Text of a lecture given by David (Lord) Alton at the Catholic Society of Bath University and Bath Spa University College on Thursday 20th of February 2003
The Fellowship of the Ring: J.R.R. Tolkien, Catholicism and the use of Allegory
Introduction:
Politicians often get by on precious little knowledge about the subjects that they have been asked to address. Usually they rely on knowing marginally more than their audience. This lecture is a particularly risky endeavour as I can guarantee that most people here will have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Middle Earth and its origins. The younger the audience the riskier it gets.
At Christmas last I had a
salutary reminder of the perilous journey on which I am about to embark. As we
left the cinema, my twelve-year-old son gave me a blow by blow account of the
discrepancies between the text of The Two
Towers and Peter Jackson's magnificent screen adaptation.
The Lord of the Rings, which was first published in 1954, has made
Tolkien's a household name. More than 50 million copies have been sold
worldwide. Much to the chagrin of
Tolkien's many critics the public voted it Best Book of the Century in 1997 in a
survey carried out by Amazon.com and then again in a survey carried out by
Waterstone’s and Channel 4.
As a teenager I had read The
Hobbit but it wasn't until my early twenties that I bought The Lord of the Rings. I was 23 and had just contested my first
General Election in an inner city area of Liverpool.
On the back of a three-day-week
and a struggle with the trades unions Edward Heath had gone to the country
asking the question "Who runs the country?" The uncertain result of an
almost balanced Parliament failed to answer the question and it would only be
another eight months before a second General Election would be staged. It was
over those weeks that I read The Lord of
the Rings.
It had been a difficult time for
me personally. Elected as a student I had served for two years on Liverpool City
Council representing an area where half the homes had no inside sanitation,
running hot water, or bathrooms. Half the streets were still lit by gas lighting
and the massive slum clearance programme meant that day by day many desperate
people came to me with acute social and housing needs.
I had just survived an attempt
to expel me from my then political party for bringing to light corrupt attempts
by a colleague who was trying to rig housing grant applications. I had also
received a letter from the then leader of my party telling me to desist from
attacking my Socialist opponent, the sitting member. I had exposed his
parliamentary record and his failure, over 30 years, to speak or campaign in the
House of Commons about the appalling hardships of his constituents.
I had run up against the Establishment. The MP was a friend of
my leader and I was told to lay off or lose financial support and the leader's
endorsement. I had accepted the second option.
The Lord of the Rings was
therefore a very welcome distraction from all of this.
Much later I read The
Silmarillion and Tolkien's short stories, my favourite of which is Leaf
by Niggle.
I also came to Tolkien as
someone who as a child, and again as a student wrestling with his faith, had
been captivated by C.S.Lewis.
As an eleven-year-old, the lady
who ran our public lending library pointed me at The Narnian Chronicles and encouraged me to read them. Later I
devoured The Cosmic Trilogy - and still believe that the third book, That
Hideous Strength, - has a powerful and prophetic message for our times.
Lewis' Christian apologetics, especially Mere
Christianity and The Problem of Pain,
helped me to deepen and articulate my Christian faith.
Lewis' friendship with Tolkien and with Owen Barfield and the other Inklings, is the sort of camaraderie out of which creative genius can flow. It also underlines how friendship on the journey of understanding helps us all "to go deeper and to go higher" as Lewis memorably puts it.
When the Inklings gathered at
Oxford's Eagle And Child (the "Bird and Baby") or in Lewis's rooms to
read aloud their latest writings were they simply embarked on a literary or, in
the case of Tolkien a philological endeavour, or was there something else at
work here?
I want to divide my talk into
four themes:
1.
Allegory or more?
2.
The Christian Narrative.
3.
The Political Narrative; and
4. What it means for us now.
Allegory or More?
According to the Collins English
dictionary, allegory is where “the apparent meaning of the characters and
events is used to symbolise a deeper moral or spiritual meaning”.
Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal
Farm by George Orwell, or Lewis' The
Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe are good examples of both political and
religious allegory. Tolkien did not actually much care for The Narnian Chronicles for this very reason.
Tolkien generally spurned
allegory as an art form – he even professed to hating it – so it seems
unlikely that his works were intentionally and fundamentally allegorical.
Indeed, in his Foreword to The
Lord of the Rings instead of allegory he said
"I much prefer history, true
or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of
readers. I think that may confuse "applicability" with
"allegory"; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader and the
other in the purposed domination of the author."
In his letters he is less
emphatic, admitting that,
"…any attempt to explain
the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language." (And, of
course, the more "life" a story has the more readily will it be
susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate
allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.)."
If we were simply to read The
Lord of the Rings as an allegory we would be missing its point. Just as
Jesus used parables to take us to a deeper truth, so Tolkien weaves his stories
to take us ever deeper. It is like peeling off the snake's skin as stories are
revealed within his stories: each one challenging us, sensitising us, inviting
us. And what is it he wants us to discover?
Humphrey Carpenter's collection
of Tolkien's letters (Allen & Unwin 1981) gives us Tolkien's own answer:
"Of course, Allegory and
Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth."
In 1925, G.K. Chesterton had published The Everlasting Man - which was to have a direct effect on C.S.Lewis's conversion.
In a chapter entitled "The
Escape from Paganism" Chesterton takes us directly to the Truth:
"Nothing short of the extreme
and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that
particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea
of the king Himself serving in the ranks like a common soldier. By making that
figure merely human we make that story much less human. We take away the point
of the story which actually pierces humanity; the point of the story which was
quite literally the point of a spear."
Chesterton adds that faith:
"…is not a process but a
story….The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the
same is true even of the story of God.
The Catholic faith is…a story and in that sense one of a
hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense
one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life."
Tolkien echoes this in his
remark (ibid.):
"So the only perfectly
consistent allegory is a real life; and the only intelligible story is an
allegory…. the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it
can be read 'just as a story'
Of the New Testament he says
that "The
Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all
the essences of fairy stories."
This is different from all the others because it has "entered
history" Unlike the other stories "there is no tale ever told that
men would rather find true…to reject it leads either to sadness or to
wrath"(Lecture at St.
Andrew's University, 1937).
Perhaps prefiguring the way in
which Tolkien will tackle his epic tale, Chesterton observes that "Every
story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement."
All the elements, from the genesis and "the great
music" of The Silmarillion to the
awesome climax at Mount Doom, take us from alpha of creation to the omega of
judgement. This is a story that exists for itself.
Tolkien tell us that:
“The Lord of The Rings is of
course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously at first, but
consciously in the revision”. Elsewhere he states "I am a Christian (which can
be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic" (ibid.).
In 1958 he wrote that The Lord of the
Rings is "a tale, which is built on or out of certain 'religious' ideas, but
is not an allegory of them."
So this is more than allegory,
much much more; and what were those "certain 'religious' ideas" that
inspired Tolkien?