By Clement Harrold

March 26, 2026

This week we celebrated the Solemnity of the Annunciation on March 25. But March 25 is also significant for another reason: it’s the traditional date of Our Lord’s crucifixion.

Someone who knew this tradition very well was the novelist J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic. It’s therefore no coincidence that in his literary world of The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship set out from Rivendell on December 25, and the Ring was destroyed on March 25.

Catholic readers of Tolkien’s epic will know that the hobbit Frodo has often been described as a Christ figure.

In a previous post, we explained what we mean when we say that Jesus “bore” or “took on” the weight of the world’s sin during His Passion. Jesus does this not by becoming guilty of our sins, but by grieving for them.

While Frodo never grieves for the sins of Middle-earth, the role he plays is analogous to Christ’s role beginning in Gethsemane and culminating on the Cross.

To the extent that Frodo succeeds in carrying the burden that has been placed on him, he becomes a kind of Alter Christus, another Christ. Joseph Pearce explains:

If the wearing of the Ring symbolizes living in sin, the bearing of the Ring signifies the carrying of the Cross. If we are Ring bearers and not Ring wearers, we are carrying the weight of sin without sinning. We are taking up our cross and following Christ.

Frodo Baggins, as the one chosen to be the Ring bearer, is the Cross bearer. He is, therefore, a Christ figure.

Of course, Tolkien was famously not a fan of allegory, and so we should be careful not to interpret his storytelling too woodenly. While Frodo resembles Christ in some ways, the correspondence between the two figures is not (and was never intended to be) one-to-one.

In fact, the Solemnity of the Annunciation offers us a reminder that Frodo also serves, in certain crucial respects, as a kind of Marian figure.

Tolkien’s strong personal devotion to Our Lady has often been noted.

He himself expressed this filial piety in a letter to his son, Michael, when he spoke of “that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God’s way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter religion” (March 6-8, 1941).

In another letter addressed to his Jesuit priest friend Robert Murray, Tolkien further expounded on the impact that Mary exerted over his imagination:

I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. (December 2, 1953)

Given his deep love for the Virgin, it is no surprise that Tolkien should weave aspects of her mission and charism into his literary masterpiece.

We see this most clearly at the Council of Rivendell, when the free people of Middle-earth have assembled to discuss what to do with Sauron’s Ring. After much heated and fruitless debate, it eventually dawns on Frodo that only he should be the Ring-bearer:

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo’s side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice.

“I will take the Ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”

In this passage we see both Frodo’s heroism and his humility.

Like Mary at the Annunciation, he is acutely aware of his own limitations, and he intuits that this task may cost him everything. But like Mary, he accepts it anyway: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

Devout Catholic that he was, Tolkien saw profound value in Frodo’s decision to do the next right thing, even when it was totally unclear how everything would be accomplished.

This offers a model for us in our own spiritual journeys as we learn what it means to follow Jesus on the road to Calvary. Frodo is both a Christ figure and a Mary figure; indeed, he is a Christ figure insofar as he is a Mary figure, for there is no one who imitates Our Lord better than His Blessed Mother.

Frodo, however, only ever imitates Christ imperfectly.

At Rivendell he makes his extraordinary fiat (“Let it be done”), yet when the time comes for him to destroy the burden of sin which he has carried for so long, he fails in the task. He lacks the willpower to cast the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, and it ultimately requires an act of Providence to bring his quest to its completion.

In this way, Tolkien’s epic novel teaches us that none of us can conquer sin on our own.

But through his example of humility and courage, the hobbit Frodo encourages us to trust not in ourselves but in Our Blessed Mother and her divine Son. Just as she once told the servants at Cana to “Do whatever He tells you,” so in this Lenten season she urges us to follow the One who invites us to take up our cross daily and follow Him.