An Undeceptions Podcast. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with ends of worms and a newsy smell. Nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat. It was a hobbit hole. And that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened onto a tube-shaped hole like a tunnel.
A very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs. And lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats. The Hobbit was fond of visitors.
Hearing those words sends a shiver down my spine and draws on deep memories of childhood. In fact, I still have on the shelf opposite me the 40-year-old copy of The Hobbit I pinched from my older brother, who was raving and raving about the book. So I borrowed it. Sorry, Rob, if you're listening, which he never does.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, not for us, but for his children. We might never have known about this story were it not for one of Tolkien's students at Oxford, Elaine Griffiths, who suggested to Allen and Unwin publishers that it might make a pretty good children's book. The chairman, Stanley Unwin, gave it to his own 10-year-old Rainer, who famously wrote
This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations. It is good and should appeal to all children between the age of 5 and 9.
Well, it's appealed to a much wider readership than that since its publication in 1937. The Times referred to it as one of the most influential books of our generation. And of course, The Hobbit was the seed from which grew the best-known Tolkien epic, The Lord of the Rings. And we're going to get to that too.
More than giving us great stories, though, these books, so Director Mark informs me, launched an entire modern literary genre.
fantasy fiction. You know, fantasy fiction, where the gap between fairy tales and normal life is bridged. I'll take his word for that. I'm like a lot of people. I'm sure I don't like fantasy fiction, or even people who read fantasy fiction, but I like Tolkien.
I am, in fact, a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands. I smoke a pipe and like good plain food, unrefrigerated, but detest French cooking. I like and even dare to wear, in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats.
I am fond of mushrooms, out of a field, have a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome. I go to bed late and get up late, when possible. I do not travel much.
"The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination, not the small reach of their courage or latent power. I've always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds." – J.R.R. Tolkien
And so Bilbo Baggins is an ordinary hobbit, a down-to-earth character, but also one who walked along the edges of a much grander tale. Because while Tolkien was writing about common sense heroes, he also spent much of his life constructing an entire mythic landscape in which characters like Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin all wander.
A high fantasy that reached beyond simple hack and slash stories of warriors and beasts. Here was a mythology that pointed to something much bigger than the author's imagination. Something real. In fact, the truly real.
Tolkien was a Christian writer, not in the sense that he wrote about Christianity in the way that, say, his friend C.S. Lewis wrote about Christianity, but in the sense that he wrote from within a Christian universe, about the world as it really is. He believed that all genuinely good stories pointed to the one overarching epic about the good, how we have fallen away from it,
and how unseen forces can bring us back. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that
that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth. John Ronald Rule Tolkien was born on January the 3rd, 1892, in the Orange Free State in Southern Africa. It's now just called the Free State Province of South Africa.
He and his mother and brother moved to England when he was three for what was meant to be just an extended visit. It became permanent when his father died of rheumatic fever before he could join them.
So his early life was a story of dependence on his extended family for financial support, though that didn't go very well. Dependence on his mother, Mabel, for his home schooling and faith. And as we'll see, dependence on a local priest. And here to tell us more is Professor Alison Milbank, canon theologian of Southall Minster near Nottingham and professor at the University of Nottingham.
She studied theology and literature at Cambridge University and completed her doctorate at the University of Lancaster. Among her many publications is Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians, the fantasy of the real. He obviously ended up being terribly bright and learned, but were there signs of that early on?
Well, when he was at school, he went to the King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, which is a famous state school. He did well. And he had a circle of friends whom John Garth has written about, who met for kind of literary conversation. And they all saw themselves as people of faith and all people who were going to contribute to the future of
They had a very kind of high view of themselves and their kind of vocation. - Now what do we do? - We change the world! - Oh good, something simple. - Through art, you clown. Through the power of art. - Brothers, will you join your comrades in this act of changing the world?
That's the 2019 film Tolkien starring Nicholas Hout. It tracks the great man's life from his early school days through to the fateful writing of that first line of The Hobbit. It perfectly captures the creative camaraderie that was so important for Tolkien personally and for his stories.
Several of them died in the First World War. Tolkien kind of carried on the project, if you like. I see. Is this where the tea club Barovian Society comes in? That's right. Tell us about that. This was this little group who met and gave papers to each other and read their poems aloud.
and this sort of thing. It was very much of the time GK Chesterton had a similar kind of club when he was at school in London. - We should form a club. - What? - A brotherhood. - Aren't we already a club? A tea drinking club. - A tea drinking club sounds like something my stepmother would go to. - The tea club. - It doesn't sound any better just because you repeated it. - The Birmingham Boys. - That sounds like a circus act. - The Boys of Barrow Stores.
Tolkien's love affair with language began with his mother's Latin lessons, of course.
After marrying his childhood sweetheart, Edith, in 1916, they moved to Oxford to follow this obsession. His first job as a researcher was in 1920 with what would become the Oxford English Dictionary. He spent much of his time apparently investigating the Germanic origins of English words beginning with W.
That's a lot of words when you think about it, like the word wort, word, for instance. After a stint up in Leeds, he returned to Oxford in 1925 as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon with a fellowship at Pembroke College.
It must have been an amazing day when Tolkien was granted the position of Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. That's a really big gig here in Oxford. He was so excited he zipped down from Leeds to, well we're in Summertown, just north of the city, and he came here to Northmore Road and purchased number 22. Here we are.
It's a lovely British house but actually he bought it before Edith had seen it and when she got here she hated it.
it was too small for their growing family. So he did what any good guy would do and he moved his family. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. About 10 steps away to number 20 Northmoor Road which is yes a much larger house and here we are. It's a great big fence
and a very clear sign saying private. Obviously these guys are sick of Tolkien pilgrims making their way here. Actually this is a lovely house and apparently this is where he started writing The Hobbit. So this is a bit of a pilgrimage.
He was fascinated by language. How and when did he move into that as a specialty, and what did he like specializing in? Well, he moved into that very early on in his university career. Obviously, philology and English, with that particular interest, formed his whole career. I once had the privilege of examining his copy of the Summa Theologica,
And it had little slips inside where he'd mark the place with sort of lecture handouts on Anglo-Saxon from his lectures. Really? Oh.
Wow. So he was a Thomas Aquinas fan, was he? Well, I argue so. And he certainly owned a copy, which was bought by somebody in Italy. And there are little pencil marginalia that I think are Tolkien's because they're on the same pages as these slips. Whereas I think this copy belonged to a priest earlier who made another set of notes on this edition. Yeah.
But Tolkien seems to have noted things to do with marriage. So while he was in the boarding house, he met his future wife, who was also an orphan and also living this kind of life. And they weren't allowed to marry for a while because they were very, very young. And so he seems to have looked up canon law on marriage, as you might say what Thomas Quiner said about it in the summer.
That's funny. And then what was his early academic posting?
So he starts at Oxford, though he has a little period away at Leeds. But then most of his life, he's in Oxford. And very much of Oxford, lived in Headington and other parts of Oxford with his growing family of four children, eventually. We once did an episode for Underceptions about Oxford's impact on C.S. Lewis.
That's episode 81, by the way. Lewis's Oxford. I'm wondering if you've got any thoughts about how Oxford shaped Tolkien's own output and personal life. Well, obviously the Oxford circles of friends were very important to him. And the Oxfordshire countryside, the Marlborough Downs south of Oxford are very shire-like places.
So that side of Oxford, the kind of the woods outside Oxford, the fact that Oxford ends very abruptly and the country kind of comes right in is quite important. In terms of Oxford intellectual life, Tolkien's terribly sort of, he's very much an independent thinker. He doesn't belong to schools of thought of other people. And he's often kind of quite resistant to other writers.
Tolkien's obsession with philology, the structure, historical development, and relationships of languages was extreme, even by an Oxford Don's standards. He didn't just make up fanciful names for his fantasy stories. He constructed entire functional languages. The ancient language of the kings of men.
One for the horse lords, another for dwarves, and then two complete elvish tongues. And one of those was influenced by the Finnish language. Little shout out for our Finnish listeners.
His fascination with Middle English, which derived from Anglo-Saxon, his specialty, also inspired his poetry. Here's one of his most famous poems about the love between the man baron and the elf maid Luthien. Apparently, it came to Tolkien when his beloved Edith danced for him under the trees. So sweet. MUSIC
But as she went he swiftly came, And called her with the tender name Of nightingales and elvish tongue, That all the woods now sudden rung, "Tenuvial, Tenuvial!" And clear his voice was as a bell, It echoes wove a binding spell, "Tenuvial, Tenuvial!" His voice such love and longing filled, One moment stood she, fear was still, One moment only, like a flame,
He leaped towards her as she stayed and caught and kissed that elven maid. As love there woke in sweet surprise, the starlight trembled in her eyes. Eleuthien, Eleuthien, more fair than any child of men, O loveliest maid of Elvines, what madness does thee now possess? Elysium limbs and shadowy hair, and chaplet of white snowdrops there,
Tolkien's post at Oxford brought him into contact with another would-be poet and writer of fantastical tales, Clive Staples Lewis. Tolkien and Lewis formed a deep friendship. They
They also made a formidable team at the university, advocating for the scholarly study of English itself. It's difficult to think of him in terms of Oxford politics, except that he and Lewis obviously did join together to stand up for the study of language, very traditional ways of studying English literature at Oxford. This was the period when C.S. Lewis, in the late 20s, was coming to theism.
But very famously, his mind was convinced of theism. But at that point in his life, he has this very sort of rationalistic view of things so that he sees imagination differently.
very much in a kind of dialectic with reason. In fact, he wrote a poem about it in which imagination is Demeter and the sort of under dark side and reason is Athena.
Whereas Tolkien actually wrote a poem for him called 'Misappear', where he tries to show him that you cannot see things properly unless you see them mythically. "To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver, the heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only wise.
and still recalls him, though now long estranged. Man is not wholly lost, nor wholly changed, disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned. His world dominion by creative act, not his to worship the great artifact. Man, sub-creator, the refracted light,
Through whom is splintered from a single white, To many hues and endlessly combined, In living shapes that move from mind to mind. Through all the crannies of the world we filled With elves and goblins, though we dared to build, Gods and their houses out of dark and light, And so the seed of dragons, 'twas our right,
Used or misused, the right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we were made. Mythopoeia, J.R.R. Tolkien. He makes the very famous observation that undergirds both of their work, but particularly Tolkien's, which is that we make still by the law in which we're made. So we are made as makers.
And we make myths, but we make them according to truth. And so truth and myth go together. And obviously for Tolkien, Christianity is the true myth because myth and history come together. And he wrote about this at length in his essay on fairy stories, which he wrote later on in the 40s and was later extended as a little book.
where he has his most extensive writing about the truth of the gospel as myth. Yes, I want to ask you about fairy tales in a moment. Can we just hover around, what do we know of Tolkien's influence on Lewis in terms of that journey toward the Christian faith? What was it? One often hears about a famous walk that they had around the Deer Park in Mordal and College. I mean, was that it? What do we know of it?
The walking around the Deer Park seems to have been important. So there was a walk that Tolkien did, and I think Hugo Dyson was there too, and Lewis. And this seems to have been important. Whether it came before the poem or after the poem, I don't know, but it's all around that time. And it is a very, very beautiful deer park. So you can really understand the kind of incarnation of power of nature as you walk around there.
And it does seem to have been at that point that Lewis embraced Christianity. In fact, Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis didn't become a Catholic. But, you know, he had been brought up a Northern Irish Protestant. I think that would have been a step too far for him. He's very much a kind of Anglican in his thoughts. Yes, yes.
I'm in Balliol College, beautiful, beautiful college. This was founded in 1263. Can you believe that? Coming up for 800 years. This was Tolkien's college. Lewis was about 500 metres from here in Magdalen College. Many people know that Tolkien and Lewis and a bunch of others met in the group called the Inklings. They met in various pubs around here.
including the eagle and child just up the road. But there was another club that Tolkien himself had founded called the Coal Biters, or in Icelandic, Coal Bitar. It refers to friends who sat so close to the fire in winter telling stories that they bit the coal. Anyway, it was an informal reading club for professors here, and they met in one of these rooms right in front of me.
and read Icelandic sagas to each other. How about that? It's amazing it didn't catch on. Tolkien's mother had instilled in him a love of green and growing things. His heart never really left the forests and villages surrounding Birmingham, where he grew up. Yes, there were forests around Birmingham.
He wasn't much of a hiker, as Lewis was, but he was profoundly affected in 1911 by a walking trip to the Pannin Alps on the border of Switzerland and Italy. He picked up a postcard there of a painting called Der Bergheist, The Mountain Spirit. Guess what it shows? It's a forest scene.
And in the middle, an old man with a white beard, big hat and a long coat. And he's sitting there gently talking to a white thorn that's nuzzling in his upturned hands. The man seems wise, humorous and compassionate. This was the origin of the wizard character Gandalf. We know this because long afterwards, Tolkien wrapped this postcard up in a paper cover on which he wrote the words Gandalf.
of Gandalf. I think that's proven then. Enter Ian McKellen's portrayal of Gandalf in Peter Jackson's incredible Lord of the Rings trilogy. I didn't think it would end this way. End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass. And then you see it. What? Gandalf. See what?
White shore and beyond. A far green country under a swift sunrise. It isn't so bad. No, no it isn't. These are all very ethereal, magical things that lie in the background of Tolkien's thought patterns. But what about the very concrete Great War?
What influence did World War I have on Tolkien? And indeed, World War II, I guess. Yes, well, World War II, through his son Christopher in particular, had quite an effect. So World War I, he fought in, as I say, as a signal. So he went round sort of on his own, quite dangerous work, but sort of sorting out all their communications. And he was invalided out. But some of his friends died.
And he also learned a great respect for the ordinary soldiers. And so Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings is based on those soldiers. And in many ways, he is very much the hero. Samwise Gamgee, or Sam, is a hobbit gardener and close companion of Frodo. He
He briefly holds the One Ring when he thinks Frodo is dead. He's determined to complete the mission and destroy the ring. He's a simple but profound character. He wonders out loud,
So that was the job I felt I had to do when I started to help Mr Frodo to the last step and then die with him. And then he answers himself, well, if that is the job, then I must do it. But I would dearly like to see Bywater again and Rosie Cotton and her brothers and the gaffer and Marigold and all. The ordinary hero who never gives up hope, who is never corrupted, that he hasn't had to hold...
the ring as long as poor Frodo. And that dates from World War I. And then World War II, he was just horrified by it. I mean, just think of people. They've been through World War I and they're just as their children are growing up.
it all happens again. And his great hatred of war and violence and the will to power, that Nietzschean will to power that you see in the Nazis, he hates. And although it's not an allegory, and he got very cross when people said it's just World War II in Lord of the Rings, obviously it affects it.
And the whole war industrial complex in which the whole of society becomes dedicated to producing weapons of mass destruction, he really hates. And his son Christopher, he was in the Air Force. They exchanged a great number of letters during the war. And so it affected him very strongly. And that's when he's writing The Lord of the Rings, during the war and just afterwards.
Tolkien was apparently a bit of a tortured artist. He was a slave to getting the details exactly right. The languages, the mood, the backstories, the phases of the moon across the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and so on. It took him more than 12 years to write. And then another five years to convince Alan and Unwin to publish it.
But throughout it all, he had the encouragement of his inklings, but especially of Lewis. Tolkien wrote, "...the unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence, as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my stuff could be more than a private hobby."
Tolkien also wrote Leaf by Niggle in this period. It's a tale about a little man who struggles his whole life to paint a picture that no one seems to value, only to discover one day that his painting is a reflection of heaven itself. Parrish turned to the shepherd. Are you a guide? He asked. Could you tell me the name of this country? Don't you know? Said the man.
"It is Niggle's country. It is Niggle's picture. Or most of it. A little of it is now Parrish's garden." "Niggle's picture?" said Parrish in astonishment. "Did you think of all of this, Niggle? I never knew you were so clever. Why didn't you tell me?" "He tried to tell you long ago," said the man. "But you would not look. He had only got canvas and paint in those days, and you wanted to mend your roof with them."
This is what you and your wife used to call niggles nonsense, or that derbing. But it did not look like this then, not real, said Parrish. No, it was only a glimpse then, said the man. But you might have caught the glimpse if you had ever thought it worthwhile to try. Can we turn to Tolkien's actual works now? They are deeply theological, but not in the way of
Lewis's Narnia was theological. So can you tell us about his approach, Tolkien's approach? It wasn't Christian parable or allegory, and yet it was Christian. Can you help us navigate that? Well, of course, Tolkien wrote and was very interested in Anglo-Saxon and Nordic
mythology. And if you've ever read the poetic Edda, this is the myths of the Norsemen, but as interpreted by a Christian writer.
Almost like a kind of pagan old... Hey, if you want to know more about the Old Norse poetic Edda, and the prose Edda for that matter, head to our double episode on the Vikings, one of my personal favourites. It's titled The Vikings, and it's episodes 65 and 66. It turns out a medieval Christian named Snorri Snurluson was the guy who preserved the largest collection of ancient pagan Norse mythology. True story. ...a Christian writer...
So he makes it sound almost like a kind of pagan Old Testament. So you see things that look forward to an eschatological view of reality and things like that. So that I would suggest that what Tolkien thought he was doing with Middle Earth, which remember is supposed to be set in our world and other worlds-
But there is converse between them very, very far back in history. So it's almost as if Tolkien is writing a kind of mythology for England than England before Christianity, but one that makes Christianity good to think about.
and which is imbued with a kind of sense of the whole world as a divine artifact. So it's a kind of world that doesn't have a lot of religious practices in it, though it's undergirded from his collection of the myths that undergirded it, the Silmarillion, with a whole myth of its creation.
as the elves understand it. The elves do worship one of the kind of angelic figures, the Lady Elbereth, the Star Kindler. They sing hymns to her, which are rather like hymns to the Virgin Mary or something. Some more sort of conservative Christians might see Tolkien's love of pagan myth as suspicious and scandalous. What might he have said in reply?
Well, you probably know that I think he's very highly influenced by G.K. Chesterton. And Chesterton famously says that only Christianity makes paganism safe to play. Just as C.S. Lewis includes fauns in Narnia, so for Tolkien, all kind of creatures are
Are there – all searchings after religious truth have a certain truth in them as essays towards the one truth. I think he wouldn't find this problematic whatsoever.
I want to ask you about fairy tales. Obviously, Lewis and Chesterton were also into fairy tales and wrote about it, but Tolkien did as well. And in fact, he wrote an essay, did he not, on fairy tales? Can you tell us what his approach to fairy tales was? And I guess, you know, what we can learn because people aren't into fairy tales anymore.
Well, Tolkien has a lot to say about fairy tales and about the whole realm of fairy, which is a particular kind of estrangement from our world so that we return to it.
So fairy tales allow the recovery of a vision of reality by taking us on a little kind of holiday away from our normal view of the world. Just as in a fairy story, somebody may be taken away from his normal reality by the queen of the fairies or something and then returns like Thomas the Rhymer most famously.
So what you gain from fairy tales is they allow you to escape. That's the first thing. Escape from death, escape into being able to talk to animals, escape from the nastiness of the modern industrial complex in Tolkien's view.
but then they restore the real world to you. So fairy tales have very ordinary things in them, bread and apples and trees and shoes. And those become...
enchanted, if you like, by the fairy tale, by the fact that you might, in the tale of the 12 dancing princesses, there are golden apples and silver pears. But you read the story in such a way as you return to our world with a deeper understanding of the reality and the beauty of ordinary apples and ordinary shoes.
ordinary people. That's the main way that he thinks that fantasy and fairy tales can work. And the happy ending is the other thing, which he calls eucatastrophe, because it's not just kind of, oh, everything in the garden is lovely. It's just you take people to the absolute pits of danger, horror,
whatever. And then there is this sudden turn by which good comes in, the happy ending, but it comes in like grace. It comes in from without. A sudden miraculous grace that you can never be sure will return, never to be relied on.
The consolation of fairy stories, the joy of the happy ending, or more correctly, of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn, for there is no true end to any fairy tale. This joy, which is one of the things which fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist nor fugitive,
In its fairy tale or otherworld setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace, never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dis-catastrophe, of sorrow and failure. The possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance,
It denies, in the face of much evidence if you will, universal final defeat, and in so far is Evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to a child or a man that hears it, when the turn comes, a catch of the breath, a beaten lifting of the heart, near to or indeed accompanied by tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art.
and having a peculiar quality. In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy and heart's desire that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through. On Fairy Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien. Do you see that as his Christian eschatology directing his thoughts?
He says it is. He has this whole section at the end of On Fairy Stories where he has all this stuff about the gospel as the greatest fairy story, but a fairy story that comes true.
And in the end, of course, he thinks all our stories, in far as we write about the good, the true and the beautiful, will all come true in the eschaton. And in fact, in heaven, we will write more stories, we will play more music, we will make more songs, because art for him goes on and on into the eschaton.
Eschaton, by the way, just means the end, or really the beginning of the new story. Tolkien certainly believed he was doing much more than just telling interesting tales. He was participating in a myth-making that found its culmination in the one true story that gives all myths their meaning. The Gospels contain a fairy story, he once wrote.
or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. But, he continued, this story has entered history and the primary world. So stay with us.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
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Tolkien's extended family were mostly Baptists, so when Tolkien's mum Mabel joined the Roman Catholic Church, they were strongly opposed to it. And I'm sad to say they cut her off financially, even though she was a recent widow and a single mum of two. I don't think that's particularly a Baptist thing to do, but man oh man do Christians sometimes suck.
It was a parish priest, Father Morgan, who made Tolkien's family life bearable. He was something of a jolly uncle to Mabel and to her two sons. And he was the kid's guardian when she died.
My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, Tolkien wrote. And it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hillary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.
So then, Alison, how influential was Catholicism for Tolkien? The Catholicism of his mother and then, I guess, of this priest who took him under his wing? It was the centre of his life.
He went to the Eucharist at certain points of his life every day, and it influences everything he does, though not in a very obvious way sometimes. It influenced everything, and the Eucharist in particular was very important to him. He said it was the heart of everything.
The Eucharist, or Communion, or Lord's Supper, is the central bit of the Roman Catholic Church service. It's where the bread and wine representing Christ's body and blood are consumed. Except in Catholicism, as in the Orthodox Church, that bread is, in a mysterious sense, Christ's body. And the wine is his blood.
The meal, if you can call it that, is super important to all brands of Christianity, but for Catholics, it's the center. It's where Christ's sacrifice for sins is represented. It's memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and it's salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.
That's actually a quote from the Catholic Catechism, if you're wondering. Anyway, what's so interesting is that Tolkien saw Christ's life, death, and resurrection as the central story of the world and of his own life, but he didn't believe in writing about it in his stories, not even in a metaphorical way. He hated allegory.
He believed stories should exist for their own sake. And if they're good stories, truly epic stories, they will, by the very nature of the universe God has made, point to the good that is God himself.
There are some Jesus types in The Lord of the Rings, of course, but only in the sense that the highest ideals found across humanity are all found knit together in the one God-man, Jesus. So there's Gandalf, who returns exalted after what looks like his death. There's Frodo, who sacrifices himself for the good of all.
And there's Eowyn, the unlikely shield maiden, who, though not a typical heroic soldier, ends up slaying the Witch King. And perhaps most striking of all, there's the future king in the travel-stained cloak, Aragorn. All that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither.
Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring. Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king, The fellowship of the ring. Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.
A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of men comes crashing down. But it is not this day. This day we fight. By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, men of the West!
Sorry, Director Mark insisted on another scene from the Jackson Lord of the Rings. It is perhaps the most stirring pre-battle sequence since the they cannot take our freedom scene in Braveheart. But apparently I'm alone in the Undeceptions team for thinking that. And it's got way too much real world history for Director Mark, of course. Anyway, Tolkien isn't only about swords and empires.
I'm wondering then about the way Tolkien departs from the ancient pagan Saxon warrior myth. The heroes of, say, the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are unlikely heroes, are they not? Can you talk to us about what you think Tolkien is doing in giving us this particular kind of hero?
I think it has a theological reading, really, because you have your epic heroes like Aragorn, but then you have your hobbit heroes, and they are the real heroes, but they are the little people. You know, he has brought down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek, as Mary sings in the Magnificat. And that's very much what happens in The Lord of the Rings. So yes, Aragorn is the king, and Aragorn does all sorts of brave things. But
But these little hobbits, partly because of their humility and their awareness of their littleness, are able to do astonishing things that nobody else could do because the evil one looks out Sauron and he doesn't rate them. And therefore, he misses them until too late.
And that is very, very important to Tolkien, I think, this sense of their humility and their smallness and their everydayness. It's almost as if he's taking sort of comic characters and giving them a kind of epic story.
Yeah, so the humble hero, that really isn't a pagan motif. So that can only have come from his Christianity, yes? Absolutely. In fact, Tom Holland's book Dominion is all about the fact that there is no such thing as treating ordinary people as of worth and value, literally making them the heroes. Did you get to the New Testament and St. Peter? So...
You know, it has to be a particularly kind of Christian insight. Though, of course, once Christianity brought it in, it obviously answers Western culture. But for Tolkien, it's very, very deliberate, I think, in the way that he does it. And certainly when you see Merry and Eowyn defeating the Nazgul, Tolkien almost moves into the Magnificat.
in the way that he frames that whole encounter. So it's done in very hieratic poetic language, but almost as if it were partly a sort of ancient epic and partly the King James version of the Bible.
And it is a little tiny hobbit and a woman disguised as a man fighting as a warrior who are able between them through their weakness to defeat the Nazgul and the Witch King because the Witch King has had a prophecy that no man can defeat him. Well, no man does. It's a hobbit and a woman. But again, it's through their weakness that they are able to do it.
Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. I hope I'm not being overly biased in suggesting that Christ was the original servant leader, the one who lowers, humbles, and sacrifices himself for those he leads. And the classic scene that underlines this idea is from John chapter 13.
It was just before the Passover festival. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God. So he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet.
drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. The opening line is ominous because Jesus had long said his mission would climax at the Passover festival, where he would offer up his own life like the lamb that was sacrificed by Jews at the Passover. And so here we are, just before the Passover festival.
It's time then for Jesus to reveal a crucial lesson, a final lesson to his closest followers. So he stands up and does the most bizarre thing imaginable. He washes his students' feet. But the narrator, that's John, the eyewitness of all of this, wants to tell us readers one more thing before he actually narrates the foot washing.
He actually reminds us of Christ's supreme authority. The words again, Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God. So he got up from the meal. Imagine you'd never heard this story before. What would you expect to follow that kind of description of absolute authority? All the power of God the Father in his hands. So he got up from the meal and what?
Performed some sign of his supremacy? Told them how to conquer the world? No, he performed the task of a household servant. He had all authority. So he took off his outer clothing, wrapped a towel around his waist and washed and dried his disciples' feet. I imagine the stunned silence initially.
Over the last few years, the disciples have learnt to go with the flow of whatever Jesus proposed. They sort of got used to him saying and doing amazing things, but this is pushing the limits. And naturally, it's Peter, John tells us, who pipes up and says, "No, Lord, you shall never wash my feet."
Just parenthetically, it's remarkable that across all four Gospels, we get the same impression of the personality of Peter. He's always presented as the leader, of course. That's just a simple organizational thing. But the striking fact is that he comes across in all four Gospels and one of the letters of Paul as a boundless enthusiast who regularly puts his foot in his own mouth.
Only genuinely historical reporting could maintain such a consistent psychological profile across diverse sources. Anyway, that's just for free today. My real point is Peter says what everyone is thinking. No way, Lord. You're the king. You don't wash my feet. I wash yours.
The original Greek, by the way, is wildly adamant. It literally says, "Not ever shall you wash my feet" – "Ace ton Iona" – "into eternity", it says. I suppose we might say in the modern world, "Never in a million years will you wash my feet." But spare a thought for Peter. The notion of servant leadership hadn't been invented yet.
In fact, that expression was only coined in the 1970 management book by Robert K. Greenleaf. Its title is Servant Leadership. Now, though, there's even a center for servant leadership. But the Apostle Peter is in the middle of the invention of the concept right here. Peter's culture prized honor and power above pretty much everything else.
Jesus had taught them about compassion and love, of course, but washing feet was a complete reversal of the honor-shame outlook of the ancient world. According to the cultural norms of Mediterranean society, what's happening here would be seen as the most honorable man in the world effectively shaming himself before his admirers. So Jesus responds, it's in verse 7 of that John chapter 13,
So in a way, Jesus on his knees like a servant is preparation for what his followers will see the next day. At the Passover, Jesus will be on a cross like a criminal, according to his own teaching, bearing the wrongs of the world, atoning for our faults.
But this isn't just theology. Jesus immediately follows up with these words: "Now that I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example." The foot washing, then, isn't only a sign of Christ's humble sacrifice on the cross. It's also a simple example to follow.
Christians haven't always got this right. Sometimes they've pursued their own honor, protection, and power. They haven't got on their knees like a servant and served the world.
and not just served each other as their own club, but the world, and even a world that sometimes doesn't like the church. John's Gospel makes a point of saying in this scene that Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, was there at the meal.
In fact, it's immediately after this scene that Judas leaves to collect his payment for turning against Jesus. And Jesus knew this, and he still got on his knees and washed the betrayer's feet.
In J.R.R. Tolkien's language, this is the great fairy tale, the upending of all things. It's the Lord humbling himself. It's the ultimate myth. Except, as Tolkien also says, this story, this fairy tale, has entered history. You can press play now. MUSIC
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.
It's easy to appreciate The Lord of the Rings as a wonderful novel today. But when Tolkien was writing, he had a really hard time convincing people it was a worthwhile project. His publishers, Allen and Unwin, just wanted a Hobbit number two.
This enormous book was viewed skeptically. The sheer commercial expense of producing a novel more than a thousand pages long would put it beyond the reach of the average reader. That's what they thought.
It was eventually released as three volumes, and what followed was a series of editorial mistakes across the volumes, and helpful corrections became the bane of Tolkien's existence. Which left little time for the mammoth collection he had been working on long before he ever dreamt of hobbits, the Silmarillion, the epic mythology that stands behind all of his Middle-earth tales. That was our room.
The one who in Adar is called Iluvatar, and he made first the Anur, the holy ones, that were the offspring of his thought. And they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, repounding to them themes of music, and they sang before him, and he was glad.
But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened, for each comprehended only the part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came. And in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.
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 worshipped. But there is no mystery. The Silmarillion is the work of a profoundly religious man. It does not contradict Christianity, but complements it
There is in the legends no worship of God, yet God is indeed there, more explicitly in the Silmarillion than in the work that grew out of it, The Lord of the Rings. When he wrote the Silmarillion, Tolkien believed that in one sense he was writing the truth. He did not suppose that precisely such people as he described - elves, dwarves and malevolent orcs - had walked the earth and done the deeds he recorded.
But he did feel, or hope, that his stories were in some sense an embodiment of a profound truth. This is not to say that he was writing an allegory, far from it. Time and again, he expressed his distaste for that form of literature. "I dislike allegory, wherever I smell it," he once said. And similar phrases echo through his letters to readers of his books.
Certainly while writing The Silmarillion, Tolkien believed that he was doing more than inventing a story. He wrote of the tales that make up the book: "They arose in my mind as given things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew."
and absorbing though continually interrupted labor, especially even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics. Yet always I had the sense of recording what was already there, somewhere. Not of inventing. Humphrey Carpenter. J.R.R. Tolkien. A Biography.
Tolkien never lived to see the publication of The Silmarillion. It was compiled and edited by his son, Christopher. Tolkien's inability to come to grips with his lifelong work led to a darkness of thought that troubled his final days. From his diary, life is grey and grim.
I can get nothing done between staleness and boredom, confined to quarters and anxiety and distraction. What am I going to do? Be sucked down into residence in a hotel or old people's home or club without books or contacts or talk with men? God help me. And these sad days were compounded by a cooling of his long friendship with C.S. Lewis. ♪
Did he have a falling out with C.S. Lewis? I mean, I've read in various places that they walked apart, you know, in the end. But is that the case? I think it was very much to do with Lewis's taking up with his wife. I think Tolkien was a bit cool about joy and that whole thing. So they did become friends.
less close to each other, though each of them has made a wonderful statement about the other in different places. And I think Lewis was behind, you know, sort of trying to do things for Tolkien later on in life. And he, I think, supported C.S. Lewis's
chair when he moved to Cambridge. So they didn't exactly fall out, but they just sort of separated. And I mean, Tolkien was never as keen on people like Charles Williams, who if you knew a bit about Charles Williams, I mean, I love Charles Williams' novels, his spiritual thrillers, but he certainly did go in for some occult practices that involve some slightly cranky things. And
to do with nakedness and swords that we won't go to, but Tolkien would have had no time for any of this. Whereas Lewis was a great admirer of Charles Williams, so I think that didn't help, sort of. Did Tolkien write about Lewis upon Lewis's death? I mean, Lewis died 10 years before Tolkien. Yes, he wrote very positively about him and about their friendship.
C.S. Lewis died on the 22nd of November, 1963, aged 64. A few days later, Tolkien wrote to his daughter Priscilla, So far, I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age, like an old tree that is losing its leaves one by one. This feels like an axe blow near the roots.
John Ronald Rule Tolkien died in his beloved Oxford on September the 2nd, 1973. He'd moved away to Bournemouth for the health of his wife, Edith, but he returned upon her death to become a fellow of Merton College. Tolkien loved the stimulation Oxford provided and the company of what he described as men of my own kind.
He kept plugging away at the Silmarillion, but his final story that would be published in his lifetime was one he wrote and shared with Edith. Smith of Wooten Major is a story about a man who swallows a star and for most of his years is able to walk through the enchanted land of Faerie.
But a time comes when he eventually has to return this gift to the King of Faerie, and it's something he struggles with, but is ultimately able to do with peace and thankfulness. Do you not think, Master Smith, said Alf, that it is time for you to give this thing up? What is that to you, Master Cook? He answered. And why should I do so? Isn't it mine? It came to me. May a man not keep things that come to him so? At least as a remembrance. Some things...
Those that are free gifts and given for remembrance, but others are not so given. They cannot belong to a man forever, nor be treasured as heirlooms. They are lent. You have not thought, perhaps, that someone else may need this thing, but it is so. I'm about two miles out of the centre of Oxford to St Peter's Catholic Church and a really large, beautiful cemetery.
where Tolkien was carried to this unassuming cemetery in Wolvercote. It's not the heart of his beloved Oxford and the reason for that, I'm afraid to say, is that Catholics were not super welcome in the heart of Oxford. They laid him out here, a little bit suburban, for the man who dreamt up that amazing mythical world.
And I'm following the signs. It tells me to turn right. Okay, well there is, wow, Edith Mary Tolkien. And then her nickname, Luthien, is given to her. She was apparently moved. She died before J.R.R. Tolkien died. When he died, he gave instructions for her to be moved out here so they could be
Oh, and I see it's one large gravesite where they are both buried. Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, the elf princess, 1889 to 1971. And John Ronald Rule Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien, Baron, his name for himself. The late Tim Keller, the famous American pastor who recently passed away, said that he never stopped reading Tolkien.
Never. He would just cycle through Tolkien's works all the way through his life. Why do you think Tolkien has such a hold on people? Well, I think it's the nature of his world and the way he writes. So when you read a Tolkien novel, you know you can go as deeply as you like, and Tolkien would have gone more deeply.
And that's the way he writes. But the readerly experience is of a world that is good, no matter how many bad things happen.
and how much cruelty there is, and how much failure there is, it is good all the way down. And that reality is deeper than we realize. So if you ever wanted to use it, I mean, he was a great apologist, Timothy Keller. I think you need to begin with people by convincing them that the world we are in is not a limited materialist world.
but a world that has a kind of unending depth and significance and truth and radiance about it. And I think you get that from reading Tolkien. So if you're ever feeling sort of depressed or anything, I mean, it does change people's lives. I was once at a Greyhound bus stop in Richmond, Virginia, and the bus was late, as so often happens with Greyhound buses. And there were three young men there
They'd all read Tolkien. I'd just been to give a Tolkien talk. One had changed his job, which was some kind of research into biological weapons because of reading Tolkien. One was walking the Appalachian Way because of Tolkien. One was going to see a girl that he felt was influenced by his reading of Tolkien. It does change your life. Yeah.
So I can understand why somebody would spend their life reading Tolkien. Yes. It's such a different, I mean, just as you speak about that, it just reminds me of something my wife and I have felt in our, this is quite shallow, in our TV watching or our Netflix watching. How many shows nowadays are ultimately nihilistic? That the badness of the world is the base of the world. Whether we're talking about Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
you know, that novel and I think it's been made into a movie. Or you think of the TV show Breaking Bad, which everyone says is one of the greatest TV shows ever. It's just dark all the way down. And people sometimes praise it as saying it's realistic, it's realistic. But actually, I long for the ability to look darkness in the face and yet know that isn't the base of reality.
What you're saying is that Tolkien gives us exactly that. Yeah, it's a choice. You either have an ontology of violence or an ontology of peace, as my husband would say, and you choose. It doesn't mean you don't look on the dark side, as you say. It doesn't mean that you don't realize the depth. In fact, it requires much more courage
to look at all this and still see that the world is good. Yeah. My last question, Alison, how has studying Tolkien's work for years influenced your own life and, dare I ask, faith? I read it quite late because when I was a little girl, I read The Hobbit, but I thought Tolkien was for boys.
And if you watch the films, you might think it's all about wars. But in fact, there's much more about the weather than anything else that they have to deal with when you're in there. For me, it helps me particularly to think about the role of creativity in faith. It really helps me apologetically because I do find it a helpful way to talk to people.
It's helped me towards my growing interest in eco-theology because of Tolkien's own very, very strong commitments, not just to the value of nature, but to the agency of nature. In his natural world, plants, creatures, trees are all active partners.
And I think what Pope Francis calls an integral ecology. So it's influenced my theology of nature, but it continues to give me hope, however melancholy things are. And Tolkien can be very, very melancholy. There is something very also almost utopian about him. Melancholic about the sadnesses in life, and yet strangely hopeful, even utopian.
That was Tolkien's life, really from the death of his father, then mother, and all through the publishing struggles and lonely end. But with a sense of pressing forward toward home, where all things will be well. That's death and resurrection, the true myth that entered history.
So let me end with the words of the humble Sam Gamgee to Frodo. Words about pressing on through the troubles, through the sadness, onwards toward home. This whole episode was director Mark's idea, so it's only right that he takes us out with the words of Sam Gamgee.
The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo. Adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for because they wanted them. Because they were exciting and life was a bit dull. A kind of sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered or the ones that stay in the mind.
Folks seem to have been just landed in them usually. Their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back. Only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know. Because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on. And not all to a good end, mind you. At least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.
You know, coming home and finding things all right, though not quite the same. Like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear. Though they may be the best tales to get landed in. I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into. ♪
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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Samwise Gamgee. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant.
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