Life of J.R.R. Tolkien (Part I)

Okay, with some tip, with the tip of our cap to the question of how we engage these texts, how we study them, how we look at the question of engaging with it. Ideally, at this point, of course, you're realizing, as I said in the conclusion, let's do a bit of both. Let's always make sure we're keeping an eye on the author. Let's learn the context. Let's know more about Tolkien and Lois just as people and know their biography, but then let's let the texts as they wrote them in the stories themselves kind of wash over us in a manner of speaking. As we sort of press into sort of an aggressive look at Tolkien, that's essentially the kind of the move we're gonna be doing. We're gonna start with some biography and some of more of the personal side of who he is because they do play a part, but along with that is I'm gonna try and help you understand what Tolkien actually was because if I were to say to you he was a philologist, most people say, well, what does that mean? That doesn't register with any type of profession that I have that I've seen today or any of these kinds of things, and so we're gonna go through his biography, but then throughout the rest of the next couple lectures, I'm going to give you a lecture. I'm gonna lecture through rather the Silmarillion and give you the essence of what happens in those books because despite the fact that most people who try to read the Silmarillion come away feeling like it's not the easiest of reads, it's not necessarily fun reading. I think it is, but if that's what they come to after Lord of the Rings, they're always like, where's the plot? You know, right off the bat. If that's how someone feels if they come to it on their own, what I'm gonna say to you is actually knowing who Tolkien is and then knowing some of his other writings in the backdrop actually, I think, then makes the theology of Lord of the Rings and some of the things he says just sort of really stand out in a very, very pronounced way. As you'll see, the Silmarillion is, in my opinion, is as good an engagement on some points with Christian theology through the lens of literature as anything that Lewis did or anyone else has done in the history of Christian literature, which is surprising because most people think of Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit as a bit more opaque, as the Christian theology is a little more submerged within the story itself. But again, you put the Silmarillion up as the backdrop and that is exactly what it is. It's the prequels, you might say. If you do that, then honestly what's gonna happen is the Lord of the Rings will stand out in a more stark contrast as to what you're dealing with. Tolkien's life. Trying to piece this together in the past has always been a bit of a problem. They're not actually great, wonderful, rich biographies of Tolkien that you would expect to find when you compare them to, say, Lewis. Lewis, I mean, actually wrote an autobiography at one point, Surprised by Joy, which is actually a great one. Though it's not actually a full autobiography, the subtitle of Surprised by Joy is The Shape of My Early Life. He tells the story essentially all the way up until, for lack of a better time period in general, when he arrives at Oxford. He doesn't tell all the later part of the story, etc. But Lewis himself also is the subject of quite a number of pretty riveting, fun biographies as well. There's the George Sayre biography, Jack, which if you're looking for one go-to biography, that's the one. It's just Jack, and that's what Lewis went by with his friends. That was his nickname. And George Sayre was actually a personal friend of Lewis'. They would go on walking tours. They hung out all the time. Very, very good representation of what Lewis was like just as a person. It goes down all the way to the nitty-gritty of talking about how he was a very sloppy eater. He would just sort of wolf the food down as fast as possible. Kind of a typical bachelor, I guess. Jack goes into all these sort of personal anecdotes of Jack. Well, that's Lewis. Tolkien, there's not as many. There's some, and I can give you them if you want. By all means, just ask. But what I'm about to do is sort of piece some things together so that you're at least aware of who he is. He's born on the 3rd of January, 1892. Parents were Arthur and Mabel. The Tolkien family was actually Germanic in heritage. They'd come from the region of Saxony. And there's actually sort of an interesting parallel here. The two sides, the Tolkien side, the Germanic side, and Mabel's side, who were the Suffields. The name Tolkien actually meant foolhardy. And some people have looked at sort of the echo of fool of a toke, sort of having an echo to fool of a Tolkien. There's kind of a little bit of sort of, again, an echo there. Hard to say. Tolkien never says this, this kind of a thing. But what we do know is that Tolkien actually, just in the same way when Tolkien's talking about Bilbo or Frodo, how there are two sides of their personality, the two lineages that feed into them. One being very conservative and withdrawn and not wanting to go on, not hardly wanting to leave the Shire ever. And there's the other one that's kind of wild and crazy and wants to go on adventures. This actually is straight out of Tolkien's biography. The Tolkien side were the wild and foolish kinds. They were the ones that kind of went off on adventures, these kinds of things. The Suffields, though, were the more reasoned, the more logical, the more, in some cases, better educated, this kind of a thing. And Tolkien liked to talk about how he is more the product of his mother's side and all these kinds of things. Well, classically it shows up when he writes the story of Bilbo. And of course, Tolkien would say later in his letters that he is Bilbo, that he kind of projects himself into that character. Arthur and Mabel, though, were not married very long because in his quest to sort of get ahead in life, Arthur actually took a job in South Africa. And the job in South Africa was a hard road to take because at this day and age, in this world, vaccinations and medicine and these kinds of things not being what they were, to move to a more remote part of the world, even for the sake of personal advancement, always had its problems, its faults. But nonetheless, Arthur decided that he was going to pick up the family from England and move to South Africa, where Arthur would take over essentially part of a banking enterprise. All kinds of little wrinkles of stories about Tolkien pop up. One of the famous ones is that when he was a young boy, very, very young, a what they call a baboon spider, basically a tarantula on steroids, bit him. And his caretaker actually had to kind of panic and suck the poison out of it. And it probably saved his life, maybe saved a limb, these kinds of things. Lots of people love to Freudianize this and say that a lot of the things with Shalob and spiders and all these kinds of things that always show up. There's another one in the Silmarillion called the Ungulliant. These big spiders, they're always gargantuan size, and they're in some ways nastier than orcs and all these other kinds of creatures. And Tolkien would later say, well, I hate spiders, but I wouldn't say that I invented them because I got bit by one when I was five. But still, he does have these kinds of stories. There are others as well. I'm going to resist the urge to kind of say that Tolkien at the age of five was already writing The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. Even if some of these things sort of come out of his psyche, it's not exactly the rich sort of soil that he will eventually have when he goes to Oxford. Here's an early picture of him. This is the earliest picture we have of Tolkien. It's he, the dapper guy on the left, is not from a beer commercial with the weird hat and the big mustache. That's his father, Arthur. That's his mother, seated. And they have three servants kind of arranged behind them, and that's Tolkien being held there by one of the servants. Again, he's very young. You can just tell by this picture he's not that old. Try to remember those formative years when you were two, and you'll kind of at least be able to compare. I mean, at this day and age, he's not actually all that aware of his surroundings, but he is living there in South Africa with his family. He is there until roughly the age of five, and as I say at the bottom, he has but one memory of his father ever. And the memory is that at one point, the family was going to take a trip back to England for just a period of time, a long vacation, maybe a sabbatical we might have called it, this kind of a thing. And what happens is Arthur sent Mabel and, at this point, their two boys back to England first, and then Arthur was going to stay behind and clear up some business, then he was going to follow along behind. And Tolkien says in a later interview that the only memory he has of his father was of him at the age of five watching his father paint A.B. Tolkien on his trunk as he was about to ship his stuff back. Because his father eventually contracts a fever, does not recover, and in February of 1896, he passes away. And so what ends up happening is as Mabel has moved back, she doesn't even get to bury her husband, Tolkien is not at the funeral, he is just quickly buried because of the fever and the fear of contagions. He's just quickly buried in a cemetery there in South Africa. And so that's Tolkien's earliest memories, his earliest life. He is technically born in South Africa, his father dies, and then he moves back with his mother. And his mother, Mabel, actually lands in the city of Birmingham. And the problem right now for the Tolkien family is that they are essentially penniless. Arthur, for all the promise of his career, for all the promise of where his career at least might lead, when he died left essentially nothing to the family. Not much to go on. For the rest of Tolkien's life, up until he finally finds a comfortable way, you might say, as a professor, he is essentially from the other side of the tracks. He's in a sort of slum level of lifestyle with his family, as poor as it gets in some ways. Later on, if it's not for the generosity of a Roman Catholic priest to take care of Tolkien and the boys, Tolkien is essentially orphanized and put out on the street. But in fact, through a series of all kinds of events, eventually comes to some stability. So I say he was impoverished, the Tolkien family was. Mabel had to do everything basically on her own. The big change, though, for Tolkien was that at some point along the way, Mabel, his mother, converts from Anglicanism, which is, of course, in England, basically being Baptist in the South. I mean, everyone's sort of Anglican at this point. There are lots of people who are not Anglican, but Anglican is the state church. It is sort of the official church. Mabel was, when she moved back, had sought the church out. But at some point along the way, and we don't really know why, what was sort of leading her this way, she decides to eventually attend a Catholic church. Eventually, she herself converts, you might say. She is received in the Catholic church, and then the boys along with her. Again, Tolkien at this point is a very, very young kid. And so for a significant amount of his life, Tolkien knows nothing else but the Catholic church. But he also is aware, as I'll say here in a bit, that it was not the natural faith of his family. And more on that in a second. So his mother converts to Catholicism, and at one point, or it's not at one point, but as a result of that, I should say, she is actually, for lack of a better word, kicked out. Her family, her father, Tolkien's grandfather, had been a Methodist, and then had eventually become a Unitarian, something like a Universalist. Basically, all roads lead to heaven. All roads lead to heaven, this kind of a thing. And sort of a strange sort of twist theologically. Even though he was a Universalist or a Unitarian, to become a Catholic meant that you were now somehow damned and sort of outside the sort of boundaries of what was accessible or acceptable. And so therefore, Mabel is sort of pushed further away from the family. And Tolkien, for much of his life, really only knows his mother as sort of the womb of his entire childhood. He is not sort of, the family doesn't sort of rally around him, and you know, he doesn't know aunts and uncles as deeply as he might because Mabel has converted to Catholicism. But that's going to come home to roost, because Tolkien will grow up in a very strange way, both an extraordinarily lonely and incapable person socially. But yet, on the other hand, he, in the course of his life, finds deep, singular friendships that will inspire him, you might say. He finds it first when he's a young man, and then later on with Louis in Oxford, he develops these very deep friendships. But they are very singular. He is not the big sort of big man on campus, sort of loud, brass personality. He is very much an isolated character. And a lot of this, he even says, comes from growing up in this world. Dirt poor, ostracized from the family, and all he really knows is his mother. And as a result of Mabel being pushed out, she essentially has to go live a little bit further outside of the city of Birmingham on her own. And where she ends up moving at the first point is to a region, a place rather, known as the Sorrow Hill Mill. Sorrow Hole Mill, sorry, Sorrow Hole Mill. And around that is a place called Mosley Bog. You can still go and see both of these places. Both of these places, the Sorrow Hole Mill and the Mosley Bog, are the origins of Tolkien's concept of Hobbiton, of the Hobbit world of the Shire. Tolkien is very clear on this. His early days, again, when he's blissfully unaware of the tension in his family, as some of you might identify with. And the age when he didn't even know that your family hated each other. When you were too young to notice, you just wanted to go play outside. Those years for Tolkien, in relative isolation, just he and his brother, they played here in the Sorrow Hole Mill. And here's a picture of it today. You can still go and see it. It is very, very much, you go there and it feels very Shire-esque. And the Sorrow Hole Mill, in particular, was one of their places where Tolkien and his brother loved to go play. There were two farmers who worked there. One of them had a black beard, black sort of mustache. One of them, the father, apparently had sort of a white beard, had grown, was a bit older. Tolkien and his brother referred to them as the black ogre and the white ogre. And they invented all these stories about how monstrous they were. And one of the, again, one of the famous stories of Tolkien's childhood is that Tolkien and his brother stole some mushrooms and these farmers chased them off the property. A scene that will obviously come back in Fellowship of the Rings. But this is it. This is the Sorrow Hole Mill. And then again, around it is a sort of a nature preserve called Mosley Bog. You can go there. Again, it's still there. It's a preserve. So it ideally will never be taken down. And this is what you will go and see. All kinds of intish-looking trees, all kinds of very green kind of thick things growing together. Very, very much a part of the landscape that Tolkien will have in his mind when he's writing about Lord of the Rings. It is also from this that Tolkien gets his love of the natural world. Just instinctively, inductively. Now, after the 60s and 70s, Tolkien is kind of co-opted by the green movement and the environmentalist movement as kind of a proto-hippie. He wasn't. All of his love of nature and all of his frustration with, I mean, he was, for example, very frustrated with the invention of the car. He thought it was loud, noisy, and needlessly fast. He always had to say, why do I have to get somewhere quickly? He's got this kind of naturalist perspective on life. It's not, however, driven politically or activistically. It's rather driven by what he has grown up knowing. He knows a very bucolic kind of simple, beautiful world. What I'll end up saying is his Christian faith actually informs it more than any kind of political ideology. Actually, when he lives on about 1977, he actually avoids any politicalization of his books. He says, don't read me as some sort of proto-allegorical environmentalist. Rather, what he loves is the world he grew up in. These are what's in his mind. Here's some others. Again, trees seeming to reach out their limbs across the paths and these kinds of things. Very, very, I would say, put it this way, the woods have a lot of personality if you go there and see it. Unfortunately, though, just to let you know, if you go there now, unfortunately, particularly after the success of the movies, you're going to find people dressed as wizards LARPing all throughout the woods. Here is a really bad Gandalf in the woods of Mosley Bog being awesome. You can go there. Again, in some ways, these are the shrines. I don't want to make it too weirdo. What was that? Yeah, it's tragic. I don't know. That's a pretty good beard. Probably fake. You can go and find this. This is the world. The real extreme fans of Tolkien will always sort of flock here. Even the people that take Tolkien in the worst possible light, there is a very, when I say small, I mean single digit small. There's a group of people who are trying to make Tolkienisms into a quasi-religion. There's a belief in elves and all this kind of thing. There's also a Jedi religion. I guess it just sort of happens whenever you're a big fictional success. Nonetheless, this is the world he grew up in. He says this is what's in his mind when he's telling all kinds of stories. He loves, this is one of the things about his personality, he actually loves trees. Not on their own, but as what he said, they're one of the most perfect examples of God's workmanship. This kind of long, deep-rooted, immovable, yet very alive and floral and swaying with the wind kind of existence. He has this understanding that trees have both this rootedness and this rigidity of time sort of being unmoved by the immediacy of the world, but yet also very much alive to the world. That is what is the principle push for him when he the concept of the Ents and these other kinds of things. Very much into his childhood when we're in these worlds. Mabel's faith, again, as I've said, was very much idiosyncratic. Her family, at least her father, was Unitarian and therefore she was rejected. And what ends up happening by this, and we have to understand this about Tolkien, his Catholicism, Tolkien's understanding of Catholicism is going to have a very martyrdom, to sort of coin a word, it's going to be martyr-esque. Because what ends up happening is when Tolkien is of the age of 13, his mother dies. She gets diabetes, she goes into failure, and eventually she passes away, not unlike Lewis and the loss of his mother at a young age. But for Tolkien, till the day he died, his understanding of Catholicism, his commitment to the Catholic faith, was always driven by the way his mother suffered at the hands of her own family, who rejected her for leaving the sort of more Unitarian scene, and at least approaching creedal orthodoxy in some ways. But also the fact that she died for it, she was a single mom kind of a thing, and he at the age of 13, he and his brother were now orphans. And it was a Catholic father, a priest, who took them in and became their caretaker for the rest of his life until he reached the age of 21 when he was at his maturity, and then he could go on his own. That being said, you have to understand the context of Tolkien's Catholicism, and then the way it is lived out. Because Tolkien, believe it or not, again, we give Lewis all the credit for being mere Christian, for the fact that he has very, in some cases, peculiar beliefs on certain things. He doesn't fit a very pre-ready-made grid as to what kind of Christian denomination he fits into, and even he's the one who coins the phrase mere Christianity. There is an element of this in Tolkien as well. He's sort of mere Catholic. All of Tolkien's friends for the majority of his life will be non-Catholics. And actually, Tolkien, as we'll say when we get to Lewis's biography, Tolkien actually leads Lewis to Christ in a very purposeful way. He doesn't say, convert to Catholicism. He says, you need to understand who Christ is. And he has this very, again, I'm not trying to overdo this, but he has a very broad understanding of what the Catholic faith is. Now for him, it's extraordinarily personal. It's my mom. She died for this. We were impoverished and she took care of me. But it doesn't mean that he hates and will not have nothing to do with anyone who's non-Catholic. It means then when you read all of his writings, frankly, there are always these elements that people pick up on where they're going, that's a very interesting, we can tell that that's more from his Catholic side. Lambus bread is always commented on. The fact that this, frankly, communion wafer is the thing that gives life and one takes it, et cetera. I think that's a little too allegorical, but still. The fact that Tolkien, the idea for sustenance is the mass, the Eucharistic bread, these kinds of things. Now you could be Anglican, you could be all kinds of Protestants and still have a high view of the Lord's Supper, but there are other kinds of things. Later on, when we get into his understanding of the angelic hosts and the way that they are engaging and creating and sub-creating the world with God, more on that later, but people always say this seems very, this is more like a Catholic pantheon of the saints kind of a thing. Whether or not that's true, there are always little elements in his writings that appear more predominantly Catholic, but I defy anyone to show me where it's just entirely like a Catholic manifesto for the faith. If there's anything, he is very mere Catholic in that sense that Lewis is sort of mere Protestant or mere Christian. There are all these elements as well. And again, for Tolkien, it is the fact that his mother died at his young age and that she suffered so much at the hands of her family, verbally and socially, for them sort of pushing her out. He actually says later in an interview, he said, I witnessed half comprehendingly the heroic sufferings and early death in extreme poverty of my mother who brought me into the church. To the day he died, again, very personal in his letters, in his personal life, his sons, particularly Christopher talks about this, this, again, I'm not trying to make him sound like he's a zealot, but this unwavering commitment to his mother's legacy for taking him out of the Unitarian world and putting him at least into an Orthodox creedal church in his own mind. Now there's a lot that can be said about Catholicism in turn of the century England. It is very oppressed. It is very suppressed. And there's all kinds of people that have said, well, maybe Tolkien is just sort of hiding his Catholic faith. I don't know about that. I mean, you know, he's, he is in the Oxford world, which is a very Anglican world when he's a professor, but nonetheless, his Catholic faith is the thing that's driving him. And I would actually even pull the Catholic word out of it from times and say, he is just as much a sort of mere Christian as Lewis is trying to be. Now you can never be mere Christian. You always have tones of your denomination or where you come from. But, and I'm stressing this because if, you know, you mentioned somebody being anti these books in general, another argument that is often said is, well, Lewis is okay, but that Catholic Tolkien, I'm not having anything to do with that guy or vice versa. I've known some Catholics who've said, I don't want to read Lewis. He's too Protestant. These kinds of things. I think Lord of the Rings doesn't sink to that level though. I think for Lewis, sorry for Tolkien, rather it is very much a part of just simply his DNA because of his mother. Later on, Tolkien and Lewis, when they actually have their relational split, they're, they're, they're close. They're the closest of friends for a while. And eventually they do kind of part ways. They don't have like a blow up, but they, they, they, they sort of grow distant from each other. One of the things that actually is the spark for that and, and a real source of, of, of wound of a big wound for Tolkien is that he at times finds Lewis to be so snarky and so rude about Catholicism when he's sitting right there kind of a thing that eventually almost in deference to his mother, he pushes sort of further away relationally because he sees Lewis as too Protestant, not in a sense of his theology, but in the sense that he hates him because he's Catholic. Now it might've been imagined, but nonetheless, this is Tolkien's personality. If you agree not to call him a papist and a, and a you know, a Rome worshiper and other kinds of pejorative names, he will argue with you and he'll be a friend and very deep theologian with you. But, but he always has this very sensitive, we might say a chip on his shoulder to whatever people sort of make fun of his Catholic faith over the years. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that Tolkien's works like in Lord of the Rings, it's very hard to really see that he's a Catholic just from the, I mean, I suppose if you go into allegory, like you said, like you, some people find it hard to see if he's Christian there. The one ring, because it's more powerful than the others. He's saying there's like one faith that's really, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. No, he, he one ring would not mean one faith. The only place for, this is just me. The only place where I really feel a strong kind of, only you might say commentary on the state of the church is actually in the negative sense. When you get to the steward of the King in Gondor, who is somehow putting himself as, as the King in his own place. And if you think about what's happening at the end of the 1800s, you have the immediate sort of declaration of papal infallibility. You have all these sort of swirling changes in the Catholic church. I get, I'm not saying I have any evidence for this, but I, every time I see that, read those scenes, it's very much like you're just the steward of the throne. You're not the King. Like you're supposed to be sitting down here, not up there, this kind of move. I, I always get this sense of, you know, he's saying that about all Kings who are all stewards rather than some ways. Again, that's just me. But that being said, no, I don't, because here's, here's the reason why also I would say that the one ring doesn't represent, say, the one religion that dominates. One, it's, it's Satan who is the one that is creating the one ring to dominate, and the whole point is to destroy it. So hard to think that it would be Catholicism. But more importantly, just sort of at a fundamental level, for Tolkien, the essence of evil is seeking to dominate, is seeking to control other people. And that is the very essence of the ring, is it dominates, it controls you, those who wear it, then want to control others and dominate others in their own kind of twisted, perverted ways. So it doesn't actually take on a grander scheme than just the, it's the device of sin in its own way, in a manner of speaking.