In his introduction Stratford Caldecott suggests that ‘an understanding of JRR Tolkien’s personal beliefs and their influence on the story for which he is famous can only enhance our appreciation for this great work of art.’. Drawing largely on Tolkien’s many letters and occasional essays, he proceeds to demonstrate how the author of The Lord of the Rings, a devout Catholic and daily communicant, interpreted his own extraordinarily rich and fertile sub-creation in the light of his Christian faith. For all Tolkien lovers, whether sharing his faith or far from it, this slim volume is an absorbing and illuminating exercise, written with both passion and erudition.

Is The Lord of the Rings a great work of art? It has often come top of public library polls, to the bafflement and consternation of our literary elite. Perhaps the arbiters of literary good taste are too sophisticated and subtle to recognise a supreme story-teller, whose epic fantasy comes from an older tradition and deeper vein of human consciousness than they can cope with? If some defining qualities of a great work of art are that it is original, can bear many re-readings and interpretations and alters the reader’s view of life in some mysterious way, then Tolkien’s book surely passes the test.. As Caldecott shows, The Lord of the Rings – and The Silmarillion, which provides its fuller background and context and which Tolkien had originally wished to be published alongside it – is a profound and original variation on the old art of mythmaking and fairy tale, with links to the Arthurian legends. It is also a book that reveals its insights slowly and bears the patient scrutiny of much re-reading.

Finally, Caldecott does persuade us that it can affect the reader’s outlook if he is open to the story behind the story i.e. the story of good struggling with and finally overcoming evil; the story of ordinary, dogged courage and perseverance, which is the true heroism; the story of ‘light shining in darkness, representing the life, grace and creative action of God.’

Mythological reality is not an ‘escape’ from reality as Tolkien’s critics aver, but an ‘intensification’ of reality. As Caldecott points out, ‘Tolkien saw natural things freighted with the depth of meaning that all things possess’, but which our ‘technological-Benthamite civilisation’ as the critic FR Leavis called it, has lost. Is this the reason for the book’s enduring popularity, now magnified by the film-trilogy? Christian faith sees man as made by and for God, fallen away from Him and yearning to return to Him, whether he know it or not.

The common reader, who keeps Tolkien at the top of the list of best-loved books, possibly instinctively recognises that The Lord of the Rings raises his own life above the humdrum and the insignificant and gives him a glimpse of the beauty, grandeur and poetry of eternal life for which he himself is intended.

This, as Tolkien explained, is true ‘enchantment’, something quite different from mere ‘magic’ and certainly not an escapist thrill. Christian revelation has not made mythmaking redundant, any more than scientific knowledge has done; it has ‘baptised’ mythology and the imagination, that they might reflect in a poetic way the great mystery of our salvation. Answering those critics who dismiss Tolkien’s characters as simplistic,

Caldecott shows the psychological realism of the chief actors in the epic, recounting how Tolkien wept at the tragedy of Gollum who, at a critical moment, makes a choice for evil despite being momentarily so close to its opposite; how Frodo’s final behavior demonstrates human nature choosing to assert itself against the demands of grace; how the unspoken presence of Our Lady hovers behind ‘Elvishness’. The ‘secret fire’ alluded to in the title is the Holy Spirit burning at the heart of the tale, as Tolkien himself states in a letter.

For Caldecott, Tolkien’s fantasy is a ‘call to arms to the reader’ to recognise that we, too, can try to transcend the mundane or malicious aspects of our lives, live with greater courage and fidelity and battle against whatever in our world seeks to dehumanise and depersonalise us. In the campuses of the 1960s, early Tolkien enthusiasts wore badges proclaiming ‘Frodo lives!’. This is still true, I am glad to say, even in the drab, provincial market town where I live. Recently, queuing at our local public library to order a book at the enquiry desk, I was alerted to an old gentleman in front of me. ‘Where do you live?’ the librarian asked him. ‘Rivendell’, he replied.

© 2004 Francis Phillips

Tolkien and the Great War. By John Garth. HarperCollins. £20

This biographical study of Tolkien’s life and thought between 1914-1918 seeks to answer the question why he ‘should have embarked on his monumental mythology in the midst of the First World War’, and what effect the War had on the creation of Middle-earth. Garth’s thesis is that the period in question is much more significant for Tolkien’s creative imagination than is ordinarily thought. However, the detailed research he has undertaken paradoxically proves how hard it is to link specific events to the complexities of a highly creative, mythmaking mind.

As Garth explains, Tolkien’s love of the Northern languages began early. Aged 11 he was absorbed by Chambers Etymological Dictionary; at King Edward’s School he was both inventing languages and lecturing to his friends on the subject; the later discovery of the Finnish epic, The Kalevala, was critical to his own invented language of ‘Qenya’. Unlike the War poets or Robert Graves, who confronted their trench experiences directly in their writings, Tolkien would observe later, ‘It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong.’

This scholar and dreamer, who was already beginning to fuse language and mythology into literary art, joined the Lancashire Fusiliers, specializing in signals. Invalided out in October 1916 with trench fever, he later caught gastritis and never returned to the Front. It would be wrong to conclude that the War did not affect such a sensitive, reflective man as Tolkien; 'By 1918 all but one of my closest friends were dead.’ Nor, as Stratford Caldecott’s book shows, was his fantasy an escape.

But, as he admitted to WH Auden, his instinct was to ‘cloak’ self-knowledge ‘under mythical and legendary dress.’ He allowed that Sam Gamgee reflected the privates and batmen he had known, and that the Somme battlefield re-emerged in the approach to Mordor. Further, CS Lewis, a fellow Great War soldier, reviewing The Lord of the Rings in 1955, pointed out its ‘realism’.

Nevertheless, Tolkien had elaborately ‘cloaked’ and transmuted his experiences, making it hard for biographers to make exact parallels. He never wrote an autobiography and, as he wrote to an inquirer after publication of his epic, ‘only one’s Guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author’s work’.

© 2004 Francis Phillips

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