Tolkien understood the nature and meaning of myth in a manner that has not been grasped by his critics. It is this misapprehension on the part of his critics that lies at the very root of their failure to appreciate his work. For most modern critics, “myth” is merely another word for a lie or a falsehood, something which is intrinsically not true. For Tolkien, myth had virtually the opposite meaning. It was the only way that certain transcendent truths could be expressed in intelligible form.
Tolkien believed that the story of Christ was simply a true myth, a myth that works in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened. Whereas pagan myths revealed fragments of eternal truth through the words of poets, the true myth of Christianity revealed the whole truth through the Word Himself. The poets of pagan antiquity told their story with words, but God, the omnipotent Poet, told the true story with facts—weaving His tale with the actions of real men in actual history.
This sublime vision found (sub) creative expression in the opening pages of The Silmarillion, in which the “true myth” is reflected through the medium of Tolkien’s wonderful imagination. In these pages Tolkien’s own version of the Creation bears a remarkable similarity to the Creation story in the book of Genesis. In the beginning was Eru, the One, who “made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made”. God, the One, “spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music”. He then allows the Holy Ones, or archangels, to share his creative gifts, declaring to them their role in Creation: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will.” In this way, the archangels brought forth the Creation of God as a Symphony of Praise in His honor: “And a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depth and into the heights . . . and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.”
Disharmony is brought into the cosmic symphony of Creation when one of the archangels decides to play his own tune in defiance of the will of the Composer. Instead of being an instrument in the Great Music, the rebel archangel composes his own theme, bringing discord. This disharmony is the beginning of evil. Again, Tolkien’s myth follows the “true myth” of Christianity with allegorical precision. The rebel archangel is named Melkor, later known as Morgoth, and is obviously Middle Earth’s equivalent of Lucifer, also known as Satan. Melkor is described by Tolkien as “the greatest of the Ainur” as Lucifer was the greatest of the archangels. Like Lucifer, Melkor is the ultimate source of the sin of pride, intent on corrupting mankind for his own spiteful purposes. Melkor desired “to subdue to his will both Elves and Men”, envious of the gifts that God had promised them, “and he wished himself to have subjects and servants, and to be called Lord, and to be master over other wills”.
The allegory becomes even less mistakable when Tolkien describes the war between Melkor and Manwe, who is clearly cast in the role of the archangel Michael. “And there was strife between Melkor and the other Valar; and for that time Melkor withdrew and departed to other regions and did there what he would.”
The parallels between Melkor and Lucifer are made even more apparent when Tolkien explains that the name Melkor means “he who arises in might”—“But that name he has forfeited; and the Noldor, who among the Elves suffered most from his malice, will not utter it, and they name him Morgoth, the Dark Enemy of the World.” Similarly, Lucifer, brightest of all the angels, means “light bringer”, whereas Satan, like Morgoth, means “enemy”. Tolkien’s intention, both as a Christian and as a philologist, in identifying Melkor with Lucifer is plain enough.
Taking his inspiration, no doubt, from the book of Isaiah (Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning. [Is 14:11-12]), Tolkien says of Melkor:
From Splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless. Understanding he turned to subtlety in perverting to his own will all that he would use, until he became a liar without shame. He began with the desire of Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into Darkness. And darkness he used most in his evil works upon Arda, and filled it with fear for all living things.
Apart from the scriptural influence, the other overriding influence is Augustinian theology. Evil, as symbolized by darkness, has no value of its own but is only a negation of that which is good, as symbolized by light.
Shortly after this description of Melkor, Tolkien introduces Sauron, the Dark Enemy 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. 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.
The sheer magnificence of Tolkien’s mythological vision precludes any adequate appraisal, in an essay of this length, of the Christian mysticism and theology that gives it life. 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.
Tolkien is, however, equally powerful in his depiction of goodness. His belief that truth, and therefore reality, is ultimately metaphysical leads logically to the subsistent belief that the physical universe is merely a reflection of some greater metaphysical purpose. Thus the physical actions of the hobbits and the other heroes—and villains—in The Lord of the Rings are part of some unseen but all-powerful and ever-present metaphysical drama. Those who behave virtuously are doing the will of the One, whereas those who succumb to evil are subjecting themselves to the will of the Enemy.
Seen in this light, the whole drama of The Lord of the Rings takes on deeper mystical significance. In the normally shy and retiring hobbits, called unwillingly to acts of unsuspecting heroism, there is the exaltation of the humble. In their reluctant heroism, we see a courage ennobled by modesty. In the Quest, with its trials, tribulations, suffering and sacrifice, there is the Way of the Cross. In the Fellowship of the Ring, collectively facing evil with a defiant adherence to virtuous truth, there is an image of the Church Militant in a hostile world. 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 and enables him, in death, to achieve a mystical union with the divine beyond the reach of time. Throughout the whole book, there is a real sense of exile, a feeling that all the struggles in the shadowlands of this physical life are but figments of a fuller life that can be lived only in the metaphysical reality beyond “the circles of the world”. This is not realism; it is hyperrealism. Tolkien’s fantasy is applicable to the very marrow of our beings in this “real life”. We, like the hobbits and men in Middle Earth, are exiles from our true home. We, like they, are poor banished children of Eve, sending up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.
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. It is true that Tolkien’s detractors, and many of his admirers, have failed to grasp this ultimate truth at the heart of his myth. Unfortunately, those that are blind to theology will continue to be blind to that which is most beautiful in The Lord of the Rings. One is reminded of the words of C. S. Lewis that a diligent atheist, or, for that matter, a delicate neo-pagan or agnostic, cannot be too careful of what he reads. In straying too deeply into Tolkien’s world, he will be straying into the world of truths that he had not previously perceived. If he continues to follow 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.
Tolkien’s work remains a tour de force in a world of mediocrity. Its weakness, if weakness it is, lies not with its author but with its readers. Those who fail to see the far-off gleam of evangelium in Tolkien’s work are those who are not looking for it.
There are none so blind
(blinded by the night),
as they who will not see,
they neither seek nor find,
(though reminded by the light),
they are but will not be.
40
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LETTING THE CATHOLIC OUT OF THE BAGGINS
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, back in 1997, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was voted “the greatest book of the twentieth century” in several major polls, emerging as a runaway winner ahead of its nearest rival, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Readers of the Daily Telegraph voted Tolkien the twentieth century’s greatest author, ahead of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in second and third place, respectively. Two months later, a poll of the fifty thousand members of the Folio Society produced an even more staggering vindication of the literary position of The Lord of the Rings. The Folio Society asked its members to name their favorite books of any age, not simply those published in the twentieth century, and Tolkien’s myth triumphed once again. It received 3,270 votes. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was second with 3,212 votes and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens was third with 3,070 votes.
Tolkien’s triumph was greeted with anger and contempt by many literary “experts”. The writer Howard Jacobson reacted with splenetic scorn, dismissing Tolkien as being “for children . . . or the adult slow”. The poll merely demonstrated “the folly of teaching people to read. . . . It’s another black day for British culture.” Susan Jeffreys, writing in the Sunday Times, described The Lord of the Rings as “a horrible artifact” and added that it was “depressing. . . that the votes for the world’s best 20th-century book should have come from those burrowing an escape into a nonexistent world”. Similarly, Griff Rhys Jones on the BBC’s Bookworm program appeared to believe that Tolkien’s epic went no deeper than the “comforts and rituals of childhood”. The Times Literary Supplement described the results of the poll as “horrifying”, while a writer in the Guardian complained that The Lord of the Rings “must be by any reckoning one of the worst books ever written”.
Probably the most bitter response to Tolkien’s triumph came from the feminist writer, Germaine Greer, who, a quarter of a century earlier, had attained notoriety for her authorship of the best-selling handbook of women’s “liberation”, The Female Eunuch. Greer complained that the enduring success of The Lord of the Rings was a nightmare come true.
As a fifty-seven-year-old lifelong teacher of English, I might be expected to regard this particular list of books of the century with dismay. I do. Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized. At the head of the list, in pride of place as the book of the century, stands The Lord of the Rings.
Rarely has a book caused such controversy; rarely has the vitriol of the critics highlighted to such an extent the cultural schism between the literary illuminati and the views of the reading public.
It is perhaps noteworthy that most of the self-styled “experts” among the literati who queued up to sneer so contemptuously at The Lord of the Rings are outspoken champions of cultural deconstruction and moral relativism. It is also noteworthy, however, that their anodyne and anoetic criticism of Tolkien’s work betrayed an utter ignorance of the profound debt to, and depth of, Christian theology, which is the work’s chief hallmark. No doubt, had they not been so ignorant, they would have sneered with an added degree of derision at the discovery that the work was deeply Christian in inspiration. Either way, the level of critical engagement, or lack thereof, illustrated a collective blindness as regards the Christian dimension in The Lord of the Rings. This blindness, or rather, my exasperation at it, was the spark of motivation behind my writing of Tolkien: Man and Myth (Ignatius Press, 1998). My intention was to highlight the centrality of the Catholic Church in Tolkien’s life and to illustrate the significance of the author’s Catholicism to his work. Previously, the major critical works on Tolkien—those by Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger—had concentrated on the linguistic dimension while largely overlooking the religious aspects. Although these scholarly studies were excellent and worthy of the highest praise, the fact remained that the most important ingredient in Middle Earth was not being discussed.
In Tolkien’s own “scale of significance” as to the relationship between him and his work, Tolkien had insisted that the fact that he was “a Christian (and in fact a Roman Catholic)” was the most important of the “really significant” elements in his work, stating specifically and explicitly that it was more important than the linguistic influence. This being so, it seemed odd, to say the least, that there had been no major study of the real significance of the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings. My own work was, therefore, an effort to rectify a sin of omission.
Now, however, five years after the publication of my book, there seems to be a veritable flood of new religious studies of Tolkien. It is not, perhaps, a plethora, since that suggests that the new phenomenon is in some respects unwelcome or unhealthy; rather, it is an embarrassment of riches. I, for one, am utterly delighted that there is now such a flow of Christocentric studies of “the greatest book of the twentieth century” and would like to offer a brief guide to some of these new titles.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth by Bradley J. Birzer (ISI Books, 2002) is arguably the pick of the crop. In chapters such as “Myth and Subcreation”, “The Created Order”, “Heroism”, “The Nature of Evil” and “The Nature of Grace Proclaimed”, Professor Birzer elucidates the sheer magnificence of Tolkien’s mythological vision and the Christian mysticism and theology that give it life. Perhaps the highlight of the book, at least in this reviewer’s judgment, is an excellent and enthralling chapter on the relationship between Middle Earth and modernity, in which Professor Birzer combines his scholarship as a historian steeped in the tradition of Christopher Dawson and Russell Kirk with his grounding in philosophy and theology to place Tolkien’s subcreation into its proper sociopolitical and cultural context.
If Birzer’s book has a rival to the claim of being pick of the crop, it is Richard Purtill’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion (Ignatius Press, 2003). This is not merely my opinion but that of Professor Birzer himself also. “Purtill’s book deserves a place alongside the best of
Tolkien criticism”, Birzer writes.
At once deeply personal, wise, and Christian, Purtill’s intellectual and highly readable work offers an overflowing stream of brilliant insights into Tolkien the man, the author, and the Roman Catholic. Especially stunning are Purtill’s explorations of myth and the deeper meanings behind serious science fiction and fantasy. One comes away from this book not only with a better understanding of Tolkien, but more importantly, with a greater grasp of truth, beauty, and Grace.
My own thoughts exactly; and since I could hardly express myself more eloquently than Professor Birzer, I shall not attempt to do so.
Time and space do not permit anything other than a cursory glance at some of the other Tolkien books that have been published recently. The appropriately named Inkling Books of Seattle have published Celebrating Middle-earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defence of Western Civilization, a collection of essays edited by John G. West Jr., and Untangling Tolkien by Michael W. Perry. The former includes contributions by West himself, by Peter Kreeft and by the present reviewer; the latter describes itself as “a chronology and commentary for The Lord of the Rings” and serves as a very useful reference work for those wishing a clearer picture of the time frame within which the action takes place.
There are also several new studies by Protestants, representing a welcome crossing of the denominational frontier. These include Tolkien in Perspective by Greg Wright (VMI Publishers, 2003), The Gospel according to Tolkien by Ralph C. Wood (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), Finding God in The Lord of the Rings by Kurt D. Bruner and Jim Ware (Tyndale House Publishers, 2001), and Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings by Mark Eddy Smith (Intervarsity Press, 2002).
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