Avallónnë. Fifth Age. - Professor Bradley Birzer explores Tolkien’s perspective on faerie (myth), truth, and man in his introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth.

To enter faerie - that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation - is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence. . . . To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J.R.R. Tolkien firmly believed . . .”

The English Roman Catholic G.K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that ‘he not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.’ Likewise, Tolkien shows in ‘Smith of Wootton Major’ that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to full become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.

“For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. . . .

“Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. . . .

“Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology.”

Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society . . .

“Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. ‘It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad,’ Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy.”

To the modernist, ‘myth,’ like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

“For religious fundamentalists, myths also represent lies. Myths, the argument runs, constitute dangerous rivals to Christian truth and may lead the unwary astray, even into the very grip of hell. . . . It is likely, the fundamentalist concludes, that all myth comes from the devil and is an attempt to distract us from the truth of Christ . . .”

For Tolkien, however, even pagan myths attempted to express God’s greater truths. True myth has the power to revive us, to serve as an anamnesis, or way of bringing to conscious experience ancient experiences with transcendence. But, Tolkien admitted, myth could be dangerous, or ‘perilous,’ as he usually stated it, if it remained pagan. Therefore, Tolkien thought, one must sanctify it, that is, make it Christian and put it in God’s service. . . . This motif of ’sanctifying the pagan’ has been repeated throughout history by Christians in a multitude of ways, and was instrumental in contributing to the wildly successful spread of the faith.”

It is both fitting and worthwhile to recall the comments of C.S. Lewis in his review of The Lord of the Rings at this point:

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity. The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. [Tolkien] applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it in any other way.” (quoted in Colin Duriez’s Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle-earth)



Namárië.