The Return of the King: Aragorn and the Myth of the King’s Return

Rev. Dr. Nicholas Newman 

One of the great tragedies of our modern society is that we have lost our stories. We have lost them not because we no longer know them, not because we no longer find them exciting, or even because we no longer find them meaningful in the context of modern culture. We have lost our stories because we have started viewing ourselves as being outside of the story.  

Stories are foundational to how humans understand who we are and the world around us, far more than a primitive Netflix for hunter-gatherers huddled around a fire, as our society has reduced them to that. The encoding of information within a story, and the passing along of that information from one generation to the next through storytelling, is the very purpose of mythology. In their excellent book When They Separated Earth from Sky, Paul and Elizabeth Barber discuss this process; and how these stories, told again and again, can keep this encoded information accurately being passed on over thousands of years. One of their central examples is the story of Crater Lake from the Klamath Tribe. This story preserves a geologic event from over 7000 years ago, encodes it, and allows the information to be passed along in the form of a story. 

Myth is not only a way for humanity to encode what we would understand as scientific phenomena, which are perhaps beyond the ability of a “primitive” society to understand. As modern people, we often look down our noses at what we would consider “primitive” societies, because our technology is better, but humans in ancient times were as perceptive as we are, and perfectly able to make observations about the world around them. Humanity doesn’t use stories to explain unknown phenomena, but to understand how we fit into the world we see around us, both the physical as well as the spiritual reality in which we live our lives. 

Having reduced mythology to nothing more than, at best, old stories that are exciting but irrelevant, and at worst outright lies, we consider ourselves to be outside of the narrative context within which humans have always understood ourselves to live. Rather than being within the story, we look at the story as something to analyze, to dissect, to put Ancient people under a Magnifying glass. This has led to our culture being adrift, without anything to be rooted in, with no way to understand what it means to be a human being. Thank God, there is something of an awakening going on about our stories. Jonathan Pageau and his Symbolic World podcast, Fathers Stephen DeYoung and Andrew Damick, Deacon Seraphim Rohlin, and many others are reintroducing us to our stories, not only in an academic way, but as a framework within which to live. 

The importance of stories was evident to J.R.R. Tolkien as well, and he was dismayed at the way that stories had been relegated to nothing more than entertainment for children. He speaks about this a great deal in his article On Fairy Stories: “Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery,’ as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused” (On Fairy Stories xx). Tolkien argues that there is nothing inherent within Fairy Stories that makes them suited for children, and the stories must often be made palatable for them (à la Disney), but, he argues, the same could be done with any type of book; they too would just have to be modified for children. It is when society lost its understanding of what Fairy Stories are that they were relegated to children, because they were looked at as not necessary. Tolkien vehemently disagrees, and instead talks about them in terms of sub-creation: “But in such ‘fantasy,’ as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator: (On Fairy Stories xx). In creating stories, humans are living theologically, living in imitation of God, the Creator. Humans take all those things that God has done, the working of God in creation, how God works salvation, etc., and distill them into their stories (even pagan mythology is based on the history of salvation, perverted to be from the view of the demonic, rather than that of God; for an excellent discussion of this, please read Fr. Stephen DeYoung’s new book on Baal).  

Tolkien attempts to reverse the trajectory of society, bringing England, particularly, back into its stories. Unfortunately, he finds that England is so far removed from its stories that he needs to build a “mythology for England” (as Humphrey Carpenter put it). It is for this that he writes the stories of Middle-earth, which is not fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a different world (as most modern fantasy would be), but rather stories taking place in a mytho-historic era of our own world (like the Iliad was a mythical rendering of the Mycenaean period). In creating these stories, Tolkien incorporates themes, imagery, and so forth from a variety of different sources: Norse mythology, Finnish mythology, Celtic mythology, Medieval romance, and, perhaps most importantly, his Christian (i.e., Roman Catholic) worldview. The story, then, is a quilt, a patchwork, in which all these various strains are combined and influence one another, creating something new. Tolkien compares this new story, built from many components, to a soup, quoting George Webb Dasent: “we must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled" (On Faerie Stories in The Tolkien Reader pg. 46). By subjecting stories to academic scrutiny, we ultimately miss the point of the story. By analyzing the story, we do not allow ourselves to engage with it with what Tolkien calls “literary belief.” This is not a mere “suspension of disbelief,” but a real engagement with the world of the story:  

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside (On Faerie Stories in The Tolkien Reader pg. 60). 

“Secondary” worlds sometimes work by different rules than the “Primary World,” the addition of magic, for example, or flying dragons and other fantastical creatures which would not be able to exist, and so on, but must be internally logical. We engage with stories, not because they are an escape from reality, but because they are a reflection of reality. While the story of the “successful ‘sub-creator’” is something new, it is, in a sense, a “type” of the real world, and allows us to engage with reality on another level. 

Tolkien takes up many of the great themes of the “Primary world” and explores them in his subcreated reality; he speaks to this in one of his letters, Letter 144 to Waldman: “I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths.” While, as Tolkien’s own illustration points out, it is difficult to tease out every individual strain of influence in a story, since they are woven together into something new, the reader is expected to recognize and engage with the different levels of themes and allusions made within the text, to engage more completely in the “Secondary World.”  One of these themes is that of the rightful king’s return. We see this both in The Lord of the Rings, with the return of Aragorn to the throne of Gondor, as well as in The Hobbit with the return of Thorin to the throne of Erebor (short-lived though his reign may have been).  

In the "Primary World," we see this trope in some of the earliest written literature. Homer's Odyssey, for example, in which Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, returns from the war at Troy to his kingdom after numerous adventures, to find it overrun. Numerous suitors have usurped his palace and are pressing his wife to marry, assuming her to be a widow. He slays the suitors and restores his rulership over the island. The Odyssey is one of a cycle of poems, called the Nostoi, about the return of the Trojan heroes to their respective home kingdoms, and the difficulties and troubles they faced. Many of these heroes, unlike Odysseus, are not even able to reestablish their rule; Diomedes, for example, finds a usurper on the throne and goes into exile. Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, and so on. The stories of the king's return in Tolkien, however, differ in some major ways from these Nostoi. Most notable, perhaps, is the length of time it takes for the king to return. In the Nostoi, Odysseus has the longest journey home, lasting ten years; Tolkien's king's return comes after generations (at least reckoned by human standards, while Thorin returns within his own lifetime, the people of Laketown have been waiting generations). The return of the king has been awaited so long that it becomes a thing of legend, spoken of in prophecy, so we see in The Hobbit that the people of Laketown sing a song that prophesies the return of the Mountain King: 

The King beneath the mountains,    

The King of carven stone, 

The lord of silver fountains    

Shall come into his own!  

His crown shall be upheld,    

His harp shall be restrung, 

His halls shall echo golden    

To songs of yore re-sung.  

The woods shall wave on mountains.    

And grass beneath the sun; 

His wealth shall flow in fountains    

And the rivers golden run.  

The streams shall run in gladness,    

The lakes shall shine and burn, 

All sorrow shall fail and sadness    

At the Mountain-king's return! 

The king’s return is marked by a return of prosperity; a dispossessed people once again finds that which it lost; its homeland is restored, and the power and wealth that once were its own are found again. This happens too, when Aragorn takes his place as king in Minas Tirith. While the people of Gondor were never driven out of their city, their nation began to decline precipitously after the death of the last king (although they had been on the decline before this as well). As king, Aragorn restores Gondor to its former glory. 

This sounds less like the nostoi cycle, and more like the stories of the "slumbering king" type. These "slumbering king" stories are widespread in Medieval European mythology, but examples and variations on the theme exist in many different cultures and time periods. This type of myth sees a king, usually one whose exploits were larger than life, who does not truly die, but goes off to slumber, usually in a cave under a mountain, and often with his warriors and attendants with him, until he will return again to set right things that have gone awry in his former kingdom. Some prominent examples of this type of myth include the mytho-historic king of England, King Arthur, who does not die during his final battle with Mordred, but is spirited away by the lady of the lake to the island of Avalon. Myths of his return, as early as the twelfth century, begin to develop, that he would return when he was needed. The English king Richard the Lionheart plays a similar role in the cycle of stories that grow up around the outlaw Robin Hood. Richard the Lionheart was captured on his return from the Crusade and held for ransom. This allows his brother, John, to usurp his throne. John is a tyrannical ruler, and the noble outlaws work toward freeing their rightful king, who rights the wrongs of Prince John on his return. The last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantine XI Palaiologos, was last seen charging boldly into the army of the Ottoman Turks besieging the city. While logic would dictate that he was killed, myths persist of his eventual return and the reestablishment of the empire.  

Tolkien says in a letter to Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, that The Lord of the Rings is “fundamentally a religious and Catholic work." While he does not include anything overtly Christian, such as a priesthood, churches, etc., he does weave Christian imagery and theology into the very fabric of the world and the narrative. We see this, for example, in how Tolkien structures his pantheon of gods. At first glance, they seem to be very similar to the pantheons we know from Greek, Roman, Norse, etc., mythology. There is a king of the gods, Manwë; there are gods of various aspects of the natural and communal life – a god of the ocean, a goddess of the forest, a god of smith work, and so on. These gods rule over the earth and work to fashion it, assisted by various other spirits of different potency. These gods, however, are not supreme in their power. They are the thoughts of another, of Iluvatar, who creates them and sets them over parts of his creation. This cosmology, then, is a thoroughly Christian one, in which God creates the world and sets angelic beings over various aspects of creation. In Tolkien’s world, there is even an angelic rebellion, led by Melkor, who attempts to undo and corrupt the works of his brethren.  

We see the weaving of Christian themes in how Tolkien approaches the relationship of a true king, who rules with genuine authority, versus a usurper or tyrant. Romans 13 speaks of the Christian's relationship with the civil authorities, how he ought to respect them, and offer taxes, honor, and even fear to those to whom it is due within the civil government. These temporal authorities, St. Paul tells us, are put in place by God in order to further the good in their goodness, and to punish the wicked. As the Roman Empire became Christianized, and the emperor became a Christian ruler, the emperor takes on a role beyond these temporal authorities; in Romans 13, he becomes a type of Christ, much like King David or King Solomon, ruling the Christian people temporally as Christ does cosmically. After the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, the successor states that grew up in Western Europe retained this typological understanding of kingship as well. Particularly beloved kings, or kings who ruled before catastrophe strikes, become mythological types of the Second Coming as well.  

While Aragorn's return to Gondor and his accession as king reflects myths of the type of the "slumbering king," not overtly Christian in their origin, Tolkien plays on the eschatological nature of such myths and creates in Aragorn a Christlike figure, whose return to Gondor reflects the Incarnation and the Second Coming of Christ. Like Christ’s death on the Cross, His descent into Hades, and His Resurrection from the dead destroy death and snatch humanity out of the jaws of Satan, Aragorn’s return to Minas Tirith leads him through the paths of the dead, before he reaches Gondor in time to tip the balance of the battle and turn the victory of Sauron into defeat. Following the Ascension, we live both in the expectation of His imminent return, but also in the reality of His presence. In Matthew 18:20, Christ promises that “when two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” When we participate in the Eucharistic gathering, we participate in the Eschaton; this is sometimes referred to as an “already but not yet” understanding of Christ’s Second Coming. Aragorn does not take up residence in Minas Tirith after the battle; Nazgûl he is not yet crowned but rather remains outside of the city with the army, awaiting the final battle with Sauron. He is, however, not absent from the city, entering it to tend those who were wounded by the Nazgûl: Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry, during the siege. It is only after Sauron is defeated that Aragorn enters the city, is crowned, and takes his place as king, restoring the kingdom of Gondor not only to its former glory, but elevating the kingdom to something beyond what it has ever known. Like the Second Coming does in the “primary world.” Aragorn’s kingship, then, is structured very consciously by Tolkien following the model of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Second Coming of Christ, and his kingship brings about the telos of Gondor, beginning a new age in Middle-earth.