Tolkien Called 'The Lord of the Rings' a 'Fundamentally Catholic Work'

J.R.R. Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously so in the revision." He made the claim in a letter to the Jesuit priest Robert Murray, written shortly before the book began to appear. A newly excerpted biography, D.J. Taylor's The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien (Pegasus Books, copyright 2026), uses that letter to trace how Catholicism shaped both the books and the man.

What did Tolkien mean by a 'Catholic work'?

In revision, Taylor writes, Tolkien "carefully cut out references to anything that might be thought to refer to a belief system in Middle-earth." The religious element was instead "absorbed into the story and the symbolism." God is present only "where you know to look for him, unadvertised and operating by stealth." Taylor argues a secular reader could meet the reanimated Gandalf in Fangorn forest "without peril to his conscience": wizard in a made-up world or God's will made manifest — "either choice will do."

Taylor credits this restraint with solving fiction's recurring God problem. Divine providence, he notes, often hands novelists "a get-out clause" from realism — citing Piers Paul Read's The Upstart (1973), whose antihero Hilary Fletcher resolves his cruelties by walking into a confession box. Tolkien avoids that trick, Taylor argues, by never forcing the choice on the reader.

Where are the biblical echoes?

Taylor lists concrete correspondences:

• Gandalf taken to the summit of Orthanc by Saruman and offered co-command of the world — a temptation scene.
• Gandalf's return from apparent certain death, greeted by disciple-like companions.
• "Marian shadings" over Galadriel's activities in the woods of Lothlórien.

He also points to themes of penance, redemption and burdens borne, plus a pronounced determinism: "someone out there in Middle-earth or beyond it has plans for Frodo and Sam — and of course for Gollum."

What debt did Tolkien say he was repaying?

The Murray letter frames the work as the discharge of an existential debt contracted in childhood, in gratitude for a Faith "that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know." The originator was his mother, Mabel Tolkien, "who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it." Taylor reads Mabel as a victim of her faith, whose example her son preserved through "the sanctity of his own actions."

That piety had a cost. Taylor calls Tolkien's courtship of Edith "simply autocratic" even by early twentieth-century standards: the world he planned for his future wife "demanded that she become a Catholic." There was, he writes, nothing Edith could have done about it — accept Tolkien as he was, or move on.

How did his belief show itself in daily life?

Taylor notes the puzzle that Tolkien's orthodoxy coexisted with strict skepticism elsewhere: he assumed things about God, Heaven and Hell "that he would never have assumed of any early medieval manuscript." Yet a 1940s letter to his son Christopher records 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." The ray lighting it, 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."

He accepted pulpit accounts of divine intervention the same way. Of a tubercular boy healed at the Lourdes grotto, 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." Watching the Hollywood film The Song of Bernadette in the mid-1940s, he found it "a most marvelous story in every aspect, human and religious."

Taylor's verdict is double-edged. The faith gave Tolkien "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." The same starkness governs the fiction: no one in The Lord of the Rings, Taylor writes, gets by on ironic detachment, because "the issues at stake are far too serious for liberal equivocation." The biography, now available from Pegasus Books, positions that uncompromising faith as both the engine of Middle-earth and the price paid by the people closest to its author.