Psalm 121 is the second of the fifteen Songs of Ascents — pilgrim songs sung by Israelites traveling up to Jerusalem for the feasts. The journey was real and dangerous: bandits in the passes, exposure on the ridges, days of walking through territory dotted with the high places of other gods. The hills were not a metaphor for the pilgrim. They were the literal terrain, full of literal threats, watched over by literal shrines to rival powers. The psalm is sung against that landscape. The first line is a question, not an answer — and the answer steps over every hilltop shrine to the One who made the hills themselves.

From the writers we read together

J.R.R. Tolkien

Oxford philologist, Catholic, author of The Lord of the Rings (1892-1973)

Tolkien wrote that line for Sam at the lowest point of his journey — alone, in enemy territory, on a stair under a black sky, with Frodo presumed dead. Sam looks up and sings. The song does not deny the shadow; it locates it. The shadow is real, but it is not on top. Something older and higher rides above it. That is precisely the move of Psalm 121. The pilgrim does not pretend the hills are safe. He lifts his eyes through them to the One who made them.

Tolkien believed that the great stories work because they rhyme with the true one — that what he called eucatastrophe, the sudden turn toward joy, is woven into the fabric of reality by its Maker. Psalm 121 is a small eucatastrophe sung in two verses. The question of verse 1 sounds like despair until you hear verse 2. Help is not coming from the hills. Help is coming from the hand that shaped them. Whatever ridge you are crossing today, the Sun rides above it.