Christianity and Tolkien

[Bêthberry]

My apologies for a very late reply to Boromir's question to me. It's been difficult to find enough time to be able to frame the kind of thoughtful reply his post deserves.

Originally Posted by Boromir88

My counter question to Bb, however, is what reasons would Tolkien have to deceive the recipients of his written letters?

LadyBrooke provided the gist of my response.

Originally Posted by Lady Brooke

I'm not Bb, but I wouldn't consider it so much deception, as tailoring what you say to your audience - I wouldn't go in and tell my college professors half the things I might tell my best friend. I don't speak the same way around my mom and her family as I do around my dad and his family. I think it's natural human behavior to stress certain things around certain audiences, and that could have played into what Tolkien wrote to certain people. And like you said, memory plays a huge part in it.

Indeed, I never used or implied any sense of dishonesty or deliberate misrepresentation in my comments about the nature of letters. It is not a matter of deception but of degree of emphasis and of enthusiasm that makes a personal statement between friends differ from a general public or critical statement.

Tolkien's Letter, No. 142 to Robert Murray, (written December 2, 1953) is very clearly written to a dear and close friend, of the family as well as of Tolkien himself. It is a lovely, personable letter, one of the most personable ones the we have in the selected letters and I've always found it a fascinating fact that Father Murray was the grandson of the founder of the OED. Tolkien's first academic position was working on the OED, the letter W.

There are a couple of points I would make simply as a scholarly or pedantic analysis of the letter as we have it. It is edited, as two ellipses point out. And it is a response to a letter from Father Murray, with his critiques of the LotR, read in manuscript. In fact, apparently Tolkien himself had invited Father Murray to make comments. Even with Carpenter's summary of Murray's letter, I would be interested to see that letter in its entirety and even the previous one from Tolkien with the invitation to comment, nosy little stalker that I am. It would help to know, for instance, if Tolkien had asked for any particular direction in comments or critique. When we ask friends for their opinion, often the shared subjects of interest (and shared dislikes!) form part of an expected context of conversation. Did Tolkien invite religious interpretation? (And if so, did he do so with any other of the people to whom he showed the manuscript and pre-publication copies?) Or was it a spontaneous readerly response on Murray's part?

First of all, clearly this letter is part of an extended discussion about LotR. As Tolkien writes,

Originally Posted by Letter 142

I have been cheered specially by what you have said, this time and before,

It would be so nice to know what Murray had said not just this time, but "previously". We don't have the full discussion here in this letter.

Second, Tolkien makes an interesting claim about Murray's comments.

Originally Posted by Letter 142

you are more perceptive, especially in some directions, than any one else, and have even revealed to me more clearly some things about my work.

It is quite interesting for an author to say to a reader that the reader has pointed out things the author had not fully realised. Often this kind of comment is a compliment to the reader. Is is simply a courteous way of saying, "Well, I never meant that but you could be right" ? The remaining part of the paragraph does say that this direction was originally unconscious on Tolkien's part, and then "consciously so in the revision", but that of course raises the question of what it was originally and how much of that original impetus was edited out or changed. The other point about this comment is that Tolkien says Murray speaks "in some directions", a phrase which suggests that those directions are not all-inclusive: there are other directions which Murray does not address. This suggests at least the possibility of a caveat on the interpretation that LotR is exclusively a Catholic book. Certainly Tolkien ends the paragraph not with more detail about the Catholicity of the book but of his own personal faith. He slides into personal psychology rather than literary statement. Of course a book will show evidence of an author's personal beliefs and psychology because that is part of his world vision. But that is not quite the same thing as saying the book is exclusively about that world vision.

Another point also suggests this, the subject of the paragraph following this one, in which Tolkien discusses his love of the Classics in contrast to works of English Literature and his great interest in Philology.

Originally Posted by Letter 142

Also being a philologist, getting a large part of any aesthetic pleasure that I am capable of from the form of words (and especially from the fresh association of word-form with word-sense), I have always best enjoyed things in a foreign language, or one so remote as to feel like it (such as Anglo-Saxon).

Again, this is personal. But elsewhere in other letters and essays Tolkien has talked about how the Legendarium had its genesis in his creation of the elvish languages and that the stories necessarily became the fleshing out of those languages.

Perhaps Tolkien, a private man, was very reticent to speak about his faith, a faith which was censored and derided in the England of his time, to anyone who did not share it. And perhaps he thought identifying the book as Catholic would harm its sales. We don't know and can merely conjecture.

But my point about most claims for religion is that they don't explain the non-religious motivation. One of the links in Boro's link does attempt to discuss how the pagan world view and Catholic world view coincide, but very few discussions consider the relationship between the philology and the faith. That is why I think this Letter is so misused (although not the only one misused).