Syncretism and Tolkien

Syncretism refers to the combining or mingling of different schools of thought and most frequently is used in reference to the active melding of two religions. While this activity has a long history, it is especially notable in the initial spread of Christianity in the Middle Ages. By combining elements of the pre-established mythology with elements of the new faith, i.e. Christianity, these missionaries attempted to smooth out the conversion process and not raise too many hackles.

Tolkien had no concerns about missionaries and pagans in need of converting. He was, however, a Christian himself with a strong passion for the mythology of those very pagans. As an Anglo-Saxonist and philologist, Tolkien was consistently working with Old English and Middle English texts and therefore he frequently encountered themes, ideas and even single words that took a hold on his imagination. He poured these ideas into his own fiction and we can see them return in the society and the language of the Rohirrim, as well as in the history of the Elves in The Silmarillion. While these Germanic, heroic elements are near the surface of his work and recognisably so, as they are on the Gosforth Cross, they do not make up the main message of his narrative. As Tolkien himself argued in a letter, ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously at the revision. … For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism’J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Letter to Robert Murray’, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

By his own standard of fantasy writing, as argued in his essay “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien could not introduce active Christian imagery or practices into his “secondary world” without breaking its spell. As such, there are no crosses or churches scattered across Tolkien’s Middle-earth, no church bells toll on Sundays. His Christian faith, as present in the story, comes through in the way Tolkien deals with the costs of Germanic heroism, with its fatalistic and almost suicidal drive, and how he presents the “good side” in his work. We will see this in more detail in the discussion of Ragnarök scenes on the Gosforth Cross and the end of the Third Age in The Lord of the Rings below.