Paganism in Middle-earth

Despite Tolkien's assertion that The Lord of the Rings was a fundamentally Christian work, paganism appears in that book and elsewhere in his fictional world of Middle-earth in multiple ways.

He wrote in a letter to his close friend and Jesuit priest, Robert Murray:[T 1] The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.

[7] Reynolds adds that, on the contrary, Tolkien stated explicitly in a letter that The Lord of the Rings "is built on or out of certain 'religious' [Catholic] ideas, but is not an allegory of them ... and does not mention them overtly".

[8] Professionally, Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe.

His intention to create what has been called "a mythology for England"[T 3] led him to construct not only stories but a fully-formed world with languages, peoples, cultures, and history, based on medieval materials.

[T 6] Other commentators have similarly compared Gandalf to the Norse god Odin in his "Wanderer" guise—an old man with one eye, a long white beard, a wide brimmed hat, and a staff.

[12][11] Although never described as a god, it is evident that Gandalf has power; Tolkien explains that the Wizards are Maiar, lesser spirits who serve the Valar, and who may take human form when in Middle-earth.

The natural world is in many places shown to be alive, with trees that have "feet", mountains that can show their anger with snowstorms,[22] the herb athelas that creates a sparkling joy, or the cockerel that crows to welcome the morning as the wind and weather indicate the changing tide of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

After the Scouring of the Shire, there was "wonderful sunshine and delicious rain ... but there seemed something more: an air of richness and growth, and a gleam of a beauty beyond that of mortal summers that flicker and pass upon this Middle-earth".

[24] The Wizard Radagast shares his name with a pagan god in Slavic mythology,[25] and he has a shaman-like affinity for wild animals, skill with herbs, and ability to change his hue and shape.

The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey takes the wildly blowing battle-horns of the Riders of Rohan, storming into battle, to mean "bravado and recklessness", that "he who fears for his life shall lose it, but that dying undaunted is no defeat; furthermore that this was true before the Christian myth that came to explain why".

[30] Tolkien stated in his 1936 lecture The Monsters and the Critics that he was inspired by the apocalyptic Norse legend of Ragnarök, where the gods know that they are doomed in their final battle for the world, but go to fight anyway.

In some respects (as you can see in his 1936 Beowulf lecture...) the Old Norse 'theory of courage' might even be regarded as ethically superior to the Classical if not to the Christian world-view, in that it demanded commitment to virtue without any offer of lasting reward.

In Christian terms, Boromir atones for his assault on the Ring-bearer Frodo by single-handedly but vainly defending Merry and Pippin from Orcs, illustrating the Catholic theme of the importance of good intention, especially at the point of death.

[37]The historian Ronald Hutton writes that in depicting a pagan Middle-earth, the Christian Tolkien was setting up an interesting relationship between his own religion and his invented world.

He notes that Tolkien made this hard to investigate: he avoided biography, disliked critics, and distrusted analysis of literature based on the author rather than the work; and further, apart from his Letters, he left no memoirs and few clues in his diaries.

Hutton suggests that the many unsent drafts of letters indicate that Tolkien was embarrassed by the question, as he wanted to be clear about his Christianity, and was pleased if people could glimpse that through his writings, but his remarks about the presence of Catholicism in The Lord of the Rings were brief and difficult to interpret, as he had been stung by criticism of the absence of religion in the work.

Hutton cites Verlyn Flieger's statement that Tolkien's faith was "subject to doubt and losses of confidence", and even in later life he wrote to his son Michael that he was constantly tempted to unbelief.