What we can learn about good and evil from The Hobbit

With the deaths of so many in Newtown, Connecticut, it can be easy to see the power of evil in the world. Indeed, it can be hard to see anything but evil in the deaths of so many innocent people. Youth is a time of hope and promise, and schools are intended to be a place of sanctuary and learning.

Yet, we must look to hope. Some of the most beloved writers of the English language made it a theme of their writing, and as we heard the news of the deaths at Sandy Hook elementary, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was coming to movie theaters. If there is nothing else that Tolkien intended with his most innovative creations–hobbits–it was to convey the possibility of hope and life and innocence against the power of evil.

Indeed, it is not just hobbits and their love of the creature comforts of home, food, and books that Tolkien wrote of, but also the nature of evil and its corruption of the good. Glenn Fairman, in his piece “Hobbits, Orcs, and the Human Condition” for the American Thinker posits that this is why Tolkien strike home for readers (and perhaps movie goers): “The universes of Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis touch a spot in our hearts, not because of a one-dimensional black and white depiction of Good and Evil, but because they ring true in excavating the subtlety of what drives evil. Evil is not deemed co-equal with Good, […] but as a corrupted end which once sought the Good.”

Through our “fairy tales,” then, runs the theme of free will and the necessity of free will to the growth of good, even in the potential for pain and death. Says Fairman

It is in our finite reckoning of time that patience exhausts itself and oftentimes our endurance is drawn down as we despair of evil’s resolute gravity. Faced with suffering and evil occurring at an ever-accelerating cadence, it may be easier to believe that we are alone in our sorrows instead of exerting faith that a Deft Hand holds the reins. Sometimes it seems as if the free will of a broken humanity is insufficient when weighed in the balance against our cruelties. But without free will there is no love; and without love there is no impetus for a God of Love to create.

But free will or a future redemption is thin gruel to a town with classrooms full of murdered children. Is it enough to say that God did not will this thing and that despite the glib horror of the words, ripples of good are projecting out in time so that as a consequence at least some of this evil might one day be redeemed? Unlike our stories of Middle Earth, there was no convocation of Eagles to spirit those innocents away from a cruel and insane hand. Nevertheless, we are hearing now of unlikely heroes and sacrifices in the face of certain death by some who did not come home.

It is too early to tell, perhaps even in this lifetime, how these events will have weighted the waves of contingency and their significance for those perhaps not yet born. It is not a cliché to hold that courage and faith are needed now more than ever. They were indispensable in an age of Hobbits, elves and dwarves; how much more so in a tangible world of fragile men.

Often, we may feel as Frodo, who in the darkness of the Mines of Moria lamented, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Our hearts go out to those in Newport whose lives have been altered forever and whose loved ones will never come home, at least not in this life, and we hope that even in the dark moments that they will find solace and hope in courage and faith. To the rest of us, I hope that we can provide to them, and each other, the small comfort we can offer. And perhaps, here again, we can listen to Gandalf, the sage wizard of Tolkien’s creation:

There are those who believe that “it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”

As we all mourn the lost, I hope that we can realize that we are not powerless against great evil, but that it is in our every day acts that evil can be held back.