The Lord of the Rings sits just under the scaffolding of my mind. For years, when asked my favorite book I’d say Lord of the Rings without hesitation, even though before writing this essay, I’d only read it three times. It’s one of those works I don’t need to reread, because it’s indelibly marked how I think. The sweeping scale of its plot, its largely impersonal writing with moments of pathos; its emphasis on sternness, both in courage and joy; and its systematic thought hit something deep in myself. This is the feeling Tolkien described when he tells of hearing the Old English poem Crist I: 

Eala éarendel engla beorhtast
 ofer middangeard monnum sended 

Hail Earendel brightest of angels

High over middle-earth sent unto men (1)  

He wrote later: "I felt a curious thrill as if something had stirred in me...There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond the ancient English.” (2) He tried. The character Eärendil, based on this poem, recurs in his work, mostly appearing in the Silmarillion and associated myths and poems he wrote for Middle Earth. I find that something “remote and strange and beautiful,” which Tolkien saw in Cynewulf, in The Lord of the Rings and in the Eucharistic liturgy. It carries a sense of reaching down into the fabric of reality and drawing up some of its essence. That feeling can drive you mad if you let it. It can take you both out of this world and deeper into it, into the Catholic cosmology. It would be too simple to draw a line between reading Tolkien’s interpretation of Cynewulf and my priestly vocation, but my vocation is downstream of it, as is my moral imagination, as is my work on late medieval and early modern England. 

The Lord of the Rings has a reputation as a book for the religious homeschooler. Taylor Ransom’s (@realtaylorransom) Instagram skits sum up perfectly how it is sometimes treated as the one safe book, steeped enough in faith that it can be permitted into the lives of children surrounded by Christian media. I’d love to deny the allegations, but it extended its siren song to me as well. I came to Lord of the Rings via Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, which had a cover blurb praising it for working in the tradition of Tolkien and CS Lewis. I was already rabidly devoted to the Narnia series after a rough start in which I was terrified of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (still my least favorite) and Tolkien seemed like a logical next step. I was a mystical child, and Lord of the Rings fit naturally.

I joke that Aragorn convinced me I was straight for years, but it’s true – I had the biggest fictional crush on him. For this essay, I recracked the binding of the stiff paperback trilogy my mom got me at eleven and found a periwinkle flower pressed between the pages. I had decided that periwinkles were the best analogy for the elanor flower, emblematic of Arwen Evenstar (Aragorn’s romantic interest, incidentally) shining softly in the dusk. 

Much has been said about the Catholic character of the Lord of the Rings. Whole books and podcasts have been written about lembas’ Eucharistic character, the Marian language used to describe Galadriel and Arwen Evenstar, and Tolkien’s idea of subcreation – that as God created us, so we are endowed with the desire to create. Likewise, his theory of eucatastrophe, the unimaginably good happening and the undoing of terrible wrong, was drawn from the crucifixion and resurrection. Tolkien couldn’t forsee this when he wrote, but the Michael Joncas hymn On Eagles’ Wings neatly describes Gandalf’s evolution into Gandalf the White: 

He will raise you up on eagle’s wings

Bear you on the breath of dawn

Make you to shine like the sun. 

Tolkien’s theologies of humility, weakness, just war, and mercy also play pivotal roles in shaping the plot.

To all this, I’d add that Lord of the Rings, especially Return of the King, has heavy Christological overtones and is majorly concerned with the shape of salvation history. Tolkien imbues Aragorn, the titular king, with an existential rightness as if he were from the stump of Jesse. And there is a literal stump – the white tree – springing forth at his arrival in the fullness of time. Aragorn isn’t a one-to-one analogy for Jesus. But he is the looked-for messiah of Gondor: priest, prophet, and near-miraculous healer. He raises the wounded in body and mind and ushers in a new age of peace and prosperity. On this reread, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the emphasis Tolkien puts on lineage and noble blood. Possibly the only redeeming explanation is that he intends us to think of lineage in the sense of Christ’s spiritual lineage through the “House of David,” rather than a purely racial or biological genealogy. After all, Matthew famously traced Christ’s lineage through Joseph – a real father to Jesus, but not a biological one. 

Tolkien’s soteriology – the mechanics of salvation – is played out in the history he has constructed for Middle Earth. There is Frodo’s self-sacrifice and his long, Passion-like walk through Mordor to Mount Doom, which might be Golgotha. He also uses heavily apocalyptic language to describe the lead up to the two pivotal battles of Return of the King: Pelennor Fields and the confrontation at the Black Gate. There is the repeated insistence that the Third Age, the world the characters know, is passing away. 

None of this theory on Tolkien’s Catholicism mattered to me until my later readings. When I read this book for the first time, I was eleven. The onion-like layers of meaning were mine to unpack on my own. In Gondor, they say grace before meals, calling it the standing silence. I read Faramir’s words at the Window on the West – “we look towards Numenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and ever will be” (3)- and felt a shock of wonder when I saw that they mirrored the Glory Be, capstone of many traditional Christian prayers: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. I remember hearing John 3:19-21, which speaks of the creatures of darkness hiding from the light, and feeling a sense of revelation as I decided that Tolkien must have been thinking of that passage when he wrote Gollum’s fear of light, both moral and solar. I cringe now, thinking of my grandiose earnestness. But it felt revelatory at the time; it felt like the pieces were snapping together and I was seeing the inner workings of something great and beautiful. 

The Lord of the Rings shaped my faith in two main ways. First, it gave my moral imagination something to chew on. Second, it gave me a methodology, a reason to read and connect the dots with works of criticism and theology. When you write a personal essay you tell the primary story, and then you root about under it for the second, secret, truer story you need to tell. One of these is a homeschooled child spending too much time thinking on her own, and one of these is the interaction between the archetypal work of Catholic imagination and my family life. In his retirement, my grandfather studied Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a hobby. Tolkien, downstream of Wagner but close enough that he was interested, was a way I could connect with him. He was someone whose intellectual companionship I craved, and Lord of the Rings gave us a shared interest. My grandfather died this year, and had been too deaf for a serious conversation for most of a decade. The best years of our talks were when I wasn’t much more than a child, but he treated me so seriously that I feel as if I’d had those conversations with him as an adult. The Lord of the Rings facilitated them.

There is another story as well, about coming to the Anglican Communion as a refugee from Rome, leaving Tolkien’s faith. Tolkien’s eldest son became a priest. Years later, he celebrated his father’s funeral Mass; it comes full circle. I am writing these words as a postulant for holy orders and first year seminarian. Tolkien’s devotion formed mine, and then I had nowhere to use it inside his church. I don’t think Tolkien would agree with a woman’s vocation to the priesthood. Maybe he would describe me like Eowyn, railing against the constraints placed on her and finally, healed, making peace with her place in the world. But I hope he will understand, from the cloud of witnesses.  

1. Cynewulf, Advent Lyrics (Crist I) https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/christ-i/; translation the author’s.

2. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1978. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p. 72.

3.  The Two Towers, p.884