J.R.R. Tolkien believed in reincarnation
A ‘devout Catholic’ had his own ideas
To grow up Christian, one is told that J.R.R. Tolkien was a ‘devout Catholic’, and his fantasy fictions are widely seen as part of the Christian religion.
I went to look up the sources for Tolkien’s religious beliefs. There were surprises—like his belief in reincarnation.
Tolkien is known as a ‘devout Catholic’—but clearly wasn’t.
As he is so widely known as Catholic let’s deal briefly with the evidence for that question. After his mother converted from a Baptist background, he was raised and educated as a Catholic. But as biographers have long noted, his actual religious practice was very mixed. Between 1920 and 1930, i.e. between the ages of 28 and 38, Tolkien says he had all but apostatized.
This was the period in which he formed the mythology of his Middle-earth.
Tolkien’s fiction has so often been assigned Christian meanings, but he would claim his stories had been present in him “at birth.” When the Christian scholar Clyde S. Kilby spoke to him in 1966 he recorded Tolkien suggesting “the whole thing had begun, as he says, at birth.”
The Middle-earth stories, Tolkien thought, were within him in utero.
He’d wandered back to ‘the Church’, but his attendance was spotty.
In an appendix to a 2014 biography, Raymond Edwards goes over the evidence of Tolkien’s actual religious practice, finding him speaking of going to Mass but also noting he’d been too “depressed” to go.
Tolkien seems to have disliked ‘confession’ and most priests.
There isn’t much evidence for Catholic fervor throughout much of his life. He never visited Rome. He did no proselytizing or apologetics. Was he a ‘Catholic writer’? Edwards notes that Tolkien seems “deliberately to have avoided identifying himself in this way…”
Indeed, in a 1962 interview, Tolkien said that a writer must think everything through for himself, and he warned the conclusions may be troubling, to himself and others. He explained:
“He may not have the object of revealing that or lecturing to anybody or even trying to put forward his view as a total one or a good one.”
This alone suggests he held views that were not ‘orthodox’. Or not orthodox for Christianity.
Along the way he seems to have discovered a belief in reincarnation.
It’s a drama present in the Letters. In 1954, Tolkien was at a Catholic bookstore chatting with the manager, Peter Hastings. This man was a fan of The Lord of the Rings, but he was disturbed by Tolkien’s conversation, and wrote in rebuke. Hastings explained that Elves reincarnating was a religiously forbidden fantasy.
“God has not used that device,” as Hastings put it, and he strongly suggested that Tolkien — as a Catholic — quash the idea.
Since Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle earth, Elves reincarnate. The details shifted around over time, but in general, he saw them dying, as their souls go to some ‘darkness’, and return to the world.
Tolkien wrote Hastings a long reply.
He would continue writing that Elves reincarnate, he says, and signals he’s open to the possibility that human beings actually reincarnate.
And he adds: no Catholic officials are qualified to say otherwise.
As he explains, he does not see how:
“…any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of spirit and body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the possibility of re-incarnation…”
A ‘devout Catholic’ would not have said this.
As I read Tolkien’s comments, I’m at a loss to understand why he has ever been said to be a ‘devout Catholic’ — while he denied the Catholic church had knowledge of the afterlife. He seems not to have believed, by extension, in the traditional Christian ‘Heaven’ or ‘Hell’.
Tolkien’s religious status is not Catholic. He is ‘agnostic’.
Or not a ‘devout Catholic’, but a social one.
Tolkien later took to saying LOTR was “not ‘about’ anything but itself.”
But he seems to have been re-reading his own work in the years following its publication, and seeing more. He writes in 1957:
“…it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness.”
He writes to one fan in 1958:
“Though it is only in reading the work myself (with criticisms in mind) that I become aware of the dominance of the theme of Death.”
Or another fan the same year:
“It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.”
These are themes that would occur to few of Tolkien’s readers as his main themes. But they clearly express that he did not view his fiction as concerning Christianity, but as some kind of spiritual event that surrounds souls at birth and then again at death.
Scholars began to take a look at reincarnation as a theme in Tolkien’s fiction.
Verlyn Flieger, the noted Tolkien scholar, has for years written on this subject, though her work on this point is oddly neglected. His writing on Elven reincarnation, she notes, had talk of Elves moving onto a new life that “redressed” a previous one. This seemed to describe a concept like the ‘karma’ of Hindu or Buddhist theology.
Was reincarnation confined to Elves? In 2007, Flieger published a paper, “The Curious Incident of The Dream at The Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-Earth,” that found reincarnation in hobbits.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Merry has a strange experience. Half-awake, he began to speak:
“‘Of course, I remember!’ he said. ‘The men of Carn Dûm came on us at night and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart!’ He clutched at his breast.”
Merry then came to his senses.
“‘No! No!’ he said, opening his eyes. ‘What am I saying? I have been dreaming.’”
Tolkien’s original draft of the chapter, Flieger notes, read a bit different:
‘I begin to remember,’ he said. ‘I thought I was dead — but don’t let us speak of it.’”
Flieger comes to the conclusion that Merry experienced a vision of a previous life.
But Tolkien always said that hobbits were a species of human. Did this mean he saw reincarnation in the human realm?
Had he believed in this himself? Flieger concludes:
“I would say that while the evidence is not unequivocal, the final answer must be a qualified ‘yes, probably.’”
It’s a theme lightly present, she suggests, in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” where he observes that in dreams, “strange powers of the mind may be unlocked…” This seems to signal an idea more like past life regression.
In Tolkien’s stories, everyone is going and coming back.
Sauron, the villain, was killed…and returns. He becomes, as Tolkien noted in a letter, a “reincarnation of Evil…”
Gandalf the Gray dies and returns as ‘Gandalf the White’ — and that too was called a ‘reincarnation’. In a 1954 letter Tolkien wrote to the same priest who wanted to see his work as Catholic, he’d tried to explain:
“Gandalf really ‘died’, and was changed…”
Though often read as some kind of Christian drama of resurrection, such moments abound in The Lord of the Rings. The horse Shadowfax is “one of the mighty steeds of old…returned.”
The dwarves named every king ‘Durin the Deathless’ because he was “held by them to be the Deathless that returned.”
King Théoden says after he’s been brought back to himself:
“Dark have been my dreams of late…but I feel as one new-awakened.”
In 2009, the scholar Steve Walker published a study, The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-Earth’s Magical Style, pointing to these moments, and finding a “theme of reincarnation flows in various forms through the narrative…”
Tolkien’s key idea is ‘reappearances’.
His epic is fueled by a plot point: the Ring of Power makes a wearer disappear, then re-appear when taking it off. As Steve Walker writes:
“Gollum comes back. Bilbo comes back. Everyone who bears the ring—Frodo, Sam, even Tom Bombadil—dramatically reappears.”
To wear the Ring is to be in a dream-like, shadowy zone. Taking it off, one returns to life.
Hobbits are constantly dying and coming back.
Their homes are holes in the ground—like graves. Over and over they seem to die, then reappear. Note even in the subtitle of The Hobbit: ‘There and Back Again’.
At the start of The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo is gone, assumed to be dead. But Frodo “did not think Bilbo was dead.” Then Bilbo returns, and they go on their journey, “flying from deadly peril into deadly peril.”
Frodo seems to die constantly.
After one such moment, Aragorn says to him: “I thought you were dead!”
At the end, Sam returns to the Shire, and says, “I’ve come back.”
Rosie, the girl he ends up marrying, says to him: “They said you were dead; but I’ve been expecting you…”
Sam ‘drew a deep breath’, and says: “Well, I’m back.” 🔶
