Tolkien’s Theology and the Creation of Middle-earth

Back In the late 1960s, when I was a young teenager and an aspiring hippie of the Tolkienesque persuasion, it was fashionable to be seen with the records of Tyrannosaurus Rex — a duo consisting of Marc Bolan and Steve Peregrine-Took, who looked rather more like hobbits than any kind of dinosaur. It was especially fashionable to be seen with their first two Tolkienesque titled albums, My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair, But Now They’re Content To Wear Frowns On Their Brows and Prophets, Seers and Sages: The Angels Of The Ages under one arm, and the one-volume edition of Lord Of The Rings under the other. That way one’s coolness could be (we thought) visible to all.

Some of us had even read the book! I was indeed one of these (completing it in four days of transfixed fascination). However, I can’t also claim to have reflected very profoundly on it, which is something that Tolkien himself would not necessarily have disapproved of. For many years afterwards, I had the feeling that it was a book relevant only to that curiously intoxicating period, especially after I’d discovered the likes of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, and Mann.

Yet I still returned to it at intervals. With my children, I watched Peter Jackson’s film versions, enjoying them immensely, and yet still feeling as if I needed an “excuse” to spend time reading Tolkien’s work which, rather bizarrely, I’d come to feel was perhaps a guilty pleasure. Nevertheless, I eventually noticed that serious academic studies of it were appearing (to be fair, this began in the 60s – I just wasn’t aware of it). After looking at some of these academic treatments of Tolkien, I began to feel that I didn’t need an excuse to study such enjoyable books as Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

This brings me to the book in hand: Tolkien and Theology, edited by Douglas Estes. Let me say at the outset that this is an excellent collection of state-of-the-art Christian theological/literary criticism of Tolkien’s work, that fully reflects Tolkien’s own observation, quoted early on by Douglas Estes, that, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Further, as Estes also says in his Introduction, “When we read Tolkien…our imagination absorbs truth that we may not be able to explain in words, but challenges us, and changes us, to live differently.” Even if it does, we can try and explain this truth that challenges and changes, as is so effectively demonstrated by this collection.

The book is divided into three sections: The Shire, Osgiliath, and The Greenway. It ranges across many of Tolkien’s writings and engages with Peter Jackson’s film versions. Estes provides a useful summary of each essay which will help to enable the reader to orientate themselves, and the range is enormous across the fourteen chapters. From speculation on what The Fellowship of the Ring may be able to tell us about koinōnia or the New Testament concept of Christian fellowship; friendship more generally; asking whether Gandalf is a kind of angel or messenger; the relevance of the munus triplex of Karl Barth, and especially of the reinvigoration of this in Jackson’s films; Treebeard (a “character” always a little puzzling to me, but rather less so now – see below) and the importance of patience (“rootedness”), place – and the environment – to the “pastoral imagination” and practical theology; fascinatingly, on the role of smell as a spiritual sense through citing Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology; the relevance of the many meals shared in the books and, importantly, the much misunderstood and often overlooked roles of Tolkien’s female characters. I could go on, but I hope something of what is on offer has been suggested.

I will give an example of the depth of the scholarship here by focusing on two of the chapters. Needless to say, I could have picked any of the essays here, but I will look at, first: “The Doom of Elves and Men.”

This chapter by Keith A. Mathison is, for me, especially engaging in so far as its preoccupations suggest certain resonances with the work of both Eric Voegelin and William Desmond, in particular their concepts, respectively, of anamnetic reflective distance and posthumous mind (which Desmond himself refers to as a “thought experiment”).

This essay reflects the metaxological nature of Tolkien’s writings. After all, many of his stories are set in Middle Earth and reveal its in-between, provisional state. This should immediately alert us to the essentially metaxic condition of the characters as creatures who have come to be from a source beyond or outside of themselves and are, as it were, journeying (back) to that source. Many of Tolkien’s works depict the varying degrees of consciousness that each character has of their being within the metaxy: from the maximally aware (Gandalf, Frodo, Tom Bombadil) to those whose awareness has atrophied for various reasons (Saruman, Sauron, Gollum). Indeed, the more metaxically aware characters tend to be the ones that exemplify the searching (for transcendence, perhaps) through their constant journeys (we remember that The Hobbit was subtitled There And Back Again). Interestingly the characters whose sense of the transcendent has atrophied seems to incline them not to journey/search. Gollum, for example, doesn’t want to leave his cave; but it is Sauron’s nihilistic fixity (which is his fatal mistake – see below) that seems to most exemplify this: what does Sauron actually believe in, apart from power (and he has orcs to do the legwork to exercise that), that he would actually journey to attain – as such he’s become just an eye. The “reluctance” of hobbits to travel, on the contrary, is an aspect of their deep feeling of already being “at home” i.e. proximate, they feel, to their source. The Shire is very much felt to be “home,” but Frodo, Sam et al demonstrate how they can rouse themselves – or be roused – to protect their home.

Consciousness of our in-between state is often manifested in an individual’s feelings about death and immortality. Mathison quickly relates this to Genesis 3: 22-23 where we are told that Adam was driven out of Eden “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”‘ He also argues, interestingly, “that Tolkien’s use of this theme provides us with a way of thinking about how we might consider death not only as a punishment but also in some sense as a gift.” Comparing Elves and Men, Mathison notes that Elves may be “immortal,” but that they are “tied to this world” whereas Men “die and depart” from it, and yet this is spoken of as “the gift of Ilúvatar” (in The Silmarillion). In what way, then, is death a “gift”? Mathison suggests that death, for Men, is “the fulfilment of their being” and that “another world fulfils the being of Men.” Focusing (here) on Men’s fear of “death because no-one knows what happens after death,” Mathison suggests that to “live forever in a world of murder, rape, war and disease” would “not be a life worth living,” and that “Worse still, as a fallen and sinful creature would be to live forever apart from the communion with God for which we were created.”

This is the despair of “hell on earth” and we can see how escape from it, even through death, can be seen as a gift, and thus certainly not to be feared because “Human destiny, whatever it may be, lies beyond this world.” And this is precisely what those mired in the banality of evil (their own hubristic self-interest) do not understand. Sauron, the Ringwraiths, and so on, “stretched to the point of ‘undeath’” have made a “fatal mistake” which was to confuse “true immortality with mere longevity. They escaped death in one sense only to suffer a fate worse than death.” This is a tragic confusion of ends, the ultimate category error.

Mathison suggests “That this is the fundamental point that Tolkien makes regarding the attempt of mortal Men to prolong life beyond its normal boundaries.” He quotes from a letter by Tolkien in which he expresses his view that “that Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become “immortal” in the flesh.” Or, to put it another into more Voegelian terms, they must not try to “immanentize the eschaton” which is to “counterfeit” immortality when true immortality is beyond the equivocalities of our metaxic state. Tolkien, I suggest, writes in what I have elsewhere called a metaxologically saturated poetic language, that faces the constant challenge to remember, coupled to the imperative need to remember, our current metaxic state of in-betweeness – penultimacy – and the very real dangers we risk (not least among them self-separation from God) when we hubristically overreach ourselves; exemplified perhaps most fully by Tolkien in the character of Sauron. In what may be read as a kind of “antidote” to this Mathison notes that, “In his Confessions (Augustine) wrote, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’” Tolkien’s answer is Augustine’s answer. True immortality for human beings is found only in communion with God.

Interestingly, just as I had finished reading this book and had completed my own notes for this review, the news broke about the felling by vandals of the world-famous Sycamore Gap Tree in the Northumberland National Park in England. The many images of the ancient tree in its full splendor across the seasons, when contrasted with the photographs of the felled and dying wreck, seemed to symbolize something further. I returned to the final essay in this collection: “Thinking Like an Ent: Treebeard and the Pastoral Wisdom of Eugene Peterson.“

This chapter, by Trygve D. Johnson, suddenly, as it were, had taken on a newly urgent relevance. I will explain. Talking about both Peterson and Tolkien, Johnson writes that they both had “a fondness for trees. Both saw trees as a source of uncommon grace and beauty for the world.” He adds, quoting Peterson’s translation of Psalm 1, that those who “chew on Scripture day and night” will be like “a tree replanted in Eden, bearing fresh fruit every month, never dropping a leaf, always in blossom.”‘ Johnson observes that “The metaphor the Psalmist uses for spiritual maturity is tree-growth – patient, intentional, rooted, and one that bears fruit in season.” How does this relate to Tolkien’s continuing and contemporary relevance? Johnson’s comments seem timely and relevant:

Peterson’s recommendations to pastors may also mirror the wisdom of Treebeard. Embrace the quiet life of contemplation of God, and turn off the noisy, contentious, temporal folly of so much of our contemporary zeitgeist and enter the eternal conversation with an enduring tradition of a great cloud of witnesses. When we do this, we will have more to say to those handicapped by confusion and despair and fear and anxiety and hatred.

It seemed to me, as I read this, that in its reflection and bringing together of both Peterson and Tolkien’s work, that something of especial appositeness was being said that “balanced” the horrible pictures of the stricken Sycamore Gap Tree, with a memory of something more enduring perhaps: the ability we still have of being able to reflect on what we, as human beings, are capable of in our freedom of choice about how we think and act, and the consequences of those thoughts and actions. A tree is just a tree, felled or flourishing. We can hew it down, or we can celebrate it, just as we can with most things in life. Tolkien’s works are certainly expressions of that capability to celebrate, just as they about the consequence of choices made. Tolkien’s writings have contemporaneous relevance that seem clearer than ever.

I hope that the above comments show some of the complexity and insight that these chapters by Mathison and Johnson bring to the discussion. They are representative of the general level of argument in this fine collection. I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone interested in Tolkien and, further, contemporary Christian theological thinking and literary critique.     

No-one should feel that they need an “excuse,” as I once did, to read Tolkien’s profound and profoundly entertaining works, or watch Peter Jackson’s excellent film adaptations (or, for that matter, to listen to their Tyrannosaurus Rex records), as this collection amply proves. In fact, I have quite literally reached for, and am reading once again, my old, old copy of Lord of the Rings and am enjoying it as much as always. Yet now I am enjoying it with a new, urgent and deeper understanding than ever before.

Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology
Edited by Douglas Estes
Lanham, MD. Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023; 282pp

Print