Renodus

J.R.R. Tolkien

6 min read

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)

Life

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in the Orange Free State (now South Africa) in 1892, moved to rural Warwickshire with his mother and brother after his father died, and grew up in a small village called Sarehole — a kind of English countryside that was already disappearing under industrialization and would later reappear, half-real and half-hallucinated, as the Shire. His mother converted the family to Catholicism and was unofficially disowned by her Baptist relatives for it; she died of diabetes when Tolkien was twelve. He was raised by a Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan, who became the most important adult of his life.

He went up to Oxford on a scholarship, fell in love with a fellow orphan called Edith Bratt, and in 1916 — aged twenty-four — found himself on the Somme as a signals officer. He survived the battle; most of his closest school friends did not. He came back with trench fever, a lifetime aversion to machines, and what he would much later describe as the only defense he had against mechanized slaughter: the writing of a different kind of world.

For the next fifty years Tolkien was a philologist and professor — Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, then English language and literature at Merton College — who wrote fiction in every spare hour. The Hobbit came out in 1937 almost by accident; he had been writing it for his children. The Lord of the Rings took him seventeen years and was published in 1954–55; it became, against every publisher’s prediction, one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century. But The Silmarillion — the vast mythology he had been writing since 1917, the thing he actually considered his life’s work — he never finished. His son Christopher edited it posthumously and published it in 1977, and spent the next four decades editing the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth from the boxes his father left behind.

What They Were Doing

Tolkien’s peculiar project — “peculiar” in his own sense — was mythopoeia: to make a mythology where one was needed and didn’t exist. He believed England had no mythology of its own, that it had been erased by the Norman conquest, and he set out to manufacture a plausible pre-Saxon legendarium from scratch, complete with Elvish languages (actually two complete Elvish languages, developed before the mythology), cosmogony, genealogy, and an aesthetic of inevitable decline from a bright beginning. The resulting world is the opposite of a conventional fantasy setting: the magic fades, the great heroes die, the golden cities fall, and what’s left at the end is a diminished agricultural England that still has the memory of a vaster past. That diminishment — the sense of living after the myth — is the emotional engine of everything he wrote.

[[the-silmarillion|The Silmarillion]] is the cosmogonic core. Ilúvatar sings the world into being; Morgoth, his brightest disciple, sings discordantly; the Elves awake; the Silmarils are made and stolen; a first age of catastrophic, beautiful warfare burns itself out. The Lord of the Rings happens at the tail end of this, in the Third Age, when the great powers are already leaving. The ring at the center of that book is not a weapon; it’s the thing you have to give up voluntarily or it will eat you.

Critics have spent sixty years arguing about what the books are “about.” Tolkien himself denied they were allegorical — he hated allegory, particularly the C.S. Lewis kind — but he admitted they were “applicable.” The Shire is rural English memory under industrial threat. Mordor is the Somme industrialized. The Elves are departing because the age of enchantment is ending. The recurring emotional key is eucatastrophe — Tolkien’s own term — the sudden, undeserved, un-foreseeable turn to grace at the moment of total defeat. Sam looking up and seeing the star above Mordor; Gollum biting the ring off on the cliff-edge. The turn does not cancel the loss. You still lose the Elves. The Shire is still scoured.

He was a practicing Catholic, and the books have a Catholic shape even where they don’t have a Catholic surface: the created world is good, it has fallen, the fall is repaired by suffering rather than strength, and the victory is always partial. Frodo does not destroy the ring. He fails; he claims it. The ring goes because of a creature whose own fall made him incidentally useful. That is not a Hollywood ending; it is a theology.

Influence

It’s hard to name the scale of Tolkien’s influence without sounding absurd. Modern fantasy as a genre — every trilogy with elves, every map at the front of the book, every invented language — is basically post-Tolkien. George R.R. Martin is in dialogue with him (self-consciously and somewhat against him). Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Susanna Clarke, N.K. Jemisin all write out of the space he cleared. Outside genre, he made the “secondary world” respectable as a serious literary object — a permission without which there’s no Borges library, no García Márquez Macondo, no Murakami-well. His linguistic inventions changed how fiction thinks about invented languages. And his Catholic theology of eucatastrophe has seeped into unlikely places — Marilynne Robinson’s grace-haunted novels, the late work of Cormac McCarthy. What he was actually doing — building a vast invented past to stand against twentieth-century mechanical violence — turned out to be something other writers desperately needed permission to try.

Connections

  • The Silmarillion — the mythology behind the mythology. The First Age cosmogony that The Lord of the Rings is the distant echo of.
  • Homer — Tolkien’s deepest pre-Christian model. The catalogues, the named weapons, the doomed warrior code, the sea-voyaging exile — all Homeric inheritances. Túrin is Achilles with a Christian diagnosis.
  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Campbell’s monomyth, published 1949, just as The Lord of the Rings was being written. Tolkien hadn’t read Campbell and didn’t need to; he was one of Campbell’s great contemporary cases in real time.
  • The Divine Comedy — the Christian cosmological epic as literary architecture. Tolkien’s Ainulindalë (the music of creation) is Dante’s Paradiso in Genesis form.
  • The Knight in the Panther’s Skin — the medieval heroic code restaged under Christian weight. Rustaveli’s Tariel and Tolkien’s Beren are first cousins — warriors whose love is theological and whose friendships are the moral spine of the plot.
  • A Farewell to Arms — Hemingway’s Italian-front novel and Tolkien’s mythologized Somme are the same war processed through two opposite literary instincts. Minimal realism vs maximal mythmaking; both were at the front.

Key Works

Themes He Anchors

Power and Morality · Free Will and the Moral Law · The Shadow

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