Tolkien & Anglo-Saxon England: Protectors of Christendom

From The Imaginative Conservative, which I've just added to my sidebar and from which you will see more here at OJC.

The Christian should embrace and sanctify the most noble virtues to come out of the northern pagan mind: courage and raw will.  “It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage,” Tolkien wrote. “The northern [imagination] has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times."  Tolkien thought that a vigorous Christianity needed that northern pagan myth spirit to make it stronger.  The German-Italian theologian Romano Guardini argued along the same lines. . . .

From its original conception as a myth for England, first conceived in muck and blood-filled trenches in northern France, Tolkien’s legendarium grew much larger in scope and significance. The story, especially The Lord of the Rings, became much more than a myth for any one people or any one nation. It, instead, became a myth for the restoration of Christendom itself. The intrepid Anglo-Saxon missionaries, in particular St. Boniface of Crediton, created medieval, Christian Europe by carrying classical and Christian traditions into the heart of pagan, barbarian Europe. St. Boniface converted innumerable barbarians to Christianity, unifying them under Rome. St. Boniface even crowned Pepin, son of Charles Martel, an action that would eventually lead to the papal recognition of Charlemagne as the revived Holy Roman Emperor in 800 a.d.  With the return of the king Aragorn to his rightful throne, Tolkien argued, the “progress of the tales ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome."  In his own private writings, Tolkien equated numerous parts of Italy with various geographical aspects of Gondor.  In his diary, for example, Tolkien recorded that with his trip to Italy, he had “come to the head of Christendom: an exile from the borders and far provinces returning home, or at least to the home of his fathers."  In a letter to a friend, Tolkien stated that he had holidayed “in Gondor, or in modern parlance, Venice."  That Tolkien should place a mythologized Italy, and ultimately Rome, at the center of his legendarium is not surprising, as he viewed the Reformation as ultimately responsible for the modern, secularized world.

That Tolkien believed that the Anglo-Saxon world might offer us strength to redeem Christendom, should not surprise us. The hero of The Lord of the Rings, after all, is an Anglo-Saxon farmer turned citizen-warrior. Even as an uneducated gardener, this most loyal of companions recognized hope deep in the heart of Mordor. “Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach."  Like his real counterparts who understood the meaning of the Logos, Sam, too, can comprehend the abstract.

One of the principal criticisms we hear from the neopagans among the European New Right, which is producing some absolutely excellent analytical works re: the debacle that is Europe, is that Christianity is a feminized, flaccid and pacifistic faith that not only quite naturally gave rise to liberalism but sapped the vitality from modern European men.  Ad fontes, they cry, but it is not to our sources that they look.  They look to tradition, but a tradition that antedates ours.  They look to the noble pagans of old.  (Well, we would point out that they weren't so noble, and that the Faith was a needed corrective, but their point is taken.)

I must confess that when we look at ourselves in the mirror there is some justification for this criticism.  And it's not only liberal Protestantism that exhibits this manifest lack of muscular Christianity; as Leon Podles has demonstrated in his work, certain strains of Catholic mysticism are to blame, as are strains of modern Evangelicalism. 

Judging by what I observe in much of Neo-Anglicanism, the feminizing rot has taken told there as well.

It was not so in our history, however.  As Tolkien argued, and as it came out in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Christianity did make peace with the Anglo-Saxon warrior culture.  This culture fed into a European stream and became the basis of chivalry, some notes of C.S. Lewis on which can be read here.   I'm thrilled to see that Tolkien believed that the renewal of such a culture could become the basis of a renewed Christendom.   My belief is that Christians in Europe and the Anglosphere MUST become "men with chests" again, lest the task of saving Western civilization from the depredation of the Islamist/Leftist phalanx passes to the neopagan and all too often neofascist movement in Europe and elsewhere that is currently working up an impressive head of steam.

Comments

[The Haunted Bookmam]

Love the Imaginative Conservative. I am surprised this gem wasn't on your radar sooner. Thanks for spreading the goodness.

[Embryo Parson]

Haunted Bookman, me too!

[Tom Harbold]

Excellent post! Enjoyed this immensely – and agree, on all points. Well said!

[Embryo Parson]

Thanks, Fr.