The Fellowship of the King is a free Catholic literary magazine inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As I happen to believe that The Lord of the Rings is the greatest literary work of the 20^th century (and also because I have deep personal admiration for Tolkien as a Catholic Author), I was delighted to be able to contribute an article about Monarchy and Tolkien’s work for the magazine’s 2015 Autumn Issue, which by the way is packed full of extremely good content (and this is only part 1 of 3).

The Lord of the Rings is certainly a topic which I will write about a lot in the future, but for now here’s an excerpt from the first paragraph of Seven Stars and Seven Crowns:

The great Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien once described his masterpiece The Lord of the Rings as a “story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power…” Of all these, the battle between Kingship and Tyranny is one of the most deeply Catholic themes in the story. It is also one of the most obvious. Most Catholics who have read The Lord of Rings will rightly recognize in these fictional histories the figure of Aragorn, the prophesied King, as a type of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will return like Aragorn to reclaim His Kingdom. Yet these same Catholics will often overlook a more hidden meaning in the portrayal of Kingship in The Lord of the Rings, for the simple reason that we have forgotten that Christendom also once had an earthly King.

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