Avallónnë. Fifth Age. – In a chapter entitled “Myth and Sub-creation” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Bradley Birzer explores Tolkien’s beliefs regarding myths, both pagan and true. “Tolkien mythologized nearly everything in his life,” Birzer writes. In more familiar and (I believe) accurate terms, it might be said that Tolkien saw the spiritual dimension in every area, aspect, and act of his life.

Birzer continues:

For Tolkien, mystery surrounds us. But modernity has deformed our perception of this reality. His mythologizing of the world, Tolkien believed, increased our ability to see the beauty and sacramentality of creation. . . .

Indeed, for Tolkien, myths expressed far greater truths than did historical facts or events. Sanctified myths, inspired by grace, served as an anamnesis, or a way for a people to recall encounters with transcendence that had helped to order their souls and their society. Myth, inherited or created, could also offer a ’sudden glimpse of Truth,’ that is, a brief view of heaven. At the very least, sanctified myth revealed the life humans were meant to have prior to the Fall.

Two fundamental aspects of Tolkien’s mythology must be stated from the outset. First, as every reader of Tolkien has found – either to his delight or to his chagrin – Tolkien created a world vastly complex and nuanced. . . .

“Tolkien believed his legendarium to be a single entity revealed to him over time. To him, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings were a continuation of the same story, inseparable, and, when divided, incomprehensible.

The second aspect of Tolkien’s mythology that must be understood is his firm conviction that God authored the history of Middle-earth, in all its manifestations. Tolkien thought that he merely served as a scrivener of God’s myth. ‘I have long ceased to invent,’ Tolkien wrote in 1956. ‘I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. . . . The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), “that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named.”‘ . . .

“After all, both Tolkien and Lewis argued, God spoke through the minds of poets, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth,’ Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves. ‘One must be content to accept it in the same way, remember that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths, i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there.

Birzer argues that two essays by Tolkien – The Monsters and the Critics and On Fairy-Stories – reveal additional depth to Tolkien’s understanding of myth.

Tolkien’s examination of Beowulf, the subject of the first essay, has become a standard in the field of Beowulf criticism, and Anglo-Saxon scholars and critics typically either agree with it or abhor it. For Tolkien, who had committed to memory almost the entire poem, Beowulf represented one of the great moments in western history. . . .

“Beowulf, Tolkien had argued, is as important for the historian and the theologian as for the English teacher. Two things should immediately prove this, he thought. First, the story contains a dragon. Rarely in literature does one find them. Contrary to our popular memory of legends, no ‘wilderness of dragons’ abounded in medieval literature. Instead, when such a bestial worm does present itself, the critic should take its significance to the story and its symbolism seriously. Indeed, the appearance of a dragon signifies a number of things – most of them evil. A dragon personifies ‘malice, greed, destruction.’ Second, Tolkien noted that few authors would devote over 3,000 lines of high poetry to something ‘not worthy of serious attention.’ Instead, the ‘high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful.’

“Beowulf’s greatest strength, Tolkien believed, lay in the author’s understanding that the theme should be implicit rather than explicit.

For Tolkien, the Beowulf poet beautifully intertwined pagan virtues with Christian theology. . . . Most certainly a Christian, the author used the poem to demonstrate that not all pagan things should be dismissed by the new culture. Instead, the Christian should embrace and sanctify the most noble virtues to come out of the northern pagan mind: courage and raw will.

“Tolkien’s belief that the best of the pagan world should be sanctified reflects St. Augustine’s thinking. In his On Christian Duty, St. Augustine wrote, ‘[If philosophers] have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.’

Tolkien warned that fallen man can pervert fairy stories, fantasy, and myth, making them something for the promulgation of evil. Therefore, Tolkien concluded, one should leave fantasy to the mental imagination and to the written word. To take fantasy to the animated visual arts, such as with motion pictures or the theater, must result in either ’silliness or morbidity.’

“Indeed, as high art forms, fairy stories and fantasy offer much to human existence. First, fairy stories illuminate the vast inheritance our ancestors have bequeathed to us. Second, fairy stories give us a new sense of wonder about things we have taken for granted or which have become commonplace. . . . Fairy stories and fantasy allow one to see ‘things as we are (or were) meant to see them.’

Yet, because we are fallen, restless, and susceptible to pride, Tolkien argued, even the well-intentioned can pervert the high calling and gift of creativity. In such perversions, man turns art into power; adulterated by sin the prideful man uses his gifts not to exalt creation and the creator, but to serve himself. . . .

“With such religious implications and significance in its artistry, Tolkien concluded, the best fairy story and sub-creation provides the reader with what he labeled the euchatastrophe, the unexpected joy. . . . The ultimate fairy story, or true myth, then, is the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. . . . ‘The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact,’ C.S. Lewis argued along Tolkienian lines. ‘The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.’

“With the Incarnation of Christ, ‘art has been verified,’ Tolkien claimed. ‘God is the Lord, of angels, and of men – and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused’ with the arrival of God in Time, and man has been blessed beyond earthly comprehension.

The story, especially The Lord of the Rings, became much more than a myth for any one people or any one nation. It, instead, became a myth for the restoration of Christendom itself.”



Namárië.