 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the primes and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praised their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pearce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I'm your host Joseph Pearce. Thanks so much for joining me. And today we are going to be focusing on the greatest writer of the 20th century in my humble opinion and the author of the greatest work of the 20th century, not merely in my humble opinion, but in the opinion of many others. In fact, it was when this author's best known and best-selling book, The Lord of the Rings, was published that a whole new genre of what we now call fantasy literature exploded upon the scene, most of which is not fit to be in talkings of The Lord of the Rings' shadow. But my book on Tolkien, Tolkien, Man and Myth are the first of three books of it on Tolkien. More recently for Tan books, I've written Bilbo's Journey, Discovering the Hidden Meaning of the Hobbit and Frodo's Journey, Discovering the Hidden Meaning of the Lord of the Rings. But before that, I wrote a book called Tolkien, Man and Myth, which is a biography of Tolkien. And that book was provoked, prompted and provoked by the reaction of the critics to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings emerging as the greatest work of the 20th century, according to several opinion polls and national opinion polls in the UK. And the response of the self-styled literati to this success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was dismissive and contemptuous. So one critic even said, this just shows the folly of teaching people to read. Now the irony is it was quite clear to me from reading the banality of their responses that none of them had actually ever bothered to read The Lord of the Rings before passing judgment upon it, such is pride and prejudice. But I thought that I would come to Tolkien's defence and that was what I said provoked me to write my first book on Tolkien, Tolkien, Man and Myth. All you need to understand about The Lord of the Rings is, as Tolkien said, and I'm quoting him here word for word, the Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously at first, consciously in the revision. So if you want to understand The Lord of the Rings, on the deepest level, we have to understand it's fundamentally religious and Catholic. And again, my book, Frodo's Journey, looks at that dimension. And so far as we have time, we will do so here. But I suspect we won't have much time for that. You can also check out Tan Courses, the course on Tolkien, which I've taught for Tan, where we go into much more detail on the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings. But I want to focus on the author here, in the authority. Look, I focus on Tolkien himself. The Tolkien said there was a scale of significance in his relationship between him as author and his works. And he said there's various things in the scale of significance. But the most important of the really significant factors, he says, is the fact that I am a Christian and in fact a Roman Catholic, which can be deduced from my stories. In other words, the most important thing about Tolkien we need to know, if we want to understand his works, is his Catholicism and that this can be deduced from his stories. We can see that Catholicism in his works. He said in that, when talking about the scale of significance, he said that I was born in the Shire in a pre-mechanical age and that this was important. Now, this is poetic license. Tolkien's not telling a lie, but he's not telling the literal truth either because he wasn't born in the Shire, by which he means rural England. He was born in South Africa of all places in a place called Bloomfontaine where his father had moved for work and the family had moved with him. But after a year or so there, after Tolkien's birth, the family returned to England, or rather his mother and he and his brother returned to England. His father was due to return some time after once he had managed to tie up the loose ends of the business venture out there. But he never returned because he tragically, he died. So that Tolkien was born on January 3rd, 1892. His father died on February 15th, 1896. So shortly after Tolkien's fourth birthday, he lost his father that the family returned to England the previous year, 1895. So Tolkien spent his first three years in South Africa, probably the only connection to the Lord of the Rings from that period is that he was bitten while he was in South Africa by a tarantula. Now, Barry might have small teeth, I don't know what age he was when he was bitten by the tarantula, but he was only three when they returned home. So he was certainly small, a toddler. And if you're bitten by a spider that must have seemed as big as you are, then it's not surprising perhaps that you might have had an aversion for spiders. And we can't help but perhaps but see that some of the monster spiders in Tolkien's work, such as Ungoliant in the Silmarillion and Shilob in the Lord of the Rings and the Giant Spiders in The Hobbit, might have some arachnophobic connection to Tolkien's childhood experience in South Africa. Although Tolkien did deny that he was actually an arachnophobe, he had a fear of spiders. But when they moved to England following the death of their father, obviously the family was somewhat plunged into poverty and reliant, dependent upon financial support from both his mother's family and also from his father's family. And they lived in Birmingham before moving to a village. So born in the shy and a pre-mechanical age. Well, first of all, as I said, he was born in South Africa and hardly the shire. But then he moved to Birmingham and we have to understand about Birmingham. It was a village at the time of the Industrial Revolution. But by the time that Tolkien was living there at the beginning or at the end of the 19th century, it had become the second largest city in England. May perhaps not quite then. It was certainly growing very quickly. It is now the second largest city in England and certainly was by the middle of the 20th century. So this is a huge industrial city growing up on a spot which had once been a village and Tolkien and his family lived in a house, a small cottage, a small house with factory chimneys within sight, with a railway line going round the back with the steam engines belching out, salt and smoke. The factory chimneys belching out, foot and smoke. No, he wasn't born in the shire in a pre-mechanical age. So what does he mean when he says that? He's talking about a golden age, a magical period of his childhood when they moved from Birmingham from this big industrial belching city to a small village called Seherhol in Warwickshire, not far from Birmingham, but far enough to be a village with a village pond to play in, village trees to climb and peace and quiet countryside and nature. And this was the Shire in a pre-mechanical age, which fired Tolkien's imagination and inspired the depiction of the Shire in the Lord of the Rings. In 1900, when Tolkien's eight years old, old his mother converts to Catholicism and this plunges the family from poverty into penury because the families are so opposed to her conversion that they cut off financial support. So now the family is in dire straits and his mother dies only four years later in 1904 when Tolkien is only 12 years old. He becomes an orphan and Tolkien was convinced that his mother's early death was a direct consequence of the way that she was treated following her conversion. So he says that my own mother was a martyr indeed dying to ensure that he and his brother keep the faith and he talked of her death in poverty too ill to receive theatricum, the last rites of the Eucharist in extremis and because of this martyrdom of his mother's part, he said this is written much later. I find it very hard when my own children stray away from the faith. So for Tolkien, his mother was had heroic virtue and was a martyr for the Catholic faith. To no wonder that Tolkien remained a resolute Catholic for the remainder of his life. Following the death of his mother, talking to his brother, Hilary, they had as their new guardian, Father Francis Morgan, who had befriended Tolkien's mother. And he became the legal guardian. They were not particularly at home with the relative with whom they were living. So every morning they would cycle to the Birmingham Oratory, which had been founded by John Henry Newman, 50 or so years earlier, slightly less than that, and would serve Father Morgan's mass every morning. Every morning. Around this time as well, in the summer of 1909, so Tolkien at this point would be 17, he met a fellow orphan, Edith Bratt, who was three years older than he was, so she would have been 20, and they fell in love. Father Morgan was concerned that this love affair would inhibit Tolkien's schooling, and so he requested that he did not see her until he was 21 years old. This must have been very hard, but Tolkien showing amazing obedience agreed to that. When on his 21st birthday, he wrote to her only to discover that she was engaged to marry someone else. But undeterred, he went and sought her out and persuaded her that she needed to not make that terrible mistake and that he was her prince charming, and she needed to marry him, which she then did. They got married, and immediately upon getting married, but Tolkien went off to fight in World War I and in what he called the animal horror of the Battle of the Somme. Battle of the Somme is one of the bloodiest, most horrible battles in the whole history of humanity. The number of people killed in very short periods of time was absolutely horrific. Tolkien thankfully was not one of them, but he was there at the Battle of the Somme. By the time he left to go across to the trenches, his wife Edith was already expecting their first child, John, who would go on to become a Jesuit priest. So having survived the war, they would have three more children, three sons and a daughter. And we mustn't underestimate the importance of Tolkien's role as Pater Phamilias, as the father of a family in his life and in his life as a writer. He wrote a series of letters every Christmas, allegedly from Father Christmas, and we'll go to elaborate lengths to have his children continue to believe they were actually from Father Christmas, even as children got older, including getting the postman to deliver the letter with a North Pole stamp on it. And in one year, even walking across the lovely clean carpet in dirty boots, because their children would think the father would never possibly do that because mother would kill him, must be Father Christmas. So the lengths he went to keep the magic of Christmas alive with his children in these Father Christmas letters, which have now been published with illustrations and it's absolutely delightful. But of course, the other thing about Pater Phamilias is that his first book to which we all know the Hobbit was written for his own children, for the entertainment of his own children. So it was as a father that he became an author. But for the day job, he was also a philologist and a medievalist and an academic. So in other words, he taught, first of all, at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire in the north of England. And then for many, many years at Oxford, a philologist, a lover of languages, a linguist, his expertise was particularly in Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman conquest in 1066. And he drew upon his knowledge of languages in general and Old English in particular in his writing of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. And also his knowledge as a linguist in inventing the Elvish languages. And again, it's the Tolkien's being a linguist first and the story teller second, if you like. You know, we can honestly say of Middle Earth in general and the Lord of the Rings in particular that the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, not as in the logos, not as in the word of God, particularly, but Tolkien invented a language, an Elven language, Elvish, and he wanted people to speak it. So having created the word or the words of the language, he then had to make those words become flesh by infleshing, incarnating people who can speak it. And so the stories were told so that his language could be spoken. The word and the words became flesh and dwelt amongst us in Middle Earth, Tolkien following, if you like, the divine pattern in his creativity. In the 1920s, he formed a friendship with C.S. Lewis. We'll talk about more about that in the next episode of The Authority when C.S. Lewis will be our focus. But when Lewis and Tolkien first met, Lewis was an atheist and very anti-Catholic. Lewis was born in Belfast, the most sectarian city in the Christian world arguably. The divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast and Northern Ireland would eventually lead to civil war in Ireland and ended the so-called troubles for 30 years. This, of course, was more recently after the death of both men, but this was simmering. So you wouldn't have thought they had much in common, Tolkien and Lewis, to form a friendship. What they had in common was a shared love of the Old North, particularly Old Norse. So the sagas written in the Old Norse language, the Old Scandinavian language of the Vikings. And Tolkien had formed a club called the Elder Edda, sorry, it's not called the Elder Colbyta, which literally means those who bite the coal because they sit so close by the fire during winter. To read the Elder Edda, the great Old Norse saga and Tolkien's fellow linguists, philologists could speak Old Norse and read it. Lewis couldn't particularly, but he asked nonetheless if he could come along to these meetings and to this reading. And he was allowed and with a crib, he got better at his Old Norse. When that club ceased to exist, following the finishing of the reading of that saga, Lewis felt the need to continue this male camaraderie and formed a group which became known as the Inklings, which is the most important literary group of the 20th century with many prominent members, but most prominent of all were Lewis himself and J.R.R. Tolkien. And every week for many years, they would meet twice a week once in Lewis's rooms in Mordland College, Oxford, and once at the local pub, The Eagle and Child, which they nicknamed the Bird and Baby. And they would read their own works and discuss literature, et cetera. Most significantly to the future of literature, perhaps, was a long night talk between Tolkien and Lewis and their friend Hugo Dyson on September the 19th, 1931, beginning in Lewis's rooms, but they always went out for a walk. And the subject of that long night talk was mythology. And Lewis said, but myths are lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver. In other words, that myths are just beautiful lies and we love them because they're beautiful, but they don't tell us the truth. Because they don't tell us the truth, they're ultimately worthless. Tolkien's response was, no, they are not lies. And then, expounding upon his philosophy of myth, the love of wisdom to be found through story, and showing how the gift of creativity is part of the Imago dei in us. We are made in the image of God. And the imagination is the imagination, part of that creative image of God in us, and that we make by the law by which we are made. In other words, God is a creator. God's a poet, an artist, a composer. And we are, therefore, in our own creativity, in our own artistry, in our own poetry, in our own music, that we are showing that divine image forth. And Tolkien said that the gospel is the true myth. Tolkien and Lewis never used the word myth in the modern sense of being a lie. Myth is merely, in its original sense, a story. So the gospel is the true myth, the true story in which the story is not told with words, but with facts. The history is his story, is God's story. And in the story of Christ is how the storyteller enters his own story. And this long night talk had such a profound influence upon C.S. Lewis that it was the final step upon his conversion to Christianity. Within a few weeks of that, he was writing to a friend that I have definitely started to believe in the Christian God and that my long night talk with Tolkien and Dyson had a great deal to do with it. So in 1937, as we said, the Hobbit was published and a children's story. And the Lord of the Rings would begin initially as a follow-up, as a children's story, but would grow up and grow out of control, if you like, and grow into this huge, big work, which is certainly not for children only. That's for sure. But before we get to discuss the Lord of the Rings a little bit, before we conclude, I want to talk about something that's an interesting, it's an interesting episode in Tolkien's life. And it's his interaction with two people that we've also met in previous episodes of The Authority. One is Hilaire Beloch, who was the subject of an episode, and the other was Father Martin Darcy, who we mentioned in the episode on Evening War. He was the priest who received Evening War into the Church and the priest upon whom Evening War based the character, Father Mowbray, from, in his novel, Bright Head Visited. So these three come together. How do they come together? Well, Hilaire Beloch is giving a talk in Oxford on the Norman conquest of England. And of course, for those of you who don't know, the Norman conquest followed in the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is when the Normans invade England. And then thereafter, the nobility, the aristocracy, the royalty of England speak French as their first language. And English becomes the language of the peasants and of the poor, not of the court. So the academics and the clergy spoke Latin. The aristocracy and nobility and royalty spoke French and the peasants spoke English, old English. So Beloch, being half French and being a Franco file, a lover of all things French, said that the Norman conquest was a good thing for England because it brought England into the fullness of Christendom. Tolkien was present at this talk and sitting right behind him was Father Martin Darcy. And Father Martin Darcy could see Tolkien getting more and more irritated at the way that Beloch was belittling Tolkien's beloved Shire, in other words, Anglo-Saxon England. And Father Darcy suggested that Tolkien should actually raise some objections, but Tolkien was somewhat coy about doing that in public. So, but Tolkien's position was that Anglo-Saxon England was thoroughly Catholic before the Norman conquest and did not need the Norman conquest to become more Catholic. I am a great admirer personally of both Hillar Beloch and J.R.R. Tolkien, but in this great divide, this great argument between the two, I am very much on Tolkien's side, that Anglo-Saxon England, the Shire, did not need an invasion of the Norman French to make it fully Christian. Let's, we don't have much time at all to speak about the Lord of the Rings, we'll just say it's fundamentally religious and Catholic. I will say very briefly before we move on to concluding this episode that the key to unlocking the Lord of the Rings is the date on which the ring is destroyed. The ring is destroyed on March the 25th, Tolkien is a medievalist, he knows as a Catholic that March the 25th is the date of the Annunciation, which is the date on which the word becomes flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, the date on which God becomes man. But he also knows a medievalist that traditionally March the 25th is the date of the crucifixion. So March the 25th dates both the birth of, oh, the conception of Christ, and also the crucifixion of Christ. The journey from Rivendell, the Fellowship of the Ring, when they leave Rivendell to Golgotha, Mount Doom, is the life of Christ. They leave on December the 25th, the birth day of Christ, and they arrive at Mount Doom on March the 25th, the death day of Christ, the date of the crucifixion. So what's destroyed on Mount Doom on March the 25th is the ring. What's destroyed on Golgotha on March the 25th is the power of sin. So the power of the ring and the power of sin are the same thing. So then we can see that the one who wears the ring is the sinner. When you put the ring on is the act of sin. If we keep the ring on, we shrivel and shrink and we golemise ourselves, we become addicted to the power of the sin, to the power of the ring, and become slaves to sin, as St. Paul tells us. On the other hand, if instead of wearing the ring, we're not ring wearers, we're ring bearers, we are cross-carriers. We are carrying the weight of sin without sinning. So there's much more to say about the Lord of the Rings than I have, and I would advise you perhaps to either check out the Tang courses on the Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which I've taught, or my book, Frodo's Journey, Discovering the Hidden Meaning of the Lord of the Rings to go deeper. But we're gonna conclude here with two things I want to say about Tolkien to conclude. There's this wonderful saying where his understanding of tradition and the church, when he said that I cannot understand the modern mania for going back to the so-called purity of the early church, because I do not know why a sapling is considered to be superior to the foreground tree. And he said that even if the sapling is superior to the foreground tree, if we chop down the foreground tree, looking for the sapling, we don't find the sapling, we simply kill the tree. This is Tolkien's understanding of the church as the tree of life, if you like, that has gone through 20 centuries. It's the same tree, it's essentially the same, teaching the same truths, and yet it moves through the centuries, responding to whatever the particular fashions and fashions of the seasons of the centuries are. And then two things just to sum up where he stood on the most important things. He was sent a letter by his publisher's daughter, who was doing a school project. This is 1969, so not long before Tolkien died. And this little girl asked a school project, what is the purpose of life? So she asked him and the whole reply is wonderful, but I'm going to just conclude on the final two paragraphs of this. So it may be said that the chief purpose of life for any one of us is to increase according to our capacity, our knowledge of God, by all the means we have, and to be moved by it, to praise and thanks, to do as we say in the Gloria in excelsis, laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gracius agimus tibi, proctomanium glorium tuum. We praise you. We call you holy. We worship you. We proclaim your glory. We thank you for the greatness of your splendor. And in moments of exaltation, we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148 and in the song of the three children in Daniel 2. Praise the Lord, all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing. If anybody doubts the centrality of Tolkien's Catholic faith to his life and to his understanding of the purpose of life, as he puts it there, they need reading no further. But we are going to conclude actually with one other wonderful thing he wrote, and this isn't one of his letters, and it's about the blessed sacrament, out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated. I put before you the one great thing to love on earth, the blessed sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that, death, by the divine paradox that which ends life and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste or foretaste of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships, love, faithfulness, joy, be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires. I certainly can't top that, so I shan't even try. Instead, we'll conclude this episode of The Authority. Thanks as always for joining me. Until next time, goodbye, God bless, and good reading. This has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce, brought to you by Tan. 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