A work of restoration

Joseph Shaw on how some measure of ancient glory could be passed on to future generations

In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory… and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone.

JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King, p260.

On May 14th, 1854, Bishop Ullathorne called on the [Curé d’Ars] and asked him to pray for England. The bishop of Birmingham relates that the man of God said with an accent of extraordinary conviction: ‘Monseigneur, I believe that the Church in England will be restored to its splendour.

Dom Ernest Graf, The Cure of Ars

The century and a bit from about the 1830s to the end of the 1950s was a period of restoration. One aspect of this was the revival of interest in the Middle Ages, not as a period of darkness, horror, and Catholicism, but as intriguing, romantic, and profound. Although not only a project of Catholics, the Catholic Church in England played an enthusiastic part in this. The glory the Medieval Church might seem unattainable, but some things could be saved, some new things could be built in the ancient spirit, and, to paraphrase Tolkien, some measure of the ancient glory could be passed on to future generations.

So, in Oxford, once a great Catholic university filled with every kind of religious order, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was possible for the Benedictines, Dominicans, and Franciscans to return. Around the country impressive Cathedrals and monasteries were built: in Buckfast, the monks themselves raised a stunning new church, literally on the foundations of a 12th century monastic church, which had been destroyed in the Reformation. The ancient landscape of holy places, too, was painstakingly restored, at first with pitifully modest shrines, but with increasing confidence and splendour as time went on: Walsingham, Holywell, Glastonbury, Willesden, Caversham: the list goes on. [All of these shrines are honoured by pilgrimages organised by the Latin Mass Society: Ed.]

The parallel with the world of the Lord of the Rings is too obvious to labour. The melancholy of past glory is everywhere present in Middle Earth, but it is not the melancholy of despair. It might not be possible to turn the clock back, but it is possible to restore the King, to save the still-free lands, to defeat the enemy in his current incarnation, and to make some measure of repair and renewal, morally, spiritually, and physically. Underlining the point, this restoration is described twice, first for Gondor, and then for the Shire. And this indeed is the Christian vocation: the restoration of God’s image in man, with respectful gratitude to our predecessors in the Faith, and in unity of spirit with them.

Tolkein: ‘He is said to have made loud responses in Latin at the English Mass’

However, the English Catholic programme of restoration suddenly came to a halt, in the 1960s, ushering in a period of extraordinary hatred of the past, and a kind of spiritual as well as physical vandalism. In the words of Saruman, near the end of the Return of the King: ‘I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives.’

Like many of his generation, Tolkien found himself betrayed by those placed in positions of authority in that Church. He is said to have made loud responses in Latin at the English Mass, which first appeared in 1965. It can give us little satisfaction to note that the new programme, an attempt to make the Church relevant to a modern world in which medievalism seemed to be losing its allure, coincided with the most disastrous period of apostacy and lapsation, of priests and religious abandoning their vocations, and the closure of churches and communities, which is possible to imagine outside of a period of severe persecution.

Tolkien’s own literary achievement, which in its own way ‘preserves the memory and the glory of the years that were gone’, has on the contrary endured and proved an extraordinary success. May it continue the work of making imaginative room in its readers for the restoration which we need today even more than at the time it was composed.

Towards the end of the Lord of Rings, Merry contemplates the corpse of Saruman and hopes it marks the ‘very last end of the War’

‘I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess.’, said Sam gloomily. ‘And that’ll take a lot of time and work.’

A longer version of this paper was delivered to ‘More than Memory: Tolkien Spiritual Conference’ on 25th May 2019.