A Spiritual Biography

Those kindly souls who read my posts will know by now that I am a Tolkien fanatic. So I caution you, dear reader, if you are not a Tolkien fan, stop reading now!

If you are still with me, I’d like to tell you about a wonderful book that we are reading at home: we’re not quite finished yet, and we know that we’ll be really sad when we reach the end.

The book is Tolkien’s Faith, by Holly Ordway, published in September: quite expensive, but absolutely worth every penny.

It’s a new biography of the great man, centring on his Christian faith. A major blemish of serious Tolkien studies, right from the start, has been that his Christian faith, of which he made no secret, has been treated as an incidental, even slightly awkward, item: a bit of an elephant in the room. Of course his writings appeal to a vast readership, the majority of whom are not Christian believers, and this includes many of the academic Tolkien specialists who write about him. His first biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, was estranged from the Christian faith in which he’d been brought up (his father was an Anglican bishop), and he began the trend of downplaying the religious side of Tolkien.

But in fact religion was not a ‘side’ of Tolkien. His faith permeated the whole of his life, as a family man, as an academic, and as a writer.

Holly Ordway, not only a convinced Christian herself but also a professor of apologetics, reverses the whole trend. She takes the bull by the horns and expounds Tolkien’s entire life in terms of his faith. This is in no way a distortion. He was a devout Christian and he repeatedly stated that his popular writings, such as The Lord of The Rings, were Christian in inspiration. She succeeds magnificently in portraying a man who, though of course far from perfect, was a consistent and in many ways exemplary Christian.

Not only is this new view of Tolkien a terrific inspiration to those of us who are both Christians and writers, but so is Ordway’s straightforward, no-nonsense approach. In the course of describing Tolkien’s faith, she makes sure to explain all the beliefs and practices involved, given that the majority of fans will have little or no knowledge of them. And so, without being ‘preachy’, she gives us the full Monty: the details of his Christian upbringing, the things he believed, his prayers, the worship he attended and loved, his witness, and so on. As is appropriate for a serious biography, she makes no attempt to evangelize, but by simple explanation of the faith, implicitly commends it and shows its coherence and attractiveness.

So, both as a refreshingly authentic portrait of Tolkien, and as an exemplary piece of Christian non-fiction, I heartily recommend this book.

Spoiler alert — or possibly health warning. Tolkien was a Catholic, of course, and so is Holly Ordway, though she teaches in a Baptist University in the US. And in fact, I would also recommend Ordway’s autobiographical work, Not God’s Type, in which she describes how she came to faith from extreme atheism (helped partly by the writings of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis), and then made the transition from Protestant belief to full communion with the Church.