J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”
It comes from a letter Tolkien sent to family friend Fr. Robert Murray, S.J., grandson of the founder of the
Oxford English Dictionary Sir James Murray, dated to 2 December 1953. Fr. Murray had read the galley proofs of LotR and had, at Tolkien’s instigation, sent some comments on and criticism of the work. criticism. According to him, the book left him with a strong sense of “a positive compatibility with the order of Grace,” and compared Galadriel to Our Lady. He also doubted whether many critics would be able to make much of the book, since “they will not have a pigeon-hole neatly labelled for it.” Here is Tolkien’s reply in part:
It was wonderful to get a long letter from you this morning… I am sorry if casual words of mine have made you labour to criticize my work. But, to tell you the truth, though praise (or what is not quite the same thing, and better, expressions of pleasure) is pleasant, I have been cheered specially by what you have said, this time and before, because you are more perceptive, especially in some directions, than any one else, and have even revealed to me more clearly some things about my work. I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. 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. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.
Here meanwhile are some of Tolkien’s comments about people reading his work as an ‘allegory’:
But in spite of this, do not let Rayner [Unwin] suspect ‘Allegory’. There is a ‘moral’, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals – they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.
Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.
(To Sir Stanley Unwin, 31 July 1947)
I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.)
(To Milton Waldman, ca. 1951)
The Lord of the Rings as a story was finished so long ago now that I can take a largely impersonal view of it, and find ‘interpretations’ quite amusing; even those that I might make myself, which are mostly
post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point. Except for a few deliberately disparaging reviews – such as that of Vol. II in the
New Statesman, in which you and I were both scourged with such terms as ‘pubescent’ and ‘infantilism’ – what appreciative readers have got out of the work or seen in it has seemed fair enough, even when I do not agree with it. Always excepting, of course, any ‘interpretations’ in the mode of simple allegory: that is, the particular and topical. In a larger sense, it is I suppose impossible to write any ‘story’ that is not allegorical in proportion as it ‘comes to life’; since each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life. Anyway most people that have enjoyed
The Lord of the Rings have been affected primarily by it as an exciting story; and that is how it was written. Though one does not, of course, escape from the question ‘what is it about?’ by that back door. That would be like answering an aesthetic question by talking of a point of technique. I suppose that if one makes a good choice in what is ‘good narrative’ (or ‘good theatre’) at a given point, it will also be found to be the case that the event described will be the most ‘significant’.
(To W.H. Auden, 7 June 1955)
)
- and John quoting the 
