Paganism in Middle-earth

Scholars have identified

Paganism covers an eclectic mix of religious beliefs and practices, often including many gods (polytheism) and a living nature imbued with spirit (animism). It was defined in early Christian times largely negatively, as non-Christian religion. Pagans may speak as if there was just one deity, often "the Goddess", while accepting multiple deities; they may speak of nature or the Earth as divine, suggesting a form of pantheism, though this may shade into either animism or transcendentalism. There is thus a wide spectrum of belief.^[4]

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.[T 1]

The scholar Patrick Curry writes that Tolkien's statement

• 
  Like the

  polytheistic.^[1]

Although never described as a god, it is evident that Gandalf has power; Tolkien explains that the Wizards are Maiar, lesser spirits who serve the Valar, and who may take human form when in Middle-earth. In several ways he thus resembles Odin the wanderer.^[13][2]

Queen of the heavens

In Tolkien's legendarium, the Elven-smith Celebrimbor forges Rings of Power, with consequences told in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had been asked to investigate a Latin inscription excavated at a 4th-century temple of the pagan god Nodens with a curse upon a ring. He concluded that Nodens was probably the origin of the Irish hero Nuada Airgetlám, "Nuada of the Silver-Hand". In the Elvish language of Sindarin, Celebrimbor similarly means "Silver-Hand". Paganism, lightly disguised, thus extends to central plot elements of Middle-earth.^{[18][17][19][20]}

Animism

Since the

Tolkien was "rather disturbed by [an

Nazi leadership a few years later. Nevertheless it did provide an image of heroic virtue which could exist, and could be admired, outside the Christian framework. In some respects (as you can see in his 1936 Beowulf lecture...) the Old Norse 'theory of courage' might even be regarded as ethically superior to the Classical if not to the Christian world-view, in that it demanded commitment to virtue without any offer of lasting reward. ... He also felt that Old Norse mythology provided a model for what one might call 'virtuous paganism,' which was heathen; conscious of its own inadequacy, and so ripe for conversion; but not yet sunk into despair and disillusionment like so much of 20th-century post-Christian literature; a mythology which was in its way light-hearted."^[34]

Shippey analyses "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", an appendix to The Lord of the Rings, for what it says about Tolkien's delicate balance between open Christianity and his treatment of his characters as heathens, a word that Shippey observes Tolkien uses very sparingly. Shippey notes that both Aragorn and Arwen are pagan, though Aragorn is "remarkably virtuous .. without even the faults of Theoden, and he foreknows his death like a [Christian] saint".^[31] Shippey notes that Arwen is inconsolable, seeing nothing after death, rejecting Aragorn's "we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!"; as Shippey says, "Arwen is not comforted" by this;^[31] none of the traditional consolations of religion are present.^[31]

The salvation of a pagan who had done wrong is discussed in The Lord of the Rings in connection with the death of

The scholar George Clark writes that Tolkien resembled the Beowulf poet in being [37]

a learned Christian who re-created a heroic world and story in an implicitly Christian universe governed by a God whose existence and nature the poem's wiser characters intuit without the benefit of revelation. Tolkien's Beowulf poet was a version of himself, and his authorial persona in creating [The Lord of the Rings] was a version of that Beowulf poet.^[37]

The historian Ronald Hutton writes that in depicting a pagan Middle-earth, the Christian Tolkien was setting up an interesting relationship between his own religion and his invented world. He notes that Tolkien made this hard to investigate: he avoided biography, disliked critics, and distrusted analysis of literature based on the author rather than the work; and further, apart from his Letters, he left no memoirs and few clues in his diaries. Hutton suggests that the many unsent drafts of letters indicate that Tolkien was embarrassed by the question, as he wanted to be clear about his Christianity, and was pleased if people could glimpse that through his writings, but his remarks about the presence of Catholicism in The Lord of the Rings were brief and difficult to interpret, as he had been stung by criticism of the absence of religion in the work. Hutton cites Verlyn Flieger's statement that Tolkien's faith was "subject to doubt and losses of confidence", and even in later life he wrote to his son Michael that he was constantly tempted to unbelief.^[38]

Hutton sees three, sometimes "discordant", elements in Middle-earth's (religious) cosmos. There is a single male supreme being, Eru Iluvatar, "in personality much like a Christian God". A heavenly choir of beings, the Ainur, serve him, while one, Melko/Morgoth, rebels against him, like Satan among the angels. Hutton calls this Christianity with a Neoplatonic twist. However, secondly, the Ainur are not pure and virginal, but live in the world (Arda), have sex and quarrels, and make mistakes. This, he writes, is like the pagan Norse gods, or the classical era gods of Mount Olympus: "a full-blown pagan Neoplatonism". Thirdly, unlike the ancient gods, his gods are at best only sporadically interested in the affairs of Middle-earth; instead, they defend their own "fairyland", Valinor, and the rest of the world is like a fairy-tale in that it is seen through the eyes of elves or hobbits, not of humans. This, he writes, is "utterly un-Christian", and he finds it striking how badly they fit together. Thus, questions like what happens to humans after they die are handled differently in the early and later phases of his writing. The goddess Fui acts like Persephone, the Greek goddess of the underworld, judging the dead and sending them to "a dim plain", or to be tortured by the evil Melko, while a few are brought to the enchanted realm. Hutton notes that while Christopher Tolkien tried "gamely" to fit this to the Catholic scheme of purgatory, hell, and heaven, it "obviously" fits better with the Homeric or Virgilian accounts of the afterlife. If this was Christianity, Hutton writes, it would be a heretical form; he prefers to call it pagan.^[39]

See also

• Tolkien and the classical world
• Tolkien and the Celtic

References

Primary