We continue our look at Hamilton from the perspective of Oxford Professors C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Part one showed how issues of group and individual significance, courage and cowardice, and race, gender, and family are prominent in Hamilton, and that Lewis and Tolkien both had some significant things to say about these issues. We now turn to love, a key factor in issues of gender and family in particular, and look more in depth at what Lewis had to say about explicitly about it.
Finally, and briefly, of love: where it is implicit in Hamilton, Lewis gives the full definition. Love is at the heart of marriage and family, as we can see when Eliza beckons Alexander that, “So long as you come home at the end of the day, that would be enough.” But Alexander and Eliza’s sister Angelica both confess to personal ambitions which will never be satisfied. Quite arguably, this stems from an inadequate conception of love, a love that is grounded in self rather than in something larger. In his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis confessed that his unrepentant ambition was to satisfy his own soul, alone: “Remember, I had always wanted (mad wish!) to call my soul my own.” But when this is the only possible foundation for love, eventually one wishes to call other’s souls one’s own as well. Thus, Lewis describes “smother love” in his Great Divorce, particularly in chapter ten in where the love of the controlling mother becomes:
What she calls her love for her son has turned into a poor, prickly, astringent sort of the thing. But there’s still a wee spark of something that’s not just herself in it. That might be blown into a flame.
At one point in The Great Divorce, Lewis even brings a stampede of unicorns onto the scene with the hope that, for just one moment, a self-love absorbed individual might take their mind off of themself. Lewis goes on to state the case for the true ground of love more explicitly with, “Human beings can’t make one another really happy for long … You cannot fully love another creature fully until you love God.”
Lewis makes the same point when he distinguishes between “Need-love” and “Gift-love” in his Four Loves: Need-love is all about oneself, while Gift-love is concerned solely with the good of its recipient. Lewis models Gift-love by describing its divine source,
The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the world.
And this is arguably the singular insight of what he considered his greatest fictional work, Till We Have Faces. The Jealous, plain-faced sister Orual comes to realize that she had had only “smother love” for her younger, beautiful sister Psyche,
Oh Psyche, oh goddess … Never again will I call you mine; but all there is of me shall be yours. Alas, you now know what it’s worth. I never wished you well, never had one selfless thought of you. I was a craver.
Hamilton’s richness lies in its being more than simply a story of a nation of immigrants finding belonging, as love and family are brought strongly into the narrative. While Black Panther focused on the role of fathers, showed strong capable women contributing to Wakandan society and allowed space for Okoye’s military career within her love relation with King T’Challa, in Hamilton it is the pathos of love and family that gives the political narrative flesh and blood. But Lewis shows us the deeper meanings of these, explaining why Hamilton is more gripping, and of more enduring significance, than a simple political narrative.
In part two of this article, we continue by first examining Lewis’s more developed views on love in his Space Trilogy, then look at solace in Hamilton, as it naturally follows the twin story lines of courageous battles fought and of love, and conclude with a look at how “History has its eyes on you”
Lewis on Gender and Love
Lewis’s views on love can hardly be considered complete without a look at his sci-fi series, The Space Trilogy, which might otherwise be considered a trilogy of the sexes. The opening book, Out of the Silent Planet, is set on Malacandra (the male Mars), the sequel on Perelandra (the female Venus), while the finale is set on Thulcandra (Earth), where marriage is examined. It has been observed that the opposing community structures in That Hideous Strength reflect the differences between harmonious family life and a less organic world of competition. Two societies oppose each other – one secular, scientific and democratic, Belbury (which houses the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E.), and the other familial, with hierarchical but complementary roles, the Society of St. Anne’s. But it is the democratic, scientific society Belbury where everyone struggles to gain the upper hand and can trust no one, whereas the patriarchal society functions more like a loving family in which everyone truly gets along! Viva la difference.
Lewis comments insightfully on gender throughout the Space Trilogy. Explaining the ruling spirits of Malacandra (Mars) and Perelandra (Venus), Lewis states:
The two creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, “My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.
The genders go beyond the sexes, however, Lewis instructs us. Noting that languages have masculine and feminine cases for all sorts of things, from mountains (male) to trees (female), Lewis argues that gender underlies language and reality: “the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine” But they do not reduce to simple, homogenous equality. “Equality is not the deepest thing,” the Director of St. Anne’s tells Jane Sturbridge in the finale, That Hideous Strength. To Jane’s notion that is was in the soul that people were equal, the Director retorts:
That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes – that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food … Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition … No one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not be …. You see that obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill – specially between man and woman where the roles are always changing.
So essential is this fundamental difference between the genders that Lewis has the Director state, “You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
And a greater symbolism awaits the student of gender and of Lewis. When Jane dreamed of a world of dry, homogenous equality, the Director leads her to see:
That there might be differences all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent… ‘Yes,’ said the Director, ‘there is no escape… The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with you adversary quickly.
So, when Jane asks, “You mean I shall have to become a Christian?” the Director responds, “It looks like it.” This supreme male gender is the supreme being which Lewis had so feared in his conversion: “I had wanted (mad wish!) ‘to call my soul my own.’” Concluding the paragraph in which Lewis admits he was “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” he considers the divine compulsion:
“The words compele intrare – compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
Likewise, Jane (and Mark) find themselves at the mercy of “the origin of all right demands,” and a God with “strong skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps to destroy,” who “is above and beyond all things … so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.”
Despite his personal flourishing, Hamilton creates and endures many sorrows. His affair with Maria Reynolds, occurring when he could have otherwise spent the summer with his family upstate, puts his marriage in shambles. Holding for love and family over Alexander’s ambition, Eliza declares:
I’m erasing myself from the narrative,
Let future historians wonder
How Eliza reacted when you broke her heart …
The world has no right to my heart.
The world has no place in our bed.
They don’t get to know what I said.
The second devastating blow comes when their son Philip dies in a duel defending his father’s name from insult. As Eliza’s sister Angelica describes in the song “It’s Quiet Uptown,” a serene lament, “There are moments that the words don’t reach, there is suffering too terrible to name.” Subsequently, “The Hamiltons move uptown, and learn to live with the unimaginable,” and amid the ensuing quiet, Alexander finds solace in faith:
I take the children to the church on Sunday,
A sign of the cross at the door
And I pray
I never used to do that before.
Angelica alludes to the same source of comfort, “There are moments that the words don’t reach, There is a grace too powerful to name.” Their journey through “the unimaginable” ends with the refrain, “Forgiveness. Can you imagine? Forgiveness. Can you imagine?”
But where Hamilton stops short of explicit faith – a “grace too powerful to name” and “forgiveness, can you imagine?” – Lewis shows a Christian faith that explicitly provides the answer. Forgveness is key to the Christian story – no other religion in the world can boast the centrality of forgiveness that the Christian faith does. It is the story of the cross, an atonement before God offering forgiveness to each member of humanity. It is central to such works as the Christian author Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) and the 2018 film about the worship song, I Can Only Imagine.
It was Lewis’s own Christian faith that helped him through his own portion of soul-numbing grief, the loss of his wife Joy, which he addressed in A Grief Observed:
“Where is God?” Lewis asked, “Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other hope is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting from the inside. And after that, silence.”
Twenty years prior to his Grief Observed, Lewis was asked to write a book on pain, though he admitted that he felt hardly qualified for the task. Nevertheless, he signaled the journey from pain to God that he would follow decades later in his own pain, in his Problem of Pain:
Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world … No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil. It plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.
When in his own grief, Lewis struggled on whether to regard God as a Cosmic Sadist or Cosmic Vivisector, or even whether one should believe in a God at all. He likened the experience of pain to a card game which is only interesting if there is money on the game. Only when the stakes are high will you find out what your hand is worth, and only suffering can test your hand, by fire as it were. Lewis found his own expectation of God to be shallow, and came to realize that “the more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.” Lewis came to find solace in his faith, in the hands of that great vivisector Himself. He pondered how his wife’s passage from life led her to a greater glory, to be like a sharp, brilliant sword now wielded in the hand of her maker. And not only a sword,
But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall in wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered in… In some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.
In pondering her completion, Lewis found his own salve:
Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.
Tolkien understood grief as well, having lost both parents by age twelve, as well as enduring the horrors of World War I firsthand, on the battlefront. But it is in his writings where we find him poignantly grappling with death and solace. The Lord of the Rings, he stated, “is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality.” In his theory of fairy stories, a genre opposite that of tragedy he notes, a central feature is “the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death.” But whereas tragedy provides an anatomy lesson of catastrophe, fairy story instead provides “the Consolation of the Happy Ending … eucatastrophe.” Fantasy “does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure,” these are “necessary to the joy of deliverance;” fantasy does deny “universal final defeat” and serves as evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
Thus, Tolkien describes fantasy, like the tale of Middle Earth, as a realm both “wide and deep and high and filled with many things … beauty that is an enchantment, an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.”
Thus, in his Lord of the Rings Samwise, Frodo, Aragorn and others listen to the song of their journey, “Until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”
As to forgiveness, Lewis and Tolkien both pointed towards Divine forgiveness as the key to our humanity. Lewis stated the problem: “In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough.” But we can only forgive as we are forgiven:
To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
Thus, Lewis’s Christ figure in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan, states of his sacrificial act atoning for Edmund’s treachery:
Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know … that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.
Tolkien demonstrated Christ’s atonement, empathizing with and ultimately redeeming our broken humanity in striking fashion. Tolkien and Lewis famously disagreed on how to represent figures like Christ in their stories: Lewis’ Aslan, son of the Emperor over the Seas and King, a regal Lion (just as Christ was “The Lion of Judah”) of Narnia directly represented Christ, whereas Tolkien spread elements of the gospel around in his works.  Thus, images of sacrifice and forgiveness are rife. Frodo bears in his own body the wounds sustained from carrying the ring o Mount Doom, though it is with Gandalf and Aragorn that we can see forgiveness played out directly. After sacrificing himself to slow the Balrog from catching his friends, Gandalf eventually finds himself under a darkness where “ice fell like rain” and laying on a mountaintop “until my task is done.” Gandalf’s “task” greatly resembles Christ’s atonement:
I was alone, forgotten, without escape upon the hard horn of the world … faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping. And the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone.
The parallels to Christ are striking:
alone, forgotten: “He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3)
faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4)
And the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone: “We know that the whole creation groans and travails with labor pains together until now” (Romans 8:22)
It also appears that Tolkien knew his Dante. In his Inferno, Dante describes the lower reaches of hell as in fact cold and dark, being far removed from the light and warmth of God’s love. There, in a final act of willful defiance, Satan beats his wings to escape only to freeze himself in the lake of hell:
The emperor of the reign of misery from his chest up emerges from the ice …
Beneath each face extended two huge wings … and those he flapped, and flapped
And from his flapping raised three gales that swept Cocytus, and reduced it all to ice.
Just as Gandalf demonstrates of Christ’s work of atonement, so also does Aragorn, the King of Gondor, embody our deliverance:
Thus he (Aragorn) became at last the most hardy of living Men, skilled in their crafts and lore, and was yet more than they; for he was elvenwise, and there was a light in his eyes that when they were kindled few could endure. His face was sad and stern because of the doom that was laid on him, and yet hope dwelt ever in the depths of his heart, from which mirth would arise at times like a spring from the rock.
Tolkien thus follows Lewis in grounding ultimate forgiveness, and thus our solace, in the person of Christ. As Lewis argued, it is in God that we find the source of meaning and strength:
God designed the human machine to run on Himself … God cannot give us peace and happiness apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.[44
Hamilton admits as much, both our human weakness with “sufferig too powerful to name,” the need for “forgiveness” and a “grace too powerful to name.” Tolkien and Lewis do us the favor of the naming.
Hamilton’s Finale: His Story Has Its Eyes on You
Alexander Hamilton’s tale ends tragically and ironically (spoiler alert for the American History non-cognizant, a charge to which the author himself confesses) as the principled and courageous Hamilton dies in a duel at the hands of the wavering and cowardly Burr. Their feud had been developing for over a decade, as Burr first switched parties to defeat Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, for a Representative seat in New York in 1791. In 1800, Hamilton opposed Burr and maneuvered in Congress to throw a deadlocked electoral college Jefferson’s way in the Presidential Election. Coming in second, Burr became Jefferson’s Vice President, but as Jefferson was dropping him from the ticket in the 1804 election, Burr ran for Governor of New York, when Hamilton publicly opposed his candidacy causing Burr to lose. Hamilton opposed Burr’s unprincipled ambition, stating in one letter that Burr would make commitments, “but he will laugh in his sleeve while he makes them and will break them the first moment it may serve his purpose.”
The early death of Hamilton, the “ten dollar founding father without a father,” is deeply lamented:
Every other founding father’s story gets told
Every other founding father gets to grow old.
Hamilton’s wife Eliza picks up where Alexander’s story trails off. She lives another fifty years on the public front, speaking against slavery and raising funds for the Washington Memorial. In the private, family-oriented sphere, she establishes the first private orphanage in New York City and interviews the soldiers with whom Hamilton fought, seeking to “tell his story.”
Like Alexander, Eliza works “like (she) is running out of time” and wonders if she has done enough, lamenting that had he been around, she could have done so much more. “Will they tell my story?” Eliza wonders. Will the future generations tell Alexander’s story? Hamilton’s, finale echoes George Washington’s farewell address in which he sets out to “teach ‘em how to say goodbye.” Washington desires, “like the scripture says, … (to) sit under my own vine and fig tree, a moment alone in the shade, at home in this nation we’ve made” yet he anticipates himself “consigned …soon to the mansions of rest” having helped establish “good laws under a free government.”
To this vision, Lewis counters with his own notion of good, and of Joy. Lewis had no problems with moral crusading, holding that:
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.
The courage to pursue just such morality itself, while doomed when relying on mere human strength, is thus a gift, a grace “too powerful to mention.” But Lewis saw that the matter did not stop simply at the level of the moral:
God may be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted kits claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
Or as he put it in the finale of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength,
Of course there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not where the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels.
For Tolkien, the battle between life and death, between good and evil, is the essence of eucatastrophe, the “true form of the fairy tale, and its highest function.” It implies eventually “the joyous turn” which “does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, or sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
Thus, like the stories of Alexander Hamilton, his wife Eliza, and even George Washington, Tolkien “en-courages” us that our endings can be like that of the fellowship of Sam, Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest, when the minstrel sings them the song of Frodo the Nine-Fingered and the Ring of Doom,
Until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, an their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.
That the phrase “the very wine of blessedness” alludes to the communion cup helps us bring Tolkien and Lewis back home to their source in faith. For all his talk of fairy story and imagination, Tolkien admits,
Of course, fairy stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough.
And making the case even more explicit, he states:
The Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces the essence of all fairy stories… But this story has entered History and the primary world… 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.
Martin Luther King drew his source of strength from Scriptural promises as well, alluding to the prophet Amos who delivers God’s exhortation:
Seek me and live … But let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children … No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Work on America’s “Great Unfinished Symphony” goes ever on. Washington’s hope to “sit under his own vine and fig tree”(itself an allusion to the prophet Micah, where peace was guaranteed due to the Almighty having spoken)where he could be “at home in the nation we’ve made” is the proper rest of a life well-lived. Washington’s hope for a place in the “mansions of rest” is one best guaranteed by the words of Jesus who promises, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” To Alexander’s confession, “I’m never satisfied,” Jesus offers that “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.” To Burr’s lament that death “takes [and] History obliterates,” Jesus answers “but the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”To Burr’s refrain that love “takes and it takes and it takes and we keep loving anyway,” Scripture reminds us that “we love because He first loved us.”
It is perhaps fitting to conclude with Dante’s image of Divine Love, depicted in the concluding lines of his Divine Comedy as he gazes on Christ:
Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy,
Already were all my will and my desires
Turned – as a wheel in equal balance – by
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
This love to which Hamilton alludes is the love that gives and gives and gives and does not take. It provides the courage and hope to lift all things to eternal significance both in this world and the next. In the face of this love, Hamilton can only stare and state, “You complete me.” Hamilton is about “America, you Great Unfinished Symphony,” of which Hamilton “wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.” But this Unfinished Symphony is in truth a part of Lewis’s Great Dance in which the nations are but minute corpuscles amidst the grand and luminous streams of personal beings, all conducted in a Cosmic Orchestra by a Conductor who has fashioned each individual instrument. The sense of a nation finally fades away, as Scripture states, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” And it is an orchestra of worship; heaven will be an orchestra in which every nation and tongue sings God’s praise to fulfill the vision of the Psalmist: “Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.”
In Hamilton, the characters exalt in finding themselves in New York City, “the greatest city in the world” where history is “happening,” where “the revolution’s happening.” But it is in what Augustine referred to as the City of God where the greatest revolution unfolds, where men turn to God as the source of their love and action. Hamilton and its songs saunter, sway, and sigh through the national and earthly travails of a revolution, but such a play only portends what Teilhard de Chardin reminded us of at the beginning, that,“the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in act we live steeped in its burning layers.”
Seth Myers. “Tales of Courage and Hope: Hamilton in Middle Earth and Narnia.” An Unexpected Journal 1, no. 3. (Fall): 163-226.
Direct Link: https://anunexpectedjournal.com/tales-of-courage-and-hope-hamilton-in-middle-earth-and-narnia-part-one/
 Hamilton, I.17, “That Would Be Enough.”
 Hamilton, I.11, “Satisfied.”
 C.S.Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Glasgow: Collins, 1955), 182.
 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 104.
 Ibid., 99-100.
 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 1.
 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 305.
 Hamilton, I.19, “HIstory Has its Eyes on You.”
 C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003), 171.
 C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, (New York: Scribner, 2003), 145
 Ibid., 145 – 147.
 Ibid., 145.
 Ibid., 313.
 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Glasgow: Collins, 1986),182.
 Ibid.,, 183.
 Ibid., 313 – 315.
 Hamilton, II.15, “Burn.”
 Hamilton, II.18, “It’s Quiet Uptown.”
 C.S.Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Bantam, 1976), 4.
 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 93, 95. Ch.6 “Human Pain.”
 C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 49.
 C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 73.
 JR.R. Tolkien, in a letter of 14th October, 1958.
 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” in Tales from the Perilous Realm (Boston: Harcourt, 2008), 383.
 Ibid., 384.
 Ibid., 315.
 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine, 2001), Book VI.4, 250.
 C.S. Lewis, “On Forgiveness” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Collier Books, 1980), 125.
 C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper, 1994), 178-9.
 Genesis 49:9, Hebrews 7:14, Revelations 5:5.
 Donald T. Williams, An Encouraging Thought: The Christian Worldview in the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (Cambridge, Ohio: Christian Publishing House, 2018). Williams book includes the idea that Frodo represents Christ the Priest, Gandalf Christ the Prophet, and Aragorn Christ the King.
 Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 111.
 Dante, Inferno (New York: Modern Library, 2003), translated Anthony Esolen, Canto 34.28-29, 46-52.
 Tolkien, Return of the King ((New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), Appendix A.5, 374.
 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 50. Book 2 Ch.3 “The Shocking Alternative.”
 See footnotes 78 – 80.
 Bernard C. Steiner and James McHenry, The life and correspondence of James McHenry (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Co., 1907), 484.
 Hamilton, I.1.
 Hamilton, II.23, “Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story.”
 Hamilton, II.9, “One Last Time.”
 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 134.
 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Collier, 1986), 65. Ch. 4 “Human Wickedness.”
 C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Scribner, 2003), 369.
 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” in Tales of the Perilous Realm, 384.
 J.R.R.Tolkien, Return of the King (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 250
 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” in Tales of the Perilous Realm, 373.
 Ibid., “On Fairy Stories: Epilogue,” 388.
 Amos 5:4, 24.
 Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream … Speech given at the “March on Washington,” NPR. Available https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety .
 “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken.” Micah 4:4.
 Hamilton, I.9 “One Last Time.”
 John 14:2.
 Hamilton, I.11 “Satisfied..”
 John 4:14.
 Hamilton, II.22 “The World Was Wide Enough.”
 John 4:14.
 1 John 4:19.
 Dante, Paradise, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: The Modern Library, 2007), 33:142-145.
 Hamilton, II.22, “The World Was Wide Enough.”
 Galatians 3:28.
 Psalm 67:4.
 Hamilton, I.5, “The Schuyler Sisters.”
 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957), quoted in Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly (Ventura California: Regal Books, 2007), 5.