No, Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” isn’t Christian
The religion sure likes to say otherwise
Christianity makes a big effort to claim J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” as a Christian text. A story about magic rings, elves and wizards…is Christian?
They keep saying so, but that doesn’t make it true. Let’s take a look at Tolkien’s religiosity and the godless book that he wrote.
The fantasy world Middle-earth has a vague spirituality.
There is something, one might say, very suggestive of forces beyond the physical. A well-known description of it comes from a fan letter from 1971 that Tolkien received and writes about in another letter. As he puts it:
“I had one from a man, who classified himself as ‘an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling … but you’, he said, ‘create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp’.”
Tolkien agreed with this assessment, and replied that the fan would not see this light “unless it was with you also.”
But where is there any religion?
One reads The Lord of the Rings without finding a hint of anything typically associated with Christianity or religion of any kind. There are no churches, clerics, prophets, temples, or scriptures.
As the scholar Edmund Fuller noted:
“In this story there is no overt theology or religion. There is no mention of God. No one is worshipped. There are no prayers…”
There is also no theocracy, racism, classism, or homophobia. It would be difficult to imagine a less Christian story.
Many scholars have studied the possibility of religion in Tolkien’s work.
It is just not there (see here, here, here, here). Brian Rosebury writes in Tolkien: a Cultural Phenomenon:
“Not only is Christianity not literally present, there is no surrogate for it or allegorical structure suggestive of it.”
But Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis had made the same point in a review of The Fellowship of the Ring. He observes that “there are no pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application.”
Tolkien’s fiction was anti-Christian.
That’s how it was originally read. As the Tolkien scholar William Ready noted in 1969:
“One of the great things in favor of Tolkien, in the opinion of many of his readers who have rejected formal religion, and they are in the millions, is that there is no religion in The Lord of the Rings…”
There are wizards, ghosts, and many kinds of magical beings, subjects usually considered offensive to Christians. That Tolkien was Catholic was considered surprising. As his biographer Humphrey Carpenter wrote:
“Some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien’s stories and his Christianity, and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write with such conviction about a world where God is not worshipped.”
Many Christians came to Tolkien asking him to affirm the Christianity in his fiction.
His standard statement on the ‘meaning’ of his book was this:
“It is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political.”
But Christians kept asking. In a 1966 interview in the Niekas fanzine he was asked if Frodo is a ‘savior’ like Jesus. He replied: “Well, you know, there’ve been saviors before; it is a very common thing.”
The quest of The Lord of the Rings had seemed to begin on December 25th. Tolkien was asked: Was this a Christian cue? He replied it was “just an accident,” adding that his novel was “not a Christian myth anyhow. It was a purely unimportant date.”
Over and over, Christian fans tried to get Tolkien to confess to the Christianity in his work.
He wrote one in 1958:
“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! I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive.”
But one letter had Christians convinced.
In 1981, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien was published and included a 1953 letter from Father Robert Murray. The Catholic priest who was personal friends with Tolkien had read The Fellowship of the Ring and felt that Galadriel, the Elf queen, strongly suggested the Virgin Mary.
He wrote Tolkien asking for verification. Tolkien agreed, and added:
“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”
When this appeared, Christians had their smoking gun. This became all the proof needed of whatever “Christian” ideas any Christian would ever bring to Tolkien’s work.
Tolkien was certainly in a funny position.
He identified as Catholic but his vast fantasy narrative wasn’t a Catholic story. Who would be his readership when his work was published?
The basic realities of the marketplace is not a subject that is typically associated with Christian claims on Tolkien. But the subject comes into view with the 2023 edition of Tolkien’s letters, which restores cuts made to the 1953 letter to Father Robert Murray and other letters.
In context, Tolkien was not actually talking about the religious influences on his work. He was talking about selling his work.
Here’s page 1 and 2 of the full letter. Basically, before The Fellowship of the Ring was to be published, Tolkien was alarmed that secular book critics would bury his book. He had a strategy to get famous Christian writers to get them to blurb his work, and he was writing Murray to ask him to pass on his book on to noted priests.
In the process of doing so he agreed that Galadrial bore some resemblance to the Virgin Mary.
When secular audiences, in fact, adopted Tolkien’s work then he immediately stopped trying to get religious readers to buy it.
The 1953 letter is full of qualifications.
After agreeing that his character Galadriel is somehow like the Virgin Mary, he adds that his entire sense of religion, actually:
“…I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.”
But Tolkien’s Catholicism is typically a story less about his religious beliefs than about his dead mother. He converted at age eight when his mother converted. In this, Mabel Tolkien became a scandal to her Baptist family who, in Tolkien’s view, had persecuted her for it.
Mabel died of diabetes, leaving her sons in the care of priests. Tolkien grieved her every day, all his life. The ongoing link that he had to her was Catholicism, and his comments on the religion are entwined with that grieving. As Humphrey Carpenter writes:
“Indeed it might be said that after she died his religion took the place in his affections that she had previously occupied.”
That he was actually very Catholic is in some doubt.
Throughout his life, Tolkien does a lot of things that Catholics don’t usually do. He married an Anglican girl after a ‘conversion’ that was very unfelt.
Before long, he all but apostatized. As he wrote in a later letter:
“Out of wickedness and sloth I almost ceased to practise my religion — especially at Leeds, and at 22 Northmoor Road.”
The period lasted nearly a decade, from 1920 and 1930. These were the years in which Tolkien’s core Middle-earth storylines were conceived.
His return to the church caused family warfare.
To think of the Tolkien family, indeed, is to reflect on a family bitterly torn by religion. Edith did not want to be Catholic and Tolkien couldn’t explain to her why he wanted to be one himself.
Carpenter wrote that “to Edith he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding.”
His own wife didn’t think his religion was a considered rational commitment to Catholic theology. It was, rather, an emotional tie.
In some letters, Tolkien can come off ‘devout’.
Christians like those letter, and they ignore when is is not that devout. He speaks of disliking of most priests. He’d say he went to church regularly, but he’d also he he’d been “too depressed” to go.
He made no effort to study theology, visit Rome, or write about Catholicism. He seems to have deeply loved Santa when he is silent on the Jesus story. He makes no statement on viewing Jesus as a real person.
He did go to Catholic mass — to pray for working women.
In a late letter, Tolkien’s Catholic advice to his grandson has been taken to be devoutly Catholic. But readers often ignore the part about Tolkien telling his grandson to go a church that will “affront your taste,” and makes a special note about being in sympathy for “women in trousers.”
Why was he thinking about having sympathy for working women when he went to church? He was thinking about his mother.
He writes of nursing a lot of doubts.
He wrote in the 1963 letter of advice to his grandson: “The temptation to ‘unbelief’ (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there within us.”
He clearly had a lot of not-Catholic beliefs. Christians aren’t so eager to talk about his great use of reincarnation. His comments on this subject make it clear that he did not personally invest the Catholic tradition with much spiritual authority.
Tolkien was really a man who was socially Catholic, but didn’t really have a spiritual home, except Middle-earth.
In some sense, one might say, he wrote his own scripture.
In later years, Tolkien was adamant that his own life story not guide how his books were read.
He refused many efforts to have a biography written. As he’d explain, he felt his identity was best communicated by “tales and myths.”
He stayed Catholic, it would seem, as the best of inadequate choices. He considered the Anglican faith a “pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs.”
He thought even less of Protestantism, calling it “ignorant,” as efforts to recover a pre-Catholic Christianity were “mistaken and indeed vain.”
But Christians keep trying to claim him.
The reason for this effort is clear. Christianity has no good writers. The religion stifles good writers.
Christianity would’ve stifled Tolkien if he really was one. 🔶
