Tolkien’s Imagined Pre-Christian Past
When J.R.R. Tolkien described the era depicted in Beowulf as "heathen, noble, and hopeless," was he also talking about his own work?
by Abby Roberts
A lot has happened in the almost five months since my last newsletter. First of all: I have an essay coming out! “What Lies and Threats” will be the free article in the April issue of Speculative Insight! It covers in-universe history and nationalist myth-making in The Lord of the Rings, especially in the appendices.
Among other things, I traveled down to Charleston, South Carolina, to participate in the inaugural Holy Moot conference a week ago. I spoke about the role of doubt and uncertainty in Tolkien’s legendarium. I think it went well. There was only one major technological hiccup. People laughed when I meant them to laugh. My knees only shook a little.
“Well, Abby,” I said to myself, “that sounds like News. Perhaps you should write about it on here before it actually happened, this being, in fact, a Newsletter?” That’s a very good point, Past Abby. I would have written a newsletter about the presentation if it weren’t for all the other things that happened, but I’ll save that for the “What Am I Doing?” section at the end of the newsletter.
Developing my Holy Moot presentation was a saga in itself. The first version of my presentation was more than 60 slides long before I cut it down, and this is as good a place as any to share the outtakes. So let’s talk about Tolkien’s fictive pre-Christian past.
Tolkien’s Imagined Pre-Christian Past
In the following essay, I will discuss what J.R.R. Tolkien believed about religion, history, etc. I am not preaching his beliefs as correct. I am not writing apologetics for any religion. The reader does not have to agree with Tolkien or with me.
One of the articles I read in preparation for my talk was Claudio Testi’s 2013 Tolkien Studies article, “Tolkien’s Work: Is it Christian or Pagan? A Proposal for a ‘Synthetic’ Approach.” The article is good. I have a few qualms with the word “pagan” used in the context of pre-modern religion, as very few, if any, pre-modern people would have used a term that meant “rural” or “rustic” to refer to themselves. I prefer “pre-Christian” or “polytheist.” But by “pagan,” Testi meant, loosely, a religion that operates on the “natural” rather than “supernatural” plane; this is his definition, and he sticks to it. Fine. He also argues that Tolkien’s legendarium is an expression of “essentially Catholic culture,” which, loosely, means there is fusion between these natural and supernatural planes. This is a separate thing from the legendarium being a work of Catholic apologetics or even being entirely consistent with official Catholic doctrine.
Very good. I agree. I think lots of people should read Testi’s article so we can all get on the same page re: Tolkien’s legendarium, Christianity, and historical polytheisms, which, as Testi points out, has been the topic of a few decades of Discourse. The pre-Christian and extra-Christian influences are there. People who point them out are not imagining things. But although Tolkien experienced moments of doubt like most other people of faith, he was not blinking in Morse code to tell us he was a secret polytheist or something.
What I’m stumped on is why anyone is confused on this point at all because JRRT kind of came right out and told us what he was doing: creating a fictive pre-Christian so that he could explore certain themes. At least, that’s the creative motivation he attributed to the Beowulf poet in his 1936 lecture-turned-essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
As briefly as possible, “The Monsters and the Critics” is Tolkien’s defense of Beowulf as a work of literature. Particularly, he defended the Old English poet’s decision to put the hero in conflict with monsters, which many critics of JRRT’s day apparently thought was silly. The lecture/essay is culturally significant enough to people without LotR brainworms that it’s included in the back of the edition of Beowulf I got in college. “We do not deny the worth of the hero by accepting Grendel and the dragon,” Tolkien wrote. “Let us by all means esteem the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall” (17). That is: the presence of the monsters doesn’t deprecate the hero’s brave yet tragic death.
“The Monsters and the Critics” is pretty hardcore as essays go. It gives us many doom-metal-ish lines, such as “disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme” (30) and “the wages of heroism is death” (26).
But Tolkien was not giving an eighth-grade book report. He was not only interested in the poem’s theme but in how and why the anonymous poet constructed the poem to explore it. Tolkien interpreted Beowulf not as a remnant of a pre-Christian tradition but as the work of a Christian antiquarian working with some pre-Christian material but adding much of their own flair. The poet, Tolkien wrote, “knew much about old days, and though his knowledge—of such things as sea-burial and the funeral pyre, for instance—was rich and poetical rather than accurate with the accuracy of modern archaeology (such as that is), one thing he knew clearly: those days were heathen—heathen, noble, and hopeless” (22).
“Heathen, noble, and hopeless.” What did JRRT mean by that?
First, note that this is how Tolkien imagined the pre-Christian past. Not how that past “really was.” The past, as it is depicted in the art and literature of people of later ages is always a separate thing from the lived experience of a person who actually lived in the past era. Tolkien himself described the Beowulf poet as creating an imaginary past: one that was rich and poetical rather than accurate.
By “heathen,” Tolkien obviously meant pre-Christian, polytheist, or—if you must use this word—“pagan.” In the days before Christianity arrived in Britain, the people were not Christian. Yeah, well, duh, but why is this important?
In the Norse myth of Ragnarök, Tolkien pointed out, the gods and their human allies do battle against the monsters at the end of time—and the gods &co. lose. He argued that the view of history taken by pre-Christian Germanic-speaking peoples (i.e. “Germanic pagans”) was a long arc ending in defeat by the forces of darkness and death. Tolkien was enamored with this idea of courage in the face of inevitable death, (problematically) referring to it as “Northern courage” because he contrasted it with the defeat of the Titans by the gods of Classical mythology. This is what Tolkien meant by “noble.”
But whereas the early medieval Christian could hope for something after the end of time, Tolkien argued, their polytheist ancestors could not. With the coming of Christianity, Tolkien wrote, “there appears a possibility of eternal victory (or eternal defeat), and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries” (22), but this possibility was not evident to pre-Christians. This is what Tolkien meant by “hopeless.”
(Nota bene: Tolkien did not mean that pre-Christian polytheists necessarily went to Hell in the sense of eternal damnation when they died. Testi, in his article, discusses the concept of the “virtuous pagan”: some Christians of late antiquity and the Middle Ages believed that polytheists who lived according to Christian virtues and did not reject the Gospels but simply never encountered them would receive salvation. I can’t say if Tolkien the twentieth-century Catholic subscribed to this idea, but I agree with Testi’s overall point that there was less contradiction between medieval Christianity and pre-Christian traditions than people often assume.)
Tolkien remarked that “hel” was the Old Norse word referring to one of the worlds inhabited by the dead as well as its ruler. In that sense, many of the English polytheists, in their own imaginations, did go to Hel when they died.)
So, according to Tolkien, the Beowulf poet was a Christian writer invoking the noble, hopeless, pre-Christian past. They (the poet) did this to explore the idea of courage in the face of death. Because although the poet did not believe in the old gods, Tolkien argued that “no Christian need despise” the essential theme of Ragnarök: “that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die” (23). The old gods were gone, but the monsters remained. The Christian was “like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in a hostile world” (22). That is, Tolkien believed that early medieval Christians lived in essentially the same spiritual universe as their polytheist ancestors, despite the substitution of one god for many and the appearance of salvation.
Therefore, the Beowulf poet was “a man learned in old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, perceiving their common tragedy of inevitable ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he was himself removed from the direct pressure of its despair,” Tolkien wrote. “He could view from without, but still feel immediately and from within, the old dogma: despair of the event, combined with faith in the value of doomed resistance” (23)
I would argue that this description also fits old JRRT.
In “The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien was talking about Beowulf. He did not have to construct his “legendarium” along the same lines. The legendarium was a messy, many-headed creation that evolved throughout Tolkien’s life, and he attributed its creation to several conflicting motives. But there are similarities between Tolkien’s creative process and the one he attributed to the Beowulf poet. If JRRT did not outright project his own creative interests on the Beowulf poet, the essay shows he was preoccupied with these ideas a few years before he started work on The Lord of the Rings.
For one thing, I would describe Tolkien as “a man learned in the old tales.” He probably forgot more about pre-modern literature than I would ever know. Tolkien was well acquainted with despair, thanks to his childhood trauma and wartime experiences and other horrible things. And Tolkien thought a great deal about death, how one should face it, and whether anything might come after it. Death appears in this essay. Death is busy throughout the blood-stained events of The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin. The Hobbit is allegedly a happy cute book for children, yet the Grim Reaper maintains a presence nonetheless. In archival footage filmed by the BBC, Tolkien read aloud the following quote from Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, calling it the “key spring” of The Lord of the Rings:
“There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
Tolkien, in his legendarium works, specifically created a fictional pre-Christian past. He was clear that he didn’t imagine Middle-earth as “another planet,” like in a science fiction novel, but as our world in a forgotten prehistory. Middle-earth has a sun and moon that are the same as Earth’s sun and moon. The constellations are the same but with different names and stories attached to them. Over time, through gradual disenchantment and the actions of glaciers and tectonic plates and perhaps the hand of God, Middle-earth would be transformed into our Earth. The First/Second/Third Age periodization that Tolkien used for his fictional setting resonates with the six ages of the world imagined by the people of late antiquity and the medieval world. In the legendarium, Tolkien created an imaginary past that was “rich and poetical rather than accurate,” as well as “heathen, noble, and hopeless” in all the ways I’ve already laid out.
(Yes, most of the characters of The Lord of the Rings are “saved” from gruesome and horrible deaths, but, well, uh, LotR is one of Tolkien’s more optimistic books. For characters whose fates are “doomed resistance” against inevitable deaths, see Boromir or Théoden or an abundance of characters in any other legendarium works. The Children of Húrin is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read but also one of the bleakest.)
But I think the biggest tell is in how Tolkien handled (or didn’t handle) religion in his legendarium works.
Tolkien argued that the Beowulf poet minimized the presence of both Christian and polytheist traditions in the work. “If the specifically Christian was suppressed, so also were the old gods.” He attributed three reasons for this: one, because the Beowulf poet did not believe those gods had ever really existed; two, because their names were still, at the time of the poem’s writing, carried powerful currency with the remaining polytheist holdouts; and three, “because they were not actually essential to the theme” (22).
Similarly, Tolkien attempted to minimize the presence of religion in his legendarium works. In his case, however, I’m not sure that reason number one given above is helpful (Tolkien wouldn’t have believed in the reality of deities he made up) and reason two certainly is not (no one worshipped Eru and the Valar, the supernatural entities of Middle-earth, in the real world). I am unsure about reason three; sometimes, he seemed to really need Eru and the Valar for his themes. But the basic effect is the same: the removal of overt religion in an imagined pre-Christian setting.
In what I think of as “the letter that launched a thousand takes,” Tolkien wrote this:
“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 they symbolism.”
(The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, quoted in The Nature of Middle-earth, 401. Emphasis mine.)
What tends to grab people’s attention is the claim that LotR is “fundamentally Catholic.” Carl F. Hostetter, the editor of The Nature of Middle-earth, argues that the key word here is “fundamentally;” i.e. in its basic elements. LotR is built out of Catholic stuff, but this stuff is implicit, rather than explicit, in the work. But for my purposes, that doesn’t matter. Here, I’m emphasizing Tolkien’s statement that he took out most references to religion within the novel.
I don’t think Tolkien was as thorough in removing “anything like religion” from The Lord of the Rings as he insisted. Gildor’s hymn to Elbereth, Sam’s prayer to Eärendil, and Aragorn’s reverence for the White Tree are not secular and agnostic acts. In one moment of overt (fictional) polytheism, Tolkien described Théoden as “like a god of old, even as Oromë the great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young” (The Return of the King 113).
Nonetheless, Tolkien had a vexed relationship with religion in his legendarium works. Aside from a handful of instances (like the pre-Akallabêth Númenorean monarchs worshipping Eru on Meneltarma), he did not describe his characters visiting any places of worship or conducting any rites, although I argue that many of their actions are religious in character, indicating belief in supernatural powers that can’t be seen, felt, or touched. Tolkien described the Valar, the godhead manifest in twelve persons within his created setting—emanations of the One, a creation myth ripped straight from Neoplatonism—variously as “gods,” “archangels,” and “demiurgic beings,” indicating indecision over their role. I would argue it’s perfectly fine to refer to them as “gods,” as they recall the gods of Norse and Classical mythology more than they do divine messengers. “Demiurgic beings,” the most accurate term, is unwieldly.
To me, it seems that Tolkien wanted to create a body of work that had the flavor of the polytheist mythologies he loved. He could have created a straightforwardly monotheistic or agnostic setting, but he did not. At times, he also seemed to have wanted his character to act in ways that resonated with him as a person of faith, such as by invoking supernatural powers in times of distress. But he was reluctant to portray them unambiguously doing religion.
In my opinion, he was in a quandary, wanting to have both his pre-Christian and Christian cakes and eat them too. Or, at times, not have them and not eat them. This is one of a handful of creative decisions Tolkien made that I don’t care for.
I feel that it’s a missed opportunity, for example, that among the Númenorean exiles in Middle-earth, “religion as divine worship (though perhaps not as philosophy and metaphysics) seems to have played a small part” (Letters, quoted The Nature of Middle-earth, 401.) For one thing, Tolkien created a pre-modern setting. It’s the rare pre-industrial farmer who, when the rains haven’t come and the kids are sick and the husband is injured, would power through those uncertainties without performing a ritual of some kind. What we moderns call “religion” was, in the pre-modern world, omnipresent, because being at the mercy of powers beyond one’s control or comprehension was consistent with most people’s lived experiences. To an extent, I find the general lack of, I dunno, amulets and oracles and curse tablets in Tolkien’s setting unbelievable. But he’s not writing history, and he doesn’t have to adhere to historical facts. Fine.
But for another, I find religion as a human phenomenon, and religious worldbuilding, interesting: people’s hopes and fears distilled into narratives and actions, a way of thinking, of making sense of a universe that can’t be comprehended by humans in its entirety. Many, if not most, fantasy authors default to their modern, mechanistic, secular mindsets, perhaps understandably. I think a genre that owes so much to the pre-modern world could serve to be more imaginative in this respect, not just using the wallpaper of pre-modernity but exploring pre-modern mindsets as well.
In other words, I’m fine with Tolkien’s imagined past being polytheist, noble, and hopeless.
What Am I Doing?
Well, a lot, but not much related to writing. The times, frankly, are shit.
I’ve vented about this at length on Bluesky so I’ll be brief here: Trump and Musk’s attack on the federal workforce has affected almost everyone I know. I am not exaggerating or climbing on a political soapbox when I say this. I have attended community action meetings and seen women my mom’s age crying because of how frightened they were of losing their jobs, their retirements, their livelihoods. I have attended town halls and local events trying to find information and resources for my loved ones. I have lost count of the number of times I have called my elected officials in the past month begging them to stop the president from firing my aging mother and people like her. I know that much of the country hates civil servants and is glad that they are suffering, but I think the country should have an EPA and NOAA and USAID and so on and that people I care about shouldn’t be sacrificed to other people’s spite.
So, January and half of February were taken up by civic engagement. The second half of February was taken up by my Holy Moot presentation. And March has been spent in burnout.
I always tell myself not to take on so much that I burn myself out, and yet, I always take on so much that I burn myself out. And then I have the nerve to be surprised when it happens. Again.
Writing will resume when morale improves. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of textile art because it gives me something to do with my hands. I purchased a historically inspired 10th-century-ish dress from Armstreet. It needs hemming so I’ve been teaching myself to do that, as well as making a veil to go with it because medieval women wore veils. I also want to make a little bag to hang from my belt. Eventually, I want to make a more accurate dress inspired by an 11th-century manuscript illustration, as well as a longer, better veil, but I’ll see how the small things go first.
And I’ve been listening to Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books. I read them and liked them in high school, but I’m surprised by how much I don’t remember. It’s been fun to rediscover them. I’m learning Latin again. The verbs are killing me. And I’ve been playing The Pillars of the Earth, a video game about the construction of a medieval cathedral based on the historical novel of the same name.
And that’s it.
Stay frosty out there, I guess.
Minuscule Script is the newsletter of author Abby Roberts. I really appreciate your support at this early stage of what I hope will become a career.
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