Tolkien and Literature

Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature And Theology
By Trevor Hart and Ivan Khovacs, editors.
Baylor University Press, 2007
(146 pages, $29.95, paperback)

reviewed by S.N.D.

“On Fairy-Stories” is J.R.R. Tolkien's famous essay based on the Andrew Lang Lecture that he presented at the University of St. Andrews on March 8, 1939. Tolkien first published it “with all too little revision and excision” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in 1947. He revised it and republished it in 1964 in Tree and Leaf , which remains in print now in The Tolkien Reader .

Tolkien's essay continues to attract scholarly attention. In Being Reconciled: Ontology and pardon , the noted theologian John Milbank, a founder of the Radical Orthodoxy school, states that in a future work in his series dealing with the theological concept of Gift, he will include an analysis of Tolkien's “astonishing essay.”

And this year Baylor University Press published Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology , which contains papers presented by Christian scholars at a symposium hosted on March 8, 2004 by the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts in the University of St. Andrews . The symposium marked the 65 th anniversary of Tolkien's lecture and focused on the ideas it contained.

In Chapter 1, “Tolkien, St. Andrews, and Dragons,” Rachel Hart, an archivist at the University of St. Andrews Library, traces the history of Tolkien's lecture and essay and summarizes the influence of Andrew Lang's fantasies on Tolkien's work.

In Chapter 2, “The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis,” Colin Duriez gives “a brief overview of the friendship of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis” and describes their mutual “preoccupation with rehabilitating fantasy and fairy story.” Duriez is a freelance writer living in Cumbria who has written several publications related to Tolkien and Lewis.

Chapter 3, “Tolkien's Mythopoesis,” by Kristin Johnson, a research student at the University of St. Andrews , studies the concept behind Tolkien's poem “Mythopoeia,” which he dedicated to Lewis. Johnson illuminates the “longstanding discussion” of Lewis, Barfield, and Tolkien on “language, myth, and imagination.”

In Chaper 4, “Tolkien, Creation, and Creativity,” the noted theologian Trevor Hart explores Tolkien's thoughts, central to the Andrew Lang lecture, about “the relation of Creation to making and sub-creation.” Hart's exploration leads him deeply into Tolkien's creation myth at the beginning of The Silmarillion .

Chapter 5, “Tolkien and the Future of Literary Studies,” contains the 2004 Andrew Lang Lecture presented by David Lyle Jeffrey, distinguished professor of literature and humanities at Baylor University . Jeffrey's begins by stating that both Lang and Tolkien had “a strong commitment to a greater inclusiveness in the canon [of literature]” and that both desired a recovery “of those works, mostly older, which most transparently engage the supernatural.” Jeffrey proceeds to explore Tolkien's views about Fantasy as a necessary counterbalance to Drama.

In Chapter 6, “Tolkien and the Surrendering of Power,” Loren Wilkinson, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Regent College , compares Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings with the Peter Jackson films. His thesis is:

The unheroic gardener, who serves and does not seek power, Wilkinson argues, is more like the hero of the Christian story than the warrior. The authority of God's Son “is rooted in suffering, not in the wielding of swords.”

Finally, in Chapter 7, Ralph Wood, university professor of theology and literature at Baylor addresses “Tolkien's Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why the Lord of the Rings is not Manichean.”

Tree of Tales is a major new addition to Tolkien studies.