Is The Lord of the Rings a Catholic Novel?

And what would that mean anyway?

It seems desperately important to many people to claim The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic, or at least Christian novel. Whole academic texts and essays have been written on the subject. The question that interests me is not so much whether it is or it isn’t but why so many people seem so intent on proving that it is. But that also raises the question of exactly what it is that they are trying to prove.

The initial impetus for this inquiry is a recent Substack note:

This is an extremely simple statement of the case and one open to a variety of objections, but it will do as a starting point for framing the problem of deciding if any novel is Christian or Catholic and whether it is — here’s the rub — “inescapably” so.

“Inescapably” is key here. It is a claim that The Lord of the Rings could not possibly be mistaken for a work of any other faith. But this claim rests on three elements that are not uniquely and therefore not inescapably Christian, and which one might even argue are not Christian at all.

• Good ultimately triumphs. Evil ultimately loses.

• Sacrifice is the path to victory.

• Seemingly tiny pebbles become the chief cornerstones.

There is certainly nothing uniquely Christian or Catholic¹ about any of these ideas. Good triumphing over evil is the theme of most stories in every culture, with a very obvious psychological appeal to all human beings. Every general, of every culture, understands that sacrifice is unavoidable on the path to victory. Stories from all over the world celebrate the nobody who makes good. These are not inescapably Christian themes; they are common themes.

But are they, in the ordinary way that they occur in this or any story, actually Christian at all, let alone inescapably Christian? Yes, Christian eschatology says that God will triumph over Satan at the end of time. But The Lord of the Rings does not go on to the end of time, and there are inescapably Christian works in which the good guys do not triumph, at least in any worldly way. The Whisky Priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory walks into a certain trap, knowing he will be tortured and killed. The bad guys win. We are left to assume, if such is our faith, that his act is redemptive, or if such is not our faith, that his act is either foolish or an act of heroic defiance against an indifferent universe.

Nor, for that matter, does Frodo get to live happily ever after in The Lord of the Rings. He has been crippled by his ordeal and cannot return to ordinary life. It is an element of the Christian understanding that our earthly lives often end badly. It is a trope of modern fantasy that the hero triumphs, kills the dragon, takes the treasure, gets the girl, suffers no lasting physical or psychic damage, and lives happily ever after. But this is not the Christian vision of life. Ultimate triumph, yes, in the attainment of the beatific vision, but that is outside the scope of most novels, and certainly outside the scope of The Lord of the Rings just as it is outside the scope of The Power and the Glory. Confidence in such a triumph is something the reader brings to the work, not something that the work brings to the reader.

Nor is “sacrifice is the path to victory” necessarily a Christian or Catholic idea. Christ is the perfect and eternal sacrifice in atonement for the sins of all mankind. But Christ, having paid the price for all, gave us a new commandment, the commandment of love. Love may indeed involve sacrifice. It usually does. But it is Love that is the path to victory. Or, to put it in the Words of Christ, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Even the tiny pebble that becomes the cornerstone is not necessarily a Christian motif, despite being phrased as a modified quote from the Psalms. The stone which the builders rejected is commonly taken to refer to Christ, and the psalm does not say that it is rejected for being too small. However we take it, it does not make Dick Whittington becoming Lord Mayor of London into a Christian symbol or allegory. By that measure, we would have to make a Christ figure of Elon Musk. Upward mobility is not a Christian virtue, or at least, it is not a Catholic virtue.

One might respond that at least The Lord of the Rings is not unchristian, like so much literature today. Some would disagree. After all, it contains dragons and magic rings, which are not Christian things. Others might point to its division of the world into good races and bad races. I think we might fairly say that these criticisms result from a too literal reading of the text. And certainly it is neither hedonistic nor nihilistic like, for instance, Game of Thrones. But there is a vast literature from many religions and cultures that is not hedonistic or nihilistic either. Not having the particular vices of George R. R. Martin or Sally Rooney does not in itself make a work “inescapably Christian.”

Scholars on a mission will parse through the text looking for Christian and specifically Catholic symbols and allusions. And they will certainly find them. Some of these will have been placed there intentionally. Tolkien, after all, was a scholar and doubtless had a vast stock of allusions always at his command — far more so than most of his imitators.

But such symbols and allusions exist in the work of most authors of the Western tradition, whether they put them there deliberately or not, and whether they were believing Christians or not. The Bible and the stories of Christian saints and heroes are deeply woven into the language and imagination of the West. They are so deeply ingrained in our culture and language that most authors, of any faith or none, invariably use them, wittingly or unwittingly. Their mere presence does not establish Catholicity of authorship or intent. Nor does it necessarily create a Catholicity of effect since most modern readers will not recognize such motifs for what they are or know their original meaning.

A novel is an experience, and because we have associative minds, experiences, both real and literary, tend to bring other ideas into our heads. Authors do, of course, intend their stories to bring certain ideas and images to mind, and by and large this works and is rationally discernable. But because language is an appeal to memory and every person’s memory is differently stocked, individual readers will invariably miss some of what the author intends and experience things that the author did not intend. And the academic and the reviewer, no matter how circumspect, is hugely motivated to find intent and meaning everywhere in the text. It is these types of discoveries that they are rewarded for, and so they are strongly incented to discover as many of them as they can. In doing so, they tend to paint authors as far more wily and devious craftsman than they really are, and also to lose the forest in the trees.

C. S. Lewis, in his essay Fernseed and Elephants, warned against such literary spelunking, complaining how scholars were apt to read all sorts of improbable things into the text of the book and into the author’s intentions. I myself, in the very narrow literature that comments on my books, have found people seeing ideas and meanings that certainly were not consciously in my head as I wrote.

What is inescapably deliberate in The Lord of the Rings is the numerous allusions to, indeed, wholesale borrowing from Norse mythology, not Christianity. Tolkien was setting out to create a mythology for the English people based on the stories and motifs of their Germanic and Scandinavian ancestors. His sensibilities were undoubtedly Catholic, but his sources were not.

And there is another point to be made here about the literary and cultural traditions of the West. Christianity is undoubtedly a huge influence, and its symbols and stories run all through the Western tradition. But it is not the only source of its symbols and stories. They come also from the Greeks, the Romans, the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, and, to lesser extents, the Celts and all the various people and cultures of the Mediterranean basin and the Near East. To suggest that Western Culture is a wholly Catholic culture or Christian culture is absurd. And the fact that it is less Christian now than it used to be is not a sign that it was ever wholly Christian. It never was. Of course there are Catholic influences in The Lord of the Rings, but it is also shot through with a quintessential Englishness. So are the works of Greene and Waugh, just as the work of Flannery O’Connor is shot through with quintessential Americanness.

In many cases, the values that readers and critics claim to find in works like The Lord of the Rings are not, in fact, Catholic or Christian values but English or American or middle-class values. Those national and class values certainly incorporate elements of Catholic or Christian thought, though they often exclude or play down other elements of it, but it is far more often our own particular melange of values that we think we have discovered in such books, not a pure strain of inescapably Catholic or Christian values.

Lewis again, on the belief of modern scholars that they have uncovered the true meaning of texts that have been misunderstood for centuries:

I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant. But in this third instance I am a privileged person. The revolution in thought and sentiment which has occurred in my own lifetime is so great that I belong, mentally, to Shakespeare’s world far more than to that of these recent interpreters. I see — feel it in my bones — know beyond argument — that most of their interpretations are merely impossible; they involve a way of looking at things which was not known in 1914, much less in the Jacobean period.

My point in quoting this passage is not that the modern interpreters of Tolkien are wrong (though Lewis, in the same essay, asserts that some contemporary interpreters of Tolkien were, to his certain knowledge, wrong) but to point out the extent to which our own ideas seem to us a complete, logical, and natural point of view when they are in fact the product of a very particular set of circumstances and intellectual movements, the course and product of which we are commonly unaware of. Or, to put it another way, the set of values that we, if we are Catholic, believe to be Catholic, or if we are Christian, believe to be Christian, are most likely a mish-mash of Christian elements and things belonging to our own country, class, and historical moment, and that the values we perceive in fiction, rightly or wrongly, are those of that particular mish-mash, not “inescapably” Christian or Catholic at all.

And the same is, of course, true of every writer who ever set pen to paper. They were equally a product of their time and held values that were the product of their time, place, and class, as well as of their creed. Recognizing this about yourself enables you to look at your own beliefs and values with a somewhat jaundiced eye. This is what an education, particularly a university education, should seek to do for its students. It is what that much-abused phrase “critical thinking” ought to mean. It is a lesson one imagines few of Lewis’s students would have failed to learn. But even with those jaundiced eyes, we can’t suppose that we have actually achieved that kind of clear, independent universal value system we once naively thought we possessed. At best, we will have achieved a habit of second-guessing ourselves and checking our sources. Certainly, in the full flow of literary composition, when creating worlds and characters and sending them on adventures, we will be operating with a mind steeped in the full and rich complexities of our time, place, class, and creed.

Which brings me back to the effort to demonstrate and proclaim the “inescapably” Catholic or Christian nature of The Lord of the Rings. To be sure, there are literary works that are truly “inescapably” Catholic, at least in their subject matter. The Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory spends part of the novel trying to obtain a bottle of wine so that he can celebrate the Eucharist. In Brideshead Revisited, Julia refuses to marry Charles because she finds herself unable to defy the Catholic prohibition on divorce and remarriage. These things are central to the novels in question, and they are inescapably Catholic.

But there is no such inescapably Catholic thing to be found anywhere in The Lord of the Rings. There are symbols and allusions, certainly, as there are in most works in the Western canon, but there is not one point of the story of which one could say, “That could only happen to a Catholic” or “That could only happen in a Christian society.” (Or is there? Rebuke me in the comments if you think there is.)

What one can say is that, allowing that the dragons and the magic rings and the good and bad races are all denizens of a secondary world and that there is no intent to make us believe in them in the primary world, The Lord of the Rings is not an uncatholic or unchristian work, as is, for instance, Game of Thrones or His Dark Materials. And that should be good enough. Not every book that is read by or written by a Catholic has to be as inescapably Catholic as Brideshead Revisited or The Power and the Glory, or as inescapably Christian as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It is enough that they are true to the nature of human experience in this world in that specific aspect of human life that they deal with.

Which returns us to the question: why is it so important to so many people to claim that The Lord of the Rings is an inescapably Christian or inescapably Catholic book? Why is it not enough for them to say that it is a good book, written by a Catholic, and not showing any of the anti-Catholic sentiment or the hedonistic nihilism of so much modern fiction?

Is it because they think that a novel, because it is a thing made of words, must be held to the same standards of theological and philosophical rigor as an essay in those disciplines or that it is unworthy if it is not transmitting some sort of salutary and explicitly Catholic or Christian exhortation to the reader, and that The Lord of the Rings must therefore be vindicated by showing its Catholic or Christian roots?

Is it because they are in love with the modern fantasy genre but feel the need to somehow sanctify the genre by vindicating the Catholicity of its roots?

Is it because, as academics, they want to get students to take their classes and read their articles by teaching and writing about a book that their students have already read rather than by introducing them to other works that they might more profitably read? Or are try using it as a gateway drug to lead students to those other books?

What’s your reason?

Do I think that The Lord of the Rings was written by a man of Catholic sensibilities? Yes, we know this to be true. Do I think it could not possibly have been written by a man of Protestant or Orthodox or Jewish or even of pagan Norse sensibilities? No, I don’t. And the existence of any number of Christian themes and motifs does not argue to the contrary. First because, as I argued above, they are woven so deeply into our culture and language that they are frequently used by authors who have no idea of their origins. Second because one does not have to belong to a faith to be interested in it or in how its adherents see the world, a prime case in point being Robert Bolt, an atheist, who wrote the play A Man for All Seasons about St. Thomas More, which became one of the movies most beloved by Catholics.

Like The Power and the Glory and Brideshead Revisited, A Man for All Seasons has an inescapably Catholic storyline. The Lord of the Rings does not. And The Lord of the Rings is not like a TS Eliot poem, where you have to recognize all the obscure allusions or the poem becomes meaningless. Whatever Catholic or Christian symbols and references there may be, whether intended by the author or discovered or imagined by scholars, the book is entirely understandable to the vast majority of the reading public despite their neither noticing nor appreciating any such Catholic or Christian allusions as there may be. In this sense, its Catholic or Christian nature, if it has one, is entirely escapable. It no doubt escapes most readers without, apparently, diminishing their enjoyment of or enthusiasm for the book.

I am in no sense trying to disclaim or reject The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic or Christian novel, whatever it may mean to describe a novel that way. It is certainly not unchristian or uncatholic, whatever those terms might mean. But what do those terms mean?

The Lord of the Rings is not a work of affirmative fiction, by which I mean that it is not the sort of book so often produced by publishers who describe themselves as Christian publishing houses that is designed to affirm the reader in the rightness and goodness of their faith. Affirmative fiction is not confined to Christians, of course. We all like books that affirm our current beliefs and reassure us of the righteousness of those beliefs. Much of the fiction produced by mainstream houses and other small presses is affirmative fiction of a postmodern nihilist faith or of various other faiths. Affirmative fiction sells books. This is at least one meaning of terms like “Christian novel” or “LGBTQ novel.”

Another meaning could be that the subject matter is Christian or Catholic in some way, as with The Power and the Glory, Brideshead Revisited, or A Man for All Seasons, or an obvious Christian allegory like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But The Lord of the Rings does not qualify on this ground. Nor does the author need to be Christian or Catholic to produce such works, as is the case with Robert Bolt and A Man for All Seasons.

Another meaning could be that the author is Catholic or Christian, as Tolkien was. But there are Catholic and Christian writers whose books are indistinguishable from common modern fiction. Tony Hillerman, author of the Leaphorn and Chee Navajo police novels, is a case in point.

The problem with declaring any work “inescapably Christian” or “inescapably Catholic” is that for the identification to be inescapable, the work would have to demonstrate some property or belief that was held by Christians alone or by Catholics alone. And the problem is that Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, are unique chiefly in a set of historical claims about the person of Jesus Christ and a set of theological claims about the nature of Christ, of his church, and of the destiny of man and that these are not subjects that commonly come up in a novel, except as the beliefs of their characters. And as we have established, such books can be written by atheists who presumably look on those beliefs and the actions they lead to as a curious psychological phenomenon and whose readers will often regard them in the same way.

In short, in the life of this world, which is the subject matter of almost all novels, it is perfectly possible to regard all religious belief and religious action as psychological phenomena, part of the fascinating response of human beings to life in this world, and to write books about it. Whether the author holds those beliefs themselves has no necessary impact on the way they are portrayed in a novel, if, indeed, they are portrayed at all, which, of course, they are not in The Lord of the Rings. Of course, it is possible for an author to make it clear to the reader that they don’t share the beliefs that they portray or that they do, though in both cases, this tends to make the novel more didactic and less convincing.

An author can, however, indicate where their sympathies lie without violating the form of the novel. A novel is a lens, not a window. It focuses attention on particular acts, feelings, and beliefs, and where the author focuses their attention depends largely on how they perceive the moral weight of things.

There is one line in A Man for All Seasons that has been pointed out as a fault in Bolt's portrayal of More, a thought that a Catholic formed as More was would never have expressed.

But what matters to me is not whether it’s true or not but that I believe it to be true, or rather not that I believe it, but that I believe it.

Here, we see that Bolt gives a moral weight to individual autonomy that no medieval thinker, least of all More, would have held to. What would have mattered to More was precisely whether the thing in question (the Apostolic Succession of the Pope) was true or not. Because More was Catholic, he would have believed that objective truth mattered, and individual opinion, particularly individual opinions clung to as a marker of individual autonomy, were of no consequence at all.

This notion, that facts don’t care about your feelings, is certainly one that well-formed Catholics believe, but it is not unique to them. This particular formulation of it, that facts don’t care about your feelings, comes from a Jew, Ben Shapiro, and there are plenty of atheist philosophers and scientists who would say the same thing (though perhaps not in public, as they would fear for their grant money and their tenure).

But this passage from A Man for All Seasons illustrates exactly why Catholics and Christians, and anyone else who believes that facts don’t care about your feelings, should care very much about this basic point of metaphysics and, by extension, of anthropology. It may not be an inescapably Catholic or Christian point since it is shared with many other people, but it is a point indispensable to Catholic and Christian claims. Without it, Christianity or Catholicism becomes just a personal fancy of no consequence to anyone but the individual who believes it, and it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as believing it makes you happy. Which would also be to say that the only moral weight of religious belief lies in whatever comfort it gives to the individual believer.

And this to me is what matters about The Lord of the Rings, not that it is inescapably Christian or inescapably Catholic, because it is not, but that it is inescapably objectivist, and it inescapably assigns moral weight to things in a way that clearly proclaims an objective moral universe with objective moral weights. Of course, the particular reason that it is these things is because Tolkien was Catholic. In that sense, yes, it is reasonable to say that it is so because he was Catholic. But that is, as it were, the product of inside knowledge. It does not make the book itself inescapably Christian.

Tolkien’s conception of a secondary subcreated world was very much about asserting the objective nature of reality. As he writes in On Fairy Stories:

[The storyteller] makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.

The storyteller creates an objectively true world that the reader has really no choice but to accept as objectively true since it is entirely the creation of the storyteller. And in this subcreated world, not only is the world itself objectively true, but things in that world are imbued with a fixed moral weight that is known and cannot be violated:

[T]here is in fact no wedding between a princess and a frog: the frog was an enchanted prince. And the point of the story lies not in thinking frogs possible mates, but in the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences) that, together with observing prohibitions, runs through all Fairyland.

This, Tolkien suggests, is fundamental to the characteristic of the fairy story, its absolute objectivity and fixed scale of moral weights.² And since we live in a society today, and particularly in a literary culture, that routinely denies these things, these properties of The Lord of the Rings, taken together with its enduring popularity, are what should make it of special interest and special value to Catholics, to Christians, and to everyone else who holds that the facts don’t care about your feelings.

The Lord of the Rings stands as a rebuke to the mantra of the modern writing school that the reader has to “identify” with the main character and see the world through their eyes, which injunction is simply an implementation of the post-modern idea that there is no objective reality, only personal experience, and thus that no objective voice, no authorial narrative is to be permitted. We are told that readers will not be able to engage with a book unless they can identify with a character in this way. But the enduring popularity of great objective works with strong authorial narrative voices, like The Lord of the Rings and the works of Jane Austen, and many others, clearly demonstrate the falsity of this claim.

It is clearly impossible to build a Catholic or Christian literature on the precepts and methods of a nihilist, post-modern literary culture. It would not be a house built on sand, but a house built on quicksand. It is, in a sense, too easy to evangelize someone with this worldview, for they can adopt any religion they like as a pose or a fashion statement, like wearing a crucifix as jewelry. They are insensible to real evangelization while they remain a relativist. And thus it seems to me that the first task of a Catholic or Christian author should be to affirm by their stories that the universe is indeed a place of objective reality in which things have a fixed and proportionate moral weight.

It is far more important to me that The Lord of the Rings is a book of the old form, a form from before the wholesale postmodern invasion of literature and thought, and that it remains wildly popular, giving the lie to the claim that people cannot read or enjoy books written this way anymore. Clearly they can. Clearly they do.

My latest novel, The Wanderer and the Way, which is more Catholic in its subject matter than any book of mine since St. Agnes and the Selkie, though it is definitely not affirmative fiction, is now available for preorder. But since it is set before the Reformation, it is, I suppose, as much Christian as Catholic in it subject matter. In any case, it is a book of the Camino, and I hope you will take a look.

1. Catholics are Christians. In the publishing world, however, those whom Catholics call Protestants call themselves Christians, sometimes in a way that includes Catholics and sometimes in a way that excludes them. My use of the two terms in this essay is merely to acknowledge that Christians, in this sense, may have different criteria for what constitutes an “inescapably” Christian novel compared to what Catholics might consider an “inescapably” Catholic novel. Beyond the fact that such a difference in criteria may exist, I mean nothing by the distinction.

2. We should not fail to note, though, that while the creation of a secondary world allows you to create a world of objective reality and definitive moral weight, it is also a blank canvas on which you can create just the opposite if you wish. To do so would definitely put you out of sync with the whole fairytale tradition, but perhaps that is part of what differentiates modern fantasy from fairytales.