Tolkien: Man and Myth
Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, 1998)

236 pp. First reading.
Posted 15 December 2006.


In one of his letters, Tolkien wrote that "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work". I was surprised the first time I heard the claim, and I imagine the same is true of others. There seems to be little on the surface of the story to justify the claim: no Church, no Pope, no Christ, no Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. Indeed, the cultures of Middle Earth are conspicuous for the absence of religion among them. If we are to take Tolkien at his word, we evidently must look beneath the surface of the story for its Catholic spirit. In this study of Tolkien's life and work, that's exactly what Joseph Pearce has set out to do.

The argument amounts to the claim that the metaphysical, moral, and, to an extent, historical shape of Middle Earth is consonant with, and inspired by, Catholic theology. There is, for instance, the creation myth of Middle Earth recounted in the opening pages of The Silmarillion. This myth is perhaps the most wonderful thing Tolkien ever wrote, beautiful in the language in which it is expressed, and beautiful in conception. Middle Earth is the creation of Iluvatar, The One, an uncreated Being who sings the world into existence out of love. Among the angelic beings whom he creates, one -- Melkor -- rebels and attempts to subvert the hymn of creation. He is exiled, and becomes the malevolent force behind the evil that plagues Middle Earth's history. That history, while not making explicit mention of any elements of sacred history, nevertheless makes room for them. We never learn, for instance, where the race of men originated. We are told only that they are acquainted with "the Lord of the Dark" and that a terrible tragedy has befallen them: "A darkness lies behind us ... and we have turned our backs on it". Parallels with Christianity are obvious.

There is also an affinity between the moral structure of Middle Earth and our own. It is a world, for instance, where creatures are bestowed with free will, will which may be turned to either good or evil. Those who are obedient to the good remain free, but those who do evil find that their willfulness ultimately destroys and imprisons their will and their selves. It is a precise re-presentation of the Catholic doctrine of sin. Evil in Middle Earth, as great as it becomes, is never strong by its own strength; it is always corrupted, decaying, parasitic. The ring wraiths are a vivid example of this principle: they obtain power, but in so doing they become hollow, mere shadows of real men, enslaved by their desire.

In Middle Earth, as in the Gospels, it is not the strong who triumph. The whole secret at the heart of The Lord of the Rings is that the weak things of the world have been chosen to shame the strong; it is the self-sacrifice of the humble which defeats evil. Frodo strikes deep into the heart of enemy territory to wrest a victory, and his climb up Mount Doom, oppressed by the growing weight of the ring, seems to me an obvious parallel to Golgotha. Other similarities could also be mentioned: the recurrance of a resurrection motif in the story (Gandalf, Aragorn), or the underlying confidence of the wise in the designs of Providence.

Tolkien's philosophy of myth is central to understanding what he thought he was doing when he created Middle Earth. In contemporary usage, 'myth' is often taken to denote that which is simply false. Tolkien disagreed. It might, of course, be false in the mere details of the story (as a novel is also false), but a real myth is true in its center. A myth communicates truths that cannot be said in other ways. For Tolkien, this understanding of myth is essential for understanding Christianity, for he sees Christianity as the 'true myth'. It is the myth told by the Creator, who tells his story using real people and places instead of fictional ones:


This novel perspective on Christian history -- one popularized in some of the books of C.S. Lewis, who heard it from Tolkien -- leads to Tolkien's idea of 'sub-creation'. As the Creator has told his story in the very events of history, so we creatures are invited to participate in creation by crafting worlds of our own, giving them such life as lies within our power. This was Tolkien's theological understanding of the significance of his life's work.

Pearce has written a readable and interesting book.  As a biography it is a little odd, as it spends nearly as much time quoting from and commenting on Tolkien's other biographers as it does relating the biography itself. Basically, though, he does a fine job of illuminating Tolkien the man, not in exhaustive biographical detail, but in his essentials: the spiritual and literary aspects of his life, and the relationship between them.

[Tolkien on the chivalric tradition]
“There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition... though as a product of Christendom the times are inimical to it. It idealizes 'love' — and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, 'service', courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity... This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion (as long ago it was, producing much of that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God's way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion) it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman.”

[Tolkien on Protestantism]
“The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. ... [The Church] was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history with the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the mustard seed and the full grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth, the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree.”

[Tolkien on the Blessed Sacrament]
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.

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