Christendom College Philosophy Department Chairman Dr. Daniel McInerny’s latest article on Tolkien was recently published by the popular Word on Fire. McInerny, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the college, wrote on “Tolkien’s Philosophy of Stories,” examining a passage from The Lord of the Rings to show the extraordinary depth of Tolkien’s famed work.
The article is McInerny’s latest published work this year, following on the heels of his novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair. This article, written in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death (which Christendom recently hosted a conference in honor of), studies a passage from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with McInerny richly illuminating Tolkien’s philosophy of storytelling through this examination.
The passage McInerny turns to is a famous, oft-quoted one, found in book 4, chapter 8 of The Lord of the Rings. In the chapter, Sam says, “we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it.”
McInerny takes this passage as a jumping-off point, seeing it as a “cornerstone of Tolkien’s philosophy of stories.” In a story, specifically an adventure story, “the pressure exerted upon the protagonist comes, firstly, from unusual and exciting external sources: in Frodo’s and Sam’s case, from Sauron and his minions, from Gollum, from all the physical difficulties of their journey, and from the One Ring itself. An adventure story does not exclude internal, i.e., psychological and moral, pressure. Surely Frodo and Sam experience the temptation simply to turn around and go home. But that internal pressure comes about because of the external pressure.”
For McInerny, Sam’s connection between his and Frodo’s adventure to the adventure stories of old can also be linked to a participation in the foundational story of Christ’s mission of redemption.
“For Sam and Frodo as well as for us, the desires for romance and truth have been justified and reconciled in their taking part in the one great tale,” writes McInerny.
McInerny, who earned his PhD from the Catholic University of America, teaches courses on the Philosophy of Art and Beauty and Ethics and Imagination at Christendom, amongst others. When he is not teaching and mentoring his students, McInerny has been writing fiction, nonfiction, drama, and screenplays for years, including his Kingdom of Patria series for middle-grade readers (now available on Amazon). McInerny, who lives in the Shenandoah Valley, is also the frequent writer of a newsletter called “The Comic Muse,” where he imagines a renaissance in popular entertainment fueled by wonder, philosophy, and the quest for the good life. Readers can find out more here.
In June 2024, Word on Fire Academic will release his scholarly monograph, The Way of Beauty: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts.
Read McInerny’s full article in Word on Fire here.
Read more about McInerny’s academic accomplishments here.