Fairytales, Faith, and Lived Religion

Reflections on Tolkien and Shane MacGowan

On 8 December 2023, the funeral of songwriter and Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan was held at St. Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, Country Tipperary, Ireland. After communion, Irish musicians Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill performed a heartfelt rendition of the Pogues’ cockeyed Christmas classic “Fairytale of New York.” MacGowan was famously (and justifiably) tired of the now-ubiquitous song by the end of his life, but I have to imagine he would’ve approved of mourners dancing in the aisles at his funeral while lyrics about alcoholism, drug abuse, and faith in the gutter rang through the Roman Catholic sanctuary.

This rules - and it points up how lovely and complex religious identity can be.

In a 2014 interview, MacGowan described himself as a "religious maniac" whose "free-thinking Roman Catholicism" included devotions to the Buddha and St. Martin de Porres. He likened the Holy Spirit to the Tao and stated that "I pray to the wind and the rain because I was brought up a devout Roman Catholic." This might seem heterodox verging on heretical. But in my experience as a minister and a theologian, the label a person uses to describe their religious identity—Catholic or Protestant, Sufi or Hindu—often conceals a far wider, and wilder, range of beliefs and practices than you'd expect from "official" doctrine.

In fact, the idea that religion is, first and foremost, about a slate of orthodox beliefs is itself a very Western and especially very Protestant idea. Sociologist Meredith McGuire writes, “At the level of the individual, religion is not fixed, unitary, or even coherent. We should expect that all persons’ religious practices and the stories with which they make sense of their lives are always changing, adapting, and growing” (2008, 12). Her research shows this was true historically, in premodern Christianity, as well as today.

McGuire prefers to look at lived religion, which she defines as "how religion and spirituality are practiced, experienced, and expressed by ordinary people (rather than official spokespersons) in the context of their everyday lives” (2008, 12). When you drill down on how their faith shapes up in their daily lives, even people far less iconoclastic than Shane MacGowan can surprise you with their idiosyncrasies. Lived religion is quirky, syncretic, and highly personal.

I recently reviewed the book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (2023) by the Catholic theologian Holly Ordway. There, I critique the book for taking a too-narrow view of J.R.R. Tolkien’s lived religion. No doubt he was Roman Catholic, and a devout one at that. But he was also man of paradoxes who wrestled with faith and doubt in the midst of a changing world. That wrestling manifests itself in Middle-earth, which blends elements of pre-Christian paganism, Catholic Christianity, and post-Christian secularity into a heady cocktail of literary enchantment. It also shows up in some of his views which, while they might not slot neatly into orthodox doctrinal frameworks, nevertheless have a long history within his own faith tradition.

For instance: did Tolkien believe in fairies? In the review, I write:

[Leading Tolkien scholar] Verlyn Flieger seems to think it possible. Based on her experience editing the manuscripts of Tolkien On Fairy-Stories, she writes that Tolkien’s evolving commentary on the subject “suggests that at a deeper level he believed in the reality of what he described” (2014, 157). [Historian of paganism] Ronald Hutton has shown that belief in fairies occupies a fascinating intermediary position in medieval and early modern belief: not quite pagan, but not quite Christian either. They “could not easily be fitted into conventional Christian concepts of angels or demons” (2022, 77), yet “active belief in fairies persisted among English, Welsh and Scottish commoners until the twentieth century” (109). Tolkien himself gestures at the characteristic in-betweenness of Faërie in his essay when he writes that “[t]he road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil’s tithe” (Tolkien On Fairy-Stories, 28). (Emanuel 2023, 9-10)

Dimitra Fimi, another leading Tolkien scholar (and also my PhD supervisor), recently published an excellent blog post which takes up the same question. She suggests that, drawing on popular Victorian and Edwardian views, Tolkien may have understood real-world Elves/Fairies as elemental nature spirits:

Elves, fairies, angels, elemental spirits, spirits of nature: Tolkien’s early beliefs tap into anxieties and interests of his time, with [esoteric movements such as] Spiritualism and Theosophy very much in vogue, but also remain strangely compatible with his Catholicism. Could we consider Catholicism as a more mystical brand of Christianity that allows for such beliefs? (Fimi 2023)

Just as with MacGowan, Tolkien’s Catholicism may have set him up for precisely this kind of religious blending. As McGuire, fellow sociologist Robert Orsi (2006), and Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor (2007) have all pointed out, Roman Catholicism—especially in the Middle Ages—can and does serve as a flexible framework for a whole host of diverse beliefs and practices. That’s why the Protestant Reformers slandered Catholics as “superstitious idolaters”: because there was a space for saints, fairies, and prayers to “the wind and the rain.”

Both Shane MacGowan and J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrate that, far from a heretical anomaly, syncretism may well be the norm not the exception. Western Christian theology has a bad habit of totalizing the human experience: "You're this one thing and nothing else!" But nobody is ever just one thing and nothing else. Human beings are complicated creatures who pick up influences here, there, and everywhere in order to live rich and meaningful lives. We're all navigating the world with the best religious and non-religious resources at our disposal. That’s as true of Irish punk-rockers as it is of English fantasists.

Also, “Fairytale of New York” rocks. But you knew that already.

WORKS CITED

• Emanuel, Tom. Review of Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway. Journal of Tolkien Research 18(1), Article 1 (2023): 1-18

• Fimi, Dimitra. “Tolkien and the Fairies: Faith and Folklore.” Dimitra Fimi (blog). 6 December 2023. URL.

• Flieger, Verlyn. “But What Did He Really Mean?” Tolkien Studies 11 (2014): 149-166.

• Hennessy, Matthew. “God’s Lucky Man: The ‘Charmed Life’ of Shane McGowan.” City Journal. 14 March 2014. URL.

• Hutton, Ronald. Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022.

• McGuire, Meredith B. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Orsi, Robert. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

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