The answer is an obvious and unequivocal YES, he was. Yet as with most
dealings with Tolkien
there are many levels at work here. Some can be seen directly from his
Letters. Some are detailed
in his authorized biography by H. Carpenter. Others I have gleaned from
a critical work called
"Splintered Light" by V. Flieger, which in my opinion is THE best examination
of how Tolkien's
religious beliefs influenced the genesis (ha, no pun intended) of his myths.
This article does not attempt to detail how these beliefs manifested themselves
in his work, rather it
is more of a catalog of Letters and cited references from his biography
and critical works which
demonstrate that Tolkien was a very religious person, a devout Christian,
and that this played a
major role in the synthesis of his writings.
To begin with, his biography states that at the time of his birth in South
Africa, his mother and father
both were of the Anglican Church of England. Due to concerns for JRRT's
health, mother and
children traveled back to Birmingham England. His father remained in South
Africa to tend to his
business. Soon after, his father caught rhuematic fever and died:
"Christianity had played an increasingly important part in Mabel Tolkien's
life since her husband's
death, and each Sunday she had taken the boys on a long walk to a `high'
Anglican church. Then
one Sunday Ronald (JRRT) and Hilary (his brother) found that they were
going by strange roads to
a different place of worship: St Anne's, Alcester Street, in the slums
near the centre of Birmingham.
It was a Roman Catholic church. Mabel had been thinking for some time about
becoming a
Catholic....Immediately the wrath of her family fell upon them...That his
daughter should turn papist
was to him an outrage beyond belief...The strain that this induced, coupled
with the additional
hardship, did no good to her health; but nothing would shake her loyalty
to her new faith, and
agains all opposition she bean to instruct Ronald ahd Hilary in the Catholic
religion."
[Tolkien Biography pgs 24-25]
Here we glimpse a situation where his mother's choice of religious belief
(changing from Anglican to
Catholicism), which provided her much needed spiritual support was actually
detrimental to her
physical well being because of the stress put on her from her non-Catholic
family. Her condition
worsened with time and the outcome not unforeseen:
"Unnoticed by her sons, Mabel's condition began to deteriorate again. At
the beginning of
November she collapsed in a way that seemed to them sudden and terrifying.
She sank into a
diabetic coma, and six days later, on 14 November, with Father Francis
and her sister May
Incledon at her bedside in the cottage, she died."
[Tolkien Biography pg 30]
What follows is a lengthy excerpt from the critical analysis by V. Flieger
called "Splintered Light"
which most astutely states that Tolkien's religion was on one hand a solace
for his loss, but was also
somewhat responsible for his mother's death - and so created a paradox
in Tolkien's character that
manifested itself in his writings:
"Mabel Tolkien's conversion to Catholicism when Tolkien was eight years
old permanently
estranged her from her relatives. Her determination to bring up her children
- Tolkien and his
younger brother Hilary - in the Catholic faith cut her off from the emotional
and financial support of
her family. Tolkien came to feel that his mother's heroic efforts to raise
and educate her sons alone
had drained her strength, and were the direct cause of her death. When
she died he was bereft.
`The loss of his mother,' says Carpenter, `had a profound effect on his
personality. It made him into
a pessimist. Or rather, it made him into two people.' Carpenter goes on
to characterize Tolkien's
two sides: `He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with
a great zest for life...But
from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant
in his diaries and
letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More
precisely, and more
closely related to his mother's death, when he was in this mood he had
a deep sense of impending
loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won forever.
(TAB p. 31)'
His solace was his religion. But these feelings colored his religious outlook
and gave it the same
mixture of light and dark.
`My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and 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.' Tolkien's description
of his mother's sacrifice as
an "easy" way to God is hard to fathom, for it is clear that the shock
of his mother's death affected
him deeply. An yet the statement is evidence of the close, emotional association
which he always
made between his mother and his faith. This is more than polarity; it is
paradox. His Catholicism
was inextricably linked with his mother, but her adherence to that religion
had, in his view, led to
her death and thus to his bereavement. The very thing which gave him his
faith robbed him of his
mother, and thus mixed with that faith a sense of irretrievable loss."
[Splintered Light p.2-3]
How does this internal struggle and paradox make itself part of his writings?
Well, I will make one
more citation from Splintered Light which sums this up best:
"This alternation between the vision of hope and the knowledge of despair
- between light and dark
- is both the essence of Tolkien and the clearest characteristic of his
work. The contrast and
interplay of light and dark are essential elements of his fiction. The
light/dark polarity operates on all
levels - literal, metaphoric, symbolic. It engenders Creation and Fall;
it becomes language; and its
interplay becomes the interplay of good and evil, belief and doubt, free
will and fate."
[Splintered Light p. 4]
I hope that those of you who have laboured so far through this commentary
will realize that
Tolkien's religion played a most important part of his life and his works.
But as you have seen, it
was a most complicated situation - a source of joy and sadness at the same
time.
Ok, enough of the commentary - what follows are specific excerpts direct
from Tolkien's Letters
where he explicity states his religious beliefs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Letter #131:
...Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as
it is, it is imperfectly
naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English;
and does not replace what I felt
to be missing. For one thing its `faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical,
incoherent and repetitive. For
another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains
the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and
fairy-story must, as all art,
reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or
error), but not explicit, not in
the known form of the primary `real' world. (I am speaking, of course.
of our present situation, not
of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days.)... In the cosmogony there is a fall:
a fall of Angels we should
say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth.
These tales are `new', they
are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably
contain a large
measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe
that legends and myths are
largely made of `truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only
be received in this mode; and
long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must
always reappear.
From Letter #142:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic
work; unconsciously so at
first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in,
or have cut out, practically all
references to anything like `religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary
world. For the religious
element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
From Letter #165:
It is not `about' anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical
intentions, general, particular, or
topical, moral, religious, or political. The only criticism that annoyed
me was on that it `contained no
religion' (and `no Women', but that does not matter, and is not true anyway).
It is a monotheistic
world of `natural theology'. The odd fact that there are no churches, temples,
or religious rits and
ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. It will
be sufficiently explained, if (as
now seems likely) the Silmarillion and other legends of the First and Second
Ages are published. I
am in any case myself a Christian; but the `Third Age' was not a Christian
world.
From Letter #195:
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not
expect `history' to be
anything but a `long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may
contain more clearly and
movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.
From Letter #213:
...I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive
interest in the details of the lives
of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author's works
(if the works are in fact
worthy of attention). and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main
interest. But only one's
guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship
between personal facts
and an author's works. Not the author himself (though he knows more than
any investigator), and
certainly not so-called `psychologists'. ...I was born in 1892 and lived
for my early years in `the
Shire' in a pre-mechanical age. Or more important, I am a Christian (which
can be deduced from
my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter `fact' perhpas cannot
be deduced; thou one
critic (by letter) asserted that the invocations of Elbereth, and the character
of Galadriel as directly
described (or through the words of Gimli and Sam) were clearly related
to Catholic devotion to
Mary. Another saw in waybread (lembas)=viaticum and the reference to its
feeding the will (vol.
III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the
Eucharist. (That is: far
greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of
a fair-story.)
From Letter #269:
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient
theologian to say whether
my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't fell under any obligation
to make my story fit with
formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant
with Christian thought
and belief, which is asserted elsewhere.
From Letter #310:
...So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us,
is to increase according to our
capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved
by it to praise and
thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis:...We praise you, we
call you holy, we worship
you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour.
From Letter #320:
...I think it is true that I owe much of (the character of Galadriel) to
Christian and Catholic teaching
and imagination about Mary.... -----------------------------------------------------------------
There are many other letters dealing with Tolkien's thoughts on his Christianity
- both in relation to
his works and general comments made to his family and friends. These are
provided as a numerical
reference list:
5, 43, 49, 89, 96, 153, 156, 163, 183, 191, 212, 246, 250, 306, 312.