On Boxing Day, TheOneRing.net (TORN) posted a Facebook link to one of their archived articles entitled – The Hobbit: an essentially Christian story. For me that was like saying the Sun rises in the East. A blatantly obvious fact. So much so that I originally felt no need to read the article.
What changed my mind was the amount of almost ‘cat calling’ vitriol that appeared in the comments on the Facebook thread. It even got to the stage where I wondered whether or not the comments were from people who had actually read the article. Quite frankly there was nothing in there that should have surprised a person reasonably familiar with Tolkien’s ideas and works.
The Diary of a Young Tolkienophile
My first encounter with Tolkien was the 1978 Ralph Bakshi animation. Yet, being unaware that it was based on a book (I was only 9, after all), I simply left the cinema on the false promise of the closing scene (the end of the siege at Helm’s Deep) that it was Part One of the War of the Ring, and thought nothing more of it.
Years later, I was reintroduced to Tolkien when I bought the text and occasionally graphical adventure game, The Hobbit, for my home computer. It came with a free copy of the book and I was intrigued because it called it a precursor to The Lord of the Rings. I simply devoured it, and then went and bought Rings and read it 7 times in the next 2 years. I couldn’t get enough.
As I read and re-read these books my burgeoning interest in theology made it clear that something more was going on. Something much deeper was buried in the text and I had a fair idea that it was something Christian.
I was directed to The Silmarillion, and had all the evidence I needed. Here was the Creation of Middle-earth from a Christian perspective, complete with a Devil (Morgoth – Sauron is the Lieutenant of Morgoth; for a possible Christian Mediaeval parallel check out the legend of Mephistopheles) and an angelic rebellion and war. If one has the time and the energy, simply look up Augustine of Hippo’s (5th Century) commentaries on Genesis to see how Tolkien has parallelled The Ainulindale on Augustine’s interpretation of the Genesis text.
Tolkien studies being somewhat (ironically) discouraged in academia in the UK, it wasn’t until I moved to London that I was able to start buying books about Tolkien and his works, and usually American imports. The more I read, the more my early suspicions were affirmed and developed.
But isn’t this just a case of reading what isn’t there?
Tolkien, and his close friend, C. S. [Jack] Lewis, are responsible for some of the greatest fictional writing of the 20th Century, and yet you couldn’t get two very different approaches to the use of the Fantastic for the propagation of Christianity.
Lewis very deliberately, and unashamedly, used allegory. If you read nothing other than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it doesn’t take a genius to spot what Lewis is doing. Aslan is so obviously Jesus that it seems a waste of your time to actually spell it out, but here goes:
Jesus is referred to as the Lion of Judah in the Bible, so using a fictional talking Lion to represent Jesus is an obvious step. Proverbially, the Lion is the King of the Beasts, and Jesus is the King of Kings. Aslan sacrifices himself for the wrongs done by others (particularly Edmund), and resurrects from the dead, ending the power of the evil witch. Do I really need to say it?
Like the Mediaeval period he loved so much, Lewis embraced and exploited the power of allegory to get the basics of Christianity into an otherwise straightforward story.
On the other hand, Tolkien did not like allegory. Here’s what he had to say in the Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:
But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
This was written in explicit denial of any connection with the events of World War II, but he did also go on to say that people were free to draw analogies with the Ring and the Atomic bomb if it suited them. Applicability, however, is the key word here. For whilst Tolkien did oppose allegory, he did use fiction to the same basic ends as Lewis.
In Letter 142 (p. 172 of the Letters of Tolkien), Tolkien wrote:
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.
So, although the ‘trappings’ of religion (practices, buildings, ritual clothing, aspects of formal worship) are nowhere to be found in The Lord of the Rings (and only rarely hinted at in The Silmarillion), the themes and teachings of Christianity are in every major aspect of the book.
I won’t weary the patient reader who has come this far with me, but The Letters of J R R Tolkien provide exhaustive commentary and analysis on the Christian influences and themes of The Lord of the Rings. Everything from the use of Galadriel as a type of Mary, the mother of Jesus, through to his theological and philosophical explorations in to the nature and function of evil.
This one extract from Letter 183 (pp. 243-4), should be enough to show the latter:
In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any ‘rational being’ is wholly evil. Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world. In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit. In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Numenoreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.
It’s hard to argue with the words of the Professor himself!
Where does that leave us?
In some ways where it always has.
You don’t need to be an expert in English Literature, Theology, Pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, or a host of any other sorts of academia to enjoy what is, above all, a rip-roaring yarn. Tolkien wrote because he loved telling stories.
The only major revision he ever made to a published story is when he was searching for a sequel to The Hobbit, and realised that the Ring was the way forward. As the sequel grew in its scope and complexity, he then realised that it fitted in with the ‘hobby’ stories he had been working on since World War I, and re-wrote the Riddle sequence to allow for this.
But for Tolkien, like Lewis, story was one of the most important aspects of being human. Stories could be, and should be seen to be, vehicles of truth, and for him, this was Christian truth. As he said in his paper On Fairy Stories (originally given in 1939, but amended and expanded in 1943), the greatest function of story is to provide a glimpse of what he called eucatastrophe – the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn. And for him, the ultimate eucastrophe of the story of humanity is the birth of Christ, and within that, the eucastrophe of the story of Christ is the Resurrection.
Whatever our feelings about Christianity, let us at least give credit where credit is due, and see that Tolkien was not only an exceptional story teller, but also an exceptional Christian theologian.
