From the first, the English author and Oxford University professor J.R.R. Tolkien was unwilling to embrace the liturgical reforms implemented after the Second Vatican Council. His grandson Simon tells this story:



I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right…"[i]

In such fashion, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings stood firm against what fellow English author Evelyn Waugh called “a bitter trial.”

What went into the making of such a Catholic figure like Tolkien, who stood for the traditional Faith when nearly everyone around him acquiesced to the novelties or left the Church altogether? British Catholics in the 1960s were well-positioned to recognize how the techniques used by Cranmer five centuries earlier to impose Anglicanism on the English people were again being visited on men and women in the pews. Even so, most Catholics felt obliged to do as the authorities told them. Why was Tolkien able to discern the problems with the new Mass when most others were not?

Cradle Convert



Tolkien was introduced to prolonged hardship for the Faith at an early age. Born into a Protestant family, when he was three his father died, and when he was eight his mother Mabel converted to Catholicism with her two sons. As a result, relatives refused the widowed mother financial assistance, and four years later she died of acute diabetes. Tolkien later wrote:



My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”[ii]

Raised afterwards in poverty by a capable and kind guardian – the Welsh-Spaniard Fr. Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory – Tolkien developed pious habits he would keep throughout his life of frequent Mass, regular confession, daily prayers, hope in the efficacy of the Sacraments, and trust in the Church’s Magisterium.

Gifted at Language and Storytelling



From a young age Tolkien demonstrated remarkable ability at reading and speaking languages. By his teen years he had mastered Latin and Greek, and he soon developed proficiency in modern and ancient tongues, notably Gothic and Finnish. For his private enjoyment, he began to invent his own languages; years later he would invent his fictional Middle Earth to provide a homeland with its own history and heritage for his invented languages. He became professor of Old and Middle English at Oxford University, adding to his repertoire Spanish, Italian, Middle and Old English, Old Norse, and contemporary and Medieval Welsh; he also became conversant in ancient Germanic and Slavonic languages.

His fascination and love for languages led him to specialize in the field of philology, which dealt with the words which make up a language, not merely to learn their meaning, but to find out their history. Meaning and history are discovered by studying language, literature, culture, theology, and mythology to uncover the source or origin and the themes common to them all. Philology provided Tolkien with a moral and philosophical framework for treating language that was consistent with his Catholic Faith, one that could be used to find in all stories echoes and reflections of the Gospel story.