In an article published in 2014 in the journal Tolkien Studies, aptly titled “But What Did He Really Mean?” Verlyn Flieger points out the contradictory statements that Tolkien made about various issues, the most controversial being about whether or not The Lord of the Rings was an expressly Catholic work. Flieger states:
Thus he could tell one correspondent that The Lord of the Rings was “fundamentally” religious and Catholic (Murray, Letters 172) and another that he felt no obligation to make it fit Christianity (Auden, Letters 144). … There are many such turnabouts, reversals of direction that not only make him appear contradictory but invite contradictory interpretations of his work, permitting advocates with opposite views to cherry-pick the statements that best support their position.
(Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014, p. 148)
The issue for scholars is how to avoid cherry-picking, especially from Tolkien’s letters, in order to support a one-sided idea of what his intentions were. How can we understand the paradoxical and contradictory views of religion (or no religion) in his work and letters while also acknowledging that the global audience of Tolkien’s works does not necessarily share his religious views or interpret his work according to an idea of univocal Christian belief?
Seminar on Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-first Century, November 26, 2023.
An upcoming event on November 26, free and online, will attempt to show the diversity of religious interpretations of Tolkien’s works. Presented jointly by the Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and the Tolkien Society, the organizers hope
to bring varied and underrepresented perspectives on Tolkien and religion into conversation with longstanding currents in the field, thereby enriching our understanding of religious plurality in Tolkien’s secondary world and in our primary world as well.
(Tolkien Society Online Seminar)
To give you a preview of some of these underrepresented perspectives, below is a list of the speakers and their topics. For more details about the schedule and how to register, go to the Tolkien Society Seminar page. Abstracts of the papers are available here.
Sonali Chunodkar, Ilúvatar as a Reader/Listener-God: A Barthesian Interpretation of Sub-creation in Tolkien
Alexandra Filonenko, On Some Esoteric Motifs in The Silmarillion
Taylor Driggers & Mariana Rios Maldonado, Here at the End(s) of All Things: The Fall of Númenor as a Theology of Failure for Middle-earth
Erik Jampa Andersson, ‘With Furious Speed’ – Tolkien, Revelation, and the Tibetan Treasure Tradition
Hollie Willis, ‘Borne away like smoke’: Unpacking J.R.R Tolkien’s Depiction of Cremation in Middle-earth in the Context of Catholic Canon Law
Adam Debosscher, The Pyre of Denethor: from suicide on the page to manslaughter on the screen
Rafael Silva Fouto, Pagan Magic and the Marvelous: Songs of Enchantment in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion
Brianna Burdetsky, Tolkien and Roth: The Legendarium Meets Jewish History
Mercury Natis, Baruk Khazâd! Antisemitism, Jewish Joy, and Dwarven Contexts
Tom Martin, The Tao of Tom Bombadil
Jeffrey Moore, Where In the Story Are We?: The Epilogue of The Lord of the Rings and a Retrospective Apocalypse
David Chambers, Black Eucatastrophe and Black Power
Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author
In the same spirit as the Tolkien Society Seminar, a recent article by Tom Emanuel, ” ‘It is “about” nothing but itself’: Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author,” proposes a way of reading Tolkien’s works that aims to be more inclusive than other Christian readings that argue for an exclusive and unified Catholic doctrine in all of his works and letters. Emanuel outlines an approach that would take into account Tolkien’s lived experience of his religion as well as the diversity of readers’ spiritual beliefs in interpreting his fiction.
Emanuel objects to critics who turn a valid Christian interpretation into the only interpretation:
What may be, in fact, a valid Christian interpretation of Tolkien’s fiction is passed off as proof of evangelical intent. This assertion is founded in turn upon a construction of Tolkien as an unproblematically Christian author who implants a single, univocal meaning in his works which can be worked out by proper exegesis. Such an approach does not do justice to my encounter with Tolkien’s fiction and the complex, generative interactivity between his faith, my faith, and the text itself. It does not do justice to the thousands of other reader encounters with it, religious and otherwise, which do not collapse into theological exclusivism but nevertheless draw deep wells of meaning from the secondary world into which Tolkien invites us. Nor, as I hope to show, does it do justice to Tolkien’s own stated intent regarding the interpretation of his works.
(Mythlore, vol. 42.1, 2023 https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/3/)
Emanuel’s article is free and open access from the Mythlore journal if you want to read more about how progressive Christian and Jewish modes of interpretation can suggest a way to approach Tolkien’s works.
Works Cited
Emanuel, Tom. ” ‘It is “about” nothing but itself’: Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, #143, October 2023. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/3/.
Flieger, Verlyn. “But What Did He Really Mean?” Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014, p. 149-166. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/tks.2014.0005.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beyond” and “Halls of Manwë (Taniquetil)” are both available in various publications of Tolkien’s artwork, such as Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, edited by Catherine McIlwaine, Bodleian Library, 2018, as well as in various places online.
Tolkien Society Online Seminar 2023 – Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-first Century. https://www.tolkiensociety.org/events/tolkien-society-online-seminar-2023-tolkien-and-religion-in-the-twenty-first-century/.
As always, if you do not have access to some articles (such as the Tolkien Studies one in this post) please contact me and I will send you a copy for your personal research.
Anna Smol: A Single Leaf 
4 responses to “Inclusive Perspectives on Tolkien & Religion”
“The issue for scholars is how to avoid cherry-picking, especially from Tolkien’s letters, in order to support a one-sided idea of what his intentions were.”
The short answer, of course, is: “don’t do that!” A longer, more helpful answer is, the same way one does in any field of scholarly endeavor: search out all the evidence that bears on a question, assess and weigh the evidence, and then propose a theory based on and accounting for all the evidence, show how it does so, and answer anticipated objections (especially the strongest and/or most obvious ones). Claudio Testi’s _Pagan Saints in Middle-earth_ is exemplary in this regard (which I think must be admitted, as to his method, whether one agrees with his conclusions or not).
“How can we understand the paradoxical and contradictory views of religion (or no religion) in his work and letters”
I would begin by asking whether such views as Tolkien expressed really are, necessarily, either paradoxical or contradictory, or if they can’t be reasonably understood as making different but not actually mutually exclusive claims. For example, isn’t it entirely possible for Tolkien to not “feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology”* and yet for his story to be nonetheless “fundamentally religious and Catholic”? (Consider as an analogy that Peter Jackson obviously did not feel any obligation to make his movie trilogy hew to every particular of Tolkien’s story at all points, in plot or theme or tone, and yet he and many others obviously consider it nonetheless fundamentally, in its core, true to Tolkien.)
* Tolkien then immediately adds, “though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief” (“Letters” #269). I see no reason to interpret these consecutive statements as paradoxical or contradictory either. Tolkien himself demonstrates there that they need not be.
“while also acknowledging that the global audience of Tolkien’s works does not necessarily share his religious views or interpret his work according to an idea of univocal Christian belief”
First, I would note that you could just as well omit “global” here, since even the audience local to Tolkien (in space and time) did not universally share his religious views — as Tolkien well knew — or interpret it thusly. Second, I would ask, who, exactly, has denied this obvious fact? And third, how exactly does this fact bear on the question of _Tolkien’s_ intentions, i.e., of “what did _he_ really mean”?
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Hi Carl,
Welcome to my blog, and thank you for your response.
I think we all agree that the best scholarly method is, as you say, to search out and weigh all the evidence. In my understanding of Flieger’s and Emanuel’s essays, this is the procedure they are encouraging as well. Thank you, though, for the recommendation of Testi’s book; I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my to-read list.
Of course, no one is denying that Tolkien was a devout Catholic or that some Christian interpretations of his work are not valid. The difficulty for some occurs when a critic claims to know Tolkien’s intentions and proclaims that their inside knowledge of Tolkien’s mind supports their particular interpretation as the only valid one. I prefer Tom Emanuel’s emphasis on applicability and the freedom of the reader in what he describes as “the tricky interplay of writer, reader, and text” (p.44). This approach doesn’t neglect the writer and his lived experience of his religion, but it also puts the reader in dialogue with the writer and the text.
I don’t see what the problem is with referring to Tolkien’s “global” audience. Yes, people around Tolkien (in space and time) did not necessarily hold the same religious views, as Holly Ordway’s recent spiritual biography makes clear (I’m only into the first couple of chapters, but she paints a vivid picture of how Catholicism was viewed in Tolkien’s England). And no one denies that readers today hold diverse religious views. However, where I think that this obvious fact matters: either we espouse the “authorial-intentional frame” (Emanuel p. 47) and try to claim that readers must accept our religious interpretation as the only interpretation – in which case it doesn’t matter who the readers are or what beliefs they hold; or, we can acknowledge the diverse ideas that readers (from around the globe) bring to the text, how they “draw deep wells of meaning” (p. 32) from Tolkien’s world that might add something to our understanding of his works – in which case it does make a difference.
If you read the abstracts of the Tolkien Society Seminar papers, you’ll see that a number of them will be exploring Catholic perspectives as well as Jewish history, pagan influence, and more. I’m looking forward to hearing how they might enrich my reading of Tolkien’s fictions.
Perhaps in the future, might we see you present a paper at a Tolkien conference that more fully responds to Emanuel’s study of the Foucauldian author-figure as an approach to Catholic interpretations of Tolkien’s works? I would be interested in listening to that.
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“The difficulty for some occurs when a critic claims to know Tolkien’s intentions and proclaims that their inside knowledge of Tolkien’s mind supports their particular interpretation as the only valid one.” — This isn’t a matter that I was addressing in my response (which was limited to replying to the questions you asked in the first section of your post), but I would agree that to the extent anyone _actually_ claims these things, I would also have objections. I would have to spend more time with the books Emanuel cites as examples, and with specific critiques of them, to see whether that is a fair characterization of them (particularly as regards Freeman’s book, which Emanuel singles out). But in fact I take issue most with another aspect of Emanuel’s article — regarding his claims not about critics but about Tolkien — which I may well write something about.
Similarly the notion that some critics “try to claim that readers must accept our religious interpretation as the only interpretation” — This is so obviously an absurd thing to claim that it’s hard not to feel this is a strawman. Who exactly _does_ this? I mean, yes, I’m don’t doubt that some people somewhere have done so, but is this really a fair general characterization of Christian/Catholic readings generally? Is this something that Freeman (whom, again, Emanuel singles out) actually does? (Again, I’ll have to spend more time with his book, but I know I didn’t get that message from it when I first spent some time with it.)
And I can’t help but wonder now, given your reply: are Christian/Catholic readings of Tolkien somehow uniquely guilty of being insufficiently concerned with “who the readers are or what beliefs they hold” and not “acknowledg[ing] the diverse ideas that readers (from around the globe) bring”? Are Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Pagan, etc. readings of Tolkien measured with this same measure?
Lastly, I didn’t say that there was a “problem” with referring to Tolkien’s “global” audience. I was just pointing out that the issue of shared views pertained even to just the more local audience (culturally and linguistically) that Tolkien knew, or had reason to think, his work would reach when he wrote and published it. Certainly the more global audience his work has since achieved magnifies the issue — but it didn’t create it.
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Hi Carl, Sorry for my delay in replying — it’s been a busy month! Like you, I haven’t read Freeman, and I’m also not familiar enough with a broad range of Christian critics of Tolkien to make any statements about what they do in general, if that is even possible given the variety of Christian beliefs and the diversity of lived religions. What I do react against, though, is someone saying, for example, that queer readings of Tolkien’s texts are completely invalid and should be shut down because Tolkien was a Catholic or a Christian, as we saw happened in the reactions to the Tolkien & Diversity Seminar a couple of years ago. I think that you can have “Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Pagan, etc” readings of Tolkien that do not deny he was a Catholic, and you can have Catholic critics that do not deny other approaches as equally valid.
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