Come further in! Come further up!
—Aslan in The Last Battle
It might seem a little odd to begin a reflection on my journey with J.R.R. Tolkien with words from a character in a children’s story by C.S. Lewis. My reason for doing so is simple enough. The 50 years of my journey with the magisterial author of The Lord of the Rings have been an adventure in which Tolkien has taken me further in and further up into his sub-created world of Middle-earth. But it’s more than that. The half-century that I’ve spent in Middle-earth has taken me further in and further up into the primary world in which my own life has been lived. The half-century I’ve spent with halflings has given me inklings of truths that are applicable to the real world. My time with wizards has bestowed wisdom.
My journey with Tolkien goes back to around 1973, the year of his death. I was 12 years old and probably had some vague knowledge of the author of The Lord of the Rings. How could I not? The Lord of the Rings was a monumental work which had been monumentally successful since its initial publication almost 20 years earlier, selling tens of millions of copies. I’m sure that I had heard of hobbits, but I’d never read The Hobbit. Insofar as I was reading books at all, they were westerns, such as Shane, or the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming.
Yet Tolkien’s sub-creation was part of the subculture in which I was enmeshed. Having been a surprise hit with the hippies of the previous decade, Middle-earth continued to shed its light, or perhaps to cast its shadow, over pop culture. The glam rock groups which I followed fanatically, almost religiously, dipped into Middle-earth for inspiration. Marc Bolan, with his band T.Rex, was hugely successful. Originally a two-piece band, the other member of which called himself Steve Peregrin Took, T. Rex recorded songs which evoked the fantasy-spirit of Middle-earth: “Ride a White Swan,” “The King of the Mountain Cometh,” “By the Light of a Magical Moon,” “Futuristic Dragon,” “Theme for a Dragon,” etc. As a solo artist, Marc Bolan had recorded a single called The Wizard. This was also the name of a band, misspelled Wizzard, which had several hits in 1973, and whose lead singer dressed outlandishly and flamboyantly as a cross between Gandalf and a circus clown.
The band which took me a little deeper into the ‘feel’ of fantasy in an allusive way was Queen, whose first two albums are awash with quasi-Tolkienesque motifs (at best), or pseudo-Tolkienesque pastiches (at worst). The titles of the tracks on these albums speak for themselves: “My Fairy King,” “Seven Seas of Rye,” “White Queen (As It Began),” “Ogre Battle,” or “The March of the Black Queen.” As I grew older and lost the shield of naiveté which had protected me from the cynical subtext of some of the lyrics, it dawned on me that Freddie Mercury’s handling of fantasy motifs in the lyrics of some of the tracks on these albums was not merely Tolkienesque pastiche but Tolkienesque parody, the allusive serving the subversive.
By this time, however, the time I had spent with Queen in the company of fairy kings, black queens, and battling ogres, in wondrous worlds such as Rye with its seven mysterious seas, had already kindled the desire and awakened the appetite for the world of the faërie. Ironically, therefore, it was rock culture that initiated me into the wonders of what Chesterton would call Elfland, in much the same way that the gospel songs of Elvis Presley had been my initiation into Christian theology. I’m reminded in this context of the words of C.S. Lewis, who said that a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. Books can lead us in the dangerous direction of goodness, truth, and beauty, and so can music—even rock music.
As I entered my teenage years, I had friends who had read The Lord of the Rings. Two of them would even start a printing company called Gandalf Graphics. I felt left out when these friends talked about Middle-earth and its characters, and had pangs of guilt at the lingering sin of omission which had prevented me from reading Tolkien’s epic. Yet something always held me back. Perhaps it was the sheer size of the tome, which weighed in at over a thousand pages, even though I had managed to wade through and enjoy the first two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which probably equaled The Lord of the Rings in length and was perhaps more dense and weighty in terms of content and subject matter.
Fast forward several years to the early months of 1986, and my personal circumstances had changed radically. Having become embroiled in the world of political extremism, I found myself in a prison cell serving a 12-month sentence for having committed a ‘hate crime’ in my editing of a magazine that was deemed likely to incite racial hatred. The full story of my descent into the darkness of hatred, and my emergence, eventually, into the light of love is told in my book, Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love. It is beyond the scope of our present Tolkien-related discussion to say much more of this aspect of my own personal journey, except to say that Tolkien would play a significant role in my recovery of the right path, or perhaps my discovery of it for the first time.
Finding myself in prison, with more time on my hands than I wanted, I finally picked up a copy of The Lord of the Rings. Up to this time, I had always used time itself as an excuse for my not reading it. It was long. Time was short. I didn’t have the time to invest in the reading of such a mammoth-sized tome. There always seemed to be better things to do. Now, however, languishing in a prison cell, I had no better things to do. I picked it up and began to read. The experience of doing so would be life-changing, though I didn’t know it or notice it at the time. I was aware that the world of morality which I entered upon opening the pages of the book was healthy. I knew that I was reading a work in which nobility was manifested in courageous acts of self-sacrifice in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
In crossing the threshold into Middle-earth, I had stepped into a moral cosmos unlike the relativist world in which I resided. Evil was a powerful presence in this new world—if anything, even more powerful than in the ‘real world.’ And yet virtue never surrendered to these forces of darkness, even when daunted or dented by doubt; it never succumbed to the apparently omnipotent power of the Enemy. How different it all seemed from the ‘real world’ of compromise, capitulation, and cowardice, in which evil triumphs because good men do nothing.
Later, I would realize that the mirror that Middle-earth shows us is much more powerful than a physical mirror, which shows us the mere physical surface of things. It is a magic mirror that shows us what is beyond the physical surface. It takes us beneath the surface to the metaphysical presence of goodness, truth, and beauty, as well as the destructive consequences of their absence. It shows us not simply what things are but what they should and shouldn’t be. Its magic is in its morality. It is a moral mirror that passes judgment on the world. “Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense,” wrote G. K. Chesterton. “It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.”
The introduction of Chesterton into the conversation at this point is hugely significant. I had met him in his writings a few years before I had met Tolkien, and his influence on me would be similarly life-changing, altering the direction of my journey. Henceforth, with Chesterton as my guide as surely as Virgil had been Dante’s guide, my path was no longer a seemingly inexorable descent into an abyss of nihilistic hatred, but became an ascent towards goodness, truth, and beauty, the way being lit by Chesterton with the twin torches of faith and reason.
Chesterton would also be a significant influence on Tolkien. In his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien praised what he called “Chestertonian Fantasy.” Furthermore, the chapter in Chesterton’s seminal work Orthodoxy entitled “The Ethics of Elfland,” from which the above quote is taken, was instrumental to Tolkien’s understanding of the creative process and his understanding of the relationship between creativity, imagination, and truth.
The most tangible consequence of Chesterton’s influence on me was my reception into the Catholic Church in 1989, the defining moment of my life, which, under grace, was due to Chesterton more than anyone else. It was appropriate, therefore, that the first book that I wrote as a Catholic was a biography of G.K. Chesterton, the writing of which was an act of thanksgiving to God for giving me Chesterton—but also an act of thanksgiving to Chesterton for giving me God.
After that book was published in 1996, I made the decision to embark on the adventure of being a full-time writer. I wrote Literary Converts, a book that charted the network of minds that formed the Catholic literary revival in the 20th century. In researching this book, I became more aware of Tolkien’s Catholicism. He was not, strictly speaking, one of the literary converts of whom I was writing, since he was received into the Church as a child at his mother’s behest following her own conversion; but he was very much a key figure in the revival of which I was writing and was greatly influenced by several of the key literary converts who were the focus of my book, not least of whom was Chesterton.
My interest in Tolkien having been rekindled, I rejoiced when The Lord of the Rings appeared as the greatest book of the 20th century in several national opinion polls. My personal joy was tempered, however, by the negative and reactionary response to Tolkien’s triumph on the part of the self-styled literati. His victory was treated with ridicule and contempt by those who considered their own literary sensibilities beyond reproach, even though it was evident that none of these arbiters of taste had even bothered to read the book that they were willing to condemn so unreservedly.
Seeking to be Tolkien’s champion, his knight in shining armour, I resolved to write a literary biography defending the man and his work from the critical dragons. This would be published by HarperCollins in 1998 as Tolkien: Man and Myth.
I spent the summer of 1997 sitting in the sun in the back garden of my hobbit hole in the Shire of rural west Norfolk, re-reading The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, and reading Tolkien’s other works for the first time, including his published letters. In addition, I undertook systematic research of the secondary literature on Tolkien, broadening my understanding and enabling me to delve deeper into the meaning of his work when I began writing. My book was subtitled “A Literary Life,” indicating that it was a biography which incorporated chapters on Tolkien’s work from a literary perspective.
In 1999, a year after the publication of Tolkien: Man and Myth, HarperCollins published a companion volume, Tolkien: A Celebration, the subtitle of which was “Collected writings on a literary legacy.” This was a collection of Tolkien- related essays and papers by a wide variety of writers that I had come across in my research. I suggested to the publisher that I’d like to edit these into a single volume as a “celebration” of Tolkien’s achievement, and thankfully they thought it was a good idea.
In the summer of 1998, with Tolkien: Man and Myth newly published, I travelled to Moscow to interview the great Nobel Prize winning author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had agreed to cooperate with my writing of a biography of him. During the interview, I read him a list of major Christian literary figures, asking him whether he was familiar with their work. The list included Chesterton, Belloc, Hopkins, Newman, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien. “Yes,” he replied, “I know their work.” Then, with a mischievous glint in his eye, he smiled and said that they were as unpopular with the Western intelligentsia as he was.
Feeling encouraged by Solzhenitsyn’s confession of sympathy with the great writers of the Christian literary revival, I mentioned that Tolkien had defined those moments when a work succeeds in preserving or perceiving the image of eternity as “the sudden joyous turn,” the “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth … a brief vision … a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”
“Yes, yes,” Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, concurring wholeheartedly. “In many of the episodes and certainly in the wider flow of events in my work I tried to both see, locate, and to evoke towards life such a turn.”
I then asked him if I could read two quotations from Tolkien which appeared to encapsulate the spirit of Solzhenitsyn’s own work and which suggested an even deeper affinity between his own creative vision and that of Tolkien. “The essence of a fallen world,” Tolkien had written, “is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.”
“Absolutely … absolutely,” Solzhenitsyn whispered.
I then read the following words of Tolkien as Solzhenitsyn continued to listen in attentive silence:
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honor, 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 surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, that every man’s heart desires.
“Is that Tolkien?” Solzhenitsyn asked, eyes widened in surprise. “Yes, again correct.”
As Solzhenitsyn’s piercing blue eyes met mine across the table, another image from Tolkien entered my head. This time the quotation remained unspoken, but the image of Treebeard, the wizened voice of wisdom in The Lord of the Rings, with his “deep eyes … slow and solemn, but very penetrating,” filled my mind. For an instant Solzhenitsyn’s eyes and those of Treebeard were one: “One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.” Like Pippin, I felt that those eyes were considering me with the same slow care they had given to their own interior affairs for endless years. It is this moment, more than any other, that has seared itself into my memory (seared by a seer!). I, a mere hobbit of the Shire, have truly communed with giants!
In the summer of 1999, while serving as the resident tutor for a summer program run by the Phoenix Institute at Brasenose College, Oxford, I met a young American lady who was destined, a little under two years later, to become my wife. On September 7, 2001, four days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the ‘Two Towers,’ I arrived in the United States to start a new life with my new wife in the New World. It would be true to say that Tolkien crossed the Atlantic with me, because my arrival in the States coincided with the hype surrounding the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
At that time, my book on Tolkien was still relatively new, having been published only three years earlier, which meant that I began receiving invitations to give talks all over the United States on the Catholic elements of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. As the Jackson films brought Middle-earth once more to the forefront of popular culture, I rode the wave of the Tolkien ascendancy month after month and then year after year. Today, more than 20 years after I began travelling on the lecture circuit, I have lost count of the number of talks I’ve given on Tolkien, and I’ve lost track of the many places at which I’ve done so. Some places that spring to mind are Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, numerous state universities, and countless Catholic and other Christian parishes. Beyond the United States, I have also spoken and lectured on Tolkien- related subjects in Canada, Chile, England, France, Spain, and Portugal. This September, on the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death, I will be leading a Tolkien-themed Camino across Spain to Santiago de Compostela. I can truly say, in unison with Bilbo Baggins, that Tolkien has taken me “there and back again”!
If I recall correctly, Tolkien was also responsible for the first of my numerous visits to EWTN, the Catholic TV network based in Alabama, which broadcasts around the world via satellite. I travelled there only a few months after my arrival in States, probably in December 2001, to be interviewed by Raymond Arroyo on The World Over on the release of the first of the Jackson films. Since then, I’ve written and presented four hour-long documentaries on what Tolkien called the “fundamentally religious and Catholic” dimension of his work, the first of which was aired in 2011 and the last of which in 2016. A year later, a film crew from EWTN travelled to Nashville to interview me for yet another documentary, entitled Discovering Tolkien, most of which had been shot on location in New Zealand.
My appetite for all things Middle-earth being almost insatiable, I’ve authored two more books, Bilbo’s Journey (2012) and Frodo’s Journey (2015), which help readers discover the hidden meaning of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings respectively. As for this hidden meaning, it is that “fundamentally religious and Catholic” dimension of the works which Tolkien insisted upon. Since there is no overt reference to Christianity, the religious element being subsumed within the telling of the tales, it is necessary to see beneath the literal surface in order to detect the deeper spiritual significance.
Tolkien signifies the deepest meaning of The Lord of the Rings in the clue he supplies with regard to the specific date of the destruction of the Ring. The Ring is destroyed on March 25, the most significant and important date on the Christian calendar. This is the feast of the Annunciation, the date on which the Word is made flesh, when God becomes man. It is also, according to tradition, the historic date of the Crucifixion, a fact which is all too often forgotten by modern Christians because Good Friday is celebrated as a moveable feast which falls on a different date each year. This is what the Catholic Encyclopedia says about the significance of March 25:
All Christian antiquity … recognized the 25th of March as the actual day of Our Lord’s death. The opinion that the Incarnation also took place on that date is found in the pseudo-Cyprianic work De Pascha Computus, c.240. It argues that the coming of Our Lord and His death must have coincided with the creation and fall of Adam. And since the world was created in spring, the Saviour was also conceived and died shortly after the equinox of spring. Similar fanciful calculations are found in the early and later Middle Ages … Consequently the ancient martyrologies assign to the 25th of March the creation of Adam and the crucifixion of Our Lord; also, the fall of Lucifer, the passing of Israel through the Red Sea and the immolation of Isaac.
Let’s recall at this juncture that Tolkien was both a Catholic and a very scholarly mediaevalist. He would have known of the symbolic significance of this date, and his choice of this particular date as that on which the Ring was destroyed has palpable and indeed seismic consequences with regard to the deepest moral and theological meaning of The Lord of the Rings.
He would also have known, as a scholar of mediaeval literature, that the use of liturgically significant dates was a common literary technique in the Middle Ages. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien translated, begins and ends in the Christmas season, with Sir Gawain setting out on his quest on All Souls Day, a day of penance, and wandering in the deserted wilds of Wales during the penitential season of Advent. His prayer for deliverance from the exile of fruitless wandering is made and answered on Christmas Eve. Chaucer also employs liturgically significant dates, especially in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and Dante sets his Divine Comedy during the Triduum and the Easter Octave, in which the descent into hell begins on Good Friday and the emergence from hell into the light of the risen sun (and Risen Son) on Easter Sunday morning.
In following his mediaeval mentors in their employment and deployment of allegorical clues to deepen the theological dimension of their stories, Tolkien was infusing the genius of Christendom and its literary giants into his own timeless epic. In doing so, he was thereby situating his own work firmly within that tradition. He was also deploying those same clues to signify that The Lord of the Rings was working its magic most profoundly on the level of theology. Since Original Sin and the One Ring are both destroyed on the same theologically-charged date, they become inextricably interwoven so that the Ring is synonymous with Sin itself. With his Ring, Tolkien weds his own work morally and theologically to the deepest truths of Christianity, forging it in the flames of his lifelong faith.
Such is the genius of J.R.R. Tolkien, the fruits of which have nourished me for the past fifty years, enabling me to go further in and further up. He has been to me what Gandalf was to Bilbo and Frodo, a wise and wizened sage who has guided me on the adventure of life and the quest for heaven. May God be praised as the giver of the gifts that Tolkien shared, and, echoing the words of Horatio in Hamlet, may flights of angels sing the sub-creator of Middle-earth to his rest.
This essay appears in the Fall 2023 edition of The European Conservative, Number 28:90-94.
