BY JEB SMITH

Professor J.R.R Tolkien believed that myths, fantasy, and stories could be a conduit for truth. In a discussion at an inn called the Green Dragon, one of Tolkien’s main characters, the hobbit Sam Gamgee, said of children’s stories he had heard while growing up in the Shire, “I daresay there’s more truth in some of them than you reckon.” The great Catholic writer and critic of modernity G. K. Chesterton, who influenced Tolkien, wrote, “People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.” And Tolkien himself said:

Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he “welcomed” the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into “contact with real life.” The notion that motor-cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more “real” than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree… The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant’s bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) “in a very real sense” a great deal more real.

(J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”)

The truths of Middle earth are valid to all humanity throughout time. After reading Tolkien’s works, we can see our world more accurately. Tolkien’s close friend C. S. Lewis said that reading myths “isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s a rediscovery of it…a child doesn’t despise real woods because he’s been reading about enchanted woods. What he’s read makes all real woods a little enchanted.” Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce told us that when he first read Tolkien, he “encountered a world that was more real than the one [he] was living in.”

“Our world does not have wolves that disguise themselves as grannies, but it does have “wolves who disguise themselves as sheep or grannies.” It does not have pumpkins that turn into carriages but perhaps pumpkins themselves are as miraculous and should surprise us as much as when Cinderella saw her carriage the night of the ball-there is a real danger that those who do not believe in dragons become dragons. There is a real danger that those who do not believe that Jack could slay the giant become servants of the giant and slayers of Jack. Such people, who are very successful in politics and law, are placed in the giant’s pocket and are  used by him to ensure that Jack remains powerless.

(Joseph Pearce, Bilbo’s Journey Discovering the Hidden Meaning of the Hobbit [Charlotte, North Carolina: Saint Benedict Press, 2012])

In The Keys of Middle-earth, Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova argued that the keys to understanding Tolkien’s creation were to first understand the primary medievalist literature that influenced him. Those documents provided the roots and ingredients that made up Tolkien’s imagination. C. S. Lewis once said to Tolkien, “There is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” Tolkien incorporated many elements of medieval literature into his works, such as poetry, quests, heroes, rings and riddles. In addition, medieval literature heavily influenced Tolkien’s languages, characters, names, plots, the structure of his poetry, and songs. By bringing back medievalist literature, Lewis and Tolkien were, in part, attempting to resurrect the wonder of nature that had been lost by the widespread acceptance of materialism. And as with medieval tales, the intended audience was adults.

“Storytelling was another beloved pastime, and the aristocracy especially favored long tales in verse about chivalric adventures. Stories of King Arthur and his knights were particularly popular and enjoyed by aristocrats across Europe.

(Jeffrey Singman, The Middle Ages: Everyday Life in Medieval Europe, Reprint Edition [Sterling, 2013])

Tolkien said, “fairy-story” is really an adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists.” People living during the Middle Ages and hobbits alike enjoyed life and the telling of tales. There was never an age when they must, in our modern sense, grow up. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “We envy children for still doing what men used to do, such as play games and enjoy fairy tales.”

However, it was not just the nobles and aristocrats of the Middle Ages that enjoyed fantasy tales; consider the modern Brothers Grimm, read the original German folklore; these are not the child’s tales we think of today. It seems to me that Walt Disney created the modern perception that tales are only for children.

Like hobbits, people in the Middle Ages knew how to throw a party, and did so frequently. A marriage or a jousting tournament could set the entire medieval countryside into a two-week celebration; one that would put Bilbo Baggins’s birthday party to shame. They consistently gathered on holy days, which were many, and also for baptisms, fairs, and various ceremonies, such as oaths of fealty and the dubbing of knights. They used any event as a reason to have great festivals full of drinking, feasting, dancing, joking, singing, telling of tales, and general merrymaking; something the puritans of Jesus’ day accused him of in Luke 7:34. Jesus’ first miracle was to keep the celebration at Cana’s wedding going by turning water into wine after they had run out.

Entering adulthood in our modern world means that you concede certain freedoms and agree to unwritten rules; including many freedoms that hobbits and medieval peasants would have never given up. As an adult, you are now old enough to become a slave-wage earner and pay tax to a government you may or may not support; this is now your life and is now your identity and purpose. Fun, entertainment (outside of those approved by our socialistic and capitalistic and materialistic economy) are forbidden to men who are now serfs to modern society. It is a Chrsitian, and even divine attribute to enjoy life. 

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is not part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.

(C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, First American Edition [Macmillan, 1949, 1–3])

It may be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to lifelessness, but to a rush of life…a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit force and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “do it again” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead… It is possible that God says every morning “do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike, it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we.

(G. K. Chesterton, The Three Apologies of G. K. Chesterton [Middletown, Delaware: Mockingbird Press, 2018])

The Greatest Truth of all time

Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the  old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God,  who through Christ reconciled us to himself. Justification is at the same time the acceptance of God’s righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ.”

(Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 5911 1997).

Tolkien accepted the revealed truth of the Gospel. As a devout Catholic, he learned that he was a sinner in need of repentance and forgiveness. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “with regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us, there is an immeasurable inequality.” The Council of Trent declared sin cannot be dealt with through any means other “than the merit of the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who reconciled us to God in his blood, having become our justice, and sanctification, and redemption.” Pope Benedict XVI in his doctrine on justification said, “Man is unable to ‘justify’ himself with his own actions.”Saint Bonaventure said no one can reach God, “Except through the crucified.”The CCC summarized it well by stating, “Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”

Tolkien said that “if literature teaches us anything at all, it is this that we have in us an eternal element.”Tolkien scholar Devin Brown wrote, “Through his fiction, Tolkien points to something eternal, something that goes beyond the physical world.” Tolkien believed that because man has a mind that can create and enjoy fantasy, music, poetry, art, this displays his divine nature. Something that separates us from the animal kingdom is using our abilities as image bearers to create imaginative works. And all myths in some manner reflect eternal truth since God made man and his imagination. Man, by creating, is fulfilling in some way his imaginative purpose given by God.

Tolkien believed that certain truths could only be conveyed through myths that can serve as “a far-off gleam or echo of Evangelium [Gospel- good news] in the real world.” In Wisdom in Wonderland, Joseph Pearce points out that Jesus taught truth through storytelling and parables in an imaginary setting; it was his most common form of teaching in the synoptic gospels. The stories of the prodigal son and good Samaritan, for example, used imaginary characters that his audience could relate to and so could better understand what he was teaching.

Joseph Pearce has said that if he gave a talk at a university, the topic of which was the Gospel, it would attract very few people. However, the talk will draw in hundreds of people when his topic is Tolkien. Through Tolkien and his tales, the audience hears the Good News and the teachings of the Gospel and orthodox Christianity. Further, as Pearce notes, people lower their resistance when discussing myths and legends. If you were to take the usual evangelical approach and “share the Gospel,” the audience would raise their defenses and become much less open to your message.

Tales provide an approach that can be used to share the Gospel with an audience that would otherwise not be receptive to the Good News it proclaims. In the Middle Ages, storytelling monks used tales as an avenue to bring the audience to the faith. Bradley Blitzer wrote, “Myths, Tolkien believed, allowed us to see things as they were meant to be, prior to the Fall.” Tolkien believed we could experience God through tales and mythology, and they should direct us to Him. Tim Keller has a great short video available on YouTube well worth the thirteen minutes titled “C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Power of Fiction.” It is an excellent summary of Tolkien’s understanding of myths and legends and their relation to God, salvation, Jesus’s death on the cross, and how our love of fiction points us to our creator.

Like the medievalist before him, Tolkien believed fairy tales held elements of truth; he viewed the Gospel in this way, not simply as a story but truth, a tale that entered history, a true fairy story. He explained as follows:

The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story—and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy…of course, I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story, but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest…the author…is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality.

(J. R. R. Tolkien, “Letter 89” in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien [Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000])

The account of Jesus’ life, teachings, death and Resurrection was the most remarkable story ever written by the most fantastic author. As Tolkien says in On Fairy-Stories, “This story is supreme and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord of angels, and of men and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.” In addition to being the greatest story ever written by the most fantastic author, the Gospels were historically authentic, as the author used real people in real time. In the same work, Tolkien said of the Gospel message, “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits… To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”

It was this understanding of Tolkien’s that helped him convert C. S. Lewis to Christianity. Tolkien explained how the story of God’s interaction with man was a myth and a fairy tale, just as were the stories Lewis loved in Norse epics and poems. But it was the one myth and fairy tale that also happened in history. Because it took place in history, however, did not make it any less a fairy tale. Tolkien met many gods in his extensive reading and research but called only one Lord.

I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds, only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.

(John Stott, The Cross of Christ [IVP Books, 2006])