The Relevance of Tolkien’s Unfinished Work “The New Shadow”

“However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.”

J. R. R. Tolkien would have turned 130 this month, and in spite of the apparent simplicity of his works, there are important lessons to be derived from his fantasy world. Tolkien’s oeuvre does not only teach us about the self-defeating nature of evil, the corrupting effects of power, the dangers of arrogance, and of the desire to impose order, however. For one of the recurring themes in Tolkien’s works is the human tendency to become satiated with good and cease to see evil for what it is.

In the fictional—and, in many ways, idealized—world of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit humans are taken to be inherently good, while evil is not part of our nature but is rather external, epitomized by the dark Lord Sauron and his ring of power, whose destruction leads to the triumph of good and prosperity in Middle-Earth. However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.

The Re-Emergence of “Shadow”

The New Shadow is set approximately a century after the events of The Lord of the Rings, near the end of the rule of Aragorn’s son Eldarion and is told from the point of view of Borlas, son of Beregond, one of the minor characters in the original trilogy. Borlas discusses the nature of evil with Saelon, one of his son’s friends, and then learns from Saelon that more and more people are becoming discontented with the state. Saelon suggests that Borlas go with him to learn more about this, and Borlas decides to follow him, thinking that “[p]erhaps I have been preserved so long for this purpose: that one should still live, hale in mind, who remembers what went before the Great Peace. Scent has a long memory. I think I could still smell the old Evil, and know it for what it is.”