Tolkien’s Reckoning with Biblical Narrative Causality

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling…stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness. And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper. This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time. (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.)

The greatest and most well-read story of all time is unquestionably the Bible. The Christian Tolkien, most conspicuously in his tales of the Elder Days, trod time and again the contours of his stories, most especially the Silmarillion (and his other unfinished tales of the Elder Days). This was no base allegory, especially notable given his professed disrelish of the form. His stories, such as the Adamic, Noachean, Gomorrite (I’m choosing not to say Sodomite for obvious reasons, and I can’t find an adjectival form of Lot) tale of the fall of Númenor, manage to synthesize aspects of various Biblical substories while telling a distinct and original one of his own. And yet the inextricable force that is narrative causality keeps moving.

While narrative causality as such obviously doesn’t exist in what we might call Roundworld, the most pervasive stories certainly perpetuate themselves, such as through the subconscious. The devout Tolkien went to mass daily (he wasn’t one of those “convenient” Catholics who only go to church every Sunday), presumably hearing scripture at all of them. In light of that, the Bible would surely have suffused the work even if Tolkien had had little intention of it doing so. He seems to be aware of this, categorizing the Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”, something that was especially revealed to him as he looked over the story again to revise it. The Lord of the Rings is notably less biblical than the Silmarillion, but the allusions are there. Take Frodo’s hike up Mount Doom. Even discounting all the Christlike imagery of him carrying his cross up the hill, it can’t be a coincidence that all this happened on March 25^th. But these are thematic elements, not narrative elements, as we see so much in the Elder Days.

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story. It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed. Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.)

While I’m hesitant to call the Bible a “parasitical life form”, the tendrils of its stories certainly latch on. When you follow the contours of a Biblical story, you can find yourself merely retelling that same story. This was the great fear of Tolkien in using allegory, and his great criticism of C.S. Lewis. So let’s look at how Tolkien used Biblical tales without being reduced to retelling them.

The Flight of the Noldor in many ways parallels the Biblical Fall of Man. Aman is Edenic, and the Noldor, by committing a grievous sin, go into exile. But, unlike in the Bible, where the exile is merely (in a sense) self-imposed, the Noldor exile is self-maintained. They are free to go back, but are too committed to a self-consuming vengeance. Unlike God, Mandos, in proclaiming his Doom, cautions that, should they continue on their path, Valinor will be fenced against them. It’s not yet. Unlike Adam and Eve, the Noldor knew the consequences of their actions and continued on them despite this. This arguably makes it worse. Though Finwë is Adamic, and his failings (and poor parenting) set the stage for the Elves’ original sin, he finds himself murdered before it can transpire. (Here, Tolkien embellishes on the Bible’s narrative, effectively making the serpent kill Adam.) Thus, his son Fëanor is also Adamic, and so Adam’s roles as father and as (original) sinner are bifurcated, keeping Tolkien’s work original while drawing narrative power from the Bible’s undergirding. Fëanor is also Cainian. It would be a little on the nose if he wasn’t also Adam—he commits the first kinslaying, just as Cain killed Abel. (It wasn’t the first murder, thanks to Morgoth, who, in addition to killing Finwë, had already wrought untold death and destruction on Middle-Earth, and thus presumably killed at least a few Moriquendi.) After Mandos’s proclamation, some of the Noldor turn around, while most head to their resolute doom. Imagine that in the Bible, if God was like “I did not like this. If you keep eating these apples I will have to cast you out and curse you with ephemerality on Earth.” and then Adam and Eve were like “Okay we will stop eating these apples.” It ruins the story, because of course they would never follow the Doom. But Tolkien has created a world in which such a path can be taken due to the sin of pride. It parallels the Bible, but it is emphatically its own story, as we have seen in trying to impose the narrative of one on the other.

Lewis (or Tolkien’s caricature of Lewis) might have merely aped the Word of God, but Tolkien went beyond that. He extemporized on the omnipresent Word of the Bible, filtering it through his lenses and making it his own, just as the Vala took the Music of Eru and extemporized on it at the dawn of time. They knew that not only did the themes and music wholly originate from Eru, but they did as well, and still they made aspects of the music uniquely their own, if not ultimately distinct from the Source. The Music of the Ainur, then, parallels Tolkien’s own creative process, and his successful overcoming of the Biblical Problem of Narrative Causality, (if I may be permitted to expand on Pratchett). By weaving together different narratives from across God’s Word, (the Christian God being more prosaic than Eru,) Tolkien creates something distinctly his own. -LAL