Religion, Politics, Theology, and Tolkien
Weaponizing "Allegory" vs. Acknowledging Contradictions & Diversities
There’s a new book out on Tolkien’s Catholicism as the key to his fiction; the publisher is Emmaus Road Press which describes itself as publishing “books and tracts” to proclaim “the gospel of God’s grace” which I think makes quite likely that Ben Reinhard’s The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination tends toward the allegorical/proselytizing genre of non-fiction rather than any sort of analysis of the complexities and contradictions in Tolkien’s fiction.
I do not plan to read it (although I may have to for my next book on atheists, agnostics, and animists readers of Tolkien’s legendarium), but it is also connected to my Web project1 because of the extent to which conservative/ authoritarian Catholics such as JD Vance (as well as other alt-right/white supremacists/neo-fascists/Silicon Valley dudes) claim Tolkien as their own to use their interpretations of his work in their crusade against women’s rights (as well as the rights of LBGTQ+ people, BIPOC, immigrants, and religious minorities). See this recent Substack by Craig Franson critiquing how a NYT feature writer covering the phenomenon manages to underplay ignore the “fascism” by focusing on the “weird.”
So I’m doing a fairly quick post, quick, because I’m sharing excerpts from two published essays as well as a links that directly challenge some of the ways that some conservative Christians tend to allegorize and weaponize Tolkien’s work. I don’t know if Reinhard is doing more than allegorizing, but even if he isn’t, other will use his book (as they use Tolkien’s fiction and the Bible and a lot of other publication) in their culture war. (A number of the U.S. scholars doing this are evangelicals/Christian nationalists who emphasize “Christian” and downplay “Catholicism” (by never mentioning it!) in their work in ways that would make me, were I a Catholic, nervous, given the history of prejudice against Catholics in the U.S.2)
Here’s a link to a review of Reinhard’s book at Jokien with Tolkien: in the review, he acknowledges that there are two sides to the debate (I wonder if Reinhard does as much), but that whatever side one is on (I think there are more than two myself; it’s a bad habit, I admit), we have to take into account the oft-quoted Letter #142: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” and explains that Reinhard ffocuses on the meaning of “fundamentally” for his analysis.
So my question, were I reviewing/evaluating Reinhard’s book, is whether or not he takes into account the letters in which Tolkien essentially contradicts himself about the ways in which Christianity/Catholicism manifests, or does not, in The Lord of the Rings, and, since the book is apparently recently published, does the author take into account the increasing diversity of “religion and Tolkien” scholarship in which “religion” is NOT a synonym for “Christianity”? 3 while all other religions are relegated some some sort of “not as good as WE are” category?
I only write about “religion” in the context of my atheists, agnostics, and animists project (haven’t published much because it’s going to be a book), and I don’t do theology!
But here are excerpts from two essays in Tolkien Studies which are about religion adn Tolkien and I think *must* be taken into account when writing about this topic. Tolkien Studies is a hard-copy annual journal which is available online only in Project MUSE which is also subscription only so available only through academic or large library databases.
Verlyn Flieger, “But What Did He Really Mean?” Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014, pp. 149-1464
I am excerpting the first seven paragraphs paragraphs which give a sense of Flieger’s overall argument and some of the specific examples she develops at length in the body of the essay (which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to write about Tolkien’s work in any context because failing to take into account the contradictions in what he wrote leads to problems.)5
Almost from the date of its publication, The Lord of the Rings has been subject to conflicting interpretations, appealing equally to neo-pagans who see in its elves and hobbits an alternative to the dreary realism of mainstream culture and to Christians who find an evangelical message in its imagery of stars and light and bread and sacrifice. Tolkien was more patient with enthusiasts of both sides than many authors would have been, but he was also ambiguous, even contradictory in stating his own position—for example in his letters as to whether there was intentional Christianity in The Lord of the Rings, or in his essay “On Fairy-stories” (written before The Lord of the Rings but strongly influencing it) whether elves (aka fairies) are real.
Thus he could tell one correspondent that The Lord of the Rings was “fundamentally” religious and Catholic (Murray, Letters 172) and another that he felt no obligation to make it fit Christianity (Auden, Letters 144). He could, in “On Fairy-stories” both as published and in its rough drafts, argue for elves as real yet on the same page—sometimes in the same paragraph—call them products of human imagination. He could in one breath talk about Faërie as an actual place and in the next say it was the realm of fantasy. There are many such turnabouts, reversals of direction that not only make him appear contradictory but invite contradictory interpretations of his work, permitting advocates with opposite views to cherry-pick the statements that best support their position.
One result of this ambiguity is that the same cherries can be picked by both sides to support contending positions. For example, the same passage in a letter to Robert Murray is cited by Joseph Pearce to defend Tolkien’s Christian orthodoxy (Pearce, Man and Myth 109),and by Patrick Curry to support his intentional paganism (Curry 109, 117–18). Maybe this is what Tolkien intended. Maybe not. Michael Drout’s 2005 article “Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism”6 points out that the “overreliance of critics upon the Letters guides Tolkien scholarship down the narrow channel” of finding a single theological meaning in Tolkien’ works (21). Hoping to find broader avenues of meaning, I have divided my discussion into three sections, the first on the question of intentional Christianity in his fiction, the second on the ancillary reality (or not) of elves and Faërie, and the third on the related meaning of his term Faërian Drama. The question in my title, “But What Did He Really Mean?” is not intended to provide an answer, but to use the ambiguity as a guide to what may have been issues as unresolved for Tolkien as they were for his admirers.
Christianity
I will begin with the question that has caused the most controversy among Tolkien’s readers, critics, and scholars—whether Tolkien consciously built Christian references and imagery into his work, especially The Lord of the Rings. As with any correspondence, Tolkien tailored his letters to their particular addressees. His most definite—and most negative—statement came in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman of the Collins publishing firm. The letter was written to persuade Collins to publish Tolkien’s fictive mythology, the Silmarillion, together with the then-unpublished The Lord of the Rings, and it is therefore more descriptive and rhetorical than conventionally chatty. Persuasion notwithstanding, it is important to note that although Waldman was a fellow Catholic, Tolkien did not use shared Catholicism or even shared Christianity as a selling point for his work. On the contrary, he went in the opposite direction, telling Waldman that what disqualified the “Arthurian world” as England’s mythology was that it was “involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.” He conceded that “myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth . . . but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary world,” which explicitness seems to him “fatal” (144). The word fatal is the key, and means exactly what it says— “lethal,” “death-dealing.” Connecting a fictional mythology to one from the real world would literally kill the fiction, reducing it to a gloss. Robbed of independence, it would become allegory in which every element would point to the other story.
Yet to another fellow Catholic, Robert, who read The Lord of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien took the alternative position (often cited as proof of Christian content in his fiction) that his book was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” We should consider the possibility that since by this time the book had been not just accepted for publication (by Allen & Unwin) but was well on its way to publication (Murray read galley proofs), Tolkien now felt more confidant in affirming a Christian stance. Yet he followed this affirmation with the rather odd explanation, “That is why [my emphasis] 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” (Letters 172). This takes some unpacking. At first glance it seems to be saying that the work is so suffused with Christianity that explicit reference is superfluous.
However, a closer look reveals words so carefully arranged to say both everything and nothing that they practically invite competing arguments. Joseph Pearce uses them to show that Tolkien meant The Lord of the Rings to be “theologically orthodox” (Pearce 109), while Patrick Curry cites them to support the book’s blend of “Christian, pagan, and humanist ingredients” (117). Pearce calls the statements paradoxical. Curry describes them as “syncretism.”
Pearce is not far off the mark. It does seem paradoxical to cite the religiousness of a work as your motive for cutting out religion. Moreover, for an author who emphatically disavowed allegory to invoke the “symbolism” of a work seems disingenuous to say the least. But Curry is not wrong either. To omit all reference to religion opens the door to a wider, more syncretistic and ecumenically inclusive audience, allowing Curry, for example, to point out that the Valar “are related to the ancient elements (fire, earth, air, and water) in a characteristically pagan way” (Curry 110–11). Such widely differing readings may tell us as much about the scholars quoted as they do about Tolkien, but it is significant that Tolkien opens the door to both. The key to this apparent inconsistency may lie not just in the differing philosophical adherence of the interpreters but also in the relationship of the writer to the addressee. While Tolkien was writing to Milton Waldman, he was speaking through Waldman to William Collins, chairman of the publishing firm. The wording of the letter makes it plain that he was seeking to get acceptance on its own terms for what he knew was a highly idiosyncratic work and was thus forestalling comparison.2 He likens his Valar to “the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity” (Letters 146), pointing out the difference, not the similarity. (149-151)
From endnotes: 2 And even here his position is somewhat suspect, for his own note to this statement to Auden says, “take the Ents for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all” (Letters 211), whereas Christopher Tolkien’s examination of the relevant material in The Return of the Shadow and The Treason of Isengard makes it clear that at least enough revision went on to change Treebeard from his original character as Treebeard the Giant to Treebeard the Ent, and from bad guy on the side of Sauron to good guy on nobody’s side but the trees.’ (164 n2).
I’ve been thinking recently that literary studies is aware that narrators (in fiction) can be crafted to be unreliable (whether they are aware of it or not); I’m now thinking it might be useful to acknowledge that “authors” when narrating their own writing process years, sometimes decades later, cannot be assumed to be all-knowing and completely reliable either. Historians have been long aware of that issue and teach how to critically analyze sources (especially primary but also secondary as well).
Richard C. West, “A Letter from Father Murray” Tolkien Studies, vol. 16, 2019, pp. 133-139
Since Substack does not allow “blocking within a block quote,” I’m italicizing the blocked excerpt from Father Murray’s letter to set it off from West’s information about the letter. Unlike Flieger’s essay, West is not making his own (original) argument: it’s in the “Notes” section of the journal, and the point is that Father Murray, the recipient of that letter with the Quote that Must Be Quoted, actually wrote a letter to a young scholar who was apparently one of the early proponents of Tolkien’s work as a Catholic allegory (and who, apparently, as many do, confuses symbolism as a literary element with allegory as a genre). I also think it important to note (as Verlyn says we should do in any use of any letter) that when Tolkien wrote That Letter, Murray was not yet a priest even though the way the letter is introduced as a letter to “Father Murray!”
There is a now-famous passage in the letter of 2 December 1953 in which Tolkien responds to these comments by telling the not-yet priested Murray that the not-yet-published The Lord of the Rings “is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” (Letters 172). This letter has become very well known since Letters was published in 1981, but Fr. Murray quoted extensively from it earlier, including this passage, in his 1973 “Tribute” to his friend, then recently deceased. One of the earliest scholars to follow this up was Michael A. Witt, who, while a graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, wrote his master’s thesis on the influence of Catholicism on Tolkien. This project was begun in the spring of 1978 and the final version submitted in July 1980. While working on his thesis, Witt consulted people closely associated with Tolkien. As a result he was later (in 2009) able to donate to the Library Archives of Marquette University a short letter from Fr. John Tolkien (dated 30 May 1979), three letters from official biographer Humphrey Carpenter (dated 9 September 1978, 4 May 1979, and 14 May 1980), and two letters from Fr. Murray (dated 20 May 1980 and 15 July 1980). These are housed among the Tolkien Papers, Series 5.1, Box 6, Folder 8. While Fr. Tolkien declined to give out any more information about his family than had already been published, he raised no objections to Mr. Witt’s undertaking beyond a caution to remember copyright law when making quotations. However, Mr. Carpenter and Fr. Murray were very generous with their time. Carpenter (who was filling in answering mail for Christopher Tolkien, then heavily engaged in editing) mostly answered factual questions, and advised that, while there was then still much to be published, what Mr. Witt proposed would not contradict what was already available. He also gently suggested that the differences between allegory and symbolism had not been stated with sufficient clarity, something that Mr. Witt fixed in his final version. Fr. Murray’s first letter noted that he had been “in the States for a couple of weeks” beginning on May 4, 1980, but was now (May 20th) back but at the “beginning of my own heavy exam period which goes on through most of June.” Keep in mind that from 1963 on, Fr. Murray was on the faculty of Heythrop College, University of London, and a teacher’s life is very busy. Nevertheless he told Mr. Witt that when he had a chance, after the exam period, “shall read the chapter with pleasure.” Fr. Murray’s second letter (dated 15 July 1980) is worth quoting in its entirety. It can be made public here thanks to the kind permission of Fr. Murray’s estate, the British Province of the Society of Jesus:
Dear Mr. Witt,. . . .
Tolkien was a very complex and depressed man and my own opinion of his imaginative creation is that it projects his very depressed view of the universe at least as much as it reflects his Catholic faith. I don’t know how you react to such an opinion: it goes in a very different direction from your interpretation but on a different plane. All in all I don’t think I would care to say more than that on one level the values underlying Tolkien’s imaginative works are Catholic in a rather mediaeval form. But I would subsume all theological evaluation under a literary appreciation of them as works of imagination inspired by ancient and mediaeval literature. Aragorn, for example, is certainly a type of sacral kingship, and sacral kingship lies behind the Christian evaluation of Jesus as the Christ; but I would not like to relate Aragorn to Christ any nearer than that. As for the women characters, while I would not unsay what I said nearly 30 years ago, I am much more impressed now by their cardboard unreality and what this has suggested to many readers about Tolkien’s own psychology.
I hope my remarks are not too dampening. There is a case to be made about Tolkien the Catholic, but I simply could not support an interpretation which made this thekey to everything. In my opinion the key lies in Tolkien’s imaginative response to the heroic literature which had always gripped him. (133-35).
You didn’t say whether you wanted this xerox copy back. In view of the cost of postage would you mind if I do nothing until I hear from you?
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Robert Murray S. J. [signature]
Robert Murray, S. J. [typed]
And finally, some excellent scholarship by progressive Christians I know who are very much trained in theology but occupy a very different strand of the religion than the conservatives who have tried to claim Tolkien as their own, special, sacred book! Both publications are in the open-access journals, and both have Substacks, BONUS! All highly recommended.
Tom Emanuel’s Substack, Queer and Back Again
Emanuel, Tom. "'It is 'about' nothing but itself': Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author." Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, #143, 2023.
In this essay, I want to examine how Christian scholarship drafts Tolkien, the imperfect human sub-creator, to perform Michel Foucault’s “author-function” by suppressing his tensions and contradictions and painting a figure whose life and works speak with a single, authoritative voice. I will show how this project is bound up with the doctrine of univocal biblical authority as a means by which to regulate orthodox and heretical interpretations of texts. Then, drawing on progressive Christian and Jewish hermeneutics and Tolkien’s own writings on intent and the freedom of the reader, I will propose a theological framework for reading Tolkien that honors his Catholic foundations, the sub-creative integrity of his secondary world, and the religious diversity of the readers who find it so enchanting. In so doing, I am not seeking to dismiss all existing Christian interpretations of Middle-earth as incorrect. Nor is it my intent to enlist Tolkien as an unequivocal proponent of my favored positions of religious and interpretive pluralism. Rather, I want to offer a hermeneutics of Tolkienian inspiration which treats Tolkien as a traveling-companion on a journey into the heart of the myths that give our lives meaning, rather than a semi-divine figure before whom readers must prostrate themselves. In short, I want to take him seriously enough as an artist not to idolize him, and I want to take his secondary world seriously enough not to ventriloquize it. Having hopefully succeeded, I will loop back to that brisk April day in 2012 and take another look at my moment of eucatastrophic insight, to see if it might open any new horizons for exploring Middle-earth.
Nick Polk’s Substack Tolkien Pop!
Polk, Nick. "Evaluating Bad Theology and Making a Case for the Ethical Priority of Religious Diversity in Tolkien Studies," Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 19, iss. 1,article 16.
The field of Tolkien Studies, as a community comprised of humans, contains a variety of voices and viewpoints. Among communities emerge both value as well as violence. Inevitably, as multiple ideas surface, they are met with those that are complimentary and contradictory. The exchange of ideas leads to dialogue, dialogue leads to conflict, and conflict leads to transformation. How communities handle this process contributes to their qualitative future and their effect on the world.
My aim is to submit a proposal as a contribution to this process in hopes of helping to direct the trajectory of Tolkien Studies at large and, within it, the realm of theology in particular. In large, theology in Tolkien Studies has been a monolithic affair. What I mean by this is that the theological engagement has been mostly comprised of Christian perspectives. Tolkien was vocal about his Roman Catholic faith, so it follows that Christian theologies would hold the majority in commentary and criticism. Where Christian theologies have given and continue to give invaluable insights into Tolkien’s life, writing, and future research, Tolkien Studies loses when it remains complicit to the Christian monopoly in the field of theology. For we have done a disservice to both the diversity of Christian theologies as well as those outside of the label of Christianity by assuming the term theology belongs to a reductionist construction of what many call the “Christian tradition.” Theologizing was conducted before Christianity’s rise in history and there is theologizing being done outside of Christianity today! Further, there is no singular “Christian tradition” in history. There were always a diverse array of traditions and theologies in the rise of Christianity and this diversity continues to grow under the larger umbrella of religions carrying the label of Christian.
Recognizing theological and religious diversity as a natural reality that is good rather than a problem to be solved opens up the theological possibilities for Tolkien Studies and beyond. However, I am not arguing that all theologies that arise out of religious diversity are good. In fact, I plan to demonstrate those theologies in Tolkien Studies that are bad, namely, those that attempt to shoehorn Tolkien into a particular theological cage. In this paper, I will present selections of theological Tolkien criticism for the purpose of evaluating them through practical theologian Leah Robinson’s definition of bad theology. I will then argue that bad theology in Tolkien Studies needs to be identified and replaced this with the openness of theologian John Thatamanil’s criteria for embracing religious diversity and conclude by offering a prioritizing of religious diversities as an ethical imperative for future theological endeavors in Tolkien Studies.
Ha, I am informed by Substack that I am only “NEAR’ email length limit making this one of the *ahem* shorter pieces I’ve posted!
Waves hands and insists everything everywhere all the time is connected, let me show you with this bulletin board where all the clippings are connected by a web of purple yarn!
I wrote about the alt-right online attacks against the Tolkien Society’s “Tolkien and Diversity Seminar,” especially against those using queer approaches, a while back in my Culture Warrior piece.
When I was teaching Tolkien’s fiction in classes (before I retired in 2020!), I always took care to pick some of the letters that contradicted each other to assign students to read, although, since I was teaching at a small university in rural northeast Texas (40 plus churches listed in the phonebook for the town of about 7500), some students could not be swayed in their reading of it as a religious allegory. I should note that I have no problem with a Christian analysis of Tolkien’s work: the problem I have is anybody claiming that their “Christian” reading is the only/right/authoritative reading that Tolkien INTENDED and that everybody else is wrong! I’m with Verlyn on how what we see in Tolkien says more about us, than about the human being who wrote a complex, recursive, messy, often-revised, contradictory legendarium. And I’m especially against gatekeeping a literary text.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) all that has been written about him, in spite of (or perhaps because of) all that he himself has written, the essential J.R.R. Tolkien still eludes us. What he really thinks, what he really believes, is still and undoubtedly will continue to be a matter of conjecture and (of course) of lively debate. That is partly, of course, because his work is so various, but also because when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic. It is as true of me as it is of Edmund Wilson or Germaine Greer. Or, I dare say, of Peter Jackson. But the result is that the more I read about Tolkien the less homogenous a figure I find. What I find instead is increasing fragmentation and polarization. Everybody has their own private Tolkien—more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at. (Flieger, pp. 6-7)
Flieger, Verlyn. "The Arch and the Keystone," Mythlore, vol. 38, no. 1, article 3, 2019 pp. 5-17.
The citations for the letters are from the first edition; the second revised and expanded edition kept the numbering of the original letters the same, but of course page numbers differ extremely. I am encourage contributors to the anthologies I’ve edited to cite both letter and page number (and of course make clear in their Works Cited which edition they are citing from!). It’s sort of similar to the problem the manymanymany editions of Tolkien’s most popular works cause editors and scholars.
Flieger makes a similar argument in her GOH talk published in Mythlore which, unlike Tolkien Studies, is open-access: “The Arch and the Keystone.” Don Williams wrote a response to tell us that Flieger is wrong because Christian eschatology, etc. etc. I don’t know if this is Christian- or man-splaining, or christianmansplaining, but it made me grumpy enough to write a response to Don Williams pointing out all the ways in which Flieger’s argument is better than his: A Queer Feminist Atheist Autist Responds to Don Williams. I may need to add a “feminist killjoy” (Sara Ahmed, Feminist Killjoys) category to my Substack for this sort of post and some others (I wish Substack would let me tag posts into two or more categories!).
Drout, Michael D. C. “Towards a better Tolkien criticism” in Reading The Lord of the Rings, edited by Robert Eaglestone, Continuum, 2005, pp.15–28.