For my final selection from the legion of new works on Tolkien from a Christian scholarly perspective, we shall turn our gaze to the East, not, as Leonie Caldecott would suggest, because it is Dawn, nor (heaven forbid!) because it is Mordor; we shall turn our gaze eastward to Poland, from whence an excellent work of scholarship, Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien by Christopher Garbowski (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, 2000) is published. In spite of its clodhoppingly clumsy title, its scholarly approach and unifying thesis make it well worth the difficulty of acquiring.
The quantity and quality of Tolkien scholarship has certainly come a long way in the five years since the present reviewer, fraught with frustration at the absence of good Christian scholarship on Tolkien’s “fundamentally Catholic” work, felt impelled to gatecrash the ominous silence on the subject. Since then, in the wake of the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, we have seen how the Peter Jackson entourage has sought to downplay the importance of Tolkien’s Catholic faith in its effort to market its product in a global secular environment. No matter. It is too late to subdue the rising tide of Christian Tolkien scholarship. The proverbial cat is out of the bag; or, rather, the Catholic is out of the Baggins.
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A HIDDEN PRESENCE
The Catholic Imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien
IT IS AN EXCITING TIME to be an admirer of J. R. R. Tolkien. Whereas the reputation of many of Tolkien’s literary contemporaries appears to be on the wane, his own formidable reputation continues to wax spectacularly.
The Tolkienian renaissance began in 1997 with the emergence of The Lord of the Rings as “the greatest book of the century” in several opinion polls. Then, in 2001, the release of the first of Peter Jackson’s three film adaptations of Tolkien’s masterpiece introduced the wonders of Middle Earth to millions of new admirers around the world. Now, half a century after the book’s initial publication, it is selling in greater numbers than ever. Such is Tolkien’s towering presence amid the pygmies of modernity that even the phrase “literary phenomenon” appears something of an understatement that fails to do him justice.
It is gratifying to know that the growth in Tolkien’s popularity has been reflected by a similar growth in the quantity and, for the most part, in the quality of Tolkien scholarship. In the past year or so, Bradley J. Birzer’s J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (ISI Books) and Richard L. Purtill’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion (Ignatius Press) have added considerably to the breadth and depth of the critical approach to Tolkien studies. And these two volumes are only la crime de la crime of the plethora of new titles in the field. Since this is the case, one might be forgiven for asking whether there is any need for more of the same. The answer to such a question might be that there is always room for more as long as they are not the same. More, yes; but more of the same, no.
Thankfully, JRRT’s epic myth is so rich, so superabundantly rich, that there is always more to discover. A Hidden Presence: The Catholic Imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Father Ian Boyd and Stratford Caldecott (Chesterton Press, 2003), is living proof that scholars have only begun to mine the depths for the seams of pure spiritual gold that lie at the heart of Middle Earth.
Boyd and Caldecott are perhaps best known as scholars of G. K. Chesterton, and the book itself is published by the newly launched publishing division of the Chesterton Institute, of which Boyd and Caldecott are luminaries. This, however, is not to detract from their position as scholars of Tolkien. On the contrary, both are well qualified, and Caldecott in particular is a Tolkien scholar of rare insight. Take, for instance, his succinct definition of “mythopoeia” in his introduction to A Hidden Presence:
Mythopoeia is the faculty of making, of creativity, and it is an essential part of our humanity. Escapism in a sense it may be, but in this case we are talking (as Tolkien puts it in his essay on Fairy Stories) of an escape into reality. It is the world of the everyday—boring, banal, dull, meaningless—that is the prison from which this kind of fantasy seeks to liberate us, not by distracting us from the real but by showing us the deeper patterns and meanings that lie concealed within it. (2-3)
Again, from the same introduction, this is what Caldecott has to say about the paradoxical realism at the typological heart of mythology: “Tolkien’s imagined beings and characters are neither caricatures nor stereotypes. If anything, they are archetypes. Their larger-than-life quality is necessary, for ‘they have their insides on the outside: they are visible souls.’ That is all part of the realism of myth” (4).
Apart from writing the introduction, Caldecott is the author of the first of the dozen or more essays that grace this volume. He is also the first of several writers in A Hidden Presence to refer to the significance of the date on which the Ring is destroyed: 25 March. The significance of this date will not escape the attention of Catholics, though it is certainly overlooked all too often by Tolkien’s non-Christian admirers. Tom Shippey, an Anglo-Saxon scholar and Tolkien expert, states in his book The Road to Middle Earth that in “Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, 25 March is the date of the Crucifixion”. It is also, of course, the Feast of the Annunciation, the celebration of the Absolute Center of all history as the moment when God Himself became incarnate as man. As a Catholic, Tolkien was well aware of the significance of 25 March. It signified the way in which God had “unmade” original sin, the Fall, which, like the Ring, had brought humanity under the sway of the Shadow. If the Ring, which is “unmade” at the culmination of Tolkien’s Quest, is the “one ring to rule them all . . . and in the darkness bind them”, the Fall was the “one sin to rule them all. . . and in the darkness bind them”. On 25 March the one sin, like the One Ring, had been “unmade”, destroying the power of the Dark Lord.
Always insightful in his own right, Caldecott is also a disseminator of the wisdom of others. I was particularly grateful for his reference to Flannery O’Connor’s discussion of what constitutes a “Catholic” novel. It is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized world, but is simply “one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by” (11).
The theme of the Catholic novel is taken up by Owen Dudley Edwards in an essay entitled “Gollum, Frodo and the Catholic Novel”. At times, Edwards’ efforts to forge critical connections between The Lord of the Rings and the novels of other Catholic writers, such as Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene and Waugh, are too carelessly, or at least too briefly, argued. The result is that his conclusions appear a trifle tenuous. Similarly, his discussion of the analogous relationship between The Lord of the Rings and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is frustratingly incomplete. He is also at pains to point out the inspiration that Tolkien indubitably gained from the Greek classical tradition without balancing his analysis with an acceptance that Norse and Celtic mythology were at least as important as catalysts to Tolkien’s imagination. Thus, for instance, he reminds us, in relation to Bilbo’s riddle competition with Gollum in The Hobbit, that “the story of Oedipus involves a riddle-contest with the Sphinx” (35), while at the same time he fails to allude to the rich riddle-tradition of the Anglo-Saxons. These are, however, relatively minor quibbles. For the most part, Edwards’ essay offers valuable illumination of the literary landscape within which The Lord of the Rings was written. Perplexingly, many of his most poignant points are relegated to the footnotes at the end of his essay—for instance, his berating of Edwin Muir for “snobbishly” abusing Tolkien, adding, quite correctly, that a poet of Muir’s caliber and sensibility “should have known better” (40). Most particularly, Edwards’ footnoted reference to the similarities between Chesterton’s The Flying Inn and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was most welcome.
Verlyn Flieger’s essay is the low point of the volume. On occasion, her efforts at sociological reductionism reduce her analysis to the level
of the inane. Furthermore, it is clear that she has no sympathy with, and no comprehension or conception of, the theological depths from which Tolkien drew the inspiration for his myth-making. Her claim that Tolkien’s history in Middle Earth “begins in imperfection” (62) is quite simply wrong, according to any critical criteria. It begins with God! Similarly, her claim that God in Middle Earth “is a curiously remote and for the most part inactive figure, uninvolved, with the exception of one cataclysmic moment, in the world he has conceived” is not only erroneous but plainly contradicted on numerous occasions by the analyses of the other contributors to the volume. Her essay protrudes like an awkward-looking sore thumb from the rest of the book to such an extent that one has to question the wisdom of its inclusion in the first place.
Unfortunately, there is not room in a review of this length to discuss many of the other essays in this splendid volume. Clive Tolley’s essay on Tolkien’s sublimely beautiful but sadly underrated poem “Mythopoeia” is thoroughly engrossing but flawed, in this reviewer’s judgment, by Tolley’s misreading of Pope’s Essay on Man. Dwight Longenecker’s short and ingenious essay paralleling hobbit humility with the humility exhibited by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is full of the deftly expressed wisdom with which his work always abounds.
Perhaps the finest essay in the whole collection, in terms of the pure quality of the prose, is that by Leonie Caldecott. It is not merely what she says that is so delightful but the wonderful way in which she says it. I wish, in fact, that space permitted citation at length, particularly of the concluding three paragraphs of her essay. Entitled “At Dawn, Look to the East”, the prose is as bright and as fresh as the dawn itself.
There is much else besides. There are “Perspectives” by those who knew Tolkien personally, including George Sayer and Robert Murray, S.J., and an essay by the exceptionally gifted wordsmith Peter Kreeft that was originally published in the Saint Austin Review, a cultural journal of which the present reviewer is honored to be coeditor. Two essays on fairy tales by Chesterton serve as an appropriate appendix to the volume, reiterating the deep-rooted creative affinity between GKC and JRRT. Taken as a whole, and flaws notwithstanding, A Hidden Presence deserves a place of honor in any discerning Tolkien-lover’s library.
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FROM WAR TO MORDOR
J. R. R. Tolkien and World War I
A review of
Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
by John Garth+
JOHN GARTH’S STUDY of the impact of the killing fields of World War I on the creative imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien begins with an unexpected twist, the ingenuity of which merits its citation in full.
It is December 16th, nearly the dead of winter. Chill gusts buffet the flanks and faces of the attackers struggling to advance across a bare hundred yards or so of mud. They are a ramshackle group, some of them mere novices. The minute these young men muster a concerted effort, a few veterans press forward with all their energy and skill. But most of the time there is chaos. Again and again their opponents shrug off the assault and land a fearsome counterblow, so that all the guile, fortitude, and experience of the veterans can barely hold back the assault. Their captain, J. R. R. Tolkien, tries to bring his own experience to bear; but those around him are, in the words of an eyewitness, “a beaten pack”.
The year is 1913: the Great War is eight months away, and this is just a game. Not yet soldiers, Tolkien and his team-mates are Oxbridge undergraduates back in Birmingham for Christmas, and today, in accordance with annual tradition, they are playing rugby against their old school’s First XV.
For a scholarly biography, this gimmicky and teasingly tantalizing opening, bathed in bathos, reads suspiciously like the start of a novel. It is, however, neither inapt nor inept that it does so; on the contrary, its originality is positively refreshing. It declares from the very outset that we are in the company of a gifted wordsmith who will spare us the banality of the type of academic jargon, masking ignorance, which is all too common in the myopic miasma of (post) modernity.
Garth’s approach is as welcome as it is unusual. His prose is never boring, and he is never bored by, nor boorish toward, his subject. Neither is his book the sort of hackiography (written by hacks who hack to pieces the reputation of their subjects / victims with the machete of scandal and the cudgel of scorn) that is all too common in our meretricious age. “I do not claim any divine insight into Tolkien’s mind,” Garth declares in the preface, “and I do not pretend to put him on the psychiatrist’s couch. I have not gone hunting for shock and scandal, but have focused at all times on matters that seem to me to have played a part in the growth of his legendarium.”
If, however, the author’s positive approach to his subject is laudable, the narrowness of his historical perspective is less so. His declared belief that World War I was “the crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern era” is too sweeping in its generalization and too trite in its general understanding of history. It is simply too simplistic to suggest that the “wasteland” of modernity, as epitomized by Eliot’s poem of that name, arose from the no-man’s-land of the Great War. The wasteland predated the war and was parodied by G. K. Chesterton in his prewar novels, most notably perhaps in The Man Who Was Thursday and The Ball and the Cross, both of which are peopled with “hollow men” every iota as vacuous and venal as Eliot’s postwar counterparts. And if World War I is alleged to have heralded the hedonism of the “bright young things” satirized in the poetry of Eliot and the prose of Waugh, what is to be said of the hedonism of the decadent 1890s reflected in the work of Wilde or Aubrey Beardsley? Similarly, it is a little too easy to state glibly that “disenchantment” began with the protest poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. What about the “disenchantment” of the aforementioned Decadents? And what of Romantic disenchantment? Byron, Shelley, Keats? What of these? And what of the disenchantment of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the aftermath of the Great Terror of the French Revolution, a terror as terrible as the “animal horror” of World War I, to employ Tolkien’s description of the latter conflict? And then, of course, there is the cynicism of the so-called enlightened eighteenth century. Finally, and in fact, firstly, there was the Reformation, the mother of all disenchantments, which fractured and fragmented the comparatively unified civilization of medieval Europe. In truth, it would be more accurate to insist that the Reformation was “the crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern era”, compared with which the impact of the First World War was merely a later manifestation of the disunity caused by this greater debacle four hundred years earlier.
In spite of this fundamental flaw, Garth’s book has much to recommend it. He provides little-known yet fascinating insights into the literary tastes of the youthful Tolkien, such as his indifference to Milton and Keats and, by contrast, his “passionate approval” of Francis Thompson, the Catholic mystic and poet who died at a young age in 1907 when Tolkien was in his early teens. According to Garth, Thompson’s “metrical and verbal accomplishments, his immense imagery, and the visionary faith underpinning his work” was a significant influence on Tolkien’s earliest efforts at poetry. We also learn that Tolkien believed that Thompson had successfully bridged the “divide between rationalism and romanticism”, a divide that, as a Catholic Christian, Tolkien would see as not merely unhealthy but ultimately even unnatural. The mystical and philosophical marriage of the romantic and the rational, translated more formally as the relationship between faith and reason, fides et ratio, would become the kernel of Tolkien’s own philosophy as a writer.
Garth is less insightful in his insinuation that Rupert Brooke’s famous poem “The Soldier” was the product of “pessimism”. In reality, Brooke’s self-sacrificial sentiments were the pouring forth of the optimistic naïveté, nourished on jingoism, which typified the British public’s attitude toward the war in its earliest days. One suspects that Garth has confused pessimism with melancholy, the latter of which do
es indeed permeate Brooke’s poetry and is an expression of the influence of his poetic mentor, Hilaire Belloc.
Far from representing pessimism, the “Rupert Brooke period”, as it has been called, would become a byword for the period of glib pro-war optimism that would be pricked only by the full horror of the realities of trench warfare. By the time the genuine pessimism of the poetry of Owen and Sassoon burst like bombs of protest on a shell-shocked public, Rupert Brooke had already spilled out his life as a martyr to jingoism in “some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”.
The discussion of Brooke, Owen and Sassoon, and the struggle between jingoism and protest, raises the whole thorny subject of patriotism. Is it good or evil, right or wrong? The question had been addressed memorably by Chesterton in his witticism that the patriotic boast of “my country, right or wrong” is like saying “my mother, drunk or sober”. We might love our mother, but should we condone or encourage her drunkenness? The English nurse Edith Cavell, murdered by the Germans during World War I, had stated that “patriotism is not enough”, a phrase that is often used unthinkingly to suggest that patriotism is in some way wrong. This is not, of course, what Cavell was saying. To state that a thing is not sufficient is not to say that it is wrong. Oxygen is not sufficient for the sustenance of human life in the sense that other things, such as food and drink, are necessary also. It would, therefore, be true to say that oxygen is not enough, but not to imply from such a statement that oxygen is harmful! Tolkien’s contribution to the thorny question is recounted succinctly by Garth, who relates his defence of nationalism at a college debate shortly before the war began.
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