Fr Michael Ward on a new book exploring the writer’s spiritual side.
I became a Catholic in no small part because of JRR Tolkien. Raised as an Evangelical Anglican in the 1970s to be extremely suspicious of Catholics, I nonetheless found Tolkien’s imaginative world of Middle-earth captivating. I also knew that Tolkien had been close friends with his Oxford colleague, CS Lewis, whom I was taught to regard as a Very Good Thing. And since Tolkien had played a crucial role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, I concluded that papists couldn’t be quite so bad as I had been led to believe.
It was therefore apt that my 2012 reception into the Catholic Church occurred at St Gregory and St Augustine, Oxford, where Tolkien was a parishioner for over 20 years. Quite by chance, at the exchange of the sign of peace, the first female hand I got to shake as a newly minted Catholic was that of Priscilla Tolkien, the great man’s daughter and a regular worshipper at St Gregory’s all her life.
Not long afterwards, I found myself in the bookshop at Westminster Cathedral, browsing its Tolkien-related titles. I noticed how very little had been written on his faith, a strange situation for a man who said of himself, “I’m a Roman Catholic. Devout Roman Catholic.” To be sure, plenty had been written about the religious undercurrents in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But biographers had written almost nothing about Tolkien’s own Christian life, and what little they had said was perfunctory.
Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 biography, for instance, asserted that, after Tolkien’s mother died when he was 12, religion “took the place in his affections” that she had previously held, as if his faith was no more than an emotional stopgap. Raymond Edwards’ 2014 biography relegated all discussion of Catholicism to an appendix. Other treatments zeroed in on Tolkien’s Great War service or his linguistic interests, leaving his spiritual life largely untouched. A major exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 2018 gave negligible attention to his faith. The same was true (as I wrote at the time) of the 2019 biopic starring Nicholas Hoult.
Yet, as Priscilla said of her father, he was “a devout Christian” who “cared deeply about his religious faith”. Why this reticence to address such a core aspect of his life? And who could be found to make good the lack?
Step forward Holly Ordway, my colleague and friend, who has written a fantastic new book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death, which falls on 2 September.
The anniversary is also being marked by the Royal Mint with the release of a special £2 coin. Plans are well advanced for a national memorial at a central London site. But the most important commemoration, to my mind, is Ordway’s book, which provides an account of Tolkien that is not dismissive of, or embarrassed by, or ignorant about, or uninterested in, his faith. Rather, it is a sober and factual treatment of his entire life from a religious point of view. It gave me a totally fresh impression of the man. And I am not alone. Tolkien expert John Garth has said of Ordway’s work that he “learned far more reading it than I even realised I needed to learn”.
Tolkien was baptised in infancy as an Anglican in Bloemfontein, South Africa, his birthplace. After his father’s death and his mother’s Tiber-crossing, he was confirmed as a Catholic at the age of 11. Now living in Birmingham and attending Newman’s Oratory, he took Philip as his confirmation name, after the Oratorians founder St Philip Neri.
Within a year, his mother Mabel died, and he was made a ward of Fr Francis Morgan, an Oratorian priest who became a second father to him. From that point until he went to study at Oxford, Tolkien was “virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house”. He became an acolyte and developed a profound devotion to the Eucharist, calling it “the one great thing to love on earth”.
Many Catholics pay little heed to their confirmation saint, but Tolkien had a genuine dedication to St Philip Neri. Ordway reveals that the famous monogram of his initials, JRRT, for John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, contains a hidden “P” in honour of the “third apostle of Rome”, as St Philip is known.
Not that he always hid the link. In a 1955 lecture on philology, Tolkien noted that his Christian names derived from four different languages: French (John), Norse (Ronald), Hebrew (Reuel) and Greek (Philip – from philippos, “horse-lover”).
St Philip was known for his playful spirit – what might even be called a spirit of horseplay. His desire was to maintain cheerfulness through having a clean conscience; hence the importance attached to frequent confession in Oratorian spirituality. Tolkien imbibed that spirit, which counteracted his natural tendency towards melancholy, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the most famous inn in Middle-earth is The Prancing Pony.
He admitted, “I have a very simple sense of humour.” His favourite party trick was to fall downstairs, arms and legs splaying in every direction. He once dressed up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior and chased an astonished neighbour down the road wielding an axe. An invitation to a party at his house specified there would be carriages at midnight, ambulances at 2am, wheelbarrows at 5am and hearses at daybreak.
It was not just Philippine humour that Tolkien inherited, but also his love of humility. At the Birmingham Oratory’s shrine to St Philip hangs a portrait of him topped with the Latin tag Exaltavit humiles – “He has exalted the humble” – a phrase from Mary’s Magnificat. Tolkien quoted these words when explaining how his lowly hobbits were characters fit for “ennoblement” and “heroes more praiseworthy than professionals”.
The Birmingham Oratory is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, a feast to which Tolkien confessed he had “a special devotion”. He later acquired an affinity for the visionary of Lourdes, St Bernadette Soubirous, describing her as “that child of Grace” who was nearest his heart.
His Marian devotion took root in the dark days of the Great War when he saw active service at the Battle of the Somme. From the trenches he wrote a poem entitled “Consolatrix Afflictorum” (“Consoler of the Afflicted”), one of Mary’s titles from the Litany of Loreto.
Indeed, he encountered darkness throughout his life, and Ordway’s biography shows that his faith was hard-won, including a years-long period after demobilisation in which he “almost ceased to practise” his religion.
In late life he had to deal with another kind of test, occasioned by the Second Vatican Council. Despite much private anguish about the Council’s liturgical revisions, Tolkien stated “there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.”
Tolkien’s Faith is not hagiographical or triumphalist, but it is a triumph, a long overdue account of one of the last century’s most prominent and influential Catholics.
Fr Michael Ward is a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Tolkien’s Faith by Holly Ordway is published in September by Word on Fire.
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