(Untitled)

[hikarugenji]

I'm reading Lord of the Rings again -- it's interesting to read the book carefully again after having recently been perusing Tolkien's letters. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and he considered Lord of the Rings to be a work of Christian fiction; in one letter to a reader he said that LotR was not ultimately a story of good and evil, but a story

Comments

[narugami]

Really? I always kept his foreword in mind (the part where he says it isn't a metaphor for anything). Although there's a difference between writing a parable and writing a story informed by your beliefs...

[rhysiana]

In the Tolkien and Lewis class I took during study abroad, our teacher said that the two authors argued a lot about how much real-life Christian parable it was okay to use in a work of fantasy. Lewis was of the opinion that Christ's story was the greatest ever told, and he couldn't do much to improve on it. Tolkien, on the other hand, felt that real-world elements had no place in the entirely mythologized world he was trying to create, so he tried very hard not to allow direct parallels to appear. (Of course, Lewis was a very prolific writer and Tolkien was a perfectionist who occasionally had to be locked in a room by his writing friends just to finish something. Coincidence?)

I am, of course, paraphrasing what the professor told us, because it was a class in Spanish in 2002, but I'll try to dig out my notes and see if I can find the references he used the most, since they were all in English.

[hikarugenji]

I think probably what they were getting at is that Tolkien was not using LotR as a parable, or a work of proselytizing, nor are there specific allegories (i.e. Ring = bomb, Frodo = Christ or anything like that). It's more that the entire work is founded on Tolkien's Catholic belief system; he considered LotR to be taking place in an imagined time within our own world, and since he believed in God, then God must be in the LotR world as well.

[rhysiana]

Yeah, I was actually thinking about it more after I left my first comment, and I think a lot of the difference lies in the fact that for Tolkien, Catholicism was part of who he was, whereas for Lewis, it was a reborn revelation.