Tolkien the Catholic
Lovers of literature the world over will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien Sept. 2.
Although the anniversary will be an opportunity to celebrate the life and work of the author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, many of Tolkien’s millions of admirers will be unaware that the most popular and successful author of the 20th century was a lifelong practicing Catholic. Tolkien was 8 years old when, in 1900, his widowed mother was received into the Catholic Church. In spite of intense opposition from both her own family and the family of her deceased husband, who were Anglican, Mabel Tolkien had both her sons instructed and received into the Church shortly afterwards. Henceforth, Tolkien never wavered in his faith, remaining a devout Catholic for the rest of his life. Mabel Tolkien died in November 1904. She was only 34 years old. Her orphaned son was 12 at the time of her death.
Tolkien remained convinced that his mother’s early death was a consequence of the ill treatment she suffered at the hands of her family following her conversion and the financial hardship that was its consequence. “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed,” he wrote nine years after her death, “and it was 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.”
Sixty years after his mother’s death, he compared his mother’s sacrifices for her faith with the complacency of some of his own children towards the Catholic faith they had inherited from her:
“When I think of my mother’s death … worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away.”
These two memories of his mother’s self-sacrificial love and deep faith were written when he was a young man, in 1913, and when he was an old man, in 1965. Taken together, they show the constancy of Tolkien’s own adherence to the Catholic faith throughout the entirety of his life.
Having ascertained that Tolkien was always a faithful Catholic, the question of the impact of his faith on the writing of his works needs to be addressed.
Is there any connection between the truths of the faith and the fictional fantasy that he wrote? Can Catholic truth be gleaned from the fantasy fiction?
