Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  Tolkien’s faith in old age was expressed with eloquence in a letter to his son Michael on 1 November 1963. Written three weeks before Lewis’s death and only two months before his own seventy-second birthday, this letter needs quoting at length because it provides a comprehensive exposition of Tolkien’s philosophical and religious outlook as he approached the end of his life:

  You speak of ‘sagging faith’. . . In the last resort faith is an act of the will, inspired by love. Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with any historical knowledge). ‘Scandal’ at most is an occasion of temptation—as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses. It is convenient because it turns our eyes away from ourselves and our own faults to find a scape-goat. . . The temptation to ‘unbelief (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there within us. Part of us longs to find an excuse for it outside us. The stronger the inner temptation the more readily shall we be ‘scandalized’ by others. I think I am as sensitive as you (or any other Christian) to the ‘scandals’, both of clergy and laity. I have suffered grievously in my life from stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests; but I now know enough about myself to be aware that I should not leave the Church (which for me would mean leaving the allegiance of Our Lord) for any such reasons: I should leave because I did not believe. . . I should deny the Blessed Sacrament, that is: call Our Lord a fraud to His face.

  If He is a fraud and the Gospels fraudulent—that is: garbled accounts of a demented megalomaniac (which is the only alternative), then of course the spectacle exhibited by the Church. . . in history and today is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud. If not, however, then this spectacle is alas! only what was to be expected: it began before the first Easter, and it does not affect faith at all—except that we may and should be deeply grieved. But we should grieve on our Lord’s behalf and for Him, associating ourselves with the scandalizers not with the saints, not crying out that we cannot ‘take’ Judas Iscariot, or even the absurd and cowardly Simon Peter, or the silly women like James’ mother, trying to push her sons.

  It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded of him—so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am’ (John viii). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John ix); or the promulgation of the Blessed Sacrament in John v: ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life’. We must therefore either believe in Him and in what he said and take the consequences,—or reject him and take the consequences. I find it for myself difficult to believe that anyone who has ever been to Communion, even once, with at least right intention, can ever again reject Him without grave blame. (However, He alone knows each unique soul and its circumstances.)

  The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals. . .

  I myself am convinced by the Petrine claims, nor looking around the world does there seem much doubt which (if Christianity is true) is the True Church, the temple of the Spirit dying but living, corrupt but holy, self-reforming and rearising. But for me that Church of which the Pope is the acknowledged head on earth has as chief claim that it is the one that has (and still does) ever defended the Blessed Sacrament, and given it most honour, and put it (as Christ plainly intended) in the prime place. ‘Feed my sheep’ was His last charge to St Peter; and since His words are always first to be understood literally, I suppose them to refer primarily to the Bread of Life. It was against this that the W. European revolt (or Reformation) was really launched—’the blasphemous fable of the Mass’—and faith / works a mere red herring. I suppose the greatest reform of our time was that carried out by St Pius X: surpassing anything, however needed, that the Council will achieve.22

  The ‘Council’ to which Tolkien was referring was the Second Vatican Council which had convened in 1962 and would last for four years. Like Evelyn Waugh, who died under its shadow, Tolkien was apprehensive about many of the reforms instituted by the Council. ‘We discussed religion often,’ remembers George Sayer, who met Tolkien regularly during the 1960s. ‘Tolkien was a very strict Roman Catholic. He was very orthodox and old fashioned and he opposed most of the new developments in the Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council.’23 This was confirmed by Father John Tolkien, the eldest of Tolkien’s sons, who had been ordained in the 1940s. Father Tolkien emphasized that his father’s Catholicism ‘pervaded all his thinking, beliefs and everything else’, that ‘he was very much, always a Christian’, but added that he was ‘against the changes’ brought about by the Council, ‘especially the loss of Latin’.24 Tolkien expressed his love for Latin in a letter to his old parish priest Father Douglas Carter in June 1972.25 Several years earlier he discussed the changes wrought by the Council in a letter to his son, Michael:

  ‘Trends’ in the Church are. . . serious, especially to those accustomed to find in it a solace and a ‘pax’ in times of temporal trouble, and not just another arena of strife and change. But imagine the experience of those born (as I) between the Golden and Diamond Jubilee of Victoria. Both senses or imaginations of security have been progressively stripped away from us. Now we find ourselves nakedly confronting the will of God, as concerns ourselves and our position in Time. . . I know quite well that, to you as to me, the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap. There is nowhere else to go! (I wonder if this desperate feeling, the last state of loyalty hanging on, was not, even more often than is actually recorded in the Gospels, felt by Our Lord’s followers in His earthly life-time?) I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.26

  In the same letter Tolkien questioned some of the erroneous thinking which he believed had undermined the proceedings of the Council. In his arguments against the demands for greater ‘simplicity’ in the Church’s liturgy, Tolkien fell back on the arboreal imagery of Chesterton’s Philosophy of the Tree and his own vision of the perennial wisdom of Treebeard:

  The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness—which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown,—because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!) Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history—the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites,
and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils.27

  The ‘other motive’ behind the calls for reform of the liturgy which caused Tolkien consternation was ‘aggiornamento: bringing up to date’ which, Tolkien believed, ‘has its own grave dangers, as has been apparent throughout history’.28

  There are distinct similarities between Tolkien’s view and that of Evelyn Waugh, who also singled out the alliance of ‘primitivists’ and ‘aggiornamentists’ for scorn. In an article in the Spectator at the very start of the Council’s proceedings, Waugh had written of the threat posed by the new liturgists:

  It is not, I think, by a mere etymological confusion that the majority of English-speaking people believe that ‘venerable’ means ‘old’. There is a deep-lying connection in the human heart between worship and age. But the new fashion is for something bright and loud and practical. It has been set by a strange alliance between archaeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our own deplorable epoch. In combination they call themselves ‘liturgists’.29

  There is no doubt that Tolkien was equally as opposed to those who sought to open the windows of the Church to the atmosphere of ‘our own deplorable epoch’ but, unlike Waugh, he never became embittered and was not tempted to rebellion or stubborn opposition. Instead he exercised the ‘virtue of loyalty’ to which he had alluded and sought to see the good results of the Council, as well as the bad:

  I find myself in sympathy with those developments that are strictly ‘ecumenical’, that is concerned with other groups or churches that call themselves (and often truly are) ‘Christian’. We have prayed endlessly for Christian re-union. . . An increase in ‘charity’ is an enormous gain. As Christians those faithful to the Vicar of Christ must put aside the resentments that as mere humans they feel. . . As a man whose childhood was darkened by persecution, I find this hard. But charity must cover a multitude of sins! There are dangers (of course), but a Church militant cannot afford to shut up its soldiers in a fortress. It had as bad effects on the Maginot Line.’30

  Tolkien’s deep understanding of the ecumenist debate within the Church during the 1960s was exhibited in another letter to his son Michael:

  Not that one should forget the wise words of Charles Williams, that it is our duty to tend the accredited and established altar, though the Holy Spirit may send the fire down somewhere else. God cannot be limited (even by his own Foundations)—of which St Paul is the first and prime example—and may use any channel for His grace. Even to love Our Lord, and certainly to call him Lord, and God, is a grace, and may bring more grace. Nonetheless, speaking institutionally and not of individual souls the channel must eventually run back into the ordained course, or run into the sands and perish. Besides the Sun there may be moonlight (even bright enough to read by); but if the Sun were removed there would be no Moon to see. What would Christianity now be if the Roman Church has in fact been destroyed?31

  This short aside on ecumenism was a footnote added to a long letter to Michael which Tolkien had written in an effort to bolster his son’s ‘sagging faith’. As well as offering an insight into Tolkien’s own faith in the final decade of his life, it expressed an introspectively humble approach to what he perceived as his failings as a father to his children:

  I live in anxiety concerning my children: who in this harder crueller and more mocking world into which I have survived must suffer more assaults than I have. But I am one who came up out of Egypt, and pray God none of my seed shall return thither. I witnessed (half-comprehending) the heroic sufferings and early death in extreme poverty of my mother who brought me into the Church; and received the astonishing charity of Francis Morgan. But I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning—and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again: but alas! I indeed did not live up to it. I brought you all up ill and talked to you too little. Out of wickedness and sloth I almost ceased to practise my religion—especially at Leeds, and at 22 Northmoor Road. Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger. I regret those days bitterly (and suffer for them with such patience as I can be given); most of all because I failed as a father. Now I pray for you all, unceasingly, that the Healer (the Haelend as the Saviour was usually called in Old English) shall heal my defects, and that none of you shall ever cease to cry Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.32

  One cannot help but feel that Tolkien was being unduly harsh in seeing himself as a failure as a father. Whatever shortcomings he exhibited must be countered by the mitigating pleas of those who remembered him as a loving and conscientious parent. One is reminded particularly of the testimony of Simonne d’Ardenne, both an academic colleague and a close family friend. ‘All his letters,’ d’Ardenne recalled, ‘extending over about forty years, tell of his concern about his children’s health, their comfort, their future; how best he could help them succeed in life.’33 ‘Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father,’ wrote Humphrey Carpenter, ‘never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.’34 The fact is that Tolkien did his utmost to ensure that his children enjoyed the security and love which had largely been denied to him through the untimely deaths of his own parents. The Father Christmas Letters and The Hobbit should serve as adequate evidence to acquit Tolkien of the charges he had levelled against himself.

  This domesticated aspect of his personality was, along with his Englishness, at the heart of the ‘hobbitness’ within him. When he was asked in a radio interview on BBC Radio 4 on 16 December 1970 whether, as his books suggested, he attached importance to ‘home, fire, pipe, bed’, he replied, with apparently genuine surprise, ‘Don’t you?’35 This, in turn, raises the question of his relationship with his wife. His marriage had endured its problems and difficulties, particularly in its infancy, but the teething problems of the first few decades largely resolved themselves in later years. The smouldering resentment which Edith had felt towards her husband’s faith, having lapsed herself, and her obdurate opposition to his taking the children to church, had caused tension in their marriage during the ‘20s and ‘30s. This occasionally boiled over into furious outbursts, but after one such explosion of anger in 1940 there was a genuine ‘clearing of the air’ followed by a final reconciliation. Edith explained the complex nature of her feelings and even confessed her desire to resume the practice of her religion. For the rest of her life, though she never attended Mass as frequently or as regularly as her husband, Edith was reconciled to Catholicism and even delighted to take an interest in church affairs.

  Another cause of friction within the marriage was the amount of time that Edith believed her husband’s work, both in his scholarly and his literary endeavours, was causing him to be apart from her. Yet she shared her children’s interest in The Father Christmas Letters, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was conscious of the need to involve her in his creativity and she was the first person to whom he showed two of his stories, Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, being both warmed and encouraged by her approval.

  Edith, at least initially, had resented Tolkien’s friendship with C.S. Lewis and the other Inklings, not least because their regular meetings had meant that her husband was away from home for one evening a week, but she was not totally excluded from Tolkien’s social life. They shared a number of friends who, for all their academic connections, became as much a part of Edith’s life as of her husband’s. These included Rosfrith Murray, daughter of the original Oxford Dictionary editor Sir James Murray, and her nephew Robert Murray who, partly under Tolkien’s influence, went on to become a Jesuit priest. Other mutual friends included Tolkien’s former pupi
ls and colleagues such as Simonne d’Ardenne, Elaine Griffiths, Stella Mills and Mary Salu. Some of these had amusing memories of their friendship with the Tolkiens which were recounted in Carpenter’s biography. The Tolkiens ‘did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his or her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild’s measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with.’36

  Perhaps the strongest force in their marriage, bonding them together more than anything else, was the shared love for their children. As both had been orphaned at a young age, they were intent to ensure that their own children enjoyed the strong and conventional family background that they had been denied. They delighted in every detail of the lives of their offspring and, in later life, this delight was evident in their devotion to their grandchildren. They had shared in the pride of parents when Michael had won the George Medal for his action as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes in the Battle of Britain, and they were overjoyed when John was ordained a priest shortly after the war had ended.

  Friends of the Tolkiens remembered the deep affection between them which was visible in the care with which they chose and wrapped each other’s birthday presents and the great concern they showed for each other’s health. By the 1960s, with the onset of old age, health concerns were becoming an everyday fact of life. ‘I have got over my complaints for the present,’ Tolkien wrote to his son Michael, ‘and feel as well as my old bones allow. I am getting nearly as unbendable as an Ent.’37 Yet it was his wife’s health which was causing most concern.