God in The Lord of the Rings

A friend asked me a fascinating question today--managing to bring two of my three very favorite things to talk about into one discussion--and I thought it could make an interesting blog post.

The question was, if Tolkien was a Christian and, in Middle Earth, Iluvatar represents Jehovah, why do the characters in The Lord of the Rings never talk about Iluvatar? Why is there no religion?

And my answer is this:

There is some mention of religion, but it's very low-key. The "High Hallow" where Aragorn finds the white tree is a place where the kings go to do whatever rites they have to Iluvatar. There was a similar thing on Numenor, on top of the highest mountain. And the Elves worship through their song and arts, rejoicing under the stars and all that. Tolkien being a Catholic, there is a strong sense of worshiping the Creator through intermediaries, i.e., Elbereth, Lady of Stars (Mary, Queen of Heaven), etc. Also, the Elves are more closely connected with the Valar and the Earth, whereas Men have this strange destiny which the Elves don't understand, which includes mortality, but they are also apparently more directly connected with Iluvatar himself than the Elves are (foreshadowing the Incarnation in ages to come). In the background works of mythology which underlie The Lord of the Rings, it is explicitly stated that Elves are forever bound to "the circles of the world" whereas Men, when they die, depart "the Elves know not whence" and it is only after all things are made new that Elves and Men will finally be reunited.

As it's set in a pre-historic age of this Earth, the concept, I think, is sort of like in the Patriarchal ages before Moses, when religion, magic, and kingship weren't separated but all one thing. So in a sense, Gandalf is a priest and a prophet. Like Noah or Abraham. The patriarch is priest, prophet, and king. This is the early state of mankind, not only in the Bible, but in other societies as well. See James Fraser's The Golden Bough, for instance.

And there is the much more obvious, but dark, religion of those who worship Morgoth and Sauron, representing the cruel, ignorant, and bloody side of paganism.

So what he's doing is reconciling, cosmologically, his Catholic faith with his love of pagan mythology. He wants his stories to take place in the stark sort of hard and cruel world which informs things like Beowulf, the Volsungsaga, and to a lesser degree, Greco-Roman literature. But he is definitely a devout Catholic, and wants God--The God--to be above all, and for beauty, truth, and goodness to triumph in the end (remember Sam's epiphany in Mordor, when he looks up at the stars and realizes that even Sauron and Mordor, powerful as they seem, are only fleeting temporalities). So he creates this universe in which the Creator created through the agency of his greater created beings (the Valar), then sort of left everything in their hands. They are, however flawed, and thus so is the world, but he lets it run its course (like the wheat and the tares) and only directly intervenes in very subtle and secret ways. Thus he gets both the Eternal, Omniscient, Omnipotent God of his Catholic faith and the lesser, limited, anthropomorphic gods of myth who, as gods, are infinitely less desirable than the True One who is all Love, but as characters in a story, are very interesting and useful.

Also, I think the very reverent Catholic sense of the Holiness of God and our separation from him pervades it. Contrast to the Protestant concept found in Narnia: Aslan is right there in person. But he is still there, in Middle Earth, in more subtle ways. Like when Gandalf says "Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. 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." That means Iluvatar. And it is, of course, Iluvatar, who arranges for Gollum to be there to complete the quest when Frodo can't. But it only works if they obey His will--and show mercy.