Lord of the Rings: Buddhist Allegory?

What do y’all think?

I’m not holding my breath on this one.

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Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

10 thoughts on “Lord of the Rings: Buddhist Allegory?”

  1. He makes some good points–but only because Buddhism, like most natural religions, catches some shards of truth, and Middle-Earth, written in reflection of the fullness of truth, parallels many of those elements. Nearly everything he calls out as ‘Buddhist’ is also Christian.

  2. From everything that I have read Tolkien was greatly influence by his Catholic religion and I tend to agree with this probablilty. Of course the only person who can truely tell us the truth of this has passed on and we will have to wait and see which statement is true when we pass on to be with out Lord.

  3. I guess Christ was a Buddhist also…wait, they believe that…
    In addition to the Norse Sagas and his own Christianity, Tolkien was influenced by his idyllic boyhood in South Africa. I can’t remember all the details, but I believe he was removed from a pastoral location (reminiscient of the Shire) to a more industrial location (reminiscient of Mordor and Isengard).

  4. Actually, it wasn’t the part of his childhood spent in South Africa that was idyllic- the main reason his mother took him and his brother to her family in England was because as a child the South African climate made him ill. (Her husband could not get away from work, then became ill and died in South Africa before his wife could return to him.) They stayed in the countryside of the West Midlands, outside Birmingham, and this was thsi lovely landscape that affected him as a child and probably played a role in the development of “The Shire”. When he began to attend school, the commuting cost was too high, and so they had to move to the city- industrial, turn-of-the=20th-century Birmingham.

  5. I agree with the 1st comment by Matthew L. Martin. Regarding the proverbial “Sow a thought and reap a habit..” quote from the article, I don’t know its remote origin but I first ran across it in an old Catholic book (reprinted recently, I think by Sophia Institute Press) by a Father Maturin, who perished in the sinking of the Lusitania.

  6. I suppose that The Lord of the Rings is Buddhist in the same way that the Recovery Movement is Christian. . .
    Since Tolkien’s corpus, -especially in the latter revisions, is profoundly Catholic and Christian.

  8. LOR touched on a Buddhist theme of impermanence; “Middle Earth” constantly changed, regardless of the desires of the inhabitants. It also touched on the Buddhist theme of suffering being an unavoidable part of human life. Moreover, the nobel characters in the story constantly searched their own motivations in making their decisions, which relates to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness.

  9. There may be some elements of Buddhism that resonate with LotR, but this is coincidental. The worldview principally informing the work was Tolkien’s (staunch) Catholcism. To the extent that there is common ground between Buddhist thought and that, as well as Tolkien’s own personal proclivities, there may be resonances between the two, but it would not be accurate to portray LotR as a Buddhist allegory.
    It is something that is meant to speak to the human condition and is not an allegory for any one religion, though it has resonanes with a number and is principally informed by Tolkien’s own.

  10. From the article:
    “Sauron is not intrinsically evil: he too was corrupted, long ago, by his craving for the Ring.”
    The writes assumes that we (Christians) believe that anyone is “intrinsically evil.” I guess he hasn’t read much about Christianity.

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