The legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) as one of the founders of modern fantasy literature is well-known. “The Lord of the Rings,” says noted Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, “is the best-loved work of fiction of the twentieth century.”[1] The fame of his works became even more noticeable with the trilogy of films based on The Lord of the Rings produced by Peter Jackson, bringing Tolkien’s world to a new generation. Since Tolkien’s death in 1973, there have also been several publications, including his Letters, which have made many aware that he was not only a prolific fantasy writer, but a devout Catholic as well. The assertion of this profile, however, is that Tolkien was not only a devout Catholic, but a saint.
Tolkien’s path to sanctity began with his formation in the Catholic Faith by his mother, Mabel. Despite the recent death of her husband in South Africa, she risked the ire of her Baptist family to become Catholic, and was soon cut off support from her family because of her sacrifice.[7] Living in poverty, made worse through her battle with diabetes (at which time insulin was unavailable for diabetes patients)[8] and her inability to receive proper medical care, she remained faithful to her conversion and raised her son, John “Ronald” Ruel Tolkien and his brother Hilary, in the Faith.[9] However, without the great charity of Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a half-Welsh and half Anglo-Spanish parish priest in the district of the Birmingham Oratory, founded by St. John Henry Newman,[10] where the Tolkien family lived, their struggles would have been considerably worse. J.R.R. Tolkien was thus both spiritually and physically provided for by the Catholic Church throughout his childhood, through the mediation of his mother and Fr. Morgan.
Tolkien’s mother Mabel was the most influential factor in his early spiritual formation. In their youth, Mabel instructed her sons in the Faith, and introduced them to the arts and academia which would inspire and guide Tolkien’s career for the rest of his life. Upon moving to Birmingham, attending its Oratory and meeting Fr. Morgan, Mabel’s health rapidly deteriorated, exacerbated by her poverty. After Mabel’s death at the age of thirty-four, Tolkien would forever see her as a martyr to the Faith: “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”[11] Following their mother’s passing, the Tolkien brothers were then placed under the care of Fr. Morgan according to Mabel’s will.[12]
Fr. Morgan carried on the formation of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Catholic faith after the death of Tolkien’s mother. During Tolkien’s formative years at King Edward’s School prior to attending university, he continued to grow in the Faith under Fr. Morgan’s guidance while living with a less intolerant but not especially kind aunt-by-marriage in Birmingham, England. He served as an altar boy for Fr. Morgan and, with his brother Hilary, regularly ate breakfast in the Oratory’s refectory,[13] went on annual summer holidays with Fr. Morgan to Lyme Regis,[14] and Fr. Morgan soon relieved the Tolkien brothers by moving them to a much more favorable home near the Oratory. It was here that Tolkien met his future wife and fellow orphan, Edith Bratt.[15]
While preparing for a scholarship to Oxford University, Tolkien’s mind was distracted by his burgeoning love of Edith. However, Tolkien obeyed the wishes of Fr. Morgan, his guardian, who told him not to pursue an affair with her, especially since they were at the time living in the same house, but to focus on his studies. Fr. Morgan then moved Tolkien and his brother to another lodging to keep Tolkien away from temptation and distraction.[16] As Tolkien later wrote to his son Michael, he “did not regret” Fr. Morgan’s decision.[17] Fr. Morgan continued to act as Tolkien’s spiritual father, even with hard life decisions. As Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis would later remark, “Of Fr. Morgan Tolkien always spoke with the warmest gratitude and affection.”[18] This influence would come to fruition during Tolkien’s school and university years.
Tolkien began to fully live out the faith and virtue learned during his upbringing at school and university. While studying at King Edward’s School, and continuing into his subsequent studies at Oxford University, Tolkien formed a club with other like-minded friends. The T.C.B.S., or ‘Tea Club and Barrovian Society,’ named after the tea and cakes they ate at their meetings, which primarily took place at Barrow’s Stores, shared their mutual love of languages, art, theater, history and music, as well as their strong Christian zeal. Though the group had many members, the closest to Tolkien were Christopher Wiseman (after whom Tolkien’s son Christopher would be named),[19] Robert Gilson and Geoffrey Smith. While their academic and artistic interests were formative for Tolkien, their greatest inspiration was in the overall purpose of the group: “to kindle a new light in the world, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world; that the TCBS was destined to testify for God and Truth in a more direct way.”[20] As Tolkien scholar John Garth explains:
The society existed to nurture and amplify each member’s creative powers, which should be used to restore various neglected values to a decadent and mechanized world – among them (as outlined by Tolkien) religious faith, human love, patriotic duty and the right to national self-rule… It would work through inspiration, rather than didacticism and confrontation.[21]
Exemplifying the aims of the T.C.B.S., Tolkien was also the decisive factor in the conversion of his future wife to Catholicism. The day Tolkien came of age, in 1913, he sat up in bed and composed a letter to Edith, despite not having communicated with her in three years. Although overjoyed at his reunion with Edith, Tolkien had one condition: she must become a Roman Catholic. As an active member of the Church of England, despite her own willingness to become Catholic part of her remained hesitant to leave her strong social community and was fearful of persecution from her ‘uncle,’ with whom she lived, who was very anti-Catholic. However, following the example of his mother’s own persecution, Tolkien encouraged her, “I do so dearly believe that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.” Edith’s decision led to exactly what she had feared: her uncle evicted her from his house.[22] However, Tolkien would go on to provide spiritual and emotional support for his future wife after this incident.
Tolkien continued to guide his wife in the Faith and form himself in the tradition of Catholicism given by his mother. Helping Edith and her cousin find a new home in Warwick, Tolkien began attending Benediction and Mass there with her regularly. He loved the natural and medieval beauty of Warwick and was uplifted by Edith finally being able to join him at Church.[23] Close to this time Tolkien would also switch to the English School, more closely suiting his interests in (particularly medieval) English and Germanic language and literature.[24] This instruction in the Catholic worldview of medieval Europe would lay the foundation for his own imaginative pursuits, particularly the mythology of Middle-earth, which would soon also be shaped by another force: war.
The horror of the First World War would greatly affect Tolkien’s spiritual life and influence the expression of his faith in his later works. On August 4, 1914, after Germany invaded Belgium, Great Britain declared war in response, initiating the First World War. During this war, one out of every eight soldiers in battle died.[25] This percentage was even higher for officers, like those from Oxford and Cambridge, who most often led assaults.[26] However, Tolkien decided to postpone enlistment, thinking ahead to his future with Edith and their family and desiring to complete his degree first, particularly with his need to attain a First Class degree in order to pursue an academic career. Ironically, around this time Tolkien also discovered an ancient Old English verse, from the eighth-century poem Crist (or ‘Christ’), which fascinated him and led to the invention of one of his first stories in Middle-earth, “rapturous words from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology”[27]:
Eala Earendel engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended.[28]
(Hail Earendel brightest of angels,
Over Middle-earth sent to men.)
During his time at Oxford, Tolkien, like most other students, following enlistment also took part in officer training, Tolkien having enlisted after his discovery that he could continue his academic pursuits while still performing drills.[29] Participating in training while remaining at Oxford also gave Tolkien time to prepare for his future life with Edith.
Before his inevitable deployment, Tolkien and Edith were married on March 22, 1916. The incomprehensible number of casualties from France made his return from war unlikely, and so they were driven by urgency and an eagerness built up from years of separation. Before their wedding, Tolkien finally built up the courage to alert Fr. Morgan, who promptly wished them “every blessing and happiness” and even offered to officiate the wedding for them at the Oratory, but sadly due to Tolkien’s trepidation the arrangements were already set. Then, signing their register, Tolkien learned that Edith was an illegitimate child, but he responded with gentleness and compassion.[30] Their wedding marked a final point of happiness before Tolkien would be thrust onto the battlefield.
In the trenches, his experience of the closeness of death and the stark reality of evil, alongside acts of great heroism, inspired Tolkien to develop the mythology behind his fictional world.[31] While being moved to various camps, Tolkien continued working on his poetry, forming what would become his elvish languages. He sent one of these poems to his T.C.B.S. friend Geoffrey Smith, stationed in a trench dugout at the time, and Smith would again testify to the purpose of their fraternity, saying he was serving in the War so that poems like Tolkien’s, and the beauty they showed, could live on.[32] Soon after, on February 3, 1916, just before patrolling the No Man’s Land between the opposing line of trenches, Smith wrote again to Tolkien, praying for him, encouraging him to keep the dream of the T.C.B.S. alive by publishing his work, and asking him to “say the things I have tried to say long after I am not here to say them, if such be my lot.”[33] Soon after a brief visit from Smith to Tolkien and Edith, Tolkien was deployed to France, on June 6, 1916,[34] right in time for the Battle of the Somme, one of the most deadly and horrific conflicts in human history. During that battle, which lasted from July until November 1916, at least 300,000 soldiers died on both sides and twice as many were wounded, one of whom was Corporal Adolf Hitler. On the first day of fighting, July 1, Tolkien’s dear friend and fellow T.C.B.S. member Rob Gilson was one of 19,000 British officers, up to sixty percent of all those involved in the battle, who perished.[35] During this battle, Tolkien would experience what he called the “animal horror” of modern, dehumanized robotic warfare. As Tolkien biographer Colin Duriez remarks, “The law of the jungle was amplified by machine-efficient slaughter.” Soon after Gilson’s death, a former member of the T.C.B.S., Ralph Payton, also died in combat, on July 22. His body was never recovered.[36] Tolkien would only be saved from death himself by illness.
Surrounded by mutilated corpses infested with lice, he contracted what was called ‘trench fever’. A short time after he was taken to hospital in Birmingham, yet another friend, Geoffrey Smith, died from a gangrenous shrapnel wound on November 29.[37] Tolkien’s experience of the “animal horror” of war, the immediacy of evil and death, the loss of two of the four main members of the T.C.B.S., the “blasphemy and smut” from his fellow soldiers[38] and his realization that, while the war was just, there were “orcs… on both sides”[39] – all of this not only galvanized the creation of Middle-earth and its mythology,[40] but also inflamed his desire to pursue the goals of the T.C.B.S.: “to testify for God and Truth.”[41]
After recovering from the War, Tolkien settled into his professional and family life, heroically living out his faith in both sectors. Throughout the lives of his four children, Tolkien would act not only as their father figure and true friend, but also as their spiritual director, providing them with formation in the Faith, encouragement through life difficulties, advice and even correction when needed. The influence of Tolkien’s involvement is corroborated by his eldest son, John, later being ordained a Catholic priest.[42] During the Second World War, Tolkien counselled his son Christopher to keep his Faith at heart and be inspired by it amid the darkness around him, continually reminding him of the nearness of God:
“If you don’t do so already, make a habit of the ‘praises’. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis… one of the Sunday psalms; also the Magnificat; also the Litany of Loretto… If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy.”[43]
Tolkien’s piety and experience of sorrows and war made him especially sensitive to the evils of the world, and yet he always retained hope in God, as he reminded Christopher:
A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity… And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned… not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there.[44]
Later in his children’s lives, as they began their own families, Tolkien continued to advise them in their choices and remind them of the spiritual reality within their situations. He once explained to his son Michael that man can “refuse to take other things into account” than purely physical relations in marriage, but only “to the great damage of his soul (and body) and theirs.” As Tolkien warned: “The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall… The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favorite subject.” He reminded his son that men and women are both fallen human beings with our own temptations, to see one another as “companions in shipwreck,” and that true Christian marriage is not about mere pleasure, the singular pursuit of which, as he says, often ends in “divorce courts,” but rather requires sacrifice to become genuine love: “Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification.”[45] Tolkien would also discover the suffering required to remain a faithful Catholic while working as a professor in a largely non-Catholic environment.
During his career as a lecturer and preeminent authority of Old and Middle English at Oxford University,[46] despite being in a strict minority as a Roman Catholic, Tolkien never faltered in his faith. He endured many persecutions, including an instance at dinner with his colleagues when a Master had said, commenting on the recent election to the Rectorship of Lincoln, “Thank heaven they did not elect a Roman Catholic to the Rectorship anyway: disastrous, disastrous for the college,” while sitting next to Tolkien.[47] Tolkien continued to boldly live out his faith, however, in both words and charity. As Colin Duriez notes, “he always treated [his students] courteously and conscientiously.”[48] The clearest example of his spiritual influence is Tolkien’s witness to the Inklings, an Oxford group of like-minded academic friends who shared their thoughts and literary works with one another, a kind of successor to the T.C.B.S.[49] Tolkien was one of the only Catholics in the group, and yet he was the primary factor in the conversion of C.S. Lewis, renowned apologist and writer of the Narnia series, to Christianity. When Tolkien and Lewis first met, Lewis was still an atheist,[50] his perception of Tolkien colored by anti-Catholic prejudices resulting from his Ulster upbringing and most often shown by his calling Tolkien a ‘Papist.’[51] However, one night after a long conversation with Tolkien, who explained to him that the Gospel is the fulfillment of all the myths they both loved and yet also historical fact, Lewis finally became Christian.[52]
Tolkien more clearly expounded his views of the relation between Catholicism and myth in his foundational work, “On Fairy-Stories.” In the ‘happy ending’ of fairy-stories, he explained, we come to see what he termed the eucatastrophe, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’” which is in fact a foretaste of the salvation which Christ brought to life in His Resurrection, the “Great Eucatastrophe.” Human imagination is not a mere tool but is in fact a reflection of our being made in the image of God, whereby we “assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.” God has “redeemed” our imaginations through the story of the Gospel. As Tolkien explained:
The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy… There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits… To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.[53]
Apart from his professional life at Oxford, Tolkien consistently professed his Catholic faith to both family and friends. As his friend and assistant Clyde S. Kilby remarked, “I do not recall a single visit I made to Tolkien’s home in which the conversation did not at some point fall easily into a discussion of religion, or rather Christianity,”[54] and according to his son Michael, his faith “pervaded all his thinking, beliefs and everything else.”[55] He was especially devoted to the Eucharist, once telling his son Michael:
“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”[56]
He also recommended frequent participation at Mass, explaining that “[t]he only cure for sagging of faith is Communion.”[57] Tolkien even once served at Mass for his friend and fellow Inkling, Fr. Gervase Mathew, SJ.,[58] and experienced a mystical vision of the Eucharist during another Mass.[59] Similarly, Tolkien also firmly believed in the validity of the Papacy. “I myself,” he said, “am convinced of the Petrine claims, nor looking around the world does there seem much doubt which (if Christianity is true) is the True Church.”[60] Tolkien was equally devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, saying to another Jesuit friend that “upon [her] all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded.”[61] Tolkien also expressed his Catholic faith in another way through the writing of his well-known fantasy stories.
The most influential expression of Tolkien’s Catholicism is his fantastic legendarium set in his invented world of Arda, or Middle-earth. As Tolkien explained, “After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode.”[62] From the very beginning of The Silmarillion, a pseudo-biblical mythology from the viewpoint of his ‘elves,’ or more properly called the Eldar,[63] Tolkien established his world as definitively monotheistic: “In the beginning was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar.”[64] Tolkien clearly calls Ilúvatar the “True God,”[65] and His Spirit, the “Flame Imperishable” or “Secret Fire,” he explicitly names as the Holy Spirit.[66] Then, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s most well-known work, we see typological imagery which he specifically reveals to be Christian in inspiration. The angelic Vala Elbereth and Galadriel are both Marian figures for whose intercession the heroes often pray,[67] while Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn and Sam fulfill the offices of Christ as priest, prophet, king and suffering-servant.[68] Spiritual warfare is also a central theme to Tolkien’s stories in Middle-earth.
The reality of spiritual warfare is primarily shown by the influence of demonic entities in Middle-earth. Sauron, the primary villain, is a demon, as is the secondary villain, Saruman.[69] The heroes’ struggle against the temptation of the Sauron’s One Ring of Power is thus a spiritual struggle, culminating in the eucatastrophe of the Ring’s destruction by a direct act of Divine Providence in reward for Frodo’s prior act of mercy toward Gollum, the former Ring-bearer who had become twisted by his attachment to it.[70] Tolkien expresses a distinctly Catholic view of morality, with Frodo explaining that evil can “only mock, it cannot make,”[71] and Aragorn dismissing relativism with his statement that “good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.”[72] Along the way during their journey, the Fellowship, and particularly the Ring-bearer as he moves deeper into the realm of the Enemy, is nourished by lembas, an elvish bread whose name means ‘bread of life’ or ‘waybread,’ equivalent to viaticum, a bread which primarily nourishes the spirit and which grows more effective when received while fasting.[73] As Tolkien scholar Bradley J. Birzer notes,
Indeed, the Elven lembas arguably serves as Tolkien’s most explicit symbol of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings; it is a representation, though pre-Christian, of the Eucharist. For Tolkien, nothing represented a greater gift from God than the actual Body and Blood of Christ.[74]
Tolkien consistently shows the Providence of God in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf, an angel whose special task is to combat Sauron, overcomes the demonic Balrog and dies in the attempt, yet is “sent back” by God,[75] resurrected and subsequently transfigured as a preview of the resurrection of Christ.[76] Gandalf also counsels Frodo, the Ring-bearer, with words of Catholic wisdom. He advises Frodo to act with mercy towards Gollum:
Pity? It was Pity that stayed [Bilbo’s] hand. Pity and Mercy: not to strike without need… Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.[77]
Gandalf also reminds Frodo of the preeminence of Providence, even when we cannot see its design:
“Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker [Sauron]. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”[78]
As Tolkien says, “The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Though this is not explicit in his story, due to it being set in a pre-Christian time period and to avoid erroneous religious implications, Catholicism is “absorbed into the story and the symbolism,”[79] just as God communicates Himself in a primarily sacramental way in our daily lives.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s prowess as a writer of fantasy literature is well-known. However, by a thorough study of his life and writings, particularly his private correspondence, as well as the testimony of those who knew him personally, the fact that his worldview, which formed the basis for all of his life choices and his works, is inextricably Catholic can be clearly demonstrated. The fact of Tolkien’s devout Catholic faith can be seen by both believers and nonbelievers alike. As Protestant writer Donald T. Williams notes,
And one reason I think many non-believers love the book is that it gives them an escape from a secular and meaningless world into a place where meaning and purpose not only exist but are also believable. For that is a world in which their own natures are not frustrated but fulfilled.[80]
With the addition of future research on this topic, especially into any potential miracles attributed to Tolkien’s intercession and the possibility of a cult of veneration (of which there has already been at least one occasion, with a Mass and prayer for the opening of Tolkien’s Cause for Beatification held at his old parish, the Oxford Oratory),[81] Tolkien’s cause for canonization may be formally opened.
[1] Tom Shippey, The Lord of the Rings: Book of the Century, at Tolkien Estate, https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/home.html.
[2] John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Divinus perfectionis magister (25 January 1983), §I.1.
[3] Divinus perfectionis magister, § I.1.
[4] Philip Kosloski, “Will Tolkien and Chesterton be declared saints?”, Aleteia (14 July, 2018), at https://aleteia.org/2018/07/14/will-tolkien-and-chesterton-be-declared-saints/.
[5] “Venerable,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Carson, Joann Cerrito, 2nd ed., (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2003), 434.
[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 828, at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/828.htm.
[8] Carpenter, Tolkien, 32.
[9] Carpenter, Tolkien, 26.
[10] Carpenter, Tolkien, 29.
[11] Carpenter, Tolkien, 34.
[12] Carpenter, Tolkien, 35.
[13] Carpenter, Tolkien, 36.
[14] Carpenter, Tolkien, 41.
[15] Carpenter, Tolkien, 42.
[16] Carpenter, Tolkien, 46.
[17] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 43.
[19] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 306.
[20] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 5.
[21] John Garth, “T.C.B.S. (Tea Club and Barrovian Society),” in Michael D.C. Drout (ed.), J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 635.
[22] Carpenter, Tolkien, 73.
[23] Carpenter, Tolkien, 74.
[24] Colin Duriez, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (Oxford, England: Lion Books, 2012), 65.
[25] John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 8.
[27] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 78.
[28] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 77.
[29] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 79-80.
[30] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 87.
[31] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 102.
[32] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 89.
[33] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 91.
[34] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 93.
[35] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 96.
[36] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 99.
[37] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 101.
[38] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 66.
[39] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, Letter 71.
[40] Colin Duriez, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (Oxford, England: Lion Books, 2012), 102.
[41] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 5.
[42] Colin Duriez, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (Oxford, England: Lion Books, 2012), 140.
[43] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 54.
[44] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 69.
[45] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 43.
[46] Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien & The Silmarillion (Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976), 68.
[47] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 72.
[48] Colin Duriez, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (Oxford, England: Lion Books, 2012), 133.
[49] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 152.
[50] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 144.
[51] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 154.
[52] Duriez, Tolkien: Legend, 167-169.
[53] J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," in The Tolkien Reader (Great Britain: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), 88-89.
[54] Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien & The Silmarillion (Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976), 53.
[55] Joseph Pearce, Tolkien: Man and Myth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 194.
[56] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 43.
[57] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 250.
[58] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 99.
[59] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 89.
[60] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 250.
[61] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 142.
[62] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 131.
[63] Tolkien, Letters, Letter 131.
[64] J.R.R. Tolkien; Christopher Tolkien (ed), The Silmarillion, 2nd edition (New York: Ballantine Book, 2002), 3.
[65] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 156.
[66] Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2002), 62.
[67] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 213.
[68] Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2002), 69.
[69] Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying Myth, xii.
[70] Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying Myth, 60.
[71] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 201.
[72] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 33.
[73] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 213.
[74] Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2002), 63.
[75] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 156.
[76] Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2002), xii.
[77] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 65.
[78] Tolkien, Fellowship, 61.
[79] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Letter 142.
[80] Donald T. Williams, “An Encouraging Book: How Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Saved Me,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 30 (5) (2017), 34.
[81] Sarah Burns, “”Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is On The Path To Sainthood,” at epicPew (6 July 2018), at www.epicpew.com.
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