Why You Shouldn’t Write Like Tolkien (Unless You Are Tolkien) - Part II

The early death of Tolkien’s mother from diabetes, in 1904 — when she was just thirty four and Tolkien was just twelve years old — was of course another defining moment in his young life.

Just four years before her death Mabel had converted to Roman Catholicism, a move that alienated her from much of her family. After her death, he and his brother were placed under the care of a Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan.

Tolkien remained a ‘devout Roman Catholic’ for the rest of his life, and this religious conviction shaped not only his moral imagination but his entire metaphysical outlook. In a 1956 letter to his friend Amy Ronald, Tolkien wrote:

“I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

This theological melancholy — the idea that the world is fallen, that suffering and evil must be endured with courage and humility — permeates his fiction. Frodo’s journey does not end in triumph, but in trauma. In fact Frodo fails in his mission, he succumbs to the evil of the ring and does not cast it into the fire.

As Tolkien put it:

“…where I think I am the most right, is making point of fact that… Frodo actually failed.”

It is through luck, fate or some higher power that Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger and falls, with the ring, into the fire.

Despite the destruction of the ring: Frodo fails, the age of Elves ends, and Middle-earth

becomes the realm of men. There are not really any true happy endings, only “glimpses” of grace. This Catholic pessimism, combined with his love of ancient myths that often end in tragedy, created a moral framework that was stoic.

As Tolkien says: “I’m entirely stoically minded.” (Of course this is nonsense! The man was deeply romantic and emotional — at least in his writing!)

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Aslan and Allegory: A Christian Tale

“I dislike allegory, whenever I smell it.”

Tolkien famously detested allegory. In the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, he wrote:

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations… I much prefer history, true or feigned.”

This idea — history as a “long defeat” tempered by glimpses of grace — permeates his work. The Elves, immortal yet fading. Men, mortal yet capable of glory. The Shire, corrupted and rebuilt. There is no utopia, only courage in decline.

Tolkien’s faith runs through The Lord of the Rings, but never explicitly. He famously wrote in 1953:

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision.” 

It is no accident that the Ring is destroyed on March 25 — the Feast of the Annunciation in the Catholic calendar, the date of the Incarnation, the date has also been linked to the fall of the angels, the creation of Adam, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, and the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea. Though there is no clear Christ figure in Middle-earth — bar perhaps Frodo — but the echoes are undeniable.

“…he (Frodo) has some of the features of Christ. I guess the accepting of a burden…But that seems, I suppose, more like an allegory of the human race.”

The Lord of the Rings is not Christian allegory. It doesn’t preach. C.S. Lewis — a contemporary and friend of Tolkien’s — wrote an overtly allegorical tale in his Chronicles of Narnia, but there is no “Aslan” here. Instead, it is steeped in Christian imagination. Catholic ideas — of fall, redemption, free will, sacrifice, the light and the dark, and grace — are embedded in the fabric of the story.

At the heart of his fiction lies one driving theme, a theme that lies at the very heart of Catholicism:

"Stories – frankly, human stories are always about one thing – death. The inevitability of death”.

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Love and Lúthien: The Tale of Edith

Before we look at death and how Tolkien’s relationship with it affected his worldview and work — let’s look at love.

The other great pillar of Tolkien’s life was his love for Edith Bratt, three years his senior. They met while boarding in the same house, but Tolkien’s guardian forbade the relationship until he turned 21.

Most teenagers might ignore this order and pursue their love, but Tolkien — like a pious hero that could have leapt right out of one of his own books — took the quest to heart. He waited. He fought a war. He returned.

In 1917 — as he recuperated from trench fever in Thirtle Bridge near the village of Roos on the east coast of England — there came a day when Tolkien was capable, and the two went for a walk in the woods nearby. It was late spring, and summer was stretching her legs. Legend has it that Edith danced for him in a glade of blooming hemlock. It was this moment that inspired one of the most moving stories in all his legendarium — the tale of Beren and Lúthien, in which a mortal man falls in love with an immortal elf who gives up her eternal life for the sake of love.

In his mythology, Men are mortal, while Elves are immortal. That tension shapes the entire moral architecture of Middle-earth. Men can die, and so they change, grow, falter, and strive. Elves cannot die (except in battle), and so their fate is stasis. Immortality, Tolkien eventually concluded, is not a gift — it is a burden.

It was not a burden that Tolkien had to bear, as he and his lifelong love Edith share a gravestone, bearing the names “Beren” and “Lúthien.”

In one of the most romantic moments imaginable, Tolkien’s mind is not focussed on love or life; but death. Even in this blissful moment he is painfully aware of his own mortality, in comparison to Edith’s relative immortality. But why?

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War and the Ring: The Machine Made Flesh

The First World War was arguably the crucible of Tolkien’s creative soul. As a student at Oxford, he had formed a literary group called the TCBS — the Tea Club and Barrovian Society — with a few close friends. He was studying at Oxford as the war began. He signed up but deferred his deployment in order to complete his studies. The moment he finished his degree he goes to war.

He headed out to France just in time to fight in the Battle of the Somme. Here he witnessed firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, tanks, and mechanised slaughter.

The Somme was a harrowing affair, with over a million casualties. A shocking statistic: 243 boys from his school, King Edward’s, died — and from his Oxford college, Exeter, 141 young men were killed. He later wrote that:

“The war made me poignantly aware of the beauty of the world. I remember miles and miles of seething tortured earth — perhaps best described in the chapter about the approach to Mordor. It was a searing experience.”

The Nazgûl, the Mûmakil (or Oliphaunts), and the devastated plains of Mordor all draw from his experience of war — the feeling of being stalked by evil in an unnatural land, the sounds of great machines of war whining, grinding and exploding around him.

To some degree he was lucky as he caught trench fever in 1917, which might well have saved his life by pulling him from the front.

He was not to know that the war was in its final stretch and whilst he was recovering — whilst he was watching Edith dance in that glade — the prospect of him returning to the front was a Sword of Damocles hanging over him. He was mortal as the threat of death was so imminent in his mind. Edith was the immortal elf as she had her whole life still stretched out before her.

Therefore, we make the elves immortal, in a sense. I had to use ‘immortal’, I didn’t mean that they were eternally immortal, merely that they are very longeval and their longevity probably lasts as long as the inhabitability of the Earth.”

Edith was far from truly immortal, but in the context of the war, her life must have seen to him ‘as long as the inhabitability of the Earth.’

So to what extent is the Lord of the Rings influenced by or a true representation of the war?

In response to a suggestion that his work was nothing but a battle between good and evil, Tolkien said:

“Well that’s, I suppose, actually, a conscious reaction of the war from the stuff that I was brought up on—“The War to End Wars,”…which I didn't believe in at the time and I believe in less now.”

It is undeniable that his war time experiences coloured Tolkien’s work but certainly not on an allegorical level. As he said in the 1968 BBC interview he said:

“People do not fully understand the difference between an allegory and an application… You can go to a Shakespeare play and you can apply it to things in your mind, if you like, but they are not allegories... I mean many people apply the Ring to the nuclear bomb and think that was in my mind, and the whole thing is an allegory of it. Well, it isn’t.”

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Modernity and the Ring: Rage Against The Machine

So if the ring is not the nuclear weapon and Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. What, then, is it truly about?

While many readers focus on elves, dragons, and quests, and many others focus on Christianity and war, one of the most persistent, and under-appreciated, themes in Tolkien’s work is his critique of modernity.

As the Second World War was grinding to a close, Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher saying:

“Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines.”

To him, “the machine” wasn’t just a piece of warfare technology — it was a moral failure, an existential threat to both nature and humanity. The core battle in The Lord of the Rings is not only good versus evil, but art versus control, creation versus domination. 

Tolkien explained this clearly in a now-famous passage from one of his letters:

“Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it (the machine) attempts to actualise desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil."

To Tolkien, technology that sought to dominate — to “cohere,” to reshape the world by force — was not neutral. It was spiritually corrupting. It represented the fallen desire to master rather than understand, to possess rather than to sub-create.

What Tolkien called “the Machine” was not just technology. It was ideology. The desire to fix, to control, to impose systems in place of mystery, wonder, and humility. In one of his most biting passages, Tolkien wrote:

“From Daedalus and Icarus to the giant bomber… the tragedy and despair of all machinery is laid bare.”

This applies as much to tanks, bombs and Saruman’s factories of war as it does to bureaucratic and political systems of control. It is no coincidence that Saruman, once awise wizard, is ultimately undone not by Sauron, but by his own imitation of Sauron’s means: industry, war machines, and mass production.

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The Ring of Power: How Power Corrupts

At the heart of The Lord of the Rings is a moral vision — that the desire for power inevitably corrupts. The Ring is the “machine” of domination, and even the most well- meaning cannot wield it safely. As Tolkien warned his son Christopher during the Second World War:

“You can’t fight the enemy with his own Ring without turning into an enemy… An ultimately evil job.”

Sauron’s One Ring is not a random magical object. It is the ultimate machine, a tool forged for control. “The Ring of Power” is not about magic tricks; it’s about the temptation to coerce others, to bend them to your will. Tolkien’s heroes — Frodo, Sam, Gandalf — all struggle against this temptation in different ways. Even Galadriel nearly fails.

Gandalf refuses the Ring not because he is weak, but because he is wise enough to know what the machine would make him. He tells Frodo:

“With that power, I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.”

Tolkien added elsewhere that Gandalf would have been worse than Sauron — not because he was evil, but because he would have been righteous. He would have used the Ring for good, and in doing so, would have enslaved the world in the name of salvation.

Frodo on the other hand is not a warrior-king or a powerful wizard. He is a hobbit — a humble, ordinary hobbit.

“I've always been impressed that we’re here surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds…I thought the wisest remark in the whole book was that where Elrond says that the wheels of the world are turned by the small hands while the great are looking elsewhere, and they turn because they have to, because it’s their daily job.”

Frodo succeeds (sort of) not through strength or power, but through endurance, friendship, luck, duty and grace.

This is what modern fantasy often misses. The lesson is not “power used well,” but the renunciation of power.

This is where world-building meets story: the Ring, as Tolkien explained, is the Machine, the attempt to dominate others through power. Industry is not evil because it is mechanical, but because it tempts humanity to control, coerce, and consume, and humanity at its purist, at its least machine-like, is capable of resistance.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”

“I invented that little rhyme in my bath one day!” (Tolkien, 1965)

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