Tolkien lied!

[Child of the 7th Age]

I wanted to take a look at this letter, and I think I've tracked it down. It appears in the second edition of Silm but not the first. It also appears in the published Letters if anyone wants to look at it there. It's a 10,000 word monstor written in 1951 to try and get the Collins publishing house to hurry up on their promise to publish both the Silm and LotR together . This is a well known letter. It's where Tolkien says that he once thought to write some tales in great detail while leaving others as fragments in order to encourage minds wielding paint, and music and drama to come in and complete the outline. (This line is much loved by RPG and fanfiction writers!)

After looking over this letter, I've come to the conclusion that Tolkien is not a liar. He actually means what he says. The most substantive reference to Christianity is in this context: Tolkien was bemoaning the fact that his own country had no truly "English" myth and that he had hoped to be the one to remedy that deficiency by drafting a "body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogenic, to the level of the romantic fairy story". He argues that the Arthurian legend did not provide an adequate English mythology for a number of reasons:

Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britian but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. . for one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent, and repetitive. For another and more important thing, it is involved in and explicitly contains the Christian religion.... for reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy story must, as with all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error) but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary "real" world. ( I am speaking of course of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read."

The italics are mine. And what "essay" is he referring to in the last sentence?
Is this the passage you meant, Morm???

If this is it, then I think Tolkien's words are a coherent part of a particular argument that he is making throughout the entire letter and not just a knee jerk reaction and possible cover-up of some hidden Christian "agenda". (I am saying this in jest, of course!) Just look later in the letter and you'll see what I mean. Tolkien explicitly refers to his story of Creation. He acknowleges that there is "a fall: a fall of Angels, we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of the Christian myth." Then he goes on to point out that all myths and legends are connected. Certain symbols and truths must invariably reappear, whether or not we are talking in a Christian or some other context:

These tales are 'new', they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of "truth" and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. There cannot be any "story" without a fall--all stories are ultimately about the fall--at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.

Tolkien is distancing himself from an explicitly Christian interpretation in this letter, but he is doing it for a particular reason. He is doing it because his stories will not operate on that level--instead they will reflect the more universal symbols and images that are the heart of all myth, whether Christian or not.

Just an aside, but I don't think Tolkien is referring only to Silm in these passages. The whole point of his letter is to show the publisher that Silm and LotR are a complete whole that must be published together. His statements apply to the entire Legendarium. If he felt that it was "fatal" to include Christian elements in the Silm, it would be equally fatal to include them in Lord of the Rings.

I've been all over the boards on this issue. At different points, I've seen more or less Christianity in the Legendarium. At this juncture I am personally convinced that there is no explicit Christianity in the early Legendarium, just as Tolkien implies in this letter. The reason we have so many interpretive problems with this is that later on the author changed his mind on this and a number of related things. When he speaks of the Christian elements in LotR, it is always in terms of "revisions" and not the original draft. (that was the other letter that Fordim refers to above. I don't have the citation but will try to dig it up.

Long ago I said to Littlemanpoet that I'd love to see someone go through HoMe and all the archival material and pinpoint exactly when this change occurred. (I was actually hoping he would do it for me. ) This change was undoubtedly gradual: certain revisions even before 1951, more later on. It almost seems as if Tolkien wantsed to erase some of the faerie elements and spirit and substitute history instead. There must be ways to determine this chronologically. To the best of my knowledge, no one has done such a study. I just do not see Christianity in the early Legendarium--the whole mood of pessimism and fate seems very different than a Christian world. Even Shippey said that one of the reasons Tolkien wrote LotR was to explore how and why good men perservered when they were struggling in a pre-revelation world. There is also no doubt when I read the Athrabeth that something has definitely changed. If Christianity isn't coming through the front door, it's at least slipping in the back!

I would love to know more about why this happened. Is it just a middle aged/older man coming closer to his doom and dwelling on questions of ultimate fate? Was it the slow realization that the world was not going to heal despite the fact that two world wars had been fought? I don't know. I just know that somewhere along the road Tolkien changed his mind. Perhaps first there was a revision here and there (certainly pre 1951) or a letter referring to Christian symbolism. In subsequent years Tolkien's whole image of the Legendarium shifted. No longer were the Elves the center of attention. Explicit references were made to Eru taking on a man's form and coming into the world. This is so, so far away from the distant Eru that we began with. So Tolkien isn't a liar, but he was notorious about changing his mind. Kilby called it "contrasistency"

Can anybody figure out this particular change that led from elf to man and from universal myth to hints of explicit Catholic doctrine?