Eru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The Lord of the Rings

Catherine Madsen

First published in The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Lord of the Rings, ed. Paul E. Kerry (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).

At the 1987 Mythopoeic Society conference in Milwaukee, where I first considered the practical absence of religion from The Lord of the Rings,¹ I was immediately asked by Professor Charles Huttar whether the cosmology of The Silmarillion did not undermine my argument. I replied rather incoherently that The Lord of the Rings was a finished, published work, written for an audience, whereas The Silmarillion was a collection of private legends repeatedly revised and never completed. As I am liable to do at unrehearsed moments, I meandered and did not quite answer the question; this paper is a belated attempt to sort out what kind of difference it makes to write for an audience and with a fair prospect of publication, rather than for oneself with publication a distant hope. I think it is relatively easy to show that the theological underpinnings of The Silmarillion were deliberately omitted from The Lord of the Rings, and to find convincing evidence of the reasons.

I admit that I am somewhat reluctant to draw conclusions from The Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings is so satisfying as “the soup that is set before us” that I do not altogether care about “the bones out of which it has been boiled.”² Tolkien’s sundry drafts and revisions are – as anybody’s drafts must be – extremely uneven in quality, and represent a literary apprenticeship as much as the construction of an imagined world. As the many later posthumous volumes have shown, the drafts have major inconsistencies, shifts in intention, and evolutionary dead ends of plot and character. The effort to make the older material consistent with The Lord of the Rings – or even self-consistent – proved so confounding that The Silmarillion could never be satisfactorily finished. For many readers, including myself, Christopher Tolkien’s long-awaited 1977 Silmarillion volume did not seem to account for The Lord of the Rings; stories that had seemed tantalizing and beautiful as passing references turned out to be entangled, interminable and comparatively inexpert when seen in full. The presence of all this material in Tolkien’s mind and manuscripts does not quite mean that the great inchoate mass of the legendarium – far less the 1977 version – trumps the deliberate and carefully considered presentation of The Lord of the Rings. By the time the story was done, it had grown away from its origins – even, in some sense, beyond them; with the hobbits at its center it had a coherence and a humble humanity (and a sense of humor) that the legendarium as a whole never acquired.

From the outset, The Lord of the Rings was not only a more public piece of work but a more predetermined one than The Silmarillion. It was addressed to readers who wanted more about hobbits, more about Gandalf and Gollum, more about the Necromancer; certain questions, and certain convenient approaches to the answers, presented themselves. Bilbo’s ring, which had simply happened along in The Hobbit, became the center of the new work. Language irresistibly became more complex: sprinklings of the Black Speech, of Sindarin and Quenya, of Dwarvish, and of Rohan’s undiluted Anglo-Saxon appeared. The English of the narrative also became more adult and more urgent. Part of Tolkien’s task was to create the tone that would bridge the somewhat comic Edwardian complacency of the Shire with the high elegiac feeling of Elves and Men: the exact degree of archaism, the exact timing of each exposure to the lore of the Elder Days and each meeting with the Elves. (An unfinished letter from 1954 shows how carefully he gauged the archaism; he calls it “moderated or watered,” an attempt to render the terseness of “a real archaic English” in the contemporary vocabulary. He rejects with scorn the “bogus ‘medieval’ stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like.”³ This struggle for the right tone may have had some influence on the development of the Third Age of Middle-earth as “a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’”⁴ whose God, however, is “immensely remote.”⁵ The delicate problem of how the hobbits come into contact with the Eldar and the remnant of the Númenoreans, and how they are taken up into the larger business of the world through Frodo’s possession of the Ring, was already complex enough; to introduce religion overtly through “churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies”⁶ would have added another layer of complication, and of social commentary (rural hobbit vicars? some equivalent of High Mass at Minas Tirith?), that would have impeded the action.

Religious buildings and ceremonies are scarcely present in the Silmarillion material either. A detailed cosmology is certainly present, but a cosmology is not a religion – particularly not in an invented world, where all the characters are equally real for the purposes of the story. The characters who might have founded a religion are occupied with literal and physical warring against Melkor/Morgoth, and have no need to theorize about Eru in any case. After Morgoth’s overthrow the barest bones of religion come into existence, and only among Men: Meneltarma, the holy mountain of Númenor, has “a high place that was hallowed to Eru Ilúvatar”⁷ with no building and no recorded observances. The anti-monotheism that Sauron establishes during the last days of Númenor, based on the worship of Melkor, requires an extravagant temple where unbelievers are sacrificed as enemies of the state, but this is clearly the very antithesis of legitimate religion – and bears out Tolkien’s consistent practice of using the word “worship” only for false worship.⁸ True worship is apparently indescribable, like its object.

In Middle-earth, true worship does not survive the destruction of Númenor, unless in observances like the moment of silence that Faramir’s men keep before dinner. Notably, the story of the music of creation and Melkor’s rebellion is never told. There was a model for such a scene, had Tolkien wanted one: within the first hundred lines of Beowulf a minstrel recites a creation story something like Caedmon’s hymn. Nothing comparable happens in The Lord of the Rings. The tale of Beren and Lúthien, prefiguring the love of Aragorn and Arwen, is sung; the tale of Eärendil, which will become visible and palpable to Frodo and Sam in the form of the star-glass, is recited. The creation story is outside the boundaries of the tale. It does not appear even in a confused form, as (for example) the “Eusa show” in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, with its scrambled conflation of St. Eustace, Jesus, and the letters USA.

Tolkien did play with the idea of such confusion as he worked on the Silmarillion material following the publication of The Lord of the Rings. He had become self-conscious about elements that conflicted with scientific cosmology, like the flat world that existed “before the seas were bent” ⁹​​ at the downfall of Númenor, and the belated origin of the sun and moon in the fruits of the Two Trees, and tried to revise them away.¹⁰ At one point, recognizing how deeply embedded they were in the material, he considered handling these elements not as facts known to the Elves, but as unverifiable legends transmitted among Men:

​​ 

What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions…handed on by Men in Númenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back – from the first association of the Dúnedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand – blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas.¹¹

If this idea had been fully carried through, it might well have boomeranged by making the creation story itself look more legendary and less literal, which Tolkien probably did not intend. But in The Lord of the Rings the legendary material is treated as straightforward historical fact. The absence of a creation story is not conspicuous; subliminally one simply has the impression that the effort of defeating Morgoth and then Sauron has left Middle-earth in such exhaustion, even after millennia, that all earlier memories (or legends) are very far distant.

The Lord of the Rings is at yet another remove even from Mannish legend. It is not about what Men or Elves know, but about what hobbits know. Cosmologically speaking, they do not know very much. At moments of danger they hear the Valar invoked as guardians and great powers, but the Valar, though high and remote, are clearly structural rather than supernatural, and elsewhere rather than invisible. The characters who invoke them have faith in them, but do not have to take them on faith. Except in the line “the Valar laid down their Guardianship and called upon the One” in Appendix A,¹² there is no unambiguous mention of anything resembling God, and the names Eru and Ilúvatar do not appear. Various characters suggest at various points that there is no such thing as chance, but this is a human habit of cognition which may or may not suggest a rudimentary theology, and which in the “real world” is by no means exclusively Christian. The guardians of the universe and the workings of fate and chance are far beyond the ordinary knowledge of the hobbits; what is nearer, not quite within reach but compellingly just beyond it, are the Elves.

Crucially, it is the numen of the Elves, their otherness and their beauty, that a rustic character like Sam or an intellectually curious character like Bilbo or Frodo is drawn to. The Elves represent something beyond the common life of the Shire, “spiritual” in the sense that they stir the spirit, but not disembodied or ethereal. They are, as Tolkien said in “On Fairy-Stories,” not supernatural but “natural, far more natural than [man].”¹³ The Elves are the hobbits’ source of wonder: they offer access to high language, ancient lore and song, a kind of intensified reality, and a goodness so far out of hobbit reckoning as to be perilous. (Charles Williams’ phrase “a terrible good” is not a conundrum to a reader acquainted with the Elves.) Ted Sandyman¹⁴ and some of the Riders of Rohan¹⁵ dismiss the Elves as an old wives’ tale, but the Gaffer tells Sam that “Elves and Dragons” are “the business of your betters”¹⁶ – large and uncanny and possibly dangerous, like literacy. In fact “the business of his betters” is altogether bound up with literacy, and even with philology: old wives’ tales and legends are relics of a past so ancient and so grave that the daily life of the Shire seems ephemeral beside it. The Elves are dangerous, in the sense that they disturb one’s peace of mind; a hobbit cannot be content with his patch of garden or his Bag End squirearchy if he has once longed for them. They introduce vastness, a sense of the dark backward and abysm of time. Gildor Inglorion says to Frodo, “The Elves have their own labours and their own sorrows, and they are little concerned with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creatures upon earth. Our paths cross theirs seldom, by chance or purpose.”¹⁷ The words disclose another way of life, living itself out as it were in parallel to the Shire’s, unknowable and greatly to be desired. That life, even where it suggests the adjective holy, is a deeply natural life; it has none of the checks and moral exhortations and liturgical apparatus that characterize religion.

If The Silmarillion in some form had been published along with The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien wished, the cosmological underpinnings would have been available to his readers from the beginning; there would now be no debate about their relation or relevance to the tale of the Ring. But he never offered The Silmarillion as a truly finished work. The samples he sent were difficult for the editors who saw them (and possibly for Tolkien himself) to imagine as a coherent book, and the material was less closely related in style and content to The Lord of the Rings than Tolkien probably realized. The Silmarillion material, on the whole, puts the lover of The Lord of the Rings “out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”¹⁸ As matter for analysis and scholarship it is still very interesting, but it seems to have been written by an almost entirely different process of composition than The Lord of the Rings. Even had the two works been published together, the question might still remain: why are the cosmological details so essential to The Silmarillion so inessential to The Lord of the Rings?

Tolkien is one of those writers whose scholarship and imaginative work inform each other. The recurrent frustration of the desire to do his own writing erupts into the insights of his essays; one can read his intentions for The Lord of the Rings quite strongly through “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-Stories.”¹⁹ The two essays lay the theoretical groundwork for The Lord of the Rings; “On Fairy-Stories” reads at some points like a manifesto for the metaphysical – and physical – stature of the Elves. Even the strong but rather parenthetical placement of the Christian reference in the epilogue to “On Fairy-Stories” parallels the placement of the hint of resurrection as a postscript in the story of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A.²⁰

Much of the power of the Beowulf essay lies in Tolkien’s imaginative sympathy with the poem’s treatment of the past. His own complex layering of the past of Middle-earth owes a good deal to the atmosphere and structure of Beowulf. He recognized – and made recognizable to other scholars of Anglo-Saxon – that the poem, linguistically and culturally distant as it is to the modern reader, gave even its original audience a sense of infinite distance:

the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance – a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground.²¹

“More pagan” is the only phrase that makes no sense in terms of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For all the dark and desperate losses of the Elder Days, there has been no break there between an old and a new cosmology. The hobbits are unfamiliar with the past because they are untutored, not because some new evangel has supplanted the old legends; they stand in relation to the Valar not as an Italian Catholic does to the old Roman gods or a Danish Lutheran to the Norse ones, but almost as a secular American Jew does to Moses and Isaiah – perhaps knowing little of what they said or did, but aware of them as great figures in a still viable and unbroken tradition. (Though of course Moses and Isaiah are mortal and are members of the same people as their modern descendant, whereas the Valar are immortal and have no biological tie to the hobbits.)

The absence of religion from Beowulf provides a model for its absence from The Lord of the Rings, though with very different circumstances and motives. In Beowulf, written during a Christian time but set in a pre-Christian past, any mention of Christ would have been an anachronism; at the same time, the gods that Christianity displaced could not be reinstated, but could only be treated as demons:

But if the specifically Christian was suppressed, so also were the old gods. Partly because they had not really existed, and had been always, in the Christian view, only delusions or lies fabricated by the evil one, the gastbona, to whom the hopeless turned especially in times of need. Partly because their old names (certainly not forgotten) had been potent, and were connected in memory still …with active heathendom, religion and wigweorþung. Most of all because they were not actually essential to the theme.²²

“The gods” of The Silmarillion – written in a Christian time about an imaginary time – are neither evil nor delusory, but in The Lord of the Rings they are never called the gods. Their role is underplayed there; beautiful and powerful though they are, even the Valar are not perhaps “actually essential to the theme.”²³ But the specifically Christian is also suppressed. Tolkien thought the Arthurian legends unsuccessful partly because of their “fatal” inclusion of Christian elements,²⁴ and it seems uncontroversial to say that he did not wish to follow their example. He apparently drew this sharp line in order to protect the integrity of the legendary, not to protect Christianity from contact with the legendary. The philological movement as a whole was curious about old words and legends partly because of their origins in a pre-Christian age; perhaps, to a mind that desired real otherness, the appearance of Christian elements simply made a legend feel too recent and familiar.

Tolkien’s sense of the sorrow and brevity of life – Beowulf “is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy”²⁵ – heals, at least temporarily, the division between pagan and Christian. “A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.”²⁶ In theological and literary terms, the heroic worldview with its vision of the defeat of the gods was replaced at the Christianization of northern Europe by a preoccupation with the individual soul in the balance between salvation and damnation; for most medieval authors, and apparently for Tolkien, “the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries.” But the Beowulf poet “is still concerned primarily with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die. A theme no Christian need despise.”²⁷ For a veteran of the Somme to call the struggle against temptation the “real” battle is testimony either to the weight of theological and literary tradition or to the restorative powers of normal life; still, Tolkien is never simple-minded about the spiritual battle. He calls the Beowulf poet’s treatment of the past “a greater contribution to early mediaeval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil”;²⁸ he would not, one infers, have consigned his own non-Christian readers to the devil.

“On Fairy-Stories” deals with elements that are non-human, non-divine (or non-theological, either as gods or demons), and also non-monstrous. The elves – the word is not capitalized in the essay – are close to the center of its attention, or as close as they can be when their function in fantasy is to be distant. In defining the fairy-story Tolkien echoes very closely Gildor’s words to Frodo, so closely that one wonders which passage was written first:

Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. Naturally so; for if elves are true, and really exist independently of our tales about them, then this also is certainly true: elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. Even upon the borders of Faërie we encounter them only at some chance crossing of the ways.²⁹

The appeal of the elves is partly that of antiquity, and of longevity, but also they have a grace and beauty startlingly beyond the human. Surprise is an essential aspect of their nature. An “arresting strangeness,” a “quality of strangeness and wonder,” is part of Tolkien’s definition of Fantasy;³⁰ it figures as well in his description of Recovery, which allows us to be “startled anew”³¹ by familiar colors and shapes and faces (as Frodo is when his blindfold is removed in Lórien³²). On this point Tolkien has allies in unexpected quarters: Brecht’s principle of Verfremdung, “alienation,” was based on the need to turn the familiar into the strange so as to renew the experience of theatre.³³ Brecht drew on a 1917 essay by the Russian critic Victor Shklovsky which declared that art should not so much clarify and explain as defamiliarize or “deautomatize” our surroundings to make them freshly perceptible. “Art exists,” said Shklovsky, “that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”³⁴ Whether or not Tolkien knew of Brecht’s or Shklovsky’s work, or would have cared for it aesthetically, his thinking on fairy-stories is very much along the same lines:

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give….It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.³⁵

The hobbits’ responses to the Elves in The Lord of the Rings show the radical dehabituation and awakening to wonder of a consciousness that has been too circumscribed; the effect on the reader encountering the Elves is much the same.

Very early in the essay Tolkien says that (as for Thomas the Rhymer) “The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven”³⁶ – another indication that he distinguishes the most compelling legendary material both from the primary world and from the Christian schema. The otherness of Faërie and its inhabitants is as absolute as the otherness of God, but differently so – perhaps more so, to a writer who believes in a God that shared man’s nature. It is as non-human as the animals that suddenly and startlingly appear in the last stanza of Auden’s “The Fall of Rome”:

 Altogether elsewhere, vast

 Herds of reindeer move across

 Miles and miles of golden moss,

 Silently and very fast.

But the elves can speak. Language, of course, is at the center of Tolkien’s awareness, and at several points in the essay he mentions the desire “to hold communion with other living things” as one of the “primordial human desires.”³⁷ To speak with the absolutely other – with a non-human creature that can yet comprehend and answer in human language – is a profound wish, and not only for a philologist.

Desire might indeed have made a fifth category along with Fantasy, Recovery, Escape and Consolation; it is a pervasive presence in the essay. “The inner consistency of reality”³⁸ may make a fantasy infinitely desirable, even when one knows that it cannot come true; in a sense what one wishes is to keep wishing it could come true. As a child, Tolkien says, he did not want to feel that fairy-story events could happen in “real life”:

Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.³⁹

The source of desire is often in the unattainable – what Lewis called “Northernness” is one instance, a quality of light and space and atmosphere that can be experienced but not grasped or kept – and at least as often in sorrow: the loss of love or of a beloved person, the desolation of war, the dread of death, grief at the death of trees. In a 1956 letter Tolkien spoke of the “real theme” of The Lord of the Rings as

Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.⁴⁰

His long reflection on the “sundered fates” of Elves and Men in the Silmarillion material clearly underlies his suggestion in the essay that while fairy-stories confront “the oldest and deepest desire…the Escape from Death,” the “human stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.”⁴¹ To speak to the absolutely other is to encounter desires absolutely unlike one’s own; yet these opposing desires may be made to some degree comprehensible by their common quality of longing.

The epilogue to “On Fairy-Stories” is by turns moving and cloying; it presents an affecting picture of Tolkien’s thought processes, but ignores the rules of scholarly evidence as he has followed them earlier in the essay. The skeptical reader, and even the reader trying to adopt Tolkien’s beliefs, becomes entangled in a web of ambivalent responses. “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true” (unsupported assertion); “To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath” (almost an accusation – in spite of Tolkien’s own attraction to sadness as a literary mode); “Because this story is supreme; and it is true” (unsupportable assertion); “Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men – and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused” (glorious, daring assertion, even if not supportable).⁴² I was thirteen or fourteen when I first read the essay, and felt inarticulately that in the epilogue Tolkien was trying to satisfy a desire that had not first been awakened in the reader, far less whetted unbearably. Having defended the autonomy of the elves, he immediately domesticated them by making their stories subordinate to the “supreme” and “true” Christian fairy-story. Having declared that the road to fairyland was not the road to heaven, he suddenly leapt the median and got us on the road to heaven anyway, and I could not help feeling the pains of intellectual whiplash. Nonetheless, the epilogue is itself useful evidence: the fact that Tolkien could make such an open statement of his Christian belief suggests that where he did not make it, he did not wish to make it.

The interplay between author and audience is a delicate thing. If it does not arise from frank exploitation, it rests on the gradual accumulation of trust. Inasmuch as Christopher Tolkien and the Inklings were the first audience for The Lord of the Rings, it was unnecessary to make any overtly religious reference in it. Inasmuch as English institutions were officially Christian (even if Anglican and not Catholic), a general familiarity with Christian themes could be taken for granted. Inasmuch as not all his readers would be practicing Christians, Tolkien had no reason to confront them with Christian references. He had private reasons as well as literary ones for reticence about his religion. His mother’s ill health and early death, results of the poverty that followed her family’s rejection of her conversion to Catholicism, must have been high among them. His wife’s eventual near-rejection of her own conversion had disappointed and distressed him. He was keenly conscious of the persecution of Catholics in England, from the Reformation right up to his own lifetime; commenting on ecumenism in a 1967 letter to his son Michael, he remarks, “Has it ever been mentioned that R[oman] C[atholic]s still suffer from disabilities not even applicable to Jews?”⁴³ Even apart from the example of Beowulf – and the negative example of the Arthurian material – he would have had many disincentives, and probably no inclination, to present his religion directly.

But he also does not present it in code. He wrote to Rhona Beare in 1958 that he had “deliberately written a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them.”⁴⁴ In his general rejection of allegory in the Foreword to the 1965 paperback of The Lord of the Rings he speculated that “many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”⁴⁵ He was not interested in that kind of domination, on religious or any other grounds. For those familiar with the Christian story and sensibility, there are clear echoes of Mary in the praise of Elbereth, of the Host in the eating of lembas, of the burden of the Cross in the burden of the Ring; but these are structural elements of Tolkien’s imagination, not strategies of evangelism. He is not winking at Christians, or at Roman Catholics, over the heads of non-Christian readers. He was reticent about his religion to the point of courtesy; he could maintain his own ways, and even (in private correspondence) deplore others’, without having to make a show of it.

When Catholic readers wrote with observations about the religious resonances of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was happy to respond in kind. In letters to the Jesuit priest Robert Murray he frankly used Christian terms for his own cosmology, for example calling Eru simply “God”⁴⁶ and Sauron’s Númenorean cult of Melkor “a Satanist religion.”⁴⁷ He spoke feelingly to Murray of the effect of his religious upbringing on his imagery:

I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. 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 or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know[.]⁴⁸

This is both a very open statement of Christian allegiance and gratitude, and an extraordinary withdrawal from Christian insistence. In effect he grants absolute freedom to the reader – to take “the story and the symbolism” on Catholic terms or on any other terms, without shibboleths or conditions. Humphrey Carpenter offers the very plausible argument that Tolkien omitted worship from his invented world “because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie.”⁴⁹ The result is that his world is not a lie either to a Christian who would reject pagan gods, or to a non-Christian who would reject the Christian one. The irony that false worship can arise in Tolkien’s world even in the absence of true worship only underlines the extreme fragility, the fugitive nature, of religion in this world that is not idolatry.

One reader’s striking observation that in The Lord of the Rings “some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source”⁵⁰ shows what may be possible with the omission of both pagan and Christian references: intensity of wonder and integrity of spirit are diffused throughout the work, and come to seem “natural, far more natural” than they are in the primary world. Tolkien conveyed to his readers the beauty of his religion without either its militant or its triumphant face – even without its content, in any credal sense, and yet still with its moral gravity and its starriness. The Lord of the Rings offers religion obliquely and thus without impediment; it offers religion’s effects and not its anxieties.

The natural theology of Middle-earth is itself “far more natural” than the rationalism with which the term is usually associated; it is not philosophical reasoning at all, in either Aquinas’s or the Enlightenment’s terms. It is the spontaneous and active response of the characters to self-evident truths. Unalienable rights are (unsurprisingly) not Tolkien’s concern; it is unalienable responsibilities that drive Elrond and Gandalf, Aragorn and Galadriel, and above all Frodo, to seek the defeat of Sauron. The damaged landscape, the threat to the Free Peoples, the terror of the Nazgûl, the destruction of trees, call forth a feeling and a resolution: there is a task to do, and theological rumination would be a detour. The absence of religious directives in Middle-earth presents us with the greatest verisimilitude: we must make our decisions for ourselves, with occasional intimations of being looked out for by benevolent powers, but with countervailing suspicions that we are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The conflicting paradigms need not be resolved into one right belief. You take the Ring, though you do not know the way.

To tie up the cosmological loose ends of the legendarium is impossible; the effort was one of Tolkien’s great distractions in his later years, both in long explanatory letters to his readers and in his work on the Silmarillion material. To grasp the religious achievement of The Lord of the Rings is an easier task, though a subtle one. It may be useful to approach the question through a 1945 letter to Christopher Tolkien. Lewis had recently written an essay⁵¹ which considered the hold of myth on the Christian too self-consciously modern to believe in miracles or to take the creeds at face value, but too much attached to the Christian story to reject it. Tolkien had been much taken with Lewis’s reasoning:

It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. [Lewis’s] point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth. So that the faintheart ‘admirer’ is really still getting something, which even one of the faithful (stupid, insensitive, shamefaced) may be missing.⁵²

As a Christian, he found this idea helpful in cases like the Eden story, which cannot be defended as historically true in the modern sense, but which he found profoundly emotionally true – historically true because cognitively true, as it were – in its appeal to the human sense of moral exile and loss.⁵³ Meanwhile, as a storyteller, he was deeply engaged in elaborating a beauty from which the reader could draw nourishment (painstakingly presented as a true history though not historically true). He did not apply Lewis’s point to his own story as he wrote to his son, but certainly the value of story as story struck him in a new way; the idea of the non-Christian “admirer” of The Lord of the Rings drawing genuine religious nourishment from it, even in the absence of belief, would not have been foreign to him when the admirer eventually appeared.

In the essay, Lewis imagines the pure rationalist asking the “faintheart” Christian, “Why not cut the cord?…Everything would be much easier if you would free your thought from this vestigial mythology.” He answers (with his trademark briskness towards intimate and painful emotional states) that the love of the mythology, the intimacy of the connection, justifies the attachment:

To be sure: far easier. Life would be far easier for the mother of an invalid child if she put it into an Institution and adopted someone else’s healthy baby instead. Life would be far easier to many a man if he abandoned the woman he has actually fallen in love with and married someone else because she is more suitable. The only defect of the healthy baby and the suitable woman is that they leave out the patient’s only reason for bothering about a child or wife at all….Even assuming (which I most constantly deny) that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.⁵⁴

Lewis himself was incapable of telling a story without hammering home an argument; Tolkien, anchored in language at a level far below argument, could trust his story to do its own work. But those who have grown up on Tolkien and Lewis and are not embarrassed by myth may take the reasoning in another direction. Lewis’s analogies of the mother and the lover apply to others besides ambivalent Christians; the myth you have fallen in love with, and with which you must keep faith, may not be Christianity. The story that commands your allegiance may not be the most “suitable” story. It may be The Lord of the Rings; it may be a bare-bones theological structure very much like it, which for me turned out to be Judaism; it may be a religion yet to be formulated, compounded of realism and sorrow, severity and longing. Beauty is nourishing, and we take it where we can get it – in the Bible, in the late Shakespeare, in a syncretic stew of art and music and verse from our own culture and from cultures not our own. We draw a distinction between beauty and truth where we have to, as well as recognizing distinctions between historical and “mythical” truth. But the signals and reminders that nourish us most deeply – that return us through beauty to our moral selves – cannot be counterfeited or substituted, even by systems that for others constitute true worship.

Later in the 1945 letter to his son, Tolkien speaks of the “fundamental literary dilemma” of The Lord of the Rings, which forces his skill and attention onto the plot and his characters’ emotions when his deeper wish is to write about “the heart-racking sense of the vanished past” which is in some sense his real subject. “A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”⁵⁵ In the sense that the Christian story is the most profoundly “untold” story of The Lord of the Rings – so deeply submerged beneath the tales of the Elder Days that only its illumination is present – it is the most moving one; but only its absence makes it so. The Christian echoes “alienate” the Christian story so it can become beautiful and nourishing to readers who would otherwise reject it; what they do with it later is not the sub-creator’s business. For many readers the sense of longing and wonder, without which the soul dries up, is appeased more strongly by The Lord of the Rings than by Christianity – partly because it is assumed to be really unappeasable: it concerns things we cannot have, because they belong to realms we cannot live in and because we and all our works shall die, and we take comfort from Tolkien’s recognition that we cannot have them.

As a very young man – as a member of the T.C.B.S.⁵⁶ – Tolkien had a sense of being engaged in some holy work. He was, but not in the youth’s sense of being “destined to testify for God and Truth in a more direct way” than as a soldier.⁵⁷ It was through indirection that he finally found the way. He wrote his greatest work as a father and a scholar, a storyteller conscious of his audience, a social and political observer of considerable sophistication who knew that you cannot impose your religion (however sustaining) on your equals; a man of many sorrows and disappointments who had learned that work must often be delayed, abandoned unfinished, or finished very differently than it was started. The Lord of the Rings is a mature man’s book; it works within the constraints of his readers’ and his publisher’s wishes, telling a tale to which his beloved Silmarillion is and remains mere background. In the telling, he enlarged the boundaries of the tale to whet unbearably the reader’s desire to know the full story in the background – and the full story is not there. Its many fragments and iterations do not add up to a work equal to The Lord of the Rings, though they fed it and gave it many of their best qualities. The theological elements were left almost wholly behind; for a combination of literary and religious reasons, he did not judge them necessary to the new book. He judged well. The absence of religious reference gives readers, some of whom would ordinarily be at odds, common imaginative access to a serious tale of danger and wonder and sacrifice. The road to fairyland is not the road to heaven: on it believers and unbelievers may meet with mutual sympathy and common moral purpose – even if only seldom, and only at some chance crossing of the ways.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Lewis, C. S. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970, 63-67.

Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 3-24.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

—. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.

—. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Ballantine, 1965.

—. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

—. Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

—. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.