John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was born in South Africa, was brought to England by his mother at the age of three, and suffered the early loss of both parents.  His mother’s death when he was twelve was particularly significant.  Her conversion to Catholicism had not been well received by the family, and Tolkien thought shameful treatment of her had contributed to her early death.  He looked on her as a martyr, and the intensity of his adult devotion to the Catholic faith owed something to that experience.

Educated at King Edward’s School and Oxford, Tolkien became one of the greatest philologists of his era and perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the Medieval dialects of the English West Midlands—hardly a standard preparation for a career as a Christian apologist.  Indeed, Tolkien was never known as an apologist in his lifetime, but rather as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he was a member of the Inklings, the famous Christian writers’ group that included C. S. Lewis, and as the author of the popular fantasy works set in his imaginary world of Middle-Earth.  He is credited with single-handedly creating the genre of adult fantasy.  Tolkien did, however, make three important contributions to Christian apologetics that continue to resonate in the field to this day:  the conversion of C. S. Lewis, the exposition of the doctrine of sub-creation in the essay “On Fairie Stories,” and the embodiment of elements of of the Christian worldview in his Middle-Earth legendarium, especially in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.   These contributions are not unrelated.

C. S. Lewis, arguably the greatest apologist of the Twentieth Century, might not have become a Christian without Tolkien.  A number of influences had been moving him from his atheism toward theism and Christian faith, but the tipping point was a conversation with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on Addison’s Walk in Magdalene College, Oxford, on September 19, 1931.  Tolkien argued that Lewis was moved by the idea of divine sacrifice when he encountered it as myth, but inconsistently rejected it in Christianity.  But, Tolkien argued, Christianity is simply a true myth—the true myth.  The passion of Christ was that moment in history where all the imperfect and corrupted hints of truth in human mythologies were fulfilled in reality.  Rightly understood, the historicity of Christ’s death and resurrection added to, rather than detracted from, the sense of mystery and meaning that Lewis had found in the pagan myths.  Within a week and a half, Lewis realized that he now believed that Jesus was the Son of God.  Not only did the insights he gleaned from Tolkien help move Lewis to faith, they became central to Lewis’s own thinking, as expressed in his essay “Myth Become Fact” and applied in books like The Pilgrim’s Regress and Miracles.  So in a sense, Tolkien stands behind all the achievements of the greatest apologist of the century.

Tolkien made his own distinctive contribution to apologetics as well, though it was not widely recognized as such at the time.  The essay “On Fairie Stories” started life when Tolkien was invited to give the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews in 1938.  In the process of dealing with his professional literary topic, the nature of fairy tales and their place in the history of literature, Tolkien propounds his doctrine of sub-creation, gives further insight into the apologetic argument that helped to convert Lewis, and reveals the foundations of his own greatest literary and apologetic achievement, the Middle-Earth saga.

Where do fairy tales come from?  Tolkien’s answer applies not just to the fairy stories of his topic but to every aspect of human culture.  Human beings are creative because they are made in the image of the Creator.  Humans’ “secondary creation” or “sub-creation” therefore reflects the “primary creation” of God in myriad ways, while also corrupting and distorting it because of sin.  This sub-creational connection to spiritual reality at the heart of our divinely imaged humanity makes it possible for a discerning reader to see how our most profound myths and stories reach out in yearning toward the “eucatastrophe” or “happy ending” that would redeem our lostness.  In the epilogue, Tolkien applies these insights to the Christian story in ways that echo what Lewis must have heard in Addison’s Walk.  “The Gospels contain a fairy-story” which includes “the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.  But this story has entered history and the primary world: the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation.”  The Christian Gospel is the eucatastrophe of human history: “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits” (Tolkien The Tolkien Reader, pp. 71-2). 

In the Middle-Earth legendarium which is Tolkien’s greatest legacy, elements of the Christian worldview encapsulated by his coinage eucatastrophe are central to the structure of the imaginary world and the plots that unfold within it.  The creation story of Middle-Earth in The Silmarillion has Iluvatar (God) giving the Valar (roughly equivalent to biblical angels) a theme of music which they elaborate into a grand symphony (a brilliant picture of sub-creation); but one of them, Melkor (parallel to Satan), rebels and introduces discord, which is overcome by the second and third themes introduced by Iluvatar so that the composition ends in resolution and harmony despite everything Melkor and those who follow him can do.  This music then becomes the history of the world.  It is a theistic picture of creation that resonates with Genesis 1-3 and Job 38:4-7 and lays the groundwork for a kind of narrative theodicy. 

Then in The Lord of the Rings, the biblical worldview of the author manifests itself in at least five ways: the symbolic imagery of darkness and light; the motif of the strength of weakness (echoing, perhaps, the Old-Testament passage Zechariah 4:6: “Not by might, not by power . . .”); the role of sacrifice in the victories achieved; the hints of a personal Providence, a guiding purpose behind supposedly chance events; and heroes who resemble the great Hero of the biblical story in ways that are not accidental (though calling them “Christ figures” is probably saying too much).  Gandalf may be seen to represent Christ the Prophet, Aragorn Christ the King, and Frodo and Sam Christ the Suffering Servant. 

Consider, for example, the way divine Providence is reflected in the story.  Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker—and that this may be an encouraging thought (Tolkien 1954, 81).  Why is this an encouraging thought?  Because if Bilbo was meant to find the Ring there had to be Someone to do the meaning.  Meaning and purpose are inescapably personal categories; only persons can intend or purpose.  Therefore, there is a Force at work behind the scenes, and Frodo is not on his own.  Though his name is never mentioned, Iluvatar is the primary mover of the story and thus there is a reason to hope for a victory that no amount of military might could have brought forth, reason to hope that Gandalf’s strategy may not be the ultimate folly after all.  Middle-Earth is not ultimately an impersonal universe, which may be one reason why it resonates so strongly with people who increasingly think they live in one (for more see Williams, An Encouraging Thought, pp.18-36).

Tolkien did not consciously think of himself as a Christian apologist the way his friend C. S. Lewis did.  But he sought to be a faithful witness for Christ (as we see on Addison’s walk) and a faithful Christian thinker who treated the Gospel as true seven days a week and not only on Sundays.  The Christian “story” was the key to insights in his academic work, which focuses on language and literature rather than on theology or philosophy.  Those insights led to Lewis’s conversion and informed the approach to truth that made Lewis the great apologist he was.  (Lewis acknowledges his “incalculable” debt to Tolkien, saying that Tolkien and Dyson were the “immediate human causes” of his own conversion, in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of Dec. 21, 1941—Lewis, Letters, 2:501.)  The doctrine of sub-creation has affinities with applications of the imago Dei to human art in Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy,” G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker.  Tolkien brings those insights into sharp focus in the essay “On Fairie Stories,” but he incarnates them perhaps more profoundly than any other writer in his own sub-creation of Middle-Earth.  He called The Lord of the Rings “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” (Tolkien. Letters, p. 172).  There are specifically Roman Catholic elements there for those who wish to look for them, but the most profound insights are consistent with the “mere” Christianity for which the Inklings are famous.  Showing us what biblical truth looks like incarnated in both life and literature may be the most profound apologetic of all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources:

Tolkien, J. R. R. 1981.  The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 

Tolkien, J. R. R. 1954-6. The Lord of the Rings, 3 vols.  London: George Allen & Unwin; N.Y.: Ballantine, 1965.

Tolkien, J. R. R. 1938 Andrew Lang Lecture, St. Andrews University.  “On Fairie Stories.” In The Tolkien Reader. N.Y.: Ballantine, 1966, pp. 5-84.

Tolkien, J. R. R. 1977.  The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Secondary Sources:

Lewis, C. S. 2004.  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2.  Edited by Walter Hooper.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Kilby, Clyde S. 1976.  Tolkien and The Silmarillion: A Glimpse of the Man and his World.  Wheaton: Harold Shaw.

Williams, Donald T. 2018. An Encouraging Thought: The Christian Worldview in the Writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.  Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House.

Further Reading:

Dickerson, Matthew.  2012.  A Hobbit Journey: Discovering the Enchantment of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.  Grand Rapids: Brazos.

Kreeft, Peter J. 2005. The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview behind The Lord of the Rings.  San Francisco: Ignatius.

Shippey, T. A. 1992. The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology.  London: HarperCollins.

Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College, an ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America, and a member of University Church, Athens, GA. A border dweller, he stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, theology and literature, Narnia and Middle-Earth.  He is the author of fourteen books, including Ninety-Five Theses for a New Reformation: A Road Map for Post-Evangelical Christianity (Toccoa: Semper Reformanda Publications, 2021) and Answers from Aslan: The Winsome Apologetic of C. S. Lewis (Tampa: DeWard, forthcoming October 2023).