The Bible As 'The Ultimate Fairy Tale'

Jane Chance is professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Women and Gender at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She's the author of "Tolkien's Art" and "Lord of the Rings." Beliefnet spoke to her recently about the spiritual underpinnings of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings."

What was Tolkien's religion, and what does his literary work have to do with it?
Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, close to being Tridentine in his conservative Catholicism.

How does that make its way into the books?
Scholars have noted, for example, that Elbereth Gilthoniel, to whom the Elves sing, and to whom Frodo looks for help when he's at his moment of despair in the last book of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, occupies the role of the Virgin in the Catholic religion.

But on another level, the whole trilogy was informed by a Christian sensibility.
Sure. During the 1960s, as Tolkien was becoming a sort of cult hero, there was a graffito, "God Is Dead. Frodo Lives." That suggests the way Frodo, who is the main character of "The Lord of the Rings," is a kind of resurrected hero. At the end of the trilogy, he does have a resurrection, when he goes over to the Grey Havens with Bilbo. What is that, if not a metaphor for eternal life? And after all, possessing the Ring, being stretched by the exercise of free will, is another way of seeing eternal life.

Tolkien saw the Bible as a "true myth," something like his own mythmaking. Was it a truer myth?
If you read "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien talks about the story of Christ's resurrection as the ultimate fairy story because it has the ultimate happy ending. (Click here to read more on this.)

Tolkien distinguished between the primary world, which is the world of pain, suffering, turbulence that we live in day-to-day, in which we have finite lives. But he talks about fairy tales as a creation of a secondary world, in which the reader finds escape, consolation, and recovery, where the colors are brighter, as he says, where you are sick and are always healed. It's the recovery of Paradise, if that's what you want to call it. We all long for a secondary world. But he would see the Bible as truth in the primary world.

He would never identify his secondary world as real-the Grey Havens, for instance, as Heaven. He never used Christian terminology to describe his world, because it would be a violation of the secondary-world construction to introduce the primary world into it.

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