Book Review: Tolkien's Faith

Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway (Word on Fire Academic, 2023).

In a sort of sequel to my review of The Mythmakers, John Hendrix’s enchanting graphic novel about J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, today’s review focuses solely on Tolkien. In Tolkien’s Faith, Holly Ordway has given us an exploration of his faith that’s so comprehensive and detailed that I came away feeling that I knew him much better than I ever had before—for in many ways, to know his faith was to know him.

Many fans are aware that Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, but not many of us understand just what that meant in the time and place in which he lived. When his mother, Mabel, converted to Catholicism when Tolkien and his brother were eight and six, her experience could hardly have looked attractive to her sons. “As a general rule … to be a Catholic in England at the end of the nineteenth century,” Ordway writes, “was to be poorer than your Anglican counterpart … and to have fewer connections and inferior prospects.” She adds, “For Mabel Tolkien, the consequences were more serious than for most people. As a widow with limited resources and two young children, she would be hit hard when her disapproving family cut off their financial support.”

Nonetheless, both boys willingly followed their mother into the Catholic church. That decision shaped everything in their lives, from where they lived to what schools they attended to their mother’s choice of guardian for them—Father Francis Morgan—when she died just a few years later.

Of course, it would shape much more than that for Tolkien; the faith he embraced would form his mind, his values, his relationships, and his work. In this exhaustive account, Ordway traces that powerful influence throughout his life and career. She has done her research very thoroughly, and her book is filled with Tolkien’s own thoughts on faith and its meaning in his life, as well as those of his family members, friends, colleagues, reviewers, and researchers (and adorned with a wealth of footnotes!).

We get familiar episodes such as Tolkien’s befriending Lewis and playing a role in his Christian conversion, but we get fresh insights on them as we see them from Tolkien’s point of view—thus learning how talking these things through with Lewis helped Tolkien out of his own spiritual dry spell. We also get plenty of information that will be new to many readers—I, for instance, didn’t know (although maybe many of his other fans do) that Tolkien translated the book of Jonah for the English version of the Jerusalem Bible, or that he loved Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King.

Through this spiritual lens, Tolkien the man, as well as Tolkien the scholar and writer, is on full display, with his undisputed flaws and his many virtues. We meet here a Tolkien with a mischievous sense of humor, an unpredictable temper, and an unending flow of kindness and generosity. Thanks to Ordway’s lovingly painstaking work, I feel now as if I not only know him much better than before, but also like him much better as well.

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