J. R. R. Tolkien’s
SANCTIFYING MYTH
Understanding Middle-earth
Wilmington, Delaware
To Rita, Kevin, and Todd Birzer,
who journeyed with me into the heart of Mordor.
May we all meet in the Blessed Realm someday.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Joseph Pearce
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1:
The Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien
Chapter 2:
Myth and Sub-creation
Chapter 3:
The Created Order
Chapter 4:
Heroism
Chapter 5:
The Nature of Evil
Chapter 6:
Middle-earth and Modernity
Conclusion:
The Nature of Grace Proclaimed
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
The phenomenal popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings continues to be greeted with anger and contempt by many self-styled literary “experts.” Rarely has a book caused such controversy and rarely has the vitriol of the critics highlighted to such an extent the cultural schism between the cliquish literary illuminati and the views of the reading public.
It is perhaps noteworthy that most of the self-styled “experts” amongst the literati who have queued up to sneer contemptuously at The Lord of the Rings are outspoken champions of cultural decon-struction and moral relativism. Most would treat the claims of Christianity in general, and of the Catholic Church in particular, with the same dismissive disdain with which they have poured scorn upon Tolkien. Indeed, their antagonism could be linked to the fact that Tolkien’s myth is enriched throughout with inklings of the truths of the Catholic faith.
According to Tolkien’s own “scale of significance,” expressed candidly in a letter written shortly after The Lord of the Rings was published, his Catholic faith was the most important, or most “significant,” influence on the writing of the work. 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, the present volume emerges as a valuable and timely reiteration of the profoundly Christian dimension in the work of the man who is possibly the most important writer of the twentieth century.
Professor Birzer grapples with the very concept of “myth” and proceeds to a discussion of Tolkien’s philosophy of myth, rooted as it is in the relationship between Creator and creature, and, in consequence, the relationship between Creation and sub-creation. In his rigorously researched and richly written study, Professor Birzer helps us to understand the theological basis of the mythological world of Middle-earth and enables us to see that Tolkien’s epic goes beyond mere “fantasy” to the deepest realms of metaphysics. Far from being an escapist fantasy, The Lord of the Rings is revealed as a theological thriller.
Tolkien’s development of the philosophy of myth derives directly from his Christian faith. In fact, to employ a lisping pun, Tolkien is a misunderstood man precisely because he is a mythunderstood man. He 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 detractors that lies at the very root of their failure to appreciate his work. For most modern critics a 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. This paradoxical philosophy was destined to have a decisive and profound influence on C. S. Lewis, facilitating his conversion to Christianity. It is interesting—indeed astonishing—to note that without J. R. R. Tolkien there might not have been a C. S. Lewis, at least not the C. S. Lewis that has come to be known and loved throughout the world as the formidable Christian apologist and author of sublime Christian myths.
Integral to Tolkien’s philosophy of myth was the belief that creativity is a mark of God’s divine image in Man. God, as Creator, poured forth the gift of creativity to men, the creatures created in his own image. Only God can create in the primary sense, i.e., by bringing something into being out of nothing. Man, however, can sub-create by molding the material of Creation into works of beauty. Music, art, and literature are all acts of sub-creation expressive of the divine essence in man. In this way, men share in the creative power of God. This sublime vision found (sub)creative expression in the opening pages of The Silmarillion, the enigmatic and unfinished work that forms the theological and philosophical foundation upon which, and the mythological framework within which, The Lord of the Rings is structured.
The Silmarillion delved deep into the past of Middle-earth, Tolkien’s sub-created world, and the landscape of legends recounted in its pages formed the vast womb of myth from which The Lord of the Rings was born. Indeed, Tolkien’s magnum opus would not have been born at all if he had not first created, in The Silmarillion, the world, the womb, in which it was conceived.
The most important part of The Silmarillion is its account of the creation of Middle-earth by the One. This creation myth is perhaps the most significant, and the most beautiful, of all Tolkien’s work. It goes to the very roots of his creative vision and says much about Tolkien himself. Somewhere within the early pages of The Silmarillion is to be found both the man behind the myth and the myth behind the man.
The “myth” behind Tolkien was, of course, Catholic Christianity, the “True Myth,” and it is scarcely surprising that Tolkien’s own version of the creation in The Silmarillion 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.” This, therefore, is the theological foundation upon which the whole edifice of Middle-earth is erected. Disharmony is brought into the cosmos when Melkor, one of the Holy Ones, or Archangels, decides to defy of the will of the Creator, mirroring the Fall of Satan. This disharmony is the beginning of evil. Again, Tolkien’s myth follows the “True Myth” of Christianity with allegorical precision.
Shortly after describing the rebellion of Melkor, Tolkien introduces Sauron, the Dark Lord 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 descendants of Tolkien’s Satan, rendering impossible, or at any rate implausible, anything but a Christian interpretation of the book. In the impenetrable blackness of the Dark Lord and his abysmal servants, the Ringwraiths, 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. In his depiction of the potency of evil, Tolkien presents the reader with a metaphysical black hole far more unsettling than Milton’s proud vision of Satan as “darkness visible.”
Tolkien is, however, equally powerful in his depiction of goodness. In the unassuming humility of the hobbits we see the exaltation of the humble. In their reluctant heroism we see a courage ennobled by modesty. In the immortality of the elves, and the sadness and melancholic wisdom that immortality 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’s “vale of tears” and enables him, in death, to achieve a mystical union with the Divine beyond the reach of Time.
In Gandalf we see the archetypal prefiguration of a powerful Prophet or Patriarch, a seer who beholds a vision of the Kingdom beyond the understanding of men. At times he is almost Christ-like. He lays down his life for his friends, and his mysterious “resurrection” results in his transfiguration. Before his self-sacrificial “death” he is Gandalf the Grey; after his “resurrection” he reappears as Gandalf the White, armed with greater powers and deeper wisdom.
In the true, though exiled, kingship of Aragorn we see glimmers of the hope for a restoration of truly ordained, i.e., Catholic, authority. The person of Aragorn represents the embodiment of the Arthurian and Jacobite yearning—the visionary desire for the “Return of the King” after eons of exile. The “sword that is broken,” the symbol of Aragorn’s kingship, is re-forged at the anointed time—a potent reminder of Excalibur’s union with the Christendom it is ordained to serve. And, of course, in the desire for the Return of the King we have the desire of all Christians for the Second Coming of Christ, the True King and Lord of All.
Significantly, the role of men in The Lord of the Rings reflects their divine, though fallen, nature. They are to be found amongst the Enemy’s servants, usually beguiled by deception into the ways of evil but 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, i.e., 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. 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. Unfortunately, those who are blind to theology will continue to be blind to that which is most beautiful in The Lord of the Rings.
This volume will enable the blind to see, and will help the partially sighted to see more clearly the full beauty of Middle-earth. As a guide for those who would like to know more about the sanctifying power of Middle-earth this volume will prove invaluable. The sheer magnificence of Tolkien’s mythological vision, and the Christian mysticism and theology that gives it life, is elucidated with clarity by Professor Birzer in chapters on “Myth and Sub-creation,” “The Created Order,” “Heroism,” “The Nature of Evil,” and “The Nature of Grace Proclaimed.” There is also an excellent and enthralling chapter on the relationship between Middle-earth and modernity, in which Professor Birzer combines his scholarship as a historian with his grounding in philosophy and theology to place Tolkien’s sub-creation into its proper sociopolitical and cultural context.
With Professor Birzer as an eminently able guide, the reader will be taken deep into Tolkien’s world, entering into a realm of exciting truths that he might not previously have perceived. As he is led, with 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.
Joseph Pearce
August 2002
Preface
My oldest brother, Kevin, received a first edition of The Silmaril-lion for his birthday in the fall of 1977. I was only ten at the time, but I knew it was a momentous event. The new gift seemed almost biblical. I found the cover, one of Tolkien’s own paintings, “The Mountain Path,” especially fascinating. Through it I seemed to sense that the Oxford don was inviting me into what he called his “perilous realm.” Even at ten, I knew it was a path to a world beyond anything I’d experienced in my central Kansas upbringing.
The present book began, in a sense, during the summer of 1979, as I prepared to enter the sixth grade at Holy Cross Elementary School. That summer I saved up my lawn mowing money, rode my bike downtown to Crossroads Bookstore in Hutchinson, Kansas, and purchased the boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I devoured them. I loved Tolkien and even prayed for him, along with my deceased father, every night before bed. At that age, of course, I got no more deep meaning out of Tolkien than that one should be a good guy and always do the right thing. But nonetheless, Tolkien and his (good) characters very much shaped my thinking as a teenager, and indeed have served as lifelong models of the noble and Christian ideal. I also remember visiting my grandparents in Hays, Kansas, during seventh grade and attempting to read The Silmarillion. With the exception of the opening chapter on the creation of Arda, which I thought was intensely and spiritually beautiful (and still do), the book meant little to me. It failed to contain for me the high drama that The Lord of the Rings had. I read the opening few chapters of The Silmarillion numerous times, but never made it beyond the story of Ilúvatar and the conflict with Melkor.
Eight years later, I wrote a paper on Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism for Dr. Kenneth Sayre at the University of Notre Dame. I was struck by how much I had missed as an eleven year old. To be sure, I had captured the essence of Tolkien, but I had missed the important nuances: that the Ring represented sin, the lembas the Blessed Sacrament, Galadriel the Blessed Virgin Mary. Of course, in the years between the first reading and the second reading, I had lost, and later regained, my childhood faith. Another nine years passed before my older brother Todd, having just finished the work, talked me into reading it again. I was deep into my dissertation in American frontier and Indian history at the time, and nothing else seemed too important. But as a rule I follow Todd’s advice. I picked up the trilogy yet again, and Tolkien struck me like “lightning from a clear sky,” as C. S. Lewis had aptly described his own experience of reading Tolkien. I also began to make new connections.
Tolkien, I discovered quickly, fit clearly and neatly into the mold of a number of twentieth-century Christian humanist and antimodernist writers and thinkers, such as Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, Etienne Gilson, Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and T. S. Eliot. Each, I believe, wanted to prevent the crumbling twentieth-century Western world from fully entering the Abyss, and I am profoundly thankful to each for their scholarly efforts and courage in the face of extreme secular and ideological opposition.
When I expressed my newly rediscovered enthusiasm for Tolkien to my close friend Winston Elliott, president of the Center for the American Idea in Houston, he encouraged me to deliver a lecture on the topic at the Center’s various programs. Another member of the Center, Gleaves Whitney, then finishing his dissertation on Christian humanism at the University of Michigan, advised the same. I followed their advice, and I’ve been working on Tolkien as an academic project ever since. I owe them each—as well as Winston’s wife, Barbara, and his colleague, John Rocha—a great debt for helping me realize that my belief that Tolkien was a serious man and writer worthy of scholarly study was not simply nostalgic. Indeed, I can’t imagine my own intellectual development (such as it is, with its many limitations) over the past decade without acknowledging their encouragement—intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
I owe a great thanks to a number of other persons, including: the various members of the Hillsdale College Tolkien Society, especially Dr. Donald Turner, Melinda Dille, Philip Nielsen, Nicholas Brown, James Sherk, and Christopher Neuendorf; friends and family who read drafts and commented on early versions of the chapters: particularly my brother Todd, Melinda Dille (who, along with my wife, proofed the entire text), Kevin McCormick, and Lisa Moreno; David Bratman of Stanford University, who offered me a number of helpful suggestions on chapter 2; my many friends at ISI, especially Jeremy Beer, Jason Duke, Jeff Nelson, Jeff Cain, and Admiral Mike Ratliff; Philip Nielsen and Nicholas Brown for assisting me in research; Judy Leising of Hillsdale College Library for finding a plethora of useful sources via interlibrary loan; Christopher Mitchell and the staff of the Wade Center at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois; Matt Blessing, head archivist for the Tolkien Papers at the Marquette University Library; and a number of others for offering their help in a variety of ways, including Bill Ratliff, John Dichtl, Annette Kirk, Michal Semin, Patrick Curry, Tom Shippey, Joseph and Susannah Pearce, Bud Macfarlane Jr., and Pieter Vree. I owe special thanks to Hillsdale College Provost Bob Blackstock and my division dean, Tom Conner, for providing a summer research grant in 2001, materials, and time to allow me to research and write this book. Finally, I need to recognize a debt to several scholars who have greatly influenced my own thinking on Tolkien: Jane Chance, Patrick Curry, Verlyn Flieger, Clyde Kilby, Joseph Pearce, and Tom Shippey.
My greatest thanks are to my wife, Dedra, and my children, Nathaniel and Gretchen. Dedra never realized what a Tolkienite she married, though she’s quickly becoming one herself. And Nathaniel, age three as of March 2002, knows the very important difference between Gandalf and Dumbledore. Gretchen, age one as of January 2002, is more interested in the VeggieTales, and, for now, her father is fine with that. Each, however, gave up considerable playtime and space to allow me to research, think, and write, though of course I cherish any and all distractions they provided and always will.
Bradley J. Birzer
Fayette Township, Michigan
Feast of St. Finan, 2002
Introduction
To enter faerie—that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation—is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence.1 One arrives in faerie only by invitation and, even then, only at one’s peril. The truths to be found within faerie are greater than those that can be obtained through mere human understanding; and one finds within faerie that even the greatest works of man are as nothing compared with the majesty of creation. To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien firmly believed.
The last story Tolkien published prior to his death, “Smith of Wootton Major,” follows a normal but charitably inclined man who has been graced with the ability to make extraordinarily beautiful things while metal smithing. Smith, as he is known, discovered the gift of grace on his tenth birthday, when the dawn engulfed him and “passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world.”2 Like the earth at the end of Eliot’s “Wasteland,” Tolkien’s Smith had been baptized, and through this gift he receives an invitation to faerie. While visiting that world, he discovers that in it he is the least of beings. Its beauty, however, entices him, and he spends entire days “looking only at one tree or one flower.”3 The depth of each thing astounds him. “Wonders and mysteries,” many of them terrifying in their overwhelming beauty and truth, abound in faerie, Smith discovers, and he dwells on such wonders even when he is no longer in faerie.4 Nevertheless, some encounters terrify him:
He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eye. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.5
And yet, despite the fact that he portrayed the man Smith in prostration before such grand visions, the rest of the story reveals that it was not Tolkien’s intention to denigrate Smith’s importance, but only to emphasize his place—and therefore the place of humanity in general—in the economy of creation. The English Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that “[h]e not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.”6 Likewise, Tolkien shows in “Smith of Wootton Major” that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to fully become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.
For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. In an essay describing the greatness of the medieval poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Tolkien wrote:
Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it received part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories—of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale, and not a thinly disguised moral allegory).7
Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. As Chesterton wrote, “[B]eauty and terror are very real things,” but they are also “related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.”8
Certainly myth, of which faerie is one kind, holds an estranged place in the modern world, as Tolkien well knew.9 But, he believed, so much the worse for the modern world. Indeed, myth might just be the thing needed to save the modern world from itself, as Tolkien suggested in his famous poem, “Mythopoeia,” which echoes the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).10
Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology.11 Myth can emphasize the beauty of God’s creation as well as the sacramental nature of life.12 “Our time, sick nigh unto death of utilitarianism and literalness, cries out for myth and parable,” American novelist and political philosopher Russell Kirk explained. “Great myths are not merely susceptible of rational interpretation: they are truth, transcendent truth.”13 Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society.
In his inimitable way, Chesterton once wrote that
imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does not know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.14
Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. “It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad,” Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy.15 Communities “share symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order,” political theorist Donald Lutz explains. “The shared meaning and a shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people.”16 The man “who has no sympathy with myths,” Chesterton concluded, “has no sympathy with men.”17 One cannot, it seems, separate men from their myths.
Yet many of our contemporaries—a bizarre combination of those who have embraced secular modernity as well as those who abhor it, the Christian fundamentalists—have rejected the importance of myth. For the modernist, imbued with the doctrines of Jamesian and Deweyite pragmatism, myth is a lie. One cannot, after all, see, feel, smell, taste, or hear armyth. Mythre mains just beyond our material and physical senses, and we most certainly cannot scientifically verify it. Though myth is essential to man qua man, as Chesterton rightly contended, one of modernity’s chief characteristics is the watering down of richly felt and imagined reality, and the substitution of cheap counterfeits and thin shadows for the mythic vision. “In this new sphere,” wrote theologian Romano Guardini in the mid-1920s, “things are no longer directly detected, seen, grasped, formed, or enjoyed; rather, they are mediated by signs and substitutes.”18 To the modernist, “myth,” like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.
For religious fundamentalists, myths also represent lies. Myths, the argument runs, constitute dangerous rivals to Christian truth and may lead the unwary astray, even into the very grip of hell. Why study The Volsunga or Homer, for example, when the Christian Gospels tell us all we need for salvation? It is likely, the fundamentalist concludes, that all myth comes from the devil and is an attempt to distract us from the truth of Christ. The ancient gods and demigods of Greece, Rome, and northern Europe, after all, must have been nothing more than demons in disguise.
For Tolkien, however, even pagan myths attempted to express God’s greater truths. True myth has the power to revive us, to serve as an anamnesis, or way of bringing to conscious experience ancient experiences with transcendence. But, Tolkien admitted, myth could be dangerous, or “perilous,” as he usually stated it, if it remained pagan. Therefore, Tolkien thought, one must sanctify it, that is, make it Christian and put it in God’s service. Medieval believers had the same idea, and the story told of the early-medieval saint Boniface of Crediton exemplifies one such attempt. The story (a non-factual myth, certainly!) of Boniface claims that while evangelizing the pagan Germanic tribes in north-central Europe, he encountered a tribe that worshiped a large oak tree. To demonstrate the power of Christ as the True God, Boniface cut down the tree, much to the dismay of the tribe. But rather than seeing Boniface struck down by their gods, the pagan tribe saw an evergreen instantaneously spring up on the same spot. So that Boniface could continue preaching to the astounded pagans, the story continues, his followers placed candles on the newly grown evergreen, which eventually became the first Christmas tree. This motif of “sanctifying the pagan” has been repeated throughout history by Christians in a multitude of ways, and was instrumental in contributing to the wildly successful spread of the faith. Christmas and Easter, for example, were placed on high pagan holidays; St. Paul attempted to convert the Athenians with reference to their statue of the “Unknown God”; St. Augustine re-read the works of Plato and Cicero in a Christian light in his City of God; St. Aquinas uncovered the synchronies between Aristotelian and Christian thought; and on our own continent, we see that Catholic monks built a monastery on top of the highest mound-temple in Cahokia, Illinois, former site of the priest-king of a vast Native American empire. Indeed, churches throughout Europe and North America sit on formerly sacred pagan sites. In building churches in such places Christians sought, in essence, to baptize the corrupt ground, just as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas baptized pagan ideas.
It was Tolkien’s understanding that man’s role in the sanctification of the world is a cooperative and limited one. Given the constraints of his materiality, man ultimately only catches a glimpse of the highest things, and his attempts to emulate them in their truth, beauty, and excellence are but meager. When Smith of Wootton Major discovers to his embarrassment that a doll of a beautiful woman his village has revered is horribly shabby and trite when compared to its transcendent model, the Faery Lady, whom he has just met, she calms his fears: “Do not be grieved for me… Nor too much ashamed of your own folk. Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awakening.”19 As an artist, a scholar, and a mythmaker, Tolkien gave us a glimpse of the truth, beauty, and excellence that lies beyond and behind our tangible world. That glimpse, which leads to real joy, Tolkien labeled the euchatastrophe.
Throughout his entire mythology—The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and the other works on Middle-earth—Tolkien stubbornly affirmed that the hope of the modern world lay in a return to some form of the Christiana Res Publica. “Someday Christendom may come/Westward/Evening sun recedent/Set my resting vow/Hold in open heart,” cries the poet Mark Hollis.20 What form such a trans-figured world would take, of course, is unclear. After all, Tolkien believed, man’s job is not to plan the universe, but to use the gifts God has given him for the betterment of all. “The awful Author of our being,” one of Tolkien’s favorite thinkers, Edmund Burke, wrote, “is the author of our place in the order of existence.” He, “having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the part assigned to us.”21
In his thinking about truth, reason, science, art, and myth, and in his hope for a renewal of Christendom and an end to the ideologically inspired terror of the twentieth century, Tolkien fits in nicely with a group of twentieth-century scholars and artists which we might collectively label as “The Christian humanists.”22 The Christian humanist asks two fundamental questions: (1) what is the role of the human person within God’s creation? and (2) how does man order himself within God’s creation? Christian, or theocentric, humanism, as opposed to anthropocentric, secular, Renaissance, or Enlightenment humanism, argues that one cannot understand man’s position in the world until one first acknowledges that man is created in the image of God and lives under the natural law as well as the divine law.23 The ranks of the Christian humanists include such poets and scholars as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Romano Guardini. As will become readily apparent in the following chapters, Tolkien should be counted as one of their foremost thinkers and spokesmen.
Each of the seven chapters of this book examines a different aspect of Tolkien and his mythology. Chapter 1 considers Tolkien himself; in essence, it is a mini-biography. Chapter 2 describes the nature of myth and the realm of faerie; specifically, it explores Tolkien’s academic ideas on myth and language, as well as his broader goal for his own mythology, which was, in short, to revive the northern spirit of courage by infusing it with the Christian doctrine of grace. Tolkien thought such a coupling necessary in order to bring back a genuine and effective Christendom. Chapter 3 considers Tolkien’s conceptions of the Good and the created order. It looks at the role of God/Ilúvatar in Tolkien’s mythology, as well as the various sacramental symbolisms and parallels found within the legendarium (Tolkien’s word for his entire mythology). Chapter 4 follows chapter 3 in theme. It attempts to show, at least from Tolkien’s perspective, what man’s duty is within God’s created order by focusing on five characters from The Lord of the Rings—Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir, Frodo, and Sam—as representative archetypes of Western heroes. Chapter 5 delves into Tolkien’s conception of evil and its role within the created order. Chapter 6 looks at Tolkien’s political philosophy, with special attention to his views regarding modernity and the perverse ideologies of the twentieth century. Finally, the conclusion evaluates Tolkien’s legacy and considers the future of his mythology and its power to revive the world’s understanding of right reason.
Chapter 1
The Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien
When Denis and Charlotte Plimmer interviewed J. R. R. Tolkien in 1968, they met with him in his garage-turned-study. “Not that the garage itself is any cave of wonders,” the Plimmers admitted. “Jammed between the Professor’s own house and the one next door, in an undistinguished Oxford suburb, it would be no more than a banal little room, filled with files and a clutter of garden chairs, if it were not for the man.”1 A normal man in a normal world, but with something profoundly and almost indescribably different. For the Plimmers, Tolkien’s very being transformed the drab office into something and somewhere else. As he did with his family, his classroom, and his fiction, Tolkien turned his normal, middle-class setting into the enchanted world of Middle-earth. Those who met Tolkien often noted that graces seemed to follow and flow from him, lifting up the lives of all those they touched. That same grace reached his readers, as raw numbers alone demonstrate. By one estimate, The Lord of the Rings has sold over 150 million copies since its publication in the mid-1950s.2 More than any other author of the twentieth century, Tolkien resuscitated the notion that the fantastic may tell us more about reality than do scientific facts. When the army asked Michael Tolkien to list his father’s profession, it should surprise no one that he answered “wizard.”3
John Ronald Reuel was born to Mabel and Arthur Tolkien in Bloem-fontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892. When the climate caused Ronald to become ill in 1895, his mother moved him and his brother Hilary back to England. A year later, his father died. With aid from her family, Mabel raised the two children as a single parent. When she joined the Roman Catholic Church in June 1900, her family withdrew its financial support, leaving Mabel to fend for herself. Four years later, in November 1904, Mabel died of a form of diabetes, leaving Ronald and Hilary in the care of Father Francis Morgan, a Roman Catholic priest at the Birmingham Oratory, which had originally been founded by John Henry Newman.4
In 1908, Tolkien met his future wife, Edith Bratt. Father Morgan forbade Tolkien’s relationship with Edith, but the two became engaged when the priest’s legal status as guardian ended when Tolkien turned twenty-one in 1913. With the strong encouragement of Tolkien, Edith joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1914, and the two married on March 22, 1916. They would have four children: John (b. 1917); Michael (b. 1920); Christopher (b. 1924); and Priscilla (b. 1929).5
In 1915, after taking his degree from Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien joined the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, one of the most decorated English regiments of World War I.6 A year later, he saw battle at the Somme, one of the bloodiest of the war. On the first day alone, Germans slaughtered over 20,000 French and British soldiers. “One didn’t expect to survive, you know. Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” Tolkien told an interviewer nearly sixty years after the war. “Parting from my wife then—we were only just married— it was like a death.”7 After several months on the front lines, Tolkien contracted what was generally referred to as “trench fever” and returned permanently to England.8 Though he spent less than a year in the war, it affected him deeply. Tolkien had lost several of his closest friends, and their loss, he believed, gave him an even greater duty to carry on their jointly conceived project, which was to do God’s will in the world.9 It was also during the war that Tolkien began to combine his conception of faerie—i.e., fairyland, that realm of magical beauty and charm that for Tolkien served as an analogue for a sacramental understanding of the world—with the urgent need for new myths to reinvigorate the twentieth century.10 “The war made me poignantly aware of the beauty of the world I remember,” Tolkien said in 1968. “I remember miles and miles of seething, tortured earth, perhaps best described in the chapters about the approaches to Mordor. It was a searing experience.”11
Upon returning to civilian life, Tolkien first took a job on the Oxford English Dictionary, where he took great pride in his work.12 Two years later, in 1920, he accepted his first teaching position at Leeds University. Though Leeds awarded him the prestigious title of “Professor of English Language” in 1924, Tolkien accepted an even more eminent position as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University in 1925. His academic sub-speciality was the literature and language of Mercian, an Anglo-Saxon dialect.13 He remained at Oxford for the rest of his academic career. The only significant change in his position there came in 1945, when he was named Merton Professor of English Language. In 1959, Oxford awarded him emeritus status.14
Most of his students thought Tolkien a mumbling lecturer. “The first professor to harrow me with the syntax and morphology of Old English had a speech impediment,” Guy Davenport wrote in reference to Tolkien in 1979, and “wandered in his remarks.”15 Tolkien had mumbled for a long time, and it had often caused him problems. As an interviewer from the American Library Association told him in 1957, “I do appreciate your coming up from Oxford so that I might record you Professor Tolkien, but I can’t understand a word you say.” In typically self-deprecating fashion, Tolkien responded, “A friend of mine tells me that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.”16 When invited to give a guest lecture at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Tolkien responded, “I should not, of course, object to lecturing several times. I am quite hardened by it, and even enjoy it—more than my audience.”17 Students reported that he spoke too quickly, hurrying through parts Tolkien himself found boring.18 Lewis, Tolkien’s closest friend, could be blunt when describing Tolkien’s speaking abilities.
He is scholarly, and he can be brilliant though perhaps rather recondite for most undergraduates. But unfortunately you may not be able to hear what he says. He is a ba lecturer d. All the same I advise you to go. If you do, arrive early, sit near the front and pay particular attention to the extempore remarks and comments he often makes. These are usually the best things in the lecture. In fact one could call him an inspired speaker of footnotes.19
As Lewis conceded, though, if Tolkien often mumbled, moments of brilliance and clarity revealed themselves equally often, especially when he recited poetry. “I remember one [lecture I] attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien,” poet W. H. Auden wrote. “I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound.”20 A student in a 1926 class was equally enthralled with Tolkien’s reading of Beowulf: “He came in lightly and gracefully, I always remember that, his gown flowing, his fair hair shining, and he read Beowulf aloud. We did not know the language he was reading, yet the sound of Tolkien made sense of the unknown tongue and the terrors and the dangers that he recounted—how I do not know—made our hair stand on end. He read like no one else I have ever heard.”21
Students most remembered Tolkien’s kindness and his endless efforts to make them learn. He always approached his subject with “appealing jollity.”22 Anthony Curtis contrasted Tolkien and Lewis’s teaching styles:
At the end of the hour with Lewis I always felt a complete ignoramus; no doubt an accurate impression but also a rather painful one; and if you did venture to challenge one of his theories the ground was cut away from beneath your feet with lightning speed. It was a fool’s mate in three moves with Lewis smiling at you from the other side of the board in unmalicious glee at his victory. By contrast Tolkien was the soul of affability. He did all the talking, but he made you feel you were his intellectual equal. Yet his views beneath the deep paternal charm were passionately held.23
Other students compared Tolkien to his medieval counterparts. “With Tolkien you were in the meadhall in which he was the bard and we were the drinking, listening guests,” detective writer Michael Innes said.24 Oxford professors rarely received standing ovations, but Tolkien frequently did, despite his speech impediments.25 Another student, now a famous lexicographer, remembered, “He made acute observations. I followed them all up. He beamed when I made some discoveries.”26
Tolkien’s habit of treating his students as his equals was a trait that socially conscious Oxford students must have found appealing. Female students especially appreciated Tolkien, since he treated them just as he did the men.27 Indeed, while he certainly had his angry moments, Tolkien seems to have treated nearly everyone well. John Lawlor wrote that his “first and abiding impression [of Tolkien] was of immediate kindness.”28 Walter Hooper labeled Tolkien a “deeply sympathetic man.” “I resemble a hobbit,” Tolkien wrote George Sayer, “at any rate in being moderately and cheerfully domesticated.”29 His children have said similar things. Michael wrote that his father always talked to, rather than at, him. “I have simply looked upon my father as a far more interesting, far more kindly, and even far more humble man than any other I knew, and whose intimate friendship I was privileged to enjoy.” Michael noted that his father especially listened intently to his children, and he took what they said to heart.30 Despite his harried schedule, Tolkien rarely put his work above his family. “Our father’s study at home was in some ways the hub of the house,” Priscilla remembered. “It was never forbidden territory to us, except when he was teaching.” When Tolkien needed to work to make deadlines, he usually did so late at night, after his children were asleep.31
Tolkien’s jovial personality led him to thoroughly enjoy playing pranks. With C. S. Lewis, he once dressed as a polar bear for a non-costume party, wearing “an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug” and painting “his face white.”32 As Tolkien and Lewis walked home heavily covered in fur, they claimed convincingly, according to another Inkling, “to be two Russian bears.”33 At a lecture in the 1930s, Tolkien told his audience that leprechauns really existed and pulled out a green, four-inch long shoe to prove it.34 Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter notes that Tolkien would chase neighbors away dressed as “an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe.” As an elderly man, Tolkien often included his false teeth when paying store clerks.35 And he loved the slapstick humor of the Marx Brothers.36
It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance to Tolkien of C. S. Lewis and the “Inklings,” the professor-student literary group they helped make famous. In turn, it would be equally wrong to suggest that the relationship was not reciprocal, as Tolkien also greatly influenced Lewis and the Inklings. It was with the Inklings that Tolkien read his own works and criticized those read by others. The Inklings also served as an extrafamilial social outlet. “He was a man of ‘cronies’ rather than of general society,” Lewis wrote of him, “and was always best after midnight (he had a Johnsonian horror of going to bed) and in some small circle of intimates where the tone was at once Bohemian, literary, and Christian (for he was profoundly religious).”37
Tolkien first met Lewis at Oxford in 1926. After a faculty tea, Lewis approached Tolkien to discuss the latter’s ideas on a revised English curriculum. After the meeting, Lewis offered a mixed reaction in his diary. “No harm in him,” Lewis recorded, he “only needs a smack or two.”38 Soon, though, Lewis joined Tolkien’s academic club, the Kolbitár, which was dedicated to reading the Icelandic Sagas in Old Norse.3940The Silmarillion41The Silmarillion4243