A fundamentally Catholic work

Charles A. Coulombe on J.R.R Tolkien’s deep commitment to the Faith

One hundred and thirty years after his birth, J.R.R. Tolkien needs virtually no introduction to anyone literate in any major language read on Planet Earth. The unassuming Oxford Don was already a celebrity – especially among the Counter-Culture – when he died. The fact that his books are renowned world-wide while the depth of his conviction and devotion to the Catholic Faith are not says more about the Church in his time and ours than it does about him. Had this Professor of Philology flourished at a time when the Catholic Hierarchy were convinced of the absolute truth of the Faith over which they preside, then he would have been his age’s Chateaubriand or Sir Walter Scott: a literary catalyst for a period of strong Catholic revival. That he was not cannot be laid at his door, but at theirs.

Oddly enough, this epitome of English literature was born in Bloemfontein in what was then the Orange Free State, less than a decade before the Boer War which would see it annexed by the British Empire and then incorporated into the nascent Union of South Africa. His religious life began at the still-extant baptismal font in the city’s Anglican Cathedral of St Andrew and St Michael. Tolkien’s father, Arthur, had been sent there with his newlywed wife, Mabel, to take up a banking position. But the hot, dry country (which JRRT remembered) was unhealthy; the future author almost died from a tarantula bite (which he did not remember). When the lad was three, his mother, Mabel, took him and his brother back to their parents’ native Birmingham. Arthur was to join them a little later but, tragically, he contracted rheumatic fever and died in Bloemfontein. Mabel and her sons were forced to live off the kindness of relatives.

When his mother – a highly educated woman who taught the precocious brothers at home initially – converted to Catholicism in 1900, her family cut them off. She managed to make ends meet, and was spiritually nourished by the Birmingham Oratory, founded by Cardinal Newman. She died of the then-incurable diabetes in 1904; years later, JRT would recall: “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.” Their Guardianship was given by Mabel to a priest of the Oratory, of whom Tolkien would write: “He was an upperclass Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.”

Father Morgan oversaw Tolkien’s education at King Edward’s School and his entrance to Exeter College, Oxford. Tolkien would meet and fall in love with Edith Brand; complying with Fr Morgan’s strictures, they did not marry until the eve of JRRT’s 1916 departure for France to fight in World War I. His experiences in the trenches marked him as they did so many; a casualty, he was returned to England, and in 1920 mustered out of active service; all but one of his boyhood friends were dead. From that time he commenced the academic and literary career that has since made him universally famous. As is well known, it was during this time that he made the acquaintance of C.S. Lewis, in whose conversion to Christianity he had a major role – but whose Ulster-bred anti-Catholicism kept him out of the Faith, despite Tolkien’s best efforts. World War brought Charles Williams to Oxford, and while Tolkien did not really “get” a good deal of his work, when he died in 1945 JRRT had a Mass said for him at Blackfriars and served it himself.

This of course leads us to the question of just how much Tolkien’s religion affected his work – and particularly his magnum opus. The answer is, very much so. To one correspondent he wrote: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” He was in fact quite explicit about it on numerous occasions; to cite one particularly clear letter: “…I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter 'fact' perhaps cannot be deduced; though one critic (by letter) asserted that the invocations of Elbereth, and the character of Galadriel as directly described (or through the words of Gimli and Sam) were clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary. Another saw in waybread (lembas) viaticum and the reference to its feeding the will (vol. III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is: far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story.)”

Indeed, as any orthodox Catholic’s faith must be, Tolkien’s religious life was firmly centred in the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary. In a letter to Robert Murray SJ, he writes of "...Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty, both in majesty and simplicity is founded”. We might compare his elven hymn to Elbereth with the famous Marian hymn of John Lingard.

Here is Tolkien:

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear! O Queen beyond the Western Seas! O Light to us that wander here Amid the world of woven trees!

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth! Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath, Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee In a far land beyond the sea.

O stars that in the Sunless Year With shining hand by her were sown, Inwindyfieldsnowbrightandclear We see your silver blossom blown!

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees, Thy Starlight on the Western Seas.

Compare to Lingard:

Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star, Guide of the wand’rer here below: Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy careSave us from peril and from woe. Mother of Christ, star of the sea, Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.

Sojourners in this vale of tears, To thee, blest advocate, we cry; Pity our sorrows, calm our fears, And soothe with hope our misery. Refuge in grief, star of the sea, Pray for the mourner, pray for me.

So too with the Blessed Sacrament; as noted, Tolkien himself saw it as the inspiration for Elven Waybread. As he wrote to his son Michael: “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. [...] There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste— or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.” He was a staunch advocate of daily Communion: “The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.” He spoke out of sad experience; at one point when very depressed and suffering, his doctor – fellow Catholic and Inkling Howard Havard – prescribed a cure: “All right now, but I've been in a very bad state. Humphrey came here and told me that I must go to confession and that he would come early on Sunday morning to take me to confession and communion. That's the sort of doctor to have.”

As the 1960s progressed, The Lord of The Rings became an international bestseller, and was embraced by many in the emerging Counterculture. “Frodo Lives” T-shirts multiplied alongside “Come to Middle Earth” posters. That the hippies should have been enchanted by such a Catholic work seemed odd to many, but not to the Professor himself, who spoke of: “the behavior of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for ‘cavaliers’, and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of faineance and filth.” The emergence of such phenomena as the Christmas Revels, the Renaissance Faires, and the Society for Creative Anachronism at the same time shows that Tolkien indeed saw what others did not: that many young people of the time – just as during the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Inter-war years – were seeking the eternal truths that only the Catholic Faith could give them.

Unlike those two eras, however, the Church of the 1960s was too busy accommodating to the spirit of the age to evangelise; too busy shredding precisely those things about her that had always attracted seekers before – especially the Liturgy. Tolkien, for his part, did not cease to go to Mass. Nevertheless, his grandson Simon recounted: “I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.” Nevertheless, as he wrote to his son, “Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with any historical knowledge).”

So it was that Tolkien endured the immediate post-Conciliar years and all their horrors; he died in 1975. His life and witness have brought many to the Faith, despite everything; for many of us cradle Catholics, JRRT’s work has deepened our Faith. Certainly, it has in my life - and provided many dear friends from the ranks of Tolkien enthusiasts. Not too surprisingly, therefore, some have spoken about his beatification, and indeed on 2 September 2017, a Mass was offered for that purpose at St Aloysius’ Church at Oxford. This was particularly poignant because during his academic career, the then Jesuit church had been Tolkien’s parish. They came to epitomise everything he disliked about the New Church, going so far as to burn all the relics in their famed reliquary chapel in 1971 (Tolkien was mercifully living in retirement with Edith at Bournemouth then). But by the time of that Mass, the Jesuits had surrendered the parish to the Oratorians, to whom Tolkien had been so close in Birmingham. It was truly fitting that one of them should have offered the Sacrifice on that occasion.

Whether or not Tolkien is ever beatified, one thing is certain. When the day comes that the Catholic hierarchy is once again, as a unified body, interested in evangelisation, there can be little doubt that Tolkien’s writings – both fictional and otherwise – will play a great role in the work of converting the Anglosphere. As compelling as the sense of reality is that permeates his fantasies, his educated, urbane, but withal down-toearth and completely believing style of Catholicism is one that resonates strongly with those reared in a world built upon the unreal. The Professor would surely appreciate that.

Tolkien: ‘his educated, urbane, but withal down-to-earth and completely believing style of Catholicism is one that resonates strongly with those reared in a world built upon the unreal’