Shortly after describing the rebellion of Melkor, Tolkien introduces Sauron, the Dark Lord in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron is described as a “spirit” and as the “greatest” of Melkor’s, alias Morgoth’s, servants: “But in after years he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the Void.”
Thus, the evil powers in The Lord of the Rings are specified as direct descendents of Tolkien’s Satan, rendering impossible, or at any rate implausible, anything but a Christian interpretation of the book. In the impenetrable blackness of the Dark Lord and his abysmal servants, the ring-wraiths, we feel the objective reality of evil. Sauron and his servants confront and affront us with the nauseous presence of the Real Absence of goodness. In his depiction of the potency of evil, Tolkien presents the reader with a metaphysical black hole far more unsettling than Milton’s proud vision of Satan as “darkness visible”.
Tolkien is, however, equally powerful in his depiction of goodness. In the unassuming humility of the hobbits, we see the exaltation of the humble. In their reluctant heroism, we see a courage ennobled by modesty. In the immortality of the elves, and the sadness and melancholic wisdom it evokes in them, we receive an inkling that man’s mortality is a gift of God, a gift that ends his exile in mortal life’s “vale of tears” and enables him, in death, to achieve a mystical union with the divine beyond the reach of time.
In Gandalf we see the archetypal prefiguration of a powerful prophet or patriarch, a seer who beholds a vision of the Kingdom beyond the understanding of men. At times he is almost Christlike. He lays down his life for his friends, and his mysterious “resurrection” results in his transfiguration. Before his self-sacrificial “death”, he is Gandalf the Grey; after his “resurrection” he reappears as Gandalf the White, armed with greater powers and deeper wisdom.
In the true, though exiled, kingship of Aragorn we see glimmers of the hope for a restoration of truly ordained, that is, Catholic, authority. The person of Aragorn represents the embodiment of the Arthurian and Jacobite yearning—the visionary desire for the “return of the king” after aeons of exile. The “sword that is broken”, the symbol of Aragorn’s kingship, is reforged at the anointed time—a potent reminder of Excalibur’s union with the Christendom it is ordained to serve. And, of course, in the desire for the return of the king, we have the desire of all Christians for the Second Coming of Christ, the true King and Lord of all.
Significantly, the role of men in The Lord of the Rings reflects their divine, though fallen, nature. They are to be found among the Enemy’s servants, though usually beguiled by deception into the ways of evil and always capable of repentance and, in consequence, redemption. Boromir, who represents man in the Fellowship of the Ring, succumbs to the temptation to use the Ring, that is, the forces of evil, in the naïve belief that it could be wielded as a powerful weapon against Sauron. He finally recognizes the error of seeking to use evil against evil. He dies heroically, laying down his life for his friends in a spirit of repentance.
Ultimately, 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. Catholic theology, explicitly present in The Silmarillion and implicitly present in The Lord of the Rings, is omnipresent in both, breathing life into the tales as invisibly, but as surely, as oxygen. Unfortunately, those who are blind to theology will continue to be blind to that which is most beautiful in The Lord of the Rings.
This volume will enable the blind to see, and will help the partially sighted to see more clearly, the full beauty of Middle Earth. As a guide for those who would like to know more about the sanctifying power of Middle Earth, this volume will prove invaluable. The sheer magnificence of Tolkien’s mythological vision, and the Christian mysticism and theology that give it life, is elucidated with clarity by Professor Birzer in chapters on “Myth and Subcreation”, “The Created Order”, “Heroism”, “The Nature of Evil” and “The Nature of Grace Proclaimed”. There is also an excellent and enthralling chapter on the relationship between Middle Earth and modernity, in which Professor Birzer combines his scholarship as a historian, and his grounding in philosophy and theology, to place Tolkien’s subcreation into its sociopolitical and cultural context.
With Professor Birzer as an eminently able guide, the reader will be taken deep into Tolkien’s world, entering a realm of exciting truths that he might not previously have perceived. As he is led, with the Fellowship of the Ring, into the depths of Mordor and Beyond, he might even come to see that the exciting truths point to the most exciting Truth of all. At its deepest he might finally understand that the Quest is, in fact, a pilgrimage.
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TRUE NORTH
IN 1920 C. S. LEWIS WROTE to his friend Arthur Greeves, deploring the “anti-Catholic propaganda” and “rampant Protestantism” in the novels of George Borrow, seeking an explanation for the prejudice in the work of an author that he otherwise admired. Lewis blamed it on Borrow’s “northernness”: “It lies in the extreme Northernness or Saxonism of his nature. He thrilled, as we once did, to everything Norse. . . . Hence, of course, a thoroughly Southern, Latin & Mediterranean thing like the Church was antipathetic”.
Lewis’ words serve as an indication of a common misconception about the nature of Catholicism on the part of those brought up in the Protestant “North”. The implicit assumption that Catholicism is something essentially “southern”, or Mediterranean, is a product of the supercilious self-righteousness of the Reformation. Since the people of southern Europe had the audacity to remain loyal to the Church during the upheavals of the Reformation, it was assumed that their failure to become “good Protestants” was the result of ignorance or superstition. Unlike the “enlightened” people of the North, the “peasants” of the South were perceived as obstinately “backward” in their faith and culture. Thus was the legacy of Athens and Rome, and Florence and Venice, dismissed with levity by the latter-day barbarians of the “North”.
Ironically, this prejudiced presumption of superiority is as unjust to the “true North” as it is to the “true South”.
Since, geographically, it is difficult to place the Catholicism of Ireland, France and Poland, or the Orthodoxy of Russia, into the neat division of Europe into a Protestant North and a Catholic South, one is forced to question the criteria by which the advocates of “northernness” define what they actually mean by the “North”. Having done so, we will see that their vision is that of a “false North”, quite distinct from the “true North” celebrated in the works of Tolkien and, to a lesser degree, Lewis. The “false North” is derived from an idolization of the mythical Norse, as seen through the pseudopagan prism of modern materialist philosophy. “Northernness”, thus defined, is the idolizing and idealizing of the cultural union of all that is perceived to be Germanic and Scandinavian. Within this cultural Weltanshauung, the Catholics of Bavaria and Austria constitute an embarrassing anomaly who are either excluded from the pan-Germanic elite because of their religion or are admitted as “honorary Germans” in spite of it. (In fact, since the majority of German speakers have retained their unity with Rome, there is a logical, and theological, flaw at the very heart of the whole idolatry of the “false North”.)
The ideals of the “false North”, propagated by Nietzche and Wagner in the nineteenth century, came to grotesque and caricatured fruition with the advent of the Third Reich. The absurd and perverse “northernness” of Hitler, which expressed itself in a rampant Prussianism aping, ironically, the “southern” glories of ancient Rome, served to discredit the ideas and idols of pan-Germanism, or—more correctly, considering its Bismarkian roots—pan-Prussianism. To put the matter more alliteratively, Prussian pride precedeth the fall of the false North. This perverse “northernness” was condemned in forthright terms by J. R. R. Tolkien in a letter to his son Michael in 1941: “I have in t
his War a burning private grudge . . . against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler [for] ruining, perverting, misapplying and making for ever accursed, that noble Northern Spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
The true North, loved so fondly by Tolkien and Lewis, is that creative seedbed of myth and culture, Christian and pre-Christian, which springs from the fertile soil of Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and which inspires the spirit and points toward the truth. Among the fruits of the true North are the Kalevala, the Elder Edda, the Orkenyinga Saga, King Harald’s Saga, The Dream of the Rood, Beowulf and The Seafarer. Among its heroes are King Arthur and King Alfred the Great, Merlin and Cuchulain. And, of course, many of its heroes are also saints: Brendan, Patrick, Aidan, Edmund, Magnus and so on.
And the true North continues to inspire. In the past century, new generations have sought inklings of the truth in the mysteries of the North. George Mackay Brown, ardent Orcadian and Catholic convert, wove the magic of the Orkneys into the mysteries of life. In the islands of his birth, he discovered oases of sanity in an increasingly deranged modernity. His friend, Sir Peter Maxwell Davis, has set Mackay Brown’s literary vision to music, bringing his rough-hewn wisdom to symphonic life. Similarly, Sibelius has breathed tonic life into the kalevala, and the Estonian composer Arvo Part has synthesized the culture of the Baltic North with the universal majesty of Gregorian splendor.
Above all, the true North has inspired the greatest work of literature of the twentieth century—The Lord of the Rings. As with the work of George Mackay Brown, Tolkien’s work represents a triumphant fusion of northern mythology and Catholic truth.
Tolkien knew something that George Borrow was never able to understand and something that even C. S. Lewis never fully understood. He knew that, at the deepest level, there is no division between North and South. True North and true South were in communion. They are in communion with each other because they are in communion with Rome.
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THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING
KING ARTHUR. CAMELOT. The knights of the Round Table. Lancelot. Galahad. Gawain. Merlin. Excalibur. The Lady of the Lake. The Holy Grail. The very mention of the Arthurian conjures up a plethora of images, sacred and profane. One cannot take a solitary step into the Arthurian past without finding oneself in a world of wonder. It is a demimonde where the haziness of history merges with the legacy of legend and the mystery of myth. Its wyrd-woven web of chivalry and chicanery, miracle and magic, queerness and quest, retains its perennial potency as the centuries unravel. Amid the ephemeral periphery of human folly it remains as a monument of the Permanent Things. It continues to fascinate and inspire.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, new generations have drawn inspiration from the imaginative wellspring, the living waters, the quick freshes, that the living legacy of Arthur represents. From the iconoclastic absurdity of Pythonesque irreverence to the dulcified banality of Disneyed irrelevance, the Arthurian has suffered at the hands of its abusers. Yet, in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, the poetry of Charles Williams or the novels of C. S. Lewis, it has breathed the breath of life into new art and new literature. The paintings of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris, the Arthurian poems of Williams, and That Hideous Strength by Lewis testify to the power of the Pendragon, the power of the ancient to beautify the modern.
Ultimately, however, the Arthurian has a power and value that supersedes and transcends the merely literary or artistic. It confronts the presumptions of modernity with the provocative majesty of monarchy. The Arthurian represents the return of the king, the rekindling of kingship amid the dying embers of dead philosophies. Monarchy or kingship, in the Arthurian sense, has precious little to do with the tawdry trappings of “royalty” that linger, like the fall of the shadow of past glories, over the fading face of modern Europe. Monarchy has everything to do with authentic authority—the true authority that resides in the head of the family.
Kingship and kinship are mystically united in the integrity of the paterfamilias. Families are not democracies; they are, or at least they should be, self-sacrificial hierarchies rooted in grace. In these self-sacrificial hierarchies, the role of the paterfamilias is not to domineer but to serve. In kinship, the one who will reign must rein in his powers. All fathers of families, tribes or kingdoms are called to emulate the calling of the Holy Father, the Pope, whose duty is to be the Servant of the servants of God. To rule is to serve. This is at the heart of the Church’s social teaching; it is at the heart of all true authority; it is at the heart of kingship.
King Arthur, the Once and Future King, stands forever as the wielder of Excalibur, the symbol of authority, the sword that serves. Beowulf, destroyer of demons and dragons, stands forever as the wielder of the “fairest of weapons, God-revealed”. Aragorn, the king in exile, stands forever as the wielder of the Sword of Elendil, the sword that was broken but is reforged in glory. The Jacobite Pretender, another king in exile, stands forever as the wielder of the hopes of Catholic England and Scotland, hopes that were broken but are reforged in faith. In a truly mystical sense, the Once and Future King and the King over the Water are One. The Arthurian and the Jacobite are united in the authenticity of the authority they represent. They are bound by the Faith and in the Faith. They are the timeless defenders of Christendom against the infidel. They are beyond the transient rebellion of time. They have fought the Long Defeat without ever losing sight of the far-off glimmers of final victory. They are unconquerable. They will return.
“The Sword of Elendil would be a help beyond our hope—if such a thing could indeed return out of the shadows of the past.” Boromir’s words are those of all who fight for the Faith in the exile of this valley of tears. Only after our exile will we see the Blessed Fruit of her womb, Jesus, the King of Kings from whom, and in whom, all other kings must bend the knee in homage, love and service.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken:
The crownless again shall be king.
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TOLKIEN AND THE CATHOLIC LITERARY REVIVAL
IF ONE WERE ASKED to list the key Catholic literary figures of the twentieth century, it is likely that the names of Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh and Greene would spring to mind. It is equally likely that the name of Tolkien would be overlooked. The author of The Lord of the Rings is not generally perceived to be one of the key protagonists of the Catholic literary revival, a fact that reflects the extent to which his work is misunderstood. Tolkien’s Christian faith is often ignored by critics or else, when alluded to, is dismissed as an aberration that had little or no effect on his subcreation. There is, in fact, an amusing irony in the parallel between Tolkien’s position and that of Graham Greene. During the course of his last interview, Greene had reiterated his oft-repeated disclaimer that he was “not a Catholic writer” but “a writer who happens to be a Catholic”. Yet, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Greene’s novels are still considered intrinsically to be those of a Catholic writer. On the other hand, if Tolkien had ever made the claim that he was not a Catholic writer, few would have questioned its validity The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are not in any sense “Christian”, it is claimed, but merely the work of someone “who happens to be a Catholic”.
The problem arises when one realizes that Tolkien’s own view of the relationship of his faith to his art was almost diametrically opposed to that espoused by Greene. For Tolkien, his faith was of paramount importance and absolutely essential to his subcreation. George Sayer, a friend of Tolkien and Lewis and a biographer of the latter, has remarked that “The Lord of the Rings would have been very different, and the writing of it very difficult, if Tolkien hadn’t been a Christian. He thought it a profoundly Christian book.” Tolkien was also pleased when Father Robert Murray had writt
en to say that the book had left him with a strong sense of “a positive compatibility with the order of Grace” and that the image of Galadriel was reminiscent of the Virgin Mary. “I have been cheered specially by what you have said,” Tolkien replied, “because you are more perceptive, especially in some directions, than anyone else, and have even revealed to me more clearly some things about my work. 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.”
Following his assertion that The Lord of the Rings was “fundamentally religious and Catholic”, Tolkien had added that he was “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”.
On another occasion, Tolkien sought to emphasize the importance of his faith in less emotive language, placing it at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of influences that he called the “scale of significance”:
I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author’s work . . . and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest. But 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.
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