To ask what Tolkien thought of God is rather like asking what Marx thought of socialism or how Samuel Pepys regarded the business of diary-keeping. In each case the subject so completely overwhelms the world to which it is introduced that it becomes a colonizing force, transforms it, turns inescapable, an overpowering juggernaut gathering everything up in its slipstream. Tolkien, it is fair to say, saw God everywhere: in the minutest details of his day-to-day life and the landscapes that lay beyond it, in his relationships, in his hopes and dreams and, above all, in his art. If he remained unconvinced by his friend Charles Williams’s lurid supernatural thrillers, in which evil stalks the London pavements and demons are ready to pounce from the rooftops, then he would have agreed with Williams that God’s distinguishing mark is his ubiquity.
There is a rather revealing letter written to his friend the Jesuit priest Robert Murray, shortly before The Lord of the Rings began to appear, which acknowledges the mark of this divine thumbprint. Here, Tolkien insists, is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously so in the revision.” By this Tolkien meant that in going through the manuscript he had carefully cut out references to anything that might be thought to refer to a belief system in Middle-earth, while allowing the religious element to be “absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
Tolkien, it is fair to say, saw God everywhere…above all, in his art.
Even as a teenager of a conventional Anglican church-going type, I was uneasily aware of these figurative stirrings, the thought that behind the sword and sorcery and the hobbit drinking songs lay something far more profound, elemental and subtly wrought, that nothing was ever quite what it seemed. Some of this was to do with those well-advertised themes of penance, redemption, goodness, burdens demanding to be borne, jobs needing to be finished by the people who began them, or in Bilbo’s case their uncomplaining heirs. A little more had to do with the pronounced air of determinism, sometimes amounting to fatalism, and the suspicion that someone out there in Middle-earth or beyond it has plans for Frodo and Sam—and of course for Gollum—that the tools of this extra-worldly agency have yet to appreciate. But by far the larger part is a matter of straightforward biblical echoes: Gandalf being taken up to the summit of Orthanc by Saruman and shown a world which is his to co-command if he desires it; Gandalf miraculously returning from what had previously appeared to be certain death, to the delight of his disciple-like companions; the Marian shadings that hang over Galadriel’s activities in the woods of Lothlórien.
Bringing God into a work of fiction nearly always creates problems for writer and reader alike. The difficulty lies in the fact that the presence of the divine so often provides a get-out clause that enables the writer to dispense with a realistic approach the moment the going gets tough. Piers Paul Read’s The Upstart (1973), one of my favorite “Catholic” novels, features a nasty little middle-class ingrate named Hilary Fletcher, who revenges himself on the aristocratic family down the road he believes to have patronized him by bankrupting their son and seducing both their daughters. Fletcher’s solution to the mess he has got himself into is to walk into a confession box and repent. Taxed with implausibility—given that nothing in Fletcher’s previous career has ever hinted he would be capable of this step—Read would doubtless reply that this is how divine providence works: in mysterious ways, and with the aim of returning sinners to the fold.
If Tolkien, in bringing God into his fiction, manages to avoid the trick of having his cake and eating it too, then this is because his God is only there where you know to look for him, unadvertised and operating by stealth, and it would be perfectly possible for an out-and-out secularist to read the scene in which a reclothed and reanimated Gandalf appears in Fangorn forest without peril to his conscience. A wizard in a made-up world or God’s will made manifest on a reimagined earth? You can take your pick, and either choice will do.
All this, as Tolkien acknowledges in the same letter to Father Murray, represents the working off of a kind of existential debt—a debt, more to the point, that goes all the way back to childhood, and declares itself in gratitude for having been brought up “in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know.” The originator of that faith was his mother, “who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.” Mabel Tolkien, you are encouraged to infer, was a victim of her faith. It is up to her son, if not to avenge her death—Christian deaths are not there to be avenged—then to follow her example and preserve her immortal spirit through the sanctity of his own actions. All this gave Tolkien the terrific sense of spiritual purpose that irradiates his life, but it also made him inflexible, all too ready—at times—to sacrifice human psychology on the altar of belief. Even by the standards of the early twentieth century, his courtship of Edith can seem simply autocratic. The world he had planned out for his future wife to inhabit demanded that she become a Catholic: it was as simple, or as fraught with difficulty, as that.
Meek, trusting and confident that at all times his path through life was lit by divine lamplight, Tolkien swallowed his Catholicism whole.
To a non-believer, the puzzle of Tolkien’s Catholic orthodoxy is that it coexists with a resolute skepticism in every other area of his daily life. To particularize, he assumed things about God, Heaven and Hell that he would never have assumed of any early medieval manuscript that came his way. On the other hand, evidence of Tolkien’s pure, unalloyed piety exists on every side. He not only believed in miracles, visions and the concept of what he called “Christian joy” but was at all times keen to bring his own experiences to the table. A letter to his son Christopher written in the 1940s offers a blow-by-blow account of a spiritual awakening at St. Gregory’s, his Oxford parish church, in which he “perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual rays from the Light which both held and lit it.” The ray, he decided, was “the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized.”
It was the same with the accounts of divine intervention in human affairs relayed to him from the pulpit at St. Gregory’s. Of the story of a small boy with tubercular peritonitis taken to the grotto at Lourdes and introduced to a little girl who had been healed and miraculously restored to health, he remarked, “So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are. They are intrusions (as we say, erring) into real life, but they do intrude into real life, and so need ordinary meals and other results.” God, you see, is in the last resort ordinary. Induced to watch the Hollywood blockbuster The Song of Bernadette, patron saint of Lourdes, in the mid-1940s, he found it “a most marvelous story in every aspect, human and religious.” Meek, trusting and confident that at all times his path through life was lit by divine lamplight, Tolkien swallowed his Catholicism whole. All this gave him a moral sense and a humility that most twentieth-century writers altogether lack, but it also made him hard and unyielding, particularly in matters of spiritual affiliation. There was nothing at all that Edith could have done about his insistence that she convert. She either had to accept Tolkien as he was—and the implications for her own life—or move on. The choices that await the people in Tolkien’s fiction are equally stark. No one in The Lord of the Rings gets by on ironic detachment or a disinclination to be drawn: the issues at stake are far too serious for liberal equivocation.
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From The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien by D.J. Taylor. Copyright © 2026. Available from Pegasus Books.
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