Tolkien's Faith

Tolkien scholar, Dr Holly Ordway, has written a "spiritual biography" of J.R.R. Tolkien that shows how his Catholic Faith impacted his work.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Fr Dwight Longenecker

What will delight lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in the pages of Holly Ordway’s biography. In the final chapters, she summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus, he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, father, hardworking academic, and most of all—faithful Catholic layman.

The interminable Tolkien industry has churned out blockbuster feature films, television series, commentaries, critiques, essays and analysis. Numerous biographies have dissected his life, his friendship with C.S. Lewis, and his continuing legacy.

The influence of Tolkien’s Catholic faith on his great saga has been observed and analyzed, but no single volume has used Tolkien’s Catholic faith as the sole lens through which to view his life. Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway has now produced the complete study of Tolkien’s spirituality and shown the profound influence of Catholicism on every aspect of the great myth-maker’s life.

Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. In her 2014 book, Not God’s Type, Ordway told the story of her personal involvement with Tolkien’s work and how it eventually led her from avowed atheism into the Catholic Church. An enthusiast for Oxford, England, and the Inklings, Ordway is well connected with the current generation of Tolkien scholars and has drawn on all the Tolkien literature to produce a heroic spiritual biography that is worthy of the heroic author.

St John Henry Newman was a great influence in Tolkien’’s life, and Newman’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur (Heart speaks to heart) is an apt description of Ordway’s book. The heart of Tolkien’s life and work is his Catholic faith, and that heart spoke to Ordway’s heart, and she speaks from her heart to the heart of the reader—always balancing the scholar’s objectivity with the aficionado’s passion and the biographer’s observation and critique with the devotion of a fellow Catholic and Christian apologist.

In saying that Ordway writes from her heart to the heart of the reader, her biography of Tolkien is not merely an inspiring offering for the already convinced Catholic. Instead, she clearly has her eye focussed on the Tolkien readers who do not share his Catholic faith and who are intrigued by Tolkien while ignorant, or even antagonistic, towards his Catholicism. As a good apologist Ordway does not argue, but invites the non-Catholic reader to ask, seek, and find. She encourages curiosity and draws the reader to understand Tolkien’s heart and mind in order to more deeply appreciate first his work, then his faith.

With this reader in mind, at every point Ordway takes time to explain Catholic beliefs and customs. She does so in a clear, objective way—educating without being condescending and informing with the genuine enthusiasm of a teacher who assumes her students want to know as much as possible about the subject.

Step by step she walks us through Tolkien’s life from his birth and baptism in South Africa to his declining years of fame, fortune, and frustrations with the impact of the modern world on his beloved Catholic Church. The handsome volume is enriched with over seventy photographs from every stage of Tolkien’s life as well as a bumper crop of excellent appendices. There one will find a timeline of Tolkien’s life, The Prayers and Liturgical extracts (in Latin and English) that were the staple of Tolkien’s religious practice, a full glossary of religious terms, an exhaustive Bibliography, a Biblical index and a general index.

What will delight lovers of Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in these pages. In the final chapters, Ordway summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus—a work which is consistently acclaimed as the most popular work of fiction in English in the twentieth century— he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, father, hardworking academic, and most of all—faithful Catholic layman.

C.S. Lewis observed that “Tollers” was “the most married man” he knew, and throughout her biography Ordway shows how Tolkien’s marriage and family life helped to keep him grounded and produced the humility and self-effacing qualities that added to his greatness. Tolkien said Samwise Gamgee was the true hero of his tale, and when he wrote the final scene of Sam returning home to Rosie and their children, surely it was the heart of Tolkien as father and husband that speaks to the hearts of all his readers.

This heart, as Ordway portrays, was also the heart of a Catholic Christian, and it his deep faith that imbues every page of The Lord of the Rings, and subtly summons the reader further up and further in.

When visiting Oxford a few years ago Father John Saward—the present parish priest of St Gregory and St Augustine’s in North Oxford— asked me to celebrate the Sunday Mass as he planning to be absent. Knowing that Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla was likely to be in attendance, I had the opportunity of meeting her.

In a brief conversation after Mass I said, “I think your Father was the greatest Catholic evangelist of the twentieth century.”

Miss Tolkien was surprised and asked, “Oh! Why is that?”

“Because” I replied, “He had Sam say, ‘There’s some good in the world Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for!”

Holly Ordway’s tribute to Tolkien lays out in detail exactly what that “Good” is and how Tolkien himself fought for it as humbly as a hobbit.