If comparisons with Newman, Patmore, Thompson and Hopkins illustrate the affinity that exists between Tolkien’s work and that of the early protagonists of the Catholic literary revival, comparisons with the works of G. K. Chesterton serve as further evidence that Tolkien’s achievement should be seen within the context of an orthodox Christian response to secular society. Like Chesterton, Tolkien subscribed to a vision of Merrie England that was an idealized view of what England had been before the Reformation and what she could be again. It was an England free from post-Reformation puritanism and postindustrial proletarianism, an England where individuals owned the land on which they lived and worked. It was Blake’s green and pleasant land liberated from the dominion of dark, satanic mills. Chesterton had eulogized this mythical England in his verse, his essays and his novels, and Tolkien had subcreated his own version of it with his descriptions of the Shire. “In many ways,” writes Charles A. Coulombe elsewhere in this volume, “the Shire expresses perfectly the economic and political ideals of the Church, as expressed by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, and Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno. . . It is the sort of society envisioned by Distributists Belloc and Chesterton”.
The linking of the Shire with the distributism of Chesterton and Belloc moves the discussion of Tolkien’s place within the Catholic literary revival from the philosophical to the socioeconomic. On this level, there are many striking similarities between Chesterton and Tolkien, most notably in their shared distaste for urban industrialism, which places them in a long plaintive tradition stretching back to Blake and Cobbett almost two centuries earlier. Chesterton had written a study of Blake and a full-length biography of “great Cobbett” describing him as “the horseman of the shires” and the champion of England’s dispossessed rural population, the last rustic radical: “After him Radicalism is urban—and Toryism suburban.” “In Mr. Chesterton’s view,” wrote a reviewer, “Cobbett stood for England: England unindustrialised, self-sufficient, relying on a basis of agriculture and sound commerce for her prosperity, with no desire for inflation.” Chesterton’s view of Cobbett’s England conforms with Tolkien’s view of the Shire, which he told his publisher was “based on rural England and not on any other country in the world”. Comparing Cobbett to Shelley, Chesterton wrote: “Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have called Birmingham what Cobbett called it—a hell-hole.” This was certainly a view with which Tolkien would have concurred wholeheartedly, especially as he had seen the village in which he had spent his childhood swallowed up during his own lifetime by the “hellhole” of the West Midlands conurbation. It is also interesting that Chesterton’s description of Cobbett is equally applicable to Tolkien:
What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside . . . the toppling triumphs of machines over men. . . the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles.
The evident convergence of opinions raises the question of Chesterton’s influence on Tolkien. Chesterton’s fame was at its height when Tolkien was still at school and arguably at his most impressionable, and it is clear that Tolkien knew, and largely sympathized with, Chesterton’s work. Nonetheless, the danger of overstating the case was apparent in Christopher Clausen’s essay “The Lord of the Rings and The Ballad of the White Horse”. Clausen claimed that The Lord of the Rings is “heavily indebted” to Chesterton’s ballad, particularly in the similarity of Galadriel’s role to that of the Virgin Mary in The Ballad of the White Horse. Clausen also saw Tolkien’s dwarves, elves and men, somewhat incongruously, as parallels of Chesterton’s Saxons, Celts and Romans. The basic structure of the two works is similar, in Clausen’s view, because both tell the story of a war between good and evil forces in which an alliance of the forces of good, despite all the odds, gains the victory against the vastly more powerful forces of evil. In both works, the culmination of events is the return of the king to his rightful state. Clausen also alludes to the symbolism implicit in the fact that Gandalf’s horse, Shadowfax, is the archetypal white horse of English legend.
One suspects that Clausen has read too much into the similarities between the two books, some of which are surely no more than coincidental or superficial. Although Tolkien was well acquainted with Chesterton’s Ballad, admiring it greatly as a young man before becoming more critical of its undoubted flaws in later years, the extent of his scholarship suggests that his direct indebtedness to Chesterton must be limited. Yet, regardless of the alleged nature of Chesterton’s direct influence upon Tolkien, there is considerable evidence of his indirect influence, and there are clearly discernible links of affinity between the two men.
One of the most notable of these is the sense of wonder that is an essential part of both men’s work, and indeed of both men’s outlook and philosophy. In The Lord of the Rings, the enigmatic figure of Tom Bombadil seems to embody this Chestertonian sense of wonder, in which wisdom and innocence are unified, to a sublime degree: “Tom sang most of the time, but it was chiefly nonsense, or else perhaps a strange language unknown to the hobbits, an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight.”
Tom Bombadil also appears to be Chestertonian paradox personified. Older than the world, he is perennially young. He has the wisdom to wonder, the wisdom ofwonder, which sees through worldly cynicism. He has childlike innocence without childish naïveté. These qualities are also present in the character of Quickbeam, an ent who is introduced to the hobbits by Treebeard:
All that day they walked about in the woods with him, singing, and laughing, for Quickbeam often laughed. He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees. Whenever he saw a rowan-tree he halted a while with his arms stretched out, and sang, and swayed as he sang.
T. A. Shippey, author of The Road to Middle Earth, referred to the infectious nature of this sense of wonder in Tolkien’s work when he said that Tolkien had “turned me into an observer. Tolkien turns people into birdwatchers, tree spotters, hedgerow-grubbers.” This was certainly one of Tolkien’s intentions, springing from his belief that one of the highest functions of fairy stories was the recovery of a clear view of reality:
We need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. . . . This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. . .
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity. . .
Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day, and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.
Perhaps the bonds of affinity between Tolkien and Chesterton are displayed most explicitly in their shared respect for tradition. In 1909 Chesterton had defended traditionalism by labeling it the philosophy of the tree:
I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as whe
n it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly by its roots the higher it rises with its branches. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species.
A keen sense of tradition was as important to Tolkien as it was to Chesterton, and the whole of The Lord of the Rings resonates with its presence. Yet it is interesting, and perhaps not completely coincidental, that the mythological figure that Tolkien uses to embody this principle of tradition is Treebeard, a treelike creature who was the oldest living being in the whole of Middle Earth. Treebeard appears to be Tolkien’s personification of Chesterton’s philosophy of the tree.
When Pippin and Merry had first seen Treebeard, they felt that the wisdom of the ages could be glimpsed in the depths of his eyes:
Those deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impressions of them.
“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”
Of course, this traditionalist imagery is rooted in the Catholicism that Chesterton and Tolkien shared, serving as a timely reminder that the bonds of affinity between them subsist within a greater wellspring of inspiration from which both men drank thirstily. Like a host of other Christian writers before and since, Tolkien was concerned principally with what the critic Lin Carter described in her study of The Lord of the Rings as “the eternal verities of human nature”. What was important to all the writers of the Catholic literary revival was not the accidental trappings of everyday life, the “stuff” of soap operas, but the essential nature of everlasting life, not what human society was becoming but what humanity was being, not the peripheral but the perennial. This was the animus at the very core of the revival heralded by Newman, a revival that enshrined the belief that the highest function of art was the expression of the highest common factors of human life and not the lowest common denominators—life’s loves and not its lusts. It is by these standards that Tolkien’s work should be judged, and it is by these standards that he shines forth as one of the illustrissimi of the revival of which he was part.
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TRUE MYTH
The Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings
SOME CHRISTIANS REMAIN SUSPICIOUS of The Lord of the Rings. They see within its mythological setting hints of neopaganism, possibly even Satanism. Can anything containing wizards and elves, and sorcery and magic, be trusted? Certainly, in the wake of the worldwide success of the Harry Potter books, many Christians fear the effect that “fantasy” literature might be having on their children. Are these fears justified? Should Christian parents prohibit their children from reading these books? Emphatically, in the case of The Lord of the Rings at least, the answer to these questions is no. Far from being prohibited, Tolkien’s epic should be required reading in every Christian family. It should take its place beside the Narnian Chronicles of C. S. Lewis (Tolkien’s great friend) and the fairy stories of George Macdonald as an indispensable part of a Christian childhood.
It is intriguing that the same Christians who express their suspicion of Tolkien are quite happy for their children to be exposed to the witches and the magic in C. S. Lewis’ stories. Clearly, these naturally concerned parents are oblivious of the profound Christianity that threads its way through Tolkien’s myth. In truth, and “truth” is the operative word, the power of Christ speaks more potently and subtly in Tolkien’s Middle Earth than in Lewis’ Narnia.
Many devotees of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have read it, often on numerous occasions, without gaining an inkling of its deeper meaning. Its spirituality, if any is detected, is seen as pagan, little more than a cocktail of new-age pantheism. It is clear, therefore, that Tolkien is widely misinterpreted and often misunderstood, a charge that can seldom be leveled at C. S. Lewis. Is this a weakness in Tolkien’s work? The question can be answered only by comparing Tolkien’s and Lewis’ respective approaches.
The most important difference in Tolkien’s and Lewis’ approaches lies in their attitude to allegory. Lewis’ work abounds with allegorical connections, whereas Tolkien disliked the unsubtle straitjacket that the use of allegory placed upon the weaving of a story. In his foreword to The Lord of the Rings, he said about allegory:
I much prefer 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 was well aware that the forsaking of allegory in the telling of his tale gave his readers a freedom that many would not merely use but abuse. Applicability implied the likelihood of its misapplication. It was a price he was prepared to pay. Above all, however, story and allegory had one thing in common. They both subsisted within higher reality with a higher purpose.
Allegory and story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human “literature”, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read “just as a story”; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start from opposite ends.
Regardless of whether they started from opposite ends, the works of Tolkien and Lewis converged, meeting somewhere in Truth. Both men believed that fairy stories and myths were not, as the “moderns” maintained, lies or falsehoods representing a reprehensible escape from reality. On the contrary, they were the best way of conveying truths that were otherwise inexpressible. They were also the best way of high-lighting the difference between facts and truth. Facts were physical, but truth was metaphysical. Facts were scientific, but truth was an art. Specifically, and properly understood, Truth was the Art that governed the cosmos, and the purpose of art, that is, subcreation, was to mirror Art, that is, the primary Creation of the Creator. Thus, in a sublime paradox, myth becomes the highest realism. This was encapsulated by Tolkien in his essay on fairy stories:
The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”. . . in the “eucatastrophe” we see a brief vision . . . a far-off gleam of evangelium in the real world.
In conclusion, Tolkien stressed that Christianity, the true myth, had reconciled all lesser myths to itself. The lesser myths, in the form of fairy story or romance, were “derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.” However inadequate in themselves, they still offered a glimpse of the greater truth from which they spring or into which they flow.
Where then is this brief vision of the greater truth, this “far-off gleam of evangelium”, to be found in Tolkien’s work? In his greatest works, those centered on the secondary world of Middle Earth, the careful avoidance of allegory makes the search for the sudden glimpse of reality a wonderful game of hide-and-seek. As Tolkien himself intended, and as millions of his readers continue to demonstrate, it is not necessary to play the game in order to enjoy the story. It is, however, necessary to play the game if one wishes to understand the s
tory more fully and enjoy it at its deepest. One can scratch the surface or plumb the depths. On the surface, one is entertained and swept away in a beautifully dramatic narrative; beneath the surface, one is introduced to the profound Reality that makes the drama beautiful. The true adventure is not in the mastery of prose but in the mystery of praise.
The profoundly Christian nature and supernature of Tolkien’s work can be demonstrated by adopting a trifocal approach. First, by looking at Tolkien the man, we shall discover the soul of a Christian mystic; second, by studying Tolkien’s philosophy of myth, we shall come to understand the theological basis of his own mythological world; and third, by looking at the myth itself, as revealed in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, we shall see that Tolkien’s epic goes beyond mere “fantasy” to the deepest realms of metaphysics. Far from being only an escapist fantasy, The Lord of the Rings will be revealed as a theological thriller.
In order to get to grips with Tolkien the man—or with Tolkien as the man behind the myth of The Lord of the Rings—it is useful to start with how the man saw himself. Specifically, it is useful to see how he saw himself in relation to his work. According to Tolkien’s own “scale of significance”, his Catholic faith was the most important, or most “significant”, influence on the writing of The Lord of the Rings. It is, therefore, not merely erroneous but patently perverse to see Tolkien’s epic as anything other than a specifically Christian myth. This being so, and considering how the very concept of “myth” is often misunderstood, we should proceed to a discussion of Tolkien’s philosophy of myth.
Literary Giants Literary Catholics Page 30
