JRR Tolkien has had some unexpected admirers – Joni Mitchell, Iris Murdoch, Terry Pratchett and WH Auden – and to their number is now added Niall Ferguson, the clever economic historian. He took part in a recent episode of Great Lives, the BBC Radio 4 series hosted by Matthew Parris on individuals who deserve to be called great, to put the case for Tolkien, supplemented by a feisty article for the Sunday Telegraph. He loved Tolkien’s books as a boy; as a father he read them to his children. More unexpectedly, he attributes his own political conservatism to Tolkien and wonders that Tolkien’s liberal admirers – notably contemporary Silicon Valley entrepreneurs – seem oblivious to his politics.
“Why, if his books are so immensely popular,” he asks, “has Tolkien’s deep-rooted conservatism had such a tiny influence? For nearly all Tolkien’s millions of readers seem to have overlooked the fact that the great edifice of his fiction stands on a foundation of profoundly Tory philosophy.”
Ferguson doesn’t, obviously, equate a Tory philosophy with attachment to the Conservative Party, a body which Tolkien treated with reserve. But undoubtedly Tolkien was, as Ferguson says, conservative with a small c: he once crossed a cheque to the Inland Revenue with the words: “not a penny for Concorde!” He was, says Ferguson, a little Englander to the point of parody.
It is of course excellent news that a distinguished economic historian turns out to be so sound in his tastes. And there were many enjoyable things in the Great Lives programme. When Matthew Parris, expressing a not uncommon view, said that he was himself allergic to dwarves, elves and suchlike fantasy, and asked, “Is there something wrong with me?” (plainly expecting the answer, “no”), Ferguson replied, unhesitatingly, “Yes.”
But sound as he is on Tolkien, Niall Ferguson does not give an account of the whole man. For Tolkien’s religion was far more fundamental to his worldview than politics. Ferguson acknowledges that Tolkien was a conservative Catholic who preferred the Latin Mass, and leaves it at that. But religion coloured everything about him: his sensibility, including his artistic sensibility.
His antipathy to modernity had, as John Garth points out, much to do with his experience in the Great War during which he served on the Somme: the inhuman machinery of war consumed some of his closest friends.
But this flight to local, familial, rural and particular things from the mechanised inhumanity of industrialisation wasn’t the product of a Tory mindset; it was in spirit very similar to William Morris’s anti-industrial, anti-mechanistic outlook.
It was Catholicism that coloured his life, his work and his worldview. Consider his letter to his wife Edith in 1916, when he was a soldier: he wrote that he “wished more than anything to make England Catholic” again and in doing so to reintroduce “beauty, purity and love to his country”. This is not a political aspiration; it is spiritual.
His social conservatism was an aspect of his faith. This is not to say that Catholicism makes Tories – a generation after Tolkien, CS Lewis and the Inklings met in the Eagle and Child in St Giles in Oxford, the same pub frequented by Herbert McCabe, a Marxist Dominican friar – but the Church does draw its roots from families and small communities and parishes.
Tolkien’s faith was bound up with his love for his clever, pretty mother, Mabel, who died when he was 12. It was she who became a Catholic after the death of her husband, as a result of which she was cut off from the financial support of her family and her husband’s. It was one reason why she and the boys, Ronald (JRR) and Hilary, were poor, though her husband’s brother Laurence very generously paid for Tolkien’s school fees. And to an extent, the family’s reduced circumstances as a result of her conversion seems to have caused her son to have thought of his mother as a kind of martyr.
Mabel converted to Catholicism in 1900 and moved back to her native Birmingham where she and her sons could be close to a Catholic church as well as to the school where JRR was a pupil. She moved to a house close to the Birmingham Oratory, founded by John Henry Newman, where she became friends with the Oratorian priests, including Fr Francis Morgan whom she named in her will as her sons’ guardian, for she had no confidence that her own family could be relied on to raise them as Catholics. When she was ill, she and the boys moved to a cottage in the village of Rednal close to the Oratory retreat house, where the family had the freedom of the grounds, where they would take Fr Francis’s dog, Lord Roberts, for walks.
Fr Morgan loved the boys. JRR thought of him as a second father. He could not take them into the Oratory and so placed them in homes within reach of the Oratory so he could see the boys every day. He supplemented their finances with his own money so they could continue to receive an excellent education. His only offence was his appalled reaction to the news that JRR was romantically involved with another young orphan, Edith Bratt. He not only forbade Ronald to meet Edith, but to correspond with her until he came of age. “I owe everything to Fr Francis,” he wrote, and duly obeyed. He and Edith married during the war.
So his faith was associated with his deepest emotional attachments, to his mother, and his second father.
Catholicism was no less integrated with JRR’s imaginative and linguistic work. The world of his creation, which owed everything to the Norse myths, was never pagan in its outlook, though the Christianity was infused rather than explicit or allegorical. Indeed, he would maintain that “the noble northern spirit” was “nowhere… nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianised”. His best-known work is full of Christian resonances: to take one obvious instance, the destruction of the Ring in the Lord of the Rings took place on 25 March, the date of the Annunciation and the Incarnation.
He was influential in the conversion of his friend CS Lewis to Christianity. One evening in September 1931, he and another friend, Hugo Dyson, visited Lewis in Magdalen, and argued him from theism to Christianity by persuading him that his openness to the underlying truths of myths could be transferred to the Christian story, with the difference that in this case, “the story of Christ is simply a true myth”. Tolkien was distressed that Lewis never became a Catholic, which he attributed to the “ulsterior motive”, or Lewis’s apparent regress to Ulster Protestantism.
JRR’s Catholicism came nearest to translating into politics in his qualified sympathy for Franco in the Spanish Civil War on the basis that the Republicans were anti-Catholic and killed clergy. He detested Hitler but was even more repelled by Stalin.
But this is not to say that JRR Tolkien was a Conservative; he was a conservative Catholic. The real question, then, pace Niall Ferguson, is not why liberal admirers fail to appreciate his Conservatism, but why his Catholicism is so little influential with Lord of the Rings devotees. Perhaps the answer is that Tolkien was light in his touch. He wrote to the Jesuit priest, Fr Robert Murray:
“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
If Niall Ferguson has taken his political conservatism from Tolkien, perhaps he should not stop there… the next move in following Tolkien is terribly obvious.
This article first appeared in the January 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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