CHAPTER 1

“A FUNDAMENTALLY RELIGIOUS AND CATHOLIC WORK”

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.

—J. R. R. Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J.1

As for any inner meaning or “message,” it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. . . . I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

—J. R. R. Tolkien2

There is a mystery at the heart of The Lord of the Rings that continues to baffle and confuse the critics. Is it “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” as Tolkien claimed in a letter to his Jesuit friend, Father Robert Murray, in December 1953, or is it, as he claimed in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, devoid of any intentional meaning or “message”? If Tolkien dislikes allegory in all its manifestations and if he insists that it is “neither allegorical nor topical,” how can it be Catholic? If there is no literal reference to Christ or the Church and no allegorical level of meaning, the work cannot be Catholic. It’s as simple as that. And yet it can’t be as simple as that because Tolkien also insists that it is “religious and Catholic,” prefixing the assertion with “of course,” as if to state that the religious and Catholic dimension is obvious.

The mystery deepens when we realize that Tolkien refers to The Lord of the Rings on another occasion as being an allegory. Replying to a letter in which he was asked whether The Lord of the Rings was an allegory of atomic power, he replied that it was “not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination).” Having confessed the allegory of power, he asserted that this was not the most important allegory in the story: “I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real center of my story. . . . The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality.”3

It seems, therefore, that Tolkien contradicts himself, describing his work as an allegory in one place and denying that it is an allegory in another. Is he confused, or is he simply guilty of employing the same word to denote two different things? Is The Lord of the Rings an allegory in one sense of the word and not an allegory in another?

Clearly Tolkien is not confused about the meaning of allegory. He was a philologist and professor of language and literature at Oxford University. As such, we can safely assume that he is using the word allegory in two distinct senses. In one sense, The Lord of the Rings is an allegory; in another sense, it is not.

Perhaps, at this juncture, it would be helpful if we took a moment to discuss the various meanings of allegory. Linguistically, allegory derives from the Greek word allegoria, itself a combination of two Greek words: allos, meaning “other,” and agoria, meaning “speaking.” At its most basic level, therefore, an allegory is anything that speaks of another thing. In this sense, every word we use is an allegory. A word is a label that signifies a thing. A word, if spoken, is a noise that points our mind’s eye to the thing the noise signifies; if written, it is a series of shapes that point our mind’s eye to the thing the series of shapes signify. It is indeed astonishing to realize that we cannot even think a single thought without the use of allegory, a mysterious fact that subjects all perceptions of reality to the level of metaphysics, whereby the literalness of matter is always transcended by the allegory of meaning.

It is clear that Tolkien could not have had this basic meaning of allegory in mind. At this level of understanding, The Lord of the Rings is obviously an allegory because it couldn’t possibly be anything else. This being so, let’s continue with our exploration of the different types of allegory so that we can discover what sort of allegory The Lord of the Rings is and what sort of allegory it isn’t.

The most elevated form of allegory, or at least the most sanctified, is the parable. This is the form adopted by Christ to convey the truth He wished to teach. The prodigal son did not exist in reality; he was a figment of Christ’s imagination. Yet the story of the prodigal son has a timeless applicability because we can all see something of ourselves and others in the actions of the protagonist and perhaps also in the actions of the forgiving father and the envious brother. Insofar as the parable reminds us of ourselves or others, it is an allegory. Insofar as Frodo or Sam or Boromir remind us of ourselves or others, The Lord of the Rings is an allegory.

A far less subtle type of allegory is the formal, or crude, allegory, in which the characters are not persons but personified abstractions. They do not have personalities but merely exist as cardboard cutouts signifying an idea. For instance, Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy is not a person but a personified abstraction. She exists purely and simply to signify the beauty and wisdom of philosophy. Similarly, the character Christian in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is not a person but a personified abstraction who exists purely and simply to signify the Christian believer on his journey from worldliness to otherworldliness. As a formal allegory, every character in Bunyan’s story is a personified abstraction. C. S. Lewis echoes Bunyan’s method in The Pilgrim’s Regress by introducing characters such as a beautiful maiden in shining armor called Reason who has two beautiful younger sisters called Theology and Philosophy.

Tolkien is evidently referring to this kind of allegory in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. He cordially disliked such allegories because they enslaved the imaginative freedom of the reader to the didactic intentions of the author. In order to teach and preach, the author of a formal, or crude, allegory dominates the reader’s imagination, forcing the reader to see his point. Whereas good stories bring people to goodness and truth through the power of beauty, formal allegories shackle the beautiful so that goodness and truth become inescapable. Such allegories may have the good and noble purpose of teaching or preaching, but they do so at the expense of the power and glory of the imaginative and creative relationship between a good author and his readers.

It goes without saying that The Lord of the Rings is not this sort of allegory.

Many other forms of allegory could be discussed, such as the intertextuality employed most memorably by T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” or the way allegory is subsumed with great subtlety and dexterity within the works of Homer and Shakespeare and by modern novelists such as Evelyn Waugh. Although there is no obvious employment of intertextuality in Tolkien’s work (though it is present), there are numerous parallels between the ways allegory is subsumed in The Lord of the Rings and the manner in which this is achieved by the greatest writers of epics, tragedies, comedies, and novels. It’s not possible within the constraints of the present volume to discuss and analyze these fascinating parallels, but the discerning reader will detect the similarities in approach as we illustrate and illumine Tolkien’s technique in the following chapters.

There is, however, one literary form of allegory that must be discussed if we are to truly understand how The Lord of the Rings can be seen, as its author described it, as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” This literary form is the fairy story, of which Tolkien’s story is perhaps the greatest ever told.

One of the greatest proponents and exponents of the power and truth to be found in fairy stories is G. K. Chesterton, a writer who exerted a profound influence on Tolkien. In the chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” in his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote persuasively and with great eloquence in defense of fairy stories:

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. . . . The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. . . . Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized the earth.4

For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be. We do not condone selfishness merely because it is normal, nor should we. A healthy perspective always judges selfishness—most especially our own selfishness—from the perspective of selflessness. In the language of religion, we always judge sin from the perspective of virtue, that which is wrong from the perspective of that which is right. Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.

Chesterton countered the dogma of the materialist that there was nothing but matter by insisting that materialism had imprisoned the spirit of man within the three-dimensioned walls of space. Materialists emphasized the “expansion and largeness” of the cosmos and “popularized the contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man.” The materialist, Chesterton wrote, was imprisoned and “seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large.”

It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more large corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.5

One is reminded in this context of Oscar Wilde, himself at one time a prisoner in the real-life Reading Gaol, who remarked that “we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”6 For the materialist, such as Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (until he learns better), a star is nothing but “a huge ball of flaming gas,”7 barely worth looking at except from the perspective of a purely scientific curiosity. For such materialists, who refuse to believe in anything but the “huge ball of flaming gas,” the sun is mere matter and therefore of the same “stuff” as the gutter. For these materialists, who spurn fairy stories as a mere flight from reality, there is nothing other than the gutter and therefore little point in looking beyond it. Realism, for the materialist, is the gutter itself. Realistic literature should, therefore, keep its eyes firmly fixed on the gutter and away from any unrealistic flights of fancy in the direction of the stars. In contrast to these self-proclaimed “realists,” lovers and tellers of fairy stories, such as Wilde, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien, see the stars as signifying a higher reality beyond the gutter. For these lovers of fairy stories, the star is not merely a ball of flaming gas but also an allegory, a thing of beauty signifying a beauty beyond itself and light in the darkness pointing to the light beyond all darkness. It is for this reason that Samwise Gamgee proclaims in one of the darkest moments in The Lord of the Rings that “above all shadows rides the sun.”8 For hobbits and elves, and those who see with the eyes of hobbits and elves, the sun is a signifier of the giver of all light who vanquishes all shadows.

In his seminal essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien takes up the Chestertonian view of fairytales against the myopic view of the materialist, enabling us to see fairytales as he sees them and—implicitly and by extension—enabling us to see his own epic fairy story, The Lord of the Rings, as he sees it.

Answering the charge that fairytales are escapist, Tolkien readily concedes that escape is one of their main functions: “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?”9 Such escape is not merely the flight of fancy of those seeking some respite from the sufferings and miseries of life but also a laudable attempt to break through the walls of materialism that the modern philosopher has constructed around the mind of man. For a Christian—and let’s not forget that Tolkien was a lifelong practicing Catholic—the world is a prison. In the words of the Salve Regina, one of the most popular Catholic prayers, the world is “a vale of tears” and its inhabitants, the “poor banished children of Eve,” are exiles awaiting their true home in heaven. For the Christian, the world is a valley of death, a land of shadows, or the shadowlands. The light that vanquishes the shadows is not of this world but has its source in our true home beyond it. One of the purposes of fairy stories is, therefore, to enable us to evade the shadows and catch a fleeting glimpse of the beauty and freedom that awaits us beyond the prison walls.

Such “escapism” was an aspect of what Tolkien referred to as the “mystical” face of fairy stories, which points toward the supernatural.10 This mystical dimension is important because man is not merely a creature of nature but also a supernatural creature. Because “there is a part of man which is not ‘Nature,’” Tolkien wrote, there is a part of him that is “wholly unsatisfied by it.”11 One of the functions of fairy stories is to satisfy the desire of man for something beyond nature—something mystical, spiritual, and supernatural.

Another face of fairy stories is “the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.” The fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “may be used as a Mirour de l’Omme,” as something that shows us ourselves.12 It is this aspect of fairy stories, a major feature of Tolkien’s own fairy story, that displays most obviously and potently the allegorical dimension. In reading The Lord of the Rings, we are seeing a mirror of man; we are seeing ourselves, our neighbors, and the world in which we live reflected back to us in charming and sometimes alarming ways. And The Lord of the Rings is not only a natural mirror made of mere matter but also a magical mirror that does not permit us to see ourselves in a purely passive or detached sense. The magic of the mirror is that it has the power to change the person who looks into it. The person reading The Lord of the Rings will see himself and the world in a new and transfigured light. If he allows the magic to work, he will be transformed from the person he thought he was into the person he is really meant to be. It is in this sense, as the following pages will endeavor to show, that The Lord of the Rings is the “fundamentally religious and Catholic work” that Tolkien described it as being.