From a talk given at the Adeodatus Winter Forum: “Canonizing” Tolkien: The Case for Reading Tolkien at All Levels of Catholic Education
I often recommend that parents and students and donors who want to assess a high school should pay attention to its valedictory addresses, to get a sense of the spirit that motivates its best students. At the best schools, these express a conviction that, in words attributed to Benedict XVI, “We are not made for comfort; we are made for greatness.”
What elicits desires for greatness in our youth? What forms the image of greatness that will shape the efforts of their lives? Jane Forsyth, in her 2007 valedictory address at St. Augustine Academy in Ventura, dwelt on the power of the books they read together in English class.
Our class has always loved English. We have been privileged to read many great works of literature, and our discussions of them have been lively; often they carried on after class. But among all the years of English classes, this last year, especially this last semester, stands apart.

We began the year in much the same vein as past years, reading two works that, though they had little in common with one another, were nonetheless elevating and magnificent: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The second semester was different: we began with All Quiet on the Western Front, an agonizing story of a hopeless young man in the trenches of World War I who dies abandoned and disappointed by those in whom he had put his trust. We next read The Great Gatsby, a tale of decadence, betrayal and disappointment set in the 1920’s whose theme is the illusory and unattainable nature of man’s innate desire for happiness and goodness. This work was followed by Steinbeck’s famous The Grapes of Wrath which, through its twisted use of Biblical allusions and socialist propaganda, challenges Christianity, setting up a system of belief founded on human beings and manifested by a communist ordering of society to merely natural goods.
We were all shaken by these books, so unlike any we had read in our many years at St. Augustine Academy. Their darkness and despair dampened our spirits, and their utter Godlessness was shocking and disturbing. Our souls rebelled against these works; and we realized all at once that everything we had been taught about the nature of man and the goodness of God had taken root within us.
We closed the year with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and a peek at Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. These, too, dealt with decadence, ugliness, and sin. But they did not leave us with a bad taste in our mouths. Their steadfast hopefulness contrasted sharply with the despair of the other works we had read. They acknowledged the problems with fallen man and with the world, but then pointed to God as the one who can solve these problems.
These works struck a chord in us, teaching as they did that, to be sure, evil does exist; that a battle is raging between Satan and God; that the battleground is our souls; that the battle is to the death; but that, in spite of all this, we have nothing to fear because Christ is our Great Captain who will win the victory with us. Indeed, He has already won: by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, He has bought us back from the devil and made grace, that necessary help of God, available to us. And if we open the doors ever so slightly, that grace will flood our souls.
Let me point out what a model their English teacher must have been. If you want to assess your English classes, begin by rating your students on the extent to which they found the books elevating and magnificent, that they were shaken and disturbed, that they found hope in the face of despair. Great literature is not meant to be dissected and left for dead, but to arouse and form our souls. As Arnold Bennett says in Literary Taste: How to Form It, “The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe.”
But something is missing in Jane’s list. In previous years, she and her classmates would have read many of the great heroic epics of Western literature – The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Divine Comedy. But where is the great modern heroic epic? Brideshead and O’Connor point to God and grace but do not exemplify for us how to live a life heroically.

In classical times, epics, culture, and education went together. Ancient epics expressed and formed their cultures. Everybody had heard and read them so often that everybody knew them. They could be quoted and referred to without citing them. These cultural epics inspired youth and were a source of wisdom for the learned. The characters and events were an ideal that the young men, especially the leading young men of the time, wanted to live up to. Alexander carried around with him a treasury which included Homer’s Iliad. He saw everything that he did as living up to the glory of Achilles. He carried that with him as he overcame the entire Persian Empire.
Epics not only express and form a culture, but they have traditionally been the focus of formal education. For the Greeks, formal education meant educating into the Iliad and the Odyssey. That was the whole goal. In the Socratic dialogue, Protagoras, Protagoras describes Greek education: “And when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written… they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them.”
Education into these works was considered sufficient education. Not only were you educated into the ideals, the language, and the mastery of the author, but it also prepared you to learn everything else. It provided a framework within which to judge. You had to incorporate everything else you learned into this framework.
The Lord of the Rings is an epic of a similar character and with a similar profundity of impact to the great epics of the tradition. Dr. Tekla Bude, Oregon State Associate Professor of Medieval Literatures, defines an epic as “a long story about a hero that serves as an organizing point of cultural or social identity.” She then identifies four aspects of a cultural epic:
- It is about heroes
- It involves universal settings
- It involves the supernatural
- It provides the foundation of a culture.
1. Epics are about heroes. We often call someone “a hero” who, in the moment and outside of their ordinary life, does something heroic, but that doesn’t make them a heroic character. A heroic character is prepared for heroic things and his life is led in expectation of doing these great things.
Heroes are judged by and judge themselves by other standards. Aristotle identifies heroic virtue as a separate category from ordinary virtue. He uses Hector as an example. For an ordinary man to do some of the things that Hector did would be rash, but for him, they were right. Heroes are used to the fact that their peoples depend on them. The heroes know that and accept it.
This doesn’t mean they are all good; when a hero falls, it is a 9.0 earthquake.
“Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain.”
The Lord of the Rings is filled with heroic figures: Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, the Council of the Wise, Saruman, Denethor, Faramir, Boromir, and Éowyn. These are all heroic characters who have to deal with and make decisions that we don’t have to face. Aragorn is a great example. He knew from his youth he was meant to be a hero. He had prepared himself for the moment of trial for 70 years. At Parth Galen, when Gandalf had died, Aragorn becomes the leader of the company. The Orcs have crashed in on the Fellowship and taken Merry and Pippin. Frodo and Sam have fled. Boromir is dead. Aragorn says, “Now the company is all in ruin. It is I that have failed. Vain was Gandalf’s trust in me.” It’s almost impossible for us to imagine what a devastating moment that was for Aragorn. He felt that his whole life’s commitment had failed and he was the failure. Yet he went on.

2. Epics have a universal character. In The Lord of the Rings, we experience villages and agricultural land, as well as ancient forests of great danger and yet compelling beauty. We travel through mountains, caves, plains, devastated landscape, deserts, strongholds, and cities of ancient beauty and strength. My ability to picture what he described was very poor, but when I encountered these things in real life, I understood his descriptions, and his descriptions helped me experience them more fully. I recognized some of the devastation before the gates of Morgoth when I drove through the deserts of Utah. I recognized the mountains when I was in the Rocky Mountains for the first time. I recognized mountain strongholds when I visited Assisi, and Bree in rural villages in Iowa.
In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter many different kinds of people. We encounter the Shire, the ordinary folk who have a home they love. We encounter Tom Bombadil, someone who is at home that way but in the natural world. We encounter the Last Homely House of Elrond, where memory and story are central aspects of life. We encounter Lothlórien, the Dream-flower where the past remains present. In Rohan, we find the the great grass swept plains up against the mountains and a people who are accustomed to both the plains and the mountains – the horse people, the semi-barbaric, who live in relationship with a civilized world like the way the Goths related to the Roman world. We encounter Gondor, an ancient civilization always living in relation to its past. We even encounter the Orcs with their very debased and violent way of life.
3. Dr. Bude includes the supernatural as an important part of cultural epics. Christopher Dawson, the great British sociologist of the 20th century, said that religion is the basis of all culture. Tolkien, for various reasons, deliberately avoided explicit religion in The Lord of the Rings. ‘ But encounter with the religious is an important part of the education of the four hobbits. The Shire is without religion. As wonderful as the Shire is, there is nothing that looks beyond life in the Shire. The Travellers learned from the Elves to invoke Elbereth. During several months in Rivendell, the hobbits had heard the stories of the Silmarillion about Ilúvatar and the Valar; these later strengthened Sam and Frodo as they were about to enter Mordor. The Gondorians retained some religious practices, such as bowing to the west before eating. For them, this brought to mind Numenor and Elven home and the Valar who govern the world under the one God, Iluvatar. Frodo felt awkward that the hobbits had no such custom.
Still, for the most part in The Lord of the Rings, the divine is hidden. But it is powerfully at work. Providence is a central theme in the work. We see this especially through Gandalf. Gandalf is a wizard on a mission, literally. He was sent by the Valar to fight Sauron, and he was sent back after his death to finish the job. Central to Gandalf’s heroic wisdom is acute perception of Providence at work. Early in the story, Gandalf speaks to Frodo of how Bilbo came to find the Ring in such an odd circumstance that nobody would have foreseen. He says, “Behind that, there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.” Gandalf is very serious about this. He sees that something incredible, something divinely surprising, has happened. So he doesn’t let Frodo give the Ring to somebody more powerful who could be really responsible for it. He seems to think, “Something has happened I didn’t anticipate. I need to understand its whole purpose. What is the One up to in this?” This is the way Gandalf rolls.
Trust in Providence allows Tolkien’s heroes to exemplify mercy, the chief spiritual virtue of the whole epic. Through the story, we are led to believe that having mercy on those who deserve punishment or death will be rewarded and that we should always in every possible circumstance offer mercy. True, it’s dangerous to be merciful to those who don’t deserve mercy. But Gandalf says Bilbo took so little harm from the Ring because he acted with pity by not killing Gollum. In the end, the Quest would have failed except for Gollum; Gollum would not have been alive if Frodo had not learned the lesson of mercy from Gandalf. Providence and mercy are the heart of the religious aspect of The Lord of the Rings.
4. Finally, an epic provides a foundation for culture by presenting its ideals in a way that shapes culture. I think that, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien united and expressed the ideals of Christian civilization in a purer and more heroic way than ever before, as love for the lowly, hope for its ennoblement. The story presents with a clarity of Christian moral vision – mercy, duty, freedom, choice, heart, will, love for the natural, love for the laborer. I also think that we imbibe from him the best spirit of Christendom, including the Greco-Roman, and Norse traditions it united and purified. We are prepared to love and learn from the cultural, theological, philosophical, and historical experiences of the Church that help us understand more deeply the spiritual vision he presents.
5. I will add one aspect of a culture epic to Bude’s list: a cultural epic invites and rewards thought. It is a repository of cultural wisdom. A cultural epic means more to you the older you get. You learn more from it. When you go back as a scholar, you discover more of its treasures. And you reinspired by it. When you go back and read it again as an older person, when you have yourself tried and failed, when have yourself experienced so much more of people and places and things, his works mean so much more to you. I now find it hard to read many passages aloud without crying.
Did Tolkien intend The Lord of the Rings to become a cultural epic? He did see that it would play that role in the Shire. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo gives the Red Book of the Westmarch to Sam before he goes over the sea. He says to Sam:
You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger, and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part in the Story goes on.
The Lord of the Rings as written by Bilbo and Frodo, passed on to Sam, becomes the cultural epic of the Shire. It leads them into a new relationship with the kingdom of Arnor and Gondor and ennobles the whole society. From then on, young hobbits would realize, “We are made for greatness.”