Here we meet. . . the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak—owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One. . . . ²

In order to explore the “secret life in creation,” J. R. R. Tolkien cast his art in the literary type termed fairy tales. While fairy tales are not automatically mythical, they create an atmosphere that is especially suited to the character of myth. Tolkien also saw that fairy tales were perfectly suited to Christian theology. Both fairy tales and Christianity demand belief in other worlds, and, while those of Christian conviction exist quite beyond the reach of the imagination, those envisioned in fairy tales (defined as he defines them) can offer insights unavailable to any other mental activity.

The atmosphere of fairy tales yields enchantment, the charm people feel when they glimpse something of the benign mystery of the universe. “Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician,” he explained. ³ It excites the human spirit to the point of deep-seated delight. This magic differs from ordinary magic in that it possesses an organic or natural air. The magic of the magician is manipulative and crude, motivated by the desire to wield power over nature; that which enchants induces an exultation in the rightness of life, creates joy, and issues in humility. The atmosphere of myth is indispensable to portraying it. Fantasies that evoke this sense take us into a secondary world in which we experience escape, recovery, and consolation.

Tolkien was charmed by an anecdote he found while reading one of Chesterton’s essays, about how Charles Dickens was seized with a strange feeling when on a dark London day he saw MOOREEFFOC written upon the glass door of a coffee room, and then realized he was viewing it from the inside. ⁴ Tolkien felt that one must look beyond the every day sameness and discover new perspectives from which the familiar look odd. When we experience the pleasant shock of entering a plausible fantasy world, we briefly escape from the dehumanizing and degrading aspects of our mechanized (and now computerized) society. This effect—which he calls recovery—is positive and exhilarating: we recover a sense of the preciousness of things. We begin to see them apart from possessiveness and self-advantage. Myth enables us to see the world with fresh attention, prompting us to cease taking things for granted and discover their full integrity. ⁵

The result is humility and consolation. In the world of fairy tales, goodness has its proper beauty and certain deep and ancient desires—such as conversing with animals or traveling backwards through time—are satisfied. Perils and dire threats are real; failure and sorrow exist in all their startling momentousness, but beyond them is the consolation of the happy ending. The story concludes with that sudden and marvelous grace of happy resolution, and “we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.” 6 Tolkien’s understanding of his craft is immensely helpful, but more satisfying still is the degree to which his stories fulfill its promise.

The foundations for Tolkien’s achievement were laid in his childhood, when he felt a prodigious interest in languages, the vehicles of myths. Orphaned at the age of twelve, he attended King Edwards (a distinguished grammar school in Birmingham) on scholarship, where he not only studied requisite Latin, Greek, French, and German, but soon delved into Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and Old Norse, and then began inventing languages of his own. 7 His interest was especially piqued by the epic poems and myths he encountered in the remote past, exuding as they did that aura of antiquity that so fascinated him. He later studied comparative philology at Oxford, but his work was interrupted by a stint in the army during World War I. While there he contracted trench fever. During his long convalescence he began composing myths of his own. These myths were the beginning of The Silmarillion, which was edited and published posthumously by his son, Christopher, nearly six decades later. 8 After marrying Edith Bratt, a fellow orphan and his adolescent sweetheart, he began his career as a teacher of Anglo-Saxon. In the early years of his creative output, two types of stories formed in his imagination: one type was built around grand and heroic themes (such as “The Lost Road,” with its father and son quest for the ideal kingdom of Numenor); the other type composed for amusement, mostly to tell to his four children as evening entertainment. In 1945 he was elected the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University; this election allowed more time and opportunity to pursue his writing as a private hobby.

J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both academics who met at Oxford in the 1920s. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, Lewis an atheist. Helped by Tolkien’s convictions as to the nature of myth, Lewis was soon converted to Christianity. 9 They were drawn together by their mutual interest in what they termed “northernness,” or the mythic aura that arose from Norse myths and legends. It created within both strange longings. Each in his teens had undertaken to compose stories of his own in an attempt to capture that fascinating, elusive quality of desire. Their creative activity as adults was an extension of these early endeavors. Tolkien recalled in a letter: “L[ewis] said to me one day: ‘Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.’ We agreed that he should try ‘space-travel’, and I should try ‘time travel.’ ” “What we really like in stories” he defines in another letter as “discovering Myth.” ¹⁰

Tolkien’s view of the nature of myth, which Lewis was subsequently to develop and make a cornerstone in many of his writings, affirms that the mythologies of ancient peoples occasionally glimpse “something really higher. Divinity, the right to power (as distinct from its possession), the due worship, human inventions though they may be.” This “something really higher” came to full historical realization in the Incarnation of Christ and the consequent salvation of which Christians partake. Amidst the complex narratives of myth, certain realities are adumbrated which the Christian scriptures reveal to be historical fact. The myth of the dying and rising god, for instance, existing in various forms in so many mythologies, is an adumbration of the historical reality of the death and resurrection of the Son of God.

The historical account in the Gospels of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ is the central eucatastrophe of history. Eucatastrophe is Tolkien’s term for the essence of consolation—the “happy ending” that affords a joyous sense of conflicts resolved and justice achieved. “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true,” he states concerning the Incarnation. ¹¹ The pattern portrayed in the life of Christ expresses the complete paradigm upon which successful fantasies draw.

NOTES
1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 75. This essay was first given as the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrew’s in 1938. It appeared in print in Essays presented to Charles Williams (Oxford University Press, 1947); and then in Tree and Leaf (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964). It is a classic statement on the nature of fairy tales and contains provocative assertions on the relation of the Gospels to them. For a fuller discussion of this subject, see chapter 7 on Lewis.

2. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., #131, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 143.

3. Tolkien, Reader, 39.

4. Tolkien, Reader, 77.

5. For a fuller discussion of recovery, see C. S. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” Of This and Other Worlds (London: Collins, 1982), 112-21.

6. Reader, 87.

7. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), 22­37. This is the standard biography, to which I am indebted for biographical details.

8. First published in London by George Allen and Unwin in 1977, and in Boston by Houghton Mifflin. Christopher has also edited and published posthumously his father’s other stories.

9. See Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 24­45 for a detailed account of their early friendship and Lewis’s subsequent conversion.

10. Carpenter, Letters, 378, 29.

11. Carpenter, Letters, 72.