A super-awesome analysis

Kathleen E. Gilligan’s article on the topic of reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings from the perspective of parallelism with The Holy Bible is well versed in its reasons for analyzing the two books together. Throughout the article, Gilligan uses a wide variety of quotes, personas, and examples to prove her point that the Ring, in Lord of the Rings, represents an inner temptation suffered by all characters within the Bible.

Not to exalt Lord of the Rings to biblical proportions, but Gilligan proves valid arguing points that the Lord of the Rings series of novels were written with biblical themes in Tolkien’s mind. She does a good job in her introduction paragraphs giving background on both the context of her article, as well as the context of Tolkien’s writings. Gilligan sets the tone for her article while establishing her validity as a writer by using multiple different sources in order to prove that Tolkien’s background as a Christian creates a (whether coincidental or not) very biblically structured order of books. In his novels his characters often portray some sort of biblical figure, all of which have to overcome temptation, or  “the Ring”.

Gilligan’s description of the characters within the Lord of the Rings are somewhat brief, and cut off towards the conclusion of her description of them. This, in my opinion, is her largest flaw within her article, and it is due a lack of knowledge and/or research on the topics. For example, it is my opinion that while relating characters Gandalf and Galadriel from Tolkien’s book to Christ, she uses too many direct quotes from both scripture and the book to relate the two. She repetitively uses the same passage of scripture in order to relate the three characters, and somewhat doesn’t complete her thoughts when verifying these parallels.

In conclusion, Gilligan’s article had a strong thesis as well as introduction paragraph into the insight of reading Lord of the Rings from a biblical context, but her body paragraphs are not well –researched in their relation of the temptations of Christ by Satan to the temptations of the enormous power of the ring towards Gandalf and Galadriel. Gilligan does a good job in the wording of her article, giving it an overall formal tone which establishes, or gives credit to herself as an author.  Her analysis is very good, and even if you have not read the Lord of the Rings novels, like myself, you will give consideration to doing that exact thing after reading Gilligan’s article.