Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  Tolkien’s version [of nationalism] had nothing to do with vaunting one nation above others. To him the nation’s greatest goal was cultural self-realisation, not power over others; but essential to this were patriotism and a community of belief. “I don’t defend ‘Deutschland über alles’ but certainly do in Norwegian ‘alt for Norge’ [All for Norway]”, he told Wiseman on the eve of the debate. By his own admission, therefore, Tolkien was both an English patriot and a supporter of Home Rule for the Irish.

  In distinguishing between Deutschland über alles and Alt for Norge, Tolkien is essentially distinguishing between imperialism and nationalism and insisting that the former is always a negation of the latter. An imperialist is a “patriot” who tramples on the patriotism of others; a nationalist is a patriot who respects other nations as he wishes his own nation to be respected. The former is pernicious and finds expression in Tolkien’s legendarium in the expansionism of Mordor and Isengard, whereas the latter is a blessing and finds expression in Rohan, Minas Tirith and, most memorably of all, the Shire. Hobbits are nationalists; orcs are imperialists.

  And this, of course, brings us back to the purpose of John Garth’s book. Since it is his intention to show the connection between Tolkien’s wartime experience and his writing of The Lord of the Rings thirty years later, the final judgment on his book should rest on his success or failure in doing so. If this is the criterion, it must be said that his book is of only limited value. Tolkien stated that the most important influence on the writing of his magnum opus was religious. His work was “fundamentally religious and Catholic”, and the fact that he was “a Christian . . . and in fact a Roman Catholic” was at the top of the “scale of significance” that governed the relationship between himself, as author, and his work. Nowhere in Tolkien’s scale of significance is the war even mentioned.

  It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the impact of the war—and, in consequence, the relevance of Garth’s book—entirely. Nobody could have lived through the “animal horror” of the Somme without its indelible scar being left somewhere on the psyche. Perhaps in the desolation of Mordor we see the desolation of no-man’s-land; perhaps in the very darkness of much of the chronicles of Middle Earth we see the shadow of the war and its horrors. Perhaps. Ultimately, however, the shadow of the war is only a dim shadow of the Shadow itself, a shadow that represents not war but the evil that causes war. The work, at its deepest, is a theological thriller, “fundamentally religious and Catholic”. As such, and to reiterate, Garth’s work is of limited value, especially when compared to those works on Tolkien that concentrate on the more important influences on his life and work. Nonetheless, and this important caveat aside, the work is well written, entertaining and informative.

  Anyone seeking a definitive exposition of the depths of Tolkien’s life and work will not find it here. If, however, like the present reviewer, he has an insatiable appetite for all things Tolkien, this book will make a valued addition to his presumably already burgeoning collection. Tolkien and the Great War is not the main course—it is not even an appetizer—but it certainly makes a very palatable side dish.

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  DIVINE MERCY IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS

  PETER JACKSON’S BLOCKBUSTER FILM ADAPTATION of The Lord of the Rings has been watched by millions of moviegoers throughout the world, most of whom will be unaware that they are watching a film version of “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”.

  The work’s author, J. R. R. Tolkien, was a lifelong devout Catholic who poured his Catholic heart into the writing of the myth that is now captivating a new generation, half a century after its first publication.

  Yet, if the Catholicism is indeed as “significant” as its author claimed, where exactly are the Catholic signs that bestow this significance?

  This is too large a question to answer in a solitary article. Indeed, there are now several whole books dedicated to the Christian heart of Tolkien’s myth. This being so, we will concentrate on one aspect of the Christian dimension. Let us examine the manifestation of divine mercy in The Lord of the Rings.

  “Above all shadows rides the sun”, proclaims Samwise Gamgee amid the perilous gloom on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol in The Two Towers, declaring his faith and hope in a power beyond the reach of the Shadow. The hopeful hobbit, like the hope-filled Christian, has no need of despair, even in the midst of the greatest evil. Darkness can never ultimately prevail in the presence of the Sun that never sets.

  Sam and Frodo are led into the gloom of Cirith Ungol, and into the lurking presence of the monstrous Shelob, by the treachery of Gollum. And it is, ironically, in the relationship between Sam, Frodo and Gollum that we find the key to understanding the role of divine mercy and the workings of divine providence in the whole work.

  Throughout the story, Gollum is seeking to betray Sam and Frodo in order to regain possession of the Ring, his “Precious”. Knowing his treacherous intent, Frodo initially wished that Gollum had been killed: “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature when he had a chance!”

  “Pity?” replied Gandalf. “It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy.” Gandalf then went on to say that he believed that Gollum was mystically bound up with the fate of the Ring. “My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least.” These words are recalled later by Frodo when he too has the chance to kill Gollum. Like Bilbo, Frodo also chooses the path of mercy over vengeance, and like Bilbo, his charitable choice comes to “rule the fate of many”. At the climactic moment on Mount Doom, Frodo finds that he cannot, at the very last, cast the Ring into the Fire. On the very brink of success, he finds himself on the verge of final, and fatal, failure. It is at this crucial moment that Frodo, the Quest and Middle Earth itself are saved by Gollum, who rushes forward and bites the Ring from Frodo’s finger before losing his balance and falling into the abyss, destroying himself and the Ring in the process. The scene is not only a triumph of divine providence over fate, it is the triumph of divine mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated. According to Tolkien himself, Frodo was saved “because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved—by Mercy: by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness and injury.” 1 And as for Gollum, he fell into the Fire, clutching his Precious. He made his choice and he has his reward.

  The greatest manifestation of divine mercy is, of course, the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, and at its deepest, Tolkien’s myth serves as a reflection of this archetypal mercy. The journey of Frodo and Sam into the very heart of Mordor in order to destroy, or unmake, the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom is emblematic of the Christian’s imitation of Christ in carrying the Cross. At its most profound level, 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. This is the ultimate applicability of The Lord of the Rings—that we have to lose our life in order to gain it; that unless we die we cannot live; that we must all take up our cross and follow him.

  All of this would be deducible implicitly from the story itself, but Tolkien makes the parallel even more explicitly. “I should say”, he wrote, explaining the final climactic moments on Mount Doom when the Ring is finally unmade, “that within the mode of the story [it] exemplifies (an aspect of) the familiar words: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’.” Tolkien makes the Christian dimension even more unmistakable, and unavoidable, in the fact that the climactic destruction of the Ring, and in consequence the destruction of the Dark Lord who had forged it, occurred on “the twenty-fifth of March”. The significance of this date will not escape the attention of Catholics.

  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.

  There are, of course, many other examples of divine mercy shining forth from the pages of Tolkien’s masterpiece—too many to mention in a solitary article. It is, however, very comforting in the midst of these dark days that the most popular book of the twentieth century, and the most popular movie of the new century, draw their power and their glory from the light of the Gospel. Deo gratias.

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  RESURRECTING MYTH

  A Response to Dr. Murphy’s “Response”

  THERE IS SOMETHING A LITTLE FISHY about Dr. Murphy’s “response” to my article “True Myth: The Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings”—fishy in the sense that it is a large red herring. It seems to me, having read his “response”, that the whole argument he constructs is nothing more than a nebulous nonsense that will waft away at the first faint breeze of logical, not to say theological, reality. Ultimately, as we shall see, his less-than-edifying edifice is built upon non sequiturs constructed on fallacious foundations. On the assumption that there is a good deal of truth to be derived from mythology, it can be said, quite truthfully, that Dr. Murphy’s position is far less substantial than the castles of the fairies.

  Dr. Murphy endeavors to downplay Tolkien’s assertion that The Lord of the Rings is “of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” by quoting another of Tolkien’s letters in which he describes the work as “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration”. He implies thereafter that the linguistic foundations are as important as the religious. It is, however, interesting that he fails to quote another letter by Tolkien in which the author of The Lord of the Rings states unequivocally that the religious element is more important than the linguistic. I say that it is interesting because this particular letter forms the basis of my whole approach to understanding The Lord of the Rings in my book Tolkien: Man and Myth. Clearly Dr. Murphy has read my book, because he quotes from it selectively throughout his article. Why, therefore, did he fail to quote the very letter that both refutes his own suggestion that religious and linguistic elements are of equal importance and also forms the foundation of my own argument that he is presumably endeavoring to refute?

  It is curious that Dr. Murphy asserts that “Tolkien would not want us to take his own suggestions about the meaning of his work as the last word”. Possibly not. Yet, as Tolkien states specifically, he knows “more than any investigator”. Consequently, assuming that Tolkien is correct in this assertion (and I believe that he is), his words are more reliable than any other words on the subject. I would go further. I would assert that we ignore Tolkien’s words at our peril. The author is the anchor that keeps us bedded in the underlying realities that constitute a work. Once we begin to ignore the author, we inevitably drift away from the true meaning of the work. Tolkien’s “guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself” might know more about The Lord of the Rings than does the author himself, but since we are not at liberty to ask them personally (except perhaps in prayer), we should treat Tolkien as the most reliable arbiter of his own work. To reiterate, therefore, we can assume quite safely that The Lord of the Rings is indeed a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work” and that the Catholic dimension is the most important of the really significant factors that animate the book.

  Tolkien’s secularist admirers never fail to remind us that Tolkien denied that The Lord of the Rings could or should be seen as an allegory. Thus, for instance, Dr. Murphy complains that “Pearce omits from his article any discussion of the difference between myth and allegory, a distinction that was important to Tolkien”. He then quotes from Tolkien’s famous essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, in which Tolkien complained that the “defender” of a myth, “unless he is careful, and speaks in parables . . . will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and. . . will be left with a formal and mechanical allegory”. Ironically, Dr. Murphy has unwittingly destroyed his own case by the very words of Tolkien that he has sought to employ in his prosecution of it. In this passage, Tolkien is speaking of the dangers of reducing the myth to “a formal and mechanical allegory” while advocating that the critic employ the more careful and subtle allegorical approach implied by the use of parables.

  It is a truth invariably missed by those allergic to allegory that Tolkien’s attacks on allegory always and invariably refer specifically to this “formal and mechanical” kind. Tolkien considered this form of allegory, exemplified most notably perhaps by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and C. S. Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress, as being too crude in its mode of conveying the truth. Tolkien preferred the subtler allegorical approach of mythology whereby the facts of the story become applicable to the truth that is present in our own lives. This applicability of the literal meaning of a story to the world beyond its pages is no less “allegorical” than other forms of allegory; it is a difference in degree, not essence. It is less formal, less mechanical, more subtle, but no less allegorical. Thus, for example, Tolkien stressed that “any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations.)”

  “The truth is”, wrote C. S. Lewis, that allegory is “one of those words which need defining in each context where one uses it.” In his early work, The Allegory of Love, Lewis defined allegory in its formal, mechanical or crude form, as follows:

  On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia (visible things) to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira (Anger) with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia (Patience).

  Lewis, like Tolkien, often denied that his work was allegorical in this strict sense of the word. In December 1958 he wrote to a correspondent denying that Aslan was an “allegory”.

  By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects, e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan a giant represents Despair.

  Although Lewis denied that Aslan was “formally and mechanically allegorical” in this crude sense, he would clearly have conceded that Aslan is meant to remind the reader of Christ, without specifically representing him per se. Similarly, Gandalf in his death and resurrection is meant to remind us of Christ without any suggestion that we are ever meant to think that he is meant to be Christ Himself. He “dies” as Gandalf the Grey and is washed white in the blood of his sacrifice, returning resplendently transfigured as Gandalf the White. Frodo is depicted as Christlike in his carrying of the Ring, which, like the Cross, is an emblem of evil or sin; yet he is clearly not intended to be seen literally as Christ.

  Tolkien’s depiction of the Christlike in The Lord of the Rings parallels the Christo-subtle images evoked by the great and anonymous Anglo-Saxon scop who first recounted the story of Beowulf. Indeed, we should not be the least surprised to discover that Tolkien’s approach to the Christoc
entric applicability of his myth parallels the applicability of the actions of the hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic. Beowulf reminds us of Christ at several points throughout the narrative, but we are never meant to see Beowulf as Christ Himself. Clearly Tolkien had drawn deep draughts of inspiration from the subcreative well of this profoundly Christian poem.

  There is, in fact, such an abundance of applicable Christian images throughout The Lord of the Rings that one scarcely knows where to start or when to stop. Aragorn is the symbol of kingship, that is, authentic authority, and his kingship reminds us not only of Christ himself but of the desire of Englishmen for the return of the true, that is, Catholic, king—the king in exile—whether the resonance surrounding him be Arthurian or Jacobite or both. 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. One wonders, in fact, whether the very name of Aragorn could be linked to Catherine of Aragon, the saintly queen who, with the support of the Pope, refused heroically to grant a divorce to Henry VIII, staying true to her Catholic faith while her adulterous husband declared himself head of the Church of England. Obviously we are not intended to believe that Aragorn is Catherine of Aragon! It is not a formal allegory, but a story that is applicable allegorically.

  Might we not see in the two characters linked ingeniously by Tolkien through the employment of a phonetic anagram, Theoden and Denethor, the victory of Christian hope (hence Theoden) over pagan despair (hence Denethor)? Clearly Theoden is not God; neither is Denethor, Thor. Yet the applicability of their actions to the reality of paganism and Christendom enriches the myth beyond measure. It is not a question of this allegorical applicability impoverishing or “murdering” the myth, as Dr. Murphy implies, but of its breathing the life of God, or “Eru, the One”, into it. Again, Tolkien declared in one of his published letters that, as a Catholic who believed in the Fall, he perceived human history as the Long Defeat with only occasional glimmers of final victory; paralleling these words, Galadriel states specifically in The Lord of the Rings that she and the Lord of the Galadhrim have, “together through ages of the world . . . fought the long defeat.” The elves, like mankind, are exiled in time and, to employ the language of the Salve Regina, are like the “poor banished children of Eve” sending up their sighs, “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears”. Unlike men, however, the elves are marooned in immortality and are trapped in the Long Defeat of the vale of tears for centuries unnumbered. No wonder the elves call death “the gift of Iluvatar” (that is, God) to man. The elves are painfully aware of the poignant difference between immortality and eternal life. Thus the Salve Regina culminates in the faithful Christian’s acknowledgement of this gift of death in the plea that, “after this our exile”, we may be shown “the Blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus”.