From July 2013
Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien by Stratford Caldecott (Darton, Longman, & Todd Ltd., London, UK: 2003)
“He [Tolkien] created a body of work that is imbued with a profound wisdom-a wisdom that our civilization desperately needs-drawn very largely from the Catholic faith in which he was raised.” Caldecott, p. 4
I was a sophomore in high school when the Tolkien craze hit America, back in the mid-1960s. I read The Lord of the Rings and fell into a passion to become a fantasy novelist. I had never imagined that such stories as this had ever been written. They set my brain on fire.
It took me some fifty years to achieve my dream, by God’s grace. I am a fantasy novelist, with real books in print, published by Chalcedon. I read the Bible every day, but every two years or so, I revisit Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth. His books have never lost their fascination for me. I dare to hope that God will bless my Bell Mountain novels and someday make them speak to their readers as Tolkien speaks to me.
Tolkien published only two novels in his lifetime, The Lord of the Rings and its predecessor, The Hobbit. What is it about these two books that has wrought so strongly upon my own imagination? And I’m not alone-their sales are in the many millions, worldwide.
This little book by Stratford Caldecott-director of the Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture, Oxford-has at least some of the answer to that question.
First You Have to See It
C. S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and many published meditations on Christian theology and themes, was one of Tolkien’s closest friends. Tolkien is widely credited with having converted Lewis, then an unbeliever, to the Christian faith (p. 11).
I didn’t read the Narnia books until much later in life; and when I did, their Christian message was, to me, quite obvious. Written for children, enjoyed by many adults, the Chronicles thinly disguise our Lord Jesus Christ as the great Lion, Aslan-who sang the world of Narnia into existence, died to save a sinner, and rose again from the dead to be revealed as the true king of all creation, forever. Some Christians do find these books unpalatable, pointing-as did Tolkien-to an overabundance of pagan influences. I can only answer that Lewis had a very long way to go, spiritually, before he was capable of writing Narnia. I’m sure he would have gone farther, had he lived longer.
But Tolkien’s message is not so obvious. In fact, his message has eluded many readers to whom The Lord of the Rings is just a slam-bang fantasy, nothing more. The Christianity which is the foundation of Middle-earth was not apparent to me until, frankly, other writers pointed it out to me. But now I can’t not see it!
If you haven’t seen it, either, Caldecott’s book will make it visible to you. He cites abundantly from Tolkien’s many published letters, in which Tolkien wrote candidly of his vision and his methods. For example, Tolkien wrote to a friend in 1953:
“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” (p. 50).
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