Light Beyond All Shadow, Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work. Edited by Paul E. Kerry and Sandra Miesel.

Abstract

There are several dangers in presenting a collection of essays on Tolkien and religion. One, common to any collection of essays, is that of adherence to the declared central theme (made more difficult here by the fact that Tolkien, although his Catholicism is well-known, was not a religious writer in anything like the same sense as C.S. Lewis). The other hazard, of which Sandra Miesel is aware in her introduction (p. 12), is that the huge corpus of Tolkien criticism increasingly raises the question of what else there is to be said. The theme here is the nature of religion and spiritual experience as shown in Tolkien’s work, although a somewhat clearer distinction between biographical and literary ends is needed: some of the papers seem to address Tolkien’s personal background, while others refer to the receptive religious experiences of the reader. The collection is a companion to that published by the same press in 2010, edited by Paul Kerry with the title The Ring and the Cross, and specifically linked to Christianity; but religious experience does not need to be Christian, of course, and Tolkien’s love of Northern mythology is also noted, while several essays do make the point that ethical or religious points, whatever their source, are not necessarily exclusive. It is worth recalling that those outside Christianity or any religion can read Tolkien far more easily than, say, Lewis, and it might offer a salutary Verfremdungseffekt to some of Tolkien’s interpreters to recall that some read the Gospels as fantasy-writing. Not even the notions of fallen man and innate sinfulness, upon which several essays touch, are exclusively Christian. A paper defending Tolkien against the charge of New Age occultism (John Warwick Montgomery, ‘Tolkien: Lord of the Occult?’) demonstrates incidentally the universality of receptive possibilities that need not depend upon, or exclude a Christian reading. The arguments that have been adduced to put Tolkien into this category, as Montgomery correctly notes, can equally well be applied in other directions, and the use of Jungian archetypes, for example, could be very productive indeed. We are offered 12 essays on various aspects of (mainly) The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, of Tolkien’s Catholicism, and on the Peter Jackson films. There are some interesting lines of exploration, but some of the material is either tenuous or tangential.