A new book brilliantly captures what his Catholic faith meant to the author of The Lord of the Rings.
A new book brilliantly captures what his Catholic faith meant to the author of The Lord of the Rings.
I had the great privilege of reading Holly Ordway’s latest book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, in manuscript, and I was quite taken with it. I’ve now had a chance to give it a second, very close reading and my suspicions — which began when first reading Ordway’s previous book, Tolkien’s Modern Reading — are confirmed. Ordway not only has written the great book of 2023 with Tolkien’s Faith, but she has also proven herself one of the great Tolkien scholars, having now written some of the best things that exists on the great man.
Fifty years after Tolkien’s death, Ordway reminds us with every sentence of Tolkien’s Faith that the author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, was, first and foremost, a devout Roman Catholic. Ordway is certainly not the first to make this claim, but she is the best at doing so, being, in many ways, the culmination of nearly 25 years of argumentation by figures such as Joseph Pearce, Stratford Caldecott, Phil and Carol Zaleski, and, most recently, prior to Ordway, Carl Hostetter.
The most recent revised and expanded version of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien — to which Ordway would not have had access, given that they’ve just been released — only confirm this. Several of us who have written on Tolkien have thought he was very Catholic, but the most recent edition of his letters proves he was very, very, very Catholic.
To many, especially readers of National Review, such a statement — that Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism matters — seems obvious, but to a whole cadre of Tolkien scholars and fans, Tolkien’s faith is either an annoying detail about the man or something simply to be ignored. Indeed, there’s a whole subset of Tolkien scholarship and fandom dedicated to Peter Jackson’s films (which did not completely ignore the Catholicism, it must be stated, especially in the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring), to Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power, and to a variety of what can only be labeled as “fan fiction” that almost completely ignores Tolkien’s faith. One might even go so far as to claim that there’s Tolkien himself and then there’s a “franchise” of all things Middle-earth. Rarely do the two strains converge.
Still, even serious Tolkien scholars have remained divided on how much weight to give to his Catholicism. Ever since Pearce published his mighty Tolkien: Man and Myth (Ignatius Press) in 1999, the divide between the pro-Catholic and anti-Catholic forces has grown.
With Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith, however, the issue is closed. Or, at the very least, it should be. At this point, no Tolkien scholar or fan can ignore the man’s faith.
Again, as Ordway makes clear, Tolkien’s faith pervaded every aspect of his life, from his friendships to his family to his vocation as scholar and professor.
Born in 1892, Tolkien was baptized in the Church of England. After the untimely death of his father, Tolkien’s mother, Mabel, converted to Roman Catholicism when he was just eight. This was a bold move, especially given that she was a widow trying to raise two boys. Neither England nor her relatives were in the least friendly to the Roman Catholic religion, and she and her two sons (John Ronald and Hilary) were effectively ostracized and alienated from the family at large.
It must be noted that such prejudice did not subside easily or readily in the U.K. As late as the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sir Martin Gilbert told me in a wonderful lunch at Hillsdale College, he (being Jewish) and Tolkien had to sit together, away from the normal members of the Church of England while at college table in Oxford.
Still, Mabel did maintain her newfound faith, and she suffered immensely for it. When she became tragically ill, the family could have intervened and helped her. Yet, they demanded she relinquish her Catholicism, which she refused to do. She died when Tolkien was twelve, leaving him and his brother in the care of a Catholic (Oratorian) priest, Father Francis Morgan. Tolkien and his brother, then, were raised by Morgan. Father Morgan was excellent but stern, preventing, for three years, Tolkien from seeing the woman who would eventually become his wife, Edith, because she was Church of England. Despite his love for Edith, Tolkien obeyed Father Morgan, cherishing him as a second father.
Regardless, Tolkien’s faith was never cheap nor easy. As Ordway brilliantly puts it:
His spiritual life was one of drama and difficulty. In what follows, we will see that, although Tolkien was introduced to the Catholic faith by his beloved mother, Mabel, he also had many reasons to relinquish it and return to the Anglican church in which had had been baptized. As a young man, his experience of thwarted love could have embittered him against the Catholic priest who was his guardian. He fought on the front lines of the Great War, a conflagration in which most of his close friends were killed, and which caused some of the finest writers of his generation to abandon their Christian faith entirely. In a time when the Church of England’s status as the Establishment religion meant a great deal and Catholics were a socially disadvantaged minority, it would have made his career, his social life, and even his marriage smoother if he had muted his Catholicism or exchanged it for something more conventional. The experience of a second World War, this time with his own sons serving in the armed forces, could have caused him finally to abandon his faith altogether. The turmoil caused by Vatican II, and the loss of the Latin liturgy of the Mass that he loved so much, could have caused him to reject the authority of the Church or withdraw from engagement in Catholic life.
In almost every aspect of his professional career and social life, even in his marriage, Tolkien would have been tempted to turn from his Catholicism — which he freely accepted at age twelve — but he never did. He remained utterly loyal, even through the turmoil of Vatican II, to the very end of his life in September 1973.
Ordway, in Tolkien’s Faith, walks the reader through his life. She details his time in war, his time in scholarship, his time in family, his time in Church, and his time in friendship. While she’s mostly interested in biographical details and spiritual insights, she also offers — with much wisdom — tidbits, here and there, on his literature and his mythology. The latter is not the focus, yet it is always insightful and thought-provoking. Some of the most fascinating parts of the book, however, come through and from these tidbits.
This is not in any way to suggest that the biographical parts of the book are less interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ordway’s expertise is certainly in the biographical detail, and I was most taken with her writings on Tolkien’s friendships. Not only his friendships with spiritual beings — his intense devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John the Beloved, and St. Philip Neri — but also his tangible friendships with C. S. Lewis. For what it’s worth, I see the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien as a bit more tumultuous than Ordway does, but I’d be a fool not to take her arguments on the matter with utmost seriousness.
As I had the chance to note in another publication, “Beautifully researched, beautifully argued, beautifully written, Tolkien’s Faith is . . . well, a beautiful work about a beautiful man. Throughout my adult life, I’ve done my best to keep up with Tolkien scholarship, and I can state that Tolkien’s Faith is one of the very best, if not the best, works on Tolkien I’ve ever read.” I can only state this here with more emphasis.
I have only one complaint with the book, and it’s a ridiculous one. The print margins are simply too small, and I had a difficult time making marginalia and jotting down notes in the book. Usually, I had to underline what I liked, but then rest content with merely putting my thoughts at the end of each chapter, given, of course, available space. Again, a minor complaint, to be sure!
Far beyond a straight-forward biography, Tolkien’s Faith might well be called a sort of “life and times” in the best sense, mixed with the catechism. Explaining in great detail the intricacies and nuances of Roman Catholicism, as Tolkien would have experienced it, Tolkien’s Faith taught me as much as about Tolkien as it did my own faith.
Let us hope that all of Tolkiendom reads this wonderful book.