Resolving Pagan Imagery with Tolkien's Faith & Judging “Worship” of His Work.

While Christian Imagery is omni-present throughout Tolkien's work and methodology, Pre-christian imagery and mythos are also quite prominent. This dilemma at times makes it difficult to fully resolve how Tolkien’s stories fit into his vision of faith and creation. Tolkien himself was quite well versed in pre-christian thought and expression, particularly in England. Furthermore, in the essence of his mythmaking, Tolkien also reveals a philosophy of language and history beneath his mythos via his writing process. As a man of faith, Tolkien possessed an understanding of writing and creation that was deeply connected to his faith. In beginning his writing processes with Languages and building out of them, Tolkien expressed that faith and creation gain inner consistency and merit through their engagement with the living environment around them. As a result of this fact, we can reconcile Tolkien's inclusion of and reliance upon pagan imagery with his Christian faith through his understanding of how Christianity took root in England as well as what faithful sub-creation entails.  

For Tolkien, worship is an action rather than simply a belief or an experience of the intellectual kind. Rather, Faith occurs as a moment of transcendent lived engagement with both the human condition and our surroundings. This transcendent moment is not entirely different from the force which gives words, names, and even the arcs of  his stories weight in our hearts and cultural memories. Thus, it seems sensible that despite holding a Christian Faith, Tolkien would treat pre-christian myth with reverence to the lived experience it generated and even the manner in which it shaped Christianity’s development in early England.  Essentially, Tolkien's treatment of the pre-christian mythos stems from his understanding of norse myth and the process of naming. I wrote a blog post several weeks ago detailing how Tolkien's process of naming and use of language, as well as sub-creation itself interact with his concept of worship through language. In addition, we have to understand what differentiates Tolkien’s understanding of both language and faith distinctly. If we treat sub-creation as Tolkien’s expression of divinity, we can assess reinterpretations and adaptations of his work as either faithful to the spirit of his stories, or as the thieving work of Morgoth’s disciples. For Tolkien, engagement with the context around words and the world is the essence of sub-creation. Our aim as creators and thinkers is to find stories and spirit within the essence of the world and its ideas in order to join the music and experience the light of divine creation.

In exploring the notion of worship in Tolkien as a practice executed through Language and sub-creation we can not only explore Tolkien's notions of divinity. We can also assess the work that has been done with The Lord of the Rings that acts as “noble and faithful worship” of the series and work which does not fall under this category. The clearest two examples to contrast in this regard are the Peter Jackson Lord of The Rings films as opposed to the Amazon Rings of Power series. While at the beginning of such a sentence the reader might already decide which of the two was a faithful interpretation and which failed, but the details of each of the examples' creative processes reveal how success and failure are determined.  In beginning with the characters' names, Tolkien’s starting point for the origins of mythology becomes language, a cultural heartbeat which he felt through the mythos and literature of England. An example of an inspiring work for Tolkien is Beowulf and its associated mythology. Beowulf  is an interesting case due to the fact that despite being an “Anglo-Saxon” story it describes nordic peoples far from home. For Tolkien, this interconnected mythos is equally as important as “high literature”. For Tolkien such a story provides a beautiful  format for sub-creation. Within its language, its meter, and the essence of this piece, Beowulf and other works of myth provide loose ends upon which to construct, implications through which to engage in the music and share the light of their sacred trees.  

Returning to the two cases of subcreation with which we are confronted, while neither exist as perfect efforts, the Film adaptations by Peter Jackson are inherently more successful because of the process in which they were made. The films  attempted to capture the spirit that Tolkien’s words awakened. This was done with the aim of bringing its joy and features into a breathing world in a new medium, respecting the essence of each story, rather than attempting to package and sell “never before seen” elements of it.  Jackson’s films engage in an honest attempt to reconstruct Tolkien’s world for the viewer through its maps, its characters, and  its relationships Despite its failures in the understanding of evil, and even at times the cycles of History Tolkien attempted to document, they retain its essential features, and explore the world on the basis of its own limitations. Amazon, however, perceived the series as a group of elements to which audiences were attracted(interest in orcs, interest in elves, etc)  rather than a holistic body of languages and relationships which in their singular essence create a spirit. This approach evidently failed. While Tolkien’s starting point was language, and Jackson built on that language, Amazon began with a then preexistent Tolkien  “brand”. The Series’ primary point of engagement was the iconography of the films, followed by focus group data and a basic understanding of some of the stories in the Silmarillion.

Tolkien mastered the art of finding words that served as emotional and cultural touchstones in relation to lived human relationships. The space between linguistic relationships(in terms of one word relating to another word, or groups of words) and the transcendent singular human experience of them in relation to the world, the gap that Tolkien fills through repetition and verbal experience, is the same space that Amazon ignored. For Tolkien, worship and subcreation exist in the revelling of this moment, and thus such an act must come from intimate experience with and reverence for such an area. Here arrives the inclusion of pre-christian Mythos within Tolkien’s work.

The liturgy as well as all notions of Christian faith did not emerge into a vacuum, particularly not within England. Instead, as is argued by Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown, it emerged through the psalms, upon pre-existing traditions of riddles, jokes and singing within mead halls and gathering places. In such an environment, Tolkien’s mythological understanding and methodology would not retain its luster, as well as its legitimacy if it was not respectful of the presence of pre-christian tradition in its relationship with the mythos of England. For Tolkien if language and faith are a transcendent experience, of course it would be sensible to place that experience within the context that it was born. Furthermore, such an understanding would yield itself compatible with reverence to pre-christian tradition rather than ignorance to it, or abstracting these practices under the vague blanket of “Paganism”.

-PR