Born 3 January 1892 in South Africa, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is best known as the author of the fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) and The Hobbit (1937), in which he created a world with a new language, strange characters, and an imagined culture. Tolkien converted to Catholicism in 1900. Educated at Oxford, he eventually returned to the university as an English professor. He married Edith Bratt after her conversion to Catholicism. They had four children. Tolkien died on 2 September 1973.
The initial conversion and continuing commitment of J.R.R. Tolkien to the Catholic faith were the fruits of evangelization. In this story we discover that evangelization can take place in very gentle and ordinary ways. Here s mother’s conversion and love of the Catholic faith coupled with the support, kindness, charity, and forgiveness of a local pastor form the foundation for the lifelong and devout Catholic faith of J.R.R. Tolkien who used his stories as a way of passing on to his children his faith in God and his understanding of good and evil.
J.R.R. Tolkien was only three years old and his brother, Hilary, was one when they left South Africa and returned to England with their mother. Their father, an English banker, planned to follow, but died unexpectedly in February 1896. Plunged into grief, Tolkien’s mother took the two little boys to the Anglican Church every Sunday.
Their routine changed without warning one Sunday when they went to St. Anne’s Catholic Church in the slums of Birmingham, England. Their mother had decided to convert to Catholicism for reasons she never explained. In the spring of 1900, when Tolkien was eight years old, the young family was received into the Catholic faith.
Their conversion angered family members, who opposed Catholicism. Relatives on his mother’s side were Unitarians. Relatives on the father’s side were Baptists. Both sides of the family cut off financial support. Tolkien’s mother remained firm in her faith, however, and took it upon herself to instill in her young sons her love of Catholicism.
Father Francis Xavier Morgan was the pastor of their parish. A man of kindness and humor, he took an interest in the struggling family. He visited often and served as a father figure for the boys.
It was not long before the strain of providing for the family took its toll on Mrs. Tolkien. By April 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, his mother was hospitalized with diabetes, and the boys were sent to live with relatives. By June, her condition had stabilized. Determined to keep her family together, Tolkien’s mother asked Father Morgan to find a family with whom they could live and share meals. He arranged for this with the local postman and his wife.
That autumn, her condition deteriorated and she died after collapsing into a diabetes-induced coma. Her death strengthened Tolkien’s faith in the Catholic Church. "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed," he wrote, "and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as He did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."
Their relatives wanted to send the boys to a Protestant boarding school where their ties to Catholicism would be severed. But Tolkien’s mother had named Father Morgan in her will as guardian for her sons and protector of their Catholic faith. In the years that followed, Father Morgan used his private family income to raise the two boys. He found a place for them to live and paid for their schooling. Every summer, he took them on vacation. "I first learned charity and forgiveness from him," Tolkien recalled.
When Tolkien was sixteen, he fell in love with nineteen-year-old Edith Bratt, who was also an orphan. Her guardian had arranged for her to live in the same house where Tolkien and his brother boarded because the landlady loved music and would allow the young woman to practice the piano. When Father Morgan realized the budding romance had caused Tolkien’s grades to slip, he moved the boys to a new home and forbade Tolkien to speak or write to Edith until he was twenty-one. In 1911 Tolkien moved to Oxford, where he focused his studies. At midnight on the day he turned twenty-one, he wrote to Edith. Within days, they were engaged to be married.
Edith assured Tolkien that she wanted to become a Catholic, but she knew her guardian would be outraged. Tolkien described how his own mother had been persecuted by her family for converting. "I do so dearly believe," he told Edith, "that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly." When Edith told her uncle that she planned to convert, he disowned her. On 8 January 1914, she was received into the Catholic Church.
Tolkien graduated from Oxford the following year and enlisted as a second lieutenant in World War I. On 22 March 1916, before departing for France, he married Edith in a Catholic ceremony with Father Morgan officiating. Tolkien remained devoutly Catholic throughout his life and took responsibility for raising their children as Catholics during periods when Edith’s interest in Catholicism waned. Their oldest son eventually became a priest.
Tolkien’s work has strong religious undertones. He used his stories as a way of passing on to his children his faith in God and his understanding of good and evil. In a letter he wrote in 1953 to a Jesuit priest friend, Tolkien wrote: "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism."
Tolkien does not explicitly present Catholic teaching in The Lord of the Rings. Yet Catholic themes are threaded throughout: creation and fall, the primacy of good over evil, free will and moral choices, humility and hope, temptation and love, conversion and redemption.