A hidden presence: the Catholic Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Harry Potter of forty years ago was Frodo Baggins, J.R.R.Tolkien's hero. Frodo's fans, older than Potter's but every bit as obsessive, not only devoured printing after printing of The Lord of the Rings, but also regaled themselves--between protesting the war in Viet Nam, and demanding the right to use four-letter words in public--with sporting Gandalf for President buttons and organizing Hobbit parties.

One thing that might have given pause to these now aging friends of Middle-earth is the fact that its historian was a zealous and uncompromising Catholic. Tolkien practised Humanae Vitae, frowned on the marriage of his best friend, C.S.Lewis, to a divorced woman (on the grounds that such a union belied Lewis' much publicized conversion to Christianity), and even defended Franco's role in the Spanish Civil War. He kept the Faith, moreover, through nearly sixty years at Oxford University, the wellspring of genteel anti-Catholicism in twentieth-century Britain, where even such an enlightened soul as Lewis refused to see a moral equivalence between totalitarian outrages against Protestants and those against Catholics. "... [I]f a Lutheran is put in jail he [Lewis] is up in arms," complained Tolkien in a letter to his son, Christopher; towards the end of World War II. "But if Catholic priests are slaughtered--he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it)."

But for all this unswerving loyalty to Rome, Tolkien refused to think of himself as a Catholic writer. He claimed to be a writer, who just happened to be Catholic, a teller of stories without theological subtexts, and nothing put him into an argumentative mood more quickly than to have a correspondent accuse him of allegory. He refuses to admit, for example, that lembas, the magic bread the elves supplied Frodo and Sam with, was in any way reflective of Catholic belief in transubstantiation, or, for that matter, that the Ring as many have argued, referred to the hydrogen bomb. Magic and miracle abound in The Lord of the Rings, but their ultimate source is unspecified. Thus when Frodo faces death at the hands of the barrow-wights, he appeals for help, not to God or even to a god, but to that most delightfully human character, Tom Bombadil, who crashes through the wall of Frodo's prison, "hat feather, and all," bringing with him "real light, the plain light of day."

Here, no doubt is one reason why sixties Youth took such delight in Tolkien's myth-making. It promised them a religious high, without the necessity of having to practise a religion. In Lord of the Rings, Lembas gives Frodo and Sam strength, as LSD gave their young admirers joy, physiologically, not metaphysically.

But metaphysics and Catholicism are inseparable. Tolkien, however carefully he may avoid explicit references to religious belief and practice in his fiction, cannot help speaking with a Catholic voice. This is the point made in A Hidden Presence: The Catholic Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien, a richly informative and wide-ranging collection of essays, and reminiscences. "To think of Tolkien's labours as somehow removed from his Church," argues Owen Dudley Edwards, one of the contributors to A Hidden Presence, "is ... as absurd as to think of them as somehow removed from his life." Unlike Belloc, claims Edwards, Tolkien "did not put his writings on sectarian parade." No need to. What he wrote was what he was: Catholic.

A Hidden Presence sheds light above all on Tolkien's role as a subcreator, that is to say as a story-relier whose creative power is derived from the fact that he is made in the image of God. The universe he imagines is comparable to but not identical with the one he himself inhabits. A subcreator, then, like a lieutenant on the battle field, must make his own tactical decisions, but always in the light of orders handed down from on high.

And it is this quintessentially Catholic commitment to the principle of subsidiarity that makes Tolkien, according to the authors of A Hidden Presence, such a successful myth-maker. He looks out at his world from below, putting himself on a level with hobbits, so that as the story of their mission unfolds, nothing about them seems small or insignificant. And of deepest significance, of course, is their role as defenders of the Shire, together with all the pro-family and localist tradition it has given rise to, from the universalist forces of evil represented by Sauron.

Nor does this David-and-Goliath struggle ever go entirely in David's favour. True, Frodo and his companions receive some supernatural first aid from the elves, but they certainly have no secret weapon as effective as the one that David himself disposed of. In fact their biggest handicap turns out to be the very ring that they are charged with disposing of. The more it stays in Frodo's possession, the more it corrupts him until finally he refuses to part with it, and only Gollum's greed saves the world from darkness or rather only God's grace working through Frodo and Gollum. The message beautifully annunciated by Tolkien in his writings and documented by today's wisest Tolkien scholars in A Hidden Presence is that without God man can do nothing.