J. R. R. Tolkien

Life

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, then part of the Orange Free State, to Arthur Tolkien, an English bank manager, and Mabel Suffield. After his father’s sudden death in 1896 the family settled in the West Midlands of England, where Mabel raised Ronald and his brother Hilary in straitened but devoted circumstances. In 1900 Mabel was received into the Catholic Church together with her sister May. Her family, staunchly Baptist, retaliated by withdrawing all financial support; her early death from diabetes in 1904 left Ronald convinced for the rest of his life that his mother had died a martyr for the Catholic faith.

Guardianship of the orphaned brothers passed, by Mabel’s will, to Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory — a half-Welsh, half-Spanish priest in the line of Saint John Henry Newman. Father Francis raised the boys with affection and discipline within the Oratorian world of plainchant, Latin liturgy and intellectual seriousness. Tolkien would later say that he had received from him “my first idea of charity, which I have ever since perceived was the heart of Christianity.”

At King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and later at Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien combined a precocious gift for languages with a deep sacramental life. He fell in love at sixteen with Edith Bratt, an older Anglican orphan; Father Francis, anxious for his ward’s vocation and faith, forbade contact until Ronald’s twenty-first birthday. Tolkien obeyed to the day. On the night his ban lifted he wrote to Edith proposing marriage; she was already engaged to another man, broke off the engagement, was received into the Catholic Church the following year, and married Ronald at the Oratory church in Warwick in 1916.

Days after his wedding Tolkien sailed for France as a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers. He fought through the Battle of the Somme, lost almost all his school friends, and was invalided home with trench fever — an experience that later coloured every page he wrote about war, mercy and loss. He returned to Oxford, took the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon at thirty-three, and remained an Oxford don for the rest of his working life.

Throughout that life he was a daily communicant. “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated,” he wrote to his son Michael in 1963, “I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.” He prayed the Rosary daily, made a Marian pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1958, and considered devotion to Our Lady the single greatest source of grace in his life: “All my own small perception of beauty, both in majesty and simplicity, is founded upon Our Lady.”

Tolkien played a quiet but decisive role in the conversion of his closest friend, C. S. Lewis, walking the grounds of Magdalen College with him through the night of 19–20 September 1931 — a conversation later described by Lewis as the one that broke open his resistance to Christianity. Tolkien grieved when Lewis returned to Anglicanism rather than the Catholic Church of his Irish childhood, but the friendship and the conviction never wavered.

His literary masterpieces — The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) — are not allegory, as he was at pains to insist, but they are saturated with Catholic sensibility: providence woven through apparent chance, sacrifice unto death that rises again, the lembas-bread of the Elves recognisably eucharistic, the burden of evil borne by the smallest and weakest, Galadriel a Marian figure, and the long defeat that yet awaits a sudden in-breaking of joy — the same joy, he believed, that the Resurrection first poured into the world. In a letter to the Jesuit Robert Murray in December 1953 he wrote: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

The liturgical changes following the Second Vatican Council were a great cross to him. He continued in his last years to make the responses at Mass aloud in Latin, sometimes audibly correcting the celebrant, but he obeyed and remained, accepting the suffering as part of “the long defeat” he so often described. Edith died in November 1971; Ronald followed her on 2 September 1973, fortified by the sacraments. They are buried together in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, under one stone that bears their names with the inscriptions Beren and Lúthien — the lovers of his legendarium whose story he had written, he said, as his “greatest tale” about Edith.

No cause for Tolkien’s beatification has been opened. He is honoured today by many Catholics as the most influential lay Catholic writer of the twentieth century in the English language — a witness to the truth that the imagination, sanctified, is itself a form of worship.