Of all the Catholic authors of the last century, JRR Tolkien is the best read – and astonishingly draws his readers, without any warning, into a Catholic mind.
He does this with such sensitivity and subtlety that there is some scope for the Church, as part of its evangelistic and apologetic task, to offer to help our culture with the interpret-ation of what they find so entrancing, inspiring and beautiful. For the Catholic Church shares the same mould as the mind of Tolkien.
Nonetheless, from the perspective of our secular culture, Tolkien can appear to be a mystery.
He works at two levels, of course. The first and most important level is that of archetypes. He writes in his fiction what is true in the world of fact. Actually, because he writes with some profundity, his fiction is often truer and more accessible than much fact.
Tolkien writes with what has been described as the “freedom of implicity”. He doesn’t lect- ure, teach, harangue or preach; he sings a melody for which you discover you already have the harmonic accompaniment within you. He leaves you with the responsibility of clothing what you have discovered with its deeper meaning.
Nonetheless, in our sub-Christian culture, where the hordes suffer from cultural amnes-ia, critics aim certain superficial questions at him. Obsessed with both sex and feminism (not always the happiest of bedfellows) the critics ask: “Where is the sex and where are the heroic powerful women?”
Finding it difficult to look beyond the immediate drama of the narrative, Tolkien is writt- en off by some of our contemporaries as boringly Platonic and unpleasantly misogynistic.
Yet rather like the New Testament, where nothing can happen without Our Lady’s consent as God-bearer, or her initiating the ministry of the Messiah with her intercession at Cana, you have to look a little deeper into the lay- ers of the narrative to perceive the more complex imagination and intentions of the author.
Drawing out how the inspiration of Mary functions for the figure of Galadriel is an enterprise requiring more space than we have here; but we only have to take a little trouble to look back into Tolkien’s early Middle Earth to discover the pattern of the mutuality of love, an equality not of status but of courage and self-giving, lying at the roots of his narrative.
In fact, Tolkien is more ambitious than the rather unimaginative power-brokers of binary feminism envisage. He not only intermingles man and woman, but, in order to drive the quest for unitive purpose further and deeper, he has ambitions for the fusion also of mortal and immortal. So human and elven love, representing the fusion of mortal and immortal, provides him with the material for his archetypal quest.
In The Silmarillion, in the first age of the world, Beren (a mortal man) fell in love with Lúthien, the most beautiful of all the children of Ilúvatar, immortal daughter of Thingol, Elf king of Doriath, when he catches sight of her dancing in the moonlight. Finding his way to Doriath through many perils, he asks for her hand in marriage.
But to her father he is both an unworthy as well as unwelcome suitor. So to get rid of him, King Thingol resolves to solve the problem by sending him on an impossible quest: to retrieve the three Silmarils, the most precious of all jewels, which house light from the beginning of the world, more ancient than the sun.
They had been stolen by Morgoth, who had proclaimed himself king of the world; he had embedded the Silmarils in a great iron crown and placed it on his own head. He never took the crown off his head, while Balrogs – spirits of flame – surrounded the jewels, which were guarded behind dark walls in the depths of his terrible realms.
Rebuking the father for being willing to exchange his daughter for things, Beren sets off full of courage, skill and determination. But at the first hurdle he is captured and overcome by werewolves and consigned to a pit to be eaten.
However, Lúthien, no passive object of adoration, has taken matters into her hands, and has decided to accompany him secretly on the quest to help, defend and speed his success.
In a series of wonderful encounters she constantly rescues him. The journey continues as man and woman, lover and beloved, human and elven princess, journey and struggle side by side. She will even descend into the pit of death to offer her immortality in exchange for their return to life together.
Their love, like their quest, was built on the determination to both live and die for each other.
For Tolkien, the pattern of the interweaving of love through all the categories of existence, of immortal and mortal, man and woman, lover and beloved, always co-dependent, is drawn from the deeper wisdom of the Gospels.
It is there that we find in the deepest expression of mutuality in Theotokos and Christ, Our Lady and Jesus, setting the pattern for a narrative of mythic expectation that characterises the heart of the human quest.
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