By: Fr. Guy Trudel
Embarking on a task so large as the one proposed in this paper, I could find no better place to start than a letter written by Tolkien in 1953 in reply to Fr. Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest and the grandson of Sir James Murray, the founder of the Oxford English Dictionary:
“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work: unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.”
While we might argue about the influence of Christianity upon the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien definitely thought of his work as Catholic and Christian. But the attribution of the whole work to his Catholic upbringing provides matter of greater interest to us here: clearly Tolkien thought that his religious faith provided a necessary remote cause for his mythological epic, since his faith “nourished [him] and taught [him] all” that he knew. The difficulty in assessing the Christian character of this work lies precisely in the strange, seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of the strong claim to faith’s influence in the last part of that quotation, with the conscious decision to cut out “practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices” from the novel. Tolkien summarizes his own approach to this apparent contradiction in the very next statement: “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” Just how Tolkien understood this oblique approach to religion within his works as an expression of his Catholic faith requires that we first examine how he understood the conjoined realms of Story, the storyteller, and his craft. Then I propose that we move on to the story itself and see how these principles, and Tolkien’s faith, find expression in the novel -- how the Lord of the Rings, in other words, proceeded from the Catholic imagination of its author.
This pursuit of one aspect of the novel leads us into the scholar’s natural tendency to analyze, to dissect and label, or to disassemble the story in order to find similarities or analogues to various other bits and pieces of Story which may lie well outside the scope of the tale itself. Tolkien identifies this academic coral-reef in his famous essay on the Old English poem Beowulf, where he criticizes attempts to mine the story for historical detail or folkloric study before an appreciation for the story as story takes place. Tolkien’s allegory for this arid critical dissection demands quotation:
“A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendents, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”
Clearly, then, the Lord of the Rings must be understood on its own terms, as a whole story, and much of this paper must be subordinated to an appreciation for the story as a story first; only then can we understand how Tolkien thought of his work as a product of Christian imagination.
Appreciation for Story as Story led Tolkien to reject the whole realm of Allegory as a simplistic disguise, something which reduced the story to the cheap wrapper which delivered the candy, an instrument or code necessary for the transmission of The Real Point or The Deeper Meaning. Christian or Catholic commentators often allegorize the Lord of the Rings, saying that Galadriel or Elbereth is the Virgin Mary, or that Gandalf is Jesus, like Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, or implying that Frodo is The Christian, along the lines of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or the Medieval play Everyman. When asked, in his last radio interview in 1971, whether The Lord of the Rings was an allegory, Tolkien replied immediately: “No. I dislike allegory whenever I smell it.” His statement here agrees entirely with a longer argument, given in a letter to his publisher, concerning the same point:
. . . do not let Rayner [the publisher’s son and advisor] suspect ‘Allegory’. There is a ‘moral’, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals -- they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such. Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.
Despite Tolkien’s best efforts to explain his story as something other than allegory, correspondents often asked the allegory question: in a way, this confirms Tolkien’s point in the passage above, the point that a closely-woven story often appears as allegory to those who wish to read it that way. The more important point, however, comes in the closing sentences of this quotation, where Tolkien speaks of the Ring in his novel being taken as an allegory of power, only because all power works in a similar way. The author telling a tale describes a particular expression of a common motif in life, and this lends itself to seeing the particular as expressive of a universal theme or concept. This process of abstraction, where the universal themes come forth from a story which stands in its own right apart from such “universalisms,” helps to explain why the Lord of the Rings was Catholic “unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision” and why Tolkien decided to take out references to “religion.” Tolkien’s Christianity influenced his tale unconsciously insofar as he described a world taken from the givenness of his Christian perspective, a perspective which taught that the myriad diversity of created things all expressed some perfection of God, that providence and grace pervaded the created order, and that even within a world after the Fall, natural created Good, though marred by sin, was not completely taken away. References to pre-Christian religion and ritual could only cloud the picture of an unredeemed world without revelation consistent with Tolkien’s beliefs.
Tolkien’s whole tale of Middle Earth, from the Silmarillion through the Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings emerges from a Christian and Catholic understanding of nature and morality, and so the presence of Tolkien’s belief underlies the entire novel as a subtle, hidden presence. While someone can read the novel and enjoy it without any reference to Christianity, the structure of this imaginary world, its characters, and its plot hold something more for those open to the Christian backdrop, the Christian imagination behind the details. The following study only touches upon aspects of the novel which reveal that influence more obviously than others. First, it will point out structural details in Tolkien’s imaginary world which presuppose or point to a Christian vision of the world. Then, it will explore some elements of grace and providence in the novel, and finally it will finish with the moral vision found in some of the characters and in the central plot. Throughout this whole study, I will attempt to avoid references to the text as an allegory, without losing the rich symbolism in the story.
Christian Aspects of Tolkien’s Middle Earth1. Time
Time plays an enormous part in the Lord of the Rings, so much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that Tolkien obsessed over details of the calendar, of years and days. The appendices to the novel contain, not only a synopsis of dates for the events in the plot, but also a treatise on calendars and timekeeping in Middle Earth. Tolkien’s concern for inner consistency in telling his tale drove him to work out these details and lists (no wonder the novel took sixteen years to complete: 1938-1954). When we look a little deeper into the dates mentioned for principal events within the plot, another cosmological and ecclesiological pattern appears, a deliberate structure that reveals a conscious design extending beyond this concern for consistency. The book begins and ends with Bilbo and Frodo’s joint birthday, September 22 nd, and this also determines the day on which Frodo leaves from Bag End, September 23 rd, the fall equinox, when sunlight and night are of approximately equal duration. The journey to Rivendell, then, becomes a journey into winter darkness. The significance of the starting date for the Fellowship’s journey is instantly obvious: Yule, or December 25, occurs proximately enough to the Winter Solstice to make the date a plausible one within a pre-Christian framework, while the significance of the day in the modern calendar still colors our perception. The Church chose to celebrate Christ’s birth on this day as a replacement for the ancient Roman feast of Sol Invictus, replacing the cosmological sun-god with the brightening and illuminating Son of Righteousness. This cosmological “brightening” toward spring has its parallel in the journey from Rivendell to the destruction of the Ring at Mount Doom : the journey moves from deepest Winter to Spring, from the Birth of Christ to March 25, the feast day of the Annunciation, the liturgical day which celebrates the conception of Christ. This movement from the Birth of Christ to his Conception may appear somewhat backward until we recall the popular medieval tradition that Christ died on the very same day as the Annunciation -- a fact of which Tolkien, as a medievalist, was no doubt aware. Gondor adopts 25 March as the beginning of its New Year, the same day on which the medieval calendar started. The timing of these major events in the quest closely parallels the life of Christ from Birth to death and resurrection just as they follow the major cosmological moments in the solar year. Light and darkness appear in the cosmological times in the novel, as much as they do in the contrasts between such settings as Minas Tirith and Mordor.
Another, more ambiguous aspect in the novel comes with the gradual sense of decay with time’s passage, a sense which seems so foreign to our own Darwinian inheritance of evolutionary improvement, socially as well as biologically, over time. The beauties of the past ages, the “Elder Days”, constantly fade away in the change all around. Through the use of one Elven Ring, Elrond attempts to preserve the lore and traditions of the Elves from the Elder days, artificially staving off the changes in the world around Rivendell. The elf-queen Galadriel preserves the forest of Lothlorien in its pristine Elder beauty through the magic of another Elvish ring, but both Galadriel and Elrond realize that their labors must eventually succumb to the march of time and change when the One Ring passes away. “We have fought the long defeat” says Galadriel (I, 372), and later she expresses the Elvish view when speaking to Frodo of the One Ring’s destruction:
. . . if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlorien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten . . . . The love of the Elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea, and their regret is undying and cannot ever wholly be assuaged. (I, 380)
As the Elves face diminution, so too do the people of Numenor; Aragorn’s kingship represents a renaissance of older culture, but one which will eventually fade, much as Aragorn surrenders his life at the end of the account of Arwen and Aragorn’s tale in the appendix to the novel. The theme of fade and decay in Middle Earth, of sorrow for what is lost in the midst of joy in victory, exemplified most clearly in Frodo’s farewell to Sam and the Shire at the end of the story, gives the novel its bittersweet quality, but it also appears to introduce a note of despair or pessimism contrary to Christian hope.
While the theme of change and decay accords with Tolkien’s own pessimism regarding technological progress and his conviction that things in general got worse rather than better, it does serve a Christian purpose within the novel as a kind of “sic transit gloria mundi” motif. The world once known continues to change, and nothing in this life remains forever -- so the glory of the world passes, and leads us to consider that the human spirit longs for something more than what this life offers. The world Tolkien gives us exists after the Fall but before Redemption, where the characters themselves have either a vague understanding of life beyond death, or (for the elves) recourse to a facsimile of this life in a deathless, unchanging earthly existence in the Uttermost West. The elves, in their constant state of longing remembrance, thus recognize Death as a mysterious gift of God (the One, Iluvatar, whom Tolkien mentions once or twice in the text) to mortal men, and Aragorn adverts to Death as a passage to another life when he takes his final leave of Arwen, after she remarks that “the Gift of the One is hard to receive”: “‘So it seems,’ he said. ‘But let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’” (III, 344). Although the nature of change within Tolkien’s world resembles in some ways a Germanic futility, where all roads lead to an ultimate defeat, where sorrow and courage find their most eloquent expression in the face of this defeat, it also expresses the imperfection and death which remain part of Creation due to the Fall. No victory can come in the Fallen World without some loss, without some sorrow, and so in the end, Elrond loses his daughter, and the Elves their preserving magic, through the victory over Sauron. Frodo finds no more consolation within the world, and must journey to the West for healing. The Elves relinquish the world to mortal men. A world fractured by sin awaits the arrival of its Saviour, and its fulfillment beyond the circles of the world.
WORKS CITED:
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981) Letter 142, 172.
“Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 7, 8.
Petrus Comestor, Historia Scholastica, PL 198:1537D: “Creditur autem conceptus octo Kalendas Aprilis, et, revolutis triginti tribus annis, eadem die mortuus est.”
Frodo and Sam, in a way, remain “asleep,” close to death, only to “rise” later through the healing powers of Aragorn as King.