The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Lord of the Rings

The Ring and the Cross

The Ring and the Cross Christianity and the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien

Edited by

Paul E. Kerry

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rlpgbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data on file under LC#2010001826 ISBN: 978-1-61147-064-2 (cl. : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-1-61147-065-9

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments

7

Introduction: A Historiography of Christian Approaches to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings PAUL E. KERRY

17

Part I: The Ring The Pagan Tolkien RONALD HUTTON

57

The Christian Tolkien: A Response to Ronald Hutton NILS IVAR AGØY

71

Can We Still Have a Pagan Tolkien?: A Reply to Nils Ivar Agøy RONALD HUTTON

90

The Entwives: Investigating the Spiritual Core of The Lord of the Rings STEPHEN MORILLO

106

“Like Heathen Kings”: Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien’s Fiction JOHN R. HOLMES

119

Confronting the World’s Weirdness: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin RALPH C. WOOD

145

Eru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The Lord of the Rings CATHERINE MADSEN

152

The Ring and the Cross: How J.R.R. Tolkien Became a Christian Writer CHRIS MOONEY

170

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CONTENTS

Part II: The Cross Redeeming Sub-Creation CARSON L. HOLLOWAY Catholic Scholar, Catholic Sub-Creator JASON BOFFETTI

177 193

“An Age Comes On”: J.R.R. Tolkien and the English Catholic Sense of History MICHAEL TOMKO

205

The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community JOSEPH PEARCE

224

Tracking Catholic Influence in The Lord of the Rings PAUL E. KERRY

234

Saintly and Distant Mothers MARJORIE BURNS

246

The “Last Battle” as a Johannine Ragnarök: Tolkien and the Universal BRADLEY J. BIRZER

259

Bibliography Contributors Index

283 302 305

Acknowledgments THIS PROJECT BEGAN TO PERCOLATE IN MY MIND WHEN I WAS A STUDENT member of the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society. I looked forward to each Tuesday during term time when I would walk across the street from St. John’s College and make my way to the upper room of Pusey House at St. Cross College where its meetings were held. That Society attracted a variety of students, particularly Christians of various denominations including Church of England, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Baptist, and Orthodox who were brought together by a shared desire to study the life and thought of C. S. Lewis. In that context, I began to conceive dimly of a project that might explore interpretations of Christian influence in Tolkien’s works. When the Peter Jackson films began to be screened in cinemas across the world they reignited an interest in Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings, and in his other writings. The question of how they might have been informed by his Christianity, for he was a devout Roman Catholic, leapt to the fore. Lectures and talks were given on the subject and articles surfaced in newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and on the internet. It was a pity, I thought, that the various views on this important subject were often expressed in isolation. A comparative approach might be useful in weighing evidence and evaluating arguments. Thus, this book represents a personal effort to bring together opposing views. It embodies the principle that reasonable discussion is possible, and a praiseworthy aim, perhaps even all the more needful when an issue is contested. I am grateful to my fellow contributors for their patience and good will through all phases of this book’s production. They demonstrate that Tolkien’s ideas have attracted scholars in a variety of disciplines beyond their traditional home in English, such as in History, Political Philosophy, and Theology. Two veterans of Tolkien Studies deserve special mention. Sandra Miesel has been a stalwart guide and ready sounding board as this project crept for7

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ward. Marjorie Burns always responded to my queries with cheerful encouragement well before she became a contributor. Professor Harry Keyishian, Director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, guided this book through the peer-review process. This provided constructive insights and improved the volume. Ruth Eldredge, a postgraduate student at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, ensured that the volume met the stylistic guidelines of the Press. I am indebted, as are each of the contributors, to Professor Carson Holloway, Executive Director of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, and to Dr. Bradford P. Wilson, the Association’s President, for their generous financial support in obtaining permission from the Houghton Mifflin Company and HarperCollins Publishers to quote from the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. I completed much of the editing work on this book in 2007–8 while I was at Princeton University as the Ann and Herbert W. Vaughan Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. I thank the Program’s Director, Professor Robert P. George and its Executive Director, Dr. Bradford P. Wilson, for providing an outstanding research environment. I am also grateful to Mr. Luis E. Tellez of the Witherspoon Institute for his interest in this project and for fostering my research. While at Princeton, I was able to give presentations to the James Madison Program Undergraduate Fellows Forum, as well as students at Mercer House and Wiggins House. Conversations with these bright, capable, energetic, and kind students are amongst the highlights of my year at Princeton.

 Excerpts from The Tolkien Reader by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1966. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins, Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1994. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, illustrated by Alan Lee. Copyright © 2007. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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Excerpts from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. 50th Anniversary Edition. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1988. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Shaping of Middle-earth by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1986. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1936. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1965. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1966. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “On Fairy Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1983. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford,” in The Monsters & the Critics and Other Essays, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Narn I Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, Copyright © 2007. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Foreword to the Second Edition, The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1965. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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Excerpts from “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1984. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 2001, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “The Oxford English School,” in Oxford Magazine by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1930. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhad,” by J.R.R. Tolkien in Essays and Studies, edited by H. W. Garrod. Copyright © 1929. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “Remembering Tolkien and Lewis,” by Anthony Curtis. Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “An Interview with Tolkien,” by Henry Resnick. Copyright © 1966. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from an unpublished chapter in “The Manuscript of The Silmarillion,” p. 81, in WCWC, Kilby Files, 1–12, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright ©. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Book of Lost Tales, I, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1984. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from The Book of Lost Tales, II, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1984. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” by J.R.R. Tolkien, in Lewis Nicholson, editor, An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Copyright © 1963. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelms’s Son,” in Essays and Studies by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1953. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Tolkien: A Biography. By Humphrey Carpenter. Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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Excerpts from Unfinished Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1980. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Letter to Clyde Kilby, Wheaton, Illinois, December 18, 1965 by Tolkien in Wade Collection Wheaton College, Folder JRRT to Miscellaneous Correspondents. Copyright © 1965 Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” from THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1983 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “On Fairy-Stories” and from TREE AND LEAF by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1964 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Copyright © Renewed 1992 by John F. R. Tolkien, Christopher R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1988 by the Tolkien Trust. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, Volume 2 by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1984 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, Volume 1 by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1983 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1966 by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © renewed 1994 by Christopher R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from UNFINISHED TALES OF NUMENOR AND MIDDLE-EARTH by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1980 by J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from MORGOTH’S RING: The Later Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1993 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Excerpts from THE TWO TOWERS by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1954, 1965, 1966 by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © renewed 1982 by Christopher R. Tolkien, Michael H. R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. 1965/1966 editions copyright © renewed 1993, 1994 by Christopher R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1954, 1965 by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © renewed 1982 by Christopher R. Tolkien, Michael H. R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Copyright © renewed 1993 by Christopher R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE LETTERS OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1981 by George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE SILMARILLION, Second Edition by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1977 by The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and Christopher Reuel Tolkien. Copyright © 1981 by The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust. Copyright © 1999 by Christopher Reuel Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All Rights Reserved Excerpts from THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1965, 1966 by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © Renewed 1982, 1983 by Christopher R. Tolkien, Michael H. R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Copyright © Renewed 1993, 1994 by Christopher R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE SHAPING OF MIDDLE-EARTH: The Quentas, The Ambarkanta, and the Annals by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1986 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpt from “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford” from THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copy-

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right © 1983 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpt from “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” from THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1983 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpt from THE PEOPLES OF MIDDLE-EARTH by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1996 by Frank Richard Williamson and Christopher Reuel Tolkien as Executors of the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpt from J.R.R. TOLKIEN: A BIOGRAPHY by Humphrey Carpenter. Copyright © 1977 by George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The Ring and the Cross

Introduction: A Historiography of Christian Approaches to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Paul E. Kerry

THE INFLUENCE OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S CHRISTIANITY, EVEN HIS ROMAN Catholicism, on his writing has sparked intense discussion and debate. The aim of this introduction is to provide a historiography, in other words, a chronological overview of the major arguments and themes that have engaged scholars about the impact of Christianity on Tolkien’s oeuvre, with particular reference to The Lord of the Rings. Due diligence is imperative as there has been an unfortunate tendency in Tolkien studies to neglect significant insights that have been made in previous monographs, articles, and essays on the subject.1 A survey of the scholarship also provides an important context for the arguments put forward in this volume. Tolkien’s authorial statements about the role of religion in his fictional writing will be reviewed, and then the specific ways that critics have determined the scope and analyzed how Christianity informed his literary production will be considered. Religion is taken to mean several things by Tolkien scholars, including the “belief in a Being or Beings greater than man and worthy of worship, and a belief in some sort of life after death.”2 It can also mean the coming together of the people of God,3 which, of course, sparks associations with the very notion of a “fellowship”; from a theological and liturgical perspective it encompasses creeds and an emphasis on priesthood.4 And in a specifically Catholic context, religion has a variety of meanings, from the Seven Sacraments to the Holy Eucharist.5 Christopher Garbowski explicated the spiritual dimension of Tolkien’s work as a process of recovery that sometimes involves self-transcendence through suffering and can lead to “among other things . . . a healing of the known world in order to see it afresh.”6 Helen Armstrong accepted 17

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that The Lord of the Rings compels us to ponder not by virtue of theology, but because Tolkien faced questions that “even the most assuredly faithful” must “when doctrines and beliefs fade out like the certainty of consciousness in the face of the complete unknown, and the only knowledge left is: Help.”7 Therefore, The Lord of the Rings is religious in the sense that it explores the way men and women “respond to the mystery of Time”8 and to the human condition of “Vergänglichkeit” or impermanence.9 There is little question that Tolkien’s most popular work is concerned with religion on these terms, but what is the nature of its debt to Christianity?10

J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S VIEW Tolkien’s devotion to Roman Catholicism is not in question; he expressed his faith openly many times in correspondence to his immediate family and friends.11 His mother, Mabel, converted to Catholicism in 1900 against the wishes of her family who withdrew both emotional and financial support, and she died at thirty-four years old. Tolkien was then raised, essentially, by Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory.12 He married a Catholic convert and one of his sons eventually entered the priesthood.13 He was a regular communicant of the Mass and “adopted St. John the Evangelist as his personal patron.”14 He was a practicing Christian, committed to Roman Catholic theology, doctrine, and ritual, convinced of its universality, truthfulness, goodness, beauty, and salvific power. What raises the interest of many of his readers is the role that his Christianity played in his imaginative writing, not least in his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien commented in different ways in his personal correspondence and elsewhere on this subject.15 He claimed to have written The Lord of the Rings “as a personal satisfaction,”16 as “an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive,”17 and he certainly wanted to preserve the story from being read as an allegory (“not allegory!”),18 but acknowledged “applicability” (“there always is”)19 and pronounced more than once that “the real theme” concerned “Death and Immortality.”20 He considered it “fatal” to his mythic “heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history” to involve “explicitly . . . the Christian religion” as happens in Arthurian romance, for “Myth and fairy story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral

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and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the “primary ‘real’ world.”21 Tolkien wrote to a publisher, in his ever authoritative tone: “It is a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology.’ The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. . . The ‘Third Age’ was not a Christian world.”22 He could also speak directly to the relationship between his literary work and his Roman Catholicism: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism.”23 And he wrote that “a few basic facts . . . are really significant” in relation to his works, and the “more important” of those: “I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic.”24 In The Road Goes Ever On, commenting parenthetically on the invocations uttered by Frodo and Sam “in moments of extreme peril,” Tolkien wrote: “These and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked.”25

THE TRAP Based on these biographical utterances, one could be led to expect elements of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings, the posthumously published The Silmarillion and other parts of his legendarium. In 1974, Richard Purtill’s chapter “Religion in Tolkien” provided a farsighted summary of the areas that scholars interested in examining the religious elements of Tolkien’s work would attempt to flesh out, such as: the cosmic battle between good and evil in Middleearth; the meaning of the repeated invocations to Elbereth throughout The Lord of the Rings; the ontological status of the wizards (Gandalf and Saruman); the Catholic mirroring of Christ through Gandalf and Frodo; the afterlife of Elves, Dwarves, and Men; the theology in Tolkien’s story, “Leaf by Niggle”; and the cosmology of The Silmarillion. But he also highlighted “Tolkien’s problem”—how does a believer create a pre-Christian world where the inhabitants are neither philosophers (Greeks), nor recipients of a special revelation (Hebrews) and yet monotheistic? In short, the theoretical challenge that Tolkien faced was that any attempt

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at exhibiting monotheism would force Tolkien to define its relationship to actual Judaism and Christianity.26 Richard Sturch observed the same dilemma.27 There was also a potential theological objection, as A. R. Bossert quipped: “To bring God into The Lord of the Rings would make God subject to Tolkien’s own imagination— justifying the Modernist argument that notions of God arise from human opinion.”28 T. A. Shippey deduced similar consequences: “If The Lord of the Rings should approach too close to ‘Gospeltruth,’ to the Christian myth in which Tolkien himself believed, it might forfeit its status as a story and become at worst a blasphemy, an ‘Apocryphal gospel,’ at best a dull allegory rehearsing in admittedly novel form what everyone ought to know already.”29 Verlyn Flieger put it this way: “He had faulted the Arthurian legend for being involved in and explicitly containing religion, and now he saw his own legendarium teetering on the edge of the same trap.”30 Much of the debate over the relationship between Christianity and Tolkien’s fiction is over how he negotiated this trap.

WHENCE THE MORALITY IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS? Patricia Meyer Spacks (1968) is often quoted for her straightforward declaration: “The Lord of the Rings is by no means a Christian work,” although she concedes that characters experience “spiritual growth” along the path of “Christian virtues.”31 Tolkien’s colleague and fellow Christian C. S. Lewis, although generous in his praise in a 1955 review that proclaimed “that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables,” made no mention of any religious meaning.32 Yet Christianity in The Lord of the Rings seemed so obvious to W. H. Auden in 1962 that the esteemed man of letters commented flatly that “the unstated presuppositions of the whole work are Christian.”33 In 1966 Marion Zimmer Bradley called attention to “Love”—heroic, patriotic, maternal, and paternal—as “the dominant emotion in The Lord of the Rings,” but Christian love did not register in her analysis.34 Dorothy K. Barber (1967) insinuated that Christianity was in the eye of the beholder: “Largely because of the figurative language and the many connotations carried by the words light, darkness, part and chance, Tolkien has been able to let a Christian anagogical significance arise from the story, if the reader chooses to see it.”35 For Lin Carter (1969) Tolkien’s

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writing threw into relief “the eternal verities of human nature.”36 Marjorie Evelyn Wright wrote in 1971 that a cosmic order exists in The Lord of the Rings that prescribes a natural hierarchy of values such as “[r]ule, obedience, courtesy, exchange.”37 Clyde S. Kilby (1974) recognized those hierarchies (e.g., Orcs to Elves) and mythic elements (such as light and dark) and pointed to myth over allegory and the power of a story (not a sermon) that “suggests the sadness of a paradise lost and the glory of one that can be regained.”38 William Dowie (1979) held that “certain ontological implications in The Lord of the Rings also belong to the warp and woof of Christian tradition. These include notions of fellowship, kingship, providence, prophecy, prohibition, festivity, and eucatastrophe.”39 Patrick Grant (1981) continued this line of analysis against “doctrinal formulations,” commenting that “The Lord of the Rings embodies an inherent morality, which derives largely from the traditions of Christian and epic poetry” such as heroism, charity, providence, and obedience.40 Colin Gunton (1999) perceived “echoes from Christian thought” in the themes of the Ring as an object of temptation, providential history, Frodo’s refusal to kill Gollum, and victory amidst defeat like “Christ’s victory on the cross.”41 Nicholas Boyle (2005) recognized Frodo’s failure as a collective failure: “His quest is not only the moment when the Little People play their part in history, it is also the moment when they fail.”42 But Boyle also maintained that this failure underscored how success was to be achieved, “on the thoroughly Catholic principles of the necessity, but not the sufficiency, of good works of salvation and of the communion of saints.”43 The temptation, according to Boyle, represented by the Ring is too great for any “unaided decision of the will” and it “requires the collective and collaborative willingness of many—perhaps distant from each other in space and time—to do all that they can for what is good and right, despite their knowledge of the inadequacy of what they do, and with no more support or validation of it than the faith that it will be joined to other work, of which they have little or no knowledge, so as to achieve the purpose of which they all seem to fall short.”44 Bill Davis (2003) speculated that Arwen accepts a mortal life not only because she loves and longs to be with Aragorn, but because she shares Aragorn’s belief that “death is a gift from Ilúvatar, the creator-God of Tolkien’s world.”45 Lèonie Caldecott (2003) perceived a general morality within The Lord of the Rings that never-

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theless contains distinctly Christian elements because the work “concerns itself with those values that are at the heart of any healthy culture: truthfulness, valour, fellowship, the acceptance of suffering in a great cause, trust in a Higher Power. More markedly Christian than all the rest is the power of the small and apparently weak to defeat those who think only of power for its own sake.”46 Bradley Birzer (2002) centered the Christianity of The Lord of the Rings in the Christlike mercy of Frodo toward Gollum and the “symbolism of a Catholic flavour having to do with prayer, the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary.”47 Likewise, Ralph Wood (2003) located its Christian emphasis in the “power of undeserved mercy.”48 Christina Heckman (2007) established that “self-sacrifice,” rooted in Christian theology and Neoplatonic thought, is a major topos in The Lord of the Rings (Galadriel, Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo) and The Silmarillion (Lúthien).49 Anne Petty had argued as early as 1979 that certain virtues such as honor, loyalty, fear, bravery, sorrow, and even compassion could stem from a “mythic impulse” and not necessarily be linked exclusively or directly to Christianity,50 but that the morality of The Lord of the Rings occupies a literary “Grauzone” (grey zone) between myth and religion.51 Or as Frank Weinreich (2005) concluded, these ethics are not mutually exclusive and in fact The Lord of the Rings features the coming together of Christian and nonreligious ethics.52 Richard Sturch (2001) realized how the intensity of Tolkien’s writing could be perceived: “The Lord of the Rings was never intended as Christian apologetic, not even to have an apologetic side effect.” Nevertheless, he accepted that the seriousness with which Tolkien takes good and evil in The Lord of the Rings may have “a certain evangelistic effect” in an age of relativity.53 Kerry Dearborn (2002) contended that there is more, that “Tolkien longed to smuggle a vision of goodness and truth into the readers’ lives” and that he achieved this through “sacramental theology,” following Abraham Heschel’s notion that “there is a holiness that hovers over all things.”54 Wood (2003) opined that Tolkien was not an evangelist: “Tolkien the Catholic is confident that the sacramental and missional life of the church will convey the Gospel to the world without the assistance of his own art.”55 In his “theological meditation” on The Lord of the Rings in which Wood used “the major doctrines of the Christian faith as a template” for his reading of Tolkien, he summarized that the “religious significance of The Lord of the

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Rings . . . arises out of its plot and characters, its images and tone, its landscape and point of view—not from heavy-handed moralizing or preachifying.”56 Matthew Dickerson (2003) exemplified moral themes in The Lord of the Rings and drew sensitive theological distinctions in observing that “salvation” is not used by Tolkien to describe “moral victory,” but rather words such as “cured” or “escaped” or “fallen” are employed.57 Words meant the world to Tolkien and it behooves all who attempt to tease out theological meanings to tread with similar care. By the same token, one can see how a Protestant view can read Tolkien’s theology against the grain. For example, the linchpin to Dickerson’s argument is his emphasis on the spiritual plane.58 Potentially this could be construed as denigrating matter, something that would contradict Catholic theology. As have many readers since at least J. S. Ryan (1969), Fleming Rutledge (2004) spotted biblical and liturgical patterns in The Lord of the Rings, including ones that Tolkien did not mention in his letters. Rutledge hinted intriguingly that Protestants identify with reading Tolkien and other twentieth-century “Catholic writers” because they emphasize “the action of grace upon the bound or impotent will, so much so that they seem more ‘Protestant’ than most Protestants.”59 Stratford Caldecott (2005) delineated the boundary between Christianity and morality in The Lord of the Rings in this way: The cosmological setting of Tolkien’s imagined world, along with the creatures and events with which he filled it and the moral laws governing this imagined cosmos, were all intended to be compatible with his beliefs about reality, and in fact provide “pointers” to a Christian world-view. Love, courage, justice, mercy, kindness, integrity and other such virtues are incarnated in the story through characters such as Aragorn and Frodo. It is a testimony to the power and realism of the Christian tradition that exposure to these patterns of the moral life can have a purifying effect on the receptive reader, yet without making us feel confined or oppressed within an ideological system.60

A CHRISTIAN ROMANTIC Robert Reilly (1968) cast Tolkien as a Christian Romantic and Kilby (1974) detected a specifically German Romantic sensibility—“Sehnsucht or longing—in Tolkien’s writing.”61 None of this would have

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placed Tolkien necessarily at odds with his faith, for according to Coulombe (1999) the “dominant note of the traditional Catholic liturgy was intense longing. This is also true of her art, her literature, her whole life. It is a longing for things that cannot be in this world: unearthly truth, unearthly purity, unearthly justice, unearthly beauty.”62 Chris Seeman (1995) mooted links to Coleridge and ascribed to Tolkien a revision of the Romantic Christian heritage: “Unlike most Romantic christologies which tend to focus on Christ as the prototype of artistic creation alone, Tolkien focuses not on the mediatory aspect of the person of Christ, but on the fact of incarnation itself—that desire has in fact been fulfilled in the primary world and, hence, becomes the prototype not of creation but of future fulfilment.”63 Another aspect of Tolkien’s writing that can be fitted into a Romantic framework is his view on the environment. The “Tolkien brand” had been co-opted by environmentalists since the 1960s and there is now a growing body of scholarly literature on the subject of his environmentalism, including considerations of it from a religious perspective. Alfred Sievers (2005) fathomed the “deep structure of Tolkien’s ecocentric view of nature” in the Celtic tradition of “a nature integrated with the divine” and an “overlay landscape” of “a non-Augustinian Western cosmological narrative.”64 Dickerson and Jonathan Evans (2006) fashioned Tolkien into a green Roman Catholic, although refusing to reduce Tolkien’s environmentalism to a set of sectarian arguments: “Tolkien’s vision of environmental ethic was firmly rooted in a deeply Christian, Catholic understanding of the world and its creator. This tradition sees the necessity of right relationships between the creator and humankind and between humankind and the rest of creation.”65 Moreover, their analysis deployed insightfully the Christian concept of stewardship.66 Finally Tolkien’s association with the Inklings or the so-called Oxford Christians, especially C. S. Lewis who wrote on Romanticism, is well-attested.67 Although scholars agree that they learned from each other it is exceedingly difficult to assess the degree and level of their influence on each other’s writing. In 2007, Diana Glyer produced a balanced historiography on the Inklings, and her monograph’s insistence on the theoretical complexity of the concept of influence rightly warned against making uncritical assumptions about intellectual connections.68

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TOLKIEN’S CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY Tolkien’s critical move—to expel allegory and yet absorb in his work applicable religious elements is at once a part of the complexity, difficulty, and attraction of The Lord of the Rings. Gerald Monsman (1970) claimed that as a Christian Tolkien “could do little else” but “affirm the images of this world” for “the Incarnation had redeemed the temporal process.”69 Jared Lobdell (2004) went further in hypothesizing about the confines of Tolkien’s mind: no Christian “can imagine our world existing before Christ existed, since He was the Word through Whom all things were made.” And further: “There was a time before Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem. But there never was a time before the Second Person of the Trinity existed—only before He was known by us to exist.”70 In attempting to exclude the epistemological possibility of a nonChristian Tolkien, he put his finger on the rub: can Christians (or any committed believer) truly think and create art outside of his or her religious box, especially if that box is accepted as the framing, fundamental, and universal truth? Christopher Wrigley (2005) pointed out that The Lord of the Rings is “rife with Christian thought and feeling” and ascertained that the latitude of Minas Tirith was that of Rome and that its seven levels evoked Judeo-Christian cosmologies. Furthermore, Rohan “has much of the feel of Protestant northern Europe,” however, “for a great many readers The Lord of the Rings serves, not as a reinforcement of the faith, but as an alternative.”71 Similarly Catherine Madsen (2004) wondered: “But might not a Christian imagine an escape from Christianity” rather than an abandonment of it?72 She adumbrated how such an “escape” shaped Tolkien’s writing: For the writer remains a Christian; he has simply made a new approach to the heart of his faith, more bearable to his mind and character. But not all his readers will be led to Christianity by his work. Or if led there, some may conclude that the fire they sought has in fact struck a different altar: that for them Tolkien has simultaneously made holiness imaginable and made it imaginable apart from Christianity. For Christianity is above all concerned with showing forth, making God visible: either in the Incarnation, in which he is said to have become a man, or in the Eucharist, in which he is said to enter bread and wine. In The Lord of the Rings God is not shown forth, nor does he even speak, but acts in history with the greatest subtlety. He does not violate the laws

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of the flesh or of food, but remains the last Other behind all otherness that may be loved. Those who are struck by this reticence will not turn to the Nicene Creed’s formula et incarnatus est but to a more obscure and paradoxical Hebrew saying: lo sh’mo bo sh’mo, “Where the Name is not uttered, there the Name is present.” For some thousand pages Tolkien refrained from taking the Lord’s name in vain; invisible, it illuminates the whole.73

Allison Milbank (2007) propounded that Tolkien’s writing is not an escape from, but rather a counter to “the loss of sign-making capacity ‘at the turn of civilisation,’ and a response to the draining of shared meaning from cultural discourse in the twentieth century.”74 She assessed that Tolkien, like Chesterton, was engaging in a new mode of “theurgic theology,” that is “a theology of art as practice” that relied on “poesis” to open “the way to God and the way to encounters with the world.”75 Tolkien’s writing was thus the mediation “just as it reveals mediation” and the “centrality of mediation is where the Christological aspect of art is located.”76 Boyle recognized something similar in that The Lord of the Rings “shows us ways of living rather than dramatizations or allegorizations of theological principles.”77 Thomas Smith defined religious belief as “not merely a matter of holding certain propositions. More deeply, it is a way of standing in and walking through the world.”78 How the characters in The Lord of the Rings behave, which is on display throughout the work, is as important as what they believe, which must be inferred through their actions. Since the late eighteenth century, the theoretical debate over the autonomy of art has been waged against religious didacticism and ostensibly won by those staking the claim of art for art’s sake. Romantic poets, such as Novalis, usurped the mantle of prophet. Too often Tolkien’s stated beliefs in both the efficacy of his story and the fundamentally religious nature of it have been held to be dichotomous, owing perhaps to the notion that art is autonomous and that religion in art would make art subservient to something outside of its own laws. As some critics have struggled to demonstrate, Tolkien appears to have found a symbiotic solution, one that sutures what was rent by rehabilitating the fairy tale genre. Jack Zipes (1979) surmised that this was crucial for “fairy tale is a secularization of religion.”79 He continues: “Tolkien was acutely aware, whether he stated this or not, that the essence of Christianity could only be conveyed to human beings in secularized form, given the

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changing referential framework of values in the Judaeo-Christian tradition . . . Thus, fantasy is not only art for Tolkien, but religion, secularized religion, which is informed by a chiliastic perspective of a redeemed humanity.”80 Dowie (1979) unpacked Tolkien’s secular religion in this way: “The stories evoke participation in a secular religion—that is, a religion in which all is sacred because all things, even the most natural, are related to one another and to a founding transcendence.”81 Tolkien comprehended the “‘interiorization’ of the spiritual experience.”82 This aligns with Brian Rosebury’s view that in the twentieth century there was a “cultural assumption of unbelief” and that one could no longer communicate openly as a member of the intelligentsia using Christian doctrine.83 Tolkien, therefore, followed Wordsworth in creating an experiential mode: The virtual suppression, in The Lord of the Rings, of the theogenic and teleological myths central to The Silmarillion, so that the reader must intuit for himself, through imagined experience, the possibility of religious order underlying Middle-earth, marks a huge stride into the world of modernism. The effectiveness of the work is founded, not upon the presumed truth of Christian doctrine, but rather upon the emotional appeal of a powerfully-realised re-imagining of the world, which affirms its essential goodness, locates evil in negation, and relates ethical and peri-ethical values to this fundamentally affirmative conception.84

Colin Duriez (1993) rejected a modernist interpretation of Tolkien and limned a portrait of him as a “twentieth-century Christian apologist” whose fiction recovers “a Christian way of seeing reality.”85 Boyle (2005) professed that Tolkien “captures the experience of coming after meaning . . . the experience of inhabiting a world in which a great story was once present but is now accessible only in shards of illumination and memory, moments of communion with saints; yet it is a world in which life has to be lived and a task has to be performed; it is a post-Christian world in which Christ still has to be imitated.”86 Perhaps what Tolkien introduced, according to Daniel Hughes (1968), is a kind of Neo-Christianity catalyzed through an ironical “de-creation” (Simone Weil), in which the creature suddenly realizes “a reduction from what we think we will be to what, in divine perspective, we are.”87 Sean McGrath (1999) observed that in the

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self-sacrifices of Boromir, Gandalf, and Frodo, Tolkien shows that “diminishment in natural being is not necessarily a diminishment of Reality.”88 It is perhaps in this way that Tolkien’s fiction both reduces and inspires the reader.89

GOOD, EVIL, AND FREE WILL No single issue has divided scholars interested in Tolkien’s theology more than his view of good and evil in relation to free will in The Lord of the Rings.90 In 1971 Gunnar Urang portrayed a Tolkien who “struggle[d] against” Manichaeanism.91 Two years later Philip Pettit philosophized that Tolkien rejected Manichaean Dualism and provided instead a “psychological explanation of how evil originates.”92 Roger Drury (1980) also cited “the complexities of the Christian faith” that arise in Tolkien’s writing, “that of the balance between predestination and free will” in the context of “prophecy” and “providential design.”93 Kathleen E. Dubs (2004) held that providential guidance and free will were not mutually exclusive and drew on the philosophy of Boethius to suggest that Tolkien could call on Christian philosophy without being in thrall to “the Christian historical perspective.”94 Tolkien’s writing, according to Thomas Hibbs (2003), articulated the reverse, that the “providential world is one in which human history has the structure of a plot, an intelligible dramatic unity.”95 Paul Kocher (1972) refused to force “a literary masterpiece into any tight philosophical mold” and was among the first to tackle the ontological status of Sauron’s evil. Kocher compared him to Goethe’s Mephistopheles in Faust, an “absolute non-Being,” and referred to Thomas Aquinas to explain Tolkien’s views.96 Willis Glover (1975) observed that even the “final defeat of evil” did not necessarily make contingency any less of a factor “in any particular episode of the struggle or in the lifetime of any particular person.”97 Richard Bullock (1985) questioned the role of free will in the context of good and evil, and its domination or surrender.98 It was Shippey, a decade after Urang, who dropped a theological bomb when he presented a case study of the possibility of Dualism in The Lord of the Rings in an analysis of Frodo at Mount Doom.99 He went further in Author of the Century (2000) and suggested that the “Inklings may have had a certain tolerance for

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Manichaeanism”100 and he further buttressed his original argument: “Is Frodo guilty? Has he given in to temptation? Or just been overpowered by evil? If one puts the question like that, there is a surprising and ominous echo to them, which suggests that this whole debate between ‘Boethian’ and ‘Manichaean’ views, far from being one between orthodoxy and heresy, is at the absolute heart of the Christian religion itself.”101 Shippey was not alone in spotting a Manichaean tendency although not a “domination” of Dualism in Tolkien’s thought.102 Thomas Honegger (2005) listed others who hold that there is a strong dualistic tendency in Tolkien.103 Robert Eaglestone (2005) justified Shippey’s refusal “to conclude on this matter” owing to Tolkien’s refusal to conclude on it.104 Tolkien was keenly aware of the philosophical complexity of the question of evil, according to John Treloar (1988); and The Lord of the Rings reflects Augustinian philosophy,105 an interpretation upheld by Matthew Fisher (2006) who provided evidence for an “Augustinian Catholic” view of evil in The Lord of the Rings.106 Going against his view of Shippey’s seemingly Manichaean reading, Scott Davison (2003) concluded that Tolkien “endorses the Augustinian view of evil.”107 Wood (2007) minced no words in critiquing Shippey’s “mistaken argument” and proposed that “Tolkien is a radical anti-dualist.”108

THE BEOWULF PROBLEM Tolkien’s 1936 British Academy lecture on “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics”109 has withstood the test of time remarkably well110 and has been the site of much scholarly investigation as it sheds light on Tolkien’s approach to pagan sources. Shippey (1982) laid out the dilemma: Above all, to Tolkien’s mind, there must have been present the problem of Beowulf. This is certainly the work of a Christian writing after the conversion of England. However the author got through 3182 lines without mentioning Christ, or salvation, and yet without saying specifically that his heroes, including the kind and honest figure of Beowulf himself, were damned—though he must have known that historically and in reality they were all pagans, ignorant even of the name of Christ. Could the Christian author have thought his pagan heroes were saved?

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He had the opinion of the Church against him if he did. Could he on the other hand have borne to consign them to Hell for ever?111

Shippey imagined that Tolkien saw himself as the one to resolve this dilemma by creating “virtuous pagans” who dwelt at a time “before all but the faintest premonitions of dawn and revelation”112 in a “heathen or pre-Christian world” presented with “a sympathetic bowdlerization (no slavery, no human sacrifices, no pagan gods).”113 Andy Dimond (2004) remarked that this approach was used by others who had sought to “legitimize Norse paganism as a subject for good Christian study.”114 Was Tolkien doing that which Johann Gottfried Herder had done for other cultures or that Thomas Carlyle had attempted to do for Scandinavian myth? Urang (1971) asserted that both the old gods and Christian references in The Lord of the Rings were handled in a similar way to the “conversion” of older materials in Beowulf.115 Randel Helms used the word “fusion” to describe this process in Beowulf and contended that the Christian gospel “hallows” legends.116 Shippey preferred to see The Lord of the Rings as a “suspension between pagan myth and Christian truth.”117 Birzer (2002) expanded this thinking and saw Tolkien’s Beowulf essay as an intertwining of pagan virtue with Christian theology: “Tolkien’s belief that the best of the pagan world should be sanctified reflects St. Augustine’s thinking.”118 In Birzer’s elucidation, Tolkien followed in the footsteps of Clement and Augustine—“appropriating the best of pagan culture and sanctifying it as Christian.”119 Peter Kreeft (2005) explained that Tolkien followed the Catholic natural law tradition and esteemed pagan contributions to culture.120 Janet Blumberg (2002) perceived Tolkien’s pre-Christian setting for The Lord of the Rings as one in which “the ascendancy of the new Christian order is not yet complete.”121 She had in mind a paternalistic Tolkien who contemplated that the pagan world not only needed, but also awaited redemption: “for the Christian mind, those small and flickering campfires are no longer alone; they are unknowingly ‘keeping faith,’ as it were, with that transcendent reality of a heavenly light beyond all earthly darkness. Such a Christian perspective cannot help but praise the campfires that blazed and then went out, long before hope for an otherworldly rescue ever came into sight. The faithfulness of the preChristian heart is if anything more remarkable, more pure, than

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the faithfulness that knows it will be rewarded.”122 This Christianizing interpretation is echoed by Kenneth Craven (2003): “The poem yearns for salvation, but beautiful as it is, neither Middle Earth nor Númenor can offer more than a blessed preternatural state achieved through love of beauty and wisdom. Like the world before Christ, Tolkien’s world contains high virtue and a longing for something else, spoken cryptically in its tales and cultures. Only the Incarnation can bring the hope that fulfills that longing.”123 Christopher Vaccaro (2004) noted that Tolkien carried on the purposeful conflation of Christian and pagan imagery in the symbol of the Cross of Christ in the White Tree of Gondor: “The tree/cross conflation was well established in the Middle Ages and, as a medievalist, Tolkien would have been very familiar with that. The White Tree is Yggdrasil . . . Volsung’s Branstock, and a brighter version of Kalevala’s mighty oak. Maintaining an artful balance between the Biblical tradition and original fairy-story, Tolkien gives us an image that begs for Christian interpretation.”124 In this volume, John R. Holmes dilates on the interplay between the Christian and pagan elements, as well as on the idea of preparatio evangelium, in “Like Heathen Kings: Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien’s Fiction.” Jane Chance Nitzsche’s groundbreaking Tolkien’s Art: “A Mythology for England” (1979) sustained a monograph-length argument about how Tolkien’s “epic novel” synthesized Germanic heroic, medieval, and Christian ideas as he described in his Beowulf essay, without “hallowing” or “sanctifying” pagan culture.125 She later (2001) called Tolkien a “master assimilator” in his ability to balance Germanic pagan and Christian concepts, as well as medieval culture.126 Marjorie Burns (2005) put the question plainly: “J.R.R. Tolkien, Christian believer or crier of Nordic doom?”127 She responded: “He is a Christian believer whose answers lie in a ‘beyond’ (a beyond that may as well be thought of as westward over the Sea). At the same time—on this plane—Tolkien is very much a Norseman and adheres to a Norseman’s creed. His message, then, is a double one. It speaks of doom and inevitable battle and it speaks of eternal peace.”128 Stephen Morillo argues in this collection that Norse paganism and Tolkien’s peculiar medievalism are at the heart of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in “The Entwives: Investigating the Spiritual Core of The Lord of the Rings.” Patrick Curry (1997) assumed that a syncretic approach, even one constituted by “postmodern flux and mingling” would lead to

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a clearer understanding of the religious dimension: “The Lord of the Rings transcends any strictly monotheistic reading. Instead, it manifests an extraordinary ethico-religious richness and complexity which derives from the blending of Christian, pagan, and humanist ingredients. It is all of these, and no single one of them. They can be separated analytically, of course, but not their joint and mutual effects—any more than can the different flavours that make up a soup.”129 Although accepting this notion of blended traditions, Stratford Caldecott proffered the primacy of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings: “the book could also be read as a demonstration of how much in ‘paganism’ is, or could be, compatible with Christianity— though not with a Christianity from which (in deference to postCartesian scientism) all cosmology has been extirpated. If some pagans have taken The Lord of the Rings for a ‘pagan’ work, it is not because Tolkien rejects Christianity, but because he views Christ as the fulfillment of pagan wisdom.”130 Shippey (2000) provocatively penned: “if pagans knew of Aurvandil, and Aurvandil is the same linguistically as Earendel, and Earendel was early equated with Christ, then could pre-Christians not have had some intuition, some sense of forerunner of their true and eventual Saviour?”131 Elmar Schenkel (2003), who called Tolkien a “conservative Catholic,” envisioned that Tolkien achieved not merely a “mythology for England” but an embodiment of European heritage through the symbiosis of Christianity and northern mythology.132 Similarly, but on a stylistic level, Martin Simonson (2006) in a careful reading noticed an “intertraditional dialogue” of various European literary traditions in the narrative on the level of genre. He traced through Aragorn the epic, romance, and novelistic modes which he judged shared “affinities with pagan and Christian paradigms.”133

CHRISTIAN REFERENCES In 1970 Gracia Fay Ellwood, respecting Tolkien’s own injunction against allegorical readings,134 followed the hint that “applicability” would assist in interpretation and identified Christ imagery in The Lord of the Rings; Sandra Miesel noted the same two years later.135 Shippey (1982) believed that Tolkien was thinking about The Lord’s Prayer as he wrote the Sammath Naur scene136 and

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proved the Christian significance of the fall of Sauron on March 25: “In Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, March 25 is the date of the Crucifixion; also of the Annunciation (nine months before Christmas); also of the last day of Creation. By mentioning the date Tolkien was presenting his ‘eucatastrophe’ as a forerunner or ‘type’ of the greater one of Christian myth.”137 There is even one moment when Shippey (1982) insinuated that Tolkien had brought readers “to the edge of Christian reference”—“at which Revelation seems very close and allegory does all but break through—naturally enough, a moment of ‘eucatastrophe,’ to use Tolkien’s term for sudden moments of fairy-tale salvation.” He refers to the song when Barad-dûr has fallen and certifies that “There is no doubt here about Tolkien’s stylistic model, which is the Bible and particularly the Psalms.”138 More recently, scholars have begun making stylistic comparisons between The Lord of the Rings and another Christian text, the Book of Mormon.139 Purtill (1984) averred that Gandalf and Frodo are “free creatures” who answer the call to “imitate Christ.”140 Kathleen Jones (1986) suspected that Tolkien began to model Frodo on Jesus of Nazareth “up to the end of Book II,” but then “regretted” it and “punished the hapless Hobbit (for his presumption?) with the most unsupportable tortures, and finally resolved, after much deliberation, that he must not be allowed to triumph (as was indeed his due) either in life or death. He must neither succeed in his quest nor be brought to final crucifixion, or the equivalent.”141 Stratford Caldecott (1999) deciphered in Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo not only examples of “Christian heroism,” but also “a kind of ‘Christ-figure.’”142 Following Catholic tradition, Jean Chausse (2001) identified three figures of Christ or “facets of the personality of Jesus”—Laborer, Sufferer, King—that correspond to Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn.143 Kreeft (2005) summarized that Christ is present in hidden ways in The Lord of the Rings, that there are parallels to Christ’s historical life, for example Christ’s Way of the Cross is embedded in Frodo’s journey up Mount Doom, with Sam a kind of Simon of Cyrene. He wrote: “The Lord of the Rings is like the Eucharist. Under its appearance we find Christ, who under these (pagan, universal) figures (symbols, not allegories), is truly hidden: quae sub his figuris vere latitat.”144 Kreeft vigorously advocated the triune approach: Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn are three Christ figures who undergo

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forms of death and resurrection and function as self-sacrificing saviors: they exemplify the Old Testament threefold Messianic symbolism of prophet (Gandalf), priest (Frodo), and king (Aragorn) . . . and correspond to the three distinctively human powers of the soul, as discovered by nearly every psychologist from Plato to Freud: head, heart, hands or mind, emotions, will. For this reason many great tales have three protagonists: Gandalf, Frodo, Aragorn; Mr Spock, Bones McCoy, Captain Kirk; Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitri Karamazov; St. John the philosophical mystic, St. James the practical moralist, and St. Peter the courageous leader and Rock.145

CHRISTENDOM OR RESTORATION OF A CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ORDER Donald L. Reinken (1966) was among the first to observe the possibilities of a Christian political order in The Lord of the Rings.146 J. S. Ryan (1969) held that Middle-earth was ready to be absorbed in all areas by Christian culture: Perhaps the final estimate of The Lord of the Rings should be as an implicit sweep of the history of Christian culture, the way in which the nations of the West were brought together and acquired a common consciousness, and an awareness of Christian philosophy, a sense of cultural and spiritual unity . . . Middle-earth contains all the materials for religion and awaits the new dynamic principle of the Christian way of life, which will break down the closed self-centred world of secular culture. Already the actions of the Fellowship have paved the way for a culture to overlay and absorb the earlier ones in a sacred order which includes aspects political, legal, moral, ritual and spiritual.147

Charles Coulombe (1999) supposed that “the dark Lord’s forces might represent not only modernity, but the Islam which was Christendom’s greatest previous enemy; the Tower of the Guard, Minas Tirith, might be seen as a symbol of the Church Militant, of the Res Publica Christiana.”148 Couloumbe interpreted Aragorn as a figure who could tap into the modern Catholic political messianism that called for the restoration of Otto von Hapsburg to the Austro-Hungarian throne and placed hope in a Pilsudski and John F. Kennedy, but also fueled belief in Franco and Castro. Aragorn is thus seen as

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a successful Bonnie Prince Charlie and a Charlemagne figure, one who would usher in the Carolingian Renaissance.149 The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, against the United States have served as a backdrop against which political nuances in the interpretation of Tolkien’s fiction are applied. John West Jr. (2002) linked key themes of The Lord of the Rings to the “cornerstones” of Western Civilization: Natural Law, the Fall, Freedom, and the Transcendent.150 Kreeft (2002) judged The Lord of the Rings to be a book about war that outlines the characteristics of evil and enlightens a culture to its own evils, such as “America’s death camps for unborn babies.”151 Janet Brennan Croft’s 2004 “Tolkien and Just War Doctrine” (2004) connects these facets of Tolkien’s writing and Catholicism.152 Boyle (2005) gave a robust reading of Tolkien’s possible Catholic political aspirations in his 2002 Erasmus Lectures at the University of Notre Dame. Boyle recalled the special “Prayer for England” that Tolkien would have participated in as an English Catholic and saw in Hobbits representatives of an antithetical force opposed to the “diabolical project” of a “global Great Britain” which was Protestant, individualistic, capitalistic, and imperialist.153 This opposition was symbolized in “the planting of the fairy tree, which puts the Shire under the special protection of an Elf Queen, [and] is something like the return of England, Mary’s dowry, to the Roman faith. The ultimate answer to our question, what are the hobbits? must then be that they are, at least by the end of the book, the representatives of a Catholic England which has resisted the temptation to secular modernity, in particular to Britishness, and has accepted its place within Christendom.”154

SUB-CREATION AND EUCATASTROPHE The key concept of “sub-creation,” which Tolkien coined, means that “the human myth-maker or storyteller may appropriately be likened to God as creator, while acknowledging that human imagination is a secondary expression of the divine creative power.”155 Another key term that Tolkien engenders in the same essay is “eucatastrophe”—the “consolatory happy ending,” which he imbues with theological meaning as he associates it with the Resurrection.156 Both neologisms are presented in his seminal essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” delivered first as a lecture in 1939.157

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This is a well-trodden pathway taken by those who seek to distil a coherent theory of Christian fantasy at work in Tolkien’s fiction, from at least Reilly’s 1963 essay to that by Martin Meyer forty years later. It is an approach used fruitfully and in different ways here by two political theorists, Carson Holloway in “Redeeming SubCreation” and Jason Boffetti, “The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community.” In 1973 Rolland Hein characterized the “pattern portrayed in the life of Christ (incarnation, death, resurrection = eucatstrophe)” as expressing “the complete paradigm upon which successful fantasies draw.”158 Frank Scafella (1981) took Tolkien to mean that although the “Author” of the Gospels was outside of the text, the Evangelists were in essence “sub-creators”—a thesis that could lead to the believer’s conflation of fact and fiction through the notion that the “Gospels contain a fairy story,” although it is the model that all fairy-stories mimic.159 Purtill (1984) agreed that Tolkien’s understanding of fantasy was deeply related to Christianity.160 Martha Sammons (1988) explained that Tolkien defined sub-creation “with an inner consistency of reality . . . [He made] it a reality apart from ours” and “consider[ed] his myth a supplement to the Bible.”161 Colin Manlove (1999) held that while Tolkien did not intend it, he permits readers to interpret The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in “Christian heroic terms” and allowed that “a fantasy that succeeds in producing a fully ‘sub-created’ world, and has a happy ending, may be drawing sacramentally on the greatest fairy-story of all, the one that became real in the life of Christ.”162 Manlove has long alleged that The Lord of the Rings— “facile and weak”—failed to meet the very standards for fairy stories set by Tolkien himself.163 John Davenport pinpointed Tolkien making an analogical turn in The Lord of the Rings, “just as the Stewards of Gondor are supposed to hold their realm in trust for the lost Númenórean King, should he ever return, so the rightful Owner of the world has entrusted Middle-earth to the care of Gandalf and his fellow wizards (and less directly to the care of the Valar, Ilúvatar’s archangelic regents), until He comes to this world Himself.”164 Some scholars insinuate a reader response, an initiatory aspect through what they see as the vicarious redemptive process at work in The Lord of the Rings. Mary Schmiel (1983) ascertained that the “Redemptive process in . . . The Lord of the Rings takes place not only in the actual story, but in the spirit of the reader, who is also a

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spectator and participant. We enter the Fellowship voluntarily. As we respond to the call to adventure . . . we disappropriate ourselves from our familiar world.”165 Stephen Lawhead (1999) assumed that as a Christian writer Tolkien believed that God operates through art,166 while David Sandner (2000) echoed that fantasy “works on us like a gospel, not only relating a moral but actually enacting it.”167 Donald Williams (2004) argued in the same vein that the “incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection of Christ not only complete and fulfill the Old Testament prophecy, they complete and fulfill the plots of all the great myths and fairy stories of the human race. All the hints in our literature that we are more than mere collocations of atoms coalesce into a coherent explanation of who and what we are when we see that this eucatastrophe is indeed the Happy Ending we were made for.”168

THE SILMARILLION AND THE LEGENDARIUM One area where the debate over the role of Christianity in Tolkien’s fiction continues is in reference to The Silmarillion (1977) and other posthumously published writings relating to Tolkien’s legendarium. Kilby (1976) testified that he had learned in personal conversations with Tolkien that the “Secret Fire” in The Silmarillion was meant to suggest the Holy Ghost.169 Kocher (1985) continued this association as he discerned that in The Silmarillion and Lost Tales there are two members of the Trinity present, God the Father, represented by Ilúvatar, and God the Holy Spirit, represented by the “‘Secret Fire’ or ‘Flame Imperishable’ which ‘giveth Life and Reality.’”170 In 1982 Shippey pronounced magisterially: “The Silmarillion was based on the Christian story of Fall and Redemption, whether one took it from Genesis or Paradise Lost.”171 Sally Bartlett (1984) showed “how every age of Middle-earth mirrors the Christian tale through the four components of creation, degeneration, sacrifice, and renewal.”172 Katharyn Crabbe (1981) detected in The Silmarillion tensions between what she labeled “the two most important influences in Tolkien’s life,” namely, “his religion and his love for the ancient and heroic north.”173 Neil Isaacs (1981) charged that the “eschatological glimpses in The Silmarillion only serve to put into perspective the proportionally minute use of explicitly Christian mythology in Tolkien’s subcreation.”174

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Burns (1998) reveled in the “conflicts” that The Silmarillion throws into relief: “Tolkien’s two-sidedness, his habit of granting equal standing to opposing ideals, his habit of creating mutually exclusive possibilities and developing them both to the full.”175 She cited examples of his “wish for permanence and change, for both security and adventure, for both innocence and experience” and “singular and multiple gods.”176 She showed through a chronological examination of Tolkien’s drafts how his ideas could change, so that for example the “god-head role” could be shared in “two differing forms” between the One and the pantheon of the Valar.177 Nils Ivar Agøy (1998) divided Tolkien studies into two eras, the “classical period” before The Silmarillion and the period after its publication. In the so-called classical period commentators would marvel at the absence of religion in The Lord of the Rings, but would typically argue that the morals in the book were consonant with Christianity, and that one could find surface parallels to Christian motifs: Frodo, Gandalf and Aragorn were Christ-figures, Elbereth a Mary-figure and so on. There was also Faramir’s Grace at meal and the frequently-overlooked reference to “the One” in the Appendices. And then there was “On Fairy-Stories” and scattered statements by Tolkien which seemed to explain yes, The Lord of the Rings was the work of a Catholic, but also seemed to indicate that this was almost coincidental.178

Agøy, using theological standards, saw in the later legendarium, particularly in “Debate of Finrod and Andreth,” allusions to “the Revelation of Christ and the Incarnation.”179 Flieger (1998) disputed this by employing literary analysis that resulted in an indeterminate reading: “Only if we can accept multiple voices, competing interpretations and contending points of view, only if we can be as honest, as doubtful, as hopeful as Tolkien was, only if we can answer the question ‘whose myth is it?’ by acknowledging that it is—in all its indeterminacy and irresolution—Tolkien’s—only then can we truly say also that it is ours.”180 Christina Scull (2000) offered a biographical reason for such seeming incompatibility: “Christopher Tolkien has observed that as his father’s life went on he became detached from his oldest legends. He could now study them, as if he had discovered them; and as he did so his mythology and poetry ‘sank down behind his theological and philosophical preoccupations: from which arose incompatibilities of tone.’”181 Flieger (2002), strengthening ideas

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that she had put forward in 1983, distinguished between Christian reference and Christian meaning: “Moreover, only in the most general sense can The Silmarillion be characterized as Christian, and in no sense at all can The Lord of the Rings be given so definitive a label. That both works are informed with the spirit of Christianity is clear. However, the seeker after explicit Christian reference, as distinct from Christian meaning, will find little in either book to get a grip on.”182 Thomas Fornet-Ponse (2006) exhibited how Tolkien’s philosophical and theological convictions began to shape his legendarium, much as Elizabeth Whittingham (2008) did: “The eschatology of Middle-earth demonstrates Tolkien’s move away from the Norse Doom of the Gods to a closer alignment with the Christian theology and images of trust and future vindication despite present defeat.”183 Burns traced how Tolkien “slowly and slightly brought his Valar in line with his Christian belief” by limiting the dramatic potential of the creation and the “human muddle” in that Melkor carries all of the evil and Ilúvatar is wholly pure and righteous. She opined that “for good and ill . . . Tolkien finds a balance between his Christian devotion and his attachment to ancient gods.”184 Here, Ralph Wood uses this balance as a heuristic device to explore Tolkien’s complex understanding of causality. Agøy (1995) observed that “The specifically Christian character of the later versions of the legendarium (including The Lord of the Rings) has been frequently overlooked despite the wealth of theological clues. Middle-earth is strictly monotheistic, God is allpowerful and good, and He has created the universe from nothing (creation ex nihilo). The Creator and His Creation are sharply distinct. The Creation is not eternal, its history is linear, with a beginning and an end. This combination of features is unique to Judeo-Christian beliefs. Tolkien does not describe the initial Fall of Man, but presupposes it.”185 Similarly Mary Carman Rose (1982) asserted that the first two chapters of The Silmarillion “provide an obviously Christian Platonist account of creation. The act of creation is accompanied by the beauty of song, and the product of this song is a metaphysically fundamental locus of beauty in the harmonious relations between creation and creator and among the various aspects of creation. The harmony is broken by the disobedience of one of the Valar, creatures analogous to the angels of the pseudo-Dionysius and to whom some of the work of creation is entrusted.”186 In 1995 Mary E. Zimmer continued this theme (which

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she revisited in 2004) by analyzing how the names and language in Middle-earth function according to Christian and Neoplatonist principles. John William Houghton (1995) proclaimed that there was no evidence that Tolkien modeled the Ainulindalë on Augustine’s De Genesi, but pointed to “the symmetry of opposed motives between Augustine’s reading of Genesis and Tolkien’s account of the creation. Each man lives in a time which sees Genesis under attack from contemporary science: in Augustine’s day, the story of creation seemed to contradict the Stoic and Neo-Platonic philosophers’ picture of the world; in Tolkien’s, as in our own, physical science and literary criticism seemed to converge in an attack on the myths of western religion, in particular on the stories of creation in Genesis.”187 And in 2003 Houghton speculated further: “Had medieval theologians encountered the Ainulindalë, they would have found its picture of a double creation—creation as music in the song of the Ainur and then as fact in the world of Ilúvatar—reassuringly easy to fit into the schema of Augustine’s Christian-Neoplatonist synthesis.”188 Bradford Lee Eden (2003) and Honegger (2005)189 both recognized the “medieval cosmological theory” of the “music of spheres.”190 Flieger (2005) contended that a quick comparison between Christianity and Tolkien’s mythos reveals some fundamental differences and not just on the level of doctrine or creed. Tolkien’s is a far darker world than that envisioned by Christianity . . . Unlike the Judeo-Christian story with which it is so often compared and that tells of a world fallen through human willfulness and saved by sacrifice, Tolkien’s mythos as a whole begins with a fall long before humanity comes on the scene and is saved (but only temporarily) twice—once by Eärendil and once by Frodo.191

One of those “fundamental differences” was cited by Trevor Hart (2007) who urged that The Silmarillion is “a theological myth depicting the creation of the world by God and the participation in God’s creative activity by angelic beings whose own mode of creativity is decisively marked by the fact that they are, in their turn, God’s creatures rather than his divine counterparts.”192 Elizabeth Whittingham (2008) concurred with parts of Flieger’s assessment and conceded that Tolkien expected defeat in history and that his “perception of our world and his portrayal of Middle-

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earth align closely with Jesus’ words at the Last Supper: ‘In the world, you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world’ . . . Tolkien, likewise, gives the people of Middle-earth— and those who read his tales—one thing: hope. In fact, the hope that Tolkien builds into his world is multi-faceted, as is the Christian hope.”193 Whittingham recalled that the “men with Jesus all die, and reportedly, the Romans crucify Peter, but according to Christian theology the hope of Christ’s second coming and eternal life for believers is beyond this world. These promises parallel the four-fold hope that Tolkien has incorporated into Middleearth.”194 First, “the One is present in the world” and in all creation, where it extends grace and intervenes at various times through the agency of Eru and the Valar; second, the “sovereignty” of Ilúvatar in the Ainulindalë in being able to give the Gift (of death) to Men, to raise humans to combat the Shadow in all its forms, and to defeat Morgoth completely; third, the “Old Hope,” which Whittingham interpreted to mean a future “incarnation” that “does not occur in the history of Middle-earth”; fourth, the intimation of an “Arda Healed, or maybe even a New Arda” when “Ilúvatar’s themes are ‘played aright.’”195

ROMAN CATHOLIC INTERPRETATIONS Catholic interpretations of Tolkien’s work have long abounded even if, as Owen Dudley Edwards (2003) vigorously averred, Tolkien did not put his Catholicism on “sectarian parade” or feel the “need to present Catholic arms.”196 There has been a new surge in avowedly Catholic scholarship on the subject that would appear to coincide with the worldwide renewal of Catholic spirituality led by two strong popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who have affirmed Catholic doctrines, magisterial authority, and the traditions of the Church.197 Catholics have been active in the public square, particularly in protecting the life of the unborn and in affirming the sanctity of the covenant of traditional marriage.198 Perhaps this confidence stems in part from the active role that the Vatican played in opposing the triple threat of the twentieth century: Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.199 The rejuvenation of some traditional religious orders and the founding of new ones, the rise of new Catholic institutions of higher education secure in their orthodox identity or conscious attempts to reinvigorate those

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identities such as at Notre Dame or Villanova Universities, and leadership provided by lay movements including Opus Dei, have all contributed. Catholic scholars have drawn on the long Catholic intellectual tradition to mount arguments against secularism, materialism, and nihilism. Joseph Pearce’s Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998) marshalled Tolkien’s letters, made accessible in 1981 in Humphrey Carpenter’s collection, and assessed Tolkien on his own terms of Catholic orthodoxy. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Tolkien has been claimed as the “great Catholic poet of the post-Christian era,”200 one who produced the modern era’s “great Catholic epic, fit to stand beside the Grail Legends, Le Morte D’Arthur, and The Canterbury Tales.”201 Birzer here in “The ‘Last Battle’ as a Johannine Ragnarök: Tolkien and the Universal” elucidates how Tolkien’s appropriation of the universalist ideas of the Stoics and medieval Christians has produced a modern epic in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. One way to situate Tolkien as a Catholic writer is to show that he shared the concerns of his contemporary Catholic authors, including “a fascination with the vulnerable and doomed hero, preeminent in François Mauriac’s Le Noeud de Vipères (1932), George Bernano’s Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (1936), Graham Greene’s The Power and Glory (1940), and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) and Brideshead Revisited (1945).”202 Joseph Pearce’s Literary Giants, Literary Catholics (2005) featured an array of essays that provides a compelling context for Tolkien as an integral innovator of the great Catholic literary recrudescence of the twentieth century. Fisher (2006) did not see Tolkien, who was more concerned with questions of language and myth, as contributing to the literary revival of Newman, Chesterton, and Belloc: “These other authors were concerned in large part with demonstrating how orthodox Christianity, particularly Catholicism, was universally valid and contained tenets that transcended limits of time and effectively countered modern secularism, subjectivism, individualism, belief in progress, and various forms of totalitarianism.”203 Pearce attests here that Tolkien did share contemporary Catholic concerns in “The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community.” Birzer located Tolkien among the great Christian Humanists of the twentieth century: John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Edward E. I. Watkin. He

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highlighted that for “Tolkien, the most important of the English Christian humanists was the historian [Christopher] Dawson” who held a chair at Harvard.204 Boyle understood this sense of history, applicable especially to English Catholics, as “the experience of coming after a period in which a unified system of life and belief held sway, of stumbling across survivals or memories of past meanings. Most significant of all, because most deeply felt, is its depiction of the experience of historical change—of the transition from one age to another and of the cost to those who are called on to live through such a crisis.”205 Michael Tomko here examines precisely this particular historical sensibility in “‘An Age Comes On’: J.R.R. Tolkien and the English Catholic Sense of History.” Thomas Smith (2006) defined a “Catholic imagination” as allencompassing and mediated “the way Tolkien’s religious vision suffuses his writings.” Thus ideas such as tradition or certain characters or “nature, sacrifice, wisdom, stewardship, suffering, weakness, contingency, hierarchy, mercy, failure, justice, death, and pilgrimage” mediate meaning in Tolkien’s fiction.206 Leon Pereira (2008) held up St. Augustine as Tolkien’s ideal of religiosity—not ritual, but love and “divine love” is the essence of the bond between Sam and Frodo.207 James Lynch (1978) considered the feast scenes of The Lord of the Rings as types of Eucharistic feast. He identified Bilbo’s farewell party, the banquet at Rivendell in the house of Elrond, and the feast in Lothlórien hosted by Galadriel as types of the Last Supper (each is focused on a departure and greater errand) and contrasted these “sacred” feasts of “holy communion” with the profane perversion of the same by Saruman promising man-flesh to the Uruk-hai.208 Kath Filmer (1987) held that The Lord of the Rings was a Christian apologetic and that central to the Catholic worldview is “the constant replenishing of sanctifying grace through the sacraments of the Church” by which the Miltonian “wayfaring Christian” is strengthened.209 Filmer identified symbols of these strengthening sacraments in lembas and miruvor (bread and wine) and through the personification of Christian concepts such as “Pity” and “Mercy,” as well as through the sub-agency of Gandalf who is a “parallel” to “the Church in its role as the dispenser of Grace.”210 Robert Murray (2003) observed that although never named as such in The Lord of the Rings, it “is full of sacraments.”211 Adam Roberts (2005) concurred that sacramental notions inhere in the central symbol of The Lord of the Rings: “Tolkien chooses a Ring that re-

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sembles a marriage band precisely because, for a Catholic, the marriage ring is a sacramental icon.”212 Fornet-Ponse (2007) rejected the comparison of Elven lembas to the Eucharist, for the Eucharist “instituted by Christ . . . has to be received in a service . . . it is intended for all Men and not restricted to the Elves and few exceptions; and in some cases confession is necessary before receiving communion.”213 Petty (2003) affirmed that “archetypes common to numerous religions and mythologies” existed in Tolkien’s fiction and described the relationship between his religion and his writing: “His Catholicism underlies the foundations of Middle-earth, but it doesn’t directly dictate the actions of his characters or the myths by which they live.”214 In addition, Garbowski’s notion is that of an expansive Tolkienian mythology (2002) that bursts the confines of any single denomination (2003).215 Catholicism points out that in this life Christian growth can occur through suffering. This has not escaped the notice of critics: “This paradox, central to Tolkien’s world, is also at the heart of the Christian spiritual life. The journey to the light of God can also be made through darkness . . . This apophatic or negative way of approaching God has a long history in Christian mysticism, and is at the heart of the works of the great English spiritual writers of the fourteenth century.”216 Dwight Longenecker (2003) proffered this observation: “Tolkien presents us with a Christian hero and type of the Christian saint because Frodo, in his faithful obedience and humility lives out the way of sacrificial love. Redemptive suffering lies at the heart of the Christian way.”217 For Boyle (2005), to miss the Catholic outlook is to miss the plot: “the success of Frodo’s mission is a salvation which only a Catholic view of life can explain. To interpret the quest, and its end, without reference to Tolkien’s Catholicism is to lose a whole dimension of its significance.”218 Urang (1971) thought similarly—to miss the Christianity inherent in the piece was to miss rich insights about the reader’s own condition: The Lord of the Rings, although it contains no “God,” no “Christ,” and no “Christians,” embodies much of Tolkien’s “real religion” and is a profoundly Christian work. Tolkien requires no “God” in this story; it is enough that he suggests in it the kind of pattern in history which the Christian tradition has ascribed to the providence of God. Aragorn and Gandalf need not turn our thoughts specifically to the Christ of Christian faith; but they persuade us that if we are to have hope in our lives and in our history, it must be hope for the kind of power and authority

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revealed in Aragorn the king and on the basis of the kind of power revealed in Gandalf’s “miracles” and in his return from the dead. Frodo is not a “Christian”; but what Frodo does and undergoes speaks to us of what a man’s responsibility, according to the Christian faith, must always be—to renounce the kind of power which would enslave others and ourselves and to submit to that power which frees us to be all that we are capable of being.219

A frequent Catholic interpretative rendering is to see in Galadriel a type of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. Ellwood (1970) accepted Galadriel as part and parcel of Jungian archetypes that equated both Isis and Mary as figures of a “nourishing Maternity.”220 Lesley Marx (1992) placed Galadriel along with Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo as partaking of the identity of Christ.221 Donald Richmond (2002) assigned a Marian influence through the “sociopsychopneumatically linked ‘homes’ of mother-love [Mabel], Mother Church, the Blessed Mother and Edith—[Tolkien’s] Lúthien and the mother of their children. These constitute the feminine ‘compass’ guiding the Rings in its writing as well as (through certain feminine characters within his texts) the entire landscape of Middle-earth.”222 Stratford Caldecott (2003) taught that “Catholics call Mary Stella Maris, ‘the Star of the Sea,’ for reasons that they themselves may find it hard to explain, but the image lies deep within Tolkien’s imagination, echoed in the figure of Varda or Elbereth, the Queen of the Stars venerated by the Elves, and also in Galadriel, who becomes for Frodo a kind of earthly image of Elbereth, and for Tolkien a representative of the Virgin Mary.”223 Burns (2005) called attention to the complex case of Galadriel “as she developed in the drafts of Tolkien’s legendarium” in contradistinction to the “gelled version from the published Silmarillion” and invited readers to ponder just how Marian a rebel is and consider that “hints of the lesser-than-ideal do in fact hover around Galadriel’s character.”224 Madsen (2004) argued that any Christianity lingering in The Lord of the Rings is merely a faded point of reference drained of all serious theological meaning: Any Christian-seeming images in it are precisely not witnesses to the Gospels; they are echoes. If Elbereth owes something to the Virgin Mary—if one can never again hear the phrase stella maris without thinking of o menel aglar elenath—it is her starriness that crosses over into Faërie, not her miraculous motherhood or her perpetual virginity. If lembas, the Elves’ waybread, clearly recalls the sacramental wafer as

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Frodo and Sam subsist on it in Mordor, it is the idea of spiritual food that comes through, shorn of all suggestion or argument of Christ’s presence in it. Tolkien borrows Christian magic, not Christian doctrine; and Christianity without doctrine is a shadow of itself.225

As she maintains in this collection, “Eru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The Lord of the Rings,” this suited Tolkien’s purposes. Boyle (2005), however, saw not doctrinal shadows, but the essential elements of Catholicism—not invented mythology—structuring The Lord of the Rings: “the calling of the individual, the communion of saints, and the relation of grace and works. They, rather than the invented mythology and cosmology out of which it is carved, structure many aspects of the book; they help to define the boundary, which in all works of fantasy is dangerously fluid, between secular fiction and sacred meaning; and they are the ultimate source of the book’s ability to speak to a very large audience about some of the greatest issues of our time.”226 As attested to in the scholarly exchange in this volume between Ronald Hutton and Nils Ivar Agøy, this collection is not designed to close off discussion and debate, but rather is an effort to show how lively, engaging, and productive the question of Christian influence on Tolkien’s literary works remains. This historiography shows how steady and fruitful the discussion and debate on this topic have been over many years and how many facets of Tolkien’s oeuvre are thrown into relief, sometimes subtly, sometimes blazingly, by analyzing the evidence along these lines. Moreover, the ebb and flow of interest in the subject tells us something not only of Tolkien and his writing, but also of the spirit of our own times, our predilections, values, and needs. All signs seem to indicate that Tolkien’s writing will continue to provoke, inspire, and provide rich food for thought about its relation to religion and spirituality generally, and Christianity in particular.

NOTES 1. See “Useful Tolkien Bibliographical Sources” in the bibliography to this book for a selection of what is a growing number of helpful bibliographical aids. Thomas Fornet-Ponse reviewed briefly the literature that examines the use of Tolkien’s biography, letters, and conversations to support Christian interpretations of The Lord of the Rings. He divides religious interpretations into three groups: those that claim the Christian perspective is the best critical perspective;

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those that analyze Christian aspects of Tolkien’s work; and those that approach the work theologically, a perspective that Fornet-Ponse would like to see undertaken by more formally qualified theologians. See his “‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.’ Tolkien zwischen christlicher Instrumentalisierung und theologischer Rezeption.” 2. Purtill, Lord of the Elves, 105. 3. Eaglestone, “Invisibility,” 78. 4. Lobdell, “Angels,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 68. 5. S. Caldecott, Power of the Ring, 61. 6. Garbowski, Recovery and Transcendence, 190–91. 7. Armstrong, “Two People,” 11. 8. Aldrich, “The Sense of Time,” in Pearce, Celebration, 87. 9. Parker, “Hwaet We Holbytla,” 608. 10. Cf. Birzer, “Christianity,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 101–3. See also Davies, “Theology in The Lord of the Rings,” in ibid., 645–46. 11. His daughter Priscilla Tolkien wrote: “His religious life as well as his temperament had given him a lifelong appreciation of liturgy and ritual: he was a devout Roman Catholic and the public worship and ceremonies of the Church were an essential part of his faith. This also meant for him a profound sense of continuity with the early Christian and medieval world (“Foreword,” in Gray, Tribute, viii). 12. Priestman, Life and Legend, 10. Cf. Coren, “Morgan, Father Francis,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 434–35. 13. In 1913 his future wife, Edith, was accepted into the Catholic Church and she and Ronald were married on March 22, 1916, in the Catholic Church of St. Mary Immaculate in Warwick. Tolkien’s son, John, “was ordained a priest at the Church of St Gregory and Augustine in North Oxford in February 1946” (Tolkien and Tolkien, Tolkien Family Album, 36–38, 70). 14. Pearce, “Saints,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 586. 15. Michael D. C. Drout has been tireless in attempting to fashion Tolkien studies into a scholarly genre with the same standards prevailing in any academic field. He has written, in exasperation, that such letters or other authorial statements are not evidence in themselves that The Lord of the Rings is necessarily meant to be religious. Of course, the text itself must be analyzed and these articles make text-based arguments, often drawing on Tolkien’s other fictional and scholarly writing. Some who complain about citing Tolkien’s letters in which he is explicit about the religious content of The Lord of the Rings quote happily from other letters without raising the same critical objection. Few have subjected Tolkien’s oft-cited dislike of allegory to the same truth test either. (See Drout and Wayne, Tom Shippey’s “Tolkien.”) One exception to this is David Harvey’s The Song of Middle-earth. 16. Tolkien to W. H. Auden, June 7, 1955, in Tolkien, Letters, 211 (Letter 163). 17. Tolkien to C. Ouboter, April 10, 1958, in ibid., 267 (Letter 208). 18. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, probably late 1951, in ibid., 144 (Letter 131). See also Tolkien’s oft-quoted “Foreword to the Second Edition” in which he stated “I cordially dislike allegory,” but that he preferred “history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings [2007], xxiv).

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19. Tolkien to Herbert Schiro, November 17, 1957, in Tolkien, Letters, 262 (Letter 202). The full context: “That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is.” 20. Tolkien to Joanna de Bortadano, drafts, April 1956, in ibid., 246 (Letter 186). Cf. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, unsent, circa October 1958, in ibid., 284 (Letter 212). 21. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, probably late 1951, in ibid., 144 (Letter 131). 22. Tolkien to Houghton Mifflin Co., in ibid., 220 (Letter 165). 23. Tolkien to Father Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in ibid., 172 (Letter 142). 24. Tolkien to Deborah Webster, October 25, 1958, in ibid., 288 (Letter 213). 25. Swann and Tolkien, Road Goes Ever On (1967), 65. 26. Purtill, Lord of the Elves, 106. 27. Sturch, Four Christian Fantasists, 7. 28. Bossert, “Tolkien and Pius X,” 73. 29. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 148–49. 30. Flieger, Interrupted Music, 51. 31. Spacks, “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings,” 82, 91. For a general introduction to this section, see Dickerson, “Theological and Moral Approaches in Tolkien’s Works,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 643–44, and Lobdell, “Angels,” in ibid., 18–19. 32. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power,” in ibid., 16. 33. “The Quest Hero,” in Isaacs and Zimbardo, Tolkien and the Critics, 53. 34. Bradley, “Men, Halflings, and Hero-Worship,” in ibid., 109. 35. Barber, “Meaning of Lord of the Rings,” 49. 36. Carter, Tolkien: A Look Behind, 93–94. 37. Wright, “The Vision of Cosmic Order in the Oxford Mythmakers,” in Huttar, Imagination and the Spirit, 276. 38. Kilby, “Mythic and Christian Elements in Tolkien,” 143. 39. Dowie, “The Gospel of Middle-earth,” 278. 40. Grant, “Tolkien: Archetype and Word,” 87, 105. 41. Gunton, “A Far-off Gleam of the Gospel,” 132–33. 42. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 256. 43. Ibid., 257. 44. Ibid. 45. Davis, “Choosing to Die,” 135. 46. L. Caldecott, “At Dawn, Look into the East,” 94. 47. Birzer, Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, 61. 48. Wood, Gospel According to Tolkien, 102. Cf. David Bratman, “Mercy,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 418–19. 49. Heckman, “Sacrifice,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 583–84. 50. Petty, One Ring, xx–xxi. 51. Petzold, Leben und Werk, 24, 93. This ground has proved fertile for Christian devotional literature that continues to “find God” in The Lord of the Rings through “ordinary virtues” that can nourish the soul, like lembas. Cf. Bruner and Ware, Finding God; R. Ellwood, Frodo’s Quest; Kohman, Lembas for the Soul; M. Smith, Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues. Schneidewind and Weinreich consider books like this to be written for inspirational purposes (“Beispiele der Instrumentalisierung von Mittelerde,” in Honegger and Weinrich, Grammatik, 32–35).

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52. Weinreich and Schneidewind, ibid., 31. 53. Sturch, Four Christian Fantasists, 111, 146. 54. Dearborn, “Theology and Morality,” 98, 96 (as quoted by Dearborn). 55. Wood, Gospel According to Tolkien, 6. 56. Ibid., 9, 4. 57. Dickerson, “Theological and Moral Approaches in Tolkien’s Works,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 150. 58. Ibid. 59. Rutledge, Battle for Middle-earth, 11. Although the “exact Bibles in Tolkien’s library are not publicly known . . . he probably used the Catholic Douay Version, as well as the Authorized (King James) Version.” He had apparently “obtained an 1865 copy of The Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels. This is an AngloSaxon translation of the Gospel of John” (Walton, “Bible,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 63). 60. S. Caldecott, Power of the Ring, 5. 61. Cf. Reilly, Romantic Religion and Kilby, “Mythic and Christian Elements,” 122. 62. Coulombe, “Catholic View,” 65. 63. Seeman, “Tolkien’s Revision,” 82. Cf. Kilby, “Tolkien and Coleridge.” See also Morus, Percival, and Rosenthal, Tolkien and Romanticism. 64. Sievers, “Tolkien’s Cosmic-Christian Theology,” 141, 149–50. 65. Dickerson and Evans, Ents, Elves, and Eriador, xxii. 66. Ibid., 64. 67. Cf. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress. 68. Glyer, The Company They Keep. 69. Monsman, “The Imaginative World of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 278. Guglielmo Spirito (2008) argued similarly: the world is full of “transcendent meaning” and “spiritual radiance” (204) and the doctrine of Creation teaches Christians “to see the world as created” (206). 70. Lobdell, World of the Rings, 59. 71. Wrigley, Return of the Hero, 58–59. 72. Madsen, “Light from an Invisible Lamp,” 46. 73. Ibid., 47. Cf. Greg Wright, an “ordained minister of the dramatic arts,” who contended that there is no Christianity in The Lord of the Rings, merely an ethical monotheism (Tolkien in Perspective, 186). 74. Milbank, Chesterton and Tolkien, 163. 75. Ibid., 166. 76. Ibid., 167. 77. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 258–59. 78. T. Smith, “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination,” 74. 79. Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 146. Schenkel asserted that the Enlightenment sanitized fantasy and thus Tolkien’s project is one of restoration. (Tolkiens Zauberbaum, 16). 80. Ibid., 146. 81. Dowie, “The Gospel of Middle-Earth,” 267. 82. Grant, “Tolkien: Archetype and Word,” in Isaacs and Zimbardo, New Critical Perspectives, 88. 83. Rosebury, Critical Assessment, 138–39. 84. Ibid., 139–40.

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85. Duriez, “Sub-creation and Tolkien’s Theology,” 146. 86. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 261–62. 87. Hughes, “Pieties and Giant Forms,” 83. 88. McGrath, “The Passion According to Tolkien,” in Pearce, Celebration, 180. 89. Rogers, “Everyclod and Everyhero,” 73. 90. Cf. Rosebury, “Good and Evil,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 250–51. See also Timmons, “Free Will,” in ibid., 221–22. 91. Urang, Shadows of Heaven, 108. 92. Pettit, “Tolkien’s Good and Evil,” 34. 93. Drury, “Providence at Elrond’s Castle,” 8. 94. Dubs, “Providence, Fate, and Chance,” 134. 95. Hibbs, “Providence and Dramatic Unity,” 174. 96. Kocher, Master of Middle-earth, 77–79. Cf. Birzer, “Thomas Aquinas,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 21–22. 97. Glover, “Christian Character,” 4–5. 98. Bullock, “Importance of Free Will,” 29. 99. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 141–44. 100. Ibid., Author of the Century, 134. See also Fornet-Ponse, “Different concepts.” 101. Ibid., 141. Cf. Houghton and Keesee, “King Alfred and Boethius.” 102. Olsza´ nski, “Evil One,” 300. 103. Honegger, “Forschungsübersicht,” 20. 104. Eaglestone, “Invisibility,” 74. 105. Treloar, “Christian Concepts,” 58–59. 106. Fisher, “Working at the Crossroads,” 225. 107. Davison, “Tolkien and the Nature of Evil,” 100–103. 108. Wood, “Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding,” 87. See also Houghton “Augustine of Hippo,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 43. 109. Cf. Dickerson, “Heathenism and Paganism,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 266– 67. See also Drout, “Beowulf: Tolkien’s Scholarship,” in ibid., 59–61. 110. Drout, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics,” in ibid., 57–58. 111. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 150. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., Author of the Century, 182. 114. Dimond, “Twilight of the Elves,” in Chance, Invention of Myth, 185. 115. Urang, Shadows of Heaven, 120. Bonniejean Christensen mooted that The Hobbit retold Beowulf in Christian registers in “Tolkien’s Creative Technique: Beowulf and The Hobbit.” 116. Helms, Tolkien’s World, 14, 27. 117. This arises in Shippey’s intriguing discussion on Frodo/Fróda/Fróthi in Road to Middle-earth (1982), 156–58. 118. Birzer, Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, 35. 119. Ibid., 36. 120. Kreeft, Philosophy of Tolkien, 222. 121. Blumberg, “Literary Backgrounds,” 59. 122. Ibid., 70. 123. Craven, “Catholic Poem,” 153. 124. Vaccaro, “Cosmological Cross,” 28.

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125. Nitzsche, Tolkien’s Art, 98. 126. Chance, Mythology of Power, 17. 127. Burns, Perilous Realms, 172. 128. Ibid., 178. 129. Curry, Defending Middle-earth (1997), 119, 117. 130. S. Caldecott, “Horns of Hope,” 13. 131. Shippey, Author of the Century, 258. 132. Schenkel, Tolkiens Zauberbaum, 27, 38. Perspectives that dilate on Tolkien in the modern European political context can be seen as responses to current tensions over the role of Christianity in the European Union. Cf. Kerry, “Quarrel over Religious Roots.” 133. Simonson, “Intertraditional Dialogue,” 109. 134. Birzer, “Christian Readings of Tolkien,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 99–101. 135. G. Ellwood, “Good News,” 85–142. Miesel situated Tolkien’s writing through the theories of Mircea Eliade on myth and sacred time, theories that Clyde Kilby drew on and that continue to be employed today. Miesel, Myth, Symbol and Religion, 56; Kilby, “Mythic and Christian Elements”; Hopp, “Das Heilige.” 136. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 110; also his Author of the Century, 141. 137. Cf. Pearce, “Incarnation,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 293–94. 138. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 150–52. 139. Bloom, “Introduction,” 2 (2000); Boyle, Sacred and Secular, (2004), 249; Kerry, “Thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and History,” 65–69 (2005). 140. Purtill, Myth, Morality, and Religion, 87. 141. Jones, “Use and Mis-use,” 5–6. 142. S. Caldecott, “Over the Chasm of Fire,” 29. 143. Chausse, “Icons of Jesus Christ,” 30–32. 144. Kreeft, Philosophy of Tolkien, 222. 145. Ibid., 223. Cf. Pearce, “Christ,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 97–98. 146. Reinken, “Christian Refounding.” Cf. Mary Keys’s “Tolkien’s Tales” for the relation of political theory to Tolkien. 147. Ryan, Tolkien: Cult or Culture?, 192. 148. Coulombe, “Catholic View,” 65. See “Romantic Conservatives.” 149. Ibid., 64–65. 150. West, “Defense of Western Civilization,” 15–16. 151. Kreeft, “Wartime Wisdom,” in West, Celebrating Middle-earth, 31. 152. Croft, War and Works, 138–45. 153. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 254. 154. Ibid., 263–64. 155. Gilliver, Marshall, and Wiener, Ring of Words, 197. 156. Ibid., 123. See also Garbowski, “Eucatastrophe,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 176–77. 157. Birzer, “Resurrection,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 479–82. 158. Hein, Christian Mythmakers, 179. 159. Scafella, “Tolkien, Gospel, and Fairy Story,” 310–20. 160. Purtill, Myth, Morality, and Religion, 1–15. 161. Sammons, “Better Country,” 14.

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162. Manlove, Fantasy Literature, 72. 163. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, 206. 164. Davenport, “Happy Endings,” 206. 165. Schmiel, “In the Forge of Los,” 18. See Delsigne, “Hobbits, Tolkien, and God.” 166. Lawhead, “J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Middle-earth,” 171. 167. Sandner, “Joy beyond the Walls of the World,” 141. 168. Williams, “Is Man a Myth?” 18. 169. Kilby, Tolkien and “The Silmarillion,” 59. 170. Kocher, “Ilúvatar,” 36. 171. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 179. 172. Bartlett, “Invasion from Eternity,” 22. 173. Crabbe, J.R.R. Tolkien, 114. 174. Isaacs, “Preface,” in Zimbardo and Isaacs, New Critical Perspectives, 3. 175. Burns, “All in One, One in All,” in Agøy, Between Faith, 6. 176. Ibid., 12. 177. Ibid., 14–15. 178. Agøy, “Fall and Man’s Mortality,” 20. 179. Ibid., 28. 180. Flieger, “Whose Myth Is It?” 42. 181. Scull, “Development of Tolkien’s Legendarium,” 23. 182. Flieger, Splintered Light, xx. 183. Whittingham, Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology, 200. 184. Burns, “Norse and Christian Gods,” 175–77. 185. Agøy, “Quid Hinieldus,” 32. Cf. Birzer, “Fall of Man,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 187–88. 186. Rose, “Christian Platonism,” in O’Meara, Neoplatonism, 205–6. Cf. Lobdell, “Angels,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 18–19. 187. Houghton, “Augustine and the Ainulindalë,” 8. 188. Ibid., 172. 189. Honegger, “Zur Phänomenologie von Gut und Böse.” 190. Eden, “The ‘Music of the Spheres,’” 184. 191. Flieger, Interrupted Music, 140. 192. Hart, “Tolkien, Creation, and Creativity,” 48. 193. Whittingham, Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology, 196. 194. Ibid. 195. Ibid., 196–98. 196. Edwards, “Gollum, Frodo, and Catholic Novel,” 85–89. 197. Bossert contended that The Lord of the Rings might show the influence of particular papal encyclicals of Pius X, Lamentabili and Pascendi domini gregis against “agnostic, immanentist, and evolutionist criticisms” (“Tolkien and Pius X,” 54). 198. Cf. Beckwith, Defending Life; Elshtain and George, Meaning of Marriage; Neuhaus, Public Square. 199. Cf. Rychlak, Righteous Gentiles; Weigel, Final Revolution. 200. Craven, “Catholic Poem,” 163. 201. Coulombe, “Catholic View,” 65. 202. Edwards, “Gollum, Frodo and Catholic Novel,” 32.

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203. Fisher, “Working at the Crossroads,” 220. Adam Schwartz also does not include Tolkien in his assessment of the Catholic literary revival associated with Chesterton, Dawson, and Greene (Schwartz, The Third Spring). 204. Birzer, Sanctifying the World, 136. 205. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 265. 206. T. Smith, “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination,” 75. 207. “Morals Makyth Man,” 182–83. 208. Lynch, “Literary Banquet,” 13–14. 209. Filmer, “Allegory Unveiled,” 19–20. 210. Ibid., 20. 211. Murray, “Tribute to Tolkien,” 99. Cf. Abromaitis, “The Distant Mirror,” in Touchstone. This article is an abridged version of her “The Sacramental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien,” chapter 4 in Whitehead, The Catholic Imagination. 212. Roberts, “The One Ring,” 64. Cf. Coren, “Marriage,” in Drout, Encyclopedia, 408–10. 213. Fornet-Ponse, “Eucharist,” in Drout, Encylopedia, 177–78. 214. Petty, Land of Heroes, 36–37. 215. See Garbowski, “Eschatology,” and “Middle-Earth and Catholic Imagination.” 216. Tolley, “Symbolism of Light,” 75. 217. Longenecker, “Little Way through Middle-Earth,” 86. 218. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 256. 219. Urang, Shadows of Heaven, 122. 220. G. Ellwood, Good News, 93. 221. Marx, “Mirror of Galadriel,” 45. 222. Richmond, “Tolkien’s Marian Vision,” 13. 223. S. Caldecott, “Over the Chasm of Fire,” 12. 224. Burns, Perilous Realms, 108–9. 225. Madsen, “Invisible Lamp,” 37. 226. Boyle, Sacred and Secular, 258.

I The Ring

The Pagan Tolkien Ronald Hutton

I’LL START WITH AN ADMISSION: THAT BY OFFERING UP A CATCHY TITLE for this chapter, I am laying myself open to a number of possible misunderstandings. So, I am going to commence by explaining what I am not going to do in it. I am not going to argue that Tolkien himself was a pagan in his personal practice of religion. He was, of course, for most of his life, a devout Roman Catholic Christian, and that was built into his own identity, self-perception, and selfpresentation. Nor am I going to play the game of identifying sources, either in ancient pagan texts or in medieval literature, that deal with a pagan past from which Tolkien drew ideas for his own mythology. This is a very valuable and enjoyable enterprise that has engaged some excellent scholars—among whom T. A. Shippey was the magnificent pioneer—but it is not my business here. Nor am I going to attempt what Catherine Madsen has recently done with such eloquence, which is to explore the profound appeal that Tolkien’s fantasy literature has for non-Christian readers, and ways in which it may be viewed as embodying a nondenominational, “natural” religion.1 I am instead going to try something broader, and in some respects more difficult: to examine the relationship between Tolkien’s own religious views, at differing times, and his imagined cosmos. In that sense my title might easily have been simply “Tolkien’s Religion,” but the one that I chose indicates the particular spin that I intend to put on it. In doing so I am taking the opportunity to build upon an essay that I published a couple of years ago,2 not merely to extend and reevaluate some of its conclusions but to make some reflections on the general difficulty of matching Tolkien’s writings with some of the things that he himself said about them. The great problem that underlies this, as every biographer or critic of the man has found, is that Tolkien himself did not want biographers and did not like critics. He fundamentally distrusted an 57

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approach to literature that focused on the person behind the work. Furthermore he was always more himself an analyst of language and a teller of tales than somebody capable of deconstructing literary works. As such, he left us no memoirs and his diaries tell us little about his works of fantasy. The closest that he ever comes to explaining himself, in any surviving sources, is in the famous collection of his letters, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, and these are a very different class of document, with particular pitfalls and limitations.3 For one thing they are not evenly spread across his long adult life, but survive overwhelmingly from the last three decades of it. The 1910s and 1920s, in which he developed his mythology, are especially badly represented. What is more, most of the letters in which he reflects on the nature of that mythology were written after The Lord of the Rings was completed, and therefore represent a series of retrospective glosses and justifications of that one work. They are targeted at particular recipients for specific ends, and usually have a defensive air. As such, although they do provide invaluable insights into Tolkien’s mind and attitudes, they cannot always be taken on face value. They certainly cannot be taken as necessarily representative of his beliefs during earlier periods of his life. I have to state this firmly because they are, inevitably, the major source quarried by his biographers and by critics of his work who wish to uncover the impulses that lay behind the creation of his imagined world and its characters. In the context of this discussion, both their importance and their difficulties are very obvious. Tolkien himself devoted more time in them to the religious elements in The Lord of the Rings than to any other aspect of the book except the linguistic one. Furthermore the embarrassment that he felt about the subject is illustrated by the fact that an unusually high proportion of the letters in which he tackled it were never sent, but kept at home as discarded drafts. When you read what he said, much of the nature of his difficulty becomes obvious, because he was trying to defend two very different positions at once. On the one hand he was anxious that people should know that he was a Christian and a Catholic. He told them so if they seemed to have any doubts, and was delighted if they read Christian meanings into The Lord of the Rings. He informed one correspondent, indeed, that his Christianity could be deduced from his stories, although—perhaps significantly—he did not specify that The Lord of the Rings was one of them. Nonetheless he added immediately after that comment that some readers had found

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specific references to Catholicism in The Lord of the Rings itself, such as resemblances between Galadriel and the Virgin Mary, or between lembas and the consecrated host of the Mass.4 To another person, a Jesuit, he declared that the book was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” He added that this was initially an unconscious feature of it at first, but a conscious one “in the revision.”5 I think myself, however, that it is important not to push these remarks too far. For one thing, the context of these letters must be borne in mind. Tolkien had, as he explicitly admitted,6 been hit hard by the criticism made by some reviewers that his book contained no religion. He was out to answer it as strongly as he could, and to reestablish his own public credentials as a believer in the process, especially to fellow Catholics. For another, it is notable that he himself never stated that he had put specific references to Catholicism into his text. The apparent allusions to the Virgin or to the Host were detected by other Catholics, and he seized upon them as useful ammunition in his defense of his book against accusations of atheism or agnosticism. At times he admitted that they had been subconscious if they were there at all, and suggested that his Catholicism could not in fact be deduced from his books.7 A third major consideration is that anybody who seeks carefully crafted theological references in Tolkien’s work must run up against the fact that he was not a theologian. He said as much in one letter, and was plainly speaking the truth.8 His own brand of Catholicism was a deeply personal, emotional, and instinctual one, based on the experience of receiving communion. His enduring loyalty to the Church of Rome, as he told his son Michael, was based primarily on the fact that of all the Christian denominations it was the one that most honored the Blessed Sacrament.9 This statement is borne out by the almost total lack of interest that he showed in the politics of his church, and in the developing disputes over its theology and rites, even at the climactic time of the Second Vatican Council. His central religious preoccupation, which was with the mystery of the Real Presence in the Mass, was never touched by these. Furthermore, as Verlyn Flieger pointed out long ago, Tolkien’s religious faith was not a robust and untroubled one but subject to doubt and losses of confidence.10 Even in old age he could write to Michael that “temptation to unbelief” was always present.11 Here I would counter an assumption generally made in studies of Tolkien’s life and work: that, whatever his private and in-

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termittent doubts, his general dedication to Catholicism remained constant ever since his childhood. His mother’s conversion to that faith, and—as he subsequently saw it—her martyrdom for it, and his great debt of gratitude to the priest who funded his education, are commonly regarded as the twin foundations of a lifetime commitment. In the back-projected view, from his old age, they certainly were, but here it may be important to take notice of another statement in that letter to Michael: that for a time in his past he “almost ceased to practice” his religion. He defined this period as being his time at Leeds University, and at 22 Northmoor Road, Oxford.12 The period that he delineates here spans the 1920s. This raises both the possibility that there were phases of his life that were less Christian than others, and that his famous role in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity, at the end of the 1920s, also represented the beginning of a return to fervent belief on his own part. For our present purposes, it matters a lot that the 1920s were a crucial period for the evolution of his mythology. Finally the biggest and simplest reason for caution in reading The Lord of the Rings as a straightforwardly Christian work is that Tolkien repeatedly stated that it was not, even as he was trying to rescue his reputation as a Catholic author. In a famous letter to the publisher Milton Waldman, in 1951, he said that, while he was prepared to have “elements of moral or religious truth” in myth or fairy-story, he did not want his imagined cosmos to be “involved in, or explicitly contain” the Christian religion. He added, in particular, that although it had what might be called a “fall of angels,” this was quite different in form to “that of Christian myth.”13 Seven years later he spelled this out again, stating that unlike the creation represented in “what may be perhaps called Christian mythology,” his world was created with evil already present in it.14 In this distinction he was absolutely correct. Seven years after that, he declared that he didn’t feel obliged to make his fiction “fit with formalized Christian theology.”15 In an argument with another correspondent in 1954, he roundly defended his wish to allow elves to undergo reincarnation, a fate for souls that has always explicitly been condemned by orthodox Christian theology, and especially by that of Tolkien’s own church. His argument was twofold. First, he held that creative fiction simply does not need to obey the rules of the familiar universe: in his own words, what is “bad theology” in the existing world was “a legitimate basis of legends.”16 Second, he did not think that rein-

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carnation necessarily was bad theology, commenting that he did not see how anybody could “deny the possibility of reincarnation as a mode of existence.”17 It is significant, however, that, once it was written, he failed to send this letter. Likewise, he explicitly flouted traditional Christian teaching on the nature of magic, which has long defined it as illusions and snares of the devil, as opposed to the genuine miracles that were worked by saints, to whom alone God gives power to suspend the laws of nature. In a letter to Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien explained that in his imagined world all magic produced real physical change, no matter who wielded it, and was itself morally neutral: the morality of it lay only in the purpose for which it was used. He added that it was also inherent in certain kinds of being, such as elves. This view draws on clearly identifiable ancient traditions, and is utterly un-Christian: again, it is significant that Tolkien cut this passage out of the letter before sending it.18 What he was generally at pains to emphasize was the cosmological novelty and uniqueness of his imagined world. This is what irritated him so much about attempts to read it as an allegory of anything else, including Christianity.19 For example, he pointed out to a publisher how unusual he was in making the sun in his world part of a second-rate order of creation rather than a primary and divine symbol.20 In this he was, again, certainly correct, and it fits with his most unusual love of starlight as a symbol of higher divinity and of hope. This position is the more striking in that he was perfectly capable of writing as an explicit and powerful Christian author in other works, both of fiction and scholarship. “Leaf by Niggle” is a perfect allegory of the Catholic view of salvation, while his essay on fairy-stories is an argument for a specifically Christian approach to scholarship.21 In his own cosmology, he therefore chose, quite consciously, not to follow this approach. So, what does that cosmology add up to? The answer is found in a completely different body of source material, the successive volumes of Tolkien’s drafts for unpublished stories which his son Christopher edited and brought out from 1983 onward. In many ways they are models of editorial work because of the patience, generosity and integrity with which Christopher Tolkien has worked. Like the edited letters, however, they possess problems. One is that, as Christopher himself constantly made clear, the drafts are at times very hard to date or place in order. Another is that in commenting on them, Christopher Tolkien was always

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looking backward from the form into which his father put his mythology near the end of his life. My purpose here is to turn the viewpoint around, and look forward, from the first imagining of the myth. Finally Christopher’s editorial interventions are not always ideologically neutral and he occasionally seems concerned to put a Christian gloss on passages that, by my reading, do not necessarily sustain it. When those difficulties are stated, it is clear that Tolkien’s imagined cosmos took a firm shape at the end of the 1910s and the beginning of the 1920s. When analyzing it, the obvious tactic for a historian is to compare it with other systems of belief, noting the points of each from which Tolkien derived ideas. Although I am going to do just this, I would like at the beginning to follow his own emphases and point out how unlike any other system of belief it actually is. It truly is unique, and that is because it is composed of three quite different, and at times discordant, elements. The first is represented by Tolkien’s supreme being, Ilúvatar, who is in personality very much a Christian God. He is assumed to be male and ever-loving, exists outside space and time, and has the peculiar mixture of existential characteristics of the Christian Jehovah. On the one hand, he proclaims that the material world is created according to his own design and that everything that comes to pass in it is according to his ultimate plan. On the other, he seems to be surprised by aspects of what actually does occur, and to react to them with grief and frustration. The Christian nature of this deity is reinforced by his creation of a retinue of heavenly choristers to serve him in his design, the Ainur. One of these, Melko or Morgoth, comes to lead a rebellion against his creator’s authority and to take up residence in the material world as his particular sphere of action, in which he embodies pure evil. This is a clear parallel to the fall of angels led by Satan. Furthermore a link to characteristically Christian ritual magic is provided by the fact that the most powerful of the Ainur are associated with particular elements: Manwë with air, Ulmo with water, Aulë with earth, and Melko with fire. Each in turn has a following of spirits specific to that element.22 This is, moreover, Christianity with a particular twist, and that twist, as Mary Carman Rose recognized years ago, is Neoplatonism.23 The definitive characteristic of this cosmological tradition is an original supreme deity who emanates out power to bring lesser divinities into being, who then have direct responsibility for worldly affairs. This is just what Ilúvatar does, singing the Ainur into being

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and then having them sing the world into existence. He then delegates immediate authority over it to those of them who are most enthusiastic about the job, the Valar. Thus far, we have a perfectly good Neoplatonist Christian cosmos. The second element enters in the next stage of Tolkien’s original story, when Ilúvatar’s heavenly choristers take up residence in the world. To fit the Christian model, those who had not joined Melko’s rebellion would now have the role of good angels, doing their master’s bidding and acting as his messengers. This is exactly what does not happen, because they take up the role of “gods” and are almost preposterously unangelic. For one thing, they have sex, in both senses. They are very firmly male or female, and some of them form unions and produce children. Furthermore their behavior is bad by normal human standards, let alone those of the Christian heaven. They constantly bicker, quarrel, compete, make serious tactical errors, and act impulsively and irresponsibly.24 Marjorie Burns has recently done excellent work by pointing out ways in which Tolkien adopted characteristics from pagan Norse deities to fashion his own.25 In one perspective, however, this argument misses the point that the concept of a squabbling family of goddesses and gods, each of whom have responsibility for a particular aspect of life on earth, is found from Scandinavia to Mesopotamia. It is most famously portrayed in the Iliad, and Tolkien’s Gods in many respects bear a stronger relationship to those of Olympus than any others: in their individual personalities and associations, their relationships, and their atrocious behavior. At this point it is worth bearing in mind a letter that Tolkien wrote to his Jesuit friend many years later, in 1953, which mentioned that he was “brought up” on Greek and Roman literature, and especially loved Homer.26 Fourteen years after that, he wrote to somebody else that his association with Germanic languages and cultures should not be overstated, and that he had a particular love of Latin and an affection for other Mediterranean tongues. He reminded his correspondent that in his mythology he had actually made the north the place of evil.27 Tolkien’s theology has thus changed shape to a full-blown pagan Neoplatonism; but it is even now not perfectly that because of the third element that makes it unique: his love of fairies and faerie. Although the deities of ancient pagan mythologies commonly had a home apart from the human world, they nonetheless intervened constantly in the latter: it was their domain, and their main pre-

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occupation. Tolkien’s gods, by contrast, are distinguished by their remarkable lack of interest in, and even aversion to, most of the world that they themselves created. Although a few take a sporadic interest in its affairs, their main preoccupation is with the creation and defense of an idyllic land reserved for themselves, their own servant spirits, and invited guests.28 It is, effectively, a fairyland, which humans reach only in dreams, or after death, but which lurks on the edge of their consciousness, and those of the other beings of Middle-earth, and conditions their view of the cosmos. It is a measure of Tolkien’s devotion to fairytales that his mythology has a further unique characteristic: that it is never viewed through human eyes. The older portion of it is always recounted through the traditions of elves, and the later, much more famously, of hobbits: in both cases beings conceptually from fairyland. This resolute determination to portray a world in which humans are not the highest forms of intelligent and corporeal life is utterly un-Christian. It is rooted firmly in ancient pagan beliefs, but as developed through the medieval and later traditions of fays and goblins: traditions that functioned either as supplements or as antidotes to orthodox Christian cosmology. These, then, are the component parts of Tolkien’s unique religious vision. What is especially striking about them is how badly integrated they are in his stories: they tend to dominate in different sections of the narrative. Take for example the crucial question of what happens to humans after they die. In the first chapter of the first draft of Tolkien’s mythology, from the period around 1920, it is stated that their souls leave the world, for a purpose of Ilúvatar’s own, and that they will eventually join his celestial choir. This fits the predominantly Christian tone of that first section. In the next one the pagan themes are paramount, and here we are told firmly that after death, humans journey to an underworld for judgment by Fui, a goddess of the dead. She sends most to wander on a dim plain, some to be tortured by the demonic god Melko, and keeps some herself, while a few of these, especially beloved of the gods, are brought in chariots and horses to join them in their enchanted realm. Christopher Tolkien gamely tried to assimilate this scheme to the Catholic one of heaven, hell, and purgatory, but it has much more obviously in common with the portrayals of the afterlife found in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, with Fui and her spouse Vefantur taking the parts of Hades and Persephone.29 What Tolkien’s son was too honest and painstaking to ignore was the

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glaring contrast between these two accounts. There seem to be three possible explanations for it, and for lack of alternative sources of evidence I cannot choose between them. One is that the more Christian first chapter is preserved in a form written much later than the second one. Christopher Tolkien rejected this on the grounds that the manuscripts themselves suggest that the second was written, in its present form, soon after the first. It was, however, the only way of resolving the problem that he could perceive. A second possibility is that Tolkien himself became less Christian between the writing of the two chapters: which might be the case in view of what he later wrote about his relative loss of faith at just this period. A third is that his visions of his own cosmology actually were contradictory, and that he adopted different versions of them according to his subject matter and his mood: he became more Christian when contemplating the Supreme Being and more pagan when dealing with matters on earth. Because he never finished these early stories, or rationalized them for publication, the contradictions were never ironed out. Or, to put it another way, they were ironed out, but only about a half-century later; this is where Tolkien’s surviving letters come in again. I have quoted extensively from passages in them that work against a simplistic reading of The Lord of the Rings as a Christian work. Viewed from the perspective taken here, however, Tolkien’s protests that his invented world was not a Christian one feature merely as sporadic and unavailing rearguard actions in a progressive abandonment of the pagan elements in it. Anxious to reestablish his credentials as a Catholic author, after the criticisms made of the book, he set out to prepare his earlier work for publication by remodeling it in a much more coherently Christian form. The bulk of his references to it in his letters consist of glosses upon it that play up the Christian elements,30 and in his final version of the early story of his world, posthumously published by Christopher Tolkien as The Silmarillion, the job was complete. The divine beings that supervise the earth are no longer called “the Gods,” and the world is created by the Supreme Being himself, single-handed, with a word. The Valar are then put to work to watch it under his direction. They no longer reproduce or quarrel, and the more earthy and disruptive of them have disappeared altogether. When humans die, their souls leave the earth for a destination determined by the single great deity, and reincarnation has disappeared. The result is a coherent and harmonious Christian Neoplatonism.31 I

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emphasize, however, that this work was done after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, and that it is the earlier cosmos that underpinned the writing of that masterpiece. I would like to conclude, therefore, by looking at elements in the book itself which have commonly been taken to exemplify those implicit Christian attitudes, as opposed to explicit Christian theology, which Tolkien claimed, in his letters, that he did implant in the text. One is the constant sense of providentialism, of an unseen and benevolent hand guiding events. This is certainly present, and it is also found in his earlier stories that became The Silmarillion, where it is explicitly suggested that either Ilúvatar himself or one of the gods is doing the guiding. Some have pointed to a specific Christian source for this attitude, such as Kathleen Dubs’s identification of the early medieval author Boethius, whom Tolkien would certainly have known well.32 There are two problems with such an approach. One is that there are also possible pagan sources for it, most obviously the concept of Wyrd, the depersonalized force of fate that features in some of the Anglo-Saxon writings in which Tolkien was expert. The second is that at no point in The Lord of the Rings is the reality of such a guiding hand ever actually proven, and no character makes such a belief a basis for action: it is accepted by some characters, instead, as a comforting thought that is largely irrelevant in practice. In the earlier tales, a god is sometimes shown explicitly as guiding the affairs of Men and Elves, to counteract the schemes of a rival deity in the best Homeric tradition, but the chance that Ilúvatar himself is directing events is only mentioned, in retrospect, as a faint but cheering possibility.33 Tolkien’s mythology also lacks the most heartening aspect of providentialism: which is that events lead inexorably to an ending that includes salvation for those who have had the faith to believe in the pattern. Nobody in The Lord of the Rings bases action in this life upon the hope of a better state after it. The point where such a hope is most obviously needed, at the conclusion of the love story of Arwen and Aragorn, is marked instead by a bleak denial of certainty. It seems to me that such an attitude was not absorbed by Tolkien from any texts, but was intrinsic to his own personal mixture of fatalism and pessimism. In a letter to his son Michael in 1941 he summed this up perfectly, by suggesting that “life and circumstance” make most people’s choices for them, adding however that “if there is a God” these forces would be his instruments.34 In

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his epic, characters like Gandalf are simply echoing this resigned and agnostic, but hopeful, viewpoint. A second allegedly Christian characteristic is Tolkien’s assignment of decisive heroic action, not to conventional heroes, but to physically weak and politically marginalized characters: his Hobbits. It is absolutely right that this celebration of the underdog is completely alien to the spirit of pagan epic. It is, however, almost equally unknown in medieval Christian romance. Its most obvious source, rather, is in Tolkien’s love of folk and fairytale. To quote the man himself (through Gandalf), it is part and parcel of stories about monsters and enchantments and the rescuing of princesses and “the unexpected luck of widows’ sons.”35 You do not have to invoke theology to explain why the fictions of the common people tend to have underdog heroes. Most commonly cited as Christian is the role of forgiveness in The Lord of the Rings: the rewards brought by showing charity and pity to an enemy. Again, I have two problems with this. One is that, across Tolkien’s imagined history, in purely straightforward terms giving an enemy a second chance simply never works: Melko, Sauron, and Saruman are all beneficiaries of grace, and all use it to do considerably more damage than before. The outstanding case that is always used to buck this trend is that of Gollum. He fits the usual dismal pattern by repaying mercy with ultimate treachery— and so reinforces the argument that forgiving enemies never redeems them. Nonetheless, the fact of sparing him allows Frodo, however fortuitously, and by whatever trick of chance or Ilúvatar, to succeed in his quest. Those who look for a Christian message in this need only quote Tolkien himself: that the end of the quest of the Ringbearer “exemplifies” the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”36 The difficulty with this is my second problem, which was admitted by Tolkien in a different mood and different letter. He commented here that he had written several different versions of the showdown at Mount Doom, and that the eventual one chosen was “not deliberately worked up to nor foreseen.”37 These alternative endings have now all been published by Christopher Tolkien, and they show that the one consistent theme running through them was that Frodo would fail to throw away the Ring: which is both consistent with its proclaimed power and

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makes for a more interesting climax. The other relatively fixed idea was that Gollum would somehow be involved and would fall into the Crack of Doom. Tolkien was not, however, sure how, and over a span of seven years Gollum found himself successively being pushed in by Frodo during a fight, pushed in by Sam, falling in together with Sam, or going mad and jumping into the flames himself.38 In the letter in which he admitted to these alternative versions, he also said that he arrived at the final one simply because of “the logic of the tale up to that time.”39 Even in the one in which he quoted the Lord’s Prayer, he began by stating that he chose that climax because having regard to the setting and the characters that he had contrived, such an outcome seemed to him to be “mechanically, morally and psychologically credible.” He then added his Christian interpretation of it with the comment that it might content those who wanted further reflections.40 This seems to me to suggest that those who wish to seek a Christian meaning in the end of the quest are able to do so; but it was not Tolkien’s primary purpose to expound one. It is time to close. What must be obvious from this discussion is that, while I am happy to accept Tolkien as a Christian author with reference to his personal beliefs, and to some of his published work, I do not think that this can be done, simply and straightforwardly, with reference to his mythology. He is not, therefore, a Christian writer of the same uncomplicated sort as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, Helen Waddell, Christopher Fry, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, or Rose Macaulay. Nor can he be grouped with them as part of the last great period of Christian creative writing among the English. As I have suggested elsewhere, he should be grouped instead with those authors of the same period who mixed together pagan and Christian themes to produce a blend of both: Rider Haggard, Kenneth Grahame, Algernon Blackwood, Dion Fortune, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, George Russell, and—most significantly—C. S. Lewis.41 How we classify Tolkien himself as a result is an open question. One might treat his unique cosmological and theological system as a classic example of a Christian on an intellectual holiday. After all, Middle-earth is unlike our earth in its biology, geography, and history, so why not in its religion?42 The only thing that gives me pause here is another line in one of his letters: speaking of his mythology, he said that “theologically” he thought

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his imagined world to be “less dissonant” from what some people, among whom he included himself, believed to be “the truth.”43 However much his imagined cosmos was a reflection of how he felt the “real” universe actually, or ideally, to be, it had clearly a distinctive theology of its own. If it was Christian, then it was a Christianity so unorthodox, and diluted, as to merit the term heretical. It could be made orthodox only by discarding many of its most characteristic earlier elements: and that is the work to which, in part, Tolkien devoted the last two decades of his life. I think that Tolkien himself would have been deeply hurt to be termed a heretic. That is why I characterize the non-Christian elements in his mythology—as it endured for most of his life and as it gave birth to his great book—as “pagan.” As they represented about twothirds of the ingredients that made up his imagined universe, they are not an incidental, or mischievous, part of it. They are part of the essence of the work, and therefore of the man, and that is how I justify my choice of title.

NOTES This chapter was first delivered as a conference paper at the Tolkien Society conference at Aston University in 2005. It appears here in its original and unrevised form with the kind permission of the Tolkien Society. 1. See Madsen, “Natural Religion.” 2. Hutton, “The Inklings and the Gods,” in Witches, Druids, and King Arthur, 215–38. 3. See, for example, Tolkien to Peter Hastings (draft) in Tolkien, Letters, 187– 96. 4. Tolkien to Rhona Beare (draft), undated 1958, in ibid., 288. 5. Tolkien to Robert Murray S.J., December 2, 1953, in ibid., 172. 6. Tolkien to Houghton Mifflin Co., June 30, 1955, in ibid., 220. 7. Tolkien to Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in ibid., 172; Tolkien to Rhona Beare, undated 1958, in ibid., 288. 8. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, March 6–8, 1941, in ibid., 53; Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, January 8, 1944, in ibid., 66; Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in ibid., 283–84. 9. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in ibid., 339. 10. Flieger, Splintered Light, 1–5. 11. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in Tolkien, Letters, 338. 12. Ibid., 340. 13. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in ibid., 144, 147. 14. Tolkien to Rhona Beare (draft), 1958, in ibid., 287. 15. Tolkien to W. H. Auden, May 12, 1965, in ibid., 355.

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16. Tolkien to Peter Hastings (draft), September 1954, in Tolkien, Letters, 189n. 17. Ibid., 189. 18. Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison (draft), September 25, 1954, in ibid., 199. 19. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in ibid., 145; Tolkien to Peter Hastings (draft), September 1954, in ibid., 188; Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in ibid., 283. 20. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in ibid., 148. 21. First published in the dedicatory volume to Charles Williams, and reprinted in Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 1–50, which also contains “Leaf by Niggle.” 22. Tolkien, Lost Tales, 1:45–63. 23. Rose, “Christian Platonism,” 203–17. 24. Tolkien, Lost Tales, 1:64–245, passim. 25. Burns, “Norse and Christian Gods.” 26. Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J., December 2, 1953, in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 27. Tolkien to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, February 8, 1967, in ibid., 376. 28. This is a constant theme of the Lost Tales, after 1:64. 29. Ibid., 1:59–77, 92–93. 30. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in ibid., 146–47; Tolkien to Peter Hastings, September 1954, in ibid., 193–94; Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J. (draft), November 4, 1954, in ibid., 202–6; Notes on a letter from Tolkien to the Houghton Mifflin Co., June 30, 1955, in ibid., 220; Tolkien to Michael Straight (draft), undated, in ibid., 235–37; Notes on W. H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King, in ibid., 243; Tolkien to Major R. Bowen, June 25, 1957, in ibid., 259; Tolkien to Rhona Beare (letter and draft), October 14, 1958, in ibid., 283–87; Tolkien to A. E. Couchman, April 27, 1966, in ibid., 368; Tolkien to Ruth Austin, January 25, 1971, in ibid., 407; Tolkien to Roger Lancelyn Green, July 17, 1971, in ibid., 411. 31. See Tolkien, Silmarillion. 32. Dubs, “Providence, Fate and Chance.” 33. Tolkien, Lost Tales, 1:118–19, 150–51, 2:144–56. 34. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, March 6–8, 1941, in Tolkien, Letters, 51. 35. Tolkien, Hobbit, 19. 36. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien (draft), undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 235. 37. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, June 25, 1963, in ibid., 325. 38. Tolkien, Return of the Shadow, 126, 380–81; ibid., Treason of Isengard, 208– 9; ibid., Sauron Defeated, 4–5. 39. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, June 25, 1963, in Tolkien, Letters, 325. 40. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien (draft), undated, in ibid., 235. 41. Hutton, “Inklings and the Gods,” 237. The first author to draw attention to the presence of pagan themes in Tolkien was Patrick Curry in Defending Middleearth (London 1997), 29, 110–18. Dr. Curry and I arrive at a similar position by different routes and with different emphases. 42. As I suggested in “Inklings and the Gods,” in Witches, Druids, and King Arthur, 236–37. 43. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in Tolkien, Letters, 282.

The Christian Tolkien: A Response to Ronald Hutton Nils Ivar Agøy

INTRODUCTION

AT THE 2005 TOLKIEN CONFERENCE IN BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, PROFESsor Ronald Hutton presented a paper entitled “The Pagan Tolkien.” Hutton accepts that Tolkien himself was, for most of his life, a devout Christian, but concludes that “his mythology” was largely not—although Tolkien devoted much time toward the end of his life to make it more so. In fact, the non-Christian, pagan “elements in his mythology—as it endured for most of his life and as it gave birth to his great book . . . represented about two-thirds of the ingredients that made up his imagined universe.” Thus, these elements “are not an incidental, or mischievous, part of it. They are part of the essence of the work, and therefore of the man.”1 Professor Hutton’s elegant article is thought-provoking. His conclusion flies in the face of much Tolkien criticism and commentary from the last two decades, where Tolkien’s “mythology” is often seen as fundamentally Christian. His article offers a welcome opportunity to reflect on and reexamine this view, and perhaps introduce some nuances. As I see it, Hutton makes some valuable points and raises a few matters that certainly deserve to be further discussed. But his article also contains much that I think is misleading or at least not sufficiently argued, and in some cases simply wrong. I am not at all persuaded that his main conclusion is valid. In fact, I am convinced that it is not. In the following, I will try to show why. To do this, I will first try to summarize some features of Hutton’s argument. Some others will be touched on in the more detailed discussion afterward.2 Hutton wishes “to examine the relationship between Tolkien’s own religious views, at differing times, and his imagined cosmos.” 71

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He comments on “the general difficulty of matching Tolkien’s writings with some of the things that he himself said about them,” and notes in particular the problems adhering to many of the remarks Tolkien made in Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien concerning Christianity and/or Catholicism in his works. These remarks are mostly retrospective, are in many cases made after Tolkien was stung by criticism that there was little or no religion in The Lord of the Rings, and they “usually have a defensive air.” Many of them appear in drafts that were never actually sent. They cannot, Hutton says, be seen as necessarily representative of Tolkien’s earlier beliefs, but they are inevitably a source quarried by biographers and critics and have, partly for this reason, been pushed much too far. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” is regarded by Hutton as “an argument for a specifically Christian approach to scholarship,” which Tolkien however deliberately chose not to follow in his own cosmology. For his part, Hutton wants to qualify the notion of Tolkien’s lifelong dedication to Roman Catholicism. He points to Tolkien’s admission to his son Michael in Letter 250 that “out of wickedness and sloth” he “almost ceased to practice” his religion “especially at Leeds, and at 22 Northmoor Road” (i.e., autumn 1920 to early 1930) and notes that “the 1920s were a crucial period for the evolution of his mythology.” This is important, because it is in the 1920s that Hutton discovers what he regards as fundamental non-Christian traits in this “mythology,” which are later, on Tolkien’s return to “fervent belief,” played down, transformed or abandoned. In Tolkien’s early “cosmology” Hutton finds three important, but discordant, elements: (1) the creator, Ilúvatar, bringing lesser divinities into being, this is identified by Hutton as Christian Neoplatonism; (2) the presence of quarrelling and often most unangelic gods, identified by Hutton as pagan Neoplatonism; (3) a love of fairies and faerie, apparent not least in a “resolute determination to portray a world in which humans are not the highest forms of intelligent and corporeal life” which is “utterly un-Christian.” As I understand it, it is on the assertion that (2) and (3) are non-Christian that Hutton bases his claim, cited above, that about two-thirds of Tolkien’s mythology is pagan. I take the above to be the main argument, but there are several lesser ones, meant to demonstrate that Tolkien’s legendarium3 is not as Christian, or not as orthodox, as is often claimed. Hutton wishes to show, for instance, that some traits in The Lord of the Rings that have often been taken as evidence for implicit Christi-

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anity, are actually nothing of the sort. The often-invoked sense of providentialism (“Bilbo was meant to find the Ring” and so on) may have pagan as well as Christian sources, and is in any case “largely irrelevant in practice,” never used as a basis for action. The very unpagan characteristic of assigning important heroic deeds to the weak and lowly is, Hutton tells us, equally unknown to “medieval Christian romance,” and its most likely source is rather “in Tolkien’s love of folk and fairytale.” As for the Christian virtue of forgiveness and pity—well, it never actually works to reform the enemies. True, Gollum is spared to betray Frodo one last time and thus accidentally destroys the Ring, but Hutton stresses the fact that Tolkien admitted that the printed version of the Mount Doom scene was only one of many, and had not been foreseen (and thus should not be regarded as proof of any implicit Christian message).

THE PAGAN ’20S? Was Tolkien “less Christian” in the 1920s than later? Hutton’s suggestion that he was is based on some elements in the developing legendarium (discussed later) and on Letter 250. Now, Hutton’s criticism of the arbitrary and methodologically weak ways in which Tolkien’s letters have been used is one of the most valuable observations in his article. I find his reminder that the vast majority of his letters stem from the period when much of Tolkien’s creative work had already been done to be timely, and as a historian I agree wholeheartedly that one should exercise great caution in using late remarks as proof of earlier beliefs, and that the considerable temptation to do so because of the scarcity of earlier remarks should be constantly pointed out. However, it is not obvious that Hutton has taken his own cautionary advice in the case of Letter 250, written in late 1963, more than thirty-two years after Tolkien moved out of 22 Northmoor Road. It is true that in the sentence quoted by Hutton, Tolkien himself means to describe the 1920s, but it is difficult to determine what he actually meant by saying that he had almost ceased to practice his religion, or intended it to mean. Most likely it means that he did not go to Communion as often as in other periods if his life.4 Hutton does not mention that Tolkien, in the sentence immediately before the one he quotes, states that he fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament early in life “— and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again.” Nor that he

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directly follows the quoted statement with “Not for me the Hound of Heaven”—probably meaning that Tolkien did not see himself as the narrator in that poem by Francis Thompson, actively fleeing from God. Nor does he consider the larger context—Tolkien wrote to comfort a son with “sagging faith.” Pointing out that his father had also experienced difficulties in the practice of his faith could, one would think, establish a kind of solidarity, and perhaps offer hope. For several reasons, it seems unwise to draw far-reaching conclusions from the statement. Other published sources for Tolkien’s religious practices in the 1920s are unfortunately few, but he did have a clearly visible Catholic identity. Judging from his autobiography, C. S. Lewis seems to have had him pegged as a Catholic almost as soon as he met him in 1926. In 1923, Tolkien published poems in the Catholic Inter-University Magazine, in 1928 we find him at dinner at the Eighth Pax Romana Congress—Pax Romana being the International Confederation of Catholic Students. In the same year, he read a paper to the Oxford Newman Society.5 His children went to summer and Christmas parties at the Sacred Heart Convent in Oxford, at which Tolkien was “a famous entertainer,” but unfortunately we do not know when this started.6 All this, however, is circumstantial. Hutton would have quite a strong case if it is true that central elements of Tolkien’s legendarium, as it developed in the 1920s, are pagan in the rough sense “irreconcilable with Christianity.” Are they? Let us first look at the three elements Hutton mentions.7 There is no real contest regarding the first. Hutton concedes that Eru Ilúvatar has the “existential characteristics of the Christian Jehovah [sic],” and regards the relationship between Eru and the Valar and the world as Christian Neoplatonism. I do not personally think that the latter designation really helps or that Tolkien had Neoplatonism in mind, but no matter.8 The third element, Tolkien’s “love of fairies and faerie,” need not keep us very long either. Hutton claims that it is “utterly unChristian” to portray a world where “humans are not the highest forms of intelligent and corporeal life,” but unfortunately does nothing to substantiate this surprising statement. Nor can I, as a Lutheran theologian, see any reason to believe it to be true, and I am not aware of ever having met any Christian believing that it is. We may therefore dismiss it until further grounds are offered. Hutton gives, by the way, no reason why the fairies/elves in the legen-

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darium are to be regarded as “higher” than humans, theologically speaking. Tolkien’s published letters make abundantly clear that this was not his view late in life, and I cannot remember that fairies are ever stated to be “higher” than humans in the early texts themselves, although the high elves are of course far better informed than most humans about the nature of the Valar and Ilúvatar (they are, in a very literal sense, more enlightened).9 Hutton’s second element, the presence of gods, is much more interesting in this connection. The gods of The Book of Lost Tales certainly do not come across as angels, being quarrelling, shortsighted, and, in some cases, distinctly shady. As Hutton says, they behave like pagan gods. One might say that they are pagan gods, because Tolkien actually identifies some of them with Norse/ Germanic gods.10 And this is a point where I think Hutton gets it fundamentally wrong. He recounts how Tolkien, in much later years, is concerned to convince correspondents that his writings are original and unique, not allegories of something else. He writes as if Tolkien, in the 1920s, wanted to construct a “mythology,” even a “system of belief” from scratch, so to speak, and free, if his own imagination did not suffice, to pick and choose elements from anywhere and anywhen. But I think that Hutton—inadvertently, no doubt, but again forgetting his own sound advice—uses late comments on The Lord of the Rings as if they also covered the early legendarium, and he seems to consistently underplay or ignore the way the legendarium started out partly as an attempt to reconstruct a “mythology for England” in the best nineteenth-century Romantic manner. For that reason, it was firmly rooted in authentic traditions from northwest Europe, particularly Anglo-Saxon and (when they gave out, as they quickly did) Norse.11 For several reasons, “invention” soon overtook “reconstruction,” but Tolkien’s wish to accommodate and assimilate elements from real mythologies into his own legendarium is nevertheless an essential characteristic of his work, without which the development of the legendarium becomes impossible to understand. The gods are there not because Tolkien was a pagan, but because the pagan Anglo-Saxons and Norsemen had believed in them. They were central to the traditions that Tolkien’s “mythology” was an attempt to piece together to an artistically and emotionally pleasing whole. Besides “mythology,” which Tolkien also used in some contexts, Hutton also refers to the legendarium as a “system of belief,” and even as “Tolkien’s theology.” I think this is seriously missing the point.

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Tolkien primarily wanted a frame for his tales and a setting for his languages, not a theological system, far less something to be believed in as an alternative to his faith. Tolkien distinguished sharply between religion and mythology, and found the latter almost “devoid of religious significance.”12 This is not a distinction observed by Professor Hutton, who seems to think that Tolkien’s “mythology” somehow reflects his personal faith. Hutton writes about a “progressive abandonment of the pagan elements” in Tolkien’s legendarium and mentions some specific changes. This is a convenient place to discuss when they were actually made. We must quote Hutton at length where he writes about the published Silmarillion, when the Christianizing job was supposedly complete: The divine beings that supervise the earth are no longer called “the gods,” and the world is created by the Supreme Being himself, singlehanded, with a word. The Valar are then put to work to watch it under his direction. They no longer reproduce, or quarrel, and the more earthy and disruptive of them have disappeared altogether. When humans die, their souls leave the earth for a destination determined by the single great deity, and reincarnation has disappeared. The result is a coherent and harmonious Christian Neoplatonism. I emphasize, however, that this work was done after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, and that it is the earlier cosmos that underpinned the writing of that masterpiece.

The problem with this last emphasized assertion is that it is mostly not true. What is true is that Tolkien stopped writing about the Valar having children ca. 1960. As for reincarnation and the use of “gods” when referring to the Valar, Hutton’s premises simply do not hold: Reincarnation is just as much a part of the legendarium in The Silmarillion as it had been in the 1920s (and why not, as Tolkien did not see it as “bad theology,” cf. p. 82 below?), whereas the Valar are actually still called “the Gods” in The Silmarillion.13 The other features were in place well before The Lord of the Rings was published. Creation of the world by Ilúvatar and delegation of its governance to the Valar was present as early as 1919, and never disappeared, as we shall see. Tolkien’s basic view of human afterlife did indeed develop, but it is heavily hinted in the mid-1920s that their eternal fate was “not in the hands of the Valar” (i.e., it had by default to lie with Ilúvatar), and the wording about their fate in chapter 12 of the published Silmarillion is taken from the “Quenta

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Silmarillion,” written in the 1930s, before The Lord of the Rings was even thought of. The gist, including much of the wording, is, however, already found in the “Quenta Noldorinwa” from 1930.14 As for quarrelling Valar, the warrior gods Makar and Meassë, presumably “the more earthy and disruptive” of the Valar, make their last appearance before the 1920s begin. In short, the notion that what Hutton calls “a coherent and harmonious Christian Neoplatonism” is younger than The Lord of the Rings lacks any support whatsoever. One of the things The History of Middle-earth shows us is that Tolkien was constantly experimenting in the 1920s, and that many changes making the legendarium more “Christian” in tone, although not necessarily in nature, were made in the course of that decade. The strange thing is that this is easily seen from The Shaping of Middle-earth and The Lost Road. It is highly notable that when Hutton writes about Tolkien’s “mythology,” emphasizing that the 1920s were a crucial period for its evolution, he takes his examples from The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917 and brought “close to its final (incomplete) state by the end of June 1919,” i.e., before the period mentioned in Letter 250 and that Hutton therefore suggests was a time of “less fervent faith” for Tolkien.15 Only a very small portion of The Book of Lost Tales can possibly have been written after Tolkien’s move to Leeds. It is therefore surprising that Hutton does not refer directly to the great wealth of material written later in the 1920s. In fact, he does not refer to any of the volumes of The History of Middle-earth between The Book of Lost Tales, part II, and The Return of the Shadow, and not to any volume after Sauron Defeated. If he had, his article would probably have looked not a little different. To return to Hutton’s three “characteristic elements,” I agree with him that one is rather Christian than pagan; another can be dismissed as groundless, and the remaining throws considerable light on the dilemmas facing a Christian who is committed to work with and build on pre-Christian traditions. That said, Hutton’s choice of just these three elements seems to me to be arbitrary. They are certainly no sufficient reason to label a large part of the 1920s legendarium “pagan.” Let me explain. I accept without question that both Eru and the Gods/gods/Valar are central when one wishes to consider paganism and Christianity in the 1920s legendarium, and it is true that this legendarium is largely concerned with Elves, not only with Men, although I have already said that I fail to see why

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this is especially relevant in our connection. However, why these particular three? There are several other features that—it seems to me—are at least as important. For one thing, we find that Eru created the universe from nothing, ex nihilo. He did not shape it from something preexisting, as in practically all pagan mythologies. We find, too, that a very sharp distinction is drawn between the Creator and His creation. This is also characteristic of Judeo-Christian beliefs, but not of paganism. Perhaps most importantly, we find that in Tolkien’s legendarium, the created world is not eternal. History is linear, with a beginning and an end, not cyclical, as in many pagan systems. These revealing traits, the combination of which points quite clearly to Christianity, are present in the legendarium from its earliest phase (“The Music of the Ainur,” telling of the all-powerful Ilúvatar’s creation of the world and referring to its end, was written probably in 1919), and they are stable. There is no experimenting with them. Considering the volume and nature of Tolkien’s experiments and alterations, this is notable indeed. But it was only to be expected. A highly relevant fact that Hutton does not seem to make sufficient allowance for is that Tolkien’s legendarium is conceived from the very outset as set in our universe, not in a never-never-land, a parallel dimension or suchlike.16 It follows that what Tolkien held to be theological realities in the “Real World,” had to pertain to his legendarium as well, although he always allowed for the possibility that the truth could have become garbled or confused, and was always only partly understood—just as in Real World mythologies. He was not, to be sure, and as he explained in “On Fairy-Stories” as well as a number of letters, in the business of restating the Christian faith as such, but he was concerned to avoid direct contradictions between his legendarium and Christianity as he interpreted it.17 In his 1951(?) letter to Milton Waldman, where among many other things he explained why he thought it important to avoid explicit Christianity in his legendarium, he stated that he wanted the Valar (whom he describes both as “angelic powers” and “divine”) to be such that they could be “accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.”18 But, one might well object, this is a late statement, and cannot be used retrospectively. Quite so. But he is in fact talking about “The Music of the Ainur,” first caught on paper in 1919, as just mentioned, and not fundamentally changed since, as regards the characteristics concerning us here. And what he says

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fits the developing legendarium up to 1951 perfectly. Tolkien’s efforts in the 1950s to make his legendarium more consistent and more clearly consonant with Christianity are well known, the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” being the prime example of the latter tendency, because Christianity is here explicitly referred to. Less often quoted, and certainly not mentioned by Hutton, is this oblique, but still unmistakable reference to Christianity from the period of The Book of Lost Tales, which Hutton builds his argument from: “and who knows if the salvation of the world and the freeing of Men and Elves shall ever come from them [the Gods, i.e., the Valar] again? Some there are who whisper that it is not so, and hope dwelleth only in a far land of Men.”19

THE LORD OF THE RINGS Hutton’s theory of a pagan or largely pagan phase in the development of the legendarium can be rejected. But how about the comments he makes about The Lord of the Rings? His contention is that some traits in that book are hard or impossible to reconcile with Christianity, while others are not such marks of implicit/latent Christianity as they have often been made out to be. We shall look at them, but let me first comment that Hutton goes very far—I think too far—in minimizing the relevance of the Tolkien letters that are usually cited to establish the Christian character of The Lord of the Rings, and that he uses them selectively. To take but one example: Hutton writes that Tolkien admitted that apparent allusions to Catholicism “had been subconscious if they were there at all, and suggested that his Catholicism could not in fact be deduced from his books,” referring to Letter 142 (where Tolkien famously wrote that the book was “of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic book, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision”) and 213 (“I am a Christian [which can be deduced from my stories], and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter ‘fact’ perhaps cannot be deduced”). Well, if one thinks that Hutton is right in saying this, it has to be by very narrow interpretation indeed. For instance, the reader must decide for herself whether Tolkien’s wording can really amount to an admission that allusions to Catholicism may not have been “there at all.” In any case, perhaps the fact of deducible Christianity might be just as relevant to his discussion as specifically Catholicism?

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Providence Hutton is partly right here. Just as he says, the idea of providence is found outside of Christianity, and divine providence as such does not form the basis of specific actions for characters in The Lord of the Rings. But should we expect it to? The basis for “correct” action in that book is quite explicitly a set of nonnegotiable moral norms (incidentally coinciding with the ones Tolkien the Catholic believed to be universally valid). “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear,” as Aragorn tells Éomer, “nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and another among Men.”20 It is my contention that people who believe in providence would expect it to affect mainly the things that are not a matter of human (or elvish, etc.) choice. I therefore do not see the point of Hutton’s objection. The difference between us is illustrated very well by what he says next: “Nobody in The Lord of the Rings bases action in this life upon the hope of a better state after it. The point where such a hope is most obviously needed, at the conclusion of the love story of Arwen and Aragorn, is marked instead by a bleak denial of certainty.” To the first statement: Really? How do we know? (Not that it really matters much in a discussion of Christianity versus paganism. King Théoden, of course, tells Merry that he will not, after his deeds on the Pelennor Fields, be ashamed to sit in the mighty company of his fathers, but we may perhaps hope that he would not have shown less valor if he had not believed in an afterlife.21) To the second: Have we read the same book? In my copy of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn tells Arwen on his deathbed, after Arwen has told him that she, too, must “abide the Doom of Men”: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”22 If this is not hope, what is? If, on the other hand, there had been the “certainty” that Hutton seems to expect, there would have been no place or need for hope. Certainty and hope are mutually exclusive. Celebration of the Weak The important role Tolkien gives to the weak and humble was very important to the author himself.23 Hutton calls it an “allegedly Christian characteristic.” He notes that it “is completely alien to the spirit of pagan epic” but also “almost equally unknown in me-

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dieval Christian romance. Its most obvious source, rather, is in Tolkien’s love of folk and fairytale.”—This is very strange, and seems contrived. Hutton does have a valid point in observing that having “underdog heroes” is not something exclusively Christian. But why should anyone expect medieval Christian romance to be the most likely source for Tolkien in this regard? Tolkien, who loathed the Norman conquest and felt that it had destroyed the completely romance-free Anglo-Saxon culture and language he cherished and wished to honor? More importantly, for a Christian to look to romance or fairytales to find the celebration of the weak is surely to miss the obvious. It figures prominently in the New Testament. The obvious source for any Christian is, I submit, 1 Corinthians 1:25–28; 2 Corinthians 4, 11:30, and 12:9, or indeed any of the gospels, telling the story of the humiliated, tortured, and finally executed carpenter’s son and his ragtag following of poor and marginalized people. Forgiveness and Pity Hutton is right in pointing out that Melko, Sauron, and Saruman are all offered forgiveness, but are not reformed by it. One might perhaps point out that Christians do believe in the power of forgiveness even if there is real evil in the world. But Hutton is also right that Gollum is the prime example in the book—this is evident both from the book itself, where Bilbo’s and Frodo’s pity toward him is explicitly and repeatedly discussed, and from Tolkien’s letters. I find Hutton’s argument concerning the effects of that pity to be less than convincing. In fact, I think that he again misses the point. Yes, Tolkien considered several endings at Mount Doom; and yes, only the published one is called by Tolkien an exemplification of some of the words in the Lord’s Prayer (it is hardly to be expected that he would comment to readers on drafts they had not read). However, in all the different versions, it is the presence of Gollum that would lead to the destruction of the Ring, saving Frodo and destroying Sauron. And his presence was only possible because he had been pitied earlier. Thus pity did indeed have momentous effects in this singularly important case. Hutton adds to his discussion of this the comment that “it was not Tolkien’s primary purpose to expound” a Christian meaning in the end of the quest. No. Has anyone suggested that it was? The author himself made it very clear that his purpose was not to preach, and that he

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distinguished clearly between allegory and applicability.24 Very few critics have tried to prove him wrong here, but Hutton seems to imply that they have. Reincarnation and Magic—Tolkien Flouting Christian Teachings? In Tolkien’s legendarium, Elves are reincarnated.25 Hutton notes that reincarnation is “a fate for souls that has always explicitly been condemned by orthodox Christian theology, and especially by that of Tolkien’s own church.” To my mind, this is a misrepresentation, and it is again contrived. The Christian churches have never had much occasion to take a theological stand concerning nonhuman souls. It is up to Hutton to show that doctrines concerning human life and death necessarily have to apply to possible nonhuman species with souls as well. As a theologian, I see no reason to insist that they should, and I think Tolkien summed it up very well. He admitted that reincarnation might be bad theology if applied to humanity, as he explicitly did not. And then he added that he did not see “how even in the Primary World any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of spirit and body than I believe anybody to be, could deny the possibility of reincarnation as a mode of existence, prescribed for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures.”26 Hutton’s assertion that Tolkien, by allowing for magic in Middleearth, is of the same sort, shooting at a conceptual Aunt Sally, a straw man of sorts. It is possible only by pretending that what the Church has called “magic” and condemned, is the same as what is called “magic” in The Lord of the Rings. In fact Tolkien makes abundantly clear, in the letter Hutton refers to, that this is not the case. The reasons the Church have given for condemning magic simply do not apply to what Tolkien calls magia and goeteia.27

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW AND A MAJOR PROBLEM The History of Middle-earth shows that Tolkien, in the early years of work on his legendarium, was unsure about how he, as a Christian, should handle the clearly pagan traditions which constituted one of his main sources of inspiration and which he felt obliged not to misrepresent or falsify, but rather to show in their true light. In this, as in several other ways, he identified with the Beowulf poet,

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a Christian wondering a thousand years earlier how to treat the monsters and beliefs of the pagan past.28 Tolkien was struggling with very similar difficulties himself, a Christian working with pagan traditions in his legendarium. Should a Christian have truck with old pagan stories at all, or present them favorably? Or, as Tolkien asked in his 1936 paper “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”: “shall we or shall we not consign the heathen ancestors to perdition? . . . Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?”29 He experimented a lot in the earliest phase. There was no pagan period, if by “pagan” we mean that the legendarium was not supposed to be compatible with what Tolkien the Catholic held to be religious truth, although the narrators and other people in it did not necessarily know this truth, or only knew it very partially. God was God of all, including Arda in the Elder Days, the Fall of Man was “offstage,” but a reality nonetheless, and hope of the salvation of the world dwelt only in a far land of Men. But certainly there was a period when he used the pagan traditions more directly—or less diluted and filtered, if you will—than he later decided to do. This is the time of direct identification of Manwë with Odin; of orcs as creatures of Melko, bred from subterranean heats and slime; and of Makar and Meassë, the quarrelsome gods of war. By the earliest 1920s, this “unfiltered” period was however over.30 It was through working on his “mythology,” pondering the relationships between myth and religion, studying and teaching Beowulf and other ancient works, wondering about the nature of art and poetry, myth and fairytale, and story, contemplating the origins of human creativity, and discussing these matters with others (such as C. S. Lewis in the late 1920s and early 1930s), that Tolkien came to formulate the “sub-creation theory,” which is to be found in “On Fairy-Stories” (1939) and “Mythopoeia” (early 1930s), but with important aspects present also in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936).31 Here he argued that mythology and fairystory had a value of their own in helping the reader to see the world as it really is, and giving consolation in that they affirm the Christian hope, sometimes even giving far-off glimpses of God’s fairystory for Man, the Evangelium itself. Of Beowulf he wrote that its author “showed forth the permanent value of that pietas which treasures the memory of man’s struggles in the dark past, man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned.”32 In using his imagination to make story and myth, Man was exercising his God-given power of “sub-creation.” When God made Man in His,

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the Creator’s, image (Genesis 1:26–27), He intended that Man, too, should create. The ideas in the “sub-creation theory” are not very original in themselves, but the form they are given is idiosyncratic, and the “sub-creation theory” in “On Fairy-Stories” and “Mythopoeia” is both idiosyncratic and somewhat fervent. This is because the dilemmas that produced it were self-experienced and deeply felt, and the tentative answers hard-won. It is necessary to stress once again the intimate connection between the legendarium and the “sub-creation theory.” In the 1920s, Tolkien wanted to legitimize his creative work both to himself and to others, and his theory served well to do it. When it had been formulated, it formed a basis for his later work, The Lord of the Rings in particular.33 At this point there is, as I see it, a serious problem with Hutton’s reasoning. He mentions “On Fairy-Stories,” but calls it “an argument for a specifically Christian approach to scholarship,” which it is certainly not. It is a scholarly work—albeit of an unusual and personal type, and with “scholarly” used in a wide sense—setting out (among other things, for it is curiously wide-ranging) a specifically Christian approach to imaginative fiction. Hutton uses it, and the allegorical short story “Leaf by Niggle,” as proof that Tolkien could write as a Christian author if he wanted to, and concludes, because he has already decided that Tolkien’s early legendarium was largely non-Christian, that in his own cosmology, he chose, “quite consciously, not to follow this approach.” This surprising position ignores both the origins and the functions of the essay, but all right: The early legendarium cannot have been written according to the still inchoate “sub-creation theory,” because the development of both were closely intertwined; the one informed the other.34 But when it comes to The Lord of the Rings, it is hardly possible to maintain Hutton’s position, cited earlier, that it is the earlier, supposedly pagan “cosmos that underpinned the writing of that masterpiece.” On the contrary, the ideas in “On Fairy-Stories” underlie The Lord of the Rings from start to finish.

IN CLOSING All students of Tolkien’s work would do well to take Professor Hutton’s admonitions about the proper use of Tolkien’s letters to heart.

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His article serves as a timely reminder that we should not fall for the temptation of using an elderly man’s remarks as proof of attitudes and points of view in earlier years. The thesis that Tolkien’s “mythology” of the 1920s was composed of about two-thirds non-Christian elements, that this early, largely pagan structure underpinned the writing of The Lord of the Rings, and that that book is not to any extent as Christian as many have claimed, is bold and has the often appealing value of novelty. On closer examination, however, it turns out that the frame of reference, both when it comes to Tolkien’s own writings and to critical works, is far too narrow to draw the proposed conclusions, which are in fact not supported when the legendarium is regarded as a whole.35 Worse, the conclusions are contradicted even by the limited material referred to. The thesis is built on sand, and therefore it must fall.

NOTES 1. Hutton’s article appears in this volume, but had not yet been printed when this response was written. The response is based on a copy kindly provided by Professor Hutton in late 2005. The author is grateful for comments on an earlier draft from Magne Bergland, Bjørn-Are Davidsen, Kaj André Apeland, and Anders Stenström. 2. Although tempted, I will not here enter into a discussion of what terms like “Christian” or “pagan” really mean when applied to a book or a “mythology.” My own position is that only persons can be Christian or pagan in a strict sense, but it would probably not significantly change either my or Hutton’s argument if Hutton should disagree with this. 3. In the following, I will use Tolkien’s term legendarium as an easy way of referring to his evolving corpus of connected, imaginative writing set in “Arda,” his fictional name for the world. 4. This assessment is based on the immediate context, i.e., the reference to the Blessed Sacrament just before, and to the “never-ceasing silent appeal of the Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger” just after, combined with our knowledge that Tolkien in later years sought Communion often, frequently getting up very early in the morning to go to Mass. Cf. his own comments earlier in a letter from Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in Tolkien, Letters, 338–39. 5. Whether he was active in the Catholic Catenian Association in the 1920s we do not know, but Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull inform us that he served as vice president of its Oxford Circle sometime between 1930 and 1947 (Tolkien Companion, 2:958). Another subject on which more exact information would be very welcome is Tolkien’s reading of the Roman Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton’s works in the 1920s. We know that he read and highly appreciated several of

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Chesterton’s books before World War I, among them Orthodoxy (1908), and there are several references to Chesterton in Tolkien’s 1939 lecture “On Fairy-Stories.” An idea central to Chesterton’s work, and appearing in Orthodoxy, was that paganism in many ways was an important precursor to Christianity. The idea is more elaborated in The Everlasting Man, published in 1925 and certainly known to Tolkien in the 1930s, but it is not known whether Tolkien read it in the 1920s. That Tolkien expounded a similar view in his and Hugo Dyson’s famous “long talk” with C. S. Lewis in September 1931, however, is well known. 6. Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion, 2:830. 7. Cf. paragraph 4 above. 8. The subject is much too extensive to discuss here. It may however be mentioned that Mary Carman Rose, cited by Hutton to support his assertion that part of Tolkien’s legendarium is Neoplatonist, has this to say: “I suggest . . . that any attempt to interpret the works of [J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams] as informed by any view except that of Christian orthodoxy must result in a reductive, distorted view of them” (Rose, Christian Platonism, 204). It should of course be borne in mind that she wrote before the publication of The History of Middle-earth. 9. Cf. Flieger, Splintered Light. The notion that the existence of “higher” corporeal beings is “unchristian” may be related to the popular misconception that a discovery of “aliens” would somehow disprove Christianity, one of the misconceptions that Tolkien’s fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis’s famous “Space Trilogy,” written explicitly from a Christian point of view, set out to explode. 10. In The Book of Lost Tales, Ulmo is at one stage equated with Neorth (2:331– 32), and Manwë and Tulkas with Odin and Thor (2:290). Cf. Burns, “Norse and Christian Gods.” For unknown reasons, Hutton seems eager to play down the central and well documented role of northwest European traditions in the legendarium, preferring to point to the Mediterranean lands. Hutton finds that “Tolkien’s Gods in many respects bear a stronger relationship to those of Olympus than any others,” but does nothing to support this finding except to refer to Letter nos. 142 and 294 (to Robert Murray, S.J., and Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, respectively), and not, for example, nos. 131, 168, 289, and 297 (to various correspondents). In this connection he mentions that Tolkien made “the north the place of evil” in his work—forgetting, ignoring, or at least not mentioning that this was the direction of evil in Norse mythology as well. In his discussion of the “purgatory” version of human afterlife treated in note 4 below, which Hutton believes to be inspired by Homer and Virgil, one wonders if he is aware of the clear parallels to Norse mythology. 11. On this, see Shippey, to whom Hutton also refers. 12. See Tolkien to Waldman (cited above), in Tolkien, Letters, 145, and Tolkien to Dick Plotz, September 12, 1965, in ibid., 360; see also ibid., Tree and Leaf (Unwin Hyman), 27; “Beowulf (1977),” 20, cf. 22. The quotation is taken from a 1939 lecture, and one might object that this is a later rationalization on Tolkien’s part. However, the same assumption is to be found in “Mythopoeia,” probably written in the early 1930s, and in his 1936 Beowulf paper. 13. It is true that it does not happen often, and that they are mostly so called by Men. It is also true that they were more often called “the Gods” in the early legendarium, and “the Valar” more often as the years went by. However, this was a grad-

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ual process clearly discernible in the 1920s. It is of course highly inadvisable to take the published Silmarillion as evidence of Tolkien’s latest or most developed views, as it is compiled from materials written at very different times. 14. Tolkien, “Sketch of Mythology” (1926), in Shaping of Middle-earth, 21; cf. “Quenta” (1930), in ibid., 78. Tolkien’s view of human afterlife is incidentally nowhere as straightforward as Hutton would have us believe. In particular, there are some never-resolved, thorny questions in connection with the fate of exceptional human heroes like Beren, Túrin, and Tuor, where (presumably) the needs of a good story and of exception-free theology pulled in different directions. See, for example, Tolkien, Shaping of Middle-earth, 165; cf. Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion 2:604ff. Hutton makes much of one experiment—what I would say was a frankly not very successful attempt to incorporate the Catholic doctrine of purgatory into the legendarium, although in a form also inspired by Norse visions of various realms of the dead (Tolkien, Lost Tales 1:77, cf. 1:89–93). It was, mercifully, abandoned. What it shows is not, as I think Hutton would have it, sprouting Paganism, but rather Tolkien’s wish to make his legendarium more explicitly Catholic. Be that as it may, Hutton builds his argument on the premise that it is “obviously” closer to Greek and Roman mythology, and therefore less Christian, whereas Christopher Tolkien, wishing to put a Christian gloss on things, “gamely tried to assimilate this scheme to the Catholic one of heaven, hell and Purgatory.” Hutton does not seem to be aware that the conception is earlier (1915), and that Tolkien himself used “Purgatory” to describe what was very probably the same thing (ibid. 1:91 and 92). 15. First quotation from Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion, 1:130. Hutton’s chronological confusion is evident when he suggests that differences between two texts written by Tolkien well before his time at Leeds may be explained in light of “what he later wrote about his relative loss of faith at just this period,” i.e., in a letter to Michael Tolkien (November 1, 1963, in Tolkien, Letters, 336–41) no. 250, after he moved to Leeds. 16. This is apparent in numerous ways, but especially in the many varying but explicit connections made between the legendarium and “Real World” England. In the 1910s, Tolkien was eager to write in references to specific places of personal interest to himself, such as Warwick or Great Haywood. In “The Fall of Gondolin” and in “The History of Eriol or Ælfwine” in The Book of Lost Tales, there are also references to the ancient cities of Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, and Rome, and to the Elvish name of the latter city (2:196, 315). After such references were dropped and up to c. 1950, the direct connection was mainly in the frame story, telling how a seafarer from medieval Europe came to hear or read the legends of the elves. Cf. Tolkien to “Mr. Rang,” undated [August 1967], in Tolkien, Letters, 387: “The Fall of Man is in the past and off stage; the Redemption of Man in the far future. We are in a time when the One God, Eru, is known to exist by the wise, but is not approachable save by or through the Valar.” See also Tolkien’s remarks in various other correspondence in ibid., 186, 220, 239, 272, 283, and 129. 17. There is a possible exception to this, commented on in ibid., 286f. (a draft). Discussing the complex case of Míriel, an elf-woman who “tried to die . . . leading to the ‘Fall’ of the High-elves.” Tolkien stated that a difference between “this Myth” and “what may perhaps be called Christian mythology” might be that the primal fall, introducing evil, happened before the actual creation of the world in his

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“mythology,” and therefore affected it in its nature, whereas “Christian mythology” often held that evil was brought into the world from outside. Like the matter of human afterlife discussed in note 4, this is probably a case where the needs of storytelling were different from those of widely accepted Catholic beliefs. It is however significant that Tolkien takes a number of reservations. He supposes that there may be a difference, but is quick to point out that there are versions of “Christian mythology” where it actually is held that the Fall affected the created world in its nature (cf. Caldecott, Power of the Ring, 76). His use of “Christian mythology” rather than, e.g., “Christian doctrine,” “belief,” or “theology” is also noteworthy. It is certainly significant that his comment did not signify that he thought that the Fall of Man did not apply to Middle-earth (see Tolkien to Waldman and “Mr. Rang” (cited above), in Tolkien, Letters, 147–48, 387.). The theological position of fallen Man was therefore not changed. Cf. Agøy, “Fall and Man’s Mortality,” and Caldecott, Power of the Ring, 59f. For a related Christian view from Tolkien’s close circle, see also C. S. Lewis’s letter to Ruth Pitter dated January 4, 1947: “The pre-human earth already contained suffering. That is why (like our fathers) we must believe in the fall of the angels long prior to the fall of man. Our fall consisted in joining the wrong side in a battle wh. had already begun” (Lewis, Collected Letters 1:745). 18. Tolkien to Waldman (cited above), in Tolkien, Letters, 146. 19. Tolkien, Shaping Middle-earth 1:220. Cf. Garth, Great War, 277. 20. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, 438. 21. Ibid., 842; cf. his remark on that he himself “will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better” (ibid., 518). 22. Ibid., 1063. 23. On Tolkien’s views, see letters to various correspondents in Tolkien, Letters, 149, 160, 215, 220, 232, and 321. Cf. Burns, “King and Hobbit,” and Agøy, Mytenes mann, ch. 8. 24. Cf., among many other examples, Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in Tolkien, Letters, 283f. At this point in his article, Hutton has already quoted from Tolkien’s explanation to Milton Waldman as to why he did not want his legendarium to be involved in, or explicitly contain the Christian religion (cited above, in ibid., 144), and has also cited a letter to Robert Murray, S.J. (December 2, 1953, in ibid., 171–73), where Tolkien says why he has not put in, or has cut out, practically all references to religion or anything like it. It is not clear why Hutton does not accept this, unless it is because he does not accept that The Lord of the Rings is based on the ideas in “On Fairy-Stories,” to which Tolkien refers in the first letter cited here. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in ibid., 338–39. 25. This is actually a gross simplification, but we need not go into all the details here. It is simply wrong when Hutton states that “reincarnation has disappeared” in the published Silmarillion. And why should it? Unlike Hutton, Tolkien did not regard the elvish reincarnation as something un-Christian that had to be ironed out. 26. Tolkien to Peter Hastings, September 1954, in Tolkien, Letters, 189. If there is need to discuss this further, it is necessary to define reincarnation, explore the reasons why it is rejected by most churches and see if these reasons apply to Tolkien’s Elves. It should be noted that the Elves, in what seems to have been the most permanent of Tolkien’s varying views, when “reincarnated” are not given a

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“new life,” but are allowed to continue their natural, exceptionally long, but not eternal, lives. The Christian objections usually concern the ideas of karma associated with some systems of belief incorporating reincarnation. These do not apply here. 27. See Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, draft, undated [near September 1954], in Tolkien, Letters, 199–200; cf. Tolkien to Waldman (cited above), in ibid., 145–46. Hutton writes that Tolkien explains that all Middle-earth magic produces real physical change. This is not true. What is often called “magic” in The Lord of the Rings, and goeteia in a letter to Naomi Mitchison (cited above, in ibid., 199–200) does, according to the author, not produce physical changes. 28. Cf. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (1982), 44; Agøy, “Fall and Man’s Mortality,” and Mytenes mann, ch. 6. 29. Tolkien, “Beowulf (1977),” 22. The Latin quotation is from Alcuin, who asked “What has Ingeld [a minor character in Beowulf] to do with Christ?” 30. To the regret of some, it might be added. See Apeland, “On Entering the Same River”; Garth, Great War, 280; and cf. Hammond, “Continuing and Evolving Creation.” 31. “On Fairy-Stories” and “Mythopoeia” are both printed in Tree and Leaf; the 1936 work is reprinted as an independent article (“Beowulf [1977]”) and in several other places. 32. Tolkien, “Beowulf (1977),” 22. There are parallels here to “Mythopoeia” stanzas 5–11. On this, and on the striking parallels between Tolkien and his predecessor in Beowulf studies (and fellow Christian transmitter of pagan myths), Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig, see further Agøy, “New Perspectives.” Cf. Wood, Gospel According to Tolkien, introduction. 33. If one is not convinced by reading the essay and book, the connection is confirmed in letters to various correspondents, in Tolkien, Letters, 144, 216, 220, and 310 (The Lord of the Rings “was a practical demonstration of the views that I expressed”), and is explicated in a large corpus of scholarly work on Tolkien. Hutton refers to Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light without any comment on the fact that it directly contradicts much of what he himself has to say. 34. Cf. Shippey, Road to Middle-earth; Flieger, Splintered Light, ch. 1; Agøy, Mytenes mann, ch. 7. When considering the matter, one should keep in mind the exceedingly close connections between Tolkien’s scholarly and creative work, which are well documented. That said, my position is, of course, an interpretation, not an assertion capable of being formally proved from the sources available today. 35. Of the secondary literature, I find it especially surprising that Hutton does not seem to have used Birzer, Duriez, and Pearce when exploring his chosen theme. Matthew A. Fisher’s interesting article was, on the other hand, published after Hutton prepared his paper, as was the discussion of “Religion” in Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion, vol. 2.

Can We Still Have a Pagan Tolkien?: A Reply to Nils Ivar Agøy Ronald Hutton

IT IS AN HONOR, AND A SOURCE OF GREAT EXCITEMENT AND OPPORTUnity, to be engaged in debate by a scholar as able and erudite as Professor Agøy. Not the least flattering aspect of this situation is that the piece of work that has attracted his attention was, as he states, a conference paper. The copy that I sent to him, at his request, was that delivered at the event concerned. I designed it to provoke debate among an audience listening to the spoken word, and as such expressed certain arguments with a lack of subtlety and qualification that I did not retain in the final version delivered for printing. I cannot, however, claim to have been placed at much of a disadvantage because of this circumstance. The only major amendment that I made in the version finally intended for publication concerns my characterization of the three elements found in Tolkien’s personal mythology: the Christian, the pagan, and the faerie. I gave an impression in my initial draft that I regarded these as represented in his work with a kind of mathematical exactitude: one-third each. It would be more accurate to state that nobody can determine objectively the relative proportions of each within his fantasy literature. This is partly because they blend into each other, and partly because different readers will perceive each of them to differing extents. My purpose was, and is, to highlight the nonChristian elements in Tolkien’s mythology, if only because this is much less frequently done, in comparison with the number of authors who, like Professor Agøy, emphasize the Christian one. In doing so, I am facing up directly to a problem that should strike to the heart of the concerns of the present volume. It is beyond doubt that Tolkien was a devout Christian, with a particular commitment to the Roman Catholic faith. Furthermore it is very clear from some of his writings—which both I and Professor Agøy 90

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have highlighted—that he wished to be regarded as a Christian author, whose faith informed his attitude to both the study of literature and the creation of new forms of it. Despite this, his two fictional masterpieces, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are not only devoid of any formal practice of religion by their characters, but are enjoyed by huge numbers of readers who lack any sense that these books are specifically Christian works. This is apparent from any test of opinion that can be made—reviews, fanzines, conferences, Internet sites, and personal experience. There is even a significant body of Christian opinion, brought home to me at the conference at which I delivered the paper in question here, that Tolkien’s books are actually inimical to that faith, and lead readers astray from it. My answer to this seeming paradox is that they do indeed contain major elements that are not Christian in origin or essence, and that these add greatly to the ease with which adherents to any other form of belief can enjoy them. If my solution to the problem is rejected, then two others seem logically apparent. One is that Tolkien was a very bad storyteller, a position that few, if any, would adopt. The other is that his stories are carefully designed so that their true meaning is only apparent to an elite of readers who are sufficiently schooled in the proper faith. I find no clear evidence for this attitude in Tolkien’s own pronouncements or in the books themselves, and I think that such a conclusion diminishes him as an author. I do believe, on the other hand, that his great works of fiction can be made to seem compatible with Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, by a process of argument based on emphasis and interpretation. Nils Agøy is, of course, an exemplar of just that exercise. I would, however, also suggest that the latter remains in large part speculative, and that there are other aspects of the books that make nonChristians feel equally at home with them. In some respects Professor Agøy and I are playing according to different rules. However courteous his chapter is, its ultimate aim is annihilation. If I were to respond in kind, I would aim to show that his arguments are, in turn, essentially incorrect, with some comparable vaunting rhetoric. That is not my intention, for I believe, instead, that any attempt to delineate either Tolkien’s personal beliefs or the religious content of his fictional works with perfect confidence and certainty is itself “built on sand.” In my opinion, the sources are just too complex, self-contradictory, and inadequate. With these remarks in mind, it is time to proceed to the

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specific issues raised between us. Professor Agøy rightly divides them into two groups, those concerning Tolkien’s own beliefs and those concerning his mythology. I do not think that I have confused the two as much as he insists, but shall clarify my own opinions on them here. With regard to Tolkien’s own religious beliefs, I have consistently stated that he was, beyond doubt, a Roman Catholic, and for most of his life—at least—a very devout one. That would be all that I would need to say about the matter, and quite amenable to my own purposes, were it not for four of his recorded statements, all from letters, that give me pause. I quoted all of them in my conference paper. The first, which is the only one to which Professor Agøy pays any attention, is that in which he informed his son that during the 1920s he “almost ceased” to practice his religion. This could mean a number of different things. Its main significance for me is twofold. First, it does act as some corrective to the usual view of Tolkien’s faith as one held with the same fervor throughout his adult life, ever since childhood conversion. Second, it reminds us of how little we actually do seem to know about him between 1919 and 1929; perhaps John Garth would contemplate a sequel to his wonderful account of Tolkien’s life in the preceding years.1 I have raised the possibility that it may in some way be related to the fullblooded portrait of pagan deities that he provides in sections of the early drafts of his mythology. For lack of any better data, however, I cannot, and do not, press this any further. The second quotation is that in which he expresses his resignation to the forces of life and circumstance in shaping a person’s fate, directed by a God, if one exists. The third is that in which, many years later, he admits to the “temptation to unbelief.” Verlyn Flieger has, as I noted, already drawn attention to the element of doubt and loss of confidence in Tolkien’s nature, and its reflection in his work. I agree entirely that the element of pessimism and melancholy that colors his fictional writing at times must be related to this trait in his character, and lends it much of its poignancy. The fourth is to me the most unexpected, and baffling: when he wrote of his mythology as being “theologically . . . less dissonant” from what some people, in whom he included himself, believed to be “the truth.” This blurs the barriers between Tolkien’s personal belief and his imagined world in just the fashion that Professor Agøy insists that should not be done. It makes more significant, in turn, something to which Professor Agøy himself draws attention: that

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Tolkien declared that his imagined world is, or was, in some way our own. For lack of any better information from Tolkien himself, I simply do not know what to make of it. Professor Agøy has suggested that I breach my own rules of source analysis in drawing attention to passages such as these in Tolkien’s letters, when I had devoted a significant part of my initial conference paper to warning colleagues against an uncritical use of those very texts. My response is that my warning weighed heavily on the adjective “uncritical.” I was concerned about the manner in which too often, in my opinion, authors in Tolkien had quoted what he had written about his own work as a straightforward account of his relationship with it, displaying no regard to the context of the letter. It also troubled me that so many of the letters that survive were written in his old age, and cast retrospective glosses on most of his achievement. My own tactics in using them have been to highlight certain features that I feel to be more resistant to the cautions that I have entered. One of these consists of the moments when Tolkien directly opposed suggestions that he should have made his imagined world more conformable with Christian orthodoxy, or any other cultural norms. These seem to me to be proof against the charge that he was attempting to extenuate it against accusations of heresy or irreligion; they must have come from the heart. Such a view is reinforced by the number of times at which, when making such a defense, his conviction or courage faltered and he failed to send the letter or deleted the passage; these matters clearly troubled him. The other feature consists of remarks, such as the four quoted directly above, which seem to run counter to his general reputation for a fervent and constant Catholic faith. It may be noted that I do not actually build anything on them; I merely draw attention to them as intriguing anomalies, which perhaps call the simple assumptions regarding his sense of religion into question. It would be possible to explain each one away in a fashion that would make it accord with perfect devotion and orthodoxy; but not, I think, to prove that such explanations are correct. Virtually any author of creative fiction is to some extent distanced from her or his creation, not identifying personally with every character, situation and attitude expressed in it. Conversely the personal beliefs and interests of authors are inevitably reflected in the works that they create; few if any create sympathetic and attractive portraits of things to which they are not sympathetic

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and not attracted. In that sense a rigid distinction between Tolkien’s beliefs and his mythology, of the sort that Professor Agøy seems to advocate, is neither desirable nor possible. I shall return to some of the implications of this below. Nonetheless we are agreed upon his own essential Catholic Christianity. I am more sensitive to other possible elements in his religious attitudes because of my discovery, in the course of my own research, of many individuals in England between 1850 and 1950 who combined a profession of Christian faith, often fervent, with beliefs and practices taken over from paganism: Rider Haggard is one of the most remarkable. These fit, moreover, into a long pattern of similar blendings of the two, from the end of antiquity onward and running all through the medieval and Renaissance periods.2 Until I looked more closely at Tolkien I had assumed that he did not fall into this pattern at all; now I am not so sure. It is time to proceed to the content of his mythology. I identified three different components in it, from the beginning, and Nils Agøy and I are in broad agreement over two of them: the Christian and the pagan. Where we are far apart is in our understanding of the third, which I characterized as the faerie one. I emphasized that it was the blending of this that made Tolkien’s mythology so distinctive, and, I believe, gives it much of its popular appeal as reflected in The Lord of the Rings. This component consists of a belief in parallel realms or Otherworlds, which exist within or alongside the human one but are not part of it. Their inhabitants are similar in many respects to human beings, but more beautiful and powerful (especially in the arts of magic) and longer lived, or indeed immortal. They interact frequently with the human world, and sometimes, although less frequently, humans can enter theirs. Their relationship with humanity is equivocal and fluctuating, at times benevolent and at others characterized by suspicion and even hostility. This cosmology takes two different forms in Northern European tradition. In one, the beings concerned exist in a realm apart from the material world known by humanity, reached by a journey. In others, they inhabit the material world itself, as different forms of land spirit or nature spirit. Tolkien’s mythology incorporates both, in full: indeed, beings derived from this tradition make up most of the population of his imagined world, including its central characters. What concerns me about it is that it is based firmly and obviously on pre-Christian tradition. Not only is it derived from beliefs held before Christianity arrived in the lands con-

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cerned, but it reflects a different cosmology. This is the main thrust of my characterization of it, although I also stated in my paper that it has been, at times, assimilated into an orthodox Christian worldpicture (as a “supplement”). Professor Agøy has ignored all this and concentrated instead on the theological possibilities of making such an assimilation. I therefore stand by my original contention that Christianity is only one of three elements that are fused together in Tolkien’s sub-created universe. I also stand by my contention that the three elements were fused much more strongly in the course of Tolkien’s revisions of his mythology, and subordinated more clearly to an overall Christian scheme. In its earliest surviving version, as I have argued, the Christian and pagan elements are set side by side, in a manner that at times seems discordant and contradictory. In the latest known, they are combined in much greater harmony, and firmly within an overall framework that is recognizably Christian. I can restate this with the more confidence in that Professor Agøy actually seems to agree with it, although he tries to cause me as much trouble as possible in the process. I am happy to acknowledge that I telescoped the change too much, emphasizing the first and final versions rather than examining the stages between. I accept, therefore, that the change was well under way by the time that The Lord of the Rings was written. I could argue over details, such as whether Makar and Meassë disappear before or after 1920, but there is hardly room or importance enough for that here. I remain, however, more convinced than my opponent of the difference between the earlier and later versions. Tolkien did not just stop the Valar having children by the time of the posthumously published The Silmarillion, but made them less obviously and completely gendered. In the Book of Lost Tales, they are wholly female or male. In the published Silmarillion they can take such forms as they please, when they “desire to clothe themselves,” being predisposed, individually, to a female or a male appearance but not in their true nature corporeal.3 This makes them much more similar to angels than pagan deities. Likewise, the reincarnation of elves is stated firmly and plainly in the earliest drafts. By the time of the last known, it is represented much more equivocally: on death they go to the dwelling of Mandos in Valinor, “whence they may in time return.”4 The meaning of “may” in this passage is, characteristically for the later Tolkien, left open: it could be permissive or else speculative. In the earliest version the Valar are plainly “Gods” by definition, in the last

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one the position has shifted to one in which they are regarded as so by humans. Their behavior, as I have said, also changes markedly to make them more like angelic servants and messengers than pagan deities: and this seems much more pronounced in the versions of the mythology apparently produced in Tolkien’s later years. Having raised the subject of reincarnation, this is a logical place at which to discuss the fate of souls, as represented in Tolkien’s cosmology. Professor Agøy has taught me that, whereas it is improper for a Christian to believe that human beings can reincarnate, it is entirely permissible for one to imagine such a fate for different orders of being, such as elves. He concedes that no church seems actually to have pronounced permission to do so, while then handing me the responsibility for showing why, in theory, such permission should not be granted. I would emphasize two other aspects of the matter instead, both embedded in my original argument. The first is that the issue may not trouble Professor Agøy, but it certainly worried Tolkien. This is plain from the fact that he felt the need to defend it, in the letter from which we both quote and which he then felt unable to send. The second is that, given freedom to devise for his imagined elves a fate after death that he chose, he selected one which is drawn from non-Christian beliefs. Again, my critic is emphasizing that an idea can be made compatible with Christianity, while my stress is on the fact that it is essentially not Christian. It is possible that there is a reference in the earlier mythology to a more general redemption of both elves and humanity, in a specifically Christian context. Professor Agøy draws attention to it: a passage in the Book of Lost Tales that questions whether the gods of Tolkien’s imagined world would be responsible for the “salvation” of it. It ends in a line that states that there is a “whisper” that this is not so, and that “hope dwelleth only in a far land of Men.”5 Professor Agøy represents this as an “oblique, but still unmistakable reference to Christianity.” I have two responses to his heavy emphasis on this passage. The first is that it is very oblique indeed: note the words “some,” and “whisper,” and the phrase that concludes it, deleted in Professor Agøy’s quotation, that the narrator does “not know” how such a thing could be. The second is that, having considered such an interpolation to this text, Tolkien rejected it: it is an excised draft. Here we may cross the line into a discussion of The Lord of the Rings in particular, while continuing the same theme, of the fate of souls. In the course of the book, plus its appendices, only two char-

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acters state beliefs concerning their own destinations after death. Both are quoted by Professor Agøy. One is Theóden, who is confident that he is going to join his royal ancestors, and may take his place among them with pride because he is dying heroically, in battle. The other is Aragorn, whose prospect is equally optimistic, if much vaguer: of something “more than memory” beyond “the circles of the world.”6 The distinction suits the characters and cultures of the two men. In what I see as characteristic of Tolkien, both their views could be made to fit into a Christian cosmology, but both take their place far more obviously in the pagan ancient world, in which different expectations of the afterlife exist harmoniously side by side. Theóden’s is very obviously that of a northern European heroic society, while Aragorn’s could fit into a range of more civilized pagan philosophies. Both are, however, problematic, in a manner that should now be expected of Tolkien: Theóden may not be talking of an afterlife at all, but only of a burial ground,7 while Aragorn is, as said, imprecise. Nonetheless they suit my view of the book perfectly well. So, having termed Aragorn’s words “optimistic,” why do I also call the climax of the story “a bleak denial of certainty”? This problem is, of course, posed by Professor Agøy, with the added melodramatic question of whether we have read the same book. The answer, of course, is that we have not. We have looked at the same text, but, in a classic illustration of reader response, we have seen different things in it. Professor Agøy’s reading obviously stops with Aragorn’s words. Mine goes on, to what immediately follows, concerning the reaction of his queen, to whom those dying words are addressed, and who has given up immortality for love of him: she seems to turn “cold and grey.” She goes to live alone in what was once the land of Elves in which she grew up, and is now deserted, and dies and is buried there, until the world is “changed,” and the story of her life is “utterly forgotten.”8 Aragorn’s words have therefore totally failed to comfort, and convince, the very person at whom they were aimed. Tolkien has given hope with one hand and then immediately appeared to take it away. I would have made more of this passage in my conference paper, had it not already been done so well by Tom Shippey, who calls these “perhaps the saddest lines in the work.” As he also notes, the one about the world changing is also deeply ambiguous, perhaps carrying a promise of a change that will bring new life, and perhaps stating only that she will carry on lying in the ground. I would add that this

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is, in my opinion, a classic Tolkienesque trick, of providing a statement or scene that different readers can incorporate into differing theologies and cosmologies. Professor Shippey goes on to note the manner in which the death scenes in the tale of Aragorn and Arwen “are noticeably lacking in what used to be called ‘the comforts of religion.’” He also examines the terms in which views of the afterlife are voiced by other characters in the main plot of The Lord of the Rings, and finds that while a few express hope, it is “never overtly” stated, and not shared by most.9 I agree completely with him, and therefore felt no need to cover the same ground myself in my conference paper. With this issue out of the way, Professor Agøy and I are close together on the wider theme of the place of providence in The Lord of the Rings. I am also ready to be accommodating of his arguments concerning its celebration of the weak (or at least the lowly—in hobbits’ case literally—and humble). He was correct to remind me that the Bible itself does the same. Can we, however, examine how it does so? The Gospels and Paul between them seem to me to preach a creed of personal humility and political and military pacifism, combined with a profession of faith. This is expected to reap few if any dividends in the present world, and indeed invite suffering and death. The reward will come after death, and in another world, with perhaps the expectation that the present one will in time be transformed by the deity in whose name one is bearing witness. This appears to me to be almost the opposite of what happens in Tolkien’s masterpiece, where the heroes win by showing pluck, fortitude, comradeship, initiative, ingenuity, and a willingness to use physical weapons against earthly enemies and to carry a war onto the main antagonist’s home ground in order to destroy him. His hobbit heroes, in other words, behave much more like the protagonists of folk tales, of the sort that I described in my paper, than early Christians. If the two models come up against each other, at any point, it is the Scouring of the Shire near the end, when Frodo deplores the physical violence and thirst for vengeance exhibited by the other hobbits. He is utterly ineffectual, but one might argue that it is beside the point, if he can be held to represent any moral superiority. It is never made clear, however, that he actually does: he is not commended for his actions by any other character, nor is any reward held out for him in another sphere of existence, and nor is it even suggested that subsequent events might have been any better had he prevailed. Instead, Frodo’s

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stance most obviously has the effect of emphasizing his increasing isolation and unworldliness. When considering the role of mercy and forgiveness in the story, I am quite prepared to acknowledge the validity of different positions, but that is partly because I do not fully understand that represented against me. Christians believe in the power of forgiveness, because there is a heavenly reward promised for it by the savior of humanity. No such reward is suggested in Tolkien’s tale, and in most cases the act of forgiving is counterproductive. Without the ill effects of clemency, as illustrated spectacularly in the cases of Melko and Sauron, there would be no need to get a ring into Mount Doom at all. One might believe, indeed, that the fate of Gollum is needed as a single example to offset all the others, and show that kindness and forgiveness are not invariably a bad idea. Professor Agøy seems to want it both ways, theologically, over this issue: to argue that it does not matter to the Christian position if good deeds do not win practical rewards, but then to hold up a solitary example of such a reward as hugely significant. The hobbits’ display of mercy toward Gollum aids them crucially in the end, not because it achieves any good moral effect, but because of an apparent accident of circumstance. This might have been arranged by a benevolent creator deity, showing far more involvement in the events of his world than Tolkien’s one is generally wont to do in his mythology. We are not, however, told this, and the most obvious feature of the showdown at the Crack of Doom is that in pure narrative terms it is wonderfully effective. In his own gloss upon it, Tolkien, again typically, both suggested how a Christian message might be drawn from it and described how he had arrived at it in terms of the logic of plot and character. I acknowledge it as one of the moments in the book that Christians will find most appealing and meaningful, but so do many non-Christians: pity (which is, rather than forgiveness, the informing emotion here) is not a uniquely Christian response. Professor Agøy and I are further apart over the issue of magic. There is now a considerable literature on social, theological, and official attitudes to witchcraft and magic in the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, among which the works of Fritz Graf, Christopher Faraone, Matthew Dickie, Richard Kieckhefer, Valerie Flint, and Stuart Clark are most prominent. I have made my own contribution to it.10 In very general terms, throughout the periods concerned, both the Eastern and Western Churches were chiefly

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concerned with the nature of apparently uncanny powers wielded by human beings. If their origin point was in the Christian god, then they were permissible, and could take two forms. One was to manipulate forces within the natural world that were unknown to most people; effectively, to practice skilled science. As that world was a divine creation, people who took that course were working with divinely granted materials. The other form came when the deity himself chose to suspend natural laws for the benefit or instruction of his creations, using an angel or a favored human as his instrument, and the result then was a miracle. Any other employment of uncanny power by humans had, by definition, to be made possible by demons. Standard Christian theology held that none of these had the divine power to alter the laws of nature, but that they were expert in manipulating them, had far greater powers than humans, and were also skilled in creating illusions. In practice, established Christianity drew very tightly the permissible bounds of “natural magic,” and usually regarded all magical operations as demonic unless they took place within the official structure and prescribed rites of a church. Authors interested in magic, for their part, made two opposed arguments. The first was that the quantity of arcane power hidden in the natural world, and available to informed humans, was much greater than orthodox religion allowed. The second was that magical operations should be judged by their purpose and results, so that those aimed at achieving good could inherently be deemed to be godly, and those intended to work harm were clearly demonic. Popular tradition, as embodied in folklore and folk tales, has always inclined much more to the latter view, treating magic as a tool, essentially void of morality in itself. It is this latter position (that held by magicians and folklore) that Tolkien adopts. His love of fairies caused him to bring into his mythology beings—Wizards and Elves—who either inherently dispose of magical powers or have a much greater collective knowledge of them, just as fairies do in popular tradition. Likewise, the evil entities in his world deploy much the same skills. Sometimes both appear to practice illusion, but at others—as in shattering a sword with a gesture—the results are clearly and effectively physical. At times, also, humans, while not possessed of inherent magical abilities, are capable of deploying spells, such as weaving them into a blade to make them potent against particular adversaries, in the manner of smiths in Norse sagas. In his famous letter on the subject, Tolkien distinguishes, in what he supposes to be tradi-

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tional terms, between magia (good magic) and goeteia (bad). What he does not say, or perhaps did not realize, was that both terms were commonly used pejoratively, from Roman times onward, by official and orthodox writers, for human operations that involved apparently uncanny powers. Tolkien is employing the pairing as used by magicians, to distinguish workings that have good ends and employ benevolent forces and spirits, from the opposite kind. He then actually demolishes it, by declaring that neither form of magic was, in his fiction, good or bad in itself, but “by motive or purpose or use.”11 We clearly are in a different world from the historically real one. An especially significant illustration of his attitude at work is the figure of Galadriel. Tolkien was, as we have heard, pleased when some readers found a likeness in her to the Virgin Mary. It might be pointed out that such likenesses have to be superficial, because Galadriel is not a human woman who is chosen to give birth to an incarnate god, and then becomes the queen of heaven. A feature of her behavior that may well be especially attractive to Christians, and to which they may relate, is that she is tempted by supreme worldly power, and refuses it. Nonetheless, it should be pretty clear that the basic model for her lies not in any Christian heroine but in the great noble, royal, or fay enchantresses of the middle ages, and in the pagan sorceresses like Circe and Medea, and the Otherworld women of early Irish literature, who stand behind them. What is so remarkable about Tolkien’s portrayal of her is the unequivocal approval with which she is invested. Few of her progenitors were regarded with affection: the classical and Irish examples were there to be defeated, neutralized, or discarded, and the “subtle arts” of their descendants in medieval Christian romances were usually treated with deep suspicion or hostility. This tradition is, incidentally, retained to the full in C. S. Lewis’s Narnian stories, the work of Tolkien’s closest intellectual companion in much of his creative life. It is reflected exactly, while also being shown as ignorant and unjust, in the attitude expressed towards Galadriel by the Rohirrim. Tolkien has taken a character type usually treated with wariness and disapproval because of its association with magic, and invested it with some of the attributes of the good fairies in folk tales and some of those of a Christian saint.12 In looking at such issues, I have been concentrating, for the most part, on areas that commentators have either neglected hitherto, or believed to display most obviously the Christian character of

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The Lord of the Rings. I have not treated others, which have been prominently held up as aspects of the story that seem clearly to derive from pagan tradition. They would most obviously include his inclusion of an animist natural world, with trees in particular being inhabited by benevolent or malevolent spirits. Such themes have been explored well already by colleagues like Patrick Curry and Catherine Madsen. It is time to close by considering the relationship to Tolkien’s fiction of his two great nonfictional essays. I have called “On FairyStories” “an argument for a specifically Christian approach to scholarship.” Professor Agøy has said that it sets out “a specifically Christian approach to imaginative fiction.” I think that it is or does both things, and many more besides. I also agree that the ideas in it underlie The Lord of the Rings; but here we part company. The essay concerned is essentially a defense of the writing of fantasy literature, and arguably one of the greatest of those ever written. It is fitting that it was composed just before the writing (and revised during the writing) of one of the world’s greatest examples of that kind of literature. There are a couple of points in the main text at which the author reveals himself to be a Christian, but the real Christian component is added in an epilogue, which Tolkien characterizes as “presumptuous.” This is to dignify fantasy literature still further by pointing out the parallels between it and the story of Christ, and the Christian message, themselves. In doing so he is making a tremendous, and daring, claim for that class of writing. He is certainly not advocating that such works, including his own, should be written in a Christian manner. The results are plain, and proportionate. Tolkien’s fiction has not been noted for producing conversions to Christianity, but it has turned fantasy literature, of the sort that he was defending, into one of the favorite genres of the contemporary world. Here the other great essay, that on Beowulf, is indeed of relevance. I think that its relationship with his own fiction is threefold: backward to his established mythology; sideways to The Hobbit, which he was completing around the time that the essay was written, and into which he inserted a Beowulf dragon; and forward to The Lord of the Rings. Once again he identifies himself, by stray comments, as a Christian, although this is less prominent than in “On Fairy-Stories” because he is dealing with the Beowulf poet, who shared his faith and for whom he might (just) be taken for speaking. What comes across strongly in the essay is his admira-

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tion for aspects of the pagan ancient world, as revealed in medieval Germanic and Scandinavian literature: its “Northern courage,” its “creed of unyielding will,” its nobility of character and purpose, its recognition of “the worth of defeated valor,” and its “heroism and sorrow.” No doubt all these qualities appealed to inherent aspects of his own character, although his response to some was apparently catalyzed by his personal experience of war. Some of the features of the old northern mythology that he especially highlights in the essay were already central to his own invented world, such as a great war, fought out on earth between gods and monstrous forces of darkness, in which heroic humans are ranged against the monsters.13 As has been noted for a long time (at the least since J. S. Ryan in 1969),14 Tolkien reproduces the stance of medieval authors such as the Beowulf poet, who were themselves Christian but admired aspects of old heathen culture and composed tales set in it. In this respect, however, the stories that he put into his own Middle-earth can be distinguished from that of the author of Beowulf himself, who explicitly identified himself as a Christian in the course of his narrative and as clearly blended the pagan cosmology with a biblical one. Tolkien is more like the composers of some of the Icelandic sagas and of the mythological, Ulster and Fenian cycles of Irish literature, who were Christians making a sustained attempt to portray what a pre-Christian society might have been like. Indeed, my debate with Professor Agøy bears an almost uncanny resemblance to arguments between experts in those works over the nature and proportion of pagan and Christian elements in them. In being a person of professed Christian faith, who admired the pagan ancient world, Tolkien was typical of many educated people in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What made him highly unusual were two other factors: that (whatever his occasional qualifications) he was drawn to northern more than Graeco-Roman paganism, and that he composed genuinely imaginative fiction of his own, on a grand scale. By now the answer to my opening question must be obvious: I still think that we can have a “pagan” Tolkien. I also think that we can have a Christian one. It was to help sustain the latter that I have avoided the temptation to hound Professor Agøy’s chapter, section by section, as he has done mine, and to accuse him of equivalent scholarly misdemeanors. I have concentrated instead on establishing my own case. In doing so, I believe that I have answered all

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the substantive points that he made in his main text. I have neglected to deal, one by one, with all of the matters of detail that he packs into endnotes, often at tangents to the main argument, to avoid a hammer-and-tongs, tit-for-tat, exchange that would make such a conciliatory result more difficult to achieve. I think that the mythology that Tolkien composed and reworked between the 1910s and the 1930s was based on a creation myth that is drawn principally from Christian sources. I also think that, once the products of that creation hit the earth, we are in what is in most respects a pagan world, based on clear ancient pagan antecedents, in which the remaining action—the vast majority of the cycle of stories—is set. I think this to be equally true of the great works of fiction that he subsequently published, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was far too good a Christian to put anything clearly inimical to his faith into them, so that (most) other Christians can read those books with pleasure equal to any others. Nonetheless at times he was prepared to risk what he termed “bad theology” in the services of his creative literature, and was clearly at times made uncomfortable by suggestions that he had erred in that respect. The Silmarillion, as edited by his son after his death, is by contrast a much more harmoniously Christian work, in which the pagan elements are fewer, less obvious, and better assimilated. The complication, of course, is that Tolkien himself wanted a version of that work to preface The Lord of the Rings, which would have established a religious context for the action. Nonetheless I hold to my view that The Silmarillion as published in 1977 was significantly more Christian than its component tales were by the 1940s. I do not claim to understand Tolkien himself, or to explain how the mix of enthusiasm for Christianity, paganism, and faërie lore operated in his own mind and spirit. I can, however, offer my views as one further contribution, among many, to an understanding of the materials on which he drew, the manner in which he crafted his fiction, and the reception of that fiction by its readership.

NOTES 1. For the sake of space I have not repeated references given in either of the two previous chapters to which this one refers. Full details can be found in “The Pagan Tolkien.” I am extremely grateful to Tom Shippey and Patrick Curry for commenting on the first draft of this essay.

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2. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, ch. 1–10; Hutton, “Paganism in the Missing Centuries,” ch. 5 in Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 137–92. 3. Tolkien, Silmarillion, 21. 4. Ibid., 42. 5. Tolkien, Lost Tales, 220. 6. Tolkien, Return of the King (1966), 344. 7. Shippey, Author of the Century, 178. 8. Tolkien, Return of the King (1966), 344. 9. Shippey, Author of the Century, 177–78. 10. Hutton, Witches, Druids, and King Arthur, ch. 4 and 5. 11. Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison (draft), September 25, 1954, in Tolkien, Letters, 199. 12. I need to discuss, extend, and explain these themes much further, in a paper on “Tolkien’s Magic.” 13. Tolkien, “Beowulf: Monsters and Critics (1963),” 66–77. 14. Ryan, Cult or Culture, 188.

The Entwives: Investigating the Spiritual Core of The Lord of the Rings Stephen Morillo But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great. Yet the wild wood called, and we returned to it. —Treebeard, on the loss of the Entwives

THE CLAIM OF THIS CHAPTER IS THAT THE SPIRITUALITY IN J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S Lord of the Rings, and for that matter in the rest of his Middle-earth fiction, even The Silmarillion, is not, in any significant or specific way, Christian. Instead I will argue that a combination of the Norse paganism that he studied and the peculiar medievalism of Tolkien’s own imagination produced a spiritual sensibility in his works that is not notably Christian, a sensibility focused on loss, pervaded by sadness, and haunted by the inevitability of fate, and in which redemption plays little role. Because I must present this argument in the face not only of widespread Christian interpretations of Tolkien’s works but of the testimony of the author himself, I shall try to delineate my subject matter precisely and situate my reading carefully. Thus some preliminary considerations.

PERSPECTIVES I come at this topic from several significant perspectives. The first of these is that I am a lifelong atheist, and thus from my earliest encounters with Tolkien, which predate any real knowledge I had of 106

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Christianity, I approached the world Tolkien created with what I consider an open mind, unbiased by religious preconceptions. Others may interpret this condition as the blindness of ignorance, but the impressions I formed early on survived even as my academic knowledge of Christianity expanded and I reread Tolkien (including the creation myth in The Silmarillion) more critically: when I was first asked about this topic several years ago, it came as something of a shock to me that anyone could see Lord of the Rings as an obviously Christian book. This contrasts with my experience of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, which I also initially encountered before knowing anything of Christianity. According to my parents, when I did encounter the basics of the Jesus story in a slightly later year of my still young life, my reaction was to say “Oh, just like Aslan!” No such reaction has ever occurred to me about Tolkien’s work. Not that I take this as any kind of forceful argument for my position, however, for the second perspective I bring to this topic is an admitted amateurism. I am not an “expert” (whatever that may mean in this context) on any aspect of this topic. I am not a Tolkien scholar. I am a lifelong fan, and I have taught The Lord of the Rings in a college classroom, but as part of a freshman tutorial on fantasy literature; the relevant information here is that the Wabash College Freshman Tutorial Program encourages professors to choose topics outside their areas of academic expertise so that we might engage in a mutual exploration of a topic with a set of new students. Nor is my academic field either literary criticism (I leave that to my father and brother) or religious studies. I come at this topic essentially as an informed lay reader, and thus will not be referencing much of the specialist literature. The “informed” part of this disclaimer, however, constitutes the significant third aspect of my perspective. My specialist academic field is history, of two sorts. First, I am by training a medievalist, just as Tolkien was, although with, I think, a somewhat different emotional relationship to the medieval world than Tolkien had. The Anglo-Norman world of my studies is a bit later than but intimately connected to and informed by the Anglo-Saxon and Norse worlds of Tolkien’s scholarship. Second, I have become a world historian, both in terms of my teaching and my research. The teaching has accustomed me to making comparisons and noting functional similarities between the various religions that play so large a role in world history. My research has focused on premodern military

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and cultural history, especially with respect to warrior elites. (I could offer a favorable specialist’s assessment of the military action in Tolkien’s writings.)1 The intersection of warrior values and religion is therefore not unknown territory to me.

DEFINING THE SUBJECT: SPIRITUALITY I have chosen to analyze the spirituality instead of the religion of Tolkien’s world for one obvious reason: as every reader quickly comes to recognize, there is no religion in Lord of the Rings. There is quite obviously no organized religion in the sense of doctrinal beliefs, separate castes of priests, even places of worship. Nor do the characters ever mention a god or gods, resort to prayer, or even swear oaths and make imprecations that invoke the names of deities.2 And although there are gods in the creation myths of The Silmarillion, who are therefore presumably lurking somewhere in the cosmic background of the story in Lord of the Rings, they play no active or recognized role in the latter story, while even in the creation myths of The Silmarilllion their relationship to the Children of Ilúvatar is somewhat distant, especially from men, and grows more so over time. Indeed, the god most involved in the affairs of the Children, Melkor/Morgoth, has by the beginning of the Lord of the Rings long since been vanquished, and the focus of the dark powers is his lieutenant Sauron, who although powerful, is never attributed with divinity of any sort. With no organized religion and no direct dealings with gods in Lord of the Rings (much less in The Hobbit and any of the other incidental literature), the question of religion in Tolkien must either be answered at the literal level by saying there is not any, or must be answered at the more abstract level of spirituality. An immediate problem is what “spirituality” means, especially when it has no institutional or doctrinal religious instantiation. This problem is serious enough to recommend a reversion to the literal answer, and say there isn’t any spirituality, either. But that would be too simple, and I suspect inaccurate. So I shall take “spirituality” to indicate some combination of world view and emotional tone, the combination of which produces some sense of transcendent meaning. What is the sense of spirituality in Tolkien? The problem with this question is that it does not admit a straightforward answer, given the lack of religion in the books themselves and Tolkien’s own in-

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sistence that the story is not allegorical (either of religion or of wider issues of European politics and war, including either of the world wars). Instead the question of the spirituality of Tolkien’s work must be a matter of subjective reader response. In fact, this very fact constitutes one answer to Tolkien’s own claim that the books are deeply Christian: his construction of his world may have been inspired by a spiritual sensibility deriving from his own faith, but the books have left his control, and there is no reason to give his (reader’s) reaction decisive weight in interpreting how his original impulse actually plays out in the texts. And further, Tolkien’s insistence that the texts not be read allegorically would seem to put him on the side of a more abstract interpretation: he meant the spiritual sense to be extra-textual and open to interpretation (the contrast with Lewis is again instructive here). Viewing the matter this way also seems truest to the integrity of Middle-earth as a complete invented place with its own internal logic and coherence. With the question of spirituality situated at this abstract level, the problem becomes vague enough to admit of all sorts of readings, from completely nonreligious/spiritual to thoroughly Christian. In weighing this range of answers, the question really becomes one of the reasonableness of different readings given what the texts actually say. I shall therefore proceed first by identifying what, to me, seem to be the salient features of Tolkien’s world at the spiritual or emotional level, and then examining whether a Christian or some other interpretation better fits these features. This account will clearly be subject to disagreement both about what points are salient and how they can be interpreted, but in the end, I think a strong case can be made for reading the spirituality of Tolkien’s world in a way that is not only not specifically Christian, but is specifically a product of other imaginative impulses.

ELEMENTS OF MIDDLE-EARTH SPIRITUALITY It seems to me that the spiritual sensibility of Lord of the Rings is dominated by a sense of the tragic inevitability of decline and loss, an inevitability that rises to the level of destiny or fate. This sense is, in fact, woven into the fabric of creation, according to the creation myth of The Silmarillion, and not just in the discordant music of Melkor that contests with and is eventually absorbed into the dominant themes of Ilúvatar. For Ilúvatar’s third theme, the one

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that corresponds to the Third Age in which the story of the Ring takes place, is described as “deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.”3 This sorrowful theme of decline and loss pervades the events and descriptions of the Lord of the Rings and their background, in large and small ways. The power of the Elves is waning, and the last populations of them are leaving Middle-earth, following previous departures by groups of Elves long since lost to the world of Hobbits and Men. The Ringbearers, too, Bilbo and Frodo, must depart after their labors. The physical evidence of the lost power and glory of the kingdoms of Men, both the vanished kingdom of Arnor in the north and the circumscribed power of Gondor in the south, provides the story with dramatic settings (and the occasional powerful weapon) from the Barrow Downs to the Pillars of the Kings. Gandalf pores through old manuscripts of lost knowledge, forgotten in the libraries of Gondor, in his researches about the Ring. Even nature partakes of this decline: forests are old, haunted, circumscribed in their extent compared to the old days. To state the obvious, at the largest scale the story is set at the end of an Age and narrates its passing. This structure to the story colors the meaning of the conflict between good and evil that drives the plot, giving it emotional power and resonance. For, unlike the simplistic, almost Manichaean black-and-white conflicts that dominate the field of Tolkien imitators, in Tolkien’s world even the winners must lose something. For the Elves and the Ringbearers (and, it seems clear, eventually all the others: Hobbits, Dwarves, Ents, Wizards, and so forth), the loss is in fact total, if not immediate: their world is passing, and they with it. Only for Men does the future exist, and that an uncertain one, even with Sauron defeated. This does not mean that there is no pleasure for the victors in victory, nor that their previous or remaining time in the world is meaningless or bereft of pleasure. The very transience of the world enhances its pleasures: Sam is quite content with his family and his garden at the end. Immediate, everyday pleasures are the quintessential pleasures of the nonhuman folk of Middle-earth. The story of the Entwives from which the passage at the beginning of this article comes sums up this sensibility poignantly. The Entwives are lost. Not destroyed, killed, stolen, or turned evil, just lost. The Ents are deeply sorrowful about this. Yet the wild wood called. Here, I believe, is summed up the spiritual sensibility of the Lord of the Rings.

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Nor do the characters struggle against this decline and loss. Not only did the wild wood call, the Ents returned to it. They accept their decline, as Frodo, Bilbo, and the Elves accept that they must depart from the Grey Havens. They do not lack free will, and indeed crucial characters exercise their free will at crucial times: Frodo, writhing and tormented on Amon Hen, assailed by the Voice and the Eye, the incarnations of the music of Ilúvatar and Melkor respectively, could still choose: “Suddenly, he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger.”4 Just the same, Frodo and all the major characters have all played their free part in the struggle against evil, and it has not won them any respite from their fate. Fate indeed constitutes the other part of sorrowful decline and loss, for the shape of the world and its history has already been played as the music of the Ainur. The beautiful and sorrowful third theme plays against the insistent and repetitive beat of Melkor’s resistance, side by side, until a great chord ends the music. There is no music for the Fourth Age, and even the Ainur do not know what shape it will take. It will be a new world, a different one from that in which the story of Lord of the Rings takes place.

INTERPRETATION What is the best interpretation of the spirituality of Lord of the Rings? That is, what set of influences and parallels can account most specifically for the shape of Middle-earth spirituality in terms of its sorrowful yet beautiful emphases on decline, loss, and fate? My insistence on specificity is necessary because, at a certain level, the spirituality of Lord of the Rings is clearly not incompatible with Christian spirituality. There is, at least from the evidence of The Silmarillion, a divine and benevolent design to the universe, one in which elves and humans have a special place. One can read the passage above about Frodo’s free will as a very Catholic interpretation of that moment of moral choice, paradoxically free within the designs of the Creator. But, and this is crucial, there is no necessity to read that episode, nor the larger context, as necessarily Christian. The problem of free will is a commonplace in many systems of philosophical and religious thought, nor is the solution adumbrated in Frodo’s struggle on Amon Hen unique to Christian

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theology. More broadly, the larger idea that there is a benevolent design to the universe centered on humans is common to almost all religions. More specific, perhaps, to the major world salvation religions (Christianity, Islam, many forms of Buddhism, and Hinduism especially in its devotional forms) are senses of hope, redemption, moral choices, and paradisiacal afterlives, some of which are sometimes cited (dubiously, in the case of some of these ideas —the Western land the Elves go to is clearly not presented as an afterlife but life in a different place) in favor of Christian readings of Lord of the Rings. It would be relatively easy, as a hypothetical counter-example, to construct a Buddhist reading of the Lord of the Rings. One would not even need to note the interesting coincidence that the paradise of a dominant sect of Mahayana Buddhism, the Pure Land sect, is conceived of as being a land in the far west, like the mostly inaccessible lands west of the Grey Havens. A more Zen reading could focus on the transitory nature of all things (including the Third Age) as an explanation for the moments of what might well be called Enlightenment that many of the characters find in small, everyday moments, as well as for the sorrow they feel at the departure of friends and Ages, a clear sign of attachment to the impermanent and therefore illusory things of the world. The problem here is that the sorrow is presented not as a problem but as a core feature of the world, so this reading, like Christian readings, works only at a level of abstraction high enough to elide the crucial details, that is, at a level of ideas common to many religions. Thus the question arises: why should Christianity have a special claim on ideas common to so many religions? Many arguments in favor of the Christianity of Lord of the Rings come down, it seems to me, to a sort of Christian ideological imperialism, the claiming as if newly discovered of the already inhabited common themes of spirituality everywhere. Such arguments furthermore fail to explain the specifics of Middle-earth spirituality, and specificity is, if you will, the crux of the matter. Therefore we might ask, where in Lord of the Rings are the specifically Christian features beyond the commons of spirituality? Surely a central character whose self-sacrifice redeems the world should be part of such a scheme? Clearly no such single character exists in the work. Frodo is often cited as filling this role. I find this reading unconvincing on a number of levels. At the level of detail, Frodo does not, in fact, offer himself in sacrifice for the redemp-

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tion of the world: he survives. That he then passes over to the West from the Grey Havens puts him in crowded company, not in a unique position. To extend the Buddhist reading, he might therefore be a bodhisattva, but he is not The Buddha. Indeed a literal (or allegorical) reading of the act of self-sacrifice could lead one easily to the apparently perverse but intriguing suggestion that Gollum in fact fills this role. It is his (admittedly inadvertent) self-sacrifice at the Crack of Doom that destroys the Ring, saving not only the world, but Frodo himself from his unsavior-like moment of weakness. If the bearing of the Ring more generally is Frodo’s act of selfsacrifice, must he not then share that credit not only with Sam (briefly) and Bilbo (for longer than Frodo, and who does manage to give it up voluntarily in the end, unlike Frodo), but with Gollum, who bore the Ring longest of all? At a higher level of abstraction, Frodo’s act, even if interpreted as one of self-sacrifice, does not redeem the world if the crucial world is the Middle-earth of the Third Age, which passes despite Frodo’s efforts, a point I shall return to below. Indeed if Frodo is read as Christ, the story of Lord of the Rings must become a curious inverse —even negation—of the Christian story. Christ enters the world permanently through his self-sacrifice, making individual salvations possible (and so ending the problem of the “virtuous pagans” such as Plato that Christian writers such as Dante must explain away). Frodo leaves the world through his “self-sacrifice,” taking the world (the Third Age) with him. At best Frodo is prelude rather than double: his story ushers in the Age of Men, the Age that will need a Christ-redeemer (from a Christian perspective). If Frodo is Christ, Christ is redundant. Finally, I think that seeing Frodo as Christ confuses story with Story. Christ is the central character of The Story of the Christian tradition. Frodo is the (a?) central character of a story from Middleearth, but whether that story is The Story of Middle-earth is very open to question. But if a single character runs too high a risk of transparent allegory (Aslan, anyone?), perhaps there is a more generalized sacrifice? One might claim that role for Gandalf and the rest of the order of Wizards, except that Saruman is inconvenient to that reading, and Gandalf does not sacrifice himself. The Elves? The Hobbits? Not really sacrificed, are they? The Elves leave, but that would seem to throw out the redemption with the sacrifice, for the world of the Elves is thereby lost. Jesus, a human (as well as a god, of course, ac-

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cording to the theory), sacrificed himself for the rest of humanity. The Elves are not saved, and sacrificing the Elves (or the Hobbits), even if metaphorically, for the sake of the humans whose Age is about to dawn seems to lose the point, like Buddhism with sorrow as a good thing. We are meant to feel sad that the Age in which elves and hobbits roam among humans is past. That world was not redeemed. Not to mention that sacrifice is hardly the exclusive preserve of Christianity. Purusha, in Hindu myth, sacrifices himself in order to create the world, including the hierarchy of human society. Odin sacrifices himself on the World Tree. Sacrifice is perhaps one of the most regular features in the commons of spirituality. Looking at the question from the other end, are notions of inevitable loss and the passing of a world in favor of another world that is equally material specifically Christian? Is sorrow per se, a generalized, world-defining sorrow, an object of beauty in Christianity, a sorrow divorced from the empathy one is supposed to feel for Jesus’ particular suffering on the cross? If so, I fail to see how. Thus, the negative conclusion of my analysis: that the spirituality of Lord of the Rings cannot convincingly be taken as specifically Christian. Nor, I think, did Tolkien wish it to be taken that way. The spirituality of Middle-earth may have been, for him, compatible with Christian spirituality—indeed, what else was he going to say, or feel, about the issue, as a devout as well as spiritual man? But he did not wish to write allegory, as his friend C. S. Lewis did, and nothing but allegory could capture a specifically Christian spirituality in a story such as that in Lord of the Rings, so he believed in compatibility at a level abstract enough that it is also compatible with most other major forms of spirituality. And this was in part because he was too true to his imagined world, which was not a Christian world, but one animated by a different creation myth, populated by different beings, and therefore infused with a different specific spirituality, to reduce it to allegory. Which is not to say that there are not influences on the specific spirituality of Middle-earth. I think there are two that play a significant role. First, pagan mythology, especially Norse myths, and second, Tolkien’s own (imagined) relationship to the medieval world he studied. Tolkien was, of course, a scholar of Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, including the Eddas and Beowulf, about the latter of which he wrote his most famous scholarly article. Many of the parallels between Norse myths and literature, including the Poetic and Prose

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Eddas, and elements of Lord of the Rings have been noted by others, starting with the obvious similarity of nomenclature and cosmic position between Midgard (“middle dwelling place”) and Middle-earth. In terms of creation myths, each features a multiplicity of gods, although each also has a hierarchy in which one god is preeminent. Creation in each takes place in several stages, and not just stages of material creation, as in Genesis, but stages that move in The Silmarillion from abstract and musical through visualized to real, and from unthinking and accidental to intentional in the Eddas. Perhaps most importantly, both creations, those of the Ainur and the Aesir, have an endpoint which is followed by a new age: in The Silmarillion, an age not foretold by the music of the Ainur and thus about which they have no knowledge; in Norse myth, an age after Ragnarök, the destiny of the Aesir gods, whose destiny is destruction, and whose destined loss imparts a sense of melancholy loss, whose flip side is appreciation of beauty heightened by transience, to the entire mythic cycle. The concept of Ragnarök may well have been insinuated into the original Norse mythology by Christian missionaries, a possibility strengthened by the fact that the recording of the Eddas postdates the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity. But for the purposes of this argument this makes no difference, for this is the form in which Norse myth came to Tolkien, and the Christian shape of the new Norse age is, if not exactly irrelevant, at least not directly germane, because it postdates the world and society of the myths. Its relevance is again in the parallels one might draw between it and the Fourth Age, the Age of Men, in Tolkien: both come after, and are different from, the worlds that truly interested Tolkien, whether the pagan pre-Christian worlds of northern Europe or the magical first three ages of Middle-earth when Elves, Hobbits, and Ents roamed the world. This parallel suggests that the most that can be claimed about Middle-earth before the Fourth Age is that it is pre-Christian; even believing this requires a leap of faith, given the lack of religion generally, nevermind any explicit hint about Christianity in the text, and it strikes me as much more reasonable to conclude that this is a non-Christian world with a non-Christian spirituality. This argument is reinforced by consideration of the imaginative origins of the entire world and set of myths Tolkien created. For Tolkien, what came first were the languages—he was a linguist, in love with languages and how they shaped (or at least reflected) different people’s thoughts and perceptions of reality. Having created

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languages into which the Gospels were never translated, he created worlds and societies for these languages that were, again, true to their own logic rather than driven by the logic and imperatives of Christianity. The contrast with Lewis and Narnia is once again a stark one. Yet the appeal to Tolkien’s own interests and perspectives highlights another contribution to the spirituality of Middle-earth: the emotional quality of Tolkien’s own relationship to the medieval world, a relationship colored by his own experiences and his position as a don in mid-twentieth-century Oxford.5 The world of Middle-earth has many medieval elements to it, from the level of technology to the political organization of the kingdoms. But Middle-earth is not really a created medieval world as much as a world created by a medievalist. The difference is that for a medievalist, the world he studies—and is fascinated by, and may come to love— is gone, whereas for medieval people their world was inescapably present. For the medievalist, the important world is a past age, the evidence for whose existence is fragmentary, incomplete, degraded, and often lost. For medieval people, the evidence for their world was abundant and ever-present. Even those medievalists who recognize that we live today in a more comfortable material world and a more politically egalitarian one may feel a touch of nostalgia for the past, or a sense of melancholy that a vanished world cannot be accessed directly. Medieval people, of course, felt no such thing, because their world had not vanished, nor did they expect it to.6 For Tolkien, this medievalist’s feeling of melancholy loss seems to have taken a life of its own, expressed in the creation of a world that he could access, as it was a product of his own imagination. Thus his imaginative world was colored by the medievalist’s sense of nostalgic loss. This is probably also the context into which to place Tolkien’s own experiences in World War I and, perhaps, his perceptions of World War II as influences on Lord of the Rings: not as direct input, either descriptively or allegorically, but as contributors to a sense of passing ages, lost pasts, and the melancholy that loss entails. And the crucial point here is that most, if not all, of the major characters of Lord of the Rings experience their world not as medieval people would have experienced their world, but as medievalists in their own time. That is, they are aware of the coming passing of their world, they see the evidence of lost glory and a

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world in decline, and their access to their own knowledge of the world is fragmentary. The best example of this peculiar melancholy medievalism of Tolkien’s world as experienced by its own inhabitants shows up in terms of writing. Middle-earth is a world remarkably short of documents: let us remember again Gandalf’s researches in the archives of Gondor, rummaging through ancient manuscripts, difficult to decipher and rendered incomplete by the ravages of time, for lore about the Rings of Power. What better description is there, not of the researches of a medieval scholar (for whom recently copied texts would have been, except in the most backward or preliterate societies, readily available, even if expensive), but of a medievalist? No wonder the elves trust not to manuscripts but to oral poetry, the manuscript of collective memory. Here, too, we may note the framing conceit of the story: that we are reading a story derived from the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo, supplemented by some Shire records and other fragmentary manuscript traditions of the old kingdoms, the manuscript tradition for which often comes down to a single copy that somehow, miraculously, made it into our story teller’s possession. Thus the emotional relationship Tolkien had to his scholarly subject matter (as well, perhaps, to aspects of his own world) dovetailed with the emotional sense of Norse myth, especially myth infused, whether internally or externally, by the notion of Ragnarök, the passing of one age in favor of another. Both outlooks would agree on the poignant appreciation of beauty that attachment to a passing world would necessitate, would agree that fighting the loss is futile, and would agree that there are nevertheless everyday pleasures in the world that can be appreciated on their own terms. The Entwives may be lost, but the wild wood calls, and we return to it, doomed and sorrowful but still appreciative.

CONCLUSION It would be silly to deny that Tolkien himself was Christian. But it is, I believe, misguided to think that this fact necessitates the Christianity of his masterwork. He was true to a complex, deeply imagined world of his own imagination, an imagination colored most strongly, it seems to me, by Norse paganism filtered through his

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own medievalist lens. Both these influences conspired to give to Tolkien’s Creation a spirituality that, while perhaps broadly compatible with Christianity, turns out to be specifically non-Christian in its emphasis on destiny, loss and sorrow, however infused with beauty. To deny this seems to me to deny that The Lord of the Rings is about elves, hobbits, and ents and their lost wives.

NOTES 1. Unlike much of the dreck that has filled the post-Tolkien world of fantasy publishing, The Lord of the Rings offers battle scenes that remain largely convincing even to a military historian. The number of troops engaged in the major battles, the strategies and tactics employed, and the role of morale all sit well within reasonable bounds, a result partly aided by the limited power of magic over large-scale fighting in Tolkien’s world. In these respects the books are better than the movies, for all the computer-driven wizardry of Massive. One telling change is that Gandalf’s victorious downhill charge at Helm’s Deep takes place on foot in the book; no cavalry could have charged down a real hill as steep as that shown in the film version. 2. If our standard of judgment is the actual history of human societies, this would seem to constitute perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of Tolkien’s world. Even if we grant a psychology to elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs different enough from humans that religion need not be a part of their mental universe— a position, at least for Elves, hinted at by Tolkien himself in The Silmarillion (“Quenta Silmarillion,” end of ch.1)—that the tendency implanted by Ilúvatar, according to Tolkien’s own myth, that “the hearts of men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein” should find no institutional expression is, to say the least, somewhat surprising. 3. Tolkien, Silmarillion (2006), 5. 4. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 392. 5. I am deeply indebted for the ideas in this section to a talk delivered at Wabash College in February 2003 by Martha Bayless of the University of Oregon on the world Tolkien created. She pointed out with respect to the entirety of Tolkien’s created world that it reflected not a true medieval world, but instead what she called the inside of a particular medievalist’s head. In addition to the notion of loss and decline that I will expand upon here in the context of spirituality, she also stressed the prominent role of pipes and tobacco and the near absence of women in The Lord of the Rings as characteristics of Middle-earth that reflect the “inner Tolkien” rather than an expert’s objective understanding of the medieval world. 6. One might argue that millennialism constituted a form of expecting the world to end, but the chasm separating the emotional tone of millennialism from that of medievalism is unbridgeably vast: millennialism treats this world as a transient evil, whose ending is to be eagerly anticipated in favor of the heavenly kingdom to come; medievalism mourns the past (or passing) beauty of a world that is not fundamentally evil.

“Like Heathen Kings”: Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien’s Fiction John R. Holmes

WHEN DENETHOR, STEWARD OF GONDOR, VOWS TO CREMATE HIMSELF and his son alive in The Lord of the Rings, he cites the precedent, and, surprisingly, the religion, of antiquity. Twice he refuses a tomb burial by name, and once again by the dead metaphor of death as sleep. “We will burn,” says Denethor, “like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West.”1 With his triple “no,” Denethor demonstrates that he knows he is rejecting the moral code of his culture and Gandalf rebukes him for it. “And only the heathen kings under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair.”2 The word “heathen” jumps out at the reader in these two passages—and these are the only two times that the word appears in the novel.3 It seems out of place in a novel in which, as a number of critics have observed, religious references are conspicuous by their absence. As Tolkien wrote to his Jesuit friend Father Robert Murray, he had left out, or in his revision cut out, virtually all religious references in The Lord of the Rings.4 Virtually all, yes—but these two instances of “heathen” are the minority that made the cut. The question is, why? This why? is fundamental to Tolkien studies at this moment, because the question of the relation between Tolkien’s faith and his writing has reached an impasse similar to the one Tolkien encountered in Beowulf studies when he began his career as an Old English scholar. When Tolkien was studying the poem as an Oxford undergraduate, many scholars thought of the Christian element in Beowulf as a mere excrescence layered on a pagan masterpiece in some monastic scriptorium. Tolkien presents this moment in Beowulf criticism in his chorus of critical voices in his 1936 Gollancz lecture as reducing the poem to an anthology of “pagan lays” and the poet to a monkish editor.5 We are not faced with quite the same 119

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problem with The Lord of the Rings: we know from external evidence the author’s religious affiliation. But the current state of scholarly opinion on Tolkien’s religious thought—that is, what bearing (if any) his faith has on his fiction—was well summarized by Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne in their retrospective of late twentieth-century Tolkien criticism occasioned by a review of T. A. Shippey’s Author of the Century: We are sympathetic to the critics who wish to use Christian (and specifically Roman Catholic) theology to understand LotR. After all, Tolkien was a devout Catholic and his religion is well known to have influenced his scholarship, fiction, and life . . . But articles on religion and Tolkien have a tendency to rely upon Christian theology as a received truth, which is no doubt true for many Christians, but exceedingly unlikely to be persuasive to scholars, Christian or non-Christian, who would like to see arguments grounded on rigorous logic.6

Later, in discussing particularly Joseph Pearce’s Tolkien: Man and Myth, Drout and Wynne add clarifying detail: Interpreting Tolkien’s works by saying that they have the effect of one of the mysteries of the church merely delays the problem of interpretation. And in fact this deferral of interpretation is even more problematic than the deferral to any putative source, since (almost by definition) the mysteries of the Church and Tolkien’s religious joy at the Eucharist remain beyond explanation. Doubtless critical frustration at using mysteries to explain texts is seen as either pathetic or amusing by those who share Tolkien’s faith and experiences, but such an approach holds little promise for a literary criticism open to believers (and non-believers) of different religions.7

The relationship between an author’s belief and critical interpretation became a major concern for the twentieth-century formalists known as “the new critics,” which they labeled “the problem of belief.”8 Avoiding the “problem” of belief usually leads to other critical fallacies, as Matthew A. Fisher demonstrates in response to the same Catholic criticism Drout and Wynne were addressing. “Clearly readers like [Joseph] Pearce and [Jason] Boffetti see a great deal of applicability in The Lord of the Rings to the Catholic faith, and I will not challenge or dismiss the right of readers to focus on such applicability. But we must be clear that the applicability as discerned by the reader is not the same as authorial intent.”9 In attempting to

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escape the “problem of belief” we run smack into what Wimsatt and Beardsley called “the intentional fallacy.”10 Tolkien’s own entanglement in the problem in regard to The Lord of the Rings, both in his own lifetime and now, curiously echoes his own “critical frustration” with Beowulf scholars who would defer the question of belief altogether by constructing the phantom of a pre-Christian poem, which takes us back to the word “heathen.” Surely a philologist as careful as Tolkien, in a work that had been as heavily revised as The Lord of the Rings, could not have been insensitive to the semantic dissonance created by the word “heathen” in the Denethor passages. He would have known that his readers would apprehend the word as an exclusively Christian term: the dissonance lies in the fact that the latter days of “The Third Age” in which The Lord of the Rings is set fell some 4,000 years before the nativity of Christ. The word, then, would appear to be an anachronism. Yet appearances can deceive. In his profession as a medievalist, Tolkien was aware of the charge of anachronism in Old English and Middle English poetry set in pre-Christian times. In Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936), Tolkien faulted the critics who found the link between Cain and Grendel in Beowulf to be an ignorant anachronism. The monsters, he insists, are implicitly scriptural, yet at the same time associated with similar monsters in Germanic mythology, and he assures us that “this is not due to mere confusion.”11 The Beowulf poet’s description of the initial reaction to Grendel’s attack is in fact (1) quite close in tone to Gandalf’s rebuke quoted above, (2) the first use of the word “heathen” in Beowulf, and (3) open to the charge of “anachronism” in presenting a Christian condemnation of an earlier pagan culture: hæ ´ þenra hyht; in mo¯dsefan, dæ ´ da De¯mend, ne¯ hı¯e hu ¯ru heofen Helm wuldres Waldend.

Swylc wæ ´ s þe¯aw hyra, helle gemundon Metod hı¯e ne cu ¯ þon, ne wiston hı¯e Drihten God, herian ne cu¯þon,

[Such was their custom, hope of the heathens; they thought of hell in their souls, they knew not God, the judge of deeds, they knew not the Lord God, they knew not how to praise heaven’s protector, ruler of glory.12

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As Friedrich Klaeber pointed out in his edition of the poem, the heathen practice of burning the dead (mentioned explicitly in Beowulf 1107ff, 2124ff, and 3137ff) is expressly condemned by the Christian poet (445–46, 1007–1008, 2457–58, 3107ff ).13 Yet surely the Beowulf poet had more of an excuse than Tolkien for using the word “heathen”; applied to King Hrothgar’s fifth-century Danish court, the word is merely descriptive. How could the word be appropriate, though, for a twentieth-century Christian author writing about an imagined past 4,000 years BCE? Religious matters in Tolkien’s fiction are, like literary ones, usually entwined with philological matters. As Shippey observed, nearly every aspect of Tolkien’s life was filtered through his passion for words.14 And the etymology of the word “heathen” had been the subject of philological debate in Tolkien’s youth. The etymological headnote to the word in the Oxford English Dictionary begins with the long-standing assumption that the religious term was derived from the abstract noun heath, and was therefore a gloss on the Latin pa¯ga ¯ nus, “villager, rustic.” In Rome, as in the Gothic east, the advent of Christianity in the towns relegated the non-Christians to the sticks (Latin pagus) or the barren waste-lands (Gothic haiþi). Note that even in the OED an etymological question invariably becomes a story: the word heathen tells the tale of a pagan exodus. But just two years before the OED account appeared (the fascicle Heel-Hod was first issued December 1898), the reconstructed story of the word was questioned. The Norwegian philologist Sophus Bugge had been exploring linguistic links between the ancient Etruscans and the Armenian neighbors of the Goths, and he suggested that the Gothic haiþno, attested in Bishop Wulfilas’s translation of Mark 7:26, was influenced by Armenian het’anos, “heathen,” and therefore cognate with Greek evqno~ (ethnos), “nation, Gentile.”15 In Bugge’s analysis, then, “heathen” glosses the Hebrew goyim. Either etymology absolves Tolkien’s use of “heathen” in The Lord of the Rings from the sin of anachronism. Whether heathens are “foreigners” (Bugge’s connection with ethnos) or “people of the heath” (the older assumption), the word can logically apply to the predecessors of the Gondorians who burned their dead rather than burying them like respectable Third-Agers. There is no doubt, however, that Tolkien expected his readers to feel the semantic tension between the familiar religious connotation of “heathen” and its earlier, more secular etymon (whichever etymology one chooses). This was, after all, Tolkien’s fondest method of providing

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an aura of antiquity to his prose without resorting to the archaic diction of which he is often (falsely) accused. Although Tolkien sometimes revived linguistic fossils that had dropped out of common use (eyot, tussock), more often he used common words still in circulation (reek, doom, tell ), but in contexts that subtly suggested that another, and as it turns out, older, meaning must be showing through, like the earliest inscriptions on a palimpsest. When the modern reader sees reek he thinks “stench,” but catches a whiff of the older sense of “vapor, smoke”; doom spells “disaster,” but the older “judgment” peeps through; “tell” means “relate,” but with a trace of the original “count” (a sense reduplicated in the verb recount). If words are palimpsests—recycled parchments on which newer messages are written over older ones—then sacred words are no different. Or perhaps, in the case of the religious lexicon of English, it would be more accurate to say that the sacred words of Christianity retain vestiges of their pagan or secular past. In so doing, Christian words imitate popular Christian piety. It is a commonplace observation that Christianity tends to assimilate whatever culture it encounters. Christianity meets Germanic culture and turns its winter solstice festival into a celebration of the birth of Christ. Geol becomes Christmas. Moving into Ireland, Christian monks reinterpreted the Celtic harvest festival of the dead into a celebration of the Church’s saints and martyrs. Samhain becomes Hallowe’en. It is precisely that assimilation that captures Tolkien’s imagination, both as a professor of Old and Middle English, and as a fantasy writer—and, I hope to demonstrate, as a Roman Catholic. The OED’s dilemma over “heathen” is only a specific instance of a general pattern that Tolkien thought that scholars, both literary and philological, were reading wrong. Tolkien’s quarrel with modern medievalists was not over the general scenario of Christianity assimilating and adapting pagan material, but over the nature of that assimilation. Even among medievalists there was in the early twentieth century a modernist condescension toward the medieval mind, to which Tolkien objected on two grounds: first generally, as an antiquarian who on many issues preferred the older way of thinking to the modern, and then specifically as a Roman Catholic who often found that the basic presuppositions of the medieval mind most foreign to modernism were to him firmly held beliefs. Thus, while the apologist for modernism sees the Christian assimilation of heathen culture as a bigoted destruction of a rival re-

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ligion, Tolkien suspects that the real bigotry is in that narrow, fundamentalist form of modernism, and sees instead in medieval minstrelsy a Christian art that preserves what has come before it, in the same way that myth-makers always have. And while the fundamentalist modernist thinks of that preservation as an ignorant anachronism, Tolkien knows that the medieval poetic approach to the stories of deities and heroes before Christ was usually not to reject them as lies, but to value them as what St. Irenaeus called a preparatio evangelium, a “preparation for the good news.”16 Certainly there were religious bigots, then as now, Christian and heathen, who reject the mythology that precedes them as ignorant superstition. But that is not what is going on in Beowulf (although it may be going on in the most monstrous criticism). Because of the Old English scop’s taste for the older heathen material—the affinity of the modern Catholic fantasist for the earlier heroes that Tolkien shares with the Beowulf poet—what Shippey called “the Appeal of the Pagan”17—the Christian artist actually builds respect for the heathen rather than tearing it down. “It is the poet himself,” Tolkien concludes, “who makes antiquity so appealing. His poem . . . is a greater contribution to early medieval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil.”18 While such a “harsh and intolerant view” clearly existed in AngloSaxon times among both heathens and Christians—and still exists in our times among both secularists and Christians—Tolkien’s plea is rather more modest than that of his most vocal Christian apologists. It is simply this: do not assume that the lamentable loss of the rich pre-Christian mythology was a conscious and systematic obliteration by Christian clerics when in fact those clerics were the only ones preserving any trace of pre-Christian thought. The motive for this preservation was not so much an admiration, however grudging, for the defeated foe—Beowulf presents heathen culture as neither defeated nor foes, merely tragically mistaken—but rather a real sense of solidarity with the spiritual and moral implications of the older world view. In a way peripheral perhaps to understanding the Denethor scene, but vital to my argument, Tolkien’s Catholicism is central to a critical understanding of how he incorporated by significantly altering the immolation motif from Beowulf. In Beowulf, as already noted, the practice of burning the dead is explicitly condemned; Klaeber observes that the practice “was frowned upon by the Church.”19 The disapprobation is long-stand-

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ing in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Semitic migrations into Canaan replaced cremation with inhumation around 2500 BCE. Nor were the early Hebrews the only ancient peoples to make cremation a moral issue: the Zoroastrians in fifth-century BCE Persia made cremation a capital offense.20 In ancient Rome—a culture that fits more closely the image of Denethor’s Gondor—Cicero looked at the cremation of Sulla “for the first time in the history” of his gens as a decadence to which the more traditional practice of exhumation was preferable.21 Buddhism, of course, founded by an avatar who was himself cremated, has always embraced the practice. The very notion of the avatar—an incarnation of a divine being— reinforces the appropriateness of cremation for Buddhism. If the physical body is something better left behind by the spirit—a way of thinking central to Buddhism and wrongly attributed to Christianity—then the burning of the dead body is merely an expression of the belief of its worthlessness. The gentleness of Klaeber’s idiom—that the Christian Church “frowned upon” cremation—is not euphemistic, but aptly precise. The Church in Anglo-Saxon times did not have a solemnly declared doctrine on cremation, but it opposed the heathen practice because it was often accompanied by a profession of despair and a denial of the resurrection of the body. Some theologians argued —and it is this view that prevailed—that cremation is acceptable as long as the act is not intended as an attack on the faith.22 Here was Tolkien’s artistic dilemma: he had a powerful dramatic, emotional, and moral conflict from Beowulf, the theology of which was no longer valid. How can the modern writer invest the scene with the same dramatic, emotional, and moral weight when the values of his audience—indeed his own religious values—were at best ambivalent about cremation? Well, we have already seen Tolkien’s solution: Denethor’s immolation of his son is no mere cremation, but murder. Gandalf does not rebuke him for his funeral preferences, but for suicide, and (more to the point in terms of “the Northern theory of courage,” which we will address below) despair. Gandalf says that heathen suicide shows both pride and despair, but theologically despair is a form of pride. The wretch who cries, “My sins are too great even for God’s mercy: I cannot hope to be saved” may seem humble or self-deprecating, but is actually attributing to his actions a power greater than God’s. In Beowulf criticism, the scholarly misapprehension of Christian thought that Tolkien opposed is suggested in the very terms of the

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discussion. In 1897, F. A. Blackburn introduced the phrase “Christian Coloring” to refer to the role of Christian thought in Beowulf, and the phrase stuck—even in Klaeber’s edition, whose views were much closer to Tolkien’s than to Blackburn’s. The phrase is revealing. “Coloring” is, to the modern mind (in Blackstone’s century and ours) secondary to the essence of a thing; it’s something you add later, after the basic identity and structure of the thing is established.23 And that was Blackburn’s conclusion: Beowulf was a pagan work encrusted with a Christian patina. For many folklorists who yearned to rescue the pagan “original” from beneath the gospel glaze, Blackburn may as well have called it a dis-coloring. Blackburn himself was one of those yearners: he ends his essay with the conclusion that “Beowulf once existed as a whole without the Christian allusions.”24 Such yearning for another Beowulf is vain, says Tolkien, and he dismisses what he calls the critics’ “disappointment at the discovery that it was itself and not . . . a heathen heroic lay” or “a Nordic Summa Theologica.”25 But while Tolkien would argue with Blackburn’s conclusion, he would have appreciated at least part of Blackburn’s method: examining the evidence of the individual word. At the end of his career, Tolkien presented his niggling focus on the level of the word in self-deprecating terms as the characteristic flaw in his teaching. “I would always rather try to wring the juice out of a single sentence, or explore the implications of one word than try to sum up a period in a lecture, or pot a poet in a paragraph.”26 Blackburn looks at the Christianization of heathen words (such as heathen itself, as we have already speculated) in a lengthy passage of which I have no doubt Tolkien would have approved. It is well known that the missionaries of the early Church took many words belonging to heathen beliefs and practices and applied them to corresponding conceptions and usages of the Christian system. In Yule, Easter, God, hell, etc., we still keep words thus adopted; others, now obsolete, are hælend, nergend, drihten, metod, frea, etc. To these may be added the various epithets applied to the Persons of the Trinity, which are used so freely by the Old English poets. Most of these are simply equivalents of Latin expressions, or imitations of them; e.g. Ælmihtig (omnipotens); ece drihten (dominus æternus); wuldor-cyning (rex gloriæ); and the like. This use of native words and epithets is nothing peculiar, of course; the same thing had already taken place in Latin and had given to deus, dominus, etc. their ecclesiastical meaning.

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But when such words are first used by the church, it is plain that something of the old meaning still clings to them and is suggested to the hearer.27

To use a modern ecclesial term: bingo! Blackburn is describing precisely the way Tolkien uses words with dual consciousness of older and newer meanings. Later proponents of the “heathen Beowulf” theory continued to use the philological method, enumerating all words supposed to have “Christian” coloring. H. Munro Chadwick begins his argument in The Heroic Age (1912) with the assertion that all Old English poems except for Beowulf are undeniably Christian in tone and diction, whereas religious references in Beowulf are a small portion of the whole, tend to be brief, and “singularly vague” in their theology.28 Chadwick proceeds to consider the individual words which might be considered to be “Christian Coloring.” The word god is of very frequent occurrence and always used in the Christian sense. The other epithets of the Deity are “lord” (frea, drihten), “father” (faeder), “creator” (scyppend), “ruler” (waldend), “almighty” (alwalda, aelmihtiga), “ruler of men” (ylda or fira waldend), “ruler of glory” (wuldres waldend), “shepherd of glory” (wuldres hyrde), “king of glory” (wuldorcyning), “guider of the heavens” (rodera raedend), “helm of the heavens” (heofena helm), “ruler of victories” (sigora waldend), “king of victories” (sigora soðcyning). On the other hand there is no example of the word gast in a religious sense (Holy Ghost), nor of the name Crist, nor of any epithet denoting “Saviour” (nergend, haelend etc.).29

Yet surely this is an argument from absence. Tolkien draws quite another conclusion from the perceived scarcity of Christian references in Beowulf: they were deliberately suppressed, just as Tolkien said he had edited out his own “unconsciously Christian” elements in The Lord of the Rings. “But if the specifically Christian was suppressed,” Tolkien reasoned, “so also were the old gods.”30 In a footnote he elaborates, arguing that the omission of explicitly Christian references is intentional. Tolkien draws a clear distinction between the narrative voice and characters in Beowulf, and as an example turns to the most-cited “anachronism” in Beowulf, the identification of Grendel as the kin of Cain. This identification, in Beowulf lines 108 and 1261, constitutes, according to Tolkien, the only explicit reference to the Bible in the poem. Tolkien cites Beowulf line

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1355 to show that Hrothgar is ignorant of Grendel’s origin: his descent from Cain is a narrative report by the Christian poet looking back on Hrothgar’s time.31 The mechanism by which Christianity is foregrounded in Beowulf —the Christian narrator looking back on pagan heroic material (with more admiration than condemnation, Tolkien insists)—is conspicuously absent in Tolkien’s fiction. That absence will always hamper any discussion of Tolkien as a Christian author. The putative redactors of The Lord of the Rings, for example, Bilbo, and then Frodo, would themselves have predated Christ by four millennia. Thus, to achieve any sub-created verisimilitude in the novel, Tolkien would be at pains to expunge any unconscious expressions of Christian thought. But the concept of preparatio evangelium makes it possible to nurture images and ideas that would be common to heathen and Christian thought. Thus in The Children of Húrin, which takes place 6,500 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings,32 and therefore more than 10,000 years before Christ, there is silence on matters such as man’s fate after death, although it is a silence that invites the speculation of the Christian (and post-Christian) reader in the twenty-first century. When Túrin, grieving the death of his little sister, seeks assurance from the wise servant Sador, asking “Where has she gone?” Sador can only reply, “no man knows; or I do not.” But when Túrin presses Sador, he adds, “A darkness lies behind us, and out of it few tales have come.”33 Of course, the “darkness” Sador is talking about is a familiar motif to the reader of Tolkien, who is used to thinking of the evil Sauron as the source of the “Shadow” that comes out of Mordor. But it also suggests the metaphoric darkness of ignorance of a lost legendarium. The notion of preparatio evangelium suggests a larger context for which “a darkness lies behind us” is the perfect description. As a Christian mythopoet, Tolkien was in precisely the same position as the Old English poet with whom he identified, the unnamed author of Beowulf. Both had their imaginations sparked by the great heathen stories of the Germanic north; both knew that the highest truth lay in the gospels. To the great Germanic scholars of the nineteenth century, to whom F. A. Blackburn’s daydream of “some monkish copyist, whose piety exceeded his poetic powers”34 was the only way to envision the Beowulf poet, the twin progressive sciences of philology and anthropology were threatening the truthclaims of Christianity by shining the light of investigation back into

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the heathen past, a past that seemed to predate the oldest stories of the Jews, and certainly predated Jesus of Nazareth. Nineteenthcentury Christians who wished to hold on to their faith were forced into a Hobson’s choice of either abjuring modern science or abandoning a literal interpretation of Genesis, which placed Eden a mere six millennia before them. Beowulf scholars of the generation before Tolkien’s assumed that the Beowulf poet, Blackburn’s “monkish copyist,” must have scrambled like nineteenth-century Christians to shore up gospel truth against heathen lies. But Tolkien knew that medieval thinkers had already solved this problem more than a thousand years before Victorians pronounced it a peculiarly “modern” one. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition the syncretism of Germanic and Christian (and classical) myths is best known through a tenth-century sermon by Ælfric (and one based on it by Archbishop Wulfstan), although the ultimate source seems to be four hundred years older: the sixth-century De Correctione Rusticorum by Archbishop Martin of Bracara.35 Martin’s title, “On the Correction of Rustics” confirms our earlier etymological speculation of heathen and pagan as “country folk (non-Christian).” Pa ¯ ga ¯ nus and rustica ¯ nus had been synonyms since classical times. Wulfstan’s title, De Falsis Diis, adds another stratum of difficulty to our understanding of the interplay of Christian and pagan in early Christian England. In one sense, the word falsus means precisely what the modern reader assumes it to mean: an attack on the truth-claim of non-Christian religions. But that meaning does not fit the tone of either of the Old English versions of the sermon: neither Ælfric nor Wulfstan offers any indication that his audience was in danger of backsliding into paganism. The act of tracing Germanic and Greek myths back to Genesis, as Wulfstan does, sounds more like an apology for the truth-claims of paganism than a protest for Christian truth. What is the true meaning of false? If we turn away from apologetics to exegesis—which is more likely what Wulfstan was about in this sermon—we discover a literary meaning of falsus, which better fits the context. A century after Wulfstan it became an entire theory of allegory and literary interpretation for Bernardus Silvestris. In his commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, Bernard several times employs the words falsus and falsitas as synonyms for his key term integumentum, “veil.”36 For Bernard, as for all medieval thinkers who subscribed to preparatio, the fundamental approach to pagan beliefs was not to prove them untrue, but to reveal the al-

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legorical meaning of whatever truth they exhibited. In the transition from medieval to modern thought, the word “false” has been victimized in precisely the same way as “myth”: it has been pejorated from “obscuring a truth” (a sense that still survives in the modern English phrase “false face” for “mask”) to “not true.” The sermons themselves (De Falsis Diis) are pure preparatio. The argument is as follows: the history recorded by Genesis was our original connection with the true God who created Adam and Eve. But when Jahweh scattered human languages after the building of the Tower of Babel, many cultures forgot the true God and began worshiping fallen angels (and Euhemerized men, according to Ælfric and Wulfstan) as gods. So, regardless of how ancient the accounts of heathen gods are, the God of Abraham and Moses was there before them, and the Son of that God who was born in the flesh during the reign of Caesar Augustus existed for all eternity before that. The ability of the Christian imagination to catch fire from the heathen, both on the macrolevel (myth) and the microlevel (the individual word) was also what fired Tolkien’s imagination. For Tolkien, as for the great nineteenth-century philologists, both levels are connected. “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval,” Tolkien wrote in “On Fairy-Stories.”37 On the level of the word, Tolkien looks at the vocabulary of Beowulf, the same words Blackburn and Chadwick used to argue for the pagan origins of the poem, and reaches quite a different conclusion. In fact, Tolkien was much more alert than were the proponents of a “heathen Beowulf” to what individual words can reveal about their heathen roots. For example, Blackburn lists Old English metod and dryhten as simply synonyms of “god” and “lord.”38 But in his lecture notes keyed to the “set texts” an Oxford student had to know to prepare for exams in the English School (this excerpt is dated October 1927), Tolkien examines both of these words for what they can reveal about their pagan past.39 To be sure, Blackburn had already told us that “something of the old meaning still clings” to these words when they are used in a Christian context.40 But Tolkien is not so vague. In his notes to Caedmon’s Hymn of Creation (mid-seventh century), Tolkien makes an observation about dryhten as a title for God that a decade later will find its way into his famous Beowulf lecture at the British Academy. “Dryhten,” he records, “was originally captain, Lord of a gedryht = military company.”41 It is through this heathen military

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word (think of the Marshalls of Riddermark in The Lord of the Rings) that Tolkien, in his 1936 Beowulf lecture, perceives the traces of a Germanic warrior god. But instead of seeing in the military meaning of the word now adapted to the Christian god a contrast with the earlier pagan meaning, Tolkien senses a solidarity between the Christian poet and his heathen ancestors. Here Tolkien does not cite Blackburn or Chadwick, but W. P. Ker, who contrasts the final triumph of the Christian apocalypse with the final (if glorious) defeat of gods and heroes in the Norse Ragnarök.42 For Tolkien (and, he thought, for the Beowulf-poet), there is more similarity than contrast between Jerusalem and Asgard, because the heathen warrior who sided with the (finally doomed) Norse gods against “Chaos and Unreason” was on the same side as the Christian God who opposed the same foes. Tolkien saw the picture of the Christian in the Beowulf-poet’s schema as “like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world,” and the monsters “the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, who became the enemies of the one God, ece Dryhten, the eternal Captain of the new.”43 Tolkien chose to view this Old English epithet for the Christian God through its original force as a military title. It must be understood that this is in fact a choice and not the inevitable implication of the history of the word. In his “Prefatory Remarks” to Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf, Tolkien warned against the etymological fallacy.44 Continuance of a word in poetic or colloquial vocabulary does not imply consciousness of earlier meanings of that word. But Tolkien’s instincts were that Dryhten still had some of its “heathen” military flavor when it applied to the Christian deity. The other word that Blackburn cites as merely a gloss for “God” is metod. But as Tolkien suggests in the same lecture cited above, the word has a heathen past not often recognized even by Old English scholars. The literal meaning of the word, “measurer,” suggests the Judeo-Christian creator-god, described in Genesis as setting boundaries to the lands and waters (Genesis 1:6–10; the participial form metend appears in the OE Genesis A, line 1808). But to the classicist me¯tod raises suspicions of descent from Latin me¯tior, me¯tı¯rı¯, mensus sum, “to measure,” as well as Greek mhn (me¯n) and perhaps metron (metron). Of course, OE metan is cognate with, not derived from, Latin me¯tior. As such, it has an assured pre-Christian existence, and therefore meaning, in English. Tolkien mapped the trajectory of the English word’s pre-Christian meaning in his notes

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to Bede’s account of Caedmon. From the idea of “measure,” it comes to refer to “personal providence” (that which is measured out to the individual), i.e., fate. “It descended from pre-Christian times,” Tolkien elaborates, “and represents the world as an ordinance or system independent of man or his works; also related to “death” (metodsceaft) Old Norse mjotuðr (a) dispenser, ruler, judge, (b) death.”45 Metodsceaft appears three times in Beowulf as a word for death or fate,46 and once in Genesis A.47 To Tolkien, however, the most remarkable thing about the layering of Christian upon heathen in religious words is the very fact that the heathen words survived in English. Although many ecclesial terms in modern English (including the word “ecclesial”) are borrowed from Greek (church, eucharist) or Latin (altar, communion), Tolkien notes that most common religious terms carried over from pagan associations rather than using new words for new things. “It is remarkable how many of the primary words of the Christian religion were in Germanic, but especially in Old English (the earliest after Gothic to be Christianized) of nature, and therefore ultimately “heathen” origin. In OE the words for God, heaven, hell, sin, redeemer, saviour, cross, paradise, Easter, Lent, holy, saint, eucharist, baptism, and so on, are all native [god, heofon, hell, synn, Aliesend (Hælend), Neregend, ro¯d (gealga), neorxanwang, Eastor, Lencten, hælig, halga, hu ¯ sl, fulwiht, etc.]”48 The penultimate word on Tolkien’s list, hu ¯ sl, is of particular interest both as a final example of a Christian word which offers a portal to a heathen past, and as a transition to examples of tales which do the same, becoming “a door on Other Time,” as Tolkien called fairy-stories.49 In Christian usage hu ¯ sl referred to the Eucharist, but, Tolkien says, “actually it is an old heathen word meaning ‘sacrifice, sacrificial victim’ and occurs in OE and in Gothic where husol: oumiva, huuslakkaþs: qusiasthrion ‘altar.’”50 The shift is not as violent as it may seem (although violent the image of sacrifice certainly is), for the whole ceremonial history of the Eucharist begins with animal sacrifice in Old Testament times, figured through the perfect sacrifice of the Lamb of God in the crucifixion, commemorated and reenacted by the consecration in the Mass. The picture of a heathen sacrifice in the earliest Germanic form of the word hu ¯ sl, then, is not so far removed from the zebach (Hebrew: “sacrificial victim”) of Aaron or Melchizedek. But a few lines after his reflection on hu ¯ sl, Tolkien examines another Old English word for Eucharist, which

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bears more directly on Eucharistic images that Catholic readers of Tolkien suppose central to The Lord of the Rings. The two items most commonly cited as “Catholic” in The Lord of the Rings are Galadriel as a type of the Blessed Mother and the Elvish lembas or “waybread” as Eucharist. Both were cited in an article in a major orthodox Catholic periodical51 occasioned by the release of the first Lord of the Rings film, and both were noticed by the very earliest readers of the novel. “I am a Christian,” Tolkien wrote to Deborah Webster in 1958, “(which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter ‘fact’ perhaps cannot be deduced; though one critic (by letter) asserted that invocations of Elbereth, and the character of Galadriel . . . were clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary. Another saw in waybread (lembas) = viaticum and the reference to its feeding the will . . . and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist.”52 This important letter has been extensively quoted by Catholic apologists, but it is worth noting that Tolkien considers his Christianity to be readily apparent, but his Catholicism not so much. Still, some astute readers have found him out through his Galadriel and his waybread. But what is Tolkien’s only conclusion in this letter when “outed” as a Roman Catholic? Only that “far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story.”53 There again is Blackburn’s word: “colour.” And here Tolkien suggests the correctness of the term: his religion (presumably the “far greater thing”) will always provide a “colouring,” even when he is not consciously trying to be “religious.” If the mystery of the Eucharist “coloured” Tolkien’s invention of a “lesser thing” like lembas, a reader can be forgiven for not making a connection that, Tolkien seems to imply, was not conscious on his part. In reminding Ms. Webster that The Lord of the Rings is, like Beowulf, a fairystory, Tolkien leads us back to his borrowing of Sir George Webbe Dasent’s metaphor of the story as soup.54 We needn’t ask to see the bones it was made of. Blackburn, to the contrary, would have us reconstruct a pagan cow. Tolkien’s phrase “colour the mind” reminds us of Blackburn’s condescending phrase “Christian coloring,” already discussed, although I doubt if Tolkien had that in mind. Still it suggests a far less direct, less triumphal role for his Catholic faith than some of his more zealous post-Peter Jackson coreligionists (and I include my-

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self here) sometimes claim. But it also suggests that the Mariology of Galadriel and the Eucharistic nature of lembas, as obvious as they may seem to some, were not conscious goals, but natural byproducts of Tolkien’s faith. Mainstream Tolkien critics sometimes lose patience with the triumphalist tone of Christian Tolkienists— Drout, Wynne, and Fisher all rolled critical eyeballs (a total of six eyes, by my calculation) at Joseph Pearce’s extravagances, such as his assertion that it is “not merely erroneous but patently perverse to see Tolkien’s epic as anything other than a specifically Christian myth.” Yet the more sober picture of Catholic doctrine working silently and unconsciously in Tolkien’s art is precisely what Pearce and the best of his fellow Christian Tolkienists (Ralph Wood, Peter Kreeft, Bradley Birzer, Stratford Caldecott, and perhaps, someday, myself) present us. Shortly after the lines just cited, Pearce describes Catholic theology as “breathing life into the tales as invisibly but as surely as oxygen.”55 The invisibility of the process is not always acknowledged by Tolkien’s Christian readers. Nevertheless we still face Drout and Wynne’s challenge: even if the premise of religious doctrine as an informing presence is accepted (however reluctantly or provisionally), we are still left with the task of interpretation. The critical phrase “so what?” springs to mind. Instead of doing my duty as a Catholic literary critic, however, I am going to postpone interpretation yet again, and approach Tolkien’s statements on lembas in the letter to Ms. Webster with the nonliterary tools of philology and the lexis of the Catholic sacramental system—and hope that the process will, in the end, aid the long-delayed interpretation. Tolkien told Ms. Webster that a reader of The Lord of the Rings had observed “waybread (lembas) = viaticum,” and that the waybread’s feeding of the will is “a derivation from the Eucharist.” Yet as an old altar server (who continued to serve at Mass in adulthood: he told the widow of Charles Williams that he would serve at a Requiem Mass for her husband in 1945)56 and a lover of words, Tolkien knew that the Latin viaticum and the Greek Eucharist were related, but not equivalent terms. Viaticum is always Eucharist, but Eucharist is not always viaticum. Eucharist (the “good grace or gift”) is the communion wafer or the sacrament of giving it in general. Viaticum (“provisions for a journey”) refers only to that communion wafer, or act of giving it, in the sacrament known in Tolkien’s day as Extreme Unction, or “Last Rites.” The “journey” (via) for which it provides nourishment is the one Bede’s Death Song (735 AD) referred to as

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néidfæræ (West Saxon nedfere), “the necessary journey,” death. Nedfere is a common Old English kenning to which Tolkien nods in the opening of his allegorical story “Leaf By Niggle.”57 Yet, as Tolkien observed in general about the religious vocabulary of English Christianity, the Germanic cultures did not need, or at least did not immediately adopt, the specialized Latin and Greek vocabulary in order to make the fine distinctions required by sacramental theology. While hu ¯ sl was adapted from a word for heathen sacrifice to be the general equivalent of Eucharist, Old English developed a separate word for that particular Eucharist given with Last Rites, and when we see it—as Tolkien did in the Old English version of Bede’s account of the Poet Caedmon—we immediately hear echoes of both viaticum and waybread. The word is wegnest. The first part of the compound, weg-, is, quite discernibly, “way,” cognate with Latin via in viaticum. In his lecture notes Tolkien glosses the second part, -nest, as “related to ge-nesan, ‘come back safe,’ nesian, ‘save.’ Cf. the same in G. nähren.”58 The notion that waybread will bring the traveler home safe recalls another gift to the Ringbearers: the walking sticks of which Faramir said “a virtue has been set upon them of finding and returning.”59 Once again, the Nigglish, philological focus on the individual word is not so far removed from myth and tale as it may seem to the Lit.witted: we look at wegnest or lembas and we see the pilgrim preparing for a journey; Sam hoisting his backpack (the Old English word for which, Tolkien notes, also contains the −νεστ ροοτ: nestpohha) on his way to Mount Doom (do¯m, the last judgment, the end of the pilgrim’s journey). There are limits, however, to what we can learn from the history of our sacred words. We have already noted Tolkien's warning about the “etymological fallacy”: in a May 4, 1958 letter to Father Robert Murray Tolkien reminds his Jesuit friends that there is no such thing as the “original” meaning of a word or, at least, we cannot know it.60 In Tolkien's philological (and mythological) analysis of dryhten and metod we saw that Blackburn was a bit too simplistic in saying that they were just words for “god.”61 But what is god? As Chadwick noted, god is the most frequent word for the deity in Beowulf (an undeniable statistical fact) “and always used in the Christian sense” (a quite deniable judgment, to which we will nevertheless grant provisional acceptance).62 But if there was a preChristian story behind dryhten and metod, could not there be another behind the most common word for God god? There is,

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Tolkien tells Father Murray, but we can never recover the full story. If the mythology for England must always remain a fond hope, so, too, the mythology (and philology) for Christendom. But what little can be done through philology, Tolkien does. If, as the great nineteenth-century comparatists surmised, god comes from the Indo-European root *gheu(e)- (and Tolkien admits the philologists are only guessing here),63 then the final consonant in d gives us a very important clue. The root is a verb, meaning “to cry.” The d suggests the past participial ending of Indo-European languages, as in English friend (the one who is loved) or fiend (the one who is hated): god is “the one who is invoked.” But the meaning of that meaning takes us out of the comparatively reliable morphological branch of philology and into the uneasy realm of semantics. Still Tolkien gives his friend one more philological fact about god. The most common adjective form is godly or godlike (etymological doublets: the Old English lic lost its final consonant in Middle English). But another adjective is so altered by phonological forces the infamous “i-mutation” of Germanic languages that its connection with god is often unrecognized. Sometime in the pre-Christian era (in fact, before the birth of Christ), the ancestor of all Germanic languages added the suffix *-igaz to god (or gud) to form an adjective. The influence of the i in *-igaz shifted the vowel in god to y, producing the word attested in Old English as gydig, “possessed” modern English giddy. A similar vocalic transformation is seen when an Old English feminine ending turns god to gyden, “goddess” (compare fox and vixen, or indeed, the initial vowel in woman and that in its umlauted plural women). The modern meaning of giddy, “dizzy,” would seem to be a semantic decline from the idea of divine possession. Yet there must have been some conceptual link between worship and vertigo because, as Tolkien noted, even the word “dizzy” goes back to God. We may think of our religious words of classical origin like deistic (from Latin deus) and theistic (from Greek qevo~)—as unrelated to the “native” word stock, but the common root of both words also survives in the Germanic line of descent in the word Tuesday, the day of a heathen god. With this connection, Tolkien is on shakier ground than with giddy: a year after Tolkien made these observations to Father Murray, Julius Pokorny issued what would become the standard authority on Indo-European etymologies, the Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.64 Pokorny lists deus/qevo~ under a different Indo-European root from dizzy. IE *deiw (etymon

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of deus/qevo~) seems to refer to shining brightness in the sky, and IE *dheu (etymon of dizzy) apparently means “to rise up in a cloud.” There are profound phonological obstacles to claiming *dheu and *deiw as cognates: the aspirated dh was quite distinct from d. Yet the pull of the semantic pattern is tantalizing, especially when we consider that the Bacchanalian frenzy of one possessed by the god was known to the ancient Greeks as enqevo~ (entheos), hence “enthusiasm.” But even if Tolkien proves wrong on this point, I hope that a Tolkien enthousiaste¯s can be forgiven succumbing to the temptation of one more etymology from the *dheu root. An extended zerograde form of the word (that is, a form in which the vowel degrades to extinction, and assimilates to suffixes and other words) developed in the Proto-Indo-European parent language as a separate root *dhwel. In prehistoric Germanic this became *dulaz, which survives in the English word dull, or its German cognate Toll—the first syllable in Tolkien’s family name, and a clear indication of his divine inspiration (the German word can mean “frenzied”). At the end of all these etymological speculations, Tolkien asks Father Murray, “Is not the idea of god ultimately independent of the ways by which a word for it has come to be?” And he elaborates in a footnote: “The fact that it is derived from a single facet, even if proved, does not prove that other facets were not equally present to the mind of the users of this conventional sign.”65 This common-sense philology of Tolkien’s is nothing less than the linguistic analogue to the theological notion of preparatio evangelium. The reality and the idea of God certainly existed before our word god, just as the eternal God preceded and informed the heathen concept of their gods, despite any theological or conceptual errors. It was the failure of readers to grasp this point that shocked the orthodoxy of some Christian readers in dealing with the character of Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings. Goldberry is unable to answer Frodo’s question “who is Tom Bombadil?” because the answer involves “the mystery of names,” and Goldberry’s response “he is” sounded too much (and too blasphemously) like Jahweh’s reply to Moses: I am who am. To one such quibbler, Tolkien responded that one’s “unique relationship to the creator” can be without a name only by excluding other finite creatures with similar relationships, so that “pronouns become proper nouns.”66 Milton invokes the same principle of the logical priority of a divine reality to its name, and hence the principle of preparatio, in his prayer to the pa-

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gan goddess Urania in the opening of book VII of Paradise Lost. He seems at first blush to be compromising his Calvinism by invoking a heathen name, but in fact he is simply addressing the Holy Spirit, for “The meaning, not the Name I call” (7.5). The words that come down to us from heathen antiquity (metod, drythen, hu ¯ sl, wægnest, dysig, gydig) show us as clearly as Tolkien’s reading of Beowulf the fundamental affinity, although not identity, between heathen and Christian notions of heroic virtue. Gandalf’s condemnation of Denethor’s heathen despair is not a rejection of a pre-Christian ethos, but a rejection of a wrong ethos, an error that is an error even by the standards of the Danes and Geats of Beowulf’s day—as well as the Gondorians and Rohirrim of the Third Age. That standard, which Tolkien in his Gollancz lecture on Beowulf, and again in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (1953), called “the Northern courage,” he found in the words of a Christian warrior at the Battle of Maldon in 991, (although Tolkien suggested the words were much older). Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað. [Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder spirit the greater as our strength lessens.]67

That a warrior fighting for Christian Wessex against a pagan host could echo the sentiments of a Northern heathen hero like Beowulf indicates that we might be too hasty in labeling the Norse vision of Ragnarök “despair.” Tolkien does use that word, despair. Of “the nearness of pagan time,” he says, “The shadow of its despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there.”68 Although the theologian would quibble over Tolkien’s use of the word despair—he is clearly not using it in the moral sense of denying the possibility of salvation—the Catholic Tolkien manifestly shares the sentiment, as Verlyn Flieger observes. “That Tolkien is in sympathy with this despair is clear, but it is just as clear that for him this in no way contradicts Christianity.”69 And I would even omit the qualifier “for him,” because the medieval Christian understanding of preparatio evangelium makes it possible to celebrate the virtues of the heathen, such as the Northern courage of Beowulf, while rising above heathen error, such as the lack of that courage in Denethor. The stew-

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ard’s despair was indeed despair in the sinful Christian sense, which the veriest Woden-worshipper would understand as wrong. To present resistance to despair—in Catholic doctrine the theological virtue of hope—as a moral absolute, however, is not to banish ambiguities. This misapprehension of medieval Christian thought by modern critics was particularly irksome to Tolkien, as can be heard in his defense of the Pearl-poet in his W. P. Ker Lecture on Sir Gawain: “Those who take an ultimately stern and uncompromising moral view are not necessarily simple-minded.”70 While the “Northern Courage” suggests an absolute both in Germanic Heathendom and Roman Christendom, there is a grey area involving the rival virtue of prudence, namely: when does the rejection of wanhope (the earlier English name for “despair”) become the opposite extreme of foolish hope? The Aristotelian doctrine of the “golden mean,” ratified by medieval Christianity, suggested that any virtue is usually a delicate balance between vicious extremes. While most of the scenarios invoking Northern Courage in Tolkien’s fiction uphold the absolute value of hope, there is one First-Age proverb recorded in The Children of Húrin that offers a counterpoint to Northern Courage. In chapter 4, young Túrin is growing up fatherless, his father Húrin long ago captured by the fiend Melkor. Only Túrin still speaks as if his father were alive, and Sador cautions him with the gnomon, “False hopes are more dangerous than fears.”71 In the Greek tradition, Homer’s Telemachos is in Túrin’s exact situation in The Odyssey, but a more detailed parallel to the no-man’s land between wanhope and fool’s hope is Euripides’s Herakles Mad, in which the family of Herakles is in the clutches of the tyrant Lycus while the hero is trapped in the underworld. In a still-unsurpassed dramatization of the moral dilemma, Amphitryon, the hero’s father, argues that despair being cowardly, the family must expect Herakles to come through. Megara, the wife of Herakles, counters that, given that no one has ever returned from Hades, to expect Herakles to come to their rescue is inhumane. While Tolkien, and Heathen Germanic tradition, clearly favors hope over wanhope, consideration of the dangers of foolhope does not compromise the Christianity of Tolkien’s analysis, nor make courage in the face of inevitable downfall exclusively “Northern” as Euripides’s Amphitryon attests. It does, however, uphold Tolkien’s conviction that Christian and Heathen heroic story had compati-

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ble moral systems; that in fact the Northern Courage enriched the Greco/Roman, Judeo-Christian moral system: it was “the great contribution” to European culture.72 Having in this rambling fashion addressed a stipulated impasse between Christian and secularist criticism of Tolkien, I should of course be expected to offer a solution. Alas, any such expectation is doomed to disappointment. I will, however, offer the following observations. First, a certain proportion of Christian interpretations of Tolkien will, and should, continue to do what Drout and Wynne inveighed against: preach to the choir, present “Christian theology as a received truth.” The choir in fact exists, has a long literary tradition, and to the choristers Christian theology is a received truth. There is a place for such parochial criticism, just as there is for Freudian readings of Shakespeare. Every parish (even Niggle’s Parish) should have its bulletin, and not every writer need aspire to go beyond the parish (or The Parish, as it might be capitalized in Hobbiton, that very parochial burgh). But those who do so aspire do need to heed Drout and Wynne. They have outlined quite clearly, from the point of view of Tolkien’s pluralistic audience at large, the danger of “using mysteries to explain texts.” Even from the Christian point of view, there are dangers in preaching to the choir. If even part of the motive for writing about Tolkien is evangelical, then proselytizing which is intelligible, or even palatable, only to the converted is doomed to failure. I suspect that a great bit of the zeal with which Christian writers tout Tolkien’s Christianity is misplaced territoriality: he’s one of us, so you can’t have him. Conversely a great deal of the rancor against Christian writing on Tolkien is no doubt fueled by the opposite fear: that Christianizing Tolkien will either diminish him or take him out of a larger circulation. Tolkien’s readers of every description have always connected with the author in an intensely personal way that can engender a proprietary evangelical zeal even without the element of religion. Second, a major contribution to the impasse is another major problem in Tolkien criticism that Drout and Wynne observed in the opening sentence of their review essay: “while critics have endlessly covered and re-covered the same ground, they appear not to have read much of each other’s work.”73 This is particularly true of discussions of Tolkien’s religion. Most of the negative statements about Christian criticism of Tolkien cite only the online equiva-

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lents of parish bulletins; rarely do they cite more scholarly and solid books such as Bradley J. Birzer’s Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2002), Ralph C. Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien (2003), or Stratford Caldecott’s The Power of the Ring (2005) (all of which postdate Drout and Wynne’s essay, so they at least are off the hook). Despite these three fine studies (and others as good or nearly so), the Christian study of Tolkien that really makes the case for the critical relevance of Tolkien’s Christianity is, I think, yet to be written. And sorely needed. On the secularist side, progress in Tolkien criticism requires non-Christian critics to go beyond their own parochialism—not just in terms of actually reading Christian criticism, such as the three works just mentioned, but also in breaking out of limiting preconceptions about what Christianity actually is. Here the impasse is clearly between Christian and secular, not Christian and Non-Christian Religion. The secularist assumption is that religious thought judges and condemns its opponents, and that secular thought does not. That has not been my experience. The secularist misunderstanding of Christianity that Tolkien strove to correct in Beowulf criticism is very much alive in Tolkien criticism, and unless it is rooted out, no discussion of religion in his fiction will make much progress.

NOTES 1. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (2004), 825, (bk. 5, ch. 4). All subsequent citations of The Lord of the Rings will refer to the “Fiftieth Anniversary” text (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). For the sake of readers using other editions, however, citations will also be identified by book and chapter. 2. Ibid., 853 (bk. 5, ch. 7). 3. T. A. Shippey briefly notes this fact in passing, by way of recommending Richard Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus. (Shippey, “History in Words,” in Hammond and Scull, Lord of the Rings 1954–2004, 31–32. 4. Tolkien to Robert Murray S.J., December 2, 1953, in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 5. Shippey, “Beowulf,” in Monsters and the Critics, 8. 6. Drout and Wynne, “Tom Shippey’s Tolkien,” 109. 7. Ibid., 109–10. 8. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, chs. 32–35 and Practical Cricitism ch. 7; Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Poetry and Christianity,” in Verbal Icon, 267–93. 9. Fisher, “Working at the Crossroads,” in Hammond and Scull, Lord of the Rings 1954–2004, 220. Fisher is citing online articles by Joseph Pearce found at

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www.catholic.net/rec/Periodicals/Igpress/2001-12/dossier.html and Jason Boffetti (cited below). 10. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Pathetic Fallacy,” in Verbal Icon, 3–18. 11. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 26. 12. Beowulf lines 178b–183a. Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight, 7–8. Translation is my own. 13. Ibid., xlviii–xlix. 14. Shippey, “History in Words,” in Hammond and Scull, Lord of the Rings 1954– 2004, 25–39. 15. Oxford English Dictionary (1933 edition), 5:171, column 2. 16. Ralph C. Wood discusses the concept of preparatio evangelium, but does not use the term, in Gospel According to Tolkien, 8. He further explains the term in responding to an attack on Tolkien’s Christian orthodoxy in an online essay entitled “Tolkien’s Orthodoxy,” at www.leaderu.com/humanities/wood-response/ html. 17. See Shippey, “Tolkien and the Appeal of the Pagan” in Chance, Invention of Myth, 145–61. 18. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 28. 19. Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight, xlviii. 20. Vendidad, Fargard 1, verse 16. This book of Zoroastrian laws in the ZendAvesta presents “the cooking of corpses” as a plague sent by the evil spirit Angra Mainyu, in retaliation for the holy Ahura Mazda’s creation of the city of Ragha. Curiously, verse 12 says the same about exhumation. 21. Cicero, De Legibus 2.22, ed. Keyes, 441. 22. Code of Canon Law, Can. 1176 §3. Official Ecclesial prohibitions against cremation are recorded as late as 1892—the year of Tolkien’s birth—but the language of the decree (from the Archbishop of Freiburg) was essentially that of the canon cited: cremation is licit as long as it is not intended as an attack on the faith. The last official canons prohibiting cremation (although again, in a very circumscribed context) are the nineteenth-century: Canons 1203 and 1240. 23. That the medieval mind would not necessarily share that presupposition is observed by Tolkien’s friend and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances: “In the history of the theory of colour, for instance, colour began by being regarded as a primary quality of the coloured object and was later transferred to the status of a ‘secondary’ quality dependent on the beholder” (25–26). The modern thinker who supposes that the shift is the result of “progress,” an advance in the science of optics, is deceived: whether color is a primary or secondary attribute is not a question of physics but of epistemology, and independent of the state of knowledge about the nature of light. 24. F. A. Blackburn, “Christian Coloring,” 225. 25. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 7. 26. Tolkien, “Valedictory Address,” in Monsters and the Critics, 224. 27. Blackburn, “Christian Coloring,” 228. 28. Chadwick, Heroic Age, 47. 29. Ibid., 48. 30. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 22. 31. Ibid., 45 n. 20. 32. C. Tolkien, “Introduction,” in J.R.R. Tolkien, Children of Húrin, 14.

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33. Tolkien, Children of Húrin, 43. 34. Blackburn, “Christian Coloring,” 219. 35. See J. C. Pope, ed., Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection (London: Early English Text Society, 1968), 676–712; also Caspari, Martin von Bracara’s Schrift. 36. Westra, Commentary on Martianus Capella, 133–38. 37. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 24. 38. Blackburn, “Christian Colouring,” 216. Blackburn’s spelling is actually drihten, but Tolkien uses the more common dryhten. This may seem a philological pedantry, but OE y and i indicated quite different vowels. 39. Tolkien MSS A29(a) f. 90, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The date “Oct. 1927” appears on the first folio of this section, unnumbered, but in the position of f. 71. This and all subsequent citations from Tolkien’s papers are copyright 2007 J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust, and are quoted by permission. 40. Blackburn, “Christian Coloring,” 228. 41. Tolkien MSS A29(a) f. 93. 42. Ker, Dark Ages, 57, cited in Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 21. 43. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 22. 44. Tolkien, “On Translating Beowulf,” in Monsters and the Critics, 56. See also “Etymological Fallacy” in Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 384. 45. Tolkien MSS A29(a) f. 90. 46. Beowulf, 1077, 1180, and 2815. 47. Genesis A, 1743. 48. Tolkien MSS A29(a) f. 93 verso. 49. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 32. 50. Tolkien MSS A29(a) f. 93. 51. Boffetti, “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination.” 52. Tolkien to Deborah Webster, October 25, 1958, in Tolkien, Letters, 288–89. 53. Ibid. 54. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in Tree and Leaf, 22. 55. Pearce, “True Myth,” 34–38; Fisher cites both passages in “Working at the Crossroads,” 218. 56. Tolkien to Michal Williams, the widow of Charles Williams, May 15, 1945, in Tolkien, Letters, 114. 57. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 73. 58. Tolkien MSS. A29(a) f. 93 verso. Tolkien offers a brief essay, “Of Lembas” in C. Tolkien, ed., The Peoples of Middle-earth (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 403– 5. Thomas Honegger’s entry on “lembas” in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 353–54, reviews Tolkien’s other references to waybread. 59. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (2004), 694 (bk. 4, ch. 7). 60. Tolkien to Robert Murray S.J., May 4, 1958, in ibid., Letters, 268. 61. Blackburn, “Christian Coloring,” 228. 62. Chadwick, Heroic Age, 48. 63. Tolkien to Robert Murray S.J., May 4, 1958, in Tolkien, Letters, 268. The asterisk is a conventional sign, established by August Schleicher in 1869, that the following word is reconstructed rather than attested in written records. 64. Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. 65. Tolkien to Robert Murray S.J., May 4, 1958, in Tolkien, Letters, 269.

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Tolkien to Peter Hastings (draft), September 1954, in ibid., 192. Tolkien, “Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” (1966), 5; translation is Tolkien’s. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 23. Flieger, Splintered Light, 17. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 93. Tolkien, Children of Húrin, 72. Tolkien, Monsters and the Critics, 20. Drout and Wynne, “Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien,” 101.

Confronting the World’s Weirdness: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin Ralph C. Wood

WYRD IS A WEIRD WORD. IT IS THE ANGLO-SAXON TERM USUALLY RENdered as “fate,” although its very pronunciation indicates something more than mere fatalism—the notion, namely, that things happen as they do because they must. Wyrd indicates, instead, the pagan view that the world is at least partially ruled by weird forces. J.R.R. Tolkien remained veritably obsessed with wyrd, calling it “fate,” “doom,” “luck,” or “chance.” He was drawn to the ethos of Norse saga and Germanic fable because they acknowledge, as Greco-Roman mythology does not, the terror of such malevolent and inscrutable powers. At Ragnarök, the final battle pitting the gods against these overwhelming forces, the divinities are themselves defeated and the earth is returned to the black night of chaos and unreason from which it inexplicably came. Yet our ancient northern ancestors lived and died courageously amidst such a hopeless world, and Tolkien admired them for their dauntlessness. The Venerable Bede records the bleak confession of a chieftain serving under King Edwin of Northumbria concerning human life under northern paganism: Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counselors. Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort he vanishes from sight into the darkness from which he came. Similarly, man appears on earth for a little while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows. Therefore if this new teaching [i.e., the Christian

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gospel] can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.1

Tolkien agreed with the Anglo-Saxon warrior that Christianity offered a bright and promising alternative to this dark and grim vision of reality. Yet unlike his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien refused to set forth any overt defense of the Gospel as a neat answer to such dour paganism. To him, Lewis’s work constitutes a restatement of Christian themes in allegorical form, reinforcing what believers already affirm. Tolkien sought, by contrast, to recast the entirety of human history by way of a massive mythological construction he called his legendarium, thereby deepening and expanding our experience of the Christian metanarrative. Thus did he silently imbue his work with covert Christian convictions, leaving his readers to make the implicit theological connections on their own. Although The Lord of the Rings is set in a pagan age long before the call of Abraham and the coming of Christ, Tolkien there gives convincing fictional life to a deeply providential sense of time and history. Sauron, for example, is the servant of Morgoth, a rebel Vala akin to Lucifer. Sauron has fashioned a single Ruling Ring by whose coercive power he schemes to dominate the then-known world, called Middle-earth. But while Sauron appears to control the Ring of addictive force until the very end, Tolkien hints that there is another and greater power working against it. We thus learn that Bilbo was meant to find the One Ring, even though he seemed to happen upon it by chance. The final triumph of the hobbits and the other “weaklings” of Middle-earth over mighty Sauron and his demonic forces is enabled, discerning readers will notice, by an invisible divine sovereignty operating through them. Why, no sooner than completing The Lord of the Rings, did Tolkien return to the ancient legends of Húrin and his doomed children, especially the gloomy tale of Túrin Turambar? His son Christopher, who has gathered these stories into something akin to a novel, offers no answer, although he tells us that they were one of his father’s intractable obsessions. My own surmise is that Tolkien felt he had never done full justice to wyrd as it was understood by the Anglo-Saxon Christians. For in their primordial conviction that our lives are governed by forces that we cannot control —even though they are finally governed by God—there is truth that Christians and unbelievers alike ought to heed.

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Briefly put, this late Tolkien work called The Children of Húrin concerns the curse of Morgoth. He has determined to demonstrate his monstrous sovereignty over all of Arda (earth) by destroying not only Húrin for having fought so willfully against him, but also Húrin’s innocent family as well: “The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Wherever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.”2 On its face, such demonic wyrd-swearing seems to offer little promise. For if Húrin and his progeny are fated to bitter failure and death, why then follow their inevitably unhappy story? Tolkien does not help matters by adopting the distanced formality of The Silmarillion, with its rather stilted King James cadences and word inversions. Nor is the dense thicket of hard-to-pronounce personal and place names readily penetrated. The quality and character of the novel’s dramatis personae—as in the antique Northern epics that Tolkien so deeply admired—are revealed almost entirely by speech and action, so that we rarely find them making inward reflection on motives and purposes. Even so, The Children of Húrin proves strangely fascinating. For while Tolkien abjured allegory, he approved of what he called “applicability”—i.e., the linking of things prehistoric and legendary with things historical and even contemporary, thus bringing his mythography into engagement with our own world. There is a little-noticed line in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings that helps make this connection. It contains an important key, I believe, for unlocking this book that conveniently integrates the previously scattered episodes constituting the life of Túrin Turambar. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the Company of Nine Walkers having found their path blocked by a huge snowstorm on Mount Caradhras, the wizard Gandalf cryptically declares that “There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in the world longer than he.”3 As a thoroughly modern writer and believer, Tolkien seeks to acknowledge the reality of these “evil and unfriendly things” and thus the abiding truth of wyrd: the presence of forces and powers that

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operate beyond the immediate, although not the ultimate, control of Ilúvatar, Tolkien’s analogue to the sovereign God. After Darwin and Heisenberg, for example, it is hardly possible to deny the place of chance and accident, of hazard and uncertainty, amid what Tolkien calls “the Circles of the World.” The Great Chain of Being— the Greek notion adopted by Christians that everything is ranged along a perfect continuum from inert minerals to unfallen angels, so that nothing happens by mere accident but everything with intrinsic purpose—this splendid chain of continuity lies in pieces. Despite all the later qualifications put on the breakthrough insights of Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century, most of us still believe that, so far as we humans can discern, every natural effect is the product of its antecedent causes, necessarily so. Yet these natural occurrences seem not to be morally, much less mercifully, ordered. They appear to be prompted by material forces that collide and complement each other in often unpredictable ways, chancily so. To an extent heretofore unrecognized, we know that we are born with genetic predispositions, whether mental or physical, that set drastic limits on our prospects and possibilities. We are also the partial products, not only of environing influences, but also of just plain luck—of good or ill fortune, of wyrd. Who of us can say that we have chosen the true path at every turning, or that we have deserved every disaster that has befallen us, so that our lives are the sum total of decisions rightly or wrongly made? This is not for a trice to suggest that Tolkien regarded the universe as unsponsored and undirected, as Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould have been wont to say.4 On the contrary, it is Morgoth himself who is the absurdist and nihilist, here declaring that “beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing.”5 Yet even as a convinced Catholic, Tolkien seems to have questioned God’s omnicausality. He appears to have sought, instead, a better way of affirming the providential order of the cosmos—namely, a means of acknowledging the weirdness of the world without attributing everything to God, even indirectly. The Children of Húrin thus indicates that Ilúvatar works his will, not by directly manipulating these powers and forces, but rather by enabling a right human response to them. The web of things consists in a delicately spun tissue of interstitial and interdependent energies—most of them accidentally clashing and coinciding, many of them alien to human good. Tolkien suggests that our lives can flourish, both morally and spiritually, only with a properly

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humbled acceptance of them. Even then we are guaranteed no happy outcome. Húrin and his wife Morwen are deficient in this requisite humility, while their children Túrin and Niënor come to spurn it altogether. Yet the result is not outright and easily predicted disaster, but rather a complex tangle of the good and the bad whose outcome proves immensely sad, albeit only at the very end. Suffice it here to account only for Túrin’s understandable and yet disastrous denial of wyrd. Because his father lies under the curse of Morgoth, Túrin’s birth is accompanied by ill omens. The lines of his life are also straitened by his decidedly mixed, even contradictory, qualities: “Túrin was slow to forget injustice or mockery . . . yet he was quick to pity, and the hurts and sadness of living things might move him to tears.”6 Thus while he proves to be a virtually invincible warrior, Túrin is also the product of what Tolkien’s narrator calls “unfriendly fortune”: “often what he designed went awry, and what he desired he did not gain; neither did he win friendship easily, for he was not merry, and laughed seldom, and a shadow lay on his youth.”7 As often proves true in Tolkien’s work, his heroic characters are undone more by their virtues than their vices. Like Boromir in The Lord of the Rings, Túrin is so valiant in battle that he comes to think himself unconquerable. Yet why should he not, especially when his alliance with a brood of outlaws issues in good rather than evil things? Gradually, therefore, Túrin alters his name from Neithan the Wronged to Túrin Turambar (Túrin the Master of Fate). He thus refuses to heed the urging of his friend Beleg the elf-warrior not to make a direct assault on Morgoth’s armies but rather to wait for the action of the Valar (the godlike creatures who have not broken faith with Ilúvatar) to rescue them. In his brusque refusal to trust Beleg, Túrin is described as “being fey and unwitting of what lay before him.”8 The antique word “fey” is exceedingly ironic here, for it means “fated” or “doomed to death.” Rather than recognizing his own potential ruin at the hands of wyrd, Túrin begins to think himself a creature whose will and might are irresistible. In his incautious pride, therefore, Túrin mistakes Beleg for an orc and mistakenly slays him. Hence the wisdom of Gwindor, Túrin’s companion in valor: “The doom lies in yourself, not in your name.”9 Yet rather than moralizing over Túrin’s vaulting hubris, Tolkien makes his self-doomed hero a deeply sympathetic figure, more to be pitied than condemned. Like Oedipus and Siegfried and Be-

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owulf, he comes to a sinister end while accomplishing admirable deeds. In an act of unexampled valor, he slays the giant dragon Glaurung. Discontent even in his magnficent victory, Túrin labors riskily to draw his sword Gurthang from the Worm’s belly. Yet again he oversteps, for no sooner has Túrin accomplished this daring deed than he learns that he has unwittingly married his own sister Niënor. The sword having been mightily retrieved is useful only for piercing himself to death. Niënor in turn has committed similar self-slaughter upon learning that her husband is her brother. Rather than leaving readers with the confident feeling that justice has been accomplished, however roughly, The Children of Húrin infuses us with a sense that we too are ensnared in such unavoidable webs of guilt, so that none is innocent, not one. We also unwittingly commit vice even in our virtuous acts. Mablung, one of the novel’s noblest characters, is the immediate cause of Túrin’s death for having told him the truth about his marriage. That truthtelling becomes the occasion for death-dealing is yet another example of the world’s weirdness, for truth is meant to bring life and not death. Thus does Tolkien make Mablung’s bitter lament also our own: “I also have been meshed in the doom of the Children of Húrin, and thus with words have slain the one I loved.”10 That life is woven through with both chance and necessity thus constitutes an enduring Tolkienian theme. Yet if a naïve notion of divine monocausality is the chief temptation of Christians—thus ascribing everything to God and nothing to the weird way things simply are—the chief temptation of secular modernity is to deny teleology altogether. And once the cosmos is construed as having no telos, then the powers and forces of the world bid fair to be conquered and made instrumental for entirely human ends. For Tolkien, this is the perennial appeal of magic, and he worries that our fascination with so-called labor-saving machines is our own form of sorcery. Whether ancient and occult on the one hand or else modern and scientific on the other, magic seeks to overcome the slow and often hazardous processes of time, as they work themselves out within the natural and the human order. A prudential humility, as we have seen, is the only faithful way to engage these often weird processes and, even then, with no assurance that one will succeed. It was a monocausal magic that Jesus refused when tempted in the wilderness by the devil, taking instead the slow and arduous and weird path that winds toward Golgotha. Pre-

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suming that he was impervious to the world’s weirdness, Túrin revealed himself to be more than a figure in an ancient legend. As Conrad’s Marlow says of Lord Jim, he is indeed “one of us.”

NOTES 1. Bede, History of the English Church and People, 124–25. 2. Tolkien, Children of Húrin, 64. 3. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1981), 302. 4. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York, Bantam, 1988); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (New York: Ballantine, 1999) are representative works. 5. Tolkien, Children of Húrin, 65. 6. Ibid., 39. 7. Ibid., 81–82. 8. Ibid., 119. 9. Ibid., 170. 10. Ibid., 256–57.

Eru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The Lord of the Rings Catherine Madsen

AT THE 1987 MYTHOPOEIC SOCIETY CONFERENCE IN MILWAUKEE, WHERE I first considered the practical absence of religion from The Lord of the Rings,1 I was immediately asked by Professor Charles Huttar whether the cosmology of The Silmarillion did not undermine my argument. I replied rather incoherently that The Lord of the Rings was a finished, published work, written for an audience, whereas The Silmarillion was a collection of private legends repeatedly revised and never completed. As I am liable to do at unrehearsed moments, I meandered and did not quite answer the question; this chapter is a belated attempt to sort out what kind of difference it makes to write for an audience and with a fair prospect of publication, rather than for oneself with publication a distant hope. I think it is relatively easy to show that the theological underpinnings of The Silmarillion were deliberately omitted from The Lord of the Rings, and to find convincing evidence of the reasons. I admit that I am somewhat reluctant to draw conclusions from The Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings is so satisfying as “the soup that is set before us” that I do not altogether care about “the bones out of which it has been boiled.”2 Tolkien’s sundry drafts and revisions are—as anybody’s drafts must be—extremely uneven in quality, and represent a literary apprenticeship as much as the construction of an imagined world. As the many later posthumous volumes have shown, the drafts have major inconsistencies, shifts in intention, and evolutionary dead ends of plot and character. The effort to make the older material consistent with The Lord of the Rings—or even self-consistent—proved so confounding that The Silmarillion could never be satisfactorily finished. For many readers, including myself, Christopher Tolkien’s long-awaited 1977 Silmarillion volume did not seem to account for The Lord of the 152

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Rings; stories that had seemed tantalizing and beautiful as passing references turned out to be entangled, interminable and comparatively inexpert when seen in full. The presence of all this material in Tolkien’s mind and manuscripts does not quite mean that the great inchoate mass of the legendarium—far less the 1977 version —trumps the deliberate and carefully considered presentation of The Lord of the Rings. By the time the story was done, it had grown away from its origins—even, in some sense, beyond them; with the Hobbits at its center it had gained a coherence and a humble humanity (and a sense of humor) that the legendarium as a whole never acquired. From the outset, The Lord of the Rings was not only a more public piece of work but a more predetermined one than The Silmarillion. It was addressed to readers who wanted more about Hobbits, more about Gandalf and Gollum, more about the Necromancer; certain questions, and certain convenient approaches to the answers, presented themselves. Bilbo’s ring, which had simply happened along in The Hobbit, became the center of the new work. Language irresistibly became more complex: sprinklings of the Black Speech, of Sindarin and Quenya, of Dwarvish, and of Rohan’s undiluted Anglo-Saxon appeared. The English of the narrative also became more adult and more urgent. Part of Tolkien’s task was to create the tone that would bridge the somewhat comic Edwardian complacency of the Shire with the high elegiac feeling of Elves and Men: the exact degree of archaism, the exact timing of each exposure to the lore of the Elder Days and each meeting with the Elves. (An unfinished letter from 1954 shows how carefully he gauged the archaism; he calls it “moderated or watered,” an attempt to render the terseness of “a real archaic English” in the contemporary vocabulary. He rejects with scorn the “bogus ‘medieval’ stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like.”3 This struggle for the right tone may have had some influence on the development of the Third Age of Middle-earth as “a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’”4 whose God, however, is “immensely remote.”5 The delicate problem of how the Hobbits come into contact with the Eldar and the remnant of the Númenóreans, and how they are taken up into the larger business of the world through Frodo’s possession of the Ring, was already complex enough; to introduce religion overtly through “churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies”6 would have added another

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layer of complication, and of social commentary (rural Hobbit vicars? some equivalent of High Mass at Minas Tirith?), that would have impeded the action. Religious buildings and ceremonies are scarcely present in the Silmarillion material either. A detailed cosmology is certainly present, but a cosmology is not a religion—particularly not in an invented world, where all the characters are equally real for the purposes of the story. The characters who might have founded a religion are occupied with literal and physical warring against Melkor/Morgoth, and have no need to theorize about Eru in any case. After Morgoth’s overthrow the barest bones of religion come into existence, and only among Men: Meneltarma, the holy mountain of Númenor, has “a high place that was hallowed to Eru Ilúvatar”7 with no building and no recorded observances. The antimonotheism that Sauron establishes during the last days of Númenor, based on the worship of Melkor, requires an extravagant temple where unbelievers are sacrificed as enemies of the state, but this is clearly the very antithesis of legitimate religion—and bears out Tolkien’s consistent practice of using the word “worship” only for false worship.8 True worship is apparently indescribable, like its object. In Middle-earth, true worship does not survive the destruction of Númenor, unless in observances like the moment of silence that Faramir’s men keep before dinner. Notably, the story of the music of creation and Melkor’s rebellion is never told. There was a model for such a scene, had Tolkien wanted one: within the first hundred lines of Beowulf a minstrel recites a creation story something like Caedmon’s hymn. Nothing comparable happens in The Lord of the Rings. The tale of Beren and Lúthien, prefiguring the love of Aragorn and Arwen, is sung; the tale of Eärendil, which will become visible and palpable to Frodo and Sam in the form of the starglass, is recited. The creation story is outside the boundaries of the tale. It does not appear even in a confused form, as, for example, the “Eusa show” in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, with its scrambled conflation of St. Eustace, Jesus, and the letters USA. Tolkien did play with the idea of such confusion as he worked on The Silmarillion material following the publication of The Lord of the Rings. He had become self-conscious about elements that conflicted with scientific cosmology, like the flat world that existed “before the seas were bent”9 at the downfall of Númenor, and the belated origin of the sun and moon in the fruits of the Two Trees,

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and tried to revise them away.10 At one point, recognizing how deeply embedded they were in the material, he considered handling these elements not as facts known to the Elves, but as unverifiable legends transmitted among Men: “What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions . . . handed on by Men in Númenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back—from the first association of the Dúnedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand—blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas.”11 If this idea had been fully carried through, it might well have boomeranged by making the creation story itself look more legendary and less literal, which Tolkien probably did not intend. But in The Lord of the Rings the legendary material is treated as straightforward historical fact. The absence of a creation story is not conspicuous; subliminally one simply has the impression that the effort of defeating Morgoth and then Sauron has left Middle-earth in such exhaustion, even after millennia, that all earlier memories (or legends) are very far distant. The Lord of the Rings is at yet another remove even from Mannish legend. It is not about what Men or Elves know, but about what hobbits know. Cosmologically speaking, they do not know very much. At moments of danger they hear the Valar invoked as guardians and great powers, but the Valar, though high and remote, are clearly structural rather than supernatural, and elsewhere rather than invisible. The characters who invoke them have faith in them, but do not have to take them on faith. Except in the line “the Valar laid down their Guardianship and called upon the One” in appendix A,12 there is no unambiguous mention of anything resembling God, and the names Eru and Ilúvatar do not appear. Various characters suggest at various points that there is no such thing as chance, but this is a human habit of cognition which may or may not suggest a rudimentary theology, and which in the “real world” is by no means exclusively Christian. The guardians of the universe and the workings of fate and chance are far beyond the ordinary knowledge of the Hobbits; what is nearer, not quite within reach but compellingly just beyond it, are the Elves. Crucially, it is the numen of the Elves, their otherness and their beauty, that a rustic character like Sam or an intellectually curious character like Bilbo or Frodo is drawn to. The Elves represent something beyond the common life of the Shire, “spiritual” in the sense that they stir the spirit, but not disembodied or ethereal. They are, as Tolkien says in “On Fairy-Stories,” not supernatural

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but “natural, far more natural than [man].”13 The Elves are the Hobbits’ source of wonder: they offer access to high language, ancient lore and song, a kind of intensified reality, and a goodness so far out of Hobbit reckoning as to be perilous. (Charles Williams’s phrase “a terrible good” is not a conundrum to a reader acquainted with the Elves.) Ted Sandyman14 and some of the Riders of Rohan15 dismiss the Elves as an old wives’ tale, but the Gaffer tells Sam that “Elves and Dragons” are “the business of your betters”16—large and uncanny and possibly dangerous, like literacy. In fact “the business of his betters” is altogether bound up with literacy, and even with philology: old wives’ tales and legends are relics of a past so ancient and so grave that the daily life of the Shire seems ephemeral beside it. The Elves are dangerous, in the sense that they disturb one’s peace of mind; a hobbit cannot be content with his patch of garden or his Bag End squirearchy if he has once longed for them. They introduce vastness, a sense of the dark backward and abysm of time. Gildor Inglorion says to Frodo, “The Elves have their own labours and their own sorrows, and they are little concerned with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creatures upon earth. Our paths cross theirs seldom, by chance or purpose.”17 The words disclose another way of life, living itself out as it were in parallel to the Shire’s, unknowable and greatly to be desired. That life, even where it suggests the adjective holy, is a deeply natural life; it has none of the checks and moral exhortations and liturgical apparatus that characterize religion. If The Silmarillion in some form had been published along with The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien wished, the cosmological underpinnings would have been available to his readers from the beginning; there would now be no debate about their relation or relevance to the tale of the Ring. But he never offered The Silmarillion as a truly finished work. The samples he sent were difficult for the editors who saw them (and possibly for Tolkien himself) to imagine as a coherent book, and the material was less closely related in style and content to The Lord of the Rings than Tolkien probably realized. The Silmarillion material, on the whole, puts the lover of The Lord of the Rings “out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”18 As matter for analysis and scholarship it is still very interesting, but it seems to have been written by an almost entirely different process of composition than The Lord of the Rings. Even had the two works been published together, the question might still remain: why are

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the cosmological details so essential to The Silmarillion so inessential to The Lord of the Rings? Tolkien is one of those writers whose scholarship and imaginative work inform each other. The recurrent frustration of the desire to do his own writing erupts into the insights of his essays; one can read his intentions for The Lord of the Rings quite strongly through “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and “On Fairy-Stories.”19 The two essays lay the theoretical groundwork for The Lord of the Rings; “On Fairy-Stories” reads at some points like a manifesto for the metaphysical—and physical—stature of the Elves. Even the strong but rather parenthetical placement of the Christian reference in the epilogue to “On Fairy-Stories” parallels the placement of the hint of resurrection as a postscript in the story of Aragorn and Arwen in appendix A.20 Much of the power of the Beowulf essay lies in Tolkien’s imaginative sympathy with the poem’s treatment of the past. His own complex layering of the past of Middle-earth owes a good deal to the atmosphere and structure of Beowulf. He recognized—and made recognizable to other scholars of Anglo-Saxon—that the poem, linguistically and culturally distant as it is to the modern reader, gave even its original audience a sense of infinite distance: “the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance—a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground.”21 “More pagan” is the only phrase that makes no sense in terms of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For all the dark and desperate losses of the Elder Days, there has been no break there between an old and a new cosmology. The hobbits are unfamiliar with the past because they are untutored, not because some new evangel has supplanted the old legends; they stand in relation to the Valar not as an Italian Catholic does to the old Roman gods or a Danish Lutheran to the Norse ones, but almost as a secular American Jew does to Moses and Isaiah—perhaps knowing little of what they said or did, but aware of them as great figures in a still viable and unbroken tradition. (Though, of course, Moses and Isaiah are mortal and are members of the same people as their modern descendant, whereas the Valar are immortal and have no biological tie to the Hobbits.) The absence of religion from Beowulf provides a model for its absence from The Lord of the Rings, although with very different cir-

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cumstances and motives. In Beowulf, written during a Christian time but set in a pre-Christian past, any mention of Christ would have been an anachronism; at the same time, the gods that Christianity displaced could not be reinstated, but could only be treated as demons: “But if the specifically Christian was suppressed, so also were the old gods. Partly because they had not really existed, and had been always, in the Christian view, only delusions or lies fabricated by the evil one . . . Partly because their old names (certainly not forgotten) had been potent, and were connected in memory still . . . with active heathendom, religion and wigweorþung. Most of all because they were not actually essential to the theme.”22 “The gods” of The Silmarillion—written in a Christian time about an imaginary time—are neither evil nor delusory, but in The Lord of the Rings they are never called the gods. Their role is underplayed there; beautiful and powerful though they are, even the Valar are not perhaps “actually essential to the theme.”23 But the specifically Christian is also suppressed. Tolkien thought the Arthurian legends unsuccessful partly because of their “fatal” inclusion of Christian elements,24 and it seems uncontroversial to say that he did not wish to follow their example. He apparently drew this sharp line in order to protect the integrity of the legendary, not to protect Christianity from contact with the legendary. The philological movement as a whole was curious about old words and legends partly because of their origins in a preChristian age; perhaps, to a mind that desired real otherness, the appearance of Christian elements simply made a legend feel too recent and familiar. Tolkien’s sense of the sorrow and brevity of life—Beowulf “is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy”25—heals, at least temporarily, the division between pagan and Christian. “A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.”26 In theological and literary terms, the heroic worldview with its vision of the defeat of the gods was replaced at the Christianization of northern Europe by a preoccupation with the individual soul in the balance between salvation and damnation; for most medieval authors, and apparently for Tolkien, “the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries.” But the Beowulf poet “is still concerned primarily with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die. A theme no Christian need despise.”27 For a veteran of the Somme to call the struggle against

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temptation the “real” battle is testimony either to the weight of theological and literary tradition or to the restorative powers of normal life; still, Tolkien is never simple-minded about the spiritual battle. He calls the Beowulf poet’s treatment of the past “a greater contribution to early mediaeval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil”;28 he would not, one infers, have consigned his own non-Christian readers to the devil. “On Fairy-Stories” deals with elements that are nonhuman, nondivine (or nontheological, either as gods or demons), and also nonmonstrous. The elves—the word is not capitalized in the essay —are close to the center of its attention, or as close as they can be when their function in fantasy is to be distant. In defining the fairystory Tolkien echoes very closely Gildor’s words to Frodo, so closely that one wonders which passage was written first: “Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. Naturally so; for if elves are true, and really exist independently of our tales about them, then this also is certainly true: elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. Even upon the borders of Faërie we encounter them only at some chance crossing of the ways.”29 The appeal of the elves is partly that of antiquity, and of longevity, but also they have a grace and beauty startlingly beyond the human. Surprise is an essential aspect of their nature. An “arresting strangeness,” a “quality of strangeness and wonder,” is part of Tolkien’s definition of Fantasy;30 it figures as well in his description of Recovery, which allows us to be “startled anew”31 by familiar colors and shapes and faces (as Frodo is when his blindfold is removed in Lórien).32 On this point Tolkien has allies in unexpected quarters: Bertolt Brecht’s principle of Verfremdung, “alienation,” was based on the need to turn the familiar into the strange so as to renew the experience of theater.33 Brecht drew on a 1917 essay by the Russian critic Victor Shklovsky that declared that art should not so much clarify and explain as defamiliarize or “deautomatize” our surroundings to make them freshly perceptible. “Art exists,” said Shklovsky, “that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”34 Whether or not Tolkien knew of Brecht’s or Shklovsky’s work, or would have cared for it aesthetically, his thinking on fairy-stories is very much along the same lines: “Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a

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good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give . . . It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”35 The hobbits’ responses to the Elves in The Lord of the Rings show the radical dehabituation and awakening to wonder of a consciousness that has been too circumscribed; the effect on the reader encountering the Elves is much the same. Very early in the essay Tolkien says that (as for Thomas the Rhymer) “The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven”36—another indication that he distinguishes the most compelling legendary material both from the primary world and from the Christian schema. The otherness of Faërie and its inhabitants is as absolute as the otherness of God, but differently so—perhaps more so, to a writer who believes in a God that shared man’s nature. It is as non-human as the animals that suddenly and startlingly appear in the last stanza of Auden’s “The Fall of Rome”: Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

But the Elves can speak. Language, of course, is at the center of Tolkien’s awareness, and at several points in the essay he mentions the desire “to hold communion with other living things” as one of the “primordial human desires.”37 To speak with the absolutely other—with a nonhuman creature that can yet comprehend and answer in human language—is a profound wish, and not only for a philologist. Desire might indeed have made a fifth category along with Fantasy, Recovery, Escape and Consolation; it is a pervasive presence in the essay. “The inner consistency of reality”38 may make a fantasy infinitely desirable, even when one knows that it cannot come true; in a sense what one wishes is to keep wishing it could come true. As a child, Tolkien says, he did not want to feel that fairy-story events could happen in “real life”: “Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably,

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they succeeded.”39 The source of desire is often in the unattainable—what Lewis called “Northernness” is one instance, a quality of light and space and atmosphere that can be experienced but not grasped or kept—and at least as often in sorrow: the loss of love or of a beloved person, the desolation of war, the dread of death, grief at the death of trees. In a 1956 letter Tolkien spoke of the “real theme” of The Lord of the Rings as “Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.”40 His long reflection on the “sundered fates” of Elves and Men in the Silmarillion material clearly underlies his suggestion in the essay that while fairy-stories confront “the oldest and deepest desire . . . the Escape from Death,” the “human stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.”41 To speak to the absolutely other is to encounter desires absolutely unlike one’s own; yet these opposing desires may be made to some degree comprehensible by their common quality of longing. The epilogue to “On Fairy-Stories” is by turns moving and cloying; it presents an affecting picture of Tolkien’s thought processes, but ignores the rules of scholarly evidence as he has followed them earlier in the essay. The skeptical reader, and even the reader trying to adopt Tolkien’s beliefs, becomes entangled in a web of ambivalent responses. “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true” (unsupported assertion); “To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath” (almost an accusation—in spite of Tolkien’s own attraction to sadness as a literary mode); “Because this story is supreme; and it is true” (unsupportable assertion); “Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused” (glorious, daring assertion, even if not supportable).42 I was thirteen or fourteen when I first read the essay, and felt inarticulately that in the epilogue Tolkien was trying to satisfy a desire that had not first been awakened in the reader, far less whetted unbearably. Having defended the autonomy of the elves, he immediately domesticated them by making their stories subordinate to the “supreme” and “true” Christian fairy-story. Having declared that the road to fairyland was not the road to heaven, he suddenly leapt the median and got us on the road to heaven anyway, and I felt the pains of intellectual whiplash. Nonetheless, the epilogue is itself useful evi-

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dence: the fact that Tolkien could make such an open statement of his Christian belief suggests that where he did not make it, he did not wish to make it. The interplay between author and audience is a delicate thing. If it does not arise from frank exploitation, it rests on the gradual accumulation of trust. Inasmuch as Christopher Tolkien and the Inklings were the first audience for The Lord of the Rings, it was unnecessary to make any overtly religious reference in it. Inasmuch as English institutions were officially Christian (even if Anglican and not Catholic), a general familiarity with Christian themes could be taken for granted. Inasmuch as not all his readers would be practicing Christians, Tolkien had no reason to confront them with Christian references. He had private reasons as well as literary ones for reticence about his religion. His mother’s ill health and early death, results of the poverty that followed her family’s rejection of her conversion to Catholicism, must have been high among them. His wife’s eventual near-rejection of her own conversion had disappointed and distressed him. He was keenly conscious of the persecution of Catholics in England, from the Reformation right up to his own lifetime; commenting on ecumenism in a 1967 letter to his son Michael, he remarks, “Has it ever been mentioned that R[oman] C[atholic]s still suffer from disabilities not even applicable to Jews?”43 Even apart from the example of Beowulf—and the negative example of the Arthurian material—he would have had many disincentives, and probably no inclination, to present his religion directly. But he also does not present it in code. He wrote to Rhona Beare in 1958 that he had “deliberately written a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them.”44 In his general rejection of allegory in the foreword to the 1965 paperback of The Lord of the Rings he speculated that “many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”45 He was not interested in that kind of domination, on religious or any other grounds. For those familiar with the Christian story and sensibility, there are clear echoes of Mary in the praise of Elbereth, of the Host in the eating of lembas, of the burden of the Cross in the burden of the Ring; but these are structural elements of Tolkien’s imagination, not strategies of evangelism. He is not winking at Christians, or at Roman Catholics, over the heads

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of non-Christian readers. He was reticent about his religion to the point of courtesy; he could maintain his own ways, and even (in private correspondence) deplore others’, without having to make a show of it. When Catholic readers wrote with observations about the religious resonances of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was happy to respond in kind. In letters to the Jesuit priest Robert Murray he frankly used Christian terms for his own cosmology, for example calling Eru simply “God”46 and Sauron’s Númenorean cult of Melkor “a Satanist religion.”47 He spoke feelingly to Murray of the effect of his religious upbringing on his imagery: I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know[.]48

This is both a very open statement of Christian allegiance and gratitude, and an extraordinary withdrawal from Christian insistence. In effect he grants absolute freedom to the reader—to take “the story and the symbolism” on Catholic terms or on any other terms, without shibboleths or conditions. Humphrey Carpenter offers the very plausible argument that Tolkien omitted worship from his invented world “because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie.”49 The result is that his world is not a lie either to a Christian who would reject pagan gods, or to a non-Christian who would reject the Christian one. The irony that false worship can arise in Tolkien’s world even in the absence of true worship only underlines the extreme fragility, the fugitive nature, of religion in this world that is not idolatry. One reader’s striking observation that in The Lord of the Rings “some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source”50 shows what may be possible with the omission of both

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pagan and Christian references: intensity of wonder and integrity of spirit are diffused throughout the work, and come to seem “natural, far more natural” than they are in the primary world. Tolkien conveyed to his readers the beauty of his religion without either its militant or its triumphant face—even without its content, in any credal sense, and yet still with its moral gravity and its starriness. The Lord of the Rings offers religion obliquely and thus without impediment; it offers religion’s effects and not its anxieties. The natural theology of Middle-earth is itself “far more natural” than the rationalism with which the term is usually associated; it is not philosophical reasoning at all, in either Aquinas’s or the Enlightenment’s terms. It is the spontaneous and active response of the characters to self-evident truths. Unalienable rights are (unsurprisingly) not Tolkien’s concern; it is unalienable responsibilities that drive Elrond and Gandalf, Aragorn and Galadriel, and above all Frodo, to seek the defeat of Sauron. The damaged landscape, the threat to the Free Peoples, the terror of the Nazgûl, the destruction of trees, call forth a feeling and a resolution: there is a task to do, and theological rumination would be a detour. The absence of religious directives in Middle-earth presents us with the greatest verisimilitude: we must make our decisions for ourselves, with occasional intimations of being looked out for by benevolent powers, but with countervailing suspicions that we are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The conflicting paradigms need not be resolved into one right belief. You take the Ring, though you do not know the way. To tie up the cosmological loose ends of the legendarium is impossible; the effort was one of Tolkien’s great distractions in his later years, both in long explanatory letters to his readers and in his work on the Silmarillion material. To grasp the religious achievement of The Lord of the Rings is an easier task, although a subtle one. It may be useful to approach the question through a 1945 letter to Christopher Tolkien. Lewis had recently written an essay51 that considered the hold of myth on the Christian too self-consciously modern to believe in miracles or to take the creeds at face value, but too much attached to the Christian story to reject it. Tolkien had been much taken with Lewis’s reasoning: “It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. [Lewis’s] point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off

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wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth. So that the faintheart ‘admirer’ is really still getting something, which even one of the faithful (stupid, insensitive, shamefaced) may be missing.”52 As a Christian, he found this idea helpful in cases like the Eden story, which cannot be defended as historically true in the modern sense, but which he found profoundly emotionally true—historically true because cognitively true, as it were —in its appeal to the human sense of moral exile and loss.53 Meanwhile, as a storyteller, he was deeply engaged in elaborating a beauty from which the reader could draw nourishment (painstakingly presented as a true history although not historically true). He did not apply Lewis’s point to his own story as he wrote to his son, but certainly the value of story as story struck him in a new way; the idea of the non-Christian “admirer” of The Lord of the Rings drawing genuine religious nourishment from it, even in the absence of belief, would not have been foreign to him when the admirer eventually appeared. In the essay, Lewis imagines the pure rationalist asking the “faintheart” Christian, “Why not cut the cord? . . . Everything would be much easier if you would free your thought from this vestigial mythology.” He answers (with his trademark briskness toward intimate and painful emotional states) that the love of the mythology, the intimacy of the connection, justifies the attachment: “To be sure: far easier. Life would be far easier for the mother of an invalid child if she put it into an Institution and adopted someone else’s healthy baby instead. Life would be far easier to many a man if he abandoned the woman he has actually fallen in love with and married someone else because she is more suitable. The only defect of the healthy baby and the suitable woman is that they leave out the patient’s only reason for bothering about a child or wife at all . . . Even assuming (which I most constantly deny) that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.”54 Lewis himself was incapable of telling a story without hammering home an argument; Tolkien, anchored in language at a level far below argument, could trust his story to do its own work. But those who have grown up on Tolkien and Lewis and are not embarrassed by myth may take the reasoning in another direction. Lewis’s analogies of the mother and the lover apply to others besides am-

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bivalent Christians; the myth you have fallen in love with, and with which you must keep faith, may not be Christianity. The story that commands your allegiance may not be the most “suitable” story. It may be The Lord of the Rings; it may be a bare-bones theological structure very much like it, which for me turned out to be Judaism; it may be a religion yet to be formulated, compounded of realism and sorrow, severity and longing. Beauty is nourishing, and we take it where we can get it—in the Bible, in the late Shakespeare, in a syncretic stew of art and music and verse from our own culture and from cultures not our own. We draw a distinction between beauty and truth where we have to, as well as recognizing distinctions between historical and “mythical” truth. But the signals and reminders that nourish us most deeply—that return us through beauty to our moral selves—cannot be counterfeited or substituted, even by systems that for others constitute true worship. Later in the 1945 letter to his son, Tolkien speaks of the “fundamental literary dilemma” of The Lord of the Rings, which forces his skill and attention onto the plot and his characters’ emotions when his deeper wish is to write about “the heart-racking sense of the vanished past” which is in some sense his real subject. “A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”55 In the sense that the Christian story is the most profoundly “untold” story of The Lord of the Rings—so deeply submerged beneath the tales of the Elder Days that only its illumination is present—it is the most moving one; but only its absence makes it so. The Christian echoes “alienate” the Christian story so it can become beautiful and nourishing to readers who would otherwise reject it; what they do with it later is not the sub-creator’s business. For many readers the sense of longing and wonder, without which the soul dries up, is appeased more strongly by The Lord of the Rings than by Christianity—partly because it is assumed to be really unappeasable: it concerns things we cannot have, because they belong to realms we cannot live in and because we and all our works shall die, and we take comfort from Tolkien’s recognition that this is so. As a very young man—as a member of the T.C.B.S.56—Tolkien had a sense of being engaged in some holy work. He was, but not in the youth’s sense of being “destined to testify for God and Truth in a more direct way” than as a soldier.57 It was through indirection that he finally found the way. He wrote his greatest work as a father and a scholar, a storyteller conscious of his audience, a social and

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political observer of considerable sophistication who knew that you cannot impose your religion (however sustaining) on your equals; a man of many sorrows and disappointments who had learned that work must often be delayed, abandoned unfinished, or finished very differently than it was started. The Lord of the Rings is a mature man’s book; it works within the constraints of his readers’ and his publisher’s wishes, telling a tale to which his beloved Silmarillion is and remains mere background. In the telling, he enlarged the boundaries of the tale to whet unbearably the reader’s desire to know the full story in the background—and the full story is not there. Its many fragments and iterations do not add up to a work equal to The Lord of the Rings, though they fed it and gave it many of their best qualities. The theological elements were left almost wholly behind; for a combination of literary and religious reasons, he did not judge them necessary to the new book. He judged well. The absence of religious reference gives readers, some of whom would ordinarily be at odds, common imaginative access to a serious tale of danger and wonder and sacrifice. The road to fairyland is not the road to heaven: on it believers and unbelievers may meet with mutual sympathy and common moral purpose— even if only seldom, and only at some chance crossing of the ways.

NOTES 1. For my original argument, see my “Light from an Invisible Lamp.” (The minor changes in the reprinted version included a minor error: the phrase “deliberately cheats” on page 43 should, of course, be “cheats deliberately” to echo Tolkien’s own words.) 2. Tolkien (quoting Dasent), “On Fairy-Stories,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 120. 3. Tolkien to Hugh Brogan, September 1955, in Tolkien, Letters, 225. 4. Tolkien to Houghton Mifflin, June 30, 1955, in ibid., 220. 5. Tolkien to Robert Murray (draft), November 4, 1954, in ibid., 204. 6. Tolkien to Houghton Mifflin, June 30, 1955, in ibid., 220. 7. Tolkien, Silmarillion (Boston 1977), 261. 8. See my “Light from an Invisible Lamp” for a more detailed discussion of Tolkien’s use of the word worship. 9. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1954), 142. 10. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 370–90. 11. Ibid., 373, emphasis in original. 12. Tolkien, Return of the King (1956), 317. 13. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 110. 14. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1954), 53–54.

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15. Tolkien, Two Towers (1955), 35. 16. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1954), 32. 17. Ibid., 94. 18. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 132. 19. To fix these dates in the chronology of his fiction, The Hobbit was submitted for publication several weeks before the delivery of the Beowulf lecture in 1936, and by the time of “On Fairy-Stories” in 1939 the “sequel” had progressed by twelve chapters, acquired its title, and become already a far more serious and adult work than The Hobbit (see Tolkien to Allen and Unwin, February 2, 1939, in Tolkien, Letters, 41–42). The published text of “On Fairy-Stories” is the expanded version included in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in 1947, revised at a point when the plot was much further advanced and doubtless even more influential. 20. Tolkien, Return of the King (1956), 344. 21. Tolkien, “Beowulf,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 27. 22. Ibid., 22. 23. Gandalf is an exception. He is not a Vala, but in many letters he and the Istari are described as “emissaries of the Valar” and in one letter as “of their kind.” (Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in Tolkien, Letters, 282.) But since his metaphysical status is not discussed in the narrative, and since the reader has known him fairly familiarly since the opening pages of The Hobbit, this belated identification looks retrospective, an effort to place Gandalf’s resurrection acceptably in the Silmarillion material’s established cosmology. Details, even at this level, do get away from an author in the process of writing, particularly an author who trusts his imagination to do what the story needs; fortunately Tolkien only worried after the fact about what was cosmologically acceptable. 24. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in ibid., 144. 25. Tolkien, “Beowulf,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 18. 26. Ibid., 22. 27. Ibid., 22–23. 28. Ibid., 28. 29. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 113. 30. Ibid., 139. 31. Ibid., 146. 32. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1954), 364–65. 33. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre. See index under “alienation” for the development of this idea. 34. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 6. 35. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 147. 36. Ibid., 110. 37. Ibid., 116. 38. Ibid., 139. 39. Ibid., 134. 40. Tolkien to Joanna de Bortadano (draft), April 1956, in Tolkien, Letters, 246. 41. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Monsters and the Critics (1984), 153. 42. Ibid., 156. 43. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 394–95. 44. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in ibid., 283–84, emphasis in original.

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45. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1965), xi. 46. Tolkien to Robert Murray (draft), November 4, 1954, in Tolkien, Letters, 201– 7. 47. Ibid., 205. 48. Tolkien to Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in ibid., 172, emphasis added. 49. Carpenter, Biography (Boston), 91, emphasis in original. 50. Tolkien to Carole Batten-Phelps (drafts), 1971, in Tolkien, Letters, 413. The reader is unidentified. 51. Probably “Myth Became Fact,” subsequently anthologized in God in the Dock, 63–67. 52. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, January 30, 1945, in Tolkien, Letters, 109. 53. Ibid., 109–10. 54. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” 64. 55. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, January 30, 1945, in Tolkien, Letters, 110. 56. The “Tea Club and Barrovian Society,” a group (officially named in 1911) that included Tolkien and three friends at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. The friends stayed in touch after leaving school, and began to think of themselves as a nascent intellectual movement. After two members of the group were killed in the First World War, Tolkien felt compelled by their loss to begin his legendarium in earnest. See Carpenter, Biography (Boston), 44–47, 73, and 82–89. 57. Tolkien to G. B. Smith, August 12, 1916, in Tolkien, Letters, 10.

The Ring and the Cross: How J.R.R. Tolkien Became a Christian Writer Chris Mooney

FROM THEIR MASTERY OF MIDDLE-EARTH GEOGRAPHY TO THEIR OCCAsional fluency in Elvish, fans of The Lord of the Rings books tend to be a pretty knowledgeable bunch. But many would be surprised to learn that J.R.R. Tolkien’s great medievalist epic had a coauthor: God. According to Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher at Boston College, Tolkien was under the divine spell when he composed his sprawling trilogy. “Of course it’s inspired; it’s got His fingerprints all over it,” wrote Kreeft in an article on Tolkien and evil that was reprinted in 2003 in a special all-Tolkien issue of the Catholic-leaning Chesterton Review. Kreeft is not alone in his analysis. Although Tolkien’s epic romance remains a lodestar for fantasy geeks worldwide, it has also been adopted by myriad Christian commentators. Books on Tolkien’s religiosity are everywhere. For evangelical Protestants, there is Finding God in “The Lord of the Rings” written by two authors affiliated with the organization Focus on the Family. For Catholics, there is Hillsdale College historian Bradley Birzer’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, which was released to coincide with Peter Jackson’s second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers. When The Lord of the Rings, a novel in three volumes, was first published in 1954–55, the Anglican poet W. H. Auden called it a “masterpiece,” and even suggested that Tolkien had “succeeded where Milton failed” when it came to the question of reconciling free will with the notion of a God whose power is absolute. The current emphasis on Tolkien’s religiosity has its more immediate origins in Joseph Pearce’s 1999 book Tolkien: Man and Myth, which underscores Tolkien’s deeply Catholic views. Since Pearce’s writing —and, of course, the arrival of The Lord of the Rings books on the silver screen—the theological ferment has been considerable. In 170

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April of 2000, Christianity Today ranked Tolkien’s epic among the top ten Christian books of the twentieth century; the first slot went to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which might not have even been written had Tolkien not helped Lewis to find God in 1931. More religiously infused books on Tolkien have been published, including Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien and Baylor University theology and literature professor Ralph Wood’s The Gospel According to “The Lord of the Rings.” In the 1960s and early 1970s, Tolkien was often associated with the counterculture—in particular, with the Green movement. After all, he once wrote that “in all my works I take the part of the trees as against all their enemies.”1 “Gandalf for President” buttons were common, and Led Zeppelin lyrics abounded with Tolkien references —consider “Ramble On,” for example: “’Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair / but Gollum, and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her, yeah.” (The less said about Leonard Nimoy’s 1967 song-poem “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins,” the better.) But Tolkien’s Christian interpreters, many of them conservatives, have tried to wrest him away from hippies, tree-huggers, and other assorted left-wingers. Birzer, for example, wrote in the New Oxford Review that the new Christian interpretation makes it “impossible” to see Tolkien as the poster boy for the “libertine drug culture” of the 1960s. Will the real J.R.R. Tolkien please stand up? No one disputes that Tolkien’s Catholicism influenced his writing. Indeed, he held his conservative Catholic views rather fiercely —due in part to his conviction that his mother Mabel had been persecuted by her family for her conversion to Catholicism in 1900 (she died shortly afterward of diabetes). After serving on the Western Front in World War I, Tolkien returned to his studies of medieval literature; after becoming a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, he helped found an influential group of Christian philosopher-writers called “the Inklings,” which included C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. In a 1953 letter Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”2 But Tolkien’s views—on both religion and fiction—were complex. In another letter, Tolkien outlined his aspiration to create a new mythology for England, describing the existing body of Arthurian legend as inadequate for the role because it “explicitly contains the Christian religion.” (He added, “that seems to me to be fatal.”)3 References to real-world belief systems, Tolkien

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thought, would detract from the beguiling timelessness he hoped to convey. Tolkien’s characters inhabit a pre-Christian version of our own world; they don’t worship, carry on religious rituals, or talk about faith. Commentators have noted similarities between Tolkien’s trilogy and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which also put Europe’s pagan heritage in the service of national myth-making. Some fundamentalist Christians—the same folks who bash the Harry Potter books—have denounced the prevalence of magic in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s Christian champions, however, argued that the Oxford don—like the Beowulf poet whose work he knew so well—breathed his own devout sensibility into pagan tales and archetypes, thus creating what Birzer calls a “Christ-inspired and God-centered mythology.” Indeed, some of Tolkien’s Christian interpreters see three of the novel’s main characters—the wizard Gandalf, the hobbit Frodo, and the heroic human Aragorn—as Christ figures. “Each offers his life for others, each passes through darkness and even a kind of death, to a kind of resurrection,” writes Stratford Caldecott. Christian Tolkienists also point to the central role of the virtue of Pity—a word Tolkien tends to capitalize—in the book’s plot. When the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins first discovers the dark lord Sauron’s lost Ring of Power (an event which occurs in Tolkien’s 1937 children’s book The Hobbit), he makes a conscious decision to spare the life of its previous owner, the wretched creature Gollum. In The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo’s heir Frodo and his companions continue to spare Gollum from death; these acts of mercy end up inadvertently saving the world. “‘The pity of Bilbo will rule the fate of many’ gradually becomes the motto of Tolkien’s epic,” writes Ralph Wood. “The unrestrained quality of mercy is what, I suggest, makes The Lord of the Rings an enduring Christian classic despite its pagan setting.” For more secular Tolkienists, though, this sort of talk rankles. “I don’t see pity as exclusively Christian,” notes University of Maryland English professor Verlyn Flieger, author of Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Flieger does not consider the specifically Christian reading of Tolkien’s novel to be entirely wrong-headed, but she does find it reductionist. Some critics further observe that the novel’s characters tend to be deeply invested in their Middle-earthly lives, rather than in any afterlife. Consider Gandalf’s carpe diem advice to Frodo: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”4

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Also, where Christian Tolkienists see intimations of redemption in The Lord of the Rings, their secular rivals contend that Tolkien did not create a divine comedy. Take Frodo’s parting words to Sam when Frodo leaves for the Grey Havens, a kind of overseas Elvish retirement home: “It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”5 For Peter Kreeft, this smacks of a Christlike sacrifice. But the sacrifice and loss is not suffered by Frodo alone; it is suffered by all the denizens of Middle-earth: In Tolkien’s scheme, the destruction of the One Ring necessitates the departure of the Elves from Middle-earth—and with their parting, much that is beautiful and cherished disappears from the world forever. Evil, meanwhile, will doubtlessly reconstitute itself in yet another form. “That’s a very Norse outlook: Even the winners lose,” says Stephen Morillo, a Wabash College medieval historian who teaches a course that covers Tolkien. “That’s really what lies behind the morality of The Lord of the Rings, and that’s just incompatible with a Christian interpretation.” Tolkienian Christians have a marked tendency to gush about the books: “I have no doubt that Tolkien’s great tale will be one of those we will hear told, or sung, by the golden fireside in that longedfor Kingdom,” writes Caldecott. Some also want to use the popularity of The Lord of the Rings to win converts. In a recent interview, David Mills, an editor of the conservative Christian magazine Touchstone, called Tolkien’s work “stealth evangelization”; in regard to its appearance on the big screen, he suggests that Catholics “use the movie to raise questions for their unbelieving friends . . . help them begin to see that the great story depends upon its moral and spiritual depth, and then you can ask them where they find this morality and spirituality today. We know that the only place you find them in their full strength is the Catholic Church, but your unbelieving friends don’t know that yet.” Of course, taking The Lord of the Rings this way would turn it into something closer to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, with its far more overt Christian exhortation. Tolkien and Lewis shared a distrust of the modern world, but they disagreed over the value of conveying direct religious messages through allegorical fiction. Tolkien disliked the Narnia books, and when it came to Lewis’s popular apologetics, he snidely dubbed his friend “Everyman’s theologian.” Sure enough, today Tolkien retains his status as a big-church fantasist whose work inspires multiple interpretations, while Lewis

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tends to be more narrowly championed by conservative Christians. Speaking of the breadth of Tolkien’s appeal, Bradley Birzer admits that “I think the beauty of Tolkien is that he’s not explicitly Christian. I think I would be turned off if we had Jesus running around the story.” Tolkien avoided that, but quite a few devout Christians are nevertheless claiming his story as their own. The question is whether this could be a turn-off to everybody else.

NOTES Originally published in The Boston Globe [Ideas], December 29, 2002, and republished here with minor changes by permission of the author. 1. Tolkien to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, June 30, 1972, in Tolkien, Letters, 419. 2. Tolkien to Father Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 3. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, probably late 1951, in ibid., 144. 4. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1973), 82. 5. Tolkien, Return of the King (1973), 382.

II The Cross

Redeeming Sub-Creation Carson L. Holloway

THE GREATEST FANTASIST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS A CHRISTIAN: J.R.R. Tolkien. Many may sense a paradox here. To be sure, it is not paradoxical that a Christian would turn away from the ugliness of this world, and in particular the ugliness of the modern world— and Tolkien was certainly impelled in part by such considerations—to lose himself in a different world of incomparable grandeur and beauty. Nevertheless it is paradoxical that a Christian would turn to such a world of his own making, rather than to the one that has been revealed to him through the sacred texts and traditions of his Church. We might be tempted to resolve this paradox by regarding Tolkien’s fantasy spinning—or, to use the term he preferred, his “sub-creation”—as merely trivial or frivolous, at best a kind of harmless diversion from the seriousness of his professional, familial, and religious duties. After all, as a young army officer, Tolkien confided to his future bride that he frequently desired to “work at” the Elvish tongue he had devised, from which his stories grew, but would not let himself, because “though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby.”1 Nevertheless anyone who has read the entire Humphrey Carpenter collection of Tolkien’s letters, to say nothing of Tolkien’s lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” knows that any such belittling reference to his sub-creation ultimately represents not his own view of his activity but his sober awareness of how it might appear to others. Tolkien’s love for his sub-creative work was profound and reflective, and fittingly so: for, as we will see, he regarded sub-creation as at or near the center of his humanity—that is, as essential to both the peculiar nature he had been given as well as to the common nature shared by all human beings. Nor, for that matter, can we resolve the paradox by reducing Tolkien’s Christianity to an unimportant aspect of his character. Tolkien was no mere conventional churchgoer, but a deeply pious 177

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Roman Catholic, holding his faith as a gift from a convert mother who, on his view, died as a kind of martyr. Abandoned by both her own family and that of her dead husband on account of her conversion to Catholicism, she endured hardships that Tolkien regarded as leading to her untimely death.2 We are left, then, with the following question: can the paradox be resolved? Can Tolkien’s seriousness about sub-creation be harmonized with his Catholicism? In this chapter I attempt such a harmonization. I try, so to speak, to “redeem” sub-creation, to show how it is compatible with and even informed by Tolkien’s faith. Fortunately such an effort receives considerable aid from Tolkien himself, who was, as we will see, serious and thoughtful not only about his sub-creativity and his faith, but also about the relationship between the two. What follows, then, is a reconstruction, explication, and defense of Tolkien’s understanding of this relationship.

SUB-CREATION AND HUMAN NATURE The aforementioned sense of paradox arises first, perhaps, from the apparent tension between sub-creation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Christian account of what man is, of his proper place in the order of things, and his proper disposition toward that place. Man, on the Christian view, is a creature, a dependent being who owes his existence to a Creator God. As such, is not his proper work to enjoy the creation that God has provided, to care for it and perfect it, instead of setting himself up as the pretended creator of some alternate pretended world? In response to such concerns, Tolkien reminds us that man is not just any creature, but the one uniquely created in the image of his Creator. To the extent, then, that God’s nature includes a loving impulse toward creation, man’s nature will share in that creative inclination, at least after the fashion permitted by his own limitations as a creature. In his lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien holds that “Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”3 Man is not capable of creating new things out of nothing, yet he is capable of, and naturally inclined to, a kind of creative refashioning of the things God has created—capable, that is, of what Tolkien terms “sub-creation.”

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In “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien makes the case for man’s natural sub-creativity, deriving it from his natural ability to distinguish the qualities of things from the things themselves. The human capacity for adjectives, it seems, already implies a capacity for fantasy. “The human mind,” Tolkien writes, “endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass . . . but sees that it is green as well as being grass.” It is natural, he suggests, that such a mind will imagine the magical possibility of transferring qualities from one thing to another, of, for example, changing “grey lead into yellow gold.” In “such fantasy,” he concludes, “new form is made” and “Man becomes a sub-creator.”4 Moreover Tolkien contends that such fantasy, properly understood and undertaken, need not be an impious deviation from God’s creation but can be a respectful extension of it. He makes this argument to a Christian correspondent who objected to the nonnatural creations of Tolkien’s fiction, insisting instead on a kind of realism that would only depict such things as are already found in the created order. Tolkien responded that such fictional departures from existing creation were essential to fantasy and could be understood as a “tribute to the infinity” of God’s “potential variety,” and indeed as “one of the ways in which it is exhibited.”5 Fantasy, then, is not necessarily a flight from reality but a manifestation of it, for it is the product of the exercise of one of man’s natural—that is, God-given—faculties. Man’s natural sub-creativity, however, does not extend only to a capacity and desire to imagine new things, but also to imagine new events. Man, Tolkien holds, is by nature a storyteller. Given the proclivity of most (if not all) primitive human cultures to define and transmit their identities through myths and legends—a proclivity that is by no means abandoned even in societies that consider themselves advanced and rationalistic—it would be difficult to dispute Tolkien on this point. Moreover on Tolkien’s view this story-telling aspect of our nature is not something of which we need be ashamed, insofar as God himself has recognized and accommodated it. Jesus was a teacher, of course, but he saved mankind not so much through his teaching as through his actions, the events of his life that make up his story, the Gospel story. “Man the story-teller,” Tolkien contends, “would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.” This is not to say that Tolkien regarded the Gospel account of Christ’s life,

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death, and resurrection as a mere edifying tale, as he makes clear in the context. The Gospels tell a story, but because their “author” is God himself this story was also made “to be true on the Primary Plane.”6 God, too, is a story-teller, but insofar as he is the Creator of the world, his story is also History. These arguments are characteristically Tolkien, so much so that we are tempted to say even that they are idiosyncratically Tolkien. We must resist this temptation, however, because upon reflection we can see that his ideas, while unique in a sense, are nevertheless the reasonable and recognizable fruit of a faith he held in common with millions and that was handed down over thousands of years. That is, his arguments are characteristically Tolkien, but they are also characteristically Catholic. Catholics believe, following Thomas Aquinas, that grace does not destroy, but builds upon and perfects, nature. God, in his efforts to reach out to a fallen Man, does not present Himself and His plans for us as something alien to our being, much less as something contrary to it, but as its completion. Tolkien’s notion that man the story-teller would have to be redeemed by a moving story is in this sense as Catholic as the notion that Christ became man, with a genuine human nature, not only to share but also to sanctify human nature, even the body itself and the humblest of its natural desires. On Tolkien’s account, moreover, man’s sub-creative powers are not only a God-given element of his nature, but even a particularly lofty element of that nature. This is already implied in the earlier observation that our sub-creativity is linked to our creation in God’s image and likeness, a characteristic unique to man in the order of creation and suggestive of the spirituality of his soul. Tolkien hints at such an understanding when he holds that through sub-creation we transcend the body and its appetites. The sub-creative “desire,” he contends, “seems to have no biological function” and appears to exist “apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife.”7 Again it would be difficult to gainsay Tolkien on this observation, for it is a matter of common experience that artists tend to forget the body and its needs when they are caught up in their creative activity. Indeed sub-creation casts such a spell even on those who enjoy it only vicariously; for when a work of art succeeds, it so captures the mind of its admirers that they tend to forget the body in the act of contemplation no less than the author did in the act of creation.

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Tolkien, in fact, goes so far as to name the lofty element of our nature by which we are capable of sub-creation: reason. Sub-creative story telling succeeds, Tolkien contends, to the extent that it produces “literary belief.” Literary belief, however, in turn depends upon the ability of the “mind” to enter into a story, and the world in which it takes place, and accept it as in some sense “true.” This capacity requires, however, that the events related in the story accord “with the laws of that world.”8 Tolkien’s reference to literary belief as depending on the lawfulness of world-making and storytelling reminds us that sub-creation, if it is to succeed, must produce a work that is plausible to a rational being. Fantasy might defy experience and the senses, but it cannot defy reason, for it is a work of rational beings for rational beings. Tolkien makes this explicit when he notes that fantasy and dreaming are not the same, because “Fantasy is a rational, not an irrational, activity.”9 We may close this part of the argument by noting that sub-creation is no doubt natural in a second sense, at least for some men. As applied to our humanity, the term “nature” has a dual meaning. Sometimes we use it to refer to the faculties and traits that all men share, the characteristics that constitute the kind of being we call man. This is the sense in which the word has been used in the preceding argument. We also use “nature,” however, to refer to the peculiar faculties and traits of a particular man, the characteristics that constitute some specific example of that kind of being. Thus we may say of a friend that his generosity, his diligence, or his courage are part of his “nature.” All men are capable of such virtues because of their common human nature, but some men are capable of extraordinary manifestations of them because of the peculiar gifts of their own natures. There can be little doubt, however, that Tolkien regarded himself as endowed with an unusually developed sub-creative bent. In “Leaf by Niggle,” his somewhat autobiographical short story about an artist’s relationship to one picture (of a tree) to which he dedicates most of his effort, we learn that Niggle, the protagonist, “was a painter by nature.”10 This judgment appears in the story to be pronounced by God Himself. We may conclude, then, that Tolkien ultimately regarded his sub-creative activity not merely as an eccentric pastime, as he had once suggested to his future wife, but as an aspect of his own nature in which an element of human nature itself was exemplified.

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THE PERILS OF SUB-CREATION One might respond as follows to the argument thus far: While it may be true that sub-creativity is natural to man and to that extent compatible with Christianity, it is nevertheless also true that it carries certain grave dangers to the Christian’s proper self-understanding. By setting himself up as a kind of creator, will a man not tend to forget his real status as a dependent creature with obligations to other dependent creatures like himself? Tolkien’s elevation of sub-creation, it would seem, risks leading to a two-fold possessiveness that is decidedly un-Christian. In the first place, the subcreator may come to think of himself as an actual Creator, that is, as the sole cause of his works. In fact, succumbing to a kind of selfpride, he may want to actually be, to the extent possible, the sole cause of his own works. In the second place, once his works are completed, he may view himself as the sole owner of them. All of this is incompatible with the spirit of the true Christian, who understands that his work could not be accomplished without the aid of God and other men, and that its fruits must be put in the service of God and other men. Tolkien, however, was well aware of such dangers; and he reflected seriously on how they might be avoided and sub-creation thus harmonized with a genuine Christian ethic. The key, it would seem, is maintaining the sense that sub-creation, both the activity and its product, is a gift. This idea informs “Leaf by Niggle.” As Niggle considers how he might complete his tree, he realizes that he requires “help and advice,” that his sub-creative work must be collaborative if it is to be successful. He comes to realize, in fact, that he needs the help of his neighbor, Parish, whom he had formerly regarded as only an annoyingly needy impediment to his sub-creativity. Moreover, at the same moment that he sees that his tree cannot come from his work alone, he also sees that it is not for his own enjoyment alone: “This place cannot be left just as my private park.” Tolkien thus suggests that a sub-creator’s art is not merely personal, either in its creation or its destination. It cannot be created wholly from one’s own powers, nor is it for one’s own satisfaction alone. Hence Tolkien’s account of Niggle’s exclamation upon seeing his finished tree: “‘It’s a gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.”11 Tolkien reports that he woke one morning with the idea for “Leaf by Niggle” in his head and then wrote it at one sitting.12 We must

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not therefore conclude, however, that his insights into the perils of sub-creation came as a kind of inspired flash that he wove into a minor work before turning once again to his primary literary undertaking. Rather, such concerns are crucial to the work on which Tolkien meditated most of his adult life: The Silmarillion. Writing to Milton Waldman (of Collins and Company) in hopes of convincing him to publish The Silmarillion together with The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien offered a lengthy account of the mythology he had devised. “[A]ll this stuff,” he wrote, is concerned with, among other things, the ways in which the “sub-creative desire” may “Fall”: “It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as ‘its own,’” as the “sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation.”13 Indeed, such themes are apparent even in the opening pages of The Silmarillion, which begins with an account of the creation of the world. Tolkien’s creation story, however, is in fact a story of subcreation. The Creator—Ilúvatar, the Father of all, in the language of the elves—calls into being a race of spiritual creatures, the Ainur, and shows them the world that might be, first as music, then as a vision. The world only actually comes to be, however, through the sub-creativity of the Ainur, some of whom choose to enter into it, forming it and completing it and becoming the Valar, the god-like beings who rule the world. Tolkien’s creation myth is not polytheistic, however, because it emphasizes that while the Valar took part in the world’s creation, they did so not as Creators, but as subordinate co-creators. Tolkien thus harmonizes his story with his Christianity, and in fact uses it as a way of conveying his deepest and faith-informed beliefs about sub-creation, by setting up a contrast between the loyal Valar, who sub-create according to the design propounded by the Creator, and Melkor, the originator of evil, who seeks to “interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar.”14 Most instructive with regard to sub-creation and its dangers, however, is the contrast Tolkien sets up between two of the Valar, Aulë and Melkor. Both are makers, and hence both are similar to each other “in thought and powers.”15 Melkor, however, exemplifies the pride, self-will, and possessiveness of perverted sub-creativity. He desires to “bring into Being things of his own,” that is, things made according to his own mind, not the Creator’s, and belonging exclusively to himself.16 On the other hand, Tolkien’s remarks contrasting Aulë to Melkor bring out both the perverted and

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proper versions of sub-creation. Aulë takes pleasure “in the deed of making, and in the thing made, and neither in possession nor in his own mastery.”17 He is thus free of the pride of the corrupted sub-creator. Desiring not artistic mastery for himself, but only that the art be accomplished in the best way, he appreciates the collaborative aspect of sub-creation. Thus Tolkien later reports that Aulë “did not envy the works of others, but sought and gave counsel.”18 And realizing that he is not the sole cause even of his own works, he does not fall into possessiveness. Rather, “he gives and hoards not, and is free from care, passing ever on to some new work.”19 An awareness of the perils of sub-creation informs not only the theological prologue to The Silmarillion, but even The Silmarillion proper, the history of the Silmarils, the jewels to which the fate of the Noldorin elves is bound. The Noldor, too, are makers or subcreators, students of Aulë. Through their own weakness, however, and under the evil influence of Melkor, they “fall,” as Tolkien recounts in his letters, “into possessiveness” of the things they have made.20 This fall is brought about through Fëanor, the greatest of the Noldorin craftsmen. His supreme achievement is the creation of the Silmarils, gems of unsurpassed beauty in which he has caught the light of Valinor, the home of the Valar. Fëanor, however, came to love the Silmarils excessively, displaying them only to glorify himself, and forgetting that they could not have come to be through his powers alone. Ultimately The Silmarillion is the tale of how this disordered possessiveness of his own works leads to the destruction of Fëanor and his sons, while drawing countless other evils upon their race. Recall that, according to Tolkien’s suggestion in “Leaf by Niggle,” the cure for such possessiveness is a sense that one’s sub-creativity and its fruits are a gift, one given to the sub-creator for him in turn to give to others. Tolkien appears not only to have worked out this lesson in his stories, but also to have applied it to himself. Thus we find him writing to Milton Waldman that his stories “arose in my mind as ‘given’ things . . . always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing.’”21 Later, near the end of his life and after The Lord of the Rings had proven a colossal success, Tolkien reported to another correspondent that a visitor had once said to him: “Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?” Tolkien recalls that he had responded, “No, I don’t suppose so any longer”; and he com-

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ments that “I have never since been able to suppose so.”22 Tolkien, it would seem, took to heart in life the lessons that he had tried to convey in his most important works.

SUB-CREATION AND CONTEMPLATION Once again, however, another objection presents itself. While it may be true that Tolkien’s notions of sub-creation can be harmonized with a properly Christian spirit, there is still something about his elevation of sub-creation that seems at least discordant with Tolkien’s Catholicism, if not with Christianity more broadly. After all, for Catholics the highest human activity is found not in creation but in contemplation, not in making new things but in beholding the things that God has made and revealed. In this light perhaps Tolkien’s praise for sub-creation appears misplaced. We may note in Tolkien’s defense, however, that for him subcreation is inextricably bound to contemplation of truth. That is, true sub-creative activity cannot be undertaken apart from the sub-creator’s contemplation, and the product of his art is intended as an aid to his audience’s contemplation. Once again, such notions are suggested in Tolkien’s autobiographical “Leaf by Niggle.” As the story opens, Niggle is working on his painting. He steps back to consider it, and he finds it both “wholly unsatisfactory” and at the same time “very lovely, the only really beautiful picture in the world.”23 This passage brings to light, most obviously, the creative artist’s attachment to his own work. It also reveals, more profoundly, that sub-creative activity is not simply creative but informed by some appreciation for things as they are, or by contemplation. This is surely the basis for Niggle’s dissatisfaction: his painting of the tree is not simply a record of his own invention, but an effort to capture some notion of beauty that exists independent of his own mind. This point is brought home more explicitly when Niggle, at work on his painting, is described as attempting to “catch” an aspect of the picture that he has “glimpsed.”24 His aim, it seems, is to communicate, to himself and ultimately to others as well, some idea of beauty of which he himself is not the author. Tolkien’s letters, moreover, reveal that he thought of his own work in precisely this way. To one correspondent he wrote that his works were “merely an imaginative invention, to express, in the only way I can, some of my (dim) apprehensions of the world.”25

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Contemplation, again, implies seeing things that really exist independent of our own minds. We may well wonder, then, what sort of real things we are led to see, or to see better, through sub-creation. Tolkien suggests in the first place that sub-creation, and more specifically fantasy, can help us to attain a true appreciation of the most ordinary natural objects. He notes that “fairy-stories” are often concerned primarily “with simple or fundamental things” that “are made all the more luminous by their setting.” Thus he reports that it was through works of fantasy that he “first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron.”26 One of the functions of fantasy, it seems, is “recovery” of the ability to see “things as we are (or were) meant to see them,” as “things apart from ourselves.” Fantasy permits us to see such elemental things “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.”27 Perhaps more profoundly, sub-creative fantasy can aid our contemplation of moral truth, understood, again, as something that exists in the structure of reality and hence independent of the subcreator’s mind or the minds of his audience. In one letter Tolkien suggests that he had as one purpose “the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments, that may tend to ‘bring them home.’”28 In a later letter, Tolkien goes so far as to indicate that this moral element is an unavoidable part of fantasy, or at least the kind of fantasy that Tolkien tried to pursue. He notes that The Lord of the Rings is a kind of fairy-story, but one written for adults. To begin with, such a story must succeed as a story, must “excite, please, and even on occasion move” the reader. Nevertheless, precisely because the desired readers are adults—that is, people who are concerned more with truth than mere entertainment—the story will have no effect unless it is “about something worth considering, more, for example, than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the ‘human situation’ (of all periods).”29 Finally Tolkien suggests that sub-creation may aid our appreciation of the loftiest supernatural truths. Another function of fairystory, he argues in “On Fairy-Stories,” is “consolation.” In a world often characterized by “sorrow and failure,” the successful fairystory provides the consolation of a happy ending. The best fairystories culminate in “eucatastrophe,” the “good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’” whereby the good triumphs contrary to all

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(merely human) expectation. The fairy story thus “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal and final defeat.”30 Tolkien is well aware that, to many modern readers, terms like “consolation” and “fantasy” imply a cowardly effort to escape reality. This is not his own understanding of the matter, however. For to him the fairy story’s unexpected happy ending, and its accompanying denial that sorrow and failure are final, do not simply draw us away from reality. Rather they draw us away from the painful but passing realities of this fallen world to the incomparably greater and joyful Reality that exists beyond it. As we have seen, Tolkien holds that a good fairy-story can be “true” in the figurative sense that it is credible to a rational mind because it is constructed in a manner consistent with the world its sub-creator has devised. Ultimately, however, Tolkien holds that a good fairy-story is, because of its eucatastrophic element, “true” in an even greater sense. For it points beyond its own world, and even beyond the “real” world inhabited by its sub-creator, to a better world, a world unseen but nonetheless true for all that. Thus Tolkien speaks of the fairystory’s eucatastrophe as communicating a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth,” as, in fact, “evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”31 Tolkien indicates, moreover, that he has chosen the term evangelium—gospel, or good news—quite deliberately as essential to his meaning. For the evangelium of a good fairy-story is an echo of the evangelium of the Christian story itself, which for Tolkien is not only a good story in the sense of being convincing and moving, but is also accurate history and true theology, and which therefore communicates the ultimate, and joyful, truth about the human situation: that evil and death will not in the end triumph, that they have in fact already been defeated. The fairy-story eucatastrophe is not mere childish wish-fulfillment, but an intimation of the eucatastrophic nature of the human story. The Gospels, Tolkien writes, tell the story that contains the supreme “eucatastrophe,” one that has in fact taken place within “History and the primary world”: the incarnation “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.”32 Moreover, Tolkien holds this story, and this account of ultimate reality, as “true” not merely on blind faith, but, by his own lights, reasonably. That is, he does not merely assert it despairingly in the

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face of the evidence of the world’s sorrows, but hopefully, on the basis of the deeper evidence of the human spirit. For the Gospel story appeals perfectly—as derivative fairy-stories appeal derivatively—to what Tolkien takes to be the deepest longings of the human soul. Hence he concludes his discussion of these matters by contending that the story of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ “has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality.’ There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation.” Accordingly, to reject this story, Tolkien suggests, is not, as some moderns would contend, an act of intellectual probity, but rather of spiritual self-mutilation, an amputation of one’s own deepest aspirations, and hence leads “either to sadness or to wrath.”33 “Leaf by Niggle” powerfully suggests that Tolkien understood his own work as producing just such consolation and therefore inducing a kind of contemplation of the highest spiritual truths. Again the work is clearly biographical, and so we are justified in taking Niggle and his tree as somehow representing Tolkien and his legendarium. In the story, Niggle is forced to depart for his journey—that is, he dies—before he can complete his painting of the tree. As he begins his journey to the mountains—or deeper into the reality of God—Niggle finds, however, that his tree is a real, living part of the next world, located so to speak on the border of heaven. The tale concludes with what we are to take as the voice of God remarking that Niggle’s tree “is proving very useful indeed,” both for “convalescence” but also, for many, as “the best introduction to the mountains.”34 This surely represents Tolkien’s hope for his own stories, that for many they will prove “the best introduction to the mountains,” to the heavenly things themselves.

SUB-CREATION AND REDEMPTION “Leaf by Niggle” suggests another, and stranger, hope that Tolkien entertained for his work: that it might somehow be real. This, after all, is the gift that Niggle himself ultimately receives. He spends his entire life working at his painting—laboring on it with great love but never quite satisfied with the result, inspired by the glimpses of beauty that he receives but hampered in the execution of his art

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by his limitations, his lack of diligence, and by the nonartistic duties that his situation demands of him. After all this he dies; and he finds, to his amazement and joy, that his tree is a real, living thing. This hope would seem to be no mere passing whimsy on Tolkien’s part, for it makes an appearance not only in the spontaneously composed “Leaf by Niggle,” but also in The Silmarillion—again, the major work on which he, like Niggle, meditated continually and which he, like Niggle, never really completed to his satisfaction. The sub-creator’s desire that the work of his mind should become real is depicted in general terms in The Silmarillion’s creation account. Ilúvatar, the Creator, propounds a musical theme to the Ainur, on which they compose variations. He then shows the music to them as a vision, and, seeing their love for it, causes it to be— to become a real world into which they can enter and for which they can care. This longing is depicted more poignantly, however, in The Silmarillion’s account of Aulë, the truest maker among the Valar, those of the Ainur who have assisted in the world’s creation and come to dwell in it. Impatient for the arrival of the “Children of Ilúvatar”—Elves and Men—he creates the Dwarves, stunted and unlovely because of his imperfect perception of what the Children will be. Ilúvatar rebukes Aulë for attempting something beyond his “power and authority,” pointing out that the beings he has created have no life of their own and can only move at his own will. Aulë, however, disclaims a desire for despotic lordship over the Dwarves. “I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty” of the world, “which thou has caused to be.” In other words, he had wanted the dwarves to be real, distinct from but like himself. Then, echoing an idea that, as we have seen, Tolkien articulates in his own name in “On Fairy-Stories,” Aulë defends his creative desires as something implanted in his nature by the Creator himself: “the making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee.” Aulë nevertheless recognizes his folly and repents his transgression, offering to “destroy” the “work” of his “presumption.” As a result, Ilúvatar has “compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility,” and gives life to the Dwarves, making them real, living beings.35 We need not guess at the extent to which such stories give voice to Tolkien’s own deepest hopes, for in his lecture “On Fairy-Stories” he quite openly declares the sub-creator’s desire for the reality of his own work. Realization that the Gospel is the True and Real fairy

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story, Tolkien argues, does not eliminate the need for, or detract from the validity of, more human story-telling on that great theme. “Redeemed Man is still man”—that is, man the story teller—and therefore “[s]tory, fantasy, still go on, and should go on.” “The Christian has still to work,” not only with “body” but also with “mind”; but now he can see “that all his bents and faculties,” including his sub-creativity, “have a purpose, which can be redeemed.” He concludes: “So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.”36 We may find Tolkien’s hope both moving and strange. It is moving because we can understand why the spirit of a man like Tolkien—who had lavished great care over many years on a work that he tried to make embody all that he found most beautiful and noble—would recoil at the thought that his work was ultimately destined simply to pass away. And Tolkien was well aware that in this world even literature and literary fame are mortal. Thus, although Niggle’s tree is real and living in the next world, in this one his painting ends up in a seldom visited corner of a museum that eventually burns down; and Niggle’s name is forgotten.37 In light of the preceding arguments, it does not go too far to say that Tolkien’s stories—at least The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion—were his way of touching eternity, a way, moreover, not readily separable from his very identity. We can therefore sympathize with his hope that his works would somehow be a part of eternity itself. His hope is strange, however, because most of us are not accustomed to thinking that in the next life our works, especially the works of our minds, might be actually present with us, somehow alive and as real as we are ourselves. Nevertheless, Tolkien’s thought here is, if not immediately recognizable as Catholic, certainly eminently defensible as such. His longing for the ultimate reality of his works finds support in both the oldest and most recent articulations of the Catholic faith. Writing in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern), Pope John Paul II notes that “one day,” in the new creation, not only will “this corruptible body” take on “incorruptibility,” but also “all the works and actions that are worthy of man will be re-

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deemed.” On this basis, he continues, some fathers of the Church —and he cites such luminous figures as Saint Basil the Great and Saint Augustine—developed “an optimistic vision of history and work, that is to say of the perennial value of authentic human achievements, inasmuch as they are redeemed by Christ and destined for the promised Kingdom.”38 Later, the Holy Father similarly contends that of all that we do to “make people’s lives ‘more human,’ nothing will be lost or will have been in vain.” He attributes this teaching to the Second Vatican Council, quoting the relevant passage from Gaudium et Spes: “When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise—human dignity, fraternal communion, and freedom—according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illumined and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom.”39 These passages strikingly echo the aforementioned conclusion of “On Fairy-Stories,” in which Tolkien suggests that “[a]ll tales may come true,” yet will be “as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.”40 The only difference is that Tolkien’s words articulate a more specific version of the Church’s teaching, one applicable to those like himself—those whose efforts to make life “more human” take the form of stories, the “fruits” of whose “nature and enterprise” are tales. In “The Downfall of Númenor,” Tolkien places the following words in the mouth of an Elf admonishing Men against the fear of their own death, and hence of the apparent passing of the things that they hold most dear: “Hope rather that in the end even the least of your desires shall have fruit,” for they were “set in your hearts by Ilúvatar, and he does not plant to no purpose.”41 In daring to hope that his own stories might come true, Tolkien appears to have taken these words to heart. And he appears to have been on solidly Catholic ground in doing so.

NOTES The idea for this chapter was first conceived while I was a William E. Simon Visiting Fellow of Religion and Public Life at Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. I wish to thank the Madison Program for its support of my work. 1. Tolkien to Edith Bratt, March 2, 1916, in Tolkien, Letters, 8.

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2. On this point see Humphrey Carpenter’s A Biography (Boston), 39. 3. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 75. 4. Ibid., 48–49 (emphases in original). 5. Tolkien to Peter Hastings (draft), September 1954, in Tolkien, Letters, 188–89. 6. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, November 7–8, 1944, in ibid., 100–101. 7. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated [1951], in ibid., 145–46. 8. Ibid., Tolkien Reader, 60. 9. Ibid., 69. 10. Ibid., 110. 11. Ibid., 115. 12. Tolkien to Stanley Unwin, undated [1945], in Tolkien, Letters, 113. 13. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated [1951], in ibid., 145. 14. Tolkien, Silmarillion (New York, 1977), 4. 15. Ibid., 20. 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. Ibid., 20. 19. Ibid., 8. 20. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated [1951], in Tolkien, Letters, 146. 21. Ibid., 145. 22. Tolkien to Carole Batten-Phelps, undated [1971] (draft), in Tolkien, Letters, 413–14. 23. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 102. 24. Ibid., 103. 25. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14 [1958], in Tolkien, Letters, 283. 26. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 78. 27. Ibid., 77. 28. Tolkien to Peter Hastings, September 1954 (draft), in Tolkien, Letters, 194. 29. Tolkien to Michael Straight, undated [1956] (draft), in ibid., 232–33. 30. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 86. 31. Ibid., 88, 86 (emphasis in original). 32. Ibid., 88–89. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 120. 35. Tolkien, Silmarillion (New York, 1977), 40–41. 36. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 89–90. 37. Ibid., 120. 38. John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, section 31 and 58n. 39. Ibid., section 48. 40. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 90. 41. Tolkien, Silmarillion (New York, 1977), 327.

Catholic Scholar, Catholic Sub-Creator Jason Boffetti

MOST MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE CONTENT THEMSELVES WITH TRADITIONAL hobbies such as stamp collecting or bird-watching. The more eccentric might indulge in amateur science or invention. J.R.R. Tolkien created a world. In his spare time, Tolkien went about creating Middle-earth (or discovering it, as he sometimes described it) in word, in pictures, and in poetry from his imagination’s fertile soil. His lifelong penchant for language and myth had drawn Tolkien into an academic career. But even as a full professor, he always found time to work on his “elvish tongues” and Middle-earth. What made his achievement remarkable was that Tolkien understood and could explain that which he called his “mad hobby”1 was wholly consistent with the rest of his life and, especially, with his Catholic faith when many other geniuses (and eccentrics) have been content to hive that portion of their life away from the rest of it. His imagination was informed and shaped by both his religious faith and his academic training, but it was not bound them. Tolkien’s literary genius can only be understood by coming to understand two of Tolkien’s most famous—and somewhat paradoxical—statements about his “sub-creation” of Middle-earth. Tolkien insisted in one of his letters that The Lord of the Rings was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”2 And yet, Tolkien had a strong aversion to allegory. As he wrote, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”3 Allegory and even symbolism stultify originality, but more importantly, he would explain as an author, they break the spell of illusion that an author needs to suspend the disbelief of his audience. If everything stands for something else, a work of fiction no longer creates another “real” world. It is perilous for readers of The Lord of the Rings and the rest of the legendarium to look for hidden “Catholic” symbolism largely 193

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because Tolkien himself would have regarded too much obviousness as a failure of his craft. If readers and appreciators of Middleearth are looking for how Tolkien’s faith motivated his work, they should more spend time looking at his other writings. Having said this, it is undeniable that Tolkien’s Catholic faith, as strong as it was, could not help but influence his fiction.

THE UNFINISHED TREE Right to the end of his life, Tolkien fretted about the unfinished state of Middle-earth and especially The Silmarillion, the cosmogonic history for the Middle-earth saga that Tolkien had spent his whole life writing. In his last few letters, the anxiety that he felt about leaving the work unfinished and his inability to finish the book is tangible. He wrote to Lord Halsbury on August 4, 1973, shortly before his death, imploring him to help him finish his work: “When you were here on July 26, I became again vividly aware of your invigorating effects on me: like a warm fire brought into an old man’s room . . . For over and above all the afflictions and obstacles I have endured since The Lord of the Rings came out, I have lost confidence. May I hope that perhaps, even amid your own trials and the heavy work which must precede your retirement, you could come again before so long and warm me up again?”4 Surely it makes sense that something so central to his life would consume him even until the last. But there is a deeper and more interesting explanation that comes through by reading his story, “Leaf by Niggle.”5 Creating Middle-earth, he hoped, was a divinely inspired project that would follow him into eternity in some way and not just serve as a legacy he left behind for others to enjoy. As the story is told, Niggle is a middle-aged man who is painting a picture of a tree in his spare time. He had started painting just a tiny picture of a single leaf, but the project grew into a painting of an infinitely detailed tree and its surrounding countryside, filling an enormous canvas. But Niggle fears that he will not finish his painting before he must begin a long-dreaded train trip from which he will not return. Various distractions and obligations to family, friends, and neighbors leave him without enough time to finish his painting. As he expected, Niggle begins his journey with his painting unfinished. But before the train brings him to his final destination, it

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makes a purgatorial way-stop from which he cannot proceed until “Two Voices” pass judgment on his life. They allow Niggle to continue his trip—not because he painted a beautiful tree (as Niggle had expected), but because he had given himself in service to the most distracting of all his neighbors, Parish. Eventually Niggle’s train brings him to an enchanted land and at its center he finds a magnificent tree, his tree, the one he was painting in his studio. But the tree and the surrounding scenery are incomplete. Niggle is left to finish the painting with the help of his friend, Parish. Once finished, Niggle sets off to explore the lands he has created. “Leaf by Niggle” constitutes Tolkien’s most clearly autobiographical, even allegorical, work. The “leaf” seems to represent Tolkien’s original Elven language, which inspired him to create Middleearth, and the tree and scenery are the books, poems, and drawings that describe that world, however incompletely. Anticipating his own eternal “train trip,” Tolkien always fretted that he would not finish his life’s work of creating Middle-earth and indeed he didn’t. The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977 by his son, Christopher. Tolkien uses the essay, perhaps, to justify the many hours he spent during his life creating his “tree.” Some might have seen Middle-earth as a silly preoccupation for an otherwise serious academic, but Tolkien saw it as an artistic enterprise with an eternal legacy. Tolkien believed that our earthly vocations, even our sparetime hobbies, are essential parts of our identities. Through them we worship God and in them we may well find part of our eternal reward. It is questionable whether Tolkien really thought that his Middle-earth awaited him on the other side of this life, but it is a lovely thought, both for Tolkien and for his many devoted fans. But “Leaf by Niggle” is even more important as proof against the claim that Tolkien thought Middle-earth was the defining expression of his Catholic faith. Rather, Tolkien recognizes that his soul would be judged, not by the beauty of his “sub-creation,” but by his moral life, the corporal works of love and mercy that sometimes stand between us and our life’s occupations and vocations. Although God places in our hearts the yearning to create, we must not neglect our moral duties. In fact, it may very well be the greatest test of our souls that we set aside our own projects to attend to those duties. No matter how great the artistic vision, it can never be made primary to the humble life dedicated to the praise of God and in service to neighbor. Middle-earth never replaced the cen-

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tral place of Catholic faith in Tolkien’s life or as a means of personal salvation, but through its creation Tolkien believed that he was serving a Catholic vocation as an artist.

MIDDLE-EARTH AS A PRE-CHRISTIAN MYTHOLOGY At the same time, Tolkien saw creating Middle-earth as a serious intellectual, even a culture-shaping, enterprise. Tolkien wrote that he created Middle-earth to “restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”6 In the end, Tolkien’s Middle-earth was a twentieth-century attempt to do for Northern lore what Homer had done for Greek mythology—to provide a coherent story that accounted for the bits and pieces of a passed-down tradition.7 Tolkien believed that the existing English legends, particularly the Arthurian ones, were seriously deficient compared with other European mythologies: “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands.”8 At the heart of the deficiency, he wrote, was that they “explicitly contain the Christian religion.” Rather, good myth must “contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicitly, in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.”9 The absence of Catholic or any kind of monotheistic faith in Tolkien’s Middle-earth has troubled Catholic apologists of Tolkien, although it need not. There is room for Middle-earth to be both substantively pre-Christian and yet thoroughly Catholic, if one is willing to see the Christian elements in its purpose rather than its substance, as I will argue later, but its absence was purposeful and requisite. Tolkien created a mythology of a pre-Christian England that intentionally avoided any overt appearances of Christianity or of the Christian God. In fact, religion is almost itself wholly absent from Middle-earth. Tolkien insisted that the “religious element is absorbed into the story.”10 Given the inspirational cosmology of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, it would have to be pre-Christian. The imagery, scenery, names, and stories of Middle-earth are undeniably based upon England’s literary and cultural roots. Tolkien had long been artistically inspired by Norse mythology and loved northern Europe’s ancient languages from his formative years. As a boy, Tolkien preferred German and Norse mythologies

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to the typically didactic English children’s literature. During a period of boredom with his university studies at Oxford, Tolkien started learning medieval Welsh and later Finnish to read untranslated prose and poetry. For his own amusement, Tolkien created a language he called “High-Elven,” which drew its inspiration from Finnish. Tolkien made professional use of this love of linguistic study. His first serious work of scholarship was A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), which demonstrated his mastery of English’s linguistic roots. But by 1915, his “mad hobby” had developed into a fictional language in which he composed verse. And as “High-Elven” developed, Tolkien was inspired to create a “backstory” for it and began adapting ancient Norse, Finnish, Icelandic, and Germanic legends to serve as the raw material for his prose and poems. In fact, some of the stories, the names of the dwarves and the wizard Gandalf come from the Elder and Younger Edda, which can be described as the Norse “Old Testament.”11 His most ambitious project was The Silmarillion, which he began creating during his service and convalescence after World War I.12 Throughout his life, Tolkien kept returning to it, adding to it, revising it, and making it more complex and complete. It is an odd book, a collection of stories that take place over thousands of years but in many ways, it resembles the fragmentary Northern mythologies it emulates. On its epic stage The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are just two small acts. Later, he would explain that it had long been his intention to write “a body of more or less connected legend” with one “large and cosmogonic” story, which took shape as The Silmarillion, and others at the level of “romantic fairystory,” typified by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.13 In the opinion of one contemporary critic, what Tolkien did was to “modernize the myths and make them credible.”14 Painstakingly Tolkien revised and rewrote his work in pursuit of internal consistency with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien took great pleasure in filling in the details of his imaginative world: How long do elves live? What kind of plant life exists in Middle-earth? His attention to detail was infinite and the job expanded to meet the goal of creating a whole new world, just as Niggle attempted to create his perfectly detailed tree: “He felt that every detail of his cosmos needed attention, whether or not the essays themselves would ever be published. Sub-creation had become a sufficiently rewarding pastime in itself, quite apart from the desire to see the work in print.”15 Tolkien was absorbed with creating Mid-

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dle-earth, not just because it served some external and practical purpose, but because it served a deep, childhood longing. And he well understood that for it to be a successful myth built upon England’s epic past, it had to be pre-Christian in substance and detail.

ASPIRATION AND SUB-CREATION Although his inspirations for the stories might have been preChristian, his aspirations were thoroughly Christian. While C. S. Lewis and Tolkien might have disagreed about many things, they agreed on this: God speaks to man through stories and the Christian Gospel is the greatest story ever told. Tolkien understood that the artist can create a Catholic work without leading the reader by the nose directly to the doorstep of the faith through an explicit exposition of Catholic doctrine. Instead the artist serves truth by imitating God’s own way of revelation in presenting aspects of truth faithfully through story. Lewis and Tolkien noticed that it was common to all civilization throughout history to create mythologies in order to convey their most central beliefs. It is only reasonable to assume, they argued, that if God wanted to convey his revelation, he would do so in the form of the most “perfect myth,” with the difference that it would be literally true. The turning point in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was that Tolkien helped to convince him that Christianity was the best candidate for the “perfect myth,” since it shared all the greatest common elements of the best mythologies. The Christian account of human history, culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, was the great “eucatastrophe,” as they came to call it: the happiest of all tragedies. Through the death of God’s Son, the human heart’s deepest yearnings find satisfaction in union with God, and its story explains human existence and the presence of evil, even as it ameliorates human sufferings. But this myth had the added advantage of being historical fact, founded as it was on the story of the people of Israel and the life of Christ and interpreted through a literary text and poetic tradition. This insight unfolded for both Tolkien and Lewis a literary philosophy they called mythopoeics, the philosophy of mythmaking. They would spend the rest of their lives arguing privately about how such an understanding of myth, religion, and literature could be applied to the art of writing. But for these two frustrated poets

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earning their livings as Oxford dons, there was another obvious consequence of their theory of mythopoeia: They should attempt to write popular fiction rather than continue with their less-thansuccessful poetry. If God used narrative to communicate his revelation to man, and man is called to bear God’s image on earth, then one of the most noble vocations is to “sub-create” new “secondary worlds” in narrative form. Using his vast literary, linguistic, and historical talents, Tolkien “sub-created” Middle-earth as an act of divine praise. The more convincing Middle-earth was as a real place, the purer that praise would be because it would more closely approach God’s own act of creation. Tolkien believed that when an author creates “new form” through the writing of fantasy, he fulfills his duty to God and, through the process, “man becomes a sub-creator.” In fact, Tolkien thought that the act of sub-creation was an inalienable “human right” because “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”16 It is important to note how Tolkien’s ambitions for his understanding of “sub-creation” differ from the ambitions of those artists who wish to substitute their creation for God’s and view their creations as acts of defiance against God. Such artists believe that their expressions are not sub-creations or secondary worlds at all, but are truly new worlds of original status. To begin with, this alleged novelty is impossible as the fodder for even the most radical and distorted flight from given reality will still be founded in the only reality we know. Imagination will forever be grounded in experience. Further, if creativity strays too far from reality, the illusion will become unbelievable and it will fail to charm the reader. For Tolkien, the fundamental relationship between “Creation” and “sub-creation,” reality and imagination, is one of gift and, in response, gratitude. This relationship of gift and gratitude makes great works and great rewards possible. First, because all great art is generated by a search for truth, he believed that God responds to our quest for Him with a special gift of artistic grace. Tolkien believed that any artist striving for truth will receive some kind of divine gift of artistic insight. Tolkien received his own gift in “the peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy,” which provided him with “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”17 The fundamental giftedness of God’s creation is confirmed in the act of true artistic expression.

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Second, for Tolkien, when an author creates successful “subcreation,” he owes the success of that new “secondary world” to the raw material of our own “primary world.” The artist’s own creation, no matter how fanciful, “works” because it is grounded in God’s original creation. The human imagination, rightly ordered toward the true and the good, embraces the “primary world” and the quality of one’s “secondary world” depends on the quality of one’s imagination and its grasp of given reality. A “secondary world,” for Tolkien, is not a flight of fancy, but a careful extrapolation whose success depends on the listener being convinced that the story is plausible and morally true. Plausible “secondary worlds” capture reality so well that the audience is spellbound by their power to evoke truth, even as they formally contain “fictions.” Good fantasy, and all good fiction, does not require the reader to consciously suspend disbelief. According to Tolkien, if the imagination accepts the “secondary world” as true, the audience actually goes “inside” that world through their imaginations; the will is hardly involved. Fiction fails in this task when the author creates an insufficiently “true” world and the reader is forced to employ her will to keep her imagination “in the story” because “the moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”18 It is a tribute to a story’s moral and metaphysical accuracy when a listener’s or reader’s imagination is held by that “secondary world” effortlessly. While fanciful in details, such worlds have to “ring true” in the sense that they hold our imaginations without conscious and disturbing acts of willful belief. It is for this reason that Tolkien tried so hard to make a believable Middle-earth from the material of “Northern” mythology and language more or less consistent with pre-Christian religion and why he believed so strongly that to introduce overt Christian symbols and allegory would endanger the success of his stories. Instead the mythmaker serves truth and “true” story at the same time.

ALLEGORY AND OTHER “MYTHS” Tolkien rejected intentional allegory in his writings because he had higher aspirations than that for Middle-earth. In the end Tolkien was dedicated to making the story of Middle-earth a lasting literary achievement on par with the greatest works of literature. The

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highest compliment that can be paid to a created “secondary world” is that its story has achieved the status of an “original myth,” that is, its plot transcends mere fictional story and becomes “fictive truth.” To make his point, Tolkien distinguishes between three kinds of myths: original, literary, and philosophical. Tolkien hoped that his Middle-earth would approach being accepted as original myth, the highest and most difficult form of myth, but only the greatest of mythologies have achieved that cultural status. Original myths, such as Homer’s Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, are so “true” and so convincing that they fall somewhere closer to literal truth than fiction. These are stories that have deep moral and religious purpose and they can serve as a cultural patrimony or even the spiritual foundation for a civilization. These stories are regarded to be true, not just useful or pleasurable fancies. In our cynical and unimaginative age, Tolkien feared that we had largely left this type of myth behind.19 He did not have great hope that our age would recognize and treat his Middle-earth as original myth, so he hoped instead that it would be accepted as literary myth. With literary myth, the story can be regarded as “true” when the author creates a world that is believable as an imaginatively “discovered” world. The story is internally consistent and so it is provisionally “true.” Like a sculptor who describes the process of sculpting as uncovering the statue that exists already in the marble, Tolkien thought of Middle-earth as a place that already existed. It was his task to discover and explore it and then to present it accurately to his audience. The history and the other details of Middle-earth came to Tolkien in just this way: “They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labor . . . yet always I had a sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing.’”20 Tolkien never wanted to let his readers think that Middle-earth could be anything but a real place, spell-binding and true, if not culturally formative. When responding to letters from readers asking him whether Middle-earth existed and whether hobbits were real, Tolkien was elusive. Often he would answer them affirmatively, committed as he was to the idea that a “secondary world” was a real world, too. Tolkien believed that for his audience to accept Middle-earth as a literary myth, at the least, he would have to insist that Middle-earth was in some sense a real place. It is very clear from his writing that Tolkien did not want Middleearth to be understood as mere allegory, or what he called a philo-

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sophical myth, the third type of myth. His strong dislike for intentional allegory in any fiction strained his friendship with C. S. Lewis. He accused Lewis of overusing allegory in his Chronicles of Narnia, making them “unreadable.”21 With philosophical myths, such as Aesop’s Fables, the religious, moral, or philosophical messages are regarded as more important than the story itself and the allegorical or didactic elements are allowed to harm the story by forcing the reader to see obvious “primary world,” symbolic parallels or lessons. In fact, the author does not expect the reader to regard these stories as real and only wishes them to take away a moral message. Tolkien also believed that such stories failed as good writing because, just as when the writer fails to present a plausible secondary world, in the moment readers are made aware of any symbolic connections between our world and the fictive world, the literary spell is broken; readers reemerge from the imaginary world and realize that it is “only a story.” Even though Tolkien rejected the pedantic use of allegory, he did not deny that his stories conveyed moral and philosophical messages about central human themes. Tolkien did not disapprove of stories that conveyed a moral or religious message, given that all good and true stories have “applicability,” and he readily admitted that Middle-earth taught moral lessons. Rather Tolkien objected to making the moral message the primary purpose of writing and then leading the reader by the hand toward some obvious, practical lesson. What Tolkien particularly disliked was the forced use of allegory to cram a moral message down the throats of the reader, an act of disrespect toward the reader. Such a tactic assaults the intelligence of the reader whom Tolkien assumes will receive the moral content if they are open to actively thinking about the story, the characters, and the choices they face. Unintended allegory, however, can appear in successful fiction because “the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it.”22 Readers will find allegory even if the author does not put it there. Symbolism, allegory, and moral and spiritual lessons will appear to the extent that a “secondary world” is made real through the unintended presence of material and moral truths from our “primary world.” That great feminine heroines behave like his mother Mabel or the Virgin Mary only confirms the permanent substance of what constitutes true feminine courage. So Tolkien does not reject allegory as absolutely

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as his earlier statement suggests, only that it should not be allowed to overwhelm the story by purposeful inclusion. Tolkien always affirmed that his works taught good morals and would, over the long run, direct his readers to the Catholic faith. While Tolkien’s Middle-earth does not instruct in Catholic moral theology, the moral tectonics of Middle-earth are distinctly Catholic. The evidence for Tolkien’s astonishing theological consistency and thoughtfulness can be found simply by reading at random from his published letters. There Tolkien admits that in creating Middleearth he carefully constructed a world with the same moral contours as our world. Throughout the novels, Middle-earth’s ethics and metaphysics are consistent with the moral world we know: Corruption of the will, not magical power or fate, lies at the heart of evil acts. “Magical” objects—like technology in our own world—are good insofar as they are used for good ends. A willingness to share in suffering is a necessary part of taking up our moral duties. He carefully avoids painting the struggle between the Free Peoples of Middle-earth and the minions of the archvillain Sauron as a strictly Manichean battle of “good versus evil.” Tolkien’s approach is more Augustinian: The characters of Middle-earth are distinguished above all by what they love. Among the Free Peoples, one finds both the noble and the corrupt. Every character can be ruined by the sin of pride and the wicked have the capacity for moments of good action (such as Gollum) and even moral redemption (such as Boromir). As a Catholic story teller, Tolkien wanted to bring essential truths to his readers without doing violence to the craft of successful subcreation. As a romantic and a Christian, Tolkien believed in the deepest part of his heart that Middle-earth was, in some sense, a real place, even if it existed only in his own imagination. There is a consistency in his writer’s life that is a rare gift to the generation of imitators that have followed him, but few have sub-created as well. Perhaps Tolkien’s most lasting and under-appreciated legacy has been that he lived his life as the model Catholic academic. He found a way to make all aspects of his life converge into one cohesive whole: Catholic, academic, husband, father, friend, and artist. In a century in which many other Catholics wrestled to understand how to implement the new vision of lay Catholic vocation brought about by Vatican II, Tolkien lived that vocation by combining his literary genius seamlessly with his faith where each aspect of that life enriched the other. And in a century in which the postmodern

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academics increasingly made their works obscure and irrelevant, Tolkien made his writings profoundly culturally relevant. If Tolkien’s Middle-earth was just a “mad hobby,” then it was one of the most successful and deeply thought-out hobbies that the literary world has ever seen. But it was more than that. It was the fruit of his Catholic vocation to know and live the “Truth,” one that permeated every aspect of his life.

NOTES 1. Tolkien to Edith Bratt, March 2, 1916, in Tolkien, Letters, 8. 2. Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J., December 2, 1953, in ibid., 172. 3. Ibid., Lord of the Rings (1999), foreword to the second edition, xvii. 4. Tolkien to Lord Halsbury, August 4, 1973, in Tolkien, Letters, 431. 5. It was first published in the Dublin Review in 1947 and was later republished along with the essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1965). 6. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 144. 7. For the best summary of this argument, see chapter 1 of Richard Purtill’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion and also Lin Carter’s “Fantasy in the Classical Epic.” 8. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 144. 9. Ibid. 10. Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J., in ibid., 172. 11. Like the Old Testament, the Younger and Elder Edda contain poems and stories that were compiled and edited over time. One of the clearest cases of Tolkien’s borrowing from these texts can be found in the Volsunga saga in the story of Sigurd and the killing of the dragon, Fafnir. This tale served as a rough outline for The Hobbit. See Carter’s “Fantasy in the Classical Epic.” 12. As John Garth has demonstrated in Tolkien and the Great War, Tolkien could write little more than brief ideas and short verse on scraps of paper during his actual war service in the trenches, but he was able to turn his attention more fully to starting The Silmarillion after World War I. 13. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 144. 14. Henry Resnick, “The Hobbit-Forming World of J.R.R. Tolkien,” Saturday Evening Post, July 2, 1966. 15. Carpenter, Biography (London), 252. 16. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1983), 145. 17. Ibid., 155. 18. Ibid., 132. 19. Tolkien makes one important caveat to the idea that we have largely abandoned original myth. The Christian Gospel remains a potent original myth because it “contains a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.” See the epilogue to “On Fairy-Stories” (1983), 155. 20. Ibid., 145. 21. Sayers, Jack, 189. 22. Tolkien to Sir Stanley Unwin, July 31, 1947, in Tolkien, Letters, 121.

“An Age Comes On”: J.R.R. Tolkien and the English Catholic Sense of History Michael Tomko This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs. —C. S. Lewis, 1954

THE WORDS OPENING C. S. LEWIS’S 1954 REVIEW OF THE LORD OF THE Rings are worth recalling not only for their characteristic intelligence and critical insight but also for their record of a fresh reading experience.1 More than fifty years after its original publication, the book has become familiar in our age, spawning film-begotten action figures and earning Tolkien the apposite label of the “author of our century.”2 Against the imitative fantasy genre and industry it engendered, Lewis’s review reminds us of the profound strangeness of The Lord of the Rings in its own time and, so it should remain, in ours. According to Lewis, this literary artifact is fundamentally antisecular, not in the common usage of the word to mean atheistic, but rather to signify that it does not belong to the saeculum, or contemporary age.3 As such, Blake’s 1789 Songs of Innocence are an apt comparison. The mythopoeic Blake’s radical experiment in poetic form embodied his protest against what he saw as the increasingly rationalist, utilitarian spirit of his time. It also inspired wildly different readings among readers. In Tolkien and Lewis’s time, Blake’s zeal awakened Thomas Merton’s awareness of holiness in the world, while his passion also drove Jim Morrison into Dionysian revelries.4 Tolkien’s own countersecular craft has also generated such variegated, heartfelt responses ranging from Lewis’s own proclamation that The Lord of Rings was “good news, good beyond hope”—a rearticulation of Tolkien’s sense of his own fairy story as an “echo of evangelium in the real world” and an an205

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ticipation of Nicholas Boyle’s view of it as the “secular scripture” of Catholic England—to the New Age reading of his ecology and spirituality by Patrick Curry.5 In hopes of complementing those critical assessments of Tolkien’s theology, I will address these issues by focusing on the remarkable innovation in literary form that is The Lord of the Rings. What is this text? Epic, romance, mythology, fantasy, realist novel, postmodern, medieval—any or all of these terms both fit and fail to capture the nature of the work’s genre and form. Lewis wrestles with this question in his first paragraph, first announcing that “heroic romance has suddenly returned” but then adding the cryptic modification that in literary history The Lord of the Rings represents “not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.”6 In other words, it is both an inherited form and a revitalized form, a tradition and a revolution, a novel and venerable artwork. At the level of literary form, I believe that the countercultural sway and breathtakingly strange resonance of The Lord of the Rings can largely be attributed to the English Catholic sensibility that structures this heroic, epic novel. This is not, I would maintain, to disregard Tolkien’s caveat against allegory, whose implications are most thoughtfully considered in Thomas W. Smith’s essay on Tolkien’s “Catholic Imagination.” Characterizing his approach as lectio divina, Smith unfolds how the treatment of mediation and tradition in The Lord of the Rings imparts a Catholic “vision of human life and the world” and argues that recovering this perspective goes deeper than the effort “to mine the books to find examples” of religious “symbolism, theme, or narrative structure.”7 Yet literary analysis of form and structure need not entail the instrumental and possessive self-gratification that the dwarfish metaphor of hermeneutic “mining” implies. Rather literary form can bring into focus what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling,” a discourse common to a book, its author, and his or her culture. Such an approach, without falling prey to reductive allegorization, has the advantage of locating an author living responsively within a vital tradition and of revealing how a book is shaped by and shapes a culture. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, it can place Tolkien back into dialogue with the world of English Catholicism, from which he has often been abstracted by both his religious and nonreligious critics. As Maisie Ward writes in The English Way, because Catholicism “is universal it is in every country, but because it is sacramental it is intensely local, found in

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each country in a special and unique fashion, not a spirit only but a spirit clothed in material form.”8 Understanding Tolkien’s sense of history as part of this English Catholic way will enable us as readers not only better to understand the rich form of The Lord of the Rings but also to see the spiritual depth of his countercultural response to modernity.

TOLKIEN AND THE LONG DEFEAT In focusing on the structure of the work, I take my cue from Tolkien himself. In his 1955 letter to the English Jesuit Robert Murray, Tolkien writes: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. The religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”9 There is always a certain danger in taking an author’s words, especially retrospective commentary, as an interpretive key. For instance, the need to use “of course” often signals the introduction of something that is not, of course, all that obvious. That this religious work had to eschew representing religion is ultimately a profound point, but the logic embedded in that pivotal “why” requires more than a little meditation. In addition, it would have been natural, but not necessarily representative, for Tolkien to emphasize the Catholicity of the work to Father Murray, even if it meant making a perilous excursion, rare for him in any context, into the world of psychological language. While this account of the creative process would satisfy T. S. Eliot’s 1934 call for a religious literature that was “unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian,” exactly what Tolkien categorized and valorized as unconscious creation and conscious revision in these heavily reworked volumes remains opaque.10 Where is the line drawn? Which is more authentic? Ultimately what I find compelling about this letter and its claim that the The Lord of the Rings re-presents and embodies a Catholic view of the world is Tolkien’s own sincere expression of relief and joy in discovering it. He is reacting to a fellow English Catholic’s reading of the yet unpublished work and finding in it an underlying “order of Grace,” an assessment, which, Tolkien writes, has “even revealed to me more clearly some things about my work.”11 In other words, Tolkien’s

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claim is not a programmatic attempt to sanctify the work or to control future interpretations. Despite the priority of the elaborate world of The Silmarillion and its patchwork development over a dozen years, The Lord of the Rings was a largely unplanned literary adventure, a surprise undertaking written to satiate the surprising demand for a sequel to The Hobbit. While it drew on previous chronologies and genealogies, the work itself was a spontaneous overflow of mythography whose content and shape grew and expanded in unexpected ways that startled Tolkien himself and poured out from his own sense of the world.12 Like the unpremeditated work itself, his statement to Murray seems to be an expression of gratitude that the book has been found to capture, even at levels he did not see or anticipate, the teachings and truths he held dear. I thus find what Tolkien himself calls a “very clumsily put” description of his own discovery of the Catholic foundation of The Lord of the Rings reminiscent of a moment in Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle,” an account of the life, death, and afterlife of a frustrated but persistent middle-class painter and autobiographically inflected “Everyman.” Following his purgatorial refining, Niggle responds with a gracious delight and unself-conscious surprise when he sees that “the Tree” he repeatedly tried to create in his art has become part of the divine fabric on the heavenly road to the “the Mountains far away.” Tolkien’s own reaction sounds something like Niggle’s gasp of “It’s a gift!” when it was revealed to him that his art had likewise been found to express the heavenly.13 In this same letter, Tolkien stresses that the underlying faith that shaped his creation was, he felt, a gift that had been given to him by his mother and the Oratorian congregation of Birmingham. In the less frequently quoted portion of the letter, he attributes the emergent spirit of The Lord of the Rings to his widowed mother Mabel, who in converting to Catholicism set herself at odds with a deeply ingrained English distaste for Roman Catholicism, alienated herself from her remaining family, and thus sacrificially winnowed the income of her family: “For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.”14 Following her 1904 death, the twelve-year-old orphan’s spiritual nourishment fell to Father Francis Morgan, a priest in the Birmingham Or-

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atory, who was his stern but invested guardian until he reached the age of twenty-one. In “J.R.R. Tolkien: Creator of Middle-earth,” the biographical feature accompanying the DVD of Peter Jackson’s film version of The Lord of the Rings, this period of Tolkien’s life is conspicuously dropped. Tolkien is dislocated and disinherited, wandering—to quote one of the movie’s cowriters Phillipa Boyens—in the “absence of a father.”15 This is a different picture of personal formation than the one Tolkien paints of “the heroic sufferings and early death in extreme poverty of my mother who brought me into the Church” and the “astonishing charity of Francis Morgan” who “had been a father to me, more than most real fathers.”16 This characterization of a near familial bond of loving charity among members of a community is one of the central tenets of the Oratorians to which Morgan belonged. It is the aspect that the nineteenthcentury convert John Henry Cardinal Newman, who founded the Oratory in England, emphasized in his letters when discerning the call to establish the Birmingham congregation: “There are great difficulties in the Oratorian rule, which we must be aware of from there being no vows. St John has had some interesting talk with Father Repetti . . . He likes the plan much . . . but warns us that it all depends on the possibility of our keeping together, and that unless we start with some persons who thoroughly understand each other and will pull together through good and evil nothing can be done.”17 As a result of his own loss and subsequent guardianship by Morgan after Mabel’s death, Tolkien grew up with a deep connection to the Oratorian world that had been at the cultural and intellectual heart of English Catholicism since Newman’s time. He even described himself as “virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house.”18 The Oratorian emphasis on forming their community based on mutual personal commitment rather than on taking vows may have even influenced the digressive passage at the end of the Council of Elrond in which the harried fellowship takes time to debate their decision not to take an oath binding them to the quest.19 This letter, again, is important not just because of the content of what Tolkien retrospectively writes but also because of his characterization of these major life events. They reveal the way he had been formed by his English Catholic background and how that spirit would in turn form The Lord of the Rings. The break from medieval England at the Reformation, which Tolkien once impishly called the “W. European revolt,” left English Catholics alien-

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ated and disoriented in their own landscape, community, government, and churches. They lived under the Penal Laws until 1829 and were afterward still subject to discrimination, which Tolkien himself felt, citing past “torture and expropriation” to current “disabilities not even applicable to Jews.”20 For this remnant—a minority under persecution for “recusance,” or an unwillingness to swear allegiance to the regime of the age—the writing, recording, and passing down of history became the way to preserve their distinct identity and stitch together a wounded community across generations. In his book Memory and Identity, Pope John Paul II writes that “the histories of nations, objectified and recorded in writing, are among the essential elements of culture—the element which determines the nation’s identity in the temporal dimension.”21 English Catholics were considered an “imperium in imperio” or nation within the nation, so historiography—and the lives of past martyrs in particular—was their cultural lifeblood.22 It was Alban Butler, an English Catholic historian and priest, who authored the 1756–59 The Lives of the Saints, which was originally titled The Lives of the Father, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints. Additionally pilgrimage sites connected with Catholic martyrs (from Saint Winefride’s Well in Holywell, Wales, to the gallows at Tyburn in London) would become (and remain) an important part of English Catholic religious devotion. In letters to his own children, Tolkien’s descriptions of his mother’s lonely death amid “persecution, poverty, and . . . disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith” draws on the language of martyrdom and mirrors the intent of such writing to suture the Church’s experiences through generations.23 This can shed light on the sense of geographically redolent history that Lewis described “in the Tolkienian world,” where “you can hardly put your foot down anywhere . . . without stirring the dust of history.”24 Tolkien himself made this conflation, claiming that as a Catholic he did not expect “‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat.’” The allusion is, of course, to Galadriel’s speech on the way the Elves have “fought the long defeat” through “the ages of the world.”25 In the next section of this chapter, however, I focus on an aspect that relates even more specifically to Father Morgan and the Oratorian influence by examining the sense of history articulated by Frederick Faber and Newman in the mid- to late nineteenth century and how this can shed further light on the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings.

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FROM RUINS TO REVIVAL, WEATHERTOP TO ISENGARD Part of the difficulty in classifying the genre of The Lord of the Rings is that it bears characteristics of various different narrative forms. As Lewis wrote, it is of course a romance, and, given the import of Frodo’s spiritual battles, perhaps even what W. H. Auden would call a subjective quest romance.26 On the other hand, it is also a historical novel concerned with the social forces that constitute a historical period and the causal factors—be they actions, characters, or events—that precipitate a change in the social fabric. For instance, Walter Scott’s seminal historical novel Waverley (1814) highlights the loss and gain of passing from clannish tribalism to modernity in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. The lengthy narrative features an ordinary eponymous hero who stumbles into Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Battle of Culloden, thus narrating Britain’s progress from the romantic Jacobitism of the Stuarts to the reasonable rule of the Hanoverians. This offers structural parallels to the humble hobbits’ venture among the great historical figures of Middle-earth, participation in remarkable events such as the Battle of Pelennor Fields, and witness to the transition from the Age of Elves to the Age of Men. This historiographic emphasis can be seen in the multiple titles of the red book, the manuscript by Bilbo and Frodo described within the pages of The Lord of the Rings as its source text. While Bilbo’s title is personal and emphasizes the individual’s quest (“My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After”), Frodo’s title appears more as a chronicle that accentuates historical change (The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King) and almost erases his own pivotal role in the passive attribution “as seen by the Little People.”27 Yet Tolkien (and presumably Bilbo and Frodo) did not share Scott’s adherence to the stadial model of progressive historical development crafted in the Scottish Enlightenment. So why does Tolkien foreground a historical change between ages as a, if not the, crucial outcome of The Lord of the Rings? Tolkien’s English Catholic community was continually attempting to make sense of its own alienated place in English history by rewriting national history from their own perspective. This at least partially accounts, I would suggest, for Father Murray and Tolkien’s shared recognition of a Catholic sense in the work. Whether it be John Milner’s recuperation of Gothic grandeur from the so-called

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dark ages or John Lingard’s skeptical and professionally exacting depiction of reformation history, English Catholics often proposed alternative ages or offered differing interpretation of periods from the dominant narration of national and religious history.28 This process of narrating against the age, or saeculum, intensified after the 1850 return of the Catholic hierarchy to Britain and the wave of conversions including and following Newman’s. While institutions in Victorian England seemed to be becoming less religious and its thought and culture reflected theological doubts, English Catholicism was undergoing a revival.29 Frederick Faber, a convert to Catholicism and a priest at London’s Brompton Oratory, captured this contrapuntal sense of history in his 1849 hymn “Faith of our Fathers,” whose recounting of the passage from past dungeons to current hopes for national conversion serves as a sort of anthem for English Catholics. For our purposes, Faber’s introductory sonnet to his collected poems conveys a wrestling with the transition between ages that is similar to that which structures The Lord of Rings: Blame not my verse if echoes of church bells With every change of thought or dream are twining, Fetching a murmuring sameness from the fells, And lakes, and rivers with their inland shining. And marvel not in these loose drifting times If anchored spirits in their blythest motion Dip to their anchors veiled within the ocean, Catching too staid a measure for their rhymes. An Age comes on, which came three times of old, When the enfeebled nations shall stand still To be by Christian science shaped at will; And the fresh Church, rejecting heathen mould, Shall draw her types from Europe’s middle night, Well-pleased if such good darkness be her light.30

The opening octet captures the sense of confusion that Faber saw in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Consistent with the introductory excuse “Blame not my verse,” Faber self-consciously draws attention to the difficult task of reconciling the metaphors that would unite faith and culture. The second line is a metaphorical mess. “With every change” is musical diction referring to the changes or notes that are part of church bell-ringing; “of thought or dream” shifts to a mental image but does so indecisively; and finally “twining” is a natural image of a vine. How can a

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change twine especially when it is a dream? It is ultimately unclear how, or even if, the three come together. Further, in the next line, “fetching” is an odd choice of words. It could simply mean going and getting, as in “to fetch a pail of water.” Yet, in the nineteenth century, there was also a nautical sense to “fetch,” meaning to direct one’s vessel in a particular course, often in relation to the current.31 The awkwardness, the apology, and the sailing metaphor all continue in the second quatrain. There is also a self-conscious contradiction in this passage that represents Faber’s cultural enterprise as a boat of rowers pulling hard but sitting still. English culture, according to Faber, had lost its Christian moorings and drifted toward secularization. In opposition, Faber labels himself among the spirits who are blithe—a word associated with movement and activity. Further these souls are rhythmically and repetitively catching together, a term in rowing for putting oars in the water together at a steady or staid pace. Yet contrary to all this, these are “anchored spirits,” and their boat stays with the “anchors.” This image is nearly ludicrous until we consider that the anchor impeding their progress is a long-standing Christian symbol representing the cross. So Faber’s sojourning vessel, anchored by the cross, is still having difficulty moving between the shores of faith and culture. While the “church bells” of the ecclesiastically minded Faber find no place in Tolkien’s work, this octet does point to the difficulty of reconciling his vision with the spirit of the age and the consequent perplexing awkwardness of any countersecular artwork. Then comes the sonnet’s volte, or turn, which introduces a pivotal change and orders the disordered pile of images. All is resolved when, without any real foreshadowing, “An Age comes on.” By parsing history into different ages in the closing sestet, Faber can see the English Catholic Revival as a sudden, new moment for the “fresh Church” that is nevertheless a returning golden “Age.” This emergent fourth age is novel, but it draws on ancient sources, specifically the “middle night” of the medieval period, for its vitality. Paradoxically, and against the common wisdom, such medieval darkness will provide an alternative form of enlightenment. These terms echo Lewis’s description of The Lord of the Rings as a revolutionary return. A countercultural vision that moves against the current of Victorian historical progressivism, English Catholic culture will draw its guiding light from the much-maligned Dark Ages. For both Tolkien and Faber, the revival of this oncoming age will be

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a recovery, a search for past resources to guide the Church through its present struggles. The mode of thinking and rhetoric within Faber’s poem finds fuller expression in his fellow Oratorian Newman’s famous 1852 “Second Spring” sermon, which was preached in Birmingham to the newly reinstated bishops gathered together from across England for the first time. In poetic phrasing that is both spiritual and geographic, Newman’s central conceit compares the history of Catholicism in England to the seasons. Reflecting back on the periods from the Reformation through the eighteenth century, Newman scans the landscape of England’s history for the English Catholic Church but finds only an uncanny, gradually decaying ruin: That old Church in its day became a corpse (a marvellous, an awful change!); and then it did but corrupt the air which once it refreshed, and cumber the ground which once it beautified. So all seemed to be lost; and there was a struggle for a time, and then its priests were cast out or martyred. There were sacrileges innumerable. Its temples were profaned or destroyed; its revenues seized by covetous nobles, or squandered upon the ministers of a new faith. The presence of Catholicism was at length simply removed,—its grace disowned,—its power despised,—its name, except as a matter of history, at length almost unknown. It took a long time to do this thoroughly; much time, much thought, much labor, much expense; but at last it was done. Oh, that miserable day, centuries before we were born! What a martyrdom to live in it and see the fair form of Truth, moral and material, hacked piecemeal, and every limb and organ carried off, and burned in the fire, or cast into the deep! But at last the work was done. Truth was disposed of, and shovelled away, and there was a calm, a silence, a sort of peace;—and such was about the state of things when we were born into this weary world.32

Newman is known for his long, Latinate sentences that wind to paragraph length. This passage is remarkable for the way it piles on short sentences and clauses, giving a sense of plodding historical inevitability to this decrepitude. There is a depersonification that takes place as the human figure, who is the initial image of the living Church, dies, encumbering the landscape. The body is then figuratively replaced by the “temples,” which in turn crumble as the last remains and reminders of the previous age. This, of course, recalls the abbeys and monasteries that were dissolved or seized by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century and whose ruins still mark En-

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glish terrain and occupy the English Catholic imagination.33 The hollowing out of these once livid ruins is not just an architectural change but also a mental one. They witness the transition into a forgetful, fatigued, plodding world, whose false, tenuous peace cannot completely disguise the rupture that has taken place. This is, in short, a good description of the state of Middle-earth in its opening sections. Within every community—the Shire, Rohan, Gondor, and even Rivendell—there is a certain security that allows ordinary routine to take place, but each community is also marked by a sense of loss or falling off, a dim awareness, either strongly or weakly felt, of the fragility of this borrowed time, and a sense of fatigue to face or change its fate. Further, ruins are the dominant metaphor within the initial world of the book. One need not delve too deep to multiply examples, but I will focus on Weathertop, which serves as a nadir for the characters in the initial, confused portion of their quest. There the Hobbits squabble among themselves, distrust Strider, struggle to read cryptic signs from Gandalf, lose any sense of direction and purpose, violate the prohibition against putting on the Ring, and have Frodo receive a nearly fatal wound at the hands of the Ringwraiths. On the approach to Weathertop in response to Merry’s oblivious question, “who made this path, and what for,” Strider/Aragorn performs a historical survey similar to Newman’s: “This path was made to serve the forts along the walls. But long before, in the first days of the North Kingdom, they built a great watch-tower on Weathertop, Amon Sûl they called it. It was burned and broken, and nothing remains of it now but a tumbled ring, like a rough crown, on the old hill’s head. Yet once it was tall and fair. It is told that Elendil stood there watching for the coming of Gil-galad out of the West in the days of the Last Alliance.”34 This, of course, again introduces the deep mythic history that characterizes Tolkien’s secondary world, but more important than the details about the hitherto unknown Gil-galad is the sense of memory and history here embodied. Strider’s description hovers around the architectural ruin, turning to it as the shaken symbol that can only dimly recall a lost world. While the hobbits’ only connection to this place is through fragments of poetry whose referent has also been lost, Strider’s deeper knowledge is full of a bitter irony. Like Newman, he, too, personifies this ruin, comparing it to a corpse, a dead king—not an auspicious conceit for a would-be returning monarch to utter. Yet it appropriately captures the atmosphere of ruin that pervades the opening of

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the novel. At the level of plot, this culminates when the newly formed fellowship is deformed near Amon Hen, leading Aragorn to conclude: “Now the Company is all in ruin.”35 Yet neither Newman nor Tolkien remains in ruin. The main point of Newman’s sermon is to celebrate the revival, or springtime, that unexpectedly arose in Victorian England: But what is it, my Fathers, my Brothers, what is it that has happened in England just at this time? . . . It is an innovation, a miracle, I may say, in the course of human events . . . This, then, is the cause of this national transport, this national cry, which encompasses us. The past has returned, the dead lives. Thrones are overturned, and are never restored; States live and die, and then are matter only for history. Babylon was great, and Tyre, and Egypt, and Nineve, and shall never be great again. The English Church was, and the English Church was not, and the English Church is once again. This is the portent, worthy of a cry. It is the coming in of a Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical.36

Newman gives an account of a return and an advance. Empires configured around political domination come and go, but the spiritual revolution of Catholic England is not of that kind. It is one in which the corpse referred to in Newman’s first passage returns in a Lazarus-like miracle. There are three significant aspects of this paradoxical moment of innovation and return worth highlighting here. First, it is unexpected, and Newman’s breathlessness signals that if such a revival had been programmatically planned and calculated, it might not have been possible. Second, this revival is literally a revivification. Newman sees the Church organically, and thus its history is not just a legend or recorded past.37 The past is not another country for him but rather a continuous community and communion whose lifeline has been forgotten, fragmented, but never wholly severed. Finally, the “us” invoked is crucial, not only for the nature of the event itself, but also the communal reassembly that takes place. Revival is also reunion. Middle-earth, too, witnesses a turn, or volte, as unexpected and unaccountable as that of Newman’s sudden springtime or Faber’s onset of a new age. For Tolkien, it seems to come under the strange agency of “the turn of the tide” after each group within the fractured fellowship has seemingly reached a dead end.38 This upsurge also coincides with a collocation of tropes of revival—Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas appearing as reborn legends to the Rohirrim,

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the return of the vanquished Gandalf, the reentry of the Ents into history. It is thus a shocking revolution, accomplished at the branches of the reinvigorated Ents, that awaits behind the doors of Isengard: “But the doors lay hurled and twisted on the ground. And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled in ruinous heaps. The great arch still stood, but it opened now upon a roofless chasm: the tunnel was laid bare, and through the cliff-like walls on either side great rents and breaches had been torn; their towers were beaten into dust. If the Great Sea had risen in wrath and fallen on the hills with storm, it could have worked no greater ruin.”39 This happy turn represents the first real hopeful event in the work, casting the coming to Isengard as a triumph. While at first glance the “flotsam and jetsam” surrounding the “wreck of Isengard” would seem to be another example of ruin, this is actually a more complicated picture. Like the other towers and fortifications in Middle-earth, Orthanc, “[s]till dark and tall, unbroken by the storm,” was built in the lost, golden age only to be seized and squandered by invading regimes.40 Its overthrow is thus a preservation and a repossession—a return to its rightful inheritors who can purge and rejuvenate it. It is thus a kind of reblossoming rather than ruining, accomplished by the released waters of the Entwash. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman added flooding waters to his “second spring” imagery. To those who accused him of impetuously pursuing ancient truths, he warned that they “should rather turn their animadversions upon those who have dammed up a majestic river, till it becomes a flood.”41 This vernal event also brings together the members of the broken fellowship, restoring a community united by charity and joviality and reuniting the narrative’s plot lines that had followed the characters in different directions through separate chapters. In addition, the “strangest sight” of the convivial hobbit guards that stuns the men of Rohan, amuses Gandalf and Legolas, temporarily relaxes Aragorn, and flusters Gimli, could not have been foreseen or industriously executed. It comes as a gift. In arguing that one can trace a pattern of ruin to revival in the path from Weathertop to Isengard, I am not claming that either Newman or Faber were a source text for The Lord of the Rings. Rather, I am pointing to an underlying structure of thought and approach to interpreting history shared by these writers within this same community. This way of seeing the world, of seeing the strug-

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gles of eternal values in shifting temporal conditions, unites them at a deep level and can allow us to see the congruence of Tolkien’s fantastic depiction of an otherworld in The Lord of the Rings with previous English Catholic writing. In other words, at a deep, structural level, its lightning bolt was not alone in the sky. I am also not arguing that Tolkien was a member of the English Catholic revival. It is another of the formal oddities of this book that the great triumph of overturning Saruman’s seat, which has all the feeling of a culminating victory, occurs in the middle and not the end. Thus when Aragorn unwinds with a pipe, his invitation to “sit on the edge of ruin and talk” is Janus-faced.42 It looks back to the joyous wreckage of Saruman’s usurpation, but it also looks forward to the woeful fragmentation to come. The fellowship becomes riven again, the storylines divergent, the characters’ obstacles greater, their surroundings darker, and their hopes lesser. Weathertop’s ruins have been translated into Denethor’s despairing that “the West has failed” beside the symbolic withered tree in Gondor.43 What are the implications of this fall from a premature triumph for the overall structure of the book and the sense of history it represents? For all that he stood against his age, Tolkien was also of his age. Like other English Catholics living in modernity, he comes after the high point of the English Catholic revival. So while Victorian Catholicism can at times sound millennial in its exuberance, Tolkien and others, like G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh, were writing after the apocalypse. The absence of an overarching cultural conversion in England that Faber prayed for and the harrowing experience of World War I that Tolkien endured meant that the “Second Spring” had also always been on the edge of ruin. The resulting historiographic reformulation among many Catholic writers emphasizes a cyclic model of history implicit in the seasonal imagery of Newman’s sermon. Ultimately Newman, who was a realistic romantic, would not have disagreed with Tolkien’s 1944 meditation, which was written while composing The Lord of the Rings and in response to a sermon on the penitential Rogation Days of fasting before Ascension Thursday. Tolkien’s bleak vision captures the ponderous, persistent fallenness of the human experience: “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men—sinks!”44 Ages of darkness amid unexpected, ephemeral days of light and armies on this

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darkling plain invaded by sudden insurgencies of redemption— this characterizes both the pessimism and the optimism that structure Tolkien’s novel. Even his repetitive language of “old, old” conveys the inescapable repetition of triumph and tragedy. This discourse draws on a strand of what might be called a Catholic stoic historicism that endures the afflictions of the ambivalent ages but hopes for intimations of happiness in this world and ultimate fulfillment in the next.

THE DOMINION OF MEN, THE AGE OF HOOPER Out of the death and destruction that follows from the road out of Isengard, an age comes on yet again at the conclusion of the novel. The Ring is destroyed, Sauron foiled, and his repossessed tower Barad-dur ruined. This is a eucatastrophe, described by Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” that “gives a fleeting glimpse of Joy.”45 It also borrows “Second Spring” imagery to mark its culmination as Aragorn discovers a sapling descended from the royal tree Telperion, which serves as a living embodiment of the type of returning organic tradition Newman and Tolkien valued. Significantly it is in bloom, bearing “one small cluster of flowers whose white petals shone like the sunlit snow.”46 An elated picture of urban renewal accompanies this natural revival: In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets were paved with white marble; and the Folk of the Mountain laboured in it, and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone by.47

Both the architecture of the city and its greenery have been reborn. There is a re-formation of community as the city-dwellers and those from the countryside reunite to enliven public and private space. Yet before concluding that in Gondor the City of Man becomes the City of God and forgetting Tolkien’s vision of all cities sinking,

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it is necessary to see that the “spring” issuing in the Fourth Age differs in degree but not in kind from that of Isengard. The destruction of the Ring and the finale of the novel does not offer escape from the cycle of history nor does it defeat fallenness. The subtle evocation of the “snow” in the tree’s blossom and of the mortal finitude of Aragorn and his golden age in the opening phrase “In his time” reminds us that death and winter will follow. There is a bittersweet melancholy to the work’s conclusion, captured in Treebeard’s words to Celeborn—oddly transferred to the beginning of the trilogy in Jackson’s film version: “For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.”48 This happy oncoming of spring and upturn in history also dialectically contains within it the loss of all those characters and their alternative ways of being in the world that have proved so attractive. As Gandalf says to Aragorn of the age that comes on: “For though much has been saved, much must now pass away; and the power of the Three Rings also is ended. And all the lands that you see, and those that lie round them, shall be dwellings of Men. For the time comes of the Dominion of Men, and the Elder Kindred shall fade or depart.”49 Gandalf’s survey is all encompassing and offers no room for differentiation or heterogeneity. The clanging repetition “of Men” at the end of two consecutive clauses implies that “endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness” may even become more acute in the vicissitudes of cyclic history during the Fourth Age. This perspective, however, is not the result of an idiosyncratic bilious misanthropy, but rather represents a theological approach to modernity and human dwelling in history that was shared by fellow English Catholics.50 In his historical novel Helena (1950), Evelyn Waugh gives the ironic title of “Second Spring” to a central chapter on the donation of Constantine. For Waugh, this moment of establishment may have spread the faith, but it also sowed hypocrisy. Although not without positive outcomes, its major effect was only to change the temporal terms in which eternal redemption was sought. Waugh’s most famous novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) warned against any parallel triumphalism at the end of World War II. Amid victory, much passes away in the disappointing coming on of “the age of Hooper,” a character marked by his anonymous, unlovely but efficient acquisitiveness.51 In the chapter “The Five Deaths of the Faith” in his 1925 The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton provided the theological rationale for this

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unprogressive model of history: “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” For Chesterton, Catholicism shows the same tendency to sink into the conventional, deadening respectability of its age until visited “suddenly” by the “unexpected onslaught” of a revivifying force.52 Such victories must be zealously pursued, but the resurrections of history remain like those of Lazarus, with new life eventually giving way to death. Like Chesterton, Tolkien sees the Church as “the temple of the Spirit dying but living, corrupt but holy, self-reforming and rearising”—a process that will continue into the Fourth Age and into modernity.53

RUINS REDIVIVUS: INCURABLE WICKEDNESS AND BLESSED SADNESS While Chesterton may theorize and Waugh satirize life under this cyclic model of temporal history, Tolkien is unique among English Catholic writers for providing insight into the experience of living through the highs and lows of the ages. In Frodo, Tolkien embodies an ethic of the wayfaring pilgrim or wanderer moving through this valley of tears. Amid the triumph of the Fourth Age, he is not healed and not “solid and whole.” As Frodo says, “I am wounded . . . wounded; it will never really heal.”54 These wounds are the wounds received at the ruin of Weathertop. Just as Frodo’s language repeats the word “wound,” so, too, must he, annually in its season, relive the hurt of that history. Ruin is not just a trope for him, but part of his incarnate condition. Like no other character, this Ringbearer shoulders the joys and hates of the inescapable turns of time with perseverance. T.A. Shippey considers this ethic of braving high odds with little or no hope of immediate or ultimate victory a remodeled variant of Norse courage.55 I do not disagree with this, but in my estimation, the Christian virtue of patience or “long suffering” also describes Frodo’s character. Perhaps, however, Tolkien’s own words summarize best how to live with the Elves and the Church through the “long defeat” of history as Sam, Frodo, and Bilbo ride westward with the Elder Kindred “filled with a sadness that was yet blessed and without bitterness.”56 The “blessed sadness” of this countersecular art does not conform to the age’s temporal seductions of triumph, empire, or

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acquisition, but its cultural engagement still looks persistently to transform the age through acts of faith, hope, and love.

NOTES 1. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” 83. The quote in the title is from Faber, “Preface,” in Poems. Earlier versions of this paper were given to the Philadelphia Catholic Medical Association and the Secular Oratory of Philadelphia. I thank their members for the opportunity and for discussion of the ideas. 2. Shippey, Author of the Century (Boston 2000), xvii–xxvii. 3. OED Online, s.v. “secular,” http://dictionary.oed.com. 4. Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, 94–97, 207–9, 221–23; Bunch, “Yeats, Thoreau,” 217–18. 5. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” 84; Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories (1966),” 88; Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures, 248–66. Curry, Defending Middle-earth. 6. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” 83. 7. Smith, “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination,” 75, 73. 8. Ward, English Way, 7. 9. Tolkien to Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 10. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” 98–99. 11. Tolkien to Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 12. Tolkien to W. H. Auden, June 7, 1955, in ibid., 216–17. 13. Tolkien to Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in ibid., 172; Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle,” 118, 113. 14. For the foundational role of anti-Catholicism in English national identity, see Wheeler, Old Enemies, and Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 18–30. Tolkien to Robert Murray, December 2, 1953, in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 15. “From Book to Vision,” part 1, Fellowship of the Ring DVD, 1:04. 16. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in Tolkien, Letters, 340; Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, March 6–8, 1941, in ibid., 53. 17. Newman, Letters and Diaries, 35. 18. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 395. 19. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 273–74. I thank Rev. Philip Bochanski, C.O., of the Philadelphia Oratory for this insight. 20. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, undated, in ibid., Letters, 394–95; Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in ibid., 339. 21. John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 74. 22. For an example of this common description of the English Catholic place within the nation, see Coleridge, Constitution of Church and State, 149. 23. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, January 9–10, 1965, in Tolkien, Letters, 354. 24. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” 86. 25. Tolkien to Amy Ronald, December 15, 1956, in Tolkien, Letters, 255; ibid., Lord of the Rings (1994), 348. 26. Auden, “The Quest Hero,” 40–61. 27. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 1004.

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28. Milner, Treatise on Ecclesiastical Architecture, and Lingard, History of England. This is a brief, and therefore partial, account of the deeply conflicted historiographic project among English Catholics as it relates to Tolkien. For an opposing view of the more assimilative or ecumenical aspects, see Joseph P. Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment. 29. Ker, Catholic Revival in English Culture. 30. Faber, “Preface,” in Poems, 1. 31. OED Online, s.v. “fetch,” http://dictionary.oed.com. 32. Newman, “Second Spring,” 170–71. 33. The resonance of those ruins, such as in the Walsingham pilgrimage, is both described and embodied in Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars, 377–78. 34. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 181. 35. Ibid., 404. 36. Newman, “Second Spring,” 167–69. 37. For Tolkien’s characteristic use of the image of a tree to recapitulate Newman’s organic, developmental model of the church, see Letters, 394. 38. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 484. 39. Ibid., 542. 40. Ibid., 543. 41. Newman, Apologia, 100. 42. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 549. 43. Ibid., 807. 44. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, May 14, 1944, in ibid., Letters, 80. 45. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories (1966),” 86. 46. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 950. 47. Ibid., 947. 48. Ibid., 959. 49. Ibid., 949–50. 50. Rosemary Jackson argues that there is a “longing to transcend or escape the human” in Tolkien’s works. See Fantasy, 156. 51. Waugh, Helena, 119–25, and ibid., Brideshead Revisited, 351. 52. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 250–51. 53. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963, in Tolkien, Letters, 339. 54. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 1002, 1003. 55. Shippey, Author of the Century (Boston 2000), 149–55. 56. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1994), 1006.

The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community Joseph Pearce

TOLKIEN’S MAGNUM OPUS, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, HAS EMERGED AS the most popular work of literature of the twentieth century. Popularity aside, it is also, in my judgment and in the judgment of thousands of others who have registered their opinion in several national opinion polls, the greatest work of the century. It is indeed unusual, particularly in the midst of the junk culture regurgitated by modernity, to find that the most popular is also the best. This marriage of quality and quantity, in which the best is also the bestseller, is particularly gratifying because the work in question is so Catholic in its inspiration and so traditionalist, and consequently antimodernist, in its message. Much has been written in the past few years about the underlying theology and philosophy of The Lord of the Rings. One aspect of this spiritual dimension is that pertaining to the place and role of the individual within the community—or what may be termed the sociopolitical or sociocultural applicability of Tolkien’s vision to the problems facing the individual and the community in a secular age. Bearing in mind Tolkien’s assertion that his work was fundamentally Catholic,1 we should not be surprised to discover that the vision of communitas in The Lord of the Rings was shaped by the social teaching of the Catholic Church, at least indirectly. Tolkien’s close association with the Birmingham Oratory, where he and his brother served Father Morgan’s Mass on an almost daily basis as children, would have ensured the ghostly presence of Cardinal Newman throughout his childhood, but it was the presence of G. K. Chesterton that, it seems, exerted a greater influence during these years. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien confesses the influence of what he terms “Chestertonian fantasy” on his own 224

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formulation of the nature, and supernature, of mythology. It is indeed no wonder that Chesterton should have been so important to the young Tolkien. The towering influence of the legendary Chesterbelloc2 upon the intellectual life of England in general, and upon the intellectual life of Catholics in England in particular, was at its most potent and profound in the years from 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.3 This is significant because it coincides with Tolkien’s youth and, presumably, with the most crucial years of his own intellectual and spiritual development. He was eight years old when Chesterton burst upon the literary and intellectual scene in 1900 and was twenty-two at the outbreak of the War.4 Why, one might ask, is Chesterton’s and Belloc’s influence on Tolkien so relevant to a discussion of the individual and the community in Middle-earth? Put simply, it is my contention that Tolkien was greatly enamored of the distributist ideas5 of both these men and that this animated the sociopolitical and sociocultural vision of his work. Chesterton’s distributist novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and Belloc’s seminal critique of sociopolitical history, The Servile State, were published during the formative years of Tolkien’s life, the former in 1904, the latter in 1912. These works were themselves inspired by the social teaching of the Church, as expounded in Pope Leo XIII’s celebrated encyclical, Rerum novarum, published in 1891. The vision of society presented in these works, combined with their denunciation of the encroaching artificiality of industrialization, harmonized with Tolkien’s romantic desire for what he called “a pre-mechanical age.” It must be stressed that the social teaching of Leo XIII and the distributism of Belloc and Chesterton are rooted in philosophical first principles. They do not subsist within the sphere of ideology; that is to say they are not merely sociopolitical or sociocultural responses to other sociopolitical or sociocultural realities. The same is true of Tolkien’s vision of communitas in Middle-earth. His position is that of a Catholic responding to the ills of society in accordance with the theological and philosophical principles of the Church. Thus, if we are to understand the vision of the individual and the community in his work, we need to understand the first principles from which that vision springs. The fundamental tenets of what may be termed Tolkien’s “philosophy of myth,” rooted as it is in the teachings of the Church, are to be found in three crucial though often overlooked works,

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namely his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” his “purgatorial” allegory “Leaf by Niggle,” and his poem “Mythopoeia.” Essentially Tolkien’s philosophy is rooted in the principle that human beings are made in the image of God. Man is not merely homo sapiens, he is homo viator, that is to say he is not merely created “wise,” he is created with a purpose. Furthermore he is created with free will, enabling him to obey or disobey the purpose for which he is created. This, in turn, means that he is responsible for his actions. He is responsible for his obedience and for his disobedience, and must face the consequences of his choices. This mystical equation is thrown into turmoil by the Fall, the primeval act of disobedience for which we are still suffering the consequences. Thus, in his essay “On FairyStories,” Tolkien writes of “the great mythical significance of prohibition . . . Thou shalt not—or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret.”6 Given our gift of freedom, this prohibition can either be heeded or ignored. Thus, says Tolkien, “the Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation,”7 Locked Door—capital L, capital D; Temptation—capital T! So where does this “Locked Door” fit into the relationship between the Individual and the Community? Quite simply, it shows the necessity of resisting temptation. Our freedom is the key to the Locked Door. As such, the door will only remain Locked if we choose not to use the forbidden key that is entrusted to us. The Temptation is rooted in the fact that we have the freedom to break the rules but the duty to refrain from doing so. The applicability of this principle to the sphere of the sociopolitical is obvious and is perhaps best expressed in two paradoxically convergent political maxims. The first is a so-called liberal maxim by the Catholic historian, Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” The second is a so-called conservative maxim by Edmund Burke: “Liberty itself must be limited in order to be possessed.” Put bluntly in the modern vernacular, the first of these could be translated as “power corrupts and big power corrupts big time.” No wonder E. F. Schumacher declared that small is beautiful! Similarly Burke’s maxim could be restated bluntly as a warning that unrestrained liberty, otherwise known as anarchy, would result, not in widespread freedom but in the rule of the most brutal and the enslavement of everyone else. Imagine a world in which rapists, murderers, and thieves were at liberty to do as they please. No wonder Solzhenitsyn insists that “self-limitation” is the key to a healthy society!

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This is how Tolkien discussed this issue. He is speaking specifically about marriage but, after all, the relationship between the individual and the community is the mystical “marriage” at the heart of Christ’s great Commandment that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. Think of the individual as the bridegroom, and the community, or his neighbor, as the bride. If this is done, Tolkien’s advice to his son about marriage takes on great sociopolitical significance: “the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification.”8 In another letter Tolkien discussed this principle of self-limitation or “abnegation” in the specific context of the allegorical treatment of the issue of “Power” in The Lord of the Rings: Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation.When you say A[tomic] P[ower] is “here to stay” you remind me that Chesterton said that whenever he heard that, he knew that whatever it referred to would soon be replaced, and thought pitifully shabby and old-fashioned. So-called “atomic” power is rather bigger than anything he was thinking of (I have heard it of trams, gas-light, steam-trains). But it surely is clear that there will have to be some “abnegation” in its use, a deliberate refusal to do some of the things it is possible to do with it, or nothing will stay! However, that is simple stuff, a contemporary & possibly passing and ephemeral problem. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story . . . The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality.”9

It is intriguing that Tolkien passes beyond the discussion of Power, at least in its purely physical and secular sense, to the perennial questions of Life itself: “Death and Immortality.” Tolkien perceived, as all Christians must, that politics and economics are merely a derivative of theology and philosophy. Change the philosophy and you change the politics. If your philosophy has God as its First Cause and Center, His Commandments will be obeyed and

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the Locked Door will remain secure. A belief in God demands selflimitation or “abnegation.” Remove God, however, and the Commandments will be ignored or ridiculed. The Locked Door will be opened and, like Pandora’s box, its woes will be released on a heedless and hedonistic humanity. No God means “no limits” and no limits leads to the anarchy that leads, in turn, to the rule of the most ruthless: the political rapists, thieves, and murderers known as Dictators. The fact that Tolkien perceived these primary realities of sociopolitical life is evident from further comments that he made in the same letter as the one just quoted: “I am not a ‘democrat’ only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanise and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power—and then we get and are getting slavery.”10 These words, written in 1956, are evocative of the horrors of a century in which Orcs such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler had wielded the rings of power. These theoretical “socialists” of one sort or the other, national or international, were in practice moral anarchists whose wielding of the ring of power heralded not merely slavery but slaughter. Tens of millions massacred in the bloodiest orgy of power-wielding in human history. Perhaps we should clarify exactly what Tolkien meant by his not being a “democrat.” He is voicing his contempt for the macrodemocracies of modern secular states with their tendency to centralize power in huge “democratically elected” political mechanisms that are increasingly distant from, and deaf to, the needs and aspirations of ordinary people. It is clear, however, that his insistence on the “spiritual principles” of humility and equality illustrates his placing of the integrity of the individual and the family at the very heart and center of political life. It is clear, in fact, that his views are convergent with the distributism of the Chesterbelloc and with the creed of small-is-beautiful expounded by Schumacher, both of which are merely popular applications of the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity. Tolkien’s insistence on the “spiritual principles” at the heart of all reality, including the sociopolitical and sociocultural, found expression in the way that he viewed Creation and creativity. His reasoning was as follows: In that Man is made in the image of God, and since we know that God is the Creator, Man’s own creativity must be a gift of God reflecting His “imageness” in us. As, however, only

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God can Create, in the true or absolute sense, by making Something from Nothing, our creativity is only sub-creation, in the sense that we make things from other things that already exist. Thus the potter moulds his earthenware from clay; the artist paints his picture using oils or watercolors to bring to physical fruition his imaginative perception of a landscape or a human face or a still life; the story-teller or mythmaker uses words or possibly music as the means to bring to physical fruition his imaginative perception of the things, or images, about which he writes, recites, sings, or plays. In each case our creativity employs real things, Creation, to sub-create something original yet subsistent upon the Creation itself. Thus, in Tolkien’s view, there is a hierarchy of Creation. At the top is God, as Creator; then comes Creation, which is the direct fruit of God’s primal Creativity; finally there is sub-creation whereby Man partakes of the image of the Creator through the gift of creativity. The sociopolitical and sociocultural impact of such a belief in the hierarchy of Creation can be seen from Tolkien’s discussion of true and false perceptions of “life” in his essay “On Fairy Stories”: Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he welcomed the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into contact with real life. He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression of real life in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more alive than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!11

Tolkien is saying, of course, that a horse, as a living work of Creation, i.e., made by God directly, is more real, more alive, than a car which, as a work of sub-creation made by man, is lower in the hierarchy of Creative value. Yet he is actually saying more than that. The car, as a product of “mass-production robot factories,” is actually a machine made by a machine: the artificial in the service of

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the artificial. Worse, the human beings working in the mindnumbing robot factories are actually servicing the machines: the alive in the service of the dead. Thus is reality being surrendered to virtual reality. But Tolkien is saying even more than this. What does he mean by insinuating that centaurs and dragons are more “alive,” and therefore within the hierarchy of Creative value more “real,” than cars? Well, for one thing he is referring to the fact that centaurs and dragons are animate creatures, albeit only animated by the imagination. Yet I believe he is saying something even more potent and important. He is saying that there is even a hierarchy within the realm of sub-creation. He is saying that sub-creation in the service of beauty and truth is better than sub-creation for purposes of power. Put simply, art is better than technology. But why is he saying this? To answer that particular question, we have to return to the hierarchy of Created value. If God is at the top, His Creation next, and sub-creation at the bottom, does it not follow that subcreation, being a gift from God, should be at the service of its Giver, its Source? Considering that God is the Beautiful and the True, so much so that all beauty and all truth, properly understood, are a reflection of Him, isn’t sub-creation in the service of beauty and truth better than sub-creation in the service of mere utility? Isn’t the former, sub-creation in the service of God, whereas the latter is sub-creation in the service of Man? Here, perhaps, we should remind ourselves that art, within the context of this discussion, is art, as in the liberal arts. Theology is an art. She is queen of the arts as she is queen of the sciences. Philosophy is an art. History is an art. Literature is an art. Within this context we can see that Tolkien is agreeing with Josef Pieper that leisure is indeed the basis of culture. If we do not have time to study, to enjoy, and indeed to practice the arts, we will not be truly alive, and therefore not fully real—in the sense of not being as real as we are meant to be, as real as God meant us to be. Heaven forbid that we should stand before the Judgment Seat and be told that we are only virtually real! All of this has merely served as a preamble to discussing the Individual and Community in Middle-earth, Tolkien’s sub-created world. There is not time to do so. I thought it more important to provide the key by which we can enter Middle-earth and the tools by which we can apply the truths found therein with the truths we

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find in the created world in which we live. These principles, rooted in the author’s Catholic faith, are the animus by which Tolkien asks, and answers, fundamental questions about the individual and his relationship with the community of neighbors he is commanded to love. The perennial tension between the selflessness and the selfishness in human nature is felt palpably on almost every page of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien illustrates, as only a master story teller can, that only if selflessness, born of humility, prevails can the individual and the community prosper, and not only prosper but, ultimately, survive. In practical terms this means that self-sacrifice, that is to say, heroism—heroic virtue—is absolutely necessary as the antidote to spiritual obesity, that is to say, hedonism. Heroism or hedonism, that is the question. To be or not to be. To be as we were meant to be, or not to be as we were meant to be. That is the question. And there is much else besides. Central to any understanding of The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion is the power of Tradition as both a guide and protector of the community. Faced with the dynamics of Time, which is sometimes given the misnomer of “Progress,” Tradition serves as both a steering wheel and a brake. Thus Middle-earth is strengthened by the knowledge of genealogy, by the longevity and immortality of the Elves, and by the sheer entishness of the Ents who serve as the very quintessence of Tradition—a Tradition that is particularly applicable in terms of etymology and ecclesiology. Akin to the centrality of Tradition is the nature of Authority, both authentic and usurped, a question which is as central to, and therefore is as applicable to, the liberal secularist world in which we live. Ultimately we should end with the ultimate—in the sense of the ultimate question to which all other questions owe their relevance and all other answers owe their rectitude. Toward the end of his life, Tolkien was asked by a young girl: “What is the purpose of life?” Tolkien’s reply will serve as the ultimate rationale for his beliefs visa-vis the Individual and the Community. The extent of the duty of the individual to the community, and its limits, and the extent of the community’s responsibility to the individual, and its limits, all spring from the duty of the one and the responsibility of the other to praise and love the One who gives meaning and life to both. Enough of me. Here is Tolkien, answering the question: “What is the purpose of life?”

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So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour. And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel 2. PRAISE THE LORD . . . all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.12

NOTES 1. Tolkien to Robert Murray S.J., in Tolkien, Letters, 172. 2. The Chesterbelloc was the jovial name given by George Bernard Shaw to the combined impact of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc on English thought and culture during the Edwardian period. The name passed into common usage among Chesterton’s and Belloc’s contemporaries helping to cement the image in the public’s mind that the works of the two writers could be seen almost synonymously. 3. Although Chesterton was not received into the Catholic Church until 1922, he had long been perceived as a Catholic writer. Works such as Orthodoxy (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and “Lepanto” (1913) had established his reputation as an irrepressible defender of the Catholic faith. 4. Incidentally, although Chesterton’s influence on Tolkien is well-documented there is little direct evidence of Belloc’s importance, but for the reasons just stated it can be deduced implicitly. It is, however, my belief that the graphic description of the blizzard on the heights of Caradhras in The Fellowship of the Ring is derived from Belloc’s description of his near fatal efforts to cross the Alps in The Path to Rome, published in 1902. Although Tolkien had visited the Swiss Alps in 1911 and drew on his impressions of this trip in his writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he had no direct experience of hiking in mountains in such treacherous conditions and his powerful evocation of the elemental power of nature bears a striking similarity to Belloc’s treatment of the subject. 5. Distributism was the name given to the sociopolitical philosophy of Chesterton and Belloc. Rooted in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, especially as promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical, Rerum Novarum, distributism offered an alternative to the centralist principles of Marxism and the centralizing tendencies of much of modern capitalism. In essence, distributists believed that private property was sacrosanct and that the concentration of property into the hands of too few people was at the root of society’s economic and political problems. As such, the distributists opposed the plutocratic and monopolistic tendencies of modern commerce but also the socialist “solution” of placing all productive property in the hands of the State. Instead they proposed

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policies that would nurture an economy of small businesses assisted by small government. 6. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1983), 129. 7. Ibid. 8. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, March 6–8, 1941, in Tolkien, Letters, 51. 9. Tolkien to Joanna de Bortadano (draft), undated [April 1956], in ibid., 246. 10. Ibid. 11. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 149. 12. Tolkien to Camilla Unwin, May 20, 1969, in Tolkien, Letters, 400.

Tracking Catholic Influence in The Lord of the Rings Paul E. Kerry

WHY SHOULD CLAIMS OF RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE ON THE LORD OF THE Rings excite such intense interest? The academic ideal holds that scholars seek influences because they expand and deepen our understanding of the text and the author. Historically the very word influence implies that an unseen power is exerting itself on someone or something. Tracing influence is akin to following a family tree, traversing generations to reach the primal roots. But it is also like unravelling the plot to a mystery, stripping away things as they seem to uncover things as they really are. Religious influence can be particularly difficult to trace and it is hotly contested when detected in a work of literature. Some critics contend that literature adheres only to its own rules, that all art is autonomous. Others worry that sniffing out influence in every nook and cranny reduces a complex piece of literature to a mechanical game of connect the corresponding dots. Indeed, Tolkien’s concerns about allegory are not far away. Yet, far from raising ire, interest in Christian influence may barely raise an eyebrow, depending on what one asserts. Insisting that religious influence plays a vital role in Baroque poetry in Silesia might garner weary acknowledgment. Overt religious themes in literature can be both more acknowledged and less important. Why settle for exploring religion in Paradise Lost when there are delicious subtexts to be had? For some, the very ubiquity of religion can make it less appealing, even if a master such as Milton opens up wondrous views of Christian theology. Stakes are substantially raised, however, when religion recedes from plain view in a work of art, eludes a second look, yet hovers on the edge of our senses. That is when scholars begin to dig. Where is religion in the writings of Goethe or Thomas Carlyle or in Mozart’s final Singspiel? Religious influence in Mozart, Carlyle, or 234

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Goethe is especially tantalizing because it is not easily proven; nevertheless, many find their works inspirational or edifying. When one actually gets down to the business and art of analyzing The Magic Flute, Sartor Resartus, or the Wanderer’s Nightsong (“Wandrers Nachtlied”) religion in such works appears impenetrable, defying the prying blows of the scholar’s spade. Here is Goethe’s famous poem, in the English translation rendered by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Thou that from the heavens art, Every pain and sorrow stillest, And the doubly wretched heart Doubly with refreshment fillest, I am weary with contending! Why this rapture and unrest? Peace descending Come ah, come into my breast! [Der du von dem Himmel bist, Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillest, Den, der doppelt elend ist, Doppelt mit Erquickung füllest; Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde! Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust? Süßer Friede, Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!]1

What is it that has drawn generations of Germans of all creeds to believe that this poem reflects theirs and yet speaks with equal power to those of no creed? In Die Zauberflöte, Prince Tamino must face the most difficult trial of his life—death is in the wings—when suddenly he hears the maiden, Pamina, singing that he will not be alone, that she will lead him and that Love will lead them both. The next scene is highly unusual for an opera—there is very little singing as they face their symbolic trials by fire and water (act 2, scene 28). The subdued music combined with their body movements—they walk resolutely as a couple, their countenances conveying sobriety, trust, and love, to face the trials together and in some productions each raises an arm to the square in the midst of the symbolic trials of fire and water—convey a deep religious

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profundity, as if a fundamental truth about facing the human condition is being taught. What is at work here? Is it Mozart’s Roman Catholicism, his Masonic imagination, or is it “secular awe”?2 In Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, once the reader weathers the torrential mix of Carlyle’s style and erudition, there are moments of awakening of the kind that Emerson felt and that informed the New England Transcendentalists who championed his work. The Lord of the Rings leaves readers with similar impressions— by authorial design we know that it is not meant to be overtly allegorical, although “applicable”—yet something profound and awesome has taken place as we follow the journey of the Fellowship. In striving to explore this sense, the tension between different views on the role of religion is exposed. At heart, attempting to understand if and how Catholicism plays a role in The Lord of the Rings is a struggle over meaning, not only of the text, but the meaning that the text has in our lives and how deeply we allow its claims to be felt. Have we been exposed to Roman Catholic ideas or its view of the world? Is The Lord of the Rings implicitly Christian? Or perhaps Tolkien here demonstrates that even the most dearly held beliefs can be suspended in Dichterslande, in the world of literature (to return to Goethe). Or is that easier said than done? In Carlyle’s case, when he writes about the Gospel of Work, it is typical to note his Calvinist roots in such passages as the following in Past and Present: “Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his godgiven Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, ‘self-knowledge’ and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins.”3 Carlyle’s biographer James Anthony Froude famously labeled him a “Calvinist without the Theology.”4 That description has stuck, not always to the benefit of understanding the complex issue of Carlyle and religion. The “difficulty” in Tolkien’s case is that he had not separated himself from Catholic theology, but rather embraced and cherished it. The paradox of course is that critics find it easier at times to allow for strands of Christian influence on a writer (or historian or theologian or any thinker) who is openly not religious. They fear that an author’s religion may be given too much weight and possibly distort scholarly analyses. This brings up another reason why vituperative debate can arise over the role of religion in an acclaimed text. In some ways the “J.R.R. Tolkien brand” can lend legitimacy to whatever it is associ-

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ated with in the marketplace of ideas. The more acclaimed The Lord of the Rings, the more influential it becomes and the higher the stakes of defining its intellectual and cultural wellsprings. To give a crude example: if I am a cat lover and it can be shown that The Lord of the Rings was inspired by Tolkien’s fondness for felines or that cat symbolism is central to the work, then not only is my identity confirmed, but once the cat is let out of the bag such an interpretation carries with it a lion’s share of cultural capital. There is nothing unusual, nefarious, or conspiratorial about this kind of thinking, particularly when the rise and fall of “brands” is related to precisely such ideological perceptions. It happens all of the time. Rarely does it involve a work of literature that, in its film versions, reached an unprecedented global audience. This has become a high stakes game in the culture wars in which scholarly interpretations can fall squarely into the crosshairs of identity politics. This tension has emerged in the debate over to what degree, if any, Catholic ideas influenced The Lord of the Rings.5 The politics of cultural identity does not have enough explanatory power to unpack what is happening in this debate. Some Catholics who have entered the discussion are not arguing for cultural identity, but for far more than that. This is not merely about Tolkien’s Catholic values influencing The Lord of the Rings, but of his Catholic practice and sacramentalist vision. That said, the aim here is not to confront the reader with an either-or proposition: to support or to undermine a Catholic interpretation of The Lord of the Rings; rather it is to explore the process of proving influence as such. Catholic interpretations provide excellent case studies because the arguments are vividly outlined and compellingly made. Why should this be so? Devout Catholics understand their religion as essentia, the essence of who they are, not an addition to a secular self. Although contributors to and glad partakers of the practical protection and benefits of what is surely one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment, namely, tolerance, this tolerance does not imply a concomitant epistemological shift that makes tolerance a, if not the, modern virtue for secularists. Relativizing strict dogmatism helped end religious turmoil, but to some degree also placed an old cloak on the new body of secular humanism. More to the point: for orthodox religious believers, religious interpretations are about the truth, and that lends a vitality and urgency to their writing and tone that makes them refreshingly open and assertive about claims of influence. Let us now turn to

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some of these recent arguments about the influence of Catholicism and analyze the underlying assumptions in them. First of all it is important to establish that there are Catholic interpretations of The Lord of the Rings. Apparently this cannot be assumed: “There was a time, not so long ago, when the fact of Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism was known to relatively few—the Tolkien Estate was allegedly reluctant to make much of it, thinking that it would be an obstacle to potential readers.” Stratford Caldecott, editor of Second Spring, continues that many in contemporary audiences do not care or are astonished “to find their hero was a daily communicant at the Catholic Mass.”6 Certainly no one doubts Tolkien’s skill in crafting a work that readers could enjoy on different levels. This leads to the question of priorities—are there more meaningful levels, richer symbols that accord with and spring from his Catholicism? The identity politics here can be described simply: to the degree that Catholicism is crucial to The Lord of the Rings, its erudition, heroic storyline, majestic descriptions, compelling mythology, and enormous popularity in polls as the best book of the twentieth century—all of this can reflect Catholic learning, imagination, and ability to speak to and inspire new generations. Or to see it from another perspective, if I am a non-Catholic reader who is profoundly impressed, moved, or awed by what I read, am I missing something deeply meaningful in my understanding of the book if I do not see Catholic ideas in it? At the very least, my interpretative abilities might be called into question by so major an omission. On a more personal level, does the awe the work inspires have a claim on me? Ought I to feel compelled by its values or at least reconcile its Catholic ideas with my own? The idea of influence involves assumptions about true and false interpretations concerning a literary work or productive and less productive ways of analyzing a text. But these in turn entail world views, in Tolkien’s case Catholicism. Influence, then, is as much about truth as it is about power: who controls what, how that control is maintained, why it is exercised and should I submit to it? Some Catholic interpreters of Tolkien conceive of themselves as fighting a rearguard action against what could be seen, from their coign of vantage, as the spiritually vacuous if not spurious moral misunderstandings of The Lord of the Rings. For example, Peter Jackson’s recent film version of the trilogy, in particular The Two Towers, is judged by some to favor “magical art above moral fibre, wizardry at the expense of willpower.”7

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For literary critics there is the omnipresent issue of the literary canon, and Tolkien has been notoriously difficult to situate. Certain Catholic literary historians seek to anchor Tolkien in the modern Catholic tradition of British writers that they see stretching from G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, to T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh, to Tolkien himself.8 Catholic scholars are also engaged in an interpretive struggle with those who would read the pre-Christian setting of The Lord of the Rings as a celebration of heathenism or at least a rejection of Christian doctrine, ritual, or theology. Tolkien himself feared “that readers might create a sort of ‘new paganism’ around his legendarium.”9 Thus these scholars feel called upon to defend a fellow Roman Catholic writer’s work from what they see as a severe distortion: the transformation of a fundamentally Christian book into pagan apologetics or a mere secular fantasy. After speaking on Tolkien in San Francisco and New York City, Catholic critic Joseph Pearce witnessed some members of the audience leaving the room “upon hearing that Tolkien’s Catholicism was an integral and crucial part of The Lord of the Rings.” Pearce was surprised to find that “even Catholics can be taken in by the secularist delusion.” He now believes it is “time to speak out robustly in defence of the Christian profundity in Middle Earth.”10 As an editor of the Saint Austin Review, his punchy and persuasive style reminds all that Catholics have long been able to defend themselves using the finest tools of reason. Some perceive an anti-Christian bias, a “predictable hostility to Tolkien’s faith.” David Mills, an editor of Touchstone magazine, addressed such a bias in the context of a critical review.11 What is at stake, then, is the very soul of the book and potentially the souls of the readers—for evangelizing is an important part of Catholicism—as Philip Lawler, former editor of the Catholic World Report, puts it. He pronounces The Lord of the Rings “the product of a Catholic imagination” and unabashedly proclaims: “And certainly non-Catholics can become absorbed by the Catholic literary classics. The acquisition of Catholic habits of mind is often the prelude to a religious conversion. And that, of course, is one more compelling reason why we should promote Catholic literature.”12 Joseph Pearce sees in Gandalf a “Prophet or Patriarch,” a “Christlike” figure who “lays down his life for his friends,” and in Aragorn, the exiled king, one who represents the “glimmers of the hope for a restoration of truly ordained, i.e. Catholic, authority.” “Ulti-

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mately,” according to Pearce, “The Lord of the Rings is a sublimely mystical Passion Play. The carrying of the Ring—the emblem of Sin—is the Carrying of the Cross. The mythological Quest is a veritable Via Dolorosa . . . the Quest is, in fact, a Pilgrimage.”13 The true “Lord of the Rings” is “the same Lord that Tolkien worshipped every Sunday at Holy Mass.”14 Stratford Caldecott makes a sustained argument that Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is present “in a hidden, implicit way throughout The Lord of the Rings.”15 Moreover, he points to the foreshadowing of the Eucharist through “lembas or the waybread of the Elves, the thin wafers of which ‘feed the will.’”16 These interpretations beg the question: should The Lord of the Rings, at minimum, exercise a special claim on Catholic readers? Academic boundaries melt away when it comes to The Lord of the Rings and Catholic assessments likewise cut across the disciplines. Historian Bradley Birzer points out thematic parallels between The Lord of the Rings and St. Augustine’s City of God.17 And philosopher Peter Kreeft observes that The Lord of the Rings follows the “threefold scheme of the greatest story ever told” that is, “Creation, Fall, Redemption . . . For Frodo, it is the Shire, Mordor, and the Shire (or rather, the Grey Havens).” He notes how certain names “sacramentally effect what they signify,” such as Tom Bombadil or Elbereth, in the way that the name of the Lord can be used to cast out devils.18 Novelist Michael O’Brien is succinct in his interpretation: “The Lord of the Rings trilogy is irradiated by the unspoken, unseen presence of Christ . . . The sense of the coming incarnation is very prevalent . . . Tolkien’s is a truly Catholic, incarnational vision, which implies Christ.”19 Thomas Howard, emeritus professor of English, propounds that The Lord of the Rings embodies Catholicism in its emphasis on narrative events: “Where Protestants gravitate towards the immense abstractions of sovereignty, election, depravity, atonement, grace, Catholics characteristically come to rest on events: Creation; Annunciation; Gestation; Parturition; the Agony in the Garden; the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. The Mass is an enactment, as opposed to the Protestant service, with its center of gravity in the sermon.” And secondly, Howard holds that the physicality of Tolkien’s work is another reflection of Catholic influence: “Catholicism is sacramentalist. The point where the Divine touches our humanity is a physical one. Creation; pelts for Adam and Eve; the Ark; the Tabernacle; the Womb of the Virgin; the flesh of the Incarnate One; splinters, nails, whips, and torn flesh. The entire Gospel is enacted—

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physically, in the Catholic liturgy.” Furthermore, he connects lembas, the athelas, mithril, and “Sting,” to Tolkien’s world of “holy water stoups, crucifixes, relics, the Rosary, and so forth, which stand on the cusp of the seen and the Unseen.”20 This sampling illuminates a number of interpretive positions taken by those who would show Catholic influence on The Lord of the Rings. How did they arrive at these conclusions? Usually such interpretations are supported by references to Tolkien’s Roman Catholic upbringing and later statements made by him. The salient moments in Tolkien’s biography that relate to his Catholicism are repeatedly cited: his father died in South Africa and Tolkien’s mother later converted to Catholicism. Her Protestant family subsequently cut her off from any family financial assistance; she died four years later of diabetes. His mother’s martyr-like perseverance in remaining true to her new faith, despite dire poverty, made a deep impression on Tolkien. As historian Owen Dudley Edwards eloquently observed: “This meant that Tolkien’s Catholicism was fused with his identity at the most basic points of self-awareness. Clichés about the influence of devout mothers do not begin to describe the force of an inheritance like this.”21 He and his brother were left in the care of a Roman Catholic priest at the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien persuaded his wife to convert before their marriage. He attended Mass regularly, often daily, all of his life, although he was displeased with the changes to the Mass following Vatican II.22 This recourse to biography is a reasonable approach, as T. J. Reed explains: “If the process of making a work of art is an achievement within the real world, and if its making is the key to its meaning, then it follows that the meaning is inseparably linked back to the world in which it was made.”23 The most frequently cited authorial statements that scholars deploy to highlight the Catholic nature of The Lord of the Rings rest on two letters. The first is Tolkien’s response to a letter sent by Father Robert Murray: “I know exactly what you mean by the order of grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. I . . . have cut out practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults and practices in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism.”24 This is usually harnessed to explain the lack of any overt references to Catholicism or Christianity in the trilogy,

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and at the same time to underscore the author’s intention in creating a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Another key letter is cited: “only one’s guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author’s works. Not the author himself (though he knows more than any investigator), and certainly not so-called ‘psychologists.’ But, of course, there is a scale of significance in ‘facts’ of this sort.” Three distinct levels follow: “There are insignificant facts (those particularly dear to analysts and writers about writers): such as drunkenness, wife-beating, and suchlike disorders. I do not happen to be guilty of these particular sins. But if I were, I should not suppose that artistic work proceeded from the weakness that produced them, but from other and still uncorrupted regions of my being.” Tolkien then suggests certain “more significant facts” that bear on his works such as his professional life at the University of Oxford and his philological pursuits. The third level includes this: “And there are a few basic facts, which however dryly expressed, are really significant. For instance I was born in 1892 and lived for my early years in ‘the Shire’ in a pre-mechanical age. Or more important, I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic.”25 This is used by Catholic critics to guide readers in accepting a hierarchy of influences, as defined by the author himself, and as one can plainly see, Roman Catholicism is maintained by Tolkien to be a central element. In addition, Tolkien said things about his works that have been cited to throw Christian interpreters off the trail (Daniel Soukup supplies a useful summary of what he calls the “contradictions”) in which Tolkien professes that The Lord of the Rings was written as a “story” or a “tale” meant to “amuse.” Moreover Tolkien claimed that he did not believe in “moral didacticism” and did “neither preach nor teach.” Famously he repeated that The Lord of the Rings “is neither allegorical nor topical.”26 Turning to an author’s words is seen as outmoded by some critics today. Developments in postmodern literary theory have culminated “in the attempted assassination of the author by critics and theorists . . . and in the notion of non-determinate and nondeterminable meaning, which discounts in principle all human effort to construct and convey sense. Literature becomes the place where human language is guaranteed least likely to work.”27 Yet, like Gandalf after his supposed demise in the Mines of Moria, authors appear to be making a comeback and the genetic approach gaining ground: “If the idea of author-related meaning is

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decried because it encroaches on the freedom of the reader, it may be asked what value there is in the freedom not to be disturbed by any thought or feeling outside the range the reader is already familiar with. Such solipsism is precisely what literature has traditionally been valued as freeing us from.”28 Having reviewed a few scholars’ arguments in defense of Catholic influences on The Lord of the Rings, it is appropriate to consider briefly the methodological cautions issued by Quentin Skinner about proving influence. This is a reduction of a sophisticated set of arguments by a leading intellectual historian, but even in this severely restricted form the problems can be thrown into relief.29 Skinner analyzes here the case of subject testimony of the kind cited above: “When testimony about inner historical connections is supplied by the subjects themselves we seem to pass beyond the capacity of the historian to make convincing use of the evidence in any one explanatory hypothesis. There seems to be no procedure available for converting testimony about intellectual relationships into evidence about the relationship themselves. The best result of this type of investigation could only be to guess that the available testimony was not obviously false. The most likely result would be to give an explanation which was arbitrary and probably incorrect.”30 This leads to the problem of the thoughtful skeptic. A subject’s testimony can be called into question in any number of ways: revisionism, deceit, ideology, and so forth. Testimony can always be reweighed, reinterpreted, or judged insufficient when considering influence.31 How does the critic who wants to prove influence react? More evidence is sought and what started out as a case to show influence actually becomes an attempt to prove a causal relation—a very different proposition. Or we are left with the vagaries of “ambience” or color as to the extent of the influence. Skinner rejects a reversion to a common-sense position, meaning an appeal to the skeptic that it would be, at some point, arbitrary not to admit influence, because that position carries with it underlying assumptions that are themselves “entailed,” “arbitrary,” and probably “false.”32 He isolates another move that those trying to pinpoint influence make—they sometimes take metaphysical leaps when faced with contradictory evidence and adumbrate alternative explanations, rather than accept that, for example, people change their moods and minds: “The historian’s interpretation may thus be based not merely on extracting but even on constructing doctrines more abstract than any which the writer in question might seem to have held, in order to dispose of inconsistencies in his opinions which

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would otherwise remain.” Skinner presses the point home: “The available evidence about an apparently close set of intellectual links might always be misleading; the irrecoverable evidence about apparently chance connections might always be the crucial point.”33 Skinner makes this provocative observation: “The claim to have discovered an influence . . . becomes . . . a remark . . . about the observer himself.”34 This is by no means meant to position Catholic interpretations of The Lord of the Rings as flawed or insidious. In fact, such interpretations are only too natural. Readers are informed by who they are and will of course see similarities to their own time, upbringing, and religion. Intellectual historians call this the fact-value distinction—the problem of witnesses who have observed the same phenomena giving different explanations. In other words, scholars or readers who have the same evidence tend to nevertheless organize their narratives about that evidence, especially the causal relations, according to their own values.35 Aside from this, readers must face the wonderful problem of the gifted writer: the better the writer, the more able to express or comment on or describe the human condition, the greater the tendency to see oneself reflected in the enchanted mirror of the writer’s creation. Those cited here who have interpreted Tolkien’s trilogy as being informed by a Catholic ethos are neither naively nor willfully imposing their religious views indiscriminately on the text. Rather, such discussions are grounded in convincing evidence, display interpretive acumen, and rejuvenate the trilogy in specific Catholic registers that are at once penetrating and persuasive. This chapter has attempted to examine the idea of influence in a specific context, a charged one, as it touches on the centrality of core meanings in Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, and explain how these meanings can confirm or challenge identity. Determining influence is difficult and complicated. But such complexity does not mean that influence cannot be shown, much rather it carries with it the challenge of careful reading, skilled scholarship, and sensitive analyses when staking such claims.

NOTES This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture I delivered to the U.K. Tolkien Society in 2004 and that appeared in the Society’s 2005 Proceedings. I am grateful to the Society for permitting me to draw on that material here.

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1. “Selected Poems” in Goethe and Religion. Special Issue of Literature and Belief 20, no. 2 (2000): 163. 2. Einstein, Mozart, 483. 3. Carlyle, Past and Present, 197–98. 4. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 2:256. 5. I thank Stratford Caldecott, director of the Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture, Oxford, England, for helping me to locate articles in Catholic periodicals. Here are a few of the more recent books from a Catholic perspective: A Hidden Presence: The Catholic Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Ian Boyd and Stratford Caldecott (2003); Bradley Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2003); many of the essays in Tolkien: A Celebration, edited by Joseph Pearce (1999); Joseph Pearce, Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998); Richard Purtill, J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion (1984; reissued 2003). 6. S. Caldecott, “Spirituality of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 4–9. 7. Fairburn, “Lord of the Rings,” 34. Christopher Beiting believes that at least some “of Tolkien’s spiritual vision comes through in the film.” (“Once More, with Soul,” 35.) 8. Pearce, “Christian Humanists,” 18–19. 9. Birzer, “Tolkien: Man Behind the Myth,” 17. 10. Pearce, “Tolkien Revisited,” 1. 11. Mills, “Reading Tolkien,” 61, 59–61. 12. Lawler, “Catholic Instincts, Catholic Imagination,” 1. 13. Pearce, “True Myth,” 38. 14. Pearce, “Lord and the Rings,” 1. 15. S. Caldecott, “The Lord & Lady of the Rings,” 56. 16. S. Caldecott, “Spirituality of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 9. Cf. Abromaitis “Distant Mirror,” 33–39. 17. Birzer, “Augustinian Understanding,” 14–18. 18. Kreeft, “Wartime Wisdom,” in St. Austin Review, 4, 11. 19. Interview with Michael O’Brien, in Catholic World Report 42. 20. Howard, “Sacramental: Catholicism anchored Tolkien’s Life,” 23–24. 21. Edwards, “Gollum, Frodo and the Catholic Novel,” 28. 22. Cf. Birzer, “Tolkien: Man behind the Myth,” 78 and passim. 23. Reed, Genesis, 8. 24. As quoted in Kilby, “Meeting Professor Tolkien,” 9. 25. As quoted in Pearce, “True Myth,” 35. 26. As quoted in Soukup, “Middle-earth—A Fundamentally Catholic World?” 18. 27. Reed, Genesis, 17–18. 28. Ibid., 18. 29. Skinner, “Limits of Historical Explanation,” 199–215. 30. Ibid., 206. 31. Ibid., 205–6. 32. Ibid., 209–12. 33. Ibid., 210. 34. Ibid., 212. 35. Cohen, “Causation in History,” 341–60.

Saintly and Distant Mothers Marjorie Burns

BACK IN 1964, WHEN TOLKIEN STUDIES WAS JUST GETTING ITS FOOTING, A Wheaton College professor named Clyde S. Kilby visited Tolkien in his Oxford home. From this contact and through correspondence and subsequent visits, came Kilby’s following comment about Tolkien the man. “I felt Tolkien was like an iceberg, something to be reckoned with above water in both its brilliance and mass and yet with much more below the surface. In his presence one was aware of a single totality but equally aware at various levels of a kind of consistent inconsistency that was both native—perhaps his genius—and developed, almost deliberate, even enjoyed. The word, if there were one, might be ‘contrasistency.’”1 I have always liked that comment by Kilby, no doubt because it matches my own belief that you can not get a grasp on Tolkien by fixing on single truths or single proclamations. The same is true of Tolkien’s characters. At first meeting, they seem straightforward enough. But if you look at them in light of other personalities from religious belief or other literatures—or even in the light of other characters from Tolkien’s own works—there is much more going on. Let me put it this way: have you ever seen one of those patternings of dots that look like nothing at all if you look at them straight on? But if you learn to spread your eyes a little or to cross them a bit, suddenly a whole new something jumps out—figures or words or shapes hidden to the single-minded view. It is like this with Tolkien. Hidden within his clear-cut style and his clear-cut characters are layers of complexity and opposing attitudes. For example, here at Mythcon 2008 we are having the year of the Tolkien warrior woman, and on the surface my topic is not quite on. I am talking about women, yes, but not about sword swinging ladies or Tolkienian Valkyries. What I am talking about instead are women in a more religious guise, women of peace and attentive care, a far more traditional and socially acceptable type. But watch 246

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me; before I am finished, I am going to rattle some of this comfortable imagery, and I am going to do so by revealing hidden connections and by contrasistency. And so to saintly and distant mothers: To begin, who are these mothers, and how did they find their way into Tolkien’s literature? The who is easy enough; they are representatives of a female ideal: individuals who serve others, care for others, tend to others, the way mothers do, but on a larger scale. In one way or another they are also distanced from the brutal world and distanced from sexuality. They represent an old, old theme in religion, a theme pushed to the front again by Victorian preferences. Tolkien, born a Victorian and raised a Christian, knew both varieties well. The most obvious Christian example is the Virgin Mary, whose influence on both Varda and Galadriel Tolkien grew to recognize. But what about the Victorians? How did they allow for saintliness and chastity mixed with motherhood? Well, consider Dickens. His finest female characters, those most deserving of praise, typically represent both—the way Agnes does in David Copperfield by devoting herself to a father growing helpless and childlike or (at a lower class level) the way the young orphaned girl Charley does in Bleak House by tending to her younger siblings with a mother’s care. The same ideal is found in Victorian fantasy literature, in Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, for example, where goddess-like figures combining Celtic and Christian attributes tend to children underneath the sea. More to the point for today, however, are George MacDonald’s creations, those larger-than-life, maternal women of power, women who (like Kingsley’s magical women) also appear both goddess-like and Christian and who were familiar to Tolkien through books he read as a boy. The North Wind in MacDonald’s haunting book At the Back of the North Wind is one example, as is the grandmother figure from The Golden Key,2 but the most influential of MacDonald’s wise and all-seeing women is the Old Princess from his two Princess books, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883). It is typical of Tolkien to deny his appreciation of MacDonald in one place and to praise him in another, making “wholesale attacks” on MacDonald, whom he called an “old grandmother” to Clyde Kilby, but elsewhere claiming he owed to George MacDonald (along with Andrew Lang) “the books which most affected the background of my imagination since childhood.”3

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What Tolkien mentions specifically is influence from MacDonald’s goblins,4 but this is hardly the whole of it. Anyone who reads George MacDonald’s Princess books with Tolkien’s literature in mind is sure to find other similarities—counselor-poisoned, dreamhaunted kings who rise to fight again, green, glowing eyes, wheels of fire, under-the-mountain adventures and under-the-mountain lakes, wine cellar escapes, a ring of importance that assists those lost in the dark, goblins with a cannibalistic bent, a great green gem given away as a gift, and our topic of today: goddess-like figures of female power who oversee the world.5 I am trusting that most of you know something about George MacDonald, a nineteenth-century Scottish minister turned writer who lived 1824–1905; and you may well know something about his two Princess books. But let me give you a bare-bone outline of what occurs. In the first book, The Princess and the Goblin, the young Princess Irene, a child “about eight years old” lives in a large house—half castle, half farm house—far off in the mountains. Her mother is dead, her father mostly far away. One day, left alone by her nurse, she explores the deserted upper regions of the house. Here she finds an old but tall and beautiful woman, her great-greatgrandmother, a woman also named Irene.6 This is the Old Princess, and she is working at a spinning wheel high within a tower and living on pigeon eggs. When the young princess returns to her nurse and relates her adventure, the nurse accuses her of lying. In the meantime a young miner boy, Curdie, becomes aware that the goblins of the mountains intend to capture the princess and marry her to the hideous son of the goblin king. After Curdie himself is captured by the goblins, the Old Princess sends the young princess into the mountains, guided by a thread of spider’s webbing. The young princess finds and rescues Curdie; but when she explains how she found him there, Curdie (who cannot feel the spider thread) scoffs at the idea. Now the goblins break into the castle by tunneling below. A battle ensues. The good folks win, and Irene’s “king-papa” is highly pleased with Curdie. That, boiled down to its barest elements, is book I (the book which MacDonald considered “the most complete thing I have done” and which G. K. Chesterton claims “made a difference to [his] whole existence”).7 In the second, The Princess and Curdie, Irene has moved to the town of Gwyntystorm and lives there in a castle with her father.

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Back in the mountains, Curdie has begun to lose his honest, cheerful ways. One evening, on a whim, he shoots a pigeon but quickly regrets what he has done. He then remembers what the young princess had told him about her “grandmother” (as she is more conveniently called) and finds himself running with the pigeon in his hands, making his way into the house and searching for the tower. The Old Princess is waiting, but this time she appears “withered,” “crumpled,” and ancient, nothing at all like the “huge great old grandmother” Irene had described.8 Curdie is unimpressed— until the Old Princess stands up and becomes, all at once, “a tall, strong woman,” although one who is “plainly very old.”9 The Old Princess has a test and a quest for Curdie. He is asked to thrust his hands into a fire of burning roses. The pain is extreme; but when he brings his hands back out, they have acquired a magical ability, the ability to sense through touch what others are like inside. A person degenerating to an animal state will reveal that animal to Curdie. He has only to clasp the individual’s hand and feel, for example, an ox hoof or a vulture claw. Those who are virtuous still reveal a human hand. Curdie travels to Gwyntystorm to help the king and princess. He is accompanied by a strange beast named Lina, an animal somewhat like a dog but monstrous, powerful, and protective of Curdie. Lina was once a woman who was “naughty,” but she is paying for that naughtiness and redeeming herself. To Curdie, her paw feels like the hand of a child. On their journey, Lina overcomes and gains the loyalty of forty-nine other strange beasts. In Gwyntystorm, Curdie is thrown in prison but escapes into the castle, where he finds evil men have been poisoning the king. Curdie and the young Princess Irene begin acquiring good food and untainted wine. Lina and the forty-nine “Uglies” clear the castle of its plotting and self-serving inhabitants, and the king recovers in time to join in a winning battle against an invading neighboring king. In time, Curdie (whose family, they learn, has royal blood) marries the young Princess Irene. And now to draw the Old Princess closer to Tolkien and closer to Tolkien’s religion as well. First off, similarities between Irene’s grandmother and Tolkien’s Varda should be evident (in spite of differences in scale). In much the same way that MacDonald’s Old Princess watches over a kingdom and a motherless child from her tower on high, Varda, on the “uttermost tower of Taniquetil,” is the one attentive to the Children of Ilúvatar (Elves and Men), the

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one who hears “voices that cry from east to west, from the hills and the valleys, and from the dark places that Melkor has made upon Earth.”10 Neither attentive, maternal figure (neither the Old Princess nor Varda) is presently a mother—not in the sense of mothering a child born of her flesh. Each has been distanced or removed from the role of literal motherhood, the Old Princess by a three-generation gap and Varda by Tolkien’s decision to revise the spousal relationships among his Valar to mean a spiritual rather than a physical bonding—so turning Varda and Manwë’s son and daughter of early drafts into the herald and handmaiden they become in The Silmarillion. There is more than the Old Princess behind Varda, of course; there is also the Virgin Mary (Mother of the Church) whose attentiveness to prayer and invocation in Catholic tradition clearly left its mark. Like both the Old Princess and Varda, Mary is associated with stars. A common interpretation of Mary’s name comes from stella maris, meaning “star of the sea,”11 a role exemplified by the twelfth-century Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote the following: [Mary is] that glorious star which . . . cast its radiance over the whole world—the star whose splendour rejoices heaven, terrifies hell, and sheds its mild and beneficent influence on the poor exiles of earth . . . O you who find yourself tossed about by the storms of life, turn not your eyes from the brightness of this Star, if you would not be overwhelmed by its boisterous waves. If the winds of temptations rise, if you fall among the rocks of tribulations, look up at the Star, call on Mary.12

The woman in Revelation 12:1 who has “the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” is by tradition associated with Mary as well. In Tolkien’s Varda, stars are more prominent yet. She is the Star-kindler, the Star Queen, and songs or chants about Varda— or directed to Varda—speak of her stars or praise her for guiding wanderers. Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear! O Queen beyond the Western Seas! O Light to us that wander here Amid the world of woven trees!

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 O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees, Thy starlight on the Western Seas.13

So sing the Elves in a song that echoes the Marian hymn, “Hail, Queen of Heaven.”14 Hail, Queen of heaven, the ocean star, Guide of the wanderer here below, Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care, Save us from peril and from woe. Mother of Christ, Star of the sea, Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.

MacDonald’s Old Princess is not specifically described as a creator of stars, but she is referred to as “Mother of Light” and “Lady of Light.”15 Because of the moon-shaped lamp that hangs in her tower, she is also known as the “Lady” or “Mistress” of “the Silver Moon.”16 But stars and starlight are emphasized most of all, and stars appear repeatedly throughout the books in various settings and forms. In The Princess and Curdie, the Old Princess guides Curdie and his father through the darkness of the mines by taking the likeness of a star. In The Princess and the Goblin, young Irene looks into the depths of her great-great-grandmother’s silver bath and sees “no bottom” but only stars “shining miles away.”17 At times the roof and walls of the Old Princess’s tower seem to disappear, revealing a moonless sky, a sky filled with stars. And within the tower itself, the Old Princess has a domed bedroom painted blue and “spangled” with decorative stars—an image echoed not only in The Book of Lost Tales, where Varda has spangled the blue roof of Manwë’s dwelling with stars,18 but also in the star-lit Dome of Varda from The History of Middle-earth and the blue domes (or vaults) with their trembling stars, that Tolkien ascribes to Varda in The Road Goes Ever On.19 There are good reasons for all these stars. What is more representative of beauty and permanence than a far-off nighttime star? And what is more unattainable? For each of these idealized female figures, then, an association with stars not only emphasizes their splendor and their constancy but their purity, too, their removal

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from the world and therefore from possible stain: Mary as a saint in heaven, Varda in far-off Valinor, and the Old Princess cloistered in her tower, spinning and waiting throughout the years. But it’s not quite that simple. Mary was once Mary of Nazareth and walked upon this earth; the Old Princess does, in fact, leave her tower (usually in altered form); and Varda, committed as she is to Valinor and standing by Manwë’s throne, nonetheless maintains an important presence on the plane of Middle-earth. She does so through a representative figure, through our next personage of interest—Galadriel, the Elf of Lothlórien. This is not to say Galadriel is merely an earthly manifestation of Varda. She was, after all, a rebel against the Valar in her youth and has long lived in exile. But Varda’s attentiveness to and understanding of those in Middle-earth is more stated than revealed, and it is Galadriel who gives shape and drama to Varda’s role within The Lord of the Rings. It is Galadriel, not Varda, who is positioned to meet the Fellowship face to face and read the Fellowship’s heart and mind. But most significant, especially for the achievement of the quest, is the phial Galadriel gives to Frodo, a phial in which is “caught the light of Eärendil’s star,” a star placed in the heavens by Varda.20 This same light appears in the ring Galadriel wears, as if “the Even-star [Eärendil] had come down to rest upon her hand.”21 Through Galadriel, then, a tangible contribution from Varda is made available to the quest. During Sam and Frodo’s journey through the tunnels of Shelob’s lair (a journey reminiscent of MacDonald’s star-and-tunnel scene), Tolkien repeatedly hints at the light’s origins, referring to the phial as the “star-glass” or, more simply, as “a star” or “the star.”22 Unlike Varda or Mary or the Old Princess, Galadriel does not live in a tower or a heavenly realm on high, but she, too, is set apart from the outer world and she, too, is honored and revered and invoked by those in need. Both Frodo and Sam call on Galadriel as though in prayer; and both refer to her as the Lady, a title Tolkien gives to Varda as well, and one that is nearly the same as the Our Lady he most often uses for Mary. When Sam touches the phial after his wounding of Shelob, he first calls out Galadriel’s name and then calls on Elbereth, a response that Tolkien recognized—or grew to recognize—is more than a little suggestive of Catholic invocations to Mary the saint on high. “Obviously many people have noticed that appealing to the Lady, the Queen of the Stars, is just

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like Roman Catholic invocations to Our Lady,” Tolkien explained in a 1965 BBC radio interview with Denys Gueroult. And Galadriel, he acknowledged, owes much of her character to “Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary.”23 There is this as well: like Varda and the others, Galadriel has been distanced from the biological and is presented more as a grandmother than a mother—and an occasional one at that. From what we see, it is not so much her immediate family or even Lothlórien Galadriel focuses on as it is the state of Middle-earth and Middleearth’s children at large. Galadriel, then, fits the category, too, giving us four interconnected, larger-than-life, far-seeing queenly24 figures who oversee the fate of a kingdom, a realm, or a world, and do so from positions of isolation and security. Or so it would seem. Legends about Mary show her rewarding the faithful or punishing sinners on the earthly plane; and the Old Princess and Galadriel (earth-based, even in their seclusion) not only reach beyond or move beyond the safety of their havens but share directly in the troubles or dramas that come to their worlds. By necessity, by the very nature of living on earth, the Old Princess and Galadriel also live within time and should therefore be subject to time, and yet each seems immortal and appears to others as both young and old. Like an accomplished Celtic goddess, the Old Princess is able to remain invisible or to change her outward appearance, shifting from a tender maiden to a powerful queenly woman to an aged crone. At times she seems all three at once, making her “the great old young beautiful princess” Curdie admiringly describes as “clothed in green” and the “mother of all light,” a woman “worn to a pale shadow with old age” at the same time she is “as young as anybody can be.”25 Galadriel’s shifts, although similar, are suggested rather than actual. In Sam’s words (words as effusive and spontaneous as Curdie’s), Galadriel is sometimes “like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like,” “warm” or as “cold as frost in the stars” or “as merry as any lass.”26 There are other similarities still: both also test the hearts and intentions of those who come to them. Each is spoken of in a derogatory way by the ignorant and uninformed. The Old Princess is thought to be Old Mother Wotherwop, “an old hating witch” seen only at night and delighting in doing ill.27 Galadriel is known as a sorceress and a weaver of deceit.28 Both are involved with spinning

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or weaving (traditional goddess activities and ones ascribed to Mary as well); both are givers of gifts; and for both, these gifts include a large green stone.29 The Old Princess has both a silver basin and a silver bath, and like the bottomless star-filled water of the Old Princess’s bath, Galadriel’s silver basin, the Mirror of Galadriel, at first shows only stars. Once the visions fade, stars appear again. Where the Old Princess has a great-great-granddaughter whose eyes are like “a star dissolved in the blue” of a nighttime sky,30 the other has a granddaughter, Arwen Undómiel (Evenstar), in whose eyes “the light of stars” appears “grey as a cloudless night.”31 In much the same way that the Old Princess becomes a guiding star for Curdie and his father, leading them through goblin tunnels to a deserted goblin hall, the Phial of Galadriel takes the hobbits through passageways that Tolkien, in The War of the Ring, describes as Orc or Goblin tunnels.32 Galadriel, however, is more restricted, more held in place (at least in The Lord of the Rings) than the Old Princess is. Galadriel leaves Lothlórien only at the story’s end, after the enemy has been removed. MacDonald, on the other hand, not only allows the Old Princess time away from her tower but grants her an active and daring role in the drama that unfolds. He does this in a highly ingenious way that both places her out into the world at large and insulates her from any tainting brutality. Much of this away-from-home, transportable security comes from an emphasis on maidenhood, a shining and protective maidenhood that accompanies the Old Princess in spite of her experience and years.33 Her distancing from biological motherhood has already been mentioned, but MacDonald has other tricks as well. Although we are told that she is a queen, she is nearly always referred to as a princess, a far more maidenly title than queen and one that brings her closer to her great-great-granddaughter, with whom she shares a name. So much is made of this sharing between the two that a sense of doubleness begins to emerge, as though the old Irene and the young Irene are in some ways one.34 Even the titles, The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, are not quite clear. Either princess, young or old, would suffice for the title role. Most ingenious of all, however, is what occurs at the end of the second book when Curdie, in the castle at Gwyntystorm, at last finds an honest and honorable servant. This servant, a recently hired housemaid, is never given a name. At first she is only referred

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to as “the girl,” “the housemaid,” or “the chambermaid”; but as time goes by, she is more and more frequently referred to as simply “the maid,” and with repetition maid begins to take on the meaning of maiden instead of servitude. At this point something occurs that ought to grab the attention of readers of The Lord of the Rings. The sick, weakened, and childishly fearful king has been brought back to health in time to lead a small army of loyal citizens against a neighboring realm. Riding along with this small, unlikely army, which includes the young Irene, is the honest, loyal maid. It was expected she would stay behind, but she quietly follows along, riding on a “great red horse” and seated on a royal saddle that had belonged to the mother of the younger Irene.35 When all seems hopeless, it is the maid who turns the fate of the battle by sending pigeons flying against the enemy. And so we learn that the hired maid was the Old Princess all along. This is not quite Éowyn’s story, yet something of Éowyn is here: the unexpected triumphant coming from a maiden who should not have joined the battle, a maiden who is there for a newly recovered king.36 Éowyn, of course, is not a saintly or distant mother; nor is Éowyn an obvious proxy for Galadriel, the way Galadriel is for Varda, or the way the star-glass is for Galadriel. Nonetheless Éowyn rounds out Tolkien’s use of the Old Princess role. Once we are aware that Galadriel has a basis in MacDonald’s Old Princess Irene, and once we recognize that Éowyn, too, is a literary descendant of the Old Princess, a sort of associative linkage occurs. It is not a linkage as neat as the mathematical axiom that says “things equal to the same thing are equal to each other,” but—to those in the know—Galadriel is now brought closer to Éowyn and closer to the Joan of Arc experience Éowyn fulfills. Those who have read beyond the main text of The Lord of the Rings will not be much surprised. In her youth Galadriel was “of Amazon disposition”;37 the name Nerwen—given to her by her mother—means “man-maiden,”38 and in appendix B of The Return of the King, Galadriel brings down the walls of Dol Guldur and lays bare its pits after Sauron’s fall.39 But there is more going on than this, more ways in which Galadriel (and others belonging to the saintly sisterhood) show a savviness about war and the mind of the enemy. Look at it this way: however protected or unsullied these ladies may appear, they are not mere emblems of innocence and tender sympathy but watchers on the ramparts, watchers who have seen it all, watchers with more than a

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little knowledge about both evil and good. Like concerned and attentive mothers in troubled neighborhoods, they know what the bullies are up to and they know when you skin your knee. For all her saintliness and gentle demeanor, Mary is traditionally depicted as crushing the Serpent’s head; and Varda and Galadriel make their own moves and take their own stands in equally forceful ways. In The Silmarillion, Varda is the one who understood and rejected Melkor even “before the making of the Music.” And Melkor in turn hates Varda and fears her “more than all others whom Eru made.”40 In Morgoth’s Ring, she “arises in her might” with a “beauty” both “high and terrible.”41 And in an early draft from the Book of Lost Tales, Varda (in Old Princess and Éowyn fashion) rides outward from Valinor, seeking Melko42 after his theft. She is by the side of her lord, and she bears “a blazing star before him.”43 The same perception and outward-reaching strength are true of Galadriel. In Unfinished Tales, Galadriel strives to “counteract the machinations of Sauron.”44 As she is more far-seeing about the Enemy than Celeborn and more aware of what needs to be done, she looks to the Dwarves with “the eye of a commander, seeing in them the finest warriors to pit against the Orcs.”45 But even in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien leaves no doubt about Galadriel’s attentiveness to evil and to the injury evil brings. “Even as I speak to you,” she explains to Frodo, “I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind.” But to Sauron the “door” to Galadriel’s thoughts remains firmly “closed.”46 This is no small feat. Not even Saruman—Maia that he is and sent from Valinor—achieved what she achieved: infiltrating the mind of the Enemy and holding him at bay. And so, with this, let me end by changing my title from “Saintly and Distant Mothers” to “Saintly and Distant Mothers and a Bit of the Warrior, Too.”

NOTES This essay was given as the Scholar Guest of Honor speech for the 39th Conference of the Mythopoeic Society, in New Britain, Connecticut, August 16, 2008. The conference was entitled “The Valkyrie and the Goddess: The Warrior Woman in Fantasy.” 1. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, preface. 2. A draft of the introduction Tolkien began (but did not finish) for The Golden Key can be found in the 2005 edition of Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major, edited by Verlyn Flieger.

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3. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, 31; Tolkien, “Tolkien On Fairy-Stories,” 207; and “Interview with Tolkien.” Tolkien again describes MacDonald as a grandmother, “a horrible old grandmother.” 4. See Tolkien to the editor of the Observer, undated [January–February 1938], in Tolkien, Letters, 31; Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, April, 25, 1954, in ibid., 178; Tolkien to Hugh Brogan, September 18, 1954, in ibid., 185. 5. There are even a few reversals: MacDonald’s forest spiders serve the good rather than the evil. The nonsense songs Curdie sings to scare off the goblins are echoed in songs Tolkien’s goblins sing. In The Princess and Curdie, a woman turned beast (a guiding, helpful beast) is ultimately redeemed; in The Lord of the Rings, the degraded Gollum (a false guide) fails to find redemption. 6. Irene, appropriately enough, means peace, but it was also the name of one of MacDonald’s daughters. 7. From a letter quoted in Greville MacDonald’s George MacDonald, 411–12, and from Chesterton’s introduction to the same book. Chesterton goes on to call The Princess and the Goblin “the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life” of “all the stories I have read” (MacDonald, George MacDonald, 9). 8. MacDonald, Princess and Curdie, 21–22. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. Tolkien, Silmarillion, 26. 11. In a note to a draft of another letter, Tolkien writes that the Anglo-Saxon star (or star-group) that inspired his Eärendil was often thought to refer to either Christ or Mary (See Tolkien to “Mr. Rang,” drafts, undated [August 1967], in Tolkien, Letters, 385). 12. Saint Bernard, Sermons of St. Bernard, 46–47. 13. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1987), 88–89. 14. Stratford Caldecott was the first to notice similarities between Tolkien’s appeal to Varda and “Hail, Queen of Heaven” in Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. 15. MacDonald, Princess and Curdie, 47–48. 16. Ibid., 50 and title of chapter 3. 17. MacDonald, Princess and the Goblin, 179. 18. Tolkien, Lost Tales 1:73. 19. Swann and Tolkien, Road Goes Ever On (1978), 67. Blue is also the color most often associated with Mary and the two Princesses Irene. 20. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1987), 393. 21. Ibid., 380. 22. Tolkien, Two Towers (1987), 329–31, 339. 23. Tolkien to Ruth Austin, January 25, 1971, in ibid., Letters, 407. 24. The Old Princess was once a queen; the Virgin Mary and Varda are given the title of queen; and Galadriel, though not a queen, is occasionally called one as well. 25. MacDonald, Princess and Curdie, 50–52. 26. Tolkien, Two Towers (1987), 288. Galadriel’s age can be calculated as about 8,555 years, and there are indications that the Old Princess is considerably older than the role of great-great-grandmother requires. She is not yet “two thousand years of age,” she tells the young Irene, and she speaks in terms of thousands of years to come. MacDonald, Princess and the Goblin, 121.

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27. Tolkien, Princess and Curdie, 37. 28. Tolkien, Two Towers (1987), 118. 29. The stone given to Aragorn is variously the Elessar, an Elessar, or perhaps an imitation of the Elessar worn by Eärendil when he sailed into the West. Like the Arkenstone, the Princess’s green stone comes from the heart of a mountain; like the Palantíri, MacDonald’s stone grants a form of far-seeing; and, like Tolkien’s Ring that Gandalf throws into a fire, MacDonald’s stone must be placed in fire before its revelation appears. (A similar use of fire as catalyst occurs in The Princess and the Goblin, when the Old Princess throws a ball of spider webbing into her fire before giving it to Irene.) 30. MacDonald, Princess and the Goblin, 2. 31. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1987), 239. In Arwen it was believed “the likeness of Lúthien had come on earth again,” and Lúthien is herself affiliated with stars and the twilight sky (ibid.). Tinúviel, the name Beren bestows on Lúthien, means Daughter of Twilight (The Nightingale) from a word related to sparkle, as in Tintallë (the Kindler), the title given to Varda. (See Tolkien, Silmarillion, 351, 365.) Galadriel’s name, in various interpretations, carries related meanings: radiance, glittering, and gleaming. (See Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, 44–45). 32. Tolkien, War of the Ring, 215. In Unfinished Tales, in a section written after The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel herself travels through mountain tunnels by passing though Khazad-dûm (234). A possible reference to this appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Galadriel speaks knowingly to Gimli about Kheledzâram, Kibil-nâla, and the “many-pillared halls of Khazad-dûm” (1987 edition, 371). 33. In his essay “George MacDonald’s Princess Books,” Roderick McGillis points to the protective shielding that accompanies the innocent in the world of fairy tales. The young Princess Irene not only “remains unaffected by adult sarcasm” but “need fear no harm from the goblins” (see 150). 34. To add to this sense of doubleness, the younger Irene’s bedroom, like the Old Princess’s bedroom, is painted blue and ornamented with stars. 35. MacDonald, Princess and Curdie, 223. 36. There are other Éowyn parallels. In MacDonald’s story, Curdie realizes those plotting against the king intend to marry Irene to one of their number. Similarities to Wormtongue, who desires Éowyn, should be obvious. There are echoes here from Charles Dickens as well. In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, who has been usurping the family business and poisoning Agnes’s father through drink, plans to marry Agnes. Adding to these similarities are the ways in which all three evil counselors are compared to serpents or snakes. 37. Tolkien to Catharine Findlay, March 6, 1973, in Tolkien, Letters, 428. 38. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 227. 39. Tolkien, Return of the King, 375. 40. Tolkien, Silmarillion, 26. 41. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 15, 377. 42. An early form of Melkor’s name. 43. Tolkien, Lost Tales, 1:154. 44. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 234. 45. Ibid., 232. 46. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (1987), 380.

The “Last Battle” as a Johannine Ragnarök: Tolkien and the Universal Bradley J. Birzer

BEGINNING AT A VERY YOUNG AGE, JOHN RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN, A MAN of deep feeling and convictions, cherished three patriotisms: England and the North; Catholic Christendom; and a coherent stoic and Johannine understanding of eternity, time, and creation.1 As myth and shadow, as well as in history and substance, these three loyalties presented conflicts, not easily resolved. Not surprisingly, these three things found their way, directly and indirectly, into Tolkien’s legendarium. Just as he would have to reconcile their conflicting elements in his personal life, he would also have to in his mythology. As Christopher Tolkien remembered, his father spent a considerable amount of the last decade and a half of his life working out philosophical and theological questions in the mythology. “As his life went on, the mythology and poetry in my father’s world sank down behind the philosophy and theology in it,” his son continued. His father viewed himself as a recorder, not an inventor, of the mythology. “Where there were discrepancies between things he had written, he sought to study more deeply what he had already written in order to reconcile them,” his son and literary executor explained.2 At its heart, the issue in Tolkien’s personal thoughts in real life as well as in his legendarium revolved around which would rule Western civilization: pagan will, noble but limited, or Christian grace, a gift freely given to the justified human will. In the long run, Tolkien’s love of Catholic Christendom and a Johannine understanding of the divine economy incorporated and sanctified Tolkien’s idyllic attachment toward Anglo-Saxon England. In so doing, Tolkien followed the trends of the nineteenthand twentieth-century Romantics, embracing first nationalism and, later, universalism. Nowhere is this more clear than in Tolkien’s 259

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changing understanding of the place of the Apocalypse in his mythology.

THE NORTHERN IMAGINATION AND ITS LIMITATIONS One cannot doubt Tolkien’s love of England and all things AngloSaxon. As the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925–45) at Pembroke College, Oxford, and as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature (1945–59), Tolkien knew his subject well. In addition to his several profound publications on Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English subjects, Tolkien taught a variety of courses on early Germanic and Icelandic languages and legends as well as on well-known Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf, “The Battle of Maldon,” and the “Wanderer.”3 For Tolkien, one should never regard Anglo-Saxon as a mere linguistic transition or as a part of a cultural stew simmered over time, ending with a cup of modern English, equal to Latin and French. Instead the venerable language carries with it its own sense of purpose and mystery. “Anglo-Saxon is a language whose literary verse idiom is at once cultivated and remote from the modern,” Tolkien argued in 1930. “It can awake and repay a scholarly enthusiasm similar in quality to that excited by a classical language.”4 In his academic essay on the Ancrene Wisse and the Hali Meidhad, Tolkien noted that one can find a fairly strict continuity from Old to Middle English, despite the Norman invasion. The language of the Ancrene Wisse, itself a dialect of Middle English, “is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassions for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness,’ and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman,” he argued. Instead, “it has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech—a soil somewhere in England.”5 In other words, William the Conqueror changed little, except to burden an already profound and distinctly complex cultural tradition and language.6 To his students, Tolkien spoke bluntly about the subject, comparing the complex and Christianized Anglo-Saxon language and culture to the relative simplicity of its Norman counterparts: “At the first of these classes he handed round some sample passages

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of medieval English he had typed out. One of them was an English translation of the first verses of the Gospel according to John,” a student remembered. “‘You see,’ he said triumphantly, ‘English was a language that could move easily in abstract concepts when French was a still a vulgar Norman patois.’”7 Already baptized and sanctified, the Anglo-Saxon imagination could readily and importantly intuit an understanding of the rather complex Greek, stoic, and Christianized concept of the Logos. Nowhere, he wrote in a private letter during World War II, was the northern spirit “nobler than it was in England, no more early sanctified and Christianized.”8 For Tolkien, the true history and heritage of England resided in and derived from its Anglo-Saxon character, not from a hodgepodge of Latinate languages, dominating the older Anglo-Saxon traditions. And, beyond the realm of academe, England had its place in Tolkien’s legendarium. The Oxford don often noted that Middleearth corresponded, in mythical form, to Europe. The term was, tellingly, an Anglo-Saxon term for “the land between the oceans,” “the land between Heaven and hell,” the “land between the spirit and the material.”9 In sum, it represents Christian Europe. “Rhun is the Elvish word for ‘east.’ Asia, China, Japan, and all the things which people in the west regard as far away,” Tolkien noted in an interview in 1966. “And south of Harad is Africa, the hot countries.”10 England, by such logic, would be the Shire, as Tolkien himself admitted.11 Most specifically, the Hobbits represented the best of the English.12 Many of his deep loyalties stemmed from his childhood move from South Africa to England. Tolkien’s earliest memories are of Africa, “but it was alien to me, and when I came home, therefore, I had for the countryside of England both the native feeling and the personal wonder of somebody who comes to it. I came to the English countryside when I was about 31/2 or 4—it seemed to me wonderful. If you really want to know what Middleearth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly with the natural earth.”13 Tolkien had originally hoped his legendarium would serve as a mythology for England, a land devoid of all but the deeply Christian Arthurian myth, complete with Catholic apparitions of the Lady, Old Testament-style prophecies, and a search for Christ’s cup from the evening before his crucifixion. Even Beowulf, possibly written by an Anglo-Saxon religious, dealt with the history of the Danes and the Geats as opposed to that of the Anglo-Saxons. In his

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own letters, Tolkien confirmed this. “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.”14 Tolkien wanted a mythology for England. As he had told Clyde Kilby, a visiting professor from Wheaton College, near Chicago, the seed of his entire mythology came from the Anglo-Saxon poet, Cynewulf in his poem “Crist.” The moving lines: “Lux fulgebat super nos. Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended.” These are “rapturous words from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology,” Tolkien admitted.15 Kilby asked Tolkien to translate the Anglo-Saxon into modern English. “Here Earendel brightest of angels, sent from God to men,” Tolkien replied.16 To remedy the failure of the Anglo-Saxon people to leave a record of their mythology, Tolkien’s earliest attempt at mythological epic, The Book of Lost Tales, was to be a myth for England. The two volumes, begun during the First World War and abandoned shortly after its end, follow the story of a wanderer, Eriol, Angol, Waefre, or Aelfwine. Eriol means “one who dreams alone,” Angol is obviously Angle, Waefre is Anglo-Saxon for “restless,” and Aelfwine (“elf friend”) is a character who appears in the Old-English poem, “The Battle of Maldon.”17 Like the younger J.R.R. Tolkien himself, Eriol is a restless, wandering Anglo-Saxon, in search of legend and truth. As Christopher Tolkien noted in his commentaries in the History of Middle-earth, “Thus it is through Eriol and his sons the Engle (i.e., the English) have the true tradition of the fairies, of whom the Iras and Wéalas (the Irish and Welsh) tell garbled things.” With these stories, Christopher continued, “a specifically English fairy-lore is born, and one more true than anything to be found in Celtic lands.”18 In The Book of Lost Tales, the Elves originally went into the land of Men to spread good dreams, but the men slowly lost interest and belief. “Sorrow and greyness spread amongst them and Men ceased almost to believe in, or think of, the beauty of the [Elves] and the glory of the” gods.19 The island is England, Christopher Tolkien explained in the commentary to the Book of Lost Tales, and the Anglo-Saxons will eventually inherit the home and the culture of the Elves, thus giving it to the West as a whole.20

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But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story—the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be “high,” purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.21

Tolkien’s understanding of England as an anamnesis for Western civilization and the world is especially strong in The Book of Lost Tales. The well-educated of Edwardian England, of which Tolkien was a product, strongly embraced the concept of faerie. In his excellent book on Tolkien and the First World War, John Garth explains that “faerie as a version of Olde England could evoke home or childhood and inspire patriotism.”22 And, with England, Tolkien loved the North. When The Silmarillion came out posthumously, Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla, summed up her father’s beliefs well: “When thinking of his imagination I feel that like his scholarship it was overwhelmingly Northern European in every detail of his deepest loves and fears. The ideas aroused by the sufferings of long, hard, cruel winters, the dazzling beauty of the short flowering of Spring and Summer, and the sadness of seeing this once more pass back into the darkness; the symbolism of darkness and light is continual in this book [The Silmarillion] for good and evil, despair and hope. Such a climate also nourished the virtues which he held in such high regard; heroism and endurance, loyalty and fidelity, both in love and in war.”23 The Northern idea of courage especially impressed Tolkien. “One of the most potent elements in that fusion” between Christianity and the old traditions, Tolkien stated in a 1936 lecture to the British Academy, is “the theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early Northern literature.”24 Simply because the pagan gods departed, he continued, the enemies remain. “For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.” And, as with the

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virtuous pagan warriors of the North, “the monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God.”25 As a devout Roman Catholic, Tolkien remained critical of an unadulterated pagan will. In the end, sheer will becomes nothing more than self-absorption, even if it leads one to sacrifice himself for the greater good. In this, Tolkien follows Christian teaching. First, he follows the lead of his patron saint, St. John, standing with the Suffering Servant at the foot of the cross. One can find elements of St. John in several figures important to Tolkien: Wiglaf, Sir Gawain, and Samwise Gamgee. Second, Tolkien’s views echo those of St. Augustine in book 19 of The City of God. Christians, he wrote, reject the notion of heroism as will-centered paganism, the North African explained. After all, all virtues, if from will and not grace, will become vices, the North African argued.26 But, if they did adopt the term, they would give it to the martyrs, those who gave completely of themselves for a glory far beyond the individual.27 Properly understood and sanctified, as the Anglo-Saxons had done, Northern will could serve as a critical anamnesis for the West and, indeed, for the entire world. “It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.” Such imagination, Tolkien continued “has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times.”28 Here Tolkien echoed another Christian Humanist of his generation, the brilliant Italian-German philosopher and theologian Romano Guardini. “Deeply significant for the new religious outlook of medieval man was the influx of the Germanic spirit. The religious bent of the Nordic myths, the restlessness of the migrating peoples and the armed marches of the Germanic tribes revealed a new spirit which burst everywhere into history like a spear thrust into the infinite. This mobile and nervous soul worked itself into the Christian affirmation. There it grew mightily. In its fullness it produced that immense medieval drive which aimed at cracking the boundaries of the world.”29 Certainly Tolkien understood the dangers presented by paganism, and he knew that the Northern will must be tempered by Christian grace. Tolkien offered his fullest explanation of his fears of an unadulterated pagan heroism in his 1953 poem and essay, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” One finds the great statement of Northern heroic will in the medieval “Battle

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of Maldon.” “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens,” one line reads.30 Still, cautioned Tolkien, the strength of the statement comes from the specific standing and office of the speaker. “Yet the doctrine appears in this clarity, and (approximate) purity, precisely because it is put in the mouth of a subordinate, a man for whom the object of his will was decided by another, who had no responsibility downwards, only loyalty upwards,” Tolkien wrote. “Personal pride was therefore in him at its lowest, and love and loyalty at their highest.”31 Citing the examples of Wiglaf and Sir Gawain, Tolkien concluded, “It is the heroism of obedience and love not of pride or willfulness that is the most heroic and the most moving.”32 In this view, Tolkien echoed not only Saints John and Augustine, but he also echoed some of the greatest thinkers of Western civilization: Socrates, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, John of Salisbury, Sir Thomas More, and Edmund Burke. Given the limitations of romantic English nationalism, Tolkien soon incorporated the best elements of The Book of Lost Tales into his larger legendarium, where they took on a larger significance. The story, especially The Lord of the Rings, became much more than a myth for any one people or nation. It, instead, became a myth for the restoration of Christendom herself. With the return of the king, Aragorn, to his rightful throne, Tolkien argued, the “progress of the tales ends in what is far more like the reestablishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome.”33 In his own private writings, Tolkien equated numerous parts of Italy with various geographical aspects of Gondor.34 In his diary, for example, Tolkien recorded that with his trip to Italy, he had “come to the head of Christendom: an exile from the borders and far provinces returning home, or at least to the home of his fathers.”35 In a letter to a friend, Tolkien stated that he had holidayed “in Gondor, or in modern parlance, Venice.”36 And, even more important, Aragorn represented the highest order of Christian king as outlined by St. Thomas in his On Kingship. His closest adult friend, C. S. Lewis, might have understood Tolkien’s intentions best when he wrote But the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal; the war of the Ring is only one of a thousand wars against him. Every time we shall be wise to fear his ultimate victory, after which there will be “no more songs.” Again and again we shall have good evidence “the that wind is setting

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East, and the withering of all woods may be drawing near.” Every time we win we shall know that our victory is impermanent. If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man’s unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest; hammerstrokes, but with compassion.37

A COHERENT COSMOLOGY AND A JOHANNINE RAGNARÖK One of the most important northern texts for Tolkien was the Völuspá, translated often as the Seeress’s Prophecy or The Song of the Sibyl. Tolkien first encountered it as a young boy, but he studied it seriously as a student at Oxford in 1913.38 As an adult, Tolkien frequently taught courses on it at Oxford.39 Attempting to demonstrate to the faculty of Oxford the need for a study of northern languages and culture, Tolkien formed the Kolbitar, a group of men dedicated to reading Old Icelandic sagas and myths in their original, untranslated form. Their number included C. S. Lewis. On Tuesday, February 8, 1927, Lewis recorded his own excitement regarding his activities in the Kolbitar. “Spent the morning partly on the Edda . . . An exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse under the initiation of Longfellow at about the age of nine; and its return, much stronger, when I was about 13, when the high priests were M. Arnold, Wagner’s music, and Arthur Rackham’s ‘Ring.’ It seemed impossible then that I should ever come to read these things in the original. The old authentic thrill came back to me once or twice this morning; the mere names of god and giant catching my eye as I turned the pages of Zoega’s dictionary was enough.”40 One of Lewis’s closest friends, Owen Barfield, never shared Lewis’s love of the Northern. “What I hadn’t got any—rapport with Lewis, or, I said, not that I didn’t sympathize with it, but just hadn’t had the experience was this terrific emphasis, emotional emphasis, he had on what he called Northernness . . . And even the climate.—I think he’d rather have gone to Finland than to Greece.”41 Very importantly, Tolkien also tried to write “companion poems” to make the various Scandinavian stories more coherent.42 In a letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien noted, “Thank you for your wonderful effort in translating and reorganizing The Song of the Sibyl. In return again I hope to send you, if I can lay my

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hands on it (I hope it isn’t lost), a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza.”43 Equally important, Tolkien incorporated the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit and the name of Gandalf from the Völuspá.”44 Finally he explained that his own mythology ended with a version of the Ragnarök. “This legendarium ends with a vision of the end of the world, its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Silmarilli and the ‘light before the Sun,’” Tolkien wrote in a private letter in the early 1950s, “after a final battle which owes, I suppose, more to the Norse vision of Ragnarök than to anything else, though it is not much like it.”45 Tolkien, therefore, knew these stories at the level of the intellect and at the level of the soul. A highly controversial piece among scholars today, the written form of the Völuspá dates back to the thirteenth century. In oral form, it is much older. By the time the Völuspá had been set down in writing in the Poetic Edda, Scandinavian culture had become Christian, and scholars debate to what extent the prophecy remains pagan.46 Even the term edda might have Platonic, Stoic, and Christian roots, as some scholars have argued that the term means “reason,” “soul,” or “soulful utterance.”47 This, of course, is not a far cry from Plato’s “divine madness”—the mind beside itself —or from St. John’s understanding of the Word as “the light that lightens every man.”48 But, whether the pagan cultures anticipated the Christian or whether the earliest Christian scribes recorded the pagan myth with Christian elements will forever remain a mystery of deep significance. According to the myth of the Völuspá, Odin summoned the Sibyl, possibly a resurrected giantess, to prophesize. She tells a moving story of creation and betrayal. The most controversial part among scholars, however, is the ending, known as Ragnarök, the “Doom of the Gods.” Precipitating the end, the trickster god of chaos, Loki, leads monsters along with the frost and fire giants in rebellion against the gods. The old gods and their foes perish fighting each other: The sun turns black, earth sinks into the sea, the brightest stars vanish from the sky, steam rises up in the conflagration, a high flame plays against heaven itself.49

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As the heavens are consumed by a purging fire, the world is reborn into what seems to be a golden age. It is nothing less than the return to Eden, but without the labor the Judeo-Christian God demands of the prefallen Adam. There afterwards will be found in the grass the wonderful golden chequers, those which they possessed in ancient times. Without sowing the fields will grow, All ills will be healed, Baldr will come back; Hod and Baldr, the gods of slaughter, will live happily together In the sage’s palaces—do you understand yet, or what more?50

Despite all appearances, the golden age is not all that it seems, for death shall arise quickly and evil lurks barely below the surface. Then the powerful, mighty one, he who rules over everything, will come from above, to the judgement-place of the gods. There comes the dark dragon flying, The shining serpent, up from Dark-of-moon Hills; Nidhogg [the dragon] flies over the plain, in his wings He carries corpses; now she must sink down.51

Many, if not most, scholars have argued that Ragnarök and the destruction of the old gods does usher in the golden age, dismissing Nidhogg as a minor annoyance, soon to be rectified by the “powerful, mighty one.” But, this seems to miss the point of the ending, for the peace following Ragnarök is a false peace, and the appearance and ascendancy of the demonic dragon Nidhogg is a portent of more evil to come. Some scholars have also argued that the “she” in the last line refers to Nidhogg. If this is true, then the demon will disappear, and the golden age might stick. But, this seems unlikely. More likely, the “she” in the last line refers to the Sibyl. She has given her prophecy, and she must now descend back into the earth. The end of the prophecy shows Nidhogg with corpses; the end of the Völuspá shows the Sibyl returning to the earth. In Norse theology, consequently, Ragnarök brings nothing more than the abyss, and the absence of a New Jerusalem is clear. While numerous obscurities exist in St. John the Revelator’s vision, it offers serious hope at the end of the prophecy, unlike its Norse counterpart. On the island of Patmos, an elderly John received the revelation from the Christ himself and from angels. As

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commanded, St. John wrote letters to the seven churches of Asia, analyzing their moral strengths and weaknesses, directing them to purify themselves of blatant and latent corruption. Toward the end of each letter, St. John wrote: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev 2:7).52 Those who prevail through the various trials will receive the “morning star” (Rev 2:28). After the admonitions to repent are given to the seven churches, Christ the Lamb of God opens seven seals, releasing calamities on mankind. Then, seven angels blow seven trumpets, each unleashing additional devastation. Meanwhile two witnesses for God preach repentance. After 1,260 days of preaching, they are slain, resurrected, and called to heaven. “And a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev. 12:1). As she delivers a baby boy, a “great red dragon” attempts to devour the mother and child (Rev. 12:3). The child, a boy, goes to the throne of God and the woman escapes into the wilderness. “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven” (Rev. 12:7–8). Thrown from the heavens to the earth, the dragon is joined by a beast from the sea and a prophetic beast from the earth. This unholy Trinity performs signs and wonders, and many follow them. While the forces of evil lead humanity astray, Christ harvests the world with a sickle. An angel likewise reaps the grapes of the earth to press out the bloody wine of God’s wrath. The war continues, as the beast continues to delude many men and women. The wicked city of Babylon falls. Finally Christ the White Rider, leading an army of white-robed martyrs, conquers the beast and his prophet, throwing them into a lake of fire. An angel seizes “the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and [binds] him for a thousand years, and [throws] him into the pit, and [shuts] it and [seals] it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while” (Rev. 20:2–3). At the end of the thousand years, Satan will arise again, but he will be defeated almost immediately by fire from the heavens. God will then judge all souls, looking through the Book of Life. Should a person’s name fail to appear, he will be thrown into the lake of fire. After this final judgment, the New Jerusalem shall descend

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and remain for eternity. “And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:23). Tolkien only revealed rare glimpses of his own end-times mythology, but it seems to draw heavily upon the Norse and Christian versions of the apocalypse. Certainly the legendarium as a whole has a complete feel—with a beginning (the Ainulindalë), the middle (a hint of the Incarnation as described in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth), and an end (the Last Battle). The Ainulindalë, as published in The Silmarillion, was complete. The nature of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, appears only in speculation in the Athrabeth. The conversation between Andreth and Finrod, though, does anticipate the Incarnation. “They say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end,” Andreth skeptically states. “Even if He in Himself were to enter in,” Finrod answers, “He must still remain also as He is: the Author without.”53 By comparison, much of what Tolkien revealed about his own apocalypse seems minor. As early as the Book of Lost Tales (ca. 1917), Tolkien’s end most resembled the Norse Ragnarök. In this earliest version, Fionwë, son of Manwë, destroys Melkor, but only by destroying the world in the process.54 By 1926, when Tolkien wrote the “Sketch of the Mythology,” the author had added much to the end. Now, Tolkien allied Túrin Turambar to Fionwë and, ultimately, the former slays Morgoth with “his black sword.” Additionally the fire of the Silmarils will “rekindle the Two Trees,” and “Gods and Elves and Men shall grow young again, and all their dead awake.”55 Four years later, in 1930, Tolkien wrote out the earliest version of The Silmarillion. Now Tolkien put “the end” in the form of a prophecy, spoken by Mandos, the god of the dead, before the Valar, with the elves reporting it to the peoples of the world. When the world is old and the Powers grow weary, then Morgoth, seeing that the guard sleepeth, shall come back through the Door out of the Timeless Night; and he shall destroy the Sun and Moon, but Eärendel shall come upon him as a white flame and drive him from the airs. Then shall the Last Battle be gathered on the fields of Valinor. In that day Tulkas shall strive with Melko, and on his right hand stand Fionwë, and on his left Túrin Turambar, son of Húrin, Conqueror of Fate [coming from the halls of Mandos]; and it shall be the black sword of Túrin

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that deals unto Melko his death and final end; and so shall the children of Húrin and all Men be avenged. Thereafter shall the Silmarils be recovered out of Air and Earth and Sea; for Eärendel shall descend and surrender that flame which he hath had in keeping. Then Fëanor shall take the Three and yield them unto Yavanna Palúrien; and she will break them and with their fire rekindle the Two Trees, and a great light shall come forth; and the Mountains of Valinor shall be levelled, so that the Light shall go out over all the world. In that light the Gods will again grow young, and the Elves awake and all their dead arise, and the purpose of Ilúvatar be fulfilled concerning them. But of Men in that day the prophecy speaks not, and no Man it names, save Túrin only, and him it names among the Gods.56

This version remained essentially unchanged in the 1937 edition, the last Tolkien would work on until the 1950s. The only significant difference in the 1937 version is that Tolkien adds that the Earth shall “be broken and re-made” during the Last Battle.57 When Tolkien returned to The Silmarillion in the 1950s, he removed the “prophecy of Mandos,” and Christopher Tolkien used this version to conclude his 1977 version of the book. “If it has passed from the high and beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred, and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended,” the 1977 version concludes, “Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.”58 Importantly, in the 1977 version, the Elves no longer spread the rumor of the Prophecy of Mandos. “The myth that appears at the end of the Silmarillion is of Númenórean origin; it is clearly made by Men, though Men acquainted with Elvish tradition,” Tolkien explained in the posthumously published Morgoth’s Ring.59 In an explanatory note to one of his last writings, “The Problem of Rôs,” written in the late 1960s, Tolkien concluded: “Nor would their tongue be heard again, unless the prophecy of Andreth the Wise-woman should prove true, and Túrin in the Last Battle should return from the Dead, and before he left the Circles of the World for ever should challenge the Great Dragon of Morgoth, Ancalagon the Black, and deal him the death-stroke.”60 Christopher Tolkien left out the role of Túrin and his possible deification at the Last Battle in the recently published The Children of Húrin.61 Numerous other glimpses of the Last Battle appear in the legendarium. In the 1980 Unfinished Tales, Tolkien very briefly discussed

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Manwë’s role in the Last Battle, here referred to as the “Dagor Dagorath.”62 In a discussion of the Istari, the question arises about the nature of Gandalf and the possibility that he is the “last appearance of Manwë himself.” Gandalf, however, cannot be Manwë, as the latter “will not descend from the Mountain until the Dagor Dagorath, and the coming of the End, when Melkor returns.”63 Gandalf, like his foe Sauron, was originally a Maia spirit serving the Valar. In the 1977 version of The Silmarillion, Elbereth, a Vala and the wife of Manwë, forms the constellation of Menelmakar (Orion) as a sign of the Last Battle to come. “And high in the north as a challenge to Melkor she set the crown of seven mighty stars to swing, Valacirca, the Sickle of the Valar and sign of doom.”64 In discussion, the “sickle,” known to the Hobbits as “the Wain,” makes its appearance several times in The Lord of the Rings. This constellation is Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, called the Wain or Carleswæn and similar names by Anglo-Saxons and other Northern Europeans. Elbereth, the starry Queen of Valinor anticipates Mary, the Woman Crowned with Twelve Stars in the Book of Revelation. Several cultures and races play a significant role in the Last Battle as well. The Silmarillion (1977), for example, states that the Dwarves, made originally sturdy to resist Melkor, would help remake “Arda after the Last Battle.”65 The Númenóreans play some role in the last battle as well. “Ar-Pharazôn the King and the mortal warriors that had set foot upon the land of Aman were buried under falling hills: there it is said that they lie imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten, until the Last Battle and the Day of Doom.”66 Indeed the fall of Númenor at the end of the Second Age foreshadows the end of the world.67 “The level to which the Númenóreans were able to advance their civilization, in spite of its turn toward excess and darkness, makes their fall of such proportions that it disrupts the physical land itself,” Anne Petty writes, “the end of the world as they knew it; Tolkien’s wished-for Ragnarök.”68 Although Tolkien took much from the Völuspá, he clearly took much from the Revelation of St. John as well. This should not surprise the modern reader. Tolkien, wielding the moral imagination, often sanctified the pagan. As he stated in a 1966 interview, “You asked me what books move me; mostly mythology moves me and also upsets me because most mythology is distasteful to people. But it seems to me that we miss something by not having a mythology which we can bring up to our own grade of assessment. That’s

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what I always wanted to do—mythological things like Greek or Norse myths; I tried to improve on them and modernize them—to modernize them is to make them credible.”69 Deeply religious and devout in his Roman Catholic faith, it would be bizarre for its theology and culture not to influence his views.70 “He was still writing substantial notes the year before he died,” Christopher recalled, “but much of his thought in his last 10 years was devoted to explaining things in his own work as though it were something he had discovered rather than something he had created and could alter.”71

ROMANTICS: NATIONALISTS AND UNIVERSALISTS Tolkien’s move from a romantic nationalist vision of England to a more Christian universalist vision follows the changes in the main currents of myth from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Driven by the romantic impulse as found most recently in the arguments and writings of Edmund Burke, many in the nineteenth century reacted strongly to the dry, calculated liberalism and utilitarianism of the eighteenth century by embracing myth. Many of these myths proved specifically nationalist, providing an important glue for the emerging nation states of that century. One can find the most blatant of the nationalist myths in Finland and in Germany. In Finland, for example, hoping to unify his people, Elias Lönnrot compiled the Finnish Kalevala. While Lönnrot’s vision proved benign, the German project did not. In Germany, both Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to create a uniquely German myth by paganizing the origin and character of the emerging nation-state. In his diary, Wagner recorded “I am the most German being, I am the German spirit . . . But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn’t it, for it is humanly finer than all else? Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What glorious people it ought to become.”72 Seventeen years earlier, Wagner had embraced a form of universalism, socialism for all of mankind. “I [revolution] will destroy every wrong which has power over men. I will destroy the domination of one over the other, of the dead over the living, of the material over the spiritual, I will shatter the power of the mighty, of the law of property. Man’s master shall be his own will, his own desire his only law, his own strength his only property, for

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only the free man is holy and there is naught higher than he. Let there be an end to the wrong that gives one man power over millions . . . since all are equal I shall destroy all dominion of one over the other.”73 Wagner successfully combined these two things— national socialism and a pure German character (according to his lights)—in his four-part grand opera, The Ring of the Nibelung. Inspired by pagan tales of an accursed golden Ring from the medieval Scandinavian Poetic Edda and the Volsunga Saga, Wagner portrays the gods to be malicious and manipulative fools who deserve death. Wagner, English philosopher Roger Scruton explains, “proposed man as his own redeemer and art as the transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world.”74 Certainly the death of Siegfried in the final part of Wagner’s Ring opera, leading to the fiery consumption of Valhalla in Wagner’s rewrite, strongly suggests the apotheosis of man. In his own art, Wagner significantly changed the prophecies as found in the Seeress’s Prophecy of the Poetic Edda. But, as argued above, the pagan end of the Völuspá has far more in common with St. John’s visions of the Apocalypse than it does with Wagner’s more utopian nineteenth-century vision. Although he came to disagree with Wagner on many things, Friedrich Nietzsche also sought to reclaim a pagan world. In his Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche described the need, as he sees it, to destroy the myth of Christianity, but not to destroy myth and religion altogether. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, has only increased the suffering of the world. “Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions of ‘God’ and ‘sin,’” Nietzsche wrote, “will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child’s plaything or a child’s pain seems to an old man.” What has the Church done for the world, Nietzsche asks, but “make a sublime abortion of man?” Weak men—if they be men at all—“with their ‘equality before God,’ have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe,” Nietzsche feared, “until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre.”75 Man must move beyond his Judeo-Christian self and reclaim a latent paganism. The former has served as nothing but a shackle, while the latter will liberate the true man. Nietzsche himself believed that his ideas had taken him, mystically, into another universe or plane of existence, confirmed later, by a vision of Zarathustra, a pre-Christian Persian priest and prophet, within and next to him.76 With such an affirmation, Nietzsche believed his

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writings to be a fifth Gospel, obviating those of Sts. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He, Nietzsche, then, would serve as a “rival and successor to Jesus,” espousing the myth of the Overman and transcending the limitations of good and evil.77 Simultaneously a number of mythmakers of the nineteenth century sought a universalist myth, transcending the limitations and particulars of the nation-state or a particular race or people. Each of these anticipated the currents of mythology of the twentieth century. In Scotland, for example, Sir Walter Scott Protestantized the Middle Ages, offering a non-Catholic population in the British Isles and in America an acceptable form of heroism and knightship. It especially influenced the upper crust of the antebellum American South. Often called the “American Sir Walter Scott,” James Fenimore Cooper sought to create a universal republican myth in his famous Leatherstocking Tales. In all five volumes, the reader encounters the “natural Republican” Natty Bumppo, an orphan, of English stock, raised by a remnant of the Delaware Indians in a Christian missionary village. For all intents and purposes, Natty is the American Frontier. The opening to all of the tales, The Pioneers, especially reveals an idyllic republic: “Places for the worship of God abound with that frequency which characterizes a moral and reflecting people, and with that variety of exterior and canonical government which flows from unfettered liberty of conscience,” Cooper wrote. “The whole district,” he continued, “is hourly exhibiting how much can be done, in even a rugged country, and with a severe climate, under the dominion of mild laws, and where every man feels a direct interest in the prosperity of the commonwealth of which he knows himself to form a part.”78 Reflecting the language in the Old Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Cooper described the “good” Indians as “natural republicans,” implying that while they are still in a savage state, they have the potential to become citizens of the American Republic, itself a “republic of republics.”79 When one takes all five Leatherstocking Tales together, one discovers that Cooper believed the American frontier to be the place where any person—male, female, black, white, Indian—can become a real man or woman.80 In the same vein, Englishmen, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Morris, embraced a universal myth of Western civilization, often portraying England as its greatest manifestation, although Morris could have criticized the England of his era. While Morris’s myth focused on the medieval West, Tennyson just as often em-

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braced the classical West, often tying it directly to the modern West or Britain. This seems most clear in Tennyson’s brilliant poem “Ulysses.” The poem follows a king who gives “Unequal laws unto a savage race” but the race knows the king not at all. The king, the poem continues, has enjoyed life and suffered greatly. He has seen many things—places, persons, and kingdoms—and yet remains a gray spirit who pursues knowledge ceaselessly, “beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” In the end, though, all that remains is the struggle. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in the old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal-temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.81

The nineteenth-century mythmakers—romantics all—remained divided, sometimes one with another, sometimes one with oneself. Should myth claim to be particular or universal? Should it embrace the particular at the expense of the universal, or should it proclaim the universal at the expense of the particular? Certainly the conflict was a strong one, and more often than not our memory of nineteenth-century myth tends to be that which glorifies the particular, and, generally, that means an inordinate love of the barbarian and the nationalist. In the twentieth century, the romantics turned to a blatant universalism. The clearest early example of this is Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, which follows the late ninth-century AngloSaxon King Alfred as he struggles to unite his own people, the remaining Britano-Roman nobility, and the mad Irish against the heathen Danish invaders. The story moves from despair to hope to despair and back to hope. The hope comes not from Alfred, but from the Mother of God, who appears as a symbol of Grace to give warning, guidance, and inspiration. But, even with victory, there appears at the end of the ballad a prophecy of coming darkness. I know that weeds shall grow in it Faster than men can burn; And though they scatter now and go, In some far century, sad and slow, I have a vision, and I know The heathen shall return.

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They shall not come with warships, They shall not waste with brands, But books be all their eating, And ink be on their hands. Not with the humour of hunters Or savage skill in war, But ordering all things with dead words, Strings shall they make of beasts and birds, And wheels of wind and star. They shall come mild as monkish clerks, With many a scroll and pen; And backward shall ye turn and gaze, Desiring one of Alfred’s days, When pagans still were men.82

The intellectuals and ideologues, Chesterton’s Alfred understood, would assault the world in a far more devastating manner than had their barbarian ancestors. Men such as Nietzsche would play with the Word, thus distorting our image of It. Others followed Chesterton’s lead, each in his own way looking for a universal understanding of the human person via myth. The Welshman, David Jones, explored the meanings of Western civilization in his art and poetry by drawing upon the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Dawson. In turn, figures such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, and Evelyn Waugh greatly admired Jones’s work. His most famous poem, Anathemata, attempted to find a liturgy, or theology of history, within Western and world civilization, and the poet incorporated history, archeology, and anthropology in his heavily footnoted mythopoeic study.83 Not surprisingly, it offered an Augustinian vision of history. Equally importantly, Jones believed that man, at his most fundamental level, is a maker and creator. He, therefore, has within him a vital sacramentality, allowing him to make and understand words and signs. The highest form of art, then, was the Christian Mass, and its “nature allowed it to subsume all works of art, even those prior to its institution.”84 In his poetry and plays, but especially in The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot toys with our all-too-comfortable notions of time and eternity. And, in the middle of his playing, he arrives at the same point as Chesterton did. Nothing good or right or virtu-

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ous is possible without Grace. We as human persons find our deepest meanings and purposes fulfilled only when the “fire and rose are one.”85 That is, through the Incarnation, the Word offers the light that lightens up every man. Without that grace, nothing but evil is possible. Such grace allows us to escape the tyranny of the seasonal cycles. “Come, happy December, who shall observe you, who shall preserve you,” the chorus asks in The Rock. Again, only the Grace imparted through the Incarnation allows us to be virtuous, to be moved to do the right thing for the right reasons, to find our place within God’s economy of Grace. “For us, the poor, there is no action / But only to wait and to witness.”86 Although nowhere near the quality of the previous figures mentioned in this chapter, but a mythmaker in her own right and by her sheer overwhelming popularity, British writer J. K. Rowling has also embraced a universal understanding of the human person. While the earlier volumes of the Harry Potter series contain a number of Christian symbols—the blood of the unicorn giving life or death depending on the state of the partaker, a phoenix named Fawkes—the sixth volume, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, contains the most overtly Christian elements of the series to that point. Rowling also draws heavily on Northern, Greek, and MiddleEastern myth and language, and many Christian critiques have complained that Rowling presents a world that is seemingly gnostic and dualistic: the good and the evil seem equal. But, digging deeper, especially with the character of the greatest wizard, Dumbledore, we find a subtle but profound revision of the simple dualism of good and evil. Dumbledore, we discover, has had two significant victories against evil forces: once in 1945 and a second time in the late 1980s or early 1990s. These dates, respectively, the defeat of the axis powers and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, cannot be accidental. This, of course, is not to suggest that the seven Harry Potter volumes are about the defeat of Nazism and Communism—rather they are about the defeat of evil, with references to two of its most recent manifestations. Instead, in volume six, the reader discovers that love transcends magic. In it, Dumbledore states to Harry: “You are protected, in short, by your ability to love! The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort’s! . . . [Voldemort] was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.”87 Voldemort, the Dark Lord, has split his soul into seven parts, to which Dumb-

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ledore states: “Splitting it is an act of violation, it is against nature.”88 “Lord Voldemort has seemed to grow less human with the passing years, and the transformation he has undergone seemed to me to be explicable only if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call ‘usual evil.’”89 While the relatively peaceful nineteenth century allowed for romantics (e. g., Wagner, Nietzsche) to indulge in idyllic nationalism, the utter brutality of the twentieth century forced its romantics (e.g., Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling) to reconsider the fundamental nature of the human person.90 To be sure, the systematic murder of over 205 million persons in the killing fields, Gulags, and Holocaust camps of the twentieth century forced the most thoughtful of men and women to reconsider the most fundamental question of all: what is man? Rather than identifying him as being merely Aryan, bourgeois, or some other particular thing, the mythmakers of the twentieth century did what they could to combat the Picassoesque deconstruction and reconstruction of the human person by identifying the universal elements of man. In the end, in order to transcend the limits of the mind and the body, the mythmakers of the twentieth century found the one universal quality of man: the soul. It was a truth they recovered rather than discovered, as great figures in Western civilization such as St. John and Snorri Snurlson had already advocated the idea to their own respective communities. And, with the lead of Tolkien as the greatest mythmaker since Dante, the twentieth-century mythmakers embraced the concept of the edda, “the soulful utterance.” In turn, millions of readers have unknowingly accepted the complex theology and philosophy of the Best of the Western tradition.

CONCLUSION With his legendarium, Tolkien has offered the most complete mythology of the last several centuries. Indeed, one can, without exaggeration, argue that he will be read alongside Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton five hundred years from now (should the “Last Battle” be postponed). Deeply rooted in the universalist Western tradition of the Stoics and the early and medieval Christians, Tolkien created a myth to explore the nature of the human person against the avaricious dreams of the capitalists and the diabolical schemes of the national and international socialists, all of whom

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would replace God with man. Even with incomplete ideas, such as Tolkien’s understanding of the Last Battle, one finds this to be true. In his mythology, one learns more about the nature of the human person, creation, time, eternity, and God from hobbits, elves, and dwarves than from all the scholarly tomes of the last 100 years.

 This article is dedicated to Cecilia Rose Birzer (b. and d. August 8, 2007)

NOTES 1. By Johannine, I mean St. John’s discussion of the Word as found in the prologue to his gospel, verses 1–14. 2. Cater, “Filial Duty,” 92. 3. On Tolkien’s teaching, see the excellent essay by one of his last undergraduate students, John S. Ryan, “Tolkien’s Formal Lecturing.” 4. Tolkien, “Oxford English School,” 779. 5. Tolkien, “Ancrene Wisse,” 106. 6. Or, as Tom Shippey wonderfully put it: “It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conquerer.” See Shippey, Road to Middle-earth (2003), 40. 7. Curtis, “Remembering Tolkien and Lewis,” 429. 8. Tolkien to his son, Michael, June 9, 1941, in Tolkien, Letters, 56. 9. Tolkien to Rhona Beare, October 14, 1958, in ibid., 283. 10. Resnick, “Interview with Tolkien,” 41. Tolkien, however, told Clyde Kilby that he had never said this. See Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, 51. 11. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, 51; Brace, “Footsteps of the Hobbits,” (an interview with Tolkien); and Foster, “Early History.” 12. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, 51; Norman, “Prevalence of Hobbits,” 98; and Tolkien, Interview with Dennis Gerrolt, BBC Radio 4, January 1971. 13. Resnick, “Interview with Tolkien,” 41. 14. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 144–45. 15. Tolkien to Clyde Kilby, December 18, 1965, in WCWC, Folder “JRRT to Miscellaneous Correspondents.” 16. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion, 57. 17. “Battle of Maldon,” 16. See also Verlyn Flieger’s path-breaking chapter, “Footsteps of Aelfwine,” and Tolkien, Book of Lost Tales 1:14. 18. Tolkien, Lost Tales 2:290. 19. Ibid., 1:20. 20. Ibid., 1:24. 21. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in Tolkien, Letters, 144–45. 22. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 78. 23. Priscilla Tolkien, “Talk Given at the Church House,” 4.

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24. Tolkien, “Beowulf ” (1963), 70. 25. Ibid., 72. 26. Augustine, City of God, bk. 19, ch. 25. 27. Ibid., bk. 10, ch. 21. 28. Tolkien, “Beowulf ” (1963), 77. 29. Guardini, End of the Modern World, 9. 30. Tolkien, “Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” (1953), 3. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Ibid., 13–16. 33. Tolkien to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 1967, in Tolkien, Letters, 376. 34. See, for example, Tolkien to Richard Jeffery, September 7, 1955, in Tolkien, Letters, 223; also Carpenter, Biography (Boston), 222. 35. Carpenter, Biography (Boston), 222. 36. Leighton, “Tolkien’s Clue,” 11. 37. C. S. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” 89. See also Shippey, “Appeal of the Pagan,” 151–52. 38. Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion 2:651. 39. Ryan, “Tolkien’s Formal Lecturing,” 45–62. 40. W. H. Lewis, C. S. Lewis: A Biography. 41. Barfield, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett, November 19, 1983, Kent, England, transcript, in WCWC. 42. On the “companion poems,” see Scull and Hammond, Tolkien Companion 1:140. 43. Tolkien to W. H. Auden, March 29, 1967, in Tolkien, Letters, 379. 44. Tolkien to “Mr. Rang,” drafts, undated [August 1967], in ibid, 383. 45. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, undated, in Letters, 149. 46. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion, 1, 9, 275; and Bellows, Poetic Edda, 2. 47. Hollander, Poetic Edda, xiii. 48. For an excellent examination of Plato’s concept of “divine madness,” see Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness. 49. Larrington, Seeress’s Prophecy, in Hollander, Poetic Edda, verse 57. 50. Ibid., vv. 61–62. 51. Ibid., vv. 65–66. 52. This and all biblical citations in the article are from the Revised Standard Version. 53. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 321–22. 54. Tolkien, Book of Lost Tales 1:219. 55. Tolkien, Shaping of Middle-earth, 40–41. 56. Ibid., 165. 57. Tolkien, Lost Road, 333. 58. Tolkien, Morgoths’s Ring, 203–4. 59. Ibid., 342. 60. Tolkien, Peoples of Middle-earth, 374. 61. Tolkien, Children of Húrin. 62. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 395, 402. 63. Ibid., 395. 64. Tolkien, Silmarillion (Boston 1977), 48. 65. Ibid., 44. 66. Ibid., 279; see also Tolkien, Sauron Defeated, 336.

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67. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 341. 68. Petty, Land of Heroes, 84. 69. Resnick, “Interview with Tolkien (March 2, 1966),” 40. 70. Shippey, “Appeal of the Pagan,” 151–52; Flieger, Splintered Light, 160–61; Petty, Tolkien in the Land of Heroes, 121ff. 71. Christopher Tolkien quoted in Cater, “Filial Duty,” 92. 72. Wagner, Diary, 73. See also Wagner, Ring of the Nibelung. 73. Millington, Wagner (London: J. M. Dent, 1984), 37. 74. Scruton, “Modernism,” in Modern Culture, 68. 75. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 63, 70–71. 76. On Nietzsche’s mysticism, see Lubac, Drama of Atheist Humanism, 469ff. 77. Ibid., 477. 78. Cooper, Pioneers, 13–14. 79. Ibid., 80. 80. For a fuller discussion of Cooper and Republican myth, see the introduction to Birzer and Willson, American Democrat. 81. Tennyson, “Ulysses.” 82. Chesterton, White Horse, bk. 8, lines 242–66. 83. See Jones, Anathemata. 84. Schwartz, Third Spring, 300, 331ff. 85. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” final line. 86. T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” opening chorus. 87. Rowling, Half-Blood Prince, 511. 88. Ibid., 498. 89. Ibid., 502. 90. This is not to suggest the nineteenth century was peaceful, only peaceful in relative sense in comparison with the twentieth century. Indeed, the world has never witnessed any brutality—state vs. state or state vs. its own citizens—comparable to that of the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century warfare remained political and economic in its essence, changing borders, fighting for resources, and so on. Twentieth-century warfare and state-sponsored terror at home and abroad added ideological strife to its violence.

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———. The Return of the Shadow. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins, 2002. ———. Sauron Defeated. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2002. ———. The Shaping of Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. ———. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. New York: Ballantine Books; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. ———. The Silmarillion. London: HarperCollins, 2006. ———. Smith of Wootton Major. Edited by Verlyn Flieger. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. Tolkien on Fairy-Stories. Expanded edition, with commentary and notes, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2008. ———. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. ———. The Treason of Isengard. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins, 2001. ———. Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins/Unwin Hyman, 1988. [Also published 1965.] ———. The Two Towers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Second edition published 1987. ———. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. ———. The War of the Ring. The History of Middle-earth 8. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. Tolkien MSS., Bodleian Library, Oxford. Tolkien, Priscilla. Foreword to Gray, Tribute to Tolkien, vii–x. ———. “Talk Given at the Church House [Bookshop] Westminster on 16.9.77.” Amon Hen 1977, no. 29: 4–6. Tolley, Clive. “The Symbolism of Light and Darkness in The Lord of the Rings.” In Boyd and S. Caldecott, Hidden Presence, 69–79. Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 15, 1 (2002). A special edition devoted to J.R.R. Tolkien and the Christian Imagination. Treloar, John L. “Tolkien and Christian Concepts of Evil: Apocalypse and Privation.” Mythlore 15.2, 56 (1988): 57–60. Turville-Petre, E.O.G. Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Urang, Gunnar. Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writing of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien. London: SCM Press, 1971. Vaccaro, Christopher T. “‘And One White Tree’: The Cosmological Cross and the Arbor Vitae in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 42 (2004): 23–28. Vidmar, John. English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585– 1954. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2005.

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Wagner, Richard. The Diary of Richard Wagner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. The Ring of the Nibelung. Translated by Andrew Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. Ward, Maisie. The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity, from St. Bede to Newman. London: Sheed and Ward, 1933. Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1945. ———. Helena. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2005. Weigel, George. The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Weinreich, Frank. “Ethos in Arda. Charakteristka der Ethik in Mittelerde.” In Honegger and Weinreich, Eine Grammatik der Ethik, 111–34. Wells, Sarah, ed. The Ring Goes Ever On. Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings. 2 vols. Coventry, England: The Tolkien Society, 2008. West, John G., Jr., ed. Celebrating Middle-earth: “The Lord of the Rings” as a Defense of Western Civilization. Seattle: Inkling Books, 2002. ———. “The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization.” In West, Celebrating Middle-earth, 15–30. Westra, Haijo Jan, ed. The Commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1986. Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in NineteenthCentury English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Whittingham, Elizabeth A. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 7. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Williams. Donald T. “Is Man a Myth? Mere Christian Perspectives on the Human.” Mythlore 23.1, 87 (2000): 4–19. Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954. Wood, Ralph C. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Louisville, Ken.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. ———. “Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean.” In Hart and Khovacs, Tree of Tales, 85–102. Wright, Greg. Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter—A Look at the Unsettling Power of Tolkien’s Mythology. Sisters, Ore.: VMI Publishers, 2003. Wright, Marjorie Evelyn. “The Vision of Cosmic Order in the Oxford Mythmakers.” In Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith presented to Clyde S. Kilby, edited by Charles A. Huttar, 259–76. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971. Wrigley, Christopher. The Return of the Hero: Rowling, Tolkien, Pullman. Sussex, England: Book Guild Ltd., 2005.

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Zimbardo, Rose A., and Neil D. Isaacs, eds. Understanding “The Lord of the Rings”: The Best of Tolkien Criticism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Zimmer, Mary E. “Creating and Re-Creating Worlds with Words: The Religion and Magic of Language in The Lord of the Rings.” In Chance, Invention of Myth, 49– 60. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. London: Heinemann, 1979. [Revised edition published in 2002.]

USEFUL TOLKIEN BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES Bertenstam, Åke, comp. “A Chronological Bibliography of Books about Tolkien” [1953–2003] http://www.forodim.org/bibliography/tolklist.html. Bratman, David. “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004.” Tolkien Studies 4 (2007): 325–54. Croft, Jane Brennan, and Edith Crowe. An Index to Mythlore: Issues 1–100. Altadena, Calif.: The Mythopoeic Society, 2008. Drout, Michael D. C., and Hilary Wayne. “Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982.” Envoi 9, 2 (2000): 101–67. Johnson, Judith. J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Marquette University Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Grace E. Funk Tolkien Collection, 1925–2003, http://www.marquette .edu/library/collections/archives/Mss/JRRT/JRRT-funk-sc.html. The Tolkien Society (United Kingdom) Home page: http://www.tolkiensociety .org/. West, Richard C. Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981.

Contributors NILS IVAR AGØY is dr. philos., cand. theol. & philol., professor of modern history at Telemark University College, Norway. He has written extensively on Tolkienian subjects. His publications in this field include Mytenes mann: J.R.R. Tolkien og hans forfatterskap (2003) and, as editor, Between Faith and Fiction: Tolkien and the Powers of His World (1998). He has also translated The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, Unfinished Tales and The Children of Húrin into Norwegian. Tolkienian research interests include Tolkien and Christianity, Tolkien and cultural identity, and Tolkien’s sub-creation theory. BRADLEY J. BIRZER is Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History, Hillsdale College, Michigan. Fascinated with the intersection of myth and history, Birzer is author of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2003) and Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007). This paper originated as a talk given at the Seattle Opera, August 17, 2005. JASON BOFFETTI has a PhD in Politics from the Catholic University of America. He has worked at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. as a research associate in education policy, Policy Review magazine, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He has published articles in First Things, Crisis Magazine, The Review of Politics, and the National Catholic Register, and taught politics at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida. His research interests lie at the intersection of religion and politics and the contemporary political theory of pluralism and pragmatism. He grew up on Cape Cod and works in Washington, D.C. MARJORIE BURNS is an English professor at Portland State University in Oregon. She has written extensively on J.R.R. Tolkien’s works and has lectured on Tolkien throughout the United States, as well as in England, Norway, Australia, and The Netherlands. Her Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (2005), received national acclaim. She is currently working on “J.R.R. Tolkien: Interviews, Reminiscences, and Other Essays,” along with co-author Douglas A. Anderson, forthcoming. This will include all known and available interviews with Tolkien. CARSON L. HOLLOWAY is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In 2005–6 he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His books include All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics and The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy. His most recent book is The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity. He lives in Omaha with his wife, Shari, and daughters Maria, Anna, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Jane.

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JOHN R. HOLMES has taught English at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio since 1985, where he has tried to squeeze as much Tolkien and word history as he can get away with into his literature courses. For twenty years he avoided writing about Tolkien, but is now trying to make up for lost time. RONALD HUTTON is Professor of History in the University of Bristol, and the author of fourteen books on a wide range of topics concerning history and archaeology. PAUL E. KERRY (D.Phil., Oxon) is a visiting fellow at The Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations and a research associate at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He has authored a monograph on Enlightenment thought and Goethe and edited several volumes of intellectual history on Mozart, Goethe, Carlyle, Schiller, and Benjamin Franklin (in progress). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has held visiting positions at Oxford, Cambridge, Reading, Edinburgh, and Princeton universities. CATHERINE MADSEN is the author of In Medias Res: Liturgy for the Estranged (2008); The Bones Reassemble: Reconstituting Liturgical Speech; a novel, A Portable Egypt; and many essays. For several years she was a contributing editor to the interreligious journal Cross Currents. CHRIS MOONEY is a 2009–2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is the author of three books, the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science, Unscientific America, and Storm World. STEPHEN MORILLO grew up in the legendary lost city of New Orleans before it sank beneath the waves. There, he learned some of the antediluvian arts of that unmatched civilization, including painting, cartooning, creole cooking, playing the blues, and creating Mardi Gras costumes. As evanescent shadows of the Ideal Form that was the Big Easy are all that now remain, Morillo practices his arts as a reverential contribution to the half life of those shadows, hoping for a Crescent City Renaissance. He lives in Crawfordsville, Indiana, with his wife Lynne, children Robin, Dione and Raphael, and familiars in feline form who carry names of his favorite painters. In his spare time, Morillo teaches world history at Wabash College and writes books about premodern military history. In this way, he manages to get some mileage out of his Harvard AB and Oxford DPhil in medieval history. He first encountered Tolkien at the age of two, when his mother read him The Hobbit. His illustrations from that age of dwarves carrying away the dead body of Smaug still exist. JOSEPH PEARCE is the author of Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998) and the editor of Tolkien: A Celebration (1999). He has also written biographies of G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and is a co-editor of the Saint Austin Review, a Catholic cultural journal. His most recent book is Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays (2010). He is Writer-inResidence and Associate Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University in Florida.

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MICHAEL TOMKO is an Assistant Professor at Villanova University where he teaches literature in the interdisciplinary Department of Humanities. He holds a doctorate in English literature from the University of Notre Dame as well as degrees from Oxford University (St. Edmund Hall) and Swarthmore College. His essays and reviews have appeared in Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, Religion and Literature, Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Studies. A former fellow of the Erasmus Institute and the Penn Humanities Forum, he is currently working on a study of British Romanticism and Catholic Emancipation and co-editing an anthology of English Catholic writing. RALPH C. WOOD has been University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University since 1998, having previously taught at Wake Forest University for twenty-six years. He received his BA and MA degrees in English from Texas A&M University-Commerce in 1963 and 1965. His MA and PhD degrees in Theology and Literature were earned at the University of Chicago in 1968 and 1975. His main books are The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (1988), Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (2003), Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004), and Literature and Theology (2008). The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (2003) has been translated into Korean and Japanese as well as being recorded as an audio book. He was the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture in 2007–8.

Index Ælfric, 129 afterlife: Christian view of, 64, 98, 112, 128 Age of Men. See Fourth Age Ainulindalë, 40, 270. See also Silmarillion Ainur, 40, 62, 183, 189. See also Valar Alfred, King of England, 276–77 allegory, 20, 26, 114, 193, 200–204, 234; versus applicability, 18, 32, 47–48, 120, 147, 162; and myth, 21 America (United States), 275 Ancrene Wisse, 260 Anglo-Saxon (language), 260–61 Apocalypse, 267–69, 274. See also Ragnarök Aquinas, Thomas, 28 Aragorn, 21, 23, 32–34, 66, 80, 97, 239 Arda, 147, 270 Arthurian legend, 18, 20, 158, 196, 261 Arwen, 21, 66, 80, 97 Auden, W. H., 20, 160, 170, 266 Augustine, Saint, 40, 43, 203, 264–65 Aulë, 183–84, 189. See also Ainur authorial intent, 243. See also intentional fallacy Barfield, Owen, 266 “Battle of Maldon,” 138, 262–64 battle scenes, 118 beauty, 164–66 Bede, 145 Belloc, Hilaire, 42, 68, 225, 232, 239 Beowulf, 29, 31, 83, 102, 119, 121, 261; influence on legendarium, 157–58; non-Tolkienian criticism of, 121–26 Bible, 23, 31, 33, 36 Bilbo Baggins, 110, 146, 211

biography, 57–58, 72 Birmingham Oratory, 18, 208, 224 Blackburn, F. A., 129 Blake, William, 205 Boethius, 28–29, 66 Book of Lost Tales, 75, 262, 270 Book of Mormon, 33 Brecht, Bertolt, 159 Caedmon, 130, 135, 154 Caradhras, Mount, 147 Carlyle, Thomas, 30, 234, 236 Catholicism: English, 206, 209–16. See also Roman Catholicism Causality, 146, 150 Chesterbelloc, 225, 228. See also Belloc, Hilaire; Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton, G. K., 26, 42, 68, 85–86n. 5, 218, 224, 276 Children of Húrin, 271 Christianity: self-evidence of, 188. See also Roman Catholicism Chronicles of Narnia. See Lewis, C. S. Circles of the World, 148. See also fate color, 126, 133 community, 224–25; Christian, 226–27; relationship to individual, 227, 230–31 contemplation, 180, 185 Cooper, James Fenimore, 275 correspondence: Tolkien’s, 58, 72, 92 cosmology, 61, 72, 155 Crack of Doom, 68, 99, 113. See also Mount Doom creation, 33, 39, 115; ex nihilo, 78, 229; hierarchy of, 229; by Ilúvatar, 78 cremation. See immolation critics, 57, 58, 72 cross, 21 Curdie, 248–49

305

306

INDEX

De Falsis Diis, 129–30 De Genesi, 40 death, 21, 135, 161, 191, 227. See also immortality “Debate of Finrod and Andreth,” 38 Denethor, 119, 125, 138, 218 despair, 139. See also hope Dryhten, 130–31 dualism, 28–29, 278 Dwarves, 189, 197, 256, 267, 272 Eärendel, 32, 271 Eärendil (evening star), 40, 154, 252 Earth, 271. See also Arda Edda, 197, 266, 267, 274, 279 Eddas, 114–15 Eden, 268 Elbereth, 19, 45, 272 Eliot, T.S., 207, 277–78 Elrond, 209 Elven language, 177, 195, 197 Elves, 100, 159–60, 231, 262, 270–71; relation to other races, 155–56 encyclicals (papal), 190, 191, 225 England, 35, 259, 261; Tolkien’s regard for, 259, 263 English (language), 121–23 Ents, 110, 231 Entwives, 110, 117 environmentalism, 24 Éowyn, 255 Eru, 41, 77, 163. See also Ilúvatar Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 136 eucatastrophe, 33, 35–37, 186–87, 198, 219 Eucharist, 17, 22, 25, 43, 133 evangelium, 187, 205. See also eucatastrophe evil, 60 Faber, Frederick, 212 fact-value distinction, 244 faerie, 46, 63, 74, 94, 159, 263 fairy story, 18, 26, 31, 36, 198; conflated with Christianity, 161–62; as truth, 160–61, 186–87, 201. See also “On Fairy-Stories” fairy-tale, 67, 73 faith, 21

Fall of Man (Christian), 39, 83, 87n. 16, 226 fantasy, 179, 181, 200 Faramir, 38 fate, 145, 158 Fëanor, 183 fellowship, 17, 21–22 Fellowship, the, 34, 37, 216–17, 236 forgiveness, 67, 81, 99 Fourth Age, 111–12, 115, 221 free will, 28– 29, 148, 170, 226. See also providence freedom, 226 Frodo Baggins, 19, 21–23, 28, 33, 40, 43, 46, 73, 110, 172, 256; on Amon Hen, 111; as Christ-figure, 112–13; Scouring of the Shire, 98 Galadriel, 43, 45, 134, 247, 252, 253, 255; with Frodo, 256; as Virgin Mary, 59, 101, 133 Gandalf, 19, 33, 43, 67, 110, 119, 220; as Christ figure, 239; condemns Denethor, 138; as Manwë, 272; on Mount Caradhras, 147; origin of, 272; resurrection of, 168 Garden of Eden. See Eden Gaudiium et Spes, 191 God: Christian, 37, 77, 146, 178, 226, 228; etymology of, 135–37 goeteia, 82, 89, 101. See also magia, magic Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 28, 234–36 Gollum, 21–22, 67–68, 73, 81, 99 Gondor, 219, 265 good and evil, 19, 28–29 gospel, 189, 198. See also Christianity Green movement, 171 Grey Havens, 173 Guardini, Romano, 264 Harry Potter, 278–79 Heathen, 119, 121, 124, 128–30 Helm’s Deep, 118 Herakles, 139 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 30 Hinduism, 114

INDEX

Hobbit, The (book), 91, 208 Hobbits, 35, 64, 67, 98–99, 104, 108, 146, 156–58, 197, 215, 261 Holy Ghost, 37 hope, 139. See also despair human nature, 179, 181 Húrin, 147, 149. See also Children of Húrin Iliad, 63 Ilúvatar, 21, 37–38, 40–41, 62–66, 72–74, 148–49, 183, 249; children of, 108, 189; as creator, 189; music of, 111 immolation, 124–25 immortality, 227. See also death incarnation, 25, 187 influence, 238, 242–43 Inklings, 24, 28, 171 intentional fallacy, 121 interpretation: validity of, 244 Irenaeus, Saint, 124 Irene, Princess, 248–49 Isengard, 217 Italy, 265 Jackson, Peter, 133, 209 Jehovah, 62, 74 Jesus Christ, 21, 24–25, 27, 31–33, 41, 113, 150, 268–69, 275; humanity of, 180; teachings, 227 John the Revelator, 18, 264, 268–69, 272 Jones, David, 277 Kalevala, 273 Ker Lecture, 139 Ker, W. P., 131 Kilby, Clyde S., 246, 262 Kolbitar, 266 Last Supper, 41, 43 “Leaf by Niggle,” 19, 61, 135, 181–82, 185–86, 188–90, 194–95, 208, 226 lectio divina, 206 Leeds, 60, 72, 77, 87 legendarium, 19, 37–41, 45, 75, 146, 239, 261; chronology of composition, 168, 153; relationship

307

to Christianity, 74, 78–79, relationship to Tolkien’s scholarship, 157 lembas, 43–45, 59, 133–34, 240–41 Lewis C. S., 20, 24, 60, 74, 86, 146, 171, 198; on allegory, 202; on beauty, 165; on Lord of the Rings, 205; Narnia stories, 101, 107, 116, 173 liberal arts, 230 Lina (character), 249 literary theory, 181, 242 liturgy, 23–24 Lord of the Rings: drafts of, 95; film version, 209; literary genre, 211; reasons for writing, 18 Lord’s Prayer, 32, 67 MacDonald, George, 247–48 magia, 82, 101, 172. See also goeteia, magic magic, 61, 82, 99–101. See also goeteia, magia Makar, 83 Maldon. See “Battle of Maldon” Man: in image of God, 228. See also God; Men Manichaeanism, 28–29, 203 Manwë, 83, 250, 272. See also Ainur Mary (Virgin), 22, 35, 38, 45–46, 59, 101, 133, 163, 240, 247, 250, 256, 272; as Galadriel, 253 Mass (Catholic), 18, 59, 240, 277; Tolkien’s attendance, 85, 241 Meassë, 83 Medievalism, 116 Melko, 63, 67, 83. See also Ainur; Morgoth Melkor, 39, 108–9, 183, 270; music of, 111; as Satan, 163 Men, 44, 110, 155, 191, 262, 270–71. See also Fourth Age Mercy. See pity Metod, 131–32 Middle-earth, 27, 31, 34, 36, 41, 44, 68, 196, 110, 193, 231; creation of, 194, 203; as Earth, 94; as England, 215, 261; natural theology in, 164 Middle-English, 259–60 Milton, John, 137–38

308

INDEX

Minas Tirith, 25 modernism, 20, 123–24 modernity, 25, 207, 218, 221 monocausality. See causality monsters, 82, 121, 131, 263–64, 267 morality, 20–23 Morgan, Father Francis, 18, 208–10 Morgoth, 41, 62, 146–49, 154–55, 270. See also Melko Morris, William, 275–76 Morwen (wife of Húrin), 149 Mount Doom, 28, 67, 73, 81, 135. See also Crack of Doom Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 234, 236 Murray, Father Robert, 135, 163, 207, 241 myth, 21, 22, 31, 198, 201 mythology: for England, 75, 261–63; Norse, 58, 60, 63, 68, 75, 94, 179, 279; and theology, 92; Tolkien on, 44, 75, 272, 259 mythopoeia (concept), 198–99, 277 “Mythopoeia” (poem), 226 narrator, 127–28 nationalism, 273 natural law, 30, 35, 57 natural theology, 164 Nedfere, 135 Neithan the Wronged. See Túrin neoplatonism, 22, 40, 62, 63, 65, 72, 74, 76, 86 New Jerusalem, 268–69 Newman, Cardinal, 42, 209, 212, 224; “Second Spring,” 214, 217 Newman Society (Oxford), 74 Nicene Creed, 26 Nidhogg, 268 Niënor, (sister and wife of Túrin), 149–50 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 274–75 North Kingdom, 215 Northern courage, 103, 125, 138–40, 263 Númenor, 31; fall of, 272 Odin, 114, 267. See also Völuspá Old Princess, 250, 253

“On Fairy–Stories,” 35, 83–85, 102, 130, 157, 159–61, 178, 189, 224, 226, 229 One, the, 38, 155, 231, 270. See also God; Eru; Ilúvatar Orcs, 228, 256 Otherworlds, 94 Oxford, 73, 260 Oxford English Dictionary, 122 paganism, 29–30, 239, 274 Paradise Lost, 137–38 Parish (character), 195 Phial of Galadriel, 251–54 Philology: Christian, 126, 132; Tolkien’s use of, 120–23, 135–36 pity, 99, 172 post-nationalism, 279 pre-Christianity, 158 preparatio evangelium, 124, 129–30, 137–38 priesthood, 17 Primary World, 24, 164, 180, 187, 199–202 Problem of belief (concept), 120 Prophecy of Mandos, 270–71 providence, 80, 98, 146, 148, 155; providentialism, 66, 73 Purusha. See Hinduism Quenta Noldorinwa, 77 Ragnarök, 115, 117, 131, 145, 268, 270, 272. See also Apocalypse reincarnation, 82, 88, 96 religion, 94; formal practice, 91, 108; and spirituality, 108; scholarly treatment of, 120. See also Christianity; Roman Catholicism Rerum novarum, 225 resurrection, 34–35, 187 Revelation, 269 Ring, 21, 43–44, 73, 110, 117, 146, 173, 228, 240 Ringbearers. See Bilbo Baggins; Frodo Baggins “Road Goes Ever On,” 19 Roman Catholicism: principles of, 17, 19, 21, 41–46, 72, 239, 242;

INDEX

sacramental nature of, 240; Tolkien’s practice, 18, 92, 161, 237–38. See also Catholicism: English romanticism, 24–25 Rowling, J. K., 278 Sacraments, 17, 43, 59, 240. See also Roman Catholicism sacrifice, 22, 112–13 Samwise Gamgee, 19, 43, 68, 110, 135, 253, 264 Saruman, 19, 67, 218 Satan, 269 Sauron, 28, 67, 146, 154–55, 272 Scott, Sir Walter, 211, 275 Scouring of the Shire, 98 Second Age, 272 Second Vatican Council, 59, 203 Secondary World, 200, 202. See also fairy story; fantasy Secularism, 124, 140, 239 Self-transcendence, 17 Shire, 153, 261 Silmarillion, Christian readings, 36, 39, 40, 95, 104, 154; compared with Lord of the Rings, 153, compositional style, 147, 156; cosmology, 152, creation story, 108–9, 183; earliest version, 270; and legendarium, 37–41; providence in, 66; publication, 183, 194; reincarnation in, 76, 87 Skinner, Quentin, 243 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 190 Songs of Innocence (William Blake), 205–6 spirituality. See religion stars, 250–51. See also Mary Sting, 241 Strider, 215–16. See also Aragorn sub-creation, theory, 35–37, 83–84, 193, 229, 242; in Christianity, 180, 195; versus Creation, 182, 199; hierarchy, 230, as human nature, 180; as reason, 181; Tolkien’s personal view, 184–85 suicide, 125 suspension of disbelief, 193 symbolism, 206, 278

309

T.C.B.S. (Tea Cakes and Barrovian Society), 166 temptation, 226 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 275–76 Théoden, 97 theology 26, 60, 69 Third Age, 19, 110, 113, 121, 153, 219 Thompson, Francis, 74 time, 18 Tolkien criticism: lack of readership, 140 Tolkien, J.R.R.: creative process, 273; environmentalist, 24; Inklings, 24, 197; linguist, 115, 122–23; on LotR, 60, 127; medievalist, 106, 121, 124; mythology, 92; Northern imagination, 263; philology, 126; political views, 228; Roman Catholicism, 18–19, 59, 73, 77, 83; scholarly work, 119; studies, 38; upbringing, 18, 241 Tolkien, Mabel (mother), 18, 45, 171, 178, 202, 208–10, 241 Tolkien, Michael (son), 66, 72 Tolkien, Priscilla (daughter), 263 Tom Bombadil, 137 tradition, 231 transcendence, 27 Treebeard, 220 Trinity, 25 truth, 24; art as revealing, 199; religious, 19, 237; truth claims, 238 Túrin (son of Húrin), 139, 147, 149–50, 271. See also Children of Húrin Ulmo. See Ainur universalism, 275, 278–79 Valar, 36, 39, 41, 63, 74, 76, 77, 95, 149, 155, 183, 247, 249–50, 252, 256 viaticum, 134. See lembas vocabulary: Christian, 135 vocation (religious), 194, 202–3 Völuspá, 266, 267, 274 Wagner, Richard, 273–74 Waugh, Evelyn, 220 waybread, 135. See also lembas

310 Weathertop, 215, 221 wizards, 100 women, 246, 255–56 words: Tolkien’s choice of, 127, 132 World War I, 116

INDEX

World War II, 116 worship, 17, 136, 153, 166, 172, 195; Tolkien’s use of word, 154 Wulfstan, Archbishop, 129 Wyrd, 66, 145. See also fate