A few days after notice went out that the first lecture in our winter series would deal with J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a message arrived in my e-mail inbox. The sender was interested in attending and bringing his son. He needed to be clear on one point: was I going to be for or against the book? If I was going to be against, he did not think he could bring his son, because he was raising him to be appreciative of writers like Tolkien.
The message alerted me to the fact that within the church, strong voices of caution are raised and high levels of suspicion aroused whenever an author works with the worlds of fantasy and myth. This is particularly the case when the stories involve the use of magic, and even more so when there is even a hint of so-called “good magic.” This, needless to say, is the issue at stake for many who are critical of the Harry Potter books. In the context of The Lord of the Rings, the issue is more or less personified in the figure of Gandalf, the good and noble wizard who wields his craft in defense of those who would battle the evil one. Even without a Gandalf-style character, however, the very presence of a figure of evil in a book is enough to keep some Christians at bay.
I responded to the e-mail by saying that I was clearly in the for camp, and that I view The Lord of the Rings as a deeply Christian work, from the imagination and hand of a deeply Christian writer. For me, that has always been, if not self-evident, then at least fairly assumed. I first read the books when I was 14, having twice read through the C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and being quite ready to take on something a bit more substantial. Tolkien, I was told, was a Christian and had been a close friend and colleague of Lewis. The Lord of the Rings, I was informed, is a tale of the struggle between good and evil, and it was against this background that I began that first reading. I have to admit that at the time I wondered where the Aslan/Christ figure was, and why there was no explicit mention of God or “the King across the Sea,” but Tolkien's portrayal of the great drama in the battle between good and evil was, at least at the time, enough for me to mark the book as Christian.
It was only much later, as I worked through a more focused reading of Tolkien's works, that I came to realize that to many Christians of this generation his project is not self-evident … and in that e-mail message I was reminded that for some it is not self-evidently or obviously a good, or even acceptable, project.
What I argued that night in my lecture, and what I repeat here, is that Tolkien's project is not only “good,” but that it actually matters to the church. It matters not just in terms of what he deals with (and the themes of the Great Tradition are there), but also in how he deals with them. In a post-modern and increasingly secular and post-Christian world, the average person under the age of 30 might have little idea as to who David or Paul or even Jesus is, but he or she will almost surely know Frodo and Gandalf.
The church may find here a way to speak to those born of this secular and post-Christian age. More importantly, we need Tolkien's imaginative language of poetic myth for our own sake. In a society that so often flattens and dulls the imaginations of its members, trading in the dangerous hopefulness of the people of God for the banality of a consumption-driven culture, we need Tolkien and his kind. We need this rich, imaginative and frankly counter-cultural way of doing theology.
J.R.R. Tolkien is in many respects an unlikely literary hero for our times. A staunch Roman Catholic (sometimes narrowly so, calling Lewis's Anglican church “a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs,”) and life-long academic, he lived a rather unremarkable domestic life in an Oxford suburb. He was a careful and exacting scholar, who as professor of Anglo-Saxon defended the view that the study of English should culminate in Chaucer, Shakespeare and his like being far too modern. Scrupulously attentive to detail, he rewrote his core works many times, in the end offering a relatively small canon for publication. For all that he was the creator (or “sub-creator,” as he preferred to see it) of an extraordinary world, his own way of being in the ordinary world was plain and decidedly hobbit-like. He once wrote:
“I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanical farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field), I have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”
“I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanical farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field), I have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”
Yet in his great works of fantasy, he uproots his hobbits (and with them both his readers and his own self) and takes them far afield in search, not of mere adventure, but of truth.
It is this business of the search for truth that lies at the heart of Tolkien's project. A search for truth, mind you, as it is to be carried out through the making of myth.
More than anything else, Tolkien understood himself to be creating a mythology for England . “I was from early days grieved,” he wrote to Milton Waldman at the Collins publishing house, “…grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands.”
In other words, he saw great myths in so many other cultures, but nothing distinctly English. The Arthurian stories were close; they were sufficiently English, but not quite the stuff of myth. The Arthurian world was too much the “real” world, and far too tied up with the Christian faith. “Myths and fairy-story must,” he explained to Waldman, “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real' world.”
And so it was, that in 1917 at the age of 25, Tolkien began what was to be his life's work, the creation of a myth for England. The Book of Lost Tales was the working title for the cycle of stories that would, after countless rewrites (and a final editing by Tolkien's son, Christopher), be published posthumously as The Silmarillion.
But why myth? We tend, in our contemporary North American church context, to be conditioned to think of myth as the (perhaps failed) attempts of non-Christian peoples to make sense of the world. This most often leaves us in some variation of two basic positions vis a vis myth. On the one hand, pagan myths are read as interesting examples of those attempts of non-Christian cultures to make sense of the world; attempts that may, at one extreme, be seen as deceptions. On the other hand, there is a school of thought that wants to see all myths as having equal validity as expressions of truth; a school that at its extreme end wants to see, in the words of novelist Michael O'Brien, “the stories of the Christian Faith (as being) merely our version of universal ‘myths.'”
For Tolkien, neither of the two basic positions is adequate to address the true nature of myth. Myths, he claimed, are to truth what language is to objects or ideas. Myths are an attempt to describe truth – inventions which attempt to articulate, however partially, truth. Much unlike the materialist and rational modes of speech so common in our day, myth is nuanced, open and elastic in its way of speaking. As layer after layer of story is added, myth raises as many questions as it answers, but so be it. A belief in progress and the Cartesian modes of knowledge born of the Enlightenment landed Tolkien's Europe in the hell of two world wars; why not prefer the imaginative imprecision of myth?
In his essay “Myth Became Fact,” C.S. Lewis makes the rather stunning assertion that the story of Christ is actually a true or factual myth. “The heart of Christianity,” he writes, “is a myth which is also a fact… (that) happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.” This is a position in which he was deeply influenced by Tolkien, for whom the “Christian myth” was the one under which all myths must be subsumed. Yet there is a level for him at which myth, including his own “myth for England ,” is significant in its own right as a form by which we can best consider truth.
Still, as a Christian, Tolkien found that he could not help but write in a way which echoed the “true myth.” Not, mind you, that his work was at all allegorical, neatly lining up biblical themes and characters with direct parallels in Middle Earth. He found allegory far too stilted and shallow to be of much use in the shaping of imagination and the search for truth. He spoke instead of applicability: “I much prefer history (to allegory), true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.”
Applicability, he added, “resides in the freedom of the reader… (not) in the purposed domination of the author.” If his readers find in The Lord of the Rings a cipher for understanding something about the evil of the Third Reich, it is not because Sauron is Hitler, but rather because in his portrayal of Sauron Tolkien has managed to say something true about evil.
But again, as an even cursory reading will show, The Lord of the Rings contains no prayer, no explicit talk of God, and no worship. There is the cosmology set out in The Silmarillion – with its creation story, monotheistic deity (Iluvatar), principalities and angelic powers (the Valar and Maiar, including “fallen angels” Morgoth and Sauron), and the Children of the One (both humans and elves) – but this is all part of the background myth, and so will be unfamiliar to more casual readers and movie viewers.
Yet even without a working knowledge of the background myth, it is not hard to see how The Lord of the Rings works with the grand themes of Fall, Mortality and what Tolkien calls “The Machine” or “Magic,” representative of the desire of the creature to manipulate creation for power. These themes, undeniably theological, course through Middle Earth, just as they course through our own earth. And how could this be otherwise, when a Christian myth-maker tells a story which, by design, is meant to say something truthful and faithful about the shape of the world? And because he seeks to say something truthful and faithful, he will inevitably take us beyond a mere description of the broken mortal state of humanity and into a vision of redemption. Redemption in his myth, as is so true in the Christian myth, is born of that which the Enemy would mistake for weakness, powerlessness and insignificance.
This essay is an edited and condensed version of a longer essay, published in this form with Mr. Howison's permission.
