Volume 14 Number 3 Article 9 Spring 3-15-1988 Light from an Invisible Lamp: Natural Religion in The Lord of the Rings Catherine Madsen Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Madsen, Catherine (1988) "Light from an Invisible Lamp: Natural Religion in The Lord of the Rings," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 14 : No. 3 , Article 9. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol14/iss3/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Argues that the tendency of many critics of The Lord of the Rings to “[mine] it for Christian content” does the work a disservice, since Tolkien explicitly states that a Secondary World should not contain Primary World elements. Examines the “natural religion” present in The Lord of the Rings, without obvious ritual, dogma, or god. Additional Keywords Christianity in The Lord of the Rings; Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings—Religious aspects This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol14/iss3/9 MYTHLORE 53: Spring 1988 P a g e 4 3 JLight from an Invisible JLamp Natural Religion in The Lord of the Rings Catherine Madsen It was in 1971 that a reader wrote to Tolkien, though such borrowings were necessarily done for calling himself "an unbeliever, or at best a man of devotional reasons — as though any writer might not belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling" and borrow powerful images from what is, after all, the saying how profoundly he had been moved by The Ur-text of Western civilization. Jared Lobdell, in his Lord o f the Rings. "You,” he Baid, "create a world in otherwise insightful England and Always, employs the which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere curious expedient of searching through The Lord o f without a visible source, like light from an invisible the Rings for examples of the gifts of the Spirit from lamp." ( Letters, 413) St. Paul’s list in First Corinthians, an exegetical effort which has nothing to do with how a storyteUer thinks; Some eight years earlier, though I was too young he also identifies several characters as "unfallen", an to put it so clearly, I had had a similar response impression which the subsequent publication of Tol­ upon first reading the book. There seemed both a kien’s letters has shown to be inaccurate. (See espe­ brightness and a severity in it, an intensity of focus, cially Letters, 203-4 and 286-7.) These methods strike that was plainly religious in character, the plainer for me as a kind of pious occultism, which takes to not being specifically Christian. In those days I was uncovering resemblances and correspondences and very impatient with evangelism, and fairly good at hidden meanings simply because the overt, meanings detecting it; but what Tolkien seemed to be doing was they look for are not there. One might as well try to something quite different. He seemed to present reli­ prove that Tolkien was interested in ceremonial magic gious feeling, and even religious behavior, without because Gandalf, Aragorn and Bombadil chant spells. ritual, revelation, doctrine, indeed without God except But Tolkien insisted, over and over again, that he was for two fairly cryptic and untheological references in writing a story, not a homily. He was not trying to the appendices. The book seemed to have far less to encode Christian ideas in his work any more than he do with the New Testament than with the mountains I was trying to deny them. "Nobody believes me,." he could see out my windows, but it moved me to reli­ complained (Letters, 264) "when I say that my long gion. Indeed, having once goaded my parents in an book is an attempt to create a world in which a form argument into asking me, "Well, what do you believe?" of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might I ran to my room, brought out the three volumes, and seem real. But it is true.” presented them saying, "I believe this." It was youth­ ful extravagance; but I have never since been sure It is clear enough from his own statements else­ that it was false. where that Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, and took his religion with profound seriousness all his life. But he Subsequently for several years, on the advice of was not a simple person, and how his Christianity the critics, I tried faithfully to discover in Chris­ worked on his storytelling is not a simple matter. He tianity what I had found in The Lord o f the Rings, disliked preaching, not only in stories but in most and on the whole did not find it there. It was not for sermons (Letters, 75), and his religious feeling was lack of expectation; I thought, as certain of the critics founded not on a sense of the logic of Christianity seem to have thought before publication of Tolkien's but on a love for the sacramental Body of Christ (Let­ biography and letters, that all the Inklings thought ters, 53-54 and 338-340). Also, his sense of the pur­ the same about Christianity, and that when Lewis pose of fairy-stories prevented him from making any spoke Tolkien could not be far behind. But neither literal reference to the world’s history in his own Lewis nor Williams, nor indeed Dante or Augustine or stories. "If a waking writer tells you that his tale is Paul or the evangelists, struck the same note. I had a only a thing imagined in his sleep," he said in his bad dream during that time in which the Elves came essay "On Fairy-Stories", "he cheats deliberately the sailing back to Middle-earth from the West, and disem­ primal desire at the heart of Faerie: the realisation, barking prostrated themselves before a cross upon an independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined won­ altar, repenting of their love for Elvenhome and con­ der." The effect of any open reference to Christianity fessing Christ. I believe this is the situation in which in his stories would have been equally fatal. He felt much of the Christian critical opinion has placed The that the Arthurian legend failed as a fairy-story Lord o f the Rings: it has tried to take the enchant­ partly because "it is involved in, and explicitly con­ ment out of it. It has tried to make an independent tains the Christian religion.... Myth and fairy-story," imagination a means to a religious end. Finding myself he said, "as all art, reflect and contain in solution strongly drawn to faith by the book, and yet not par­ elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but ticularly to the Christian faith, I think this effort to not explicit, not in the known form of the primary see it as Christian is essentially mistaken. ’real’ world." (Letters, 144) The critics who have undertaken to "prove" the Why a man who was clearly committed to his reli­ book’s Christianity have used some interesting meth­ gion should have had an even deeper allegiance to the ods; they have mined it for Christian content with the laws of the fairy-story, I hope to suggest. But it is same ingenuity their spiritual forebears used to find clear that he did not intend his work to argue or foreshadowings of Jesus among the law and the illustrate or promulgate Christianity. Any Christian- prophets. The late Professor Kilby, in his Tolkien and seeming images in it are precisely not witnesses to the Silmarillion, lays much stress upon motifs which the Gospel: they are echoes. If Elbereth owes some­ appear both in Tolkien’ s work and in the Hebrew thing to the Virgin Mary — if one can never again scriptures (such as the long lives of the patriarches hear the phrase stella maris without thinking o menel and the unions between earthly and angelic beings) as aglar elenath — it is her starriness that crosses over MYTHLORE 53: Spring 1988 into Faerie, not her miraculous motherhood or her nity a polite unbeliever might use of the religious perpetual virginity. If lembas, the Elves’ way bread, observances of his adopted country. It is left to clearly recalls the sacramental wafer as Frodo and Frodo, whose task leads him into horrors Bilbo cannot Sam subsist on it in Mordor, it is the idea of spiritual imagine, to invoke Elbereth and Earendil as the Elves food that comes through, shorn of all suggestion or do — because they are the highest powers he knows; argument of Christ’s presence in it. He borrows Chris­ and to Sam, who in Shelob’s lair cries out four lines tian magic, not Christian doctrine; and Christianity of Sindarin as though pentecostally inspired (II, 339) without doctrine is a shadow of itself.