True Myth

Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

Aldean B. Hendrickson1

• Introduction

Hobbits, elves, and wizards. Ringwraiths, balrogs, and trolls. The White City, the
Black Tower, the Grey Havens. And One Ring to Rule them all. The name and
works of J.R.R. Tolkien is familiar around the world. His books have fascinated gen-
erations of readers since their initial publication: The Hobbit in 1937, and The Lord
of the Rings in 1954 and 1955. But here is a passage from his pen that you may not
have heard before:
I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sac-
rament. […] There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and
the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death:
by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surren-
der of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what
you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be main-
tained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance,
which every man’s heart desires.⁠2
Tolkien is known worldwide as the author of genre-defining works of fantasy.
His books have been translated into dozens of languages, selling millions of copies,
and have served as the basis of a monumentally popular trilogy of films. Tonight,
however, I want to talk about the Tolkien you may not know: the man of deep and
fervent Catholicism, who used his vast knowledge of language and a tireless imagi-

1 Graduate Student, Faculty of Canon Law, Université Saint-Paul/Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario. This
paper was originally delivered 8 February 2011 as part of the Ottawa ‘Theology On Tap’ lecture series.
2 Letter to his son Michael, March 1941, in Letters, 53-54.
 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

nation to express the deepest truths of his faith in a vast sweep of legends and
myths, with such success that he is recognized, by many measures, as the greatest
author of the twentieth century.3

• Early biography

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was raised a Catholic, although he was not born
such. His mother, a young widow struggling to provide adequate support for her
two young boys, made the surprising choice to secretly take instruction in the
Catholic faith, and was received into the Church of Rome when Ronald was eight
years old. This decision was absolutely pivotal in the life of her oldest son. Both
Mabel Tolkien’s family and the family of her late husband — Methodists and Bap-
tists, respectively — greeted her decision with outraged horror, and whatever finan-
cial assistance she had been receiving from family members was immediately
withdrawn.

The increasingly straightened circumstances of the tiny family placed enormous

pressures on Mabel as she desperately struggled to provide her boys with educa-
tional opportunities. She poured her whole energies into providing for her boys, at
the expense of her own health: she collapsed into a diabetic coma and died in
1904 at the age of thirty-four. Ronald was twelve years old when he buried his
mother. Nine years later he wrote:
My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody
that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and
myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble
to ensure us keeping the faith.⁠4
The sacrifices his mother had made to enter the Church, followed by her tragic
death, cemented for Tolkien a deeply emotional attachment to his religion. And his
mother’s will committed him and his younger brother Hilary to the guardianship of
Father Francis Morgan, an Oratorian priest who had been a contemporary and
friend of John Henry Newman, and who had been a good friend to the Tolkiens in

3 See the opening chapter of Shippey, Author of the Century, for details on the assertion of this distinction.
4 Quoted in Carpenter, 31.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

their years in Birmingham. Tolkien’s continued Catholic upbringing was thus as-
sured.

• Asterisk

How that Catholic faith found expression, however, was rooted in the passionate
love of ancient languages that began in primary school and set the course for his
life’s work — both private and professional — from which he never swerved. Tolk-
ien was a philologist: a scholar of the historical development of language. As a stu-
dent and later as a professor, Tolkien was particularly interested in Norse, Anglo-
Saxon, and other old Germanic languages. In the field of philology, attempts to re-
construct lost words in ancient languages — words that scholars postulate might
well have been a part of the language, but for which they have found no evidence
— are marked by an asterisk to indicate their theoretical status.
Obviously such a convention lies open to a blurring between the purely histori-
cal and the imaginative. Tolkien was very comfortable with this blurry border be-
tween scholarship and creativity, and enjoyed taking it to yet another level, com-
posing a number of ‘asterisk-poems’ — beginning with a bit of children’s nursery
rhyme as a starting point, supposing it might possibly be the mere vestigial trace of
a much fuller ancient poem that was now lost, then imaginatively ‘reconstructing’ a
full-length poem which might once have been. One of these made its way into The
Lord of the Rings, where the story of the cow jumping over the moon is spun out to
a poem of some sixty-five lines.

Clearly, as I said, such exercises mark a conscious leap from scholarship to the
work of imagination. But for Tolkien such imaginings were not merely fanciful; he
was increasingly drawn toward what scholar Tom Shippey has called ‘asterisk-
reality’ — re-imagining languages, and further re-imagining the circumstances in
which such languages could have developed. 5 Such ponderings led him naturally
into an even wider field: myth-making.

• Myth

5 See Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, p.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

At its most basic, myth is a specific form of story, one in which humans seek to
present in narrative — in a symbolic form of reality — a truth that is transcendent,
beyond the ordinary realm of their experience. 6 The first eleven chapters of the
book of Genesis, for example, are considered by scholars as belonging to the liter-
ary genre of myth. So, too, in its way, does the vast written work which Tolkien la-
bored over nearly all his life.

This mythic character was absolutely deliberate on Tolkien’s part. An ardent Eng-
lishman and a passionate — as well as professional — devotee of the myths of an-
cient peoples throughout northern Europe, he was perennially disappointed that his
native England had no extant epic myths of its own. The tapestry of tales that he
wove into what was eventually published as The Silmarillion was initially the result
of his quixotic effort to single-handedly craft a “mythology for England” that would
occupy the same unifying place of national identity that the Homeric epics did for
Greece, the Kalevala in Finland, or the Eddas in Iceland. “I had in mind to make a
body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to
the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with
the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths — which I could
dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.”⁠7
The Englishness of the resulting imagined world faded over the course of re-
working and refining. Rather than producing a supremely English myth, Tolkien
came instead to craft something more universal, and also something more personal,
more essential to his deepest held convictions: he composed a Catholic myth.
This is not to say that he composed an alternative to or an improvement on the
Gospel. Such an accusation would have infuriated Tolkien, or more likely set him
off in peals of incredulous laughter. For him such a project would have been as ab-
surd as it would be unthinkable. Much of Tolkien’s theory — and conviction — re-
garding the role of mythopoeia, ‘myth-making’, is to be found in his landmark essay
“On Fairy-Stories” originally delivered as a lecture in 1938. There he makes a very
careful and important distinction between levels of belief: there is the primary level,

6 Thanks for this definition to Rev. Yvan Mathieu, S.M., Professor of Biblical Studies at Université Saint Paul/
Saint Paul University, Ottawa.
7 Letters, 144.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

the “real world” where Christian believers rightly place their faith in the Gospel;
then there is the secondary level, the sub-created world produced by the imagina-
tive work of an artist. Within such an imagined world, within for example a work of
literature, the reader can be reasonably expected to give this secondary level of be-
lief to what he or she encounters therein (assuming the sub-created world they en-
counter is well-crafted and sufficiently believable).8
And despite the grand dream expressed in the quote above, I do not think we
should imagine that Tolkien ultimately saw his work as myth in the same way that
the Epic of Gilgamesh is one. Rather, he was pleased to use the genre of myth to
craft a myth-like work of fiction, or what Richard Purtill qualifies as a “literary
myth” as distinct from “original myth”.9
[L]iterary myth may embody a truth that is given primary belief: in
Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the world is created by God, an idea to which
Tolkien gave primary belief. But Tolkien or his readers did not accept
this idea because of Tolkien’s literary myth. Rather, Tolkien wrote the
myth, and some readers enjoy the myth, because of previously held
beliefs. The belief creates the myth, not the myth the belief.10
Tolkien’s Catholicism is woven deeply into the very fabric of his imaginative
work, and that is more than evident from a close reading of the various texts. But he
is careful to make sure that his “real world” faith does not rise to the surface of the
work. Tolkien held an intense dislike for allegory as a literary form, one of the rea-
sons he was highly displeased with his friend C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia se-
ries. The easy formula of “this equals that” in an allegory seemed to Tolkien a weak
and simplistic approach, and one ultimately incapable of deeply meaningful re-
sults. “The more ‘life’ a story has [he wrote] the more readily will it be susceptible
of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the
more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.”1⁠ 1
Rather than an allegorical mode, Tolkien preferred the mythic. It is hard to over-
state his distaste for allegory: one of the (to his mind damning) faults of the Arthu-

8 See Purtill, 4.
9 See Purtill, 1-7.
10 Purtill, 7.

11 Letters, 145.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

rian legends was that, in addition to their not being English — they are rather
largely Welsh in origin — they are “involved in, and explicitly contain the Christian
religion.” He goes on:
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth
and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements
of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the
known form of the primary ‘real’ world.1⁠ 2

• Creation and Sub-Creation

If mythic tales were not to make explicit reference to “primary reality” religions,
then what should they do? Tolkien’s own assessment of his completed work in this
regard is illustrative:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and
Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revi-
sion. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all ref-
erences to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imagi-
nary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the
symbolism. 13
At the very beginning of his cosmogony is, not surprisingly, the very beginning:
the Creation. Here is an example of Tolkien’s myth-making, his ‘asterisk-reality’ as it
finally took shape upon the page.
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made
first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought,
and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to
them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before
him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone,
or but a few together, while the rest hearkened; for each compre-
hended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and
in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as
they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in
unison and harmony.⁠14

12 Letters, 144
13 Letters, 172.
14 "Ainulindalë" in Silmarillion

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

Tolkien called his vast body of legends “a monotheistic but ‘sub-creational’

mythology.”⁠ 15 Referring to narrative devices such as the creation narrative, he ex-
plained the recognizably angelic beings he called Ainur as “meant to provide be-
ings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher my-
thology, which can yet be accepted — well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that be-
lieves in the Blessed Trinity.”16
Perhaps the most essential term to approaching Tolkien’s understanding of his
own work is sub-creation. Working in the genre of fairy-story — his preferred term
for the high, mythic end of folk-tales which most appealed to him — allows the
writer to act as a kind of demiurge, a sub-creative artist who, to borrow a phrase
from Bradley Birzer, is both made and making in the image of the ultimate creator,
God.1⁠ 7 This was the art that Tolkien strove for. C.S. Lewis echoed this ideal, writing
that the artist should “create as lavishly as possible. The romancer, who invents a
whole world, is worshipping God more effectively than the mere realist.”⁠ 18
Artistic creativity was, then, for Tolkien itself an inherently religious act. He ex-
pressed the highest goal of this sub-creative endeavor in a Greek neologism of his
own coinage, the eucatastrophe, which he defined as “the sudden happy turn in a
story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears” which is, he further argues,
“the highest function of fairy-stories to produce.”⁠19
I was […] led to the view that [eucatastrophe] produces its peculiar
effect because of a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature [which
is] chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a
sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped
back. It perceives — if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane
[…] — that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great
World for which our nature is made. And […] the Resurrection was the
greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story — and pro-
duces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears be-
cause it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those

15 Letters, 235.
16 Letters, 146.
17 See Birzer, 39.

18 As quoted in Birzer, 39.

19 Letters, 100.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and
altruism are lost in Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell
what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell
a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be re-
deemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But
since the author of it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality,
this one was also made to Be, to be true in the Primary Plane. So that
in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian mira-
cles too […], you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth be-
hind the apparent Anankê2⁠ 0 of our world, but a glimpse that is actually
a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.⁠21

• Catholic notions

So what are some of the Catholic elements that can be found in Tolkien’s written
works? A few come immediately to mind:
• The seemingly-obvious Marian references in certain aspects of the Elven
Queen Galadriel (at least as she is encountered, late in her career, by the hob-
bits in The Lord of the Rings) and much more so in Elbereth, the ‘queen of
heaven’ who placed the stars in the skies, and whose name several characters
invoke in efficacious intercession for her blessing and aid in need.
• The Elven waybread, lembas, which holds some sustaining quality beyond the
norm of mere human food. This is widely pointed to as a derivation of Catholic
Eucharistic belief. Tolkien acknowledged that such a connection was made by
readers in one of his letters, but without commenting further upon it, either
yea or nay.22 Though no one can doubt Tolkien’s personal devotion to the
greatest of the Sacraments, when commentators like Birzer state that “the Elven
lembas arguably serves as Tolkien’s most explicit symbol of Christianity in The
Lord of the Rings,” I will merely stress the qualifying “arguably” in that state-
ment, and let it stand.
• The burden which Frodo carries for the self-sacrificial deliverance of the free
world leads many to interpret him as a Christ-figure, while his celibacy is for
some authors indicative that he represents the priesthood of the Christian faith-
ful. Certainly I would grant that the model of Christ’s passion was deeply inte-
gral to Tolkien’s Catholic imagination, as the perfect example of Christian hero-

20 ἀνάγκη — ‘necessity, constraint’

21 Letters, 100-101.
22 Letters, 288.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

ism. But I would stop short of the blatantly allegorical claims which run
counter to Tolkien’s stated feelings on such devices.
But although not insignificant, these are all details in a vast scheme. And they all
lead us too far in the direction of allegory, of looking for isolatable equivalencies t
our primary beliefs in the primary reality. I cannot help but believe that the more
genuine Catholic elements in Tolkien’s work are those which inform the very struc-
ture of the stories and the world. In what time I have remaining, I would like to fo-
cus on two of these macro-level themes, themes which, I believe, are at the heart of
the arc of the various tales of Middle-earth, and which Tolkien addresses in a rec-
ognizably Christian — and Catholic — manner: forgiveness and redemption in a
fallen world, and the problem of free will.

• Forgiveness and Redemption: Frodo and Gollum

Middle-earth is a fallen world, indeed it is not going too far I think to say it is
our fallen world; in certain moments of theorizing Tolkien places in an imagined
prehistory sometime between the Fall of our first parents and the beginning of
Judeo-Christian salvation history. And there is perhaps no character in The Lord of
the Rings more completely fallen than Gollum.

Introduced as a grotesque aquatic monster in The Hobbit, Gollum is revealed as

a much deeper character in the later work. He is, in brief, a hobbit who, ensnared
and enslaved by the malignant power of the Ring, has lived long lonely centuries
tormented by it, and, having lost the Ring to Bilbo Baggins, has emerged once more
into the world of light, driven like the most desperate addict to find and reclaim the
Ring.

He lurks on the edges of the story for the first half of the quest, and Frodo ques-
tions why Bilbo or others did not kill the vile creature when they had the chance.
But when he finally meets Gollum at close quarters, Frodo quickly realizes the wis-
dom of Gandalf’s admonition that no life is to be taken lightly, and throughout their
journey together toward the fiery end of their mission, Frodo patiently and, it would
seem, unwisely strives to give Gollum opportunity for repentance, for forgiveness,
and for redemption.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

Ultimately, of course, Frodo fails in his quest. At the very brink, after having
toiled far beyond the boundaries of endurance through a veritable hell on earth, the
central protagonist of the tale succumbs to the temptation he has diligently resisted
throughout his long and harrowing journey. Unable to so far transcend his fallen
nature, he refuses to destroy the Ring, and instead puts it on his finger, claiming its
unholy power for his own.

But he is not the only fallen character present in that moment; a circumstance
that is undeniably due to an overall attitude of forgiveness and hope for redemption
which Frodo has consistently extended toward Gollum.
At any point any prudent person would have told Frodo that Gollum
would certainly betray him, and could rob him in the end. To ‘pity’
him, to forbear to kill him, was a piece of folly, or a mystical belief in
the ultimate value-in-itself of pity and generosity even if disastrous in
the world of time. He did rob him and injure him in the end — but by
a ‘grace’, that last betrayal was at a precise juncture when the final evil
deed was the most beneficial thing any one could have done for
Frodo! By a situation created by his ‘forgiveness’, he was saved him-
self, and relieved of his burden.2⁠ 3
Even though he failed in his will to complete his quest, Frodo was saved from
the eternally fatal consequences of this failing by the fruit of his own earlier acts of
mercy and forgiveness. The grace he extended to Gollum, though it did not have
the immediately intended result of Gollum’s redemption, bore fruit in time as euca-
tastrophe, an unexpected moment of saving grace.

• Free Will: Túrin and his doom

Throughout his writings, Tolkien refuses to put aside the free will of each and
every individual to make moral choices that determine their actions. This is particu-
larly remarkable in a sweep of mythological sub-creation that carries a strong sur-
face theme of fate and doom.

There are many examples of this centrality of free will in The Lord of the Rings.
Throughout his journey from the Shire to Mordor, Frodo encounters a long list of

23 Letters, 234.

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 Aldean Hendrickson — Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination

significant persons who are, each in their own way, tempted to take the Ring from
him and use it for their own purposes: Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, Boromir,
Faramir. All have to make a free and courageous act of will to resist the nearly
overwhelming temptation, but most are able to do so. There is no inescapable fate
that binds any character in the tale. Even events that have been foretold by some
sort of prophecy — such as Éowyn’s slaying of the Chief of the Ring-wraiths — are
not presented as predestined inevitabilities, but as the result of the free choices of
the individuals.

However, it is in his larger legendarium that Tolkien gives the richest exposition
of this paradox of fate and free will. One tale in particular stands out as the most
potent exemplar, that of Túrin Turambar, a version of which is contained in The Sil-
marillion, and which was recently published in its fullest form as a free-standing
volume entitled The Children of Húrin. Túrin is a man who lives out his life under
the shadow of a demonic curse, but it is a curse of which he is not directly aware.
And while he is innately heroic and noble, his every step throughout his life goes
tragically astray, with devastating consequences to everyone he loves and to every-
thing he holds dear.
But Tolkien subverts the saga-worthy fatalism of the tale with the consistent fact
that at every turn, while Túrin interprets the tragedy that follows him everywhere as
the malicious finger of the Enemy, Morgoth, the narrative clearly demonstrates, in
episode after heart-rending episode, that it is Túrin — an arrogant, willful, head-
strong man of unbending pride — who brings about these tragic outcomes by his
selfish, freely-chosen actions. What appears from one perspective, then, to be a
quintessentially Nordic or Anglo-Saxon tragedy of a family cursed, is from another
point of view — and I believe deliberately so on the author’s part — a vivid parable
of how much damage one man can inflict upon the world, upon the very ones he
loves, not through malice, but through his own sin of pride.

• Conclusion

I do not believe that Tolkien ever forgot that he was indeed the author of his
works, yet he certainly felt, at times quite strongly during the long composition of
The Lord of the Rings, that the story was being revealed to him as he wrote it, that

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he was little more than a humble amanuensis, faithfully recording the events of a
long-forgotten prehistory. “They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and as they
came, separately, so too the links [between the various stories] grew. […] Always I
had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘invent-
ing’”24
And while he certainly was not immune to the excitement of worldwide fame,
Tolkien did not write as he did for either glory or for fortune beyond the ability to
more comfortably provide for his family. He wrote for love: love of stories, love of
language, love of the green earth and the English countryside that he saw vanishing
all around him, and for the love which he had for his Catholic faith, a faith that in-
formed all his daily interactions, to which he bore witness to colleagues and family
members, and which, through his inspired art, he was able to testify to in a way
uniquely his own.

24 Letters, 145.

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Works Cited

Birzer, Bradley J. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth.

Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: The Authorized Biography. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1977.
Carpenter, Humphrey (ed.). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2000.
Purtill, Richard. J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2003.
Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New
Mythology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
———. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion.
———. The Children of Húrin. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London:
HarperCollins, 2007.

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