March 12
The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth, Ralph C. Wood (2003)

My path toward this book began when someone in RMO expressed disappointment that the recent Lord of the Rings movies downplayed the "obvious Christian themes." I had read the books recently and while I remembered plenty of moral and spiritual themes I hadn't noticed anything even remotely Christian. But I was ready to be enlightened, so I asked him to elaborate, whereupon he recommended this book.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Although he later called the Christianity in the books "overt", he still didn't quite explain what he meant by that.

The book's introduction puts an end to any expectation. The author explicitly disclaims any overt allegory, and quotes Tolkien doing likewise:

With that disclaimer, Wood asserts nevertheless that "Tolkien's work is all the more deeply Christian for not being overtly Christian." He then proceeds to enumerate and discuss various themes in Lord of the Rings which he says are Christian values.

One can hardly disagree with his particulars. We are shown that mercy is a central theme in the books, and it's a Christian value; that duty is a central theme in the books, and it's a Christian value; that sacrifice is a central theme in the books, and it's a Christian value; and so on for page after page. That's all well and good, but to me it only proves that the Bible and Lord of the Rings both are such expansive and wide-ranging works that a significant overlap is inevitable. One would have little difficulty making a similar list connecting Tolkien with some other religion, or connecting Christianity with some other piece of literature. (I can't help noticing that a blurb on the cover mentions The Gospel According to the Simpsons.)

Naturally, the author is selective in what he chooses to emphasize. (He did mention "free play of the imagination".) Some of the Tolkien virtues don't strike me as particularly Christian -- love of nature, for instance. Yet he manages to come up with just enough scripture to back it up. He offers a wonderful little discourse on Tolkien's delight in things that develop slowly, but I still can't see what that has to do with Christianity.

Wood is most convincing in making his case when he doesn't discuss the book at all but instead examines Tolkien's life and other writings. He provides ample evidence that Tolkien himself was a devout Christian. Tolkien's view of the world was that of a Christian, and he sometimes discussed his work in Christian terms. From there, it's not much of a jump to the conclusion that, even as Tolkien deliberately avoids writing anything Christian into the book, his choice of themes nevertheless reflects his own Christian sensibility. That's true enough, but one could just as easily argue that since Tolkien was very much an English country squire, even though the book isn't about England, it still reflects the author's deep-seated Englishness. Indeed, the book inadvertently makes a powerful case for that. I hadn't ever given much thought to how much Middle Earth reflects the values of pious rural England, but this book really drives home the point. Even the Christianity is a decidedly English Christianity.

The book is far more enjoyable when one sets aside the author's supposed thesis and instead reads it simply as an interesting discussion of Tolkien written in a Christian vocabulary. On such terms, it's a pleasant read, and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys pondering Tolkien and is at home in the world of religious studies (a category which I believe includes at least two of Benzene's regular readers).

The book includes quite a bit of discussion of Tolkien's other Middle Earth writings, especially the Silmarillion. I happen to be quite familiar with that one -- probably even more than Lord of the Rings, by virtue of the accident that I've had my own copy of Silmarillion ever since I was a kid, and I reread it about once every two years, whereas the Lord of the Rings books we had when I was young ended up with someone else, and consequently I went about 15 years without reading them.

I'm not at all familiar with the various other posthumously published Tolkien writings. Indeed, I had no idea there were so many of them. Wood's book has frequent and intriguing citations of passages from Morgoth's Ring, "The Monsters and the Critics" and Other Essays, and a few other works, including a compilation of Tolkien's correspondence. It sounds like these include a great deal more background on Middle Earth. Perhaps some day I'll investigate them.

One of these references, which Wood saves for the last chapter, is the most striking in terms of his Christian thesis. Somewhere in the course of Morgoth's Ring an elf and a human have a theological discussion. Toward the end of it, the human speculates that Ilúvatar [God] would himself come to Middle Earth in mortal form and thereby redeem humankind. Or so says Wood. Rereading his comments carefully, his quotes are indirect enough that I'd want to see the original.

Still, it was enough to wake me up in time to finish the book. About two-thirds of the way through it was starting to become soporific. Although it's not a long book, it's slow in the middle. It's as if the author knows he doesn't have enough material for a whole book, so he's obliged to stretch out every point for all its worth, and include all his mateiral no matter how marginal. This book might have been better cut in half and published as a long article instead.

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