The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 768-773
“This is an evil door,” said Halbarad, “and my death lies beyond it. I will dare to pass it nonetheless; but no horse will enter.”
Aragorn and his company have arrived at the door to the Paths of the Dead and every heart, unless it be the heart of Aragorn himself, and Legolas perhaps, falls under a dread at this haunted place. Such is the strength of Aragorn’s will, something that we might call fey if it were not that he has been called to his destiny by a power that is both deeper and higher than the spirits of the earth, that at the last all the horses of the Dúnedain and even Arod of the Rohirrim are willing to follow their masters into the dark. For a time, Gimli stands rooted to the spot by his fear of the dead, but eventually he too is willing to follow.
The journeys into dark places, into tunnels, form a major theme in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf is warned by Aragorn not to enter Moria, but when he does so he is confronted by the Balrog and in the deep places of the earth and then in a high place he fights the battle of his life, passing even into the place of the dead. Frodo and Sam go through Shelob’s Lair where the darkness has a tangible presence that can be touched, and there Frodo passes into a death-like state after suffering the sting of Shelob’s bite. Now Aragorn’s company follow their lord into the paths of the dead through a door that Halbarad, close kinsman and companion to Aragorn, knows that heralds his death. He will fall in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields a few days later.
I could go on to speak of other dark journeys that do not necessarily involve physical tunnels but share aspects of those. I could speak of the dark journey of Merry and Pippin across the plains of Rohan as captives of the orcs of Isengard; the dark journey that Faramir goes through in his relationship to his father that leads almost to his death; the journey that Frodo and Sam take across Mordor to the Cracks of Doom; Sam’s horror in seeing the destruction of the Shire by Saruman and his gang of thugs; and I could also speak of the dark journey that Éowyn takes that leads to her encounter with the Lord of the Nazgûl at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the darkness that she enters and within she remains after the battle. In fact, we could say that every major character in the story has to take a dark journey.
Of course this is not original to Tolkien, nor did he intend it to be. The theme of the hero’s dark journey is an old one in the European mythology from which Tolkien drew so much of his inspiration, weaving those stories with his own dark journey, his experience of the trenches of the First World War and the Battle of the Somme of 1916, and the death of all but one of his closest friends in that terrible conflict. We could mention the journey of Lemminkäinen into the underworld in the Kalevala of Finland that Tolkien loved and read in its original language. And although Tolkien did not appreciate it so much, I do not think that we can leave out the journey of Odysseus into Hades on his journey home from Troy to his home in Ithaca.
That none of us can find life, can come at last to Paradise, without passing through death, is at the heart of all of these stories, and Tolkien’s story invites us to consider this for ourselves. Indeed, we could say that it is the refusal of characters to embrace loss and diminishment in The Lord of the Rings, characters like Sauron and Saruman and Denethor, that is their greatest tragedy. And at the heart of all this, the story to which all the stories ultimately point, is what Tolkien called the True Myth, the death and resurrection of Christ as recounted in the gospels.
Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings 
I’ve been moved many times whilst reading your reflections, but I think this one is especially powerful and to the point, for the way you interweave the stories of the different characters and the dark night of the soul through which they each have to pass. As you say, they lead ultimately to the True Myth of the sacrifice of Christ for our atonement. All this had to be, for without the Fall we would have had no need of redemption, and thus no need of a saviour: felix culpa. As Milton put it in the Argument to Book Three of Paradise Lost: ” God sitting on his throne sees Satan flying towards the world; shows him to the Son who sat at his right hand; foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind… yet declares his purpose of grace towards him…”.
I’ve seen this so many times in my personal and family life, and in the lives of others in my work as a children’s and also a mental health social worker: the need to pass through a “dark forest”, as Dante put it, in order to develop and learn wisdom and compassion to all. I think Tolkien was particularly conscious of this, from his experiences of the loss of his parents and then his friends in the Great War. He was able to distil it in his legendarium, which is so full of loss and sorrow, and yet hope at the last.
Thank you so much for this, Chris. In many ways I find it harder to see the dark journeys of those that I care about than my own. Not that those are easy. There is always that lurking fear that the dark might be endless with nothing beyond it.
On Tolkien’s own experience, I think that Tom Shippey was right to name him the author of the century. The Lord of the Rings both tells the story of the sorrow of our age and yet, as you say, gives us hope at the last.
this sure hits home, as they say. The unwillingness to face the darkness of death also brings about the fall of Numenor, right?
And as a pathologist, I can add that a central characteristic of a neoplastic (cancer) cell is the cell’s “unwillingness” to die, when death is necessary for the body as a whole to stay in balance.
Yes, the tragedy of Numenor is exactly that. So too the rings of power that enslave the men who become the Ringwraiths.
Thank you so much for sharing your insight into cancer cells. It is such a powerful image of the nature of modernity. We are a Numenorian culture. So many gifts and yet so afraid of the dark.