He doesn’t really fit the bill.
J. R. R. Tolkien that is. Novelists these days are supposed to wear their angst on their finely tailored sleeves, to be whirling dervishes of deconstruction, discontent, deviance and the divine right of protest. Yet the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ringswas quintessentially comfortable—in his life as well as in his tweeds. He was also formed, informed, shaped, defined and inspired by his Roman Catholicism.
I write this because yet another movie based—albeit sometimes loosely—on the man’s writings is in the making, and at this rate there will be at least six full-scale feature films. There are two biopics planned about the lives of Tolkien and his friend and fellow Christian, C. S. Lewis. It’s remarkable and welcome, and while purists never welcome publicity or success, the more that is known of Tolkien by a mass audience, the better is has to be for Catholicism.
It’s not only the purists in our camp, of course, who question all this.
When various bookstores, newspapers, magazines and literary societies compiled their lists of all-time greats a few years ago, Tolkien won the contests over and over again. First it was a chain of stores, polling more than 25,000 people. Dickens, Tolstoy, and Jane Austen did well, but the fellow with the pipe and friends in dwarfish places came out top.
This annoyed the chattering classes no end, so the highly prestigious Folio Society polled its 50,000 members. Connoisseurs of fine literature, these good men and women were certain to make a different choice.
They didn’t.
The question was then taken to other countries, other languages, and changed into “Best Book of the Century”, “Best Author of the Century” and even “Greatest Writer of the Millenium.” Like it or not, Tolkien beat Joyce, Proust, and Balzac. It prompted one British critic to say that this was why universal literacy and a publicly funded library system were not so desirable. He was joking. Just.
Because nothing is so unpopular with our elites as, yes, popularity. And Tolkien is as popular as they come. In the summer of 2000 the short trailer of The Lord of the Rings movie was put on the film company’s official website, part of an early publicity blitz for the release of the first of the three productions at the end of this year.
On the first day the trailer was available there were 1.5 million downloads. Twice the number for the previous record, held by Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Informed opinion believes that The Lord of the Rings could be the most commercially successful movie ever made.
Why? Or, in the words of those who dislike the Oxford University professor with his tales of wizards, elves, battles and mystery, why does this awful man and his awful readers do so well?
The support for Tolkien is fascinating not only because of its size but because of its diversity. Devotees of science fiction, fans of “Dungeons and Dragons”, traditional Roman Catholics, zealots on the fringes of the political far right, dabblers in the occult, old hippies and, now, a new wave of people opposed to globalisation and free trade.
The reason for the bewildering alliance is the nature of the man himself. He was a serious, orthodox Catholic; he was raised and educated by the Oratorians in Birmingham, England; he was never happy with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council; and he even somewhat sympathetic to the aspirations of Franco and his gang during the Spanish Civil War. Yet this needs context. There were many British and North American Catholics who, whilst totally opposed to Hitler and Nazism, were shocked by the slaughter of priests and nuns by the Republicans in Spain and grudgingly preferred the Generalissimo to a left increasingly dominated by Stalinism and the Kremlin’s thugs.
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