Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  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 theistic interpretation of the book. Furthermore, as has been seen, the theology of The Silmarillion is orthodox in nature, paralleling the teachings of traditional Christianity to a remarkable degree. This throws into question Lewis’s view that Tolkien created his own theology, along with his own ‘myths, geography, history, palaeography, languages, and orders of beings’. In fact, far from creating a new theology Tolkien merely adopted and adapted an old one to his own use. This 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. Whether Tolkien was consciously aware of this is another matter, but subconsciously he was so saturated with the Christian concept of reality that it permeates his myth profoundly.

  He admitted as much in a letter he wrote on 14 October 1958. Referring to The Lord of the Rings as ‘a tale, which is built on or out of certain “religious” ideas, but is not an allegory of them’, he discussed its theology: ‘Theologically (if the term is not too grandiose) I imagine the picture to be less dissonant from what some (including myself) believe to be the truth.’21 This letter, which implies that Tolkien was surprised to find how orthodox his work actually was, suggests that the theology was introduced subconsciously. However, Tolkien’s efforts to explain, or explain away, the awkward (or orcward?) position of the ores from a theological point of view, indicate his over-riding desire that his myth should be seen as essentially orthodox in nature.

  The awkwardness of ores had been pointed out to Tolkien by Peter Hastings, manager of a Catholic bookshop in Oxford, who suggested that ‘Treebeard’s statement that the Dark Lord created the Trolls and the Ores’ contradicted Christian teaching that evil was incapable of creating anything. In reply, Tolkien was at pains to point out that ‘Creation, the act of Will of Eru the One that gives Reality to conceptions, is distinguished from Making, which is permissive’:

  I think I agree about the ‘creation by evil’. But you are more free with the word ‘creation’ than I am. Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Ores. He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Ores—who are fundamentally a race of ‘rationally incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. Treebeard is a character in my story, not me: and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand. . . Suffering and experience (and possibly the Ring itself) gave Frodo more insight; and you will read in Ch. I of Book VI the words to Sam. ‘The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the Ores, it only ruined them and twisted them.’ In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the ‘gods’, let alone of God.22

  The orcs, therefore, are seen by Tolkien as victims of the Fall, as is Man, with the difference that their corruption by Tolkien’s Satan was much worse than that of Man.

  The ramifications of the Fall are evident throughout The Silmarillion, as indeed they are throughout The Lord of the Rings, in the recurring theme of conflict between the creative force of Good and the destructive force of Evil. The effects of this perennial conflict on the history of mankind was summed up succinctly towards the end of The Silmarillion:

  It is said by the Eldar that Men came into the world in the time of the Shadow of Morgoth, and they fell swiftly under his dominion,—for he sent his emissaries among them, and they listened to his evil and his cunning words, and they worshipped the Darkness and yet feared it. But there were some that turned from evil and left the lands of their kindred, and wandered ever westward; for they had heard a rumour that in the West there was a light which the Shadow could not dim.23

  Since Tolkien saw his own myth as a reflection of the True Myth, which was the fullness of Reality flowing from God, it is not surprising to see these views reflected in his life as well as his work. Tolkien believed that the perennial conflict between good and evil was as much a part of Earth as of Middle Earth. In a letter to his son Christopher on 14 May 1944, he wrote:

  A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men—sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face—not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit—we do so little that is positively good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!24

  If the recurring theme of conflict between good and evil runs through The Silmarillion as a defining pattern, it remains only a part of the wealth of theology and mysticism with which Tolkien embroiders the fabric of his myth. In the moving story of Beren and Luthien there is love, prayer, angelic intercession, sacrifice, the wisdom of accepted sorrow, and even a dim prefiguring of the Incarnation and Redemption. Elsewhere in The Silmarillion, there are even, on occasions, moments of sublime poetic beauty as, for example, this description of water and the sea:

  And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in the Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.25

  In this passage, as in so many others throughout The Silmarillion, Tolkien succeeds in synthesizing the physical with the metaphysical in a way which marks him as a mystic. This mysticism was evident in a letter he wrote to one of his sons in November 1944, significantly at a time when he was in the midst of writing The Lord of the Rings:

  Your reference to the care of your guardian angel makes me fear that ‘he’ is being specially needed. I dare say it is so. . . It also reminded me of a sudden vision. . . I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory’s before the Blessed Sacrament. . . I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. . . And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized. And I do not mean ‘personified’, by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since—for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love)—it has occurred to me that. . . this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son. . . is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic. Anyway, dearest, I received comfort. . . which I have (I fear) failed to convey: except that I have with me now a definite awareness of you poised and shining in the Light—though your face (as all our faces) is turned from it. But we might see the glimmer in the faces (and persons as apprehended in love) of others.26

  If
this is both heavy and heady, it is nonetheless important to any understanding of Tolkien’s life, his personality and his work. Those who fail to share Tolkien’s faith or philosophy may find his line of reasoning utterly incomprehensible,—yet it was, for Tolkien, a logically reasoned exposition of an aspect of truth which he had perceived and experienced. In Tolkien’s view, truth, and therefore reality, was ultimately metaphysical in nature, the physical universe being merely a reflection of some greater metaphysical purpose. This is reflected in The Silmarillion, in which the whole of physical creation is envisaged as a Great Music, played by angelic sub-creators in accordance with the will of God. The interposing of Tolkien’s letter to his son with the myth propounded in The Silmarillion illustrates that Tolkien did not consider his sub-created myth as ‘fiction’, as popularly understood, but as a figment of truth.

  Christopher Tolkien, the son to whom the above letter was addressed, has said that his father became ‘more and more interested in the metaphysical aspect of The Silmarillion’27 and it is a pity that he never wrote more about this facet of his work. It is clear, however, that The Silmarillion, the myth which formed the background to Tolkien’s creative life for more than half a century, from his youth until his death, was probably the most important of all his works as regards the personal effect it had on him as the author, or sub-creator. It accompanied him throughout his life and created the framework, the context, into which The Lord of the Rings was slotted. If Tolkien was the man behind the myth, its sub-creator, The Silmarillion was also the myth behind the man, moulding his creative vision.

  CHAPTER 7

  ORTHODOXY IN MIDDLE EARTH:

  THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MYTH

  You cannot afford to ignore Dante’s philosophical and theological beliefs, or to skip the passages which express them most clearly; but. . . on the other hand you are not called upon to believe them yourself.1

  In spite of Tolkien’s statement that ‘I do not seriously dream of being measured against Dante, a supreme poet’,2 these words of T.S. Eliot concerning the reading of Dante are just as applicable to anyone reading The Lord of the Rings.

  One cannot afford to ignore Tolkien’s philosophical and theological beliefs, central as they are to his whole conception of Middle Earth and the struggles within it, but on the other hand one can enjoy Tolkien’s epic without sharing the beliefs which gave it birth. This, of course, is evident from the many millions who have read and enjoyed Tolkien’s books without sharing his Christianity. However, as his friend George Sayer has remarked, ‘The Lord of the Rings would have been very different, and the writing of it very difficult, if Tolkien hadn’t been a Christian. He thought it a profoundly Christian book.’3 In a letter to another friend, Tolkien had written, ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.’4 These words were written to Father Robert Murray on 2 December 1953, more than four years after Tolkien had completed The Lord of the Rings and eight months before the first volume of it was finally published. Father Murray was the grandson of Sir James Murray, the founder of the Oxford English Dictionary, and was a close friend of the Tolkien family. At Tolkien’s request, Murray had read part of The Lord of the Rings in typescript and galley-proofs, and had responded with both comments and criticism. He wrote that the book left him with a strong sense of ‘a positive compatibility with the order of Grace’, and compared the image of Galadriel to that of the Virgin Mary.5

  Murray’s comments elicited a candid response from Tolkien:

  I have been cheered specially by what you have said. . . because you are more perceptive, especially in some directions, than any one else, and have even revealed to me more clearly some things about my work. I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded.6

  Following his assertion that The Lord of the Rings was ‘fundamentally religious and Catholic’, Tolkien added that he was ‘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’.

  The reference to his mother’s conversion may have been prompted by the fact that Father Murray was a convert himself, having been received into the Church several years earlier largely under Tolkien’s influence. Murray had arrived in Oxford in 1944 and soon discovered ‘the joy of friendship with the Tolkiens’. ‘Less than eighteen months later, when they realised that I was being drawn to share their faith, they introduced me to Father Carter, which led to a lasting friendship with that wonderful man and preacher.’7

  Father Douglas Carter was Tolkien’s parish priest, and Murray recalled that Tolkien had a high opinion of the priest, ‘one of whose sermons inspired a long and theologically rich letter to his son Christopher’.8 This letter needs quoting at length because it throws important light on Tolkien’s faith and philosophy at the time he was writing The Lord of the Rings. He wrote that he and his daughter Priscilla had cycled to St Gregory’s where they had heard one of Father Carter’s ‘best sermons (and longest)’. It had been a ‘wonderful commentary on the Gospel of the Sunday (healing of the woman and of Jairus’ daughter)’ which had been ‘made intensely vivid by his comparison of the three evangelists. . . and also by his vivid illustrations from modern miracles’:

  The similar case of a woman similarly afflicted (owing to a vast uterine tumour) who was cured instantly at Lourdes, so that the tumour could not be found, and her belt was twice too large. And the most moving story of the little boy with tubercular peritonitis who was not healed, and was taken sadly away in the train by his parents, practically dying with two nurses attending him. As the train moved away it passed within sight of the Grotto. The little boy sat up. ‘I want to go and talk to the little girl’—in the same train there was a little girl who had been healed. And he got up and walked there and played with the little girl; and then he came back, and he said ‘I’m hungry now’. And they gave him cake and two bowls of chocolate and enormous potted meat sandwiches, and he ate them! (This was in 1927). So Our Lord told them to give the little daughter of Jairus something to eat. So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are. They are intrusions (as we say, erring) into real or ordinary life, but they do intrude into real life, and so need ordinary meals and other results. . . But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have—though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation. And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain—in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce).9

  The essay, ‘On Fairy Stories’, to which Tolkien referred, was originally an Andrew Lang lecture given at the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1939. At the time of this letter to his son it still had not been published, not appearing in print until publication of the memorial volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams in 1947. In this essay Tolkien elaborated his view of the function of fairy stories, expressing the theory which The Lord of the Rings attempted to put into practice. Fairy stories offered ‘consolation’ through the ‘imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires’ but, more importantly, the fairy story offered ‘the Consolation of the Happy Ending’. Whereas Tragedy was ‘the true form of Drama, its highest function’, the opposite was true of fairy story: ‘Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and i
ts highest function.’ This good catastrophe, this ‘sudden joyous “turn” ’ representing a ‘miraculous grace, never to be counted on to recur’, did not deny the existence of ‘dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure’. On the contrary, ‘the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance’. Rather, it denied the ‘universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief:

  It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to a child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.10

  Tolkien wrote an epilogue to this essay because this ‘joy’ which he had specified ‘as the mark of the true fairy-story (or romance), or as the seal upon it, merits more consideration’:

  The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’. . . in the ‘eucatastrophe’ we see a brief vision. . . a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world. . .

  I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.11