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When David Mills took two of his children to the opening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," it was more than a family outing. His interest in the sequel to "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" goes even beyond his childhood fascination with the books on which the movies are based.

Mills, the director of publishing at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Beaver County, is a nationally recognized scholar on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. He considers "The Lord of the Rings" much more than a fantasy.

"It's a wise Christian story with moral and spiritual depth that very few modern works have," he said. "It makes you think, and it teaches you something important about the world."

Mills calls the tale "stealth evangelism," and that's no surprise to anyone familiar with Tolkien's life and literature. Yet, Mills said, "A surprising number of writers on Tolkien ignore his religion."

Mills, who also teaches at the seminary and edits faculty work, has written extensively on the Inklings, a group of Oxford University writers that included Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers.

He wrote "The Pilgrim's Guide: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Witness" and plans a Tolkien volume for the series. Mills' story on his own conversion to Catholicism appears in "Surprised By The Truth III," and recently he was on the Eternal Word Television Network's "The Journey Home." He also wrote "The Saints' Guide to Knowing the Real Jesus."

Because of his expertise on Tolkien, Mills has been interviewed in the national media and recently was on a televised Billy Graham show. He wrote about Tolkien for Harmony magazine, and in the January issue of Touchstone Magazine, where he is senior editor, Mills interprets the presence of divine providence (the concept of God as a guiding power in the universe) in "The Lord of the Rings."

Tolkien wrote in personal letters that he "disliked allegory" and "purposely kept all allusions to the highest matters down to mere hints, perceptible by the most attentive, or kept them under unexplained symbolic forms."

Mills missed them the first time around. At age 12, when his parents gave him the book to occupy him on a family vacation, he was immediately enthralled by the plot and the characters. He was not fond of fantasy literature then nor now, though even as an adolescent, he knew this story was different.

"I spent the entire weekend sitting and reading," he said. "I've read it about 20 more times and get more out of it every time. You learn something every time you read it."

Tolkien was born in 1892 and was 4 when his father died. Raising the family in a rural village near Birmingham, Tolkien's mother died eight years later. Relatives did not take in Tolkien and his younger brother because they disapproved of the mother's conversion to Catholicism. So the boys became the wards of the Rev. Francis Morgan.

Tolkien excelled in grammar school where he debated in Latin and Greek.

"He became an Oxford professor at the age of 37, and since there were very few professors, that was quite prestigious," Mills said. "He was an academic star."

Tolkien was an expert in the Norse language and taught literary classics and ancient mythology. He kept company with writers who were already legends. Chesterton, often called "the prince of paradox," wrote crime fiction with Father Brown as the detective. Sayers, one of the first women to receive an Oxford degree, wrote the Lord Peter Whimsey mysteries, and Lewis created the "Narnia Chronicles." Tolkien successfully converted Lewis from atheism to Anglicanism, though he tried to convert him to Catholicism.

"Their nickname – the Inklings – was a little joke, a pun," Mills said. "They wrote so much that their fingers were inky, and they had an inkling, a hint, an intuition of something."

Tolkien wrote "The Hobbit" as a bedtime story for his children, and through a series of coincidences, it fell into the hands of a publisher. "It came out in 1937 and was a best seller," Mills said.

"'The Lord of the Rings' took him 12 more years to write. It appeared in 1954, five years after he finished it because he kept revising everything."

Tolkien enjoyed his success as a practical matter. He had four children to raise (one became a Catholic priest), and it was a relief that he had another source of income.

"He also seemed to be gratified and flattered that people loved his stories," Mills said.

The trilogy is the saga of Frodo, a young hobbit who is chosen to secretly carry an all-powerful ring to the land of Mordor, and to destroy it by casting it into the fires of Mount Doom.

"Some of the good guys are a little gray and are tempted to do evil," Mills said. "In some of the villains, like Gollum, there's still some part of them that loves the good. It's much the story of wicked little children."

They are watched over by an unnamed power that controls things that are "meant to be." In letters, Tolkien refers to this as "The Authority" and "The Great Author." In the story, it is the unexplained reason that the wizard Gandalf sacrifices himself, returns from the dead and says, "I was sent back."

"The characters will say, 'You were meant to be here,' or 'So it was ordered,'" Mills said. "The events work out for the good when they should not work out at all. In some cases, it's in such a way that some intervening power is clearly at work. That happens in two ways: first, when events seem to be arranged for the good without the heroes doing anything to deserve them. The second is when they work out for the good because the heroes do the right thing when it is, practically considered, the wrong thing."

There are several chances for someone to kill Gollum. But because they show mercy and let him live, he is the one who falls into the Crack of Doom with the ring and saves the world.

"Tolkien wrote the story in an entirely made-up world, but it's a world that operates by the moral and spiritual laws of this one," Mills said. "All the characters have to face moral choices, and they have the chance of either being saved or being damned. I think the book is one of the most beautiful themes in literature, and the last chapter is an extraordinary mixture of real joy and real pain."

Not all readers and viewers catch the themes of redemption, morality and spirituality. More may be drawn to the adventure and the battle between good and evil. Whatever the reason, Tolkien's trilogy has been popular for more than six decades, and the first movie received 13 Oscar nominations.

"It's impossible (for someone else) to write another book like 'The Lord of the Rings,'" Mills said. "A writer like Tolkien comes along just once every century or two."

Maryann Gogniat Eidemiller is a Greensburg freelance writer for the Tribune-Review.

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