Tolkien as Cherished Falsehood
The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine degree angles, there are optical convolutions, there are mock corbels, and clashing metal-stone interplay. But every line is broken up for the eye. If one straight line were allowed, then a second one might come in by stealth; they might get together, and they might look like a cross. Great care is taken in avoiding even a hint of the cruciform. But Tolkien takes even greater care that no shadow of Christ should fall on his Middle-Earth, nor even anything that might remind of that golden shadow. —“Tolkien as Christian”
I’ve argued that Lafferty’s essay “Tolkien as Christian” is important for understanding how he thought fiction and religion relate. Lafferty took Tolkien to be a crypto-Catholic writer, a view he may have been alone in holding. It certainly isn’t a criticism one often hears of Tolkien. His reasons help explain why he thought his own work did not hide the cross, but I won’t rehearse them again here. What I haven’t mentioned is that the essay had a coda of sorts.
This short piece appeared in the February 1981 issue of Niekas, a science fiction and fantasy fanzine published in New Hampshire. Like other fanzines, it carried essays, reviews, artwork, and letters. This particular issue included a special section on science fiction and religion. Lafferty’s piece appeared under the heading “Random Thoughts.”
He begins by half-regretting that he went on the record about Tolkien, recalling the hostile response to his essay in Triumph. He then turns the invitation back on Niekas: how can one discuss religious experience in a genre that, he argues, rigorously excludes it? Of course, he had been doing that all along, and he wasn’t about to spell any of it out, but he does fire some shots at impostors. The distinction he makes between religion and its fictional substitutes helps explain what he thought was missing from so much of the genre literature around him.
Speaking of religion, while you did get a comment from R. A. Lafferty in #25, I'm surprised that nobody in the religion-and-SF discussion seems to have mentioned Lafferty's own work, much of which is permeated with religious symbolism (probably too highfalutin a word). Of course, as he said himself, “religion is very difficult to smuggle into SF”; I guess he's done the smuggling so well that most people haven't noticed. —George Flynn
