Tolkien and Evil

... this is a strain in Tolkien I don't quite trust. He seems to have greater confidence in evil than in good.

At the end of Lord of the Rings the triumph of good leads to the destruction of nearly everything good. Lothlorien is abandoned, the Shire is overrun with foulness, and the elves all leave Middle Earth.

It is naive to assume that the triumph of good means good results for all; however, it is equally naive to assume that evil consistently betters good.

Flos Carmeli

I think that this is a rather glum take on the end of Lord of the Rings. True, it is not the shiningly complete victory we would like but neither is it the practically complete triumph of evil that is presented above. Sam finds a good and happy life in the Shire as he helps return it to normalcy. Aaragorn rules with a fair and good hand in the lands over which he has sway. Indeed, it is sad that the Elvish folk leave Middle Earth but, as they themselves point out, it is their time to go. Nothing stays as it is forever. That doesn't mean it is a triumph of evil but merely that it is the way of the world for the order of things to change. It is reflecting the way the world really works in the story. We may not always like the change but we can't see the big picture either. I haven't read The Children of Hurin, in large part because I dislike reading others' attempts to finish deceased authors' unfinished works. There is never any telling where the original author might have taken the tale with further work.

It seems to me that perhaps the above comment is a misunderstanding of Tolkien's completely Catholic view of our world. Please pardon my sketchy theology, but if Satan is prince of this world, then we should not really expect a complete triumph here ... certainly not by our efforts, at any rate. Jesus' victory in procuring our salvation means that we will see triumph in the next world but we are not necessarily promised more here ... as Tolkien points out in the excerpt from a letter below.

I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect "history" to be anything but a long defeat -- though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive treatment of the question that Steven raised above ... just my overall view of it.