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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of March 30, 2026
Contributions for the week of April 6, 2026
- "I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien."
- "But Halo... Halo was magic."
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Notes -
Well, Tolkien was Catholic, not Anglican...
In general he resisted too obvious readings. He once admitted to a reader (Letter #320), "I think it is true that I owe much of this character [Galadriel] to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary", while clarifying that Galadriel is a penitent rather than direct analogue. Here's a bit more of Tolkien on the subject.
Letter #142:
Letter #213:
That said there are definitely elements of LotR that can be read along other lines. Though it was Tolkien's intent to not depict any positive 'religion' in the text, because he thinks that a metaphor cannot include the very thing that it is a metaphor for within itself and still function, a Protestant or atheist might note that, when it does appear, organised religion in Tolkien's works is always evil. He removed most references from LotR, but in The Tale of Adanel the first demand Morgoth makes of humanity is that they build a temple to worship him:
In the Akallabeth, Sauron also establishes a temple where sacrifices will be offered, which is contrasted with the simple, austere purity of earlier Numenorean worship:
Perhaps two instances are not enough to make a pattern, but one cannot help but notice that in Tolkien's world, the good guys never make temples or churches, and never have priests or monastics or any kinds of religious official. Nor do they even make prayer very often; perhaps the closest example in LotR is Faramir and his rangers taking a moment of silence to face west, towards lost Numenor, before a meal. In general it seems that heroic characters, though very much of aware of their dependence on providence and implicitly trusting in God, do not build mediating institutions. On the contrary, building a temple or establishing a religious hierarchy is an activity seen only among the villains. It is a form of idolatry, born of fear and showing a lack of genuine faith, and which only enslaves them.
Adanel again:
It's easy for a Protestant, especially an evangelical or someone descended from the Radical Reformation, to read this and say, "Aha! Idolatry! Rome!" For that matter one might be tempted to link it to the Temple in Jerusalem, perhaps echoing Jesus' criticisms of the Temple hierarchy. (Or one might take it in a more anti-semitic direction, but I see no need to encourage people like that.)
An author may end up sending messages he never intended, and this is one where I think there is a tension between Tolkien's writing and some of his own life and convictions.
I wonder sometimes about how this applies to Tolkien's very many atheist fans, to the extent of defacements like Palantir and Anduril. I suppose it's not fair to tar atheist fans of Tolkien with those abominations. Those are examples of a culture that simultaneously adores Tolkien's work, at least on the superficial level, while despising his ethics. But an atheist - perhaps indeed like Pratchett - might appreciate Tolkien's work and his ethics even while believing him to be, however understandably, in error about the existence of God or the truth of Catholicism.
The interpretation that seems obvious to me is that Tolkien wrote his fantasy as though it were the ancient history of our world, and being a Christian, he wrote it to be spiritually compatible with the Christian understanding of the spiritual history of our world. The Numenoreans don't build temples because in the early chronology of the Bible, God very explicitly doesn't want a temple, and they don't have churches or hierarchical religion because there's no Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) basis for it at that point in the chronology. Sure, you can make something up, but then if you're actually describing it to the reader, you're implicitly saying "this form of worship/church/Temple/institution that I made up out of whole cloth is totally theologically valid." Tolkien can't roll his own temple or church because he doesn't perceive himself to have the authority to describe such an institution and say, by authorial fiat, that this is a proper form of worship that God finds pleasing; doing that sort of thing is generally perceived to be deeply unchristian by Christians. None of this applies to paganism; it's fine to describe all sorts of fantastical methods of being wrong about God, because from a Christian perspective there's an infinity of false theologies but only one true one.
Here, he's directly copying biblical descriptions of religious practice in era that ends with Abraham and the Patriarchs, which is roughly where these stories would presumably happen. Simple altars in a high place are an apparently-acceptable method of communion with God prior to the Abrahamic Covenant, so it's what he uses as well. The obvious corollaries for the temples of Morgoth and Sauron are Dagon and Baal.
Yes, and that's consistent where, though I see the anti-semitic or at least anti-Judaic reading of an evil deity who demands people make a 'House of the Lord', acknowledge him sole god of the world, and worship only him, I think in context Tolkien is plainly criticising idolatry in a manner consistent with biblical convictions. Morgoth, and later Sauron, set themselves up as false gods, appropriating and perverting the imagery associated with the true god.
I don't think Tolkien's refusal to depict any religion, even primitive religion, was wholly because of his setting being framed as prehistoric Earth. He says directly, in Letter #131, that he thinks that containing 'the Christian religion' is 'fatal' to a fairy-story. This was the reason for his dislike of Arthurian legend.
That said I do also think he has a paradox in his First Age writings that he never quite resolved, which is that, quite apart from being Christian or even Catholic works, Tolkien was also heavily inspired by what he called 'Northern' myth. Turin is a Germanic hero, and his story occurs in the atmosphere of Germanic or Anglo-Saxon (or to a lesser extent Scandinavian) mythology. That means, for instance, things like Fate or Doom as powerful forces in the text. These are, for lack of a better term, 'religious' concepts. Tolkien's chronology does not allow for Christian or Jewish characters - the closest he comes is a sort of ethical monotheism. However, it would allow for pagans, but he does not allow himself to have pagan protagonists, even when the whole story he's writing is derivative of a fatalistic pagan spirituality.
To an extent Lewis has a similar issue, except that Lewis is more of a classicist and his great pagan loves are Greek. Even so Lewis allows himself to speak about Christianity and our world's religions more explicitly, so he does a bit more explicit work in trying to find points of harmony.
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