The Man: John Ronald Ruel Tolkien   The Making of the Myth   Meaning behind the Myth   Embracing the Joy   Footnotes   Select Bibliography

            Where, in modern literature, are bucolic country lanes transformed into the haunts of evil pursuers?  Where could creaking, malevolent willows ensnare unwary hikers?  Where might an ancient and broken sword, sheathed and hidden, be forged anew as the heralded weapon of a would-be king?  All this, and much, much more, is found within the pages of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of the best-selling Lord of the Rings.

            Perhaps you have already read, and re-read the full Lord of the Rings trilogy, and have an appetite for more insight.   Perhaps you have seen the movie, and are among the curious.  Let the reader beware: this paper is not intended to be a primer for The Lord of the Rings.  There are numerous books of that nature on the market (and doubtless, new arrivals coming soon).  Rather, these pages serve as a brief introduction in understanding John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the author, the mythmaker, and his values.

            The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) has enjoyed periods of vast popularity since it’s initial publication in the 1950’s.  That popularity, especially swelling in the 1960s and 1970’s on the strength of paperback editions, and the ensuing sense of celebrity, mystified the author.  This is part of a fascinating “oddness” that surrounds the trilogy, it’s creator, and it’s enduring impact upon readers.

The Man: John Ronald Ruel Tolkien

            An initial impression of J.R.R. Tolkien, for a young reader, might be that he had a lot of initials in his name.  Perhaps this is a first glimpse of the oddness, the apparent distance between Tolkien and the majority of American readers who have encountered his work. 

The author was very attached to his childhood memories, and his view of ‘Englishness”.  He passionately loved the West Midland countryside of his youth.  It is easily concluded that he modeled the Shire as an idealized form of  “his England.”  Tolkien was fond of  “plain food”, and disliked Continental cuisine and it’s impact on English tastes.  He mourned the loss of a simpler, agrarian society and regretted the noise and fume of industrialization.  His love of tree and wood is prominent in his literature, though he was not a particularly avid outdoorsman.  Tolkien did eventually abandon the use of his automobile, preferring to bicycle his way to errands and his academic schedule in Oxford.

Tolkien was, foremostly, an English professor.  At Oxford, Tolkien was a brilliant if distracted philologist.  He mastered the dusty languages of his trade, as professor of Anglo-Saxon.  He delighted in language.  He published scholarly works of translation, and assiduously reworked his many and popular lectures.  He might have made an even deeper mark in his teaching and research, but for his distracted fascination with yet another myth.  Beneath the veneer of a talented, yet seemingly ordinary middle-class university professor lurked an extraordinarily brilliant, creative mind.

The Making of the Myth

            Tolkien’s masterful creation, his long labor of love, stemmed first from his fascination with linguistics.  There is the matter of his invented languages:  Tolkien had been at them for years, and began to create a history for them and peoples to speak them. As he crafted, revised, and polished these “made up” languages, Tolkien began to form a mythical setting for them.  It was during convalescence from WWI service in France, in 1917, that he first weaved this original saga of myth.  It may seem an odd way to create a masterful work of literature.  It was uniquely his way, and would occupy him until his death in 1973.

 Tolkien spun a massive and complicated epic myth: tales of the Silmarilli, three great gems owned by noble elves and stolen by an evil being, Morgoth. These tales are found in the long unpublished Silmarillion.  

Experimenting as an author, he penned an adventure starring a little creature called a hobbit, located in Middle Earth, a land occupied by elves, dwarves, men, and other creatures.  This tale skirted the margins of the greater myth.  It was, of course, The Hobbit, published in 1937.   The book was well received in Britain and America as a remarkable children’s story.  Indeed, The Hobbit hints at the deeper, powerful forces of Tolkien’s myth, while masquerading as children’s literature.

 In response, the publisher pushed for more “hobbit” material for eager readers.  The busy professor, however, was well on his way to something much larger and more epic, a book that would carry The Hobbit back to the majesty of the unfinished Silmarillion.  Thirteen years in the writing, sometimes untouched for months, in spare hours grudged from grading exams, preparing lectures, and scholarly translation and writing, the able professor painstakingly penned and typed the 71 chapters and appendices we know as The Lord of the Rings.

He did not write in leisure, and he did not write in complete isolation.  As noted above, Tolkien wrote his fiction when many other duties were completed, a few hours snatched by day or often late at night.  He also had an audience.  Initially, he had created The Hobbit as entertainment for his children.  There were also interested adults.  A significant friendship had developed with a colleague at Oxford, C.S. Lewis.  Drawn together in their love of literature and an appreciation of Norse mythology (what Lewis called “Northernness”), these two Oxford dons were strikingly different.  Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, and Lewis a son of a Northern Ireland Protestant.  Lewis was (initially) struggling over agnosticism, Tolkien a devout Christian.  Tolkien had married young and Lewis was a long-time bachelor.  Lewis was on the “literature” side of the faculty, and Tolkien on the “language” side. 

With the typical “clubbiness” of men of their generation, and Great War veterans, they were drawn together with other men over the love of good beer, good talk, and, in this case, reading and writing—their craft.  Soon they were exchanging manuscripts and offering friendly critiques of each other’s poetry.  Tolkien eventually read aloud sections of The Silmarillion to Lewis, who encouraged him greatly.  Later, Tolkien said: 

“He was for long my only audience.  Only from him did I ever get the idea that

 my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.” 1

As years passed, Tolkien’s audience did widen.  A number of friends began to gather alongside Lewis and Tolkien as a loose literary circle (known as the Inklings).  Portions of unpublished works were read and discussed.  In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the group heard from The Hobbit and then LOTR prior to their publications.  Lewis also read from his works, the Chronicles of Narnia, and his “space trilogy”. 2   Rich reading, indeed!

Meaning behind the Myth

            One of the qualities that shines from LOTR is the evidence of it’s lengthy crafting.  This was no tale spun out during a summer sabbatical!  Tolkien pieced together his myth in slow years of fits and starts, with ponderous devotion to detail and many rewrites.  It is clear this is not a sloppy, half-painted fantasy world with inconsistencies gaping through the plot lines.  Certainly this attention to detail adds to the appeal, as does the richness of heroic vocabulary employed by Tolkien.  The twenty-first century reader encounters an educating wealth of archaisms. 

            Much more importantly, LOTR is grounded firmly within the parameters of Tolkien’s own world-view.  The trilogy reflects his deeply held convictions about myth making and truth.   His ideas were well developed, if a bit distant from many of his readers. However, understanding Tolkien’s thinking can help explain the great popular appeal of the work.

The professor’s views on myth making are found in his essay On Fairy- Stories.  The essay is a rambling discussion of the history, appeal, and significance of fantasy writing.  Tolkien wrote On Fairy-Stories at about the same time as his first strides into creating LOTR, and so reveals his “mid-creation” thinking. 

 While some quickly dismiss fantasy or “fairy-stories” as juvenile, Tolkien vigorously argues that

“.. fairy stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things:  Fantasy,

Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule,

less need than older people.”  3

He believed fantasy stories have a powerful purpose for adults.  It is especially insightful to read Tolkien’s explanation of the last of these elements, the “Consolation of the Happy Ending”.  Ever the philologist, Tolkien actually coined the word “eucatastrophe” to define the “joy” of a happy ending:

“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending:  or more correctly

of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any

 fairy-tale):  this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can

produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, or ‘fugitive’.  In it’s

fairy-tale - or otherworld  - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: 

never to be counted on to recur.  4

Tolkien was writing from the heart, as an author, a lover of literature, and a man of deep faith. He later revealed that he wept as he wrote of the hobbits being honored on the Field of Cormallen” in LOTR.  It was a moment of eucatastrope, a moment, indeed, of a sudden joyous turn after a long struggle with a dreaded evil power.

            It cannot be doubted that Tolkien’s myth making was anchored in his Christian faith.   He asserted that his Middle Earth writings were not allegorical, such as is found in Lewis’ Narnia books.  He generally disliked the thin veils of allegory.   His approach was more subtle; he meant his myth-making (“sub-creation”, as he put it) to reflect a deeper reality so that

“.. the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse

 of the underlying reality of truth.  It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow

 of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’

…But in the ‘eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be

greater – it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”  5

Tolkien viewed the New Testament Gospels as containing a sort of (true) fairy-story, embracing “all the essence of fairy-stories”. 6   He saw the Birth of Christ as the eucatastrophe of Man’s history, and the Resurrection of Christ from the dead as the eucatastrophe within the Incarnation.  These are the “sudden joyous turns” he celebrated and embraced as a Christian.  Tolkien wrote,

                        “This story begins and ends in joy.  It has pre-eminently the ‘inner

consistency of reality’.  There is no tale ever told that men would rather find

was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its

own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art,

that is, of Creation.  To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”  7

Tolkien discussed these convictions with other scholars.  In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis gives a fascinating account of Tolkien’s influence in his own conversion to Christianity: Lewis describes a long evening of discussion with Tolkien and another colleague, Hugo Dyson.  Tolkien patiently explained his view of the story of Christ as a true myth.   Soon thereafter, Lewis embraced the Christian faith and became its staunch defender, eventually penning well-known books such as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters.

Embracing the Joy

Many readers will not debate the high-minded discourse of On Fairy-Stories, nor wish ever to attempt to spell ‘eucatastrophe’!  Still, for them the reading of LOTR is more than simply a great entertainment; it is also a great comfort and a repeatable pleasure.  Why? 

Good ought to oppose Evil.  The small and overlooked, if determined, really can make a noble difference in a world beset by many terrors.  Courage and self-sacrifice may inspire devotion and heroism otherwise inconceivable.  Readers weep, not only at the Field of Cormallen, but also at the lone return of Samwise from the Gray Havens.  Sudden turns of joy do not eliminate life’s pangs of sadness.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth experiences a defeat of Evil, the end of an Age, at very great cost. The Elves depart, and much that is fair and beautiful is lost.

Tolkien’s faith beckons to the reader of his fiction.  This world, too, is imperfect, stained and threatened by Evil.  There is much of Mordor in the news, in any generation.  The Elves have left, perhaps, and will not return; Man has been evicted from the Garden.  But Tolkien did not believe we were left alone, without hope or help.  Victory had been achieved, he believed, at great cost, through as rugged cross and an empty tomb.  The result of this eucatastrophe: a possibility of joy, of relationship and rest.   How then, shall we live?  Tolkien would have us seek, as he sought, not only mere myths that bring moments of happy-ending.  He has pointed the way to the True Myth that brings a deeper joy. 

Perhaps, just perhaps, he would smile in seeing the film version of The Lord of the Rings released at Christmas!

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Jim Layman is a Regional Director within the Campus Ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ

He resides in Medford, Massachusetts.  Email him at jim.layman@uscm.org

Footnotes

1-      As quoted by Carpenter, Tolkien: a Biography, p. 148

2-      the space trilogy by C.s.Lewis:  Out of the Silent Planet,  Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength

3- From “On Fairy Stories”, p.46, The Tolkien Reader

            4- On Fairy Stories, p. 68

            5- Ibid, p. 71

6-      Ibid, p. 71

7- Ibid, p. 72

Select Bibliography:

Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, (the authorized biography)

The Tolkien Reader, J.R.R. Tolkien, see essay “On Fairy- Stories”

Surprised by Joy, C.S.Lewis

England and Always, Jared Lobdell

The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis