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pv
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Post Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 03, 2005 08:34
We are familiar with the fact that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, who even converted non-believers to his faith. We are also familiar with the the author of the Silmarillion, who creates a mythology that personifies the forces of nature, turning them into gods and goddesses with genders and personalities.


But which is the real Tolkien - the devout Christian or the pagan worshipper of nature?
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atalante_star
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 12:24
Tolkien's *religion* was Catholicism, certainly. But he grew up in rural England, and much of the life of countryside England is tied in with the cycles of nature and tales of older religions. And by that, I don't mean that rural England is full of witches and wizards dancing naked in the fields!! There's a more subtle influence - for example - most of the major pagan festivals are still celebrated throughout the country, but under the name of more "acceptable" festivals - including May Day, Harvest Festival and Halloween.

And when your childhood is full of wandering through the countryside in various places, I think its only natural to "pretend" that it contains gods and goddesses - why else a thunderstorm? why else a sudden bloom of honeysuckle in a barren meadow? I'm not saying he believed there truly were nature gods and goddesses, but that an imaginative child such as Tolkien must have seen the possibilities.

Also, English myth is tied up with nature deities - especially legneds such as the horned man / Herne the Hunter etc. He must have known these and absorbed them for later use, as he did so many other countries' mythologies - most of which probably had nature iagery in too.

Furthermore, I suppose, as he became more fervently anti-industry and anti-urbanity, having forces of nature in his books must have become more appealing - allowing the woods and trees to fight back in a way they could never do in real life.
LadyBeruthiel
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 02:47
The Catholic tradition has always admitted elements of truth and goodness in other religions, including pre-Christian pagan ones. St. Paul wrote that the pagans "have the law of God written on their hearts." Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis called these elements "good dreams," and speculated they were given by God to prepare the world for the Gospel. So maybe there's not as much of a contradiction there as people might think.

I find the ethical structure and spiritual values of Tolkien's world to be deeply Catholic; it's as if he were translating his beliefs into his own invented mythological language.
Figwit
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 05:12
I think Tolkien is as thoroughly catholic as one could possibly be. He sees traces of christianity within the traditions he knows so well, and works them into his own works. The Rohirrim are a good example of that: he combines Germanic 'wyrd' with the catholic faith in resurrection, creating a strong and vivid culture that appeals to us beyond its fantastical elements.

This is often a complaint about catholicism, that it incorporates too many pagan traditions and thus strays from its biblical sources. But personally I find this to be the strength of catholicism: it sees the weavings of God everywhere, and it is able to respect other cultures for it.

I find this aspect of catholicism in Tolkien's works.
pv
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 05:17
I find the ethical structure and spiritual values of Tolkien's world to be deeply Catholic;


Any organised religion would encourage a deference to authority, but Tolkien appears to encourage the idea of following one's own conscience. Characters like Faramir and Eomer are shown defying figures of authority and following their own ideas of what is right. This is more akin to Martin Luther's Protestant idea that people ought to interpret religion in their own individual ways, without too much reference to religious authorities. But Tolkien's ideas are more radical even than that. He says (through the words of Gildor Inglorion) that a figure of authority should avoid giving advice to anyone, and should not request anyone to follow a particular course of action.
This does not sound like any organised religion, including Catholicism, as most religions encourage deference to their precepts & discourage individual thinking.

[Edited on 4/6/2005 by pv]
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Figwit
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 06:00
But Tolkien's ideas are more radical even than that. He says (through the words of Gildor Inglorion) that a figure of authority should avoid giving advice to anyone, and should not request anyone to follow a particular course of action.
This does not sound like any organised religion, including Catholicism, as most religions encourage deference to their precepts & discourage individual thinking.



Nope, it's quite typical for Catholicism. The responsibility lies within the person's own conscience, not in merely obeying the rules.
elvishmusician
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 09:53
I find the ethical structure and spiritual values of Tolkien's world to be deeply Catholic; it's as if he were translating his beliefs into his own invented mythological language.
I agree, to be honest I see a lot more Catholic values in the story than that of pagans - even at the beginning of the Sil that was mentioned -the fall of Melkor is much like the fall of Lucifer in the Bible (right down to them both having 'musical' giftings). Also I have read that Tolkien and C.S Lewis set out to present the gospel in a different way using their mythical worlds - likewise many Christian parrellels can also be drawn from the 'Tales of Narnia' by C.S Lewis.
LadyBeruthiel
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 05:35
Well, it's going to be pretty hard to depict Tolkien as a pagan nature-worshiper, at least for me. It's true that his creation myth departs from the account in Genesis in that it develops a community working in concert with the principal creator, and of course you could think of the Valar as gods and goddesses. But this might also reflect modern (Catholic) ideas about human beings (creatures) being co-creators with God. However, I am gritting my teeth on my umpteenth attempt to get into the Silmarillion, so I think I'll shut up (much to the relief of some, I'm sure ) and let more knowledgeable folks follow this direction.
Figwit
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 04, 2005 10:50
Lol, nobody eats fish on friday anymore Well, at least no one I know

As for co-creation, in the Jewish Talmud there are stories about angels being co-creators as they are the messengers of God. I think, if you *would* regard the Ainur as angels that might be a good way to look at them.

But overall, the coolest creation myths are those where stuff happens. Genesis, however profound and ethically challenging, is not cool. The stories of Yggdrasil or the Babylonian creation myth, on the contrary, are really weird and exciting.

A creation myth is supposed to explain a couple of things about God(s) and humans, and how they see "eachother" - in other words, how people see themselves through the eyes of an all-powerful creature. It's sort of like how you think your dad would see you. It's also supposed to explain why things are the way they are.
So I think, for a complex, Germanic world like Middle-earth, the only thing he could create was what he did create.

Mmmm... did that make sense?
atalante_star
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 05, 2005 04:24
Lol, nobody eats fish on friday anymore Well, at least no one I know

*jumps up and down* the school I went to still does that!!!
As for co-creation, in the Jewish Talmud there are stories about angels being co-creators as they are the messengers of God. I think, if you *would* regard the Ainur as angels that might be a good way to look at them.

*nods* I agree. I've always thought that if one wants to take a Christian parallel for the Valar, it should be as the angels. They can create, but they can only create through the power and will of Ilúvatar - though they can have their own *ideas* for creation.
But overall, the coolest creation myths are those where stuff happens. Genesis, however profound and ethically challenging, is not cool. The stories of Yggdrasil or the Babylonian creation myth, on the contrary, are really weird and exciting.

Don't forget the Aboriginal Australian creation myths! They are fabulous!
atalante_star
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 05, 2005 12:15
I think one thing perhaps to note here is the fact that Tolkien adds "pagan" bits and bobs in when he doesn't *need* to. For example, the Ents are fairly essential to the story, whether they reflect some woodland deities or not, however, especially in older drafts of his works, nature spirits crop up more - one I always remember is a mention of the spirits of sea spray and waves. That's not a necessary thing - waves could just be waves without invoking a spirit to act in them.

Religion aside, Tolkien had a very strong sense of wanting nature to be able to fight back against the continual industrialisation of both this world and his world - and that comes across throughout his writings, in many ways.
Figwit
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 05, 2005 09:36
I agree atalante! I also think (I've been trying to brush up on my Germanic mythology) that it might have something to do with the whole Let's-create-a-myth-for-Brittain plan: in Germanic mythology there are seperate entities in the sea (for the waves, for the current and at the bottom of the sea), for the trees, for the flowers, for the mountains, for the snow... (those lovely frostgiants )... Maybe he tried to work in as many nods to those ancient concepts as he could?
atalante_star
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 06, 2005 05:29
Maybe he tried to work in as many nods to those ancient concepts as he could

I'd be surprised if he hadn't really - thinking from his childhood upwards. The books his mother gave him to read contained a lot of fairy-stories and mythology, and that interest carrie on through the rest of his life, culminating in his career in Anglo-Saxon. With someone so interested in olden tongues and olden cultures, taking elements of those mythologies would, I presume, seem completely natural.
Fattybolger
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 06, 2005 08:16
Both Tolkien and C.S.Lewis evidently felt a sort of nostalgia for pagan times, in which 'little' deities were accessible to mankind in a way that a 'remote, high God' could not be. There's a lot of this in Lewis's science-fiction trilogy, which he reputedly embarked on as a counterpart to Tolkien's imaginative writings: Lewis wrote about spiritual adventure far away in Space, Tolkien far away in Time. The Oyeseru (planetary protective spirits) in Lewis's trilogy are in many ways similar to the Valar in Tolkien. There's a wonderful passage in Perelandra where Ransom, the (very) Christian hero, thinks that 'there might, if a man could find it, be some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass'. Strict, obsessive, exclusive monotheism is an awfully difficult doctrine to maintain...
pv
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 06, 2005 05:44
Since God is not (let's face it) "real" in the way in which you and I are real - believers often find different ways in which to make God seem real to them.

Finding God in the forces of nature is a way of making God real. One can feel the rain & see the stars and most of us do feel a sense of awe in the presence of nature.

In the presence of nature, Tolkien probably felt the presence of the divine. "Earth's cramm'd with heaven and every common bush afire with God." So the Ainulindale was his tribute to nature - his way of taking off his slippers in the presence of God.
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atalante_star
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 06, 2005 06:52
Both Tolkien and C.S.Lewis evidently felt a sort of nostalgia for pagan times, in which 'little' deities were accessible to mankind in a way that a 'remote, high God' could not be. There's a lot of this in Lewis's science-fiction trilogy, which he reputedly embarked on as a counterpart to Tolkien's imaginative writings: Lewis wrote about spiritual adventure far away in Space, Tolkien far away in Time. The Oyeseru (planetary protective spirits) in Lewis's trilogy are in many ways similar to the Valar in Tolkien. There's a wonderful passage in Perelandra where Ransom, the (very) Christian hero, thinks that 'there might, if a man could find it, be some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass'. Strict, obsessive, exclusive monotheism is an awfully difficult doctrine to maintain...

Let me see if I can get my CSL chronology right here ... Pelandra and the others were written around the same time as The Lost Road - those sets of stories were both the result of a private challenge between them - for CSL to write a mythological story involving space and Tolkien to write a mythological story involving time.

Now I *think* that time was when Tolkien and CSL were still debating religion - CSL went from being a complete non-believer, to believing in a god of some description, and then on to believing in the Christian god (but a Protestant God, not a Catholic one ... which upset Tolkien just a little). So I suspect that if Pelandra had been written 5, 10 or 20 years later, those notions of polytheism wouldn't have been in there ... but that's just my guess

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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 09, 2005 12:08
I simply HAD to comment on this. Allow me to qoute from Humphrey Carpenter's bio of Tolkien:


[i]'Some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien's stories and his Christianity, and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write with such conviction about a world where God is not worshiped.
But there is no mystery. 'The Silmarillion' is the work of a profoundly Christian man. It does not contradict christianity ut compliments it. There is in the ledgends no worship of God, yet God is indeed there, more explictly in the Silmarillion than... the lord of the rings. Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and at the same time, []not to be a lie[/i. He wanted the mytholgical and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the uniberse; and as a christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshipped.
At the time, to set his stories 'realistically' in the known world, (stay with me now, it's almost done. This, in the parentheses, isn't part of the qoute, but continuing...) where religious beliefs were explictly christian, would deprive the of imaginative colour. So while God is present in Tolkien's universe, He remains unseen.'

I hope that helps!!! Please read the book, it talks more about this, and other things. By the way, Tolkien helped convert C.S. Lewis to christianity.
Fattybolger
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 10, 2005 02:48
If Humphrey C. said that he needs to take another look at Silmarillion, though what he says does apply to LoTR. God (Iluvatar, Eru) is quite explicitly present in Silmarillion and he is worshipped, at least in Númenor which has a temple to him. What they don't have is the sort of direct personal knowledge of God which Christians have. This is something which will never be accessible to Elves, only to us wicked-but-redeemable humans in later epochs.

Sorry, this isn't to do with nature worship - but just to set the record straight...
pv
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Post RE: Tolkien's true religion...
on: June 10, 2005 12:40
What they don't have is the sort of direct personal knowledge of God which Christians have. This is something which will never be accessible to Elves, only to us wicked-but-redeemable humans in later epochs.


But the elves did have a direct personal access to God - they were allowed to live in Valinor and there are references to their direct interaction with the Valar. Galadriel, for instance, treats the dwarves with respect, because she has great respect for Aule, their creator, with whom she has interacted directly. It was the men who felt that they were missing out on this direct interaction with the divine, and tried to sail west to the forbidden lands.

Even on Middle Earth, it is the elves who are more aware of the presence of the divine on earth. They worship the trees (the Mallorns of Lorien) and the stars. As they are so very aware of the presence of the Valar on Earth, many of them feel no burning desire to go to Valinor. Haldir, who feels the presence of the divine in the trees of Lorien, says that he wouldn't move to Valinor because he may not find his favourite trees there.

This is one of my favourite lines in LotR - this is the author himself speaking of his intense love of the natural world, through the words of one of his characters. Tolkien is saying here that he wouldn't want to move to heaven because he might not find his favourite trees there. These are not the words of a man with an academic interest in pagan nature worship. These are the words of a man who is a nature worshipper himself.

[Edited on 10/6/2005 by pv]
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cirdaneth
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Post Re: Tolkien
on: May 29, 2012 04:25
*bump.

My take on this is that the mystical side of Christianity has always focussed on the natural world. St Francis being the most obvious example and St Columba another.
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Post Re: Tolkien
on: June 08, 2012 09:13
If Christianity is a very hazy, fuzzy reflection of who and what Christ was, then Tolkien's writings are likewise for the Euro shamanistic "pre-historical" period. Let's face it, we are deep into a rationalist, left-brain-dominant era, one that for most of humanity started with serious agriculture, and is "peaking" (read about to crash) right about now in the 21st century.

To me, both Xianity and EFM (Euro-fairy mysticism; perhaps read about it at hercynia.net) are attempts to hold onto -- with various symbolic devices -- the great pre-left-brain epoch of humanity. The other day I saw a brilliant bumpersticker: "God's original idea was to hang out in a garden with vegan nudists" Yeah, just a few "Elven garments" and you have Lothlorien. But it is clear that modern Xianity is not at all about God's original plan, nor really much of Christ's attempt to bring some semblance of that plan to the modern mass society human. Nor is the experience of Tolkien, either from a book or a mass audience film, much like being a real Elf in a pristine, all but endless forest. (Although where I live I can get maddeningly brief glimpses of it. Let me tell you, it's really, really maddening!)

I guess I'll just say that Tolkien maintained his "staunch" Catholicism as a bulwark against the threat of soulless, Saruman-like, left-brain, industrialist modernism. Within the Catholic Church he could be spiritual, if not mystical within an accepted organization. But then he took his "Great Holiday" into EFM too -- just to "round out" the spiritual, mystical experience. ;-} Don't say I blame him. . . .
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Post Re: Tolkien
on: June 17, 2012 04:43
Well! A week on and I've decided you can't understand Tolkien from the letters. I'd say he was a natural pagan and then a Catholic convert, and as mentioned Catholicism is very accommodating. When it was imposed on the African slaves in South America they simply mapped the attributes of the saints onto their gods, and continued with their beliefs in parallel. Better that than a merciful beheading. As Hercynian says Tolkien satisfied his need for the spiritual in Nature through his writings, though he says unequivocally that LOTR was a work informed by his Christian beliefs. Even so the themes he deals with are not exclusively Christian. I wonder what Tolkien thought of the Christian mystics? Here's Master Eckhart- "Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God." I have never thought that the book was about God, nor religious in any way, so maybe Tolkien was more of a mystic than he knew.

Edit.
Funny old world innit? I've been going through 'Letters' while reading Robert Pirsig's 'Lila', which is where I got the Eckhart quote from. In letter 209 Tolkien discusses the etymology of words and how the meaning can suddenly change, citing yelp, which used to mean 'to speak proudly'. Yes! Meanwhile in 'Lila' the etymology of the Indo-European root of rta is described, and he equates it to his concept of static quality in his metaphysics, which includes the tenets of religion. It's been a very odd few days reading.
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