![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
religion in Middle-earth
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ellen_denham is going to sit on a WFC panel titled "Why Is There No Religion in Middle Earth?" What a loaded question. When did you stop beating your ...As promised, Ellen posted to the MythSoc mailing list on this, specifically asking for comments from those who'd read Lin Carter's Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings, as Carter was cited in the panel description. My particular curse is to have read almost every book in English on Tolkien, so I responded from that angle, putting in also my response to another poster's recent question asking for recommendations of books on Tolkien and religion, thus:
If we're going to respond to Lin Carter - which I am about to do at considerable length - we need to have at hand what he actually said.
Carter's contentious comments on religion in Tolkien appeared only briefly in his 1969 book on Tolkien, which was focused on placing LOTR in the context of the history of fantasy literature, rather than on evaluating Tolkien's work. But his 1973 book Imaginary Worlds was a history of fantasy, and its view of Tolkien was focused on evaluating his achievement in that context. LOTR had been so widely praised that Carter felt there was room to emphasize what he saw as the book's flaws, and one of the things he said was this: When he writes that "Tolkien's world has no religion in it," Iluvatar and the Valar don't count.
"That is not what I am talking about," he writes. "A religion is much more than just the presence of an actual god, or gods; it is also an established canon of inspired writings and an organized priesthood, a system of temples and shrines, and so on." Medieval societies of the kind Tolkien used as models had such an organized religion, he says, and other fantasies inspired by them have had them too. Then he gives a long list of examples, from Conan the Barbarian on up. "But there is no religion at all in The Lord of the Rings - no temples, shrines, priests, prayers, amulets, scriptures, ikons, idols - nothing! None of the many characters, not even the heroic warriors, so much as swears by his gods. Obviously because they have no gods. Which is simply incredible in a primitive world of wizards and warriors and walled stone cities." (Imaginary Worlds, p. 122-24)
The first thing that occurs to me to say in response to this is, "By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me!" which is what Frodo says to the Nazgul at the Ford of Bruinen. Luthien, or even Elbereth, may not technically be gods, but from a Catholic author they are definitely serving the function of angels or saints in this context. Anyway, so much for characters not swearing by them. There are other examples; this one is particularly memorable.
Secondly, Carter has a rather limited idea of what an organized religion requires. The medieval Norse, for instance, did not have any canon of inspired writings that we know of. Their legends and poems about the gods and heroes were neither canonized nor considered sacred texts the way we consider the Bible. The Jews, after the fall of the Temple, simply abandoned the hereditary priesthood that had served them before that; even today, rabbis are not really "clergy" in the sense that Christians use that word; a rabbi is a learned man, not a priest. Some Asian religions, I believe, do without temples and shrines, and the diaspora Jews also rank low on that scale.
The peoples of Middle-earth, however, do have some of the "and so on" which Carter doesn't enumerate. If they don't have a canonized scripture, they do have the kind of stories of the gods and heroes of the past that customarily appear in scriptures, even a creation myth (though Carter didn't have access to this one, as it first appeared in The Silmarillion which hadn't been published when he wrote). They have some rituals, notably the moment of silence before eating that Faramir and his men perform at Henneth Annun. This, Faramir explains, is a gesture of respect towards Eldamar and Valinor, so they also have a holy place. They have funerary customs and respect the dead, a common religious practice. And, as Carter would say, so on.
What they have more than any of this, however, are aspects of religion that are not dreamt of in Carter's philosophy. These are the moral and spiritual content of religious belief, which underlie every action the admirable characters take, and indeed drive the whole plot, because it is a spiritual concern to rid the world of an evil menace, and not a practical consideration to defeat the bad guy in the black hat, that inspires the decision to destroy the Ring, rather than - as practical men like Boromir would prefer - use it. I hardly need to go into this here, as so many authors have done so brilliantly. The best source for this purpose is Richard Purtill's Lord of the Elves and Eldils, because like Carter he was writing before The Silmarillion and proves his case, rather dazzlingly, from LOTR alone. (Ellwood's Good News from Middle-earth, the other pre-Silmarillion religious study of Tolkien, is a hunt for Christ figures and new-age woo-woo, and even if you want such things, would not be suitable for countering Carter.) Of more recent books on Tolkien's religious dimension that consider the posthumous writings, I'd say the best ones which still focus mostly on LOTR are The Battle for Middle-earth by Fleming Rutledge and Following Gandalf by Matthew Dickerson. (The Birzer and Caldecott books mentioned by others are OK, but these are much better.)
So the answer to Carter is that he's framed his question wrongly - what Tolkien lacks is not religion, it's colorful religious trappings - and even taken as Carter frames it, his charge is not entirely true. But nevertheless, his observations are not entirely hallucinatory, so we can also raise the questions of whether what he sees is, as he claims, "simply incredible," and of why Tolkien writes it this way. But these are further observations on the topic, not directly answers to Carter, because they attempt only to explain the case; they don't answer it.
From an external, author-based perspective, we can say that Tolkien couldn't have his pre-Christian characters be Christians, for obvious chronological reasons, but he didn't want to have them worshipping false gods, so he made them the virtuous pagans of (mostly hypothetical) Christian theology. Some of the authors on religion in Tolkien go into this point.
From an internal, character-based perspective, though, there's an answer so breath-taking that, again, it is not dreamt of in Carter's philosophy. The reason his pagan warriors don't worship false gods is that, through the Elves, and they through the Valar, have unfiltered access to the truth about the spiritual universe. (The truth as Tolkien sees it, of course, but as an author he has the right to make his Catholic theology the unfettered truth within his own fiction.) They don't need false gods; they have the real God. They don't need priests and rituals and so on; they have a closeness to the divine that few today are fortunate enough to experience. That palpable sense is part of what makes LOTR such an inspiring book.
That's what I would say if I were on Ellen's panel, and I hope it helps.
no subject
no subject