J. R. R. Tolkien

The Argument

J.R.R. Tolkien is the writer who gave the twentieth century its most convincing demonstration that the Christian imagination can produce literature of the highest order — not by writing allegory, which he hated, but by creating a secondary world so fully realized that it carries the weight of primary reality. Middle-earth is not an allegory of the Christian story. It is a world shaped by a Christian imagination, and the shaping is visible in every choice Tolkien made.

His essay On Fairy-Stories is the theoretical foundation for his practice and one of the most important statements of Christian aesthetics in the twentieth century. He argues that the human desire to make stories — to sub-create — is a reflection of our being made in the image of the Creator. The consolation of the fairy tale, which he called eucatastrophe — the sudden turn from catastrophe to joy — is the literary form of the Resurrection. The Gospels, he told Lewis on that famous walk, are the true myth: the one all other myths were reaching toward.

For literary apologetics, Tolkien is the supreme instance of what a Christian literary imagination can produce when it is fully formed and fully deployed. He did not write Christian fiction. He wrote as a Christian — which is a different and more demanding thing.