Tolkien then divided the “facts” of his own life into three distinct categories, namely, the “insignificant”, the “more significant” and the “really significant”:
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 weaknesses that produced them, but from other and still uncorrupted regions of my being. Modern “researchers” inform me that Beethoven cheated his publishers, and abominably ill-treated his nephew; but I do not believe that has anything to do with his music.
Apart from these “insignificant facts”, Tolkien believed that there were “more significant facts, which have some relation to an author’s works”. In this category, he placed his academic vocation as a philologist. This had affected his “taste in languages”, which was “obviously a large ingredient in The Lord of the Rings”. Yet even this was subservient to more important factors:
And there are a few basic facts, which however drily 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.
Considering Tolkien’s insistence on the primary importance to his work of his Christian faith, it is pertinent to place him among the illustrissimi of the Catholic literary revival and to look more closely at his place in its historical development.
The revival itself was instigated by John Henry Newman, and its beginnings can be said to coincide with Newman’s reception into the Church in 1845. The critic George Levine described Newman as “perhaps the most artful and brilliant prose writer of the nineteenth century”, and there is no doubt that Newman’s literary achievement was both prodigious and prolific. His works of fiction, Loss and Gain and Callista, are among the greatest novels of the Victorian era, and his autobiographical Apologia is probably the finest exposition of a religious conversion ever written in the English language. His verse, the most accomplished and most beautiful of which is The Dream of Gerontius, places him in the first rank of Victorian poets, and to cap it all, he is considered a popular theologian of rare distinction who warrants a place among the foremost doctors of the Church. Almost single-handedly, Newman’s genius had revitalized English Catholicism, and the quality of his literary output had set the standard that future generations of Catholic writers would seek to emulate.
The enormity of Newman’s spirit was to prove a potent influence on Tolkien’s early development. From 1902, when Tolkien was ten years old, a considerable part of his life revolved around the Birmingham Oratory, a large church served by a community of priests that had been established by Newman in 1849 following the model established in Italy by Saint Philip Neri. Newman spent the last four decades of his life within the oratory walls, dying there in 1890. In 1902 the community still included many priests who remembered Newman as a friend and who had served under him, one of whom was Father Francis Xavier Morgan, destined to become Tolkien’s guardian following the death of Tolkien’s mother two years later.
If Newman’s indirect influence on Tolkien’s early life is beyond question, the extent of his influence on Tolkien’s work is not so easy to verify. Certainly, the substantial body of Newman’s literary output would seem to have little in common with the fantasy genre in which Tolkien excelled. This, however, should not obscure the underlying affinity that exists between the two writers. In spite of the widely different means employed by each, the end result was essentially the same. The difference was not in what they were trying to say but only in the way they were trying to say it. Perhaps the similarity of intention can be seen most clearly in the purgatorial peripatetics employed by both writers. Tolkien’s theme in his short story “Leaf by Niggle” and his poem “Mythopoeia” is not that dissimilar from Newman’s vision of the afterlife in The Dream of Gerontius. Yet these surface similarities are merely a reflection of a deeper unity that springs from the Catholicism that animates their work. For Tolkien and Newman alike, the substantial body of their work is “Catholic” insofar as it represents an orthodox Christian response to the cynicism and materialism of the age. The logic of such a response is expressed with characteristic eloquence by Newman:
Turn away from the Catholic Church, and to whom will you go? it is your only chance of peace and assurance in this turbulent, changing world. There is nothing between it and scepticism, when men exert their reason freely. Private creeds, fancy religions, may be showy and imposing to the many in their day; national religions may lie huge and lifeless, and cumber the ground for centuries, and distract the attention or confuse the judgment of the learned; but on the long run it will be found that either the Catholic Religion is verily and indeed the coming in of the unseen world into this, or that there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, nothing real in any one of our notions as to whence we come and whither we are going. Unlearn Catholicism, and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic, in a dreadful, but infallible succession.
There is much in this short extract from one of Newman’s sermons that throws light on Tolkien’s subcreation of Middle Earth. Newman’s description of the Catholic religion as “verily and indeed the coming in of the unseen world into this”, offers a key to understanding the hidden forces that give so much depth to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. It is the constant awareness of the powers of the unseen world, hidden but real, that fires the imagination and gives these books the creative tension that permeates each page. The other key is Newman’s insistence on the stark dichotomy between the Church and the Alternative. There is no murky common ground between the two; it is a fight between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, between orthodoxy and scepticism. One is reminded of Chesterton’s words on his deathbed: “The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.”
Nor were the views of Newman, Chesterton or Tolkien the result of an unreasoned religious bigotry. On the contrary, they were anchored in the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas and were motivated by a rejection of modern philosophy. The reductio ad absurdum that followed on from the Enlightenment’s rejection of scholastic philosophy and its espousal of the Cartesian axiom, cogito, ergo sum, was all too obvious. Beginning with “I think, therefore I am”, the modern world had regressed to the ultimate scepticism about the objectivity of existence itself: “I am but I can’t be sure that anything else is.” This regression of modern philosophy from the perennial wisdom of the ancients to the primeval soup of sceptical reductionism was at the heart of Newman’s claim that to unlearn Catholicism was to “become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic, in a dreadful, but infallible succession”.
This philosophical battleground lies at the very core of Tolkien’s work and is the ultimate key to its depth and potency. It also explains both its enduring appeal and the continuing hostility it provokes. Those who subscribe, however unwittingly, to the perennial philosophy adopted by the Church will find reassurance in Tolkien’s epic tales of the eternal nature of the struggle between good and evil and the moral imperatives and choices this entails. To the philosophically sceptical, who can’t be sure of anything, Tolkien’s certainties are merely absurdities. His depths are shallows; his truths are falsehoods; his myths are lies. To tamper with a memorable aphorism of Kipling’s, it would seem that light is light and dark is dark and never the twain will meet.
The practical implications of Tolkien’s philosophical approach are most evident in his enshrining of the objectivity of truth. Far from his “fantasy” world representing a flight from reality, it is, in the metaphysical sense, a flight into reality. The events in Middle Earth are not merely real, they are hyper-real, too real for comfort, so that the reader is genuinely concerned about the characters and the turn of events, the threat
of dyscatastrophe and the joy of eucatastrophe. The Ring that Frodo carries is so real that it can’t be tossed away and forgotten about. The consequences of doing so would be so disastrous that it would be an unthinkable act. Yet the dangers of not doing so are real also, intensely so, and there is a sublime heroism in the dutiful resolve to bear the burden in spite of the fear and suffering it entails. The Ring is not a fantasy, a figment of the mind, an urge, a desire, or an opinion that can be changed; it is a fact that must be faced, borne and finally overcome. This is true realism, built upon the solid rock of objectivism. It has precious little to do with the false realism of the sceptics, who base their understanding of reality on the shifting sands of subjectivism where nothing is good, nothing evil, nothing true in itself. Perhaps it is not surprising that the sceptics, self-centered in their dogmatic assertion of cogito, ergo sum, have sought clues to reality in the most fickle recesses of themselves, in the sexual fantasies and dream analysis of Freudian and Jungian psychology. In this way, most modern “realism” is really little more than surrealism in disguise—an impostor masquerading as the real thing.
Tolkien’s preoccupation with the nature and objectivity of truth leads inevitably back to Newman. In Newman’s Apologia, his semiautobiographical novel Loss and Gain and his historical novel Callista, he explored the intricate nature of the individual’s quest for truth. In Callista, a novel set in the third century, Agellius, a Christian, endeavors in vain to convince his sceptical uncle of the claims of the Church:
“O Jucundus,” cried Agellius, irritated at his own inability to express himself or hold an argument, “if you did but know what it was to have the Truth! The Christian has found the Truth, the eternal Truth, in a world of error. That is his bargain, that is his hire; can there be a greater? Can I give up the Truth?”
His uncle’s reply echoed the words of Pilate two centuries previously and those of sceptics many centuries later:
“The Truth!” he cried, “this is what I understand you to say,—the truth. The truth is your bargain; I think I’m right, the truth; Hm; what is truth? What in heaven and earth do you mean by truth? where did you get that cant? What oriental tomfoolery is bamboozling you? The truth!” he cried, staring at him, half of triumph, half of impatience, “the truth! Jove help the boy!—the truth! can truth pour me out a cup of melilotus? can truth crown me with flowers? can it sing to me? can it bring Glyceris to me? drop gold in my girdle? or cool my brows when fever visits me? Can truth give me a handsome suburban with some five hundred slaves, or raise me to the duumvirate? Let it do this, and I will worship it; it shall be my god; it shall be more to me than Fortune, Fate, Rome, or any other goddess on the list. But I like to see, and touch, and feel, and handle, and weigh, and measure what is promised me. I wish to have a sample and an instalment. I am too old for chaff. Eat, drink, and be merry, that’s my philosophy, that’s my religion; and I know no better. Today is ours, tomorrow is our children’s.”
In setting this dialogue more than a millennium and a half ago, Newman was emphasizing the perennial nature of the question. Scepticism, hedonism and materialism were not modern inventions but age-old negations, man’s continual denial of the truth that eludes him. Nor were they “progressive”. Throughout history, the accentuation of the negative has led to the decay of civilization and the ultimate return of barbarism. It is symbolized in Christian Scripture by Pilate’s asking the same question as does Jucundus, coming to the same conclusions and washing his hands of the whole affair. Pilate, the personification of the eternal sceptic, dismisses truth as unknowable and therefore irrelevant.
In The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, Tolkien uses an invented world for the same reasons that Newman had used the relative distance of antiquity. By placing his epic in Middle Earth, he can deal with eternal verities without the distractions of fads, fashions and the flood of ephemera that clutters modern life. If he had set his story in England during the 1940s, he would no doubt have been commended for his “realism” by contemporary critics, but his “modern” work would appear dated today and possibly less relevant and real to subsequent generations. Tolkien’s subcreated world is timeless, enabling him to ignore the peripheral in favor of the perennial problems of existence. For this reason, The Lord of the Rings is no more dated today than it was when it was first published. For the same reason, it is safe to predict its continued popularity. If future generations stop reading Tolkien’s classic, it will not be because it has become irrelevant or dated. Rather, if they stop reading Tolkien, it will be because they have stopped reading. If technology makes the written word redundant, Tolkien’s work may flounder. His books, which have proved too real to be reproduced by any of the new forms of virtual reality, may then be forgotten. If so, it may mark the triumph of technology but certainly not the triumph of “progress”. In such circumstances, one is reminded of the wisdom of Coventry Patmore’s poem “Magna est Veritas”:
Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
This short verse, written by one of the most celebrated Catholic poets of the Victorian era, displays all the hallmarks of the literary revival heralded by Newman. It shows the same preoccupations that characterize the work of both Newman and Tolkien. There is the insistence upon the transcendent and objective nature of truth and upon its perennial prevalence regardless of the fashionable whims of a largely heedless humanity. More specifically, as far as direct comparisons with Tolkien are concerned, there is the same almost mystical reverence for the timeless endurance of the ocean. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, there is more than a glimmer of the poetic poignancy that Patmore felt in the majestic presence of the sea:
But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.
This reverence for the sea is given theological expression in The Silmarillion:
And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Iluvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.
In prose such as this, Tolkien succeeds in encapsulating theological principles in terms that are evocative of the metaphysical poets. The Ainur are the angelic powers given responsibility for the Creation of Middle Earth by Iluvatar, the One omnipotent God. Their collective act of Creation, overseen by the One, is described as the Music, the symphonic subcreation of the universe. In thus describing water as something in which there still lives the echo of this angelic Music, Tolkien reaches sublime heights of imagery worthy of the great poets.
There is also a striking similarity between the words Tolkien puts into the mouth of Ulmo, the angel most responsible for the Waters, and the words of the Victorian Catholic poet Francis Thompson in his poem “To a Snowflake”. First, Tolkien:
Then Ulmo answered: “Truly, Water is become now fairer than my heart imagined, neither had my secret thought conceived the snowflake, nor in all my music was contained the falling of the rain.”
Compare this with Thompson’s verse:
What heart could have thought you?—
Past our devisal
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(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Unfortunately, modern ignorance of both philosophy and theology has resulted in this deep love of nature being mistaken for a form of pantheistic paganism. The extent to which Tolkien sought to dispel such misunderstanding is evident in the early pages of The Silmarillion, in which he goes to great pains to ensure that his own version of the Creation myth conforms with orthodox Christianity.
Comparison with another Victorian Catholic poet will illustrate the intrinsic unity that exists between Tolkien’s “greenness” and the Christian philosophy that underpins his work. Gerard Manley Hopkins had been as devastated by the felling often or twelve poplar trees in 1879 as had been the young Tolkien by the felling of a favorite tree during his childhood. In both cases, the wanton destruction inspired literary creativity. For Hopkins, it resulted in the writing of “Binsey Poplars”, one of his finest poems:
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc uńselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
For Tolkien, this love of nature, and especially of trees, bore fruit in his creation of the arboreal ents and in the charming characterization of Treebeard and Quickbeam. As with Hopkins, the roots from which the fruit sprang were philosophical. The creative vision of both men was shaped to a profound extent by the scholastic philosophy of the Church. For Hopkins, the rigors of his training to become a Jesuit left him thoroughly conversant with the philosophy of both Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas. The influence of the former is most evident in the way that inscape in Hopkins correlates with the concept of haecceity in the metaphysics of Duns Scotus. The concept of inscape also explains the omnipresence of nature-reverence and its mystical significance in Tolkien’s work, and this in turn represents a further example of the fact that one must plumb the philosophical depths if one is to understand the colorful surface of Middle Earth.
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