because it’s complex.
Uh Tolkien loved languages.
That’s really the origin story of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien created this wonderful world of Middle-earth, but it started with his love for languages.
Uh he first created a language, the language of the elves, and then he created an entire world.
where those languages could be known.
And so Middle-earth is very complex, and I cannot even begin to talk about all the complexity
Because Middle Earth has its own history, multiple different languages and cultures.
It has a moral imagination.
And when you read the books, you really feel that.
You feel like you have been taken to a different place, a different world.
Where there are men, there are human beings, and there are things that are relatable, of course, but you recognize this is an ancient world.
The built-in history that you can read in other places in Tolkien is very, very present.
And that creates a sense of, wow, I’m walking into a different culture
And so again, it is not a fast-paced story.
It is meant to be read slowly.
It’s meant to be walked through like a journey
Because you you linger in the Shire.
The Shire is the home of the Hobbits.
And Frodo, who is one of the main characters, he’s a hobbit
And he lives in the Shire.
And the Shire is this very wonderful, happy place.
And Frodo and his companions, they journey away from the Shire, they do eventually come back.
But in the beginning, in part, you feel the festive attitude, uh, the festive vibes of the Shire, and you want to hang out there.
You you feel that
in reading these books.
Later on in the the series of books you feel the weariness that Frodo and his companions feel as they’re traveling and walking days on end.
You
You do feel the weight of the journey, you feel the tension at times, you feel the love and the friendship.
And so if you’re going to read this three-volume, six-book, 1200-page epic tale, you need to do it slowly.
And when I was first reading the first book or volume, Fellowship of the Ring, it reminded me so much of Star Wars.
So I grew up, born in the 70s, kid in the 80s.
I grew up on the Star Wars world.
I had Star Wars action figures.
And I did a deep dive.
In college, I wrote an entire essay on George Lucas and his use of mythological archetypes.
in Star Wars.
So I love Star Wars not just for the action.
I love Star Wars for the power of storytelling and mythology.
And there are a lot of similarities.
So if you are familiar with the Star Wars saga, there are elements of the Lord of the Rings that will feel very familiar.
So, for example, our hero is a very unlikely hero in both Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.
A hero that is young and drawn into a cosmic struggle with evil, surrounded by an unlikely group of companions.
And so I’m thinking about Frodo in Lord of the Rings and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.
Neither of them are warriors.
Yet they learn along the way, Frodo has his sword sting, and Luke Skywalker, of course, has his lightsaber.
So they didn’t start as warriors, but
they become those that can handle a sword or a lightsaber.
Neither of them ask for the burden that is placed on them
But both are called, both are guided by an unseen calling.
So in the Star Wars universe, that would be the force.
In Lord of the Rings, it’s not stated explicitly, but because J.
R.
R.
Tolkien was a Christian, there is a sense of providence
Which Christians would call God’s unseen work that happens through Lord of the Rings.
Both Frodo and Luke Skywalker are given
a guide, uh a wise sage to uh guide them in their journey.
Frodo had uh Gandalf, who is one of the most celebrated characters
In Lord of the Rings, I absolutely love everything about the character Gandalf.
And in Star Wars, you have Obi-Wan Kenobi.
And the similarities continue because there is a group of unlikely companions.
So in Star Wars, you have this
Group of rogues and rebels, you have Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca.
That’s the kind of original fellowship in Star Wars.
And in Lord of the Rings, there are hobbits and men and elves and dwarves.
And so as the fellowship of the ring is created, you have Frodo and uh you have Sam, you have Mary and Pippin.
They are four hobbits
You have Aragon and Boromir, who are men.
You have Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf.
And elves and dwarves didn’t really get along, but Legolas and Gimli formed this beautiful friendship.
Friendship is one of the deep themes throughout Lord of the Rings.
And then of course in the fellowship you have Gandalf the Wizard.
And so it’s interesting that these unlikely heroes also have an unlikely group that forms around them.
And there are some differences in Star Wars.
Luke grows stronger.
Frodo actually grows weaker towards the end of the story.
his friend Sam has to carry him at one point.
And then there is the scene at the cracks of Mount Doom.
And again, these are spoilers, but there’s going to be lots of spoilers in this episode.
But towards the end, um Frodo, who is the ring bearer, as the Fellowship of the Ring is formed
It is Frodo who is selected to carry the ring to Mount Doom.
And in the end, Frodo, when he’s at the cracks of Mount Doom,
is seduced by the power of the ring.
He wants to claim it for his own and not destroy it.
So there are differences, but one of the things that I see that really stands out in both
Lord of the Rings and Star Wars is the use of mythological archetypes or patterns
I think Joseph Campbell is really helpful here.
In Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
Campbell details these patterns that can be seen in different cultures in different forms of mythology.
Now, it’s widely known that George Lucas read Joseph Campbell’s work and was highly influenced by him.
And Tolkien, I think, uh, you know, he’s writing The Hobbit before Campbell wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces, but Tolkien was aware
of various cultural archetypes in mythology.
So in Campbell’s work on uh the hero, he
Discovers this reccurring archetype or pattern in mythology of the hero’s journey
There is a call that the hero receives.
There is a a launching into their journey.
There’s trials along the way.
There’s some kind of descent.
And of course, then there is the accomplishment of the journey and the return.
And you see this in both Star Wars.
If you just look at the original 1977 Star Wars film, later entitled A New Hope, originally it was just called Star Wars, you see the hero’s journey.
And you see it in The Lord of the Rings.
But Tolkien goes somewhat further.
Campbell says that these stories reflect.
the common human experience, but Tolkien would say they reflect reality itself
These stories continue to be told and retold because life itself is a journey
We are each the hero, the central figure in our own stories.
So to understand this story, the story of the Lord of the Rings, and to understand Middle-earth, let me describe and introduce some of these characters.
So I’ve already mentioned hobbits.
So Frodo and Sam, Mary and Pippin, they are hobbits.
Hobbits are sometimes called halflings.
They are human-like
Um, but they are shorter.
They’re often overlooked.
Um, they’re very what we would call salt of the earth
kind of persons, right?
They love comfort and food.
They’re very consumed with food.
You may have heard of, you know, hobbits not have not only eat a a breakfast at the beginning of the day, but they have second breakfast
So meals, not just the food itself, but but shared meals are very important.
They love their home, the Shire.
uh they’re gardeners and farmers, they love staying close to the land, they love festivals and parties and and pipe smoking and and they’re they’re they’re a peaceable bunch
A number of people in Middle Earth don’t even know about the Hobbits.
They’re way out on the west side of Middle Earth
And some people have heard stories about him, but a lot of people from the east side, Mordor, where the fellowship is traveling, and Gondor, which is the the topic of
the second two books.
All this is on the east side of Middle Earth.
The Shire is way out on the west end.
So a lot of people don’t even know about hobbits because hobbits tend to keep to themselves.
Hobbits are not known to take
epic journeys outside of the Shire.
So hobbits, I think in Tolkien’s work, while they’re not human, they do form a kind of human ideal
Like this is humanity done right.
Okay, so you have the hobbits, uh, and then you have men, uh, Aragon, of course, being the most important man.
Uh there’s lots of other men in the story.
Uh mentioned Boromir, who is a part of the fellowship, but Aragon gets a lot of focus.
Um, and there’s lots of men living in different areas and men in Middle Earth are
Noble, they are capable of both greatness, doing great virtuous things, and they’re also subject to corruption and failure
Men in Middle Earth really wrestle with power, with being in control, and are often tempted to misuse it.
So you have the Hobbits, you have men like Aragon and Boromir, but then you have the elves.
And all of the elves in Middle earth are delightful, they’re interesting, they are very ancient.
There are wise.
Um I mentioned there’s a built-in history behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And so there is a a talk.
There was at one point a great alliance, the alliance of elves and men.
when men learned to lean on the wisdom of the elves.
So they represent um beauty and ancient memory
And also a fading glory.
Um, elves are able to reproduce, but they do so slowly.
And so we understand the background history, elves were more predominant in Middle-earth.
But by the time of Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring.
The L’s have really sort of fallen out of popular imagination in Middle-earth
And they have formed their own conclaves.
So you have Els in Rivendell, there we meet Elrond, who is an extremely important character.
The Council of Elrond, which is the longest chapter uh of any of the Lord of the Rings books, is extremely important because we get the history of Middle Earth, but also the formation.
Of the fellowship, and it is the council of Elrond that then uh bestows upon Frodo this call to be the ring bearer
So you have elves in Rivendale, and I think even more importantly are the elves in Lothlorien
And the let’s call her the matriarch.
She’s the lady of Lothlorien is Galadriel.
And Galadriel’s
Importance cannot be overlooked in the story.
The gifts that she gives to each member of the fellowship is essential for their journey.
And I I love uh exploring the the elves and their role in Lord of the Rings.
Maybe I’ll do a whole episode and talk about Elrond and Deladriel.
I think they’re important.
Uh but I’m trying to give you here just an overview of the characters.
So I’ve mentioned some of the elves.
Within the fellowship is Legolas.
And he’s a tree elf.
There’s lots of different kinds of elves.
And uh he’s important uh because he forms a friendship with one of the dwarves in the fellowship.
So dwarves in Middle-earth were strong, they were they were short in stature, but they were mighty in battle, they were industrious, they were great builders, they would build these
beautiful holes in caves.
Uh you see that in the caves of Moria.
They’re also very, very loyal.
And there is a breakdown in the relationship between elves and dwarves.
There’s some backstory there, which makes the friendship of Gimli, the dwarf, who’s a part of the fellowship.
And Legolas, a beautiful story.
I really, really like Legolas and Gimli.
They’re involved in one battle.
And they in their friendship are being kind of competitive.
Like, how many bad guys have you taken out?
And they run into each other at different parts of this one battle and they’re they’re they’re giving their their their their kill total.
Again, I’m here to advocate for nonviolence, but there was something um beautiful about that friendship.
It it’s like it’s like guys who have male friends that, you know, you wanna one up
because there’s kind of a male competition thing.
Anyway, dwarves um are minor characters but important
And then, of course, you have wizards like Gandalf.
Wizards were not rulers.
Wizards serve as guides.
Um, they point other people.
towards courage rather than than seizing power from themselves, but wizards are also
Able to be tempted.
And so there is a wizard who is tempted by evil and becomes an evil guide
Not all wizards are the same.
Of course, Gandalf is the wise guide throughout the Lord of the Rings.
And everything in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I’m speaking of the the trilogy of books, all my comments here are about the books and not the films
But everything revolves around the ring, the one ring.
Now, in the Lord of the Rings, we learn that there are many rings.
But Sauron, who is the main villain, he is the dark lord, he is the emperor, he is the mastermind behind all that is evil.
in Middle-earth, Sauron forges one ring, and it’s the ring that would be more powerful than all.
And so there is an inscription on the ring: one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study.
series is out now.
Go to the show notes for ordering information.
And this to me is the subplot throughout the Lord of the Rings, and that is
What the ring represents.
And I think for Tolkien, it is through literature a theology of power.
What do we believe about the ability to control
To oversee people.
Now, this ring, the ring that’s at the heart of the story, it dominates
This ring has power to seek after people, to cause people, to change, to be malformed.
One of the villains in the story is Gollum.
Gollum, we first meet in The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings.
Gollum was a hobbit, but his obsession with the ring deforms him.
Gollum speaks of the ring as his precious, and indeed he kills to obtain the ring and to hang on to the ring.
And so the ring promises control and power, but it also enslaves.
Men are tempted, and we see that in the character of Boromir.
Men are tempted by the ring to use this ring, let’s call it the ring of power, for good
But the wise ones in the story, Gandalf the Wizard, Elrond, and Galadriel the Elves, they don’t even want to touch the ring
because they know of its seductive power.
No one in the story is immune to
the temptation to take the ring, claim it for your own, and, at least for some, do good.
Or Saruman is searching for this ring.
He is
lost the ring and he is searching for it to complete his domination of Middle Earth.
So Sauron wants to use the ring of power to dominate and control.
Some men think we can use the ring to do good, but in the end the ring always seduces people to darkness and evil.
I think the ring itself raises the question of what does power do to the human heart?
I mean, because in the Lord of the Rings, the ring corrupts everyone who comes in contact with it.
The hobbits
So I haven’t mentioned Bilbo.
He’s the Hobbit who is the main character of the novel, The Hobbit.
Bilbo does appear in Lord of the Rings.
In the very beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring, the very first book, Bilbo still has possession of the ring, and he gives it to Frodo, who is his nephew or cousin.
Uh he gives him the ring and there’s a little struggle.
He’s not able actually to give it up.
He leaves it in an envelope on a mantle.
And there is this, because Bilbo is going to go on another adventure, but he’s not going to take the ring, but he wants to take the ring.
And so there’s a moment uh where Gandalf has to really confront Bilbo, because Bilbo’s tempted to hold on to it.
And of course, men are seduced by the ring.
Boromir tries to take the ring later on in the story from Frodo.
It has corrupting power.
Power corrupts is one of the themes.
But one of the themes that I really want to emphasize, and this will take us to the sort of end of the story, and I want to talk about what happens when the ring is ultimately destroyed.
This is not the finale of the tale, but it really for me is the climax.
There is still other there’s another whole battle that takes place.
When Frodo and Sam return to the Shire.
There’s the scourging of the Shire.
But I want to get us to this important climax.
And again, this is all sorts of spoilers.
Because in the climax, what we see is one of the other primary themes running through the Lord of the Rings is mercy.
And Tolkien uses the word pity.
In The Hobbit, in the novel The Hobbit, Bilbo has a chance to kill Gollum.
who is just totally corrupted by the rain.
Gollum is not a good person.
He he was a hobbit and now he’s not even hobbit-like.
He’s more animal like.
Hobbit is a a horrible character, and Bilbo has a chance to kill him but doesn’t.
And Gandalf later tells Frodo the story in Lord of the Rings.
that Bill Beau had mercy, had pity on him.
He chose him mercy.
And and Fro was like, well why do you just kill him?
Well
As the story continues on, there is an encounter much later on with Frodo and Gollum, and Frodo, who is
The ring bearer, he has the ring.
He’s attacked by Gollum, because Gollum is trying to get the ring back.
And Frodo has the opportunity to kill Gollum like Bilbo, and Frodo doesn’t do it.
Frodo also has pity on Gollum.
Now Sam, who is Frodo’s companion,
Sam, by the way, really is the true hero of the story.
I might talk about that on a different episode.
But Sam is a gardener from the Shire.
He’s a hobbit, and he is a servant.
of Frodos and they don’t have just a servant master relationship.
Sam is devoted to Frodo.
Always calls him Mr.
Frodo, but Sam loves Frodo.
And because he loves Frodo, he hates Gollum.
And he wishes that Frodo would have killed Gollum.
But there’s even this beautiful moment
When Sam, who just hated Gollum, I mean, just hated him, wanted to kill him
But Sam has this moment when he can kill Gollum, but he sees Gollum differently.
He begins to see Gollum not as a creature to be defeated, but as a fellow hobbit who’s simply broken and enslaved by a lust for power
And this becomes a predominant theme throughout Lord of the Rings: the ability to show pity.
Pity, and that’s the word Tolkien uses, pity is
The practice of mercy.
And for Tolkien, mercy isn’t weakness, mercy is how evil is ultimately undone
Now, without getting lost in every detail, let me talk to you about the climactic moment when Frodo reaches Mount Doom.
Now we expect Frodo, who has carried the ring so far all the way from the Shire in the west to Mount Doom in the east
hundreds and hundreds of miles, days and weeks and months of travel, has the opportunity to cast the ring
Into the cracks of Mount Doom, where there is a fiery pit that will destroy the ring.
It’s the only way.
That’s where the ring was forged.
That’s the only place the ring can be destroyed.
And Frodo, who is literally carried by his beloved Sam up Mount Doom, gets to the edge to this great crack.
And so you expect Frodo to cast the ring in, but then Frodo has a change of mind, a change of heart.
He claims the ring for himself in the margin of my copy of uh Return of the King.
This is the last volume where this story takes place.
When he claimed the ring for himself, I wrote No exclamation point in the margin.
Now I had seen the films, I knew this happened, but I was letting the story be a surprise.
I was so disappointed, I was like, No.
Well, here’s what happens, and again, this is the big spoiler.
Gollum had been following them up Mount Doom.
Gollum, who Sam just earlier had the opportunity on Mount Doom to kill, Gollum doesn’t.
Sam has pity on Gollum, just like Frodo had pity, just like Bilbo had pity.
And so Gollum springs out of nowhere to steal the ring.
So now Frodo has the ring.
He’s claiming it for himself.
And Gollum jumps out, and there’s a struggle for the ring.
and Gollum steals the ring from Frodo.
And while dancing in joy, Gollum loses his footing
and falls into the crack of Mount Doom, into that fiery pit, and both Gollum and the Ring are destroyed.
Now, this is an important moment in the story.
It’s in a chapter in the final volume entitled Mount Doom
In fact, when I was reading this chapter, I thought the entire chapter was just going to be about traveling up Mount Doom.
So I wasn’t expecting this climactic moment.
Uh, but this is in chapter three of the final book and the final volume is called Mount Doom.
And when I got done reading it, I just sat and thought.
about how masterfully Tolkien wrote this story.
Because what happens in that moment is the ring which embodies
evil, which embodies the power to control and dominate, this ring is ultimately destroyed
But not through strength.
I mean, Frodo finally succumbed to the temptation of the rain.
He wanted to use it, presumably for good
But we’ve seen how everyone else was corrupted by the ring.
Had the ring not been destroyed by Gollum’s attack, I would imagine Broto would have ultimately been corrupted by the ring.
So the ring is destroyed not by moral strength, not by heroism on the battlefield.
There are battles, there are sword fights.
There are orcs, we didn’t even talk about that, that are destroyed.
There are battles that take place in the Lord of the Rings, but the ring itself is not destroyed by heroism.
by by strength in battle or by moral courage.
The ring is not destroyed by killing the bad guys like Gollum.
Rather, evil was destroyed by evil.
So I like to see Gollum as an embodiment of evil.
And what Tolkien is showing us is that
We don’t overcome evil by replicating evil acts, but in by doing good, that’s how we overcome evil.
We overcome evil by doing good, which is what Jesus
And the apostles taught us that if we will resist the temptation to destroy evil by evil acts on our own, what we see
Is that evil will turn in on itself.
That’s what we see.
So I sat after reading this chapter for a while
And this is what I wrote in my copy of Return of the King.
And so I just want to read it for you because I want you to hear my sort of raw reaction to this.
Here’s what I write.
In the end, the ring was destroyed by the very miserable evil it had created.
See, Gollum was once Smeagol.
Sorry, I’m adding commentary to what I wrote.
Gollum was originally Smeagol, but he became deformed.
into this hideous creature, Gollum.
And he became evil, Gollum, by the power of the evil ring.
Okay, so back to my my notes here
In the end, the ring was destroyed by the very miserable evil it had created.
Not all evil is as powerful as the Dark Lord.
That’s Sauron.
Gollum represents the emptying effects of evil.
Evil as a privation of the good does not have substance or being.
I talked about this in a previous podcast episode walking through Fleming Rutledge’s book.
It was the episode that talks about Christus Victor, hell, and evil.
And Fleming Rutledge brings out this very ancient Christian tradition of understanding evil as the privation of the good, that evil doesn’t have being in itself.
That it’s the emptiness of good.
And I think Gollum represents this.
So again, back to my notes.
Gollum represents the emptying effects of evil.
Evil as a privation of the good does not have substance or being.
The Church Fathers taught this.
Gollum exemplifies this.
His lust for the ring had led him on a course towards becoming nothing.
Quite literally nothing.
And Sam, when he takes pity on Gollum, um, on Mount Doom before the attack.
Sam begins to see Gollum as this pitiful figure.
And this is what evil does.
Evil eventually destroys itself.
And so, well, let me wrap up because this episode is getting long.
But why should you read Lord of the Rings?
Well, I would say if you’re not a reader, watch the films.
But if you want to tackle a novel that will transform you, I recommend The Lord of the Rings.
Because it helps us see the danger of power, the corrupting tendencies of power.
The Lord of the Rings shows us the necessity of mercy.
The importance of friendship, strength in humility, and the mystery of God’s providential grace.
The Lord of the Rings reminds us that even when we fail, the story may not be over.
So again, this was not intended to be an expert’s opinion on the Lord of the Rings, but just one reader’s overview.
I probably will do a few more episodes on Lord of the Rings because I’m still stuck in Middle-earth.
But remember, Middle-earth is not just a place we visit.
It is a
Story that reshapes how we see.
Well, that’s all that I have for you today.
Thank you for joining me for this episode.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.