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Tolkien Studies, Volume 4, 2007, pp. 293-297 (Review)

P bl h d b t V r n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/tks.2007.0018

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WORKS CITED

Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Brisbois, Michael J. “Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth,” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 197-216.

Russell, Beth. “Botanical Notes on the Mallorn,” Mallorn 43 (July 2005): 20-26.

Shippey, T. A. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings by Stratford Caldecott. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005. viii, 151 pp. $16.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 082452277X.

A revised and expanded version of the author’s Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, published in England in 2003, this self-described search for “Tolkien’s secret fire” finds it in the author’s devout Catholi-cism.

The first 113 pages develop Caldecott’s interpretation of the famil-iar fact that Tolkien was a religious man who subsumed his faith in his fiction. He cites, as seemingly every writer on the topic does, Tolkien’s famous December, 1953, letter to family friend Fr. Robert Murray, S.J.:

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first but consciously in the revision . . . the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (48).

Few thoughtful readers will disagree that Tolkien was a devoted Catholic; the relative importance of his Catholicism in his creative scheme is, how-ever, debatable. Many other elements are incorporated in the making of Middle-earth; faith is but one.

Caldecott’s style mingles personality with scholarship: “I sometimes think of the Inklings (not to mention the ‘Coalbiters’!) when I read the description of Elrond’s ‘Hall of Fire’ in Rivendell, for it is there they would have been most at home” (11). Such authorial intrusion may seem more like casual conversation than cogent criticism to some readers. Af-ter a while, Caldecott’s use of “I” to introduce his views seems both re-dundant—who else could it be?—and distracting, rather like Tolkien’s own authorial intrusions in The Hobbit, wisely excised from The Lord of the Rings.

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Similarly, some passages seem to veer from criticism into moralizing, such as this judgment of Niggle: “Many of us have delusions of self-im-portance, and by contrast view the needs of others as less weighty than our own” (25). True enough, but examination of conscience is not the same as examination of the text.

Therein lies the problem with books of this sort. The reader perforce has two subjects to weigh and balance: literary scholarship and theo-logical interpretation. Chapter one’s further examination of “Leaf by Niggle” illustrates this dilemma. When Caldecott describes Niggle’s time in the Workhouse as “a bit of a joke against the popular notion of ‘time in purgatory,’ which as a well-informed Catholic he knew to be false” (26), some Catholic readers may disagree even as non-Catholics are left in the dark.

Caldecott continues: “There follows an examination of his [Niggle’s] conscience by the Holy Trinity (three mysterious Voices overheard in the dark)” (26). But there are only two Voices in the text. Such an error early in the book cannot help but prompt a misgiving: caveat lector.

In the second chapter, Caldecott declares that “Frodo emerges as a very ‘Christian’ type of hero. . . . He allows himself to be humiliated and crucified. He refuses earthly respect and glory for the sake of something much greater; not merely his own integrity, but the will of the Father in heaven” (33).

But Frodo fails his last temptation. The Ring is destroyed not by Frodo’s willing act but by Gollum’s fatal deed. Caldecott says: “Thus in the end it is not Frodo who saves Middle-earth at all, though he bore the Ring to the Mountain, nor Gollum, who took the Ring into the Fire. It can only be God himself, working through the love and freedom of his creatures, using even our mistakes and the designs of the Enemy (as The Silmarillion hints he will do) to bring about our good. The scene is a tri-umph of providence over fate, but also a triumph of mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated” (36). This interpretation is simply too forgiving of Frodo, whose will fails him. “I do not choose now to do what I came to do” is, after all, what he says at the Cracks of Doom; he does not say, as Jesus did in Gethsemane, “Not my will, but thine be done.”

To Caldecott’s credit, references to The History of Middle-earth, The Let-ters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and other critical texts on Tolkien, especially Verlyn Flieger’s, are incorporated in this study. On the other hand, references to non-Tolkien writers as varied as St. Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Dwight Longnecker, St. Therese of Lisieux, Charles Peguy, and Catechism of the Catholic Church underscore the Procrustean aspect of this book. “I do not know how closely Tolkien had studied the life of St. Phillip Neri,

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the founder of the Oratory” (66), he writes at one point, noting nonethe-less the “Oratorian resonances” in the professor’s life.

There may indeed be similarities to the Virgin Mary in the depiction of Galadriel, as other scholars have noted. Longnecker’s 2003 paean to a Raphael Madonna, “a kind of purity that was both as soft as moonlight and as hard as diamonds” suggests that writer was familiar with Sam’s description of Galadriel to Faramir: “Hard as di’monds, soft as moon-light.” (56), as Caldecott observes.

Sometimes, on the other hand, Caldecott misses a Catholic element that seems transparent. Indeed lembas is analogous to the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, which makes the long Lent of fasting and privation that Sam and Frodo endure in Books Four and Six leading up to March 25, an Easter of sorts in Middle-earth, worth noting.

The fourth chapter, “Let These Things Be,” compares Biblical ac-counts of Creation with Tolkien’s. Reincarnation, an element in Tolkien’s legendarium, contradicts “the clear teaching of the saints, and assumes that the Gospels (in which Christ speaks of an eternal hell as a real possi-bility) must at some point have been deliberately falsified. Reincarnation is therefore incompatible with Catholic, Orthodox, or Evangelical Chris-tianity. . . . Tolkien did not, however, see anything wrong with exploring the idea in the world of his imagination, and made good use of it con-structing the drama of the Elves” (85). Here, Tolkien’s non-orthodoxy is absolved.

“Behind the Stars,” the fifth chapter, presents Caldecott’s view of Elvishness, “a kind of beauty or even the sense of beauty . . . a sense of freedom, of a yearned-for infinity. It is something like coming home, but only at the end of a long journey. In a word, I suppose, it is the glimpse of transcendence, of what it might mean to go beyond all limitation, outside time itself perhaps, into a place where beauty converges and commingles with goodness and truth.” (94). Elves “are artists, but also scientists and nature-mystics” (91).

Caldecott links this notion to the unions of Beren and Lúthien and Aragorn and Arwen, adding “if I am right, it is also echoed in the long-postponed marriage of Samwise to Rosie Cotton, which represents the ‘earthing’ of the more distant epic marriages of Men and Elves. Of course, Rosie Cotton is not an Elven princess, any more than Tolkien’s own Edith Bratt was. . . . For Tolkien the male-female dynamic is not, finally, a matter of a couple only, uniting in harmony the human with the Elvish elements in our nature, but of a fruitful couple; that is to say, of a couple that is open to being blessed with new life. It is not simply with his marriage to Rosie that Sam’s eros—his love and longing for the Elves, the motivation of his journey—is fulfilled and blessed, but with the birth and growth within his home of Elanor and the other children” (98-99).

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In his conclusion, Caldecott again evokes Sam as a paradigm for the reader’s experience: “We find, like him, that once we are inside such a tale, it is difficult to escape, for our lives have been changed. . . . We real-ize that we are called to some sort of service, so that the light may not perish from the earth” (112). Finally, Caldecott aptly cites Sam’s vision of Eärendil above Mordor: “the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing; there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (113).

Seventeen pages of appendices fill out the rest of this slim book with five short essays on other non-Catholic topics: Tolkien and Jung, Tolk-ien’s social philosophy, King Arthur, and the author’s changing concep-tion of a hitherto flat earth rounding into a globe after the fall of Nú-menor. The longest of these, at seven pages, is Caldecott’s commentary on the Peter Jackson film trilogy. Present here are many of the usual quibbles, which need not be reprised. But when Caldecott writes that the Ring “is destroyed by apparent ‘accident,’ an accident that Jackson makes clear would not have occurred but for the many sacrifices that had been made along the way by Frodo and by each of the members of the fellowship” (130), it was Tolkien, not the screenwriters, who conceived that moment.

One footnote buried on the penultimate page would be more at home in the text proper. Caldecott writes:

In this book, I have tended to stress the Catholic inspira-tion behind The Lord of the Rings. Only a small proportion of Tolken’s admirers, however, are Christian. Wherever he derived his ideas and images, they have an appeal and a reso-nance well beyond any single religious tradition. This is as it should be. Tolkien was reaching back to a time long before Christ, and before the great ‘axial period’ of the world re-ligions five centuries before that. As we have seen, he did not hold with Max Müller’s view that religion evolves from a primitive stage of mythology and superstition to a more con-scious and scientific apprehension of the world. That view, expressed in the best-selling Outline of History by H. G. Wells and effectively demolished by G. K. Chesterton in The Ever-lasting Man, was anathema to the Inklings. Tolkien believed that paganism contained much that anticipated and pointed toward the full truth that had been revealed in Jesus Christ. If he is correct, we would expect to find echoes of the con-cept of ‘secret fire’ in many cultures and religions—and so we do. (142)

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Regarding the book itself, the font employed (Calligraphic 421), while attractive and airy, lacks a certain typographical gravitas. The text seems more carefully edited than some other recent works on Tolkien; this reader found only one typo, and that in the notes (“tee” for “tree”). The bibliography’s list of twenty-four letters in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolk-ien provides suggestions on further reading, but perhaps commentary on these could have been woven into this slim volume.

An afterword by editor Roy M. Carlisle proclaims: “Your spiritual life will be increased and your appreciation for this staggering work by Tolkien will be forever enhanced by Stratford’s wise guidance. May the fellowship of the Ring be always with you” (147). This passage illustrates the bifurcated nature of this book. While one of the better such works, The Power of the Ring makes assertions that Tolkien scholars will find argu-able and even deniable. Catholic readers, including this one, may like-wise quibble with some of Caldecott’s ex cathedra declarations. A success-ful compromise, it is said, leaves neither side particularly happy. By that criterion, The Power of the Ring succeeds.

Reducing The Lord of the Rings to a Christian allegory similar to C.S. Lewis’ Narnian tales is mistaking a crucial part for the whole. As critics as diverse as Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce point out, one need not share the author’s faith to cherish his tale. Many other things are at work in it: Tolkien’s love of trees and loathing of technology, his enjoyment of good food, good friends, good cheer, and good beer, his nostalgia for the “little England” of bygone days, his experiences in the trenches of World War One. Caldecott’s book is colored by viewing all these through the stained-glass lens of faith. While a pleasant, sometimes provocative, interpretation, it is a worthy, but perhaps not an essential, addition to the scholarly canon.

Mike FosterMetamora, Illinois

Reading “The Lord of the Rings”: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic, edited by Robert Eaglestone. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. vi, 214 pp. £45.00 / $75.00 (hardcover) ISBN 082648459X; £12.99 / $24.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 0826484603.

My first impression of this book evoked uncomfortable memories of an earlier effort: J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land (1984), edited by Robert Giddings. This deeply eccentric if pioneering collection included papers which verged on parody, evoking images of earnest young academics, mostly in polytechnics, for whom Tolkien functioned mostly as grist for new critical mills. It is clear from the present volume, however, that things