Take on Hope

My mother always told me: “Praise the Lord!  Even through gritted teeth.” And no one describes better than Tolkien the grim resolution to continue on the way, even when hope is faint, or seems wholly gone. I do not say I am without hope, though it does feel very faint right now.

The foster mother told me: “I have no doubt that the evil [one] in this world would use this for harm in all our lives… However, greater is He that is in us than he who is in the world. Period. Love wins. Period. Whatever happens, wherever [she] ends up – Love wins. Forever. We have a choice.”

My choice is to go on.

—

[Aragorn] turned to the Company. “We must do without hope,” he said. “At least we may yet be avenged. Let us gird ourselves and weep no more! Come! We have a long road, and much to do.”

—Fellowship of the Ring, Lothlorien

—

Gimli ground his teeth. “This is a bitter end to our hope and to all our toil!” he said.

“To hope, maybe, but not to toil.” said Aragorn. “We shall not turn back here.  Yet I am weary.”

He gazed back along the way that they had come toward the night gathering in the East. “There is something strange at work in this land. I distrust the silence. I distrust even the pale Moon. The stars are faint; and I am weary as I have seldom been before, weary as no Ranger should be with a clear trail to follow. There is some will that lends speed to our foes and sets an unseen barrier before us; a weariness that is in the heart more than in the limb.”

—The Two Towers, Riders of Rohan

—

Stern now was Eomer’s mood, and his mind clear again.  He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither; for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark. So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind.

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red night-fall! 

These staves he spoke, yet he laughed as he said them. For once more lust of battle was on him; and he was still unscathed, and he was young, and he was king: the lord of a fell people. And lo! even as he laughed at despair he looked out again on the black ships, and he lifted up his sword to defy them.

—The Return of the King, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields