An Aspirational Cultus?
Tolkien Fandom at the Borders of Belief
I have a new article out!
You can find “An Aspirational Cultus? Tolkien Fandom at the Borders of Belief” in the latest issue of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature. The theoretical framework of fantasy as secondarily religious worldbuilding is directly linked to my PhD research, which I hope to post about more in the not-too-distant future. (I’ve been deep in the thesis-writing trenches these last few months!)
I’ve posted the first few paragraphs below so you get a sense of what I’m up to. However, the article is free and open-access, so I do hope you’ll read the rest too!
I have always felt that cemeteries are Tolkienian places: the thoughtful stillness, the intertwining of natural rhythms and the work of human hands, the awareness of mortality and deep time. I grew up down the street from a historic graveyard, and it was not uncommon for visitors to find me sitting, cross-legged, in the shade of a honey locust tree with a dog-eared paperback in hand – perhaps my father’s Ballantine paperback copy of The Return of the King, the one with Barbara Remington’s unforgettable cover art. My younger self would have been overjoyed to know that twenty-odd years later he would find himself here at J.R.R. Tolkien’s grave in Oxford with hundreds of likeminded others, summoned by our shared passion for Middle-earth and the man who wrote it into being. The occasion of our meeting is Oxonmoot, the annual gathering of the U.K. Tolkien Society, and our convergence upon Oxford’s Wolvercote Cemetery on this early September afternoon commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of our favorite author’s death.
Clad in everything from formalwear to faded T-shirts and handwoven cloaks, we wend our way through the headstones to the grave which Tolkien shares with his wife Edith. The chair of the Tolkien Society greets us and invites us into a space of quiet reflection – not difficult to achieve in a sunny graveyard in late summer. Having gathered our thoughts to Tolkien and the ways in which his works have touched our lives, we listen to a reading from the climax of The Lord of the Rings (LotR): the destruction of the One Ring and the fall of Barad-dûr, followed by Gandalf’s rescue of Sam and Frodo from the wrack of Mount Doom and the hobbits’ awakening amidst the green trees of Ithilien. When the reality of Sam’s deliverance dawns upon him and he cries aloud, “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard” (LotR VI.4 952), tears pool at the corners of my eyes. Then the reading ends and the crowd lapses into contemplative silence. I glance around me: fellow attendees are withdrawing tissues from the pockets of their cosplay outfits, squeezing the hands of loved ones, weeping in earnest. At an unspoken signal, representatives of the Tolkien Society and other fan organizations lay memorial wreaths upon the Tolkiens’ grave. When this is done, a single unaccompanied voice rises in song: “Namarië,” Galadriel’s hymn of parting to the Fellowship of the Ring in Lothlórien. When the music has died away, and there is nothing left but “sun on the leaves” (LotR VI.4 952) and wind in the grass, we breathe a sigh of relief that settles somewhere between nervous laughter and tears. The memorial, and by extension Oxonmoot, has reached its end. The time has come to bid each other goodbye.
Past attendees of Oxonmoot will recognize what I have just described as Enyalië, a word which means remembrance in Tolkien’s invented language Quenya. Ever since Tolkien’s death in 1973, fans have gathered at his graveside each September for this ritual of memory and appreciation. Yet as moved as I was by Enyalië 2023, I am not sure that Tolkien would have quite approved of it. In a 1965 letter, his friend W.H. Auden wrote to him “fear[ing] that most of the members” of the newly organized New York Tolkien Society “would be lunatics” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien [Letters] 359, #275). Tolkien responded wearily: “Yes, I have heard about the Tolkien Society. Real lunatics don’t join them, I think. But still such things fill me too with alarm and despondency” (359). He would give the U.K. Tolkien Society his blessing four years later and serves, to this day, as its president in perpetuo. But there is little question that his relationship to his literary devotees was always one of ambivalence, leading him to infamously dub his burgeoning fandom “my deplorable cultus” (Carpenter 233). Given Tolkien’s philological background, it seems reasonable to assume that his use of the word “cultus,” with its strong religious connotations, was deliberate. The word “fan” itself has its origins in the Latin fanaticus, referring to temple devotees (Jenkins Textual Poachers [Poachers] 12), and its emergence during the late nineteenth century as a descriptor for ardent lovers of sports and music was likely intended to evoke associations of religious enthusiasm (Cavicchi "Foundational Discourses of Fandom” 29-30). Tolkien the philologist seems to have intuited what the history of the word implies: there is a connection between the passion of the fan and the devotion of the believer.
Given his apprehensions regarding his “cultus,” his Roman Catholic faith, and his insistence that his legendarium did not constitute “any kind of new religion or vision” (Letters 283, #211), Tolkien might well have eyed Enyalië with suspicion. Perhaps he would worry that we were engaged in idolatry, venerating him as a secular saint or literary deity. Superficially at least, there might be something to this: with its graveyard setting, communal readings, and meditative silences, the Enyalië I attended reminded me of nothing so much as Christian liturgy. But speaking as a practicing Christian, it did not threaten my religious commitments in any way; at no point was I concerned that we were worshiping Tolkien the man. If anything, the memorial’s worship-like structure made it more impactful for me, not less. What are we to make of this collision between Tolkien fandom and the trappings of faith?
In what follows I will attempt to answer this question, which is thornier than it might at first appear. I will first survey the state of scholarly debate around fandom and religion before outlining my own working definition of religion as sacred worldbuilding. I will link this to Tolkien’s theory of fantasy worldbuilding in his essay “On Fairy-stories” (OFS) to propose a framework for understanding and researching the religious qualities and affordances of fandom as the activities of a secondary faith community. I will then use this framework to exegete Enyalië as a prime example of what might be called a fan liturgy, a powerful collective experience that takes religious form without carrying over religious content. Having undertaken this interdisciplinary pilgrimage, I will arrive at my conclusion: that Tolkien’s secondary world, his community of devoted fans, and the lineaments of Christian ritual have combined to produce, in Enyalië, a fan practice which troubles the boundaries between the sacred and the secular, the world(s) of fantasy literature and the world(s) of everyday experience. This would almost certainly have made J.R.R. Tolkien uncomfortable. But as I hope to show, it tells us something important about why his fiction remains compelling to so many people of so many faiths – and offers, perhaps, some lessons to existing communities of meaning in a pluralistic, post-Christian world.
Read the whole thing, free and open-access, over at Mythlore!