J. R. R. Tolkien famously described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” But while these words have been widely and enthusiastically quoted in Catholic studies of Tolkien’s legendarium, readers have not always paid sufficient attention to what Catholic and religious would have meant to Tolkien himself. To do so is to misunderstand the full import of the phrase.
From his childhood as an altar server and “junior inmate” of the Birmingham Oratory to daily Mass with his children as an adult, Tolkien’s Catholic religion was, at its heart, a liturgical affair. To be religious and Catholic in the Tolkienian sense is to be rooted in the prayer of the Church.
The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination takes this claim seriously: The Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien’s myth as a whole) is the product of an imagination seeped in liturgical prayer. In the course of its argument, the Ben Reinhard examines the liturgical pieties that governed Tolkien’s life from childhood to old age, the ways in which the liturgy colored Tolkien’s theory of myth and fantasy, and the alleged absence of religion in Middle-earth. Most importantly, he shows how the plots, themes, and characters of Tolkien’s beloved works can be traced to the patterns of the Church’s liturgical year.
Of course, anyone familiar with recently liturgical history will know just how much has changed in that regard since Tolkien's time, and I was glad to see Reinhard acknowledge this directly and early on in his work:
As we prepare to examine the role the liturgy played in shaping Tolkien’s imagination, it is of the highest importance that we recognize that the liturgy experienced by Tolkien may not be the liturgy immediately familiar to us. The liturgical reforms introduced after the Second Vatican Council—in the last decade of Tolkien’s life—introduced wide-ranging changes to the Church’s prayer: the calendar, the Divine Office, and the structure and language of the Mass were all altered significantly. A book on Tolkien’s imagination is, of course, no place to chronicle the extent of the changes, nor to debate their merits—but we must at least recognize that they occurred, if we are to avoid falling into traps of our own construction. To understand the impact of the liturgy on Tolkien’s imagination, we must make a continual effort to understand the liturgy as he would have experienced it in his formative and creative years.” (p.10)
This is a critical point of context, and those not familiar with the pre-conciliar liturgical forms, calendar and tradition, may well not realize just how different their own particular lived liturgical experience may be from Tolkien's in many regards.
Reinhard's intent in The High Hallow is to analyze and speculate upon the central importance and defining character of the liturgical life and liturgical piety in Tolkien's life and formative years and how that may have manifest within his writings. Reinhard acknowledges and addresses Tolkien's general dislike of allegory (i.e. stories that have an underlying, hidden moral, meaning or message). This is an important point to acknowledge if we are to take any such study seriously and The High Hallow takes head on the challenging, push-pull topic of the potential theological and liturgical themes in Tolkien's writings. What do I mean? Well, on the one hand, Tolkien is famously known for not being a fan of allegory, but on the other hand, from time to time Tolkien seems to make room for it. What's more, in some cases Tolkien even seems to explicitly acknowledge it, such as in the case of one of his lesser works, Smith of Wootton Major, a work that Tolkien himself said is a "somewhat satirical" allegory for a parish church and parish priest. Tolkien comments:
There is some trace of allegory in the Human part, which seems to me obvious though no reader or critic has yet averted to it. As usual there is no “religion” in the story; but plainly enough the Master Cook and the Great Hall, etc., are a (somewhat satirical) allegory of the village-church, and the village parson.
Reinhard comments accordingly:
Tolkien's picture of religious life in Wootton Major is hardly idealized. The Hall itself has lost much of its old glory: it is "no longer painted or gilded as it had been once upon a time" (Smith, 3-4). To make matters worse, the office of Master Cook has fallen to a plainly unworthy man. Master Cook Nokes is a petty and mean-spirited sort, unskilled and ignorant of his craft, but possessed of a remarkable vanity and a degree of low cunning. As Tolkien commented, the functions of the Hall were "steadily decaying….. into mere eating and drinking— the last trace of anything 'other' being left in the children" (Smith, 87). Nokes himself is the embodiment of the decay; for Tolkien, he represented "the vulgarization of Wootton" (Smith, 128). And the vulgarization is catching. Smith himself is unable to speak to many in the village of his adventures, as "too many had become like Nokes" (Smith, 18). The villagers may keep the feasts, but they are not alive to the meaning or importance of them. As Tolkien wrote, "The church has been 'reformed.' Memory survives of 'merrier' days, but most of the village would not appreciate any revival of them" (Smith, 143). It is difficult, of course, to read all this without being reminded of Tolkien's critiques of Eucharistic irreverence in the 1950s and 60s and his volatile reactions to the postconciliar liturgy. The fact that religious life had decayed in Wootton Major does not mean that it must decay forever, and the tale ends on hope.
This is the sort of content that one can expect from The High Hallow, a work that also explores the more fundamental cosmology and mythology of Tolkien's core mythological realm, Middle Earth, drawing comparisons between the creation mythology we find in The Simarillion and the biblical account of creation found in Genesis. Reinhard also considers the possible influence of particular liturgical texts, chants and popular Catholic devotions that we can find in such places as the elvish high feast days.or the ancient Numenorean men, inclusive of echoes of specific liturgical prayers that Tolkien likely had memorized.
For my own part, what is key in Reinhard's work is that he doesn't overstate the objectivity of his case. He is plainly aware this is he is offering an interpretation, and in that regard he is making his case for these interpretations while still leaving the door open for other potentialities. I believe that is important and, at least to me, makes this a far more serious and scholarly consideration. Allegory and allegorists frequently fall into the 'chicken and the egg' problem of which came first -- the story or the allegorical 'meaning' -- but in this instance, regardless of whether Tolkien did or didn't intend to consciously place such liturgical meanings within his writings, given the formative and spiritual import of the sacred liturgy on Tolkien's own personal life, it seems hardly a stretch to posit that this may well have, even if only unconsciously, seeped out into Tolkien's mythological world. As Reinhard himself notes:
...it is worth remembering that denying allegory is not the same as denying significance or—to use Tolkien’s preferred word—applicability. Recognizing the liturgical pattern behind The Return of the King can help us understand why so many Christian readers of the novel have felt at home there.
He continues:
This, then, was Tolkien’s life in liturgy. The Mass was, in many ways, the governing principle of his life: it anchored his schedule, molded his devotion, and nourished his family. It was a source of order, joy, consolation—and, occasionally, pain. It seems clear from the discussion above that Tolkien was a prime candidate, if ever a layman was, for a liturgically formed imagination—in [Conrad] Pepler’s words, an imagination “coloured by the Mass drama” and ready to connect any and all activities to the pattern of the liturgy
Perhaps that is even the more compelling story that we might find in The High Hallow, for it is a work that not only shows us the potential liturgical influences that we might be able to find in Tolkien's writings, it also is a witness to the power of the Church's liturgical life to form and to deeply influence one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Title: The High Hallow: Tolkien's Liturgical Imagination
Author: Ben Reinhard
Hardcover, $24.95
Product Link: https://stpaulcenter.com/store/the-high-hallow-tolkiens-liturgical-imagination
