As a teenager, J.R.R. Tolkien met and fell in love with a young woman named Edith Bratt. But, being an orphan, the young Tolkien was under the guardianship of a Catholic priest who opposed their relationship. He banned Tolkien from seeing her. Remarkably, Tolkien submitted to him and had no contact with Edith for several years. It was only after the guardianship ended when Tolkien turned twenty-one that he resumed contact with Bratt. Upon doing so, he learned that she was engaged to another man. He spent a week trying to persuade her to break off the engagement and resume their relationship. He was successful, and they married soon after.

This episode in Tolkien’s early adult life is indicative of his moral psychology. When a moral authority dictated a certain course of action, there was simply no other option but to do what morality demanded. It calls to mind a scene from his friend C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength in which one character says to another, “I suppose there are two views about everything,” to which another man replies, “Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.” Tolkien could not have said it better.

It would be many years before this same man would write The Lord of the Rings, in which a company of nine—the fellowship of the ring—sets out in hopes of defeating the Dark Lord Sauron, whose growing shadow threatens the safety of Middle-earth. They must destroy a ring that holds much of the Dark Lord’s power, but the ring’s malevolent power undoes them. Boromir, a man who desired to wield the ring for good, has died. The fellowship is sundered, and the three remaining members must decide what to do: Will they follow Frodo and Sam? Attempt to rescue Merry and Pippin? Time is pressing—the longer they wait, the farther away both groups of hobbits will be. So what do the three survivors do? They stop to take care of the body of their fallen companion, Boromir. This is odd, especially for contemporary readers like us. Time is short. A decision must be made. Quickly. Yet they decide to undertake the laborious process of honouring the fallen man. Viewed in pragmatic terms, it makes no sense.

It feels especially odd in a moment when we regard the movement of time as a kind of moral force compelling us to act in certain ways. Many speak of being on the right side of history, or knowing what time it is, as if gesturing to the calendar or a clock is itself a moral argument. As if such acts of valour—or cowardice—are determined by the ineluctable march of moments. But Tolkien has another understanding of time and history. In his correspondence, he reacted strongly to the notion of historical progress, writing, “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” If anything, the passing of time followed the material logic of entropy, a pattern of sweeping decay and inevitable decline. Peace, order, goodness were aberrations to the story of decline time told. People’s lives take place within various acts of this long defeat. But that does not mean right and wrong change with the seasons. Honour and virtue are not—or should never be—subject to the same force of entropy that seems to guide human civilizations in their natural descent. For Tolkien, claims about historical necessity or contingency carry no moral weight.

It is perhaps telling, then, that this odd scene of honour for Boromir is almost entirely omitted from the film adaptation. Yet it contains one of the core ideas in the moral philosophy of Tolkien. When Legolas says, “We must first do what we must do,” he is voicing an idea central to Tolkien’s entire historical and moral imagination. It might seem banal, but remember for Tolkien “all that is gold does not glitter.” A moral law exists outside the decaying ages of this world, a law that binds the virtuous and obliges them to follow it, even when doing so is inconvenient, even ruinous.

Honour in the Long Defeat

There is a simplicity about Tolkien’s moral vision that is refreshing. Certainly, there are times when the answer to the right course of action is not altogether plain, and wisdom and prudence are needed to help one see the right way. But if honour compels one toward a certain action, come what may, then nothing else matters—at least not for Tolkien.

We might stumble over the centrality of honour because Tolkien draws on a moral vision largely forgotten in our day. But the wise elders of old understood that when an individual faced a question of right and wrong, they were also facing a question of honour and dishonour. To behave honourably is to behave in a way that agrees with your nature, with the way you are made to act as a rational creature. This is why honour plays such a central role in Aristotle’s understanding of natural law, for example. Even during the Reformation, Protestant ethicists centered honour in this way: for the Lutheran theologian Niels Hemmingsen, natural law is shaped and defined by what is honourable.

For Tolkien, the demands of honour wed to wisdom and prudence are generally the only demands on us when we consider what we ought to do. History is simply the stage on which we act, playing our part well or poorly. Our feet are set down at some moment in time by forces entirely outside our control, and we must decide how to walk. As the wizard Gandalf counsels elsewhere in Lord of the Rings, “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” But this is not how many of us think about the relationship between time and moral choice. Rather than the space in which we make choices, history has come to be one of the central inputs that informs our choices, competing with the claims of honour as defined by the moral law.

Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. Here the claim is that we live in a unique apocalyptic moment in human history and, given the threats facing us, certain actions and words that might have once been beyond the pale are now admissible.

Tolkien did not think much of such “historical” arguments. In The Two Towers, Éomer, the prince of Rohan, says to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange. . . . How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” To which Aragorn replies, “As he ever has judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour.

All of this raises an obvious question for Tolkien’s readers. Many people today appeal to history when making moral judgments partly because they feel that the world has changed so dramatically that one has to adjust, to keep pace with the times, you might say. Failing to do that sounds to many like the Luddites of the past who, when confronted with a mechanical loom that would put many weavers out of work, chose to destroy it. This was a potent yet futile gesture: the loom triumphed, and the weavers had to adjust to a new world.

Is Tolkien’s moral reasoning beset by a similar problem? Can we simply say “neither” when met with a complicated moral dilemma in which both options seem poor? Is this approach realistic in a complicated moral environment in which there often really are such things as the lesser of two evils? Tolkien’s answer to these questions is striking, not least because there is some sense in which he takes the side of the Luddites, fully accepting the possibility of catastrophic defeat as a potential (and unhappy) necessity. A long view of history, though, puts such decisions in perspective.

Tolkien gives us this view through elvish characters like Galadriel, beings who have lived through several ages of Middle-earth. As they continue to build in truth, goodness, and beauty, they do so with a keen knowledge that all of this is only “fighting the long defeat” against a shadow that continually returns to blot out the light. In Tolkien’s world there was a primeval joy marked by the delight of the gods and the beauty of their work. But then an evil greater than Sauron destroyed much of the beauty. Ever after, history was a story of grief and long defeat, for what was lost will never be regained in this world, though it might be tasted again across the sundering seas. In the interim we enjoy the pleasures given to us and resolve to do what we can for the good with the time that we are given. Our hope is never to vanquish evil altogether, for we cannot do that. But we can act, as Tolkien says in The Return of the King:

Those who wish to fight the long defeat well know that the “weather” facing future peoples is not ours to rule. But we can uproot what evils we encounter in hopes that our children and grandchildren might see a more fruitful crop than we ourselves ever shall.

Where Hope Lies

When facing a complex moral dilemma, Tolkien makes a significant concession similar to the one Christopher Nolan makes in his film The Dark Knight. At one point, Nolan’s Batman is interrogating the Joker, who unnervingly reveals that Batman must break his one rule—that he does not kill—if he is going to rescue the woman he loves. The Joker has no rules, but Batman does, and this is a major liability. The Joker can do anything to get what he wants. Batman cannot.

The idea is that those committed to evil use tactics that the good are categorically barred from using. To use such methods is to cease being good. Goodness has rules, but evil does not. Tolkien understands this line of thought and makes it clear in his fantasy. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf and the evil wizard Saruman have an extended dialogue. When we first meet them, Gandalf is “the Gray,” while Saruman is “the White.” These colours indicate their seniority in the order of wizards, with Saruman the greater of the two. However, Gandalf notices on his arrival that the latter’s robes no longer appear white but shift colour depending on how Saruman moves. Gandalf later recounts to the fellowship,

Note that Gandalf does not say Saruman is wrong, but that he is foolish. He grants Saruman’s point about how white can be easily changed, dyed, or broken. Later, when Gandalf himself becomes “White,” a similar exchange happens as he and Aragorn consider the paths they must take in the war to come. Gandalf says,

There were things that Saruman could not do as long as he was “the White.” But once he resolved to “break” that colour, he could—and so he became more powerful, lacking the constraints that bind the honourable.

The possibility of a final disastrous defeat is uncomfortable for us, steeped as we are in post-Enlightenment progress narratives in which the world is always improving through innovation, technology, and human boldness. Yet the concept of history’s long defeat pervades Tolkien’s work and was forged in his early adult years. As a young man Tolkien had a group of friends, something of a prototype for his later, more famous group of friends, the Inklings. This earlier group coalesced as teenage school friends, nearly all of whom were killed in World War I. In a letter written later in life, Tolkien remarked that “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” In 1918 Tolkien was only twenty-six years old. World War I not only robbed Tolkien of his friends; it also deprived virtually all its European combatants of unfathomably large numbers of young men—permanently changing Europe’s demographics, culture, and ways of life. The world Tolkien had known as a young man really was conclusively overthrown and destroyed by the Great War. Indeed, it is not altogether wrong to regard his creation of the Shire and even the fellowship of wandering men as a kind of love letter to that lost world, an attempt to show others who would never know it themselves what had once been.

We should be careful here, for there is a way of reading Gandalf’s claim that “Black is mightier” that would be theologically problematic. Tolkien did not mean to say that there are dualistic forces of good and evil and that the evil is stronger. What he means here is that we act within the world as it exists. There are choices that the good are not allowed to make. True freedom is constrained, bounded. The evil, in contrast, are not so limited. For Tolkien, the good should always refuse to choose between two evils, even if one is the lesser evil. The virtuous reject false dichotomies and seek out other strategies, however strange or remote or uncertain they might seem. There might only ever be a fool’s hope, but that is better than losing faith with the good by participating in evil.

But does this mean that those devoted to the good are doomed to defeat whenever they find themselves in a moral struggle against evil? Tolkien thought not. He did, however, recognize that the odds are stacked against goodness, to some degree. This is a basic condition of our current reality—there is a certain entropy to the world, a sense in which goodness must work against the grain of a fractured and fracturing world.

For this reason the beginnings of things are always preferable to Tolkien, in some sense. He was a philologist after all, a lover of words fascinated by the origins of language. He writes of Gollum’s “fascination with roots and beginning,” and he could just as easily have been writing of himself. His own beloved hobbits—Tolkien himself was a hobbit in many ways—live underground, near the roots. Tolkien’s love was given to the spring. And so in that sense history is a long defeat away from good and lost origins as what we might call moral entropy works itself out across time and place.

Even so, Tolkien was never a fatalist. He always knew that goodness could triumph, could be vindicated. He just did not necessarily expect it, nor did he necessarily care if the good was vindicated in his own lifetime. He believed, as he wrote in The Return of the King, “that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” A hope beyond this world sustained Tolkien and emboldened him to follow the good even in the face of almost certain defeat under the shadow of this world. Like his friend Lewis, Tolkien always retained a hope in a goodness that existed beyond and above “the shadowlands.”

Life Beyond History

So how is goodness preserved for Tolkien? This brings us to Tolkien’s great prayer. We are familiar with the idea of a catastrophe. Or, to use more updated terminology, we might adopt Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of a black swan. A black swan is a completely unforeseen and cataclysmic disaster, something that seems to unmake the world. But Tolkien also envisioned the opposite of such an event, in which the effect works in the other direction, in which “everything sad comes untrue,” as Samwise says near the end. This kind of event, which Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe”—the “hope unlooked for” when all seems lost—allows good to face evil even though history remains something of a long defeat.

This isn’t triumphalism. The eucatastrophe derives its meaning precisely from the fact that it is not certain or guaranteed. It is a fool’s hope, as Gandalf sometimes says. Yet it is something Tolkien sees as hardwired into us. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien speaks of “fairy” as a dangerous realm that overlays the world, so we can never be wholly removed from it. Fairy stories, tales that speak to that unseen realm and help us remember that we live with a foot in that world, offer their readers a unique joy that bubbles up from something deep and submerged within us, something we have nearly forgotten yet secretly long for:

Running in parallel to this idea of an unlooked-for and blessed turn to the good, Tolkien also recognized a frailty in evil. “Black is mightier,” and yet it possesses a brittle quality that goodness does not. True, evil can use methods and tactics that the good cannot, and this gives it a certain power that goodness lacks. But Tolkien knew that evil was self-destructive. Théoden, the great king of Rohan, says, “Oft evil will shall evil mar.” The person driven by evil is often their own worst enemy. Vanity, pride, and ambition will prove the greatest weakness, causing those who are evil far more damage than their enemies ever could. This happens many times in The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, one of the main conceits of the final two volumes is that Sauron is repeatedly undone by his own assumptions, fears, and pride. Were he a possessor of deeper wisdom, he would be impregnable. And yet were he a possessor of deeper wisdom, he would not be Sauron.

Tolkien rightly sees something unnatural in evil, something that goes against being itself. And so evil unexpectedly brings about its own demise. What else helps bring about eucatastrophe? A further answer, for Tolkien, is providence. For Tolkien, “providence” is not, as it became for many in the modern West, a kind of sacralized synonym for “progress.” Tolkien is plainly no believer in progress. But he does believe that a loving God exists above all creation and that even amid the darkness of the world he is still a power over it. This belief shows up in Gandalf’s wise words to Frodo when he tells him that “there was more than one power at work” when Bilbo first came upon the Ring of Power in The Hobbit. He continues, “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of [Sauron]. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.”

Even amid the darkness and uncertainty facing Frodo at that point in the story, there was a quiet word of hope, a reminder of powers from outside the world that set themselves against evil. This shows up again, later in the story, in one of the great battles, in which King Théoden of Rohan comes to the rescue of the great city of Minas Tirith. Tolkien describes Théoden, an old man, as bent and weary as he approaches the battle. But then he senses a change in the wind, and the dark clouds that had covered the land for days are suddenly moved by this unlooked-for gust. This, too, is an act of that power from beyond the world’s end, intervening on behalf of Théoden and his company.

Tolkien’s idea of providence is meant to tell us something like what is shown in the story of Elisha and the angels in 2 Kings 6. An enemy army has been sent by a hostile king to capture the great prophet. Elisha discovers this when his servant looks outside and sees that “an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city.” Yet Elisha was not moved. Calmly he told his servant that “those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” He then prayed that God would open the servant’s eyes—and suddenly the servant sees hills full of horses and chariots of fire coming to their aid. The doctrine of providence, then, is a comfort and a bulwark to us. It is why, for example, Aragorn could choose to care for Boromir’s body before setting out on his quest to rescue Merry and Pippin. It is why Tolkien could wait patiently to resume his relationship with Edith.

Providence is a bulwark against despair. It is a reminder to us that even as darkness seems to fall and the long defeat threatens to become final, there is hope from outside the world. One day the king of a far country will triumph here, and we will see that “the grey rain-curtain [of this world] turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and [we shall] behold white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” We live in a time of unwinding, when so much that was once good (or was at least better) now seems to be falling into disrepair and ruin. But Tolkien’s understanding of providence, inextricably bound up in his understanding of history, should strengthen our hearts. For the great conflict in all human thought and action is not whether you will stand on the right side of history but whether you will stand firm at the last, when all hope seems lost. Courage, Lewis once said, is the shape every virtue takes at its testing point. And from where do we get courage? From the same place Sam finds it when he nearly gives in to despair in The Return of the King—through remembering that all shadows ultimately fail, banished by a swiftly rising sun and a beauty that invades from beyond the world.