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demnation
Rohan
Dec 27 2013, 10:29pm
Post #2 of 17
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I suppose it is a testament to Tolkien's skill
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that his work speaks to people like me who care not a whit about Catholicism or religion in general.
Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless
As far as any character is 'like me' it is Faramir–except that I lack what all my characters possess: Courage.
A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity
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Eruonen
Half-elven
Dec 27 2013, 10:38pm
Post #3 of 17
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It illuminates the man and his thinking toward his work.
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I doubt that we would have the LOTR, Silmarillion, or even The Hobbit without the influence of his faith.
Would he have been driven simply out of his desire for philology to construct his mythos based on his admiration for Northern sagas? Though he may have started such a work, I think the outcome would have been different. The whole eucatastrophe and arc of his story probably would not have been developed as it was.
"Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."
"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies." Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil."
We are fortunate as readers of fantasy that he believed as he did.
By the way, I am not RC and do not belong to an organized religion so the posting was merely to show the importance of his faith to him.
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demnation
Rohan
Dec 27 2013, 11:22pm
Post #5 of 17
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Apologies for the sharpness of my first remark. I acknowledge and appreciate the influence of Tolkien's faith on his work, but the truth is is that I am totally out of my depth when it comes to religious interpretations of Tolkien's work. Still, all interpretations make for interesting discussions, so thanks! 
Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless
As far as any character is 'like me' it is Faramir–except that I lack what all my characters possess: Courage.
A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity
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Eruonen
Half-elven
Dec 28 2013, 4:13am
Post #6 of 17
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And to this point, there are multiple takes on JRRT and LOTR
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from different perspectives....psychology, gnosticism, philosophy, etc. etc. and all have made interesting observations.
For example:
http://bcrecordings.net/...php?main_page=page_2
"Tolkien and "The Lord of the Rings"
Gnosis and Creativity merged in this great work by J.R.R. Tolkien. A seven part set is introduced by this full-length presentation.
Running Time 74:04. Listen or Download"
http://www.cgjungpage.org/...id=541&Itemid=40
A Jungian Interpretation of Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings
Written by Pia Skogemann
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Rembrethil
Tol Eressea
Dec 28 2013, 5:41am
Post #7 of 17
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That there is always application, even if allegory is absent, there is always a lesson to be learned. In drawing it out, we may seem inventive and pedantic (My Mum always had to point out the morals in every film and television program. 'Was that right? Was that kind? What should he have done? Why?), but they are still there.
The fact might be that Tolkien was a Catholic, and that pervaded his life. I think that those who do not agree will temd to minimize the fact, and those who do tend to overstate it. The truth is most times, somewhere in the middle.
Call me Rem, and remember, not all who ramble are lost...Uh...where was I?
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FarFromHome
Valinor
Dec 28 2013, 1:17pm
Post #8 of 17
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This article starts in an interesting way
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by focusing on the origin of Tolkien's Catholicism with his mother's conversion. It makes him very different from "cradle Catholics" of his generation (Joyce and Proust are always the ones that come to my mind) who perhaps also absorbed the aesthetic of Catholicism but who rebelled against the teachings of the organised religion itself.
I think an important element of Tolkien's faith is that he came to it through his beloved and soon-to-be-lost mother. Her sacrifice (martyrdom, even, in his mind) gave him a personal commitment to his faith that few "cradle Catholics" would have, I think. For Tolkien, his Catholicism was deeply internalized, and (it seems to me) not primarily concerned with the outward trappings of organized religion. I believe (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) he wasn't educated in Catholic schools, and living in England where Catholicism was not the state religion with the kind of controlling status it had, for example, in Ireland, he was free to keep his religion on the level of a moral and spiritual inspiration, rather than experiencing it through the flawed human institutions that led some Catholic-born writers of his generation to rebel. I wonder if Tolkien's decision to omit all references to any organized religion from LotR, but instead to give the whole work a sense of the mystical and spiritual, might spring from the way he experienced his religion himself.
I'm inclined to think that all religions, at the level of the mystical and spiritual, draw on the same human impulses and come to resemble each other. The outward trappings may be different, but the deeper impulses are very much alike. In fact, even without a deity, "spirituality" or "humanism" or any other attempt to understand our place in the universe leads back to this too. Perhaps that's why Tolkien seems to speak to everyone, no matter what their religion or lack thereof, providing they respond to this deep human desire for something beyond themselves.
They went in, and Sam shut the door.
But even as he did so, he heard suddenly,
deep and unstilled,
the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth.
From the unpublished Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings
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squire
Half-elven
Dec 28 2013, 4:12pm
Post #9 of 17
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Your observations got me thinking and researching
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Your ideas about Tolkien's Catholic upbringing in a non-Catholic context got me thinking about something else we have just read: Milbank's ideas (in Eruonen's other thread on this board) about The Hobbit and the Catholic socio-economic "Distributist" movement of the early 1900s. She seems to suggest that Tolkien would have been aware of, if not actively a supporter of, these ideas simply because he was an English Catholic.
I had never heard of Distributism before, and I looked it up. Evidently in England two of its leaders were Belloc and Chesterton, whom I have encountered before as examples of prominent English Catholic writers and intellectuals. I know that Tolkien said he was very aware of Chesterton since they shared an interest in English culture and folkways, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a mention of Belloc in my readings about Tolkien's influences. Your post drove me to look them up and see if they, too, had had a more "private" Catholic outlook due to being English.
What I found seemed to muddy the waters even more: Chesterton was high-Anglican who went to St. Paul's, a class Anglican public school; though long in sympathy with Catholicism, he only converted in late middle age, in the 1920s. Belloc was Anglo-French, born to a prominent Englishwoman and a French attorney, but raised in England after his father's death when he was an infant. He was educated at the Oratory School, England's prototypical 'public school' for Catholics founded by Cardinal Newman. By contrast and in keeping with your argument, Tolkien's guardian may have been an Oratory Catholic priest, but the boy went to King Edward's School, which was not a Catholic institution -- although being in Birmingham, I suspect it was more open to religious minorities than some other English schools at the time.
Well, this is rambling a bit, but what I'm getting to seems to be that it is very hard to make general statements about England's Catholic intellectuals, as Pearce tries to when he argues that Tolkien's membership in the ranks of Catholicism's "literary converts" was peculiar because he was a "cradle convert", "a charming mixture" of cradle Catholic and "full-blown convert". Chesterton and Newman are famous examples, I guess, of more mainstream "literary converts" (as is Pearce himself, I found out today; it's almost as if Pearce wants his own life choices to be validated by identifying them with Tolkien's as much as possible). Likewise, following your thinking, I wonder if we can really guess how Tolkien's Catholicism was affected by his being English rather than living in a majority-Catholic culture like Ireland's or France's, or how his religiosity was different from that of other English Catholic intellectuals because of his particular education and somewhat unique personal history.
His faith was one of his distinguishing features as an author and thinker, of course. But so were his interests in the English past, the aesthetics of language and the appeal of romantic tales, none of which are particularly Catholic in themselves. Again, sorry to ramble... all of this reminds me of our discussion of Rosebury's book last year, and of Rosebury's insistence that Tolkien must be given context and comparisons if he is to be appreciated as a literary artist (see the "solitary idol" quote in my post here). Yet as Rosebury and other Tolkien critics continue to highlight in their studies, it's just plain very hard to compare Tolkien to others on almost any front!
squire online:
RR Discussions: The Valaquenta, A Shortcut to Mushrooms, and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
Lights! Action! Discuss on the Movie board!: 'A Journey in the Dark'. and 'Designing The Two Towers'.
Footeramas: The 3rd (and NOW the 4th too!) TORn Reading Room LotR Discussion; and "Tolkien would have LOVED it!"
squiretalk introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary
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Eruonen
Half-elven
Dec 29 2013, 1:57am
Post #10 of 17
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And unlike C.S. Lewis, he avoided the allegory impulse
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and only utilized his RC faith as a framework for his secondary creation. The Silmarillion opens as Genesis and it is very easy to see the similarities, however, it also has significant differences that make it distinctly his sub-creation. To recognize the themes from his Christian background does not diminish the universal appeal to readers of all beliefs or unbelief positions. At the heart are ideals and myths that transcend one culture / religious outlook. After all, the themes he explored and relied upon have distinctly "pagan" - northern European pre-Christian contributions from mythos to languages. He simply provided a direction toward a future Christian story since his sub-creation is pre-Christian history. Like I said, I am not Catholic and do not consider myself religious other than in a broad sense, but I can recognize his influences and am very happy they allowed his creativity to flow. Without them, who knows what he would have produced and if any of these stories would exist.
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Lightfoot
Rivendell
Dec 29 2013, 3:41pm
Post #11 of 17
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I listened to one of his Tolkien lectures a few years ago
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and found it to be rather interesting. During the lecture Pearce did not interpret Tolkien's works allegorically, instead he attempted to show the various connections between his stories and his faith. The lecture was specifically on Radagast and Tom Bombadil and focused on their connections to and possible inspiration from Adam (the one from Genesis).
Faithful servant, yet master's bane,
Lightfoot's foal, swift Snowmane
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FarFromHome
Valinor
Dec 29 2013, 5:33pm
Post #12 of 17
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As you say, "who knows what he would have produced and if any of these stories would exist" if not for the influences, including his faith, that made Tolkien what he is. He had to find a way to reconcile his faith with his even earlier love for the elements of "pagan" myth (I'm basing the chronology on Tolkien's recollection of being about seven when he drew a "green great dragon", while according to the article he was eight when he was received into the Catholic church). How could a boy who "desired dragons" also be true to the faith he inherited from his beloved, martyred mother? He found the solution to that tension in his sub-creation, the idea that all myths are "splinters" of the light of the one "true myth", splinters that can be recombined in many ways to bring out truths that, while not complete, are still a part of the truth of that "one true myth". It's a powerful insight, expressed most powerfully, for me, in his poem Mythopoeia:
...Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made....
Perhaps it's because he found this way to see his own subcreations not as mere imaginings, but as part of the great truth that he believed in so deeply, that his world seems so real, and so deeply felt.
They went in, and Sam shut the door.
But even as he did so, he heard suddenly,
deep and unstilled,
the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth.
From the unpublished Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings
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Eruonen
Half-elven
Dec 29 2013, 8:26pm
Post #14 of 17
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Nice post that sums up his approach.
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And Squire, I do think a high Anglican upbringing may have worked the same as the identical Christian mythos/doctrine is the bedrock of both.
(This post was edited by Eruonen on Dec 29 2013, 8:29pm)
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FarFromHome
Valinor
Dec 29 2013, 10:01pm
Post #15 of 17
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... until at least the age of 8 he was probably no more aware of, or committed to his religion than most "cradle" Christians are. Children absorb and accept the moral and religious outlook of their parents and social group, but they aren't normally asked to learn about and commit to a different religion to the one they naturally absorbed, as Tolkien was at the age of eight. So whatever sect his mother had converted to, I think the experience of the conversion (especially once it was sanctified by his mother's death) would have changed his relationship with his faith.
But Catholicism also has elements that other sects may not have, and that may have made it all the more powerful in Tolkien's situation. In England at that time the Catholic church defined itself in opposition to protestantism, as a faith that had survived in the face of persecution and martyrdom, as the iconic Catholic hymn Faith of our Fathers expresses:
Faith of our fathers, living still,
In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene'er we hear that glorious Word!
Refrain
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death. ...
A history of martyrdom was a big element of English Catholicism (I was brought up as a Catholic in England, and I remember this very well, although things have changed greatly since the second Vatican council in the 1960s.) I'm sure Tolkien must have absorbed much of this in the instruction he would have had before he was received into the Catholic church, and for him it wuld have had particular echoes in his own mother's situation. She too was a martyr in his eyes, dying rather than giving up the faith that kept her estranged from her family. I think this explains the thinking behind his apparently strange statement that "...it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith." Not that it was easy to lose his mother, but that her suffering (and his too, I think, on losing her) cemented his commitment to the faith she died for.
So I think that from the age of eight, but much more so after his mother died, Tolkien's faith must have been a much deeper and more conscious element in his life than it would have been otherwise. (It's similar in a way to how he describes the impact England itself made on him, seeing it for the first time in contrast to South Africa which is all he had known before.)
My original point though was really just that Tolkien's interest in pagan myths was a very early and deep-seated one. It would probably have been enough in itself to lead him to the career he chose in philology and ancient literature, and if not for his mother's conversion and subsequent death, would presumably have been the main inspiration for any writing he did. But I suggest that her conversion to Catholicism gave him another source of inspiration. I suppose he could have transferred his interest from pagan mythology to, say, Christian apologetics, as C.S. Lewis did after his conversion to Christianity as an adult. But he didn't. Tolkien stuck with his first love, the pagan myths, and incorporated them into his belief in the one "true myth". Would his writings have been the same without his Catholicism? Of course we'll never know, but I'd argue that the intensity of feeling he had for the "true myth" of his religion, especially after his mother's death, must be one of the inspirations that makes his work so vivid.
They went in, and Sam shut the door.
But even as he did so, he heard suddenly,
deep and unstilled,
the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth.
From the unpublished Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings
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N.E. Brigand
Half-elven
Dec 30 2013, 8:03am
Post #16 of 17
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Skip Pia Skogemann in favor of Timothy R. O'Neill.
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If you're looking for a Jungian interpretation of Tolkien, his 1979 book The Individuated Hobbit is better than her 2009 book Where the Shadows Lie. If you must have a more recent model on those lines, try perhaps Robin Robertson's series of articles printed under the general heading "Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings".
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EomundDaughter
Lorien
Feb 21 2014, 11:20pm
Post #17 of 17
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the differences between the interior of a historic Catholic church and that of any Protestant church.....statues, altars angels, saints, artwork, stained glass artwork.....carved bible stories, candles, incense, golden chalice...a sensual bonanza in the older Catholic churches...most of it rejected by Protestant churches as decadent...
an orphan like Tolkien with his kind of creative mind would of course love the Catholic churches....maybe find solace there
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