Decanonize Tolkien

To understand his work better, we must lift the man down from the pedestal we've built for him.

J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien’s grave at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford

Note: a lightly edited version of this essay first appeared in German in the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung (Journal for Fantasy Research). Scholars were asked to respond to the prompt: “Is it time to call it a day with Tolkien research?” You can read it the complete forum (in German) here.

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In addition to being a scholar of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, I am also a theologian and a minister in the United Church of Christ, a progressive American Christian denomination. I would therefore like to think I am drawing upon the rich biblical tradition of parable-telling when I answer this forum’s question “Is it time to call it a day with Tolkien research?” with a story.

It is Sunday, 3 September 2023, and I am gathered with other members of the U.K. Tolkien Society at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford. Tolkien fans and scholars have been arriving by the busload all afternoon, processing through the cemetery in everything from suits and ties to Lord of the Rings-themed T-shirts and more than a few hand-embroidered Elven cloaks. At 2pm sharp, a portable microphone crackles into life and the chair of the Society invites reminds us to stay off the graves and turn off our mobile phones. Fifty years ago, almost to the day, J.R.R. Tolkien left this world on 2 September 1973. Every year since then the Tolkien Society has paid its respects at this graveside memorial, the climax of its annual Oxonmoot gathering: Enyalië, from the word for “remembrance” in Tolkien’s invented language of Quenya. Some introductory words remind us that we are gathered here today to honor, not only the man and his works, but also the ways in which those works have touched our lives. We honor the relationships they have engendered and the joy they have stirred in our hearts: “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,” as Tolkien writes in his seminal essay On Fairy-Stories (2014, 75). Then follows a suitable reading from Tolkien’s writings. This year it is that portion of The Return of the King wherein the One Ring is destroyed and Gandalf rescues the hobbits Sam and Frodo from the ruin of Mount Doom. As the reading builds to a eucatastrophic crescendo—Tolkien’s word for the sudden joyous turn that is the hallmark of the true fairy-story (2014, 75-76)—tears pool and overflow at the corners of my eyes. I glance around me to see others blowing into handkerchiefs, squeezing the hands of loved ones, weeping openly. As the reading comes to an end, representatives of Tolkien fan organizations from around the world—including a sizeable delegation from the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft—step forward in silence and lay memorial wreaths upon the grave which Tolkien shares with his wife Edith. The ritual concludes with a single voice intoning “Namarië,” the elven-queen Galadriel’s song of parting to the Fellowship of the Ring in Lothlórien; the word means farewell. When the last echoes have died away, and there is nothing left but sun on the grass and wind in the trees, the crowd breaks, bidding each other goodbye with mingled tears and laughter. It is a magnificent, cathartic end to a dayslong celebration of Tolkien and the community which has sprung up in his wake.

For those outside the world of Tolkien fandom and scholarship, the whole affair might sound overwrought, not to say mildly cultish. Speaking in my capacity as a theologian, I can assure my reader that the devotees who gathered in Wolvercote Cemetery were not worshiping Tolkien. True to its name, Enyalië is a memorial: an opportunity to focus memory and celebrate a secular figure, and a secular text, that help us make sense of our lives in addition to any religious commitments we may or may not hold. The ritual itself sits at a fascinating intersection of the religious and the nonreligious, mapping neatly onto American liturgical scholar Constance Cherry’s (2010) fourfold framework of Christian worship, with the spoken excerpt of The Lord of the Rings fulfilling the role of a Bible reading or a sermon in a typical liturgy. Even if the participants do not venerate the novel as an alternative to Scripture, however, there is no doubt that we grant it—and Tolkien’s corpus more generally—a certain canonical status in our lives.

We are not the only ones either. Fantasy literature is not an easy category to pin down. As Tolkien once wrote of Fäerie, the Perilous Realm in which fantasy lives and moves and has its being, it “cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible” (2014, 32). Nevertheless, booksellers need categories by which to classify and market their wares, and audiences need genres to set their readerly expectations – and, if the work is good and the reader is receptive, perhaps even fulfill them. Scholars too need their definitions, even provisional ones. The American theorist of fantasy and the fantastic Brian Attebery defines a genre as a “fuzzy set,” a term he borrows from mathematics: “categories defined not by a clear boundary or any defining characteristics but by resemblance to a single core example or groups of examples” (Attebery 2014, 33). He places The Lord of the Rings firmly at the center of the fantasy genre. Not all fantasy is Tolkienian, of course, and as the twenty-first century has drawn on, the mainstream of Anglophone fantastic literature has thankfully expanded to include diverse authors such as N.K. Jemisin, Tomi Adeyami, and Tamsyn Muir among many others. But as British fantasist Terry Pratchett once wrote:

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji. (2014, 86)

This is a storyteller’s way of making the same point which Attebery makes in the language of literary scholarship and which the graveside Enyalië makes in the language of liturgy. In the fifty years since Tolkien’s death, his work and legacy have irrevocably shaped our understanding of what fantasy even is. This Oxford don, whose seemingly anachronistic, unclassifiable, wildly popular stories of Elves, Hobbits, and magic rings were once dismissed by the self-appointed guardians of Western literature, has now become one of its canonical figures.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends very much on whom you ask. Speaking as a lifelong Tolkien fanatic, my answer is: a bit of both. Either way, we might as well throw in the towel on biblical scholarship as on Tolkien scholarship. Just as the Bible is an inescapable, bone-deep influence on Western culture even for those who do not accord it status as Scripture, Tolkien is an inescapable influence on modern fantasy and, by extension, the study of the fantastic. His canonical status is why we cannot yet write him off; he means too much to too many people, has exerted too great a gravitational pull upon our field of inquiry. Yet that same canonical status is also why Tolkien scholarship must explore new horizons of reception and applicability and grapple responsibly with Tolkien’s complicated legacies both literary as well as cultural, historical as well as contemporary – another feature his work shares with the Bible. In fairness to my colleagues, many exceptional scholars, both established and emerging, are actively breaking new ground in Tolkien studies. More is needed, however, and an active reconsideration of approaches which have held sway in our field for too long.

Tolkien’s own image of the Cauldron of Story from On Fairy-Stories moves us toward a deeper understanding of the changes for which I am advocating. Responding to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European mania for collecting, categorizing, and analyzing folktales, Tolkien writes that contemporaneous scholars of folklore were by and large “using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested” (2014, 38). Anthropologists, mythologists, and folklorists most often deployed ancient narratives to reconstruct a (largely imaginary, although not always inaccurate) premodernity, or else sought to trace the genesis of a narrative type or trope back to a single, discrete historical ancestor. Tolkien acknowledges that, as a philologist both professionally and creatively preoccupied with words and their histories, he too feels this pull toward origins. He hastens to add, however:

[E]ven with regard to language it seems to me that the essential quality and aptitudes of a given language in a living moment is both more important to seize and far more difficult to make explicit than its linear history. So with regard to fairy-stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. (39)

Borrowing an image from the British folklorist George Webb Dasent, Tolkien writes that in the Cauldron of Story there are the bones, that is the variegated sources of any given narrative, and the soup, that is “the story as it is served up by its author or teller” (40). In his famous essay on Beowulf, Tolkien uses an architectural metaphor to make a similar point: a man who gathered up the ruined masonry of old buildings to build himself a tower. When the man died, his neighbors noticed that his building materials derived from a variety of ancient sources, and so they demolished the tower in order to ascertain where the stones originally came from. What these source-seekers failed to notice was that “from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea” (Tolkien 1983, 8). In both cases, Tolkien’s concern is less with a story’s origins, to the extent that these can be ascertained with any certainty, and more with “the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are” (2014, 48).  Tolkien scholarship might well glean a lesson from this. Those of us who study the man will always find it edifying (possibly) and entertaining (most certainly) to “interpret every single note Tolkien once wrote on a napkin and subject this analysis to multiple peer review,” to quote from this forum’s prompt. If we seek to continue in a genuinely Tolkienian spirit, however, we would do well to consider more deeply and carefully the effects of Tolkien’s fiction upon his readers and the wider culture in which they are implicated.

Key to this endeavor will be loosening the grip of so-called “authorial intent” over large swaths of Tolkien fandom and scholarship. To use a contemporary example: the recent release of the Amazon Prime series The Rings of Power has resulted, in the English-speaking world at any rate, in a superfluity of bile from fans who have appointed themselves the true defenders of Tolkien’s legacy. Tolkien never explicitly described Black Elves or Black Dwarves; therefore, according to this line of argument, diverse casting is an affront to Tolkien’s intentions. Those who enjoy the series, especially women and fans of color, have come in for online abuse, ranging from accusations of being fake fans and Amazon shills to racial slurs and hate speech. I have numerous issues with Amazon’s adaptation of the Second Age of Middle-earth, but diverse casting is absolutely not one of them. Toxic discourse around a show which is, in my view, neither good nor bad enough to warrant such extremes of opinion, has been mirrored in the scholarly community. The U.K. Tolkien Society’s 2021 seminar “Tolkien and Diversity” came in for widespread vitriol from politically and theologically conservative fans and scholars alike. Some of my colleagues have received death threats for the so-called “crime” of being women and/or people of color who write about Tolkien from their unique and valuable social locations (Reid 2022). In my home country the United States, rightwing publications such as the National Review defend Tolkien against “wokeness” (Birzer 2021) while crypto-fascist pseudo-intellectuals appropriate the imagery of Elves and Hobbits to argue for minoritarian rule (Yarvin 2022). Likewise, Tolkien has long been a figure of fascination for Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party; the ultraconservative Italian Youth Front famously staged a “Hobbit Camp” in 1977 as a space for dreaming a neo-fascist future into being (Horowitz 2022).

These odious appropriations do not come out of nowhere. The selfsame passage from The Lord of the Rings which we read at Enyalië 2023 features Gandalf crying aloud, “Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom!” which is followed in short order by this:

But the Men of Rhûn and of Harad, Easterling and Sauthron, saw the ruin of their war and the great majesty and glory of the Captains of the West. And those that were deepest and longest in evil servitude, hating the West, and yet were men proud and bold, in their turn now gathered themselves for a last stand of desperate battle. But the most part fled eastward as they could; and some cast their weapons down and sued for mercy. (Tolkien 2005, 949)

The words made me blanch in the midst of my emotion. Tolkien’s troubling tendency to cast non-White peoples in the role of the Evil Other intrudes uncomfortably upon the very climax of his masterwork (cf. Mills 2022). It is not difficult to see how contemporary fascists find support for their noxious ideology in The Lord of the Rings if they are inclined to look for it. Specious arguments about Tolkien’s authorial intent and the “canonicity” of adaptational and interpretive choices thus frequently function to bolster white supremacist interpretations of his work – interpretations which draw upon genuine, and genuinely problematic, features of the text to construct a “Tolkien” who underwrites fascist apologia.

As foolish as it would be to deny that such readings of Tolkien exist, it would be equally foolish to say that these are the only readings which are possible, or indeed the ones to which the vast majority of Tolkien’s readers subscribe. My present research at the University of Glasgow explores the reception of The Lord of the Rings among nonreligious Tolkien fans, as part of a larger study of the role of ostensibly secular popular narratives in meeting human needs for identity, community, and meaning in a post-Christian spiritual landscape. The fact that Tolkien means so much to those who explicitly do not share his Roman Catholic faith refutes theologically exclusivist claims that Tolkien’s work can only be understood as the essentially Christian work of an essentially Christian author (e.g., Pearce 2003, ix). Pioneering reception studies by such scholars as Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs (2008), Luke Shelton (2020), and Robin Anne Reid (2023) join constructive reconsiderations of Tolkien’s multifaceted legacy from Black (Thomas 2019), queer (Driggers 2022), feminist (Croft & Donovan 2015), and ecocritical (Conrad-O’Briain & Hynes 2013) perspectives. The whinging of reactionary forces within the Tolkien community notwithstanding, we need more of this, not less. After all, the Enyalië gathering which I attended in Oxford did not check fans’ religious status at the door. There was no segregation along lines of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation, with “true fans” at the front of the queue and “woke shills” pushed to the back. The only sine qua non of participation was a love for Tolkien’s work and a desire to share that love with others. Here we see “the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are” (Tolkien 2014, 48) at its most inclusive, even liberatory.

Saint J.R.R. Tolkien? (Art by R. Lentz)

In the inaugural issue of the German Tolkien journal Hither Shore, Thomas Fornet-Ponse writes that we must distinguish sharply between Christian instrumentalization of Tolkien’s fiction and theological reception of the religious themes to the found therein (2004, 53). This may seem perfectly obvious to scholars from other fields where feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial methodologies have long since subverted the iron-fisted reign of authorial intent, embracing multivocality and reader response as valid theoretical perspectives. Within Tolkien studies, however, Fornet-Ponse’s caution remains as relevant as ever. Indeed, we who study Tolkien must extend the distinction beyond the realm of the religious to the broadest possible consideration of his influence upon the field of fantasy studies, the fantasy genre itself, and the wider world of culture and politics. In a recent article in the journal Mythlore (2023), I argue that we can and should replace a hermeneutic of Tolkienian authority with a hermeneutic of Tolkienian inspiration, framing the sub-creator of Middle-earth as a conversation partner in the dialogue of meaning rather than a Foucauldian (or, one might say, scriptural) authority before whom we must bend the literary-critical knee. Such a shift away from a focus on Tolkien’s sources, let alone his “intentions,” enables us to situate interpretations of his fiction as interpretations and not as qualities which inhere in the works themselves. It subverts the disciplinary function of religious and literary canons (Aichele 2009, 62), liberating Tolkien’s story-world to become a common symbolic language rather than a set of prescriptions – generic, political, or otherwise. The eucatastrophic Joy which we glimpse in his fiction must become a critical joy which “entails the transparent discussion of how a text reflects systemic issues whilst also potentially celebrating its affordances and nuances” (Lavezzo & Rios Maldonado 2023, 243-244, emphasis original).

We must, in short, decanonize Tolkien. Only then can we study and love his works with greater honesty, depth, and integrity.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Aichele, George. “Canon, Ideology, and the Emergence of an Imperial Church.” In Canon and Canonicity: Essays on the Formation and Use of Scripture, edited by Einar Thomassen, 45-65. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009.

• Attebery, Brian. Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

• Barker, Martin & Mathijs, Ernest. (Eds.) Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audience. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

• Birzer, Bradley J. “J. R. R. Tolkien's Work Transcends 'Wokeness’.” National Review. 24 June 2021. URL.

• Cherry, Constance M. The Worship Architect: A Blueprint for Designing Culturally Relevant and Biblically Faithful Services. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010.

• Conrad-O’Briain, Helen and Gerard Hynes. (Eds.) Tolkien: The Forest and the City. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013.

• Croft, Janet Brennan and Donovan, Leslie A. (Eds.) Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2015.

• Driggers, Taylor. Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

• Emanuel, Tom. “‘It is ‘about’ nothing but itself”: Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author.” Mythlore 42(1) (2023). Forthcoming.

• Fornet-Ponse, Thomas. “‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work’: Tolkien zwischen christlicher Instrumentalisierung und theologischer Rexeption.” Hither Shore 1 (2004): 53-70.

• Horowitz, Jason. “Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader.” The New York Times. 21 September 2022. URL.

• Lavezzo, Kathy and Mariana Rios Maldonado. “Tolkien, Fandom, Critique, and ‘Critical Joy’: A Conversation.” Postmedieval 14(1) (2023): 231-248.

• Mills, Charles W. "The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto." The Southern Journal of Philosophy 60(1) (2022): 105-135.

• Pearce, Joseph. Foreword to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth, by Bradley J. Birzer, ix-xiv. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003.

• Pratchett, Terry. A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2014.

• Reid, Robin A. “A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams’s ‘Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged ‘Conflicting Sides’ of Tolkien’s Singular Self.’” Mythlore 40(2) (Spring/Summer 2022): 196-220.

• Reid, Robin A. “How Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists Engage with Tolkien’s Legendarium.” In Tolkien and Diversity: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar 2021, edited by Will Sherwood, 52-85. Edinburgh: Luna Press Publishing, 2023.

• Shelton, Luke. “‘Small Hands Do Them Because They Must’: Examining the Reception of The Lord of the Rings Among Young Readers.” PhD diss. University of Glasgow, 2020.

• Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York: New York University Press, 2019.

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. 50^th Anniversary Ed. London: HarperCollins, 2005.

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 1983.

• Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien On Fairy-Stories. Edited by Verlyn Flieger & Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2014.

• Yarvin, Curtis. “The Tolkien System of Social Roles.” Gray Mirror (blog). 2 August 2022. [N.B. I decline to link to Yarvin’s essay because I do not wish to drive traffic to his site.]