All good things must come to an end—that’s the saying. And it applies to The Lord of the Rings as much as it does to anything else. I think that the success of Tolkien’s posthumously published works—many of them unfinished, and stapled together by Tolkien’s faithful son, Christopher—has a lot to do with the sweet and melancholy aftertaste that people want to linger once the story is over.
Having come to the end, can we accept it? Gandalf does. As we come near to the end of the story, and the hobbits are nearly home after many adventures, Gandalf warns them that one more adventure awaits them in the Shire. When the hobbits say that they have nothing to worry about because he is with them, the wizard says,
‘I am with you at present,’ said Gandalf, ‘but soon I shall not be. I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.
‘But if you would know, I am turning aside soon. I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another.’¹
So Gandalf, the Grey Pilgrim, the rolling stone, finally comes to rest. That sounds sad, but Gandalf doesn’t sound sad. He knows that something new and strange awaits him: rest.
It is not uncommon for people to ask preachers, “Will we be bored in Heaven?” Leaving aside the unfathomable question of what Heaven is really like, and even whether or not the redeemed are actually destined to live there (or someplace new), I suspect that the real concern has to do with the meaning of life.
For most people the meaning of life is wrapped up with their work. But when the work is done, what then? For a saintly few, life’s meaning is derived from the daily struggle with evil. (The feisty among us enjoy a good tussle.) But the Bible tells us that even that will come to an end someday. The good guys are going to win, finally, and forever. The fight will be over. Our Rest will be won. So, what then? Will we just sit around reminiscing about our glory days like a bunch of former high school athletes? (We see something like this with Pippin and Merry according to an appendix in The Lord of the Rings.)
There’s another way of approaching the problem that sounds good, and even pious, but there’s still something not quite right about it. I recall my wife’s grandfather, a theologian with advanced degrees from Harvard and Yale, saying that Heaven would be like a library where study never ends. While I think that may be a little closer to the truth, I still think it misses by a long shot. When we see Cherubim in the Bible, it doesn’t look like they’re studying God in the way that theologians study Him. They’re praising Him, and that’s quite different. (More about this in a moment.²)
But for the moment, let’s return to the question, “Will Heaven be boring?” Perhaps it seems like it could be if you don’t have a taste for holiness. (But if that’s the case, Heaven would most likely be terrifying rather than boring.) The very question begs the question; it is also blasphemous because it implies that the creation has something that the Creator does not.
How can we imagine an eternal rest when we can’t even rest for a few moments now? We may look forward to a vacation so that we can “rest and recuperate,” but that way of putting it shows that the point of rest is getting back to work. Perhaps you’ve felt listlessness on the third week of vacation. That’s when “sleeping in” has lost its charm, and you’re looking for things to do. If Heaven is like that, it probably sounds like Hell. Perhaps eternal rest is unimaginable because it calls for an entirely different mode of life. I think that’s what we see with Gandalf here—he needs to have a long talk with Bombadil because he’s entering a mode of life for which Tom is truly the master.
Medieval thinkers noted that life can be lived in two modes—an active life and a contemplative one. Ideally, a man ought to make time for both. But people being people means that one or the other tends to come more naturally to most of us. Because of the plain need to make a living, the active life is easy to justify. It’s also more interesting to observe. Watching someone at prayer is about as interesting as watching paint dry. And books about contemplatives usually don’t appeal to anyone but contemplatives, unless, that is, they record visions full of dragons and brimstone.
This has been called the Martha-Mary Problem. You may recall the story. Jesus had some friends named Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, and they were siblings. Lazarus doesn’t come into this story, but hopefully you remember the drama of his raising (“Lazarus, come forth!”). This story is about his sisters. Today we might call Martha a type A personality. She was a doer, a planner, a woman who got things done. And like many people of this type, if you didn’t look busy, she’d help you get busy. To her credit, things do need to get done.
In this story Jesus and a bunch of hungry disciples had just dropped in for dinner—so, someone had to feed them. But if it hadn’t been that, there would have been something else, because there is always something that needs doing for the Marthas of the world. That’s why this story is so important and why it has annoyed the Marthas of the world ever since. Because here, in the middle of all the preparations, Martha’s sister, Mary, was just sitting around doing nothing—at least that’s the way it appeared to Martha. Mary, you see, was leisurely listening to Jesus. Presumably Jesus was teaching. When Martha noticed Mary just sitting there—doing nothing—she complained to Jesus, assuming, I think, that He would do the sensible thing and back her up. Instead, He surprised her by saying this: “Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). (I’ve often wondered what the hungry disciples thought of that.)
The Lord of the Rings isn’t the story of Tom Bombadil. It’s a story about a quest to rid the world of power untethered from goodness. The Ring of Power is raw power, power supposedly beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche put it. But power untethered from the restraining and directing influence of goodness is necessarily evil. There’s no “beyond” when it comes to good and evil. It’s one or the other; either power serves goodness, or it serves evil.
While Tom Bombadil is good, he’s no Martha. In The Lord of the Rings there’s no Bombadil option. Evil must be defeated; if it isn’t, then even Tom will fall in the end (the last, as he was the first).³ It’s a situation much like the one we face today. We may feel like Frodo, wondering why we can’t just sit things out. But Frodo was no Bombadil, and neither are we. We also live in a world dominated by a Dark Lord, the Dragon in the book of Revelation. And even though Christians, including Tolkien, know that only the return of the King will put an end to the Dragon, there are roles for the rest of us to play in the story of his defeat. But even those stories will come to an end. And hopefully, when our stories are told someday, they will end the way Bilbo thought a good story should end: “And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.”⁴
When the fight is over and the doing is done, our lives will necessarily look more like Mary’s—or Bombadil’s—than Martha’s, or Gandalf’s. Since that’s the case, perhaps we should get a little practice in resting before then. If we do we will find that Heaven isn’t boring after all. It’s something we can look forward to. It may even look like life at Tom’s house.
Now, as I come to the end of this book, it is time for the big reveal; it is time for me to tell you what I think Tom is for, as plainly and as directly as I can.
I think Tom is the ending, as in a happy ending.
What does this have to do with dominion? Well, bless my beard, it’s the same thing! In the Bible God doesn’t lay down His dominion when He rests on the seventh day; He enjoys what He has made. And Tom’s dominion and his rest amount to the same thing.
Perhaps this seems unlikely, since we meet Tom at the beginning of the story, before things really get going. But I think that’s the genius of Tom, and Tolkien. He comes at the beginning because he gives us a glimpse of the ending—the happy ending.
Throughout The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, Sam, and the other members of the fellowship find rest along the way. At first it’s just the four hobbits; then a mysterious Ranger called Strider joins them. Then four more join in: Boromir, the man from the South; Gimli, a dwarf; Legolas, an Elf; and, of course, Gandalf. At first they all find rest at Rivendell. Then, after disaster in the Mines of Moria in which the Fellowship seems to have lost Gandalf for good, the remainder of the Fellowship find rest in Lothlórien. And after that the Fellowship is soon broken. There are brief respites along the way for the remnant of the Fellowship, but no genuine rest, just smaller and smaller samples of the real thing until they all get to the end of the story. And even at the end of the story, Frodo doesn’t find rest, not truly. He’s too deeply wounded by his contest with evil. His hurts revisit him annually. He’s restless, even in Bag-End. Only Sam truly understands. But Sam is torn; he’s still very much at home in Middle-Earth. What’s Frodo to do?
A truly great storyteller knows how to suggest the ending at the very beginning without giving too much away. We see that in the Bible, in something known as the proto-evangelium (Gen. 3:15). (In a way that’s an entirely different story—but in another way it isn’t.) And we have the ending of The Lord of the Rings, and the end of Frodo’s story, faintly suggested in the house of Tom Bombadil. In the first paragraph in the chapter titled, “Fog on the Barrow-downs,” we read this:
That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.⁶
I suppose you could write this off as filler, or just a way of setting a scene to contrast with the action when the hobbits are captured by the Barrow-wight, if not for one thing. Frodo sees the vision in his dream again, this time at the very end of The Lord of the Rings. But this time he’s not dreaming—he’s sailing into the West, and it is at this point that Bombadil is mentioned for the last time.
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.⁷
When Bilbo tells Frodo and Sam in Rivendell that books should have good endings, Sam raises a question: Where will the people who live ‘happily ever after’ live?⁸ Well, now we know, they will live in a “far green country under a swift sunrise.”
I could say more, but why should I? This is the end—Frodo’s Eternal Rest—and nothing more that I could say could be better than that.
1. The Return of the King, 974.
2. The best theologians don’t separate study from worship—I’m not talking about those theologians.
3. The Fellowship of the Ring, 259.
4. The Fellowship of the Ring, 32.
5. This is Frodo’s question to Gandalf as they approach the Shire near the end of The Lord of the Rings. Even though he’s nearing home, Frodo suspects that he will not find the Rest he longs for there.
6. The Fellowship of the Ring, 132.
7. The Return of the King, 1007.
8. The Fellowship of the Ring, 267.