Michael Jahosky argues in his new book that J.R.R. Tolkien engaged in the telling of a parable, and that the great author wanted to create Christian art and mythology, not Christian propaganda.

The Good News of the Return of the King by Michael T. Jahosky (230 pages, Wipf and Stock, 2020)

Scholar Michael T. Jahosky has written one of the most intriguing books on Tolkien to have come out in years and years, The Good News of the Return of the King. (Indeed, it’s been a great, great Tolkien year, especially when one also considers the happy arrival of Holly Ordway’s Tolkien Modern Reading). Understanding Tolkien’s disdain of allegory, Jahosky argues that the great author fully engaged in the telling of a parable. As the author persuasively argues:

The Lord of the Rings is a parable about what Jesus’s parables are about, which is the very story of reality itself. Myth is so effective because it embodies the very message it seeks to communicate; the myth is the message. Parables are a special type of myth, or story, and in this book, I want to show that this is because they are incarnational stories. When God chose to disclose himself, he chose to do so mythically through parable.

Parable, not allegory, was Tolkien’s way, according to Jahosky. But, a parable of what?

This is the great question, of course, and Jahosky takes great pains to argue (rightly) that Tolkien wanted to create Christian art and mythology, not Christian propaganda. But, art, by its very nature, demands certain complexities that always elude propaganda. Thus, the meaning of art comes in layers, often surprisingly dense, while propaganda is merely visible at first sight, on the surface, for all to accept or reject.

Through a fascinatingly complex set of steps, Jahosky argues that Tolkien’s Legendarium—but especially its most complicated manifestation, The Lord of the Rings—presents an incarnational myth. Not pre-incarnational, as in waiting for Christ, but incarnational, as in Christ is present. As Jahosky writes:

This does not mean, as most Tolkien scholars have argued, that Middle-earth is set literally during a pre-Christian period. It could refer to a pre-Christian time period, but it could just as easily be read as a description of the first century in which Jesus lived, which was a simultaneously Christian and non-Christian historical period. It is surprising that these alternatives have not been explored or touched on in other scholarly treatments of Tolkien’s books. This seems to be an ideal setting in which to show how Christianity can flourish in any historical period while avoiding coming across as an explicitly Christian story.

While most Christian Tolkien scholars have argued that Christ is yet to come in Tolkien’s legendarium, with Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn merely foreshadowing the offices of Christ—priest, prophet, and king, respectively—Jahosky claims that Aragorn is a parable of Christ. Indeed, Jahosky makes the fascinating argument that one cannot understand the Christian kingship of Aragorn without first understanding the Hebraic kingship of Thorin Oakenshield.

Even if one disagrees with Jahosky’s ultimate argument, he has to be credited—and with enthusiasm—for finding so much of the Old Testament in The Hobbit, a work that Tolkien scholars usually gloss over en route to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

If I had any real complaint or criticism about the book, it’s that Jahosky too freely presents the truths of Christianity as something that is hidden and must be revealed. While he’s most clearly not a Gnostic, one might take Jahosky’s book and the argument and present it as such. Still, this complaint is minor beyond minor, and probably to be easily and readily explained away by Jahosky’s excitement to reveal what he’s found.

After all, the book’s strengths overwhelm this one small criticism.

While gloriously always its own book, The Good News of the Return of the King freely and happily engages not only with several Christian Tolkien scholars such as Joseph Pearce, Ralph C. Wood, Peter Kreeft, Matthew Dickerson, and yours truly, but also with evangelical scholars such as N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath, Gerald McDermott, and Tim Keller. In a very fetching way, Jahosky puts us all in a type of pub—maybe even the Bird and the Baby—and invites each one of us to talk and share our views. But, one must state in bewilderment, who knows what the Protestants would drink? Regardless, Jahosky’s engagement with other scholars only makes his own book more interesting and, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, more itself.

This engagement, however, is only one of the book’s many strengths. Second, latent within The Good News of the Return of the King is also a book on and about C.S. Lewis, and Jahosky rightly uses Lewis’s words to break the many silences Tolkien left in his own writings. Indeed, Lewis comes out just as fascinating as the main subject of the book, and one can only hope that the author will pursue more about Lewis in a future work, perhaps, in that work, using Tolkien to fill in some of the silences left by Lewis (though, admittedly, Lewis was rarely silent about anything, especially himself!). One can’t come away from The Good News without a profound respect for Tolkien and Lewis.

Third, Jahosky writes (and researches) in a terribly fetching way. It’s hard not to be drawn into the book, simply by the writing style alone. Again, imagine lots of scholars sitting in the pub, talking with one another in intense dialogue. Tolkien and Lewis are also there. What’s amazing about Jahosky’s writing style, though, is that he also draws the reader into the dialogue as well.

Fourth—and this completely undoes the possibility of a gnostic interpretation of The Good News—Jahosky offers a nuanced and complicated view of various paganisms, noting in the best Christian Humanist tradition (to which Tolkien belonged), that the complexities of non-Christian religions only reveal with more depth the glories of the Lord in all of His spectacular wonder. God, after all, reveals Himself throughout all of His creation, not merely through Christianity.

Fifth and finally, and related to the points just mentioned, Jahosky approaches every aspect of this book—from the writing to the research to the book-length sustaining of his argument—with an integrity that is as rare as it is refreshing. Never does the author apologize for his faith, though The Good News is clearly a book of Christian apologetics. Jahosky is just so excited about his discovery that he wants to share it with the world, and the world is better for it.

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