If you’re a Tolkien fan, it’s time to celebrate, because this year marks the 70th birthday of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.

You might know a lot about The Lord of the Rings, but did you know that Tolkien himself once said it was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”?
In his letters (collected and published in 1981), Tolkien wrote repeatedly of his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the importance of prayer, and the connection between his writing and his faith. In a letter to a Jesuit friend, Tolkien says, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision… [T]he religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

This might sound a bit strange for anyone familiar with the story—there are lots of orcs, elves and hobbits, but not much that resembles the Catholic Church.
Well, Tolkien valued subtlety it seems – he didn’t much like allegory (unlike his friend C.S. Lewis!) The key to finding the Catholicism in Tolkien’s epic is in the calendar…

Tolkien uses a technique from medieval literature (think Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Arthurian romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) where he chooses key dates associated with Christianity for big moments in his own narrative.

The Ring of Power is destroyed on March 25, which, according to tradition is both the date of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel tells Mary she will bear a son, who is Christ, and the date on which Christ was crucified to break the power of original sin.

We all know the famous inscription on the ring that Gandalf reads: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” The power of the One Ring and the power of Original Sin is the same: to rule all, and in the darkness bind them.
Tolkien, as a Catholic, would have been very aware of the significance of March 25, so it’s no accident that he connects the destruction of the Ring of Power to the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, when God the Incarnate is crucified in order to break the power of sin and darkness and redeem the brokenness of the world.

Another very significant date is December 25  – Christmas! The date which marks the birth of Christ also happens to be the date in The Fellowship of the Ring when Frodo Baggins leaves Rivendell to begin his journey to Mount Doom. It’s not rocket science to see a connection between Frodo’s quest to take the One Ring to Mount Doom and the life of Christ, from his birth to his death.

The Ring in Tolkien’s narrative is, for many readers, a picture of sin, and the act of putting on the Ring is like the act of sin. Putting the ring on shuts you out and makes you invisible to the world of light, exposing you instead to the Dark Lord and putting you at great risk of succumbing to his will.

A huge part of Frodo’s character is that he’s a ring-bearer, not a ring-wearer (for the most part). Bearing the ring is like bearing the weight of sin without sinning. There’s an allusion here to Christ taking up the cross and bearing the sins of world. Frodo is bearing a cross on the way to Mount Doom in the same way that Christ took the via dolorosa to Golgotha, the real Mount Doom.

70 years on from when it was first published, The Fellowship of the Ring continues to inspire millions of readers with its message of hope in the midst of darkness. Just like Haldir says, “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”