Whether or not this tale have a moral it is not for me to say. The King (who told it me) said that it had, and quoted a scrap of Latin, for he had been at Oxford in his youth before he fell heir to his kingdom. One may hear tunes from the Rime, said he, in the thick of a storm on the scarp of a rough hill, in the soft June weather, or in the sunset silence of a winter’s night. But let none, he added, pray to have the full music: for it will make him who hears it a footsore traveller in the ways o’ the world and a masterless man till death.2
Appendix – Tolkien the Catholic
Religion took a central role in Tolkien’s life; he is often seen now, too, as a specifically Catholic writer, and his writings are sometimes interpreted in ways that may appear fanciful (and not just to non-Catholics). It is worth looking at this question in a little more depth, and under two aspects.
I – Life
Tolkien was throughout his life a faithful Mass-goer, and a man who took prayer seriously. Some writers have seized on statements from various letters and asserted that Tolkien was throughout his life, at least in aspiration, a daily Mass-goer.1 The main evidence for this usually cited is a letter written to his son Michael in 1963. This can hardly be solid evidence for his practice of decades earlier; in fact, he explicitly says there that he neglected his religion ‘especially at Leeds, and at 22 Northmoor Road’,2 which would cover the years 1920–30. We might note, also, the anecdote cited in Chapter 10. III above in which Tolkien declared he was so depressed he had not been to Mass for a fortnight. These evidences, and others, are hardly reconcilable with an invariable habit of daily Mass-going. Certainly, this was his practice as a schoolboy, and probably became so again at various times in his life, particularly as he grew older; but my sense is of a man who was much afflicted by (self-perceived) laziness or inertia (‘wickedness and sloth’, in the same 1963 letter), and affronted by the shortcomings of the clergy and his fellow Catholics, all of which he cannily names as a cloak for temptations to unbelief. This is a dynamic many of us will find all too plausible and familiar. It remains true that his eucharistic piety was intense, and continuing.
As Stratford Caldecott has pointed out, Tolkien’s ‘spirituality was one of gratitude and praise’, in which man gives voice to the otherwise mute rejoicing of all creation.3 Tolkien counselled one of his sons to learn prayers of praise by heart: he recommended, what he himself found helpful, the Glory Be, the Gloria, Psalms 112 and 116, the Magnificat, the Litany of Loreto and the prayer Sub tuum praesidium. Tolkien himself usually said his prayers in Latin, although this was simple habit rather than any sense of obligation. He did compose Quenya versions of five prayers – the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Sub tuum praesidium and the Litany of Loreto – but there is no suggestion he used these devotionally.4 He also suggested learning the Canon of the Mass by heart, so that it could be recited privately if circumstances prevented one getting to Mass.5 If this seems a daunting regimen, we should remember that as a boy he had served Fr Francis Morgan’s Mass daily, and was doubtless saturated with the rhythms of the Latin liturgy.
He had a great devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, although reluctance to make his confession (which he had been brought up to think an essential preliminary) sometimes meant he abstained from Communion for a time.
Primarily, religion consisted for him of the sacraments and private prayer; he did not, like C.S. Lewis, feel under a duty to engage in public evangelism or intellectual justification of belief. He was not wholly uninvolved in the wider life of the Church, however; he had as we have seen links with the convent at Cherwell Edge, run by the nuns of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. In 1944 he was a founder member, and Vice-President, of the Oxford Circle of the Catenians, an association of Catholic professional men. On the whole, though, corporate religion (apart from Sunday Mass) did not play an obviously great part in Tolkien’s religious life; but this was not unusual amongst Catholics of his time.
He was in favour of ecumenical initiatives with other Christian bodies, but the liturgical changes of the mid- to late 1960s were not to his taste. One of his grandsons remembers him determinedly making the responses in Latin at an English-language Mass; but although the aesthetic of the reformed Rite was not his, and we may guess he disliked the style of the English translation,6 he made no fuss about the validity of the Rite. He remained an obedient son of the Church: ‘There is nowhere else to go! … there is nothing to do but to pray … the virtue of loyalty … indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert.’7 Tellingly, his name does not appear amongst those who signed the petition to Pope Paul VI that secured the so-called ‘Agatha Christie indult’ (granted to Cardinal Heenan on, ironically enough, 5 November 1971) permitting ad hoc celebration of the unreformed Rite of Mass in England and Wales, although it seems very likely he was approached.8
He did not, in fact, have any fundamental objections to vernacular liturgy; indeed, in the last months of his life, Tolkien vigorously expressed the opinion that the greatest disaster in history was the lapse of the Goths into Arianism, at the very point when their language, which had already been used for a version of the Bible, might have been after the Byzantine (and Cyrillic) practice used in the liturgy. This would have given a strong exemplar for dignified worship in the Germanic tongues, and thus a Catholicism that would have become native to the peoples later most affected by the Protestant Reformation (he had made a similar point in a letter of 1965). He illustrated this point by reciting the Our Father in Gothic in ‘splendidly sonorous tones’.9 He was also fond of citing the Old English version of the prologue to John’s Gospel, to show that English could move naturally amongst abstract concepts at a time, he said, when French was merely ‘a vulgar Norman patois’.10
II – Work
The second aspect of Tolkien’s Catholicism is its presence in his writings. In some ways, this presence is so structural, so basic to his imagination, that analysis of it risks (as he said of the author of Beowulf) pushing over the tower to see where he got his building material.
In one strong sense, Tolkien is not a professedly Catholic writer in the consciously assertive tradition of Belloc or Chesterton, and he seems deliberately to have avoided identifying himself in this way; in one of his Beowulf lectures, he dismisses an erroneous opinion (that he believed, as it happens wrongly, was Chesterton’s) as ‘Bellocian prejudice’.11 Efforts to recruit him posthumously as a member of such an ‘English Catholic tradition’ should be resisted; Tolkien reckoned unthinking advocacy of lazily assumed religious prejudice in the intellectual sphere wholly pernicious, and of no service to the Faith (in a letter of 1945, he complains about a ‘sentimentalist’ in the Catholic Herald who asserted that a wholly fanciful etymology should be adopted because it was ‘in keeping with Catholic tradition’12).
There is no organized religion in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, apart from a few Númenórean ceremonies, and obviously wicked worship (with human sacrifice) of the diabolus Morgoth. His characters, overwhelmingly, are what would be conventionally thought of as virtuous pagans, although they move in a world where a creator God is acknowledged if not worshipped or prayed to. Nevertheless, Tolkien insisted to a friend, the convert and Jesuit Robert Murray, that The Lord of the Rings was ‘a fundamentally religious and Catholic work’.13 It is interesting to note some superficial connexions;14 but too much should not be made of them. Many were entirely adventitious developments, not essential elements of the story; easy parallels between his story and Christianity (Frodo as a ‘type’ of Christ, for example) were things Tolkien himself always resisted, although they are still found amongst some of his commentators. Joseph Pearce, for example, is a serial offender in this regard: ‘The Lord of the Rings is a sublimely mystical Passion Play. The carrying of the Ring – the emblem of Sin – is the Carrying of the Cross. The mythological quest is a veritable Via Dolorosa.’15 These may, in Tolkien’s terms, be legitimate applications of the story, but to suggest they are its whole meaning, that the book is in fact a
‘Passion Play’ calquing the story of salvation, is to reduce it to a facile allegory, which (surely) he would have disapproved of, as denying the validity of the story itself. Our own tales are not simply types of Christ’s, but are first of all themselves.
Insofar as any of these parallels are valid, it is only because the moral pattern of Christianity (with regard, say, to suffering and its value) is a universally valid one and thus holds for his characters as much as for anyone else. The story, he strongly insisted, is just that: a story, not an allegory of the Christian life.
George Sayer remembers Tolkien commenting on this:
He would sometimes pull a bunch of American letters or reviews towards him and say, ‘You know, they’re now telling me that …’ and then he would say some of the things they’d told him about The Lord of the Rings. He’d say, ‘You know, I never thought of that. I thought I was writing it as pure story’. He gradually came to believe some of the things that, well, you were telling him.16
We should not place too much stress on the last sentence. What Tolkien ‘came to believe’ were what he would call ‘applicabilities’, parallels and tropes that might be discerned precisely because they were deployed unconsciously rather than with design. If Tolkien wrote a Christian story, it is because all stories are Christian stories.
What makes Tolkien a specifically Christian writer, and his books specifically Christian books, is his absolute conviction of the power and validity, under God, of our capacity to tell stories. This is a bold and not uncontroversial claim.
The short story Leaf by Niggle is illuminating here. Niggle is a painter, working on a great canvas of a Tree, which is perpetually ramifying and taking over more of his life. He is also constantly interrupted; the last of these interruptions prevents him finishing the picture before he dies. After passage through Purgatory, and reconciliation with his bothersome neighbour, he finds his Tree, finished and alive, set in a landscape on the approaches to the Mountains, which are God’s country, heaven. This puts in fictional form an insight Tolkien expressed forcibly to C.S. Lewis, and later put into his poem ‘Mythopoeia’: that our stories, particularly as they approach that high style we call ‘myth’, necessarily and inevitably express something of God’s truth, precisely because this is what human beings do. He does not mean that stories must be allegories, in which characters and events ‘stand for’ particular moral or spiritual truths (in fact, he disliked this type of story); rather, any well-told tale will convey some elements of God’s truth not normally or otherwise expressible. In his lecture On Fairy Stories, Tolkien elaborated his theory, which he called ‘sub-creation’: art exists, story exists, because human beings as images of God the Creator, are by nature makers. God may even choose, Leaf by Niggle suggests, to give a measure of primary reality (the ‘Secret Fire’) to these products of our secondary art:
[the Christian] may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true …17
His concern was, however, that our stories should, properly to exercise our sub-creative faculty, not be morally or theologically inconsistent with what we know as the primary world; we have seen the lengths to which he went to devise an acceptable model of Elvish reincarnation, although (arguably) the simple fact could have stood as a given of his secondary universe.18
There is an unspoken question here, of course: does this ‘effoliation and multiple enrichment’ apply to all imaginative writing, or only to that done in an explicitly Christian context and with deliberate purpose? What about consciously anti-Christian stories? Does it also apply to them? Tolkien never addressed these specific objections, but I think it reasonable to suppose he would not have thought his theory disproved by them. This is, in fact, only to transfer a basic question of theodicy into the sphere of storytelling, and the answer would (surely) be analogous. If God’s providence can encompass deliberate human evil, and (in some incalculable but real way) not just nullify it but turn it to positive good, then surely the same must be true on the (in one sense less acute) level of human storytelling. The sub-creative faculty can doubtless be turned to an evil or immoral end, but its native virtue, which is one of making, will in some fashion, and under God’s mercy, assert itself. If being – existence, things, stuff, creation – is of itself good, although it can be perverted to partial ends, then the making or effoliation of it, such as storytelling is, must also be good in itself, despite (it may be) our deliberate efforts to the contrary. This is mysterious (in the technical theological sense, as well as the usual meaning of the word) but no more so than any other question of why evil exists and how a good and loving God is able not merely to tolerate it but also to incorporate it in his plan so as in some fashion to make that plan greater. We may believe this or not; it has however been the usual understanding of Christian theology since it first became articulate; and Tolkien, as we see from his own creation stories, certainly assented to it.
This doctrine of storytelling, which we might call one of implied Christian content, may be contrasted with the explicit allegorizing many claim to prefer, and indeed to detect in Tolkien’s major fiction. The problem with allegory, for Tolkien as for others of similar temper, is that (as we have noted) it tends to reduce all stories to versions of a single story – characters, places, meetings within the tale, all become counters equivalent to elements in one overarching narrative of which all other stories are simply pale analogues: our tales are no more than bad versions of a Platonic archetype of human nature, or some aspect of it. Tolkien complained in his lecture On Fairy Stories of the reductive nature of ‘comparative folklore’; tales can only be made ‘versions’ of one another by abstracting them from the particular elements that make them distinctive.19 This tends both to undervalue the very elements characteristic to any given tale, and to devalue particular instances of created or subcreated reality.
If Tolkien disagreed with C.S. Lewis about allegory (of which Lewis was preternaturally fond), he also, in On Fairy Stories, gives clear signs he knew what later emerged as the central thesis of Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, and may be his most original contribution to Christian apologetics: ‘joy’ itself, an indescribable desire awoken by particular encounters (very often literary), and pointing always beyond itself to what, Lewis eventually determined, is a signpost to God. Tolkien writes, first, of fairy stories ‘If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded’; then, speaking of the particular emotion evoked by what he called the eucatastrophe, the unexpected happy ending, he says:
It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) 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.20
Two things are notable here; first, that Tolkien characteristically sees ‘Joy’ in the context of the northern theory of courage, of the prospect of ‘universal final defeat’; second, that although this lecture (in its developed form at least) precedes Lewis’s Surprised by Joy by a good dozen years, we should be shy of claiming Tolkien as somehow the source of Lewis’s theory: Lewis had made various attempts to describe and explain this crucial element in his religious experience before this time, notably in the preface to the 1943 edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, his ‘allegorical apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism’, written at much the same time as Tolkien expanded the lecture and presumably therefore much in the air of the Inklings’ discussions that year. He had also begun an account of it in 1930, formalizing hints in his diaries of the previous decade, and an abortive verse account two years later, before, in September of 1932, writing The Pilgrim’s Regress, which implies the later theory even if it does not, exactly, state it.21 Lewis’s ‘Joy’, rather, had (like Tolkien’s ‘sub-creation’) become part of the common stock of ideas alive in
their circle.
Recent writers on what we might call Tolkien’s religious aesthetic (Verlyn Flieger, Stratford Caldecott) have given prominence to his use of light as a fundamental symbol of God’s presence, and its purity or tainting as a sign of the working-out of his providential purposes in accord with, or in despite of, created wills. The light of the Trees is qualitatively different from the later lights of sun and moon, holier, more life-giving; its memory stays with the Eldar and in some sense transfigures them, whilst its enduring presence in the Silmarils, in Eärendel’s star and latterly in Galadriel’s glass, is both physical reminder of hope and, in several instances, an operative instance of it. By making its wearer invisible, the Ring makes him untouchable by light, and thus cut off from the presence of God, confined to the blind realm of the Fallen One.22 Stratford Caldecott remarks,
original sin … also resulted in a kind of invisibility, as Adam hid from the Lord in the forest of Eden: ‘But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”’23
As was mentioned earlier, Tolkien’s constant theme was ‘death: inevitable death’. The ‘message’ of Leaf by Niggle, inasmuch as it can be reduced to a single item, is that death is not the end of sub-creation, but a way to the fulfilment of it, to the achieving of what we had long ago despaired of ever finishing, let alone of bringing to the very perfection that, in vision, had inspired us: to its incorporation into the loving plan of God.
This is one of Tolkien’s approaches to the problem; the other is through the elves: they are above all makers, of song, story, works of hand and mind, freed from the limits imposed by a human life-span and gifted with skill beyond human measure. They are arch-sub-creators who are yet bounded by the world in a way men are not. The Silmarils are the great embodiment of elvish art; but they are also the cause of their maker’s ruin, and that of his whole people, who are caught by selfish love of what has been made, rather than joy in the making and giving. An image of God-given beauty can, too easily, become an idol; the elven dilemma is our own writ large.
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