“Those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.”
—Gandalf
In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien makes several comments about the goals and purposes of the literature of Faery, a category that includes what we now call fantasy literature. Of the mythical and fairy-tale setting, he writes: “They open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe” (“Fairy,” 129). And a little later he adds, “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (“Fairy,” 155). Fantasy literature and its cousins, myth and fairy tale—at least the higher and better literatures of these kinds—transport us outside our own time and space. Or at least they open the door that we may travel there ourselves. And once there, we look at something that is timeless, and we are able to see truths that we might not see within the context and confines of our own limited perspective. If the fantasy is written well—if it is “successful,” to use Tolkien’s term—then it gives a glimpse of the “underlying reality or truth.” And because that truth is seen apart from our own particular and peculiar time, we are able to see its universality rather than merely associating it with one cultural setting. For as we have seen illustrated in numerous ways in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and even in the essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien did believe that there is an objective truth, just as there is an objective morality. It is a truth that underlies all truths. It is not relative to time or space. And furthermore, that underlying truth is one that we can (and ought to try to) see.
In his book The Orphean Passages, Walter Wangerin Jr. expresses in slightly different words something of what I think Tolkien is saying in his essay.
In order to comprehend the experience one is living in, he must, by imagination and by intellect, be lifted out of it. He must be given to see it whole; but since he can never wholly gaze upon his own life while he lives it, he gazes upon the life that, in symbol, comprehends his own. Art presents such lives, such symbols. Myth especially—persisting as a mother of truth through countless generations and for many disparate cultures, coming therefore with the approval not of a single people but of people—myth presents, myth is, such a symbol, shorn and unadorned, refined and true. And when the one who gazes upon that myth suddenly, in dreadful recognition, cries out, “There I am! That is me!” then the marvelous translation has occurred: he is lifted out of himself to see himself wholly.[67]
Wangerin’s “mother of truth” is Tolkien’s “underlying reality or truth,” which myth (and fairy tale and fantasy) is an ideal vehicle for revealing. It is not just some distant inapplicable truth that we see but a truth that speaks to our own situation. As Tolkien also writes, in describing the recovery that fairy stories can bring us: “We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make” (“Fairy,” 146). The glimpses of the fantastic in the realm of Faery can help us see in a new light that which is common and part of our primary world. In fact, we even see ourselves more clearly in a way we might not otherwise see; we see the truth about ourselves in “dreadful recognition.”
My goal in writing this book has been to suggest some of the underlying reality or truth into which Tolkien gives us so many glimpses. Of course one need not agree with Tolkien’s understanding of what that truth is in order to enjoy and appreciate his work. Yet whether or not one agrees with Tolkien’s views, it is tremendously helpful, and perhaps indispensable, to at least understand what those views are if one is to understand what Tolkien was seeking to accomplish.
Then again, it may just be—and this is my own view here—that part of the reason for the phenomenal success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is that the books really do speak truly. They have the ring of truth through all of their important particulars because they are drawn from deeper and more permanent, or fundamental, truths. Even readers who do not assent to those truth claims that are fundamental to Tolkien’s work (when they are spelled out as they are in this book) may be subconsciously drawn to the work as being true.
Of course if Tolkien’s theistic worldview is in any sense correct—if the Christian expression is the underlying truth about the world—then the most permanent and fundamental thing we might wish to talk about, even if the topic is uncomfortable to some, is Ilúvatar himself: Eru, the One, both the Author of Middle-earth and the Authority over it. As Tolkien also wrote of myth and fairy, “Something really ‘higher’ is occasionally glimpsed in mythology: Divinity, the right to power (as distinct from its possession), the due of worship; in fact ‘religion’” (“Fairy,” 124). These words are certainly a true description of what may be found in Middle-earth. Amid the many glimpses of the corruption of the earthly (or Middle-earthly) desire for the power of domination are also numerous glimpses of real divinity, the right to power. If Tolkien is correct about the reality of divinity, then this existence and importance and power of the Creator, Ilúvatar, is a truth worth exploring if we wish to understand Tolkien’s world. In particular, these strong theological underpinnings of Tolkien’s work, especially with respect to salvation, raise one more question—a question that has been raised by many Tolkien scholars over the decades: Do The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings compose a Christian mythology?
My answer to this last question is a firm and unequivocal “no and yes.”
I would feel guilty giving such an answer (or nonanswer) if it were not that Tolkien’s own answer to this question would, I think, also be “no and yes,” depending on how the question was meant and the context in which it was asked. Indeed, any easy answer to this question (whether “no” or “yes”) is almost certain to be at least overly simplistic, if not altogether wrong, and would do injustice to Tolkien and his works.
Illustrating just how complex the question is, Paul Kerry devoted an entire book chapter to a historiographic analysis of how it has been answered over the past fifty years.[68] He illustrates that there have been not only different answers, but even entirely different frameworks or approaches to the question, including some framed by moral concerns, others by romanticism, some by the question of modernity, some by the question of free will, and some by the importance of Tolkien’s sources. His essay contains well over two hundred footnotes! Kerry has done an excellent job, and I will not attempt to reproduce his work but will note only that the equivocation of my own answer gives credence to the complexity of the question. As with many such questions, perhaps the important starting point is understanding just what is meant by the asking.
Not a Christian Myth?
I will begin by answering, “No, The Lord of the Rings is not a Christian mythology.” There are several reasons for giving this answer. A starting point, though by no means a convincing argument in and of itself, is what Tolkien wrote about his own works in his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. Of the origins of The Silmarillion, he writes, “It was primarily linguistic in inspiration” (Foreword), and of The Lord of the Rings, he adds:
The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. . . .
As for any inner meaning or “message,” it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. (Foreword)
In other words, if by saying that the legendarium was a Christian mythology one meant that the author had some hidden agenda leading him to write a cleverly disguised bit of Christian propaganda, or even a Christian allegory, then Tolkien offers a clear denial. The stories of Middle-earth are not written as Sunday school lessons or mere devotional guides (though I don’t doubt that passages from the works have prompted important spiritual reflections among readers). In the stated intention of the author, they are, on the one hand, linguistic explorations and, on the other, stories intended to amuse, delight, and move the reader. Of course authors don’t always know why they write something, and even when they do, they are not always fully forthcoming about those reasons. But given what I have read about Tolkien in various biographies and in other works exploring his academic career, and his relationships with the group of fellow writers known as the Inklings, I am strongly inclined to take his words at face value.
This is not to say that his goals of telling a good story, or his aversion to allegory, are somehow un-Christian. Christian theology says much about delight, and about the value of art and creativity, and about language. I merely observe that there is nothing uniquely Christian about either linguistic exploration or telling a good story. Remember that the question of this section is not whether the legendarium is an anti-Christian myth—it certainly is not—but simply whether it constitutes a Christian myth. And such a designation would seem to imply a much more religious motive than the motive given by the author.
Another reason to answer “no” (and a considerably more important one) is the sheer amount of source material that Tolkien drew upon that was pagan, or pre-Christian, especially Norse tales and mythologies. Tolkien was enamored by early Northern mythology, appreciating both its richness and depth. In “On Fairy-Stories” he writes: “I had no desire to have either dreams or adventures like Alice [in Wonderland], and the account of them merely amused me. I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool. . . . But the land of Merlin and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons” (“Fairy,” 134–35). The nameless North of Sigurd is not a Christian world. Far from it. And yet we see this inspiration of the nameless North in numerous places through Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings. Even the names of the dwarves (and the wizard) in The Hobbit are borrowed from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, an important piece of twelfth-century Icelandic writing. Recall also the tale of Éowyn, Théoden, and the people of Rohan discussed in chapter 2. As already noted, they are clearly modeled after the Anglo-Saxon people; their values, customs, and ceremonies are those of pagan Germanic peoples. We should also note that one of Tolkien’s two elvish languages is modeled after Old Finnish, and the pagan Finnish work known as the Kalevala was important source material. In addition to the Völsungasaga and the Kalevala, other important pagan sources for Tolkien’s work such as The Saga of Hrolf Kraki and other Eddic stories have been well documented, and we will not dwell on them here.
Even The Silmarillion, the most theological of Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings, provides an example of pagan influence. Though Middle-earth is clearly a monotheistic world—Eru means “the One,” and this Creator, also known as Ilúvatar, is a self-existent being upon whom all else depends for its existence—once we get beyond the short creation story of the Ainulindalë, we see much more of the Valar (the gods) than we do of Ilúvatar (the God). Thus despite the monotheistic beginnings, in many ways the remainder of the book reads more like Norse mythology than it does like the biblical book of Genesis. The point here is that the story—by which I now mean the plot, the characters, the setting, and the language of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—has far more visible elements that are identifiable with Norse and Germanic mythology than with the Christian myth.
One source worth exploring in a little detail is the poem Beowulf because it is so important to Tolkien and influences him considerably. While it would be very difficult to find in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings any overt traces of biblical characters or biblical narratives (such as one might expect to find in a “Christian myth”), it is nearly impossible not to see myriad traces of Beowulf throughout Tolkien’s works. One of the most interesting aspects of this influence is the presence of the character Beowulf himself in Tolkien’s Middle-earth—though his presence is not as obvious as finding Icelandic dwarf names borrowed from Eddic writings.
Tolkien scholar Michael Drout, in an essay titled “Tolkien and Beowulf: Medieval Materials for the Modern Audience,” argues that, rather than inserting a simple and obvious Beowulf character in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien instead gives a three-fold portrayal of Beowulf: “I think [Tolkien] took the attributes of Beowulf the character and spread them through Aragorn, Éomer and Théoden. Each character in The Lord of the Rings has some key similarities to Beowulf, but each is also different. Thus Tolkien can with a straight face deny the influence of Beowulf on The Lord of the Rings [and yet] at the same time make use of all his Anglo-Saxon source material—which includes Beowulf.”[69] Why would Tolkien do this? One reason may have been that he felt he could “take the hints” from medieval sources but then “improve on them,” as Tom Shippey argues Tolkien did with many other sources, especially the dragon Fafnir, slayed by the hero Sigurth, which (along with the Beowulf dragon) provides important inspiration for Smaug. Tolkien also thought, as Shippey argues, that he could rework and improve on many of the devices of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and thus he could at the same time both claim that he greatly disliked that particular play of Shakespeare and be “indebted” to it “again and again.”[70] Mightn’t this be what Tolkien was doing with the hero Beowulf?
But Drout gives another very plausible reason: “This technique of taking the attributes of medieval characters and dividing them among multiple Lord of the Rings characters is necessary, I believe, in order to make a modern audience accept the characters in Lord of the Rings. A true analog of Beowulf, with all of Beowulf’s bravado, fearlessness, and legalistic perfection would be too scary to a Modern audience. We wouldn’t trust him.”[71] A different way to say this is that modern readers have a difficult time relating to an undiluted Beowulf as a hero. He is too foreign to the modern imagination, which is trained to be cynical, especially of its heroes. As Drout might have pointed out if he had written his essay in 2007 or later, when that modern cynicism is applied to Beowulf the hero, we get the Beowulf of the 2007 Robert Zemeckis film (played by Ray Winstone), who ends up being seduced by Grendel’s mother (played by Angelina Jolie) and then conceives a child with her rather than slaying her. And, of course, he hides this little fact from everyone else. Unfortunately, the child turns out to be the dragon that returns to kill him. As Martha Monsson pointed out bluntly but astutely, the so-called heroes of Zemeckis’s Beowulf “are lying scoundrels” while his “women are useless, helpless ornaments, unfit for anything except to be the property of a man.” As a side note, she adds (also accurately), “It is safe to say there is very little in the movie a real Anglo-Saxon would recognize.”[72] Tolkien, by contrast, though his heroes are by no means perfect, did not blindly apply cynicism to them all.[73] I think he did not want his readers to be cynical either—or, rather, did not want their cynicism to be born out. Yet he seemed to anticipate the ingrained cynicism of most of his readers, that they could not accept the Beowulf given to us by the medieval poem. Thus he instead gives us Beowulf in three smaller doses, in the persons of Aragorn, Éomer, and Théoden. That, I think, is Drout’s point.
My own opinion is that Shippey and Drout are both correct about this; both of these motives were at work in Tolkien. Furthermore, I think that Tolkien had already done something with the hero Beowulf in The Hobbit similar to what Drout argues he did in The Lord of the Rings. In The Hobbit, three different characters each individually reveal one aspect of Beowulf in isolation from the other aspects. Beowulf’s superhuman strength, his excessive pride, and his moral virtue—three traits Tolkien believed were centrally important traits of the medieval hero as represented in the poem that bears his name—are taken by Tolkien and given (one each) to three different characters in The Hobbit. In doing this, readers can see what that trait looks like in isolation from the other two. Yet Tolkien does this in a way that keeps each of the three characters still connected to the Beowulf of legend in some recognizable way.
The most obvious Beowulf character in The Hobbit is Beorn (though Beorn also draws inspiration from the Böthvarr Bjarki, or “Warlike Little-Bear,” in the Old Norse Saga of Hrolf Kraki[74]). Beowulf possesses superhuman strength—the strength of thirty men, we are told by the poet—and is invincible in battle until he faces the dragon at the end of his life. Likewise, Beorn is a bear-man, whose superhuman strength and prowess are clearly visible at the Battle of Five Armies. “He came alone,” the narrator tells us, “and in bear’s shape; and he seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath. The roar of his voice was like drums and guns; and he tossed wolves and goblins from his path like straws and feathers . . . so that nothing could withstand him, and no weapon seemed to bite upon him” (Hobbit, 349). We could add to this that Beorn’s house closely resembles a medieval Germanic mead hall, down to the beverage served there; it is described as “a wide hall with a fire-place in the middle,” where they “sat long at the table with their wooden drinking-bowls filled with mead” (Hobbit, 168, 177). Tolkien’s sketch of Beorn’s house (found in some editions of The Hobbit) could easily be a drawing of a mead hall and is highly similar to a mead-hall drawing in the 1927 book Introduction to Old Norse by Tolkien’s colleague E.V. Gordon.[75] Given Tolkien’s philological interest, it is certainly significant that the name Beowulf is poetic for “bear”—though in a roundabout way: Beowulf is translated literally to “bee-wolf,” but a wolf is another name for a thief, hence a bee-wolf is a bee-thief, or honey-thief, or bear. Now Beowulf is not actually a bear or even a were-bear, but his name at least gives that hint, possibly pointing to the source of his strength. Tolkien simply takes that a step further: Beorn, whose name also means “bear,” really is a bear-man, or were-bear.
However Beorn is not by any means a complete Beowulf character. He has the superhuman were-bear character and strength of Beowulf, but he has neither Beowulf’s concern for moral virtue nor his excessive pride. Consider first the issue of excessive pride. Tolkien’s understanding of the work of the Beowulf poet is important in grasping his threefold portrayal of the Beowulf hero. In his essay “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhtelm’s Son,” Tolkien explains that Beowulf, according to the poet who told the tale, is too concerned with his own glory. While this is excusable in his fight against Grendel, because at the time Beowulf has no people of his own to protect, it is not excusable in his fight against the dragon when at that time he is a king with responsibility to protect his people. His “excess persists,” Tolkien argues. “He will not deign to lead a force against the dragon, as wisdom might direct even a hero to do; for, as he explains in a long ‘vaunt,’ his many victories have relieved him of fear.” As a result, “the people lose their king disastrously.” As Tolkien concludes, “In Beowulf we have only a legend of ‘excess’ in a chief” (“Homecoming,” 23). Whether one agrees that Beowulf was guilty of excessive pride, the point here is that Tolkien thought so, and this is a significant aspect in his understanding of the poem and its hero. A complete Beowulf character or analog, as Tolkien understood him, would have this excessive pride.
Having said that, we must note that Beowulf also shows concern for moral virtue in many other instances, such as in his refusal to take unfair advantage in a fight over Grendel or in his refusal to usurp the throne of the Geats from his younger and weaker cousin Heardred after King Hygelac is killed in battle. In the hero Beorn, by contrast, neither the characteristic of excessive pride nor that of moral virtue is made evident—or at least they are not shown to be important traits in the story (unlike in the tale of Beowulf ). Beorn doesn’t appear at all concerned with what others think of him. (In fact, he doesn’t have much contact with the human race at all.) He isn’t concerned with receiving glory. He also isn’t particularly concerned with rules for moral conduct. Although he is certainly brave and fierce, Beorn is something of a morally neutral character, neither good nor evil. His murder of a goblin prisoner whose head he then sticks on his gate is ruthless and gruesome. Shippey calls Beorn “insufficiently socialized,” writing that he “comes from the heart of the ancient world that existed before fairy-tale, a merciless world without a Geneva Convention.”[76]
And then we have Thorin Oakenshield, who by contrast seems to represent all of Beowulf’s pride, without either his moral virtue or his superhuman strength. Thorin is perfectly willing to break his bargain with Bard and the elvenking and is certainly overcome at the end of the tale with excessive greed and pride, seemingly untempered by virtue. If, after considering Beorn, one thinks it a stretch to also associate Thorin with Beowulf, consider the numerous parallels between the characters and their tales. Like Beowulf, Thorin is the descendant of the great heroes of old and yet has been dispossessed of his kingdom. Of course both Beowulf and Thorin lead a group of fourteen companions (if you count Gandalf) on a quest in which they face several monsters, culminating with the dragon who is woken by a thief and enraged. After their respective dragons are slain, both Thorin and Beowulf die and are buried with their great swords and with treasures taken from the worm’s hoard. Thus the similarity of plot elements between The Hobbit and Beowulf also ties together Thorin and Beowulf. Indeed, the plot at least would tie Beowulf more closely to Thorin than to Beorn.
Who, then, represents the third aspect of Beowulf in this threefold portrayal, the moral virtue without either the excessive pride or the strength? None other than the hero: Bilbo Baggins the hobbit. Bilbo lacks Beowulf’s superhuman strength (although he can be said to have gained, through the Ring, some measure of superhuman abilities). He certainly is not guilty (as Thorin is) of excessive pride. Yet he is clearly the hero who most displays moral virtue. Bilbo’s virtue even includes the same sense of fairness that prevents Beowulf from using a sword to slay the unarmed Grendel, for Bilbo also decides that it would not be a fair fight for him to slay the unarmed Gollum. As for other explicit connections between Bilbo and Beowulf (in addition to the alliteration of their names), consider that at the end of the quest it is Bilbo, and not Thorin, who is the real leader of the company. It is also Bilbo, and not Thorin, who aids Bard in slaying the dragon. Most importantly though—and this may have been Tolkien’s philological hint—Bilbo is himself a bee-thief like Beowulf, though with a little twist typical of many of Tolkien’s philological jokes. Rather than being a thief of bees as Beowulf the bear is, Bilbo is a thief (a burglar to be exact) who is a bee (he carries a “Sting,” which is the name of his sword). Tolkien seems to be drawing on this threefold portrayal of Beowulf in The Hobbit to suggest that real heroism is not demonstrated by strength or by pride, but by virtue. If this was his conscious intent, he accomplishes it by drawing on a fundamentally Germanic source.
The point here in looking at Tolkien’s primary sources is not that the poem Beowulf is pagan (though many of the other important Norse, Finnish, and Germanic sources were) or anti-Christian. Indeed, the version of the poem that has survived for us today was told (or retold) by a poet who was likely a Christian. It was not even written in Old Norse but in Old English. But in its roots it is a pre-Christian tale rich in its Norse-ness, its heroes are Norse, and it was only vaguely Christianized by the English poet who passed it on to us. If it is at all a Christian poem, it is a Christian poem about a pre-Christian time. (We will return to this later in this chapter.) And it is certainly not the Bible. If Tolkien was giving us a Christian myth, why would Beowulf rather than the Bible provide such central source material?
This, in turn, raises another issue that may be even more important. In answering the question of whether the Middle-earth mythology is Christian, we also must recognize that there are almost no explicit references to religion anywhere in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Though these tales contain veiled references to a higher power—many of which have been discussed earlier—there are very few examples of anything resembling a religious practice and no references to Ilúvatar or any particular monotheistic divinity. (There are several scattered references to the Valar, but since they function in a literary way more like pagan gods, these references can be seen as strengthening the point that Tolkien’s myth is not Christian.)
The only example of a recognizable religious practice in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings that I would consider obvious is when Faramir and his men face west in a moment of silence before their meals. Faramir explains the practice to Frodo, saying, “We look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be” (IV/v). This practice strongly echoes Christian prayer, especially the prayer known as the “Gloria Patri,” which ends referencing God the Creator as the one “who was and who is and who ever shall be.” But although Faramir’s phrase “that which . . . will ever be” certainly brings to mind the divine with phrasing familiar to Christian prayer, there is no explanation beyond that. Only readers familiar with The Silmarillion would recognize this last phrase as a reference to Ilúvatar.
Other examples are even less obvious. One could certainly make many connections between the lembas of the elves and the bread of Holy Communion—a sacrament that Tolkien, as a Roman Catholic, celebrated his entire life. Bradley Birzer has noted, “Indeed, the Elven lembas arguably serves as Tolkien’s most explicit symbol of Christianity.”[77] But while Birzer and others have done an excellent job exploring this symbolism, and I have no doubt that it was intentional on Tolkien’s part, it is nonetheless a symbol easy to miss, in large part because there is nothing resembling a religious ceremony each time the wafer is consumed.
We could also note that in his dialogue with Gandalf and Frodo, after he was discovered listening at the window, Sam says both “Lor bless you, Mr. Gandalf, sir!” and, a short time later, “Lor bless me” (I/ii). “Lor,” of course, is short for “Lord,” which is a reference to the divine, and the theistic form of blessing is certainly an example of religious practice. But it is difficult to make too much of such a minor practice that is not repeated elsewhere and has nothing else attached to it. Certainly these two offhand references to the “Lor[d]” don’t suffice to turn the story into a Christian story.
Gandalf’s chastising of Denethor when the Steward attempts to take his own life is more significant as a reference to religion: “Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death. And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus” (V/vii). Indeed, this example rightly belongs in a chapter defending a premise that The Lord of the Rings is a Christian work, or at least an explicitly theistic one. It is certainly a reference to the existence of a greater moral authority, and thus is another good example of Tolkien’s portrayal of morality as being rooted in real objective standards and not just personal or cultural opinions. Gandalf believes that even the highest authority of a great kingdom must yield to objective moral standards. It is also a hint at one of the main topics of this chapter: there is a war with two opposing sides, one being Ilúvatar, the authority in whom is rooted objective moral standards, and the other being the Dark Lord, who is mentioned by Gandalf in this passage. (Interestingly, the Dark Lord is most likely a reference not to Sauron, but to Morgoth, whom Sauron serves.) Like the words of Gandalf to the Balrog discussed earlier, these words of Gandalf put the wars of Middle-earth—and more importantly, the decisions of individuals—into a decidedly religious context. But of course none of this is in any way overt or explicit. If it is religious and theistic, it is so only in a very veiled way.
The most important aspect of this passage to consider and explain may simply be Gandalf’s use of the word heathen. The word is an explicitly religious term. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the noun heathen as “one who holds a religious belief which is neither Christian, Jewish, nor Muslim” and dates the earliest use of the term to an Old English Christian text from around AD 1000, where it would have had an even narrower meaning: “one who is not a Christian.” Gandalf uses the adjectival form, which keeps the same meaning in the OED: “of an individual or people: holding religious beliefs of a sort that are considered unenlightened, now esp. ones of a primitive or polytheistic nature; spec. not of the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim faiths.” At face value, then, Gandalf is rebuking Denethor for not holding to Christian religious practice, which of course implies the norm of those practices (at least within Gondor). It is possible that Tolkien simply missed this one-time word usage when he sought to cut out of his work any references to religious practice (a point to which we shall soon return). It may also be that he was using the word with a different meaning that would draw more on its roots in Old English. The root of heathen is heath, and the accepted meaning of heathen (as given by the OED) is derived from a more literal meaning: one who is from the heath rather than from the city—that is, an uneducated peasant. But the reference to the Dark Lord probably suggests something nearer to the religious meaning. Yet even if the religious meaning was the one intended, and it was left in the text intentionally, it is still only a small and passing reference to religious practice.
The Missing Piece
The vague and passing references to religion mentioned above might—if there were more of them and if Tolkien had not drawn so heavily on pagan literary sources—be taken as evidence of the Christian nature of Tolkien’s work. Tolkien himself, at one point, even acknowledges that his works contain more religious aspects and references to God than many readers seem to notice. Referring to invocations of the divine uttered by Sam and Frodo, he writes, “These and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked.”[78]
But one overarching reason to say “no” to categorizing the Middle-earth mythology as Christian still remains, and it would apply even if we included the far more theological work, The Silmarillion, along with The Lord of the Rings and the posthumously published Histories. This last reason is both the simplest and the most profound: there is no Christ in these stories! That is, there is no presence of the Creator, Eru Ilúvatar, as an incarnate being within his creation. Christianity rests fundamentally on a set of historical events: the birth, life, death, and especially the resurrection of the first-century Jew named Jesus, believed by Christians to be the eternal Creator God having taken on physical human form as the Messiah long promised by the Jewish prophets. (The word Christ, used as a title for Jesus and from which we get the term Christian, is just the Greek translation for the Hebrew word messiah.) According to Tolkien’s Christian faith, at a real moment in the earth’s history, God the Son was incarnate; he became a man and lived on the earth. As is written about Jesus in the Gospel of John: “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:10, 14a).
Paul the apostle, the first international missionary of Christianity in its infancy, also understood clearly the significance of the historical incarnation and resurrection when he wrote:
For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas; and after that by the eleven. Then was he seen by more than five hundred brethren at once. . . .
And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. . . . And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins. (1 Cor. 15:3–6a, 14, 17)
Paul’s use of the phrase “first of all” suggests the primary importance of these events, and his appeal to eyewitnesses adds to his claim for their historical validity. His later argument about the vanity of Christian faith if the events of Christ’s life—especially the historical resurrection—are not true drives home his point. In short, the story of Christ may be a beautiful story, but in the Christian understanding it won’t bring salvation unless it really happened as a historical event: unless God the Creator entered his creation at a particular moment in its history. Faith in this story, if it is not historically true, is futile and worthless. According to Paul, this historicity is of first importance to Christianity.
Tolkien also understood the importance to Christianity of the incarnation as a real historical event, in addition to its status as a powerful myth. He writes, toward the end of “On Fairy-Stories”:
But this [gospel] story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment 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. (“Fairy,” 156)
Emphasizing the reality of the incarnation, Tolkien uses the term history twice, and also twice uses the word true to refer to the actuality of the events of the gospel story within history. Even the term eucatastrophe, which Tolkien coined, implies a real event—that is to say, an event with a real, sudden, and dramatic impact: literally, a good catastrophe. Thus, the power of the gospel story, which Tolkien describes earlier in that paragraph as containing “a fairy-story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories,” goes beyond words to the underlying truth, which in this case is the reality of history. The story itself is beautiful, containing “many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect self-contained significance” (“Fairy,” 156). However, the chief part of the power and beauty of that story, the ultimate “fulfillment” of the creative art at work in story itself, comes from the fact that this story has entered the history of the primary world.
It is interesting to note here that Tolkien doesn’t say the story originated in history, or that it describes history, but rather that it entered history, implying that the story preexisted history. As he writes in the next paragraph, “This story is supreme; and it is true. Legend and History have met and fused” (“Fairy,” 157). If Tolkien is correct, then the gospel story is the truth by which all story truths are measured. But no such gospel is present in The Lord of the Rings or even in The Silmarillion: the story that Tolkien believes has entered the earth’s history has not entered the history of his Middle-earth. Yet if the historical presence of that story is critical to the Christian mythology—as Tolkien believed it was—and if it doesn’t exist in Tolkien’s mythology, then in what sense can Tolkien’s mythology be Christian?
Now, one might claim that in fact there are Christ-figures in Middle-earth. If by “Christ-figure” one is referring to characters who imitate Christ in significant ways—by living out the definition of Christian charity; by embodying mercy, truth, wisdom, humility, and faith; and more specifically by giving their lives for the sake of others—then it is easy to agree with this statement: there are characters in Tolkien’s writing who are Christlike. Indeed, there are numerous such figures. Gandalf is wise and merciful, committed to truth, and full of faith. At Khazad-dûm, he sacrifices his life for his companions. In this way he is a “Christ-figure.” Of greatest importance, he not only dies but is resurrected, passing from death back into life. Aragorn also makes Christlike sacrifices; though his heart longs to go to Minas Tirith, where he might take up the throne of Gondor and earn the right to wed Arwen, he instead sacrifices his goals and ambitions for the sake of the hobbits Merry and Pippin. Like Christ, Aragorn also is a healer, calling back Éowyn even from death, and Faramir and Merry as well, and later on, Frodo and Sam. And he too experiences a sort of resurrection in entering the Paths of the Dead and coming out again into life. It is also interesting to compare what Aragorn accomplished at the Paths of the Dead with the apostle Paul’s description of Christ; in Ephesians 4:8–10, Christ is desribed as descending from heaven into the depths of the earth and rescuing the captives there—usually understood to mean rescuing the spirits of the dead from their torment in hell.
Likewise, Frodo, when he takes upon himself the Quest to Mount Doom, is offering his life in Christlike sacrifice for the sake of all the free peoples of Middle-earth. Frodo could certainly be seen as fitting the prophet Isaiah’s depiction of the promised Christ: “There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him” (Isa. 53:2). Which is to say that Frodo had no great physical stature that would have made him one of the great of Middle-earth. His experience at the Tower of Cirith Ungol furthers this image. Richard Purtill points out, “His physical sufferings parallel those of Christ: he is imprisoned, stripped of his garments, mocked, and whipped.”[79] And though he does not actually die a physical death and return to life, he is thrice brought back from the verge of death: once from the blade of the Nazgûl when he was well on his way to becoming a wraith, once from the sting of Shelob when even Sam had given him up for dead, and once by Aragorn at the end of the Quest. In this last instance we read that he went “to the very brink of death ere [Aragorn] recalled [him]” (VI/iv). At the conclusion of the trilogy, we see just how real his sacrifice is, for like Christ he always carries the scars of his death wounds (on his hand!) and is never able to really return to his life again.
Even Boromir, in the final moments of his life, is a sort of Christ-figure in that he gives up his life defending the hobbits. Yet not one of these characters is Christ, for not one of them is the incarnate God, and neither is any one of them perfect. Christ is the ultimate fulfillment and embodiment, in both the mythic sense and the primary historical sense, of the completeness of God’s love, truth, wisdom, mercy, and, ultimately, self-sacrificial giving. He is the perfect sacrifice given for the sins of all mankind. That element is left out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Gandalf comes the closest to this, but though he is a Maia (or “incarnate angel,” as Tolkien ventured to write in a letter) who “passes the test, on a moral plane anyway (he makes mistakes of judgement)” (Letters, 202), he is not Ilúvatar incarnate. Though he loves words and takes on flesh, he is not the Word made flesh. And even on the moral plane, though he may pass the ultimate test of refusing the Ring—a test the wizard Saruman fails—Gandalf may have failed other, smaller moral tests, as we discussed in the first chapter. Certainly Gandalf shows hints of pride and self-satisfaction, as noted in The Hobbit: “The wizard, to tell the truth, never minded explaining his cleverness more than once” (Hobbit, 141). The Christian understanding of the importance of the cross depends both on Jesus’s divinity—that he is the Creator and not a created being, and in some mysterious way the fullness of his divinity continues to be in his fully human and incarnate form—and on his sinless perfection.
In fact, to deal with these sacrifices within Tolkien’s story by labeling the characters involved as “Christ-figures,” and then subsequently dismissing them as if that “Christ-figure” label says all that needs to be said, diminishes both their sacrifices and the sacrifice of the real Christ. (Such a simplifying label also gets at why Tolkien disliked allegory and was wary of explicit religion in fairy tale and myth.) Jonathan Evans explained well one of the shortcomings of such oversimplifications.
The idea of symbolic sacrificial death to save someone or everyone is too universally encountered to permit a narrow definition of one of them as a pattern for all of them. Not that the pattern isn’t there: but the way specific instances of this motif are related is probably not one of a simple transference of the pattern from one to another. Like triads, redemption through death and resurrection is a pattern of meaning so deeply inscribed into the nature of things that they will appear in many narratives otherwise unconnected in the literature and mythology of many cultures in many times and places.[80]
These examples of Christlikeness may point back to a Christ, but to find that Christ we must look into the primary world, and into Tolkien’s Christian (and specifically Catholic) faith, for we will not find that Christ in Middle-earth.
So if we return to my discussion of salvation in chapter 8, we realize that something is missing there too. As I claimed, Tolkien certainly uses Christian imagery of salvation—though he does so by relying on words like cured rather than saved—and, like the Christian Gospel writers, even ties the spiritual notion of salvation to repentance, especially in the case of Boromir. But the means of salvation is never spelled out. In the Christian faith, one is saved through faith in Jesus Christ: faith that he died on a cross to pay the penalty for sin and that he was raised again from the dead. That is, salvation is not earned by anything the individual does, but rather it comes by God’s grace, which is worked out through the death (a real, physical death, occurring within human history) and resurrection of the Christ; Jesus had to die a real death in order to pay for our sins, and in his rising from the dead, death itself is conquered. But this saving faith (or belief) in the Christ cannot be at work in the world of Middle-earth because there is no Christ in Middle-earth in which to have faith! And since this incarnation of the Creator within his creation is so important to Christianity, as is his sacrificial death to pay for our sins, it must be argued that any mythology that does not include the death and resurrection of a Christ is therefore not finally a “Christian mythology.”
Sorrow and Loss
This last point connects to another aspect of Tolkien’s Middle-earth that I have always found very curious. It is hard to read either The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings and not come away with a profound sense of sorrow and loss. Galadriel captures this pathos early on in the trilogy when she welcomes the Fellowship to Lothlórien with the strangely solemn comment, “For ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat” (II/viii). This sense of sorrow abounds wherever the reader turns. Consider, for example, our last encounter with the Ents when Treebeard speaks with Aragorn: “Treebeard’s face became sad. ‘Forests may grow,’ he said. ‘Woods may spread. But not Ents. There are no Entings.’” And a short time later, saying farewell to Celeborn and Galadriel, he adds: “It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again” (VI/vi). This is a clear picture of loss: no Entwives, no Entings, no future. Tolkien leaves the reader with the knowledge that the Ents are doomed to disappear from Middle-earth, and with them something good and wonderful is forever lost.
Likewise, we also learn from Celeborn that his own doom is to be separated from Galadriel, while Galadriel’s doom is to see—with the destruction of the One Ring—the subsequent loss of all that she has worked for in Lothlórien. Nor are these isolated examples. Rather, this tone pervades the story. There is also the grievous parting of Arwen from Elrond, her father: “None saw her last meeting with Elrond her father, for they went up into the hills and there spoke long together, and bitter was their parting that should endure beyond the ends of the world” (VI/vi). Galadriel, Elrond, and Gandalf also depart from Middle-earth forever, leaving it a lesser place. Théoden asks Gandalf, “For however the fortune of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?” To which Gandalf replies: “The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been. But to such days we are doomed” (III/viii).
We might sum up much of this sadness simply by pointing out that The Lord of the Rings does not end with the victory celebration and wedding at the Field of Cormallen (though these joyous occasions are described in brief) but with the parting at the Grey Havens. Before we even reach that parting, we read that “Frodo dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country” (VI/ix). For in the end, Frodo is “too deeply hurt”; he “tried to save the Shire,” and it is saved, but not for him. He left “filled with a sadness that was yet blessed and without bitterness” (VI/ix).
It is not that The Lord of the Rings is all sadness. There are frequent glimpses of joy. But the joy is a distant, veiled joy, whose source we are not given to see clearly. It is like the passage, discussed earlier, when Sam sees the star from the Land of Shadow: “And hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” And yet the next moment he is back in Mordor, and the suffering resumes, and light and high beauty are lost and never explained.
The Silmarillion is an even more deeply sorrowful piece. It is centered on the curse of Fëanor and the evil that arises because of it, yet all of Middle-earth is caught in that web of deceit and destruction. Every major elven kingdom fails and falls: Hithlum, Lothlann, Nargothrond, Doriath, and lastly, Gondolin. Likewise, nearly all of the great elven lords are killed: not only the sons of Fëanor but also Fingolfin, Finrod, Turgon, Thingol, and many others. The tales of Húrin and his son Túrin are especially tragic. In the version of the tale published in The Silmarillion and titled simply “Of Túrin Turambar,” the narration notes, with profound understatement, “It is called the Tale of Grief, for it is sorrowful” (Silm, 199). To the extent that Tolkien’s longer and fuller version of the tale, called The Children of Húrin and published in 2007, reveals more of the characters, including their strengths, and hopes, and joys, and their great love for each other, the result is that it also delves even more deeply into the sorrow and loss.
Even the victory of the Valar over Morgoth at the end of the Quenta Silmarillion brings little joy. Two of the three Silmarils are lost, and a dark shadow is cast by the last evil act of Fëanor’s sons, who hold to their father’s wicked oath and slay the guards in the camp of Eönwë, Manwë’s herald, in a final effort to possess the jewels. Thus, of Manwë’s victorious forces returning to Valinor, we read: “Their joy in victory was diminished, for they returned without the Silmarils from Morgoth’s crown, and they knew that those jewels could not be found or brought together again unless the world be broken and remade” (Silm, 254).
The depths of sorrow, even in victory, are expressed in the final lines of the Quenta Silmarillion: “Yet the lies that Melkor, the mighty and accursed, Morgoth Bauglir, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of Elves and Men are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days” (Silm, 255). The sadness of this ending should not come as a surprise, though. That The Silmarillion (as well as The Lord of the Rings) will be so filled with sorrow is foretold early in the Ainulindalë in a description of the battle being waged between the Theme of Ilúvatar and that of Melkor. Ilúvatar’s Theme, we are told, is “deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came” (Silm, 16–17, emphasis added). The sorrow in these books truly is immeasurable!
And yet, as the author claims, there is beauty in it. There is tragedy in the tale of Húrin, but there is great joy also when Húrin finally comes before the throne of Melian and by her power is released from the lies of Morgoth and is his thrall no longer. There is great beauty in the forgiveness Fingon offers Maedhros, and in his memory of their former friendship, which prompts him to heal the feud that divides their people. There is beauty in the valor of Fingolfin, even when he falls crushed beneath the left foot of Morgoth. There is beauty in the self-sacrificing loyalty of Finrod to Beren. Indeed, the examples of beauty are made all the more poignant because they are surrounded by such tragedy. It is not idly that Tolkien begins the tale of Beren and Lúthien with these words: “Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures” (Silm, 162, emphasis added).
As Tolkien suggests in the Ainulindalë, for many of his readers the beauty of the stories comes from their sorrow. But where does this sorrow come from? The sadness of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings—and even of The Hobbit, which ends with the deaths of Thorin, Fili, and Kili—can be seen in part as echoing the sadness of Norse mythology that Tolkien found so moving. Here the gods themselves are doomed to disaster, and with them is doomed all the earth. Glory is not to be found in the hope of the hero, or in the hero’s final victory, but rather in the hero’s willingness to continue to fight the battle even though he knows he is fated to die in the end. There is something of this type of sorrow present.
There is perhaps even more of the sorrow of the Old Testament (at least as it is understood from a Christian perspective), full as it is of stories of betrayal, of broken families, and of ruin. Its primary subject is the people of Israel. The stories of Abraham, Isaac, and especially Jacob, the patriarchs of Israel, are stories of deception, loss, and unfilled promises. None of them makes a permanent home in the promised land. Brothers turn on their brothers seeking to kill them or sell them into captivity, uncles mistreat and exploit their nephews and daughters, and fathers curse their own sons.
And it doesn’t get any happier in the days of the judges or the kings, especially in the days of the kings after David. Most of the heroes of faith of the Old Testament die without seeing their hope fulfilled. There is ever a sense that they are strangers in the world. As the author of the New Testament book of Hebrews writes of these heroes: “All these died according to faith, not having received the promises, but beholding them afar off, and saluting them, and confessing that they are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. . . . And all these, being approved by the testimony of faith, received not the promise” (Heb. 11:13, 39). As for the nation of Israel itself, it goes from captivity to captivity: from slavery in Egypt to slavery in Babylon, with numerous captivities in between, such as the frequent periods of subjugation to the Philistines during the time of the judges and the reign of King Saul. In all of the centuries of Israel’s history recounted in the Old Testament books of Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, there are only a few brief lifetimes of glory and victory, such as during the reigns of King David and King Solomon. Even the years of David’s reign have significant tragedies, including the rebellion and subsequent death of David’s own son Absalom. The Old Testament is full of sorrow that is not unlike the sorrow of many Norse and Germanic legends, such as the poem Beowulf, which ends with its hero dead and his nation destined to come to an end.
Or perhaps the two sorrows go hand in hand. In both cases it may be the case that the pervasive sadness comes from the absence of Christ and thus an absence of a means for redemption and salvation; there is, in the body of Tolkien’s Middle-earth writing, the knowledge that such redemption is necessary—that is, there is an understanding that the Christian hope lies in a historical incarnation of the Creator—but no such Christ has come to Middle-earth.
Shippey has mentioned this pervasive sense of sadness both in his writings on Tolkien and in lectures. I asked him what he made of it. His reply is very interesting and it illuminates some of what I have just written. His sense is that both Tolkien and his good friend C. S. Lewis were drawn to the stark beauty of early Germanic paganism but were also concerned with the way that England was “slumping back” toward this paganism. They saw England moving away from the specifics of Christianity toward a vague deism, and as devout Christians they worried about that move. What they desired, according to Shippey, was a sort of mediation. They wanted to show the beauty and the splinter of truth in paganism and its literature, without adopting its beliefs. They wanted to present the people of the pagan Germanic North as doing the best they could under the circumstances, but also to show that without the revelation of Christianity they couldn’t help but be sad. Thus, these people were not to be blamed but rather to be pitied; there is no happy ending without divine intervention. “A point I would make at length if I ever had to comment on the subject is how horrible paganism was in reality,” Shippey adds, before concluding: “Tolkien occasionally showed signs of impatience with sentimental neo-paganism of the kind now thoroughly familiar. I think he wondered what it would have been like for a decent honest sort of man, an Englishman in fact, indeed someone like him, living in a pagan world before Christ. Sad, that’s the word!”[81]
Returning to the pre-Christian sorrow of the Old Testament, we see that the Old Testament holds the promise of the coming Messiah, but none of these promises are yet fulfilled; they are still centuries away when the Old Testament ends. What separates the New Testament from the Old? In the Christian understanding, it is fundamentally this: the coming of the Messiah; the incarnation of God the Son; the entering of the Creator into his creation; the fulfillment of the plan of salvation, so that salvation is not merely a word or idea or plan but an actuality. That is also what separates a Christian understanding from the mythology of Middle-earth. To quote once again from Richard Purtill: “If The Silmarillion seems to end on a somewhat dark and despairing note, it is because Tolkien has not allowed himself to introduce any hint of the true Hope of the World. Partly, this is his personal reticence; partly it is his artistic purpose. But the Christian hope is in Tolkien’s own heart and is hidden in the heart of his work.”[82]
A Christian Myth?
To some it might seem odd, after the declarations of the past few paragraphs, to turn around and suggest that Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology is, after all, a Christian mythology. And yet, just as there are important reasons for arguing that it is not, there are other significant ways in which the legendarium most certainly is a Christian myth and should be viewed as such. It could be argued that even its most hobbicentric parts, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are best seen in the light of a distinctly Christian outlook.
To understand this answer, we should again begin with Tolkien’s own words, once more from a letter written in 1953.
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. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be 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. (Letters, 172)
Tolkien is very clear in this letter regarding his own opinion of his works: his trilogy is not merely peripherally Christian but fundamentally so. Not only fundamentally so but consciously so. Indeed, this seems so obvious to the author that he can only say “of course” to the suggestion. All that he knows—and thus all that he is able to put into his stories—has been nourished by his Christian faith.
In explaining this, Tolkien also answers a question we posed earlier: Why are the references to the divine so vague and veiled in The Lord of the Rings? We now see part of the answer. It is not, according to Tolkien, because the work is not Christian but rather because the work is so thoroughly Christian. Tolkien would rather have readers moved by the deep and profound Christian nature of his writing than distracted by the trappings of religious practices, especially if those practices come with negative connotations or are simply associated with one narrow cultural expression of Christianity. Furthermore, having visible elements of the religious practices of our world appear in Middle-earth would provide too great a temptation to view the work as allegory. Many readers start chasing exact parallels: this equals this, and that equals that. They proceed in an allegory as if the story can be reduced to mathematical equations rather than appreciating what is actually there. And then there are other readers—and I include myself in this second category—who, like Tolkien, are suspicious of overt allegory. It makes a work feel more like a sermon than a story, more like a secret code to be deciphered than a work of art. If I sniff any sort of clumsy and obvious allegory, I usually quit reading. In either case, allegory would interfere with the deeper and more profound Christian themes by trivializing them.
By contrast, the fabric of reality is far more complex, far richer and more wonderful than a formulaic representation of one idea by a single neatly packaged, analogous narrative symbol. Tolkien, therefore, instead of letting the Christian element remain on the surface, where it might easily be dismissed with little thought—by those who agree with it as well as by those who disagree—lets his faith be absorbed into the story and the symbolism, largely unconsciously. It is there to be pondered, thought about, and reflected on, to bring new insights with each subsequent reading. In fact, the most conscious thing he does is to remove the explicit religion. But he does this, it is very important to note, not because he wants to make the work less Christian, but rather (according to his letter) because he wants it to be fundamentally more Christian.
It is also worth noting that, while Tolkien’s use of pagan and pre-Christian literary source material is undeniable, it is a mistake to overemphasize the importance and influence of that material to the exclusion of other sources. For example, we have already mentioned ways that Tolkien drew upon themes and events in various Shakespearean plays, especially Macbeth. Even more significant perhaps, but often overlooked, are ways that Tolkien was inspired by and drew upon (consciously or not) nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance and fantasy literature, especially that of Samuel Crockett and George Macdonald (whose Christian faith played an important role in his fairy tales and fantasy novels). Douglas Anderson, in his notes in The Annotated Hobbit, provides an example of a clear connection between a scene in Crockett’s 1899 novel The Black Douglas and a passage in the chapter “Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire” in The Hobbit.[83] Jared Lobdell’s treatment of this topic in his book The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy provides an intriguing look into these and other sources, arguing that Tolkien was as much or more inspired, at least in narrative structure, by these works as by pagan myths.[84]
We will return shortly to both the presence of pagan influences and the (apparent) lack of overt religion in the stories of the Third Age of Middle-earth, but since Tolkien himself spoke of his Catholic Christianity as being “absorbed into the story,” we should first explore in what ways it was absorbed and just what that means. One explanation of what is meant by “absorbed” is simple and can be seen in all the ways we have been discussing in this book: in the Christian understanding of objective morality and moral responsibility (which is certainly present in other religions but not in secular modernism); in the Christian importance of hope; in ideas of human worth, nobility, and purpose having their source in a divine Creator; in Christian notions of stewardship; in the understanding of human creativity as also having its source in a Creator (another uniquely Judeo-Christian idea in sharp contrast with modern naturalism that views humans as complex biochemical computers);[85] in Christian notions of salvation (as a spiritual and not merely physical state or event); in the acknowledgment of the reality of the spiritual plane as well as the physical; and especially in the ever-present hand of the Creator—“Ilúvatar” as he is called by the elves, “God” as he is called by Christians—at work within his creation.
In a letter written in 1958, Tolkien suggests that most of the biographical information one might learn about him would not significantly aid one in understanding his writing (including The Lord of the Rings). Most facts about him would be completely useless. Some pieces of information, such as his tastes in languages, might have some relation to his writings but would require significant unraveling to figure out exactly what that relationship was. However, a few facts about him are actually quite significant in understanding his work. Of these he mentions only three, of which the “more important” is his Christian faith: “And there are a few basic facts [about myself], which however drily expressed, are really significant. . . . I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic” (Letters, 288). There are two important points to be made here. The first is Tolkien’s claim that knowing the “fact” of his Christian faith is “really significant” and “important” in explaining his works. The second is his belief that his Christianity is evident in his writings, or deducible from his stories, as he puts it. But if the Christian faith of the author is evident in the stories, that seems to be reasonable evidence that the work itself is a Christian work. And if that work is a myth, then it is a Christian myth. Of course Tolkien may be mistaken about the deducibility of his beliefs; many fans of his writing seem to be oblivious to his Christianity (though my own guess is that this is largely due to a lack of knowledge of just what the tenets of the Christian faith are). As to the former point, I think Tolkien is absolutely correct that an understanding of his Christian beliefs is tremendously helpful to understanding his works. A significant part of this book has been to explain how those beliefs are manifest in various ways in the Middle-earth mythology. But isn’t that an argument that the mythology can and ought to be understood, at some level, as being Christian?
If we turn our attention from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to The Silmarillion, we see even more clearly Tolkien’s Christian faith woven through the fabric of the tale, or absorbed into its symbolism. Whereas references to Ilúvatar are veiled in The Lord of the Rings, and religious practices are almost completely expunged, The Silmarillion is fully and overtly theistic. Ilúvatar is explicitly present, personally and directly, as well as through his angelic servants, the Valar. It is Ilúvatar himself who throws down Númenor and sunders the seas.
Then Manwë upon the Mountain called upon Ilúvatar, and for that time the Valar laid down their government of Arda. But Ilúvatar showed forth his power, and he changed the fashion of the world; and a great chasm opened in the sea between Númenor and the Deathless Lands, and the waters flowed down into it, and the noise and smoke of the cataracts went up to heaven, and the world was shaken. And all the fleets of the Númenóreans were drawn down into the abyss, and they were drowned and swallowed up for ever. (Silm, 278–79)
A full exploration of The Silmarillion would be beyond the scope of this book. (This book, like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is intended to be hobbicentric, which is really anthropocentric since hobbits belong to the race of men, while The Silmarillion is elvicentric.) However, there are three aspects of that work that must be discussed in the context of this book, for they suggest a profoundly Christian understanding of the mythology of Middle-earth and relate to comments made in the previous section. These three aspects will be discussed at length.
The first aspect is that while nearly all references to religious practices were cut from The Lord of the Rings, they play a central role in the Akallabêth: The Downfall of Númenor, which is part 4 of the published version of The Silmarillion. The worship of Ilúvatar is the central element of the Akallabêth (which mirrors the history of Israel from the kingdom of David onward, as told in the Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles, ending with the fall of Israel to Babylon). At the start of the great kingdom of Númenor, we read: “But in the midst of the land was a mountain tall and steep, and it was named the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, and upon it was a high place that was hallowed to Eru Ilúvatar, and it was open and unroofed, and no other temple or fane was there in the land of the Númenóreans” (Silm, 261). The decline of the kingdom is then intimately linked to the loss of faith in Ilúvatar, to the cessation of his due worship, and to the persecution of those faithful to him.
Tolkien chronicles this downfall by coming back at key times to the state of this temple. We later read that “after the days of Tar-Ancalimon the offering of the first fruits to Eru was neglected, and men went seldom any more to the Hallow upon the heights of Meneltarma in the midst of the land” (Silm, 266). This is the first major step in the decline of Númenor. Under the kingship of Tar-Palantír, there is a brief period of restoration, but then the kingdom grows even worse, until by the end we read that “the Meneltarma was utterly deserted in those days; and though not even Sauron dared to defile the high place, yet the King would let no man, upon pain of death, ascend to it, not even those of the Faithful who kept Ilúvatar in their hearts” (Silm, 272). Instead, a temple is built to Morgoth, and people begin to worship the Dark Lord. Then the downfall is complete: “And men took weapons in those days and slew one another for little cause” (Silm, 274). Though the military might of Númenor actually reaches a peak in these days, the internal state of the kingdom is abysmal, and its final end approaches quickly. Thus the fate of Númenor parallels the state of Ilúvatar’s temple and of the faithful who worship him. When Ilúvatar is worshiped properly, Númenor prospers in the way it ought to prosper. When worship of Ilúvatar ceases and his people are persecuted, Númenor declines and becomes like the worst of the heathen kingdoms of Middle-earth. It is difficult, then, to see Tolkien’s Akallabêth as anything other than a deeply religious work. In many ways it mirrors the Bible’s narrative of the downfall of Israel under the kings who succeed David and Solomon, leading up to the fall of Israel into captivity to Babylon. Of course it may also reflect Tolkien’s view of the West and in particular of England in his own time, as it moved away from a significant Christian influence to a post-Christian culture with only a remnant still worshiping the Christian God. If the Akallabêth is not a Christian mythology, then at the very least it is a profoundly Christian understanding of a pre-Christian or possibly a non-Christian time.
But what, then, do we make of the influence of Northern mythologies that has led some scholars to wrongly associate Tolkien’s work with paganism?[86] There is at least one explicitly Christian reason, or biblical model, for Tolkien to have made so much of pagan sources even in a work he wanted to be deeply Christian. The most clear biblical defense of this approach can be found in Acts 17. Beginning in verse 16, the passage describes the apostle Paul’s first missionary visit to Athens. It takes place in the middle of the first century when Athens was a polytheistic culture full of idols and temples to numerous gods, including the goddess Athena (after whom the city gets its name) and the god Ares, known to the Romans as Mars (whose hill, the Areios Pagos or “Rock of Ares,” or “Mars’ Hill,” Paul preached on). The Athens of this time was certainly what Christians would call a pagan city.
Now up to this point, Paul’s preaching had been primarily in synagogues among Jews and God-fearing gentiles. In order to defend his points he had relied (often successfully) on the Hebrew Scriptures, which would have been accepted by these audiences. In Athens, however, Paul ventures into the marketplace where, as the Douay-Rheims translates, “He disputed . . . every day with them that were there,” and the Jerusalem Bible[87] translates, “He debated every day with anyone whom he met” (Acts 17:17). These were not Jews, or even monotheists. Among his audience and those who disputed with Paul were philosophers from Epicurean and Stoic traditions. And the problem Paul seems to encounter is that his previous approach of reasoning from Hebrew Scriptures doesn’t work with this new and different crowd. Not only do they have no reason to accept the Hebrew Scriptures as true, but Paul’s words don’t even make sense to them. The Greek word anastasis that he uses for “resurrection” sounds to them like just the name of another goddess. So they refer to Paul with a derogatory term that might be translated as “seed spitter,” meaning a bird that indiscriminately picks up random seeds from the ground and spits them out without any discernment or understanding.[88] The Douay-Rheims translates the insult as “word sower,” but the Jerusalem Bible renders it more poetically as “parrot,” to capture the idea of one who repeats words without understanding. Paul’s response to these philosophers is revolutionary in the Christian church, though the significance of what he did is often forgotten today. Rather than forcing the Greeks to first understand the Hebrew Scriptures and learn a whole new set of stories and poems from Jewish culture before being taught Christianity, Paul takes a brand new approach to proclaiming the Christian gospel: he searches out their own pagan myths and poetry and finds the glimmers of truth there, and then he speaks to the Greeks using the language and imagery of those myths.
Now Paul certainly didn’t believe that those myths were true in the full or complete sense (or historical sense) that he understood the Christian gospel to be true. Indeed, as the book of Acts has just finished explaining, “His spirit was stirred within him, seeing the city wholly given to idolatry” (Acts 17:16). Or, to refer again to the Jerusalem Bible, “His whole soul was revolted at the sight of a city given over to idolatry.” Paul certainly could have stirred up considerable additional animosity by telling the Athenians that they had everything completely wrong in worshiping Athena and other gods, or that there was no worth in their religions. Instead, however, he actually praises them for being “extremely scrupulous . . . in all religious matters” (Acts 17:22 JB). He then preaches a sermon that draws on their own myths and poets and suggests that those myths have in them the seed of truth that points to the deeper truth of the gospel: “What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you” (Acts 17:23).
Paul’s sermon can be read starting in Acts 17:22. It is fascinating how, in order to speak of a God who through his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, both reveals his name and shows mercy, Paul uses the pagan myth of the unknown god who also, in his mercy, stops a plague from wiping out the city of Athens. Paul uses the truth and beauty in pagan myths and puts them in the service of a higher truth. This use of a pagan myth as the central piece of his sermon must be seen, then, as a Christian approach, modeled by the greatest Christian missionary of the first century. It is neither pagan nor un-Christian.
In this myth of the unknown god, when the plagues are advancing on their city, the Athenians send for advice to a prophet and poet named Epimenides. It is Epimenides who tells the Athenians to make a sacrifice of sheep to the unknown god. This sacrifice moves the god to end the plague, and the people of Athens are saved. Paul’s Greek audience would have known the myth well, and so he didn’t recount all of this detail in his sermon in Athens, nor did he mention Epimenides by name—or if he did, the summary of his sermon provided by the author of Acts leaves it out. But Paul does quote from this prophet-poet, saying, “For in him we live, and move, and are; as some also of your own poets said: For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). In fact, a larger section of the poem from which Paul quotes is still preserved among the surviving works of Epimenides.
They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one—
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.[89]
Pagan poet that Epimenides was, Paul nevertheless almost certainly recognized in this poem, especially in the first and third lines above, a prophetic reference to the death and resurrection of Christ. Likewise, the fourth line—which is quoted by Paul in his sermon—also conveys a truth to which Christians can give full assent. Whatever Epimenides thought he was writing about, Paul saw a deeper truth, and he likely believed that God was the one who inspired these words in this pagan Greek prophet.
What Paul did with the pagan myths of the Greeks, showing in them a truth pointing to the deeper truth of his Christian gospel, Tolkien believed could be done with the pagan myths of the Norse. Tolkien’s use of those myths does not come from a hidden pagan impulse but from a deeply Christian impulse—one he shared with the apostle Paul. And we needn’t read between any lines to attribute this reasoning to Tolkien, for he was explicit about it. The argument for the possibility of pagan myths and stories of Faery being capable of revealing Christian truth is not only central to his essay “On Fairy-Stories” (cited in many passages already) but was also an argument that he made to his friend C. S. Lewis, one that helped lead Lewis into the Christian faith. Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia, indirectly addressed to Lewis, contains some of the argument as well. In his essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien also speaks of the Christian Beowulf poet making use of pagan material to convey Christian thought, even suggesting in his long appendix B that “the language of Beowulf is in fact partly ‘re-paganized’ by the author with a special purpose, rather than Christianized (by him or later) without consistent purpose” (“Monsters,” 41). The re-paganization of the language of the poem in certain places serves to make it truer and more beautiful, and in its core ideology more Christian and less pagan.
Tolkien does the same thing as the Beowulf poet. And so in Tolkien’s work we see the presence and influence of many pagan Germanic values, as we noted earlier, but we also see the author understanding, presenting, and ultimately judging those values from a Christian perspective. In The Hobbit, we see both the values of the mead hall—“food and cheer and song,” or simply friendship and fellowship—and the code of the warrior, whose glory comes from amassing treasure and defeating and subjecting enemies in war. What we see is reminiscent of how the Beowulf poet starts his poem.
Yes, we have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes’ kings in the old days—how the princes of that people did brave deeds.
Often Scyld Scefing took mead-benches away from enemy bands, from many tribes, terrified their nobles. . . . He lived in comfort for that, became great under the skies, prospered in honors until every one of those who lived about him, across the whale-road, had to obey him, pay him tribute. That was a good king.[90]
However, the perspective Tolkien brings to these values is that of the Christian: the perspective that there is an objective morality and a spiritual reality that make moral victory more important than military victory. It is a worldview that includes, among other things, a belief in life after death, a belief in a day of judgment, and a belief that reality includes both a spiritual plane and a material plane, an unseen and a seen. This perspective leads one to view the world with eternal rather than temporal values. As we saw in the previous chapter, Tolkien uses the words of Thorin on his deathbed to present that perspective. In the face of the eternal, Thorin is able to see in a new light what he previously valued. Gold and silver have temporal worth. Friendship has eternal worth. And so Thorin repents of his earlier words and deeds. So while Tolkien’s writing upholds from the Christian worldview the mead-hall values of “food and cheer and song,” it shows the vanity of the warrior’s pursuit of glory and riches. Likewise, in chapter 2 we saw the Anglo-Saxon warrior’s glory epitomized in Théoden, especially at his death, and yet even as Tolkien presents this glory he also lets us see it from another perspective, which in that case is through the eyes of Merry.
The Absence and the Presence of the Incarnation
In fact, the reasons for labeling even The Lord of the Rings a “Christian work” are plentiful enough that we must return to the final and most important reason for answering “no” to the question at the start of this chapter. The last and most significant reason for saying that Tolkien’s mythology is not a Christian mythology was that there is no incarnation—there is no Messiah, no divine Savior—in Middle-earth. Tolkien himself acknowledges in a draft of a letter written in 1956 that “there is no ‘embodiment’ of the Creator anywhere in this story or mythology.” Why not? He gives one answer in the same letter draft: “The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write” (Letters, 237). Again, it is the importance of the incarnation, not its lack of importance, that Tolkien claims as one motivation for not including it. This answer is, I think, a thoroughly honest one and is consistent with a humility Tolkien always shows with respect to the gospel story.
Another part of the answer is that there would be no real way to present the actual incarnation in Middle-earth without it becoming allegory. Unless, of course, Tolkien were to fully connect Middle-earth to our world. But while that might in some way be possible,[91] the moment that final step was made, not only would Middle-earth cease being Middle-earth (as we know it in the stories), but the incarnation itself would simply be the event in our world as it has already been described in the Gospels; it would not be an incarnation in Middle-earth.
There is, however, another answer to this question of why no incarnation, if indeed Tolkien’s myth was so deeply Christian. It may be the same as the answer Michael Drout astutely gives to the question of whether the hero Beowulf was present in The Lord of the Rings. As we noted, Drout argues that while Beowulf was not present in a single obvious or allegorical way, he was present in a more subtle way in Tolkien’s threefold division of Beowulf into Aragorn, Éomer, and Théoden, with each of the Middle-earth characters taking a different set of the medieval hero’s important characteristics. In this sense, Beowulf was present, allowing Tolkien to make a significant commentary on a hero he thought very important without actually admitting to including that hero. He seemed to have done the same thing with Beowulf in The Hobbit, neatly dividing his great strength and fearlessness, his excessive pride, and his moral virtue amongst Beorn, Thorin, and Bilbo respectively. Again, he reveals the importance of Beowulf.
But if Christ was even more important to Tolkien, might he not have done the same thing with him? Yes, and we pointed out earlier in this chapter exactly how: by using the same threefold portrayal in the characters of Aragorn, Frodo, and Gandalf. None of these three alone are Christ allegories, but together they form a prophetic picture of the hero of the Christian faith. Tolkien takes the characteristics of Christ as king and healer and descendant of David, who releases from captivity not only human slaves but even the captive dead, and gives those characteristics to Aragorn the descendant of Elros. He takes the characteristics of Christ the suffering servant, who endures the passion and the shame of being stripped and tortured as he sacrifices his life to save those he loves, and gives those characteristics to Frodo, even down to the wounds on his hands and the stripes on his back. And he takes Christ as an incarnate spiritual being, who casts out demons and is raised from the dead, and gives those to Gandalf, who both defeats the demonic Balrog and rescues Faramir by driving off demonic Ringwraiths. These are not allegories, and we would miss the complexity and beauty of Tolkien’s portrayal if we sought to turn them into allegories. But an argument every bit as strong or stronger could be made for the threefold portrayal of the incarnate Christ in The Lord of the Rings as for the threefold portrayal of Beowulf in either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.
But there is another answer to the question that may be even stronger, though it is somewhat different. And here I must address a second aspect of The Silmarillion—or rather, The Silmarillion as it might have been. There is a very interesting dialogue scene buried in Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One, which is the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth, written by Tolkien and edited posthumously by his son Christopher. According to Christopher’s notes, there is a strong indication that his father viewed this particular dialogue (which is now called “Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth”), as well as an essay discussing the dialogue, as finished and as a part of the canon he intended for publication in The Silmarillion. According to these notes, the story itself was to have been included in The Silmarillion proper, and the essay included in an appendix. (Tolkien often placed his most important material in appendixes. He claimed that the tale of Aragorn and Arwen told in appendix A, subsection I.v, was very important to understanding Middle-earth.) So what is this scene? In “Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth,” the great King Finrod Felagund, lord of the realm of Nargothrond (and the brother of Galadriel), is having a conversation with a wise woman named Andreth. Finrod, who is of the race of elves, and Andreth, of the race of men, are trying to understand the differences between their races and what hope each race has separately or together. Andreth mentions an old belief that one day Ilúvatar himself will enter into his creation: “They say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end” (Morgoth, 321). Finrod and Andreth then have a discussion about this ancient belief, during which Finrod comments that it seems right to him for an artist to enter his creation, and that if any artist could and would do it, it would be Ilúvatar. Moreover, Finrod believes that such an incarnation is actually the only hope that elves and men have for the healing of the hurts of Morgoth. Thus Finrod concludes:
If Eru wished to do this, I do not doubt that he would find a way, though I cannot foresee it. For, as it seems to me, even if He in Himself were to enter in, He must still remain also as He is: the Author without. And yet, Andreth, to speak with humility, I cannot conceive how else this healing could be achieved. Since Eru will surely not suffer Melkor to turn the world to his own will and to triumph in the end. Yet there is no power conceivable greater than Melkor save Eru only. Therefore Eru, if He will not relinquish His work to Melkor, who must else proceed to mastery, then Eru must come in to conquer him. . . . If any remedy for [Melkor’s evil] is to be found, ere all is ended, any new light to oppose the shadow, or any medicine for the wounds: then it must, I deem, come from without. (Morgoth, 322)
Reading this passage reveals one thing at least: Tolkien viewed the incarnation of God, coming to earth as Messiah, as somehow inevitable in Middle-earth. Through the voice of Finrod, he describes the incarnation as necessary: as the only hope for Middle-earth, the only way “healing could be achieved,” the only way to prevent Melkor from “triumph[ing] in the end,” the only possible “remedy” for Melkor’s evil. No other solution to the fundamental problem of evil is conceivable—none except for the incarnation of the Creator, Ilúvatar. “Surely” Eru will do it, Finrod reasons; he “must.”
That Tolkien wrote such a scene, describing the incarnation of the Creator within his creation, illustrates both how thoroughly Tolkien’s Christian faith is ingrained in his mythology and also that he realized just what would need to happen in his world for it to fully reflect his deep and profound Christian joy. Shippey even suggests that a dialogue between Gimli and Legolas at the start of “The Last Debate” might actually be about the “Incarnation, the Coming of the Son of Man.”[92] The conversation concerns the hope of men and the seed of men. Shippey examines Gimli’s pessimistic response that all that men do will “come to naught in the end but might-have-beens” (V/ix), and Shippey notes that Gimli’s comment “would be entirely true without qualification, in the Christian view, if fallen humanity had not been rescued by a Power from outside, a Power beyond humanity which nevertheless became human.”[93] As Finrod tells Andreth, the coming of Ilúvatar into his creation is the only hope. Since that hope has not yet been fulfilled, and indeed is not even widely known among the peoples of Middle-earth, it is not surprising that the stories are so full of sorrow and sadness; Melkor’s evil is still without a cure.
To return to the question, we might now answer that Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology is certainly not un-Christian nor in any way pagan, but neither is it fully Christian; rather, it is a Christian understanding of a pre-Christian time. It is undeniably a work coming from a fully Christian mind, and yet it does not describe a fully Christian world. In that way it is very much like the poem Beowulf. But the Christian understanding of truth and reality seems (at least to me) to be far more deeply woven into the fabric of the Middle-earth legendarium than it is in the poem Beowulf.
The Theme of Ilúvatar
The third aspect of The Silmarillion that reflects its Christian underpinnings brings us to the conclusion of this book, for it gets at a root issue in understanding The Lord of the Rings and indeed all of Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology. In Tolkien’s mythology, the original fall (the rebellion of some of the created order against the Creator) begins before the physical earth is even made, affecting the earth before any of the Children even appear. In the Ainulindalë, the account of the creation of Middle-earth (Silm, 15–22), Ilúvatar begins a great Theme of Music that his first created beings, the Ainur, are to take part in, “each with his own thoughts and devices.” However, Melkor, to whom “had been given the greatest gifts,” in seeking “to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself” begins to weave into his music an aspect of discord that is seemingly in opposition to the Theme of Ilúvatar in which the other Ainur are partaking. The result is discord, and before long some of the Ainur begin to follow Melkor rather than Ilúvatar. There is, as it were, a rebellion in heaven. Here, rather than stopping Melkor’s music altogether or expelling him, Ilúvatar begins a second Theme. Against this second Theme, Melkor also rebels with discord. So Ilúvatar begins yet a third Theme. Here we get to one of the most important moments in the creation, around which all of the events in the coming history of Middle-earth revolve.
And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern. (Silm, 16–17)
In this imagery, Tolkien gives us a history of Middle-earth. Indeed, the Music is the history of Middle-earth, as Ilúvatar tells the Ainur. This imagery is at the heart of all the tales in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings—or, we might say, of the one long tale that weaves through them all. These tales are about the rebellion of Melkor, and his desire to destroy the works of Ilúvatar. More importantly, however, they are about how Ilúvatar responds, taking the most triumphant notes of his enemy and weaving them into his own solemn pattern. In other words, Ilúvatar’s plans are not thwarted by Melkor’s evil. The Creator is able to foresee everything that Melkor is going to do in opposition to him and to work his own plans so that they encompass even the actions done by his enemy in rebellion.
In his use of this metaphor of music and his portrayal of the war of sound, Tolkien is working out in his writing a great principle of Christianity. The apostle Paul, whom I have already quoted, is one of the most important figures in understanding Christianity. In a letter Paul writes to the first-century Christian church in Rome, he encourages its recipients by telling them that God is able to take all things—even those things intended for evil—and work them out so that they result in good (Rom. 8:28). This is at the heart of the Christian understanding of history. What was the greatest triumph of Satan, the devil, in all of history? It was having Jesus, the Christ who was sent to save the world, nailed to a cross by the very people he had come to save. Yet God takes that most triumphant note of his enemy and makes of it his own greatest victory, for in Christ’s death on the cross and his ensuing resurrection, God works out his plan of salvation: the solemn pattern that has been at work since God promised to Abraham that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Satan, in working to have Jesus put to death, ends up aiding in the fulfillment of the prophecy made to Adam and Eve when evil first entered into the world, that a descendant of Eve would one day deal Satan the crushing blow. That crushing blow is dealt by Jesus on the cross, when he dies for the sins of the world and then rises again from death and conquers both sin and death. This story, more than any other, is at the heart of the Christian faith that is woven into the fabric of Middle-earth. As Ilúvatar says to Melkor, none can alter the Music in his despite: “For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined” (Silm, 17). And later he says of men, “These too in their time shall find that all that they do redounds at the end only to the glory of my work” (Silm, 42).
One of the most moving examples of this principle illustrated in The Silmarillion—at least in terms of the beauty of the imagery—comes very shortly after Ilúvatar makes this proclamation. Ulmo, one of Ilúvatar’s chief servants, and one of the most wise and powerful of the Valar, laments the destruction that Melkor is causing in the new creation.
And Ilúvatar spoke to Ulmo, and said: “Seest thou not how here in this little realm in the Deeps of Time Melkor hath made war upon thy province? He hath bethought him of bitter cold immoderate, and yet hath not destroyed the beauty of thy fountains, nor of thy clear pools. Behold the snow, and the cunning work of frost! Melkor hath devised heats and fire without restraint, and hath not dried up thy desire nor utterly quelled the music of the sea. Behold rather the height and glory of the clouds, and the everchanging mists; and listen to the fall of rain upon the Earth! And in these clouds thou art drawn nearer to Manwë, thy friend, whom thou lovest.” (Silm, 19)
Ilúvatar doesn’t merely proclaim empty words of hope to the Ainur, that the deeds of his enemies will prove but his instrument in the devising of things more wonderful; he immediately shows Ulmo how he works it out. Bitter cold, intended to destroy the works of Ilúvatar and his servants the Valar, instead becomes a vehicle through which the beauty of snow and frost is brought to life. Heat also, intended by Melkor to dry up the waters of Ulmo, instead results in the height and glory of clouds and ever-changing mists and rain. We see this principle at work time and again in Middle-earth, in The Lord of the Rings, and elsewhere. We see it in the plans of Saruman: the orcs capture Merry and Pippin to bring them to Isengard, and yet Ilúvatar uses Saruman’s betrayal as a means both of waking the Ents and of bringing Aragorn to Rohan to arouse Théoden, Éomer, and the latent strength of the Rohirrim. Eventually, we see it even in Gollum’s wickedness, for he becomes the instrument by which the Ring is destroyed when Frodo becomes unable to complete his task.
Indeed, it is in understanding the Theme of Ilúvatar that much is tied together, including the importance of moral victory over military victory, and even the nature of Gandalf’s power and actions. If Ilúvatar is capable of taking the most evil acts of Melkor, the most powerful of all created beings, and bringing good out of them—even while the acts themselves remain evil—surely he can bring good from the efforts of his servants. The outcome of the war is in Eru’s hands; what he desires from his servants is their love and obedience—that they do what is right—and not that they win the war for him. In that sense, the story is not so much about Melkor’s rebellion, nor even about Ilúvatar’s work to bring his good purposes to pass despite the rebellion of Melkor, though of course both of these are incorporated into the story. Rather, it is about the choices of all the beings with free will created by Ilúvatar, and whether they choose to do what is good and right (and thus serve Ilúvatar), using their time and gifts and talents as good stewards. It is about a choice that every free being must make: On which side of the war will they fight? To draw on the language spoken by Aragorn to Théoden, “Open war lies before [us all], with Sauron or against him.” But it might better have been said, had Tolkien desired for religious aspects to be more overt, “Open war lies before us all, with Ilúvatar or against him.”
The Real War and the Happy Ending
And now we have come full circle, for we are once again speaking of war. In the first chapter of this book I explored the ethics of war, and especially the question of torture, and in the second chapter I asked whether Tolkien glorified war and violence. My conclusion was that, in Tolkien’s writing, something we might call moral victory is much more important than military victory. Put another way, war is not what The Lord of the Rings is really about. That is, the physical conflict between the armies of Sauron and those of the West, even if that battle takes narrative center stage, isn’t the deepest concern. For Ilúvatar has the power, at any time, to destroy entire kingdoms if he so desires. He does so with Númenor. What, then, is the power of Sauron to him? Nothing.
But at another level, war is exactly what the story is about. Not the wars fought with sword, spear, and bow against orc, troll, and warg, but the war that Melkor is waging upon Eru Ilúvatar: “About his throne there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war one upon another in an endless wrath.” It is the conflict in which “the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with [the Theme of Ilúvatar], and again there was a war of sound more violent than before” (Silm, 16). It is not ultimately a war over land or territory but a war over the hearts of the Children of Ilúvatar. It is, as we saw in the confrontation between Gandalf and the Balrog, a war between heaven and hell, between the Secret Fire (the realm of Anor) and the realm of Udûn. It is, in short, a spiritual war rather than a physical one. The Lord of the Rings is, in fact, a working out of another great Christian principle, expressed again by the apostle Paul: “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places” (Eph. 6:12). The real battle is not against physical armies but against spiritual enemies. The goal of these spiritual enemies is not to destroy the body but to destroy the spirit.
This is why this enemy cannot be defeated using weapons of evil. This is why, as Paul explains, the Christian’s real armor is truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and ultimately salvation and prayer. Frodo has a mithril coat, but he also is defended by his own mercy. Sam wears loyalty and hope. Aragorn and Faramir have the armor of truthfulness. Interestingly enough, Tolkien visualizes this spiritual battle in the physical realm in a handful of places, in order to give the readers an imaginative glimpse of it. We saw it in the battle of Gandalf and the Balrog, as well as in the confrontation between Gandalf and the Nazgûl in front of Minas Tirith. We even see it in the confrontation between Glorfindel and the Nine outside Rivendell. Gandalf explains to Frodo: “Those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power. . . . Yes, you saw [Glorfindel] for a moment as he is upon the other side” (II/i).
Many of the separate elements of the story come together in this understanding. What is at stake is the salvation of the Children of Ilúvatar, and therefore the moral choices of those Children are what matters. This is why Faramir would not snare even an orc with a falsehood. The physical battle might be won in such a way, but a battle in the real war—the spiritual war—would be lost. This, of course, relates directly to the moral landscape of Middle-earth, and to the heroism of Tolkien’s characters, and to the potential for heroism in his readers and the war we all fight. Jared Lobdell comments on what Tolkien brought to our modern world and hints also at how it not only comes together but comes together for us: “The past, and this includes the heroic past, is alive in the present; the Great Days do live on inside us, no matter how unheroic and Hobbit-like we may be, or seem; the green and pleasant land must outlast the dark Satanic mills, and we can call upon our hidden heroism to help; there is Right and there is Wrong, and we can know the difference between the two—and fight for the right—that is indeed a message of hope.”[94] Not everyone in Middle-earth understands this, of course, but the wise do. In the dialogues between Gandalf and Denethor, it becomes clear that Gandalf understands the spiritual nature of the war, while Denethor sees only military victory or defeat. Consider that Gandalf, himself a spiritual being who took the form of flesh in order to aid the people of Middle-earth, almost never takes up arms against a fleshly foe but reserves the full demonstration of his powers for other foes of like spiritual nature: the Balrog (itself a spirit of flame and shadow in service of Melkor, who is renamed Morgoth by Fëanor), Saruman (another of the Istari), and the Nazgûl (once a man but now a wraith who has entered the spirit world). As Gandalf tells Frodo shortly before the Council of Elrond: “There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming” (II/i). This is also why Gandalf is so concerned with the “cure” of the characters of Middle-earth (Gollum, Saruman, and Wormtongue, as well as Bilbo and Frodo); why he always wants to give people the chance to repent; why he would rather encourage people to fight the battle themselves (that is, to choose well) than to fight the battle for them. As we saw in chapter 8 on salvation, the outcome of the spiritual war has eternal consequences: salvation or damnation.
In this battle, the unity of those who oppose Sauron (and his master, Morgoth) is vitally important, but this is true as much because unity itself is a good thing as because unity will bring about a great military force. Unity is the goal, not just the means to a goal. Or, to put it another way, the music of Morgoth (if it may be called music) is the sound of “discord” or disunity. For Morgoth, it is not that the disunity of his foes is merely a means to some other end; rather, the disunity of his foes is itself an end. “Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him,” the elf Haldir acknowledges to the Fellowship when he must blindfold them upon their entry into Lothlórien (II/vi). And a short time later, Galadriel also tells the Fellowship: “Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true” (II/vii). It is not by chance that Galadriel mentions hope in the same breath that she speaks of the values of faithfulness and unity within the Fellowship. Hope too is part of the battle. Hope and despair are not simply means to some other end but are the ends themselves. For Ilúvatar, the desire is for his Children to have hope; for Morgoth and his servant Sauron, they have already won a battle the moment they have brought about despair.
But here, again, we must pause. As I noted before, whenever someone speaks of the importance of a spiritual reality, there is (and should be) a certain wariness of gnostic tendencies. When I argue that, in Tolkien’s Christian understanding of the world, there is an underlying spiritual battle that is more important than the physical confrontation of opposing armies, am I saying that the physical world is not important? Not at all.[95] As I explored at the end of chapter 8, salvation is won neither by freeing an immaterial soul from a physical body nor by trying to deny the body and becoming somehow more spiritual. Though at certain times the heroes must be willing to suffer great bodily hardship, as Frodo and Sam do in crossing Mordor and climbing Mount Doom, and though their willingness to (in a sense) deny their bodies is certainly part of their heroism, the denial of the body is not in any way an end or a goal. These moments of denying the body are merely means—and short-term ones at that—toward some other greater end.
The war in Tolkien’s mythology, even if it can rightly be called a spiritual one, is still fought by embodied creatures in a physical world. And, moreover, it is fought precisely in the way those physical beings use their bodies. As I argued earlier, battles are won in small acts of kindness, meeting the physical needs of other beings: building houses for dispossessed hobbits, feeding strangers who appear in your forest, showing mercy even to enemies who seek to harm you, planting trees and cleaning fouled rivers (whether in the Shire or in Isengard). Bilbo wins a battle by choosing the “duty” of feeding the dwarves who unexpectedly appear at his door (at the start of The Hobbit), even if it means he gets less food himself. And his practice of that duty helps prepare him to be the sort of hobbit who also accepts the more heroic duty of being willing to reenter a goblin-infested mountain to help rescue the same dwarves. (As it turns out, he is not required to do this, but he understands his duty and is willing to.) Butterbur never picks up a sword, and yet he takes part in the battle.
“I am [still willing to help],” said Mr. Butterbur. “More than ever. Though I don’t know what the likes of me can do against, against—” he faltered.
“Against the Shadow in the East,” said Strider quietly. “Not much, Barliman, but every little helps.” (I/x)
Most simply put, those in Tolkien’s world who most deeply understand the spiritual reality also care most profoundly about the physical reality, about every single tree that might flower or bear fruit. Even the willingness of physical beings to take up the sword and give their lives for the sake of others is, as Théoden learns, also a way to fight the good fight, the spiritual fight.
Every chapter in this book has had this war behind it: the reality of the spiritual as well as physical realms, the importance of the eternal as opposed to the temporal. So we end with a final question. What is the applicability of this understanding to our lives today? Or, to phrase it another way, drawing on Tolkien’s own view of fantasy literature, what is the underlying reality or truth that Tolkien would have us see? I return again to two passages from the end of Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories.” The first paragraph comes from the section immediately before the essay’s epilogue, and the rest from the epilogue itself.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. 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. (“Fairy,” 153)
It has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed . . . men, in a way fitting to this aspect . . . 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 [consolation]. 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. . . . 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. . . . To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.
. . . The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is pre-eminently . . . high and joyous. Because this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.
. . . The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. (“Fairy,” 155–56)
What Tolkien is saying here is that we fight the same battle in our primary world. It is not fought with swords and spears against physical foes, the armies of Sauron. Rather, it is fought with our truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and prayer. It is fought as we “work, with mind as well as body.” It is fought as we “suffer, hope, and die.” Barliman Butterbur fights the battle as much in his Prancing Pony Inn at Bree as soldiers fight it on the front lines of Gondor. The hobbits must fight this battle in the Shire as much as the men of Rohan fight it on their borders. Indeed, the “Scouring of the Shire” is not an appendix tacked on to the end of the story, but it is the real story; it is what the entire book is about. Gandalf is training the hobbits so that they are prepared to do in the Shire what they have seen him and Aragorn do in Rohan and Gondor. That training succeeds. They don’t need Gandalf anymore. The hobbits are all grown up. Frodo shows to Saruman the same mercy that Gandalf does.
Of course it is not just Gandalf training the hobbits to fight this battle; it is also Tolkien training his readers. But if Tolkien is right—if the Christian story is true, as he and “so many sceptical men” have come to believe—then the victory of salvation is possible. And if sadness and wrath come from rejecting that story, then salvation comes in the opposite way: from believing it. What is exciting to Tolkien is not only that the Children themselves may be redeemed but that all of their efforts, their working as well as their suffering, and even their art, may have redemptive value and may be redeemed.
Fortunately, the war is not destined to continue through eternity. Eventually the war will come to an end. At the end of Tolkien’s story “Leaf by Niggle,” which I mentioned in chapter 9 in the context of Tolkien’s tree, the painter Niggle has gone on a Journey and finally meets the Shepherd, who leads him into the Mountains. All of the imagery of the book leads us to believe that this Journey is Niggle’s death—or the life that follows his death—and that the Shepherd is none other than the Great Shepherd of Christian faith—namely, Jesus. Niggle follows the Shepherd into the Mountains. (If one discerns the more obvious imagery of the Shepherd, then understanding the Mountain imagery is not difficult either.) Niggle’s final surviving painting—a single leaf that had hung in a museum—is lost: “For a long while ‘Leaf: by Niggle’ hung there in a recess, and was noticed by a few eyes. But eventually the museum was burnt down, and the leaf, and Niggle, were entirely forgotten in his old country” (“Niggle,” 95). Nonetheless, Niggle’s creative art is ultimately vindicated in the most profound and fitting of ways. His tree is given the gift of reality; his “desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation.”
I have no doubt that Tolkien had his own story, his own art, and his own hopes in his mind when he wrote the ending to his story “Leaf by Niggle.” Throughout the tale we have come to understand that the mysterious person known only as the Second Voice is a Divine being, both wise and merciful: a member of a trinity that includes the First Voice, the Second Voice, and a Doctor. Niggle’s painting of a tree has become a real tree, with a surrounding land and in the distance behind it a few of the Mountains—understood to be a sort of heavenly realm, or a final destination of reward. As the tale ends, we hear the First Voice say of Niggle’s now-living painting: “It is proving very useful indeed. As a holiday, and a refreshment. It is splendid for convalescence; and not only that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains” (“Niggle,” 95). For countless people, The Lord of the Rings has provided splendid refreshment. For that, the author would be glad. But his deeper desire is that for some it would be an introduction to the Mountains.