This week is Holy Week for Western Christians. It begins with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, includes the Last Supper and Christ’s agony in the garden on Thursday evening, his trial, execution and burial on Friday and his Resurrection at dawn on Sunday morning. It is a time when all the Old Tales suddenly align. It isn’t an overstatement to say it represents the very centre of reality.

It’s hard to know where to begin to reflect on Holy Week within Tolkien’s work. The Incarnation; the appearance of God in human form in the person of Jesus was central to Tolkien’s understanding of what made Fairy Stories function. He described the greatest moment of a tale to be the eucatastrophe; the ‘good disaster’, when the sudden and unexpected turn from despair to deliverance brings a joy beyond the walls of this world.

Tolkien recognised two great eucatastrophes in history. In On Fairy-Stories he writes that “The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”

Wherever we see the eucatastrophe operate within Tolkien’s world, we can recognise the foreboding, uncertainty, forsaken-ness and eventual joy of Holy Week.

The latest issue of Plough featured two excellent essays, one on the history of how Christians have understood suffering, the second about The Dream of the Rood, one of my favourite Anglo-Saxon poems about a man who dreams of a talking tree.

In the first essay, historian Tom Holland explained that pagans found the idea of Christ’s passion particularly unpalatable. Suffering was not a noble thing to endure, and crucifixion in particular was an especially humiliating and scandalous way to die, to the extent that the Romans who invented it didn’t really talk about it all that much. One of the most famous Christian images, Christ on the cross, wasn’t one that early Christians depicted.

One of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion after the conversion of Constantine is a carved ivory from the early 5th Century that is in the British Museum. Jesus is absolutely shredded, an athlete wearing the loincloth of an Olympic victor. His expression is calm and stoic, a tradition that continues in the Eastern church to the present day.

Eleanor Parker writing on The Dream of the Rood gives a similar insight into how the pagans of Northern Europe came to terms with the suffering Christ. The talking tree, which later turns out to be the very Cross Jesus is crucified on, describes Jesus willingly climbing the tree to do supernatural battle with Death. It reframes his execution as something heroic, not dissimilar to the adventures of someone like Beowulf.

Emily and I were recently watching an episode of Cosmonaut Variety Hour, a pop-culture series on YouTube, because they were reviewing the Lord of the Rings films. Marcus, the show’s presenter, talked about the first time he’d gone to see The Two Towers in the cinema; the film opening with a flashback to Gandalf’s fall from the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm in Fellowship.

The stories begin to diverge. Instead of following Frodo and Aragorn et al. like we did in the first film, the camera falls with Gandalf. As he descends he catches his sword Glamdring, which is making this whistling sound as it falls through the air and begins his fight with the Balrog which will take them from the depths of Moria to its highest peak.

Marcus describes this as the moment he was absolutely sold on The Lord of the Rings. He remembered being sat in the cinema and thinking it was just the coolest thing ever that Gandalf hadn’t really given up or been beaten by the Balrog. He’d chosen to enter into a one-on-one duel to the death with it.

This detail had always been lost on me - I’m grateful for having been made to read the books first, but it did mean that scene clearly never impacted in quite the same way when I already knew what happened to Gandalf.

As I read about The Dream of the Rood, it occurred to me that the duality (and the trickery) of Gandalf’s sacrifice on the bridge represents something really similar to the Anglo-Saxon presentation of the crucifixion. Christ seems to have lost, to have sacrificed himself, but in hindsight (or through the perspective of the Cross itself) we see him readying for a great spiritual battle.

The Harrowing of Hell is an Old English term for what Jesus was doing in between his death on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday. Like Gandalf, Christ embarks on a long descent into the world of the dead (or the ‘lower parts of the earth’, according to the letter to the Ephesians), freeing the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world.

Despite being mentioned in some of the earliest Christian creeds, the Harrowing of Hell is certainly a less well-known story in modern, Protestant Christianity. However, it remains a central part of Orthodox theology and was an incredibly popular image in Old English poems - both Cædmon and Cynewulf wrote about it.

Cynewulf wrote the poem which includes the “Hail Eärendil” line Tolkien loved so much, and as a professor of Old English it makes sense that he would incorporate the Harrowing of Hell so prominently in his work.

People are always descending into the lower parts of the earth in Tolkien’s writing and always emerge transformed. It is where Beren and Lúthien capture the Silmaril, Bilbo his Ring and where Aragorn summons the Army of the Dead.

The makers of the Lord of the Rings films are clearly very aware of this. As well as the framing of Gandalf’s descent, which had such an impact on Marcus from Cosmonaut, they arrange Gandalf’s body in the shape of a cross as he falls in Fellowship. Before Frodo enters Cirith Ungol, Gollum tells him it is “the only way”, a parallel with Christ’s struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, as he seems to ask God if there is an alternative to the suffering before him.

All of these examples are applicable to Holy Week without being analogous; none of these characters are a stand-in for Christ. They are all pagans. Tolkien himself said religion only appeared absent from The Lord of the Rings because it had been “absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

These still point us to the great Eucatastrophe and ultimately reflect Tolkien’s Old Hope - the fool’s hope - that there might actually be a release from bondage and an escape from Death. That “we are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”

I hope you all have a very blessed Holy Week, whether you are of the Old Hope or not. Enjoy a break from the demands of work; rejoice in the new life breaking out around us. Wes þu hal!

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying,
‘I called to the Lord out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
You cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
Then I said, “I am driven away
from your sight;
how shall I look again
upon your holy temple?”
The waters closed in over me;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped around my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me for ever;
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.
As my life was ebbing away,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
Those who worship vain idols
forsake their true loyalty.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!’
Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.

Four years ago I collapsed around 10 minutes into a game of football with friends at Aston Power League in Birmingham. I stopped breathing, my eyes glazed over and my heart stopped beating. Embarrassingly, I also vomited and shat myself.

My friends performed CPR, fetched a defibrillator from a member of staff and prayed for me as they waited for the paramedics to arrive.

Father Simon, a local priest who played football with us fetched holy oil from his car boot and anointed my feet and legs as the paramedics got to work.

Simon remembered conversations we’d had about St Bede and figured I wouldn’t mind being read the Last Rites even though I’m not a Roman Catholic. These are the last prayers given to someone before or whilst they die. They can’t be administered to someone who has already died.

I was sedated and taken to City Hospital in Birmingham, where Emily was brought to see my body before I was taken into the intensive care unit. I would not wake for several days.

The prayer of Jonah in the belly of the fish has, perhaps for obvious reasons, become a special one for me in reflecting on this experience. The imagery of lying on the floor of the earth with deep waters closing in has become more immediate.

I understand now what Jonah is talking about in a way I did not before. The same is true of the images of Sheol in Psalm 30 or Psalm 88. I feel like I know a little of what that place is now.

The experience of emerging from a coma is difficult to remember and piece together. The medical professionals lowered my sedation several times in an attempt to rouse me, but seizures and fits of intense vomiting meant that I was repeatedly re-intubated and lowered back into sleep. I don’t remember the seizures, but I do remember being sick and feeling intense paranoia and agitation.

Everything initially had the janky appearance of early PlayStation 2 graphics; the presence of a large tube extending down my throat and smaller ones in my neck and arms may have roused subconscious memories of Neo’s entry into the ‘real world’ in The Matrix, the beige ceiling tiles in the ward reminiscent of the existential video game The Stanley Parable, in which the player gets stuck in an endless narrative loop inside a liminal, purgatorial office space.

These initial reactions are apparently very normal for anyone waking up in intensive care. Unaware of where I was and unable to remember how I got there, I reached for various assumptions – that I had been kidnapped, that I was still inside a dream I was unable to wake from and most significantly that my consciousness had been separated from my body against my will and placed inside a virtual reality.

Memory is a strange thing. I was initially able to remember very little. I couldn’t remember who the Prime Minister was. I couldn’t remember the Queen’s name. I couldn’t remember what year it was. I could remember Emily and Edmund. I also remembered that my Dad was dead, something my Mum was sat at home worrying about having to remind me of.

A nurse called Finley asked me if I’d like to listen to music. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember any music that I liked. He set up a tablet computer next to my bed, and in act act of incredible grace got it to play the entirety of Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. I remembered that I knew this record.

So began a strange period of remembering. As the days passed I remembered more. Strangely, these days have with time become incredibly difficult to recall. The way I understood space morphed and changed.

Although I was in the same bed for the entirety of my stay on the cardiac ward, my experience and memory of that space varies wildly. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was if the windows, walls and doors moved themselves around from day to day.

I hallucinated quite badly whilst coming off the sedatives. A friend pointed out recently that this must have been particularly frightening for someone who had never tripped before. It was.

I imagined the two men in the beds opposite me were neo-Nazis who were burning down parts of the ward. One night I had a waking dream in which the ward had become a kind of haunted house lit with melting candles. A nurse found me trying to escape, having pulled out all the wires monitoring my heartbeat.

I’m not sure when, like Jonah, I remembered God. I still have my sketchbook that was sent to me in hospital. Alongside a load of nonsensical scribbling there is, scrawled across a page, “the sun will not hurt you by day, nor the moon by night”, a line from Psalm 121.

Ash Wednesday fell on the 2nd of March that year; 9 days after I had collapsed. The hospital chaplain came to the ward to impose the ashes. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent in the liturgical calendar, and Christians are traditionally marked with a cross on their forehead, made from the ashes of the previous year’s palm crosses.

Interestingly, Ash Wednesday is largely about memory. As he marked my forehead, the priest said “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”.

It is a strange thing to dwell on, especially after narrowly escaping death. The words of the liturgy invoke an earlier memory. These are the words God speaks to Adam when he casts humanity out of the garden of Eden.

Because they follow on from God’s declaration that Adam will forever eat his bread by the sweat of his brow until he returns to the ground, the words are often taken to be a curse.

Erik Varden, in his book on Christian Remembrance, The Shattering of Loneliness, argues that this is a misnomer. Adam had forgotten where he had come from. He was formed from the earth on the Sixth Day, the Creator breathing a soul into him by grace; ‘a gift no effort or deserving can obtain’. The Hebrew word for ground is adamah. Adam’s ‘deepest truth is contained in his name’.

The reminder that he is dust is not a condemnation but a statement of fact – it points to Adam’s origin and true nature.

I can’t remember if it was this date or the following Sunday that the priest returned to administer Communion. Communion is about so many things, but memory is again central. In most denominations and traditions, Christians are reminded of Christ’s words in the gospels; that each time we drink the wine and eat the bread, we do so in memory of Him.

In many traditions, including the one in which I was raised, memory is all Communion is about. It undergoes no metaphysical transformation, it is a simple symbol.

Recently I’ve felt the need for the Eucharist to be more magical than that, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that my memory and sense of self got significantly better after taking the bread and wine in hospital.

In Chrétien de Troyes’ story of Perceval and the Grail, the realisation of the Quest, which ends with Perceval being able to receive Communion is intimately tied to a reconciliation and remembrance of the hero’s self – of Perceval as he truly is.

It would be deeply careless to make the story all about Perceval, though. As I was driven to the hospital, sleeping through the depths of the coma, and eventually beginning to recover, I was myself remembered by a multitude of friends, family, friends of friends and total strangers.

I was remembered in prayer almost constantly, from my home in Birmingham all the way to the St Edmundsbury Cathedral. Friends hosted my Mum and sisters in Birmingham and cooked meals for my wife. My sister and brother-in-law chronicled the events of every day from my collapse to my return home in great detail inside a notebook.

As time has passed, I’ve undergone a kind of forgetting in reverse. The paranoia, visions and confusion that seemed so real and all-consuming at the time are now difficult to recall.

My mind has recovered miraculously. Although I can’t remember much of the weekend I collapsed, there are very few gaps in my memory. I can remember what music I like. I remember who I am.

Coming to this point of the year every year is a reminder to call to mind the other things that can so easily escape my attention. The Lenten call to remember that I’m actually dust. To remember as often as I can the presence of my Creator in ordinary bread and wine. And to remember the significance of this small story inside a bigger story; of God’s goodness to me as my life was ebbing away.

Rise up; the realm of love renews
The battle it was born to lose
- Geoffrey Hill

The Long Defeat is a phrase that appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of The Lord of the Rings. When a depleted and tired Fellowship arrive in the elven kingdom of Lothlórien, they meet the Lady Galadriel. Galadriel is one of the elves who saw the light from the Two Trees before the sun or moon were made. This is an incredibly important distinction among the elves, and also makes Galadriel one of the oldest people left in Middle-earth.

Introducing her husband, Galadriel says that;
“together, through ages of the world, we have fought the long defeat.”

The Long Defeat encompasses the struggle of the elves in Middle-earth. Although we regard that fictional or secondary world as enchanted, elves of Galadriel’s age have watched it fade through many generations. They know that the struggle against decay and death is not one that it is ultimately possible for them to win.

They struggle anyway, and Galadriel’s home of Lothlórien represents one of the last enclaves of beauty that calls to mind the memory of the unspoilt beauty of the Blessed Realm itself. The Long Defeat of the elves gives them a distinctly melancholic perspective on the world that Lord Elrond communicates, when he claims to ‘have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.’

In Letter 195, Tolkien diagnoses this perspective as both Christian and distinctly Roman Catholic. The Long Defeat ultimately animates the heart of The Lord of the Rings. Knowing that using the Ring to defeat Sauron will result in themselves becoming corrupted reflections of the Dark Lord, the forces of good set out on an inverted quest; not to find something, but to lose it. Michael N. Stanton describes it as a story in which ‘Evil struggles to gain power; Good to relinquish it’.

In the BBC’s 2003 ‘Big Read’ poll, the UK voted The Lord of the Rings its ‘best-loved book’. I wish we acted like it. Endurance, long-suffering and the relinquishing of power are not popular contemporary virtues.

In sharp contrast to Tolkien’s witness, the metric for participation in anything these days tends to be success. Most activism encourages participation with the assurance that you as an individual can make a difference. Whether recycling your waste or driving or flying less is deemed really necessary or not is based on whether that small action will effectively slow climate breakdown or not, rather than whether it is more objectively a good thing to do.

Christianity in the West also expresses itself very differently to Tolkien’s melancholic strain of Roman Catholicism. Evangelical Protestantism markets an extremely positivist brand of religion which shares a great deal with self-help culture, encouraging you to sign up and claim the victory of Christ in every aspect of your own life, from your friendships to your physical health to your search for meaningful work.

Many of the Church’s more powerful and vocal limbs eagerly anticipate the assured revival of Christianity as an accepted and dominant force in national life before the imminent return of Christ. Catholic and Orthodox spheres aren’t exempt in this respect either, and there you can easily find chronically online trad bros calling for the conquest of the Holy Land or Constantinople by force of arms.

There are similarities here to what the cornered philosopher Walter Benjamin recognised in the historical materialism of his own time. Benjamin lamented a philosophy fixated on winning a game of chess, convinced that the eventual triumph of the masses was scientifically assured.

By way of contrast, the greatest and most orthodox expression of Christianity, both historically and amongst the global majority today is martyrdom.

In martyrdom we witness the image of our God, who we believe took human form and became obedient to death; ‘even death on a cross’. It is the concrete expression of the belief that there are some things worse than dying, and a denial that death itself represents an ultimate or final defeat.

One of the finest artistic meditations on martyrdom can be found in Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life, which depicts the life and witness of St Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska during the Second World War.

At every turn, Franz is told by his fellow Austrian villagers, his religious leaders and his captors that his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler is meaningless for the reason that it will achieve nothing.

So much of the way we attribute value in the modern world is based on this kind of utilitarian outlook. Will this input achieve the desired outcome? Will I win the game of chess? To borrow the dialectic of artist David Jones, martyrdom is the opposite of this - it is gratuitous.

Franz’s act of conscience is gratuitous in the extreme. It isolates his family from his village, creates tension between his wife and mother, condemns his children to grow up without a father and disinherits them from his military pension. His name is left off the St Radegund war memorial. His refusal to take the oath doesn’t shorten the war, change the Nazis’ philosophy or prevent the Holocaust. His accusers were right. On strictly material terms, Franz Jägerstätter loses.

And yet, like Malick, we cannot help ourselves in recognising something more than material in Franz’s life; an image or a sign worth beholding.

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot’s words from Middlemarch serve as a coda to the film and a lens for the saint’s life. It is perhaps history’s unhistoric acts, its failures and defeats that contribute to the good of the world as much as the more occasional triumphs of good over evil.

Whether the knowledge of this was of comfort to Jägerstätter in prison is difficult to say. Fighting a Long Defeat is hard and often lonely work.

GK Chesterton explores this precarity in the first chapter of The Ballad of the White Horse. A harried and defeated King Alfred whose ‘failure fills the land’ asks of the Mother of God whether he will finally be successful in his war against the Danes.

Like the Fellowship of the Ring gathered at Elrond’s council or in the realm of Galadriel, Alfred finds that;

Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
To no good man is told.

Alfred defeats Guthrum, but even in this victory foresees a return of nihilistic paganism at some point in the future. (There was some foresight on Chesterton’s part here. The publication of the Ballad in 1911 immediately preceded the First World War, the emergence of Nazism as a political philosophy and the development of the atomic bomb.)

It would be a mistake to believe that because I spend a lot of time thinking about the Long Defeat I am much good at fighting it. Practically, one of the best pictures of the Long Defeat is weeding, one that Chesterton makes reference to in The Ballad of the White Horse. I hate weeding, mostly because you are never finished doing it. The weeds always win.

In a similar sense bringing children into the world is emblematic of the Long Defeat. They will probably be the cause of more harm than good. They will eventually die and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. Nevertheless, their existence, the enormous amount of labour required in raising and nurturing them and the terrible possibility of outliving them is somehow worth it. This wager seems an increasingly radical one; that modern folk are understandably less inclined to risk making.

I don’t really understand how to neatly wrap up thoughts on the Long Defeat. Instead, here is another, more recent example of seeing it fought well.The 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary feature was given to No Other Land, a film which follows Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, as he documents and resists the forced displacement of his people from Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the occupied West Bank.

During the film, Basel befriends Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist about his age. They form an unlikely friendship despite the enormous differences in their lived experience. Halfway through the film, the two are sitting in Basel’s car. Yuval is excited because an article he has written about the violent displacements in Masafer Yatta has been viewed thousands of times.

Basel warns Yuval that he needs to understand that to practice solidarity with his people, Yuval must accept that he is a ‘loser’. His article won’t change anything. Basel tells Yuval not to expect things to change quickly, and advises him to be patient.

Basel recognises from experience and from the line of intergenerational activists whose work he has inherited that there is an importance to fighting this fight without the assurance, belief or even the hope that it will end in victory.

There is something essential, Basel urges, in acknowledging that their efforts will likely end in failure. In doing so, they recognise that the purpose of their struggle isn’t the certainty of success.

No Other Land is itself a wonderful image of this; a remarkable, miraculous film that against the odds exists in a world in which it feels like it shouldn’t have been allowed to. It hasn’t tipped the scales in favour of Basel or his people. They made the film anyway.

I would like my work to participate in something of the same tradition or spirit. I want it to be for the growing good of the world. Little books and prints are unlikely to achieve this in any material, utilitarian way. I want to make them anyway.