Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written a nice summary (in two sentences!) of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel, The Lord of the Rings. I was moved to comment there, and now to post a greatly amplified version of that comment here. One justification for the latter move is that the subject has some bearing upon recent discussions at this website. More fundamentally, anything will do for an excuse to write about Middle Earth.

This is the first of a three-part reflection on the religious significance of Tolkien’s masterful work. In this first part, we will see how Tolkien came to the Catholic Church, what he found there, and how this is reflected in the thematic elements of The Lord of the Rings. In the second part, we will consider the meaning of sacramental signification, and what this has to do with the “sacramental world” of Middle Earth. The third part will consider the linguistic roots of Tolkien’s mythology, the ways language is used in The Lord of the Rings, and what we can learn from this, particularly with regard to liturgical worship.

From Africa to Mother’s Church

Our latest podcast addressed the recent announcement from the Vatican concerning the creation of a Personal Ordinariate for Anglicans who desire to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. For many of us, thoughts about the Ordinariate’s future will stir up stories from the past of Anglicans who have made the journey to Rome. One such story is that of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien, familiarly called Ronald,¹ was born in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State (in what is now South Africa), on January 3, 1892, firstborn child of Arthur and Mabel Tolkien. He was christened in Bloemfontein Cathedral (Anglican) on January 31, 1892.² In the spring of 1895, due to concerns about her son’s health, Mabel brought Ronald and his infant brother, Hilary, on an extended holiday to her and Arthur’s hometown of Birmingham, England. While his young family was away, Arthur contracted rheumatic fever, and died a few months later. Arthur Tolkien was buried in the Anglican graveyard at Bloemfontein.³

Mabel Tolkien was left to raise Ronald and Hilary in Birmingham, assisted by her and Arthur’s families. Mabel at first continued to worship as an Anglican. Then in 1900, when Ronald was eight years old, Mabel and her sister, May, began to receive instruction in the Catholic Faith. In the spring of that same year they were received into the Catholic Church. A couple of years later, Mabel rented a house next to the Birmingham Oratory, so that Ronald could attend the Catholic school that was run by the Oratorians. The Birmingham Oratory had been founded in 1849 by the famous convert from Anglicanism, John Henry Newman. Twelve years after the death of Cardinal Newman, his Oratory became the spiritual and educational home of J.R.R. Tolkien.⁴

Two years later, Newman’s Oratory became simply “home” to Ronald and Hilary. Their mother died from complications brought on by diabetes in the fall of 1904. By making Father Francis Morgan of the Oratory their legal guardian, Mabel Tolkien had ensured that her sons would have the chance to persevere in the Catholic Faith. Family members discussed the possibility of contesting Mabel’s will and forcing the boys to attend a Protestant boarding school. Father Morgan, however, was able to find one sympathetic aunt (with no particular religious views) who lived near the Oratory to provide the boys with a room.⁵ Tolkien’s biographer, Humphery Carpenter, describes the life that the orphaned boys now led, under the direct care of Fr. Morgan:

Fortunately, the Oratory was near, and it soon became Ronald and Hilary’s real home. Early in the morning they would hurry round to serve Mass for Father Francis at his favorite side-altar in the Oratory church. Afterwards they would eat breakfast in the plain refectory, and then … they would set off for school.⁶

Here is Tolkien’s own brief account of his life at the Oratory:

I had the advantage … of a ‘good Catholic home’ — ‘in excelsis’: virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house, which contained many learned fathers (largely ‘converts’). Observance of religion was strict. Hilary and I were supposed to, and usually did, serve Mass….⁷

Much later in life, Tolkien himself offered this assessment of his mother’ conversion, and the care that she took to preserve her sons in the Catholic Faith:

For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little [concerning the religious element in The Lord of the Rings]; and should be chiefly grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it….

But I am the one who came up out of Egypt, and pray God that none of my seed shall return thither. I witnessed (half-comprehending) the heroic sufferings and early death in extreme poverty of my mother who brought me into the Church; and received the astonishing charity of Francis Morgan. But I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning–and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again…. ⁸

“A Fundamentally Religious and Catholic Work”

Fr. Longenecker writes that the Mass changed the way that Tolkien viewed the world, and that Tolkien, in turn, changed the world. I think that each of these claims is true. We know how Tolkien changed the world. He wrote The Lord of the Rings.⁹ But what does the Mass have to do with that? How did the Mass shape the way Tolkien saw, and subsequently wrote about, things in the primary and imaginary worlds?

Consider some of the things that Tolkien wrote about the Sacrament which he had come to love:

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 upon 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….¹⁰

Tolkien acknowledged that his novel is a fundamentally Catholic work:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic  work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults and practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.¹¹

The oblique yet pervasive religious element in The Lord of the Rings is, I think, aptly described as sacramental. I am not suggesting that Middle Earth is sacramental in the sense that it is “about” the sacraments. Tolkien insisted that he was not trying to preach or prophesy:

As for ‘message’: I have none really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth specially revealed to me!¹²

This statement is not at odds with the claim that the novel is a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” First of all, the Catholic Faith was not specially revealed to Tolkien. Secondly, the Catholic Faith is sacramental, and is therefore able to be communicated by means other than “preaching” or overt messages. The Word made flesh is not merely talked about in a Catholic church. He is sacramentally present. This is a silent presence, under the forms of everyday things. The “religious element” is similarly present, though doubly obscure, in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien received numerous queries about the meaning of his work, and he was not entirely reticent to write about the thematic elements which are in the story:

But I might say that if the tale is ‘about’ anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about ‘power’. Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.¹³

The sensitive reader of The Lord of the Rings knows that the fundamental problems of men and elves were not resolved by the downfall of Sauron. The conundrum posed by death, the various possibilities for not dying, and the longing that is in our hearts (for what?), with which we confront death (in one way or another), is larger than Middle Earth. It is larger even than whatever lies beyond the Grey Havens. “Eternal endurance” lies beyond the reach of both the victors and the vanquished in the War of the Ring.  But by raising the question of the (so-called) escapes in a particularly profound way, Tolkien silently invites us to ponder the possibility of ultimate salvation.

Tolkien’s conception of the limitations of created things, the eschatological tendency of history (which implies the incompleteness of all, or almost all, that is achieved in time), and the relativity of even elvish endurance partially accounts for the subtle yet immense power of The Lord of the Rings to elicit longing. We read the book and find ourselves longing for something that is felt to be possible, or to have been possible, but has (so it seems) become lost in a realm inaccessible save, perhaps, by memory. For us, this memory is brought to mind through the “memoirs” of the little people who saw, and took part in, the great events that marked the end of the Third Age.

Embalming and Anamnesis, Or, Two Kinds of Memory

The Lord of the Rings provides us with an indirect glimpse of a glorious salvation, and even occasionally hints at an inscrutable source of that salvation. Help comes even to Middle Earth.¹⁴ The temporal victory of the free peoples of the West is greatly enabled by a variety of inanimate but virtuous things, some (seemingly) common-place, others quite extraordinary. I will not spend time, in this post, cataloging the “sacramentals” of Middle Earth. Some of them are obvious. Description of these and the overall sacramental effect of the world will be the subject of the next part of this series.

Here, I will be content to conclude by reflecting upon one profound, but not unambiguous, sacramental theme in the book: the living memory of the elves.

Gimli alludes to the peculiar nature of elvish memory in his words to Legolas, upon leaving Lothlórien:

Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror, be it clear as Kheled-zâram…. Elves may see things otherwise. Indeed I have heard that for them memory is more like the waking world than to a dream. Not so for Dwarves.¹⁵

This elvish power with respect to past time is most fully embodied in the land of Lórien.¹⁶ Recall Frodo’s sensations upon passing into the “heart of Elvendom”:

As soon as he set foot upon the far bank of Silverlode a strange feeling had come upon him, and it deepened as he walked on into the Naith: it seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time and into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more. In Rivendell there was the memory of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world.¹⁷

Sam, as usual, states his impressions simply and succinctly: “I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.”¹⁸

These quotations, taken from the Fellowship’s departure from, and entrance into, Lórien, could easily be applied to the traditional Liturgy of the Catholic Church (in either the Eastern Rites or the Latin Rite). The Liturgy is a form of living memory, an anamnesis, a remembering which renders an historical action effectively present.¹⁹

Elvish memory is, with respect to its peculiar power of bridging time, similar to the living memory of the Church in her liturgical celebrations.²⁰ In the sacraments, what is presented is not merely the past, for the sacrament is not a reminder of what is irrevocably gone, or currently absent. Sacramental reality is a present reality, a living way into the once-and-for all-time action whereby death is abolished, and life and immortality are brought to light.

When ritual is considered merely as symbol, it becomes its own funeral. In religious communities, ritual is unavoidable, even where it is dead, or debased, or its effectual life denied or forgotten. Objectively, Christian ritual can be emptied of its life through being estranged from the living, breathing, Apostolic Church. On the other hand, in those churches that have preserved the mark of apostolicity, groups and individuals can become so preoccupied with some favored (or despised) form of the liturgy, that the objective significance of all valid forms is occluded. Such situations are exhausting and demoralizing, even if they are, at times, practically unavoidable.

In the time-period envisioned in The Lord of the Rings, elvish memorializing had fallen from higher purposes, though it was not given over to evil. The power of the Three Rings, instead of being used primarily to promote and enhance the developing life of creation, had been turned to the more dubious art of embalming the past.²¹ This decline is part and parcel of a wonderful gift turned to grievous wrong, leading to great, though futile, works and deeds. That story is told in The Silmarillion,²² but it only ends with Galadriel’s victory of self-denial in The Lord of the Rings.²³ The works of the elves, even their good works, were intrinsically limited. Elvendom was subject to corruption. Only by this recognition, and the “letting go” that it entailed, could the elves find freedom.

The sacraments do not, however, operate by a limited, created power. The sacraments operate by the power and promise of God, which is the ultimate significance of the Latin phrase, ex opere operato, “by the fact of the action being performed.” The sacraments bridge time, not by embalming the past (hoarding memory), nor by the artificial perpetuation of life (serial longevity), but as “powers that come forth from the Body of Christ, which is ever-living and life-giving.”²⁴

Catholic ritual is nothing but the sacramental life of the historical Christ, communicated to his mystical Body. Does the New Testament seem void of ritualism, say, by comparison to the Mosaic codes, or the pagan cults? That is because we have forgotten that the life of Christ is our ritual. Does anyone think that the Gospels are mere narratives, a verbal embalming of an historical moment, long past? God forbid. The Gospels are sacred ritual. The mystical rites of the New Covenant cause us to participate in, to live by, that life which we find recorded in Sacred Scripture. To participate in these rites is to live “inside a song;” indeed, it is to live inside the Song of Songs.

But our participation in the sacraments is not to be simply equated with ultimate salvation. When faith gives way to sight, sacraments will cease. We abide yet in a time of longing, though the substance for which we long has been revealed, and is communicated to us daily, in the Holy Mass. In the eucharistic liturgy, we sing the song of eternity, and in the transubstantiated Gifts, we receive eternal life. But we do not sing as we shall then sing, nor live as we shall live.

Deliverance and Presence

For me, the greatest virtues of The Lord of the Rings are its capacities to awaken longing for the ineffable and to deliver an astoundingly satisfying happy ending, which nevertheless refuses (truthfully and artistically) to pose as ultimate, and even refuses to be the actual ending of the book. This is quite moving. We are not left with just the longing, which leads (at best) to romanticizing sadness, which is a kind of embalming of the present. Nor are we left with a false triumphalism, wherein we convince ourselves that all our desires have been satisfied, which leads to shallow complacency. We are left to hope for something more.

This post has focused upon the theme of escape from death and corruption, which Tolkien presents by means of exposing the false alternatives and providing a mythological foretaste of the real thing. ²⁵ Ultimate salvation is the supernatural effect of the sacraments, which are visible means of grace, conveyed in ritual form. Elvish artistry (or man’s best approximation thereof) is not falsified by the sacraments; it is elevated and set to work  in a new, supremely efficacious, realm of existence.²⁶

Another tremendous virtue of The Lord of the Rings is its capacity to show us the significance of the natural world. In the next part of this series, I will discuss this aspect of Tolkien’s work, which is sacramental in the sense of manifesting the presence of the ineffable in and through the visible.

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1. Followers of the Inklings will also know that his closest friends referred to Tolkien as “Tollers.” [↩]
2. Humphery Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2000 [1977]), 20-21. [↩]
3. Tolkien, 23-24. [↩]
4. Tolkien, 34. [↩]
5. Tolkien, 40. [↩]
6. Tolkien, 41. [↩]
7. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000 [1977]), 395. [↩]
8. Letters, 172, 340. [↩]
9. The Lord of the Rings “changed the world” in an objective way, by adding something new and wonderful to the world, considered in its totality. This would of course be true even if no one other than Tolkien ever read the thing. However, through its massive popularity, the novel has “changed the world” in the additional sense of changing people in the world, in any number of ways. [↩]
10. Letters, 53-54. [↩]
11. Letters, 172. [↩]
12. Letters, 267. [↩]
13. Letters, 284. [↩]
14. The source of this help is never named; e.g., who sent (and re-sent) Gandalf? If he is a steward “of all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands” (Rings, 758), who (and where) is the King? Frodo was “meant” to find the Ring, but by whom? And was the water and starlight granted to the ring-bearers in Mordor really, in some sort of intentional way, a response to Sam’s “prayer” to Galadriel? Such are the more overt (though hardly direct) hints of some source by whom the Quest is ultimately enabled and vindicated. [↩]
15. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004 [1954-55]), 378-79. [↩]
16. I take the successive chapters “Lothlórien,” “The Mirror of Galadriel,” and “Farewell to Lórien” to be the spiritual apex of the novel. [↩]
17. Rings, 349. [↩]
18. Rings, 351; emphasis original. [↩]
19. This is the kind of remembering that we find denoted in biblical phrases such as “God remembered his covenant….” [↩]
20. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1103-04. [↩]
21. See Letters, 151-52, 236. [↩]
22. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977). [↩]
23. Rings, 365-66. [↩]
24. Catechism, 1116. [↩]
25. I realize that I have said nothing about the Nazgûl, those shadows of men enslaved to the Nine Rings. I have not forgotten them, nor their relevance to this theme. The form of existence of the Nine, self-imposed (though prompted by Sauron), and then utterly beyond their control, is very horrible. Their “perpetual longevity” was, and was proved to be, a false escape, being founded upon the created power of the One Ring. [↩]
26. The alternative to “elvish” (i.e., beautiful and traditional) liturgy is the progressive and iconoclastic liturgy of Saruman, various forms of which are currently operative in both Protestant and Catholic settings. I cannot help comparing Saruman’s destruction of the ancient trees of Fangorn, for the purpose of fueling his own hideous innovations, to the destruction of Catholic churches, altars, images, prayers, etc., whether by enraged Protestants of the 16th century or innovating Catholics of the 20th century, besotted with the spirit of the age. [↩]