CHAPTER 1
âA FUNDAMENTALLY RELIGIOUS AND CATHOLIC WORKâ
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 âreligion,â to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
âJ. R. R. Tolkien to Robert Murray, S.J.1
As for any inner meaning or âmessage,â it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. . . . I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
âJ. R. R. Tolkien2
There is a mystery at the heart of The Lord of the Rings that continues to baffle and confuse the critics. Is it âa fundamentally religious and Catholic work,â as Tolkien claimed in a letter to his Jesuit friend, Father Robert Murray, in December 1953, or is it, as he claimed in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, devoid of any intentional meaning or âmessageâ? If Tolkien dislikes allegory in all its manifestations and if he insists that it is âneither allegorical nor topical,â how can it be Catholic? If there is no literal reference to Christ or the Church and no allegorical level of meaning, the work cannot be Catholic. Itâs as simple as that. And yet it canât be as simple as that because Tolkien also insists that it is âreligious and Catholic,â prefixing the assertion with âof course,â as if to state that the religious and Catholic dimension is obvious.
The mystery deepens when we realize that Tolkien refers to The Lord of the Rings on another occasion as being an allegory. Replying to a letter in which he was asked whether The Lord of the Rings was an allegory of atomic power, he replied that it was ânot an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination).â Having confessed the allegory of power, he asserted that this was not the most important allegory in the story: âI do not think that even Power or Domination is the real center of my story. . . . The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality.â3
It seems, therefore, that Tolkien contradicts himself, describing his work as an allegory in one place and denying that it is an allegory in another. Is he confused, or is he simply guilty of employing the same word to denote two different things? Is The Lord of the Rings an allegory in one sense of the word and not an allegory in another?
Clearly Tolkien is not confused about the meaning of allegory. He was a philologist and professor of language and literature at Oxford University. As such, we can safely assume that he is using the word allegory in two distinct senses. In one sense, The Lord of the Rings is an allegory; in another sense, it is not.
Perhaps, at this juncture, it would be helpful if we took a moment to discuss the various meanings of allegory. Linguistically, allegory derives from the Greek word allegoria, itself a combination of two Greek words: allos, meaning âother,â and agoria, meaning âspeaking.â At its most basic level, therefore, an allegory is anything that speaks of another thing. In this sense, every word we use is an allegory. A word is a label that signifies a thing. A word, if spoken, is a noise that points our mindâs eye to the thing the noise signifies; if written, it is a series of shapes that point our mindâs eye to the thing the series of shapes signify. It is indeed astonishing to realize that we cannot even think a single thought without the use of allegory, a mysterious fact that subjects all perceptions of reality to the level of metaphysics, whereby the literalness of matter is always transcended by the allegory of meaning.
It is clear that Tolkien could not have had this basic meaning of allegory in mind. At this level of understanding, The Lord of the Rings is obviously an allegory because it couldnât possibly be anything else. This being so, letâs continue with our exploration of the different types of allegory so that we can discover what sort of allegory The Lord of the Rings is and what sort of allegory it isnât.
The most elevated form of allegory, or at least the most sanctified, is the parable. This is the form adopted by Christ to convey the truth He wished to teach. The prodigal son did not exist in reality; he was a figment of Christâs imagination. Yet the story of the prodigal son has a timeless applicability because we can all see something of ourselves and others in the actions of the protagonist and perhaps also in the actions of the forgiving father and the envious brother. Insofar as the parable reminds us of ourselves or others, it is an allegory. Insofar as Frodo or Sam or Boromir remind us of ourselves or others, The Lord of the Rings is an allegory.
A far less subtle type of allegory is the formal, or crude, allegory, in which the characters are not persons but personified abstractions. They do not have personalities but merely exist as cardboard cutouts signifying an idea. For instance, Lady Philosophy in Boethiusâs The Consolation of Philosophy is not a person but a personified abstraction. She exists purely and simply to signify the beauty and wisdom of philosophy. Similarly, the character Christian in John Bunyanâs The Pilgrimâs Progress is not a person but a personified abstraction who exists purely and simply to signify the Christian believer on his journey from worldliness to otherworldliness. As a formal allegory, every character in Bunyanâs story is a personified abstraction. C. S. Lewis echoes Bunyanâs method in The Pilgrimâs Regress by introducing characters such as a beautiful maiden in shining armor called Reason who has two beautiful younger sisters called Theology and Philosophy.
Tolkien is evidently referring to this kind of allegory in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. He cordially disliked such allegories because they enslaved the imaginative freedom of the reader to the didactic intentions of the author. In order to teach and preach, the author of a formal, or crude, allegory dominates the readerâs imagination, forcing the reader to see his point. Whereas good stories bring people to goodness and truth through the power of beauty, formal allegories shackle the beautiful so that goodness and truth become inescapable. Such allegories may have the good and noble purpose of teaching or preaching, but they do so at the expense of the power and glory of the imaginative and creative relationship between a good author and his readers.
It goes without saying that The Lord of the Rings is not this sort of allegory.
Many other forms of allegory could be discussed, such as the intertextuality employed most memorably by T. S. Eliot in âThe Waste Landâ or the way allegory is subsumed with great subtlety and dexterity within the works of Homer and Shakespeare and by modern novelists such as Evelyn Waugh. Although there is no obvious employment of intertextuality in Tolkienâs work (though it is present), there are numerous parallels between the ways allegory is subsumed in The Lord of the Rings and the manner in which this is achieved by the greatest writers of epics, tragedies, comedies, and novels. Itâs not possible within the constraints of the present volume to discuss and analyze these fascinating parallels, but the discerning reader will detect the similarities in approach as we illustrate and illumine Tolkienâs technique in the following chapters.
There is, however, one literary form of allegory that must be discussed if we are to truly understand how The Lord of the Rings can be seen, as its author described it, as âa fundamentally religious and Catholic work.â This literary form is the fairy story, of which Tolkienâs story is perhaps the greatest ever told.
One of the greatest proponents and exponents of the power and truth to be found in fairy stories is G. K. Chesterton, a writer who exerted a profound influence on Tolkien. In the chapter âThe Ethics of Elflandâ in his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote persuasively and with great eloquence in defense of fairy stories:
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. . . . The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. . . . Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized the earth.4
For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be. We do not condone selfishness merely because it is normal, nor should we. A healthy perspective always judges selfishnessâmost especially our own selfishnessâfrom the perspective of selflessness. In the language of religion, we always judge sin from the perspective of virtue, that which is wrong from the perspective of that which is right. Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.
Chesterton countered the dogma of the materialist that there was nothing but matter by insisting that materialism had imprisoned the spirit of man within the three-dimensioned walls of space. Materialists emphasized the âexpansion and largenessâ of the cosmos and âpopularized the contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man.â The materialist, Chesterton wrote, was imprisoned and âseemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large.â
It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more large corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.5
One is reminded in this context of Oscar Wilde, himself at one time a prisoner in the real-life Reading Gaol, who remarked that âwe are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.â6 For the materialist, such as Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (until he learns better), a star is nothing but âa huge ball of flaming gas,â7 barely worth looking at except from the perspective of a purely scientific curiosity. For such materialists, who refuse to believe in anything but the âhuge ball of flaming gas,â the sun is mere matter and therefore of the same âstuffâ as the gutter. For these materialists, who spurn fairy stories as a mere flight from reality, there is nothing other than the gutter and therefore little point in looking beyond it. Realism, for the materialist, is the gutter itself. Realistic literature should, therefore, keep its eyes firmly fixed on the gutter and away from any unrealistic flights of fancy in the direction of the stars. In contrast to these self-proclaimed ârealists,â lovers and tellers of fairy stories, such as Wilde, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien, see the stars as signifying a higher reality beyond the gutter. For these lovers of fairy stories, the star is not merely a ball of flaming gas but also an allegory, a thing of beauty signifying a beauty beyond itself and light in the darkness pointing to the light beyond all darkness. It is for this reason that Samwise Gamgee proclaims in one of the darkest moments in The Lord of the Rings that âabove all shadows rides the sun.â8 For hobbits and elves, and those who see with the eyes of hobbits and elves, the sun is a signifier of the giver of all light who vanquishes all shadows.
In his seminal essay âOn Fairy Stories,â Tolkien takes up the Chestertonian view of fairytales against the myopic view of the materialist, enabling us to see fairytales as he sees them andâimplicitly and by extensionâenabling us to see his own epic fairy story, The Lord of the Rings, as he sees it.
Answering the charge that fairytales are escapist, Tolkien readily concedes that escape is one of their main functions: âWhy should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?â9 Such escape is not merely the flight of fancy of those seeking some respite from the sufferings and miseries of life but also a laudable attempt to break through the walls of materialism that the modern philosopher has constructed around the mind of man. For a Christianâand letâs not forget that Tolkien was a lifelong practicing Catholicâthe world is a prison. In the words of the Salve Regina, one of the most popular Catholic prayers, the world is âa vale of tearsâ and its inhabitants, the âpoor banished children of Eve,â are exiles awaiting their true home in heaven. For the Christian, the world is a valley of death, a land ...